Curriculum: Construction and Critique

Prof Alistair Ross, Alistair Ross

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781135714994
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Although curriculum is central to the schooling process, debates about it are rarely well informed. Over the past ten years there has been a dearth of books that have informed the debate by examining curriculum in a broader context, beyond the National Curriculum. Ross, in this refreshing re-examination of the area, opens up a more general debate on how the curriculum is shaped and the compromises made between different ideologies of the nature and purpose of education.

1
Curriculum Gardening

In late 1959 the Central Advisory Committee for Education (England) (chaired by Sir Geoffrey Crowther) reported on the education of 1518-year-olds. It highlighted the extra-ordinary wastage of talent—largely of working-class origin—caused when children opted to leave school at the age of 15. In March 1960, the House of Commons debated the Crowther Report. The Minister of Education, Sir David Eccles, used the opportunity of the debate to announce a change in government policy towards the curriculum. Up to this time the Ministry had almost exclusively been concerned with the resourcing of education: with teacher supply and remuneration, with school building plans, and with the organization of different types of school. But in future, Eccles announced, he would also take an interest in what was being taught in the schools: he would ‘try to make the Ministry’s voice heard rather more often and positively and no doubt more controversially’. He would open up ‘the secret garden of the curriculum’.

In selecting this phrase he intended more than to simply draw attention to the covert way in which discussion on the content of education—inasmuch as such discussion existed at all—was almost exclusively confined to professional educators. It had been regarded as their prerogative: an area in which parents, politicians and society at large were not expected to have an opinion. He later suggested that he had in mind a ‘commando-type unit’ for the curriculum (Kogan, 1978, p. 63). But the metaphor of the curriculum-as-garden is perhaps helpful in beginning an analysis of the school curriculum and the ways in which it is, and is not, changing. This metaphor is not new: Alexander has traced back organic and botanical metaphors as ‘an abiding characteristic of the language of primary education’ (Alexander, 1988, p. 153).

Gardens are strange institutions. Certain plants are designated weeds, and regarded as intruders: hoed and weeded out, but often showing remarkable tenacity in springing up again. Other plants, often close cousins of the weeds, are highly prized, and nurtured and tended to full growth, even though they may show every disinclination to take effective root, or require particular and difficult-to-achieve conditions if they are to thrive. There may be an analogy here with the different subjects of the curriculum, and with the nonsubjects. But perhaps more interesting is the concept of the garden as a whole, its design and purpose, rather than the individual component plants.

What is a garden for? It is perhaps the English tradition of utilitarianism that allows such a question to be asked, but there is certainly no shortage of answers. Gardens may be variously justified: as extensions of nature into the built environment; as inculcating

useful habits amongst gardeners (enabling them to feed their families; or exercise their flabby bodies; or to relax in and recuperate); they may express formal embodiments of the shapes and geometries of the world, as in the baroque garden; or they may be regarded as there because they’re there, representing a tradition of English particularism (whether suburban mixture, or country cottage) whose purpose is to distinguish our habitat from that, say, of the French—who have no such preoccupation with the garden, and are thus quite rightly different from us.

Who are gardens for? Do they exist for the benefit of the plants themselves? Some gardens undoubtedly do serve this purposes: Kew Gardens preserves particular varieties, herbaria preserve gene stocks for someone’s (or some plant’s) posterity. Other gardens exist for the sake of society: public parks that afford recreation, of the body or the spirit. Many gardens exist for the sake of the gardener; while others are maintained for those who own the garden, but who do not labour in it. Market gardens exist for the consumers of their products, while also providing a living for those who work in them, and a profit for those who own them.

Each of these justifications for the garden can also be mirrored in arguments for particular forms of curriculum design, and these purposes provide us with a fresh set of analogies to consider the curriculum. In some cases, the curriculum can be seen to preserve subjects—such as Latin, for example—that many would argue serve no utility and have an uncertain value, against the belief of some others that the future will be illserved if such a species becomes extinct. More common is the notion that the curriculum exists at the behest of society, and is there to serve society’s needs—though determining the extent of the diverse needs of a fragmented society is highly problematic. There are a few teachers who behave as though the curriculum existed for their sakes, and who wish to relock the gate. The State often argues that, as the owner of the educational system, it must be the sole arbiter of its purposes. Social marketeers often hold that schooling and the curriculum must be exposed to the forces of natural selection, where variations will flourish or perish as consumers make their individual choices.

This book explores various arguments for different kinds of curricula. It attempts to summarize and analyse competing models and patterns of what schools and other educational institutions provide. These models have in common the fact that they are all—like gardens—constructed by people: they are social constructions open to criticism and analysis. Gardens classify territory: land is defined with different kinds of frames or boundaries—hedges, pathways, arbours, borders, ditches—each area having its own purpose and system of cultivation—herbs, vegetables, varieties of flowers, grassy areas, and so on. In precisely the same way, Basil Bernstein (1975) has described the classification and framing of the educational knowledge that constitutes the school curriculum: classification is ‘the relationship between contents…where classification is strong, contents are well insulated from each other by strong boundaries [while] where classification is weak…the boundaries between contents are weak or blurred’ (p. 49). The garden as a whole is bounded by a framing fence: to Bernstein, the framing of educational knowledge is the ‘strength of the boundary between what may be transmitted and what may not be transmitted in the pedagogic relationship’ (p. 50).

Four major forms of curriculum will be analysed, each predicated on a different set of assumptions about the purposes and functions of education. Each of these forms is mirrored by a particular philosophy of garden design in a way that is more than simply metaphor or analogy: the different ideas about the form and purposes of gardens are part of the same cultural movements that expressed different ideas about the structures and objectives of the school curriculum.

The Baroque Curriculum

Early gardens were walled and private places. The first known picture of a garden is an Egyptian papyrus, dating back to about 1400 BC: it shows the symmetrical garden of Nebamun, bounded by a rectangular stone or brick wall. Other classical references to gardens describe them as balanced, trimmed and within walled enclosures (for example, in The Odyssey, the gardens of Alconous and of Laertes). This tradition is carried through to the medieval garden, typically geometrically arranged, with square beds, hemmed in by rectilinear hedges (or pergolas, trellises or arbours), each planted with a particular crop of herbs, flowers, fruit or vegetables.

Walled gardens are reflected in the walls of academia, even today: in our older universities, miscreant students may still be ‘gated’, or kept within the high walls that surround the College. And university activities that take place beyond the undergraduate/post-graduate spectrum are significantly called ‘extramural studies’: beyond the walls.

This form of garden perhaps reached its peak in the baroque and rococo gardens of continental western Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The key features of this form of garden are its enclosure within a strong frame, defining what is within and without the garden, and ideas of balance, regularity and symmetry, so that the forms of plants themselves are trimmed and shaped into idealized and often classical forms. Each bed or area has its own specialist function, with its own traditions and forms of cultivation. This is the curriculum of clearly demarcated subjects, classified by both content knowledge and by the discourse forms appropriate and specific to each discipline. Such strongly framed curricula have what Bernstein distinguishes as a ‘strong collection code’ (1975, p. 50).

As in the baroque garden, where selected species are not only specific to particular areas, but must be cultivated in certain ways and trained into special shapes, in such an academic curriculum (Goodson, 1988) the ‘strong framing’ allows the learner ‘little control over the selection, organization and pacing of transmission’ (Bernstein, 1975, p. 179). In Sir Francis Carew’s massively-walled garden at Beddington Manor fruit trees had their natural cycle repressed, so that when Sir Francis entertained Elizabeth I he was able to lead her ‘to a cherry-tree, whose fruit he had of purpose kept from ripening at least one month after all cherries had taken their farewell of England: he had done this by putting on a canvas cover and keeping it damp’ (Platt, 1608, quoted in Thacker, 1979).¹ Another example is the formal gardens designed by Nicolas de Pigage at Schwetzingen, which were being established in the 1750s when Voltaire stayed there as guest of the Elector Carl Theodore while he wrote Candide. The balanced formality of these gardens is reflected in the idea of a curriculum in which distinctly bounded subjects, limited in number, are ‘balanced’ against each other, and in which each retains and preserves its unique processes and form of knowledge. Such curricula are considered in Chapter 7 of this book.

The Naturally Landscaped Curriculum

There was a perhaps inevitable revolt against such a style of garden as unnatural. The formality and artifice of the baroque was rejected in favour of the landscape garden, as expressed by the character Theocles in Shaftesbury’s The Moralists (1709) when he speaks of:

The Genius of the Place… I shall no longer resist the Passion growing in me for Things of a natural kind; where neither Art, nor the Conceit or Caprice of Man has spoiled their genuine Order, by breaking in on that primitive State. Even the rude Rocks, the mossy Caverns, the irregular unwrought Grotto’s, and broken Falls of Waters, with all the horrid Graces of the Wilderness itself, as representing NATURE more, will be the more engaging, and appear with a Magnificence beyond the formal Mockery of Princely Gardens.

This was echoed in Joseph Addison’s articles in The Spectator in 1712: his objections to topiary and the mathematical figures of the formal garden, in which ‘we see the marks of the Scissars upon every Plant and Bush’ (25 June 1712); his delight in his own irregular garden, ‘a confusion of Litchin and Parterres, Orchard and Flower Garden… a natural Wilderness’ (6 September 1712).

The landscape garden was made possible by the invention of the ha-ha, ‘a technological advance in the craft of gardening which is quite exceptional’ (Thacker, 1979, p. 181). Instead of the boundary fence, a raised enclosing barrier, the ha-ha is a dry ditch, a sunken barrier, which creates an illusion that the garden and the surrounding countryside are a unity. In curriculum terms, this creates the impression of ‘a weak boundary between what may and what may not be transmitted’ (Bernstein, 1975, p. 50). Such a curriculum claims not to be governed by the artifice of subjects, but by the nature of the learner. Subjects are portrayed as artificial, dividing forms of knowledge with contrived distinctions of process, knowledge and procedures.

The natural garden and the natural curriculum are directly linked in the person of JeanJacques Rousseau. In La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) he attacks the formality of French gardens (such as those at Versailles) and extols ‘Julie’s garden’, which appears to grow spontaneously, without fixed lines, and is bounded by concealing thick trees and bushes. Nature, uncontaminated by society and social forms, is equivalent to virtue; society is corrupt, and civilization a harmful constraint. This theme is replicated in his writings on education: in Emile (rep. 1964) he propounds a system for education based on the child’s unfolding nature, rather than on the requirements of a pre-established adult-centred cultural system. For example, Emile’s understanding of mathematics and his language skills are developed by the artful and well-informed teacher, who exploits the situations of everyday life to find meaningful contexts for learning. Although a devastating attack on educational traditions—a ‘romantic iconoclast attitude towards the values and rules of traditional culture’ (Skilbeck, 1976)—the regime that Rousseau proposes is in fact highly structured, orderly and disciplined. The apparent freedom of the learner is conditioned by the constant surveillance of the teacher, which makes this difficult to reconcile with ‘natural’ learning.

The learner-centred curriculum, the subject of Chapter 9, fails to recognize that in any society, even one of two people, there can no longer be a ‘natural’ state or ‘natural learning’, and that the idea of society as a virtuous state of nature is chimerical. The same is true of the landscape garden: far from being natural, it is constrained, in its own way, by the prejudices and beliefs of its designer, and the ha-ha only gives the illusion of unity with the countryside; it is in functional terms as substantial a border as the wall or hedge. The ‘seamless robe’ of knowledge necessarily retains some notion of boundary and subject division, simply by virtue of being knowledge, because the making of knowledge is a social process that involves categorization and labelling. This generalization in itself is an act of boundary-making.

The artificiality of such ‘naturalistic’ settings is evident in the methodology of the most well-known landscape gardener, ‘Capability’ Brown. After working at Stowe, one of the first landscaped gardens, he set up in 1751 as a freelance garden designer. When asked to give an opinion on the possibilities of landscaping a property, he was supposed to have invariably replied that, were he given the task, the land in question had ‘capabilities’ which he might be able to mould and make distinctive. Thacker’s analysis is that his best work was ‘the development of the latent capabilities of a site, the natural potential of a scene…the inspired detection, analysis and encouragement of the genius loci, the “spirit of the place”’ (1979, p. 209). Making decisions about what is ‘natural’, and then constructing this vision, is pure artifice, however aesthetically pleasing it may appear. In just the same way, a curriculum formulated on notions of natural personal growth and development may be perceived as rewarding (to teacher and to learner), learner-centred and empowering, but is as much socially constructed as the subjectcentred, traditional academic curriculum.

Capability Brown’s name also has resonances with current ideas of a ‘capability curriculum’, but this latter is in reality part of a quite different curricular tradition, that of utilitarianism, analysed in Chapter 5. There is also, of course, a parallel tradition of utility in gardening design, which I here describe as digging for victory.

The Dig-for-Victory Curriculum

The baroque garden and the landscape garden are both large-scale, owned by and designed for the rich (who do not themselves, however, provide the labour for maintaining the garden, other than in the symbolic play of Marie Antoinette in the Petit Trianon). Most gardens are much smaller, and are today owned, designed and cultivated by individual families. They are often seen in utilitarian terms, sometimes providing food, sometimes a pleasing place in which to relax, sometimes a way of indulging in recreational manual labour.

The curriculum of educational institutions can also be interpreted and designed to meet very similar functions. The idea that the curriculum must in some way be useful, and in particular that the learning that takes place in schools must in some way prepare children for their future roles in work and in society is not new. Jamieson and Lightfoot (1982) point to the continuing debate on the relationship between schooling and industry dating back to the 1851 Great Exhibition. The comparative economic decline of the United Kingdom, over the past twenty years in particular (and over the past 150 years

more generally), has been analysed as a consequence of inappropriate schooling, that prefers ‘academic’ non-industrial, or even anti-industrial, values over the acquisition of ‘useful’ skills. Wiener’s now classic thesis in English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 18501980 (1981) had a very significant impact on the shaping of the UK curriculum in the 1980s (Lawton, 1994; Ross, 1995b). It was argued that there was a skills deficit in the workforce, and that this led to relative incompetence in production. The existence of this skills deficit was attributed to an inappropriately focused, weakly directed and poorly delivered school (and post-school) curriculum.

This view of the curriculum, explored in more detail in Chapter 8, requires the structure and content of education to be directly relevant to the needs of (adult) society, and in particular to the needs of employers. There is continuous and increasing emphasis on international comparisons and league tables, in terms of percentages of young people obtaining training qualifications, in terms of ability in various forms of mathematics and of attainment of scientific knowledge, which are then related to levels of industrial output and national income. The crisis that has been generated has generated a response, particularly since James Callaghan’s speech at Ruskin College in 1976, which has analogies with the crisis in food and raw materials shortages of 1939. A large proportion of the nation’s food had been imported up to that date, and this supply was then threatened by Axis naval attacks on supply convoys. The response was to divert attention to controlling consumption and to increasing domestic supply. ‘Dig for Victory’ was the slogan that led to domestic gardens being turned over to v...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1: Curriculum Gardening
• 2: What is the Curriculum?
• 3: Conflict in the Curriculum: Growth and Diversity, 1860–1976
• 4: Turmoil in the Curriculum: 19761986
• 5: The Imposed Curriculum: 19861998
• 6: Curriculum and Reproduction
• 7: Content-driven Curricula
• 8: Objectives-driven Curricula
• 9: Process-driven Curricula
• 10: Forging the Curriculum: Nationalism, Identity and the English Curriculum
• References