School Subjects and Curriculum Change

Ivor F. Goodson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135722418
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

The process of curriculum development is highly practical, as Goodson shows in this enlarged anniversary third edition of his seminal work. The position of subjects and their development within the curriculum is illustrated by looking at how school subjects, in particular, geography and biology, gained academic and intellectual respectability within the whole curriculum during the late 1960s and early 1970s. He highlights how subjects owe their formation and accreditation to competing status and their power to compete in the provision of 'worthwhile' knowledge and considers subjects as continually changing sub-groups of information. Such subjects from the framework of the society in which individuals live and over which they have influence. This volume questions the basis on which subject disciplines are developed and formulates new possibilities for curriculum development and reform in a post-modrnist age.

Part One

Becoming an Academic Subject: Case Studies in the Social History of the School Curriculum

1 Introduction

This book provides a number of historical case studies of school subjects and examines underlying patterns of change and conflict both within and between these subjects. The focus of the case studies is on the ‘process of becoming a school subject’ and therefore concentrates on the promotion of subjects as they seek establishment in the school curriculum. The concern is not to provide a general explanation of school subjects and curriculum change but rather to raise issues and generate insights about past and current work which does seek to provide such explanatory theories. Central to the book is a belief in a socio-historical approach to curriculum studies.

In particular and in summary the book seeks to present evidence for three hypotheses: firstly, that subjects are not monolithic entities but shifting amalgamations of sub-groups and traditions. These groups within the subject influence and change boundaries and priorities. Secondly, that in the process of establishing a school subject (and associated university discipline) base subject groups tend to move from promoting pedagogic and utilitarian traditions towards the academic tradition. The need for the subject to be viewed as a scholarly discipline will impinge on both the promotional rhetoric and the process of subject definition, most crucially during the passage to subject and discipline establishment. Thirdly, that, in the cases studied, much of the curriculum debate can be interpreted in terms of conflict between subjects over status, resources and territory.

Above all historical case studies of school subjects provide the ‘local detail’ of curriculum change and conflict. The identification of individuals and subgroups actively at work within curriculum interest groups allows some examination and assessment of intention and motivation. Thereby sociological theories which attribute power over the curriculum to dominant interest groups can be scrutinised for their empirical potential.¹

To concentrate attention at the micro level of individual school subject groups is not to deny the crucial importance of macro level economic changes or changes in intellectual ideas, dominant values or educational systems. But it is asserted that such macro level changes may be actively reinterpreted at the micro level. Changes at macro level are viewed as presenting a range of new choices to subject factions, associations and communities. To understand how subjects change over time, as well as histories of intellectual ideas, we need to understand how subject groups take up and promote new ideas and opportunities. It is not contended that subject groups are all-powerful in engineering curriculum change but that their responses are a very important, and as yet somewhat neglected, part of the overall picture.

Besides seeking to examine sociological explanation of the school curriculum the emphasis on the social history of school subjects generates insights and questions of importance for the future of the comprehensive school. The differential status (and available resources) of the various school subjects derive from their origins in the separate educational sectors which preceded comprehensivation. For instance, craft and practical subjects still carry with them the low status which originated through their elementary school background. School subjects, therefore, represent the deep structures of curriculum differentiation at work within contemporary schools. Recent studies of comprehensives have shown how a divisive system arises as these differentiated curricula are allocated to different pupil clienteles. Changing the internal processes of schooling in line with the comprehensive ideal will require detailed understanding of the origins and continuing strengths of the subject-based curriculum. The present pattern of subject definition and syllabus construction, of associated status and resources, ensures that school subjects play their part in preserving entrenched social divisions in the face of organisational change.

Explanations of School Subjects

The juxtaposition of intellectual ‘disciplines’ and school subjects has for some time been a starting point in the work of certain philosophers of education. Hirst, for instance, talks of school subjects ‘which are indisputably logically cohesive disciplines’.² But such a philosophical perspective is rooted in particular educational convictions, notably in the assertion that ‘no matter what the ability of the child may be, the heart of all his development as a rational being is, I am saying, intellectual’.³ In accordance with these convictions Hirst (and Peters) argue that ‘the central objectives of education are developments of mind’. Such objectives are best pursued by ‘the definition of forms of knowledge’⁴ (later broadened to include ‘fields of knowledge’). These forms and fields of knowledge can provide the ‘logically cohesive disciplines’ on which school subjects are based.

The philosophy of Hirst and Peters, therefore, provides an explanatory basis for the school curriculum aspiring to promote the intellectual development of its pupils. In this model of school subject definition it is often implied that the intellectual discipline is created by a community of scholars, normally working in a university, and is then ‘translated’ for use as a school subject. Phenix defines the intellectual discipline base in this way: ‘The general test for a discipline is that it should be the characteristic activity of an identifiable organised tradition of men of knowledge, that is of persons who are skilled in certain specified functions that they are able to justify by a set of intelligible standards’.⁵

Once a discipline has established a university base it is persuasively self-fulfilling to argue that here is a field of knowledge from which an ‘academic’ school subject can receive inputs and general direction. But this version of events simply celebrates a fait accompli in the evolution of a discipline and associated school subject. What is left unexplained are the stages of evolution towards this culminating pattern and the forces which push aspiring ‘academic’ subjects to follow similar routes. To understand the progression along the route to academic status it is necessary to examine the social histories of school subjects and to analyse the strategies employed in their construction and promotion.

The manner in which philosophical studies offer justification for the academic subject-based curriculum has been noted by sociologists. Thus philosophers such as Hirst present a view of education that Young states: ‘appears to be based on an absolutist conception of a set of distinct forms of knowledge which correspond closely to the traditional areas of the academic curriculum and thus justify, rather than examine, what are no more than socio-historical constructs of a particular time’.⁶ Whilst accepting Young’s critique it is important to note that this book will contend that school subjects represent substantial interest groups. To view subjects as ‘no more than socio-historical constructs of a particular time’, whilst correct at one level, does severe injustice to all those groups involved in their continuance and promotion over time.

As long ago as 1968 Musgrove made what, at the time, was a fairly original suggestion to sociologists. He recommended that they:

Examine subjects both within the school and the nation at large as social systems sustained by communication networks, material endowments and ideologies. Within a school and within a wider society subjects as communities of people, competing and collaborating with one another, defining and defending their boundaries, demanding allegiance from their members and conferring a sense of identity upon them…even innovation which appears to be essentially intellectual in character can usefully be examined as the outcome of social interaction…

Musgrove remarked that ‘studies of subjects in these terms have scarcely begun at least at school level’.⁷

A number of studies have sought to follow Musgrove’s exhortation, for instance recent work by Eggleston, but a very influential work in the field of the sociology of knowledge was the collection of papers in ‘Knowledge and Control’ edited by M.F.D.Young in 1971. The papers reflect Bernstein’s contention that ‘how a society selects, classifies, distributes, transmits and evaluates the educational knowledge it considers to be public, reflects both the distribution of power and the principles of social control’.⁸ Young likewise suggests that ‘consideration of the assumptions underlying the selection and organisation of knowledge by those in positions of power may be a fruitful perspective for raising sociological questions about curricula’.⁹ The emphasis leads to general statements of the following kind:

Academic curricula in this country involve assumptions that some kinds and areas of knowledge are much more ‘worthwhile’ than others: that as soon as possible all knowledge should become specialised and with minimum explicit emphasis on the relations between the subjects specialised in and between specialist teachers involved. It may be useful, therefore, to view curricular changes as involving changing definitions of knowledge along one or more of the dimensions towards a less or more stratified, specialised and open organisation of knowledge. Further, that as we assume some patterns of social relations associated with any curriculum, these changes will be resisted insofar as they are perceived to undermine the values, relative power and privileges of the dominant groups involved.¹⁰

The process whereby the unspecified ‘dominant groups’ exercise control over other presumably subordinate groups is not scrutinised, although certain hints are offered. We learn that a school’s autonomy in curriculum matters ‘is in practice extremely limited by the control of the sixth form (and therefore lower form) curricula by the universities, both through their entrance requirements and their domination of all but one of the school examination boards’. In a footnote Young assures that ‘no direct control is implied here, but rather a process by which teachers legitimate their curricula through their shared assumptions about “what we all know the universities want”’.¹¹ This concentration on the teachers’ socialisation as the major agency of control is picked up elsewhere. We learn that:

The contemporary British educational system is dominated by academic curricula with a rigid stratification of knowledge. It follows that if teachers and children are socialised within an institutionalised structure which legitimates such assumptions, then for teachers high status (and rewards) will be associated with areas of the curriculum that are (1) formally assessed (2) taught to the ‘ablest’ children (3) taught in homogeneous ability groups of children who show themselves most successful within such curricula.¹²

Young goes on to note that it ‘should be fruitful to explore the syllabus construction of knowledge practitioners in terms of their efforts to enhance or maintain their academic legitimacy’.¹³

Two papers by Bourdieu in ‘Knowledge and Control’ summarise his considerable influence on English sociologists of knowledge.¹⁴ Unlike many of the other contributors to ‘Knowledge and Control’, Bourdieu has gone on to carry out empirical work to test his theoretical assertions. His recent work, though concentrated at university, not school, level, looks at the theme of reproduction through education and includes an important section on The Examination within the Structure and History of the Educational System.¹⁵ Young also has come to feel the need for historical approaches to test theories of knowledge and control. He wrote recently ‘One crucial way of reformulating and transcending the limits within which we work, is to see…how such limits are not given or fixed, but produced through the conflicting actions and interests of man in history’.¹⁶ Likewise Bernstein has subsequently argued that ‘if we are to take shifts in the content of education seriously, then we require histories of these contents, and their relationship to institutions and symbolic arrangements external to the school.’¹⁷

Towards a Social History of School Subjects

A number of recent studies have employed historical approaches to explore curriculum issues pertinent to the questions addressed in this book. Wilkinson’s study of the classical academic curricula of nineteenth-century public schools is of this sort and draws ideas from an earlier study by Weber.¹⁸ Weber investigated Confucian education and identified three crucial elements in the education of Chinese administrators at this time. The main emphasis was on propriety and ‘bookishness’, with a curriculum largely restricted to the learning and memorising of classical texts. This curriculum comprised a very narrow selection from the available knowledge in a society where mathematicians, astronomers, scientists and geographers were not uncommon. However, all these fields of knowledge were classified by the literati as ‘vulgar’ or perhaps in more contemporary terms ‘non-academic’. The use of examinations, based on this narrow curriculum, fo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface to the Anniversary Edition
• Foreword to the Third Edition
• Family Legacies
• Introduction to the Second Edition
• Part One: Becoming an Academic Subject: Case Studies in the Social History of the School Curriculum
• Part Two: School Subjects Patterns of Internal Evolution
• Part Three: Relationship Between Subjects The Territorial Nature of Subject Conflict
• Part Four: Conclusions
• Appendix
• Index