Thinking About The Curriculum (Routledge Revivals)

The nature and treatment of curriculum problems

William Reid

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135052775
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Curricula

First published in 1978, this book looks at the 'curriculum crisis' of the 1970s, examining the effect it has had for Curriculum Studies and curriculum policy making. It focuses on a time when long-established structures and procedures were challenged and schools were accused of having lost touch with the wants and needs of communities. The author argues that the curriculum should become part of community interest and be led by this, rather than by professionals and initiates. Indeed, he feels that the curriculum must have an identity which avoids alliances with technocrats, bureaucrats or ideologues, but yet has a positive philosophy and a commitment to good values.

1

Introduction: Curriculum debates and Curriculum Studies

In his speech at Ruskin College … the Prime Minister called for a public debate on education. The debate was not to be confined to those professionally concerned with education, but was to give full opportunity for employers and trades unions, and parents, as well as teachers and administrators, to make their views known. (Education in Schools: A Consultative Document, Cmnd 6869, London, HMSO, 1977, p. 2)

There are many different voices but little joining of these voices in a give-and-take exchange. It is a mistake to think of this cacophony as a debate; there is little opportunity to listen and to formulate thoughtful response. … The claims and charges are often so contradictory or mutually exclusive that one is led to wonder what actually goes on in schools, whether generalisations are possible and whether anybody knows. (NIE Curriculum Development Task Force, Current Issues, Problems, and Concerns in Curriculum Development, Report to NCER, 1976, p. 4)

The 1970s are the decade of curriculum crisis: what could previously be left to the bureaucrats and the professionals is now a matter of acute public concern. Partly this is because schools have been too successful in their claims on economic resources. ‘Quite suddenly … the schools lost their status as sacred cows. Driven by Sputnik, racial conflict, and new frontiers, the school bubble had outgrown all non-military budgets and had burst.’¹ And partly it is because the curriculum – what the school is there to provide – has lost touch with the wants of individuals and the needs of the community. In our concern to lavish more resources on educational systems, to bring more of their benefits to more people, we had lost the ability to reflect on fundamental purposes, to match technical efficiency with quality of learning and professional commitment with public service. Now crisis is creating a new arena for the resolution of curriculum problems. An arena which will offer new roles to public and to professionals alike. But to invite public discussion and debate is one thing. To see what kind of a debate is relevant to curriculum problems and to provide the situations and the skills that enable it to be adequately conducted is another. And for the professional – the teacher, the administrator or researcher – who must review his expertise and commitment, where are the appropriate models, concepts or ideals that should guide his reorientation? These are issues that everyone must be concerned about; they are of central importance to all those who through teaching or research or as students are members of the academic field of Curriculum Studies.

The essays in this book relate to various aspects of these problems. They identify and discuss what seem to me to be the important themes that we should be concerned with as a necessary preliminary step to tackling curriculum questions through the arena of public policy-making rather than through the closed world of the initiate and the expert.

First of all, if we are, as a community, to try to find answers to curriculum problems, we have to think about them, and that, in turn, means identifying the kinds of thinking that are appropriate to them. Is it just the application of common sense that is needed? Or should we try to ‘think’ in the sense of applying concepts or theories? Is there any justice in the argument that the curriculum is something realised in action, something ‘practical’ that cannot be made the subject of theory?

If debate should be informed by intelligence² about the present state of the school curriculum and about the possibilities that exist for change and how change can be brought about, what kinds of enquiry should be undertaken to produce this intelligence? What kind of a concept of curriculum research should we have? Obviously, our answer to this question depends on whether we conceive of curriculum as something that demands practical or theoretic styles of thinking, or some mixture of the two.

How should thought and intelligence actually be applied to curriculum problems? Can the debate be conducted in a purely procedural way? Can we from known premises reach sure conclusions? How should questions of ends and means be treated in discussion on the curriculum? How do value questions and moral principles enter into it? This is the arena in which reorientation is perhaps most urgently needed. Our preoccupation with the ‘what’ question distracts our attention from the even more important ‘how’ questions that go along with it. ‘What should be taught in schools?’ or ‘What should students learn?’ are not problems that can be solved simply by applying thought and intelligence in some kind of abstract way. The thought and intelligence have to be applied by people who work through social, administrative or political structures. Unless we can provide adequate answers to questions of how this should be done, no amount of effort in other directions will produce better curriculum decisions.

Curricula are provided through organisations. If we are to make good decisions about ways in which curricula should be changed we have to understand the nature of these organisations, the circumstances under which they may be open to change and those under which they will resist it; what they are capable of doing and what they cannot achieve, however much we would like them to. In the absence of such an understanding debates on the content or purposes of the curriculum risk being purely ritualistic exercises.

Finally, what are the general implications for Curriculum Studies of the approaches to curriculum problems suggested in the earlier essays? What kind of an identity should it be seeking and what kinds of leading metaphors should guide its enquiries? Faced with a variety of possible futures, which should we choose and what are the criteria which should determine our preferences?

The essays, then, relate to two major and interconnected concerns: how can communities adequately debate questions of curricular ends and means, and how can Curriculum Studies be conceived as an enquiry that assists in the resolution of curriculum problems?

Deliberation as a means of solving curriculum problems

Throughout the essays the word ‘deliberation’ is preferred to the word ‘debate’. The reasons for this are, first, that deliberation is a more narrowly defined term and a more appropriate one, so it is argued,³ for debates on the curriculum. Second, the word has been used already by curriculum writers who have made considerable contributions to a literature defining and elaborating on it.⁴ Third, there is a need to set new directions, to turn away from the connotations of the word ‘debate’ and to think anew about what is needed when specifically curriculum problems are at issue: what contexts and situations, what styles of argument and reasoning. In places, especially in Chapter 4, the way curriculum ‘debates’ are currently conducted is explicitly criticised. In others it is criticised by implication. Those criticisms may be summarised as follows:

1. Debate proceeds on the assumption that schools and school systems are rational institutions, and that their behaviour can be changed by giving them appropriate instructions.
2. The schools’ capacity to deliver on goals is not questioned. If some predetermined level of competency is to be required of students, then it is just a matter of instituting the necessary tests to check that it has been achieved.
3. Schools and communities are thought of as uniform. Throughout a country or a state, they can be subject to the same policies.
4. Though much play is made with the word ‘debate’, education and decision-making on education are thought of as happening within relatively closed systems.
5. Fundamental questions of curricular purposes are pushed on one side. Especially, the moral nature of curriculum decision-making is passed over.
6. Discussion is imbued with a commitment to ‘right answerism’⁵ – a belief that problems can be solved in some final sense through the discovery of the right formula.
7. There is a low level of emphasis on data. It is thought that what happens in schools is a matter of common knowledge or can be found out by asking people who ‘know’.
8. Questions of how to arrive at decisions are thought of as relatively unimportant (or, again, as ‘something we all know’) compared to questions of what should be taught and learned.

The ‘debate’ launched in England by the Prime Minister’s Ruskin College speech in 1976 showed all these characteristics. The speech was based on an unpublished policy document produced within the Department of Education and Science and known as the Yellow Book. Some of its contents are known through the printing of extensive pirated extracts in the Times Educational Supplement⁶ (subsequent references to Yellow Book are to the TES article). It deals with four ‘problems’:

the issue of the basic approach to teaching the 3 Rs in primary schools; the curricula for older children in comprehensive schools; the examination system; the general problems of 16 to 19 year olds who had no prospect of going on directly to higher education.⁷

Obviously, these are exceedingly ill-defined ‘problems’. The first might sound as though it were reasonably limited in scope, but then that impression is dispelled by referring to it as an ‘issue’ rather than a ‘problem’. These are, in fact, general curricular areas about which there are more or less articulated feelings of unease. A great deal of work would need to be done before those feelings could lead to the identification of specific problems that one might set out to solve. The treatment of the ‘issues’ in the Yellow Book may be exemplified by studying what it has to say about the curricula of secondary comprehensive schools. First a range of criticisms is reviewed: there is ‘a feeling that the schools have become too easy going … some employers complain that school leavers cannot express themselves clearly and lack the basic mathematical skills’; students may be permitted ‘to choose unbalanced or not particularly profitable curricula’ and there are ‘pressures from a variety of specialised lobbies for the secondary curriculum to embrace their particular aims’.⁸ An appropriate next step might have been to try to formulate the criticisms in more specific ways and review data that might assist in evaluating them. Alternatively, if data are lacking, to suggest what might be done to obtain them. What do employers mean by ‘express themselves clearly’ or ‘basic mathematical skills’? In what ways are deficiencies in these areas thought to be a problem? Which employers are worried? Given a better insight into what is causing concern, what statistics or what research evidence can help decide whether the concern is justified? But the discussion does not proceed in this way. Rather it assumes the worries to be well founded and puts up speculative theories about how the problems may have been caused. ‘In an almost desperate attempt to modify styles of teaching and learning so as to capture the imagination and enlist the cooperation of their more difficult pupils, some [teachers] have possibly been too ready to drop their sights in setting standards of performance’, and ‘Some teachers and some schools may have overemphasised the importance of preparing boys and girls for their roles in society compared with the need to prepare them for their economic role’.⁹ Logically, of course, speculation about how problems arise is quite beside the point at a stage when the problems have yet to be defined and evidence considered on the extent to which they are real or imaginary. This further discussion seems rather to fulfil the function of clinching rumour by innuendo (curiously, the repeated ‘possiblys’ and ‘may haves’ seem almost to reinforce the indictment by implying that kindness forbids the telling of the plain truth, rather than soften it by admitting the lack of foundation for the points that are being made).¹⁰ The next step (still in advance of the identification of the problems) is to propose solutions: ‘The time has probably come to try to establish generally accepted principles for the composition of the secondary curriculum for all pupils, that is to say a “core curriculum”.’ The equation of ‘generally accepted principles’ with ‘core curriculum’ is, of course, a further logical fallacy.¹¹

However, the document was only the first step in initiating a political process intended to lead to curriculum reform. Following the official announcement of public discussion (the expression ‘great debate’ was in common currency even before the prime ministerial announcement) further papers were produced which attempted to set out ‘agendas’. These elaborated on the curriculum issues of the ‘Yellow Book’. That is, they concentrated on the ‘what’ questions. ‘How’ one has a debate on curriculum issues was not a topic for discussion, in spite of the fact that, as this was the first occasion for many years that public participation in the consideration of the school curriculum had been invited, it could hardly be claimed that there was a well-established tradition of how such things should be managed. It seems to have been assumed that the pattern of debate would be of the type commonly associated with legislative assemblies. The gatherings would be large, most participants would be ‘representing’ someone or something, and contributions would be limited to one or two statements per person. Eight regional one-day meetings were to be organised in the spring of 1977. The ‘background paper’ which was prepared, referred to here as Educating our Children,¹² showed some consciousness that this kind of debate might not be able to make much progress on solving all our curriculum problems:

In a conference lasting one day, only a limited number of issues can be discussed profitably…. (F)our main topics have been chosen for debate. These are-.

1. the curriculum;
2. the assessment of standards;
3. the education and training of teachers;
4. school and working life.¹³

At that rate of progress, maybe two days of conference would have solved all our problems? One wonders why such a small extra investment was not made.

Educating our Children was, however, the product of a ‘first stage’ of debate consisting of ‘preliminary meetings with a limited number of educational and industrial organisations, at which a paper outlining possible issues for consideration was discussed’. (This paper will be referred to as the ‘Annotated Agenda’.¹⁴) So perhaps within the general area of, for example, ‘the curriculum’ it was specific problems which the conferences were to discuss, derived through stage one from the general issues?

There is, as far as I know, no reliable published source for what happened in this preliminary stage of the ‘debate’. To judge how effective it was in advancing the discussion of curriculum problems, all one can do is compare the sequence of documents from the Yellow Book through the Annotated Agenda to Educating our Children to see in what ways argument and evidence have been used, or how far new possibilities have been considered or new views sought and taken into account. The Annotated Agenda states that it is designed to ‘encourage a fresh look at the problems, the paper therefore avoids a comprehensive review of existing policies and intentions’.¹⁵ In fact, after a one-page introduction, a heading ‘Curriculum’ is followed immediately by a paragraph entitled ‘Common Core Curriculum’ which asks, ‘Would a “common core” curriculum be a sol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• 1. Introduction: Curriculum debates and Curriculum Studies
• 2. Thinking about the practical
• 3. The concept of curriculum research
• 4. Practical reasoning and curriculum decisions
• 5. The problem of curriculum change
• 6. Rationalism or humanism? The future of Curriculum Studies
• Notes
• Name Index
• Subject Index