Reclaiming Knowledge

Social Theory, Curriculum and Education Policy

Johan Muller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135700430
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Reclaiming Knowledge asserts the necessity of a strong view of knowledge for a robust sociology of knowledge, for both researching the curriculum and developing policy. Divided into four sections or investigations, the central question underlying this book is how, in a world of uncertainty and challenge, do we develop a responsible knowledge practice?

1 The First and Last Interpreters

with Nick Taylor

Introduction

Curricular knowledge is usually seen in one of two ways. The first is as the official or codified knowledge that is packaged in the school syllabus and taught to children. Young (1976) calls this the ‘curriculum as fact’. Alternatively, it can be seen as the passage of knowledge within the school system and as that process by which some, though never all, social knowledge becomes validated as school knowledge. Young calls this the ‘curriculum as process’ (see also Goodson, 1994, especially Chapter 8).

This chapter will deal with the curriculum as a process from the viewpoint of contemporary social and cultural theory, although its sociological focus should also be clear. In some ways, this means going beyond Young’s definition and looking at how curricular knowledge circulates not only within the spheres of the school system but also between the school system and other domains of society. Adopting such an approach means taking into account various forms of social understandings, examining how they become authorized or deauthorized, how they circulate and how these circulatory patterns can be understood by looking at the nature of cultural meanings in the first place and by looking at the institutional dynamics of the different domains of society in the second.

The general model of circulatory domains developed here is not a comprehensive model of the curricular process. As the reader will see below, it is schematic rather than exhaustive. The aim is to see whether and to what extent a cogent account of curriculum as cultural meaning can be given. Nor is there any substantial comment on the burgeoning education literature which is using the broad field of cultural theory as its frame of reference. A comprehensive critical review of this literature is not the present aim.¹ A final disclaimer concerns the use of examples. Some readers may well find the rather ahistorical approach adopted here disconcerting (Goodson, 1988). Certainly, a closely argued historical analysis in terms of the model is both possible and desirable. However, the aim here is to construct the broad contours of argument and, in this instance, examples are used to shed light on the model and not vice versa.

It remains to be said by way of introduction that a general discourse about curriculum in society was conspicuously absent in academic circles in South Africa at the start of the 1990s, and to a large extent remained the case at their end. Part of the problem is that the people best placed to comment on the curriculum – teachers and curriculum planners among them – are locked into urgent practical tasks with very little time left for sober reflection and analysis. So far, there has been so much that needed to be done that such people have rarely bracketed their practice long enough to take a critical bird’s eye view of the process. Yet it is only from such a perspective that common as well as idiosyncratic features of the process come into view. I will try to substantiate this below.

Knowledge and Society

Knowledge construction and reconstruction snakes ceaselessly through the body of society. It does not proceed or progress seamlessly nor is it an aggregate of incremental steps. Even so, each main arena of society has its own specific dynamics. Society at large is the level at which we regard the world as consisting of citizens and their daily needs. It is where citizens participate in the world both as personal and expressive beings and as political and economic players. Within this inclusive ambit, one can distinguish the general domain of everyday life as well as different specialized domains of social practice. The three specialized domains that deal centrally with the curriculum are the academic domain, the educational bureaucracy and the school itself.² There is a fourth, the formal political domain or, generally speaking, the state. The state has powerful accumulation and legitimization imperatives to satisfy (Weiler, 1993), and curriculum policy and process is indelibly marked by efforts to secure these. In many ways, the state is the composite articulation of the ruling principle governing all other domains. Although this is formally so, however, it does not on its own help us to understand the internal dynamics of the other domains. Most commentaries on the politics of the curriculum, in South Africa as elsewhere, have discussed the political domain of the state fairly comprehensively (see Christie and Collins, 1984; Molteno, 1987). While its influence is unquestionably vital, it will be taken largely as given and the focus here will be on the other mechanisms of legislation that shape the curriculum.

Any analysis that speaks of a process of knowledge codification is bound to be vulnerable to charges of reproductionism. This is partly unavoidable. As the formal education system is the social mechanism par excellence for the reproduction of dominant culture and as this chapter aims primarily at describing some of the mechanisms governing the circulation of knowledge in society at large, the conservatizing force of curriculum has to receive its due (Bourdieu, 1976). Understanding this is a necessary step in the planning of any effective curriculum project, be it politically progressive, reformist or reactionary.

Each social domain to be discussed below – the academic, the bureaucratic, the school and everyday life – is characterized by its own particular institutional locations, organized by particular special interests, resulting in specific forms of knowledge. Knowledge is a signifying process which permeates society. It may be more accurate to say though that this signifying process is itself made up of a series of microprocesses, even multiples of microprocesses, which make up each domain. Each process, macro or micro, observes certain common principles of dynamism. First, there is a proliferation of interpretations of a given phenomenon or event, followed by a process of authorization of a limited number of these interpretations. Through a process of mediation, which is essentially interpretative, the authorized interpretations are then transferred to the next microprocess. This is often in a textual form in modern societies, but not necessarily so. The everyday canons of British working-class culture remain primarily oral, whereas those of the middle class are largely written (Hoggart, 1957). Increasingly, society is saturated in a ‘“lustrous bath” of hyperrealistic and glamorised images’ (Weitman, 1998, p. 74) through the phenomenal expansion of technology and the media. Nevertheless, whether oral, written or visual, transferral entails a process of redescription, which in turn relies upon a transaction of authority and power. When a transferral is from one domain to another, these transactions are usually of some significance.

Description, redescription and authorization occur within the framework of two fundamental legislative signifying mechanisms: condensation and displacement.³ Condensation is the centripetal dynamic of social meaning, the lifeline of social cohesion in which different interpretations are blended to form a single (univocal or plurivocal) meaning. Displacement, on the other hand, is the centrifugal dynamic of social meaning, a mechanism of divide and rule, with differing interpretations either suppressed or held in a kind of suspension, disarmed and rendered ineffective. Although one of the two mechanisms may predominate at any one time, neither can occur in isolation from the other.

In fact, clusters of meaning are constantly combining, dissolving and recombining into different configurations through restless processes of condensation and displacement. The power of any social group resides in part in its control over these processes. The embodiment in the curriculum of the values and practices of any particular group is the result of a process of struggle, usually symbolic, although it is always also related to the broader field of power in society. This position of mastery is more or less precarious and must be defended by continuous effort. Thus, every description, redescription and authorization represents an agonistic site of where rival groups battle for symbolic control, for control of the ‘pedagogic device’ (Bernstein, 1996).

The power of the signitive or symbolic process is part of the conveyer belt of the meanings of a society and cannot be wished away. On the other hand, because of the ineluctability of power in redescription, redescription runs the perpetual risk of replacing a self-definition with an external foreign one. This can be alienating, or worse. As Rorty (1989, p. 90) says, ‘Redescription often humiliates’. The redescription that prevails, therefore, does so all too often at the expense of earlier redescriptions which are often deeply moored in the existential reality of social actors. If the power of the redescription is magnified by structure and domination, redescription not only humiliates but can also silence. When this happens, then necessary authority and power overbalance into surplus power, which in turn means that the redescription condenses exclusively around one set of interests. The pedagogical problem is therefore how to construe the context of mediation of meaning in such a way that surplus power is minimized. This is the problem that all contemporary critical pedagogies seek to address (for example, see Freire, 1979).

Before drawing some conclusions as to how these competing tendencies in the struggle for meaning and knowledge may be reconciled, some of the dimensions of both the necessary and surplus exercise of authority at the respective sites of redescription in the curriculum cycle will briefly be outlined.

The Domain of Everyday Life

It is in the everyday world that experience is integrated and focused into the continuing identities and traditions to which a person is attached. This occurs through a set of organizing principles which make sense of experience and direct action. These vary from informal conventions to highly coded and objectified laws. The institutional sites where these occur are in the home, the high street and in the range of public venues and occasions, from weddings to the shopping mall, where people make life choices that depend on knowledge of one sort or the other. Media play an increasingly important relay role.

In principle, every person is an interpreter and provides an ‘eyewitness’ account of lived experience. Most of the time, we do not delay in according meaning to what we encounter, but do it directly and, for at least some of the time, unreflectively. These individual descriptions coagulate into more common and shared understandings via public forums such as the media, public politics or public interest lobbies, where they begin to merge with a process of tacit authorization. Successive ‘editing and recodings’ (Wexler, 1982) begin to move such interpretations towards authorization and canonization, i.e. towards a social norm that is or feels binding on thought and action. However, the canonization of an interpretation is neither a matter of simple accretion nor of progressive refinement. The stamp of social and moral authority is needed if interpretations are to be significantly shared. Legislation is a move to closure, towards the elimination of contending interpretations in favour of one approved version, whether this is by a process of condensation or displacement. In this sense, far from being merely the survival of the good and the true, the emergent or existing canon is very much an invented tradition (Anderson, 1983; Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1984).

But in the everyday world of modern society, everyday meanings are seldom total or hegemonic. Many of them are guided by serendipity where they are not simply driven by habit. Buying a car or choosing a school for the children is rarely guided by rational, or even traditionally cultural, criteria only; these decisions are often influenced by the generalized experience of friends and family, and it is in this fluid and unsystematic way that the habitus of a social group or class is built up, and reproduced, in everyday life (Bourdieu, 1977). These decisional closures are still redescriptions, however informal they may be, and there is some limit to the distance they may stray from the lived experience of ordinary persons.

These experiences are sedimented into local folklore, shaped by common sense and a healthy dose of scepticism – the ‘crude thinking’ of proverbial and idiomatic speech (Benjamin, 1969).⁴ Although the moral and social authorities provide the authoritative account, their right to canonize is dependent on the degree to which their interpretation chimes with popular memory and common sense. In other words, the legitimacy of their authority reflects the extent to which their constituents recognize and empathize with these descriptions and redescriptions. There is no one-to-one concord here, and there are real limits to redescription. ‘Anything’ does not go. It is also worth pointing out that ‘crude’ taste or knowledge is defined by contrast to ‘erudite’ or ‘refined’ knowledge or taste. The generic questions remain, however: how is this knowledge, ‘vulgar’ or ‘high’, authorized and what are the limits to this process of authorization? This is where any sociological study of knowledge and curriculum properly starts.

In summary, the process of establishing knowledge for practice (or guidelines for action) in the everyday world is, by and large, an informal and ever-shifting interpretive process, punctuated by formal moments of high tradition and ritual. For more formal codifications, for firmer definitions of knowledge, other specialized domains come into play.

The Academic Domain

A central problematic of the curriculum concerns the relation between popular and erudite knowledge. It is brought into focus with the following question: how can or should the common-sense knowledge of experience and local culture, indeed of the everyday world, relate to the codified knowledge deemed worthy of inclusion and certification in the formal curriculum? One approach poses the issue in the following terms: it asserts that the growth of capitalism has led to a split between mental and manual labour and to the rise of the professional intellectual classes who exercise inordinate power in the production of knowledge and the credentialling of a wide range of skill domains (Sohn-Rethel, 1978; Gouldner, 1979; Abercrombie and Urry, 1983; Muller and Cloete, 1987). In the evocative terms of Gramsci (1971), this split between mental and manual activity has the effect of extracting passion from scientific knowledge and reason from everyday knowledge.

This is not the only way that one might account for the differentiation between domains in modern society, but most accounts will agree that the result has been, until very recently (see Chapter 4), the dramatic schism between ordinary and formal knowledge. This is a central hub of the arguments in this book, and I shall return to it, repeatedly, in different ways because it constitutes, in my view, the central plane of distinction upon which modern schooling is founded. Seen from this perspective, the central curricular problem, which is also a central issue for social theory and political praxis, comes down to the question: what is the appropriate or proper relationship between reason and science on the one hand and the fields of passion and politics, practical activity and everyday life on the other?

During the final years of the previous century, academics came to play an increasingly central part in this knowledge–production process. Indeed, as the mental–manual split has hardened, the mental workers – the new informational middle class (Luke, 1989) – have increasingly professionalized themselves and knowledge has become even more packaged and commodified than before. The commodification and professionalization of knowledge could mean too that the knowledge ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The First and Last Interpreters
• 2 Globalization, Innovation and Knowledge
• 3 What Knowledge is of Most Worth for the Millennial Citizen?
• 4 Schooling and Everyday Life
• 5 Intimations of Boundlessness
• 6 The Well-tempered Learner
• 7 Critics and Reconstructors
• 8 Beyond Unkept Promises
• 9 Reason, Reality and Public Trust
• Index