Sociology and School Knowledge: Curriculum Theory, Research And

Sociology and School Knowledge CURRICULUM THEORY, Sociology RESEARCH AND and POLITICS School Knowledge GEOFF WHITTY METHUEN · LONDON First published in 1985 by British Library Cataloguing in Methuen & Co. Ltd Publication Data 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Whitty, Geoff Sociology and school knowledge: This edition published in the Taylor & curriculum theory, research and politics. Francis e-Library, 2003. 1. Education—Great Britain—Curricula I. Title © 1985 Geoff Whitty 370.19´0941 LB1564.G7 All rights reserved. No part of this ISBN 0-203-47263-2 Master e-book ISBN book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, ISBN 0-203-78087-6 (Adobe eReader Format) including photocopying and recording, ISBN 0-416-36960-X (Print Edition) or in any information storage or ISBN 0-416-36970-7 Pbk retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. For Alison and Patrick Contents Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 PART ONE FROM THEORY AND RESEARCH TO POLICY AND PRACTICE 1 Sociological approaches to the school curriculum 7 2 The curriculum as ideological practice 30 3 Curriculum studies and the sociology of school knowledge 56 4 From academic critique to radical intervention 76 PART TWO CURRENT CURRICULUM CONFLICTS IN A SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE 5 The Great Debate and its aftermath 101 6 The politics of public examinations 120 7 Continuity and change in social and political education 147 8 Sociologists and political movements—a resumé of the current issues 167 Notes 181 References 186 Name index 199 Subject index 203 vii Acknowledgements I am grateful to Basil Bernstein, Brian Davies and Michael Young for first alerting me to the possibilities inherent in a sociological approach to the school curriculum in lectures they gave at the University of London Institute of Education in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I should also like to thank John Eggleston for first suggesting that I should write this book back in 1978. I will always be indebted to my various collaborators over the years, namely Michael Young, Denis Gleeson, Madeleine Arnot and Richard Bowe, who will no doubt recognize their parts in the genesis and development of many of the ideas expressed in this book. Similarly, my conversations and correspondence with Jean Anyon, Michael Apple, John Beck, Bob Connell, James Donald, Henry Giroux, Andy Hargreaves, Richard Smith and Valerie Walkerdine have been especially helpful to me. However, for the ways in which their contributions have been put to use in this particular volume, I must assume full responsibility. My greatest debt is to my colleagues and students at the University of Bath, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of London who, sometimes consciously, often unconsciously, have helped me to clarify my academic and political priorities. Finally, I would like to thank Marilyn Toft for helping me with the preparation of the manuscript and for so cheerfully accepting the fact that living with me has also involved living with this project. Acknowledgement is due to Falmer Press, Croom Helm, the Open University Press and Pluto Press for permission to use material that has appeared in different form in various of their publications. It has been substantially revised before inclusion here. ix Introduction I begin this book with a brief excursion into my own biography, because I believe it will help to explain why I initially set out to explore the sociology of the school curriculum and why I am still doing so when many others have abandoned the field for other interests. I suppose I have been fascinated with the idea that the curriculum could be different from the way it is, in terms of its content and its form, ever since my final term as a pupil at one of London’s direct grant grammar schools. For most of my career there in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I doubt if I ever asked myself, let alone anyone else, why I was studying the particular assortment of subjects presented to me or why the content of those subjects was constituted in the particular way it was. That is not to say for one moment that I was uncritical of the education I was getting, but my criticisms focused almost exclusively on the way I was being taught particular subjects rather than on the value and purpose of the grammar school curriculum and its particular content. Only in my final term, when I read E.H.Carr’s What Is History? (Carr 1961) did I even begin to glimpse the idea that school knowledge was a selection from a much vaster range of possible knowledge and that its content might be socially determined. Whether or not the interest in historiography that this engendered in me helped me to gain a scholarship to one of our élite universities, I did not find much evidence within that institution that the questioning of the status of received knowledge was an activity exactly encouraged among undergraduate students. Indeed, I was able to muster a respectable degree by regurgitating facts in tripos examinations as if they were god-given and 1 2 Sociology and School Knowledge incontrovertible. Yet this was not because I had lost interest in questioning their status as knowledge, it was rather that the lack of intellectual stimulation within the courses on offer led me to devote my time to other activities. As this was by now the mid-1960s, such activities not surprisingly included radical student politics. Far from it being an escape from intellectual work, this provided me with by far the most exciting intellectual experience of my time at Cambridge—listening to Perry Anderson present an early version of his paper ‘Components of a national culture’ (P.Anderson 1968) to the Alternative University organized by the student left. That paper convinced me of the need to expose the social basis of knowledge not just to those in the relatively privileged context of higher education but to those who, as things were, never glimpsed what one of the new sociologists of education was later to term ‘the open human possibilities of creating new knowledge structures and their modes of transmission’ (Esland 1971). It was the development of these interests that gave me the then rather rare privilege of finding the postgraduate certificate in education year the most rewarding academic experience that I had had to date. I found myself at the Institute of Education in London just when the prevailing assumptions of philosophers about what was worthwhile knowledge were beginning to be exposed to critical scrutiny by sociologists. The lectures of Basil Bernstein seemed to cut through so much of the mystifications of the philosophers and helped me to see the curriculum as it existed as but one of a number of possibilities but one whose form served particular social functions. At the same time, my experiences of trying to teach the traditional grammar school curriculum to working-class boys in a Paddington comprehensive school while on teaching practice made me realize that that curriculum was often meaningless to those exposed to it. This led me to sympathize with a claim I came across from another sociologist writing in the first issue of the Journal of Curriculum Studies that: ‘there is a profound sense in which compulsory education over the past century has been essentially senseless. The curriculum to which educationists have ascribed a variety of subtle motives has been a structure of activity designed to fill the time’ (Musgrove 1969). Emerging into the teaching profession in the late 1960s, I was, like so many others at that time, fired with an enthusiasm to change things. To change not only the experience of schooling for my pupils, but also to use those changes to foster changes in consciousness that would ultimately transform society. Such was my belief in this sort of possibility that I virtually abandoned much of my involvement in broader political activities to foster change through education. Teaching firstly in a traditional grammar school that was reluctant to admit that it was in the process of becoming comprehensive and then in a progressive comprehensive struggling to espouse quite different ideals (Daunt 1975), I increasingly Introduction 3 recognized the naivety of my aspirations. Change, even in a relatively favourable environment, was neither easy nor predictable in its consequences. I did not abandon my commitment to change but felt determined to understand more of the sociological work that I had come across in my year at the Institute of Education, so that I could have a more realistic idea of both the possibilities and the problems of radical educational change. I returned to the Institute to explore these issues and found, to my astonishment, that the theories being espoused by sociologists about the ‘open human possibilities’ were, if anything, even more naive than my own. The first phase of the ‘new sociology of education’ was at its height but none the less stimulating for its over-optimistic excesses. I returned to some of the texts that I had come across as a student activist in the 1960s and sought to make the connections between them and the newer literature to which I was now being exposed. The product of this was a dissertation, part of which was published as an article entitled ‘Sociology and the problem of radical educational change—notes towards a reconceptualization of the new sociology of education’ (Whitty 1974). This warned sociologists not to romanticize the possibilities of radical change in and through the school curriculum especially in absence of broader attacks on the prevailing ‘culture of positivism’.

Load more