THE CHARACTER of CURRICULUM STUDIES Copyright © William F

The C haracter of C urriculum Studies T he C haracter of C urriculum S tudies Bildung , Currere , and the Recurring Question of the Subject W i l l i a m F . P i n a r Palgrave macmillan THE CHARACTER OF CURRICULUM STUDIES Copyright © William F. Pinar, 2011. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 All rights reserved. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-229277-6 ISBN 978-1-137-01583-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-01583-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pinar, William The character of curriculum studies : bildung, currere, and the recurring question of the subject / William F. Pinar. p. cm. 1. Curriculum planning—Social aspects. 2. Education—Curricula— Social aspects. 3. Postmodernism and education. 4. Cosmopolitanism. I. Title. LB2806.15.P56 2011 375Ј.001—dc23 2011023691 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: December 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Transferred to Digital Printing in 2015 Dedicated to Alan A. Block Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xvii Introduction 1 Part I The Subject of Politics and Culture 1 The Unaddressed “I” of Ideology Critique 25 2 Decolonization and Subjective Reconstruction 39 3 Multiculturalism, Nationality, Cosmopolitanism 49 Part II The Subject of School and Society 4 Bildung in Society and History 63 5 “Molds” and “Spirit” in the Eight- Year Study 77 Part III The Subject of Educational Experience 6 Subjective Reconstruction through Aesthetic Education 95 7 Currere and Cosmopolitanism 105 Epilogue: The Recurring Question of the Subject 123 Notes 145 References 213 Index 239 Preface The powers that generate and support the good as experienced and as ideal, work within as well as without. John Dewey (1962 [1934], 54) Curriculum studies is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to understanding curriculum. In its early decades, the field was charac- terized by a strongly ameliorative orientation, 1 devoted to improving the school curriculum. In the United States, efforts to improve the curriculum focused, at various times, on its structures, both its inter- nal structures (e.g., school subjects, their content and sequencing, and assessment) and its external structures (e.g., the alignment of the curriculum with the world beyond the school). During the great progressive experiment during the 1930s known as the Eight- Year Study (as we will see in chapter 5), the school subjects were expanded, as history was recast as social studies, incorporating material from the various social sciences. 2 Various tracts were written urging the structural alignment of the school curriculum with society, the latter sometimes very broadly conceived as “adult activities” (in the case of Franklin Bobbitt: 1918, 153–154) and sometimes more narrowly conceived as economic expectations, even actual job preparation. In both instances, it was often imagined that such alignment followed from understanding schooling as preparation for life (Bobbitt 1918, 18). In the United States, this has included an ongoing effort to coordinate the curriculum with questions of democracy, both in terms of its content and its processes, often intersecting concerns (Dewey 1916). William Heard Kilpatrick (1918) argued that encouraging students— alone and with others— to reconstruct the curriculum after projects of their own choosing, under the guidance of experienced teachers, not only enabled students to pursue their own interests (thus making learning more enjoyable, presumably) but also taught the democratic values of initiative, cooperation, and curiosity, qualities he summarized as x PREFACE “purposeful activity” (1918, 4). 3 Critical of such curriculum orga- nized around students’ interests or children “needs,” George Counts demanded during the 1930s that teachers convey democratic ideas that would enable students to reconstruct the social order (see Perlstein 2000, 51). At almost the same time Joseph Schwab argued for the educational significance of class discussion, not just the simple exchange of ideas but an ongoing focused deliberation 4 that yielded insights that only concentration and focused dialogue could yield (Schwab 1978, 35; Block 2004, 54; Levine 2007, 116). Others—especially Ralph Tyler (1949)— focused less on what was taught than how whatever was to be learned was to be assessed, a practice that told teachers what students had failed to learn. While establishing objectives had for decades been assumed to constitute the starting point of curriculum development, Tyler tied objectives to assessment, and in doing so, recast teaching as implementation. This simple but devastating demotion eradicates academic—intellectual— freedom, one indispensable prerequisite for teaching. These efforts at improving the school curriculum were presumably in the service the “individual.” It was the individual who was said to benefit from improving the curriculum, important because it was the individual who was the engine of the American economy, itself— so- called free- market capitalism— understood to be the cor- nerstone of American democracy. Who was this “individual” for whom the school curriculum was designed? What was his gender, his race, and his socioeconomic class? 5 Do not these concepts them- selves de-individuate the person as singular, unique, and original? If, as William E. Doll, Jr. (Trueit in press) has suggested, the “ghost” in the US school curriculum is “control,” does this determination to control imply that the “individual” was an unruly creature requiring, in a common image of the 1920s, reassembling (as in mass indus- trial production) so that social efficiency and/or social reconstruction would follow? During the 1930s, when the Progressive Education Association undertook one of the great American experiments in public education: the Eight-Year Study, a sustained and systematic effort was made to comprehend the human subjects of education. Under Caroline Zachry’s6 leadership, composite portraits of various students were composed that, in their summary form, sometimes seem questionable, especially when describing students’ bodies and reporting personal matters (see Zachry 1968 [1940], 519). This questionably expansive interest in students’ character and experience— now it often takes the form of ethnographical studies— remains sometimes prurient today. 7 PREFACE xi In certain ethnographies, efforts to understand the “individual” risk reducing those studied to their circumstances or to their point for the investigator. 8 These failures represent not only the misapplication of method but also an impoverishment of theory and ignorance of the disciplinary history. Under these conditions, ethnography often fails to tell us anything we did not already know. 9 The impoverishment of theory 10 and ignorance of the field’s intellectual history 11 have plagued curriculum studies for decades. The ameliorative orientation predisposes practitioners toward “action,” itself often conceived in behavioral rather than intellectual terms. Theory and history are prominent among the casualties of an ameliorative orientation focused on outcomes, often quantified in (now standardized) test scores, or qualified as platitudes such as “social justice.” In its eagerness to improve the school curriculum, curriculum studies has, as a field, devalued, even ignored, those intellectual resources that might have enabled it to do so. That missed oppor- tunity at curriculum improvement may not present itself again in the foreseeable future, as five decades of school “reform” have side- lined curriculum specialists as major players in US school curriculum improvement. In its preoccupation with improvement, then, the academic— often university based—field of curriculum studies in the United States has not only overlooked the centrality of theory and history to its intellectual advancement. Relatedly, it has also overlooked the subject, in curriculum studies a double entendre, referencing not only the school subject (and its referent, the academic discipline) but also the individual person. The former has been the subject of systematic attention, including study of the history of school subjects, showing that their content, justification, and significance have altered significantly over the past century (Goodson 2005, 54–67). Despite an unending affirmation of the “individual,” it has been the individual who remains missing in action. Implied (as unruly or ignorant or self- directing) and sometimes subsumed in the category of the social (as in “at risk” or elite youth) or the cultural (as Asian or African American or “white”), the “individual” has often been rendered a rhetorical device rather than the enduring if ever-changing multivariate site of educational experience (Autio 2006a, 106, 109). Certainly the human subject has been split from the school subject, which gets construed as “content”

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