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*Email: m.young@ioe.ac.uk
Issue refer to and take sides on, are about these purposes. There is one
question which runs through all the papers, albeit in very different ways.
It is the extent to which assumptions about knowledge define the curricu-
lum as a structure, and, as none of the papers deny the importance of
knowledge, what exactly these assumptions are. In prefacing my brief
comments on the individual papers, I want to suggest that seeing the cur-
riculum as a ‘structure’ offering constraints and possibilities may be a use-
ful way of considering the aims/knowledge debate introduced by Reiss
and White and the more overtly political questions about how and by
whom curricular decisions are made.
From their earliest days, and increasingly in modern societies, schools
have been established as specialised institutions, which can realise some
aims and not others. For example, it is possible for a curriculum to be ori-
ented to students acquiring knowledge of mathematics or history or a par-
ticular set of religious beliefs; however, it makes no sense to conceive of a
curriculum enabling young people to get jobs when the primary influence
on whether a young person gets a job is the quantity and quality of jobs
available. The logic of recognising the specialist role of schools and the
curriculum can be illustrated in another way. No one could disagree with
Reiss and White that schools should promote well-being and human
flourishing in what they do; however, that is what we expect of institutions
that do not have curricula such as families, towns and businesses. What
distinguishes schools is that their primary concern, as embodied in the
specialist professional staff they recruit, and in their curriculum, is (or
should be) to provide all their students with access to knowledge. As
Ruth Cigman has pointed out human flourishing pre-supposes access to
knowledge (Cigman, 2012). It is a school’s curriculum that addresses the
question ‘what knowledge?’; an issue explored in considerable depth in
the first paper in this issue by David Scott.
The curriculum as a social fact, I suggest, acts as a constraint on what
students can learn, not the least both through its boundaries or lack of
them between subjects and between the curriculum and the experience of
students out of school. However these boundaries are not just constraints,
they are also a set of possibilities not only about what students can learn
but about how they can progress in their learning. The extent to which
these possibilities are achievable by a school and by what proportion of
pupils will depend on a range of factors. Some will be internal to the
school, such as the approach to curriculum leadership of the headteacher
and her/his team of senior teachers and the range of expertise of the whole
staff; and some will be external such as the wider distribution of opportu-
nities in the society as a whole and in the local catchment area of the
school. What uniquely schools can do for all pupils, and that is why the
curriculum is the pre-eminent issue for all of us in education, is to offer
opportunities for pupils at all ages to move beyond the experience they
The Curriculum Journal 9
bring to school and to acquire knowledge that is not tied to that experi-
ence. It is this (relatively) context-free knowledge, which some of us have
described as ‘powerful knowledge’ (Beck, 2013; Young, 2013; Young &
Muller, 2013), and which, in Basil Bernstein’s words enables students to
‘think the un-thinkable and the not yet thought’ (Wheelahan, 2012). This
is the promise that schooling and its main instrument, the curriculum
offers. How this promise works out and for whom, and why it is un-real-
ised for so many students is what the papers in this Special Issue are con-
cerned with; I turn, therefore, to consider the papers, briefly, in turn.
The first paper by David Scott presents a systematic review of the dif-
ferent ways curriculum theorists have conceptualised knowledge. From
the perspective developed here, his most important conclusion derives
from his premise that all human learning is an ‘epistemic’ or ‘knowledge
building’ activity. It follows that the curriculum can be understood as a
structure or instrument for extending that epistemic activity beyond the
‘knowledge building’ that pupils are involved in their everyday lives. Any
other rationale for the curriculum would be a denial, at least for some, of
the entitlement of all pupils to extend their unique human capacity for
‘epistemic activity’ and ‘knowledge building’. This entitlement is limited,
in principle, by two features of all curricula, the nature of knowledge itself
and what we know about how it is acquired.
The second paper by Gert Biesta tackles the issue of ‘knowledge
building’ from a quite different perspective. He makes the case for Dew-
ey’s ‘transactional realism’ as a way of tackling the relation between
knowledge and experience which he rightly sees as the key issue for curric-
ulum and pedagogic theory and practice. Early in his paper Biesta states
that he wants to avoid the recent tendency for educational theory to ‘lose’
knowledge and slip into what he has elsewhere described as ‘learnification’
(Biesta 2010a). To do this he introduces Dewey’s concepts of
‘coordination’ and ‘transaction’ as a way of bridging the separation of
knowledge and experience that all pupils face on entering school and
engaging with the curriculum. However, while the concept of ‘transaction’
identifies a process, it is not clear how it allows for a discussion of what is
being transacted; this means that we are in danger of being left with a the-
ory of pedagogy, or teaching and learning but with no curriculum. Sec-
ond, Biesta reminds us that Dewey was concerned with how an
‘absolutist’ scientific world view (today, we might call it ‘positivist’) was
colonising other alternatives in education; something one can recognise in
much current educational research. However, as Biesta explains, Dewey
was far from being anti-science and he tried to construct what he saw as a
more adequate, ‘non-absolutist’ conception of science. The problem for
curriculum theorists is that Dewey (and Biesta seems not to disagree)
does not distinguish between his concept of science and ‘intelligent com-
mon sense’. For Dewey, we are or should be all, in this sense, ‘scientists’.
10 M. Young
References
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Biesta, G.J.J. (2010a). Good education in an age of measurement: Ethics, politics, and
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