Apr 1, 1992 - all schools. The subjects bear an uncanny resemblance .... Meyer, J. et aJ (in preoo), School KnowWg~Jor tM Ma.r.us, 16th boo\::in the. Serica.
10.
Curriculum
Perspectives
VoL 12 No. 1 April 1992
Studying School Subj ects
Ivor Goodson
In the 19605, curriculum reform became a tidai wave. Everywhere the waves created turbulence but ultimately the reforms engulfed only a few small islands; more substantial land masses hardly felt the effects at all, and on dry land, the mountains, the high ground, remained completely untouched. As the tide now rapidly recedes, the high ground stands in stark silhouette. If nothing else, our scrutiny of curriculum reform should allow us to recognise that the world of curriculum has both high ground and common ground.
In this paper, I want to try to locate the work on school subjects that is now emerging particularly from the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia.
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Much of the previous important scholarship on curriculum, certainly on curriculum as a social construction, took place in the 1960s and early 1970s, a period of change and flux throughout the Western world. This was nowhere more evident than in the world of schooling in general and curriculum in particular. For this flowering of critical curriculum scholarship at this time to happen during these times was both encouraging and in a sense symptomatic. The emergence of a field of study of curriculum as social construction was an important new direction. But though itself symptomatic of a period of social questioning and criticism this burgeoning of critical scholarship was not without its downside.
Standing out more clearly than ever in the new horizon is the school subject, the 'basic' or 'traditional' subjec~. Throughout the Western world we find exhortation as well as evidence about a 'return to basics' a re-embrace of traditional subjects. The echoes of this debate can be readily discerned in Australia. The Australian Education Council is moving steadily forward with eight curriculum areas and associated profiling for all states and territories. Whether the states will continue to abandon their cherished education rights for short-term financial incentives remains to be seen, but the prospect of a national curriculum is looming large. In England, meanwhile, the new National Curriculum defines a range of subjects to be taught as a core curriculum in all schools. The subjects bear an uncanny resemblance to the list generally defined as secondary school subjects in the 1904 regulations. The LonMn Times Educational Supplement (31.7.87, p.2) comments on this return of traditional subject dominance: 'The first thing to say about this whole exercise is that it
That downside has two important aspects as we begin to reconstitute our study of schooling and curriculum. First, influential scholars in the field have often taken a value position, assuming that schooling should be reformed, root and branch - 'revolutionised', the 'maps of learning redrawn'. Second, when this scholarship took place, a wide range of curriculumreform movements were seeking to revolutionise school curricula on both grounds. Therefore, these scholars probably would not wish to focus on, let alone concede, the areas of stability, of unchallengeable high ground, that may have existed in the school curriculum.
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[vor Goodson
unwinds 80 years of English (and Welsh) educational history. It is a case of go back to go'.
The written curriculum, notably the convention of the school subject, has here both symbolic and practical significance - symbolic in that certain intentions for schooling are thus publicly signified and legitimated; practical in that these written conventions are rewarding with finance and resource allocation and thus with associated work and career benefits.
Similarly, in scrutinising curriculum history in the US high school, Kliebard (1986, p.269) has pointed to the saliency of traditional school subjects in the face of waves of curriculum-reform initiatives from earlier decades. He characterises the school subject in the US high school curriculum as 'the impregnable fortress'.
These ideas are developed in our study of the written curriculum. But we must ally the study with other kinds of study - in particular, studies of school process, of school texts, and of the history of pedagogy. For schooling comprises the interlinked matrix of these studies and, indeed, other vital ingredients. On schooling and on curriculum in particular, we must finally ask, who gets what, and what do they do with it?
In the 1960s and 1970s, critical studies of curriculum as social construction pointed to the school classroom as the site where the curriculum was negotiated and realised. The classroom was the 'centre of action', 'the arena of resistance'. In this view, what went on in the classroom was the curriculum. The definition of 'curriculum' - the view from the high ground and the mountains - was not just subject to redefinition at the classroom level but simply irrelevant.
The definition of curriculum is part of this story. That definition is not the same as asserting a direct or easily discernible relationship between the preactive definition of written curriculum and its interactive realisation in classrooms. The definition, however, asserts that the written curriculum most often sets important parameters for classroom practice (not always, not at all times, not in all classrooms, but most often). The study of written curriculum will first increase our understanding of the influences and interests active at the preactive level. Second, this understanding will further our knowledge of the values and purposes represented in schooling and how preactive definition, notwithstanding individual and local variations, may set parameters for interactive realisation and negotiation in the classroom and school.
Now, we cannot sustain this standpoint for beginning to study curriculum. Certainly, the high ground of the written curriculum is subject to renegotiation at lower levels, notably the classroom. But the view, common in the 1960s, that the written curriculum is therefore irrelevant is less common today. Again, we are coming to see that the high ground, our common ground, is important. In the high ground, what is basic and traditional is reconstituted and reinvented. The given status of knowledge of school subjects is thus reinvented and reasserted. But the given status is more than political manoeuvring or rhetoric; this reassertion affects the discourse about schooling and related to the 'parameters of practice'. In the 1990s, it would be folly to ignore the central importance of controlling and defining the written curriculum. In a significant sense, the written curriculum is the visible and public testimony of selected rationales and legitimating rhetorics for schooling.
Finally, we should end with studies of how the preactive relates to the interactive. But for the moment so neglected is the study of the preactive definition of written curriculum that no such marriage of methodologies could be consummated. The first step is plainly to undertake a range of studies of the definitions of written curriculum and, in particular, to focus on the impregnable fortress of the school subject.
The written curriculum both promulgates and underpins certain basic intentions of schooling as they are operationalised in structures and institutions. To take a common convention in preactive curriculum, the school subject: while the written curriculum defines the rationales and rhetoric of the subject, this is the only tangible aspect of a patterning of resources, finances and examinations and associated material and career interests. In this symbiosis, it is as though the written curriculum provides a guide to the legitimating rhetoric of schooling as they are promoted through patterns of resource allocation, status attribution and career distribution. In short, the written curriculum provides us with a testimony, a documentary source, a changing map of the terrain: it is also one of the best official guide books to the institutionalised structure of schooling. (Goodson 1988, p.16)
School subjects are the major categories for schooling at both the primary and secondary level. Meyer et al (in press) argue that the general acceptance of similar subject labels throughout the world denotes the worldwide embrace of modernisation. This may be true but it most certainly may not be. What the general acceptance of subject labels throughout the world denotes is precisely that: that each country has accepted that subject categories or labels are the basis of schooling. But as curriculum history studies show, that is only the beginning of a continuing process of constitution and a reconstitution. The school subject is in continual flux - a recurrent terrain of contestation. Periods of stability may be discerned but so are periods of remarkable instability and flux.
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\ Sludying School SubjeclS
It is important then to take the argument in stages. First, the acceptance of subject labels throughout the world is itself to define an important 'structural frame' for schooling. The division into subject both internalises and fragments the discourse about schooling. The associated effects for the governance of schooling are themselves crucial for any understanding of the political culture of education.
secondary curriculum. But in the USA, the school subject is located in a completely different pattern of educational organisation and political culture. From the beginning of the republic the 'common school ideal' was a central political aspiration. As a result. school subjects tend to stress the 'inclusive' concern of educating all future citizens in the basic academic subjects. Public and community interest groups play a key roll in the governance of the school through the local district elected boards; likewise state commissions play their role. School subjects intersect with a broader system of market relations which the political culture celebrates and this is never more evidential than in the role that publishers play in generated subject textbooks for the school market place.
The second stage is more complex and depends on a more specific understanding of the local structure of education and of national political cultures. To know that each country embraces similar school subject labels should therefore provide our entry point for investigation not as Meyer et al (in press) imply its terminal point. The common language that school subject labels provide for schooling is a phenomenon which is important in its own right for it denotes that the subject-based curriculum, a pattern of division, and definition, is fairly general. But this common language of subjects is a 'global overlay' upon very different national cultures and social structures. In short, the subject-based curriculum might be an aspect of globalisation and modernisation but we need to know precisely how this global pattern interacts and collides with more local/national cultures and structures.
Some of the comparisons between Britain, the US, Canada and Australia might provide a range of 'surface' similarities - the major traditions within subjects are broadly recognisable, the link between academic traditions and university and college 'preparation'. But these surface similarities provide us only with an exhortation to further study and analyse. In themselves they do not represent the establishment of more general tendencies or trends. This is because each social phenomenon, each school subject in this case, must be located within its cultural and political milieu and within its historical context. These milieux and contexts differ very substantially and h"" .. the
Hence, in the work I have undertaken I have argued that social histories of school subject need to be undertaken in national and local milieux. The data of much of my work to date is primarily data from Britain with other data provided from North America and Europe. But to substantiate the point that national studies are crucial, it is important to point out some of the features of British Studies. The studies show a country beginning slowly and rather late to move away from a class-based pattern of educational organisation (represented in different types of school) and associated curriculum arrangements. The patterns of curriculum change and conflict are clearly related to these continuing patterns of class conflict. As a result much of the debate about curriculum until very recently have been postulated on pseudonyms for class categories: some children do the mainstream 'academic' subjects (professional and middle class with a sprinkling of working class). Others take a 'nonacademic' curriculum (exclusively working class).
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