The Crisis of Curriculum Change

At the bottom, representing long-term time, are deep oceanic currents which, although apparently quite stable, are moving all the time. Such long-term time covers major structural factors: worldviews, forms of the state, etc. The movement from pre-modern to modern, or modern to postmodern forms, can be understood in terms of these broad epochal shifts (Mills, 1959; Bell, 1973; Lyotard, 1984; Denzin, 1991). The effects of the emerging social, economic and political conditions of the postmodern era upon the organisation and practices of schooling might be understood in these terms (e.g. Hargreaves, 1994; Aronowitz & Giroux, 1991, p. 62).

Above this level are the swells and tides of particular cycles representing medium time. Such medium-term time has been conceived in boom-bust like spans of 50 years or so - although with the compression of time and space in the postmodern age, these cycles may themselves undergo compression (Giddens, 1990). It is within these medium-term cycles that one might explain the establishment of the current ‘grammar of schooling’ for example as classroom-based, graded and subject-specialised schooling in the latter years of the 19th and early years of the 20th centuries. As Tyack and Tobin (1994) admonish ‘unless reformers begin to talk the historical ‘grammar of schooling’, their attempts to initiate curriculum change will be forever thwarted.’

At the top of the ocean, representing the waves and froth, is short-term everyday time: the everyday events and human actions of ordinary daily life. Proponents of this view of history often celebrate its empirical specifics against the grander theoretical claims of epochal shifts between different historical periods (e.g. McCulloch, 1995). These theorisations of history should not be treated as competitive though. Fine-grained empirical detail and broad-based theoretical sensibility are complementary forces in history and complementary resources for interpreting such history.

The most interesting points for inquiry and investigation are when the different layers of historical time coincide; for it is at such points that inclination towards, and capacity for, change and reform are strongest. Such co-incidences or conjunctures can be seen in key moments of educational history and change. One such moment, arguably, is the global restructuring around the turn of the century that established the worldwide grammar of schooling (Tyack & Tobin, 1994; Meyer et al., 1992). Another, at least within many parts of the West, is the period 1968-72, when Keynesian economics and belief in the power of the welfare state, and optimistic ideologies of growth, expansion, openness and equality were at a peak - in ways that impacted on the proliferation of curriculum innovation, the growth of open-plan schooling, and the expansion of flexible High Schools within education (Goodson & Anstead, 1993). In many ways, the current global restructuring of schooling around market principles of choice and self-management with greater standardisation and centralisation of curricula and testing, along with greater school-level experimentation in patterns of teaching and learning and forms of organisational structure, may some twenty or more years later represent a third such conjuncture in education (although this is not an assertion in our study, but a point for inquiry and investigation).