The Crisis of Curriculum Change

Restructuring Schooling: How the Change Agents Role is Redefined

It is, of course, obvious that schooling, far from being a timeless and changeless institution, is in fact subject to recurrent waves of restructuring (whether this works its way down into the intricate details of classroom life is a matter for continuing discussion but, in a sense, this misses the point I want to make). In their seminal book, School Knowledge for the Masses, Meyer et al. (1992) have reviewed the spread of schooling as a world movement associated with modernisation. They show how, in a very short period at the end of the nineteenth century, national systems of education were established in many of the countries of the world. Whilst many of the pioneering definitions of schooling developed local and idiosyncratic versions of curriculum, within a very short period, a world movement got underway which established a short list of basic subjects. Meyer et al. (1992) judged this to have been the period 1890 to 1910. What their work alerts us to is that new democratic moves to open schooling up to the masses were only the first stage in a process. Fairly rapidly, a second counter reactionary stage set in, whereby schools were redefined and re-stratified according to the subject-centred curriculum. Whilst this may seem a small structural issue of fine tuning, rather like the new school effectiveness movement, it was in fact a massive repositioning of the possibilities for progressive action within schooling. Let me explain why.

First of all, we have to begin to see the school subject and the subject-centred curriculum as one block in a mosaic of public schooling which was painstakingly constructed over many hundreds of years. Only then can we begin to understand the role of the school subject within wider social purposes: purposes which often relate closely to the mysterious ‘mechanisms of fixity and persistence in society’. The school subject is, therefore, one of a number of prisms through what we might glimpse the structural frame surrounding state schooling. It seems, however, a particular valuable terrain for inquiry, for the subject sits at the intersection of internal and external forces. Moreover, the actions of ‘educational state’ are often uncharacteristically visible at times of subject redefinition (e.g. in the current case of the British National Curriculum, or in the current debate over the Australian Curriculum).

The school subject stands, in a sense, as the archetype of the division and fragmentation of knowledge within our societies. Encapsulated within each subject microcosm, broader debates about the social purposes of schooling are pursued, but pursued in an insulated manner and segmented (and indeed sedimented) in the range of different internal and external levels, and public and private arenas of discourse. Harmonisation across levels and arenas is an elusive pursuit: stability and conversation, therefore, remain the most likely result of the structuring of schooling, of which subjects are such a critical ingredient.