The Crisis of Curriculum Change

The structuring of schooling into subjects represents at once a fragmentation and an internalisation of the struggles over state schooling. Fragmentation, because conflicts take place through a range of compartmentalised subjects; internalisation, because now conflicts take place not only within the school but also within subject boundaries. Giving primacy to the ‘school subject’ in the resourcing of schooling is, therefore, to finance and to promote a particular narrowing of the possible discourse about schooling.

The symbolic enshrinement of subjects as the basis of the secondary school curricula is perhaps the most successful principle in the history of curriculum-making. However, as we have seen, it is not a neutral, bureaucratic or rational/educational device; it is a perfect device for conservation and stability, and stands to effectively frustrate any more holistic reform initiatives. Comprehensive innovations, such as those suggested by Dewey, stand little chance of long-term implementation.

New initiatives in curriculum-making have to be scrutinised at this level of symbolic action. A segmented subject-centred model of schooling acts to effectively silence or marginalise alternative models. Yet, often the symbolic significance of subject-centredness is itself unrecognised in much of the debate over new initiatives. In the debate over the British National Curriculum there has been a deafening silence on this aspect of the proposals.

Just to reiterate then, a democratic extension of public education to educate all children in the late nineteenth century was quickly followed by a new dispensation, a new wave, which established the subject-based curriculum. The effect of this was to internalise and fragment all arguments about the social and political purposes of schooling. From now on, these arguments could be contained within the ‘power cushion’ which school subjects represent. Any challenges to the nature and purposes of schooling had to be played out within each subject area. Hence, more general arguments and more general changes that would have transformed the nature of schooling were rendered impossible. And furthermore, the capacities for progressive action were transformed and the role of change itself revolutionised. For a teacher moving through this period, the capacity to teach a general curriculum, according to one’s judgement of the relevance and needs of the pupils, was transformed into a situation where a written curriculum, defined by the state and defined in terms of a particular school subject, was the only arena in which one could operate. In such a situation, the teachers’ work and the change agents’ work had been dramatically repositioned.