A Genesis and Genealogy of British Curriculum Studies

2. Personal Points of Entry

Ever since my own experience as a school pupil in England in the immediate post-war period, I have been deeply interested in the process of ‘schooling’. My own parents viewed the achievement of ‘their’ Labour government after the war as most clearly demonstrated by the new schooling which was offered to me and to other working people’s children. Here, I was told, was the chance to learn, a chance to start to understand the world in which I was growing up.

Yet, from the beginning I experienced odd contradictions, for while I was supposed to learn, most of the questions for which I inarticulately and tentatively sought answers were not on the school’s agenda. They were, it is true, mainly childish questions but they turned on my understanding of the world at the time. They were things that we talked about at home: Why did my father work so hard? Why did I not see him in the mornings, or until late in the evening? Why did my mother go to work to ‘support me’? Why were all the fields I played in being developed by more and larger "council estates"? Why did we have to walk ( or later, ride) more than three miles to school? Why was the school in a ‘posh’ village and not in my village? Why were the children from my village treated differently to the children from the immediate school locality?

These then were aspects of my world; but why did we never talk about them, let alone learn about them at school?

My concerns about schooling increased when I went to secondary school. I passed the ‘11+’ and was sent off to a grammar school (again, miles away from my village). All my friends now went to our village’s school: a secondary modern. The long ride to the grammar school through the council estates wearing a blue ‘venetian’ blazer and a hat with a yellow tassel cemented an incurable fascination with schooling. (The fascination lasted longer than the blazer and hat which I took to packing in my bike saddle bag and putting on in the school’s bike shed.)

At the grammar school the curriculum made my sense of disconnectedness and dichotomy at the primary school seem churlish. Here, not only was the content alien and dull but the very form of transmission and structure (the discursive formation no less) utterly bewildering. I experienced schooling as one learning a second language. A major factor in this cultural displacement was the school’s curriculum.

At the school I languished: taking nine ‘0’ level exams and failing eight. By the age of fifteen I was at work in a crisp factory. Later however (through the intervention of one teacher) I returned to school and, though still burdened with a sense of alienation from the subject matter, began to perform the tests of rote learning and memory which were rewarded with exam passes.

A degree (in economic history) and a period of doctoral work (Irish immigrants in Victorian England) followed but in 1968 the continuing sense of dichotomy between ‘life’ and ‘study’ led me to abandon all thought of an academic career. The starting point was an article - by Basil Bernstein in New Society, ‘Open Schools, Open Society’.

This article showed me that there were modes of academic study where the everyday experiences of ordinary pupils and people might be investigated. In short, where my experience of life and my intellectual questions about that experience might be finally reconnected. But, just as before, I had had to abandon my intellectual interests to pass examinations; now once again, I had to abandon an academic career so that self and study might be reinvested with some degree of authenticity.

At the heart of the academic examinations and the academic career that had followed were the same alien and seemingly redundant bodies of knowledge. Was it merely a personal pathology that made me reject them? Some species of infantilism? Some battle with the ‘father figure’? Something worse? Was this, in short, a problem of individual response?

The decision to abandon my academic career was essentially a positive redirection. I decided to leave the job I had as a university lecturer. Once I had identified the kind of work epitomized by Bernstein, I saw the newly-organizing comprehensive schools as the place where I wanted to work. Here, my own class background and experience might engage with that of my pupils in a ‘common language’ between teacher and taught. For the new generation of pupils form working homes there might be something beyond the pervasive alienation I had experienced at school.