A Genesis and Genealogy of British Curriculum Studies

These then, were the hopes I set off with as I left my working class home in a Berkshire village to settle in another village in Leicestershire and begin teaching in a ‘comprehensive school’. The school was new, very well equipped and highly innovative. The environment at the school was extremely liberal and friendly. There were no uniforms, no punishments and very little compulsion, no regimentation, no bells, no school teams. The school staff were highly gifted and deeply dedicated.

Hence, most of the normal ‘stumbling blocks’ or coercive and repressive devices which we hold culpable in our accounts of schooling were absent. The relationships with our (predominantly) working class clients were quite simply, wonderful (this is not idealised retrospection, there is much supportive evidence). Yet the educational endeavour still proved highly problematic. One feature assaulted me with its intractability of form and irrelevance of content: the curriculum, especially the curriculum for examination.

I remember sitting one night after a day of utter frustration saying to myself again and again, ‘where the hell, where on earth did this thing come from (i.e. the curriculum)?’

The comprehensive school had been devised to unify educational experience for all children. Before schools had been organized mainly into grammar schools (predominantly for the middle class) and secondary modern schools (essentially for the working class). The grammar schools were given preferential staffing, the best teachers, the most resources. Any notion of equality or democracy made it difficult to defend such deliberate sponsorship of privilege for particular social groups.

But, the comprehensive schools, reorganized into schools for all, supposedly to give opportunity for all, had retained much of the form and content of curriculum from the previous patterning of schooling. Particularly in the ‘high ground’ of ‘0’ and ‘A’ level examinations the curriculum derived mainly from the grammar school curriculum I had experienced.

I had, as we saw, loathed the irrelevance and pedantry of that curriculum. But was this individual pathology? As I watched year after year as a teacher at the comprehensive school, this curriculum, with its continuities to the old grammar schools, broke the will and interests of virtually all my working class students. Truly if there was a heart to the problem of mass education, it was here. Rejection of the curriculum that was offered, far from being individual pathology, was collective unanimity. The most consistent and unanimous rejection was reserved for the examination subjects, the so-called ‘traditional’ subjects. The establishment of these traditional subjects as the heartland of comprehensive schooling represents then at once a renunciation of certain groups and a privileging of other groups. It would seem that the divisive internal patterns once reinforced by separate types of schools were now reinforced within the ostensibly comprehensive school. The continuation of differential success for different class groups was related to the continuation of internal curriculum patterns of differentiation.

Bernstein’s theorising therefore emerged at a time when the school curriculum had been problemicised in a basic way by the reorganisation of schools into a comprehensive secondary system. The ‘traditional’ patterns of curriculum which had been so faithfully implicated in decades of social reproduction temporarily lost their ‘sense of inevitability’, of ‘givenness’. For a time, questions could be asked and in his work Bernstein’s explored the contradictions and contingencies of curriculum as a social construction. But such sociological work as we shall see, was somewhat alien to the traditions within the emerging field of curriculum studies. In this sense, Bernstein was operating in occupied, or some might say, enemy territory and the forces he faced were, if not hostile, decidedly antithetical to the scholarly traditions he was promoting. In the next section I briefly review the emergence in Britain of the field of ‘Curriculum Studies’.