A Genesis and Genealogy of British Curriculum Studies

Teacher Education in Post War Britain and the Emergence of Curriculum Studies

A landmark in the emergence of Teacher Education in Britain was the McNair Report of 1944. The report viewed the universities as undertaking a central role in teacher education particularly if the status of the teaching profession was to be enhanced. McNair argued that the university would provide vital legitimation and support for the purposes of making teaching become attractive to "intelligent and cultured" men and women. In British discourse this is a subterfuge for broadening the social class basis of the teaching profession for in Britain "culture" has always been seen as the exclusive preserve and product of the middle and upper classes. (mass culture, working class culture, is called "popular culture": this was not what McNair had in mind).

The universities at this time, the 1940s, were indeed the preserve of the middle and upper classes or to resume our British shorthand "centres of culture, research and knowledge". This milieu it was judged should now "exercise a profound influence on the education of teachers".

In the years that followed the universities became focal agents in teacher education. In the subsequent decades universities assumed responsibility for the pre-service training of teachers not just within the university departments but through indirect supervision of local "teacher training colleges". Through their in-service and post-graduate work the university departments provided on-going teaching and research support. In particular the departments of education began to pioneer new "foundational" disciplines in education. Courses were started in the psychology of education, history of education, philosophy of education and in educational measurement and psychometric educational research. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s this foundational discourse was pre-eminent.

The discourse however whilst promoting the McNair agenda of "academicising" and "culturifying" the ethos of the teacher education offered little that was of direct connection to the teachers classroom world or to the world of the children that the teacher taught. As a result new initiatives sought to connect the teachers world to the work of teacher education. Three new areas originated in this way: sociology of education, educational administration and closest of all to the classroom — curriculum studies.

In Britain Curriculum Studies grew up in university departments of education in the 1960s. The defining journal, the Journal of Curriculum Studies was founded by Philip Taylor in 1968.0 Taylor was one of the first Chairs of Curriculum Studies in Britain, founded at the University of Birmingham in 1966. Taylor’s own genealogy is symptomatic of the close links between Curriculum Studies and governance. He had previously worked as a curriculum officer at the School Council founded by the Tory Government in 1964. The Council was formed by the Minister, David Eccles, specifically to gain access to what he described as the "secret garden of the curriculum". Taylor worked on a range of curriculum projects and evaluations, some of them intimately linked with the restructuring of educational systems and of patterns of assessment and examination in post war Britain.

The founding of the Schools Council and the establishment of Curriculum Studies as a field were both then attempts to colonise or recolonise fields of educational discourse and practice. The effect of both of these initiatives on the field of educational study was both significant and I shall argue, symptomatic. Curriculum studies in Britain in the mid-1960s has been characterised in this way:

Curriculum studies was a small service industry developed in the mid-1960s, which was the result of direct central government intervention to create an institutional arena, the Schools Council, from which to influence curriculum policy within the prevailing consensus or partnership. In an earlier period this step was not necessary as there was direct statutory and indirect fiscal control over local curriculum activity — back to the future! The sites of production were in university departments of education where products were assembled in the form of curriculum projects, with an accompanying software of articles in its own new trade journals, which had limited value in many cases. They were inadequately marketed, they were more intricate than the market required or they were not related to consumer needs at all. A neo-Taylorist mode of production, built on specialized roles and quantity of product delivered goods to a non-existent market. This was not recognized for a while, probably because the software was of more interest to the universities than were the products to the teachers.