A Genesis and Genealogy of British Curriculum Studies

In particular Esland was concerned that we developed scholarship which illuminated the role of professional groups in the social construction of school subjects. These groups can be seen as mediators of the "social forces" to which Foster Watson had eluded:

The subject associations of the teaching profession may be theoretically represented as segments and social movements involved in the negotiation of new alliances and rationales, as collectively held reality constructions became transformed. Thus, applied to the professional identities of teachers within a school, it would be possible to reveal the conceptual regularities and changes which are generated through membership of particular subject communities, as they were manifested in textbooks, syllabi, journals, conference reports, etc.

In the light of the importance of historical perspectives Esland added that "Subjects can be shown to have "careers" which are dependent on the social- structural and social-psychological correlates of membership of epistemic communities".

The relationship between the content of schooling, "what counts as education and issues of power and control" had been elucidated in 1961 by Raymond Williams in the Long Revolution. He noted:

It is not only that the way in which education is organized can be seen to express consciously and unconsciously, the wider organization of a culture and a society so that what has been thought of a single distribution is in fact an actual shaping to particular social ends. It is also that the content of education which is subject to great historical agnation, again expresses, again both consciously and unconsciously, certain basic elements in the culture. What is thought of as ‘an education’ being in fact a particular set of emphases and omissions.

One might add to Williams notion of "the content of education". For I have noted elsewhere that "the battle over the content of the curriculum while often more visible is in many senses less important than the control over the underlying forms".

Michael F.D. Young sought to follow up the relationship between school knowledge and social control and to do so in a manner which focused on content and form. He argued following Bernstein, that:

Those in positions of power will attempt to define what is to be taken as knowledge, how accessible to different groups any knowledge is, and what are the accepted relationships between different knowledge areas, and between those who have access to them and make them available.

His concern with the form of high status school subjects focused on the "organizing principles" which he discerned as underlying the academic curriculum:

These are literacy, or an emphasis on written as opposed to oral presentation, individualism (or avoidance of group work or cooperativeness) which focused on how academic work is assessed and is a characteristic of both the ‘process’ of learning and the way the ‘product’ is presented; abstractness of the knowledge and its structuring and compartmentalizing independently of the knowledge of the learner; finally and linked to the former is what I have called the unrelatedness of academic curricula, which refers to the extent to which they are’at odds’ with daily life and experience.

This emphasis on the form of school knowledge should not however exclude concerns like that of Williams with the social construction of particular contents. The crucial point to grasp is that it is the interrelated force of form and content which should be at the centre of our study of school subjects. The study of subject from and content should moreover be placed in an historical perspective.