A Genesis and Genealogy of British Curriculum Studies

In fact, Young in his later work came to acknowledge the somewhat static determination of his writing in Knowledge and Control and to argue that historical work should be an essential ingredient of the study of school knowledge. He wrote of the need to understand the "historical emergence and persistence of particular conventions (school subjects for example)". When we are limited from being able to situate the problems of contemporary education historically we are again limited from understanding issues of politics and control. He concluded that:

one crucial way of reformulating and transcending the limits within which we work is to see... how such limits are not given or fixed but produced through the conflicting actions and interests of men in history.

Social Constructionist Studies

The social constructionist tradition within curriculum studies represents a continuing discourse, and a continuing space from which to challenge centralized dictates and mystifications. Institutionally curriculum studies continue to occupy sustainable institutional space; there is still ground from which to fight.

The important work by sociologists of knowledge in defining research programmes for studies of school knowledge led on then, to an acknowledgement by some of them that historical study might compliment and extend their project. In studying school subjects the inquiry has arrived at a new stage. Initial work in the early twentieth century has provided some important precursors to this work; sociologists of knowledge, like Bernstein, have subsequently played a vital role in rescuing and reasserting the validity of this intellectual project; in the process however, some of the necessary focus on historical and empirical circumstances has been lost. The task now being undertaken is to re-examine the role of historical methods in the study of curriculum and to re-articulate a mode of study for extending an understanding of the social history of the school curriculum and, in this work, particularly school subjects.

Studies in Curriculum History was launched with this view in mind. In the first volume, Social Histories of the Secondary Curriculum, work is collected together on a wide range of subjects: classics, science, domestic subjects, religious education, social studies and modern languages.0These studies reflect a growing interest in the history of curriculum and, besides elucidating the symbolic drift of school knowledge towards the academic tradition, raise central questions about explanations of school subjects whether they be sociological of philosophical. Other work in the series Studies in Curriculum History has looked in detail at particular subjects. McCulloch et al. examines the politics of school science and technology curriculum in England and Wales since the Second World War.0Subsequent work by Woolnough has looked at the history of physics teaching in schools in the period 1960 to 1985. Another area of emerging work is the history of school mathematics: Cooper looks at the fate of a number of traditions within mathematics and articulates a model for the redefinition of school subject knowledge; Moon meanwhile examines the relationship between maths in England and the United States and includes some very interesting work on the dissemination of textbooks.

Emerging work in the United States has also begun to focus on the evolution of the school curriculum, studied in historical manner. Kliebard, writing about the curriculum in the United States from 1893 to 1958 discerns a number of the dominant traditions within the school curriculum, and comes to the intriguing conclusion that by the end of the period covered the traditional school subject remained an impregnable fortress. However, Kliebard’s work does not go into the detail of school life. In this respect Barry Franklin provides some valuable insights in a case study of Minneapolis. Here the vital negotiation from curriculum ideas, the terrain of Kliebard’s work, towards implementation as school practice is seen. In addition, a collection of papers put together by Popkewitz examines the historical aspects of a range of subjects: early education, art, reading and writing, biology, mathematics, social studies, special education, socialist curriculum, and a study of Rugg’s work.

In Canada, curriculum history has been launched as a field most notably by Tomkins’ seminal work A Common Countenance. This work examines the patterns of curriculum stability and change in a range of school subjects in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries throughout Canada. Another volume seeks to bring together some of the more important work emerging in different countries on curriculum history. Besides some of the work already noted, there are important articles on the history of school physics, on Victorian school science, on science education, English, the Norwegian common school, and the development of senior school geography in West Australia.