A Genesis and Genealogy of British Curriculum Studies

Other work has begun to look beyond traditional school subjects to study broader topics. For example, Cunningham’s book looks at the curriculum change in the primary school in Britain since 1945. Musgrave’s book, Whose Knowledge, is a case study of the Victoria University Examinations Board 1964 to 1979. Here historical work begins to elucidate the change from curriculum content to examinable content which such an important part of understanding the way that status and resources are apportioned within the school.

Future directions for the study of school subjects and curriculum will require a broadened approach. The base line of work reported above is only a precursor to more elaborate work. In particular this work will have to move into examining the relationship between school subject content and form, and issues of school practice and process. In addition, more broadly conceived notions of curriculum will have to be explored: the hidden curriculum, the curriculum conceived of as topics and activities and most important of all, the primary and pre-school curriculum. As work begins to explore the way in which school subject content relates to the parameters of practice we shall begin to see in a more grounded way how the world of schooling is structured. In addition more work must be undertaken on comparative studies of the school curriculum. But enough work has been completed now on the history of school subjects to assure us that this is a promising entry point from which to reconstitute our studies of curriculum and schooling.

Alongside these developments in Curriculum Studies in line with Bernstein’s legacy British sociology of education itself whilst ideologically purer, has in places become institutionally defunct. Bernstein’s own sociology department at the Institute of Education has now been wound up and merged in subordinate fashion with a department of Educational Policy and management: hardly a sign of strategic success. But at the same time the Curriculum Studies Department at the Institute survives and produces a reasonable output of critical work. In some ways it would seem if the pre-eminent Institute of Education is symptomatic, that a stark choice has to be faced. One might choose sociology of education, ideologically pure but institutionally defunct or curriculum studies ideologically tainted but institutionally active. Actually I favour the latter route at this point. Quite simply it is strategically safer ground to fight on as the foundational disciplines come under withering fire and teacher training moves closer and closer to classroom sites. Curriculum studies contains a number of traditions which survive, and which are sociologically informed and informing. As such curriculum studies represents a continuing institutional arena for contesting traditions - the message is that in political terms those scholars who inhabit this arena should be making it more of a real site for political and an ideological contest. This is Bernstein’s true legacy and it exhorts us to try harder.