The changing configuration of curriculum provides us with a valuable litmus test of social and political intentions and purposes. As we can see these configurations change as the balance of social forces and the underlying economic landscape undergo cyclical change. In Long Waves of Reform, using an extensive archive of data generated by the Spencer Foundation project ‘Change over Time’, I try to delineate the long cycles of educational reform. Looking at the USA and Canada there is a remarkable similarity in the main ‘conjunctures’ of change in curriculum and pedagogy. A similar pattern of experimentation in pursuit of social justice to that witnessed in Britain can be seen in the period of the late 1960s and early 1970s. All schools were affected by the progressive desire to build a ‘Great Society’, characterised by social inclusion and social justice. Whilst some schools pursued ‘root and branch’ revolutionary change (as with the comprehensive schools mentioned in Chapters 1 and 2) others pursued social inclusion within a more conventional grammar of schooling.

The pattern of reversal noted in the previous chapter was similarly evident with the introduction of standards-based testing and new patterns of systems differentiation (e.g. Magnet Schools). This was part of a world movement to transform schooling, often in ways that resonated with the emerging new economic world order. Some commentators have called this ‘market fundamentalism’, bringing in a competitive business ethos around notions of school effectiveness and school choice. This accelerating marketisation of schooling had many implications, one was to side-line the significance of the struggle over kinds of curriculum. Differentiation of life chances through curriculum was progressively passed over to the work of the market in disbursing resources according to particular school sites and systems, related increasingly closely to patterns of residential location.

The seismic social and political changes at the end of the twentieth century, which are echoed in the educational transformations noted above, pose a challenge for those concerned to investigate them. The changing positionality of curriculum as a distributor of life chances and the salience of tests, targets and tables has moved the focus of social and political action. Our studies therefore need to reflect this transformation and reconceptualise both the substantive focus of inquiry and the methods employed.

From the beginning I have argued that we have to understand the personal and biographical if we are to understand the social and political. This is nowhere more true than in the relevance of personal biography in the choice of research focus and method. I have tried to show ‘where I am coming from’ and this illuminates a clear predisposition in favour of strategies for social inclusion and social justice. But I have also tried to provide a historical context for understanding social possibilities. Hobsbawm’s golden age of egalitarianism which culminated in the 1960s and 1970s has clearly passed and some personal nostalgia is patently evident in some of my accounting (Hobsbawm, 1994). But I do seek to avoid and warn against golden age reminiscences for, as Lasch has reminded us, nostalgia is the abdication of memory (Lasch, 1979). I should therefore note a few of the myths of the golden age. Many public services, schools included, developed a culture which favoured service providers rather than clients and customers and at time, trade union action sometimes exacerbated the problem. Public and professional groups can hijack resources for their own purposes just as other groups can. And progressive practices can develop areas of looseness, non-accountability and professional self-aggrandisement if so permitted. In many ways Britain in the 1970s provided a case study of such, ending as it did in a ‘winter of discontent’ among workers and trade unions which ushered in the Thatcher government.

The exhumation of the conflicts of the 1970s, the attribution of blame and delineation of causes is an ongoing task for historians. Their importance for the arguments in this book is to point out that all was not as it should be in the public services before the more recent reforms and restructuring. Whilst the best professionals adopted a ‘caring vocationalism’ in providing social inclusion many examples of self-serving professionalism could be found. The task as always was to try to understand both the larger social movements of reform but also their specific embodiment and embeddedness in personal biographies.

This book has sought to employ this focus from the beginning and in the later sections will make both the methodological and substantive argument for an increasing focus on ‘life politics’: I believe the new world order makes this even more important than it was in the earlier periods examined above. This is partly because of the triumph of ‘the individualised society’ – more than ever, in this context, individual life politics becomes the site of social contestation. Once the focus was on collective social movements, say for school or curriculum change. Now a primary strategy for understanding social change should focus on the individuals’ life politics.

As Reeves has contended:

The individual is steadily replacing the collective as the site of political action, analysis and conflict. The point here is not that everyone is becoming more selfish, but that the self is becoming a more important unit of politics than the class or group. In part this is because of the greater choice of lifestyle on offer and the breaking of hereditary voting patterns. More important has been the steady erosion of stable political affiliations; hence Labour winning more of the middle-class vote than the Tories in 1997. This is neither a progressive nor a regressive trend; it is simply a fact. One of the consequences has been what one seasoned political observer calls ‘the privatisation of anger’. People get angry a lot, but generally as individuals, rather than in a group. Once we had Jarrow marchers; now we have road rage. Once we had trade unions; now we have therapists. Many of the major battles under way – for example, between work and life, healthy living and obesity, good and abusive parenting – are being fought within individuals, rather than between them. (Reeves, 2004, p. 24)