Accessibility and specialization in the work of Michael Young

ABSTRACT

Michael Young’s work has had a significant influence over UK education in recent years, both at a school and policy level, although, as Young’s contribution to this symposium notes, it has often been prone to misinterpretation. In this response, it will be argued that the work Young describes in his paper can be understood as part of a broader attempt to address three very real problems faced by teachers in their day to day practice: the problems of expertise, accessibility and motivation. Where the development of Young’s thinking since the 1970s is often characterized as a ‘turn’, the continuity between his earlier and later work will be highlighted. In the latter part of the response, Young’s use of the word ‘specialized’ will be analysed in order to highlight some of the conceptual confusion that remains around the process of specialization. It will be argued that the clearing up of such confusion is of crucial importance if Young’s vision of all students having access to specialized knowledge is to be realized.

KEYWORDS:

• Curriculum
• social realism
• Michael Young
• education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. According to her website, Daisy Christodoulou ‘is Director of Education at No More Marking, a provider of online Comparative Judgement software for schools’ (Christodoulou, 2024). At the time of writing Seven Myths About Education, which was described as ‘one of the most talked about [books] in education in the past 20 years’ (Wilby, 2014), she was Research and Development Manager for ARK Schools, a large network of schools based in the UK. She is a well-known figure amongst teachers in the UK, having also published books on assessment and the role of technology in the classroom.

2. In Three Educational Scenarios for the Future: Lessons from the Sociology of Knowledge (found in Young & Muller, 2016, p. 64), Young and Muller outline three ways in which educational thinking might play out over the following 20–30 years. Future 1 is based on what they call an ‘under-socialized’ concept of knowledge, where knowledge is essentially taken as given and fixed (Young & Muller, 2016, p. 70). Future 2 is based on what they call an ‘over-socialized’ concept of knowledge, where boundaries between everyday knowledge and school knowledge are weakened to the point that the idea of any specialized or expert knowledge is lost altogether (Young & Muller, 2016, p. 73). Future 3 is based on the social realist account elaborated by Young and Muller in other papers.

3. This is a question that has yet to be resolved, although today the battle lines are drawn between classroom teachers and the education departments of universities, rather than between teachers and disciplinary academics.