Bridging divides in educational theory?

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Acknowledgments

I would like to express my thanks to Joe Muller for his perceptive and encouraging comments on an earlier draft and together with the other editors, Jim Hordern and Zongyi Deng for their advice and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2020/07/the-time-is-now-abolish-the-department-of-education/ downloaded from google- 15/2/21

2. In fact Bernstein mentions a third kind of knowledge that he refers to as ‘generic’ which the papers in this Special Issue do not explicitly discuss. It is important, however, in the case of educational knowledge as it refers to the consequences for professional fields such as education and social work when they rely on weak singulars with only loose boundaries between the singular social sciences and everyday knowledge (Young & Muller, 2014). This does not preclude the teacher making professional judgements, or put them in a similar place as doctors when they had to rely on folk medicine. However, it does raise difficult questions about the authority of pedagogic knowledge.

3. They do not however discuss the particular problems faced by professionally oriented disciplines such as education and social work that are based on ‘ weak ‘ singulars drawn from the social sciences

4. In mentioning Bernstein’s ‘tools’ I am thinking of categories such as classification and framing and their weak and strong forms, vertical and horizontal discourse and the development of different kinds of subject, singulars, regions and generic modes and the recontextualising, sequencing and evaluation of knowledge in curricula.

5. What I mean by normative here is that although it can be treated analytically as a mechanism, education is not in a deeper sense a mechanism. It involves teachers making judgements about what to do in the classroom and what to expect of their pupils- and most crucially that pupil learning is a voluntary act by them; not something a teacher can ever do for them..

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Funding

This work was not financially supported.

Notes on contributors

Michael Young

Michael Young is Emeritus Professor of Sociology of Curriculum at UCL Institute of Education [email protected]