Knowledge without disciplines: a critique of social realism’s disciplinary fixation

ABSTRACT

Although the social realist position is grounded in the fundamentally important observation that schools must engage students with knowledge that deepens and extends their understanding, rather than simply reproduce what they learn in everyday life, this approach commits a fatal flaw by equating such ‘powerful knowledge’ with the work of academic disciplines—a position also taken by many scholars working outside the social realist tradition. The social realist and related disciplinary approaches mischaracterize the cohesiveness and boundedness of disciplines; they evade the culturally, historically, and institutionally situated nature of disciplines and dismiss the extensive knowledge produced outside them; and they ignore the societal purposes of knowledge within general education, which necessarily differ from those of academic disciplines. In a world beset by social, political, and environmental crises, schools must engage students with systematic knowledge, but that knowledge must be selected and organized on some basis other than a simplified portrait of imagined academic disciplines.

KEYWORDS:

• Curriculum
• social education
• civic education
• powerful knowledge
• social realism

Acknowledgments

Many of the ideas in this paper were developed while collaborating with Li-Ching Ho on guidelines for the curriculum of social and civic education. Geena Kim played a crucial role in identifying sources for this article.

Disclosure statement

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