Standing in need of justification: Michael Apple, R.S. Peters and Jürgen Habermas

Abstract

Curriculum decisions are increasingly seen as technocratic or bureaucratic problems, rather than democratic issues that must be deliberated over. As such, curriculum decisions are placed in the hands of a small minority of bureaucrats and business elites who assume the only purpose of education is to prepare children for college and/or the labour market. Within these times, it is essential to revisit classics works in order to move forward a critical theory of the curriculum. To develop a critical theory of the curriculum, I shall revisit two classic books in curriculum studies—R.S. Peters’s Ethics & Education and Michael Apple’s Ideology and Curriculum. I place Michael Apple and R.S. Peters in conversation with each other because both believe, albeit differently, that the curriculum ‘stands in need of justification’: both agree the curriculum must be publically justified through democratic deliberation. Furthermore, Apple and Peters develop different sets of tools for a critical theory of the curriculum—Apple provides tools for critique and Peters tools for the normative standards. However, both inadequately develop the normative standards for determining when the curriculum is democratically justified. These normative standards, I argue, are developed by Habermas’s critical theory of discourse ethics which is capable of building upon and expanding the insights of Apple and Peters.

Keywords:

• Critical theory
• curriculum theory
• educational theory

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Anna Stieg, Rich Halverson, Natasha Levinson and Michal Apple for their assistance with this paper.

Notes

1. Educational justice simply means justice in the matters of education.

2. Peters did not consider himself a critical theorist, but his insights should be included into a critical theory of the curriculum.

3. My use of the distinction between a concept and a conception draws heavily upon Rainer Forst (2013).

4. Peters does argue that science education must also be embedded within a liberal education (pp. 43–46).

5. In the next section, I focus primarily on the strengths of Habermas’s theory of communicative action. I do so because addressing Habermas’s criticisms and limitations would convolute my argument and take the paper in a different direction. However, I have tried to address some of the major criticisms within the footnotes, but I realize this makes it seem as if these critiques are unfounded. Some are, some aren’t. Nonetheless, this paper is not a wholesale endorsement of Habermas; rather, I am defending the modest argument that Habermas’s normative theory of communicative action and deliberative democracy is defensible and should be incorporated into a critical theory of the curriculum. See Ingram (2010) for an excellent overview of the various criticisms of Habermas’s work.

6. In many ways, Apple and Habermas agree that concepts like the public are struggled over. The difference between the two is that Apple notes concepts are struggled over, while Habermas normatively explains how the struggle over concepts can be democratically legitimated.

7. Habermas’s conception of the public sphere has been critiqued by feminists, specifically Fraser (1989). I think Fraser’s critique is somewhat overstated, especially within education, because it is often assumed Fraser is critiquing Habermas for not being able to address power in the public sphere. However, Fraser is not critiquing Habermas for an inability to address power; rather, she is critiquing the sociological accuracy of Habermas’s account of the public sphere as it appears in Habermas’s (1991) book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Later, Habermas (1993, 1998, pp. 329–359) addresses Fraser’s criticisms, and my use of the public sphere builds upon Habermas’s later work. Johnson (2006) has provided an excellent defence of Habermas’s conception of the public sphere. Also, for a larger discussion on these issues (See Calhoun, 1993).

8. Habermas has been criticized for only developing a procedural theory of democracy, and insufficiently attending to the ‘ethos of democracy’. I find these criticisms somewhat exaggerated. Habermas has constantly maintained that democratic procedures depend upon ‘the lifeworld’ meeting such procedures half way. However, I agree with Bernstein (1998), Honneth (2013b) and Alexander (2008) in the sense that Habermas inadequately explains what it means for the life world to meet democracy halfway. To avoid this problem, I later distinguish between the procedural and substantive conditions of deliberative democracy.

9. I realize Habermas, Adorno and other critical theorists have addressed education. My argument is critical theory has failed to systematically explain education’s role in a democratic society. This criticism has been made by Honneth (2013a).

10. In a short article entitled ‘On Social Identity’, Habermas (1974) briefly addresses the difficulty of legitimating decisions, like the curriculum, in which he argues such decisions depend upon the normative resources of a national identity; however, such a national identity cannot be presumed to exist. What Habermas means is that curriculum administrators or elites cannot presuppose a consensus exists on what and whose knowledge is of most worth. Instead, as Apple and Habermas correctly note, we must open up democratic deliberation in order to create the normative resources required to legitimate curriculum decisions. And such normative resources, Habermas argues, can only be legitimately created through the communicative process. Also see Habermas (1998, pp. 491–517), Bronkhorst (2005) and Steele (2005) for further discussions on the connection between democratic deliberation and the process of legitimating a national identity.