The politics of knowledge in education

Abstract

This article contributes to the growing social realist literature in the sociology of education. A world systems approach is used to explain the shift to the various forms of localisation, including the emphasis on experience in the curriculum, as a strategy of globalisation that contributes to the decline of universal class consciousness and progressive politics in the contemporary period. Limiting the curriculum to experiential knowledge limits access to a powerful class resource; that of conceptual knowledge required for critical reasoning and political agency. Knowledge that comes from experience limits the knower to that experience. The shift to localised knowledge fixes groups in the working class to a never ending present as schools that use a social constructivist approach to knowledge in the curriculum fail to provide the intellectual tools of conceptual thinking and its medium in advanced literacy that lead to an imagined, yet unknown, future.

Notes

1. I am indebted to my postgraduate student, Daniel Couch, for reminding me that even that most influential of progressive educators, John Dewey, and those like the New Zealand educator, Clarence Beeby, did not allow their enthusiasm for the child-centred approach of progressive education to diminish their commitment to a knowledge-based curriculum. These educators understood the importance of the distinction between the curriculum and pedagogy. According to Couch (2011) ‘Dewey’s educational writings are devoted to recalibrating common understandings of pedagogy from a “traditional” to a “child-centered” approach. He assumed that any subject of a pedagogical praxis must require the sound reference point of a knowledge-based, and socially relevant curriculum. When he did discuss the subject-matter of education in 1897 whilst writing his pedagogic creed, as well as in many later writings, his emphasis demonstrates a desire to restructure the curriculum in such a way as to be more readily accessible by child-centered pedagogical approaches’ (n.p.).

2. A full account of the ideas presented in this article will be available in the book of the same name The politics of knowledge in education to be published by Routledge in 2012. This article frames those ideas.