State-based curriculum-making, Part 2, the tool-kit for the state’s curriculum-making

Abstract

The paper identifies three tools that support the administrative instrument of a state-based curriculum commission: compartmentalization, licensing and segmentation. These tools channel the state’s curriculum-making towards forms of symbolic rather than regulatory action. The state curriculum becomes a framework for the ideological governance of schools and school systems.

Keywords:

• Administrative tools
• compartmentalization
• curriculum commission
• Germany
• school system governance
• licensing
• segmentation
• state-based curriculum-making

Notes

1. E.g. economic growth, human resource development, youth unemployment, social immobility, intercultural relations, HIV/AIDS, tobacco and drug abuse, etc.

2. Whether there are or are not such problems and whether a changed or an unchanged pattern of school and curricular provision is needed to address them are, of course, grist for the mill of public discussion and debate.

3. For recontextualization, see Bernstein (1996), Singh (2002). For the use of the concept, see, e.g. Deng (2009), Morris and Chan (1997).

4. E.g. that a second national language, e.g. French in the German-speaking cantons in Switzerland or Swedish in Finland, not be a required subject for all elementary and middle-school students but can be replaced by ‘English’. That Norway’s ‘religion’ curriculum in grades 6 and 10 and 12 will include units on ‘Islam’. For an example of recent major controversy around a ‘reform’, see ‘High flyers and sad failures’ (2015).

5. Bähr et al. (2000), reflecting on the Swiss study that preceded the OCC project, suggest that such conflict and contention has, in a broad sense, two foci: (1) it can result from conflicts of position as, e.g. decisions and projects within Doyle’s (1992) societal context are recontextualized into the programmatic context, where there are different ideologies, traditions and legacies of practice; and (2) they can occur as knowledge conflicts, as, e.g. proposals for the teaching of new or different ‘knowledge’ are evaluated in the light of, e.g. what has always been done, of the perspectives of, e.g. the academic system, school subject traditions, resource considerations, and other related functional systems, such as religion, work life, etc. (pp. 21–22; see Table 2). As Bähr et al. also point out, ‘one may assume that that subject-related, institutional, positional and individual perspectives are also culturally biased’, with the implication of possible further conflict emerging from cultural, ethnic or linguistic diversity (p. 22).

6. The US recognition of compartmentalization lay behind the 1990s US slogan, ‘systemic reform’ (see Cohen & Spillane, 1992).

7. Mechanisms that are clearly cousins of the teacher-directed principle of Lehrfreiheit are found in other contexts. In a column on a controversial curriculum decision around the teaching of evolution made by, the State Board of Education in the US state of Kansas, a newspaper columnist noted that: ‘I checked with the both the legal counsel at the state school board and the official in charge of curriculum standards. Both agreed … No law requires science teachers to teach what the Board wants them to teach’ (Hendricks, [2005]; emphasis added).