Bringing knowledge back in: perspectives from liberal education

Abstract

From the vantage point of liberal education, this article attempts to contribute to the conversation initiated by Michael Young and his colleagues on ‘bringing knowledge back’ into the current global discourse on curriculum policy and practice. The contribution is made through revisiting the knowledge-its-own-end thesis associated with Newman and Hirst, Bildung-centred Didaktik and the Schwabian model of a liberal education. The central thesis is that if education is centrally concerned with the cultivation of human powers (capacities, ways of thinking, dispositions), then knowledge needs to be seen as an important resource for that cultivation. A theory of knowledge is needed that conceives the significance of knowledge in ways productive of this cultivation. Furthermore, a theory of content is needed that concerns how knowledge is selected and translated into curriculum content and how content can be analysed and unpacked in ways that open up manifold opportunities for cultivating human powers.

Keywords:

• Liberal education
• knowledge
• content
• curriculum
• Didaktik
• Schwab

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Corrigendum

Acknowledgements

The author would like to express sincere gratitude to Ian Westbury for his useful comments on an earlier version of this article, and is also very grateful for the meaningful comments of two anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1. For Young and his colleagues, this knowledge is derived from traditional disciplines like mathematics, physics, geography and history rather than from multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary studies such as ecological economics and human ecology (Young, 2007; Young & Muller, 2015).

2. This is not to suggest that Young and his colleagues have been influenced by Newman or Hirst when developing their argument. My intent in this paper is not to trace the intellectual antecedents of the work of Young and his colleagues, but to point out an important strand in their thinking that seems to have a historical antecedent. How and whether there is a connection with the thinking of Newman or Hirst is an issue for discussion and debate.

3. Hirst retracted this theory 30 years later, partly because of numerous criticisms of the theory from the academic community, and partly because of the ‘practice turn’ in his thinking about liberal education and the curriculum (see Mulcahy, 2009).

4. To regard Newman and Hirst as spokesmen for the knowledge-its-on-end thesis is not to imply that there are no differences between these two thinkers. In terms of philosophical orientation, the writing of Newman is informed by his Catholic religious belief and commitment (see Ker, 1990), whereas the writing of Hirst is grounded in the analytical tradition of educational philosophy associated with the University of London (see Pring, 1993; J. White, 2009). In terms of epistemology, Newman holds that knowledge found in academic disciplines is a true account of reality, whereas Hirst rejects such a claim yet holds on to the belief that academic disciplines or the various forms of knowledge embody ways of understanding reality (Mulcahy, 2009). A discussion of their differences is beyond the scope of this article.

5. Dewey (1998) speaks of the significance of scientific method in the construction of human experience. As the ‘pattern and ideal of intelligent exploration and exploitation of the potentialities inherent in experience’ (p. 108), scientific method has liberating powers in terms of ‘getting at the significance of our everyday experiences of the world’ and providing ‘a working pattern of the way in which and the conditions under which experiences are used to lead ever onward and outward’ (pp. 111–112).

6. For more discussion on the convergence, see Künzli (2013). The significant degree of convergence can be explained in terms of the Germanic influence on the Chicago tradition. As Reid (1980, p. 259) observed:

For Schwab, however, and some of his contemporaries at the University of Chicago, an inheritance of Germanic rather than English styles of scholarship, combined with the need to view educational problems in terms of the social and political conditions of a mature republican democracy, produced circumstances under which a brand of neo-Aristotelianism became both possible and attractive.

7. In the UK, the Aristotelian practical spirit of mind, once highly influential, ‘was progressively abandoned by English educators of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ (Reid, 1980, p. 252).