Regulating the unthinkable: Bernstein’s pedagogic device and the paradox of control

Abstract

Drawing upon Bernstein’s writings on the pedagogic device, this article examines how critical thinking is regulated in Singapore through the process of pedagogic recontextualization. The potential of critical thinking to speak to alternative possibilities and notions of individual autonomy as well as its assumptions of a liberal arrangement of society are problematized in Singapore. By documenting how such curricular discourses are articulated by the state and taken up in schools and classrooms, the article provides a sociological account of the relations between the organization of knowledge and the distribution of social power and control. The analysis reveals that even as official understandings of critical thinking are transmitted in the classroom, alternative, non-official orders of meaning are inevitably made available. Showing how teachers and students act to resist and challenge these prescribed understandings the article argues that the very ideas of change and indeterminacy are fundamentally built into the pedagogic device.

Keywords:

• Basil Bernstein
• pedagogic device
• recontextualization
• curriculum
• Singapore

Notes

1. Elsewhere and drawing upon Durkheim, Bernstein (1990) sometimes refers to these as, respectively, esoteric and mundane knowledge. See later discussion.

2. See Young (2009) for a restatement of esoteric/mundane knowledge as powerful knowledge/knowledge of the powerful.

3. In saying this, it should not be romanticized that liberal states are necessarily wedded to the ideal of critical thinking. As a recent and interesting case in point drawn from the US, the Republican Party of Texas declared in their 2012 political platform their party’s opposition to the teaching of critical thinking in all schools in the state – a subject that they claim carries the ‘purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority’ (Republican Party of Texas, 2012, p. 12).

4. Depending on their academic track, students enroll into either a four year program culminating in the General Certificate of Education (GCE) ‘Ordinary’ Level examinations or a five year program that leads to the GCE ‘Normal’ Level examinations.

5. Teachers and schools retain some flexibility and autonomy in decisions over how the contents of the given syllabuses are to be taught, as well as in the design and development of curricular programs that would better enable students achieve these standards. In saying this, however, it should also be noted that the intensifying focus on test scores brought about by the prevailing conditions of school marketization has greatly limited the ways in which such discretion is exercised by schools.

6. The aggregate entry points for the four-year Express and the less academically rigorous five-year Normal (Academic) streams differ to some extent across schools.

7. See, for example, Frandji and Vitale (2011), Moore, Arnot, Beck, and Daniels (2006), Muller, Davies, and Morais (2004) and Singh, Sadovnik, and Semel (2010).

8. See, for example, chapter 4 in Bernstein (2000).

9. For a sense of how similar work is being undertaken, see Wong (2015).