Curriculum and Making Human Kinds

• In Event: The Reemergence of Curriculum Theory

Abstract

The paper notes that there is an oddity in the land in which we live. When one reads its educational research, history, and public discussions, schooling seems to have no center and no standards. For some, the delegation of education to local governments and the lack of central planning prevent progress through, to borrow a phrase of the present, systemic reforms. The belief in a rudderless school encourages reforms to create national standards of what each school should do and the child learns. For others, the decentralization is a sign of greatness that allows for flexibility, creativity, and progress. That exceptional non-state state is for all the world to witness as the territory of the last rugged individuals whose entrepreneurship clearly bests the social projects of the welfare state. And visiting an elementary or secondary school in the country is the lulling impression of differences – architectural patterns, rules for teacher certification, organizational policy-making, and the curriculum that go along with of dialects of speech associated with regional differences.

The idea of schools as markets feeds the oddity. Notions of choice are to provide the freedom that produces innovation, creativity, and success for all children. And at the same time, that freedom is to be tempered through elements of public management that states the expectations to shapes and fashion the operations of freedom and choice.

This puzzle of a structured and differentiated, non-centralized and non-state state of education becomes puzzling when doing both historical and ethnographic research about the American school. Travel the country, go to charter schools, religious schools, and public schools and gestures of the diversity and the lack of standards melts away. The diversity and the markets become shallow as schooling has a strong resemblance across the land!

How can the standardization within lack of standards be given intelligibility? One approach taken in this paper is to focus on curriculum as historical practices about how to think about kinds of people, to act on particular populations, and as cultural thesis for people to act for themselves. The principles that orders and classifies the objects of reflection and action in schooling create standards. These standards are not the learning outcomes but embodied in the principles generated in distinctions and differentiations that classify classroom social interactions, learning “climates”, and children’s achievement. The standards are embodied in pedagogy as cultural theses about modes of living – the lifelong learner and/or the disadvantaged, low achiever child. Further, these standards function as a comparative style of reason that excludes and abjects in the impulse to include.

The discussion focuses on the curriculum as cultural theses about modes of life. It explores how the cultural theses governing turn of the 21st century pedagogy are different from previous systems of governing. Drawing on Rancière’s partition of the sensible and Foucault’s governmentality, curriculum becomes an historical event and the effect of power in governing who “we” are, should be, and its processes of abjection.

Author

• Thomas S. Popkewitz, University of Wisconsin