Control, Culture, and Curriculum Policy in Chester Finn and the Fordham Institute

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Abstract

In a forthcoming book (Author, 2015), my coauthors and I identify and analyze different forms of educational discourse and their implications for policy, namely, the discourse of knowledge and understanding, and the discourse of praxis. In this paper I rely upon this categorization to examine the work of Chester Finn and the Fordham Institute. This we classify as belonging to the discourse of control because of its highly prescriptive character and its disregard for student experience. The purpose of this paper, more particularly, is to highlight the extent to which there is in Finn and Fordham a recurring emphasis on a particular, mono-cultural world-view when it comes to curriculum policy with particular reference to the literacy and social studies.

Author

• Donal E Mulcahy, Wake Forest University