Knowledge and the Curriculum

Recently, I had the opportunity to listen to Michael F. D. Young, whose book Knowledge and Power (1971) was very influential on my early thinking about curriculum. Michael Young is an emeritus professor at the University of London and was in New Zealand to give the prestigious Hood lecture at The University of Auckland. He began his talk, titled "Curriculum for a knowledge society: Lessons from the sociology of knowledge", with this challenge: Much is written in current educational policies about preparing students for a knowledge society and the important role education has to play. However, these policies say very little about the question of knowledge itself. What is it we want young people to know? More worrying than this, many of these policies almost systematically neglect or marginalise the question of knowledge ... (1) Professor Young went on to distinguish between a traditional view of a subject-based curriculum and his view of a reconceptualised curriculum. The former, he claimed, is something that students comply with, and the latter is something that students acquire by engagement. His argument against the current curriculum reforms in the United Kingdom is based on his concern about the notion of viewing curriculum as an instrument for "motivating students". He contends that this (a) misunderstands what curriculum can do and (b) confuses curriculum with pedagogy. Curriculum he defines as the knowledge that a country agrees is important for all students to have access to, and pedagogy as the activities that teachers use to motivate students and enable them to engage with concepts stipulated by the curriculum. While I didn't always agree with aspects of Professor Young's argument as it developed in his lecture, he did put up challenges that were worthy of consideration. It made me reflect on the body of knowledge that we in New Zealand consider is essential for our learners to engage with. What and whose knowledge is important? Who chooses this knowledge and with what authority? Professor Young went on to argue that the curriculum needs to be seen as an end in itself, that is, for the intellectual development of students, not as a means, for example, of motivating disaffected students or solving social problems. This intellectual development is concept-based rather than content-based, but there must be content on which to build this conceptual understanding. The conceptual knowledge base, he claims, comes from specialist fields developed by scholars and communities of researchers over time. The claim he made that I found most challenging was this: "The curriculum should exclude the everyday knowledge of students, whereas it is a resource for the pedagogic work of teachers." He continued, "Students do not come to school to learn what they already know." Professor Young was very clear in his mind where the boundary lay between curriculum and pedagogy, between an agreed intellectual knowledge base and the links that teachers make to students' own knowledge and experiences. To paraphrase his words, curriculum is the agreed intellectual knowledge base and pedagogy is the work teachers undertake to draw on students' everyday knowledge to enable them to engage with and understand the relevance of the concepts in this knowledge base. Following on from this premise, the world and the concepts within it need to be viewed as an "object of thought" not as a "place of experience". Let me quote his example: If pupils cannot grasp the difference between thinking about Auckland as an example of the geographical concept of a city and their experience of living in Auckland, when they draw on their everyday concepts they will have problems learning geography, and by analogy, any school subject that seeks to take them beyond their experience [his emphasis]. He continued to explain that teachers, therefore, had two fundamental tasks: 1. …