Michael Young on the question of knowledge in the curriculum

One book that has proven to have a formative influence on me as I begin my MRes is Michael Young's book Bringing Knowledge Back In (2008). Young is a notable sociologist of education who, at the beginning of the 1970's wrote a book titled Knowledge and Control (1971) in which he helped to usher in an approach to the sociology of education that linked the kinds of knowledge then enshrined in school curricula with vested power interests - an approach that has, of course, proved to be very popular. In this more recent book, Young charts how his position has altered significantly. Though he hasn't turned his back on the idea that knowledge is to a large extent socially and historically constructed, he now understands that the extreme social relativist views that have emerged since the 1970's have caused academics to avoid facing difficult questions about knowledge and truth. This, as I understand it, has in turn undermined, rather than advanced, the sociology of education's critical and emancipatory potential. As Young himself writes:

"the 'new' sociology of education that began... with a radical commitment to truthfulness, undermined its own project by its rejection of any idea of truth itself." (Young, 2008: 199)

Furthermore, Young now believes that it is the distinctly social character of knowledge that enables it to have a claim to truth and objectivity, and to give us a basis for choosing particular educational and curriculum principles over others. The fact that cultural objects are not analysable in the same way as natural objects does not mean that those working in the cultural sciences shouldn't pursue the maximum amount of objectification possible. He pursues a lengthy analysis of the works of Durkheim, Vygotsky, Cassirer, Basil Bernstein and others in order to substantiate this claim. I won't go into this level of detail here. The book, being as it is a collection of previously published essays, is a little on the repetitive side and I suspect that most readers will want to be selective in which chapters they turn to, as I was. However I do want to focus a little on the distinction Young makes between vertical and horizontal knowledge structures and on the idea of grammaticality, which can be found in the final chapter of the book.

Vertical, hierarchical knowledge structures are those which develop through integration into ever more unitary, more general sets of propositions and towards more general explanations and laws. Something like Physics would probably best represent this type of knowledge. Horizontal knowledge structures on the other hand are those which are plural rather than unitary and which contain parallel and largely incommensurable languages. The social sciences, in their current form, are more likely to be in this vein. Verticality and horizontality have to do with theory's internal development. Moving on to grammaticality, this term is to do with a knowledge structure's dealings with the external, empirical world; that is, its ability to identify 'empirical correlates'. High grammaticality therefore refers to a theory with a high level of worldly corroboration. Together, the criteria of verticality and grammaticality "determine the capacity a particular knowledge structure has to progress." (Ibid: 210)

For me, the interesting question then arises as to where geography fits into this framework. I suggest that here we have a discipline that is verticality challenging. We have a whole host of parallel languages, stemming from that original bifurcation of physical and human geography and then into further sub-disciplines such as economic, population, and various forms of cultural geography such as humanist, critical, feminist etc. My experience at university has been that these lines of enquiry tend to follow their own disciplinary paths, with few attempts made at dialogue and integration, though there may well be geography departments where a more integrative approach is taken. This is a far cry from the early holistic origins of geography (see Bonett, 2008) and reflects ever increasing specialisation in academia.

As for grammaticality, I think geography is particularly strong in this respect. Particularly in fieldwork, but even in the classroom, geography is a subject that reminds us that there is a world out there, beyond human imaginings and constructions. A world of human and non-human others that calls for our understanding and care. In this sense, geography is a corrective to a curriculum that has perhaps become too focused on the self, a topic I have broached in previous posts and which I will no doubt engage with again. One of the values of a geography education is precisely that it brings our attention to this world outside of ourselves and, if it does its job right, provides us with the resources and conceptual understanding to find our place within it.

Bonnett, A. (2008) What is geography? London: Sage.
Young, M.F.D. (2008) Bringing knowledge back in: From social constructivism to social realism in the sociology of education. London: Routledge.
Young, M.F.D. (1971) Knowledge and control: new directions for the sociology of education. London: Collier-Macmillan.

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Subjects and tradition

A few words about tradition…

We keep hearing from certain quarters the need for a return to 'traditional subjects'. I'm not exactly sure what these people have in mind when they talk about tradition in the context of education, or even if they have taken the trouble to examine the term at all, but it seems to bring to mind the vision of a teacher, at the front of the class, reciting important dates, locations and other facts to be absorbed and regurgitated. But is this the only way we can think about tradition? Is the only alternative, as those pedagogues who talk about 'learning for the 21st century' seem to believe, to surrender ourselves to the future and to be urged along by passing fads and the pressing needs of our times? I don't think this is so. As we are about to see, there is also a potentially radical sense of tradition that we can draw from.

Jacques Derrida once talked about 'an appeal to tradition that is in no way traditional'. What on Earth did he mean by this? The philosopher Simon Critchley explains it very well indeed. A conservative sees tradition as an inheritance (the conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott actually defines education as a sort of inheritance) and something to be passed down, from generation to generation as a kind of doxa, or body of unquestioned knowledge that, at least in theory, every individual should have access to. However, a radical conception of tradition sees it in a very different light. Here, tradition is something produced through a critical or deconstructive engagement with that inheritance. Doxa is now interrogated, questioned and made to answer for itself.

If we adopt this radical sense of tradition as an educator, we still, like the conservative, recognise the need for an inheritance of knowledge that helps us to make sense of the world, but rather than accepting it with blind faith, this sort of tradition calls for an attitude of critical engagement, a sifting through, or a recovery of sorts. As Critchley notes, "what this radical idea of tradition is trying to recover is something missing, forgotten or repressed in contemporary life" (Critchley, 2010: 32). The radical traditionalist understands that we have to sometimes look back in order to go forward. Engaging with tradition in this way might help us to avoid a situation in which education is reduced to a concern only with themes of contemporary relevance, and with preparing young people for 'the 21st century'.

This leads me to another point, that of society's ongoing obsession with the future. Critchely makes the interesting claim that talk of the future is actually reactionary. A relentless insistence on the future tends to curtail interesting, original thought. We are discouraged to cultivate memory and engage with tradition. For Critchley, "the future is about amnesia, and that's what's behind this ludicrous love affair with technology and forms of social networking… these are forms of oblivion, the desire for oblivion" (Ibid: 116). These will sound like awfully strong claims, but I do see his point, for I too experience social networking as a kind of oblivion, an unworld in which our identities are surrendered and where people endlessly 'communicate' but rarely seem to actually say anything.

Following from this, the frightening thing for me is any idea that education as we know it could be adequately replaced by the likes of Google, Facebook and Twitter. This is perhaps not so far-fetched an idea, and Ian Gilbert (2011) has indeed just written a book on this very topic. What would such an 'education' look like? I suspect it would be defined largely by amnesia towards the past and a fixation with the everyday. Genuine education must look to tradition as well as the present and future, but do so in the radical, rather than the conservative, sense. This requires teachers who have a wide appreciation and understanding of their subject and who will be well equipped to engage their students critically with the various forms of human knowledge that are their inheritance.

Critchley, S. (2010) How to Stop Living and Start Worrying. Polity.

Gilbert, I. (2010) Why do I need a teacher when I’ve got Google? Routledge.

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