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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