CURRICULUM IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Curriculum in Public Schools



Curriculum in Public Schools

Q: Imagine a situation where you are confronting a skeptical group of parents who are demanding to know why someone ought to study the various subjects taught in this course. What would you tell them?"



Introduction

This paper presents a situation, in which I, being the subject teacher of history will be trying to convince the parents of some of the students on the changes that our public school has brought in to enhance the subject matter of the history course. The parents are concerned about the kind of knowledge being imparted to the students, enrolled in the subject of history.

Tackling skeptical parents is not an easy job. I will try to control the situation by informing them about the changes made in the curriculum, enabling the students to gain more knowledge and pass the exams with ease. The most basic curriculum question is what should count as knowledge. There are perennial debates over curriculum content; typically ideological debates over what version of history, cultural values, and nation will count. Most recently, government policy focus on the production of new scientific expertise for globalized, knowledge economies has led to calls for changes in science curriculum (Ball, 1993). This has been spurred by international comparative studies of student achievement, such as Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS).

As in the post-Sputnik era, there is a renewed doctrine of discipline, with members of the scientific, academic, and business community arguing for a stronger, more explicit link between the school curriculum and what are construed as basic facts, concepts, and principles of disciplinary knowledge (Bernstein, 1973). As such, it is an intervention in the current debate over curriculum content.

Curriculum Perspectives on Subject Matter

What knowledge is of most worth? What kinds of knowledge should be included and excluded? These are normative questions that teachers, curriculum theorists, and curriculum policymakers ask when engaged in curriculum making, especially at the institutional level. Their responses to these questions depend on their theoretical orientations and perspectives and indeed on their ideological and cultural investments in the educational enterprise. At the heart of these are different teleologies of schooling, culture, and society. In this section, we briefly identify four historical curriculum orientations: academic rationalism, social efficiency, humanism, and social reconstructionism (Bernstein, 1977). All have continued salience in ongoing curriculum policy debates over the purposes of schooling and curriculum content. We also describe critical perspectives on subject matter or school knowledge derived from the new sociology of education and Frankfurt school critical theory.

Academic rationalism: This tradition underscores the importance of the transmission of disciplinary knowledge for the development of the intellectual capacity of students and for the maintenance or reproduction of culture. Academic disciplines or organized fields of study are viewed as the authoritative sources from which curriculum content is derived (Bourdieu, 1990).

At its core is a disciplinary conception of knowledge, and subject matter consists of a canonical body of disciplinary ...