Shopping for skills

Today's approach to education encourages children to pick and choose topics at the expense of learning core subject knowledge, says Michael Young. He met Ian McGimpsey, the RSA's senior manager for education, to discuss alternative curriculums and whether progressive education has gone too far 

In 1971, Michael Young's book Knowledge and Control: New Directions in the Sociology of Education sent out a challenge that cut to the heart of established ideas of schooling. It questioned the basis of the traditional curriculum in schools, which Young identified as serving the needs of the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor. The book aspired to transform the educational possibilities of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds by emphasising the need to  restructure the curriculum to heighten engagement.

In his latest book, Bringing Knowledge Back In, Professor Young makes another challenge - but this time it is to the educationalists  who have been influenced by his original thesis. In the pursuit of participation he warns us not to neglect the special role of schools in imparting difficult, off-putting knowledge to young people. Currently, questions about the future of schooling - its purpose, the role of knowledge in schools, and implications for the curriculum - are increasingly being asked. This is a live debate with the RSA's Opening Minds programme and the schools that are at the heart of it.

Ian McGimpsey: A sense that the world changes in ways you don't particularly want is important in the development of your ideas. There's a phrase in the book that seemed to sum up your feelings in that regard: 'unintended consequences of the sociology of educational knowledge that began in the 70s'.

Michael Young: I think that's absolutely right. The American sociologist Robert Merton thought that the core issue of sociology was to focus on the unintended consequences of things that people did. It is the job of sociologists to try to unpick these, so that they could be thought about before an event, rather than after.

In a sense, my current book is not arguing that my earlier book was wrong, but contending that it only dealt with half of the problem. Because you could look at knowledge as social practices in a historical context, it ended up by saying there's nothing that special about knowledge at all because you could always reinterpret social practice. If that was true, you've got no principles for an alternative curriculum because you have assumed that the basis for a curriculum is people learning in their everyday lives. So you get lots of talk about the 'curriculum of everyday life' and there is a danger that a project like the RSA's Opening Minds goes down that route. What I've been doing recently is to argue that we need to focus not just on the social and historical aspect of knowledge but also that knowledge is something special in its own right. And if we don't take knowledge seriously in the curriculum we're actually denying young people just what they need - the conceptual tools to survive, make sense and act in a very complex society. Therefore, the knowledge issue is both an epistemological and a social justice issue, because those kids who don't get to university often don't get access to what I call powerful knowledge and they are the people who need it most, because they're going to find life really tough without it.

That's where my journey has led me, trying to hold on to the strengths of the original radical idea about knowledge, but also to recognise the nature of the constraints we have to face. That, in fact, you can't just understand the world in any old way, you actually have to recognise that one of the things we do in education is give access to the next generation about what the previous generations have learnt, but in a critical way so you don't necessarily just reproduce the past generation's knowledge, but build on it. If you argue it's all social learning, then it's as if we reduce ourselves to almost a primitive society, which never had any past, or any future.

IM: You raise what you see as a possible danger in projects such as Opening Minds which is that they go down a route where they have too great an emphasis on everyday experience rather than the 'powerful knowledge' that can take people beyond themselves. But this relates closely to pedagogy. If we don't work with the experience of the learner, don't we set the pedagogical challenge too high, in effect excluding a huge number of people from the emancipatory potential of education?

MY: The pedagogical challenge is faced best by placing confidence in the teachers' professionalism - their subject and pedagogic knowledge - just as a doctor will make professional judgements about what's wrong with you and what's the best treatment - a teacher is going to make judgements about the level of the challenge for students at a particular stage in their learning, in their lives and in their biographies. Teachers have to make those decisions and we have to support them. An important debate has started by the Institute of Ideas called 'What is science education for?' It is deeply worried about what's happening to the science curriculum in schools, the emphasis on experience and relevance and contemporary issues such as the environment and HIV/Aids.

Much of the old content of school science such as periodic table, pattern, molecular formulae, is being phased out. The problem is that if you don't have enough of the content knowledge of disciplines such as physics, chemistry and biology, you aren't going to be able to have a very informed debate about the environment or HIV/Aids. The challenge for the teacher is that kids have got many demands on their attention such as mobile phones, Facebook and Bebo. So, the problem for the teacher is getting all the kids involved in things that they don't immediately want to be engaged in.

IM: But isn't utilising contemporary relevance one way of getting kids involved? Opening Minds, for example, would seek to retain the knowledge of the traditional curriculum, but change its aims and organisation. Is not the idea of flexibility and experience at some stages beyond the subject discipline a way of heightening engagement?

MY: I take your point, but what I'm struck by in today's curriculum is that it is increasingly 'modularised' so students get a kind of Tesco model of knowledge. They go round and they pick this or that and it is assumed to improve access, emphasise student choice and all the current buzzwords, but something serious gets forgotten. There is a real issue about the identity of the learner, and unless learners have some sense of boundaries that give them a shared sense of identity they remain in the fragmented world of common sense and modules fragment it further. There is a stage in anyone's education before you can break down the barriers; you've got to have some kind of identity to begin with. Of course the world is not divided up into subjects and if you're trying to solve a problem in South Africa such as HIV/Aids it's a biological, economic and political issue. What disciplinary knowledge gives you is some tried and tested basis for thinking about these complex issues and about alternative ways of approaching them.

IM: The creation of learner's identity takes a long time, and reinforces cultures and ways of thinking. Can people become unhelpfully protective of a subject discipline?

MY: This partly goes back to the pedagogical challenge - a good teacher who's confident about their own subject enables their students to move beyond it. There are two dangers: one is you trap students in a subject-defined world that they can't see beyond and the other is the student that has got no identity other than their everyday life.

IM: Opening Minds and the RSA's work on education is a developmental effort. One of the things I find interesting is your ideas on the creation of an alternative curriculum. You raise two questions in particular, how we connect groups of specialists - those creating knowledge in boundaried disciplines - with curriculum knowledge to develop an alternative curriculum? And how do these subjects connect to each other?

MY: Teachers should be given the opportunity (in their training) to see the connections between their specialism and other specialisms. That process should be embodied in the curriculum. But you can't start from the connections, you've got to start from the subjects, the disciplines, and then see how they can become more connective. Otherwise, you get into the identity problem. It took me a long time in my own career to accept the notion - and I've developed it from the French sociologist, Émile Durkheim's work - that boundaries in life are both constraints and possibilities.

What I forgot in my early work was we saw boundaries only as constraints, we wanted to do away with all constraints - do away with the boundaries between the school and everyday life, between disciplines, and between the sexes and so on. To some extent that boundary-less idea has become fashionable again, through the internet and the new kinds of communication that are possible. But what this apparently radical idea misses is the absolute core element to boundaries, that moving beyond them is where the key learning takes place. It's not that they should be treated as fixed; they should be treated as real but bridgeable.