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The Curriculum Journal

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What is a curriculum and what can it

do?
a

Michael Young
a

Institute of Education, University of London

Published online: 07 Apr 2014.

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To cite this article: Michael Young (2014) What is a curriculum and what can it do?, The Curriculum
Journal, 25:1, 7-13, DOI: 10.1080/09585176.2014.902526
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The Curriculum Journal, 2014

Vol. 25, No. 1, 713, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09585176.2014.902526

What is a curriculum and what can it do?

Michael Young*

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Institute of Education, University of London

Despite the widespread use of the term curriculum in educational

research and policy, the questions in my title are not easy to answer. Furthermore, as is indicated by the papers in this Special Issue, there is little
consensus among specialists in the field. An attempt to answer them, however, is worthwhile because much writing and research about the curriculum is devoted to saying what it ought to do, and what its aims are, with
less regard for what exactly a curriculum is that might fulfil those aims.
My starting point is that curricula are social facts in the sense used by
the French sociologist and Professor of Pedagogy, Emile Durkheim (Durkheim, 1938). What this means is that a curriculum as a social fact is
never reducible to the acts, beliefs or motivation of individuals; it is a
structure that constrains not only the activities of those involved primarily teachers and students, but also those who design curricula or attempt
to achieve certain goals with them. However, curricula are not only constraints on our actions. They make some things possible to learn that
most of us would find impossible to learn without them; at the same time
they set limits on what is possible to learn in schools or other educational
institutions. In this way curricula are like other specialised institutions
families and businesses, for example they have particular purposes. It
follows, as Reiss and White note in their paper, that contemporary curricula, and their constituent elements such as subjects, inevitably rely on earlier curricula, either because they are taken for granted as the only way to
organise the transmission of knowledge or because they have demonstrated their capacity to be effective instruments for learning. In a sense
this merely recognises the central role of curricula in the transmission of
knowledge from one generation to the next. A curriculum does not imply
a particular model of pedagogy; however, they vary in the extent to which
they pre-suppose assumptions about whether learners vary in their capabilities. Whether the focus is on the curriculum of an individual school or
on the National Curriculum of a country, both are structures designed for
particular purposes. The debates, which many of the papers in this Special
*Email: m.young@ioe.ac.uk
2014 British Curriculum Foundation

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M. Young

Issue refer to and take sides on, are about these purposes. There is one
question which runs through all the papers, albeit in very different ways.
It is the extent to which assumptions about knowledge define the curriculum as a structure, and, as none of the papers deny the importance of
knowledge, what exactly these assumptions are. In prefacing my brief
comments on the individual papers, I want to suggest that seeing the curriculum as a structure offering constraints and possibilities may be a useful way of considering the aims/knowledge debate introduced by Reiss
and White and the more overtly political questions about how and by
whom curricular decisions are made.
From their earliest days, and increasingly in modern societies, schools
have been established as specialised institutions, which can realise some
aims and not others. For example, it is possible for a curriculum to be oriented to students acquiring knowledge of mathematics or history or a particular set of religious beliefs; however, it makes no sense to conceive of a
curriculum enabling young people to get jobs when the primary influence
on whether a young person gets a job is the quantity and quality of jobs
available. The logic of recognising the specialist role of schools and the
curriculum can be illustrated in another way. No one could disagree with
Reiss and White that schools should promote well-being and human
flourishing in what they do; however, that is what we expect of institutions
that do not have curricula such as families, towns and businesses. What
distinguishes schools is that their primary concern, as embodied in the
specialist professional staff they recruit, and in their curriculum, is (or
should be) to provide all their students with access to knowledge. As
Ruth Cigman has pointed out human flourishing pre-supposes access to
knowledge (Cigman, 2012). It is a schools curriculum that addresses the
question what knowledge?; an issue explored in considerable depth in
the first paper in this issue by David Scott.
The curriculum as a social fact, I suggest, acts as a constraint on what
students can learn, not the least both through its boundaries or lack of
them between subjects and between the curriculum and the experience of
students out of school. However these boundaries are not just constraints,
they are also a set of possibilities not only about what students can learn
but about how they can progress in their learning. The extent to which
these possibilities are achievable by a school and by what proportion of
pupils will depend on a range of factors. Some will be internal to the
school, such as the approach to curriculum leadership of the headteacher
and her/his team of senior teachers and the range of expertise of the whole
staff; and some will be external such as the wider distribution of opportunities in the society as a whole and in the local catchment area of the
school. What uniquely schools can do for all pupils, and that is why the
curriculum is the pre-eminent issue for all of us in education, is to offer
opportunities for pupils at all ages to move beyond the experience they

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The Curriculum Journal

bring to school and to acquire knowledge that is not tied to that experience. It is this (relatively) context-free knowledge, which some of us have
described as powerful knowledge (Beck, 2013; Young, 2013; Young &
Muller, 2013), and which, in Basil Bernsteins words enables students to
think the un-thinkable and the not yet thought (Wheelahan, 2012). This
is the promise that schooling and its main instrument, the curriculum
offers. How this promise works out and for whom, and why it is un-realised for so many students is what the papers in this Special Issue are concerned with; I turn, therefore, to consider the papers, briefly, in turn.
The first paper by David Scott presents a systematic review of the different ways curriculum theorists have conceptualised knowledge. From
the perspective developed here, his most important conclusion derives
from his premise that all human learning is an epistemic or knowledge
building activity. It follows that the curriculum can be understood as a
structure or instrument for extending that epistemic activity beyond the
knowledge building that pupils are involved in their everyday lives. Any
other rationale for the curriculum would be a denial, at least for some, of
the entitlement of all pupils to extend their unique human capacity for
epistemic activity and knowledge building. This entitlement is limited,
in principle, by two features of all curricula, the nature of knowledge itself
and what we know about how it is acquired.
The second paper by Gert Biesta tackles the issue of knowledge
building from a quite different perspective. He makes the case for Deweys transactional realism as a way of tackling the relation between
knowledge and experience which he rightly sees as the key issue for curriculum and pedagogic theory and practice. Early in his paper Biesta states
that he wants to avoid the recent tendency for educational theory to lose
knowledge and slip into what he has elsewhere described as learnification
(Biesta 2010a). To do this he introduces Deweys concepts of
coordination and transaction as a way of bridging the separation of
knowledge and experience that all pupils face on entering school and
engaging with the curriculum. However, while the concept of transaction
identifies a process, it is not clear how it allows for a discussion of what is
being transacted; this means that we are in danger of being left with a theory of pedagogy, or teaching and learning but with no curriculum. Second, Biesta reminds us that Dewey was concerned with how an
absolutist scientific world view (today, we might call it positivist) was
colonising other alternatives in education; something one can recognise in
much current educational research. However, as Biesta explains, Dewey
was far from being anti-science and he tried to construct what he saw as a
more adequate, non-absolutist conception of science. The problem for
curriculum theorists is that Dewey (and Biesta seems not to disagree)
does not distinguish between his concept of science and intelligent common sense. For Dewey, we are or should be all, in this sense, scientists.

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M. Young

This collapse of the differences between scientific thinking and common

sense leaves one with wondering where this takes us in thinking about the
curriculum. Whatever else it is, the curriculum is surely more than an
extension of common sense.
In his concluding discussion Biesta suggests that the social realist
approach to knowledge and the curriculum that I and others have developed from Durkheim can be located in what he describes as the domain
of certainty rather than the domain of possibility and that it thus it leads
to an inescapable determinism. However, as Moore (2011) expresses more
clearly than most, a realist sociology of knowledge is committed to the
fallibility of knowledge not its certainty. In other words, even truth in
the mathematical sciences is no more than the best knowledge we have so
far. All knowledge, however reliable, is always challengeable because it is
no more than our best attempt to make sense of that which is external to
us the real world. Hence it is in the domain of possibility not the
domain of certainty.
In the third paper, Priestley and Sinnema begin by questioning some of
the assumptions underpinning the case for a knowledge-led curriculum.
The strength of their paper is that they go beyond the theoretical debates
and test some of these assumptions by analysing documents from two
recently reformed National Curricula in Scotland and New Zealand. In
asking the question do these new curricula downgrade knowledge? they
demonstrate that although the word knowledge is frequently mentioned
in the documents, it tends to be under-specified and the acquisition of
knowledge is invariably associated with a variety of other educational
purposes. In other words, the evidence from the two curricula studied
gives some support to the downgrading argument. This is an important
beginning. However, to take the questions they raise further will undoubtedly require greater precision in defining the term knowledge than can be
achieved by counting the number of times the word is used. This takes us
back to the issues about what the word knowledge implies that David
Scotts paper raised.
Priestley and Sinnemas paper raises a number of other questions
about the idea of a knowledge-led curriculum which warrants further
exploration. Both the New Zealand and Scottish curricula appear to put
more emphasis how children should be rather than on what they are
expected to know. This is consistent with the view that schools should not
only provide opportunities for students to acquire knowledge but that
they should develop their attributes and dispositions. . . and teach everyday knowledge that has practical utility for everyday life. However everyday knowledge is what all pupils bring to school and it is difficult to see
why it would need teaching. There is a danger that such a view can slip
into treating the role of the curriculum as repairing deficiencies in the preschool identities of pupils, rather than taking them beyond those identities, as recent research in New Zealand shows (Sitein, 2013).

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11

Priestley and Sinnema suggest that the distinction between everyday

and disciplinary knowledge and the related distinction between knowledge and skills are not as clear cut as is suggested by those who argue for
a knowledge-led curriculum. This may well be true; however, it does not
negate the strengths of the distinctions provided they are treated analytically and not descriptively. They also suggest that it is perfectly possible
to conceive of alternative but equally rigorous approaches to introducing
disciplinary knowledge that are not framed as traditional subjects. However, even if we accept this possibility, the pedagogic problems posed by
any form of rigorous knowledge, which cannot avoid being at odds with
the experience that pupils bring to school, remain.
Reiss and White restate Whites now familiar case (Reiss & White, 2013)
for an aims-based curriculum and apply it to the specific case of science
teaching. The pros and cons of an aims-based approach to the curriculum
have been extensively debated and are beyond the scope if this short paper.
However, there are two crucial questions facing science educators that their
proposal for an aims-based approach to the curriculum does not seem to
address. The first issue is whether a science curriculum for all should be
based on an introduction to the concepts and methods of physics, chemistry
and biology. The counter view is that such a foundational approach is
only appropriate for those planning in the future to specialise in one or
more of the sciences. The related question is, if such a foundation is not
appropriate for the majority of pupils who are unlikely to be future specialists, does this not imply that the science curriculum must be differentiated at
some relatively early stage of secondary schooling? A differentiated curriculum raises the question as to the basis on which pupils are selected (or
allowed to choose) their curriculum and the principles on which the curriculum is differentiated? The fate of the Schools Councils Project Science for
the Young School Leaver in the 1960s and 1970s is not a happy precedent for
a differentiated secondary science curriculum.
Lingard and McGregor locate the knowledge/curriculum debate in
the broad context of the social changes associated with globalisation and
the new demands that these changes are thought to place on the curriculum for the future cohorts of those leaving school. They compare two
very different approaches to the curriculum developed in Australia;
Queenslands new basics and the proposals by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) for a Federal Curriculum for all states. Broadly summarised, new basics was a radical
approach to a skills-led curriculum which gave considerable autonomy to
individual schools and encouraged them to become more closely involved
in their communities a proposal not unlike the Royal Society for the
encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSAs) less systematically developed Opening Minds curriculum in England. However,
as Lingard and McGregor point out, the new basics curriculum was
only developed as a pilot for only 36 schools and with the massive swing

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M. Young

to the Right in Queensland in the recent state elections, it is highly

unlikely to be extended to the state as a whole. The ACARA curriculum
signifies a return to subjects but this is combined with basic skills testing
in the early years of secondary schooling. The paper does not go into
detail about the new basics curriculum or the idea of productive
learning associated with it; its strengths are that it brings out clearly the
complex interweaving of political and curricular ideologies as well as their
links to broader political and economic changes.
Cain and Chapmans paper addresses a familiar educational issue, the
seductive popularity of such dichotomies as content/skills and formal/informal, and explores it in relation to two subjects, history and music as contrasting case studies. I do not have the expertise to comment on the
papers accounts of the two subjects, so I will restrict my comments to their
broader issue of the role of dichotomies in educational research. They
begin with Robin Alexanders argument that dichotomies reduce complex
educational debates to bipolar slogans cast in a state of permanent and
irreconcilable opposition and go on to question his solution replacing
bipolar distinctions by a sixfold typology. In this they are surely right
such a sixfold typology can only complicate existing complexity. Their preferred alternative is a middle-ground approach that frames dichotomous
concepts as a tension between different, but not necessarily competing
ideas. This is a important step; however, it might be taken further in clarifying the difference between their approach and the way dichotomous concepts tend to be used in educational research, by drawing the German
sociologist, Max Webers concept of an ideal type (Weber, 1949).
Weber recognised that dichotomies in the social sciences and in (by
implication) educational research are in many cases all we have. We do
not have concepts that are conceptually related in precise ways and have
clear empirical referents like mass and weight or temperature and heat
in physics. Weber suggested that descriptive dichotomies could be reformulated in the social sciences as ideal types indicating tendencies. For
example, let us take the curriculum/pedagogy dichotomy that a number
of papers in this Special Issue refer to. Teachers draw on the school curriculum and their knowledge of pedagogy in their teaching; for them the two
are not distinct. However, in designing curricula, training teachers or
undertaking curriculum research, an analytical distinction between the
two concepts (as ideal types) may be useful. As an ideal type, the concept
curriculum refers to the knowledge that it is hoped pupils will acquire by
the end of a course. In contrast, pedagogy refers to the activities that
teachers devise for their pupils to enable them to acquire the knowledge
specified by the curriculum. This does not make the two concepts separate
in the practice of teachers. What such analytical distinctions can do is to
identify tendencies and question the way concepts are used as descriptions
or even dogmas an example is that between knowledge-centred and
learner-centred curricula. No curricula can disregard the knowledge it is

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hoped that students will acquire. Acquiring knowledge always involves

concepts (in other words, knowing something), but it also involves practical activities using concepts to explain something or solve a problem (in
other words, skills or doing something). The distinction between knowledge and skills is useful analytically, as a pair of ideal types, but not as a
description or as a slogan to identify whether something is good or bad.
The final paper by Tina Isaacs is a cautionary tale for curriculum specialists, both theorists and policy-makers, who forget the extent to which,
in the English system, curriculum decisions at every level, from government to classroom teacher, are shaped to a considerable degree by the
examination system, even though the two are often thought about and
analysed quite independently. Isaacs presents a detailed and compelling
case study of recent changes in General Certificate of Seconday Education
(GCSE) English assessment and grading that she describes as a perfect
storm. She uses the example to argue that the problems of grade inflation
that the governments latest reforms are designed to overcome, are all too
likely to recur, albeit in a slightly different way.
Together these papers offer a welcome change from the ideological
positioning that has characterised much of what passes for debate
between the present Government and the educational community in the
last three years. In stepping back from any easy labelling of positions,
they point to an agenda for curriculum research that could remind any
Government that curriculum theory and research is a specialist resource
they can ill afford to neglect.
References
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Biesta, G.J.J. (2010a). Good education in an age of measurement: Ethics, politics, and
democracy. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
Cigman, R. (2012). We need to talk about wellbeing. Research Papers in Education, 27, 4,
449462.
Durkheim, E. (1938). The rules of sociological method. New York, NY: Free Press.
Moore, R. (2011). Towards a sociology of truth. London: Continnum.
Reiss, M., & White, J. (2013). An aims-based curriculum: The significance of human flourishing for schools. London: IOE Press.
Sitein, A. (2013). Positive in their own identities?: Social studies and identity affirmation.
New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 48(2).
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Wheelahan, L. (2012). The problem with competency-based training. In H. Lauder &
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