The Changing Curriculum: studies in social construction
Chariots of Fire
By this view then the disciplines cannot be taught as final 'distillations' of knowledge unchallengeable and unchanging and should not be taught as incontestable and fundamental structures and texts. This would provide a deeply flawed epistemology, pedagogically unsound and intellectually dubious, for in human scholarship 'final distillations' and 'fundamental' truths are elusive concepts. We are back with the dual face of socially contexted knowledge - both because knowledge and curriculum are pedagogically realised in a social context and are originally conceived of and constructed in such a context.
The alternatives to such a dominant view continue to surface. In past debates we can find certain radical teachers pursuing the comprehensive ideal seriously and arguing that in such a milieu knowledge and curricula must be presented as provisional and liable to reconstruction. Armstrong writes that his 'contention is that the process of education should imply a dynamic relationship between teacher, pupil and task out of which knowledge is reconstructed, for both teacher and pupil, in the light of shared experience' (Armstrong 1977, p. 86).
Conclusion
In this chapter some of the origins of curriculum have been speculatively scrutinised. In particular we have seen that the notion of curriculum as structured sequence or 'discipline' derived a good deal from the political ascendancy of Calvinism. From these early origins there was a 'homologous relationship between curriculum and discipline'. Curriculum as discipline was allied to a social order where the 'elect' were offered the prospect of advanced schooling and the remainder a more conservative curriculum.
Out of these origins we have seen how this concept of curriculum became appended to a new notion of discipline. This time, (so we are to believe) 'fundamental' disciplines of 'the mind'. The juxtaposition of curriculum with (newly defined) 'discipline' intersects with a remarkably similar social configuration. This time the 'elect' are recruited by their capacity to display a facility for those academic 'subjects' allied to the 'disciplines'; their 'election' is signified by going on to study the 'disciplines' in the universities where they are defined and institutionalised.
