Learning, Curriculum and Life Politics: the selected works of Ivor F. Goodson
Nations at Risk
The implications of this change for the curriculum were substantial, and a range of curriculum reform projects were initiated through the Schools Council for Curriculum and Examinations founded in 1964. Whilst the comprehensive schools initially derived their main curriculum areas from the grammar schools, these reform projects sought to seriously apply the logic of comprehensive school reform to curriculum reform. For plainly without curriculum reform organizational reform was of severely limited significance.
Rubinstein and Simon summarize the climate of educational reform in 1972 following the raising of the school learning age to 16, and the rapid growth of the comprehensive system:
The content of the curriculum is now under much discussion, and comprehensive schools are participating actively in the many curriculum reform schemes launched by the Schools Council and Nuffield. The tendency is towards the development of the interdisciplinary curricula, together with the use of the resources approach to learning, involving the substitution of much group and individual work for the more traditional forms of class teaching. For these new forms of organising and stimulating learning mixed ability grouping often provides the most appropriate method; and partly for this reason the tendency is towards the reduction of streaming and class teaching. This movement in itself promotes new relations between teachers and pupils, particularly insofar as the teacher's role is changing from that of ultimate authority to that of motivating, facilitating and structuring the pupils' own discovery and search for knowledge (Rubinstein and Simon, 1973).
The belief that rapid curriculum reform, with a range of associated political and pedagogical implications, was well under way was commonly held at this time. Kerr asserted in 1968 that 'at the practical and organisational levels, the new curricula promise to revolutionise English education' (Kerr, 1971).
But at precisely the time Kerr was talking new forces were seeking to defend, and if possible re-invigorate, the old grammar school subjects. These were presented as the 'traditional' subjects. This campaign culminated in the National Curriculum but it is important to grasp that this re-assertion of a subject-based curriculum is part of a broader strategy of reconstitution. Moreover, the re-establishment of traditional subjects is taking place at the expense of many of those new subject areas devised specifically to sponsor and promote learning across the full range of the comprehensive school: Social Studies, Environmental Studies, General Science, Urban Studies, Community Studies and so on. These subjects had sought to develop new forms of connectedness to the interests and experiences of the pupils of the comprehensive school. The national curriculum pronounces that the approach can now only take place at the margins and that the core curriculum will once again be those subjects 'traditionally' taught since their 'establishment' in 1904.
