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This review has been accessed  times since February 12, 1999
Beyer, Landon E. & Apple, Michael W. (Eds.) (1998). The curriculum:
Problems, politics, and possibilities. (2nd ed.). Albany: State
University of New York Press
417 pp.
$19.95 (Paper) ISBN 0-7914-3810-4
$59.50 (Cloth) ISBN 0-7914-3809-0
Reviewed by Elizabeth Adams St.Pierre
The University of Georgia
February 12, 1999
Beyer and Apple's edited collection,
The Curriculum: Problems, politics,
and possibilities is a revised and updated version of a previous collection
with the same title published in 1988. Only the first section, Curriculum:
Its Past and Present, remains the same. The others, Curriculum and
Planning, Curriculum and Knowledge Selection, Curriculum and the Work of
Teachers, Curriculum and Technology, and Curriculum and Evaluation have
changed. Seven new papers are included (some replacing papers in the first
edition) and two papers have been rewritten.
In the introduction to their
1988 edition, Beyer and Apple wrote, "today . . . public education
is under a concerted attack from right wing forces
that wish to substitute an ethic of private gain and an accountant's profit
and loss sheet for the public good" (p. 4). It seems significant that, ten
years later, the editors chose not to revise their introduction and that
this statement still holds; in fact, the problem it describes has
intensified. The deskilling of teachers, a continuing top-down
conceptualization of curriculum, and the increasing privileging of
technology have resulted from "the language of efficiency, standards,
competency, assessment, cost effectiveness [that] impoverishes our
imagination and limits our educational and political vision" (Beyer &
Apple, 1998, p. 7). I certainly agree with the editors on this point.
Anyone who has been in public
school classrooms recently must be appalled
at outside agencies' control over the curriculum, control that has resulted
in, for example, a requirement that all five teachers of British
Literature in an affluent suburban high school in the southeast teach the
very same material and give the same end-of-semester test. What kind of
fear is operating to produce this scenario? What is the nature of the
power relations at work? What is the nature and genealogy of a curriculum
that produces such conditions? The editors' introduction sets readers up
to believe that questions like these will be addressed; yet, in general,
they are not. This reader does a fine job of outlining the history of
traditional curriculum and presenting a discussion of its current status
within a liberal humanist framework. It begins to get at some of the
"problems and politics" alluded to in the title but does not offer much in
the way of "possibilities," and that is what I was eager to read.
I will begin by describing the contents
of the book in a general way,
section by section, in order to illustrate what it includes and will then
offer some thoughts on its limits.
In their introduction, the
editors make a point of explaining that they do
not wish to be ahistorical and adopt what some might call a Hegelian
approach by privileging the current landscape of curriculum at the expense
of its past. Thus, the first section of the book, "Curriculum: Its Past
and Present," is devoted to a review of the more conventional or mainstream
aspects of the history of curriculum. It begins with Herbert M. Kliebard's
fine discussion of three curriculum theories available in the 19th century:
evolutionary theory (how well a course of study contributes to
self-preservation), social efficiency, and an activity curriculum centered
on projects. Kliebard explains that each of these theories developed
against the backdrop of a humanist approach to knowledge that ignored a
consideration of ideology and power relations. Next, Kenneth N.
Teitelbaum's essay reviews the rich, oppositional contribution of the
socialists to curriculum in the early 20th century, and, finally, Kenneth
A. Sirotnik takes a look at the tensions between the rhetoric of curriculum
reform and actual practices that exist in schools.
The second section," Curriculum and
Planning," continues this historical
review in that it describes in detail various curriculum models that have
been used and are still being used. Unfortunately, all of these models, no
matter how flawed, are still with us. George R. Posner reviews several in
his essay: the Tyler Rationale (John Tyler); Hilda Taba's linear,
technical-production model; Joseph Schwab's more "practical" model which is
skeptical of theory; Decker Wallace's naturalistic model; John Goodlad's
elaboration of Tyler's model; and Mauritz Johnson's P-I-E model. All of
these are presuppose that curriculum is rational, linear, and
unideological. At the end of his essay, however, Posner makes the critical
turn by describing Paulo Freire's method of curriculum planning that
follows from his banking concept of education, a model that leads to
emancipation through praxis. Susan A. Noffke's essay examines models
claiming to be multicultural; and Barbara Brodhagen, Gary Weilbacher and
James A. Beane's paper explains how to develop a unit based on the model of
"curriculum integration."
"Curriculum and Knowledge Selection" is
the title of the third section,
and it begins with an essay by Thomas E. Barone and Donald S.
Blumenfeld-Jones that is hermeneutic in nature, making appeals to authentic
experiences, coherent identities, the primacy of narrative, empathy, and
emancipation. After this dose of liberalism, I must confess that I was
relieved to next read Michael W. Apple's essay next in which he takes on
the political economy of the textbook industry and to finally get a
discussion of democracy in George Hood's paper, since it is liberal
democracy that is the driving force behind the curriculum described in this
book. Hood's essay, however, makes no mention of the fine work on
democracy by Walter Parker, of Michael Peters' consideration of democracy
from a poststructural point of view, or of the large body of work on
radical democracy by Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, David Trend, and
others.
Gloria Ladson-Billings' essay that
encourages a curriculum model based on
but not exoticizing culture begins the fourth section, "Curriculum and the
Work of Teachers." Ladson-Billings points out the ongoing tension in
educational research between practitioners who believe it is too
theoretical and academicians who believe it is often atheoretical in that
it refuses to make explicit its theoretical frameworks. Her essay
describes the beliefs about knowledge that drive exemplary teaching, even
if that teaching seems to be untheorized. Following Ladson-Billing's essay
on "culture" is Sara Freedman's essay on "gender." Reminding us that most
teachers are women and most administrators are men, Freedman is concerned
that more and more curricular decisions have been taken out of the hands of
teachers. Landon E. Beyer's essay, another on democracy, follows, and he
writes about the possibilities of a progressive, participatory democracy
that is not discouraged by often overwhelming structural inequities. Beyer
does a nice job of critiquing the individualism that justifies much of the
rhetoric and practice of the New Right at the expense of the "common good"
- a concept I expect is as problematic as the "individual." The instances
of the "common good" I have experienced have been based on what Brodhagen,
Weilbacher and Beane in this volume call "engineered consent" (p. 119).
All this talk about liberal, progressive democracy makes me wonder about
what Derrida calls the "democracy to come" and Walter Parker calls
"advanced democracy" and how concepts like community and the common good
and moral discourse might be reconfigured outside the model of emancipation
that undergirds progressivism. Beyer, however, the only author to engage
postmodernism in this volume, chooses, in a note, to focus on the
"pessimism associated with postmodern writers" and the "limitations of
postmodern analysis" (p. 261); whereas, I find his own version of democracy
depressing and limited. It is interesting, too, that he does mention
"radical democracy" but does not mention any of the scholars who write
about it.
Section five, "Curriculum and Technology,"
is just devastating in its
entirety since it points out the state we have gotten ourselves in by
allowing what Douglas Noble calls the "colonization [of education] by the
powerful forces behind technological development in this country" (p. 267).
Noble explains that educational technologists have created their own regime
of truth that is structured by close ties with the military and corporate
America. Next, Michael J. Streibel employs critical theory to analyze
three approaches to the use of computers in education: drill and practice
computer programs, tutorial computer programs, and the use of computers as
intellectual tools. Concluding that each of these has short-term benefits
but serious limitations, Streibel warns that privileging these approaches
delegitimizes other ways of knowing. To conclude this section, Michael
Apple once again does a fine analysis of the political economy of the "call
for technology." Concerned about what technological "progress" means and
who it benefits, Apple predicts that an increase in the use of technology
will contribute to the continued feminization of poverty since women
traditionally hold the jobs that will be replaced by technology. Apple
also considers race and class in his analysis to illustrate that it is
generally the privileged in all the identity categories who benefit from
the use of technology.
The book's last section, "Curriculum
and Evaluation," is introduced
by an essay by George Willis that presents a "human ideology" in opposition
to the "technical ideology" that he believes has driven curriculum
evaluation to this point. This new ideology, drawn from an essay by James
B. MacDonald, works within a dialectic and its aim is "centering," a
practice that Willis urges evaluators to adopt. In the second essay in
this section, Helen Simons supports curriculum evaluation that is
integrated in the ongoing functioning of the school -- school
self-evaluation -- that involves all participants in the process. The book
concludes with a lovely essay by Landon E. Beyer and Jo Anne Pagano
focusing on democratic evaluation that seems to move toward the "democracy
to come" mentioned above. The authors point out that traditional
epistemologies work toward the assimilation of difference, are grounded in
a narrow definition of rationality, are based on a linear, developmental
model, assume a knowing, self-contained subject, and ignore an analysis of
power relations. This is the epistemology of liberal humanism that guides
much curriculum theory, practice, and evaluation in this country. Beyer
and Pagano urge us to move toward a model of curriculum evaluation that "is
an act and not a summary" (p. 395), a model that opens up curriculum to
reinscription rather than promotes the repetition of the same.
There is much to learn about curriculum
from this book, curriculum produced
by the traditional epistemologies that Beyer and Pagano mention in their
essay. What I am left with at the end, however, is disappointment at the
lack of passion that this curriculum generates. As always, Michael Apple
offers bold analyses, and I certainly felt some inspiration after reading
Beyer and Pagano's final essay; yet, on the whole, the state of the
curriculum this book describes appears a dismal deadend. It seems to me
that, at the end of the 20th century, we are working in the ruins of
epistemologies that continue to fail us, so how can we expect curriculum,
which I think should be a thrilling topic, to be very interesting?
Liberal humanism promises us quite a
bit and has certainly taken us some
distance, yet, since World War II, a large body of posthumanist work has
been produced that looks at the failure of humanism's conception of a
knowledge that requires mastery; of its knowing subject; of its
transcendental and foundational rationality; of its totalizing desire for
similitude; of its linear progression toward liberation, and so forth. And
there has, indeed, been curriculum theorizing from posthumanist frameworks.
That body of scholarship, including work by Peter Taubman, Cleo
Cherryholmes, Jacques Daignault, Clermont Gauthier, Jan Jagodzinski, Patti
Lather, Rebecca Martusewicz is noticeably absent from this collection.
This reader is grounded in liberal humanism and sprinkled with critical
theory, and so it does what it does, which is to ask the standard questions
about curriculum and come up against the same problems. Its possibilities
and its politics are limited.
Now, this is not to say that curriculum
enabled by liberal humanism is
wrong and that by posthumanism is right or vice versa, that one is limited
and the other isn't, but that their different epistemologies allow us to
ask different questions about curriculum. Employing the analytical tools
of poststructuralism, for example, might be fruitful given the dead weight
of curriculum I found in this reader. Contrary to rhetoric that sweepingly
defines poststructural critiques as apolitical, amoral, and nihilistic and
then dismisses them is the fact that they are increasingly being used
affirmatively, ethically, and politically (with what Tony Kushner calls a
"non-stupid optimism") to break open and reconfigure many commonsense and
normative truths in education. Curriculum theorizing using these analyses
produces different knowledge and produces knowledge differently. At the
end of this book, I was ready to move in another direction, out from under
theories of curriculum that seem exhausted, inadequate, and
less-than-thrilling.
This is not the place to ask those
different questions or pursue different
answers but to gesture toward other possibilities. Beyer and Apple's
reader does ground us in a certain way of thinking about curriculum even as
it encourages us to look for alternate epistemologies and different ways of
thinking about our curriculum projects.
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