One of the most forthright predicaments of
the sociology of education in the age of neoliberal economics is how to devise
a critique of capitalist-ideological aspects of school curricula without
collapsing into epistemological relativism, or how to take issue with the
historical emergence and framework of schools without rejecting altogether the
emancipatory power of teaching children academic knowledge. This problem has
beset Marxist sociologists of education, who more often than not take up a
relativist position which ends up disavowing the possibility of objective,
universal knowledge and insists on the formation of a curriculum around a
‘class standpoint.’ This position is influenced by Georg Lukács’ (1971) theory
of the ‘standpoint of the proletariat’ and consolidated in Louis Althusser’s
(1984) claim that the sole function of the school is as a unit of social
control that disseminates ideological content designed to produce ‘little
capitalists.’ The rejection of any kind of divisions within the category we
would call ‘knowledge,’ as well as those divisions which separate ‘knowledge’
from ‘opinion’ or ‘belief’ which we would see in certain variants of analytic
philosophy, or, for example, in Badiou (2004), is a radical form of relativism
designed to attack capitalist modernity which I am obviously sympathetic to and
is well-intentioned. But what I am highly unsympathetic to is the attack on
expression of universality delivered to us by objective knowledge. The denial
of the existence of objective knowledge and the proliferation of postmodern attacks
on it has, as Elizabeth Rata (2012) describes, led to a return to pre-modern
levels of re-racialised social inequality due to relativism’s effects on
education policy and the education system.
I claim that the prevailing
Althusserian-Bourdieusian currents of the Marxist sociology of education, borne
out of a social constructivist ontology and epistemology, must be rejected, and
in its place a critical realist alternative be considered that entails Marxist
principles (mainly a more systematic critique of ideology that did not fall
into subjectivism). The positions influenced by social constructivism are
merely derivations of postmodernism and ‘standpoint theory’ which conflates
knowledge that is objectively derived with doxic knowledge (received
common-sense) that is bound to a particular group. Standpoint theories are
currently commonplace in the sociology of education and have several dimensions,
including class, race, and gender. These theories insist that what is taught at
schools is socially constructed in a way that is inexorably classist/sexist/racist
etc. and the ‘knowledges’ of the marginalised groups must be elevated to
rectify this apparent problem. Such theories often do not discuss the
curriculum in any great detail, however. Constructing an ‘authentic’ curriculum
of the working class, women, or a particular racialised group involves a high
degree of essentialism that is problematic. There appears to be no distinction
in any discussion of these theories between context-independent knowledge and
context-bound knowledge that early educational thinkers such as Emile Durkheim
and Lev Vygotsky made. Contemporary race theories (such as ‘critical race
theory’ and ‘indigenous perspectives’) have proven particularly inimical to an
emancipatory theory of knowledge, as the racialisation of knowledge not only
entails a legitimation of the category of ‘race,’ but has allowed the proliferation
of spuriously revisionist and traditionalist ideologies in the form of ‘indigenous’
or ‘Third World epistemologies.’ The development of these relativistic theories
is linked to the Karl Mannheim-influenced Strong Programme in the sociology of
science, initialised in the late 1970s, as well as the ‘cultural turn’ which
impacted the social sciences around the same time.
Critical realism, as a generalised
scientific-theoretical enterprise, seems to be the logical parent to the social
realists’ sociology of education. It is largely devised from the work of Roy
Bhaskar (1979, 2008), which is itself influenced by predominantly Hegelian and
Marxist thought, and is constructed in opposition to both positivist and
hermeneutic approaches to epistemology and knowledge. The five properties of social
phenomena for critical realists, as pointed out by Tony Lawson (Fullbrook, 2009) are: produced
in open systems, possessing emergent powers, ‘structured,’ internally related,
processual. The failure of social constructivism lies in both its fundamental
linkage to positivism and its inability to provide an account of knowledge
which is universal yet provisional, conceptual, emergent, and culturally
unbiased. The social-realist sociology of education is opposed to the
constructivist faction I mention above and is promoted by such figureheads as
Roy Nash, Karl Maton, Rob Moore, Michael Young, Elizabeth Rata, and others. I
am particularly influenced by the works of Young and Rata for this
contribution: Young’s specific work in curriculum theory and Rata’s theory of
‘localisation’ which includes how the academic Left abandoned universalism for
a relativist and reactionary politics of localism. Social realism relies
primarily on a social theory of knowledge developed from both Durkheimian and
Marxist terms as well as the pedagogical framework developed by Basil
Bernstein. The process of ‘symbolic production’ is theorised in an ‘emergent
materialist’ fashion which analogises it to the production process of economic
goods (Moore, 2007). Intellectual or aesthetic fields are universalised through
abstract concepts that are created in this material process. This conception
may come as a surprise to the many sociologists who dismiss Durkheim as simply
‘positivist’. Durkheim’s social theory of knowledge does not deny the fact that
those who create knowledge have their own interests, beliefs and values or are
at any stage making value-judgments. What is not interrogated by the social
constructivists is the possibility of the separation of self-interest from the
knowledge product. Knowledge-claims have repeatedly been subjected to rigorous
scrutiny and criticism.
As the social realists well know,
relativism and the instrumentalisation of knowledge under post-Fordist
capitalist regimes have been quite compatible with each other. Neoliberal
economies have sought a policy programme of privatisation, financialisation of
the economy and trade deregulation, which (with technological acceleration) has
led to a process of globalisation by way of what David Harvey calls ‘time-space
compression’ (Harvey, 1989). Yet, as Bob Jessop (2000) argues, a process of
localisation he calls ‘time-space distantiation’ has also effected itself. The
combination of spatio-temporal fixes for capital and opposition to capitalist
globalisation in the form of localist preservation has created a new politics
of local competition as well as new nationalisms. With this double movement emerges
a ‘local imaginary’ (Rata, 2012) which is premised upon seemingly outmoded
mythologies, traditional hierarchies and customs, some of which are being
revived in response to globalisation. It is fundamentally reactionary in
character yet seems to be a globally unfolding phenomenon. The general tendency
of de-racialisation collapsed around the 1980s as the Left abandoned class
politics for an increasingly separatist and re-racialised identitarian form of
politics which became affirmationist in character rather than materially
antagonistic and ruptural. Relativism and the disappearance of context as the
distinction between the various forms of academic knowledge has impacted the
New Zealand school curriculum, most notably the National Certificate of
Educational Achievement (NCEA) which has suffered greatly from its broken
administration format, the National Qualifications Framework (NQF). The further
development of the NCEA, as I shall demonstrate, has led to the entrenchment of
educational underachievement among particular groups and a considerable
widening of social inequalities.
Knowledge structures and the dialectic of
social realism
What we claim to be able to know is first
dependent on the composition of objects in the world, or answers to ontological questions. These must be
satisfactorily answered before posing epistemological
questions about knowledge. José López and Garry Potter (2001) argue that
the failure of positivism and empiricism to ask ontological questions that did
not have incoherent answers was what brought it down. Positivism and empiricism
for them commit ‘the fallacy of actualism’ (p.10). Actualist ontology is
represented by making a Kantian-like distinction between the ‘actual’ and
‘empirical’ where the ‘empirical’ is the basis of all knowledge. The idea is
that like the Kantian noumena, the
actual world beyond the artifice of the empirical is unknowable. The error is
that this unknowable realm is posited as existing without actually being able
to be known. This is philosophically incoherent. How can one know there is an
‘actual’ world beyond the empirical if the ‘actual’ itself cannot be known?
Because this ‘actual’ world cannot be empirically verified, empiricism is
reduced to what López and Potter call ‘the ontology of invariance’ (p.11). This
is because when empiricists observe something repeatedly in an experiment they
see a causal relationship which (factors considered) appears to be invariant.
Scientific laws are generated through the generalising of this invariance
towards a universal law of causation. Andrew Collier (1994) refers to this as
the ‘epistemic fallacy,’ which he argues takes several forms:
(1) the question
whether something exists gets reduced to the question whether we can know that
it exists; (2) the question what sort of
thing something is gets reduced to the question how we know about it; (3) the question whether A has
causal/ontological primacy over B gets reduced to the question whether
knowledge of A is presupposed by knowledge of B; (4) the question whether A is
identical to B gets reduced to the question whether our way of knowing A is
identical to our way of knowing B.
In the empiricist scenario of scientific
investigation, the experiment is the means by which we come to know;
apprehending events in the world by observation. The experiment is thus the
answer to the epistemological question ‘how
do we come to know?’ But the ontological question of ‘what is there to know?’ has been inadequately answered due to the
fallacy of actualism. The experimental method suffers from a problem that
emanates from the empiricist answer to these two questions. In an experiment,
the scientist aims to control variables which would hinder an investigation of
an event. The controlling of such variables that occur ‘in reality’ means that
the result of such an experiment may occur less frequently or hardly at all ‘in
reality’ because reality is uncontrolled, unlike a laboratory. There are many
possible other causes of events which experiments necessarily have to leave out
to investigate those events. This is why López and Potter call realism
‘thing-centred’ (placing increased importance on ontology) as opposed to the
positivist focus on events. The reality of the world is independently existing
of the knowledge we have of it (Joseph, 2002). This does not mean there is a
dimension of finitude or an invariant barrier to further knowledge of the world
like the Kantian noumena, but it
recognises that the knowledge we have of the world at present (and probably forevermore)
is not all there is to the world. There is always more to know and reason with.
This independently existing reality is referred to by Roy Bhaskar as the
‘intransitive dimension’ (Bhaskar, 2008).
The establishment of a distinction between
the ‘transitive’ dimension of knowledge about the world and the ‘intransitive’
dimension or the world-itself (an independently existing reality) means that the
idea of thought as a direct reflection of reality must be rejected (Joseph,
2002). There is still, however, a dialectical relationship between the
transitive and intransitive dimensions: there is no transitive dimension
without an intransitive referent, and there is no comprehension of an
intransitive world without making verified statements about it (knowledge).
Such a separation means that the social character of knowledge in the
transitive dimension is recognised; that knowledge is socially produced and to
an extent socially mediated. What this means is the taking on of a weak
relativism: knowledge is produced in social contexts but is capable of becoming
independent of those contexts (Rata, 2012). This extremely weak form of
relativism that critical realism allows is harshly contrasted by that of
standpoint theory, which utilises a radical form of relativism that destroys
any helpful distinctions between types of knowledge. Critical realism reduces
the deleterious effects of epistemological relativism to an awareness of
knowledge’s emergent properties. Knowledge ‘emerges’ for the critical realists
from the ‘social relations of symbolic production’ (Rata, 2012) but for those
versed in standpoint theory, knowledge arises from individual experience; an
identitarian approach. What standpoint theory (usually allied with forms of
postmodernism) aims to do is uncover the interests that lie concealed beneath
knowledge and expose the power relations that result from such a concealment.
This project is deeply influenced by the relativism of ‘power/knowledge’ [pouvoir/savoir] developed by Michel
Foucault (1981). These ‘interests’ however are individualised or particularised
and hardly seem to reflect knowledge as it is structured by the construction of
intellectual fields, in and through universities and schools. Sandra Harding
(1991) for example states that ‘female’ knowledge is epistemologically superior
to the knowledge of white men. However, she has used the relativist approach of
standpoint theory to claim this epistemic privilege: a theory which takes as
its starting premise that all ‘knowledges’ are the same and because these
knowledges are antagonistic, there is no ‘objective’ way of knowing which one
most reflects the independently existing reality we attempt to apprehend.
The social-realist school of the sociology
of education pays close attention to differences between the types of knowledge
produced in the social context (including the degree of context-dependence –
some types of knowledge are far more independent of context than others). Emile
Durkheim’s social theory of knowledge production has been influential in
explaining how conceptual knowledge differs from that of individual experience.
Michael Young (2008) explains how Durkheim’s theory is organised around the
concepts of ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ ideas. This is taken from his general
exegesis on religion in small-scale societies. The ‘profane’ broadly relates to
mundane experience and how people respond to it. The ‘profane’ is ordinary and
individualised. By contrast, the ‘sacred’ refers to a collective order of
representation that extends beyond individual perception and achieves
objectivity through its shared character. For Durkheim, religion was the model
of ‘sacred’ experience: an abstract layering of concepts that are unobservable
yet have immense explanatory power (Durkheim, 1995). This is a synchronic
theory of how knowledge is produced: collective representations are distilled
when people in a society share and congregate. Critical realism, however, is
dialectical and diachronic in the way it understands knowledge production and
structure. Young explains that the approach of Lev Vygotsky, the Russian
Marxist psychologist who wrote extensively about education, is an approach that
meets these diachronic standards. Vygotsky’s materialist dialectic is concerned
primarily with the ‘transition from sensation to thought’ (Vygotsky, 1987: 17).
The division of sensation from thought is concomitant with Vygotsky’s later
distinction between ‘scientific’ and ‘everyday’ concepts.
Like Durkheim, for Vygotsky the difference
between scientific/sacred and everyday/profane relates to both the degree of
experiential influence (or lack of) and the systematisation (or lack of) on the
particular knowledge claim being made. Claims that relate to an order of
meaning that is systematised (concepts that are internally related) are claims
in the ‘scientific’ order. Everyday concepts are those without a system that
draw on individual experience. It is the systematised, ‘scientific’ concepts
that Vygotsky argues should be incorporated into educational pedagogy as they
can be thoroughly developed through the learning process, whereas those based
on experiential knowledge are prone to confusing students (Vygotsky, 1962).
Yet, also, the two orders of concepts are interrelated in the process of
learning. The teacher, already actualised by scientific knowledge, draws the
learner into the realm of abstraction from oneself, engaging what Vygotsky
calls the zone of proximal development, or the gap between the teacher’s
knowledge and the student’s knowledge. The curriculum is structured in such a
way that invites not only conceptual acquisition, but conceptual progression as the person moves through
stages of psychosocial development. Young learners begin to understand their
place in the world through repeated dialectical moves from the abstract to the
concrete and back again. Disciplinary fields are thus understood as internally
ordered, just as the scientific programme of critical realism understands
conceptual knowledge in the same way. If this were not so, conceptual knowledge
would be disorganised; a confusing mess. For example, the New Zealand
Curriculum describes the disciplines but not the conceptual knowledge to be
learned within those disciplines. This is a problem because conceptual specification
and progression are obscured or less obvious in the curriculum, putting the
development of students’ abilities to grasp concepts and make logical sense of
them at risk.
The internal and external differences of a
body of knowledge have been excellently prescribed by Basil Bernstein (1990).
Bodies of knowledge are either amassed in a horizontal or vertical structure
depending on how the concepts are internally related. Vertical knowledge
structures occur when theories build in a cumulative and progressive way
whereby one theory is subsumed by another, more developed or precise theory.
The natural sciences are a clear example of this vertical kind of structure.
Vertical structures are essentially context-independent. Horizontal knowledge
structures are based on theories amassing in parallel form due to their
context-bound nature. External differences as an evaluative criteria for a body
of knowledge refer to its explanatory power ‘outside’ of itself i.e. aspects of
the intransitive dimension. For horizontally organised knowledge structures,
this explanatory power is ‘measured’ in terms of its ‘grammaticality’
(Bernstein, 2000) or grammar. Bernstein differentiates between ‘strong’ grammar
and ‘weak’ grammar. ‘Strong’ grammar is where a conceptual apparatus has an
internally related grammar that supports its meaning; indeed, is vital to it.
For example, ‘voltage’ as a concept is measured in watts by particular devices.
This signals an inseparable relationship between grammar, theoretical
explanation and reality. ‘Weak’ grammar occurs when such a relationship cannot
be established. Such is the case in the social sciences (although they may not
necessarily be regarded as forming horizontal knowledge structures) and where
the natural sciences attempt to overstep their capacities, as in neuroscience
(Young and Muller, 2014).
This idea of grammar is of prominent
importance for hierarchically organised knowledge structures but of lesser
importance for horizontal structures. However (or perhaps as a consequence of
this qualification) this does not mean that the social sciences or humanities are
lesser forms of knowledge, less powerful, less emancipatory or able to be
eventually subsumed by the hierarchical structures. This is because the
humanities and social sciences have their own knowledge bases and
methodological approaches that are required to be known in order to make
inferences or deep contributions (Young and Muller, 2014). The social sciences
and humanities may also, though, be considered vertical knowledge structures,
just of a different kind to the natural sciences. The natural sciences, for
Bernstein (1981: 157), have explicit and systematically organised principles,
whilst the social sciences and humanities have specialised languages and modes
of interrogation that are also organised conceptually. As Rata (2012) contends,
the production of knowledge about a situation must be and is detachable from
the ‘directly acquired facts’ in order to be considered an accountable project.
Otherwise knowledge claims are reduced to an identitarian statement of
affirmation: ‘I know because I was there,’ ‘I know because I am,’ ‘I know
because this is what I believe in.’ All these statements challenge the
democratic project of universal education by devalorising universal, objective
knowledge for not only that acquired through experience and belief, but a new
relativism that can potentially entail a dangerous authoritarian seizure of
knowledge claims. This is an anti-dialectical notion of knowledge production
that turns knowledge into a ‘struggle for hegemony’ in the agential, Gramscian
sense. It is conceptual abstraction, progression and the ability of critique
that avoids the extremely limited conception of knowledge as rooted in one’s
own experience.
‘Voice discourse’ and tribalism
The idea of knowledge that has just been
outlined, developed by a combination of those calling themselves ‘critical
realists’ (in philosophy), ‘social realists’ (in the sociology of education)
and more objectivist or ‘scientifically’ inclined Marxists, has been challenged
by postmodernism and identity-based particularisms in a radical way. Instead of
seeing knowledge as the dialectical movement of social relations of symbolic
production, knowledge is presented as a completed effect of power or
‘discourse’ that is reduced to a particular ‘culture,’ gender, ethnicity or
class background. The curriculum thus becomes an object of ideologically
malevolent power relations that reflects a particular perspective. Often
descriptions in this vein use Gramscian terms (‘dominant’ or ‘hegemonic’ and
‘counter-hegemonic’/’resistant’ knowledges) or post-structuralist/Foucauldian
terms (‘discourse,’ ‘power/knowledge,’ ‘regime of truth’). Postmodernists often
use a fusion of ‘discourse’ terms and Lyotardian statements about the end of
‘grand narratives’ (Lyotard, 1984). These perspectivisms offer a sociology of
‘knowers’ but very little or zero when it comes to a sociology of knowledge.
Knowledge is a category that is denied altogether. For these postmodern
approaches, knowledge is always distorted or ideological which is an effect of
the perspective the knower is speaking from.
The postmodern practice of defining
knowledge (or, rather, discounting it) as a game of ‘who is speaking’ has been
consolidated for criticism in an influential paper by the social realists Rob
Moore and Johan Muller (Moore and Muller, 1999). In this paper, the practice is
referred to as ‘voice discourse,’ a playful joke on the language the
postmodernists use. In Usher and Edwards (1994), ‘discourse’ is defined in the
generally accepted Foucauldian frame: an exclusionary story whose mechanisms of
exclusion are taken for granted. The politics of ‘voice’ popularised by Usher
and Edwards intends to expose the ‘discourses’ for what they are and return the
‘voices,’ or ability to ‘speak,’ of the marginalised back to them. An example
of this trend in social theory more generally is the essay by Gayatri Spivak
called ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (Spivak, 1988), an essay which, it appears,
contains fundamental assumptions about knowledge related to subalternity that
are now disavowed by Spivak herself. Postmodern ‘voice discourse’ attempts to
paint a picture of modernity which feels threatened by diversity and attempts
to eclipse all human beings under the sign of the totalitarian. Knowledge is
also rejected as totalitarian because of its universalising tendencies, which
is understood as an insidious ruse of power because knowledge is not
conceptualised by the postmodernists in terms of intellectual fields but groups
of knowers. Instead knowledge is substituted for the diversity of ‘language
games’ or, in other words, a multiplicity of voices which, either in the
Gramscian frame, battle for hegemonic representation, or in the
post-structuralist, Foucauldian or Deleuzian frame, attempt to
‘deterritorialise’ the dominant regime of truth or establish parallel regimes.
The consequences of such an understanding of knowledge are that epistemology
appears to be ‘debunked’ by sociological analysis. It becomes questionable
whether we can or should ‘know’ at all, or whether what we know is contaminated
by the totalitarian impulses of modernity.
Moore and Muller (1999) argue that the
postmodern tendency strings together epistemological concerns, ‘traditional’
forms of education, and the ‘dominant’ social group in oppressive social
relations to create a highly assumptive straw-man for the purposes of
sociological critique. One may see how I showed earlier that it is a mistake to
view a knowledge-based curriculum as essentially entailing a return to
‘traditional’ education or a ‘transmission model’ of pedagogy. The social
realists are seen not to advocate for either of these for two reasons, one
reason for each: (1) because their theory of knowledge production is
dialectical and ongoing rather than based in tradition (and consequently so
must be the curriculum); and (2) because conceptual knowledge and a reflexive
understanding of progression necessitates an interest on the part of the
learner and consequently involves careful curriculum design away from the drab
teaching of stultifying, disembedded facts. The postmodern approach of Usher
and Edwards (1994) and the constructivism of the identity-based particularisms do
however have slight differences in their theoretical application and discursive
strategies. Postmodernism as a theoretical construct is utterly confused (and,
additionally, revels in this confusion), not only about the nature of the world,
but its own self-construction as well. Linda Nicholson (1990), a broadly
postmodernist feminist, defines postmodernism as such:
Postmodernism
must reject a description of itself as embodying a set of timeless ideals
contrary to those of modernism; it must insist on being recognised as a set of
viewpoints of a time, justifiable only within its own time. (p. 11)
Unfortunately, here, Nicholson disavows
postmodernism’s role of critiquing modernity, just as that is exactly what
postmodernism is designed to do. Usher and Edwards (1994), although citing the
above quote by Linda Nicholson, nonetheless proceed to engage in an
uncompromising attack on the precepts of modernity. Their critique of the
features of modernity is duly noted as aspects of it are correct (for example,
deindustrialisation and the response of capital, financialisation), however,
labelling knowledge and the project to know the ontology of the world as
‘totalitarian’ is not. Postmodernists are against ontologising the world
because they have collapsed Kant and Hegel’s distinction between ‘reason’ and
‘understanding’ into the latter and created a relativist field of discourse.
The ‘scientific attitude’ (Usher and Edwards, 1994: 10) is falsely
characterised as the belief that the scientific method is upheld as the only
appropriate model of investigation. This ‘attitude’ is used interchangeably
with positivism, which of course has been well surpassed by the critical
realists, who have criticised it for committing the fallacy of actualism as
well as being subjectivist and individualist. It is right for postmodernists to
critique positivism, but they are off-key when they label this as the
‘scientific attitude,’ and such labelling produces a critique that altogether
misses the mark.
As Rob Moore (2007) argues, the
postmodernist relativisation and denial of truth is ironically premised upon
the acceptance of foundationalism (the position common in analytic philosophy
that defines truth as a linguistic statement which reaches a status of
‘justified true belief’) as the method of establishing truth-claims. This means
postmodernism or various forms of post-structuralism becomes continuous with
positivism. The ultimate disagreement between the two schools of thought is
whether a foundationalist truth-claim is possible – the positivist is
affirmative but the postmodernist is negative. Moore says this is a
“second-order disagreement” (p. 24) rather than a fundamental subversion. It is
here that the postmodernists/constructivists are actually on the correct side
(it is impossible to establish a truly ‘infallible’ knowledge-claim). However,
their ‘critical’ conclusion is to then state that truth is not attainable, or
its pursuit is not worthwhile. This is because postmodernists, through the
denial of positivism’s monolingual theory – a single language of logicised
sensory experience – arrive at the answer that truth is relative to the
socially constructed discursive position that one occupies in the field of
power relations. Several universal claims are thus made in the so-called
anti-universalist theory of postmodernism:
·
Power relations, in the Foucauldian
manner, are construed as all-encompassing and inescapable. The knowledge a
person has is tied to the position they occupy within these relations (considered
‘fluid’ and mobile in the linguistic postmodernist sense, or, more often, tied
to ascriptive categories rigidified into social identities in the
identity-based particularist sense).
·
The claim that knowledge is completely relative to both time and
place (the claim of the postmodernist), as well as social identity (the
identity-based particularist claim) is a universal claim of relativity. The
social relations of symbolic production caricatured as ‘totalitarian’ knowledge
is substituted for an understanding of knowledge defined simply by who is
speaking. This, in fact, leads to consequences that are more anti-democratic
than the theory of knowledge the constructivists are criticising.
·
Knowledge production is formulated
as a circularity. ‘Knowledge’ is tied to standpoints which are created by the
knowledge that makes up that standpoint. What is not interrogated in this
tautology is where that ‘standpoint’ comes from; how that particular
‘knowledge’ comes to be (unless it emanates from the individual by which case
it is simply a person’s ‘voice’ that matters, and a sociohistorical theory of production
is not needed beyond an individual’s subjective experience).
The identity-based particularisms are,
unlike the more linguistic postmodernist approaches, aware of the boundaries of
their discourse, which are based on ideological ascriptive categories that are
socially constructed, such as race and gender. However, the imagined nature of
these boundaries is often reified. Approaches that do this include feminist
epistemologies (e.g. Harding, 1991), the neo-Freireian “critical pedagogy”
(e.g. Giroux, 1992; De Lissovoy, 2008), critical race theory (e.g. Gillborn,
1990; Gillborn, 2008), and “indigenous methodologies” (e.g. Smith, 1999). Such
particularisms are prone to systematic incoherence as a consequence of the
constraints of the theory they have set up. Each of them suggests that in some
way, educational knowledge hegemonises and reproduces the perspective of the
dominant group; i.e. it is a form of indoctrination. The politics of ‘voice’
suggests that, allied with the ‘voices’ of groups broadly labelled as
marginalised, oppositional knowledges to the dominant group need to be
valorised in education in order to empower those groups and provide a means of
resistance against the ‘dominant’ viewpoint. Under this constraint, knowledge
becomes fully relative to context and always partial and particular. Knowledge
is reduced to a battle of ideological positions through the Foucauldian prism
of “power relations,” which are always stacked in favour of dominant groups.
The politics of ‘voice’ allows marginalised groups to claim a kind of
epistemological privilege and make claim to specialised areas of knowledge
which fragments the intellectual plane not along disciplinary lines but
identitarian ones.
What does this epistemological privilege
allow in terms of political resistance, if nothing else? As Karl Maton, Rob
Moore, Johan Muller, and Elizabeth Rata (among other scholars) have noted, the
apparent epistemological privileging of a marginalised subject-position has not
been politically efficacious. Moore and Muller (1999) show that although the
standpoint theory line of critique is based on the point that all pedagogy is
‘symbolic violence’ and an authority relation (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990), it
seeks to replace this falsely caricatured ‘violence’ with a new kind of
authoritarianism that privileges ‘authentic’ voices. In the realm of “indigenous
knowledges,” this has led to the edification of a new tribal elite who are
largely self-appointed as ‘authentic’ representatives of such a body of
knowledge (Rata, 2011; Rose, 2015). In the case of Māori in Aotearoa New
Zealand, this has led to an ideological concealment of class relations between
groups of Māori as the ‘authentic’ voices of this group claim to speak for a
homogeneous Māori collective. As Meera Nanda (2003) shows, race, caste and
religion as forms of radical sectarianism are beginning to re-emerge and
consolidate in powerful new ways around epistemic relativism – she shows how
all three operate in tandem through the example of the Hindu nationalist Right
and its similarities with postmodern theory in its formulation of “Vedic
science”. The endorsement of this revived sectarianism as a trend emerging in
academia, first popularised during the ‘cultural turn’ in the 1970s, has oddly
captivated many on the Left, as Nanda says responding to the issue of epistemic
relativism and ‘decolonisation’:
Given the
history of colonialism and racism, there are plenty of liberal White guilty
consciences on the one side, and plenty of anti-imperialist thin-skins on the
other side to take comfort in this epistemological egalitarianism. The
even-handed ascription of rationality serves as a poultice for both the victors
and the vanquished. […] It feels radical, also, to turn the tables on the West
by challenging “its” science with that of the victims of the West’s
colonialism. (p. 131-132).
Nanda identifies the class politics
inherent in much of Indian postcolonial theory (produced largely by those of
high castes, most often Brahmins) and its prescriptions for what the colonised
subject must do: take refuge in institutionalised beliefs or pre-modern
mythologies, or at least disavowing the intellectual heritage that the
colonising West has left them with. Notwithstanding the false characterisation
of science as ‘Western’ that tends to be supplied in such critiques, this
quickly becomes a politics that despite a disclaimer of ‘de-Westernisation,’ is
radically dislocated from emancipatory class politics. The undertaking of such
a neo-traditionalist identity, which is rendered primordial and timeless,
affords sociopolitical capital to the ascendant elite but becomes a trap for
those who are excluded. It has led, although in my view not willingly, to a
Left liberalism common in identity politics that Adolph Reed has labelled the “left-wing
of neoliberalism” (Reed, 2016): that of the professional-managerial and new
intellectual class which seeks to erase disparities in various societal outcomes
but altogether naturalise those outcomes in a new form of identity-capitalism. This
is a politics that is largely self-defeating (due to its disparity-focused
reformist agenda), but nonetheless allows the entrenchment of a new class of
people understood to be ‘marginalised’ along identity lines as the authorities
of knowledge. Consider the advent of new racialised elite classes, the
emergence of a gay petit bourgeois ethic
and identity, and the embourgeoisement of feminist movements by corporate
representatives such as Sheryl Sandberg. The creation of an indigenous elite
class, through the politics of brokerage with the settler-colonial state, is
described below as a contextually significant example of the dangers relativism
poses to the secularism and anti-authoritarianism of knowledge structures in
Aotearoa New Zealand. The destination of Left liberalism seems to be the
proliferation of such ‘diverse’ classes rather than the elimination of class
itself, although the consolidation of the Māori elite is made more difficult by
dissenting voices from inside, such as Hone Harawira and Annette Sykes (Rata,
2011).
Indigenous politics is now recognised by
the rhetoric-heavy ‘critical pedagogues’ and even serious radical Leftists as
an unquestionably radical politics continuous with the movements for
emancipation secured in the 1970s and beyond (e.g. the efforts of Nga Tamatoa),
despite its now apparent class interests. This is especially vile for the Left
to do in the age of neoliberalism, characterised by a celebration of elite
power as successful self-actualisation of personal responsibility. Māori
scholars in this emerging mode of theorising who have written or made claims about the sociology
of knowledge include Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Rāpata Wiri, Te Kawehau Hoskins,
Mason Durie, and Leonie Pihama (to name a few). The claims these scholars make
about the incommensurability and homogeneity of Māori and Pākehā “ways of
knowing” are not only spurious but conveniently cover over the class positions
of some (not all) academics who charge the ‘authenticity’ of those claims as a
kind of elite, as well as the positions of other institutionalised authorities
of knowledge. The claims they make about the mechanical, seemingly unipolar
operation of colonial dynamics in the country they reside are not consistent
with the complex issues that have arisen in the ‘management’ of indigenous
affairs by governments. In Aotearoa New Zealand this has taken the form of the
re-establishment of the (now non-spatial) tribal form through the ancestral
realignment and corporatisation of iwi tribal structures, and the suspension of
the former dynamism of tikanga Māori by the professed voices of authenticity
(Rata, 1999; Barcham, 1998). As Roger Maaka (1994) argues: “[t]he freezing of
tribes at the signing of a treaty with a European power is concomitant with the
colonisation process” (p. 314). Not only is this action of the Waitangi
Tribunal concomitant with this process, it legitimates the interests of the
newly emergent comprador Māori
bourgeoisie to effect themselves as representatives for the entire Māori
population through a process of brokerage (Poulantzas, 1976; Rata, 2000) with
the New Zealand Government. Brokerage, for Nicos Poulantzas, is the mechanism
through which a local capitalist elite becomes established as an intermediary
class between the circuits of global capital and the bounded spatialities of
local capital. This process in Aotearoa New Zealand was inflected by a
neo-traditionalist ideological push (largely supported unintentionally by
arguments of decolonisation and cultural revival made since the Māori
Renaissance) to integrate global capitalism with a new corporatised conception
of tribal society. This creates an entrenched class divide which is now
legitimated by traditionalist orthodoxy as well as corporate-legal authority. As
Elizabeth Rata argues, the indigenous episteme “maintains the illusion that
elites who justify their power and wealth with reference to tradition are
somehow different from other elites” (Rata, 2011: 374-375).
Neotraditionalist ideology has been
supported uncritically by the cultural Left, and indeed sheltered from
criticism as it falls under the jurisdiction of relativist identity politics.
It is no surprise that those tribal leaders who are keen practitioners of this
ideology represent barriers to class politics and remain one of the most
depoliticising forces in this regard. Neotraditionalism elevates a person’s
tribal status as their paramount social identification and obfuscates those
antagonisms inherent in capitalist relations that are present in the form of
social organisation and the struggle over means and products of production.
These relations are instead figured as communal social relations within the
tribe itself. This revivalism, based on primordial racial identity, and the
absence of private ownership of the means of production (instead owned by the
tribe in partnership with the state) helps to obscure those class relations.
This is what Elizabeth Rata calls the “neotribe,” which behaves like a
corporation and does not mimic redistributive social arrangements despite
claims to the contrary (Rata, 2004). Samuel Rose discusses the Native American
neotraditionalist movement which has established separate Native governments, often
constructing themselves in opposition to the trade union movement. The tribal
form of government of the Navajo, the Navajo Nation, for example, attempted to
ban union organisation on its reservation (Rose, 2015: 225). Neotribal
governments in the United States have had to tactically incorporate partial
labour laws somewhat favourable to unions or risk having their sovereignty on
the matter superseded by the federal government who would subject them to the
federal worker relations board. Failure to do this would also weaken the power
of their ideology – the tribal enterprise would be seen as just like any other
capitalist corporation. Neotribal capitalism, then, is shown to still be
capitalism. As Elizabeth Rata points out:
[E]thnic and tribal
consciousness is a mechanism in the depoliticization of the worker. The
worker-in-community of late capitalism, as a communal-self, becomes merely one
of the productive forces to be regulated and managed in the non-democratic
modes of regulation of neotribal capitalism, rather than an antagonistic
protagonist in the political contestation for the rewards of capital
accumulation. (Rata, 2003, p. 54).
Such a complex political problem relates
to epistemic relativism and knowledge production in the sense that the aim of
academics who work in the field of ‘indigenous knowledge’ is to establish this
immobile and racialised form of knowledge as having existed for all time
(concomitant to racial primordialism), allowing further entrenchment of their position.
Māori experience is linked to a global network of experiences all characterised
in the same way which further naturalises the category of indigeneity as an
eternal consistency, enduring across both temporal and spatial dimensions. For
indigenous urban planning theorist Hirini Matunga, “indigenous planning has
always existed… [it] predates colonialism” (Matunga, 2013: 5). Matunga’s
statement is of course incorrect because the category of ‘indigeneity’ has only
been required for political purposes after
the emergence of the colonising project. Fellow scholars in this area,
Hibbard et al. (2008), note that
indigenous peoples’ relation to land and planning ideas have changed since
compulsory land acquisition and the birth of the colonial state took effect.
Given the violence resulting from forced acquisitions that took place, to
suggest indigenous peoples’ ‘relationship’ to land changed between the period
prior to coloniser involvement and that afterward is not a novel statement, but
one that sits in contrast to Matunga’s conception of indigenous planning. This
is not to say that the theory itself is wrong because of such errors (it can be
scrutinised like any other) but that the temporal basis outlined by Matunga for
such a discipline is incoherent and dishonest.
Similarly, Rāpata Wiri (2011) aims to
distinguish a “Māori way of knowing” from a “Pākehā way of knowing”, the former
of which includes various forms of knowledge that have a special character
which turns out to be authoritarian. These include oral histories, whakapapa
(defined with support of the Foucauldian term ‘genealogy,’ which is described
as viewing science as “subjection”), waiata, whakataukī, and the rights of
tribal communities. I take issue with the supposed special character of each of
these forms Wiri describes. Firstly, oral histories do not constitute a way of
knowing that is specific to Māori history. They are commonplace both as a way
of recounting history and in their transcribed form, of important speeches and
proclamations, throughout the study of world history. For Wiri, the practice of
kōrero (speaking) includes both “our everyday conversation to whaikōrero or
formal oratory that is practiced on the marae” (p. 46). This definition
collapses everyday knowledge and a more ‘formal’ knowledge (which is not
necessarily representative of disciplinary knowledge) and presents each as
undifferentiated. Secondly, waiata and whakataukī can be established as aspects
of universal knowledge as forms of art and verbal literature, but several forms
are spurious and deserve being subject to scrutiny just as all other knowledge
claims are (e.g. kupu whakāri or the prophecy-telling elements, p. 50). It is
not clear in Wiri’s work how these relate to systematised intellectual fields.
Clearly they are not intended to be objects of study but artifacts of authority,
as Wiri’s theory of knowledge is subjective and culturalist. Thirdly, the
concept of whakapapa is exclusionary and dictates not only who can access
knowledge but land as well. Ranginui Walker (1996: 169) claims that whakapapa
is the founding paradigm of Māori sovereignty, but it is unclear exactly who
benefits from it in the new tribal system Wiri aims to establish as a “Māori
epistemology” based on social capital and authoritative might rather than
scrutiny and criticism. In Wiri’s recount of tribal land custom (also here
included as part of matauranga Māori), land is owned and taken under coercive
rules, just as it was under British colonialism and in regimes of enclosure
which heralded the beginning of what Marx calls “primitive accumulation,” the
stage of transition from the feudal to the capitalist mode of production (chapter
26, Capital Vol 1). Anyone, including Māori, must be able to cite their
whakapapa to claim land, which poses problems for those Māori disconnected from
their families or for who those do not know them. If a tribe abandons their
land for three generations, land can be forcibly taken. Tribes also have the
right of conquest over others (take
raupatu, Wiri, 2016: 47) which appears to be an endorsement of the violence
and war of the tribal era. Whakapapa, for Wiri, “is subjective and history is
retold from the perspective of the living person reciting that history” (p.
48). This is a relativist claim which entails that the person telling the story
becomes the sole authority over that historical account, and that it must be
accepted without the powers of scrutiny or criticism that make knowledge
powerful. Instead this knowledge, masked as egalitarian, always ends up being a
form of “knowledge of the powerful” – knowledge that is conserved by elites,
for elites, and possesses exclusionary qualities that create intellectual
divisions between people.
What Melanie Wall (1997: 43) calls the
“stereotype of the quintessential Māori” is the strategic deployment of an
imaginary of the internal coherence of Māori and their subjection to
stereotypes of romanticisation and exoticism common in the imperialist era such
as closeness to nature, deep spirituality, and a ‘vanishing race’ or
traditional way of life that must be protected, such as what one does in
conservation for endangered species. Hirini Matunga illustrates the reactionary
corollary to this notion when he says social contact with non-Māori, including
miscegenation, is damaging to the “essence of [Māori] indigeneity” (Matunga,
2013: 18). Similarly, Linda Tuhiwai Smith argues that the project of
decolonisation is about “coming to know and understand theory and research from
our own perspectives” (Smith, 1999: 39). She is, however, unable to explain
what ‘decolonisation’ is or what those perspectives required to reach it are
that are seemingly inaccessible to non-indigenous researchers. The term ‘decolonisation’
in Smith’s case thus has little substantive meaning other than a Foucauldian
one which attempts to “reclaim history” (p. 30). History as a discipline is seen
as patriarchal, progressivist, and binary. History being “reclaimed”
essentially means being reduced to perspectives where the ability to critique
is hierarchically organised based on the position one takes in an amorphous
field of ‘power relations.’ Smith’s methodological project is designed to raise
a monolithic indigenous “national consciousness” (p.73), which obscures the
class differences within that category of indigeneity, and again raises the
questions of Meera Nanda I discussed above, about the politically regressive
consequences of such a project (i.e. contributing to the growth of new
ethno-nationalist movements and new Right-nationalist tensions).
As Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks (2000) says,
“Race identity is about the sense of one’s exclusiveness, exceptionality and
uniqueness. Put very simply, it is an identity that… can only be about pride,
being better, being the best” (p.7). Smith uses a variety of nativist
stereotypes as the premises for her ‘indigenous epistemology’: a focus on
spirituality as a central part of social science research (just paragraphs
after chastising Pākehā for associating Māori with an authentic, essential,
spiritualist self), and an assumptive irrationalism of the indigenous
perspective as it is located in individual experience and opposed to universal
knowledge (predictably viewed as ‘totalitarian’). Indigenous politics as
conceptualised here thus completes the circle of colonial logic described by
Homi Bhabha in his theory of “mimicry and menace” (Bhabha, 1994). The epistemic
relativism of “indigenous epistemology” is underpinned by a culturalist
political position that is continuous with the assumptions of race science and
theory in the imperialist and pre-Nazi eras. Indigenous epistemology secures
its consistency as paradoxically epistemologically ‘privileged’, yet always
subordinate and marginal, through the hypostatisation of traditional,
pre-modern structures of customs, beliefs and ideas for the purposes of
advancing (1) an epistemic relativism that homogenises Māori as a marginalised
population using an ironic combination of decolonial rhetoric and nativist
stereotypes and (2) the entrenchment of the Māori managerial and intellectual
stratum comprised of those self-imposed or elevated ‘authentic’ voices and leaders
in indigenous politics, including the politics of that ‘knowledge’ produced in
this vein.
Relativism, instrumentalisation,
capitalism – sociological impacts on New Zealand education
The cultural turn, with its emphasis on
the politics of difference, identity and hybridity, led to the gradual
abandonment of class politics by the Left. Before this, class
consciousness-raising was the ascendant political agenda of the Left, which was
universalist in character (although this universalism was not always adhered to
in practice). The primary project of Marxists was to build an international
working-class movement of emancipation from capitalist control of their labour
as well as the means of production of economic goods and reproduction of
livelihoods. The breakdown of Left institutional structures, including trade
unions and socialist parties, as well as the production of new inequalities
through globalisation, was supported by the retreat to localism that the
arbiters of the cultural turn advanced (Rata, 2012). This turn back to
Romanticism by the New Left and the culturalists is demonstrated powerfully by
Kenan Malik (2008) in his book Strange
Fruit. Amidst the struggle for black rights in the United States of America
in the 1960s, black Americans received negligible support from the liberal Left
(albeit plenty from the Marxist and communist Left) which strengthened the
argument for ‘self-organisation’. The Black Power movement gave rise to a
symbolic black identity which was affirmationist in character. That idea of an
‘identity’ constructed from group membership (of a group which is itself
constructed) proliferated along lines of race, gender and sexuality. Each group
was understood as having its own particular ‘culture’ and epistemology. Malik concludes
that although “the right has adopted the language of diversity, liberals have
adopted the idiom of racial identity” (p. 188), which explains the perverse
reversal of positions seen in the political landscape today in terms of a
general theory of social organisation. The repoliticisation of race in such an
identitarian manner (particularly given the very public alliance of new
racialised elites with global capital and inclusion in the political class) has
led to a ‘resistant’ construction of a white racialised identity that is in
some respects class-bound to lower economic strata and defensive against the
proliferation of such elites (as well as being racist and supremacist in
nature). This supports the claim I cited earlier by Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks
that race identification is premised upon exclusion and the privileging of
certain aspects of groups over those of other groups.
This relativist development in
epistemology, that each marker of social disparity can be mobilised into a
homogeneous group, and that each of those constructed groups have their own
epistemologies that are organised horizontally, has had a deleterious impact on
the sociology of education. However, the social constructivists’ point that
knowledge is ‘socially constructed’ is important and well taken. The social
realist account argues that the sociality of knowledge is inherent in its mode
of production (i.e. the ‘social relations of symbolic production’) that enables
its universality. Knowledge here is understood as ‘socially constructed’ in a
structural context (often called ‘power relations’ after Foucault in the
postmodernist literature) yet is able to establish an autonomy which is
independent of that context. Conceptual knowledge is universalist, enduring,
and allows us to systematise the known and think about the not yet known. In
contrast to the celebratory partisanship of postmodernism, this universality is
“not an end in itself but only a means of attaining to the true purpose of the
concept, which is precision” (Cassirer, 1980). It is not, as Kant theorised,
produced through an individual’s mental labour. Knowledge has a fundamentally
social character, emergent through the relations of symbolic production. This
social character, for the social constructivists, is demonstrative of the
impossibility of objective knowledge as it is always tainted by human
interests. While the constructivists argue that knowledge simply reflects a
positional relation of different ‘standpoints’ (which conflates what is known with who knows it), the social realists argue that knowledge is
organised and structured into disciplines and intellectual fields independent
of such ‘standpoints’ which necessitates the understanding of how such
boundaries formed and where the social inequalities of knowledge acquisition
may occur. The social realist argument not only opposes and moves beyond the
shibboleths of positivism and constructivism but provides a much-needed parry
to technicism, utilitarianism, and conservative traditionalism. Current waves
of policy tend to broadly utilise the assumptions of the first two of these
three checked ideological positions (conservative traditionalism is currently
peripheral in debates on educational policy). Social constructivism appears to
be the more common affiliation for sociologists of education, in response to
technicism and utilitarianism. Social realism is still consolidating itself,
and thus is generally marginalised in the discipline.
Since the 1980s, a decisive shift has
taken place in the New Zealand education system which has its roots in
political and economic systems. The election of the Fourth Labour Government
brought the introduction of a market ideology known as ‘neoliberalism,’
popularised by the Mont Pelerin Society and the Austrian School of Economics. This
ideology ushered in widespread deregulation to resolve the Keynesian dual
burden of inflation and unemployment (Hipkins et al., 2016). However, these reforms heavily impacted the labour
market, particularly in the public sector, which suffered a significant
downsizing and led to even worse levels of unemployment. Young people could no
longer leave school early to enter the labour force. An ensuing ‘qualification
inflation’ and a rapid rise in tertiary education fees in the 1990s produced a
skill squeeze where students were locked out of the institutions they were
increasingly required to access to avoid being terminally unemployed. The
processes which would serve as precursors to the development of New Zealand’s
current education system were also initialised by the Fourth Labour Government:
the Education Act 1989 changes which established the National Qualifications
Framework (NQF), and later the business-led Picot task force and ‘Achievement
2001’ (Fiske and Ladd, 2000) which would give birth to the National Certificate
of Educational Achievement (NCEA). Prior to this, the system of awarding high
school diplomas was norm-referenced. Similar to Britain’s ‘Eleven Plus’
tripartite system (Floud et al.,
1956; Bellaby, 1977), a certain number of students were ‘destined’ to fail each
year’s examinations as they fell below the established indexical mark which
indicated a pass. The NCEA changed this with its criterion-referenced design,
allowing any and all to meet the requirements for being awarded the diploma.
However, the sheer complexities of NCEA and the NQF have allowed inequalities
to be maintained in rather subtle ways.
The New Zealand Curriculum/Te Matauranga o
Aotearoa was not completed until after the implementation of NCEA (Hipkins et al., 2016). The curriculum is split
into a ‘front end’ and ‘back end,’ where the front end says very little of note
about what is to be learned and why, instead taking refuge in the vague
language of ‘values,’ ‘principles,’ and “a vision for our young people”
(Ministry of Education, 2007: 8). It is largely structured around five “key
competencies (p. 12-13): ‘managing self,’ ‘using language, symbols and text,’
‘thinking,’ ‘relating to others,’ and ‘participating.’ Such sweeping categories
facilitate a distillation of education into broad and vague ‘skills’ that mean
very little to students on their own. Information about the actual concepts
intended to be taught is unsurprisingly evanescent. This is left for the ‘back
end’ of the curriculum. Wood and Sheehan (2012) note that these “inquiry-based
learning” or “student-centred pedagogy” approaches emphasise the ‘how’ of learning (the process) over the
‘what’ of learning (the conceptual
and content-based knowledge). This distinction becomes particularly forceful
when one considers the implications that constructivism and relativism has had
on the design of the NCEA.
The NCEA has three levels of assessment,
taken during Year 11 (Level 1), Year 12 (Level 2), and Year 13 (Level 3). It is
split into dual tracks, ‘achievement standards’ and ‘unit standards’ (Hipkins et al., 2016). This standards-based
system is very similar to the National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs) in the
United Kingdom (Young, 2008). In the NCEA, achievement standards are reserved
for ‘academic’ subjects whilst unit standards exist for ‘vocational’ fields and
are designed to scaffold students toward passing them. Students’ learning
programmes consist of all achievement standards or a mix of each. Each standard
represents an individual ‘skill’ in a subject. For example, a mathematics
standard might involve solving problems using algebraic equations. The
certificates are designed using a credit-based accumulation system, where each
standard passed confers a certain number of credits towards the certificate.
Assessment becomes the primary mechanism of transferring knowledge, not
teaching and learning (McPhail, 2013; Rata, 2016). This system has produced
extraordinary irregularities. Achievement standards are often worth 3 or 4
credits, but some unit standards in employment skills and employee ‘risk
management’ are worth 10 credits. Students can now even earn NCEA credits for
passing a driver’s license test (Parata and Foss, 2015). Under these
standards-based systems, conceptual knowledge (which is abstract and
generalizable) becomes no more important than instrumentalised forms of
knowledge (not abstract and generalizable, and often reliant on immediate
experience), which elides their fundamental differences (Young, 2008). Or, as
Leesa Wheelahan (2010) describes, the distinction between “esoteric” and
“mundane” knowledge is collapsed in the new vocational programmes into the
singular prism of empirically-observed competencies. The relativism inherent in
social constructivist approaches to knowledge is compatible with and perhaps
intrinsic to standards-based curriculum models. But, as demonstrated by
Wheelahan, this conception of knowledge is continuous with the instrumentalised
positivist approaches that are slowly creeping in to vocational programmes of
instruction.
I partake in this critique not to demonise
vocational knowledge (more, in fact, to save it from instrumentalisation) but
to highlight the educational inequalities that the NCEA system inevitably
serves when it treats such knowledges as undifferentiated. In a report by
Kirsty Johnston for the New Zealand
Herald, a clear correlation was identified between a school’s
socio-economic decile and the proportion of NCEA entries into academic subjects
vis-à-vis vocational subjects (Johnston, 2016a). Students from poorer schools
were far less likely to pass academic standards and far more likely to be
enrolled in vocational standards. Some of these standards include four credits
at Level 2 for “preparing espresso beverages under supervision,” taken by
18,000 students over five years, “purchasing household consumables” in which
700 were enrolled, and “solving issues at rental properties” with 8,000
students (Johnston, 2016b). Such arbitrary credentialisation of manual labour
tasks serves to homogenise and instrumentalise knowledge in a process of
commodification. Indeed, Johnston quotes Manukau Institute of Technology
staffer Stuart Middleton, who says that the proliferation of such standards is
part of a “quiet revolution” and critiquing them amounts to “snobbery”
(Johnston, 2016b). The key, for Middleton, is creating standards that would
lead to “employment”; i.e. reproducing the class divide of capitalism that
Johnston’s investigation into NCEA has revealed is directly reinforced by the
system. The irony is that this deleterious situation is partly related to
social constructivist, particularly postmodernist, formulations of knowledge as
power wielded and exercised over curricula by dominant groups. These
formulations imagine mundane knowledge as no different from conceptual,
abstract, generalizable knowledge. This has the effect of legitimising a
unipolar capitalist curriculum that either directly satisfies the labour-force
requirements of those dominant groups, or, as it happens, produces legions of
unskilled workers who may not have achieved the constantly shifting
prerequisites for employment. It is this linguistic and epistemological closure
of the codified realm of disciplinary knowledge for the working classes which
Basil Bernstein identifies as “restricted code” (Bernstein, 1981) that enables
the continual reproduction of the class divide, along not only lines of income
inequality but also of educational attainment.
Using the language of Bernstein as well as
Leesa Wheelahan (2010) we can broadly describe the knowledge formulated for and
taught in vocational programmes as ‘mundane’ knowledge, or what Lev Vygotsky
called ‘everyday’ knowledge. This knowledge takes the form of a ‘horizontal,’
context-dependent structure which is fragmented by social contexts, and those
contexts become the site where learning takes place, for example the workplace
or the home. However, as Wheelahan shows through the example of vocational
‘training packages’ in Australia, this has not always been the case. These
‘packages’ are also broadly equivalent to the United Kingdom’s NVQs. Their
introduction was resisted by teachers because they neglected the “underpinning
knowledge” (p. 104) which implies that underneath the surface of ‘mundane’
knowledge there is a deep layer of ‘esoteric’ knowledge or a foundation
afforded by knowledge from the disciplines. In the spirit of critical realism,
the particular knowledge covered by the training packages designed for specific
workplaces is theorised as ‘emergent’ from abstract concepts and principles
preceding it. But in Australia’s new vocational system, this conceptual
knowledge is now removed. My example of the NQF in New Zealand demonstrates the
same movement away from conceptual knowledge in vocational programmes
(notwithstanding the fact that NCEA treats all
knowledge as if it were vocational competencies in its broken
standards-based design). Indeed, Wheelahan says that the programme she once
taught had students study academic subjects, with the intention that the
knowledge from those subjects could be translated to the sphere of practice
(i.e. the workplace).
--
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