Between and Beyond the Two
Worlds of Curriculum and Teaching:
An Emerging/Converging Tripartite:
USA, Europe and China?
Tero Autio, PhD
Professor of Curriculum Theory
School of Doctoral Studies in Education
Tallinn University
The significance of education policy for
teaching practice
• It is often misguided to speak about teaching and learning
without articulated connection btw education policy, curriculum,
teaching, learning and study
• Education policy adopted matters more than any theories of
learning in curriculum and teaching practice
• Present education policy = assessment and audit in terms of
imagined economic competitiveness without any further analysis
of the role of education in society
• Education policy creates the pedagogic time-space for teachers’
work and professional identity
• Teachers should be theoretically aware how education and
curriculum policy shape teachers’ professional identities and their
work (“extended professional competence”)
The Educationalization of the Cold War
• Sputnik Shock prompted the founding of the OECD 1960
• The first meeting was occupied only by economists and the military: not a
single education expert was present
• The enemy was not only Russians but PROGRESSIVE PEDAGOGY (DEWEY) AND
POWERFUL TEACHER UNIONS
• The ideal school institution work like successful factory or military
organization, education as a cog in production machinery
• The adoption of accountability, standardization, privatization as key terms in
education policy with far-reaching consequences to teachers’ work: teaching is
essentially teaching to the the test
• The replacement of moral discourse by the rhetoric of “quality” and
“excellence”. “quality assurance systems” etc.
The current hegemony in
transnational education policy
• “Global Education Reform Movement, GERM,
a virus that kills education” (Sahlberg,P. 2011
Finnish Lessons)
• PISA is the result of the educationalization of
the Cold War
• Sputnik shock in the US in 1957: scientification
of the school curriculum (set theory in math);
focus on core subjects math, science and
foreign language(s), cf. PISA today!
President Obama’s education policy:
Through Race to the Top
• Adopting standards and assessments that prepare students to succeed in
college and workplace and to compete in the global economy
• Building data systems that measure student growth and success, and
inform teachers and principals about how they can improve instruction:
“leadership by numbers”
• Recruiting, developing, rewarding, and retaining effective teachers and
principals where they needed most; and
• Turning around our lowest-achieving schools
• 1,35 billion dollars 2011
• (Taubman 2009; Teaching by Numbers)
-----------------------Today: Economic thought is coterminous with rationality!
Rationality in the French Enlightenment: Liberté, égalité, fraternité
The big picture of modernization: to be is is to think; to think is to
calculate
Curriculum?
• Curriculum is organizational and intellectual
centerpiece of education
• What is the balance between the organizational and
intellectual creates the divide btw Anglophone and
North European curriculum theories and powerfully
shapes teacher’s professional identity and the nature
of her/his work
• Curriculum studies: curriculum theory + curriculum
history + curriculum design
• Education is a mix “zwischen Politik und Wissenschaft”;
F.D.E Schleiermacher, the founder of hermeneutics
(1768-1834)
Divide btw Curriculum and Didaktik …
• In Anglo-American context the stress have been
on the organizational understanding of the
curriculum; in North Europe on both:
organizational and intellectual
• In A-A curriculum thinking education is sciencedriven (psychology, learning sciences);
psychology and science as political construct
• In NE Bildung/Didaktik traditions the nation state
is the “objective framework” (Weniger) of
education; education and curriculum are political
matters
Herbart as a pivotal figure in both
traditions
• Also the Anglo American curriculum theoretically
derives from German sources, particularly from
J.F. Herbart’s (1776-1841) mechanist variant of
psychology based on the ideal of Newtonian
classical mechanics;
• Herbart had also a hermeneutic variant of
psychology that was instructive in the
development of Bildung traditions,
psychoanalysis and Vygotsky’s psychology
• Herbart’s own ambition was “in die Geschichte
als Newton der Psychologie einzugehen”
Herbart, behaviorism, cognitive
theories, learning sciences
• Herbart’s mechanist image of psychology à la Newtonian classical
mechanics was adopted as an intellectual cornerstone in the Anglo
American curriculum theory
• H was instrumental in the emergence of behaviorist psychology and
later on in the whole parade of cognitive theories and learning
sciences that share the basic assumptions of Herbart’s mechanistic
psychology and behaviorism
• the main bias throughout that intellectual tradition is the void of any
convincing notion of consciousness, subject, agency and personality,
the lack already present in the S-O-R schema
• Edward Thorndike (1874-1949): Education is the form of human
engineering
• F. Bobbitt, The Curriculum, 1918: Education is not very dissimilar from
railway building
A shift from a behavioral paradigm to a
cognitive one.. (Taubman 2009)
• Behaviorism’s dismissal of the unpredictability of human
subjectivity, human relations and individual personality,
and its optimism that behavior could be “conditioned” lent
itself to the command-and control-emphasis of the military
• The emphasis from strict focus on behavior to internalized
representations of that behavior, but the focus on discrete
tasks, expediency, and end results remained, since the
military’s need for command and control, predictability and
efficiency only intensified with the procurement of
innovative technologies.
• The easy quantification of behavioral outcomes articulated
nicely with the metrics of computer processing and the
statistical norms and values already incorporated in
psychological research.
Implications for the present education policy: “How
the learning sciences came to be complicit in the
corporatization of education?
• “The rise of cognitive science and the intimate
relationship between the military, computer
scientists, and psychologists” (Noble 1991) is
important in helping us to understand the roots of
our current education.
• Those psychologists (Gagné, Glaser, Mager) who had
one foot in the military and one in education
contributed to the development of the learning
sciences and to the importation into education of
language of outcomes, performance objectives, and
information processing.
Learning sciences: from knowledge to
information
• The synergy between computer scientists,
information processors, and cognitive psychologists
not only generated new metaphors of thinking and
behavior but also resulted in conceptualize
knowledge as information (“skills and competences”
in curricula)
• The reduction of knowledge to information may have
fitted information and learning sciences with
metaphors of thinking as information processing, but
it also hid the labor and desire involved in the
creation of knowledge, its historical context, and its
complexity, contingency, and ambiguity.
The political and moral “neutrality” of
Learning Sciences
• Taubman 2009: how “tools” or “tool kits” created by
information technologies are used, to what purpose, is
not the concern of the learning sciences. Whether they
are used used to forward the agenda of a military in
time of war or neoliberal policies in a time of economic
inequities, the learning sciences appear not to care.
• The lack of the moral in Learning Sciences, present in
Didaktik traditions; the moral component of the
curriculum “makes education educative: to encourage
thinking, to make subjective yet knowledgeable
judgment and decisions, to think against the subject
matter, to think against oneself, to transcend, to
transform” (Autio 2014)
• If consciousness is superfluous – as behaviorism and
Learning Sciences assume - why we have it ?
“Curriculum and Bildung/Didaktik are very
different intellectual systems” (Westbury)
The image of the teacher in the
Anglo-American Curriculum
The image of the teacher in the
Bildung/Didaktik tradition
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Teacher’s role as the intellectually
passive “agent of the system”
(Westbury 2000) in the AngloAmerican curriculum tradition
Teacher-proof curricula; ”existing
teachers are a (if not the) major
brake on the innovation, change
and reform that the schools always
seem to require” (Westbury 2000)
Curriculum-as-manual; a very
limited space for professional
autonomy, freedom and judgment
Teaching essentially means
teaching to the test
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Curriculum is an organizational and
intellectual centerpiece of education
“An autonomous professional teacher …
has complete freedom within the
framework of the Lehrplan (curriculum) to
develop her/his own approaches to
teaching” (Westbury 2000)
This relationship btw the curriculum and
the teacher; teacher as the curriculum
maker is traditionally internalized and
respected especially in the Scandinavian
countries (Singapore, Canada – and
Estonia?)
Curriculum: Subjectivity is threaded
through subject matter; we all come to the
world through curriculum
High trust in highly educated teachers
“When China rules the world” (Martin Jacques);
“liberalization and modernization reforms” in
education since 2000
• Curriculum as organizational and intellectual
centerpiece of education; teaching as an intellectual
task; ideally “academic freedom to teach”
• China is not the “nation-state” and not yet the “market
state” as most Western states, but the “civilization
state”; communism and capitalism are conceived of
recent Western imports against the 7000 years of
Chinese “wisdom traditions”: Buddhism, Confucianism,
and Taoism. China has seven hundreds years’
experience of Islam culture too.
China….
• Shifts from centralized bureaucratic hierarchies to more
dynamic structures by creating “information flows”
between schools, universities, and local, regional and
central administration
• Increase in the administrative and curriculum autonomy of
schools and teachers: “from the follower to the subject of
reform”; collaboration and cooperation instead of
competition
• From authoritarianism of Soviet pedagogy (I. I. Kairov) to
“celebrating difference and diversity”; postmodern
accounts of education and curriculum theories (btw 20002012 over 1200 books and articles under the title of
postmodern/poststructural education and curriculum
theories)
China’s current curriculum conception
• Curriculum (Ke Zheng); “No Freedom, No Curriculum”
(professor Zhang Hua)
• Curriculum studies = curriculum theory + curriculum
history + curriculum design create the center of
educational sciences
• Curriculum theory is conceived as an interdisciplinary
update of the traditional four boxes model of
educational sciences: history, philosophy, psychology,
and sociology of education
• Teacher as THE curriculum theorist: “extended
professional competence”