THE CURRENT SITUATION

We know that tomorrow will not be like today. That is one of the few certainties of the present period. We can perceive only dimly what the day after that tomorrow is likely to be like. That wasn’t always the case, as I suggested in the preface. I knew, in my early teenage, that I would, once I’d finished my apprenticeship as a furrier, become a journeyman in ‘my trade’, and that I could become a master craftsman if I chose that path. The fact that things turned out differently for me did not challenge the certainty: it was just a thing that happened, which could easily be accommodated in that rock-solid edifice of how we knew things were. Of course, the event that made things different for me was my parents’ emigration, from Germany to Australia, which was itself a tiny part of the unmaking of the postwar world. It dislodged me from certainty, even though I continued working in ‘my trade’, somewhat incongruously in hot Newcastle, New South Wales, for another ten years. Emigration, if anything, cemented certainties in those days: one moved from a place of social insecurity to a place of social security—which in the case of emigrants then meant from a place of no (reliable) work to a place of (reliable) work. In the era preceding the Second World War, immigration did not unsettle anything. Immigrant groups formed relatively closed-off, self-contained cultural islands in their new environment. By this they confirmed the continuity and stability of their ethnic and cultural identity, and reciprocally confirmed the stability and continuity of the host society. The certainties in that area of social life had their effects on curricula. If we knew that tomorrow would be as today, we also knew what it was that the young should learn and know. Broadly, they should know what we knew; and value what their elders valued. Curriculum had the function of ensuring that the future would be like the

present, which itself was much the same as the immediate past. We could be relatively clear about the aims and needs of today.

Other stabilizing factors have also begun to fade or to disappear. The social stability of that period—even if it was a relative myth—allowed curricula to be relatively inexplicit; indeed the implicitness of curriculum in central areas was a guarantee of its success. The stability of the social system was guaranteed by the stability of the nation state, which attempted to foster a national identity, which was itself a function of the state’s school system to produce. For that identity to be produced smoothly and successfully, it was essential that the core of the value system should not be the subject of overt teaching; and not subject therefore to analysis and critique.

Given that these certainties are no longer with us, the questions around curriculum have become much sharper. At the present they are posed in what I regard as fundamentally misconceived ways by politicians and by certain education experts, not just here but in all anglophone countries, and not just by those of ‘the right’. There exists now in this as in many other political areas a broad consensus, within which the range of opinion and of options is actually quite small. That range stretches on one side from purely ideological demands around moral values, cultural unity, of ‘standards’ variously described or not described, to nostalgic calls for the reinstatement of the forms of that former period of mythic or actual certainty. On the other side the calls are for a closer alignment of education with the demands of business and of industry; for higher and measurable levels of skill; for the lifting of levels of efficiency in communication—with spelling, punctuation, sentence construction being cited as indicators of performance.

But these are responses which seek to cope with present insecurities and uncertainties by proposing a return to past forms. I am entirely in agreement with calls for the education system to be socially responsible and responsive, and for me that includes without question a responsiveness to the economic, social, political and cultural demands and needs of a society. That seems to me absolutely legitimate, and beyond debate. The question is: what are the economic needs of society? What are its cultural, social, political needs for the near to mid-term future? Clearly, if past elements of the education system were attuned to the demands of the society and the economy of then, their reintroduction cannot serve any other purpose than the assuaging of uncontrollable nostalgias by those who advocate their return. Britain will not, for the foreseeable future return to the form of the

economy which existed pre-war, let alone in the nineteenth century. There are no plans to rebuild steelworks, reopen coal mines or shipyards, to rebuild other once great industries. So the forms of work, the kinds of jobs, those aptitudes and dispositions are no longer needed because they are no longer relevant.

The curriculum clearly has to address the future needs of the society in which it operates. This involves a deeply searching attempt to speculate about that future. What can we know at the moment, about the shape of things to come—the economy; forms of society; the future of nation states; globalization; the media; cultural and political developments? While this book does not propose a specific curriculum for any part of schooling, it does attempt to say something about what dispositions schooling should attempt to produce. But that presupposes some clearer sense of what will be needed for that future, so that a curriculum can be developed along the kinds of principles that will be required. So here I will indulge in some very broad speculation, and then relate that to principles of curriculum construction.

Three factors seem central to me in remaking the shape of the future: the continuing and intensifying pluriculturalism which now characterizes all the so-called developed societies; the globalization of economies, of production, and of finance; and the changes in the technologies of communication and of transport. Other, associated factors of great significance are the globalization of the media, and the consequent internationalization of culture.

Pluriculturalism is dissolving what formerly seemed like the settled identifications of cultures and nation states, and in doing so is proving corrosive of that web of values, beliefs, knowledge, structures of identities and practices, which underpinned and seemed to guarantee the stabilities which I mentioned above. This is happening at a time when in these same places the economies which had provided relative security for the largest proportion of the population are faltering—as older forms of production are taken elsewhere, to places of much lower costs of labour, and finance capital moves at the speed of light to where ‘returns’ promise to be highest. This makes everywhere potentially a low-wage economy. Changes in the modes of communication are undoing more local structures of communication, and undermine local, geographically based communities. The foreign exchange dealer who leaves home at 6 a.m. to go to work has a daily routine of communication which binds her or him more tightly into a global network than into the former community of the local neighbourhood of schools, social clubs, church, and so on.

This is accompanied by a changing landscape of communication, in part produced by these factors, and in part with its own dynamic. Quite different forms of communication are needed globally from locally; electronic communication makes the person with whom I am communicating co-present in time and distant in space. Electronic media—as well as new technologies of printing make images into a much more available, accessible and usable mode of communication than they have been—in ‘the West’ at any rate for several hundred years. That is having far-reaching effects on language, especially in its written form, which have only just begun and are likely to alter the place and valuation of writing in far-reaching ways.

Written texts are becoming much more visual than they ever were even though they have always been visual objects. But the pages of novels, textbooks, manuals that I was used to reading as recently as the 1960s and even 1970s, with their dense lines of print, have given way to pages where visual images dominate in many domains of communication. Contemporary science textbooks in secondary schools are a very good example. They are no longer objects to be read page by page by page; they consist of sets of pages which make information available in writing and in the form of visual images of diverse kinds: they are collections of resource materials. This of course presupposes, even if only implicitly, greatly changed ideas about reading, and fundamentally different reading practices.

The now available multimedia technologies of CD-ROM go well beyond this, with moving images, sound, as well as spoken and written language. The new texts exist in a plethora of semiotic forms, and demand skills of production and design never before envisaged in any curriculum of communication.

They also change our approach to knowledge, and will radically remake our conception of what knowledge is, and the place of education in relation to it. Hypertext, CD-ROM, the Internet, are no longer organized in the sequenced, hierarchical structurings which still characterizes our common sense of what knowledge is. The sequentiality and linearity of former textual structures is replaced by a web, which can be entered at any point of my choosing and explored with neither a pre-given point of entry nor a pre-given point of departure. Like the new science textbook it makes available information for me to use in my new structures: it is a resource, which is not pre-structured in readily discernible ways.

The skills demanded here are those of (information) management, and that is rapidly displacing the production of

knowledge as the central aim of formal institutionalized education. In England this is evident in the debate over forms of qualifications: whether A levels, the former ‘academic’ qualification, or NVQs (National Vocational Qualifications) or GNVQs (General National Qualifications), the new overtly practical, pragmatically oriented qualifications. The older aims of distanced critical reflection are replaced by the new aims of management and organization of (existing) information.

But new forms of social organization will still demand the production of new knowledge: we have not come to the point where we have enough knowledge for the ever-changing demands that will continue to face humankind. Economies based on ‘information’ as their raw material will be fundamentally different from those we know now, and I assume will demand specialized forms of representation and communication in which language will have a lesser place, the visual a much greater, and which may need the skills of moving from one mode of representation to another, using the possibilities of each to the fullest. Innovation, as a taken-for-granted requirement, will rest on attitudes to (cultural and other) difference and change unlike those fostered now, whether in schools or in society at large. The distinctly different modes of engagement with the world which inhere in the different semiotic modes and media—two, three-, or four- dimensional, temporal or spatial, visual verbal or tactile—can lead to quite distinct logics and rationalities (and do so now), and the school curriculum will need to foster and develop them as essential requirements for the economic, social, and political demands of the near future.