Curriculum Studies, The Future Of: Essay 5

Worthwhile Pursuits

The common thread that strongly holds together diverse advocates of curriculum studies, and even provides common concern for the curriculum development era from which curriculum studies evolved, is focus on what is worthwhile. From time immemorial, educators have asked: What is worth knowing, needing, experiencing, doing, being, becoming, overcoming, contributing, and sharing? Interest groups have emerged to vehemently vie for leadership in response to such questions, both within the curriculum field and in most societies at large throughout history. They have sought to determine the why, when, where, how, for whom, and in whose interest of the what considered worthwhile.

Big Curriculum

The big curriculum refers to the barrage of propaganda and public relations that perpetuates worldwide capitalistic and patriarchal efforts of Western corporate–governmental–military forces, providing a homogeneous culture throughout the world—that is, an imperial and neocolonial conquest that quashes indigenous cultures, languages, and even species in the interest of power, greed, and manifest destiny. It does this principally through advertising, mass media, patriotic admonitions, and many forms of schooling that instill values of an acquisitive society.

Throughout the last half of the 20th century and with greater fervor in the 21st century, a new form of world government has emerged in the form of multinational corporations. It is clear that they set the policies advocated by their appointed puppeteers known as national government leaders. A neoliberal current of cultural, political, economic, social, and personal values surges through the world with a new manifest destiny—namely, a message that everything, including the deepest of meanings, can be translated into commodities to be acquired. Such are the curricula perpetuated by militaries and mass media necessary, and study of them is vastly neglected. Instead, the attention of curriculum workers (scholarly and practical) is diverted toward fiddling with schools while the empire burns in service of personal and corporate greed. Reform of school curriculum is akin to rearrangement of the deck chairs on a sinking Titanic. Critique of acquisitiveness is clearly evident in work of Dewey, Michael Apple, Maxine Greene, Ivan Illich, Henry Giroux, William Ayers, Donaldo Macedo, William Pinar, Jean Anyon, Pauline Lipman, William Watkins, Joel Spring, Bernardo Gallegos, John Smyth, Peter McLaren, William Schubert, John Willinsky, Geoff Whitty, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Martin Carnoy, Paulo Freire, and others in curriculum studies and related areas. So is the criticism of key public intellectuals: Cornel West, Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, Jonathon [Page 245]Kozol, Herb Kohl, Kurt Vonnegut, Howard Zinn, Gore Vidal, Molly Ivins, Edward Said, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, James Baldwin, Alexander Cockburn, Margaret Atwood, Phillip Lopate, and a host of others. Saddled with mandates from corporate government to cover prescribed curricula in schools and thereby to propagate interests of the wealthy, educators and students of the future are often moved to social justice by joining together to uncover the intent of curricular hegemony rather than merely follow mandates that harm all but the rich.

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