Metatheory

A metatheory represents a conceptual framework offering both normative and empirical foundations for theory. A metatheory of the curriculum studies has fallen on hard times from a postmodernist perspective. In modernist curriculum theory, the search has been to provide some sort of comprehensive structure of knowledge and its transference through a variety of competencies such as learning skills and methods of inquiry, the idea being that it is possible to synthesize existing educational theories under a grand scheme to achieve such an end. Such a desire can be found in many fields of knowledge. Physics searches for a unified field theory and a theory of everything while the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science had hoped for the same. However, it too fell on hard times when Thomas Kuhn, a member of its editorial group, argued that this was an impossible task by describing the history of science as a set of revolutions in the second book of volume 2.

Jean-François Lyotard's critique of the grand narratives or metanarratives that legitimated knowledge through an emancipation narrative (e.g., Marxism) or a salvation narrative (e.g., Christianity), or the progressive narrative (e.g., capitalism) has had a profound effect in educational curricular circles. It marked a turning pointsome would say a “hermeneutic turn” to begin to interpret texts ideologically and to deconstruct their seeming unity. The claims to metatheory became suspicious because of their totalizing nature, which were propped up by some form of transcendent and universal truth. In curricular thought, this truth was especially damaging. Developmental theories that had universalistic overtonessuch as Jean Piaget's schema for developmental cognition based on genetic epistemologythat is, on an inherent structure of the mind; Noam Chomsky's transformational generative grammar that claimed an innate universal grammar common to all languages; and Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development all underwent critique for their universal structuralist assertions. It was found that the Piagetian pattern simply replicated the logic necessary for the development of secularized capitalism, while Kohlberg's moral development was inherently gender biased. Chomsky's schema underwent revision in light of the Sapir-Worf hypothesis, which maintained a linguistic relativity; the grammatical categories of the language a person speaks is related to how that person behaves and understands the world. For curricular thought, these developments meant that the assurances of the linear way children developed their verbal, written, and mathematical skills and their moral growth could no longer be maintained. The developmental schemas began to decenter and unravel as curricular theory faced the questions of differences along sex, gender, ethnic, mental ability, and linguistic lines. Particularities began to multiply as metatheory began to topple.

Such a meltdown, however, was being recuperated to keep the system afloat at the same time that it appeared to be sinking. Modernist closed metatheories have evolved into postmodernist open metasystems with the same general claim that a comprehensive theory is still possible, but with a caveat attached. The teleological end game of uni-versalistic closed systems that end with a final purpose or final cause have been replaced with temporal open onesthe final cause is unknown. In other words, the stability of a system is now taken to be relative until the next change occurs. One might take Karl Popper's falsifiability thesis as one of the key conceptualizations toward open system thinking. Knowledge remains reliable until it begins to accumulate anomalies and is proven false by an observation or a physical experiment. The step beyond the Popperian gambit is to maintain a heuristic approach to knowledge in each situational domain of science through stochastic analysis. Ilya Prigogine's work on dissipative structures, complex systems, and irreversibility, which identify states of disequilibrium (popularized as chaos theory) and Bruno Latour's actornetwork theory mark further advances in open-systems thought. Metatheory status is thus retained through the neologism of holism rather than the former metaphysical signifier wholism by forwarding the interconnectedness of systems, thereby the topology of spaces (the mapping of things together) has become increasingly important. Surface as opposed to depth is forwarded. Generally speaking, the poststructuralism of open-systems thinking has changed the image of thought concerning science from a set hierarchical order to an order that is more planar and horizontal where any one set of factors holding a particular spacetime configuration in place is likely to change should the dynamics of the system change.

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