Official Knowledge

Official knowledge is the explicit academic content that students are intended to learn and the often-implicit social content that both lies within and contextualizes academic content. Because of its particular blend of academic, social, explicit, and implicit knowledge, official knowledge shares its borders with at least the following three central aspects of curriculum studies: (1) hidden curriculum, (2) formal curriculum, and (3) institutionalized text perspectives. This entry focuses on questions of knowledge and its reproduction through the processes of schooling.

Over 130 years ago, Herbert Spencer wondered what knowledge is of most worth, a question that has served as a touchstone for inquiry about the content teachers deliver and students learn in schools. Official knowledge can be understood as a given society or culture's responses to this question. The field of curriculum studies understands knowledge to be socially constructed. Because official knowledge represents the academic content that those with the power to decide what successive generations of a society should come to understand as important, official knowledge embodies dominant norms and values.

Concerns about dominant norms and values fall into two categories. On one hand are concerns about the ways in which dominant ideas and ideals reify existing sociocultural and socioeconomic categories in their own image. Through this process, people (in this case, students) who most resemble those in power have the greatest likelihood of finding their ways of being and knowing represented in school. On the other hand are the ways in which dominant norms and values reproduce particular constructions of knowledge. As with all standardized versions of knowledge, it is not simply the categories around and through which students come to know about their worlds, it is the content itself.

Michael W. Apple's Official Knowledge: Democratic Education in a Conservative Age is perhaps the most well-known work in curriculum studies on this topic. Apple shares with many curriculum scholars an understanding of curriculum and knowledge as a social construction. From this perspective, knowledge and curriculum are decisions about what “counts” as important information from myriad possibilities, a selective tradition rather than a listing of infallible truths or facts. In this text, Apple traces how a coalition of not necessarily commensurate conservative groups have worked at realigning what education reform means, who is responsible for current educational failures, and the solutions for such educational failures that their reforms provide.

Central to Apple's argument is an understanding of changes in how equity is conceived by this coalition. Instead of being seen as related to oppression and marginalization of groups, equity is constructed as a need to guarantee individual's rights within a social, economic, and educational free market. Through this lens, educational problems are recast as individual shortcomings without regard to the sociocultural, economic, or other contexts that affect the knowledge students receive in schools.

Solutions for such shortcomings are often provided through a seemingly contradictory motion of tightening what knowledge means and how it is measured while increasing the private (business) sector's access to children in schools and the construction of what knowledge means for students. This pincer-like motion has created the space for ideas such as school vouchers where parents can use public monies to send their children to private schools; standardized assessments that create a mask of objectivity through which nonmajority populations are constantly measured as intellectually deficient; and multiple points of entrée for business into schooling. Apple argues that such movements are possible because they resonate with U.S. common-sense understandings of schooling and the ideas that have in many ways often been present throughout the history of education in the United States.

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