Political Research

Education is not a neutral, technical activity. Rather, as an act of influence, it must be seen as an ethical and political act. To understand this, we need to think relationally. That is, understanding education in general and curriculum studies in particular requires that we situate them back into both the unequal relations of power in the larger society and the relations of dominance and subordinationand the conflictsthat are generated by these relations. Thus, rather than simply asking whether students have mastered a particular subject matter and have done well on our all too common tests, we should ask a different set of questions: Whose knowledge is this? How did it become “official”? What is the relationship between this knowledge and who has cultural, social, and economic capital in this society? Who benefits from these definitions of legitimate knowledge and who does not? What can we do as critical educators to change existing educational and social inequalities and to create curricula and teaching that are more socially just? These kinds of questions are not new. They have a very long tradition in education and are connected to a question that was put so clearly in the United States by radical educator George Counts when he asked, “Dare the school build a new social order?”

One of the most important steps in taking these questions seriously is to engage in what has been called in cultural theory an act of “repositioning.” Thus, the framework politically and educationally progressive educators have employed in essence says that the best way to understand what any set of institutions, policies, and practices does is to see it from the standpoint of those who have the least power. Seeing the world from the standpoint of the dispossessed asks that we also rigorously scrutinize the ways in which all of our dominant institutions function, including schools. Although this may be discomforting, it is a crucial step if we are to move forward in understanding the politics of curriculum and the entire schooling process. It also redefines the role of the critical scholar as someone who is an organic intellectual that is, someone whose work in meant to support the struggles of the dispossessed.

In terms of the curriculum, this act of repositioning has significant implications. The curriculum is itself part of what has been called a selective tradition. That is, from that vast universe of possible knowledge, only some knowledge gets to be “official knowledge,” gets to be declared “legitimate,” as opposed to simply being “popular culture.” There is a strong, but exceedingly complex, relationship between a group's social and cultural power and its ability to set the terms of curriculum debates and to have its values, culture, and histories seen as the backdrop against which all other values, culture, and knowledge are to be measured. The results of this are not preordained, however. The curriculum is always the result of constant struggle and compromise. But this is not a level playing field; differential cultural and economic capital does count.

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