Curriculum Theory in Contestation? American Curriculum, European Didaktik, and Chinese Wisdom Traditions as Hybrid Platforms for Educational Leadership

Abstract

In this chapter, I attempt to theorize and historize the current global education reform movement which the Finnish education policy analyst Pasi Sahlberg (Finnish lessons: What can the world learn from educational change in Finland. Teachers College Press, New York, 2011) has coined the GERM (Global Education Reform Movement), the “virus that is killing education.” The key drivers of that global education movement adopted in Western countries with very few exceptions render the triad of accountability, standardization and privatization as a marker of the corporatization of educational provision. More specifically, I will analyze the intellectual history of neoliberal ideology, its complicit academic contributions in instrumental curriculum theory and educational psychology with its historical succession of theories from behaviourist psychology to cognitive and learning theories. In this sense, William Doll’s (1993) recognition of the Tyler Rationale’s (Basic principles of curriculum and instruction. Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1949) intellectual affinity to Descartes’s Method as a core of modernization is not incidental. Descartes’ s curriculum theory overtly co-equalizes between knowledge and ethics, but actually subordinates ethics to instrumental science and knowledge. Descartes’ s initiatives led to the modernist stratagem where ethics seeks its refuge in the self-referentiality of logocentric Reason and, by implication, seeks to legitimate the moral supremacy of instrumental mode of rationality in human activities: the good in terms of instrumentality is the moral interior of the logocentric reason; hence there is no proper reason to question the validity and legitimacy of instrumental rationality. Simultaneously and significantly, the logocentric subject provides the hidden place and source of colonialism and exploitation. Finally, this chapter considers non-Western perspectives on curriculum in China.