The disciplines of education: Between the ghost and the shadow

Abstract

In their evocatively titled book Haunting the Knowledge Economy, Kenway et al. (2006) ask: How we can learn to live with the ghosts of our past, to think about them, even find ways to ‘converse’ with them and, in doing so, understand where we are and how the future is shaped? Kenway and her colleagues use Dickens to conjure a powerful image, but does that image provide an appropriate metaphor with which to begin a discussion of the contemporary position of the disciplines of education in 2010? In the UK, have they fallen into desuetude, so much so that they are now no more than ghosts? Has the policy context of the last 20 years, that has increasingly come to influence our teaching and the funding of our research with its pressure on the production of knowledge which stresses use value, has this external force squeezed out the power of disciplinary contributions to the study of education? Do the remnants of the past now only live on in the routines of method, not in the analytical strength of disciplines? Does the absence of reference back in much that is published, the absence of conceptual communities or disciplinary-based theorization, do these now mean that the (disciplinary) past is another country? That ‘other country’ we are referring to here is the period of the 1960s to the 1980s which came about as a result of the Robbins Report (1963). The Robbins Report, probably the UK’s last full expression of liberal higher education, saw university education in more than just instrumental terms; knowledge was an end in itself. The subsequent ‘search for degree worthiness’ in teacher-education courses meant that the ‘foundation’ disciplines of philosophy, sociology, psychology and history of education came to the fore,dominating both teacher education and educational research in the UK and much of the English-speaking world. This was the period, albeit relatively short-lived, when, as Bridges (2006) reminds us, the foundation disciplines appeared to offer a secure way forward for education. They offered:a differentiation between different kinds of enquiry [R.S. Peters had recently complained of the current condition of educational theory as ‘undifferentiated mush’]; coherence in terms of internal consistency of any one of these forms and the ‘systematic’ or rigor of enquiry which raised such enquiry above the level of popular or received opinion – the discipline of the discipline.