Abstract
This is a response to two discussions of my article 'The Weakness of "Powerful Knowledge"' featuring in 2018 in the London Review of Education 16 (2), the first by Johan Muller and Michael Young and the second by Jim Hordern. It also makes brief comments on pieces on powerful knowledge in the London Review of Education Special Issue 16 (3). The question I focus on here, as in 2018, is 'What is powerful knowledge?' I raise doubts about Muller and Young's new answer to this question as well as about Hordern's defence of Young's position more generally. I suggest in conclusion that it would be helpful to abandon the term 'powerful knowledge' and use language more suitable to impartial scholarly investigations.
Highlights
This is a response to two discussions of my article ‘The Weakness of “Powerful Knowledge”’ featuring in 2018 in the London Review of Education 16 (2), the first by Johan Muller and Michael Young and the second by Jim Hordern
I look at the two major replies in turn, considering points arising from the London Review of Education Special Issue as I go
This knowledge is said to be found in school subjects such as maths, science, history, geography, English and the arts, given that they are taught according to the canons of their parent disciplines as studied in higher education, for instance, and reinforced by school subject associations
Summary
Muller and Young have views on how school subjects should be taught, about progression within subjects. The reason why I focused on the epistemological feature of PK ‘to do with bodies of knowledge built around their own, sui generis systems of interrelated concepts’ is that my concern in that 2018 article – as in this one – was to explore how far Young and his colleagues have good reasons to use the term ‘powerful’ to label the knowledge taught and acquired in a range of school subjects. Unless Young’s and others’ use of the phrase in their academic arguments is solidly based – that is, gives us clear and telling reasons why a certain sort of knowledge is rightly to be called ‘powerful’ – we should conclude that academia itself, not the world of school policy, is the home of the term’s use in a non-rational, emotive way – that is, a way that suggests but does not show that something is desirable This is true above all of writings by Young and his colleagues. Even though some of these pieces raise difficulties, about, for instance, Young’s ‘distinction between curriculum and pedagogy’ (Gericke et al, 2018), or as I have already mentioned, his alleged view of ‘knowledge as being an end in itself, rather than as a means to some larger purpose of education’ (Deng, 2018), none of them, as far as I can see, is unwilling to use the term PK in their positive curriculum proposals
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