Chapter 5: Can the Arbitrary and the Necessary Be Reconciled?: Scientific Realism and the School Curriculum¹

Questions about what counts as knowledge, and who should have access to knowledge, have been correctly placed at the center of contemporary studies in the sociology of the curriculum. McEneany and Meyer (2000), noting the tension that exists between theories that emphasize the allocation function of the educational system and those that focus on its construction of citizens able to participate in society, are conscious of the mechanism by which the “allocational” (reproductive) agency of the school is achieved. The reproductive thesis maintains, they remark, “that the implicit knowledge carried in the system is consistent only with the arbitrary culture of higher status groups, so that lower status students are disadvantaged” (McEneany & Meyer, 2000, p. 190). This theme, that of the once “new” sociology of education (Young, 1971), has been worked through with some thoroughness in the last 30 years. There may, nevertheless, be work that remains to be done. In fact, there may be the rather troublesome task of undoing some of the things that have been done. This provocative remark demands an explanation. That knowledge is “socially constructed” (and in some usually ill-defined sense not therefore to be accepted as a true account of reality); that knowledge is necessarily an arbitrary social product; and that school knowledge has the symbolic power to maintain relations of social domination, has become the conventional wisdom of an entire movement. When Bourdieu and Passeron (1977, p. 5) declared that, “[a]ll pedagogic action (PA) is, objectively, symbolic violence insofar as it is the imposition of a cultural arbitrary by an arbitrary power,” they issued what quickly became the manifesto of a generation. This thesis has placed the sociology of the curriculum at the heart of the sociology of education: if social and cultural reproduction is effected through such mechanisms, then questions about the nature of knowledge and the world become ones of general concern. The enquiries of curriculum specialists assume a broader dimension of relevance and become exposed to critique from outside the established confines of their field. This article may be regarded as such a critique: what may have to be undone is the assumption that the school curriculum is, necessarily and inevitably, adequately characterised as an expression of the cultural arbitrary. This is not to dispute the claim, indeed, allow it as fact, that the school is engaged in forms of symbolic violence, that it has a reproductive effect, and so on, but it is to assert the realist case that accurate knowledge of the world can be obtained and should constitute a non-arbitrary element of the school curriculum. The status of realism as a philosophy of science will be outlined in its place and it will suffice at this point to note that the discussion will be based on the premises of realism.