Chapter 12: Knowledge and the Curriculum in the Sociology of Education: Towards a Reconceptualization

Politicians tell us that we are (or soon will be) in a “knowledge society” and that more and more jobs require people to be “knowledge workers.” At the same time government policy documents have been remarkably silent about what this knowledge is (DfEE, 1998, 1999). Is it more of the old disciplinary knowledge or is it a new kind of trans-disciplinary knowledge that is more transient and local (Gibbons et al., 1994; Muller, 2000)? Answers to such questions should lie at the heart of the sociology of education, but also are strangely absent there as well (Moore & Muller, 1999; Young, 2000(a), 2000(b)). In this chapter we want to do two things. First we seek to clarify the nature of the problem and second, we shall propose a way ahead for the sociology of education. In developing our argument we will not only be examining the problem of knowledge in the curriculum but also raising some concerns about how the sociology of education has tended to treat the issue of knowledge more generally. We will argue that contemporary trends in the sociology of education make it peculiarly illequipped to meet the curriculum challenge posed by debates about the implications of globalization (Castells, 1996, 1997, 1998) and the massification of post compulsory education (Scott, 2000) of the last decade.