ABSTRACT
The symbolic curriculum of the Tyler Rationale as a model of social world rested ultimately on the presumption of infallible scientific method and perfectly exact language. The univocal source of authority in this approach has been left intact in most recent productions of the reified and commodified images of curriculum discourse. The apparent inability of this logic to face the complexity of education and the subsequent challenge to conceive curriculum discourse across sweeping revisions, fragmentations, and ruptures in aesthetics, ethics, politics, science, and in the notions of subjectivity have been convincingly mapped in the magnum opus of the reconceptualized field, Understanding Curriculum, by Pinar and associates (1995). Here, a brief and preliminary account will be given as a kind of second round of the still ongoing modernity-postmodernity debate focused particularly on the critique of curricular instrumentalism raised in the Understanding Curriculum. This account may be useful in featuring, in an albeit sketchy and summary way, the historical roots of instrumental curriculum discourse first imbued with moral concerns (Descartes), subsequently embodied as ‘sheer’ instrumentality as a response to “the needs of society” (as in the reception of the Tyler Rationale). Most recently, in the context of late (Giddens, 1991), second (Beck, 1994) or
postmodernity, performativity as a simulation even of instrumentality has emerged as our grasp of “the needs of society” in terms of totality and homogeneity has been lost. Literally, and not only ironically, the idea of progress in terms of performativity would have been transformed to the notion of delivering outputs at the lowest cost. Specifically, the suggestions of Jean Baudrillard and Niklas Luhmann refer to the transition in science whereby “ ‘performativity’ rather than ‘truth’ has become the criterion of scientific knowledge” (Crook et al., 1992, p. 216).
