ABSTRACT
The chapters constituting this volume were all originally papers contributed to the Fifth International Basil Bernstein Symposium at Cardiff University, Wales in July 2008. They reflect the continuing vibrancy of the worldwide work that characterises the application of his ideas to educational policy and practice. Their diversity is evident, while their common thread is continuing devotion, noted in earlier volumes, to ‘putting Bernsteinian concepts to work’ (Moore et al., 2006). They could not possibly reflect the complete range of Fifth Symposium presentations but do illustrate how relevant Bernstein’s concerns are in offering insight to our contemporary troubles. More than a third of the papers offered at the symposium concerned aspects of crisis and change in higher education and almost all, in one way or another, addressed issues of identity and consciousness in relation to knowledge formation, transition and acquisition. This is reflected in the structure of this volume where most of this Introduction is devoted to anatomising aspects of Bernstein’s analysis of the origins of the university and its continuity with contemporary shifts from disciplinarity to trainability and in Part II, ‘Shifting cargo: from singulars to regions and generic knowledge forms’, where a series of empirical studies give accounts of changing knowledge structures in university contexts in teacher education in Greece, Engineering, Physics and Anthropology in Iceland, Media Studies and Journalism in South Africa and contrasting occupational preparation in higher education (HE) and Vocational Education and Training (VET) in Australia. These analyses rest foursquare on fundamental questions explored by Bernstein concerning what knowledge is and how it is produced and made available which are taken up by Maton, Muller and Frandji and Vitale, the contributors to Part I, ‘Knowledge and knowers in late modernity’, each focusing upon big, theoretical issues of what is thinkable in any particular era and its relationship to individual and group subjectivities and identities. Each, indicatively, argues for the greater theoretical, empirical and problem-solving power of Bernstein’s work than that of his contemporary Bourdieu. In turn, Part III, ‘Multiply anchored subjectivities’, focuses on elaborating some recent conceptual
developments about pedagogic regulation, consciousness and embodiment that celebrate both the openness of Bernstein’s work to other disciplinary approaches and its anchorage in class inscription. These are illustrated by Lapping’s exploration of his use of Kleinian notions of identity, Evans and others’ claim that modification of his notion of the ‘pedagogic device’ provides new and interesting ways of relating biology and culture and Gamble and Hoadley’s analysis of classroom pedagogic control that, like the work of Morais and her associates, reminds us that the institutionalisation and operation of personal modalities in our schools will not necessarily secure access for all children to vertical knowledge forms. The outstanding characteristics of Bernstein’s vision of pedagogic processes concern their pervasiveness, connectedness and intimacy of relation to social and cultural hierarchy, power and control. He was very fond of saying that while the differences that marked the natural and social worlds were endless sources of fascination, it was the invidious ranking of the crucial categories of class, gender, race, region and religion that underlay our need to understand ‘both the creation, management and legitimation of specialized differences and the creation, management and legitimation of various social inequalities’ through schooling and other social agencies and that this involved ‘analyzing the complex inter-relations between education, stratification, economy and the various principles and arrangements of the State’ (Bernstein, 1981: n.p.). His own view of where the script for doing so should start, ‘even where the plot is not worked out and half the characters are missing’, lay in Durkheim’s representation of the contradictory dynamic ‘of the two discourses upon which the medieval university was founded, that of Christianity and that of Greek thought’ (Bernstein, 1996: 82). In a world where universities are required to service society and demonstrate their functional use, Bernstein’s sociology allows modern anxieties about shifts in conceptions of knowledge from sacred to secular, content to skills and text to hypermedia to be placed within a long historical trajectory. His work on the origins of knowledge in ancient Greek universities and changes in the classification and framing of formal knowledge across eras places the information revolution of late modernity in context. While contemporary educational policy rhetoric calls for a radical rethinking of school and university curricula by conjuring terms such as ‘generic skills’, a historical perspective grounds such debates in issues of subjectivity, learning and the limits to the possibilities for knowing in late modernity. Asking what kind of knowledge is needed for the future raises anxieties; knowing futures is an art that we have not yet mastered (Adam and Groves, 2007). Perhaps, instead, our starting point should be rethinking the question, ‘what is education for?’ Bernstein (2001: 382) points out that education is controlled and increasingly micro-managed by the state. Whereas the last time we had a totally pedagogised society in the medieval period, when the Catholic Church dominated social life, now schools, universities and other statesponsored institutions increasingly serve the needs of government and
remind us not to ‘confuse opportunity with democracy’ (ibid.). Pedagogic panic has masked moral panic and new discourses of pedagogy, ignoring content and focusing only on competencies, risk its reduction to technology and learning becoming completely decontextualised from the rest of acquirers’ life spans. What Bernstein feared most of all was the ‘socially empty’, neo-liberal notion of ‘trainability’ (ibid.: 366), inscribed in ‘life long learning’ rhetoric as ‘creativity and adaptability’ (ibid.: 368), reminding us that the need for pedagogy to be meaningful as well as relevant provides one of our greatest challenges, requiring us to reintroduce issues about content and epistemology into educational debates. In times of weak global and strong pedagogic states we need to look outside formal to informal, adult or popular education ‘outside of the State [where] there’s a possibility for change and initiative’ (ibid.: 382). It is in the interest of pursuing such themes that I now turn in this Introduction to a brief elaboration of Bernstein and other’s views of pedagogic origins, before returning to outline in more detail the nature of the other contributions contained in this volume, where Muller suggests that discussions within education about epistemology have tended to be limited to scientific knowledge, suggesting that we have not yet worked out the full ramifications of Durkheim’s discussion of the Greek curriculum. The humanities constitute the modern Trivium, and can be characterised as disciplines that develop inner consciousness or sensibility. The sciences are disciplines that investigate the outer world, and analyses of the two, involving changes both in knowledge and pedagogy, have not yet been properly conjoined. Even more importantly, what appears to have been left out of current debates and analysis about the purpose of education is the role it plays in the formation of consciousness. In asking what education is for we need to consider social organisation and knowledge more adequately. Knowledge that was produced outside the university in guilds and crafts is attracting increasing attention (e.g. Sennett, 2008) and apprenticeship is being reinvented as the way forward in many education policy documents. In this analysis, early forms of community and institutionalised educational practice, such as existed in monasteries and craft workshops, will be used to explore relationships between curriculum, pedagogy and consciousness that help us to think about knowledge and knowers in late modernity.
