ABSTRACT
As indicated in the general introduction to this section of the source book, one of the ‘new directions’ taken by the sociology of education during the last decade or so has been the study of educational knowledge, including teachers’ professional knowledge (see pp. 246-50) and knowledge enshrined in curricula. Bernstein has made a major contribution to this study, as he has done to the sociology of language. In his (1981) Perspectives on the Sociology of Education (Routledge and Kegan Paul), Robinson argues that Bernstein’s ‘work on the organization of knowledge is an extension of [his] earlier work and has been running parallel to the language theories since 1964. The essential problem that he addresses is common to both aspects of his work, namely the reproduction of the conditions through which social control is managed, how consciousness is structured by the pattern of class relationships in which the individual is located’. The passage below is taken from an influential paper in which Bernstein makes a number of important conceptual distinctions to aid in the study of curricula as socially organized knowledge. In the paper he distinguishes between curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation, and then (in this extract) goes on to use his concepts of ‘classification’ and ‘framing’ to generate a typology of educational knowledge codes which can be used to conceptualize the curricula of primary or secondary schools. In a later part of the paper (not reproduced here) he speculates on the consequences of the use of these knowledge codes for the exercise of social control and the shaping of children’s consciousness in schools.
