ABSTRACT

If we agree that education is concerned with the transmission of knowledge (broadly defined), then a common culture curriculum must be primarily concerned with public forms of knowledge, or knowledge which can be made generally available by means of established disciplines. Whether we use the term ‘forms of knowledge’ or ‘disciplines’ or ‘realms of meaning’ may have some implications for how knowledge is structured and organized within the school, but the differences in practice are likely to be small. The real point to be established is that the organization of the school curriculum must be expressed within some kind of convention or framework which is reasonably clear and unambiguous. As Stenhouse (1970) has pointed out, one advantage of discussing curriculum in terms of disciplines is that identifiable standards are built into the structure, thus avoiding the need for the search for detailed and specific objectives which tend to be unworkable and unrealistic. A discipline can be thought of not only in terms of the kind of knowledge covered, but also in terms of the methods and rules of procedure regarded as valid by the practitioners—the ‘community of scholars’. Thus, for example, it might be argued that an English teacher does not need a detailed list of objectives to be attained at the end of a term's work on Hamlet: he will be able to judge success and failure, or ‘good’ and ‘bad’ work, according to standards accepted by those who have made a study of literature. Standards will differ from discipline to discipline and in some cases may stress the content as much as the methods.