In the course Of a wide-ranging discussion, Zellynne Jennings-Wray suggests that "Hirst's philosophy of the curriculum should be considered irrelevant for curriculum planning in Jamaica" (Jennings-Wray 1978, p.3). While this is not her major pre-occupation, and while she also admits that Hirst's proposals stem from concerns which are to be found in the Jamaican Five Year Education Plan, and its attempt to implement 'Total Education', it is one that deserves, I think, a little further consideration, as indeed does her conception of Total Education.
Briefly, Hirst's philosophy of the curriculum explicitly involves three major components:
A few remarks may be in order to flesh out this skeleton. I shall take up later some of the problems involved with the evaluation; at the moment we should only note that Hirst assumes that education is, or should be, the main business of schools. Jennings-Wray appears to concur - indeed otherwise the point of her discussions, directed as they are at school curriculum planners and operators, would seem to be lost. But we should be clear that we are making this assumption or these assumptions. The factual claim that education, conceived as initiation into something intrinsically worthwhile, is the main business of schools is certainly not obviously true; and the evaluation that it should be is also one that does not necessarily recommend itself to hard-pressed bureaucrats, however short-sighted we may, and possibly correctly, think them to be. Jennings-Wray acknowledges a discrepancy "between our educational intentions and our educational practices" (ibid., p. 4); I would suggest that part of this frustrating conflict arises from supposing that our high-minded aims are indeed the social functions of the school system as a whole.
Hirst's views of the mind, of knowledge, meaning, and truth, seem to me radically misguided, but it would take us too far into general philosophy to substantiate these claims. But we should note that Hirst thinks that every meaningful use of language belongs to one or other of his forms of knowledge - knowledge because he mistakenly thinks that there is a very close link between meaningfulness and the making of verifiable (and a certain number of verified) statements (Hirst, 1974, chs. 5 & 6). It is important then not to confuse Hirst's "forms" with the subjects or disciplines we find around us, though he thinks that some of these disciplines are indeed intended to explore one, and only one, form of knowledge. (Perhaps the clearest statement of his position here occurs in an important debate with Elliott and Langford in Brown (1975).) In any case, even if one rejects Hirst's foundations, his curricular proposals have a considerable life of their own in as much as most of the ways of thinking he picks upon, especially in their developed, disciplined forms, are clearly central to any conception we can form of sophisticated full and rich human lives.
These few remarks allow us to see that some of Jennings-Wray's reasons for dismissing Hirst's relevance are insufficient as they stand. She tells us he is élitist; but his theory at least is not. Hirst's view is that the common-sense which is the general possession of all children by the end of primary schooling (mentally retarded children are an exception on most educational theories) is an amalgam of most, if not all, the forms - undeveloped, implicit, it is true, but there for all that. (Hirst thinks philosophy is a separate form of knowledge, and it is perhaps the only one that many children's common-sense might miss out on, though even this is by no means obvious on Hirst's own terms.) There may be a problem here for Hirst in that he does of course wish children to go on to study the various forms in their more developed guises, and here Jennings-Wray's claim begins to look plausible since many children are regarded as incapable of proceeding to this level. It is open to Hirst, though I do not know of him availing himself of the opportunity, to claim that this pessimism is mistaken - a function of the other, non-educational, aims of the school system, a self-fulfilling prophecy, or whatever.
I think Hirst's problem arises here from an ambivalence between the development of mind and the development of self-conscious, reflective, mind analogous to the tendency towards second-order, philosophical, studies that others (especially Warnock, 1977) have detected in Hirst's approach, despite his own disclaimers. But self-consciousness, or even philosophy, is not necessarily élitist. And Hirst's egalitarian commitments are pretty clear in another passage that Jennings-Wray herself quotes where Hirst urges that to leave out part of his programme for some pupils would be denying them some of the essential tools for rational thought. We have after all no reason to suppose egalitarianism is going to be an easy policy to implement.
Jennings-Wray also claims that Hirst's account is "reactionary in that he is anti-integration and advocates the retention of a subject-centred curriculum" (op. cit., p. 3). But he doesn't. Hirst bends over backwards to accommodate the advocates of 'integrated' studies (Hirst, 1974, ch. 9). Apart from dismissing the palpable nonsense sometimes urged by such modernists, Hirst's main requirement is that somehow each child should come to grasp the ways of thinking characteristic of each of the forms. It is not necessary to do this by teaching traditional subjects, though this might be the most efficient method, all things considered, especially when you address yourself to the cumulative, hierarchical nature of the logical relations between concepts in a form of knowledge. To illustrate, one might organize a project on ganja, say, in which the physical sciences come in through a look at the way chemicals are distributed around the body, and at what little we know of the neurophysiology of hallucinogens; religion through considering the ritual use of hallucinogens and the varieties of mystical and quasi-mystical experiences; literature through various poems and songs inspired by, or about, cannabis and other drugs; philosophy through looking at what cognitive status we should give to the experiences examined under religion; moral knowledge by examining the moral propriety of legally enforcing a person's 'best interests', or even matters of taste; knowledge of persons by looking at the curious patterns of legislation on drugs and similar substances and the motivations of interest groups; mathematics finally in practical work to discover how many plants will yield how much cannabis resin. However much you integrate or cross disciplines, Hirst's concern is that at the end of it people have used the various forms of thought correctly and without confusing them - so that they don't condemn Kubla Khan as a poem because they think opium an evil, or think that a law is morally acceptable just because it is a law. Hirst's doubt about the efficiency of breaking away from traditional subjects arises when you ask yourself how, in a series of such projects, students are going to find the time to master enough chemistry, epistemology, comparative religion, etc. for the above project to enlarge their understanding. But of course serious integrationists have always recognised that their approach was more difficult and needed more thorough planning than the traditional subject approach. The principle Hirst employs - that if a man will be deficient in rationality unless we teach him X, then we ought to teach him X somehow - seems quite reasonable. My quarrel is not with this principle but with Hirst's working out of its implications in the light of his mistaken views about where knowledge, and significantly different ways of thinking, are to be found.
Jennings-Wray's third objection is that Hirst concentrates exclusively upon an academic orientation. This is, I think, correct, and stems from the waverings I have already mentioned between consciousness and reflective self-consciousness, first and second order thinking, and Hirst's difficulty in holding consistently to his curious fundamental theories. His official line is that all intelligent action and perception involve the forms of knowledge, so making or repairing a model engine, or baking a cake, is just as much an exercise in 'physical science' as playing at theoretical chemistry; but the pressures of everyday thinking drive him to consider only the latter. It is clear that we need a more delicate classification that allows for practical subjects without their associated theory. While this is so, Hirst's error is not to be blamed on Plato, as Jennings-Wray suggests. The quotation concerning the right use of reason that she cites from Hirst occurs in a description of a Greek view that he explicitly repudiates (Hirst, 1974, p. 31, with which compare p. 33). Hirst's own preferred way of talking, about an unanalyzed "experience", does not appear to me to be much of an improvement on the metaphysical Platonic view he rejects, especially since it prevents him from achieving a clear grasp of the difference between our knowing and that which we have knowledge of (or at least, well-supported conjectures about), and thus a grasp of "simple truth" (Mackie, 1973, ch. 2). But Hirst's over-intellectualising, like the rest of his obfuscatory fundamental theory, owes most to his view of the later Wittgenstein. and Hamlyn's interpretation of that modern master.
But while Jennings-Wray thus criticizes Hirst, she says that in the context of Total Education the criteria we should use to assess the worth of any proposed subject or discipline are what it contributes to man's understanding of reality, how well it satisfies "societal needs", and what it does for our spiritual, i.e. intellectual, moral, and aesthetic, satisfaction. (I trust "religious" was omitted by design, though then "spiritual" would not have been a very happy choice.) Apart from the middle one, the ritual invocation of social needs, these criteria seem implicit in Hirst's programme, as he understands it. If this is so, and if, as I have argued, her specific objections to Hirst are largely mistaken, we can hardly agree that the man is irrelevant to Jamaican curriculum planning. Mistaken he may be, and mistaken for 'deep' philosophical reasons, but his concerns, his proposals, are clearly relevant to what Jennings-Wray thinks Total Education is all about; her arguments should not divert us from the demanding task of criticizing Hirst's fundamental theory.
It would be pleasant, even if rather pedantically boring, to conclude now with the claim that Hirst is more relevant to planning for Total Education than Jennings-Wray allows. But without withdrawing anything I have said so far, this conclusion is not as secure as one might wish; and this because it is not clear that planning for Total Education, as Jennings-Wray characterizes it, is a determinate activity.
Jennings-Wray herself notes that to be told that a totally educated person is "optimally rounded" tells us nothing (though it might suggest some hilarious irrelevancies); it replaces one indeterminacy with another. But how do we learn anything from the further characterizations she gives - "productive, creative and an involved member of the society"? Only by introducing, under cover, a lot of evaluations (i.e. preferences) which we have or know to be wide-spread among certain sections of the society in question. In this way, we give a content to the almost vacuous starting-point, but only in a manner calculated to avoid asking and answering the serious evaluative questions. This sleight of mind gives a false sense of security in an evaluative consensus that may well not exist, and that anyway should not be allowed to exist unexamined by anyone with the Socratic allegiances.
One of my major worries about the theory of curriculum planning is that whereas it should make explicit the structure of educational decisions it gives carte blanche to the pervasive disinclination to face values. We can see this in Hirst's own preference for the development of mind, which Jennings-Wray thinks will be encompassed by Total Education. People tend to accept that development, of mind, or of anything else, is a good thing; but a moment's thought would disabuse them. It is not really development that is prized; it is the thing that is developing in a particular direction, and what that direction offers that matters. If a good percentage of human minds developed into sadistic, megalomaniacal psychopaths, we might begin to notice what is going on in our unthinking endorsement of the development of mind. Hirst and other curriculum planners are not alone in failing to make their values explicit, or even to notice them - as Bernard Williams shows, even Aristotle overlooked "the moral ambiguity of distinctively human characteristics" (Williams, 1973, p. 73). Still, we are meant to learn from the errors of great men, not perpetuate them.
It would be tiresome to show that similar considerations invalidate several other of Jennings-Wray's glosses on Total Education - a healthy self-image; self-confident and disciplined; and so on. We might ask, for instance, what is to be understood by responsible and free participation in democratic processes. Suppose in a moderately enlightened industry that the management allow the workers to elect their foremen. Suppose further that the management divide possible candidates into different groups and have a rule that candidates will only be accepted from the lower groups if no-one from the top group has been nominated. What does Jennings-Wray's totally educated young man do, if he is unfortunate enough to find himself on the shop-floor? Does he go along with this sort of democratic process, since it is what he finds invested with all the authority of hallowed tradition; or does he reject it as an insulting affront, a barefaced rejection of all that democracy stands for? Jennings-Wray doesn't tell us, so everyone can agree on a series of English noises and prolong confusion. It might effectively clear many minds of cant if it were recognized that these and similar arms are shot through with unacknowledged values.
A different but usually equally hidden appeal to values occurs in the talk of needs, both social and individual, that seem to be the main further addition to a Hirstian conception that Total Education brings with it. I have elsewhere (1980) attempted to elucidate the logical structure of this part of our language and thought, to show how claims about needs can be both factual and yet insinuate evaluations. (Most of the tools for understanding the logical structure of needs can be found in Woods and Barrow (1975, pp. 117-22) and White (1975. ch. 8).) The main way I examined them was through the omission of what things are needed for. English allows us to say "I need a drink" or "young children need affection" without having to specify what these things are necessary for. But it is only when we put some end in hem that we can investigate whether in fact a drink or affection or whatever is really needed. The complete English sentence conveys only an incomplete, indeterminate thought. But talk of needs in general can be elliptical in the opposite way - we can talk grammatically about social or spiritual needs without having to think how we have to set about satisfying them. (In fact, this sort of talk allows us not to think very clearly about the goals either.) What I wish to emphasize now is that one of the many functions performed by these various ways of avoiding specificity is that of making it more difficult to spot inconsistency. When you don't explicitly say that you want X, or that we need something for Y, it may be harder to we that you also want not-X or need something for not-Y. Society's needs may seem compatible with a man's spiritual satisfaction, but when we get down to brass tacks there may be much less scope for confidence. To return to a point I suggested earlier, this disinclination to spell out the complex structure of thought, to specify the items that actually carry the burden of justifying the evaluations made, also permits, perhaps even encourages, the facile assumption that the aims of the different people and groups involved in and affected by the school system are neatly consistent. Jennings-Wray's elaborate structures for participation hardly allow for the possibility that there may be deeply rooted conflicts between the values pursued on the one hand by teachers and those of ministerial planners on the other, not to mention those of pupils or their parents: the possibility, that is, that I suggested helps to account for the sad discrepancy between professed and actual outcome that she mentions.
I have illustrated various ways in which our ordinary concepts allow us to slur over the complex structure of our thought, and in particular to push values out of sight. But we cannot think about schooling, about teaching, or about what we would like to see happening in schools, without employing values. Blurring the issues as we commonly do, we can find ourselves in rather curious situations; Jennings-Wray, and here I think she has Mary Warnock on her side too, tells us that there is a social need for people not to see work "as something which alienates but rather as the creative and dignified endeavour that it is" (op. cit., p. 3). Where? In what society is work in general a creative and dignified endeavour? Is it the society that pays for schools whose aspirations are so lamentably out of line with their products? Jennings-Wray hopes that democratic participation will diminish this disparity. It seems to me more likely that no society we can find in history can afford (in both the senses of this word that strike me) a school system that offers even an approximation to universal Total Education - how would it cope with a whole cohort of creative, questioning, participating, unalienated individuals (at least with the specific content that I choose to slip into these terms)? But it is only when we specify this content that we can see whether a discussion of needs or whatever is a discussion of practical politics or utopian phantasy.
BRANDON, E.P., (1980), "O Reason not the Need" Education for Development, Vol.6, no. 1, April 1980, pp. 18-25.
BROWN, S.C., (1975), Philosophers Discuss Education (London: MacMillan.)
HIRST, Paul H., (1974), Knowledge and the Curriculum (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.)
JENNINGS-WRAY, Zellynne, (1978), "Total Education and the 'Total' Curriculum: some philosophical and conceptual considerations", CARSEA Journal, Vol.3, no.1, March 1978, pp. 1-8.
MACKIE, J.L, (1973), Truth, Probability, and Paradox (Oxford: Clarendon Press.)
WARNOCK, Mary, (1977), Schools of Thought (London: Faber.)
WHITE, Alan R., (1975), Modal Thinking (Oxford: Blackwell.)
WILLIAMS, Bernard, (1973) Morality (Harmondsworth: Penguin.)
WOODS, R.G. & BARROW, R. St. C., (1975), An Introduction to Philosophy of Education (London: Methuen.)
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