24 Curriculum, Classroom as a Reflection of Society

Shalini Suryanarayana

Curriculum, Classroom as a Reflection of Society

The classroom should be an entrance into the world, not an escape from it.

-John Ciardi

Introduction

A lot of times it is popular to blame the educational system for the general decline in moral values and standards in society. It is also quite convenient to do so. After all it is the ‘job’ of education to socialize the young into all that is held desirable by a given society at any given point of time. Each generation therefore passes on the burden of reproach to the coming generations lamenting the general malaise that has gripped the present, while invoking the glorious past and expressing anxiety over the future. In this module, we set out to examine the validity of such a posture. The module articulates the location of education within the totality of the social matrix and uncovers the incapacity of the systems of education embedded as they are in the social setting to which they belong, to insulate themselves from the wider world and institute transformative changes by themselves.

Durkheim and Education as a Social Fact

Classical sociologist and in several senses the real father of the academic discipline of sociology, Emile Durkheim, was someone who was deeply concerned with the problem of order and solidarity in society. In the course of this concern Durkheim too was confronted by this eternal question – do we blame the educational system for the ills plaguing society? In his search for the understanding of “social facts”, in his classic work, The Suicide, Durkheim has written that it is incorrect to ascribe causation to education. It would do well to quote Durkheim here:

But this is to ascribe to education a power it lacks. It is only the image and reflection of society. It imitates and reproduces the latter in abbreviated form; it does not create it. Education is healthy when peoples themselves are in a healthy state; but it becomes corrupt with them, being unable to modify itself. If the moral environment is affected, since the teachers themselves dwell in it they cannot avoid being influenced; how then should they impress on their pupils a different orientation from what they have received? Each new generation is reared by its predecessor; the latter must therefore improve in order to improve its successor. The movement is circular. It may well happen that at great intervals a person emerges whose ideas and aspirations go beyond those of his fellows; but isolated individuals are not enough to remake the moral constitution of peoples. Of course, we enjoy believing that an eloquent voice is enough to transform magically the material of society; but here as elsewhere nothing comes from nothing. The strongest wills cannot elicit non-existent forces from nothingness and the shocks of experience constantly dissipate these facile illusions. Besides, even though through some incomprehensible miracle a pedagogical system were constituted in opposition to the social system, this very antagonism would rob it of all effect. If the collective organization whence comes the moral state it is desired to combat, is intact, the child is bound to feel its effect from the moment he first has contact with it. The school’s artificial environment can protect him only briefly and weakly. To the extent that real life increasingly takes possession of him, it will come to destroy the work of the teacher. Education, therefore, can be reformed only if society itself is reformed. To do that, the evil from which it suffers must be attacked at its sources.

Emile Durkheim, Le Suicide (1897/2005:340)

Thus as far back as in the 19th century Emile Durkheim had rejected the romanticised notion of social engineering through the educational system. Indeed, Durkheim upheld that education is but “only the image and reflection of society”. In fact as the above quotation shows, Durkheim went on to say that education “can be reformed only if society itself is reformed” as like a mirror it only reflects and imitates, and eventually reproduces society. In other words education and its institutions such as the school, university, classrooms and curriculums are all social facts. They exist in society and are a reflection of society. Because they are social facts they cannot be the cause for society; rather it is the reverse that is true.

This is in no sense to undermine the coercive power of education which it possesses as a social fact but to iterate that such power does not exist sui generis – it is a power vested on education by the collectivity or in Durkheimian terms by the collective conscience. According to Durkheim, every society in order to exist as a coherent whole requires that there be a sufficient amount of homogeneity. This is attained by standardizing knowledge and pedagogy; by making classrooms and curricula. Through education, the ‘individual being’ is turned into a ‘social being’. In simple societies, this homogeneity is accomplished by the collective conscience, that is the set of beliefs held in common by the members of a society; in complex societies characterised by increasing diversity and occupational specialisation, this solidarity is generated by division of labour. To the former, Durkheim calls mechanical solidarity while the latter much more dynamic form of solidarity is organic solidarity. The curricula and the school system cater to the ever increasing needs of the social division of labour and thereby contribute to the maintenance of organic solidarity. Schools are confronted with the same paradox of organic solidarity, which is to reconcile the desire for individuation with an increasing dependence upon society.

In schools this emerges as the dilemma between inculcating discipline and independence at the same time. Schools accomplish this through the structures such as curriculum and classrooms, and personnel such as teachers and administrators. According to John Kerr, a curriculum is all the learning which is planned and guided by the school, whether it is carried on in groups or individually, inside or outside the school. A classroom is the designated space where a curriculum is enacted. Sometimes specific classrooms are assigned specific curricula. Thus schools, classroom organisation and the structure of the curriculum are for the main, instruments of perpetuating the social order. These organisations cannot be blamed for perpetuating inequality by preparing members ready to occupy the hierarchical positions in a highly differentiated labour force; they do so because of the demands of society and not vice versa. Education only fulfils the requirements of the wider society.

Marxist Perspective

Even Marxist sociologists such as Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis who have made a scathing attack on the modern school system concede this point. Bowles and Gintis (1976) have shown that there is a correspondence between the school system and overall system of stratification in society. According to Bowles and Gintis, schools act to furnish the economy with a labour force equipped with the necessary skills and appropriate personalities and attitudes. Schools become the instruments of production of a submissive, obedient and disciplined workforce. This is a ‘hidden’ function of schooling because it is contrary to the professed ideology of schooling, in which the school is viewed as a device to promote social reform and social mobility. The ‘hidden curriculum’ operates through a ‘ correspondence’ between the structure of schooling and the economic system. The nature of work and social relations fostered in the educational system mirror those in capitalist society. For example, students have to obey orders; they have no control over the curriculum, and as such gain little intrinsic satisfaction from school work. According to Bowles and Gintis, these conditions mirror students’ future positions in the workforce as there too the alienated worker has no control over work and experiences little intrinsic satisfaction. We live in a society where “those who do not fit in are shunned”. The school as an element of the superstructure only assumes the form that the economic infrastructure dictates and as such is only a mechanism for the reproduction of the existing social relations of production.

Everyday Understandings

Somewhere the average individual is also aware of this. The school is but a microcosm of the wider society. In a multicultural society the classroom also becomes multicultural. There is a great deal of diversity among students. Each student enters the classroom with his or her own cultural capital. The standardised curriculum and pattern of teaching seek to minimise these differences and turn out citizens ready to occupy their achieved occupational statuses of the future. Prudent parents therefore invest a lot of thought and time in the selection of schools. One important criterion other than the academic reputation of the school is the kind of students that the school is reported to attract. Some schools tend to get more students from middle class families and children of salaried professionals, some get children from working class backgrounds and so on. In the United States of America for instance, where there is the concept of public schooling through neighbourhood schools, people choose their neighbourhoods with care. They do not want their children to be lumped with others in a neighbourhood with a higher population of ‘other’ ethnic groups, delinquents or known criminal offenders. There is a tacit system of neighbourhood segregation that remains in practice through a number of criteria such as race, ethnicity, level of affluence of residents, etc., or a combination thereof.

Therefore educational institutions are as good as the society is. In our society success is measured through economic gains and people parade their success through ostentation. Meritocracy induces competition and those who do not perform well are considered failures. Parents also encourage children to be highly competitive for such is the way of the world. Among the Indian middle class, putting school children through coaching classes or having home tutors is almost a norm. In the same way that there is inequality in society there is also inequality in the classroom. Students are ranked according to their performance. Sanctions in the form of rewards and punishments operate in the same way that social control does in wider society. So a child who does not wear his uniform right, or forgets to do his homework, who does not remember information, who talks in class when asked to be silent, who fails in the examination, is punished with various categories of penalties. By the time a child moves up from one class to the next and finally comes out of school he starts believing that this system of sanctions and inequality is the natural order of things. According to Kohn (1999), to legitimize the way society is organized, its schools teach competitive behaviour and social inequality as if they were fundamental law of nature. Just as with the economy, some are rewarded in school, others are punished, and both groups are taught that rewards and punishment are the result of their own efforts (Kohn, 1999) . Each time a child is punished he also learns to take responsibility for his actions. Eventually when he is unable to keep pace in society, he would as an individual take responsibility for his lack of success attributing it to his own shortcomings.

Reforming Education – Reform Society?

Sometimes we see media reports about violence in classrooms, of children carrying weapons to school or bullying other children. The general reaction to all this is to lay blame on the declining standards of teaching, lack of adequate supervision, nuclearisation of families, leaving children to day care, and a host of such reasons. Somehow all these observations are based on the premise that all is well with society and it is the school system (or the family) which is predominantly to blame. So teachers’ behaviour in classrooms, teaching methods used, the nature of the curriculum, even the organisation of space in the classroom, the nature of seating available for children, teacher-student ratio, everything comes for close scrutiny and the harshest criticism. People at large and even the media are found bemoaning the declining quality of teaching commensurate with the increasing complexity of the nature of knowledge. But as Durkheim would tell us, all these ills are only a reflection of the general anomie in society.

Mass media itself thrives on violent imagery. The spread of internet technologies has removed any kind of censorship on the access to images and information. Citizens, children included, are subjected to a bombardment of external stimuli from various sources. These get reflected in classroom behaviours.

The other side of the picture is also simultaneously altering. There was a time when harsh punishments used to be meted out to school children. Some school masters were known to be extremely strict and ‘ caning’ was a common punishment. There was a popular saying, “spare the rod and spoil the child”, referring to the merits of abusive punishments. Students would be made to stand in or outside classroom for hours, sometimes atop their benches; sometimes they were made to run several laps in the sports grounds in the worst of weather, or do push ups or be subjected other such physically exhausting and painful, psychologically humiliating and extremely traumatic punishments.

With the coming of democracy and the upsurge of civil society there has been considerable democratisation in the disciplinary regime of schools. Most schools are strict in their policy about the kind of punishments that are allowed and hitting children or other forms of physical punishments are completely outlawed. Furthermore, children are often given the ‘choice’ to pick themes for projects and other co-curricular activities within the ambit of their specific curriculum. Students are encouraged to participate in sports, dramatics, music, fine arts and other hobbies. Classroom sessions are increasingly becoming more interactive even in junior classes. The use of computers and overhead projectors and other technology has enabled stimulating exercises like use of power point, animations, film screenings, etc. to be a part of classroom learning.

Education for Transformation

These are all manifestations of changes in society percolating into the domain of education. With the democratisation of society, there has been a much needed democratisation of educational institutions. Voices of teachers and students are now heard – the teacher-student discourse has started evolving into a dialogue. But it has still not reached the ideal that educational theorist and activist Paulo Freire had for education. For Freire, education is to be viewed as a dialogue between people trying to learn together in their pursuit of perfection. It leads both the teacher and the taught to learn more than they already know. True dialogue has to be based upon critical thinking and this critical thinking should evolve by the interaction between the various participants in the dialogue. Through dialogue people communicate mutually and this communication is therefore an absolute imperative. According to Freire, numerous political and educational policies and plans have failed because of over reliance on one sided views and lack of reciprocal communication. Paulo Freire has called upon educators to aggressively challenge both injustice and unequal power arrangements in the classroom and society. According to Freire, this arrangement in the classroom reproduces the unequal power relationships that exist in society. Even in the classroom for Freire, everyone (including the student) has a recognized area of expertise, even though it may be only to do with one’s own life experiences, and sharing this expertise should be an essential element in transacting the classroom curriculum. In such a classroom, teachers have their areas of expertise, but they are only one part of the community. The responsibility for the struggle for freedom and social change lies with the entire community – in this case, with both teachers and students. As groups exercise this responsibility, they become empowered to take control over their lives.

One of the earliest writings on education for transformation came from American educationist John Franklin Bobbitt. In The Curriculum, Bobbitt wrote that the curriculum is a means to attaining socially desirable objectives. Curriculum is understood through the “deeds-experiences” the student ought to undergo to become a socially acceptable adult. It is these future adults who will constitute the society visualised for the future. So the curriculum reflects an image of what society and individuals ought to be like.

This ideal of building society through the curriculum is also evidenced in the works of philosopher John Dewey. According to Dewey, education and learning are social and interactive processes, and the school itself is a social institution through which social reform can and should be initiated. In addition, he believed that students thrive in an environment where they are allowed to experience and interact with the curriculum, and all students should have the opportunity to take active part in their own learning. Dewey makes a strong case for the importance of education not only as a place to gain content knowledge, but also as a place to “learn how to live”. According to Dewey, education and schooling are instrumental in creating social change and reform in addition to their manifest task of helping individuals realize their full potential. He argues that in order for education to be most effective, content must be presented in a way that allows students to relate the information to prior experiences, thus deepening the connection with the new knowledge that they attain through schooling. Dewey believed that democratic movements for human liberation were necessary to achieve a fair distribution of political power and an “equitable system of human liberties.” To Dewey however, unlike Freire, in the classroom, the teacher is the expert who is to organize interaction so that students learn not only content and academic skills, but also social skill and an appreciation for democratic living.

Dewey’s approach to education when put to practice has certain limitations. Due to the pressure to achieve, teachers start maintaining an undemocratic level of control over the classroom. Furthermore, sometimes in order to realise the ideal of classroom as a community, elite privately funded schools tend to get established along racial, ethnic, and economic criteria and tend to ignore the spectrum of diversity and the need for inclusivity in the wider sense. Also the moment we conceptualise the curriculum as an agent of social change in a ‘desirable’ direction we empower the practitioners of the curriculum into taking decisions about the future of people and of society. As this happens, students and even teachers teaching the curriculum become progressively disempowered and their voices get considerably muted and stifled.

Educational philosopher Maxine Greene, an advocate of a “curriculum for human beings”, has suggested ways for teachers to introduce Freire’s pedagogical ideas into the classroom. According to Greene, to create democratic classrooms, teachers must learn to listen to students’ voices. Listening allows teachers to know what students are thinking, what concerns them, and what has meaning for them. When teachers learn to listen, it sets the process of dialogue into motion. In addition, the willingness to listen and the act of listening create conditions of human empowerment; listening mitigates the marginalization experienced by students in school, it exposes the classroom to multiple perspectives and encourages students to contribute more meaningfully to the classroom discourse.

James Banks is an educational theorist who has opined that since knowledge is constructed, an important purpose of this is to help people improve society. According to him a transformative curriculum is not so much due to its content but largely due to the willingness of teachers to introduce innovations in the ways in which they organize classrooms and relate to students, and to actively commit themselves to social change.

Evaluation

The main ideas about education and society at the heart of the aforementioned philosophies are that society is always changing and knowledge is not neutral—it can either conserve the existing social order or call for change. It is seen that classrooms abound in diversity and heterogeneity and reflect the society of which they are a part. The classroom is like a microcosm of society and the curriculum reflects what the society considers to be legitimate knowledge. In a democratic society, if the classroom and curriculum have to be sites of social transformation then citizens need to be actively critical and imaginative thinkers; and this then percolates to the school system. Therefore, it is necessary to understand that the function of school exists in a continuum between reproducing knowledge and initiating social change. The school has to strike a balance between the modernist education system and a post-modern, globalized, knowledge society.

The classroom has to be sensitively reflective of a multicultural society and teach individual participants to respect diversity. That way the students emerge as genuine citizens of a democratic and pluralistic world capable of participating as world citizens. The classroom reflects the same challenges of inter-ethnic interaction that exist in the wider society. Students in the course of classroom interaction also come to realise that there are several cultures, value systems and social practices other than their own, and learn to appreciate difference and come out of cultural stereotypes.

The classroom is like a living laboratory for gaining knowledge of how to live in society while simultaneously getting curricular and content knowledge.

Conclusion

We learnt in this lesson that the classroom and the curriculum are but a reflection of society. This is something that sociologists and philosophers of education have averred since the beginning. Just as there are differences and diversities in society so also there are in the classroom, despite the standardization of learning and pedagogic practices. Therefore when we talk about the problems in schooling and the curriculum that is being imparted it is often suggested that the only way to overcome these problems is for overall social change to be effected. That is in a sense true of all institutions. Institutional reform follows social and ideological transformations. However, this does not take away from the transformative role of the educational institution. The classroom as the microcosm of society can teach students how to coexist amicably in a diverse cultural milieu; to learn about, appreciate and adapt to the cultures of others. The curriculum can make the learner aware of new knowledge systems and help imagine the possibilities for change. This presents an immense potential for the classroom, the curriculum and the school as arenas for social change and the inculcation of forward looking ideas.

References

• Banks, J. 1991. “A Curriculum for Empowerment, Action and Change.” In Sleeter, C. (Ed.) Empowerment through Multicultural Education. Albany, New York: SUNY Press.
• Bowles, S. & Gintis, H. 1976. Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life. New York: Basic Books.
• Dewey, J. 1939. Freedom and Culture. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
• Durkheim, E. (1897/1951/2005). Suicide: A study in Sociology. (Translated by John A.
• Spaulding and George Simpson) New York: Free Press; Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
• Freire, P. 1970. Pedagogy of The Oppressed. New York: Seabury.
• Greene, M. 1993. “Diversity and Inclusion: Towards a Curriculum for Human Beings.” Teachers College Record, 95(2) 211-221.
• Kohn, A. 1999. Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s,
• Praise, and other Bribes. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.