Couldby y Jones

Post-Modernity, Education and European IdentitiesAuthor(s): David Coulby and Crispin JonesSource: Comparative Education, Vol. 32, No. 2, Special Number (18): Comaparative Educationand Post-Modernity (Jun., 1996), pp. 171-184Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3099721 .Accessed: 30/09/2013 15:55

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Taylor & Francis, Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to ComparativeEducation.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 190.220.3.39 on Mon, 30 Sep 2013 15:55:03 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Comparative Education Volume 32 No. 2 1996 pp. 171-184 CARFAX

Post-modernity, Education and European Identities DAVID COULBY & CRISPIN JONES

ABSTRACT The article starts from an analytical description of the Enlightenment Programme which it equates with modernity. It raises the question of the extent to which this Programme has foundered or come to an end. It explains the important critique that post-modernism offers of Enlightenment knowledge and the relevance of this to education systems. It then goes on to consider the notions of Europe and of Europeans. It suggests that this terminology has as much to do with social inclusion and exclusion as with geography. It then critically examines the possibility that fractured systems of educational structures are a manifestation of post-modernity. It concludes with an examination of the relevance of theories of post-modernism to school and university knowledge systems. It highlights the conflict between diverse knowledge and culture and centralising state curricular systems.

The Collapse of Modernity? Education was one of the key elements of the Enlightenment Programme. A belief in the efficacy of education and in the desirability of its universal application formed one of the programme's early and key tenets. Subsequently, it was through educational institutions--the universal national elementary school and the expanded and upgraded university--that its wider beliefs and practices were to be spread across Europe and beyond in the course of the nineteenth century.

The Enlightenment Programme may be characterised as originating in the politics and philosophy of late eighteenth-century Paris and in the economics, philosophy, engineering and science of Edinburgh, Manchester and London of the same period. Since it was this programme which is so closely connected with the origins of modernism, it is worth investigating in some detail the core beliefs which, along with education, it so eloquently advocated. Obviously the attempt to synthesise the writings of the philosophes and Rousseau, of Adam Smith, Hume and Bentham, the political practice of the revolutionaries, the engineering triumphs of Watt and Stephenson and the economic practice of the world- dominating cotton mills can be nothing other than preliminary (Hobsbawm, 1975). Never- theless, there are clearly distinguishable common beliefs within a whole range of the activities of the Enlightenment Programme.

That the programme itself achieved such success and momentum links it to the notion of progress. Humanity was seen as progressing through history and this progress was seen as speeding up towards an ever improving future. The Enlightenment Programme was revolutionary in its intolerance of anything which stood in the way of this progress. For many intellectuals and artists, the march of Napoleon's armies across Europe and Egypt, sweeping away antiquated institutions and traditionalist obfuscation represented the embodiment of this progress.

Correspondence to: David Coulby, Education and Human Sciences, Bath College of Higher Education, Newton Park, Newton St Loe, Bath BA2 9BN, UK. Crispin Jones, Culture Communication and Societies, Institute of Education, University of London, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL, UK.

0305-0068/96/020171-14 $6.00 @ 1996 Carfax Publishing Ltd


172 D. Coulby & C. Jones

Key to this progress was the success of science. Science was both a total explanation and a key to human betterment. The truths of nature and of the universe were seen to be increasingly comprehensible to systematic scientific investigation and explanation. The con- dition of humanity and of the individual could be improved by the application of science to labour and manufacturing. More problematically, the methods of science could be applied to the understanding of society and politics and to the practice of government or warfare. Educational institutions were needed both to spread scientific knowledge more widely and to encourage-in Prussia, Scotland and France rather than, at this early stage, in England-its further development.

The Enlightenment Programme strengthened and propagated the notion of an individual, single identity which Weber (1930) linked also to Protestantism. Individual destiny was celebrated in the egotistical sublime of Wordsworth or Rousseau and in the heroic achievements of industrialists, soldiers or even artists. Coleridge and Blake dramatised and celebrated the eschatological struggles towards individual identity. Furthermore, individuals were now citizens, which not only implied persons with human rights but also active political identities in relation to the state. Equality, perhaps the most dangerous of the three revolutionary slogans, insisted that humanity need no longer be stratified, and that individuals could determine their own worth. Education was an important component of this reconceptualised version of identity. It comprised the mechanism whereby the full potential of each individual might be realised and celebrated. Rousseau is again a key figure here, along with Pestalozzi and Humbolt. For the Enlightenment Programme, identity became destiny.

Associated, fatally, with the Enlightenment Programme was the emergence of the belief in nations. The nation was seen to have fixed geographical boundaries, to contain one identifiable language and culture, to be itself part of a progressive history through its emergence, liberation, unification or conquest, to be identical with the state and to be, in its initial and so many subsequent formulations, in danger (Renan, 1990; Sharma, 1991). From Danton to Woodrow Wilson, this strange idea was a presupposition of the politics of the Enlightenment Programme, contested only by those traditional voices retrospectively risible in believing Italy to have been merely a geographical expression.

If the institutions of traditionalism had been the monarchy, the agricultural country estate and the Church, those of the Enlightenment Programme were, in addition to those associated with education (now replacing many of the functions of the Church), constitutional government and the industrial factory. Although the geographical expansion of the Enlightenment Programme was by no means limited by these institutions, it was the development of educational institutions which both symbolised its arrival and ensured its continuation in the absolutist empires of Austria and Russia and the Prussian monarchy. The restoration of 1815 made little impact either on the French educational system or on the ideological success of the Enlightenment Programme.

The Trinity experiment was the triumphant culmination of the Enlightenment Project. Through science, an international research team at Los Alamos had controlled the move- ments of the atom; through science a democratic, constitutional state had created an unimaginably destructive weapon and had utilised it to end global conflict apparently, in 1945, indefinitely. Academics and scientists, had now incontestably changed the world (Rhodes, 1988). The Enlightenment Programme had successfully controlled the destiny of humanity. Yet this success lay in the discovery of a deadly nuclear technology. The Enlightenment Programme had developed the science and the educational institutions which could create this technology but it had failed to generate the governmental, moral and philosophical systems which might have controlled it. Whilst humanity might be in awe of the final achievement of the Enlightenment Programme, it would also be in fear for its survival


Post-modernity, Education and European Identities 173

as a consequence of this scientific progress. After the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the Enlightenment Programme would never again receive universal or unhesitating endorse- ment. And in this hesitation lies one of the sources in which the post-modem critique originated.

Post-modernity can be viewed in two ways: as a period in human history or as a group of theories which, taken together, are a critique of the Enlightenment Programme, of modernity. In the first of these ways, human history is taken as being divided into broad, identifiable periods. Medievalism is seen as being supplanted by the Renaissance which itself was succeeded by the Enlightenment Programme and modernity. Whilst this periodisation may be a helpful and almost indispensable tool for historians, it is itself a product of modernity and can easily be misused for various progressive interpretations of history. From this periodisation view, at some point after 1945, human history entered a new phase, that of post-modernity. Indeed, some writers are more specific: Jencks (1984) dated it as beginning on 15 July 1972 at 3.32 p.m. in the USA, when the first units of the Pruitt-Igoe housing estate in St Louis, were blown up, its modernist design being seen as total human failure. This article does not view post-modernity in this way. This is partly because of a wider rejection of periodisation and partly because, unlike Jencks (1984) and others, we see it as being both difficult and unnecessary to identify the exact point or sequence of events after 1945 at which modernity came to a halt. But it is rather more because the Enlighten- ment Programme itself seems neither to be exhausted nor generally discredited. Certainly it has for the past quarter of a century been subject to a wide range of vigorous critiques and denunciations. The authors would wish to associate themselves with many of these. Never- theless, the programme itself has neither been renounced nor replaced in academic, scientific, political or, least of all, educational terms.

Whilst post-modernity might not be helpful as a chronology or mode of periodisation, as a cultural and paradigmatic critique it carries great force, not least with regard to education. Elsewhere, this critique has been analysed as being composed of at least three strands: the feminist critique, the culturalist critique and the class critique (Coulby & Jones, 1995). Whilst at least the latter of these had been well stated a long time before 1945, it is since then that the three critiques have been generally substantiated. It is also in this period that their combined weight has been felt.

It is the feminist critique which has had the most undermining effect on modernist knowledge because it dissociates from it half of humanity. The feminist critique reveals that history, culture, science and technology are, fallaciously, seen to be the exclusive products of men and, furthermore, are so presented within the curricula of schools and universities. From this perspective, modernist knowledge is flawed in at least three ways. Firstly, this knowledge itself is incomplete since it values disproportionately those areas of activity and research which have been conducted primarily by men. Secondly, the criteria whereby knowledge is defined are biased towards the selection of work produced by men. Thirdly and consequently, within the various areas of knowledge the selection of material is biased towards that produced by men.

The culturalist critique is similar in its form to that made by feminism. Modernist knowledge, as a component of the nationalistic Enlightenment Programme, is White, West- ern knowledge. It relegates the knowledge of other cultures to exoticism, superstition or folkways. It only recognises academic, scientific and cultural achievement within a few countries. The activities and achievements of the rest of humanity are effectively ignored, patronised or belittled within modernist knowledge which is chauvinistic and nationalistic as well as Eurocentric. There are again at least three ways in which this view of knowledge is flawed: it is incomplete since it includes predominantly those activities and achievements



which have derived from Europe; the criteria whereby it is defined are biased towards the selection of work produced by White people; and consequently, within the various areas of knowledge, the selection of material is biased towards that produced by such people, particularly those from Western Europe. The culturalist critique has shown the ways in which modernist knowledge does not recognise the learning, culture and science generated outside Western Europe and its offshoots in North America. Furthermore, it does not acknowledge the major contributions to Europe's own knowledge and culture which were made by other traditions. Finally, modernist knowledge conceals rather than reveals the links, for example, between the Enlightenment Programme and the worst excesses of slavery and colonialism.

The third critique of modernist knowledge is derived from class. Marx, who both belonged to the Enlightenment Programme and was also one of its major critics, explained that

The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production ... The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas ... . (Marx in McLellan, 1977, p. 176)

The fashionable tastes of the privileged classes are still cheerfully reified by academics into artistic, literary or philosophical value systems. Schools and universities are the sites of the marketing and recommodification of cultural products from critical theory to information technology.

These critiques and others, taken together, have shaken the entire edifice of modernist knowledge. Post-modernism is the culmination and the aftermath of these three critiques. Post-modernism has gone beyond cultural relativism to epistemological relativism (Feyer- abend, 1978a,b). No truth system is seen as superior. Identity is no longer single and heroic but fractured and even indiscernible. Individual taste and discrimination are prized, eclecti- cism encouraged and all canons subjected to furious attack. Modernist knowledge no longer now carries any widespread legitimacy. However, this cannot yet be regarded as a historical process with modernism gradually being superseded by post-modernism. In terms of knowledge and culture the proponents of modernism and post-modernism are currently engaged in a conflict which, in Europe at least, has taken on both a political and educational form. For education, this conflict is most visible in terms of the impact of the market and/or central political decision makers on knowledge choices and subsequent curricular reform. It is by no means clear in either educational or wider terms that this conflict has yet been resolved in favour of post-modernity.

The three books so far published in English in an explicit attempt to link education systems to post-modernity (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1991; Usher & Edwards, 1994; Coulby & Jones, 1995) have not so much focused on a new historical epoch but rather on the way in which the critique can be expanded to help in understanding current educational practice and the way in which this might be developed. These texts and others have utilised the often complex, abstruse and introverted literature associated with post-modernity and either tried to make it more readily accessible to educationalists or utilised it to assist in understanding contexts, institutions, processes and curricula. This is the approach followed in the remainder of this article which attempts to demonstrate how such approaches can cast fresh light on familiar educational topics. As a starting point in this, it is necessary to clarify the European context within which such debates about education and identity are placed.



Europe and the European? As the European Union (EU) expands and consolidates, it poses significant difficulties for the educational systems of its constituent states. One of these difficulties is how they can maintain national identities and, at the same time, enhance a sense of EU or European identity. Phrases such as 'our common European home' and 'the European house' abound. What is happening here is a classic case of the Enlightenment Programme swimming against the tide of reality, a misplaced desire to place a seemingly rational, scientific order onto a shimmering diversity. European identities, European peoples, their locations and their histories have never been so simple a construct as many modernist Europhiles would claim: indeed, many might find the pluralities in the previous clause difficult to comprehend. Moreover, this sense of pasts, however defined, is itself being eroded, for, as Jameson (1988, p. 29) noted, he could show

the disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social formations have had in one way or another to preserve.

So, just as education systems struggle to define the nature of their state, its history, its membership and make such information available for children, so the same systems have to make sense of a European 'state', its history and its membership. And just as many EU and other European state educational systems have retreated into a modernist hegemonic version of the past and the present (Jones, 1992), so might they in relation to Europe (Osler et al., 1996). It is therefore crucial for education systems in Europe (and of course elsewhere, if they think Europe important enough) to be clearer about the nature of this Europe they are encouraging their pupils to learn about. Put simply, where is Europe and who is a European?

The boundaries of the EU are clear, those of Europe far less so. The conventional view is found in a British school atlas of the late 1830s:

According to the decisions of modem science, Europe is bounded on the south by the Mediterranean sea, on the west by the Atlantic ocean, which includes the Azores Islands and Iceland; Greenland being considered a part of North America. In the north, its boundary is the Arctic ocean, comprehending the remote islands of Spitzbergen and Nova Zembla. Towards the east, the limits of Europe seem even yet to be inaccurately defined. Its natural and geographical boundaries might easily be obtained by tracing the river Ousa from its source to its junction with the Belaia, thence along the Kama to the Volga, which would constitute a striking natural division, to the town of Sarapta, whence a short line might be carried due west to the river Don, which would complete the unascertained line of demarcation. But this great outline, through the petty governments under the dominion of Russia, science has hitherto been prevented from adopting. (Russell, c. 1838, p. iii)

On the surface, this is clear enough. It seems sensible, it even appears scientific. But actually it is no more than a series of lines drawn for operational reasons, defining 'us' as opposed to 'them'. Since the word was first used in Ancient Greece, to distinguish the mainland Greeks from those in the islands, Europe has mainly been used operationally to exclude and confirm certain types of inclusion. At the same time, spurious scientific concepts have been used to sustain such definitions, such as the concept of the continent of Europe. Across Europe, pupils learn that Europe is one of the five (sometimes six) continents, namely Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Australasia, North and South America. For much of the nineteenth century



~-2L2~T

------------------------------- O0 1 1

FIG. 1. Europe at the centre of the world.

there were only four, namely Europe, Africa, Asia and America (Russell, 1838) and before the European 'discoveries', three, Europe, Africa and Asia. It is the Ancient Greek view of the world writ large. The interesting question that follows from this is the origination of these concepts, these lines on a map.

Maps are fascinating objects (Berthon & Robinson, 1991). Scientific and neutral at a first glance, they are highly politicised constructs (see Fig. 1). Most maps used in the schools of Europe, still place Europe at the centre of the world and use a projection that magnifies Europe and diminishes much of the rest of the world.

The maps of Europe also draw lines that contain many ambiguities. In particular, the eastern boundary is extremely vague, with some countries, for example Russia and Turkey, being partly 'in' and partly 'out' (according to UK Prime Minister John Major). The question that needs to be asked here is one about the principles being used for inclusion and exclusion. A study of European maps down the centuries reveals that Europe still remains, in broad outline, the same part of the globe as eleventh-century Christendom. It is a revealing clue. Christianity is the key to an understanding of Europe's location. So much so, that not only do politicians talk about Christian and European culture as if they were co-terminous, but many European education systems reflect this as well. Thus, it should not have come as so much of a surprise when, in the break up of former Yugoslavia, Serbian leaders talked about defending Europe from Islam and many Europeans discovered that Muslims had been an abiding presence in Europe for centuries. Nor should it come as a surprise that Turkey's attempts to join the EU continue to be rebuffed.

This ideological and narrow definition of European boundaries is taught in many of the schools of Europe. It no doubt becomes more strident in the states along the eastern boundaries, as they seek to define themselves and others as in or out. It also raises the second major element of this definitional muddle, namely, if we are not sure where Europe actually is, how can we be sure of who is a European? From the above discussion, it could be argued that this is more a matter of baptism than location. If Europe is Christian, then Europeans are Christians. 'Non-believers', itself an interesting phrase, are the Jews, the Muslims and, in



some cases, the Rom. Their persecution is therefore not an aberrant part of history, it is an aspect of the formation of the fragile European identity.

Of course, it is not as simple as a Christian-the rest divide. Over the centuries, other categories have been adopted, albeit usually in conjunction with the Christian as European definition. From an early period, non-Christians were seen as not only being religiously and culturally different from 'real Europeans' but also physically different too. Christian Europeans could tell 'just by looking' who was different. The alien could be identified on sight, thus making the simultaneous act of identity formation and persecution easier when Europe at last realised that some of its inhabitants, although Christian, were not White.

This history is well illustrated in the English language. The Oxford English Dictionary (Murray, 1933), in its definition of 'European', quotes three related meanings.

(1) 'Belonging to Europe, or its inhabitants' (first used in 1603). (2) 'Taking place in, or extending over, Europe' (first used in 1665). (3) 'A native of Europe' (first used in 1632).

The dates of first recorded use are not without significance, reflecting the increasing European investigation and conquest of the wider world. Interestingly, in the 1972 Sup- plement (Burchfield, 1972), a further meaning is added, relating to the third one.

(4) 'Person of European extraction who lives outside Europe: hence, a white person, esp. in a country with a predominately non-white population' (first used in 1696).

Lest it be thought that dictionaries are above political correctness, in the second edition of the dictionary (Simpson & Weiner, 1989), the most esteemed of English English, only the first two definitions had survived. A new third one had appeared, referring to new European institutions, first used in 1952. The ones that had disappeared seem to be the result of an anxiety about the past rather than a concern for lexicographical accuracy.

This common sense definition of a European is still broadly maintained. It has been made more confusing with debates about the nature of citizenship: national, EU and European (Osler et al., 1996). Yet it relates back to aspects of the Enlightenment Programme which thought in terms of the congruence of citizenship and identity. And just as many European states' education systems argue for the existence of a fictitious co-terminal nation-state, the citizens of which are of one nation as well as one state, so they also frequently construct a fallacious ideal typical model of a European citizen.

The European version of this model is straightforward. He (for it is still often he, bearing out Virginia Wolff's assertion, (discussed in Dunmore, 1995), that women have no nationality because of their lack of political and legislative power within states) is White, Christian, tolerant and rational and a model of sensible democratic citizenship. It is a wonderful but completely fictitious model. It nevertheless retains considerable power and is frequently appealed to in debates about the nature of the European. However, one of the features of the contemporary EU is that life for many of its citizens is far removed from being subject to these virtues, with xenophobia, narrow nationalism and racism on the increase (Council of Europe, 1980; Commission of the European Communities, 1993).

A post-modern reading of the realities of citizenship in Europe would point towards an acceptance of plural identities. A European can be White or Black, Muslim or Jewish and have other legitimate identities too, such as being African and European, Indian and European and so forth. Examples of this acceptance are increasing, with a particularly interesting discussion coming from Ireland (for example, Heaney, 1995). Just as Europe is an operational definition subject to almost infinite adjustment, so is the definition of European.



Currently, it is mainly used to exclude: reconsidered, it could be used to include. Without such a change, the rejection continues, at all levels of society. The English language equivalents of alien, outlander, outsider, foreigner, visitor, immigrant, newcomer, non-native and stranger (and there are many more offensive terms) are applied to fellow Europeans without qualm in everyday discourse, in schools and in the wider society. Without greater clarity, divisions in the definition of the European identity are likely to persist and intensify.

This article argues that in order to present a European education to young people, they need to know that the boundaries of Europe are constructed and manipulated. The reasons for this, historical and contemporary, need also to be explained. Furthermore, young people (and those who teach them) need to know that plural identities are the reality for most Europeans, despite the desire of many individual European states and their education system to deny this. Both these potentially confusing areas contain within them, if untackled, the potential for the denial of a wide range of human rights, including educational ones (Gundara et al., 1994). Such a perspective implies a more pluralistic approach to a whole range of educational issues, notably those concerned with structures and curricula, the concerns of the remainder of this article.

Taxonomising Diversity?

Diversity of educational structure has usually been seen as part of a traditionalist educational agenda. Yet the Enlightenment Programme, with its emphasis on achieved equality, has always found choice and diversity difficult, as the previous paragraphs have indicated. The failure of its centralising, seemingly rational attempts to categorise and organise everything and everybody for the betterment of humanity has, ironically, left the reactionary and the conservative to defend what was called diversity and choice but which was often actually the defence of diversity and choice only for the dominant 61ite.

Thus, for much of the last 100 years, progressive educationists in Europe and elsewhere have expended much energy in attempting to ensure that within each national context, children should attend one type of elementary school and one type of secondary school. Perhaps its classic embodiment is the famous US Supreme Court judgement, Brown vs Topeka, which, in attempting to end radical segregation in US schools in the 1950s, justified under the earlier 1896 Plessy vs Ferguson 'separate but equal', decision, stated that separate schooling systems were 'inherently unequal' Hailed as a benchmark decision, it actually resulted in greater segregation of the system, as White people fled the cities to live in school board areas with far fewer Black children. In similar ways, attempts to introduce comprehensive education within European education systems have led, if anything, to greater variations of structure as powerful interest groups resist, retreat and reformulate their educational preferences. For example, the move to end tripartite systems in some English Local Edu- cation Authorities and in the Berlin Land has led to a four-strand system, the new comprehensive system running alongside the old tripartite structure.

The dilemma is one between, amongst other things, egalitarian provision and parental choice or, in a sense, between collectivism and individualism, between modernist universal- ism and post-modern relativity. Such polarities are, however, themselves partly a modernist perspective. In general, they have failed to recognise a pluralist reality and, in so doing, have moved the debate away from the more serious concern, namely the relative potentials of existing and potential varieties of educational structure to bring about educational fulfilment for individuals, families, communities and states.

All European education systems face these contradictions and attempt to deal with them



in different ways. All such attempts have led to differentiated education systems, even within the supposedly comprehensive systems set up by the former Soviet Union in its constituent republics and subordinated satellite states. However, although all European education systems do differentiate, they do so in different ways. Each element in each system has, therefore, to be examined in its individual context. Similarly, evaluation of effectiveness needs careful examination, as one person's effectiveness may be seen as another person's op- pression. Other factors in evaluating such differentiation are whether it is imposed, embraced or demanded and the degree of either separation or segregation that the state allows within its education system. By 'separation' it is meant that the differentiation means parents/groups choose or have access to an appropriate form of different educational provision and by 'segregation' it is meant that the state decides on the appropriate form of different provision, with or without the consent of the parents/groups concerned. This can be made clearer if some of the bewildering range of differentiations adopted by education systems are examined. Education systems can be differentiated in some or all of the following ways (Coulby & Jones, 1995).

(1) By age-compulsory, post-compulsory, adult and continuing education and education for the elderly.

(2) By attainment-elite educational institutions, such as grammar schools, lycees and gymnasia and adult and technical education as against universities.

(3) By attendance-boarding/residential or day institutions, part-time or full-time and daytime or evening.

(4) By behaviour-separate educational institutions or classes for pupils perceived as disruptive or separate provision for those convicted of crime.

(5) By contact-classroom or correspondence/radio/TV and distance learning. (6) By curricula-for example in educational institutions with an agricultural, technical

or other vocational specialism, or military education. (7) By disability/special educational need-'special' educational institutions for pupils

and students with disabilities that make it inappropriate, in the view of the education authorities, for them to be within mainstream educational institutions, classes or curricula.

(8) By language-educational institutions using one national language and other educational institutions in the same system using another national language or other languages.

(9) By location-there are frequently differences between educational institutions in prosperous and poor areas, even though both are funded by the state. Educational institutions in rural or urban areas are again frequently different in their resourcing and curricula.

(10) By nationality-although often seen in terms of religion and/or language, this category could apply to those educational institutions set up to educate refugee and asylum seeking students apart from the mainstream state system.

(11) By gender-separate schools or different curricula for boys and girls or men and women.

(12) By 'race'-segregated educational institutions, both de facto and de jure. (13) By religion-religious educational institutions/secular educational institutions; in

addition, different educational institutions for different religions or denominations within the one system.

(14) By wealth-state or private educational institutions. This list is not meant to be exhaustive, nor are the categories mutually exclusive of one another. What is clear, is that the range of possible differentiation is large and that much of it is maintained at the expense of those within certain parts of it. Whether this is a good or



bad state of affairs may be argued but no European education system has, in practice, been able to avoid differentiation.

This partly helps to explain how, more recently, when there have been muted attempts to bring the same sort of regularity to the schooling systems of the EU, such attempts have been quickly nipped in the bud by the individual states. Indeed, if the insights afforded by the post-modem critique are accurate, the trend is likely to be for greater differentiation, hopefully examples of separation rather than segregation. However, separation, that is separation by choice, always raises the issue of whose choice; in other words, how are the educational rights of the child protected as against those of the parents and/or the relevant community?

The dilemmas that the individual states face in these respects are grave. If they support increasing demands for separate provision, the stability of the state may be threatened. If they refuse to agree to demands for greater separation, they may face internal dissent and, again, the internal stability of the state may be threatened. The dilemma cannot be avoided and, within the EU at any rate, the next decade promises to be one of rapid educational change, with the individual states being squeezed both from above by the EU and other international groupings and from below, particularly in relation to demands emanating from the increasing redefinition of the concept of a Europe of the nations. Individual education systems' attempts to deal with this reveal no clear trend, as Osler et al. (1996) revealed in their survey of European trends. It is currently unwise to predict which way debates about structures will develop and what educational structures will consequently evolve. However, the analysis does suggest that greater differentiation, in general, is more likely than less. Similar debates are to be found in relation to the knowledge that informs educational systems' curricular practice; this is the concern of the final paragraphs of this article.

Towards a Post-modern Curriculum?

It is with regard to the school and university curriculum that the theories of post-modernity have their most obvious salience. This is not least because many post-modernist theories are actually critiques of knowledge. Given this, it is surprising that the originators of these theories themselves paid so little attention to education and that educationists in their turn have been slow to see the importance of post-modernity.

Unfortunately this is not quite so simple a matter as explicating a post-modern critique of modernist school and university curricular systems. Despite the power of the Enlighten- ment Programme and the centrality of education to its success, there have been many survivals of traditionalist knowledge within European curricular systems. Obviously enough, these focus around religious influence, mainly Christianity, unsurprisingly given the analysis proposed above. Churches retain control of a proportion of higher education in The Netherlands, England and Belgium. Religious education is a compulsory subject in the schools of England and Wales, as is a daily act of collective worship. In Poland and Lithuania the Church exerts huge pressures on the educational system.

Beyond religion there are other traditionalist survivals in the European curriculum. Sometimes these centre around the way in which educationists have sought to make schools into a replica of an idealised community. Grundvig's visionary advocacy of the folk high school has been influential well beyond Denmark (Carlsen & Borga, 1993). Folk songs and dancing, a sense of community and companionship and commitment to higher traditional ideals, sometimes religious sometimes secular and the attempt to make the school into a Gemeinschaft in defence against the encroaching Gesellschaft of modernity; this vision of the school curriculum has been influential across the Nordic countries and in Germany. They are



currently one of the defining philosophies for the reconstitution of the curriculum in Latvian schools. These threads in the traditionalist curriculum can all too readily be woven into the Enlightenment Programme, particularly insofar as it concerns nationalism. Both religious studies and the community curriculum can be utilised to demonstrate the moral rightness of state decision making or, alternatively, but not exclusively, the identity of the state with the folk and the community, at its most fallacious, with the nation.

The post-modem critique, then, although directed primarily against modernist knowledge, cannot, at least in educational terms, be understood without an awareness of these traditionalist curricular survivals. The modernist knowledge system consists of a set of beliefs and assumptions which are widely held and the school and university curricular selection criteria have followed from them. Five of the elements of this system may be identified as relating to the formation of European curricula. Firstly, there is a commitment to the ineluctable progress towards the ever greater and wider acquisition of an ever increasingly accurate human knowledge. Secondly, it is primarily the natural sciences which are seen as both the true method and the important subject matter of knowledge. Thirdly, there is a commitment to technical or professional relevance within this knowledge system: it aspires not only towards truth but towards usefulness and, ultimately, towards practical effectiveness in the place of work or the place of warfare. Fourthly, there is a lack of contention or conflict regarding both the subject matter and organisation of the school and university curriculum: academic subjects are taken at face value and their artificial division of human knowledge is taken as epistemologically and pragmatically valid. Fifthly, as illustrated in detail above, it is assumed that children and young people will have differential possibilities of access to this knowledge: this may depend upon their social class, gender, culture or (compounding and legitimating these categories) perceived intelligence. This modernist knowledge system has been so taken for granted, until the post-modernist critique, that it was hardly identifiable as such. It had become confused with the whole of human knowledge. In particular it is almost unquestioned in its role in the formation of European curricular systems which have functioned to reproduce not only its content but also its uncontested supremacy.

The links between modernist knowledge and the capitalist workplace go beyond the stress on technology and practicality, which, indeed, have never been overwhelming themes of curriculum selection, certainly not in the UK, though they are important to a greater extent, in different ways, in France and Germany. Modernist knowledge is stratified according to the perceived importance of the particular subject. Whilst the position of a particular subject within the hierarchy may well vary over time, the hierarchy itself will endure. There is no conception of an unstratified egalitarianism of knowledge. The psychology which accompanies this el1itist epistemology is comfortably congruent. People are regarded as having innate differentiated abilities. These abilities then equip them to succeed at a particular subject within the hierarchy. There is a parallel stratification between people and knowledge. This stratification is itself suited to or, more strongly, is the function of workplaces and places of warfare which are organised according to a highly stratified division of labour and reward. Human identity is shaped according to notions of unchangeable intelligence into the study of particular knowledge areas and thence into suitability for a particular position in society. School and university curricula and assessment schemes perform the function of shaping identity within these congruent, modernist views of society, psychology and epistemology. These processes are invisible to those whose identities are thus shaped. Modernist knowledge is anyway unapologetic since the illusion of organic unity between theories and between theory and policy, is key to its holistic project.

One of the most pervasive of the post-modernist critiques, the one which has most influenced curricular debates and the one which has aroused the sharpest hostility, is that



which concerns cultural relativism. In a way this is not the most far-reaching strand of the critique which might be better represented by epistemological relativism or by those directly opposed to the ideals of the Enlightenment Programme. Whilst the feminist critique has been pushing at a partly open door, since even among curriculum formulators there are some women not entirely beguiled by the Enlightenment Programme, the cultural relativists have found fewer supporters within the epistemological establishment. It is the post-modernist, cultural relativist critique which most directly addresses that heterogeneity of European identities which is one of the themes of this article.

Cultural relativism asserts that individuals who are the product of a particular culture are incapable of judging the value or validity of products and practices of individuals within a different culture. Its proponents insist that no group can claim to have produced belief systems, family practices, technical or cultural productions and modes of scientific, astro- nomical or medical explanation which are in any way inherently superior to those of other groups. It should be said that the authors are divided on the absolute salience of this central tenet of relativism. In a sense this does not matter: the astonishing cultural heterogeneity of the actual population of Europe would itself be an argument for a much more relativistic approach to the school and university curriculum without any resource to argumentation in terms of truth claims. Thus, if cultural products and practices are to be regarded as of equal value and validity, whether in deference to the diversity of Europe or to the critique of cultural relativism, this has important implications for the criteria whereby school and university curricula are determined. Curricular selection is cultural selection. Those members of the epistemological establishment with the authority to implement this selection have all too often chosen exclusively from their own national culture or that of the holistic, modern- istic European knowledge system.

The current trend in Europe, however, is towards curriculum homogenisation at the state level, which in turn could lead to greater heterogeneity at the European level. This process of homogenisation has at least three components: national curricular systems, the European theme and the discovery/invention of national traditions in emergent and re-emergent states. The National Curriculum in England and Wales represents perhaps the most rigid example so far of the shift towards curricular centralism. Even in its revised post-Dearing version (Coulby & Ward, 1996) it is highly prescriptive with regard to the way knowledge is organised: subjects, the epistemological hierarchy-English, mathematics and science as core subjects for all ages-and its mode of evaluation-national testing at four key stages. Even the subject matter is specified in clear detail. Whilst the levels of prescription and specificity are now no tighter than previously centralised curricular systems such as those of France, Norway (Royal Ministry of Church, Education and Research, 1994) or Ireland, the rigour of its implementation, with regular school inspections accompanying national testing, displays a distinct shift. That this shift is also one back to a traditionalist and modernist curriculum, which is profoundly ethnocentric and overtly nationalistic, has been demon- strated elsewhere (Coulby & Bash, 1991).

The implementation of the Maastricht Treaty and the associated development of the SOCRATES programme has meant that the EU has expanded its influence from higher and vocational education and language teaching into the whole of the school and university curriculum. Understandably, what the SOCRATES initiative will be encouraging at all levels and in all its protocols is the European theme. As discussed above, this theme is highly problematic. The language programmes of SOCRATES privileges the official languages of the community over the smaller national languages and over those of urban minority groups who frequently speak important world languages. The European theme implies a common European identity, culture, history and scientific programme. Although the EU documen-



tation does not explicitly confuse Europe with the Union, this identification is all too readily made in schools and universities. Does the European theme include the histories, science and culture of Turkey, Lithuania or Malta? The latest tranche of documentation does mark a change in that the European theme is no longer always explicitly linked to Europe's place in a wider world. SOCRATES marks another step on the road to the triumphalist Eurocentric curriculum which sees (Western) Europe, isolated in pristine perfection, unilaterally creating human science and civilisation in the face of the armed and implacable opposition of various barabaroi. The hidden histories and cultures of less powerful nations will be all the more easily hidden in this bland self-satisfied Europeanisation: the Edinburgh Enlightenment, the Cordoba caliphate, Norman Sicily, etc. The European theme is increasingly becoming a barrier against the children and students of Europe understanding the nature of particular nations and of the wider world.

Hobsbawm (1962) identified the great European powers in the act of nation building. Here is Italy:

At the moment of unification, in 1860, it has been estimated that not more than 2.5 per cent of its inhabitants actually spoke the Italian language for the ordinary purposes of life, the rest talking idioms so different that the schoolmasters sent by the Italian state into Sicily in the 1860s were mistaken for Englishmen. Probably a much larger percentage, but still a modest minority, at that date would have thought of themselves primarily as Italians. (Hobsbawm, 1962, p. 89)

Schools and universities, as the quotation indicates, were the central institutions of nation building. This was not only in terms of language teaching but also in the creation and reproduction of national heroic histories, sacred landscapes, progressive sciences and so on. This process can currently be watched in its early stages in newly emergent and re-emergent states. Latvia is discovering and rediscovering the folk dances, folk songs, epic poems and European identity which its rulers believe the school and university system will be able to employ in order to confuse the state with a nation (Lieven, 1993). This state sees its history and its future affiliations to be with Europe, indeed with the EU, just as the previous Soviet Republic saw its past and future in relation to Russia. In either case the cultural diversity of the territory and not least the rights of its various language groups have been the casualty.

The population of Europe is heterogeneous in both its national diversity and its urban diversity. Post-modernism offers insights into the limitations of the Enlightenment Pro- gramme and into the difficult heterogeneity of human knowledge. There is a possible congruence here. If the epistemological establishment could take note of the insights of post-modernity, the opportunity is there to bring the knowledge taught in schools and universities more into harmony with the actualities of European diversity. At present the trend appears to be in the opposite direction. Faced with anti-sexist teaching and multicul- tural education the epistemological establishment has retreated into a traditionalist/modernist fortress. Europe is left in the grip of the conflict between fissiparous knowledge and culture and fusile curricular systems.

REFERENCES

ARONOWITZ, S. & GIROUx, H.A. (1991) Postmodern Education: politics, culture and social criticism (London, University of Minnesota Press).

BERTHON, S. & ROBINSON, A. (1991) The Shape of the World. the mapping and discovery of the earth (London, Guild Publishing).

BURCHFIELD, R. (Ed.) (1972) Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. 1 (Oxford, Oxford University Press). CARLSEN, J. & BORGA, O. (1993) The Danish Folkehojskole (Copenhagen, Royal Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs).



COMMISSION OF THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITIES (1993) Legal Instruments to Combat Racism and Xenophobia (Luxem- bourg, Office for Official Publications of the European Communities).

COULBY, D. & BASH, L. (1991) Contradiction and Conflict: the 1988 Education Act in action (London, Cassell). COULBY, D. & JONES, C. (1995) Postmodernity and European Education Systems: cultural diversity and centralist knowledge

(Stoke-on-Trent, Trendham Books). COULBY, D. & WARD, S. (Eds) (1996) The Primary Core National Curriculum: education policy into practice, 2nd edn

(London, Cassell). COUNCIL OF EUROPE (1980) Report: Conference on Intolerance in Europe (Strasbourg, Council of Europe). FEYERABEND, P. (1978a) Against Method (London, Verso). FEYERABEND, P. (1978b) Science in a Free Society (London, Verso). GUNDARA, J. & JONES, C. (1994) Education Rights and Minorities (London, Minority Rights Group). HEANEY, S. (1995) The Redress of Poetry: Oxford lectures (London, Faber and Faber). HOBSBAWM, E. (1962) The Age of Capital 1848-1875 (London, Wiedenfeld & Nicholson). HOBSBAWM, E. (1975) The Age of Revolution 1789-1848 (London, Wiedenfeld and Nicholson). JAMESON, F. (1988) "Postmodernism and consumer society", in: E. A. KAPLAN (Ed.) Postmodernism and its Discontents

(New York, Verso). JENCKS, C. (1984) The Language of Post-modern Architecture, 4th edn (London, Academy Editions). JONES, C. (1992) Cities, diversity and education, in: D. COULBY & C. JONES (Eds) World Yearbook of Education 1992:

urban education (London, Kogan Page). LIEVEN, A. (1993) The Baltic Revolution: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the path to independence (New Haven, Yale

University Press). MCLELLAN, D. (Ed.) (1977) Karl Marx: selected writings (London, Oxford University Press). MURRAY, J. (Ed.) (1933) The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford, OUP/Clarendon Press). OSLER, A. et al. (Eds) (1996) Teaching for Citizenship in Europe (Stoke-on-Trent, Trentham Books). RENAN, E. (1990) What is a nation?, in: H. BHABHI (Ed.) Nation and Narration (London, Routledge). RHODES, R. (1988) The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Harmondsworth, Penguin). ROYAL MINISTRY OF CHURCH, EDUCATION AND RESEARCH (1994) Core Curriculum for Primary, Secondary and Adult

Education in Norway (Oslo, Royal Ministry of Church, Education and Research). RUSSELL, J. (c. 1838) A Complete Atlas of the World (London, Pickering). SHARMA, S. (1991) The Embarrassment of Riches (London, Fontana Press). SIMPSON, J. & WEINER, E. (Eds) (1989) The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn (Oxford, OUP/Clarendon Press). USHER, R. & EDWARDS, R. (1994) Postmodernism and Education (London, Routledge). WEBER, M. (1930) The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London, George Allen and Unwin).


Article Contentsp. [171]p. 172p. 173p. 174p. 175p. 176p. 177p. 178p. 179p. 180p. 181p. 182p. 183p. 184

Issue Table of ContentsComparative Education, Vol. 32, No. 2, Special Number (18): Comaparative Education and Post-Modernity (Jun., 1996), pp. 149-260Front MatterEditorial [pp. 149 - 150]Last Past the Post: Comparative Education, Modernity and Perhaps Post-Modernity [pp. 151 - 170]Post-Modernity, Education and European Identities [pp. 171 - 184]Internationalisation and Globalisation: Rethinking a Curriculum of Communication [pp. 185 - 196]The Cyberspace Challenge: Modernity, Post-Modernity and Reflections on International Networking Policy [pp. 197 - 216]The Information Superhighway and Post-Modernity: The Social Promise and the Social Price [pp. 217 - 231]Continuing Education in a Late-Modern or Global Society: Towards a Theoretical Framework for Comparative Analysis [pp. 233 - 244]Performativity, Post-Modernity and the University [pp. 245 - 258]Back Matter [pp. 259 - 260]

Documents

Couldby y Jones