Thomas S. Popkewitz

Resumo: O Programa Internacional de Avaliação de Estudantes (PISA), da Organização para a Cooperação e o Desenvolvimento Econômico (OCDE), pode ser entendido historicamente como uma forma particular de dizer a verdade sobre as pessoas e a mudança. Primordial nesse estilo de raciocínio da investigação contemporânea e das reformas escolares é a estatística. Historicamente, as estatísticas modernas envolvem o paradoxo da administração das populações pelo Estado em nome da independência e da liberdade. Os cálculos internacionais contemporâneos e o ranking do desempenho dos alunos incorporam esse paradoxo da administração das populações. Os seus números fabricam os princípios sobre quem é - e como deverá ser - a criança. A fabricação que torna a criança certo tipo de pessoa é produzida por intermédio das distinções, categorias e magnitudes incorporadas nas estatísticas. Além disso, a comparabilidade nos inventários ou perfis dos tipos de pessoa produz, no impulso para a inclusão, diferenças e exclusões. A análise realizada neste artigo é direcionada para os estudos da ciência e para as políticas do conhecimento.

The paper explores the fabrications of human kinds in pedagogical research. It examines the social and psychological sciences of education as producing independent spaces for the study of people in order to act on them and as a cultural thesis for people to act for themselves. Further, it explores the principles generated about who the child is and should be. It is argued that the making of human kinds embodies particular historically generated modes of representing the possibilities of life; and these modes function to divide, differentiate and abject particular qualities of people and populations into unlivable spaces. This comparativeness produces inequality as it strives for equality. The analysis engages educational studies in a conversation with history, philosophy, political and cultural studies that draw on particular European studies brought into the US to challenge its philosophical, analytical and social/psychological traditions.

The essay focuses on curriculum history as the study of systems of reason. The first section considers curriculum as ‘converting ordinances’, inscribing Puritan notions of education as evangelizing and calculating designs in American Progressive education. The second section examines the Social Question, a cross‐Atlantic Protestant reformist movement concerned with the moral disorders of the city that underlie the new sociology and psychologies of schooling. The sciences embodied cosmopolitan cultural theses about modes of life and the urban child who threatened that envisioned future. Hall, Thorndike and Dewey, with different pedagogical implications, embodied these hopes and fears. The final section explores the formation of mathematics, literacy and music education as ‘converting ordinances’ designed in relation to the Social Question. The essay is synoptic and goes against the grain of social and intellectual history through examining the grid of practices in which principles were generated regarding reflection and action.

This paper explores the intersection of curriculum studies/curriculum history/curriculum theory through the study of systems of reason that order reflection and action. Words about ‘learning’, ‘empowerment’, ‘problem‐solving’, ‘self‐realization’, ‘community’, and so on, are not merely there in order that educators should ‘grasp’ some reality to act upon. The words are made intelligible and ‘reasonable’ within historically‐formed rules and standards that order, classify, and divide what is ‘seen’ and acted on in schooling. These rules and standards of reason are effects of power and the political of schooling. The first section explores this notion of the political and reason, considering curriculum as a double gesture. One gesture is the hope of schooling. The gesture of hope embodies fears of dangers, and dangerous populations. The latter, dangerous children, are placed in in‐between spaces—the immigrant, the poor, the disadvantaged who are to be included, yet defined as different and abjected. The phrase ‘all children can learn’ illustrates the double gesture. The ‘all’ assumes a unity of the whole that differentiates and divides the cosmopolitanism of the child (e.g. the life‐long learner) from the child ‘left behind’ who is different and can ‘never be of the average’. Finally, it explores how the notion of research as finding ‘useful’ or ‘practical’ knowledge for changing the school inscribes this double gesture and, ironically and paradoxically, assumes a consensus that establishes a hierarchy that divides the researcher from those to be shepherded. The exploration of the system of reason in curriculum studies makes visible the limits of the present, and, through this critical engagement, makes possible other futures.

School subjects are analogous to medieval alchemy. There is a magical change as mathematics, science, and social sciences move from their disciplinary spaces into the classroom. The educational and social psychologies have little or nothing to do with understanding disciplinary practices. They are intellectual inventions for normalizing and governing the child’s conduct, relationships, and communications. The author examines this alchemy in standards-based mathematics educational policy and research for K–12 schools. He argues that (a) the emphasis on “problem solving,” collaboration, and “communities of learning” sanctify science and scientists as possessing authoritative knowledge over increasing realms of human phenomena, thus narrowing the boundaries of possible action and critical thought; and (b) while reforms stress the need for educational equity for “all children,” with “no child left behind,” the pedagogical models divide, demarcate, and exclude particular children from participation.