Curriculum or Common Sense? An Exploration in the Classroom Production of Useful Knowledge

Abstract

The relation among instrumental knowledge, practical understanding, and critical insight has been examined in a wide variety of contexts, including workers' study institutes of I 9th century England (Johnson, 1979), the public school in post-World War I middle America (Lynd and Lynd, 1929), and third-world literacy programs (Freire, 1973). A recurrent theme is the tendency of instrumental or technicist concepts of education to suppress those interests and concerns of students which might lead to their developing critical insights into their situation. In other words, certain attempts to make education more practical or useful may, ironically, make students less able to form autonomous judgements about their social situation and more dependent on official definitions of it. This paper explores some problems associated with attempts to implement a curriculum geared to imparting useful knowledge. In particular, it focuses on the relation of practical understanding and critical insight to the instrumental tendencies associated with a recent curriculum innovation, life skills education, which has found wide application in educational and training contexts in Canada. In the pages which follow, I consider some main features of the life skills approach and raise issues connected with the social dimensions of school curricula of this kind. I then turn to a case of teaching skills for everyday living in the setting of a secondary school classroom.