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Negotiating Classroom Knowledge:Beyond Achievement andSocializationLinda M. McNeil aa Wisconsin Center for Public Policy , MadisonPublished online: 29 Sep 2006.

To cite this article: Linda M. McNeil (1981) Negotiating Classroom Knowledge: BeyondAchievement and Socialization, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 13:4, 313-328, DOI:10.1080/0022027810130404

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J. Curriculum Studies, 1981, vol. 13, no. 4, 313-328

Negotiating Classroom Knowledge:Beyond Achievement and Socialization

Linda M. McNeilWisconsin Center for Public Policy, Madison

Both of the dominant strands of curriculum theory depict the student as a passiverecipient of the processes and content of schooling. In this paper I report anethnographic study of economics information in selected US high-school socialstudies classes, in which I saw students determining their acceptance or rejection ofteacher-controlled course content by a process of very active negotiation. Theresistance in the response to classroom knowledge that the study demonstrates is notcaptured by describing the effects of curriculum as 'achievements' or 'learnings', inthe terms of curriculum planners, or as 'socialization', to use the term of analysts ofthe role of curriculum in cultural reproduction.

Traditional management model of curriculum

What may be best termed a 'management model' of curriculum theory dominatesresearch, curriculum development, and evaluation in American schools. Built on theassumption that the purpose of curricula is to increase student learnings, thismodel—a legacy from the social-efficiency movement of the 1920s—depicts theschool as a factory-like plant where the raw materials of student and pedagogicalinputs are processed into products of educational achievements. That the student israther inert while school personnel actively set goals, manipulate classroom variablesand measure achievements is perhaps best exemplified in the Tyler rationale, whichfor many years has imbued curriculum discourse with the language of rationalplanning.1 The role of the teacher is to convey skills and information in a way thatwill most efficiently or effectively increase the stock of each for the maximum feasiblenumber of students. While most educators at least give lip-service to the views ofchild-development theorists like Piaget or Kohlberg, in fact the student as heemerges within this model of curriculum is seen as static. Any differences amongstudents are usually expressed as two-dimensional 'learner variables' with nolongitudinal or reactive characteristics.

The recent review of social studies teaching and research sponsored by the USNational Science Foundation confirms that most research on social studiesinstruction gives much attention to instructional techniques, very little to childdevelopment or maturation, and none to student acceptance of curriculum.2

According to this comprehensive 'state of the field' report, hundreds of studiesanalyse content and techniques of instruction, but almost none consider the studentas an actor in the process.

0022-0272 81/1304/0313 S02-00 © 1981 Taylor & Francis Ltd

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Cultural reproduction model

In contrast to this management model of curriculum, a more critical perspective onthe role of schools in the reproduction of dominant, elite culture in stratified societiesis emerging. Often Marxist in orientation, this view of schools makes the curriculumand procedures of schools problematic in an attempt to understand the extent towhich schools perpetuate inequalities of power and economic status under the guiseof being funded 'in the public interest'. This role of schools has been examined byBourdieu and Passeron in France; Sharp and Green, Whitty, Young, Bernstein—among others—in Britain; and Apple, Anyon, King and Bowles and Gintis in theUSA.3 Their work, ranging from essays to statistical studies, has served a vitalfunction in raising to consciousness the ways schools legitimate the values of certainsocial classes, for example, and delegitimate the values of others.

However, a primary problem within this paradigm, at least as it has been used todate, has been the retention of the management model's passive view to the student.Bowles and Gintis speak of students being processed and socialized by schools intovalues conducive to quiescent labour;4 Apple has drawn on Easton and Dennis tooutline a traditional passive model of political socialization.5 The only empiricalstudies within this model which examine specific curricular effects do so at theprimary-school level where students seem to appropriate teachers' definitions ofthem and their activities.6 And, while Williams, Apple, and most recently Willisacknowledged the tensions counter-hegemonies set up for any sustained pattern ofcultural hegemony, only Willis has demonstrated the attempts by the dominated(students) to thwart institutional dominance.7 (While his boys at HammertownSchool react to procedures that are highly congruent with stratified curricula,Willis's analysis demonstrates their resistance primarily in terms of its relation toprocedure.) As noted by MacDonald, the cultural determinism of Bernstein andBourdieu and the economic determinism of Bowles and Gintis take little note of theresponses of those whose lives within schools are being thus 'determined'.8 Theirmodels would have us believe that students accept the official knowledge of schoolswithout resistance, struggle or conflict. But both one's intuitive observations ofpublic-school students (especially in secondary schools), and the extensive literaturefrom curriculum planners on the need to 'motivate', belie a passive role for students.The responses of students to persistent knowledge control, especially if it is aspervasive as Bourdieu et al. have claimed, must be treated as an empirical question ifwe are to understand the 'effects' of school knowledge.

Economics as optional knowledge

Economics information is an appropriate focus for the analysis of patterns ofknowledge control and student responses to them. In the US, economics inform-ation is frequently an area of 'optional knowledge' within the social studies, a one-semester elective course for seniors (although in some states it is a graduationrequirement). As optional knowledge, it offers a critical example of the power ofinformation-selection in schools. And although the motivation for teaching econ-omics in the US is frequently couched in terms that are critical of citizenunderstanding of society and its workings, economics has traditionally been a coursewhich American social studies teachers were ill-prepared to teach and whichstudents thought of as too boring or complicated to take.

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NEGOTIATING CLASSROOM KNOWLEDGE 3 1 5

Educators and business people have for years bemoaned the lack of 'adequate'economics education in public schools. The Joint Council on Economics Educationbest represents a curriculum-management perspective on the status of economicseducation. The Council sees the neglect of formal economics curricula, both as unitswithin other social studies courses and as separate courses, as a result of poor teacher-training in economics, the lack of good up-to-date materials, and the lack of adequatemeasures of student achievement in this area. The Council has tried to overcomethese 'planning' failures with tests of 'economic understanding' (usually made up ofmultiple-choice economics jargon items); a master economics curriculum guide forthe kindergarten and up to grade 12, prepared by a nationwide committee overseveral years; and the development and dissemination of inexpensive resourcematerials on economics topics. Their work, carried on by teachers, universityprofessors and representatives of the business community, assumes that studentachievement in economics understanding tests will be higher if more teachers usemore of their materials. The actual content of their materials is a rather unreflectivefree-enterprise rhetoric, especially heavy on the side of professional economists'jargon (price, supply and demand, profit) with little attention to societal conflict overthe validity of economic institutions or the equity of the distribution of economicwealth and power. Thus, the Executive Director of one state branch of the JointCouncil told me that their curriculum could deal with the price of steel because thatis a fact, but they could not treat predictions of future world-wide food shortagesbecause that is 'a value question'.9 Their emphasis assumes that more economicsstudy is better economics study, with little attention to the ways students react to it.

In contrast, Jean Anyon's recent work examines the value bases of social studiestextbooks with particular attention to the selection of economic issues and events as afactor in schools' cultural reproduction function. Her content analyses of elementaryand secondary history texts document the exclusion of dissent, non-establishmentlabour movements, and the causes of poverty.10 The texts overwhelmingly favouredan interpretation of history which attributed 'progress' to the growth of large-scalecorporations, and which tacitly entrusted legislatures and the courts with solvingthose few temporary social inequities acknowledged as arising from industrializ-ation. She found that economic ills were minimized in favour of a salutary historywhich presented little need for social reform and which presented few, if any, modelsfor collective action on the part of those hurt by the economic power structure.

Neither the Joint Council, as representatives of the curriculum planningapproach, nor Anyon in her analysis of knowledge control, gives us much sense of theeffects on students that result from these over-simplified portrayals of the Americaneconomy. The Joint Council assumes that multiple-choice vocabulary tests reflect'learnings', and Anyon makes the leap from knowledge control to social control withphrases such as 'if internalized', and 'should they [students] believe the textbookinterpretation of reality'.11 Whereas Bowles and Gintis deduce the effects ofcurriculum from labour-force patterns, the Joint Council and Anyon leave us todeduce effects from the intent of the curriculum planners.

A classroom ethnography

An ethnographic study of economics information in the classroom revealed a morecomplex pattern of student responses to the limited access they were offered to

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economics knowledge and knowledge resources. Taking the position that mucheconomics curriculum is not explicitly labelled as such, that many 'teachings' aboutthe economy are embodied in the tacit values and fragments of information of moregeneral social studies classes, I structured a study of the highest level required socialstudies course in a Wisconsin high school to determine what a student in that school,where a formal economics course was not required, could expect to learn about theeconomy.12 Three classes on contemporary US history were observed for asemester. One teacher was selected because he was trained to teach an economicselective. Daily observation, with virtually verbatim note-taking, was supplementedwith historical research into the school and the school system, and interviews withthe teachers and many of the students in the observed classes.13

Patterns of control

The research was designed originally on the assumption that economics information,because of its complexity and because of teachers' lack of economics background,might be presented differently from such standard content as social, political,biographical and military history. It was expected that these last would be treated ingreater depth than economics topics, which would be more likely to arise asfragments of jargon, dates or congressional or presidential policies. The comparisonthat was expected to emerge from classroom observations would illustrate the needto consider curriculum in terms of both the accessibility of some information(perhaps details of Second World War battles or presidential elections) and theinaccessibility of other kinds of information (presumably economic issues). The firstunexpected finding during the observation was that while the tension betweenknowledge access and knowledge inaccessibility did prove to be a valid lens forexamining course content, the inaccessibility was not limited to economics topics orany other particular subject. The access or lack of it, to particular topics, perspectivesand resources, turned out to cross topical categories and to be much more deliberateon the part of teachers than originally anticipated. The reflectiveness of theirdecisions about how to convey information, as will be discussed below, was revealedto me in interviews, but remained hidden from students.

The teachers I observed gave a great deal of attention to economics topicsbecause of their personal interests in the subject and because of the time periodcovered by the course, which began with the Great Depression and continuedthrough the New Deal to the present (or supposedly to the present). Theseexperienced teachers had used the same lecture notes and tests for years, so thechance that they altered their presentations for an observer was remote.

Their extensive coverage of economics topics, in terms of the amount of timespent, was not reflected in the manner information was treated. Though the researchwas predicated on the anticipation of finding a contrast between an in-depthtreatment of social and political history, and a more fragmented, and elusive,economics information, it soon became apparent that these teachers treated allcontent in the same way. Their methods of processing all course content underminedany intention of studying the intricacies and controversies of the American economy.All course content was tightly controlled by the teachers. (They taught in a schoolsystem where the classroom teacher, or occasionally the department, had authorityfor course content, except for the name of the course, which in this case had been

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NEGOTIATING CLASSROOM KNOWLEDGE 3 1 7

determined by the City's board of Education.) All three of the teachers presentedcourse content through lectures; in two of the three classes the students did almost noreading or writing. These high-school juniors were expected to come to class, takenotes or not; and write short-answer, factual tests every few weeks. All informationin the course was reduced to lists of facts, brief descriptions, chronologies ofpresidents, laws and court decisions. As a result, their treatment of economicsinformation took the form of lists (for example of the New Deal agencies), slogans('we are all Progressives'), and pat endorsements ('F.D.I.C.—it worked like acharm'). Most interesting was the teachers' omission of anything contemporary(their lectures for the most part concluded with Eisenhower or Kennedy, thoughKennedy died when these students were babies). They also avoided controversy,spending from zero to four-and-a-half minutes on the Vietnam War. One teacherlectured each day from an outline on an overhead projector; often he would quittalking and just let the students copy. Although he thought of himself as a New DealDemocrat, with a lively interest in labour history and agriculture, even these topicsbecame items in a list for his students to copy down. His tests, which permitted opennotebooks, had no negotiable answers; the exact word from the transparency, andnot a synonym, was required.

While the initial purpose guiding observations was to track the contrast in formand content between historical topics commonly open to students in Americanhistory classes, and the more frequently 'optional' economics content, the con-sistency with which teachers consciously limited the depth and scope of all topics ledto the use of the term 'knowledge control' to describe the presentation of all coursecontent in these classes.

A favourite lecture technique used to control information was what I havetermed 'mystification'.14 The teachers would present an idea or an institution as veryimportant but unknowable. In other words, something would be mentioned asworthy of writing in one's notes for future identification on a test, but would remainunelaborated—with the caveat being offered that it is too controversial or com-plicated for futher classroom discussion. An example would be one teacher's praise,but non-elaboration of, the Federal Reserve System. The teacher would say, forinstance, 'you must know about the Federal Reserve System, but it's too complicatedfor us to go into here'.

A summary of these teachers' presentations of economic topics reads likeAnyon's textbook analyses. Progress and benevolent growth formed the dominanttheme of the course. Two of the teachers described themselves as Progressives andJeffersonian Democrats, but all three taught a classical Hamiltonian view of theeconomy as best left to experts and government officials. The model of historyemanated from Washington, largely ignoring the same topics as lived by the people.Keynes and Adam Smith were jointly acclaimed, and as Anyon has discovered, thereverence for power, whoever is in power, overrode allegiance to any one party orpower group. The teachers expressed great need to teach students to appreciate andnot question their institutions, which their forebears had 'worked so hard to create'.Yet once created, the same institutions became in the teachers' minds immutable. Anycurrent economic problems (for example extremely high unemployment at the timeof the observations) were dismissed as temporary wrinkles in a system worthy ofuninformed trust. Other countries were mentioned only when a new tariff or tradetreaty was introduced, or when the US declared them as an ally or enemy in wartime.Otherwise, the US was alone on the planet, and within it there were no regional or

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factional differences. Anything which was controversial in its own time (Truman'sintegrating of the armed forces, repudiation of McCarthyism, enactment of socialsecurity) were presented as reflections of the general common-sense and good-will ofa unified people.

Knowledge control was so perfected in these classes, that one teacher couldremark 'we're 10 minutes behind my other class'. Each teacher decided on coursecontent, prepared tests for his or her own class, handed out books (or not) accordingto personal preference. Neither the department, the school's administrators, nor anycentral office supervisor had any direct effect on students' access to knowledge inthese classes.f For the entire semester, the students in the three classes sat passively,sometimes taking notes, and very rarely voicing an opinion or asking a question.They did no research, wrote no papers; only two of over 100 students brought innewspaper cuttings. In the class where students copied from transparencies, only12 student comments were volunteered all year, including those such as 'when is ournext test?' This teacher called on students less frequently than once a day, and thenon only the one or two he thought would have the answer to a term he was about touncover on the transparency.

The most genial teacher permitted more interaction, but his students had noreading or writing assignments, so most of their comments within the classroomwere confined to friendly banter or bad guesses to leading questions. The womanteacher, who did assign a few pages in the text each night, even though she did notlike the book, kept up a brisk lecture pace.

Student comments and questions at the beginning of the year which showedstudent expectations of a discussion format, given the title of the course, were metwith quips aimed at witty put-down; silence soon reigned. Students whoseboundless energy and noisy voices filled the halls became perfect mice upon enteringthese classrooms.15

The daily observations confirmed the worst suspicions any cultural reproduc-tion theorist could have about knowledge control as a form of social control. It wasthe interviews with teachers and students that fleshed out the complicated dynamicsbehind the apparent acquiescence. First interest was in discovering the teachers' ownperceptions of their method of teaching. While, no doubt, some of their contentselection and omission was not within the realm of conscious decision, they werefairly articulate in giving reasons for what they were doing. They felt they were veryprofessional and dedicated, and that within the unreasonable constraints imposed bytheir school's administration, they were doing the best they could.

Knowledge control rationale

Two of these constraints arose from changes in the assignment of students to theirclasses. The high school is in a city known for emphasis on education; the schools

fThe teachers' perceptions of administrative constraints as justification for tight control over classroomknowledge and my perception of the administration's laissez-faire attitude toward instruction, raisedquestions about the typicality of this school and about what variations in the school's administration inrelation to curriculum might foster greater willingness on the part of teachers for students to interact withideas and resources. A comparative study pursuing these variations has been conducted, and results areforthcoming in 1981: 'The institutional context controlling classroom knowledge', Linda McNeil,principal investigator; funded by a grant from the Organizational Processes division of the US NationalInstitute for Education (NIE-G-79-0015).

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NEGOTIATINO CI-ASSROOM KNOWLEDGE ' 3 1 9

have a high tax base and a high level of parent support. This particular school had foryears held a reputation as a college-prep school in a middle- to upper-middle-classneighbourhood. These three teachers, with 15, 22 and 23 years' experience, hadreaped the rewards of being the high seniority teachers at the 'best' high school in theregion. Several events in the recent history of the school had changed theirperception of the school and their role (and rewards) within it. First, the schoolsystem had mandated a shift from streaming I.Q. to heterogeneous classes. At aboutthe same time, the school's boundaries had been redrawn to take in a lower-classneighbourhood formerly served by an inner-city school which was being closed. Astudy done at the time of the boundary shifts reveals that concern in this school, andin the community, centred less on whether the school would adequately serve thenew students, than on what their presence would do to the reputation of the school.

The teachers revealed in interviews that from the time of these shifts they hadexperienced a lowering of expectations.f They expected that their students werenow less capable of learning, and they felt that as teachers they had less hope ofmaking a difference in their students' learning. Most literature on social-classdifferentiation in heterogeneous classes indicates that teachers will teach to thebrighter children, structure more rewards for them, and gradually exclude or rigidifycontent for the lower levels of perceived ability. In these classes, the teachers hadrebelled against being forced to deal with individual differences in their classes,especially now that the range of individual differences was perceived to be widergiven the school boundary shifts. Their rebellion took the form of imposing on themixed-ability classes the instructional pattern they had formerly used for themiddle-level classes, which one of the teachers described as being 'the masses' whohave to be 'spoon-fed'. Interaction with resources was omitted because only thebright would know how to do research without 'merely copying' from anencyclopaedia; basic reading and writing (of short papers or essay-test answers) wereeasier to drop from the course than to include, because including them implied eitherthe responsibility of giving extra attention to those students who were weak in theseskills or the pain of giving large numbers of failing grades.

Another rationale central to the teachers' justifications for their tight controlover classroom knowledge carried over from the days when students in this and otherhigh schools were protesting America's involvement in Vietnam. In this schoolmany of the students had disagreed with their teachers over Vietnam. In addition,the students' disruption of lectures to discuss the War, and their wearing of arm-bands and inviting anti-War speakers to the school, had precipitated here, aselsewhere, issues of students' rights. Eventually a hard-fought battle produced acode of student rights for the city's schools. These traditional teachers had beenhorrified at their loss of control over both students' ideas and over their deportmentin the school. One of the reasons the teachers all gave for stopping the course

f At the end of the observations, taped interviews with the teachers probed their professional background,their assessment of their resources and students, their comments on the overall school programme andadministration, and their rationale for their instructional methods and content. All three were confident,experienced teachers who disdained both inquiry and behavioural approaches in favour of solid, college-lecture type dispensing of content. Their methods were compatible with their view of history as a storyand their view of their school and students as lower in quality than in previous years. They had no sense ofthe lack of credibility students found in the information they conveyed, but they did perceive students'general sense of distance from school procedures and assignments. Their shared criteria of efficiency andauthority as essential to survival in the institution resulted in similar classroom dynamics, even though inpersonality the three differed greatly.

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chronology with Eisenhower or Kennedy was to avoid discussing current issues onwhich the students might disagree. The elimination of research or reading furthernarrowed students' access to information not acceptable to the teacher. One teachertold me that he dropped research papers partly because he felt tired and overworked,but also partly because during the Vietnam era 'the really bright students wrote someterrific papers—but they were self-indoctrinated1. In other words, the studentsstumbled onto new ideas in books and periodicals, which contradicted the consensusview of American history that the teacher wished to convey. Although the VietnamWar had ended several years prior to this study, the teachers saw each new group ofstudents in light of their memories of the War's effects on order in their school.

The first rationale which shall be mentioned here is the teacher's wish to preventtheir students from becoming cynical. The Vietnam protests, along with theboundary shifts and de-streaming, occurred while these students had been inelementary school; the present students showed little political activism and lessawareness of the reasons their teachers might not want them interacting withmaterials or ideas. But in the teachers' minds, cynicism towards Americaninstitutions is always potentially prevalent among young people; they cited newsstories of surveys of college-student opinions on big business, government, and thefuture of the American economic system. They felt that their job was to counter thistrend toward cynicism, lest the students wish to 'tear the system down'. Inquiry,discussion, or any other characteristic activities of the 'new social studies' were seenas not only light-weight intellectually, but potentially dangerous pedagogicallybecause they distracted from the 'true story' of American history. Telling that storywas these teachers' notion of their primary task.f

These goals seem to confirm commonplace observations about traditionalnarrow training and political conservatism of American social studies teachers. Butthe interviews indicate a more complex picture. When asked about specific aspects ofthe American economy, the teachers proved to be much better informed, muchbroader in their opinions, and much more sceptical than their lectures demonstrated.Two, including the teacher trained in economics, believed that the world faced acuteshortages of resources and food, and that our present institutions, in the US andworld-wide, would have to undergo transformations and probably painful dislo-cations in order to deal with the changing world economy. Many of theseinstitutions, upon which the students were building their future expectations, wouldprobably not survive. The woman teacher expressed concern that these studentswould probably not be able to buy single-family homes or own private automobiles.The teacher who used transparencies, who attributed his basic optimism to Godrather than to the strength of the system, also expressed fundamental doubts aboutpresent institutions and social arrangements for solving the severe economicproblems which lay ahead. As they talked, it became clear that the teacher'ssimplistic lectures were not indicative either of their training, of available curriculummaterials, or even of their basic political values.' Their desire for consensusinformation and a conservative slant ('appreciate your institutions'), arose as much

f The dominance of teacher talk in classes had been documented many times, as has the traditional powerof teachers to structure classroom interaction. Thus, a primary assumption of Bellack et al.'s Language ofthe Classroom was the 'game' teachers and students play in the interaction has the goal of increasing thestudents' knowledge.16 The present study challenges that as the dominant goal; sometimes in theseclasses, both teachers and students deliberately minimized substantive learnings in order to avoidcontroversy, keep personal opinions out of the public arena of the classroom, or avoid 'cynicism'.

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NEGOTIATING CLASSROOM KNOWLEDGE 321

from a need to maintain classroom control within what they considered to be analienating administrative environment. The bases of knowledge control in theirclasses had specific local and institutional dimensions not entirely deducible fromglobal theories of social control. They personally believed that the world neededmany reforms, but they feared that if students realized the severity of manyproblems, they would be too impatient in wanting to make changes. The teacherswere insecure enough in their professional roles and in the economy without theadded threat of social revolution or even classroom disruption begun by students.Their accommodation to their fears, their constraints, and their lack of rewards forefforts beyond the minimum, was to limit students' access to information, even at theexpense of their expressed goals to teach students 'the way things work'.

Student responses to knowledge control

The students in these classes sat passively, in apparent acquiescence to the limitsplaced on their access to information. Their teachers' decisions to bracket personalinformation in favour of an official, consensus knowledge were invisible to them.They had no idea that the teachers were calculating their efficiencies within theconstraints of an institution over which they felt they had little control. They had noidea that the lecture content and class format came from the negotiations by whichteachers accommodated to the tension between their goals of informing students andof keeping them from being so informed that they became cynical.

Interviews with many of the students revealed, however, that they, too, wereactively, and equally silently, weighing their own interests in acquiescing to orrejecting teacher control.f They were clearly aware of patterns of classroom controland most were aware, to at least some extent, of knowledge control. Of these, mostattributed the limited access to knowledge to 'bias', the desire of 'the school' to 'tellyou only what they want you to hear'. As protection against this bias, these studentshad decided to go along with classroom controls—limited reading and writing, limitedor no discussion, very packaged tests, polite silence in lectures. Their resistance cameat the point of believing or internalizing the content of lectures. Because theirresistance was hidden, unlike the vocal resistance of their Vietnam-era predecessors

f Semi-structured interviews were conducted with one-third of the students in the three classes towardthe end of the semester. The primary purpose of the interviews was to check the observer's perceptionsagainst the students', since the research was designed to document what students might deduce about theeconomy on the basis of their social studies classes. Students were asked to recall whether they had studiedselected economics topics in previous courses. These included capitalism, socialism, emerging (ThirdWorld, non-industrialized) countries or economics, American Indians' views of land, any individualindustry, careers, poverty, inflation, equal opportunity and several other topics frequently included in thenews or in social studies materials. (Many students, for example, did not relate poverty to their teachers'extended units on the Depression.) Interestingly, except for one or two field-trips to a sausage factory,none had studied an industry. They were asked to explain/ree enterprise and to talk about what they saw as:good aspects or problem areas in the country or economy. In conversational, non-technical language theywere asked whether they had jobs, what they liked or would prefer to change about the country, what theythought caused inflation, whether it affected them, and whether they took seriously predictions of futurefood, energy and raw-material resources. They were not asked to evaluate the course observed but tocomment on how it had changed or added to their ideas, whether they felt comfortable speaking up.Chapter VI of the study from which this paper is drawn offers a detailed contrast between specificclassroom behaviour and interview responses. For example, the lack of credibility of school knowledgewas not always apparent in their classroom acquiescence, anticipated in the interview design, nor elicitedby a direct question. More than two-thirds of the students interviewed turned a current events orclassroom procedure question into a discussion of what they saw as the biased, em'pty nature of coursecontent.17

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to the testing, grading, streaming, and lecturing of their day, it sent misleadingsignals to teachers about the success of their strategy of maintaining their students'innocence about 'the real world'.

While unaware of the gaps between teachers' personal and official knowledge,the students were all too aware of the teachers' primary concern of covering thematerial. They feared that disrupting the teachers' pacing would (ironically) incur abad 'class participation' grade, a grade which usually carried no specific numericalweight but which served to resolve borderline grades. Since the course was requiredfor graduation, and its minimal assignments meant 'B' or ' C grades were easy tocome by, many students expressed the desire to 'lie low'. Several in the womanteacher's class had begun the semester by asking questions or trying to discuss, onlyto find that she put the course back on her predetermined time-schedule with a wittyputdown and a grin. The substance of the question or contribution went un-elaborated; the staccato lecture proceeded. These students, especially because theydisagreed with her political perspective and realized that any class participationwhich they ventured would in her eyes be seen as the work of 'loud mouths', tookonly a few days to settle into the passivity already comfortable to the rest of the class.

Acquiescence to the forms of testing also began with brief, unsuccessfulresistance. The man who taught from transparencies was a Phi Beta Kappa historymajor from a major university; he taught history all day, then coached a sport afterschool. His tests were so absurd that finally two girls' parents complained at parents'night about the supremacy of the answer on the teacher's key, and the lack ofopportunity for a student to explain his or her justification for a deviant answer. Thescores on his tests ranged from 30 to 55%, and always had to be curved if most of theclass were to pass the course. Still, this teacher turned the parents' concern into an adhominem talk to the class about the parents' probable view of him as a 'jockstrapfootball coach' rather than as the 'professional historian' he felt himself to be. Afterthis time, no one protested a test question or grade.

The overriding concern for the course grade had the effect of privatizing anypotential for collective resistance to the rigid pattern of teacher talk in the classroom.Unlike the boys at Hammertown, who in Learning to Labour got together to turn theformalities of middle-class schooling being imposed on their working-class groupinto 'laffs', these students suffered the indignities alone in order to get thecredential.18 It was clear to them that the lectures and tests had been made up yearsbefore, and thus had nothing directly to do with them as individuals. Their group of30 students was quite replaceable with any other; the pattern of knowledgedispensing would go on with or without their presence.

Their response to the control of the information itself was a different story; infact, it was their resistance to the control of information that lay behind their overtacquiesence to classroom procedures. Two kinds of questions in the studentinterviews revealed gaps between the classroom picture of the American economyand their own personal knowledge. The first kind of question asked about their ownpersonal concerns: what they might change if they were in a position of power; whatthey most admired or disliked about the way the USA works. The second was aquestion about their role in the classroom. This was prompted by a specific example.One girl ended her interview with an emotional statement about the amount ofmoney wasted on space and the NASA programme. She felt that the money would bebetter spent on relieving poverty, especially among blacks. Her answer wasimpromptu, in answer to a very open-ended question that had not mentioned either

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blacks or the space programme. A few minutes later in class, when the teacher listed'NASA' as one of the 'three accomplishments of John Kennedy's presidency', thisstudent silently copied 'NASA' in her notes along with everyone else. I began askingstudents whether they ever felt they had a question to ask or wished to add a point tothe lecture or offer a contradiction. We discussed what determined whether theywould speak up.

These two questions, their own personal concerns and their willingness to breakinto the pattern of teacher control, revealed two 'effects' of the curriculum notdiscernible by a usual test of achievements. The first was that an overwhelmingmajority of the students refused to believe the course content. The second was thatthe students, like the teachers, preferred to bracket their personal information ratherthan have it risked in the public arena of the classroom. Both of these effects ofknowledge control resulted in a paradoxical interaction by which teachers andstudents contributed to each other's (and their own) alienation in the classroom,which further reinforced tighter knowledge control and increased resistance to it.

A few of the students felt that they understood the course content and that theteacher was well-informed; a few others felt that if they did not make good grades orunderstand the lectures, it was because they 'had never been good at history'. Therest, for a variety of reasons, expressed suspicion, rejection or suspended belief withregard to teacher-supplied knowledge. The silence which characterized theirrejection was a common response, but the origins of rejection were varied. Thepredominant reason for disbelief of the teacher's lecture was a contradiction betweensomething the teacher presented as fact and information the student already knew.

A few of the students pointed out discrepancies between points in the lectureand experiences they had had. Others had heard from their parents' experiences aninterpretation different from the teacher's. For example, one girl's father had toldher of his memories at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago; his version andthe teacher's were so far apart that the girl concluded the teacher was ignorant of thetrue events. Several of the students considered themselves 'buffs' on a particulartopic, such as civil rights or the Depression. Others gained most of their knowledgefrom television documentaries or books they had read outside of school.f It wasinteresting to note that whenever the student had one piece of information that he orshe felt to be more 'correct' than the teacher's, then that teacher lost credibility.None of the lecture content could be trusted after that.

In addition to being suspicious of the factual content, the students were leery ofthe generalizations teachers made, about presidents, economic policies or events. Allthe teachers, for example, spoke of Huey Long and Father Townsend as the'Demagogues', as though everyone now and during the Depression agreed on theworth of their ideas about social reform. Once when his teacher was absent, a boywhose parents had grown up in the South asked the substitute, 'How are we to knowwhat those guys were like? What if your parents HkedHuey Long?' He got no answer,and he never raised the question in the regular teacher's presence; it demonstratesimpatience with over-simplifications, but an unwillingness to challenge them withinthe bounds imposed on information exchange in the class.

f It is interesting that despite students' suspicions about the validity of information supplied by large-scale institutions (schools), they see television as 'theirs' rather than as corporate, commercial dominanceof air waves. Perhaps because it is perceived as voluntary rather than compulsory, because as a medium itis more pervasively entertaining and fast-paced than school-books and lectures, or in a few cases because itenables them to hear 'experts', they give television-supplied information more credence than teacher talk.

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In response to the fragmentation of course content, the reduction of all issuesand events to terms in a list, the students responded with fragments of their own.Their answers on tests were truncated; rarely were answers given in completesentences. When asked to complete a sentence, and this rarely happened, studentsincorporated terms from the lists into sentences that did not always make sense. Thisoccurred when I gave them questions to answer on two articles on the, then, pendingHumphrey-Hawkins legislation on full employment. When I asked the teacher ifthey answered that way because the paper was not to be graded, she reminded methat all their test answers were equally brief and cryptic.

Yet these same students could talk in interviews coherently and interestedlyabout many political issues which concerned them. Even those students thought bythe teacher to be too intellectually weak to remember anything, could articulate theirmemories of what earlier courses had taught them about the environment, othercountries, careers and other topics related to the economy. Students of all levels ofability would mention topics of concern, volunteer information on a current issueand express regret over the omissions they recognized in the course. They did notagree on the omissions. Some had favourite topics they felt were omitted. Mostregretted the lack of emphasis on anything more current than 1960. And many feltthat the omissions originated from teacher and/or school bias: 'they just tell you whatthey want you to hear'.

The teachers were a bit more successful in creating an emotional impressionwith those topics they chose to 'mystify'. When asked to elaborate such slogans as'equal opportunity' or 'free enterprise', the students' answers usually reflected theemotional connotations of the term, but included little actual understanding. Forexample, their explanations of free enterprise ranged from 'We can get things easierhere than in some countries', and 'When you think of the US, you think of money', to'no government interference with price controls', and 'small businesses and self-owned businesses'. A boy who worked at McDonald's Hamburgers, answered: 'Aguy can have his own business with no corporate affiliation'. Several conscientiousstudents looked very sad or embarrassed when asked to explain free enterprise; atypical answer, 'I know I should know what that means, but I really don't'.

Although 'economics' is not a term or school subject many students instantlyidentify with, the interviews revealed many curiosities about economic issues andconcern for a student's own relation to the economy and, in many cases, for thoseexcluded from its wealth. And they all expressed concern about having enoughinformation to plan for their future education and jobs. Yet they almost nevermentioned these concerns and curiosities in class even when they related directly totopics being covered. The teacher was not seen as a source of reliable, accurate orunbiased information. Many students mentioned that even though they got goodgrades on the tests, they did so for the graduation credit and promptly forgot theinformation after the test. Their measured 'achievements' did not represent theirinternalization of the content.

Effect of knowledge control

If neither achievement nor socialization is adequate to describe the effects ofknowledge control in these classes, we must look closely at the means by whichstudents kept their distance from the control processes and at the gains and losses of

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their resistance to it. The first effects may be discussed in terms of the patterns ofcontrol and acquiescence. Edelman19 and Kenneth McNeil20 have pointed out theneed to view acquiescence as the calculations of interest of those being dominated.Domination arises only partially out of the power of the dominant; it also requires theco-operation of the dominated. In this case, some of the co-operation was deliberate;some rested on ironies of teacher intent beyond the students' awareness. By reactingpassively to the teachers' lectures, the students sent misleading signals of acceptance,either as agreement or tolerance, justifying in the teachers' minds the effectiveness oftheir strategy of preventing student cynicism. In addition, their silence after the de-streaming of classes convinced the teacher that research, panel presentations andclass discussion were no longer possible now that the presence of less-intelligentstudents diluted the intellectual abilities of all students; no one discussed intel-ligently any more. A student present for the first mixed-ability classes recalled not anI.Q. effect but peer interaction: the 'bright' kids did not want to hurt their classstanding by giving the 'dumb' kids the answers, and the 'dumb' kids didn't want the'bright' friends they partied with to know how 'dumb' they were. Both clammed up.The teachers blamed de-tracking for taking away their chance to 'really teach'.

A further effect on classroom interaction was a reinforcement of the privati-zation model of rewards within the school. This particular school had a long historyof individual achievement in academics and sports; and the teachers' jobs werewithout much collegial base. As in most schools, student failures were attributed tothe individual rather than to the school's inability to meet a student's needs. Bybracketing their own personal information, the teachers increased the alienation thestudents felt toward the sanitized curriculum. Similarly, as students personallynegotiated how much of the content to believe, how much of the course to go alongwith, they further reinforced teachers' feelings of needing to maintain tight controlin the face of what they saw as apathy or lack of ability.

In addition, the students, by remaining silent, lost a chance for collectiveresponse. The boys Willis describes at Hammertown School kept their resistancevocal and visible.21 In this way, they touched the alienation in each other and calledforth a collective response. I asked students whether their silence in the face ofcontinued information they disagreed with, made them feel any responsibility toshare their version of the topic with their fellow students. Most felt that the otherstudents would see them as only another biased, and, possibly, uniformed source:'They'd say, "what does he know? He's just the kid in the blue shirt" '. One boy hadspoken up after the teacher had made a comment about 'all you bleeding hearts whothink we shouldn't have dropped the atomic bombs on Japan'. On the basis ofreading official military assessments of the bombings, he had challenged herinformation. He told her that according to papers of the US naval commander in thePacific, there was no need to use atomic weapons, that Japan's surrender wasimminent. Her brief retort was typical of her use of humour and brevity to bring theclass back to her interpretation and bring the lecture back to the brisk pace: 'Well,you know, inter-service rivalry will do it every time: the Navy was jealous the AirCorps got to drop the bomb!' (If she had asked him to bring in his sources, she wouldhave discovered, as he later did, that he was drawing from the official Air Force post-evaluation of the bombings, that Air Force—former Army Air Corps—officials werebeing quoted, not Navy officers.) This student later told me why he ventured thischallenge. He said he had let 'many things go by' all semester, but that this was toograve a moral issue to remain silent on. The chief vulnerability in this control of

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knowledge was resistance to it by a majority of the students; but by over'tlyacquiescing, they failed to discover their shared rejection of the teacher-suppliedinformation.

In terms of actual 'learnings', the primary effect on students may be described asthe opportunity cost of having to spend so much time in school, surrounded by awealth of materials and trained teachers, with so little chance to pursue theirquestions or to learn to interact with resources. This opportunity cost is the vacuumleft when students consciously attempted to reject simplistic information and falseconsensus models of society, or reconcile their private information with officialversions of history. They often had nothing left to take their place. When asked whatthey thought they should learn about the economy before leaving high school, mostshifted the subject of the sentence to say something about what 'they' should tell us.As one girl said, 'Surely someone will tell us' if basic resources are going to be inshort supply. These classes left these students with no sense of themselves asinformation-gatherers, much less information-generators. From these classes theywere not able to decide where to find and how to evaluate information. So when theyrejected the lecture content, they had little to take its place except to wait untilgraduating and hope to learn what 'you really need—on your own'. Because thelecture content was presented as conclusions and facts rather than as issues to bedelved into, the students had no models of learning or inquiry to pursue;22 severalexpressed frustration over not knowing where to turn for reliable information.

One further effect, again one which goes beyond achievements or socializationinto prescribed content, is perhaps the most serious. That is the implications of thepattern of splitting one's knowledge for the sake of institutional rewards. Habermashas suggested that our institutions continually and increasingly admit only technicallanguage, to the exclusion of moral, commonsense, and personal language forms.23

Technical language, as it becomes the language of our institutions, precludes moralassessments. No one could seriously claim that these midwestern 'populist', teachershad a long-range purpose of making institutional language the language of publicdiscourse. However, the net effect in their course of the negotiation of informationwhich characterized the exclusion of controversy, the inclusion of optimisticassessments of policies they knew to be questionable, and the omission of studentinquiry because of its inherent inefficiencies, was to encourage students to ignore theirprivate store of information when it seemed to contradict the official view. Studentcriticisms and questions were called 'negative'. One teacher stated that for a studentto ask why something was being studied was expressive of having a negative attitude.

The split between one's personal and public information leads to increaseddependence on large institutions for information. The 'they' students hoped wouldtell them how to get a job or how to cope with coming energy shortages was always anagent of some public or corporate enterprise. Splitting off students' personalknowledge, by denying its relevance to classroom-reward structures, gradually leadsfrom physical passivity to the acceptance, however unwillingly, of a client status.Even though Bowles and Gintis and others speak of schools' socializing students intothe levels of cultural capital amenable to pliable-worker (production) status, theclient (consumption) relationship may be even more alienating than that of labourerbecause leverage for reforming or changing the institution is removed to outside it.However ineffectual the market pressures customers may exert on large corpor-ations, these remain unavailable to clients who must 'consume' the services ofagencies in the way that students are compulsory clients to the services of schools.

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This may help explain, in the absence of a collective sensibility and in thepredominance of credentialling, why the resistance to controlled knowledge takesthe form of silent negotiation.

Thus, while the socialization into accepted knowledge content in this highschool may have been less successful than indicated by most writers within thecultural reproduction paradigm, and certainly than suggested by most who havestudied younger children, the power of school knowledge forms to reinforce certainthought patterns may be even more pervasive than these writers have so fardocumented. That is, the control of knowledge within a consensus model leads first to thelost opportunity to learn how to find knowledge outside the classroom lecture, and secondto the acceptance of the split between private knowledge {including the moral andpolitical) and the knowledge permissible for rewarded exchange within our institutionalinteractions.

The brief picture of knowledge control and responses to it sketched here does notdo justice to the complexity of the manipulation of economics information andresources by these teachers nor to the variety of the students' candid responses to theinterviewer. The data, even in this brief treatment, do lend support to severalstatements about curriculum research. The first is the need to reconsider ourprofessional educational jargon when we examine the effects of schooling, at leastmaking them problematic. When we speak of 'achievements' we must test our testsagainst the non-testable effects of patterns of knowledge access and control in theschools. When we speak of 'domination', we must get inside the institutions toexamine the specific mechanisms by which schools mediate the dominant culture;and we must take into account the local and human characteristics of the role ofschools rather than remain at a mechanistic level of analysis. In addition, we must notlet the clinical role of observer/analyst blind us to the perceptions of the participants;both teachers and students 'live' in schools every day. The insights of the writers onthe hidden curriculum into the nexus of goals and levels of interaction should not beignored by analysts of the formal curriculum. In the case of this school, the students'calculation of their interests is so short-sighted as to be labelled 'false consciousness';they did not have enough information to know what the teachers were leaving out.This false consciousness does not remove their perceptions from analyticalimportance.

Finally, in analysing patterns of domination in schools, we must not become somechanistic as to miss the vulnerabilities within patterns of control. In these classes,the cycle of alienation from teacher to student to teacher benefitted neither in thelong run and bore within it potential for change. The realities of the economy, likethat of the Vietnam War, threatened to intrude upon the classroom and force aconfrontation between the 'real world' and the idealized economy of the lectures.These vulnerabilities, and their potential for change or for greater control (as withthe Vietnam War protests), are beyond the scope of this paper. They are mentionedhere as a reminder that an understanding of the effects of curriculum can come onlywhen a view of the social roles of schools is grounded in a knowledge of the daily livesof schools, only when curriculum research goes beyond textbooks, formal coursetitles, and assumptions about course content and gets into schools, for that is wherethe students are.

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Acknowledgement

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the AmericanEducational Research Association held in Boston, Massachusetts, April 1980. Theresearch reported here was funded in part by a grant from the Graduate School of theUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison.

References and notes

1. TYLER, R. W. Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction (University of Chicago Press, Chicago,1950).

2. WILEY, K. B. The Status of Pre-College Science, Mathematics and Social Science Education: 1955-1975. Vol. 3 Social Science Education (Washington, D.C., US Government Printing Office, 1977).

3. BOURDIEU, P. and PASSERON, J. C. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (Sage Publications,Beverly Hills, California, 1977); SHARP, R. and GREEN, A. Education and Social Control (Routledge

and Kegan Paul, London, 1975); WHITTY, G. Studying society for social change or social control? InWhitty, G. and Young, M. (Eds.) Explorations in the Politics of School Knowledge (Nafferton Books,Driffield, 1976); YOUNG, M. F. D. (Ed.) Knowledge and Control (Collier-Macmillan, London, 1971);BERNSTEIN, B. Class, Codes and Control, Vol. 3, 2nd edn (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1977);APPLE, M. Ideology and Curriculum (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1979); ANYON, J.Elementary social studies textbooks and legitimating knowledge. Theory and Research in SocialEducation, Vol. 6, No. 3 (September 1978); ANYON, J. Ideology and United States history textbooks.Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 49, No. 3 (August 1979); KING, N. R. The hidden curriculum andthe socialization of kindergarten children (Doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison,1976); BOWLES, S. and GINTIS, H. Schooling in Capitalist America (Basic Books, New York, 1976).

4. BOWLES and GINTIS, op. cit. (see Note 3).5. APPLE, op. cit. (see Note 3); EASTON, D. and DENNIS, J. Children in the Political System (McGraw-

Hill, New York, 1969).6. See SHARP and GREEN, op. cit. (see Note 3); KING, op. cit. (see Note 3); KEDDIE, N. Classroom

knowledge. In Young, M. F. D., op. cit. (see Note 3).7. WILLIAMS, R. The Long Revolution (Columbia University Press, New York, 1961); APPLE, op. cit.

(see Note 3); WILLIS, P. E. Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs(Lexington Books, Lexington, Massachussets, 1978).

8. MACDONALD, M. The Curriculum and Cultural Reproduction (The Open University, Milton Keynes,1977).

9. Interview with LEON SCHUR, Executive Director, Wisconsin Council of the Joint Council onEconomic Education (1974).

10. ANYON, op. cit. (see Note 3).11. ANYON (1979), pp. 383 and 385.12. For a more comprehensive version of this study, see MCNEIL, L. Economic dimensions of social

studies curricula: curriculum as institutionali2ed knowledge (Doctoral dissertation, University ofWisconsin, Madison, 1977).

13. For a more complete discussion of the methodology and a more adequate presentation of the data onwhich this paper draws, see MCNEIL , op. cit., Chapters 3-4.

14. Ibid., Chapter 5.15. See CUSICK, P. Inside High School: The Student's World (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York,

1973) for a description of the gap between the 'official' and the view of students. An ethnography of ajunior high school reveals a similar student view: EVERHART, R. The in-between years (GraduateSchool of Education, University of California at Santa Barbara, 1980) unpublished paper.

16. BELLACK, A. A. et al. The Language of the Classroom (Teachers College Press, New York, 1966).17. MCNEIL, op. cit. (see Note 12).18. WILLIS, op. cit. (see Note 7).19. EDELMAN, M. Politics as Symbolic Action: Mass Arousal and Quiescence (Academic Press, New York,

1971).20. MCNEIL, K. E. Understanding organizational power: building on the Weberian legacy.

Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 1 (March 1978).21. WILLIS, op. cit. (see Note 7).22. SARASON, S. The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change (Allyn and Bacon, Boston, 1971).23. HABERMAS, J. Legitimation Crisis (Beacon Press, Boston, 1973).

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