Here Michael Young expands on his discussion with Ian McGimpsey (below), the RSAís senior manager for education, by exploring the influence of the internet in schools and the value of vocational qualifications.

IM: There is a sense in which your new book Bringing Knowledge Back In is a personal journey, even the subtitle ëfrom Social Constructivism to Social Realism in the Sociology of Educationí indicates that, can you elaborate on this?

MY: I started my educational life as a chemistry teacher and studied sociology in the evenings. Initially, I found great difficulty in seeing what the connection between these two were, with Max Weber on the one hand and the periodic table on the other. Then I did a masters degree at Essex and I tried to put these things together in my dissertation. It was during that time that I got offered the job at the Institute of Education, not as a lecturer in chemistry or science education, but as a lecturer in sociology education.

The first book that I edited was called Knowledge & Control, which had more influence than I ever expected. Here, I looked at knowledge in the curriculum and investigated how we can think about it, so that weíre not rooted in an assumption that knowledge is a fixed body that all kids have to do is adapt to it, and if they donít theyíll lose out. At that time (in the 1970s) there was a great sense that we could transform the world if only we had the right tools for it. Now weíre a bit more pessimistic. The world seems a bit of a tough thing to change and it often changes in a way that you donít want.

IM: The sense that the world changes in ways you donít particularly want is important to the development of your ideas. Thereís a phrase in the book that seemed to sum up your feeling in that regard: ìunintended consequences of the sociology of educational knowledge that began in the 70s.î

MY: I think thatís absolutely right, the American sociologist Robert Merton thought that the core issue of sociology was to focus on the unintended consequences of things that people did. It is the job of sociologists to try and unpick these, so that they could be thought about before an event, rather than after. In a sense, my current book is not arguing that my earlier one was wrong, but contending that it only dealt with half of the problem. Because you could look at knowledge as social practices in a historical context it ended up by saying thereís nothing that special about knowledge at all because you could always re-interpret social practice. And then if that was true, then youíve got no principles for an alternative curriculum because you have assumed that the basis for a curriculum is people learning in their everyday lives.

So you get lots of talk about the ëcurriculum of everyday lifeí and there is a danger that a project like the RSAís Opening Minds goes down that route. What Iíve been doing since is to argue that we need to focus not just on the social and historical aspect of knowledge but also that knowledge is something special in its own right. And if we donít take knowledge seriously in the curriculum weíre actually denying to young people just what they need ó the conceptual tools to actually survive and make sense and act in a very complex society.

Therefore, the knowledge issue, is both an epistemological issue and a social justice issue, because those kids who donít get to university often donít get access to what I call powerful knowledge and they are the people who need it most, because theyíre going to find life really tough without it.

Thatís where my journey has led me, trying to hold on to the strengths of the original radical idea about knowledge, but also to recognise the nature of the constraints we have to face. That, in fact, you canít just understand the world in any old way, you actually have to recognise that one of the things we do in education is give access to the next generation, access to what the previous generations have learnt, but in a critical way so you donít necessarily just reproduce the past generationís knowledge, but you build on it. If you say itís all social and you can do anything you like, then itís as if we reduce ourselves to almost a primitive society, which never had any past, or any future.

IM: I think Opening Minds, and some of the other ideas that the RSA has been working with, seem to sit right along with these tensions that you raise. For example, what is the relationship between the organisation of knowledge in to subject specialisms and our ability to engage all young people in learning. In particular, you voice frustration with some of the more recent post-modern ideas that touch on this. Can you expand on this?

MY: You can take this a number of ways. You can take this in a broader historical way, and say what the so-called postmodernists have done, particularly from France, people like Leotard and a whole range of people. What theyíve done is to call into question the whole Enlightenment project, that the core of improving and changing human society is the reasoning capacities of human beings. Theyíve actually said: look at the holocaust, look at Stalinism, look at these horrible things that reason has done, maybe the whole Enlightenment project is in fact mistaken. This results in both a relativist and, in a sense, nihilist, position.

I think that is dangerous. These ideas have slipped into the educational discourse through the language of widening participation. Thereís all this talk about lifelong learning, you couldnít be against lifelong learning, but youíve got to ask, what are they learning? And, do we have some priorities? I have come to realise a really important distinction between knowledge and experience. Itís happening a lot in the curriculum now, educationalists say you must make the curriculum more relevant, more in touch with the studentís experience. Whereas I would argue that the reason we have schools is to give an opportunity for people who have rather a narrow experience within their families and homes to go beyond their experience so they can actually see there are other ways of thinking about things. And that is a social justice issue.

IM: You raise what you see as a possible danger of projects such as Opening Minds which is that they go down a route where they have too great an emphasis on everyday experience rather than powerful knowledge that can bring people beyond themselves. But this relates closely to pedagogy. If the pedagogical challenge is too high then arenít you in effect excluding a huge number of people from the kind of emancipatory potential of education?

MY: The pedagogical challenge is faced best by placing confidence on the teacherís professionalism. Just as you go to your doctor, who will make professional judgements about whatís wrong with you and whatís the best treatment ó a teacher is going to make judgements about the level of the challenge for students at a particular stage in their learning. Teachers have got to make those decisions and we have to support them. An important debate has been started by the Institute of Ideas called what is science education for? It is deeply worried about whatís happening to the science curriculum in schools and the emphasis on experience, relevance and contemporary issues such as the environment and HIV/AIDS. Much of the old content of school science such as the periodic table, pattern, molecular formulae, is being phased out. The problem is that if you donít have enough of the content knowledge of disciplines such as physics, chemistry and biology you arenít going to be able to have a very informed debate about the environment or HIV/AIDS. The challenge for the teacher is that children have got many demands on their attentions such as mobile phones, Facebook and Bebo. So, the difficulty for the teacher is getting kids interested in things that they donít immediately want to be involved in.

IM: But isnít utilising contemporary relevance one way of getting kids involved? Opening Minds, for example, would seek to retain the knowledge of the traditional curriculum, but change its aims and organisation. Is not the idea of flexibility at some stages beyond the subject discipline a way of heightening engagement?

MY: I take your point, but what Iím struck by in todayís curriculum is that is that it is increasingly ëmodularisedí so students get a kind of Tescoís model of knowledge. They go round and they pick this or that and it is assumed to improve access, emphasise student choice and all the current buzzwords, but something serious gets forgotten. There is a real issue about the identity of the learner, and unless learners have some sense of boundaries that give them a shared sense of identity they remain in the fragmented world of common sense and modules fragment it further. There is a stage in anyoneís education before you can break down the barriers; youíve got to have some kind of identity to begin with. Of course the world is not divided up into subjects and if youíre trying to solve a problem in South Africa such as HIV/AIDS itís a biological, economic and political issue. What disciplinary knowledge gives you is some tried and tested basis for thinking about these complex issues and about alternative ways of approaching them

IM: Is there not a danger that the creation of learnerís identity takes a long time and people can become unhelpfully protective of a subject discipline?

MY: This partly goes back to the pedagogical challenge. A good teacher whoís confident about their own subject enables their students to move beyond it. The two dangers are: one is you trap students in a subject-defined world that they canít see outside of and the other is the student that has got no identity other than their everyday lives.

IM: Opening Minds and the RSAís work on education is a developmental effort. One of the elements I find interesting in your ideas is the creation of an alternative curriculum. You raise the question of how do we connect groups of specialists, those creating knowledge in boundaried disciplines, to curriculum knowledge to develop an alternative curriculum? Can you elaborate?

MY: Teachers should be given the opportunity in their training to see the connections between their specialism and other specialisms. That process should be embodied in the curriculum. But you canít start from the connections, youíve got to start from the subjects, the disciplines, and then see how they can become more connective. Otherwise, you get into the identity problem. It took me a long time in my own career to accept the notion ó and Iíve developed it from the French sociologist, …mile Durkheimís work ó that boundaries in life are both constraints and possibilities. What I forgot in my early work was that I saw boundaries only as constraints. I wanted to do away with all constraints ó do away with the boundaries between the school and everyday life, between disciplines, between the sexes and so on. To some extent that boundary-less idea has become fashionable again, through the internet and the new kinds of communication that are possible. But what this apparently radical idea misses is the absolute core element to boundaries, that moving beyond them is where the key learning takes place. Itís not that they should be treated as fixed; they should be treated as real but bridgeable.

IM: What are your thoughts on the governmentís ideas about universities opening academies and having direct links with schooling?

MY: In principle, Iím very positive about this kind of initiative. I think the strengths of the old subject associations were the interrelationship between teachers and university researchers, and if you look back itís probably true about the RSA and the exam boards. Itís certainly true about the City and Guilds; the examiners for the City and Guilds in the 19th century were university professors. Now the idea of a university professor being an examiner for the City and Guilds would seem bizarre. It is those connections between levels of learning that have been lost. We have to find a contemporary way of recreating them.

IM: Thinking about the connectivity between subject disciplines and bodies of knowledge leads to ideas about the internet in school and the easy availability of information and knowledge. Does this ability give a false sense of empowerment to the learner?

MY: Iím not at all anti-world wide web, I use Google and I think that itís terrific, but what Iím aware of is the fact that such tools only become really useful when youíve got a basis to know what youíre wanting in them. Google will help students deal with their questions but it will not help them to develop those questions.

IM: What is special about the role of a school in that?

MY: I think that schools, colleges or universities are ëtime outí places. Time out from the exigencies of everyday life, either the home or the family or the workplace. Time out to think and to develop your concepts. Iíve worked quite a lot in South Africa and if you go to the townships you see parents living in poverty and they send their kids to school with a confidence that those children will learn something that they caní t teach them. I think that is really important. A friend of mine is doing some research on Building Schools for the Future, he was taken around some of the new schools and he said the thing that struck him was that they were trying to be like a shopping mall. It was almost like saying ëyouíre still here in your everyday life, ok?í Is that how we should be designing our schools? Now Iím not saying that schools should look like Oxford or Cambridge colleges, but I do think that kids need to get a sense that a school environment is ëtime outí to actually think about the world. I was lucky enough to be brought up in a professional middle class home, so I came to school with a cultural capital that gave me an awful lot of resources when at school. If you donít have this, the school becomes even more important for you.

IM: Is the theory around curriculum development pretty weak?

MY: Yes and I also think that the idea of the intrinsic role of schools has been trapped in a rather elitist view of liberal education, which saw it only for the few.

IM: Whatís your attitude to the relationship between qualifications and career choice?

MY: What Iím deeply worried about is the new diplomas, because it introduces the academic/vocational divide at 14. The new diplomas are going to require students to make choices before they have the resources to make those decisions. Theyíre being asked to think about careers when they should still be getting engaged with the intellectual ideas they come to school for. I think this is worth defending on a social justice basis, because there are a lot of kids who come from homes where there are no books etc and are going to find this choice difficult. Some of my colleagues at the London Knowledge Lab think that if you give students mobile phones that will somehow transform their learning. Iím being a bit crude, but there is an excitement and money around these sort of ideas, which I do not think work.

IM: Do you have a view of how schools should be thinking about technology?

MY: I think that information and communications technologies (ICT) are a fantastic resource. But I think itís a resource rather like reading and writing ó youíve got to learn it. Itís amazing how much young people learn to use a technology without teachers, and I wouldnít make it an element on the curriculum until later when people want to specialise. You need a broader knowledge base to be able to do the interesting development work in relation to ICT. But all the technology in the world is not going to enable students to think theoretically.

IM: Can you expand further on the vocational/academic divide?

MY: My first response is that is an incredibly ethnocentric view of the world. Because, since the Maastricht treaty and the EU started supporting preparation on education and training matters in Europe, Iíve been to other European countries quite frequently, and those countries, wouldnít understand the vocational/academic divide. The Nordic countries, Germany, the new accessible countries of Eastern Europe, all have highly respected, highly qualified and highly regarded vocational education systems. The UK does not. We would rather it disappeared. We tend to assume that you donít want to call something vocational because that is associated with slow learners. However, in Germany, one of the intellectual, industrial powerhouses of the world, you can find large faculties of vocational pedagogy with professors and people getting doctorates and doing research programs. They treat vocational pedagogy in their universities as seriously as we treat physics or English literature.

Shopping for skills (discussion with Ian McGimpsey)

Todayís approach to education encourages children to pick and choose topics at the expense of learning core subject knowledge, says Michael Young. He met Ian McGimpsey, the RSAís senior manager for education, to discuss alternative curriculums and whether progressive education has gone too far.

In 1971, Michael Youngís book Knowledge and Control: New Directions in the Sociology of Education sent out a challenge that cut to the heart of established ideas of schooling. It questioned the basis of the traditional curriculum in schools, which Young identified as serving the needs of the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor. The book aspired to transform the educational possibilities of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds by emphasising the need to restructure the curriculum to heighten engagement.

In his latest book, Bringing Knowledge Back In, Professor Young makes another challenge ñ but this time it is to the educationalists who have been influenced by his original thesis. In the pursuit of participation he warns us not to neglect the special role of schools in imparting difficult, off-putting knowledge to young people. Currently, questions about the future of schooling ñ its purpose, the role of knowledge in schools, and implications for the curriculum ñ are increasingly being asked. This is a live debate with the RSAís Opening Minds programme and the schools that are at the heart of it.

Ian McGimpsey: A sense that the world changes in ways you donít particularly want is important in the development of your ideas. Thereís a phrase in the book that seemed to sum up your feelings in that regard: ìunintended consequences of the sociology of educational knowledge that began in the 70sî.

Michael Young: I think thatís absolutely right. The American sociologist Robert Merton thought that the core issue of sociology was to focus on the unintended consequences of things that people did. It is the job of sociologists to try to unpick these, so that they could be thought about before an event, rather than after.

In a sense, my current book is not arguing that my earlier book was wrong, but contending that it only dealt with half of the problem. Because you could look at knowledge as social practices in a historical context, it ended up by saying thereís nothing that special about knowledge at all because you could always reinterpret social practice. If that was true, youíve got no principles for an alternative curriculum because you have assumed that the basis for a curriculum is people learning in their everyday lives. So you get lots of talk about the ëcurriculum of everyday lifeí and there is a danger that a project like the RSAís Opening Minds goes down that route. What Iíve been doing recently is to argue that we need to focus not just on the social and historical aspect of knowledge but also that knowledge is something special in its own right. And if we donít take knowledge seriously in the curriculum weíre actually denying young people just what they need ñ the conceptual tools to survive, make sense and act in a very complex society.

Therefore, the knowledge issue is both an epistemological and a social justice issue, because those kids who donít get to university often donít get access to what I call powerful knowledge and they are the people who need it most, because theyíre going to find life really tough without it. Thatís where my journey has led me, trying to hold on to the strengths of the original radical idea about knowledge, but also to recognise the nature of the constraints we have to face. That, in fact, you canít just understand the world in any old way, you actually have to recognise that one of the things we do in education is give access to the next generation about what the previous generations have learnt, but in a critical way so you donít necessarily just reproduce the past generationís knowledge, but build on it. If you argue itís all social learning, then itís as if we reduce ourselves to almost a primitive society, which never had any past, or any future.

IM: You raise what you see as a possible danger in projects such as Opening Minds which is that they go down a route where they have too great an emphasis on everyday experience rather than the ëpowerful knowledgeí that can take people beyond themselves. But this relates closely to pedagogy. If we donít work with the experience of the learner, donít we set the pedagogical challenge too high, in effect excluding a huge number of people from the emancipatory potential of education?

MY: The pedagogical challenge is faced best by placing confidence in the teachersí professionalism ñ their subject and pedagogic knowledge ñ just as a doctor will make professional judgements about whatís wrong with you and whatís the best treatment ñ a teacher is going to make judgements about the level of the challenge for students at a particular stage in their learning, in their lives and in their biographies. Teachers have to make those decisions and we have to support them. An important debate has started by the Institute of Ideas called ëWhat is science education for?í It is deeply worried about whatís happening to the science curriculum in schools, the emphasis on experience and relevance and contemporary issues such as the environment and HIV/Aids.

Much of the old content of school science such as periodic table, pattern, molecular formulae, is being phased out. The problem is that if you donít have enough of the content knowledge of disciplines such as physics, chemistry and biology, you arenít going to be able to have a very informed debate about the environment or HIV/Aids. The challenge for the teacher is that kids have got many demands on their attention such as mobile phones, Facebook and Bebo. So, the problem for the teacher is getting all the kids involved in things that they donít immediately want to be engaged in.

IM: But isnít utilising contemporary relevance one way of getting kids involved? Opening Minds, for example, would seek to retain the knowledge of the traditional curriculum, but change its aims and organisation. Is not the idea of flexibility and experience at some stages beyond the subject discipline a way of heightening engagement?

MY: I take your point, but what Iím struck by in todayís curriculum is that it is increasingly ëmodularisedí so students get a kind of Tesco model of knowledge. They go round and they pick this or that and it is assumed to improve access, emphasise student choice and all the current buzzwords, but something serious gets forgotten. There is a real issue about the identity of the learner, and unless learners have some sense of boundaries that give them a shared sense of identity they remain in the fragmented world of common sense and modules fragment it further. There is a stage in anyoneís education before you can break down the barriers; youíve got to have some kind of identity to begin with. Of course the world is not divided up into subjects and if youíre trying to solve a problem in South Africa such as HIV/Aids itís a biological, economic and political issue. What disciplinary knowledge gives you is some tried and tested basis for thinking about these complex issues and about alternative ways of approaching them.

IM: The creation of learnerís identity takes a long time, and reinforces cultures and ways of thinking. Can people become unhelpfully protective of a subject discipline?

MY: This partly goes back to the pedagogical challenge ñ a good teacher whoís confident about their own subject enables their students to move beyond it. There are two dangers: one is you trap students in a subject-defined world that they canít see beyond and the other is the student that has got no identity other than their everyday life.

IM: Opening Minds and the RSAís work on education is a developmental effort. One of the things I find interesting is your ideas on the creation of an alternative curriculum. You raise two questions in particular, how we connect groups of specialists ñ those creating knowledge in boundaried disciplines ñ with curriculum knowledge to develop an alternative curriculum? And how do these subjects connect to each other?

MY: Teachers should be given the opportunity (in their training) to see the connections between their specialism and other specialisms. That process should be embodied in the curriculum. But you canít start from the connections, youíve got to start from the subjects, the disciplines, and then see how they can become more connective. Otherwise, you get into the identity problem. It took me a long time in my own career to accept the notion ñ and Iíve developed it from the French sociologist, …mile Durkheimís work ñ that boundaries in life are both constraints and possibilities.

What I forgot in my early work was we saw boundaries only as constraints, we wanted to do away with all constraints ñ do away with the boundaries between the school and everyday life, between disciplines, and between the sexes and so on. To some extent that boundary-less idea has become fashionable again, through the internet and the new kinds of communication that are possible. But what this apparently radical idea misses is the absolute core element to boundaries, that moving beyond them is where the key learning takes place. Itís not that they should be treated as fixed; they should be treated as real but bridgeable.