"I am This, but not Now"

Jessica Willis
June 2009
Curriculum theory is, then, that interdisciplinary field committed to the study of educational experience, especially (but not only) as that experience is encoded in the school curriculum ... [t]he school curriculum communicates what we choose to remember about our past, what we believe about the present, what we hope for the future.
– William F. Pinar, What is Curriculum Theory? 2004, p. 20

Currere is a reflexive cycle in which thought bends back upon itself and thus recovers its volition.
– Madeline R. Grumet (as cited by Pinar, 2004, p.35)

Memory, belief, hope, volition: How do they become the tools of our deceit and self-destruction? How may they become the tools of our emancipation? How can the synthesis and the “temporal complexity” of these four elements guide a re-entry into the riddle of a “lived present” – one that courses through the past, future, and the now (Pinar, 2004, p. 37)?
How can a pedagogue’s “complicated conversation with oneself” in the private sphere lead her, or him, to unite with colleagues and students in the “construction of ... a public sphere not yet born,” where the classroom “becomes simultaneously a civic square and a room of one’s own”(Pinar, 2004, pp. 37-38)?
These questions guide my understanding of curriculum theory, although the act of putting a hard definition on it, and on its related infinitive currere – the Latin infinitive of curriculum, meaning “to run,” and a method that studies “the relations between academic knowledge and life history in the interest of self-understanding and social reconstruction” (Pinar, 2004, p. 35) is akin to trying to grab a fistful of water.
Part of curriculum theory’s elusiveness, and multifacetedness, derives from its mirror-like quality: It is the academic study of academics, not frozen and dusty in time, but in the “ever-changing historical moment” (Pinar, 2004, p. 16). Pinar also described curriculum theory as a
form of practical-theoretical reason, and as such, it was “not subject to the scientific norms of reason and truth” (2004, p. 25). Curriculum theory, and currere, may not have to answer to these scientific norms, but they often do, particularly when viewed through the lens of autobiography, another mirror-like practice that eludes scientific norms, and has the ability to help teachers and students unify the severed public and private sphere.
Pinar referred to autobiography, and particularly African-American autobiography, as “first-person accounts composed by remarkable individuals whose subjective struggles were simultaneously collective ones” (2004, p. 46). This is not autobiography-as-memoir, which speaks as a closed course, saying the search is over (Edgerton, 1996, p. 123), but a lived practice, in the form of currere, where we aim for “truthfulness, not truth” (Pinar, cited by Edgerton, 1996, p. 133). Truthfulness (a lived state), rather than truth (a relatively fixed state), allows for the fluidity found in Pinar’s ever-changing historical moment, and lets fiction to flow into autobiographical practice. “Fictions allow one to write the ambiguity that is ‘identity’ – ‘I am this, but not now; I was this, but not really,” wrote Susan H. Edgerton in Translating the Curriculum (1996, p. 132). The temporally complex spaces between “I am this” and “but not now,” and “I was this” and “but not really” provide fertile ground for epistemological insight; it is the place where curriculum theory and currere answer to modern physics (Felman, 1987, p. 78).
In Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight, Shoshana Felman suggested that Lacan named a “pathbreaking pedagogical principle” when he drew a link between Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the theoretical orientation of physics, and psychoanalysis (1987, p. 78): “Until further notice, we can say that the elements do not answer in the place where they are interrogated. Or more exactly, as soon as they are interrogated somewhere, it is impossible to grasp them in their totality” (Lacan, cited by Felman, 1987, p. 78). One cannot seek to understand a part of something (“interrogate”) and simultaneously know it in its entirety. This indicates that “human knowledge is, by definition, that which is untotalizable” (1987, p. 78). In other words, the course – the currere – of knowledge can’t be closed. Furthermore, the space between interrogation and answer is the autobiographical place of currere, where, as Grumet suggested, “thought bends back upon itself and thus recovers its volition.”
The process of currere – the recovery of the power to choose, to set one’s own course, is the palliative, and also what is crushed, by the state of “gracious submission” enforced upon educators (Pinar, 2004, p. 46). The prone, powerless state of gracious submission, demanded by politicians who seek to take away pedagogical freedom and turn teachers into smiling, compliant tools who teach only to the standardized test and from the standpoint of a closed, fixed body of knowledge, could collapse if educators “respectfully mime” the public, non-solipsistic “autobiographical practices” of African Americans, and “‘[talk back]’ in protection of our children, their education, and everyone’s future” (2004, p. 46).
It is not accidental that “gracious submission” rings like a rule for proper ladylike conduct, or for the conduct befitting a slave. In the decades leading up to the Civil War, the teaching profession had been undergoing a feminization in the North, and in the years after the Civil War, the South rapidly followed suit; Pinar stated that, by 1865, there were as many female as male teachers in North Carolina; just five years earlier, only 7% of teachers were female (2004, p. 107). By 1925, more than 83 % of teachers in the United States were women (Hofstadter, cited by Pinar, 2004, p. 70). The profession’s feminine identity made it an ideal victim for political scapegoating when, in 1957, the Soviet satellite Sputnik was launched, and the United States became the loser in the race to reach outer space before its enemy. Pinar called the Sputnik launch a “traumatizing event ... which suggested to many that the United States no longer enjoyed military superiority over the Soviet Union.” Sputnik, and its symbolism of Soviet hegemony during the fearful time of the Cold War, led to the “intensification of criticism of public education” (2004, pp. 67-68). Politicians, academicians, and the military blamed the country’s failure on a weakness in the school system (2004, p. 68).
In the early 1960s, President Kennedy used this criticism of public education, and this fear of a “soft” – in other words, feminine – student body to launch a physical fitness campaign that would train the mind like a muscle; at the same time, he called for standardized tests that would prove a decline in fitness among white male youth (Pinar, 2004, p. 85). This mentality calls to mind the Latin saying “anima sano in corpore sano” – a sound mind in a sound body – which suggests that ability of body and ability of mind can only go together, and a weak body is equivalent to a weak mind. Pinar also noted that Kennedy’s curriculum reforms and war on physical softness were reminiscent of an earlier debate: In the late 19th century, coeducation was criticized as a threat to gender lines. It was suggested that boys would be emasculated, and girls would be masculinized, in a co-ed classroom (2004, p. 84). In a sense, classes already had been co-ed for quite some time; women were, more often than not, at the head of every classroom, in a position of power as the teacher, and this fact suggested “through innuendo, that women – mothers and schoolteachers – were blameworthy in allowing American youth, specifically white male youth, to go ‘soft’” (2004, p. 84).
The will to force public educators into a state of gracious submission also has links to public education’s deep, and covert, racialization (Pinar, 2004, p. 72). Although the association between public schools and the emancipated African-American population has roots in the Reconstruction era, after the Civil War, the racialization – particularly in the white male mind – of the public school curriculum intensified in 1954, when school desegregation was mandated by the Supreme Court. Racialization took the form of intellectual and curricular control, and through omissions and lies, the history of racism, slavery, and violence, “the school curriculum reproduced the white racism of the nation at large” (2004, p. 73).
Here, I ask questions based on one of Pinar’s definitions of curriculum theory. What do we choose to remember about our past? How does it relate to the present’s belief, the future’s hope, and volition, currere’s call for autobiography, choice, and curricular freedom? In another definition, Pinar called curriculum theory “a form of autobiographical and theoretical truth-telling that articulates the educational experience of teachers and students as lived” (2004, p. 25).
Truth-telling in the curriculum – speaking the living story about the nation’s past and present history of racism and violence – has been seen as the equivalent of treason; during the Cold War, a curriculum including the war on race, communism, women, and homosexuals “amounted to complicity with the Communist plot” and could cause uprisings and spur agitation (2004, pp. 73-74). As a result, information in textbooks had to be carefully controlled; and right-wing legislators and critics across the country forced publishers and school boards to omit any mention of lynching, the Ku Klux Klan, segregation, and other events (2004, p. 73). In Georgia, the mention of black poverty in a 1950s textbook provoked Southerners to seek retribution; one citizen said the textbook author was a traitor, and should be shot (Zimmerman, cited by Pinar, 2004, p. 74).
Over 1,000 miles to the north, more than 20 years later, in (presumably) liberal New England, the efforts to silence truth-telling, or to at least soft-pedal truthfulness, were still at play in the curriculum. My memory of Civil War studies in my almost all-white northeastern Massachusetts public school district is the title of the slim little chapter on the war in the history textbook: “A Nation Torn Asunder.” The title referred to the South’s secession from the Union, but, as it turns out, it has the right kind of poetry to name what happened, and what continues to happen, in the South. More on that in a moment.
In my textbook, there was no mention of lynching: I didn’t learn about it until college. Nor was there (aside from a few key off-task comments made by my middle school social studies teacher) any mention, in textbook or in class, of pervasive racist beliefs that exist in the present day.
Pinar argued that the crusade to masculinize and racialize the school curriculum, particularly through standardized testing and competitive sports, is most obvious in the American South (2004, p. 92), where the effects of centuries of slavery, the Civil War, and the fallacy of a completed – and successful – Reconstruction era, are still reverberating today. Memory and history were lost in the war, Pinar suggested, adding that the “phenomenon of denial and flight from reality involves, unsurprisingly, distortions in several spheres” that undermine the South’s efforts to “develop” culturally and come to terms with its past (2004, p. 95). In late June, 2009, the Telegraph, a British newspaper, published an online article about a Montgomery County, Georgia high school’s practice of holding a prom for its white students on one night, and one for its black students on the following night; the article noted that “separate proms are part of the bitter aftertaste of segregation that persists in parts of America’s Deep South” (Doyle, 2009). The notion that segregation and racism in the South – or elsewhere – was dealt a fatal blow in the 1960s, and died with the election of a black president in 2008, is another fallacy.
Pinar suggested that the destruction of plantation life after the Civil War caused the “severing” – or, as I would add, the “tearing asunder” – of the public and private spheres (2004, p. 119). Plantation life was a patriarchal, feudal society where the plantation owner “owned all: wives, children, and slaves ... [they] established the laws of everyday life, and in so doing usurped the role of public institutions, including legal ones” (2004, p. 119), and post-Civil War, after the utter devastation of the South, a new public sphere – where Southern belles had to take jobs (teaching, shop keeping, and the like) to feed their families, and gentlemen, sworn to protect their families and their way of life, were emasculated, horribly injured, often both – was forged. In so doing, the nation was truly torn. Whites, Pinar wrote, subsequently “recoiled from a public sphere suddenly controlled by African Americans and northerners ... the public school, ante-bellum in origin but introduced on a mass scale during and after Reconstruction, was viewed as antagonistic ... to the ‘southern way of life.’” In order to mend the schism between public and private spheres – a schism that threatens the very life of public education, and more – Reconstruction will have to be worked through, and the South must work to “[reclaim] the history of its disclaiming” of the public sphere (2004, p. 120-121).
This reclamation is the process of currere, a reflective process which contains four steps, or moments: the regressive – the past; the progressive – the present yet to be born; the analytical – the examination of both past and present; and the synthetical – a re-entry to the lived present (Pinar, 2004, pp 35-37). I will add that the synthetical moment is, as Grumet suggested, “where thought bends back upon itself” and reclaims itself, its stories, and the curriculum. This definition of currere also is the definition of autobiographic process – autobiography as a living form, perhaps composed of many voices, free from its associations with narcissism, and monoculturalism, and free from its binds as a closed, finished product (Edgerton, 1996, p. 122). Is not currere, and education, a shaping of the future yet to be, a present yet to be born?

SOURCES
Doyle, L. (2009, June 21, 2009). Segregated high school proms divide Georgia’s students. Telegraph.co.uk. Retrieved June 29, 2009 from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/5586617/Segregated-high-school-proms-divide-Georgias-students.html
Edgerton, S. (1996). Translating the curriculum: Multiculturalism into cultural studies. New York: Routledge.
Felman, S. (1987). Jacques Lacan and the adventure of insight: Psychoanalysis in contemporary culture. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Pinar, W. (2004). What is curriculum theory? Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.