There is an alluring, daunting, and haunting desire for practical knowledge in the contemporary social and education sciences about school change. This desire is not new: it haunts the turn of 20th century social sciences to change urban conditions and populations, and appears today in international school assessments and professional education.…

The Organization of Economic, Cooperation and Development's Programme for International Student Assessment (OECD's PISA) is explored as a site of science as an actor managing a social life. Its calculations form at the interstices of multiple historical lines as a comparative reason about nations, societies, and populations. That reason is…

The chapter considers the globalization and transnational through examining reform as embodying standards. My use of standards is not in the publically stated goals of policy. They are in the principles generated in the making of the objects of reflection and administration of children. These standards relate historically to the rules and…

Modern teaching and teacher education "magically" transform sciences, social sciences, and humanities. The alchemy of school subjects provides a way to think about frames of reference organizing inquiry and constitutes evidence in teacher education, also obscuring the normalizing and dividing practices of teaching (including…

Not-with-standing the current topoi of the Knowledge Society, a particular "fact" of modernity is that power is exercised less through brute force and more through systems of reason that order and classify what is known and acted on. This article explored the system of reason that orders and classifies what is talked about, thought and…

Examines three curriculum projects in order to evaluate the organization of social studies curriculum around the social science disciplines. Concludes that curriculum often minimizes students' creative powers by stressing logical tidiness at the expense of the social, personal, and communal processes which characterize social science. (Author/DB)

Discussion of the social sciences as forms of thought that structure meanings,'' and of the value of teaching students to develop the social discipline approach.'' (Author/SP)

Efforts to reform teacher education should include careful reconsideration of what teachers learn about curriculum design and instructional methodology. The selection and organization of school knowledge have significant social, political, and ethical implications that are ignored by traditional, rationalistic assumptions about educational…

The article discusses education from the perspectives of the different social sciences and concludes that schools should provide an environment that gives men power to open new horizons and to show new aspects of humanity from the vantage points of many different schemes and patterns. (PD)

Purpose: Prominent at the intersections of national educational agencies, higher education, and international educational performance assessments are two reform standards: "benchmarks" determining optimal student performance, and "empirical evidence" for determining the quality of reform practices. These two notions are often…

To shed light on the social research perspectives which enable people to give coherence to daily events, educational researchers must continually scrutinize the social values and beliefs which underly their research. As social and cultural affairs are explained by the social sciences, so also are theories and methods influenced by social conflict.…

Three curriculum materials which draw upon the social disciplines are examined to understand the manner in which individual responsibility and authority are defined. The three include American Political Behavior, Holt Secondary Social Studies Curriculum, and Investigating Man's World. Curriculum content in each is found to contain dispositions…

This publication reviews cross-disciplinary literature on education with the aim of informing the reader of the relation between educational governance and social inclusion/exclusion in policy and research. Various conceptual issues raised in the literature are examined first. Then, two problematics are considered to emphasize how the methods,…

One of the most important myths in education is that of progress. The idea derives from a specifically Western messianic tradition and contains the belief in the growth and the development of an organism. That belief emerges from Greek and Hebraic thought, is modified in Christian theology, and then is secularized in science. The persistence and…

The essay focuses on curriculum history as the study of systems of reason. The first section considers curriculum as "converting ordinances", inscribing Puritan notions of education as evangelizing and calculating designs in American Progressive education. The second section examines the Social Question, a cross-Atlantic Protestant reformist…