ABSTRACT
Politicians tell us that we are (or soon will be) in a ‘knowledge society’, and that more and more jobs require people to be ‘knowledge workers’. At the same time, government policy documents have been remarkably silent about what this knowledge is (Department for Education and Employment 1998, 1999). Is it more of the old disciplinary knowledge, or is it a new kind of trans-disciplinary knowledge that is more transient and local (Gibbons et al. 1994; Muller 2000)? Answers to such questions should lie at the heart of the sociology of education, but have until recently been strangely absent there as well (Moore and Muller 1999; Muller 2000; Moore 2004) This chapter has two aims: the first is to clarify the nature of the problem and the second is to build on Chapter 1 and propose the theoretical basis for a way ahead for the sociology of education. In developing the argument, the chapter will examine the problem of knowledge in the curriculum, but also raise some concerns about how the sociology of education has tended to treat the issue of knowledge more generally. It will argue that contemporary trends in the sociology of education make it peculiarly ill equipped to meet the curriculum challenge posed by debates about the implications of globalization (Castells 1998) and the massification of post-compulsory education (Scott 2000) of the past decade.
