My School, My University, My Country, My World,My Google, Myself…What is education for now?

Lyn Yates

Published online: 26 April 2012

� The Australian Association for Research in Education, Inc. 2012

Abstract Education is today in question, both in its institutional forms and in its

conceptual remit. The sense of a knowledge explosion and a world in rapid change

challenges the curricula of schools, universities, vocational colleges. And the

institutions seem to have to account for themselves in new ways, as if their purposes

have subtly shifted. Outside formal institutions the possibilities of new technologies

and new forms of communication are highly visible. Do we need education when

we have information? What happens to education when it is all about learning? And

what is the role of education research in any of this? In this 2011 Radford Lecture,

Lyn Yates discusses challenges and transformations evident across the education

spectrum today, and why, in the flux of new possibilities and new kinds of insti-

tutions, there is a need to talk again about the distinct purposes of education and

education institutions.

Keywords Policy � Curriculum � Higher education � Technology � Social change

If you Google1 the phrase what is education for? You will find it has become quite a

popular topic. Google itself claims to find about 3,680,000,000 relevant results (in

This paper was delivered as the Radford Memorial Lecture at the 2011 Annual Conference of the

Australian Association for Research in Education.

L. Yates (&)

University of Melbourne, 508 Alan Gilbert Building, Melbourne, VIC 3010, Australia

e-mail: l.yates@unimelb.edu.au

1 ‘Google’ of course is the ubiquitous proprietary search engine. However, as Alison Lee pointed out

during this conference, while most previous Radford addresses would be understandable by readers across

a long time span, the rapid social change that is in part the subject of this lecture is reflected in a

proliferation of reference points, acronyms and terms such as ‘Google’ whose longevity remains a more

open question.

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Aust. Educ. Res. (2012) 39:259–274

DOI 10.1007/s13384-012-0062-z

0.26 s). And the existence of Google and the Internet is one reason the question

itself is on the agenda. What is the point today of the institutions and systems built

in the 19th century to provide various forms of education: the schools, the working

man’s colleges, the universities? In the world of the information society is education

better left as an unfettered relationship between a consenting individual and their

smart phone?

And that is not the only reason the question ‘what is education for?’ is on the

agenda. How today can we answer the question ‘what are the qualities of the

educated person?’ (And I’ll give you the clue that I don’t think producing audit-style

lists of graduate attributes is a good enough answer.) How can we work out what are

the foundations that people need, to flourish in the future? What forms of work are

going to be available, and who will be able to do well in them? What knowledge,

skills, personal development and ways of being matter now, and what will matter in

the future? We hear plenty of talk about these questions, in the media and in policy

documents as well as in research. But even where there is a lot of apparent

agreement about the kind of people we want to turn out (the problem-solving,

ethical, flexible life-long learners, etc.), that is answering a different question from

how such people can be brought into being via education.

Moving on to education and the nation, we confront the question of whether the

traditional role of school systems in building national identities needs to be rolled

back in favour of a sense of the global citizen. Or, alternatively, does it need to be

re-asserted in order that a civil society can continue and not descend into partisan

forms of violence or anomie? If we look at schools we wonder whose answers to the

question ‘what is education for?’ should get priority—those of economists?

politicians? parents? educators? students themselves? (And where does the work of

education researchers and scholars fit in?)

If we look at universities, we find that the government itself seems to divide its

own thinking about their role into two different ministeries with two different and,

arguably, conflicting agendas.2 So should we be thinking about the Department of

Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) agendas for higher

education: widening participation, auditing graduate attributes, getting a good fit

between courses and employment opportunities? Or should we be thinking about the

Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (DIISR) and ERA3

agendas?—producing research and innovation and creativity of world quality,

identifying where the best research happens and directing resources to that? Should

we be thinking of the undergraduate years as a phase of general education for the

2 The division of responsibility for higher education into two separate ministerial portfolios was

established by the Labor Government led by Kevin Rudd when it took office in 2007, initially with the

then deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, heading a Department of ‘Education, Employment and

Workforce Relations’ (later, after she became Prime Minister, replaced by Simon Crean in this portfolio,

and in turn by Chris Evans). Kim Carr was Minister for ‘Innovation, Industry, Science and Research’

from December 2007 until December 2011. Shortly after this Radford Address was given (14 December

2011), the Government announced a reshuffle of its ministry and portfolios, and recombined the portfolio

for tertiary education (under Minister Chris Evans) as Tertiary Education, Skills, Science and Research.3 ERA is an acronym for ‘Excellence in Research for Australia’, the national research quality assessment

exercise sanctioned by the Labor Government and administered by the Australian Research Council; its

first iteration was carried out in 2010, with results released in January 2011.

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global citizen of the future? Or is it a phase of more specific and locally regulated

vocational preparation for the professions and other knowledge work opportunities?

I chose as title for this talk some phrases that are heard in today’s conversations

about education. The phrases are not esoteric and they are lexically similar, but the

simplicity is deceptive. They in fact call up very different kinds of agendas in

relation to education. And their meanings and associations raise different kinds of

questions for education research.

In Australia, My School4 and My University5 (title case) mean quite different

things from ‘my school’ and ‘my university’ (lower case).

The title case versions (perhaps they should even have a little trademark symbol

attached) are information sets, sanctioned by government and designed for the

hypothetical rational consumer. They contain sets of facts and especially figures so

you can compare school populations, resources and outcomes. The lower case

versions, the ways we might talk to each other about our own school or university,

are about experiences and human relationships: affective and irrational associations,

and calculations of advantage and outcomes that go well beyond test scores (for

example, who you will get to rub shoulders with if you go there, not just whether

they actually value-add to your cognitive abilities).

‘My Country’ and ‘My World’ are very different beasts again. The ‘My Country’

of Dorothea MacKellar’s poem6 is not about a rational consumerist choice and not

about something we can own, or some advantage we can achieve; it is a declaration

of belonging and appreciating. The national concerns seen in the decision to

prioritise history and civics as key elements of the new Australian curriculum reflect

some of the same sentiment: an interest in where do we come from, how do we learn

to belong? But enacting these concerns as a national curriculum is intrinsically a

different act than the poet’s act in creating the poem. The curriculum ‘my country’

is different from the poet’s ‘My Country’ because it is selected and sanctioned in a

particular way [it is ‘official knowledge’, to use Michael Apple’s (2000) term]; and

it is intended to be normative as well as informative or evocative. Building a new

Australian Curriculum is not just about what has been, but is self-consciously about

where we (or at least the we who are authorised to set up an ACARA) want to be in

the future, how we want to develop as a national citizenry or polity.

Incidentally, prescribing something doesn’t make it a bad thing, but it does make

it different from creating it as a poem or as an individual or family sentiment. The

designation of curriculum content references the normative intents of curriculum

4 See the My School website http://www.myschool.edu.au/, which is hosted by ACARA, the Australian

Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority, itself established by an Act of the Australian Parlia-

ment (8 December 2008).5 In March 2010 Julia Gillard, then Minister for Education, Employment and Workplace Relations and

for Social Inclusion, issued a media release announcing the government’s intention to introduce a ‘My

University’ website on the model of My School; that is currently in preparation.6 For non-Australian readers, ‘My Country’ is an iconic Australian poem that most children learn at

school. It was written by Dorothea MacKellar in 1908 when she was living in England and homesick for

Australia. It begins with a verse explaining that unlike her English readers, she is not pining for the green

leafy lanes of England, but ‘I love a sunburnt country/A land of sweeping plains/Of ragged mountain

ranges/Of droughts and flooding rains.’ See http://www.dorotheamackellar.com.au/archive/mycountry.

htm for full poem.

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and of schooling as institution and system. The normative is not something that can

be avoided in schools and especially in nationally sanctioned curricula. And we

know from the past half-century of research and social movements and challenges

that any normative selection is likely to create silences and some ‘othering’. But the

consequences of doing without a deliberated selection is one of the agendas on the

table when we become entranced with the possibilities of the free-wheeling Internet

as an alternative to these old 19th century institutions and systems. Do we really

want to do away with thinking about explicit social norms and purposes, or to leave

these to private interests and decisions? Do we want to leave these to families,

advertisers, Internet systems and the like?

Moving further through my title… in curriculum discussions, ‘my world’ (or

‘globalisation’ as it is more commonly labelled) is actually used in a quite different

way than ‘my country’ (this time lower case).

For curriculum, concerns about ‘my country’ and the forming of national

sentiments, are related to the idea that one important role of schools is a quite active

formative role: to re-create this country into the next generation. The assumption is

that what is learnt in schools and by graduates of universities and vocational

colleges will make a difference to what we are as a nation; that this is about people,

the next generation, actively creating the Australia of the future. But references to

the world, or ‘the changing world’ or to ‘globalisation’ tend to be a shorthand way

of referring to the conditions we live in and cannot escape, now and in the future. In

contrast to ‘my country’, here the world is not generally referred to, except possibly

in environmental studies, as something about which we have a choice, or as

something which we play a part in making. When the world is talked about in

curriculum-forming contexts, it usually refers to the conditions and settings outsideour control within which such choices might be made, and within which anindividual and national life will need to be constructed. The implication of many of

the policy documents falling over themselves in their anxiety to explain what we

need to do if we are not to be left behind is that we don’t have a choice to select our

world in the way that we are encouraged to select our school or university. The

phrase ‘my world’ is often used in the context of economistic thinking about ‘new

times’ and what people will have to deal with in the future. It is used to talk about

the ways people will have to negotiate their lives and become ‘lifelong learners’ in

those new conditions. This way of thinking doesn’t tend to dwell much on the way

these people may themselves impact on the world, just how they may negotiate

better or worse fates within it.

‘My Google’ is an illustration of something the ‘my world’ talk points to, and to

something a certain important 19th century thinker, now heavily out of favour, once

said: ‘we make our own history but not in conditions of our own making’ (Karl

Marx). With a personalized Google search we can customize and tailor our searches

and information sets to our interests and purposes; we can individualise. But we are

not the source of the options and the substantive material we access in this way—the

system builders design algorithms and templates; advertisers influence priorities,

and determine that not all information is considered equal. Yet ad hoc and

democratic effects play a part too: the patterns created by previous searches are part

of the algorithms and choices offered. As with the title case forms of ‘My School’

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and ‘My University’, putting ‘my’ and ‘Google’ together promotes the idea of an

individualised opportunity and responsibility or, in Foucauldian terms, responsibil-

isation, while in fact embedding us in systems and differential advantages and

constraints that are very much not of our own making. In this it is like a microcosm

of the world and of some important aspects of education in that world.

And finally, what of ‘myself’? Here we possibly find the most diversity. What

kind of self is education concerned with? The cognitive capacity of the mind? The

active agent of the market who decides which courses will flourish and which will

die? The person whose sensibilities should be cultivated by exposure to learning

they don’t necessarily get in their family, perhaps the arts or languages, or whose

talents need to be nurtured by providing diverse opportunities and support for

them?

For sociologists, ‘myself’ is the socially formed individual who brings different

kinds of interests, capacities and cultural capitals and baggage that pedagogy needs

to learn to deal with, and whose social group characteristics consume equity talk.

One of the first papers I published in education was called ‘Does ‘‘all students’’

include girls?’(Yates 1988). That was a paper about whose interests are taken as the

norm, and which qualities are made invisible or inferior in education policy and

practice, and this is a type of perspective on education that has continued to grow.

We hear it in reports on the specific needs of different groups—aboriginal students,

students from other countries or of different religions, boys, students with

disabilities or from poorer background. Indeed, that focus on the student and on

difference has grown so much that some of the sociologists who were prominent in

developing it are now calling for some stepping back to make sure that education is

paying enough attention to the power of disciplines, as Muller (2000), Young

(2008), Moore (2007), Wheelahan (2010) would put it; or to ‘intellectual quality’, as

the team involved in the Queensland Longitudinal School Reform Study put it

(Hayes et al. 2006).

These different concerns about education are constitutive of the field we work in.

The context of this conference and our work now is that of a world spinning faster,

and one where many of the traditional institutions and processes and underpinnings

of the work we do have been shaken or questioned or transformed; where the

question what is education for? is prominent but difficult to answer.

I have begun by emphasising these different kinds of lenses on education because

I believe education is a field where we need to keep a lot of different discussions and

perspectives in play, not allow one kind of talk or research to dominate all the space.

And that tends to become more difficult when we are pushed to particular uniform

templates for assessing the quality of what we have achieved.

Five years ago I began a project to study changes in curriculum policies and

curriculum thinking in the different Australian states over the past four decades.

Like any research project, especially given the limited funding that is the lot of

education researchers in this country, this project wasn’t going to do everything.

Other research and other projects are mapping spending, standards and outcomes of

school, and are studying what is taking place in classrooms or are focusing on

particular subjects in the curriculum, or phases of schooling and learning. My own

project, School Knowledge, Working Knowledge and the Knowing Subject: a

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review of state curriculum policies 1975–20057 (Yates et al. 2011) was to focus on

general policy documents, together with a limited number of interviews with people

who had longstanding involvements in the curriculum-making of their respective

states.

Now it might seem perverse, just at the point when the National Curriculum

Board8 and the prospect of a new Australian Curriculum were coming into being,

that I should embark on what might be seen as a backward-looking project to see

what had been going on around the country in the decades before this new initiative.

It might seem a long way from the outcomes-oriented and impact-directed and

‘evidence-based’ research we are being urged to produce. I did it, in part, as a way

of seeing better how in practice that question what is education for? gets thought

about, and answered; in part as a way of not taking for granted, or taking as natural,

the ways it is being taken up now; and in part as a way of engaging myself further

with those difficult questions I’ve touched on in my opening, and particularly the

debates about curriculum content.

In setting out to examine how, at decade intervals, curriculum was being thought

about around the different states, we have one means of seeing not only what has

been our recent history, but what we are doing now (what is being emphasised now

and what is no longer part of the discussion that once was). And in the sociological

and philosophical questions that drove this project, we were also trying to get a

better understanding about what is at issue now in trying to construct curriculum or

to consider the purposes of education: what kinds of foundational knowledge or

learning, or skills or capabilities, make sense in the 21st century?

The questions the project started with were as follows:

• When policies are formulated in relation to curriculum, where is knowledge seen

to reside, and what sort of a thing is it seen to be?

• How are the ‘academic’ and ‘vocational’ purposes of schooling depicted?

• What characteristics and dispositions are the learner assumed to bring to

schooling, and how is difference among learners construed in terms of

curriculum policies?

• What types of knowledge and what types of outcomes are named as core?

• How are agendas about schooling as a vehicle of knowledge and learning of the

young being put together with agendas about schooling as a mechanism of

competitive selection for life beyond school?

The first and second questions came out of my experience of being involved in a

previous project on vocational learning (Chappell et al. 2005), and my awareness of

some of the contending schools of theory and research as to how knowledge or

learning is built—critical social realism, activity theory, actor network theory,

cognitive science, and many more. In a project I did earlier, on dual accreditation

7 This project was funded by the Australian Research Council as an ARC Discovery Project and was

conducted with Cherry Collins, with further research assistance and input from Kate O’Connor, Brenda

Holt and Katie Wright.8 The National Curriculum Board was established by the incoming Labor Government in April 2008, and

was later transformed into a statutory body, ACARA (the Australian Curriculum Assessment and

Reporting Authority) in May 2009. http://www.acara.edu.au.

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subjects in NSW, it became clear that the Australian Qualifications Framework

(AQF) and the Higher School Certificate (HSC) were working with different

concepts of what knowledge or know-how looks like, and how you examine it

(Yates 2006). One approach sees knowledge or know-how as visible competencies

that are assessed as achieved or not achieved; the other sees a hierarchy of

knowledge and intelligence that is in the mind and can be assessed on paper and

graded.

In the vocational field the workplace is often seen as the heart of authentic

knowledge. The problem-based and group assessments that have found growing

favour in universities, reflect some similar sense of how effective knowledge is

built, trying to replicate ‘real world’ or so called ‘authentic’ situations. I am

currently supervising a medical educator, Jenny Barrett, who is doing research on

medical education in the hospital setting, and there too she is finding a strong sense

among the doctors and students that the place itself is a constituent component of

knowledge that matters, of ‘where knowledge is seen to reside’. But these moves to

prioritise what happens in the ‘real world’ beg a question about what, other than

credentialism, is the role of colleges and universities: the question what is educationfor now? The talk of authenticity obscures the impossibility of expecting we can just

go back to throwing everyone into simply learning on the job. These are live issues

for educators and curriculum designers. In the curriculum project, we found

significant differences between the states as to the extent they took their starting

points as traditional disciplines or took work and activities in the world as the

underpinnings of curriculum and their foundations for shaping what they did.

The third question (What characteristics and dispositions is the learner assumed

to bring to schooling, and how is difference among learners construed in terms of

curriculum policies?) came out of questions that had tended to dominate the

sociology of education since the 1970s, an interest in social and cultural and

gendered difference as a source of inequality and the idea that formal education was

built around cultural capital and dispositions of some groups to the detriment of

others. It also was intended to pick up the extent to which students are primarily

thought about as minds with better or worse cognitive capacities (that is, how much

education curriculum policies are framed within cognitive developmental perspec-

tives), and how far concerns about engagement and the diverse experiences students

bring to school are important in the framing of policy approaches. Again, there was

a lot of difference between the Australian states about what seemed to be

foundational in their approaches and starting points for thinking about the activity of

schools. In South Australia and, in a different way, in Queensland, that thinking

about difference in the situations and experiences of the students who came to

school had been foundational to how they started. In important ways their starting

points had tended to be how to keep in the education track students who

traditionally were easily shunted out of it, and curriculum frameworks were built up

from that beginning. In other states, and NSW is a strong example, difference was

not the starting point—in a sense, knowledge or even tradition was—and difference

was addressed in terms of how to provide options or appropriate pedagogies, once

the broad shape of the curriculum was in place.

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The fourth question (What types of knowledge and what types of outcomes are

named as core?) is one in which there was a great deal of activity and

experimentation over the decade or so preceding the establishment of ACARA—

the work on essential learnings, and new basics as a different way of conceiving

what is core; the arguments about which subjects should be included in the work of

the National Curriculum Board, and the like, the discussion of capabilities.

The fifth question (How are agendas about schooling as a vehicle of knowledge

and learning of the young being put together with agendas about schooling as a

mechanism of competitive selection for life beyond school?) is one of the big ones

for schooling and indeed for education systems more generally. We expect and want

education in its institutionalised form to do something valuable for students, but

these also are selective and competitive institutional arrangements, and systems all

face a problem related to the way in which that second purpose impacts on the first.

Looking around this country at what has been happening roughly in my own

working lifetime, here are some things we found.

A multitude of new policies

One of the most striking things we discovered from the project is the sheer number

of different attempts there have been since the 1970s to come up with a new

statement or vision or framework about curriculum. Leaving aside all the specific

inquiries into girls and boys, Indigenous students, vocational education, subject-

specific enquiries in music, maths etc., we found that over 100 state-based general

curriculum policies were produced in the four decades of our study, and another

fifteen at Commonwealth level—and this is prior to the huge amount of new work

going on under the umbrella of ACARA. This is one indication of how today,

education is being challenged by the times we are in. All around the country,

authorities have felt some obvious need to keep having new goes at it.

Changing times and the future

The documents are also full of concerns about the future, and of the need for schools

to do something different in preparation for a future that is different from the past.

Many of the debates about ‘subjects’, ‘key learning areas’, ‘essential learnings’ and

the like are about this. One of the things they are trying to grapple with is what

aspects of the past, especially in relation to disciplines and bodies of knowledge, are

relevant, and what needs to be done differently to prepare for a world of such rapid

technological, communications, and social change.

Worries about work

There is a preoccupation with the changing nature of work, with worries about

unemployment and Australia’s competitiveness, and what kinds of knowledge,

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skills and abilities young people will need in a world where jobs have been changing

quite a lot. The highpoint of this rhetoric was probably in the early 1980s, no doubt

subliminally influenced by George Orwell’s 1984, and by Barry Jones’ Sleepers,Wake!, when it seemed virtually every state and industry body was producing its

own new Into the 80s statement for schooling. Industry bodies were invited to

produce lists of competencies, and different schools and states experimented with

portfolios and partnership and dual-accreditation and the like. In the policy

documents at least, there was a move over time to consensus that completing

secondary school should be an aspiration for all; but less agreement on the extent to

which specific vocational preparation should be part of that.

Worries about values and citizenship

The issue of citizenship and how we want young people to understand themselves

and see others keeps being raised, and creates some of the most visible arguments

about what the curriculum should be doing. It is one of the main backdrops to why

History found itself as one of the four subjects initially sanctioned to be developed

as foundations for the Australian Curriculum. Australia is not alone in this. The

World Yearbook on curriculum I recently edited (Yates and Grumet 2011) makes

clear that around the world there is a huge amount of curriculum reformulation

going on, with some very specific attention to how to treat the story of the nation in

the context of global developments of various kinds.

Changing structures of managing curriculum

In the 1970s, reports and curriculum frameworks commonly were thin documents,

produced by education departments of the respective state public service, except

those for the final phase of schooling, which was designed for a minority as entrance

to university studies, and which normally derived from an examination heavily

controlled by cognate university academics. The documents were designed more for

schools and teachers than for the general public. In the 1980s however, states began

to bring curriculum more directly under the relevant minister (‘the ministerialisation

of education’) and into more direct political debates. They began setting up new

authorities to deal with curriculum (boards of studies). They began to build more

glossy forms of curriculum. One consequence of this was that the details of

curriculum became the subject of public debate in the media in a new way. Another

was that the documents were often landed with simultaneously trying to give

guidance to professionals and also to carry a message to the public about how well

schools are being managed by the government.

While I was doing this research on policies related to the school curriculum I was

working in a role9 where much of my everyday focus was not schools but higher

education, and particularly its research activities. Prior to that, I worked at a

9 As Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research) at the University of Melbourne.

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university (UTS) where adult and vocational learning was a key concern. One of the

striking things about the list of concerns my research project identified as key

characteristics of school curriculum policy developments over the past half-century

is that they could serve almost equally well to summarise many of the developments

and reports concerned with universities and with adult and vocational education

over the same period.10 In these other arenas too, we see frequent attempts to

address and commission reports on the appropriate content of the institutions (the

competencies reports, the qualifications debates, the graduate attributes work),

framed by wider concerns about changing forms of work, the global competitive

environment, the need to look to the future. But, as with schools, far from seeing a

big shift away from institutions in favour of self-directed alternative forms of

learning (though there is certainly a growth in the presence of private providers and

international players), we see an expansion of and more intense attention to

universities, TAFE and the like, greater consumer appetite for these, and also a great

intensification of the attempt by government to micro-manage them.

In the Curriculum Policies Project we explored differences in the culture of

different states in how they took up the problematic of curriculum (Yates et al.

2011). Two of the most important differences noted in the approaches of different

states were in how best to conceptualise the core role of schools in relation to

foundations/knowledge and how to deal with difference and equity agendas; again,

these are areas in which universities around Australia also are taking some different

approaches.

Doing historical research helps us to see and think about some new emphases that

are part of contemporary thinking about the role of education. We can see the kind

of contribution that research like this makes in terms of identifying what is different,

or what is not there, if we compare the project’s findings with one of the new and

much consulted online authorities, Wikipedia.

Wikipedia defines education in the following apparently uncontroversial way:

Education in the general sense is any act or experience that has a formative

effect on the mind, character, or physical ability of an individual. In its

technical sense, education is the process by which society deliberately

transmits its accumulated knowledge, skills, and values from one generation to

another. Education can also be defined as the process of becoming an educated

person. An educated person refers to a person that has access to optimal states

of mind regardless of the situation they are in. That person is able to perceive

accurately, think clearly and act effectively to achieve self-selected goals and

aspirations.

This definition in fact manages to miss entirely two central elements of the changes

we observed in our study of what has been happening in Australian curriculum over

recent times, and I’ll say more about that shortly. At the same time, in its final two

sentences, it takes a specifically contemporary way of thinking about education as

10 Perhaps with the exception of the citizenship and values discussion, which has certainly surfaced in a

new way for universities, but is perhaps less present in the discussions in relation to TAFE and adult

learning. This also reflects the vocationalisation of the broader adult learning institutional terrain,

compared with some earlier periods.

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natural, rather than as an object that might need scrutiny. Being an educated person

is no longer depicted as having to do with what one knows or knows about, but

today is seen as being instrumentally potent, being the rational self-actualising

person of the economists’ model: acting ‘effectively to achieve self-selected goals

and aspirations’. This does reflect a contemporary and OECD-led commonsense, but

it is not timeless.

Turning now to what the Wikipedia definition misses, the finding from the

Curriculum Policies Project that this Wikipedia definition misses entirely is that

schools, TAFEs and universities have all been grappling in recent times with a

major perceived problem: what they need to modify about that traditional purpose of

‘deliberately transmitting the accumulated knowledge, skills and values’ from one

generation to the next. The reports are full of anxieties about that aim, and often,

declarations of the need to turn away from it. What they have been worrying about

is that the changes in the world, current and predicted, seem to be leaving the

knowledge of the past generation behind or, at a minimum, calling into question

which aspects of it to take up, and how broadly to let that past experience shape the

current curriculum. Under fierce debate today is the question of what foundations

are appropriate. Many of the reports we read (and many of the statements by

politicians and education leaders) sound less like any commitment to an idea of

education as passing anything on, and more like having a new purpose, which is to

backward-map the skills they guess are needed in the future.

This is one of the areas I am particularly interested in, and that my new project is

looking at. Just beginning with where you want to end up has the distinct danger of

hollowing out the kinds of learning you need to get there, and I think this is one

reason why there has been such a strong and revived interest in Basil Bernstein’s

work. Bernstein was one of the few sociological theorists who took seriously the

dynamics of what is produced by different forms of curriculum, both in terms of

identity-building and in terms of building powerful and new knowledge (many

sociologists deal only with the first: the social messages or disciplining that

curriculum is seen to deliver). I’m thinking in particular of his classic paper ‘On the

Classification and Framing of Educational Knowledge’ (Bernstein 1971), which I

consider still to be one of the landmark contributions to curriculum theorising.

In that paper, Bernstein contrasted two different kinds of programs of learning

that he saw in schools and universities in the UK and in Europe. One was based on

clear subject or discipline forms, strong boundaries, and strongly developed subject

or discipline-based identities. The other approach, which Bernstein called

‘integrated codes’, took social themes and outcomes and the knowledge of the

learner as more central to the education activity. It was interdisciplinary, and related

learning to the topic or problem. The caution his analysis raises is that taking a

particular approach at one stage can produce problematic or perverse effects at

another. Integration codes do open up new ways of engaging and using the

knowledge of students—but they have the potential danger of tying students to the

dominating idea, and requiring a more uniform ideology by their teachers in order to

work, rather than giving students the tools to go further. Collection codes conversely

pose big problems for those concerned about social inequalities, for learners lacking

the right cultural capital and dispositions, and they have the potential to produce

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some rigidity. Nevertheless, Bernstein argued, this kind of strong disciplinary

boundary work, is also a source of the later boundary breaking and creative work

that happens with those who make it through to the PhD.

My new project is called Knowledge Building across School and University,11

and in it I am trying to see what is happening now in relation to boundaries,

changing technological possibilities, and inter-relationships in two key discipline

areas, history and physics, and also in the cross-curricular and interdisciplinary

activities of educational institutions. We are studying the current kinds of thinking

and actions here across elite and non-elite settings, and across school, undergraduate

and research stages of higher education. We are in the very early stages of this

project but some of my own interviews with those doing some of the knowledge

creating work in some of the most prestigious interdisciplinary research institutes,

have emphasised their views on the need for strong disciplinary and specialist

foundations as a basis for the work that happens there, as well as making clear their

excitement about the new kinds of knowledge being made possible through

collaboration and breakthrough technologies. And interestingly, those I have

interviewed have also been very strongly aware of the need to engage students and

excite them (about science and history for example) as a key purpose of schooling.

Knowledge-building, seen this way, is a lot more complicated than simple binaries

of disciplines versus problems or content versus process.

So, one of the things that the Wikipedia definition misses is this problem today of

what foundations look like. In the concluding chapter of our book on what the

Australian states have been doing (Yates et al. 2011), we try to explain why this task

that ACARA and also universities are engaged in, is so genuinely difficult, and that

neither trying to stick with the curriculum of the past nor trying to ignore that in

favour of straight backwards-mapping of outcome attributes has been successful.

The other element Wikipedia unwittingly misses in its definition is the rise of a

particular kind of management perspective as the measure by which education is

judged. Now, instead of talking about educational ideals, policies talk in more

generic management terms that might apply to any activity. The task and the criteria

for success are to manage particular kinds of institutional and system outcomes that

can be measured in particular ways, and this in turn has some particular effects on

the content of what is taught and learnt, and especially on what is prioritised. Bob

Lingard (2011) took up this theme of ‘ruling by numbers’ in his Radford lecture last

year.

In the final part of this talk I want to say a little about how my themes and

reflections today bear on the issue of education research and on AARE as a body of

education researchers. Fortuitously, this final section also bears on the theme of this

year’s conference: ‘Researching Across Boundaries’. In many ways, the question

what is education for now? can be joined by a set of further questions—‘what is

education research for now?’, ‘who is education research for now?’ and even, in the

light of the recent research quality assessment ERA, another question: ‘who are

education researchers now?’

11 http://www.education.unimelb.edu.au/kbp/. Funded as an ARC Discovery Project 2011–2013. I am

working on this with Peter Woelert, Victoria Miller and Kate O’Connor.

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Like many in this room, I was disappointed to see the results of the first national

comprehensive assessment of research quality in Australia in relation to education

research, even knowing first-hand the inevitable inadequacies and problematic

nature of government-based assessments of research quality. The first ERA

outcomes seemed to show that the quality of research in the field of education in

Australia was relatively poor.12 One legitimate response here is that to some extent

this is a technical artefact of the decision to code journals in particular ways, and to

devolve a lot of the outputs of people present here not to Education but to ‘parent’

disciplines outside education. As Tasmania found with the Essential Learnings

curriculum, when you try to squeeze concepts developed for one purpose into

assessment categories that have a different rationale, you can easily get into trouble,

and a whole curriculum reform can come tumbling down.13

Another legitimate objection to ERA might relate to the criteria built into the

journal gradings. In my opening comments I was trying to show that while we are in

a period of global movements and technologies of various kinds, in education, the

national and the local are a long way from having disappeared into unimportance.

My School and My University (title case) are Australian initiatives; very specific

Australian policies frame the curriculum that is approved, or the ways universities

must organize themselves; and in the debates about history and civics the local and

national are being revivified by a sense of the global and technology flows, not

displaced by these (see Yates and Grumet 2011). So a science-based model for a

research quality ranking system that assumes the highest quality research is

essentially universal in its subject matter (and in its potential readership) is

necessarily flawed (Yates 2009). The local, the situated, the interpersonal are an

important part of how education works, and that is one reason so many research

students, especially those who also work as practitioners in education, choose to do

qualitative work and case studies (though it is also easy to get a bit too comfortable

with this!) And, as we know, ERA did not set out to include impact or contribution

to professional concerns in its measures, though this is now back on the agenda. So a

political response to ERA would be to lobby for a different way of counting and

categorising; AARE I know is doing work of this kind, and the second iteration of

ERA has already introduced some changes. But today I want to focus not on this

necessary pragmatic and lobbying activity, but on how the perspective on education

inherent in the first iteration ERA categories relates to my topic and to the examples

I have been discussing in the course of the talk.

The coding and boundaries of research outputs required for the last ERA

submission implied that a research ‘output’ was either an output in sociology or

psychology or an output in education. But either/or is the wrong way of looking at

this for the field of education. The question is not whether education is a self-

contained research field, which it certainly is not, but about what is gained and what

is lost by associating as education researchers rather than through other hats, and by

12 They also showed how little money per researcher is spent on education research in this country

compared with other fields.13 See chapters on this Tasmanian curriculum reform and its downfall by Connors (2011) and Andersen

and Oerlemans (2011).

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seeing research activity through an education code rather than a disciplinary one.

Philosophical, historical, psychological, sociological, cultural studies, pedagogical,

subject-specific, even economic perspectives have legitimate grounds to be

concerned with education, to study it, to make claims on what it does. The

question is what is being made invisible by the Australian Bureau of Statistics’

categorising, in which a large amount of disciplinary work on education is deemed

not to be education research, and an even larger amount of extremely different other

kinds of work is lumped together as curriculum and pedagogy; and in which it

appears that our strongest activity as a body of researchers is a field unhelpfully

labelled ‘specialist studies of education’! The question should not be who is ruled in

or out of the research or research discussion. The question should be what value and

purposes are served by seeing the field in particular ways, including coming

together as an education research community as we do here.

William Radford, after whom this lecture is named, was a major advocate for the

cause of education research and one of the small group who in the late 1960s and

1970s initiated a research association, AARE, that would bring together education

researchers for the purpose of more effectively communicating with each other and

addressing the professional issues and problems they faced as education researchers.

He was part of the deputation too that lobbied the government for more and better

funding of education researchers, and that led to the creation of a specific education

research funding stream, through the Australian Advisory Committee on Research

and Development in Education (AACRDE).

Discussion about who education researchers were was a prominent issue in the

initial stage of forming the association. When AARE was founded you had to meet

fairly tough formal criteria to be admitted as a member. You needed to have a

higher degree and to be working on education research, and this was rigorously

assessed by a membership committee. As Bob Bessant and Allyson Holbrook’s

(1995) invaluable history of AARE reported:

One candidate with an economics degree and employed by a professor of

education as a full-time research worker on a higher education project was

refused because the projects she was working on ‘did not relate to her formal

qualifications’.

(Bessant and Holbrook 1995, p. 46)

Another was rejected because the work was seen as directed to producing a

psychological instrument rather than an education report (Bessant and Holbrook

1995, p. 47). The foundation meetings debated whether education historians were

scientific enough to count as education researchers. Conversely, a number of those

working as education researchers, though not the majority, had been reluctant to

form as an education research association rather than continuing to see their main

professional research communities as being the associations of psychology,

sociology, history and the like.

At a minimum, what an association of education researchers achieves is to have

the field rather than the discipline as the context of the agendas. It makes it possible

to take up the question ‘what is education for?’ in a way that is different from

asking this question primarily through a pre-set disciplinary lens. It makes it

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possible to consider the directions inherent in a whole lot of research and policy

activity related to education—how it is coming together. Education, as I’ve argued

in a number of my books, is a somewhat unusual field in the extent to which what

we might call lay opinion (including public and political and media interests) shapes

its directions. Nevertheless, an important role of social science and humanities

research is to try to deal with questions that are inherently non-specialist, but to do

this in more systematic and creative ways, to enhance the culture and the

professional activity by the work we as researchers do.

One of the very big issues for research activity today, from the most elite levels

through curriculum at all kinds of levels, is how best to produce collaborative cross-

disciplinary and interdisciplinary work. Interestingly, this is often done by letting

the topic or the field rather than the discipline be the arena for interaction. Public

health researchers are a good example here, but sustainability, climate, design and

many others are also clear examples. This is not about doing away with strong

disciplinary associations and frameworks, which continue to be needed, but about

how fields and problems of important social interest need conversations between

and across these as well.

So, finally, to return to my theme: My school, my university, my country, myworld, my Google, myself: what is education for now?

In this talk you may have observed that I have often been sliding between talking

about education as institution, and education in the sense of an activity with

particular directions and values. Both are important, and both need to be part of our

interests and discussions. Going back to my starting point and those 3.6 billion

Google links to discussions of what is education for?, I would suggest there are two

main concerns that have led to the popularity of this theme. One is the availability of

new vehicles for learning outside traditional institutions. These call into question the

state steering and funding that has built education systems. The second is the

uncertainty about how that traditional ‘passing on’ role of education might need to

change; the contested views about what kind of formative effect on the mind,character, or physical ability of an individual is good today. Together, these

developments invite us to revisit our thinking about education and not just about

learning.

If we asked how the Internet educates, we would come up with different

perspectives than if we asked how the Internet can be used for learning. Thinking

about education, as a social institution, and as a special and valuable and

deliberate form of development of individuals and groups and nations, is worth

doing. It invites us to consider how that deliberate and institutionally directedactivity should today be formed to enable something that is valuable for

individuals and groups and nations; and how it might accomplish something

different for individuals and groups and nations than the learning and socialisation

they might get simply from hanging around in a world and a cyberspace that is

changing in such major ways.

Acknowledgement The author acknowledges and is grateful for funding support from the Australia

Research Council for three research projects referred to in this article: DP0211943; DP0771231 and

DP110102466.

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Author Biography

Lyn Yates is Foundation Professor of Curriculum at the University of Melbourne. She is a past member

of the AARE Executive and was AARE President in 1998. Her books include What does good educationresearch look like? (Open University Press 2004) and Making Modern Lives (with Julie McLeod, SUNY

Press 2006) as well as the more recent curriculum publications referenced in the address.

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