Curriculum Criticism: Wiseman 1968 High School

Understanding Curriculum as a Literary Object

In this blog, I am following up on the concept put forth in an earlier post (on the following blog:http://denurturinghistoricalcontexts.blogspot.com/), namely the “reconceptualization” of curriculum as a literary object—and in turn what are the implications for understanding Wiseman’s film as such. To do so, I will make reference to John S. Mann chapter in the edited collection of Pinar’s (1975/2000) essays. Although the collection of essays was originally published in 1975, Mann published Curriculum Criticism during the winter of 1968-1969 in Curriculum Theory Network. I am not really familiar with that journal or its history. Coincidently, James T. Sears, recently made reference to this article in the Division B Curriculum Studies newsletter for AERA.

Mann (1968/2000) opens his essay by acknowledging Huebner admonition that our current curricular “discourse” within educational research is an “instrumental language structured around assumed means-ends, cause-effect relations,” and as a result, is “convenient primarily for regarding a curriculum,” reducing its text, its narratives, solely to “its technological aspects” (p. 133). Although this is an important curricular aspect, Mann continues, this technological aspect of the curriculum is not the only important aspect for us to take up as curriculum theorists. In order to challenge and critique reducing curricular discourses, their discursive coursings, to the language of technology, Mann (1968/2000) proposes to discuss curriculum as if it were a “literary object” (p. 133).

Let me stop briefly in order to offer a short soliloquy on the historical relationships between what Mann proposes on the opening page of this essay and one of the many narratives Wiseman (1968) tries to represent in High School. Barry Keith Grant (2006) writes:

The film also shows various classes, including language lessons, typing, history, home economics, physical and sex education, as well as teachers meeting with students regarding discipline and guidance counseling. Despite the school’s middle-class affluence, the film questions the nature of its approach to education. Wiseman has said that his first impression upon seeing the school was that it looked like a factory, a perceptions that informs the structure of the entire film. From the opening sequence, with the camera approaching Northeast’s fences and tall smokestack, to the ending, in which the school principal reads a letter from a former students about to be parachuted into Vietnam, the film suggests that the educational system is like an impersonal assembly line manufacturing consent, more concerned with socialization than knowledge. (p. 51)

Wiseman certainly conveys how Northeast has appropriated a technological discourse in various clips throughout the film. The space-training scene comes to mind here, as well as the objectification of the female body, in the scenes both with the gynecologist and nurse. Wiseman’s film High School asks the audience, the viewer, to reader, to consider institutional effect, and the potential sanity and madness of instituting, of disciplining such technological discourse.

Returning to Mann’s (1968/2000) essay—there he asks us to perhaps look at curriculum, its curricular language in a different way, a way that combines elements of aesthetics and science. “It is surprising only at first glance,” Mann tells us, “to find how well scientific and aesthetic talk get along together” (p. 133). In this project, are we not trying to combine aesthetics with science in the following ways?

1. Integrating digital media—such as the film High School, which has been made possible because of technological advancements in our society;
2. Critically analyzing the aesthetic production (film editing/sequencing) of High School;
3. Drawing (aesthetically/creatively) primarily (but not limited to) the collection of essays Curriculum Studies: The Reconceptualization as our methodological matrix for analyzing the film High School in order to offer what we might call a form of cultural criticism;
4. Utilizing web-based technologies such a “creative blog writing” to help with the aesthetic production of this paper (Google Blogger, and DreamWeaver); and
5. Engaging a curriculum theory project, which in turn attempts to answer Pinar’s call for studying the verticality and horizontality of curricular concepts and their respective historically situated contexts.

Please critique the aforementioned postulations and/or add to them. Mann (1968/2000) then draws our attention to the potential relationships between curriculum and fiction. It is here where we might further understand the possibilities and limitations of “curriculum” as a “literary object”. In order to do so, Mann draws on Mark Schorer’s (1950) treatment of the story. “And the first point to note,” Mann (1968/2000) suggests, “is that in his criticism Schorer focuses neither on the biography of the author nor on the effect of the work on the reader, but firmly on the literary object itself” (p. 134). Just wondering if there are similar approached in film studies Kate. Within this context, the function of the critique is then to disclose meanings in the object.

Wiseman (1968) presents the audience with a story, its explicit, implicit, and hidden curricula in High School—indeed the story of North East High. Could we then consider these stories, their respective curricular affiliations, as literary objects? Could we also consider Wiseman’s documentary film High School to also be a literary object in itself? In out attempts to answer such questions, “we might come close to,” as Mann (1968/2000) suggests, “or even touch or enter into, the object, to know its meanings well" (p. 134). And yet I ask myself to what ends? Or better yet, why I am so intellectually invested at this point in time, in my studies, my career, with both of these literary objects—Curriculum Studies: The Reconceptualization and High School. Autobiographically speaking (is this not always the case), is it my intellectual engagement with the aesthetic process of studying this film alongside/with/against this specific collection of essays, that is fulfilling my current epistemic desire, or is it something represented, or shared within each literary object that speaks to me, attaches itself, to my self-interests? Indeed why am I invested in subjecting myself to reading such fictions? “I would like to propose,” Mann (1968/2000) writes, “that a curriculum can be regarded in the same manner. Like fictions, a curriculum can have a story, a set of facts which on the surface purport to represent life” (p. 134). What then is the curriculum—explicit, implicit, hidden—represented/narrated in High School? Mann turns to the field of science in order to further offer us an explication of the relationship between fiction and curriculum. “In a curriculum,” Mann tells us,

a scientist precipitates a salt, or notes the effect of X rays on a photographic plate. It matters here, more than in fiction, whether there “really” was such a scientist. But by putting this fact aside for a while, it matters very much in a curriculum as well as in a story that this scientist was selected for representation from a universe of possibilities. And note that the scientist is not presented but represented. It is not a chunk of raw life a curriculum contains, but a film maker’s or text writer’s representation of life or selections from life. (p. 134)

The above passage addresses some of the concerns you have Kate with how Wiseman’s film has been constructed even though it “presents” itself under the guise of a “documentary—non fiction—film.” Can we argue to some extent that the scenes chosen and represented in the film work to subject us to a “dominant fiction” of schooling within that time period. Certainly, Pinar’s (1975/2000) collection of essays would help us to support the (de/re)construction of this historically situated “dominant fiction.” I do not have the book with me here at home, but perhaps Kaja Silverman’s (1992) book Male Subjectivity at the Margins might be of some help here with our analysis. “In both cases,” Mann makes clear, “the curriculum no less than the story, the network of selections constitutes an assertion of meaning—a symbolic commentary upon life” (p. 134). Wiseman’s film High School is a symbolic commentary upon life at schools, a school situated in the United States during the Vietnam War.