BOOK REVIEWS 291

ways seems to confine his work to university level distance education. If this is what he is concentrating on then his work fails to be the foundation of distance education. Distance education covers all levels of education and straddles across both formal and non-formal education.

Media and media mix is an area where there is little empirical evidence to go by. Research does show us, as Keagan implies, that all media reach well or, that people learn equally well from print as they do from broadcasting. However, if we were to follow consumption patterns even in the work of the most successful and sophisticated institutions, such as the OU in the U.K. for example, the justification for the expensive media of TV and radio is at best tenuous. Students, especially when they are studying for examinations, will try to get by with the minimum of effort. Reading this section one is left with the need for more empirical study on student consumption patterns of mediated education.

The economics of distance education is always fraught with problems. Despite the many studies conducted to date we are not sure exactly what researchers are looking for. The danger of comparing distance education with conventional educational is in itself a mistake. Distance education is a revolutionary idea and does not have much in common with a conservative institution. Unfortunately our measures of success and failure stiIl seem to be the diplomas and degrees issued and until we come up with other measures Keagan has no choice but compare a cottage or craft method with industrial methods of education. Every time this is done the thousands of individuals who have benefited as students but did not get degrees and diplomas, and even larger numbers of casual listeners of the many excellent educational broadcasting, radio and TV are neglected. How do we assesss this?

The work, however, is a real contribution to knowledge about the practice of distance education.

SOLOMON INQUAI International Extension College, Cambridge

The Politics of Education: Culture, Power and Liberation: Paolo Freire (Donald0 Macedo, trans.), Macmillan, 1986

This recently translated collection of essays by one of the world’s leading thinkers on the contribution made by education to social change, while including some new work, provides a timely opportunity to reappraise the writing of Paolo Freire and its impact in the decade and a half since it was first published.

Henry Giroux does this in some measure in his introduction to the Politics of Education, locating Freire’s work on the political culture of education within the New Sociology of Education’s paradigms of cultural repro- duction and recalling his theories that through discourses of crisis and critique those of domination and despair can be overcome. Through an understanding of the processes of cultural domination and oppression it becomes possible to develop a language of possibility and engagement.

What Giroux does not reveal, nor Freire acknowledge, is how Giroux’s own work on theory and politics in education has already extended Freire’s thought to theories for the application of a critical pedagogy in societies with a public sphere which depoliticises and reifies culture [Giroux, H. (1983) Theory and Resistance: A Pedagogy for rhe Opposition. Heinemann, London]. Nor,

apart from stressing the universality of Freire’s writing, does Giroux allude to the extent to which Freire’s theories have inspired educational development over the past decade and its impact, particularly in the less developed world.

Reintroduced in this volume is the now familiar concept of a culture of silence, developed by Freire from his interpretation of the reality of the Latin American peasant. Also present is codification, the dialectical process through which the covert reality of the oppressed is revealed to themselves and also to their oppressors. Through codification, an education which teaches the illiterate to explain their condition is a direct challenge to the provision of an education that is a meaningless filler of intellectual space, found commonly in literacy texts for adults and children alike.

It is these theories that resulted across the world, during the 197Os, in efforts to transform education for adults so that they might achieve conscientization, a heightened awareness of self and situation. Under the expanding umbrella of non-formal education, however, this move- ment, if not initiated by national or supranational organisations, has come to be appropriated by them, although the nature and implications of this control often remain obscure to participants, including teachers and other agents who believe that they are promoting change through critical pedagogy.

Taking, for example, the case of social workers, Freire argues that such agents will only contribute to the relief of their clients, if, through their work, they seek to change the direction of change in society. If they are motivated to promote change in behaviour through the normalization of the established order, they are in effect serving the interests of the power elite and have no commitment to the individual developing a critical view of reality. Without working to change the structure, in particular its cultural parameters, the institutional context of so-called radical pedagogies will render them ineffectual instruments for change to favour the oppressed. Indeed, change in the content of the stated curriculum, so that it conforms with the language and style of liberating pedagogy, in an established institutional context, may well prove a significant deterrent to cultural action for freedom, for, once again, education is manipulated as an agent of domestication and not liberation.

In the case of non-formal education, this process is reinforced by its marginalised attachment at the periphery of educational systems. This is a result of non-formal education’s inability to be independent of the institutional resources it receives, however low these may be, which in turn assures continued institutional control. This may be reinforced when aid to such programmes is tied to economic agreements promising the purchase of goods, often educational materials, from the donor state.

Development experience of this kind in no way weakens Freire’s arguments in ‘Cultural action for freedom’, ‘Cultural action and conscientization’ and ‘Education, liberation and the church’, all of which are reproduced here. On the contrary, it stresses the need to find ways in both theory and practice to translate their liberating theologies into forms of action that people, whatever their position, will be prepared to take.

In the context of the frontier station from which this review was written, the divergent aims of individuals, customary residents, refugees, missionaries, teachers or other agents, including researchers, even if ultimately

292 BOOK REVIEWS

subscribing to a convergent ideology, reveal the com- plexity of this task and make its fulfilment questionable.

ROSEMARY PRESTON University of Papua New Guinea

International Perspectives in Curriculum History: Ivor Goodson (ed.), Croom Helm, London, 1987,340~~.

This new collection has much to offer students of curriculum history and theory, as well as scholars and others interested in obtaining a comparative perspective on them. A compilation of original essays prepared by scholars from Canada, the U.S.A., New Zealand, Norway, Australia and Britain, International Perspectives in Curriculum History offers its readers insights which incorporate a stimulating range of disciplinary per- spectives. Framed historically, they illustrate the relationship between the schools curriculum and issues of power, interest group assertion, shifts and changes in the political-economic context and, in some instances, the manner in which ideas about curriculum are transferred internationally.

Though there is variation in the sophistication of the essays published here, most of them reflect the theoretical orientation of Ivor Goodson, the volume’s editor. Steeped in a sociology of knowledge perspective and sensitive to the work of Michael Young, Basil Bernstein, Denis Lawton and other (primarily) British scholars, the book does ample justice to Bernstein’s observation that ‘If we are to take shifts in the content of education seriously, then we require histories of these contents, and their relationship to institutions and symbolic arrangements external to the school’ and another by Goodson that ‘high status in the secondary school curriculum is reserved for abstract theoretical knowledge divorced from the working world of industry and the everyday world of the learner’. The intersection of the manner in which curriculum is related to ‘needs’ external to the school and the status of professors, curriculum specialists and teachers involved with its development is, then, the main focus. The character of material and cultural capital, and how it has evolved in the nations discussed in the book, is the main ‘external’ condition to which the best of the essays are alert. Indeed, as Goodson writes in his excellent and, in some respects, understated, introduction, ‘it is almost as if in curriculum we have a visible and well-documented litmus test of the political process in a country.’

Several essays are particularly worthy of brief and positive mention. Stephen J. Ball’s political history of English teaching in Britain from 1970 to 1985 highlights starkly the struggle between ‘progressive’ and ‘conserva- tive’ forces in the teaching of English reflective of larger debates which have come to consume British society in the Thatcher years. The backdrop for Ball’s analysis is the world of work and how it has affected ideologies germane to ‘critical literacy’. The chapter by Patricia M. Rowell and P. James Gaskell on British Columbia takes a slightly different slant, which is reflected in several of the book’s chapters, and dwells on the interaction and conflict of professional groups, university professors and others with self-interest in defining the physics curriculum. ‘The change in economic conditions.’ he writes, ‘drew attention to the role of physics instruction in the schools. Groups responding to the needs of a diverse clientele, rather than to a need to preserve the “integrity” of the discipline,

challenged the interests of the prevailing constituency and raised the notion of alternative versions of school physics.’

The most complex essay in the book is by an American, Louis M. Smith. It considers the history of science education in ‘Alte’, a fictitious United States school district. An excellent blending of historical and ‘participant observer’ ethnographic research that examines the interaction of institutional, professional and bureaucratic interests, Smith’s contribution demonstrates that histori- cally ‘individuals with their own intentions and interests, and classes or clusters of actors with their personal and professional political interests seem to be interacting interminably, sometimes cooperatively and sometim s conflictually, over the large and small aspects of education in the Alte community.’ Derek Hodson’s history of science curriculum change in Victorian England is a fine synthesis. It introduces its readers to the relevance of modem interpretations of curriculum and formative debates on what interests the science curriculum should serve. He concludes that

the way in which schools science is perceived is not the end result of inevitable progress in the disinterested search for ‘curriculum truth’. Rather, it is socially constructed, being the product of particular sets of choices made by particular groups of people, at particular times, in furtherance of their particular interests.

Other essays, which look at English teaching in Sweden, the geography curriculum in Australia, the teaching of mathematics, the ‘new math’, John Dewey’s influence in Sweden, Ralph Tyler’s progressive views of the city, and curriculum history in England and New Zealand are useful, though Ulf LundGen’s essay begs more infor- mation on Dewey’s general international impact and Barry Franklin’s essay on Tyler does not do justice to existing literature on progressive education in urban settings.

Volumes such as this should be of considerable value to educators in nations which are now engaged in curriculum construction. Goodson and his colleagues demonstrate that many Western approaches to curriculum are tied fundamentally to patterns of power and interest group conflict in the metropolitan nations that are not befitting nations wishing more indigenous and independent ways- the lesson being that before importing a curriculum model one should look very carefully behind the scenes. Though not a Marxist tract by any means, the book is, in the very best sense, also alert to fundamental structural conditions which reflect particular stages in the develop- ment of the capitalist political economies of the liberal democratic nations considered here. Indeed, one virtue of the book is that its use of ‘self-interest’ generally does not lapse into a reductionist mode, as happens occasionally with some of the radical literature produced in the U.S.A. by Giroux and others. Though tensions between demo- cratic and non-democratic, or elitist and non-elitist, conceptions of curriculum do reflect larger social changes and conditions, it is also clear that educators-their philosophical orientations, their internal institutional and organizational struggles, etc. -bear a heavy responsibility for the degree to which curriculum meets, in an intelligent and practical way, the needs of children. In this regard, International Perspectives in Curriculum is a forthright and balanced example of useful and interesting scholarship. One could ask for slightly more sensitivity on Goodson’s part to some methodological issues regarding comparative