On 28 June 2007 Gordon Brown announced the state would undergo significant structural changes that would ‘sharpen the focus of central Government’ on ‘new and very different challenges’. In fact the opposite was true. The creation of a catchall Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) could only blunt government’s appreciation of the distinctive role of teachers. 

For this reason the publication of Michael Young’s Bringing Knowledge Back In is timely. Young’s core argument is ‘the acquisition of knowledge is the key purpose that distinguishes education…from all other activities’ (p81) and the knowledge acquired in schools is fundamentally more powerful than that gained from everyday life. His clear understanding contrasts markedly with the confused thinking of government, who make out education is a solution to everything - economic productivity, citizenship, emotional well-being – and nothing.

Young begins by reflecting on the influence of his less mature self. In 1971 he published Knowledge and ControI, a collection of essays written with Basil Bernstein and Pierre Bourdieu among others. The text quickly became canonical in teacher education and contributed to a shift in the terrain of the sociology of education. Previously, sociologists were concerned with the uneven distribution of educational outcomes. Young et al brought to the fore the interplay of knowledge, the curriculum and power.

Subsequently, Young argues, many who pursued his themes neglected the question of truth. Instead, they adopted ‘a sociological approach that treats truth claims as no more than the standpoints or perspectives of particular (invariably dominant) social groups’ (p3). Traditional maths, to give a crude example, as patriarchal ideology. For Young this resulted in a reductionist, and ultimately relativistic approach, which could offer no constructive rationale or direction to schools.

Young suggests that in spite of the past failures of some sociologists, the discipline itself is still crucially important. Without sociology we are left with a naive ‘a-social epistemological realism’, which cannot account for the conditions that enable communities of experts to construct knowledge that transcends its origins. Young’s emphasis on the collective practices of knowledge generation explains his description of his own position as one of ‘social realism’ (emphasis added). 

Having staked out a position that recognises both the social and the potentially objective character of knowledge, Young relates this insight to education. He critiques three contemporary approaches to the curriculum, what he calls the ‘neo-conservative traditionalism’ of the likes of Chris Woodhead, the ‘technical instrumentalism’ characteristic of New Labour, as well as the postmodern attack on both these positions. All three, he argues, lack an adequate theory of knowledge and tend to disregard curriculum content. Advocates of the neo-conservative curriculum, for example, are not motivated by the specifics of knowledge, but are instead ‘inspired by the view that the traditional discipline of learning promotes proper respect for authority’ (p20). Equally, the instrumentalists, who dominate policy circles, see education, both academic and vocational, as a means to a primarily economic end. Similarly, if one accepts the postmodern view that knowledge is no more than a reflex of power ‘no grounds can be offered for teaching any one thing rather than any other’ (p22).

At the same time, Young suggests elements of both the instrumental and neo-conservative approaches are useful. The major strength of the conservative position is that the intellectual traditions it seeks to preserve are in fact ‘crucial in ensuring the maintenance and development of standards of learning in schools’ and are ‘a condition for innovation and creating new knowledge’ (p23). But because conservatives treat ‘the best’ as ‘given’ they are ultimately incapable of making a convincing contemporary argument for the curriculum they advocate. Instrumentalists, by contrast, are acutely sensitive to social demands, but do not address ‘the conditions that are necessary if knowledge is to be produced or acquired’ (p24). Ultimately, Young concludes, curriculum planners need to consider both the context in which they finds themselves and the intellectual traditions they must uphold.

To bring further depth to his discussion, Young draws extensively and productively on the work of French sociologist Emile Durkheim and Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky. In spite of their political differences, both appreciated the social character of knowledge. For Durkheim, the knowledge we most readily associate with formal schooling emerges first in the sacred rituals of primitive societies, which provided spaces for connecting disparate features of the world and speculating on its future. Vygotsky, by contrast, demarcated scientific from mystical thought, suggesting scientific ideas stem from man’s attempts to transform the world. Scientific concepts, Vygotsky added, differ from everyday concepts in their level of abstraction and systematic character, by the fact that they can be used reflectively, and in so far as they require their users to be taught.

Young concludes that whilst both thinkers have contrasting accounts of the origins of formal thinking, both usefully provide ‘differentiated theories of knowledge’ in which theoretical, context-independent knowledge of the type schools specialise in, differs from the experiential, context-dependent understanding characteristic of everyday life. They suggest what make us human is our ability to ‘respond to pedagogy’ and that ‘formal education’ plays a unique role developing people’s ‘capacity for generalisation’ (p67). Sadly, Young concludes, a combination of constructivist critiques of knowledge, marketised approaches to education, as well as state-led attacks on the autonomy of expert communities, has marginalised the position of knowledge within the curriculum today.

Looking to the future, Young deliberately avoids a defence of ‘any particular expression of a subject-based or disciplinary curriculum’ (p85), instead aiming for a more open-ended clarification of the ‘principles and social organisation’ on which the traditional curriculum was based. This means recognising that ‘communities of specialists’ are central to knowledge development, and understanding that it is ‘the separation of the curriculum from everyday life that gives the knowledge acquired though it an explanatory power and capacity for generalisation that is not a feature of everyday knowledge tied to practical concerns’ (p89).

There is a great deal to commend Young’s work. It makes a strong case for the power of formal knowledge and the role of sociology in understanding the conditions that enable its development. Young persuasively demonstrates that schooling plays a unique role in initiating pupils into the intellectual traditions that enable them to think for themselves. Bringing Knowledge Back In also testifies to the intellectual suppleness of the mature Young, who is prepared to critique his earlier positions and make himself unpopular with his peers, something I found particularly engaging when I interviewed him before last year’s Battle of Ideas festival. 

The second half of the book is a disappointment, perhaps because the first is so commanding. Young moves from ‘theoretical issues’ to ‘applied studies’, considering questions on the role of qualifications in educational reform, vocational knowledge, professional identity, the recognition of prior learning, as well as educational reform in South Africa. He makes a number of provocative points - professional identity is emptied out once education becomes politicised, and using exams as a change mechanism is foolish - but overall the second half lacks the vigour, depth, and impact of the first.

In an endword, a tribute to the late sociologist of education Basil Bernstein, Young notes that Bernstein was ‘a radical at heart’, who had the ‘courage as well as the insight to know that even for radicals there are things which it is vital to conserve’ (p220). Could Young have taken up this baton and clarified which knowledge should be brought back in? It doing so, he might have begun to answer the challenge he set us: to make a credible case for preserving our intellectual traditions in a changed social context. His desire to avoid building detailed curriculum castles in the sky is understandable, since this would distract from his main argument. However, he might have made more concrete the approach he advocates. In doing so, he would have given more weight to the idea that schools are not agents of social control but a force for intellectual liberation.