Schooling and the Organization of Knowledge

Description

3pm – 5pm
Syndics Room, Mill Lane, Cambridge
Seminar sponsored by CRASSH (University of Cambridge)

CRASSH has chosen as its inaugural theme, and the topic for its major conference next April, The Organization of Knowledge. This preliminary seminar is intended to provoke conversation tying theoretical conversation about the organization of knowledge to the more concrete, material, and spatial issues of education policy and practices. To that end, it brings together scholars from different disciplines, countries, and perspectives for conversation on two questions that seem crucially interconnected (although that connection itself can be a topic of debate):

1) How is schooling involved in the reorganization of knowledge? How do current policies, technologies, and testing systems determine what subjects count and how much? How are the subjects themselves changing?

2) What's national about the national curriculum? Is the increasing turn to markets, ranked measurement of achievement, and mandated skills and subjects part of a global project to produce skilled workers for a new economy? Or is it, as some have charged, an opportunity for new nationalisms to arise? Is it different in different locations?
Convener:

Professor Leslie Santee Siskin (Harvard University and Visiting Fellow at CRASSH)