What If Curriculum (of a Certain Kind) Doesnt Matter?

A review of Curriculum Policy and the Politics of What Should Be Learned in Schools (Benjamin Levin. Chapter 1, pp. 724.) Curriculum Planning: Content, Form, and the Politics of Accountability (Michael W. Apple. Chapter 2, pp. 2544.) Making Curricula: Why Do States Make Curricula, and How? (Ian Westbury. Chapter 3, pp. 4565.) Subject Matter: Dening and Theorizing School Subjects (Zongyi Deng & Allan Luke. Chapter 4, pp. 6689.) in Part I, Section A: Making Curriculum The SAGE Handbook of Curriculum and Instruction, edited by F. M. Connelly, M. F. He, & J. I. Phillion, Sage Publications, 2008

Reviewed by KENT DEN HEYER University of Alberta Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

I should begin by acknowledging that all four essays in The SAGE Handbook section Making Curriculum take readers through remarkably large swaths of research related to the politically invested terrain of curriculum making. Michael Apple, for example, in his chapter, entitled Curriculum Planning: Content, Form, and the Politics of Accountability, reviews research that illuminate[s] the relations between curricula and power (p. 25) and the importance of social movements inuencing such relations. He also cites research investigating the situated qualities of curriculum planning, distribution, and reception (p. 27) as they relate, for example, to textbooks as political-cultural products. In doing so, he details the ways such distribution and reception involve a complex articulation of social movements,
2009 by The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. Curriculum Inquiry 39:1 (2009) Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK doi: 10.1111/j.1467-873X.2008.01435.x

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class and economic relations, regional conicts, and a heavy dose of racial fears and gender hierarchies (p. 27). Given the substantial research also covered by Ben Levin, Ian Westbury, and Zongyi Deng and Allan Luke, the challenge I face in this review is to single out a necessarily limited track. While it will fail to do justice to any of these essays, I decided on the following approach. I read the four essays I was assigned and re-read John Deweys The Educational Situation: As Concerns the Elementary School (2001) as invited to do so by Westbury in his introductory essay of this Handbook section. To gain perspective on the curricular terrain these scholars review, I read each of these essays alongside Jacques Rancire (1991) and various works by Alain Badiou (2000, 2001, 2005). While their oeuvres differ, Rancire and Badiou can be reasonably summarized as writing in defense of peoples capacity to willfully exercise their own intelligence (Rancire, 1991) and potential for becoming subject to their own truth-processes (Badiou, 2001) independently of both institutionalized life and curricular plans. This approach revealed two contrasting orientations to the knowledge, truth, and politics behind two equally distinct interpretations of the relevance of various actors and sites involved in the making of curriculum. In these Handbook essays, the authors map the corporate negotiations of curriculum as a formal program of studies between sociologically dened groups and movements (Apple), professionally interested groups (Deng & Luke), politically motivated representatives (Levin), and all the above (Westbury). As I interpret their work, in their review of what they deem relevant research to the questions around making curriculum, all authors take up truth as being reproduced from generation to generation by specic knowledge heritages (Westbury, p. 48). The politics of curriculum makingpolitics interpreted as a question of who gets what? (Levin, p. 8; Apple)involves each group struggling to have its forms of knowing or knowledge-as-inherited-truth promulgated in the next formal curriculum text. Against the notion detailed by each of these Handbook authors that politics involves the plurality of opinions regulated by a cultural norm, Badiou (2005) asserts that [t]he essence of politics . . . is a rupture with what exists (p. 24). In this reading, politics ruptures the commonplace interpretations of the properly political. Rather than negotiations of interests and opinions, politics begins with statements of axiomatic truth for which existing frames of political debate cannot contain (Barbour, in press). For Rancire (1991), one such axiom is that of equality, which he posits is not an ideal to achieve, but is rather the incontestable, axiomatic condition of any democratic political statement or situation worthy of the name (Barbour, in press). As explored throughout, equality is exactly the axiomatic democratic and political condition for which state schools and its curriculum cannot, indeed, must not, take account.

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If one interprets truth as nothing more than the historical property of this or that social grouping, then indeed the politics of making curriculum as reviewed in these essays is nothing more than a battleeld upon which differently dened groups ght to extend their conicting claims into the mind of the abstracted Child. But what if we interpret truth or rather truth-processes (Badiou, 2001) in relation to knowledge, politics, and curriculum differently? I juxtapose this review of these Handbook essays into my exploration of a different curricular question, how best to arrange knowledge so as to increase the likelihood that a teacher and student can engage in truth-processes. This question speaks to the more afrmative presumption of equality-of-all in relation to truth, knowledge, and politics than found in the research reviewed here. The essays by Apple, Levin, and Westbury should be required reading for anyone betting hope for a better future (in schools or elsewhere) on the making of curriculum-as-formal-text. Levin, in his chapter, Curriculum Policy and the Politics of What Should Be Learned in Schools, offers an insiders account of the complexities faced by political actors involved in negotiating a program of studies. His account provides readers with a concise and detailed overview of the processes and partisan pressures in such negotiations. As an example of such pressure, Levin cites a rule expressed by a politician concerning public issues in which people are assumed to be not interested: If I cant explain it in 25 words or less, people stop listening (p. 10). In this chapter, Levin offers little reection about this or other issues he documents: about whether, for example, (1) such cynicism is itself a reason not to listen; or (2) where the sources of this assumed pressure actually lie; or (3) whether the content of the 25 words deserve nothing more from a reasonably intelligent public. In his chapter, entitled Making Curricula, Why Do States Make Curricula and, How?, Westbury extends analysis beyond the formal politics covered by Levin to map the expectations and actions of a wide range of actorsfrom state representatives to curriculum reformers. He provides a synthesis of research that, in addition to other ndings, leads Westbury to conclude that formal curriculum innovation has little impact on classroom practices. While words like innovation and change are often attached to curricula, Westbury sees the processes of formal curriculum making as a mechanism, or tool . . . more often than not designed to mute rather than amplify calls for educational reform and change (p. 61). Deng and Luke in their essay, Subject Matter: Dening and Theorizing School Subjects, offer a nuanced exploration of the differing traditions vertically through time (i.e., from Aristotle to Comte to Dewey) and horizontally across differing frames for categorizing subject matter as distinctively educational means and ends (p. 67). This horizontal framing concerns the shape, purpose, and enactment of subject matter as interpreted by curricular theorists ranging from Ralph Tyler and Dewey to

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disciplinarians like Jerome Bruner and those in-between such as Lee Shulman. Deng and Luke begin and end by arguing that curriculum theory offers the only possible grounding for curriculum making despite the increasing tendency of curriculum policy makers and bureaucrats to proceed without, and in cases deliberately in the face of, curriculum theory (p. 67). Agreeing with their assertion of theorys importance for practice, let me identify and answer two foundational questions at the heart of the enterprise of institutionalized curriculum and enforced schooling before returning to these essays. As is often the case, the foundational questions at the heart of our shared lives are as much the ones we do not ask as they are the ones we do. The foundational question of curriculum is not just what should count as knowledge (Deng & Luke, p. 71) or its corollary whose knowledge is worth knowing? (Apple, p. 35). It is as much, what is (and who is) not worth knowing? An answer to this foundational curricular question is this: Nothing and no one. Nothing and no one can be said a priori to be not worth knowing for all young people who live within a political jurisdiction. An answer to the more commonly asked curricular questionwhat is worth knowing?is this: That I can learn anything I wish to the degree I apply my intelligence and will within the circumstances that chance provides (Rancire, 1991). I did so when I learned to speak, ride a bike, play guitar, made games with an old wheel, and made friends in the park and on the street. This is not to say people did not help out, but rather to emphasize that I learned these things fundamentally because I was driven to do so and without compulsion from the State or the school. Let us call these two answers (that nothing/no one can be said a priori to not be worth knowing and the necessity of self-directing) the void that our contemporary state of schooling must avoid acknowledging (Badiou, 2001; den Heyer, in press).1 Each of the Handbook authors fails to sufciently acknowledge, let alone address, this void. This is understandable. To acknowledge this void risks the legitimacy of claims that state curriculum, schools, and we, as accredited educators, exist primarily for the good of the child. As I explore in greater detail farther below, institutionalized curriculum and pedagogy can only proceed by the positing of an inequalitythe childs decit or lack, and by extension, their families and communitiesthat its agents then appoint themselves, indeed, are certied, to study and rectify. An analogy helps to see the logic at work at the center of contemporary curriculum making as reported (although not necessarily supported) in these Handbook essays: Let us put all the young birds into a cage and then explain to them how to y. We will break down this process into consumable chunks and then test their consumption according to schedule. At the end of this, students will be accredited to y. Or, let us design lessons differently and justify our reasoning on the grounds that either the young,

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disciplinary communities or the social order needs it to be so. Thus, progressives and conservatives engage in education debate:
And, by the time [the progressives] ideals and theories had been translated over into their working equivalents in the curriculum, the difference between them and what he as a conservative really wished and practiced became often the simple difference of tweedle dum from tweedle dee. So, the great big battle was fought with mutual satisfaction, each side [conservative and progressive] having an almost complete victory in its own eld. (Dewey, 2001, p. 388)

We also might debate where they ought to y someday. Within this frame, however, the cage remains a given in which [a]lmost of necessity . . . personal appropriation, assimilation and expression is incidental and supercial (Dewey, 2001, p. 395). Anyone questioning the necessity of the cage is likely to be deemed crazy (and thus, following Badiou and Rancire, likely engaged in a politics worthy of the name). The people convinced that the young birds will never learn to y without their directives are bureaucrats or ideologues in various institutional guises. Regardless of what curriculum emerges from the curriculum debate detailed in these Handbook chapters, a tragic school lesson is being learned. Within the cage, each young person (now cast in social drama as a student) will come to believe some version of the following: that my will to attend to the innite learning possibilities that life presents is of no consequence; that I must have others explain to me what I should know; that I cannot claim to know unless I reproduce what was explained to me in a form recognizable to the explicator (Rancire, 1991); and that, even when the truth appears to be the opposite, the explicator has my best interests at heart. This is the logic that must be accepted, acquiesced to, or forced from the populace by all forms of enforced state schooling that conate learning with accreditation (Illich, 1971; for interpretations of the ways that this conation in schooling serves empire, see Willinsky, 1998; den Heyer, 2005). This logic of decit requires, as Dewey (2001) notes, personal appropriation, assimilation and expression to be incidental and supercial (p. 395). Working out of this logic, the questions and responses surrounding curriculum making then appear to be nothing more than an obviously requiredthat is, naturalsocial language (Bakhtin, 1986). These essays diligently map the political dynamic created by this logic as it plays out in multiple social sites. Avoiding the void and facing crowded Monday classrooms of the interred young, we can now turn back to the operative questionthe one exerting force and power in present situationsas opposed to the foundational questionsthose that return us to the heart of the matterof curriculum making as interpreted in these essays: How do competing groups make every student in the jurisdiction learn what we want to them to learn and measure that learning most efciently? The negotiated result is

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often, to speak plainly, absurd. One of the many examples of formal curricula offered in the chapters will sufce; Nova Scotias one course on Atlantic Canada in the Global Community has 30 student curriculum outcomes for this one course alone for a single Grade 9 school year! And while Deng and Luke conclude that there is a strong, almost anachronistic move toward a reassertion of the doctrine of disciplinaritywith university deans, professors, public intellectuals increasingly involved in bids to control and name the contents of science, mathematics, and other school subjects (p. 83), I must ask, but what does it matter? As Westbury and Apple emphasize, formal curricula has little discernable effect on changing classroom practices. Negotiations over formal curricula turn, rather, on the claims by interested social groups over the curriculum as a social imaginary:
Each group believes that its form of discourse and its world is the reality of the project [of curriculum design/or program of studies] and that the means and ends named by [their] symbols [and symbol making] are what the symbolic action is about. (Haft & Hopmann, cited in Westbury, p. 57)

What we learn from Apple, Levin, and Westbury about such negotiations will likely not surprise many readers of this journal. Rather than work from or in relation to the void at the heart of enforced schooling (i.e., What is not worth knowing?) or the gesture of omnipotence that is presumed to have all youth learn what some we want them to, I conclude from these essays that curriculum making is, rather, a corporate affair that proceeds under the sign for the good of the child. The givens are giventhe cage, the good it is assume to serve, and the child to whom the good is servedand negotiations proceed as a parley between interested units over the given. Each of these essays detail the lack of disinterested interest (Badiou, 2001) at the table and in the negotiated curricula that emerge. In short, I conclude that the bargains these scholars document are born out of a profound cynicism about human potential for self-direction:
On the side of the machinery of school-work, I mention rst the number of children in a room. This runs in the graded schools of our country anywhere from 3560. . . . Under such circumstances, how do we have the face to continue to speak at all of the complete development of the individual as the supreme end of educational effort? (Dewey, 2001, p. 394)

Of course, this is not to suggest that both conservatives and progressives as reviewed in these chapters lack good intentions or honourable aspirations. In the case of the latter, they just seem to misread what the point is of curriculum making. As Westbury cites several research cases to note, curriculum reformers often fail because they thought curriculum making was an educational

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projectthat is, an activity and process directed at the improvement or enhancement of schooling (p. 52). Such an assumption indicates that these reformers do not . . . understand curricula, curriculum making, and curriculum policy making realistically (p. 52). And about what are these negotiations concerned? As Westbury concludes, in the social context (in contrast to the instructional or programmatic context) the debates themselves and their resolutions yield frameworks for narratives about the role education and schooling as ideas play in a social and cultural order (p. 49). Apple also asserts that the establishments of standards in curricula are unlikely to fulll their proponents intentions. Rather they are often symbolic accomplishments (Placier, Walker, & Foster, cited in Apple, p. 28). As he summarizes, [u]ltimately, the standards became a form of symbolic politics, signaling that something was being done but having little transformative potential (p. 28). In short, curriculum change constitutes a status quo construct to appear innovative while working to block any real change:
[Curriculum making] is a mechanism, or tool, deployed to manage the political, professional, and public elds around schooling, more often than not designed to mute rather than amplify calls for educational reform and change. (Westbury, p. 61)

I agree with Apple, Westbury, and others here. Curriculum making is indeed symbolic politics involving acts of ideological compromise and political consensus (Deng & Luke, p. 82) between conservatives and progressives. The real impacting conditions of schoolsconcerning the cage and its presumed necessitynot only remain unaddressed. As the real effect of such symbolic politics, such conditions are made even more invisible/unquestionable by these debates. Levin deploys Edelmans condensation symbols to interpret why certain events become catalysts for debates over curriculum. Condensation symbols can be even small events which become highly symbolic as they seem to embody, or condense, a range of beliefs and values in a particular case (Levin, p. 19). In the context of curriculum making, they cause panics about what students are or are failing to learn. They constitute, therefore, catalysts activating interested social groups into negotiated conict. In these conicts, the panic works to foreclose any potential challenge to, or questioning of, the necessity of the cage. Levin expresses the interpretation of politics behind such a situation, Political processes are driven by interests, and particularly by the most vocal interests. Finding ways to mediate interests through different processes and uses of evidence will remain a challenge, though one worth pursuing (p. 22). As Levin further notes, [e]ven expert processes are susceptible to a preference for interest bargaining instead of evidence (p. 19). In other words, incited into debate by particular condensation symbols, curriculum as a formal program of

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studies emerges from corporatist negotiations where even evidence serves self-interest (Saul, 1995). John Ralston Saul (1995) asserts that the only views that count in a corporatist society do so because they are expressed by representatives of a corporate entity. In place of the democratic ideal of citizens, we have representatives of corporations that include professional expert groups who accept the cover charge to be included in these supposed political debates. The process of curriculum making documented in these chapters should raise serious concerns that, rather like putting too many crackers in a bowl of soup, a social situation whose knowledge of itself consists of self-interest will soak up and dehydrate any sense of common wealth or public purpose. It should also lead to questions concerning causation as relates to public policy about education. For example, Deng and Luke assert that recent government policy to focus on the production of new scientic expertise for globalized, knowledge economies economy has led to calls for changes in science curriculum . . . spurred by international comparative studies of student achievement (p. 66; emphases added). I suspect that in our corporatist situationwhere interest bargaining as much as evidence dominatesthat cause and effect are not so easily attributable or related to each other as these authors assert. Whatever its cause, purpose, or intent, the curriculum as a formal text might serve classroom learning if it were itself positioned as a historically curious artifact for student analysis (what I have outlined elsewhere as the curriculum as the curriculum [den Heyer, 2008]). Doing so, the detailed analysis of curriculum making studied by Deng and Luke, Levin, and Westbury might tell youth much about the exclusions that seem inherent to such negotiations aptly outlined by Apple (and consequently, the need for something grander in which to believe and pursue). But this would be to enter a debate about curriculum as reviewed in these chapters as if it mattered, and I want to suggest here the opposite: What if curriculum as a formal text doesnt matter?

ON AVOIDING NAILING KIDS TO THE CROSS OF OUR MISSIONARY IMPERATIVES Given the capacity of youth to read the situations of adults, we should not be surprised that the cynicism of a corporatist society as briey reviewed above (i.e., If I cant explain it in 25 words or less, people stop listening) has an analogue of despair in classrooms.2 Cynicism and despair are encouraged in these sites of social life by two mutually supporting and persuasive logics. The rst logic concerns the need to be self-interested about public questions such as formal curriculum. These Handbook authors provide the

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reader with rened analyses of how this logic plays out across a range of corporate sites. The second logic is shared by both those who support and those who advocate against present practices in schooling systems (in Deweys terms, conservatives and progressives); a logic of decit deposited in the lives of others, which we as bureaucrats, scholars, and teachers then take as our mission to rectify. Each of these entwined logics maintains the present status quo from becoming otherwise: a present situation that David Geoffrey Smith (2000) describes as frozen futurism. Let me turn to outline this second logic further. In defense of human capacities to exercise intelligence and afrmatively invent realities, both Rancire and Badiou dismiss sociology and a science of pedagogy as practices premised on the institutionalization of inequality and decit reasoning. In Rancires critique of Bourdieus sociology, for example, we can easily recognize a challenge to pedagogics (Dewey, 2001, p. 398). Both sociology and pedagogics divide the world into two: the knowing and the ignorant, the mature and the uninformed, the capable and the incapable who, in turn, require new scientic knowledge capable of illuminating and criticizing the overwhelming illusions in which everyone is imprisoned (Ross, 1991, p. xi). In each case, the operative principle of the enterprise must be the naturalizing objectication of the other so that each can legitimate its specicity as a science (Ross, 1991, p. xii). Borrowing from Rancire, and as outlined by his translator, Kristin Ross, that principlereferred to as the Bourdieu effectmay be summarized with the following tautology:
[Working-class youth] are excluded because they dont know why they are excluded; and they dont know why they are excluded because they are excluded. . . . By rehearsing this tautology, the sociologist placed himself in the position of eternal denouncer of a system granted the ability to hide itself forever from its agents: not only did the sociologist see what teacher (and student) did not, he saw it because the teacher and student could not. (Ross, 1991, pp. xixii; emphasis original)

Thus posited, we take up the inequality of others as our cause to solve:

By beginning with inequality, [each] proves it, and proving it, in the end, is obliged to rediscover it again and again. Whether school is seen as the reproduction of inequality (Bourdieu) or as the potential instrument for the reduction of inequality, the effect is the same: that of erecting and maintaining the distance separating a future reconciliation from a present inequality, a knowledge in the ofng from todays intellectual impoverishmenta distance discursively invented and reinvented so that it may never be abolished. (Ross, 1991, p. xix)

Such entwined logicsof self-interested negotiations between parties over the given and the necessity that the given always be given as lacking what only more school and a better curriculum can rectifyexemplify our situation or

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state of frozen futurism. As applies to curriculum making as formal text, this is a state in which what was expected to be revealed has been revealed, and that what the revelation discloses is that the future will always be more of this, a perpetual unfolding of more and more of this (Smith, 2000, p. 17). Smith does not believe that the present-future is in fact frozen, only a particular understanding of it (p. 15). He calls for an education to recover a future that truly is a future; that is, a condition that is actually open:
Is there a way of living Now that could address the futility of frozen futurism while honouring the truth of human aspiration and dreaming; a way of living Now . . . without giving up the possibility of continual regeneration through our mutual encounter? (Smith, 2000, pp. 1819)

In response to Smiths question, we must emphatically answer, Yes! A rst step on the way requires that educators reject the inherited missionary stance of our vocation so as to avoid nailing kids to the imperatives derived from the logics outlined above. A rst step in this regard in my own work concerns thinking through the implications of Badious (2005) claim that education . . . has never meant anything but this: to arrange the forms of knowledge in such a way that some truth may come to pierce a hole in them (p. 9). While limited by space, let me briey outline the key relationship between knowledge and truth as it relates to encounters between teacher and students. In doing so, I follow in agreement, although not in a straight line, with Deng and Lukes assertion that the formation of a school subject requires addressing an array of fundamental curriculumnot disciplinary questions . . . (p. 73). In contrast to my interpretation of what is being expressed throughout these Handbook chapters, for Badiou (2001), truth is not a social property belonging to a particular social group or knowledge heritage. As Etienne Balibar (2004) notes, Badious interpretation of truth bears no resemblance to that found in Foucaults analysis of relational regimes of power. Nor does his interpretation align with Derridas insistence on the illusory status of a truth as a temporalization of idealities (Balibar, 2004, p. 24). Further, Badious re-conceptualization of truth is unrelated to the idea of an intellectual dialectic [or] to the idea of self-knowledge (Balibar, 2004, p. 24). Rather, truthinterpreted as a truth-processis instigated by a event that voids what those thinking within the situation accept as reasonable, sensible, or politically possible and instantiates the possibility of new possibilities (Badiou, cited in Cho & Lewis, 2005). A truth-process irrupts exactly within such arranged sensibilities and knowledge of the situation, or what Badiou names as opinion (i.e., Pluto is a planet, boys will be boys, Canada is a democracy). Love provides the most poignant example of an event that irrupts within (or pierces a hole in) the opinions we assume dene our situations.

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All lovers are subject to both the particular and the universal. All lovershowever particular the people and the circumstancesare becoming subject to an eventfalling in lovethat is also universal in that love-as-event respects no pre-set rules, pre-existing identities or expectations and, we must assume, is potentially available to all. In addition to other consequences, encountering an event such as love subtracts from (or pierces a hole in) what one thought to be the case of ones situation. This subtraction simultaneously creates the possibilities of a supplement we enact in becoming more than the one we thought (were opinion-ated) we were. In this case, we break with all previous ctional assemblages through which [we] organized [a] self-representation (Badiou, 2001, p. 55). In short, all lovers constitute a becoming subject by embodying a disinterested interest in inherited opinions. Badiou writes:
I cannot, within the delity to delity that denes ethical consistency [of, and, to, a truth-process] take an interest in myself, and thus pursue my own interests. All my capacity for interest, which is my own perseverance in being, has poured out into the future consequences of the solution to this scientic problem, into the examination of the world in the light of loves being-two, into what I will make of my encounter, one night, with the eternal Hamlet, or into the next stage of the political process, once the gathering in front of the factory has dispersed. There is always only one question in the ethic of truths: how will I, as some-one, continue to exceed my own being? How will I link the things I know, in a consistent fashion, via the effects of being seized by the not-known? (Badiou, 2001, p. 50)

The proper verb tense with Badious use of an event, truth-process, and the situation dened by opinion is neither the present nor the past, but rather the future anterior. In essence, a becoming subjectas one faithful to the unpredictable implications of a truth eventdeclares this will have been true pursuing exactly what it will be absurd not to have believed (Gibson, 2006, p. 88: emphasis added). It is in this pursuit with discipline or delity of an events implications that is to be living Now. In response to Smiths question above, this Now is, simultaneously, a future becoming through the truth of human aspiration and dreaming. To avoid any confusion, it is necessary to be very clear that, for Badiou, becoming subject is a collective subjectivity entirely dependent on the emergence of an event. His is not an argument for enlightened free will or for an individualism that is fully in charge of itself. As with love, the unpredictable consequences of an event mock such assertions. As it is with truth and knowledge-opinion, so it might be with teacher and students who, as I believe these Handbook authors would agree, constitute the most relevant site of curriculum making. As Westbury writes in his introduction (Curriculum in Practice) to this Handbook section, It is only those at the chalk-face who can make curricula and school subjects that address their needs . . . and the demands of the classroom and these (real) students (p. 3). Apple, as another example, also gives this site attention by

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attending to research outlining what he believes to be more humanizing classroom curriculum and pedagogical strategies (pp. 3940). Taking their insights one step farther, however, education begins where the teacher and student seek to become subject to a truth-process. In maintaining delity to such a process, teachers and students are becoming subject to their learning and, thus, to their living. In doing so, we potentially constitute a collective becoming subject as is the case when we are seized by an intractable problem, rendered speechless by a moment of invigorating art or when we fall in love. When we note that philosophyas a founding discipline of the academe in the Greek-derived traditionsconnotes a love of wisdom, it is appropriate to describe teaching and curriculum as potential sites of an event that seizes teacher and students into a collective becoming (den Heyer, in press). In this reading, the subjects of curriculum making and education are not, for example, history, language arts, or mathematics. Rather, the proper subject of teachers work is a becoming subject whose delity and discipline is called forth by an event that renders previous and inherited knowledge as insufcient (knowledge however variously framed by experts, as reviewed by Deng and Luke, in Chapter 4 of the Handbook). As the chapters in this Handbook section attest, the perseverance of being of various sociologically dened groups and movements (Apple), of professionally interested groups (Deng & Luke), of politically motivated representatives (Levin), and of all the above (Westbury), seems to be the point upon which the present state of curriculum making is run aground. In such a situation, childrens capacities for self-directedness and potentials to engage in truth-processes are reduced to their sociological properties for the purposes of research or are read through the lens of competing knowledge-heritages concerned with conscripting new members for their own good. This will not do. Educators can supplement the curricular question of what knowledge is worth knowing? with those better given that no one can even say what is not worth knowing in the rst place. Following my brief review of Badiou, my rst candidate as a better curricular question is this: how best to arrange knowledge so as to increase the likelihood that teachers and students will encounter an event and thus a decision to pursue a truth-process? This question does not deny adults need to dispute the means or ends of education or even whether an education worth the name can occur in schools (after all, if so, I and this essay would be in a bit of an untenable position). It is rather to better limit the damage of so many self-interested adults on the afrmative capacities that our young already possess before they become the abstracted object of our missionary designs. Against such designs, what might happen if we posit equality into the educational situation; equality of intelligence (Rancire, 1991) and equality of capacity for engaging in truth-processes?

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First, the legitimacy of the cage comes into question. Second, we challenge the Bourdieu effect outlined aboveby beginning with inequality, [each sociologist] proves it, and proving it, in the end, is obliged to rediscover it again and again (Ross, 1991, p. xix) through the naturalizing objectication of the other (Ross, 1991, p. xii). Whose ends does this missionary stance serve? To any readers of our work, the insufciency, if not harm, of assigned differences by which the State/situation counts its members and discounts others is obvious (i.e., legal and illegal presences). Why, then, is so much research, as reported by Apple, for example, organized around the very same categories that serve to further objectify into abstracted sociological categories those already obviously objectied by the situation? What hope lies in such an enterprise? That in the face of Levins insider reportuses of evidence will remain [a goal] worth pursuing evidence will tear away the illusions under which everyone supposedly is operating? Only research into curriculum that begins with the premise of there being actually existing equality for all, as afrmed by Rancire and Badiou, can we void the entwined logics of self-interest and the decit that underpin the missionary stance of the Bourdieu effect. Such research would speak to and for (real) students capacities to engage in truth-processes. In Badious (2001) terms, innite alterity [or difference] is quite simply what there is (p. 25) and since every truth is the comingto-be of that which is not yet, so differences then are precisely what truths depose, or render insignicant (Badiou, 2001, p. 27). Rather than curriculum interpreted as the delivery of somebody elses mail (be it from conservatives or progressives) (Pinar, 2004), interpreting truth as the point and site of making curriculum potentially provides another social space for kids to take a chance and consider what is in light of what might become as relates to both the particular and universal of their personal and social situation.

NOTES
1. In speaking for the necessity of self-directing, I do not mean to support interpretations of agency as solely residing in the individual or to deny the complex ways peoples agency is embedded in social networks. Indeed, most of my scholarship is concerned with challenging historical, sociological, and educational work that assumes such an American middle-class and gender-specic model of agency in explanations for social action (see den Heyer, 2003; and den Heyer & Fidyk, 2007). However, in the context of research reviewed in these essays, I feel compelled to speak up for childrens capacities in this regard. 2. See, for example, studies into the differences between students preferable future in contrast to what they expect as the probable future in Eckersley (1999), Hicks (2004), and Hutchinson (1996).

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KENT DEN HEYER

REFERENCES
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