1. Finland on the current educational
and curriculum world map?
Tero Autio, PhD
Professor of Curriculum Theory
Tallinn University

2. Curriculum (OPS)?
• Basically in the service of survival and evolution:
J.F. Herbart’s(1776-1841) Recapitulation Thesis
(ontogenesis/phylogenesis); we all come to the
world through curriculum. School is arguably a
most successful single institution in human
history
• Summary of the best achievements of human
history juxtaposed with future prospects
(evaluated for the present by those in power)
• Curriculum is organizational AND intellectual
centerpiece of education at all stages

3. Koulutus- ja curriculumpolitiikan
globaali nykytrendi (esim Hargreaves
2010)
“No meaning without a frame”
BIGGER
The introduction of market
competition
League tables of performance btw
the schools
Return to traditional models of
curriculum and schooling
Intrusive systems of surveillance by
external inspection

4. TIGHTER
• The emphasis on outcomes took place already
before the rise of neoliberalism: Coleman Report
1966
• The shift in reforms from inputs to outputs, from
resource investment to learning outcomes;
Coleman insisted: “there was equal educational
opportunity only if students from differing groups
scored roughly the same scores”
• Closely related to test- and evidence-based
education reforms

5. HARDER
• Systemic replacement of experience by evidence
… hard data have pushed aside teachers’ intuition
and professional judgment
• “Data driven instruction and improvement has
become de rigueur elements of Anglo-American
approaches to educational reform”
• It can divert teachers’ attention and energy on to
short-term tasks in easily measurable indicators
of achievement, away from long term
engagement of teaching, learning, and study;

6. FLATTER
• A logical conclusion of the de-intellectualization of
teachers’ work and back-to-basic kind of curriculum
structured by intensive testing industry and
intellectually flat evidence-based research – strongly
advocated by the (unholy) alliance of neoliberal and
neoconservative education policies
• “The test-score metrics by which educational
performance is measured are not appropriate to
knowledge society goals or many valuable educational
goals more widely.” (Hargreaves et al)
• At its best, evidence-based research can inform but
NOT prescribe educational practice

7. President Obama’s education policy:
Through Race to the Top
• Adopting standards and assessments that prepare
students to succeed in college and workplace and to
compete in the global economy
• Building data systems that measure student growth
and success, and inform teachers and principals about
how they can improve instruction: “tietojohtaminen”
• Recruiting, developing, rewarding, and retaining
effective teachers and principals where they needed
most; and
• Turning around our lowest-achieving schools
• 1,35 billion dollars 2011
• (Taubman 2009; Teaching by Numbers)

8. Historical and intellectual framework
behind these trends
• Demographics in the 19th century America
• Instead of the European “conformity of will” (the
nation-state, politics) as a framework for education,
Americans had to choose social engineering by
“science” (psychology): ”prediction of behavior”;
psychology as a political construct
• In terms of curriculum theory: “half-Herbart” (1776-
1841): displacement of moral and political discourse in
education in favor of “objective science”; methodical
expert power, method fetishism at the cost of content:
method is theory; educational “silences”

9. The disappearance of the subject – and
subject matter – in the historical
succession of Anglo-American education:
• The historical and theoretical shift in education and
curriculum theory, practice and policy in Anglophone
world: from the black box of behaviorism: S-O-R; from
“learning” to “learning outcomes” >> assessment-
driven, “autistic” evidence-based education policy
without bigger visions of the interrelationships
between education, society and the individual;
(oppimiskäsitys!!, mieluiten “syvä”)
• “Teaching by Numbers” (Taubman 2009);

10. Globalization and the standardization
of subjectivity go hand in hand
• The economy as the major political and educational authority;
economy as the political construct
• The marriage btw economy and education: “Bottom line” in
business; “test scores” in education; standardization and
accountability; “quality and excellence”
• Those agendas “reflect the incapacity to conceive individuality in
any other terms than subordination to the personality ideal of the
market” (Autio, in Pinar 2012); individualization in collectivist terms,
ideally a consumer or an entrepreneur (Thatcher)
• A business corporate and production life as the generic model for
an ideal public institution, the school as no exception; the shrinkage
of the public sector – and the demise of the notion of public good
and public education?

11. Globalization and standardization…
• Colin Powell (2001): “A major challenge for the millenium is
to install freely elected democracies all over the world,
under one standard for the world which is the free market
system … practiced correctly”. The big political picture
infusing such maxims is a vision of the world united by
standardized, normative, even coercive notions of One
Subjectivity, One History, One Humankind, One Politics –
and, consequently, One Curriculum (Autio 2009)
• Fukuyama (1992), The End of History and the Last Man:
“Free market capitalism of the West and its lifestyle may
signal the end point of humanity's sociocultural evolution
and become the final form of human government”.

12. “Curriculum and Bildung/Didaktik are very
different intellectual systems” (Westbury)
The image of the teacher in the
Anglo-American context
• Teacher’s role as the intellectually
passive “agent of the system”
(Westbury 2000) in the Anglo-
American curriculum tradition
• Teacher-proof curricula; ”existing
teachers are a (if not the) major
brake on the innovation, change
and reform that the schools always
seem to require” (Westbury 2000)
• Curriculum-as-manual; a very
limited space for professional
autonomy, freedom and judgment
• Teaching essentially means
teaching to the test
The image of the teacher in the
Bildung/Didaktik tradition
• Curriculum is an organizational and
intellectual centerpiece of education
• “An autonomous professional teacher
… has complete freedom within the
framework of the Lehrplan
(curriculum) to develop her or his
own approaches to teaching”
(Westbury 2000).
• This relationship btw the curriculum
and the teacher; teacher as the
curriculum maker is traditionally
internalized and respected especially
in the Scandinavian countries,
Singapore and Canada
• Curriculum: Subjectivity is threaded
through subject matter
• High trust in highly educated
teachers

13. Post-Standardization Era
• The recognition of the
detrimental effects of business
simulation with unintentional
inefficiency by the
introduction of
standardization, privatization
and accountability measures
(production line images) in
education in the USA and
other parts of the world since
the collapse of the Soviet
Union (Ravitch; Lather;
Hargreaves, etc.)
Curriculum theory level
• The critique of educational
psychology and learning
theories since the end of
1970’s: “learning theories
don’t make sense”
• Return to the critical
reappraisal of Bildung/
Didaktik in education and
curriculum theories, policies
and reforms, teacher
education curricula, etc.
CHINA!!
Education and curriculum policy

14. Basic paradigms
Curriculum (Tyler Rationale)
• Learning objectives
• Learning experiences
• Organization of learning
experiences
• Evaluation
Bildung/Didaktik (Herbart
1802/Klafki 1991)
• Moral, ethical and political
dimension of the
curriculum; theory of good
and sustainable society etc.
• Cognitive dimension
• Aesthetic dimension
• Practical dimension

15. Bildung in reconsideration?
• Diversity and difference as a structural characteristics of politics and
education; ambivalent dynamics of diversity and difference instead of
essentializing identity
• Subjectivity and its new belongings
• Chantal Mouffe: “In order to deepen our democracy, we have to break
with rationalism, individualism and universalism. Only on that condition
will it be possible to provide a framework for the articulation of the
different democratic struggles – around gender, race, class, sexuality,
environment and others
• Acknowledging the existence of the political in its complexity: the
dimension of the “we”, the construction of the friend’s side, as well as the
dimension of “them”, the constitutive aspect of antagonism

16. “When China rules the world”
(Jacques 2011)
• Curriculum theory/studies at the center of educational
sciences; curriculum as intellectual and organizational center
of education
• The recognized inadequacy of Anglophone educational
psychology and learning theories as well as Soviet (I.I. Kairov)
pedagogy on current education and curriculum reform
agendas in China
• Efforts to re-relate curriculum and teaching to Chinese
wisdom traditions beyond Communism and Capitalism:
Buddhism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Islam spiced by latest
Western intellectual advancements (post-structural
curriculum and subjectivity theories, etc.; subjectivity and its
belonging in the context of globalization?)
• “No Freedom; No Curriculum” (Zhang Hua 2013)

17. China…
• China is adopting for its ongoing “liberalization
and democratization movement in education”
(Zhang 2013) – for assumedly superpower
political reasons too – a kind of Chinese
version of Bildung/Didaktik tradition

18. References
• Autio, T. 2013. The Internationalization of Curriculum
Research. Chapter One in the International Handbook of
Curriculum Research. NY: Routledge
• Autio, T. 2012. The Finnish Case of Schooling and Curriculum:
Between and Beyond the German Didaktik and the Anglo-
American Curriculum. Japanese Journal of Curriculum Studies,
2012, 3
• Autio, T. 2009. From Gnosticism to Globalization: Rationality,
Transatlantic Curriculum Discourse and the Problem of
Instrumentalism. In: New Curriculum History. Sense Publ.
• Hargreaves, A. et al 2011. Second International Handbook of
Educational Change. Springer
• Pinar, W. (Ed.) (in print). Curriculum Studies in China:
Intellectual Histories, Present Circumstances. NY: Palgrave
Macmillan

19. References
• Pinar, W. 2012. The Character of Curriculum Studies:
Bildung, Currere, and the Recurring Question of the
Subject. Palgrave Macmillan
• Pinar, W. 2011. What is Curriculum Theory? 2nd rev. ed.
Routledge
• Pinar, W. et al. 1995. Understanding Curriculum. NY:
Routledge
• Westbury, I. et al. 2000. Teaching as a Reflective
Practice: The German Didaktik Tradition. NY: Routledge
• Sahlberg, P. 2011. Finnish Lessons: What Can the World
Learn from Educational Change in Finland? NY:
Teachers College Press.

20. References
Yuting, C. (in print). From Follower to Creator: School as Reform
Subject. In William F. Pinar (ed.), Curriculum Studies in China:
Intellectual Histories, Present Circumstances. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Zhang, H. (in print). Curriculum Studies and Curriculum Reform in
China: 1922–2012. In William F. Pinar (ed.), Curriculum Studies in
China: Intellectual Histories, Present Circumstances. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.