Bringing Out the Dead: Curriculum History as Memory

If there requires further evidence of the rude, undeveloped character of our education, we have it in the fact that the comparative worths (sic) of different kinds of knowledge have been as yet scarcely even discussed-much less discussed in a methodic way with definite results. (Spencer, 1884 p. 10)Memory is the raw material of history. Whether mental, oral, or written, it is the living source from which historians draw. (Le Goff, 1977/1992 p. xi)Making fragile the causalities that present themselves as natural and given in daily life is to open spaces for possibilities other than those framed by the contemporary principles of 'the order of things.' (Popkewitz, 2011 p. 164)From this standpoint, reexamination of the historical operation opens on the one hand onto the political problem ... and, on the other, onto the question of the subject ... a question repressed ... through the law of a 'scientific' writing, (de Certeau, 1988 p. xxvii)THERE ARE THE FRAMEWORKS WE CHOOSE TO USE, like Spencer's eternal question, and then there are those we do not choose, but which nevertheless operate, some subverting intent and others opening spaces for possibility. If the frameworks upon which we habitually rely serve to divert us from all but dominant forms of memory, then silenced or invisible frameworks become a form of surveillance from beyond the grave. The Reconceptualization of curriculum studies (Pinar & Grumet, 1976; Pinar, 2013) has long acknowledged the necessity of historical perspective for the purpose of revealing the ways in which history is, and has been, used to codify socio-political/ideological contexts. Nevertheless, curriculum history has largely averted poststructuralist deconstruction and has remained firmly wedded to a teleology of reason, a form of "high modernism" replete with progressive axioms and a linear narrative of struggle and overcoming (Cormack & Green, 2009). Whether this is merely a lag related to curriculum history's shared sphere with educational history, a field paradoxically noted for its ability to "avoid reflection on the epistemology of science and the sociology of knowledge" (Popkewitz, Franklin, & Pereya, 2001, p. 10) or whether curriculum historians, too, are beholden to what have variously been called salvation stories, (Popkewitz, et al., 2001) and grand narratives (Lather, 2007): both conceptualize history as a way to reconcile the present.This special issue of the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, titled Difficult Returns1 : Curriculum History Disrupted seeks to engage in a process of disruption and difficult return, that we might find fissures through which to extricate narratives of curriculum history from the tenacious grasp of the typical monumental moments we are all accustomed to: from the Common School Movement to the Committee of Ten; from Brown v. Board of Education to the launching of the Russian satellite Sputnik; and from the era of civil rights legislation and activism to the thunderous backlash of the 1983 presidential commission report A Nation at Risk. We envisioned this issue as an approach to a pedagogy of re-membrance (Hendry, 2011) which challenges us to live not in the past but in relation with the past (Simon, Rosenberg, & Eppert, 2000) with an emphasis on an acknowledgment of the claim that the past has on the present (Popkewitz, et al., 2001). Such an acknowledgement requires an increased level of theorizing regarding the normative tropes of modernism and a sincere grappling with the extent to which linear narratives and positivistic aspirations for a 'science' of history have shaped the field. We note, and hope to provide nurturance to, a growing rupture in theorizing about curriculum history (Baker, 2001, 2011; Block, 2004; Hendry, 2011; Kridel & Bullough, 2007; Morris, 2001; Popkewitz, 1997, 2001; Popkewitz, 2011; Trohler, 2011; Watkins, 2001; Winfield, 2007, 2010) which challenges the disciplinary internalization of Enlightenment notions of progress, Utopian quest, struggle, and redemption; an internalization which has thus far ensured that, writ large, curriculum history remains thoroughly embedded in a project of "subjugation and erasure" (Hendry, 2011 p. …