State Curriculum Standards and the Shaping of Student Consciousness.

IN A MULTICULTURAL SOCIETY, WHOSE MEMORIES AND INTELLECTUAL INSIGHTS should guide what we teach to the next generation? Over the past 35 years, in response to pressures from many community groups, educators, and scholars, public school curricula have become increasingly multicultural. Such curricula have the potential to help young people develop intellectual tools for examining and addressing issues of power, difference, and social justice. A growing body of literature illustrates imaginative, complex, and highly engaging pedagogy designed and taught by classroom teachers for precisely this purpose (Rethinking Schools, 2001; Sleeter, 2001; Sylvester, 1994). As a teacher educator, these are examples from which I strive to help both pre-service and in-service teachers learn. The standards-based reform movement that is sweeping the U.S. and other nations (such as Britain), however, is rapidly undermining efforts to create multicultural curricula and pedagogies. The purpose of this article is to problematize one state-mandated curriculum guide: the History-Social Science Framework for California Public Schools (California Department of Education, 2001). Western capitalist democracies face a tension between ideals of individual autonomy, equality, and justice, versus social control. To bridge this tension, the state institutionalizes boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable behavior, for example through prisons and mental asylums (Foucault, 1977). Most people learn to self-regulate within the bounds of what is considered "acceptable." Chomsky (1987) points out that a propaganda system is more essential to an unjust democracy than it is to an unjust totalitarian system, since violence as a means of control contradicts the idea of democracy. Capitalist democracies today face growing instability as economies are being restructured globally, transnational corporations are vying with states for power, peoples are moving around the globe in unprecedented numbers, and millions of people are finding themselves trapped in poverty with little access to work. School curricula can serve as a propaganda system for cultivating the loyalty of future workers to the sta te and nation, and for attempting to blunt instability. The sociology of education has long been concerned with uncovering processes by which "only specific groups' knowledge becomes official knowledge" (Apple, 1993: 65). Knowledge in democratic societies generally is not produced through a conspiracy, but rather by actors within shared spaces of power, drawing on shared funds of knowledge and experiences. According to Giddens (1979), dominant groups mobilize stocks of social knowledge that legitimate their own interests. They conceal power relationships through "representation of sectional interests as universal ones," "denial or transmutation of contradictions" embedded within class conflict, and naturalization of the status quo (Ibid.: 193-195). Power is always contested, but dominant groups mask their collective power by promulgating their worldview as it if were everyone's. Dominant ideologies describe social relations in a way that portrays them as legitimate. Counter-ideologies situate subordinate groups historically in a manner that questions and challenges their oppression. As E. San Juan, Jr. (1992: 77) explained, "popular memory, a sense of history inscribed in the collective resistance against racist, patriarchal, and exploitative forces, is one of the necessary means for oppressed peoples to acquire a knowledge of the larger context of their collective struggles, equipping them to assume transformative roles in shaping history." It is ironic that, at the same time literature has burgeoned in ethnic studies, women's studies, and studies from other historically marginalized social locations, states across the U.S. are increasingly standardizing curricula. Publication of A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) prompted publicized national discussions that framed the main purpose of schools as regaining U. …