216
I'ART ISAN IUVIEW
instrument that seems to draw on the indisputable 3uthority of scientific
method. By showing traditional institutions and the traditional curriculum
to be part of a web of ideology whose function is to endorse the prevail–
ing forms of power, the social sClentist disench3nts them. They become
nothing but the power that speaks through them. I{.ealizing this, we are
released from their ghostly authority. To study them as they demand
would be to endorse the system that created them; to study them with
ironical detachment is to set ourselves outside their field of force, to ac–
knowledge their meaning as a merely anthropologic31 fact. Their meaning
ceases
to
be a meaning for us.
The radical critique of the curriculu1l1 docs not depend, however, on
the truth of the Marxian theory of history, which, although a profound
work of the imagination, is nothing more th3n that - and certainly not a
science. The radical critique depends merely on adopting the external
stance of the social scientist, of looking on the human world as a thing
constructed, and asking why - from wh3t C3use and perhaps also with
what hidden agenda - it was constructed in just this w3y. It is a trivial
truth that the causes will be found in social conditions. All that rernains is
to suggest that these conditions arc changeable and historical, and at once
the authority of the institutions that grow from them is overshadowed. It
becomes natural to suggest a new and rival agenda, a new system of
power relations, and to jettison the ideological baggage required by the
former system of power.
Yet this very independence of any particular social science , this ability
to float free of any challengeable hypothesis, suggests to me that the in–
sights of the radical critique arc not hard-won. They issue with a kind of
somnambulistic automatis1l1, just as soon as the external viewpoint is
adopted. Imagine a curriculum reformer arguing that traditional mathe–
matics is a device for empowering a certain section of society, namely the
mathematically competent, that it discriminates between those and the
remainder, giving them a privileged access to careers, institutions, and the
social world. In order to rectify this injustice, we must develop a new
egalitarian mathematics that distributes advantage equally to all who study
it. This new mathematics contains such axioms as
:2
+
:2
=
5. Learning it
confers no special advantage on the mathematically talented. Indeed, the
new curriculum will disadvantage no one, or to put it another way , it will
disadvantage everyone equally, which amounts to the same thing.
The example is absurd but not more absurd than recent proposals for
a "fen'linist science," in which the aggressive masculine tendency towards
theory and experiment is set aside in favor of more gentle pursuits, or the
proposals for a feminist jurisprudence, in which the masculine emphasis
on rights and duties under law is replaced by an attitude of caring and
