The curriculum of everything: understanding education and curriculum

Abstract

“The Curriculum of Everything advances as the eternal future in which artificial intelligence surpasses the human capacity to do but not that of understanding and feeling.” Now even the “father” of Artificial Intelligence worries even those bedrocks of being – understanding and feeling - may be at risk. Pacheco reminds us that “curriculum study is a normative question,” now necessarily “with its technological dimension.” Then in a stunningly synoptic sentence that students could usefully study all semester, he summarizes: “the curriculum as a socially, culturally, ideologically, politically and economically constructed practice, is a formal and informal dispositive of interwoven relationships between knowledge, power, and technology.” (…) Penetrated, we become impregnated with the structures of software, as Pacheco appreciates: “Technological devices are powerful instruments of subjectivity production, moving the subject into predefined ways of knowing (…) Old-fashioned rhetoric alright, but insightfully implying we need to return to the past, when were still – sort of – human, before we were seduced by supranational “citizenship” in the software state, before we became submerged in the “curriculum of everything.” Step back from the brink. Pacheco has. Let us join him” (William F. Pinar, Preface).