Curriculum in Deconstruction: A Nostalgia for the Future‪.‬

Postindustrial society exhibits signs of postmodern culture. Not only because the reality of a temporal disjunction between past and present engenders liminal perspectives on knowedge, but because the nature of episteme becomes redefined in accordance with the incommensurability between repositories of knowledge and their technologies of archiving information to secure its reproduction. To understand what is at stake for the future of education, we must ask an overwhelming question: Does knowledge have to be reduced to an archive to make it a teachable certainty as the truth of curriculum? The answer is: yes. But is it possible not to limit truth to a single and finite trajectory of meaning within curriculum? Only, if we bring the concept of curriculum to closure, not an end, to begin thinking about the goals and objectives of education again without a nostalgia for a future sans curriculum. The suggestion will be ludicrous for some and welcome for others, which is not surprising: considering all that has been invested in the concept of curriculum as a way to guide and make sense of the educational project. "We" in the West, have invested the curriculum with an ideological subtext that promotes an ethic of infinite progress and self-betterment called lifelong learning. In the process, "we" have been rendered teachers and educational institutions accountable for the future of society and the survival of the State because of the power of curriculum to influence the minds, hearts, and bodies of a new generation. I have placed "we" in brackets not to sterilize the cultural ethnocentrism associated with the pronoun, but to emphasize the self-mocking nature of any attempt to divest from it meanings related to the subjective rendering of a possible world. By referring to a "we," a subject has already identified with a group and claimed participation despite the free will of independent action. As an archive of knowledge, a curriculum presupposes the possibility of reducing knowledge to a set of mental decoding operations and performative outcomes that are empirical and therefore measurable of the cognitive and habitual changes we call "education." Knowledge is nothing if it is not grounded upon the possibility of a permanent record of physical data that can then be used to establish "laws of science" as the demonstrable evidence of the self-certainty of the truth of research in the practice of transmission and reproduction. Culture depends upon the feasibility of referring to relatively stable archives of meaning to endow expressions of understanding with the evidence of empirical value and predictive power. The failings of conscious memory require the continuing, verifiable proof of a past and a future to secure the possibility of a genealogical rendering of human experience.