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Disciplines, skills and the university

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Abstract

Several authors have suggested that the contract between the university and society formulated in the nineteenth century is breaking down, and a new relation between knowledge and society is being installed. This paper investigates what is at stake in this shift by re-visiting the roots of disciplinary knowledge, examining Durkheim’s social theory of knowledge to display the evolution of basic and professional disciplines in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Two contemporary challenges to disciplinary knowledge are then examined and evaluated. The paper concludes that it is time to transcend the standoff between disciplinary knowledge and practice-based accounts of knowledge.

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Notes

  1. The terms vary considerably: for example, ‘outcomes’, ‘skills’, ‘competences’, ‘graduate attributes’, capacities’, capabilities’. As Winch (2010) has argued, there are real differences between these terms, but the ‘family resemblance’ they share is that they all denote a kind of ‘know how’ (Ryle 1945).

  2. Discovery learning and other forms of ‘learning by doing’ set out to afford epistemological access to a discipline through procedural knowledge. In concept or content-rich fields, this amounts to learning how to recognise or create new knowledge before understanding the normative structure of the existing knowledge. ‘Learning by doing’ might seem more plausible in learning about forms of occupational knowledge, but it unfortunately all too often operates as an excuse not to provide access to conceptual knowledge (see Winch 2010; Wheelahan 2009).

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Acknowledgments

This work is based on research supported in part by the National Research Foundation of South Africa (UID 85813). The Grant holder acknowledges that opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed are those of the authors, and that the NRF accepts no liability whatsoever in this regard. The authors would also like to thanks the two anonymous reviewers and the editor for their helpful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Education, University of Cape Town, Rhodesgift, Cape Town, 7707, South Africa

    Johan Muller

  2. The Knowledge Lab, Institute of Education, Emerald Street, London, UK

    Michael Young

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  1. Johan Muller
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Correspondence to Johan Muller.

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Muller, J., Young, M. Disciplines, skills and the university. High Educ 67, 127–140 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-013-9646-4

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