Kuhn and Popper as Contrasting Models for the Education of Ethnic Minority Pupils

Abstract

Contrasting models of education and curriculum derived from the Kuhn-Popper debate on the nature of science are suggested as a basis for considering the kind of curriculum most suited to the needs of pupils from ethnic minority groups. 'Normal science' is presented as a form of community education with a curriculum designed to transmit culture and thereby initiate pupils into a 'way of seeing'. This, it is argued, is the approach of the secessionist school; it is an education for certainty.A critical and culturally transformative curriculum derived from Popper's fallibilist epistemology is offered as an alternative approach which deliberately eschews certainties and puts pupils into a culture contact situation where there is great educative potential. Here the learner has to tolerate doubt and develop an attitude of ambivalence to culture. Nothing is certain anymore.In conclusion a series of studies of the curriculum written in the 1950s by Musgrove and deriving from his teaching experience in Uganda is presented as suggestive of ways of exploiting the creativity of culture contact in the classroom. It is argued that there are some lessons here for multicultural education.

Liberalism and Communitarianism: a response to two recent attempts to reconcile individual autonomy with group identity

“…I have previously used the models of science education articulated by Kuhn and Popper as a means of identifying the issues here (Burtonwood, 1985). Kuhn (1970) regarded 'normal science' as an activity undertaken within a scientific culture or what he referred to as a paradigm.…”