School knowledge, science, institution and democracy

Abstract

The dialectical skirmishes provoked by the new discourse of “competencies” have not contributed to rescue the debate on school knowledge from their current lethargy. Among other reasons, due to their insufficient perspective, their obvious omissions, and to reduce the terms of this debate to a superficial and forgetful dualism. Therefore, it is urgent to follow rethinking and problematizing the curriculum. To that end, this paper advocates to expand our perspective with other levels of analysis that allow us to bring to light and defamiliarize the tacit assumptions about the nature and dynamics of the curriculum that tend to be taken for granted. In this sense, it will argue in favor of the imperative need for another kind of “ontological” approach, different from the conventional but also cautious with some postconventional drifts.