The aim of the paper is to stimulate philosophical discussion about issues relating to the changing role of the humanities in the secondary school curriculum in England. Recent research into the school humanities curriculum in England reveals some interesting features relating to instrumentalism and performativity within a control module of education and a technical perspective on subject knowledge (objectification), teaching and learning (skills-based) and curriculum design (behavioural objectives) (Blake, Smeyers, Smith and Standish, 1998; 2000). Latterly, schools have experienced the rapid rise of “humanistic” discourses of social constructivism through notions of subjectivism, well-being and happiness (Suissa, 2008). The rationales for these developments have been expressed through the language of choice, personalisation, flexibility, transferable skills and diversification associated with the agenda of the global knowledge economy. In this paper, totalising discourses of humanism are understood to operate as “transcendental contraband” (Bennington, 2001, p.194), domesticating and legitimating certain forms of curriculum knowledge, concealing other ways of knowing and being in the world. I argue that, ironically, at the same time as promoting some understanding of the human condition, dominant humanist discourses close down opportunities for thinking differently - on the one hand, by instituting certain fixed and restrictive totalising thinking that prevents other, more just knowledge and practices from emerging, and on the other hand, by selectively opening up spaces to allow controlling discourses of the state, the media, the economy, global agencies, business and religion to take hold. The interests of this paper lie in why and how this process is occurring, what and who is overlooked, missed out and marginalised in a curriculum colonised by certain prevailing logocentric notions of the sovereignty of humans. Such an appropriation may leave unconsidered questions of education’s enduring responsibility as an open and unfinished project to engage with curriculum knowledge as a public undertaking in the critical light of the uncertainties, instabilities, ironies and others eclipsed by our inherited traditions of thought. This study, by encouraging humanism - in the context of the school humanities curriculum – to deconstruct, gives an opportunity to investigate the language and meaning of totalising discourses as they relate to learners and teachers within the practical contexts of curriculum in which they work. The research questions guiding this study are: 1) What key tenets of humanistic thinking can be identified in the recent history of school humanities in England, namely during the following three periods? a) 1960s – 80s (Humanities Curriculum Project (HCP) (Schools Council/Nuffield Humanities Project, 1970); Man: a course of study (MACOS) (Bruner, 1965) b) 1988 – 2007 (Education Reform Act, 1988) c) 2007 – present (The National Curriculum) (QCA/DCSF 2007) 2) How might philosophical thinking contribute to an understanding of an empirical enquiry into recent changes in humanities curricula in schools? 3) What can deconstructive approaches to curriculum enquiry that focus on school humanities reveal? 4) What might comprise new ways of thinking about school humanities (“the new humanities” (Derrida, 2001))?

Metaphysics seeks for true understanding of the world through the operation of reason and logocentrism describes those logical arguments that give the appearance of neat, clear and satisfactory schemes (Norris, 1982; 1987). Logocentric discourses of humanism appear to confer order on the complexity of humanities knowledge and lead unproblematically towards the truth. By encouraging the language of humanism - as played out in recent school curriculum discourses - to self-deconstruct, the idea of the human subject as a centred, sovereign, autonomous, self-conscious, rational agent may be interrupted (Peters and Burbules, 2004). Deconstructive reading of the language and underpinning concepts of humanism revealed through the tracing of its provenance, history, guiding thoughts and significant proponents, troubles and disrupts the taken-for-granted logical arguments that establish the “conceptual apparatuses of the Humanities” (Derrida, 1978, p.365) before the movement of play of traces appropriate to a new Humanities might be considered.

By investigating the history of the discourses of humanism from 15th Century Italy, through the European Enlightenment to the English secondary school curriculum of the twentieth century, the aim is to explore what the humanities were and are understood to be and to begin to identify logocentic themes underpinning this tradition of thought. The historical account provides the background to the rise of a collection of school subjects commonly referred to as “Integrated Humanities” in some secondary schools in England between the 1960s and 1980s. Curriculum development projects like MACOS and HCP will be examined deconstructively to find and disturb the logocentric humanist discourses underpinning their guiding principles. A small-scale questionnaire survey of 47 secondary schools in the north of England in January 2009 reveals the current situation in humanities curricula at Key Stage 3 (students aged 11-14). Changes in humanities curricula have arisen from recent secondary school curriculum policy reform (2007) which marked the breakdown of strong boundaries between subjects and led to the arrival of “The Big Picture” of the curriculum (QCA, 2008). These domesticating discourses re-assemble and promote new renderings of humanistic arguments that veil the spectres of technical rationality and instrumentalism gathering strength in the wings