The Orders of Order: Curriculum Design and a Hauntology of Efficiency

Curriculum design is commonly understood as the principles and procedures for creating an organized course of study foundational for a good life. But what life is this? And what does a curriculum presume in designing it? Indebted to Derrida’s thinking on hauntology, the chapter approaches curriculum as a haunted house, examining the assumptions that are built into its shifting design principles since the early 20th century. Through discussion of curriculum’s contingent relationships with evolutionary developmentalism, cybernetic processes, and anticipatory algorithms, the chapter examines how curriculum is haunted by principles that seek to design life efficiently, embodying hopes and fears of who or what menaces these aims and must be tamed. These design principles are examined as immanent to the practices that seek to bring forth hidden developmental potentialities, improve mental processes, and anticipate environmental eventualities. They are analyzed in terms of how they generate differences and exclusions. These design principles cultivate, rank, and compare children’s inborn traits, justifying segregating those seen as “less able”; they systematize processes of continual surveillance, evaluation, and feedback on behaviors; and, they create data-driven systems to act preemptively upon risk. Taken together, curriculum design principles are orders of order. By approaching curriculum design not as “how-to” but as “haunted” by the norms and values of life itself, the chapter invites the reader to think otherwise to seemingly natural differences and exclusions that are in fact by design.