The curriculum as relation between knowledge of reality and the individual's development: Contributions from Antonio Gramsci and Lev Vygotsky

Progressive pedagogies often address two criticisms of school education. The first is that school knowledge is far from reality because it is theoretical and abstract. The second is that schools are more concerned with transmitting knowledge than promoting the development of students as individuals. These criticisms are based on at least two questionable assumptions. The first is that the acquisition by individuals of socially existing knowledge would be a process that does not promote the development of individuality. In other words, the intellectual, emotional, and ethical development of a person would be a process independent of the degree of knowledge of objective reality learned by that person. The second assumption is that knowledge relevant to individuals' lives is the one immediately connected to practical experiences. This type of vision separates the individual from the social, the internal from the external, the concrete from the abstract, the practical from the theoretical, and so on. In our chapter, we argue that in the writings of Vygotsky and Gramsci, there are substantial contributions to an educational theory in which the school curriculum is seen as a dynamic and complex relationship between the knowledge of reality and the development of the individual.