ABSTRACT
I argued in Chapter 1 that in order to understand the relationship between curriculum and cultural and economic reproduction we would have to grapple more completely with the maintenance and control of particular forms of ideology, with hegemony. We have now seen how both historically and currently certain normative conceptions of legitimate culture and values enter into curriculum. Yet we need to stress that hegemony is created and recreated by the formal corpus of school knowledge, as well as by the covert teaching that has and does go on. As the quotes from Williams indicated earlier, selective tradition and incorporation function at the level of overt knowledge so that certain meanings and practices are chosen for emphasis (usually by a segment of the middle class1), and others are neglected, excluded, diluted, or reinterpreted. For just as many educators and members of the curriculum field have often lost a serious sense of their historical rootedness in past interests of maintaining consensus through the selection of knowledge based on a vision of a society stratified by class and ‘ability,’ so too has the selective tradition operated today to deny the importance of both conflict and serious ideological difference. What was often in the past a conscious attempt by the bourgeoisie to create a consensus that was not there, has now become the only possible interpretation of social and intellectual possibilities. What was at first an ideology in the form of class interest has now become the definition of the situation in most school curricula. We shall look at this by examining some aspects of that formal corpus of school knowledge and see how what goes on within the black box can create the outcomes the economic reproduction theorists have sought to describe. Once more our view of science will play an interesting, and in this case rather direct role.
