ABSTRACT
In Chapter 4, we saw how, historically, ‘science’ provided the rhetorical justification that covered the fact that curriculum thinking was increasingly based on ideological presuppositions. This process has not stopped, either in the way that, as I just disclosed, certain views of science and social life are selected as the most legitimate knowledge in the overt curriculum in schools or in the ideological functions of science as justification for conservative research and decision making. Thus, we shall have to inquire into how the vision of education as a science functions ideologically today. For just as hegemony is maintained within schools through the tacit teaching that goes on, so too is an acritical view of institutions and an overly technical and positivistic view of science made an aspect of an effective and dominant culture by the ‘intellectuals’ whose action makes it legitimate, who make it seem like a set of neutral categories that gives meaning so that we may act appropriately to help children.
