ABSTRACT
The content-driven curriculum, with its sharply delimited divisions into high-status subjects, and its emphasis on academic credentials and validation, seems to be the vehicle par excellence for the transmission of Bourdieu’s cultural capital to an elite group of students. To insist on its application to the whole school population, as did the English National Curriculum, might appear to be an egalitarian move, accessing elite cultural capital to all. As Moon and Mortimore commented, ‘the secondary curriculum …appears to be based on the curriculum of a typical 1960s grammar school’, and ‘the primary curriculum was put forward as if it were no more than a pre-secondary preparation’ (1989, p. 9). But there are alternative perspectives on the nature of this national curriculum. First, most subjects can also be presented in an instrumental fashion: indeed most subjects (or topics and themes) can be justified in any number of ways. Bowles and Gintis quote the nineteenth-century Boston Schools Committee to demonstrate how a curriculum activity as instrumental as needlecraft could in nineteenth-century elementary schools be portrayed as character building and developing an assiduous disposition (1976, p. 168): ‘The industrious habits which sewing tends to form and the consequent high moral influence which it exerts upon society at large may cause its introduction more extensively in all the schools.’
