ABSTRACT
Quotations such as the above have more than curiosity value: they provide us with an opportunity for improving our understanding of curriculum through the removal of taken-for-granted assumptions. The lore of schooling and our familiarity with the world of the classroom can divert our attention from important questions we might be asking about the present functions of curricula and how new functions might be envisaged. One way to raise such questions is to turn away for a while from what is normal and to look instead at things and places which strike us as strange. History offers us one medium for achieving this shift of vision.1 The quotation at the head of this paper refers to a method of instruction which was familiar to university students and teachers in the Elizabethan University of Cambridge: so familiar that conveyance of its meaning does not require explanatory phrases: the reiteration of key categories will suffice – ‘Sophister’, ‘Commencer’, ‘Theses’ – and documentation need only be concerned with administrative arrangements relating to those categories – ‘From Ash-Wednesday’, ‘at one of the Clock in the afternoon’.
