ABSTRACT
So they learned the contents of their Tattered second-hand books by heart in the sweat of their brow Learned to lick the teachers’ boots and Despise their mothers. (Bertolt Brecht, ‘Our Poorer Schoolfellows from the City’s Outskirts’, in J. Willett and R. Mannheim (1976), Bertolt Brecht Poems, Part 2, 1929-1938, p. 273.)
Curriculum as problematic
In the last chapter we considered the dynamic and complex interrelationships generated by the classroom context between teachers, their students and the ‘outside world’. But such relationships are not formed in an educational vacuum and so in this chapter we consider another key variable in the classroom context: the curriculum, or the ‘what’ it is that teachers teach and students learn. This raises complex issues that take us well beyond the classroom walls.
