ABSTRACT
Central governments, of course, may often claim not to wish to interfere with matters of pedagogy (although they clearly perceive a right-and in some cases a duty-to be prescriptive on matters of curriculum). The current National Curriculum for England and Wales, for example, claims specifically to advise teachers what they must teach but not how they must teach it. There is arguably, however, only a partial truth in such a claim. The National Curriculum, for example, may not tell teachers explicitly how they should teach, but the nature of the curriculum content clearly does, often, imply, promote or even necessitate certain kinds of pedagogy, even as it marginalises others. Thus, if a National Curriculum specifies that young students must be
able to name in grammatical terms the various parts of speech, this may appear a matter of curriculum content but clearly presupposes a particular model of language development that compels forms of pedagogy different from those that might be pursued by a teacher who has a fundamentally different view of language development. In this case, the teacher may feel compelled to adopt pedagogic practices (teaching the parts of speech as a means to a particular end) that run counter to preferred practice, even though the ultimate curricular aim (to ensure certain levels of linguistic competence) may be the same. Similarly, a National Curriculum that details a list of authors to be studied, along with a high level of specificity as to what aspects of those authors’ work must be studied, effectively denies teachers the possibility of pursuing the kinds of pedagogy argued by Freire and others, in which learning is perceived to take place most effectively when students are implicated in the setting of their own educational agendas via their own curriculum selections.
