ABSTRACT
Because schools and, especially, universities are so closely associated with and so deeply implicated in the enlightenment project, it is sometimes difficult to recall that their origin and their appeal are more frequently to more traditional roots. The following elements of school and university curricula are here identified as derived from, or appealing to, traditional values, beliefs and practices. Although separated here, for purposes of clarity, they are in practice, closely interlinked:
• religious instruction, denominational teaching and acts of collective worship • a stress on particular social forms, especially those of the nuclear or extended family and
the procedures and beliefs necessary to uphold these; the reproduction of gendered identities and expectations
• the encouragement of certain forms of embodiment which may stress health or fitness or discipline and which validate participation in certain leisure activities while strongly discouraging others
• the practices of social control within schools and universities themselves and the inculcation of the norms of wider control for the purposes of stratified social reproduction; the practices of surveillance and evaluation
• the legitimation of the state’s monopoly of violence not only as a mode of control but also as an internalization of national or ‘ethnic’ identity; the construction of individuality within the political doctrines of the state
• the reproduction of tradition itself, in forms concerning the importance of particular narratives of history and the impact of these on current modes of legitimation and identity formation
• the stress on Europe as the cradle of human culture and civilization, which may be stressed in political, scientific, artistic, philosophical, technological or even military dimensions; the perceived virtues of Roman, and particularly Hellenic, structures and products may be emphasized.
