ABSTRACT
In Chapter 1 the metaphor of the baroque garden was used, to suggest that one possible design for the curriculum is as a construction of formally delimited zones of subjects or disciplines. This has been the dominant curriculum paradigm for most of English education in the twentieth century: the historical review of curriculum change shows the enormous resilience of these particular subjects. Bernstein’s 1990 analysis suggests that this dominance of the official pedagogic discourse is the consequence of a core of officials, consultants and advisers, both educational and economic, recontextualizing the curriculum into disciplines (1990, pp. 195-6). This chapter examines the way that such a curriculum is composed of boundaries and frames, and examines the origins and persistence of the major disciplines. It then examines the various arguments that have been advanced to justify the various divisions. Although in many senses a subject-based curriculum is both traditional and the means of preserving tradition, the subjects themselves are not fixed, and the ways in which new disciplines emerge and find a justification within the array of subjects reveals that the arguments for a content-based tradition are varied, and make appeal to a number of ideologies other than the simple sanction of convention and custom. As new disciplines are accepted into the disposition of curriculum contents, the hierarchies of the subjects change, and new cores and peripheries come to be defined. The content-based curriculum, though often seeking its justification in appeal to traditional eternal verities, possesses a very real dynamic: ‘the visible, public and changing testimony of selected rationales and legitimising rhetorics of schooling’ (Goodson, 1988, p. 16).
