ABSTRACT
During long walks over the Nantucket moors in the summer of 1987, I made my way through the contemporary rhetoric of fragmentation to images of broken glass, eventually arriving at the metaphor that, according to Richard Rorty, has for centuries dominated Western Philosophy. My title, “Curriculum and the Mirror of Knowledge,” is a play on his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. The essay itself, many of whose substantive ideas found their way into The Schoolhome, makes use of a number of my early analyses of curriculum even as it adds a new dimension to the original formulation of the epistemological fallacy. A revised version of the paper I wrote for a collection celebrating Paul Hirst’s work in education over three decades, this essay served as my contribution to the April 1991 Conference on Pluralism and Responsibility at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
