ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an account of the changing 'battlefield' over knowledge in English schooling in the post-war period. It explores the intellectual formations that dominated English culture. In a whole range of areas, the Conservative governments of the 1980s and 1990s sought to 'nationalise' education. The private school and grammar schools were based on the 'gentlemanly' or classical curriculum, composed of the subjects of the leisured, educated class. The 1960s saw the growth of a wide range of educational innovations that still resonate in staffrooms and classrooms. These included: new learning technologies; the science of educational psychology; curriculum theories; school-based curriculum development, new examinations; in-service education and teachers' centres. The more relaxed view of school knowledge, bolstered by a 'postmodernism' which welcomed the relativism of knowledge, paved the way for the shift of focus from curriculum to pedagogy in the New Labour years.
