ABSTRACT

Curriculum theory, as the huge weight and protean contents of this collection indicate, reaches after many different practices in a society. Its educational origins, low in the hierarchy of intellectual inquiry, render it naturally obedient to other disciplines with more power, wealth, and prestige. More typically, the planning of curricula follows the reach-me-down methods of the negotiation culture. It is, of course, entirely to the credit of the ideology-spotters that this messy procedure must be seen as none the less ideological, for all its messiness. What it embodies, in its common-sensible way, is an acknowledgement that some subjects carry greater weight than others in the big world, that outside the working party are the durable, invisible structures of society. Common sense, the idiom all speaks naturally, is none the less there to criticize like any grander modality of thought, only when they know what it's like.