ABSTRACT
When we initiated the proposal for this volume of essays, we were concerned that the growing emphasis on school achievement, and relatedly high stakes testing, was turning schools away from the worlds that surround them, preoccupying them with the machinations of student and teacher evaluation and competitive comparisons. Achievement and audit focus on emptied out measures of what curriculum does. Well described in Peter Taubman’s essay as the ‘audit culture’, this obsession with achievement and its politics and semiotics distracts communities from attention to school experiences of youth, and diminishes public education’s contribution to a student’s capacity to develop a full and productive life, participating in the culture and development of his or her community. e audit culture simultaneously turns away from yet strongly inuences the task that is a distinctive function of curriculum: the deliberate shaping towards personhood of young people. Admittedly, young people are receiving messages about their society’s vision for them all the time; but it is the deliberate and explicit shaping of this project through the legislative and formal processes of curriculum that discriminates schooling’s contribution to personhood from the multiple messages provided from family, community, popular culture, economy, law, advertising, etc.
