ABSTRACT
The dominant principles upon which the curriculum and pedagogy of working-class schooling in the nineteenth century was based were those of ‘civilizing’, ‘gentling’ and ‘making competent’ an increasingly urban population. Defence of the traditional curriculum and of traditional forms of pedagogy was often associated with a diagnosis of need for structure in inner-city schools. Many teachers saw the problem of the urban school as essentially one of boredom with and alienation from the traditional contents and structure of the curriculum and traditional modes of pedagogy. A small group of inner-city teachers in criticizing the curriculum and pedagogy of their schools and in advancing arguments for change, utilized a different vocabulary and pattern of discourse to that of the liberal majority. Although sharing with the liberal curriculum reformers the language of ‘relevance’, ‘integration’ and ‘active pedagogy’, these terms carried messages different from those of liberalism and were articulated within different theoretical frameworks.
