ABSTRACT
One of the outcomes of the advent of the NC has been a relatively new phenomenon in peacetime: the simultaneous reading of centrally produced documents by large numbers of people. Admittedly, most of those people are teachers, but other parties too have been grappling with the folders and now posters of the National Curriculum Council (NCC), trying to make personal sense of them. The NC has generated a ‘mass reading strategy’ across the land:
Everyone with a professional interest in the matter finds themselves reading the same glossy curriculum documents at the same time, and waiting for the next ones to emerge. This means that huge sections of the teaching profession and the satellite occupations which encircle it-academics, teacher educators, textbook publishers, journalists, and Local Authority officials-are engaged in a common interpretive task at roughly the same time.
