Democracy, Technology, and Curriculum: Lessons from the Critical Practices of Korean Teachers

All curricula have complex connections to differential relations of power. As one of us has argued at considerable length elsewhere, the politics of curriculum involves a selective tradition in which only certain groups’ knowledge becomes “official knowledge” (Apple, 1990, 2000). The politics of the social studies curriculum provides a clear-cut example. In nations that have a history of strong state control over the content and organization of the curriculum and of repressive governments, such politics are even clearer. This is certainly the case in the instance we again discuss hereSouth Korea.