Introduction

There is a point about education and schooling that is so glaringly obvious that it hardly seems worth mentioning. The point is this: in order to understand any system or pattern of education it is important to know just what is taught within that system; to know exactly what kinds of knowledge are deemed to be valid, important and worthwhile. Self-evident as this statement may seem, we do, as Williams (1961, p. 145) points out, nonetheless have a tendency to

speak sometimes as if education were a fixed abstraction, a settled body of teaching and learning, and as if the only problem it presents to us is that of distribution: this amount, for this period of time, to this or that group.