ABSTRACT
Curriculum’s story of the world has always been inuenced by politics. Sometimes, especially in proposals to change what is taught as national history, or in the curriculum changes that follow major political events such as the ending of apartheid in South Africa, the political direction of curriculum is explicit. But o©en its politics and sources and motives are obscure, indirect. ere is the real and reasonable space and time that it takes to make any sense of events, reected not just in topics, in what is said, but in the ways disciplines of human and cultural inquiry develop over time. en there is the overt concern of schooling with young people’s cognitive development, and the sorting and coding that frames the institutional forms in which curriculum must be oered, and scholarship reformulated into courses of instruction for students along the continuum of K-12 schooling through university and graduate studies. And for each of these cohorts there are deliberative councils which may involve diverse political constituencies to decide not only what enters the curriculum but also how it is taught and how it is to be known.
