ABSTRACT
This experience of complete curriculum upheaval was shared by many other curriculum subjects, as a result of the processes set in motion by the Education Reform Act. Ball (1990) examines the conflicts which characterised the production of the Mathematics and English Orders, and other authors have investigated the experience of non-core subjects (e.g. Evans and Penney 1995 for PE; Phillips 1998 for History). In each case, as Ball points out, contestation over the detail of subject knowledge represented a power struggle for domination and for prestige by
different communities and groups within the educational state. Specifically, in the 1988-93 period, the dominant group influencing educational policy was the ‘New Right’. In the case of geography, the government-appointed Geography Working Group was steered towards a political solution (Rawling 1992). Thus geography had won the status battle but apparently lost the ideological arguments to the ‘New Right’ and to what Ball and subsequent writers have called ‘cultural restorationism’ with its emphasis on discrete and traditional forms of subject content and a pedagogy of didactic transmission.
