ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a deeper discussion of the basic framework of assumptions under which the work on the relationship between ideology and school experience operates. This will be compared to the traditions which predominate in curriculum research. The chapter highlights one aspect of the argument about the linkages between curriculum and ideological and economic structure and outlines some general propositions about it. It demonstrates the language of learning tends to be apolitical and ahistorical, hiding the complex nexus of political and economic power and resources that lies behind a considerable amount of curriculum organization and selection. The school, as a rather significant agent of cultural and economic reproduction, becomes an important institution, obviously. Any society which increases the relative gap between, say, rich and poor in the control of and access to cultural and economic “capital” needs to be questioned. How is this inequality made legitimate? Why is it accepted? As Gramsci would put it, how is this hegemony maintained?
