ABSTRACT
Considerable work undertaken from a range of disciplinary perspectives during the past two decades has exposed common misunderstandings of the nature and significance of literacy. Despite this, current curriculum documents are replete with mistaken assumptions and views concerning the nature and significance of literacy and, especially, its relationship to curriculum. In particular, official curriculum documents persist in the view that literacy consists in some kind of unitary 'essence', typically a skill or technology. The work of theorists like Brian Street and Harvey Graff dispels such literacy myths. Street's 'ideological model of literacy' provides a cogent base from which to reject the relationship between literacy and curriculum implied overwhelmingly in curriculum documents. The changing social order which simultaneously reflects and engenders the policies and practices sketched here has important implications for literacy and curriculum. While they don't typically offer any rationale, official curriculum documents are clearly endorsing the value and urgency currently ascribed to entrepreneurial attributes.
