ABSTRACT
The cultural role and significance of language — and more generally, following J. Donald, the symbolic order — needs to be better understood, expressly in educational terms. This can be usefully described as marking a distinctive 'linguistic turn' in curriculum theorizing and literacy studies, paralleling developments and initiatives of a similar kind in the wider sphere of social and cultural theory. Curriculum also needs to be conceived within the terms of cultural transmission and ideological communication, and as comprising three intricated message-systems: school knowledge, pedagogy, and assessment. In mainstream literacy studies and curriculum research alike, an assumption all too often made is that history may be read relatively unproblematically, in terms of the inexorable march of progress and the rational movement towards 'truth'. A crucial consideration here is the significance of 'reproduction' as a distinctive concept in recent curriculum and social theory.
