ABSTRACT
I begin this book with a brief excursion into my own biography, because I believe it will help to explain why I initially set out to explore the sociology of the school curriculum and why I am still doing so when many others have abandoned the field for other interests. I suppose I have been fascinated with the idea that the curriculum could be different from the way it is, in terms of its content and its form, ever since my final term as a pupil at one of London's direct grant grammar schools. For most of my career there in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I doubt if I ever asked myself, let alone anyone else, why I was studying the particular assortment of subjects presented to me or why the content of those subjects was constituted in the particular way it was. That is not to say for one moment that I was uncritical of the education I was getting, but my criticisms focused almost exclusively on the way I was being taught particular subjects rather than on the value and purpose of the grammar school curriculum and its particular content. Only in my final term, when I read E.H.Carr's What Is History? (Carr 1961) did I even begin to glimpse the idea that school knowledge was a selection from a much vaster range of possible knowledge and that its content might be socially determined.
