ABSTRACT
We have already considered, in Chapter 2, the suggestion that education may be as much about social engineering as about personal empowerment. Such a suggestion implies that school-students are subjected to different forms of education, allied to different teacher expectations, according to the socioeconomic class from which they come. An adequate supply of managers, for example (mainly drawn from the middle classes), is ensured, along with an adequate supply of labourers, clerks, shopworkers and so on (drawn mainly from the working and ‘lower middle’ classes). Such a view contests the notion of a curriculum fixed by its internal ‘rightness’ (in Matthew Arnold’s words [1909, pp. 10-11] the ‘best that is known and thought in the world’), arguing that the curriculum at any given point in its history reflects the views and interests of particular social groups-often at the expense of the views and interests of others. As Raymond Williams puts this point of view: ‘[education systems] claim that they are transmitting “knowledge” or “culture” in an absolute, universally derived sense, though it is obvious that different systems, at different times and in different countries, transmit radically different selective versions of both’ (Williams 1981, p. 186; see also Apple 1995).
