ABSTRACT
Curriculum policy in the urban school was bedevilled with professional shortsightedness. Not only teachers, but educational philosophers and sociologists, college lecturers, curriculum developers and researchers pursued sectarian obsessions within the new religion. Those responsible for the raising of the school leaving age, the counting of immigrants, compensatory education, or the teaching of reading, all offered conflicting curriculum advice. 1 The growing Curriculum Church was attacked for its secularism in purveying a commodity called ‘knowledge’ by the deschooler Ivan Illich. The curriculum development movement, indeed, resembled nothing so much as a mad tea party of neo-scholastics. Educational sociologists, project directors and researchers, deschoolers and a host of Marxists all squabbled for funding and influence. They also neglected to consider total urban strategy.
