ABSTRACT
Attractive though it is, telling other people what to do is fraught with difficulty. As most parents, especially those of sensitive adolescents, will confirm, knowing how to say it as well as what to say are both factors requiring judgement and skill. Schooling is concerned with communicating what society deems ought to be known. It consists, in part, of telling other people what to do and how to do it. It is concerned among other things with making chosen aspects of the culture tangible and meaningful to those who become the future citizens and creators of the culture. The main purpose of schooling is to ‘exchange ideas, resources and people through a network of communication systems. The curriculum as taught is an example of such a communication system’. 1 But, as everyone knows, schooling is also used as a form of social control, of distribution of life chances. Added to which, as Silberman said, the teacher is concerned with much that does not exist in hard concrete forms; with procedures, with attitudes and feelings which act as mediators in the moving and changing process of socialisation. 2 ‘Curriculum studies’, therefore, that loose area of interest to the teacher-trainer and researcher, rather than to the teacher himself, tends to be as wide and diffuse an area of study as education itself.
