ABSTRACT
The culture which is hegemonic is in fact the gentry culture; and the key to the curriculum of English schools and universities over the past four centuries—since the much-debated rise of the gentry in the late sixteenth century—is the process of gentrification. It is the gentry culture, and neither middle class nor bourgeois culture, which has maintained its hegemony through the ideology of liberal education. School culture it is said is middle-class culture. Middle-class culture is hegemonic. There is no mention of social class: cultural differences are examined principally in terms of 'the conflict of cultures between old and young and the school's culture is expressed mainly in ceremonies. The curriculum maintains, reproduces or replicates the power structure of society either because its cultural discontinuities prevent working-class children from learning, or because its ideological potency. Hegemony, ideology and legitimacy are closely connected ideas in contemporary analyses of the school curriculum.
