"Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation." - Judith Martin, (Miss Manners)

***

"Critical theorists maintain that the curriculum serves important, though ideologically problematic, functions. For one thing, it supports the status of those with power, influence, and wealth in the existing political, social, and economic order. One way the curriculum serves this conservative function is with a hidden curriculum that convinces people that inequities are inevitable or self-inflicted and therefore are not the fault of those in control. It also serves a conservative function with an official curriculum that equips one class of students with knowledge and skills for professional and executive careers and another class of students for blue-collar and unskilled jobs. Thus, according to these writers, the explicit and implicit curriculumserves to reduce people's sense of political efficacy and increase their political acquiescence. These writers introduce an ideological dimension to curriculum analysis and may even provide an opportunity to engage in an ideological analysis of a seemingly neutral curriculum." - George J Posner, Analyzing the Curriculum

What a glorious load of swagger (on the part of the critical theorists). If you want to find ideology, you can find ideology. Inequities are inevitable - the only place you don't see them is in pure Communism, and that's a purely mental construct. If you want to abrogate personal responsibility, go ahead, but no one outside of a University Arts faculty will listen to you. And if you want to force one-size-fits-all education on everyone regardless of their suitability for it, you just will make everyone miserable. Except for yourself, of course, since you're dragging everyone down onto the same level and achieving a warped sense of equality.

As someone the author quoted said about the Research, Development and Diffusion model: "The experts gave teachers answers and solutions to questions teachers never asked and to problems the teachers never had". He didn't seem to realise that this applied to his book in general (eg The extract above).

Pedagogical approaches are difficult enough to implement in practice, but when ideology comes into the picture the ideal world in which these academics live in should implode. On the one hand they have an obsession with tailoring education to individual needs, but on the other they decry homogenous schools and classes. Even if the state had the resources to finance one-on-one private tuition they'd complain that it would lead to children growing up being unable to relate to their peers. Who do they think teachers are? Supermen? A diverse class cannot be taught in diverse ways by just one teacher.

They complain that poor, non-Asian minorities do worse in the SAT than whites, but don't mention why this qualifier is needed. If it's a culture problem, foreigners and Asian-Americans would do badly, together with non-Asian minorities. They say the maths taught in school is too formalised and isn't the sort of maths which shopkeepers use to stay in business (eg How they calculate expenditure, revenue and profit margins). Yet if they teach youshopkeeper maths in school, you're only going to be able to become a shopkeeper instead of an engineer, accountant, investment banker, mathematician etc. If they really did teach shopkeeper maths in school, richer/more motivated/smarter students would, one way or another, learn proper maths and then there'd be cries of discrimination once again.

This obsession with discrimination and ethnocentrism which seems to stem from a complex of self-loathing blinds them to reality. Indeed assuming that there must be something wrong with the current way of doing things is worse than a pattern of blind dependency. There is definitely some ideology in curriculum, but an ideological analysis of a seemingly neutral ideological analysis of the curriculum is more telling.

I hope this book is not representative of the field of education studies as a whole, but either way, this extract says it best:

"Curriculum is an area of education that is characterized by a lack of agreement about its definition and nature. There are those who have divorced themselves completely from much curricular practice at all and want to talk about curriculum only as a discourse on politics and culture. These are mostly academians. And that dialogue can be a lively and interesting conversation. However, rarely does it ever get connected to the world in which most classroom teachers and administrators live and toil. When it comes to laws and expectations, like those of No Child Left Behind, most academians have little to say except to condemn them as unwise laws. However, practitioners needs advice on how to respond to such requirements, even those which may be based on fallacious assumptions about school effectiveness, in order to make the most and best of what is included for the children they are pledged and paid to serve." - Managing Curriculum and Assessment: A Practitioner's Guide