The disjuncture then between common cultural experience and curriculum can be estimated for working class clienteles, as developing after the moral panics associated with the French Revolution. From this date on the school curriculum was often overlaid by social control concerns for the ordinary working populace.

For other classes at the time this overlay of closely structured, sequenced and presented curriculum was not deemed necessary. We learn that the public schools 'followed no common pattern of education, though they agreed on the taking of Latin and Greek as the main component of the curriculum. Each evolved its own unique forms of organisation with idiosyncratic vocabularies to describe them!(18). In so far as the curriculum depended on a learning of texts it was not judged essential that the teacher taught the text - a highly individualised form of curriculum. Moreover 'where students were divided into 'forms' (a term referring originally to the benches on which they sat) this was done in a rough and ready manner for the convenience of teaching and not with the idea of establishing a hierarchy of ability or a sequence of learning'(19).

Hence coherent alternative forms of education and curriculum developed in a wide range of schools for all classes prior to the Industrial Revolution and even after industrial transformation were retained in the public schools for the 'better classes' (and indeed for the working class were retained and defended in pockets such as 'adult education'). The model of curriculum and epistemology associated with State schooling progressively colonised all educational milieu and established itself some time in the late 19th century as the dominant pattern. The subsequent linking of this epistemology to the distribution of resources and the associated attribution of status and careers stands at the centre of the consolidation of this pattern. The assumption that the curriculum should be primarily academic and associated with university disciplines has been painstakingly worked for and paid for. We should beware of any accounts which present such a situation of 'normal' or 'given'.

In many ways such a hierarchical system denies the dialectic of education, the notion of dialogue and flexibility which might be viewed as central to the way we learn. If 'subject matter is in large measure defined by the judgements and practice of the specialist scholars' and 'students are initiated into a tradition' their attitudes approach passivity and 'resignation' this mutuality is deliberately denied. The rhetoric of the 'discipline' and the academic subject might therefore be seen as characterising a particular mode of social relations.

Educationists concerned with establishing a more egalitarian practice and curriculum are then driven to constantly assert the need for dialogue and mutuality and with it to argue for 'reconstruction of knowledge and curriculum'. For if the opinions cited are right the very fabric and form of curriculum (as well as the content) assumes and establishes a particular mode of social relations and social hierarchy. Seen in this way to argue only for changing the teaching method or the school organisation is to accept a central mystification of hierarchical structure through curriculum which would actively contradict other aspirations and ideals. Hence where pockets of alternative practice exist they present a similar case for egalitarian practice: in liberal adult education the following argument is presented:

All education which is worth the name involves a relationship of mutuality, a dialectic: and no worthwhile educationalist conceives of his (sic-and as follows) material as a class of inert recipients of instruction - and no class is likely to stay the course with him - if he is under the misapprehension that the role of the class is passive. What is different about the adult student is the experience which he brings to the relationship. This experience modifies, sometimes subtly, and sometimes more radically, the entire educational process: it influences teaching methods, the selection and maturation of tutors, the syllabus: it may even disclose weak places or vacancies in received academic disciplines and lead on to the elaboration of new areas of study.(20)