However the believers in educational goals based on theories about the fixed nature of the disciplines have ultimately to face the sad truth that the world of schooling as it currently exists is played on a pitch where scoring goals is difficult and where the goalposts are not always relevant. There is a tearful little section in Lawton headed 'Disciplines but not subjects'. Here the confrontation between philosophies and prescriptive truth and classroom reality leads to peculiar paroxysms to escape culpability for the prescription's failures. Hence Lawton writes:

there is no reason why a curriculum based on disciplines should not be related to the children's own experience and interests. The fact that so much so-called academic teaching of subjects does tend to neglect children's everyday knowledge . . . is a condemnation of traditional pedagogy or teaching-method rather than disciplines themselves as a basis of the curriculum.(28)

One wonders what a philosopher would make of the logic of culpability here? (are the disciplines beyond logic as well as culture?).

But this is to do less than justice to Lawton or Hirst. Both of these writers have of course shown considerable sensitivity to the problems of curriculum change and implementation. I have really pursued the point to show that even more sophisticated theorists are on the horns of a dilemma when working with the prescriptive mode. Hirst has pronounced at length on the dilemma in his article "The forms of knowledge revisited":

The importance of the disciplines, in the various senses distinguished, for school education, must not be minimised. What matters in this discussion is that the logical priority of intellectual objectives be recognised even if in terms of wider human values they are sometimes judged secondary. Equally their logical structure cannot be denied if they are ever to be attained. The concerns of the universities mean that their organisations of teaching and research necessarily embody these concerns to a high degree. But schools are not universities and their teaching functions are significantly different. These need to be seen in their own right for what they are. And if once that is done then not only do the disciplines matter, but many other things matter as well, things of major psychological and social concern which must not be overlooked.

This leads to a final epilogue for the forms of knowledge as prescriptions:

Education is a complex business and philosophical analysis can contribute to our planning of it in a limited way. What it can do is alert us to the danger of too easy decisions and the issue of the place of the disciplines in more than a philosophical affair. What more there is to it, I must however leave to others.(29)

The humility of this epilogue is both appealing and a clear statement of how limited the aspirations of the philosopher have become. But several logical steps are still missing before we arrive at this denouement. It is all very well to leave it to others. But who? It is all very well to alert us to the danger of easy decision. But what if philosophy had led us to the very dangers of prescriptive simplicities to which we have drawn attention? To go even further back. If schools and teaching need to be seen in their own right for what they are; why does the analysis not start there? Perhaps after all we need not theories of curriculum prescription but studies and eventually theories of curriculum production and realisation.