Chapter 7 looks at the importance of how the curriculum is socially constructed for the ongoing maintenance of the social order. In some ways this chapter asks questions that would be relevant for the interrogation of current educational policies: for instance ‘why is the dominant form of subject-based curriculum treated by policy makers as a “timeless given” ’; more pressingly ‘why are so many contemporary educational theorists accepting this as they follow the trajectory of current policies?’ Perhaps the appeal is itself part of the diagnosis of this chapter that ‘the internalisation of differentiation effectively masks the social process of preferment and privilege’.

In The Making of Curriculum, I examine the socio-political process by which school subjects become ‘timeless givens’ in the grammar of schooling. In fact the ‘traditional subjects’ turn out to be examples of the ‘invention of tradition’ as is so much else in our social world. Traditions which endure in the arena of schooling and curriculum must appeal to powerful ‘constituencies’ and without that support new challenges can never gain traction. The tradition of school subjects therefore are broadly harmonised with the external constituencies of power. Curriculum approaches that might seek to educate more disadvantaged groups must ‘run the gauntlet’ of the powerful external constituencies. Sustainability in the world of the school curriculum is therefore closely equated with the resonance achieved with external constituencies.

I noted earlier the distinction between domination and structure, and mechanism and mediation. This means that any assertion about curriculum must be located within the historical period in question. At certain points new structures are established which set up new ‘rules of the game’. Whilst this establishment of new structures might be viewed as domination, the period that follows such legislation is one of mediation. Hence as we noted in earlier sections, the period of the 1960s and early 1970s was one of social innovation in much of the Western world. In this period there were social missions and social movements aiming at social justice and social inclusion. These missions and movements, again as noted in earlier chapters, led to serious pedagogic and schooling experiments to broaden social inclusion. My point in covering some of these alternative pedagogies was not to argue that these provided an answer to the perennially elusive project of social inclusions but to delineate the purposes, pedagogies and practises that were developed as part of this social movement. In later periods ‘social inclusion’ again surfaced but this time as an uncoupled political rhetoric located within a far more stratifying strategy of educational provision. Since this rhetoric showed little interest in the earlier experiments and social movements it was difficult to believe in its serious purpose. Schools are weighted with contextual inertia and to completely ignore history in this way is to be either naïve or duplicitous, it is certainly not to be properly informed or strategically purposeful.

But this is to run ahead, for by the millennium much had changed and the reversals of the period following Thatcher’s election in 1979 and Reagan’s in 1980 have been well-documented. The chapter Nations at Risk and National Curriculum looks at the reversal in the field of curriculum. For instance in England the similarity between the 1904 structure of secondary education and the 1988 National Curriculum is pointed up. I note that the 1904 structure embodied that curriculum offered to the grammar school clientele as opposed to the curriculum being developed in the Board Schools and aimed primarily at the working class. At this point dominant interest groups were acting to favour one segment or vision over another. In the years following the Second World War and culminating in the 1960s more egalitarian forces at work in a different economic climate brought the creation of comprehensive schools where children of all classes came under one roof. As we saw earlier, come curriculum initiatives sought to redefine and challenge the hegemony of the grammar school curriculum and associated pattern of social prioritising. It was to defeat this challenge that some of the policies of the Thatcher government were formulated, notably the National Curriculum. ‘Seeking in turn to challenge and redirect these reforms and intentions the political right has argued for the rehabilitation of the “traditional” (i.e. grammar school) subjects. The national curriculum can be seen as a political statement of the victory of the forces and intentions representing these political groups. A particular vision, a preferred segment of the nation has therefore been reinstated and prioritised, and legislated as “national” .’