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elations present in society have direct ramifications within schooling and specifically what is
taught in classrooms, including pedagogical practices related to curriculum content.
2.2.1 Establishing and communicating official knowledge through curriculum.
Apple asserts that schools are a constant “site of conflict” (2004, p. vii) about what
constitutes the official knowledge. Young’s perspectives are also aligned with this, writing,
“...those in positions of power will attempt to define what is taken as knowledge, how
accessible to different groups any knowledge is, and what are accepted relationships between
different knowledge areas and between those who have access to them and make them
available” (as cited in Apple, 2004, p. 35). This statement can be considered directly
applicable to the contentious issue of how official knowledge is established in the curriculum
that is taught in schools. Young also states, “...school curriculum becomes just one of the
mechanisms through which knowledge is ‘socially distributed’” (1971, p. 27). Apple affirms
that there can be a struggle involved when establishing and negotiating the curriculum and
other aspects of schooling such as policies. He writes that policy and practice “...are the
results of struggles by powerful groups and social movements to make their knowledge
legitimate, to defend or increase their patterns of social mobility, and to increase their power
in the larger social arena” (2000, p. 9). This links to the ideas of hegemony that Althusser
(1984, 1971) and Gramsci (1957, 1971) discuss in relation to maintaining ideological control
of education, a topic broached in greater depth in Chapter 3: Methodology, Research Design
and Conduct.
Education, and in particular, curriculum is never impartial, and as Young explains, are
“socially produced” (1988, p. 24) and furthermore presents itself as a type of “...conception
of ‘curriculum as fact’, with its underlying view of knowledge as external to knowers, both
teachers and students, and embodied in syllabi and textbooks...” (1988, p. 25). This view of
curriculum as fact sees curriculum being handed to teachers by an external authority, or at
least one not at-the-coalface, to teach students a knowledge which is regarded as complete. In
discussing the tenuous nature of curriculum, and its likelihood to change over time, Young
writes that education is “…a selection and organization from the available knowledge at a
particular time which involves conscious and unconscious choices” (1971, p 24). For interest,
this is in contrast to Young’s other categorization of curriculum as practice which
“…involves a radically different concept of knowledge…no longer is knowledge viewed as a
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