Political Research

Education is not a neutral, technical activity. Rather, as an act of influence, it must be seen as an ethical and political act. To understand this, we need to think relationally. That is, understanding education in general and curriculum studies in particular requires that we situate them back into both the unequal relations of power in the larger society and the relations of dominance and subordinationand the conflictsthat are generated by these relations. Thus, rather than simply asking whether students have mastered a particular subject matter and have done well on our all too common tests, we should ask a different set of questions: Whose knowledge is this? How did it become “official”? What is the relationship between this knowledge and who has cultural, social, ...