Official Curriculum

The official curriculum can be simply defined by the way curriculum itself has been traditionally understood: as the course of study, body of courses, or program of training at a school or university. However, this conception fails to address its analytical significance in the field of curriculum studies, where attention is directed specifically at [Page 617]what is formally sanctioned by schools or other institutions of learning through their explicit educational offerings. To speak of the official curriculum is also to raise questions about the relationship between knowledge and power, ideology and institutionthe politics of education and teaching, and processes of standardization, legitimation, and accountability that come to define what constitutes curriculum. Representing an authoritative response to the classical query concerning what knowledge is of most worth, whether actively endorsed or critically interrogated, the official curriculum affords an object of analysis for clarifying educational purpose and responsibility, providing direction for instruction and assessment, and articulating the meaning of educational success.

Since the unofficial emergence of the curriculum field with Franklin Bobbitt's 1918 publication of The Curriculum, many scholars have sought, in defining curriculum, to address such concerns and expand upon understandings that are limited to that which is explicitly authorized. Making curriculum distinctions via descriptors such as official, hidden, informal, or enacted, curriculum scholars seek to challenge the tenacity with which traditional notions of curriculum, confined to the formal, have held sway and remain dominant in educational thought and practice. Much attention to the official curriculum, then, has been oriented around its exploration in relation to the “unofficial,” that which falls outside curriculum so narrowly conceived.

David Hamilton reveals, however, the officiating function curriculum has served since its introduction into an educational context in the 16th century. Locating the first such use of the word curriculum in an administrative effort of authorities to bring order to the programs of study offered in the universities of Northern Europe during the Protestant Reformation, he elucidates the ways in which social and political forces direct how and what curriculum is officially established, and to what ends. Focusing on a more contemporary and U.S.context, Herbert Kliebard documents a history of struggle over authorization of the official curriculum among various groups representing conflicting interests and differing ideological commitments. Encompassing complex com promises and even contradictions among competing constituencies, the curriculum as formalized, rather than neutral or given, is shown to be a result of deliberation, and even under negotiation.

Michael Apple has done much to direct attention to the official curriculum, specifically his analysis of the “official knowledge” subscribes and promulgates via schooling. Apple's critique posits that these struggles and negotiations are, in fact, obscured, and myriad ideological endorsements unexamined, in a presentation of the official that lays claim to objectivity and common sense. Rather, such claims are powerfully operative in cultivating taken-for-granted policies and practices in education that are profoundly value laden and politically motivated. For example, he lays bare the politics of the adoption of textbooks in the United States. Analyses of authorized textbooks, state curriculum standards, and federal educational policies have also been similarly initiated, to uncover the ideological positions authorized in them and explicate what knowledge is privileged, devalued, or excluded by official definition. For Apple, what is sanctioned is democracy as dominantly defined by the free market, citizenship as conceived in the individual consumer, and knowledge valued as a commodity.

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