Learning, Curriculum and Life Politics: the selected works of Ivor F. Goodson

Hence I began to develop a broader sense of working class experience of curriculum.  Yet the poignancy of these emerging personal insights developing in Britain in 1976-7 was in many ways too bitter to bear.  For just as one grasped the full alienating potential of traditional subjects for working class students, so the political pendulum began to secure rehabilitation of these very subjects.

Again by a twist of biographical fate I was able to watch this at first hand.  I had been asked in 1976 to act as Chairman of a Subject Advisory Committee for one of the main Examining Boards.  By chance it was the same Board that accepted my student-centred Community Studies 'O' level at Mode 3.  Yet I was an observer at a committee meeting where that very Mode 3 examination was closed down - the reasons given were twofold:  it was not 'cost effective' to have so many Mode 3’s and there had been a 'proliferation of subject titles' (an argument that later was used to underpin the arguments in favour of an National Curriculum).  So on the grounds of such apparent pragmatism, such expediency, a whole sub-culture of pedagogy and curriculum was effectively purged.

My commitment to my doctoral studies deepened as my work on the origins of school subjects and on the fate of urban and environmental studies as a innovatory new curriculum area became focussed.  I was therefore able to re-focus my investigations on the politics of curriculum in a way that would offer illumination to my own experience of schooling and that of my class.  Since that time I have spent most of my academic life searching for a more finely-grained understanding of the history and politics of curriculum.