Curriculum, Marginalization, and the Professoriate

The author exposes the subtext on which education and particularly curriculum making is based by focusing on the notion that the professoriate has been marginalized within curriculum planning by an educational hegemony that utilizes the sorting and classification mechanisms present in education to co-opt the development of educational plans. To many, the neat curriculum document that is presented to students, parents, and educational stakeholders represents the product of a long and thoughtful process that unites the combined wisdom of professors and professional educators to plan courses of study with one eye focused on personal development and the other looking toward the needs of society, education’s primary stakeholder. Enveloped within this rather prosaic view of curriculum is the common, but naïve notion that education occurs in a political vacuum that harbors no unarticulated or hidden agendas and which is not subject to external pressures that shape educational goals for specific non-educational reasons. In essence, this view perceives curriculum development as an open process that emanates from frank conversation about the philosophy of education, the implications of what it means to be educated, and public needs. In spite of the dominant conceptualization of curriculum development as a cooperative and shared venture, the process o