5.3 Influences on the Curriculum

2026 Syllabus Objectives

  1. The social construction of knowledge.
  2. Factors influencing the content of the curriculum, including power, status, culture, economic demands, and gender.
  3. Education and cultural reproduction, including the ethnocentric curriculum, the gendered curriculum, and the hidden curriculum.
  4. The curriculum and the concept of cultural capital.

The Social Construction of Knowledge

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🔑 Key Concept: Knowledge is not simply "out there" waiting to be discovered—it is socially constructed by societies based on what they believe is "worthy of being known."

Weber (1922) argued that all societies develop beliefs about what constitutes valuable knowledge. This perspective challenges the idea that knowledge exists as an objective reality independent of social context.

Understanding Social Construction in Education

The social construction of knowledge in education involves examining:

  • What kinds of knowledge should be taught
  • To whom it should be taught
  • For what purpose it should be taught

This requires analyzing ideas relating to power and control through:

  • The structure of the school curriculum
  • The content of the school curriculum
  • The development of the school curriculum

The curriculum reflects societal power structures and determines which forms of knowledge are valued and legitimized within education systems.

Factors Influencing the Content of the Curriculum

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Power, Status, and Economic Demands

Historical Development of Schools

Schools as modern institutions originally developed to meet the needs and requirements of modern industrial societies. The curriculum has been shaped by various social, economic, and political forces.

The Marxist Perspective 📌

From a Marxist perspective, schools are places where particular relations of power and control flow from the nature of economic relationships in capitalist societies.

Althusser's Cultural Reproduction Theory:

  • Cultural reproduction involves the ability of a ruling class to pass on its political and economic domination from one generation to the next
  • Education is characterized as an Ideological State Apparatus (ISA)—an important institutional mechanism for social learning
  • Teachers are agents of ideological control who "transform pupil consciousness" by trying to get students to accept "the realities of life" and their likely future social positions

Cultural institutions (education, media, religion) are seen as instruments of class oppression and domination through the power they have over:

  • What people learn
  • How they learn it

How the Curriculum Influences Worldview

The curriculum shapes students' view of the world through:

  1. Formal learning—teaching skills for the workplace
  2. Restricted access to knowledge through curriculum control
  3. Creating different levels of knowledge to mirror workplace hierarchy
  4. Valuing academic knowledge over practical/vocational knowledge
  5. Assigning special status to subjects like English, mathematics, and science
  6. Teaching acceptance of authority
  7. Commodification of knowledge through qualifications

Young's Theory of Educational Knowledge (1971)

Michael Young argued that educational knowledge has an ideological dimension. Knowledge is:

  • Categorized into subjects
  • Presented through a formal curriculum protected by gatekeepers
  • Validated through examinations (credentialism)

Young identified two key processes:

  1. Selection—deciding which subjects appear in the curriculum
  2. Stratification—arranging knowledge hierarchically (e.g., theoretical knowledge being considered superior to practical knowledge)

Economic Influences on the Curriculum ⚡

The demands of the economy significantly influence curriculum content:

  • Functionalist perspective: Education produces the right number of trained workers for economic needs
  • Example: The UK shifted from Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to Computer Studies to emphasize programming rather than just software use (like word processing)

This change reflected economic demands for more technically skilled workers in the digital economy.

Gender Influences on the Curriculum

Gender influences the curriculum through:

  • Subject association with masculinity or femininity
  • Vocational subjects are strongly gendered, often taught in single-sex environments
  • Teachers may teach differently based on the gender of students

Gender stereotyping shapes both curriculum design and student subject choices, perpetuating traditional occupational divisions.

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