Questioning the Curriculum: Arts, Education and Ideology.
Publisher Summary This chapter discusses arts, education, and ideology. The liberal view of education sees education as an independent and neutral system, dispensing knowledge, and operating to redress inequalities and offer the possibility of social mobility. The rise of the present system of education is taken as a part of the extension of civilization and the democratization of culture from elite to the whole population. A close look at the social history of schooling; however, reminds that institutions, including educational ones, do not develop in a vacuum and that the origins of the existing educational system lie in the particular social and economic conditions of the 19th century. The origins of the present educational system, then, lie in the particular social and economic features of that period that saw the birth of contemporary education. Similarly, developments in educational theory and practice in the present century have been closely related to the needs of the economy and the social and ideological concerns of policy-makers and educationalists.