A fair bit has been written about political aspects of mainstream schooling in the west.  Most of this is critical, exploring aspects of the hidden curriculum which undermine democratic participation and social justice by teaching students to be complacent, by priviledging certain knowledge over others etc.  This is an important body of work, and I agree with most of it.  But I've been frustrated by the overwhelming focus on critical over constructive perspectives.  We need both.  We need to acknowledge the shortcomings, but to envision a better way of doing things, we also need to step back and look at why things are the way they are.  In theory, our educational policy and legal context have been established to underpin a certain approach to education which was deamed appropriate to the kind of country we wanted.  I think it's time to revisit some of these underlying principles, especially in light of issues

I'm becoming increasingly aware of the problem with how we understand curriculum.  There was probably a time when curriculum related more clearly to the sum of experiences in schooling, but that time has passed.  Back when I was doing my pre-service teacher education, I learned that curriculum referred to a set of documents.. the outline of what we were supposed to teach.  I heard whispers every now and then about this thing called a hidden curriculum as well, but as exciting as that idea was at the time, I've come to think that both concepts are equally problematic--though for different reasons.  These days the best we seem to be able to come up with is the idea of standards. 

The problem with curricula, or standards, or syllabuses, is that they almost always reduce education to a set of things that students are supposed to learn.  This then gets flipped

i’ve written before about the idea of tacit teaching, and the important role which context (as opposed to explicit content) plays in the development of children.  the idea is that we should be as intentional about context as we are about content, because what we immerse our children in matters, perhaps more than what we tell them during their immersion.  

but in order to do something constructive with this idea, it is necessary to operationalize it.  the idea of context can be broken down in a number of ways.  in the context of schooling, it is we can conveniently talk about them in terms of three aspects: the physical, material environment and objects in it; the social context and interpersonal features; and the institutional landscape including formal and informal policies, which shape the course of experiences in that context.  while these areas are not mutually exclusive, they provide a