The world in today's curriculum

Abstract

When we initiated the proposal for this volume of essays, we were concerned that the growing emphasis on school achievement, and relatedly high stakes testing, was turning schools away from the worlds that surround them, preoccupying them with the machinations of student and teacher evaluation and competitive comparisons. Achievement and audit focus on emptied out measures of what curriculum does. Well described in Peter Taubman's essay as the 'audit culture', this obsession with achievement and its politics and semiotics distracts communities from attention to school experiences of youth, and diminishes public education's contribution to a student's capacity to develop a full and productive..