After the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, Sitting Bull led the Sioux into southern Manitoba to escape reprisal by the U.S. cavalry. They wintered near my hometown. This went unmentioned in history class. We were told instead to memorize the travels of Champlain who didn’t come within 1,600 kilometres of Manitoba. Relevancy was irrelevant. “Curriculum is ideological,” as Prof. Dwayne Donald of the University of Alberta puts it.
“Official curriculum ideologies become so pervasive and unquestioned that their followers are left unable to recognize them as cultural and ideological,” writes Donald. He calls this “curricular worship.”
“Curriculum documents, and the educational priorities they emphasize, are thoroughly imbued with the cultural assumptions and prejudices that the majority of the members of the society have come to consider normal and necessary for young people to know and understand,” Donald explains in a tidy and devastating critique. “In teleological terms then, curricula can be understood as preparing children for a future that has been imagined on their behalf by adults. Thus, curricula are basically an exercise in citizenship, and the success of this exercise is generally assessed according to how well the children have taken on the characteristics that the adults hoped they would.”