Constructing Curriculum Guidance 4: The politics of textual inclusion and exclusion

This paper explores the political process of constructing Curriculum Guidance 4: Educating for Economic and Industrial Understanding. It is a study of discourse management through the process of text production, which focuses upon textual inclusion and textual exclusion as a process of struggle around the aim of controlling the meaning of curriculum policy through its representation. In seeking to satisfy different audiences, textual inclusion and exclusion is analysed in terms of what cannot be said and what must be said The paper explores the contested nature of curriculum knowledge and how the selection of what constitutes, and what does not constitute, official knowledge is the product of conscious choice based upon ideological and political motives and intentions.