ABSTRACT
It is the ‘specialist forms of social organisation’ (the knowledge disciplines) that ‘remain the major social bases for guaranteeing the objectivity of knowledge’ (Moore and Young, 2010, p. 30). Yet what happens when those disciplines do not reach students in schools, do not, to use Bernstein’s words, become “recontextualised” as school subjects? In this fi nal chapter I address the question with reference to the example of the New Zealand national curriculum. The constructivist approach to knowledge with its emphasis on student competency to use knowledge has aff ected that country’s curriculum. There appears to be no consistent pattern across subjects about how much content is included. For some subjects the curriculum is the main source of guidance, in others assessment processes defi ne examinable content, while in others prescriptive information is included in subject guidelines.
