Abstract
Many thousands of hours a year are spent in many countries in drawing up specific subject syllabuses and general curriculum proposals. A common feature of such activities is a transposition of aims, objectives, or rationales with subject content and activities. Teachers with their own reasons, in many cases entirely respectable ones, for what they teach, and how they teach it, leave them largely unstated, sometimes because they are not fully conscious of them. Instead teachers’ justifications are apt to be grounded in contingency.
Many teachers and ‘curriculum writers’, deeply impressed by arrays of ‘practical curriculum objectives’ and taxonomic hierarchies, seek to justify their subjects in terms of various desirable results which often follow from their pursuit, even though other subjects or activities might equally or better secure these contingent goods. As Robin Barrow (1976) justly observed of such a situation in the United Kingdom: ‘by the end of the exercise virtually every school subject that has ever been devised is shown to be justifiable in terms of more than one of the objectives’ (pp. 35–6). A general method for avoiding this and some related forms of conceptual confusion is outlined here, with history as a specific example of how its principles can be applied.