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Australia's Curriculum Dilemmas - State Cultures and the Big Issues. Lyn Yates, Cherry Collins and Kate O'Connor (eds). 2011. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press
The curriculum is both the mechanism through which politics of education is wrought, and the instrument of teachers' work. While teaching is the professional work of teachers, it is also how the curriculum gets done, which is why teaching is inherently political. Curriculum policy-making has as outcome, the citizen that is to be. The main focus usually is what is to be taught; a prescriptive curriculum. However increasingly the focus for curriculum is becoming what is to be learned, an object for assessment. And in the discussions generated, one can witness the vigorous and not so rigorous debate over standards, external assessments, resource allocation, not to forget the technology of the process by which the knowledge is imparted, reported or measured.
But while the pattern of schooling is what politicians seek to effect, policy-making is shaped in extremely significant ways by the nature of the job itself. So that when all politically and technically feasible means of monitoring, evaluation, appraisal and inspection of teachers have been exhausted the fundamental requirements of the job still remain. As I have said previously to students - you can force teachers to teach stuff but you can't force them to do it well...