Curricula for Nations

Abstract

Some of the pupils are tremendously good and some of them are like, a bit worse.

(Erkki, MTH)

Teachers do recognise difference between students in school and act on it and, as we see in the quotation above, level of ability is a major distinction for them. Gender, class, ethnicity and nationality do not come immediately to their minds when asked about differences between students; ability, personality and behaviour do. Although the school might aim to produce the ‘abstract pupil’ in training to become the ‘abstract citizen’ of the nation state, students in school do differ by gender, social and ethnic background and even nationality. Nationality, for example, is taken-for-granted or ‘banal’ in Billig’s term (1995), an unremarked part of everyday life in our societies, where nationalism provides a continuous backdrop. Gender too is a taken-for-granted backdrop, a self-evident dichotomy so deeply rooted in our thinking that we cannot see it. And social class too is hidden in our schools. The ‘abstract pupil’ is abstracted from social bonds.¹