Every curriculum is a set of choices about whose story matters, whose knowledge counts, and whose silence is acceptable. These choices are never neutral. They are always, to some degree, political — a reflection of who controlled the room when the syllabus was written and what they thought the people in the classroom needed to know, or not know, in order to remain useful to the existing order.
I have taught in schools and universities where the official curriculum and the truth had a relationship that was, at best, approximate. I have had to decide, repeatedly, what my obligations were in that situation.
The answer I have come to — imperfect, contested, and revised regularly — is this: the teacher’s obligation is not to the curriculum. It is to the student’s capacity for honest thought.
This does not mean ignoring the curriculum, or turning every lesson into a political lecture. It means treating the curriculum as a text to be read critically rather than a truth to be transmitted uncritically. It means asking: Who wrote this, and why? What is not in here, and why not? Who benefits from this version of events?
These are dangerous questions in some institutional contexts. I know this because I have seen colleagues lose positions for asking them, and students penalised for the answers they found. The danger is itself evidence that the questions matter.
What would it mean to educate students as if they are going to live in the same world as their teachers? To prepare them not merely for employment but for citizenship — the kind that involves actually examining the decisions made in their name and holding accountable those who make them?
It would mean, above all, teaching them to read the world with the same scepticism they are taught to apply to texts. To ask of every institution, every authority, every official account: What is this for, and who does it serve?
That is not radical pedagogy. It is basic intellectual honesty applied to the act of being alive in a society.
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