Social Evaluation of Curriculum.

The article presents information on social evaluation of educational curriculum. It demonstrates some of the inherent limitations of the usual ways education evaluation is conducted. Most evaluations of school curricula depend on measures of the achievement scores of pupils to determine the success of a specific curricular offering. Recent research on the social, ideological, and economic role of our educational apparatus has pointed to three activities that schools engage in. First, schools assist in the recreation of an unequally responsive economy by helping to create the conditions necessary for capital accumulation. Second, schools are important agencies of legitimation. That is, they distribute social ideologies and help create the conditions for their acceptance. Finally, the educational apparatus as a whole constitutes an important set of agencies for production. No social institution, no set of ideological forms and practices, is ever totally monolithic. And students, for instance, will not necessarily always accept what the school teaches.