Studying Curriculum offers a practical approach for analyzing the inescapable political realities of the contemporary curriculum. It should remind the reader that what is socially constructed can also be deconstructed and reconstructed, and that notions of social equity and justice can be reconstituted within school curricula.

Ivor Goodson explores how and by whom the curriculum is controlled. He examines how social class, historical and political context, and the school curriculum are interrelated. He takes a social constructivist approach and plants this firmly in the middle ground of subjects - their traditions, departments and politics. This enables both a rendering of the experiences of those working within these traditions; and a reaching outwards to the structures and assumptions underlying those subject traditions.