MANIFESTATIONS OF THE GENDER IDEOLOGY IN THE ZIMBABWEAN SCHOOL CURRICULUM

In this paper we examined the view that what students learn at school is not simply determined by their individual motivations, psychological make-up, or inherent ability but by a number of ideological controls and constraints. We explored the notion of curriculum ideologies as beliefs about what schools should teach, for what ends, and for what reasons. Through content and discourse analyses as well as focus group and individual phenomenological interviews as instruments for data collection, we navigated the view that curriculum ideologies can be tacit rather than explicit and that in some ways, curricular ideologies derive from what might be regarded as world views. We also contrasted ideologies and theories on the grounds that the former are typically value-laden commitments while the latter (theories in the social sciences) are frequently idealized as merely descriptions of the world rather than an expression of what is to be valued. The study revealed that the most influential curriculum ideologies are not those formally acknowledged and publicly articulated through official documents, but rather those that are subliminally ingested as a part of general or professional enculturation.