Abstract

One of the guiding questions in this discussion is how is it that certain ideologies become so ingrained and resistant to challenge and scrutiny? The central assumptions sustaining the argument conceive curriculum - the backbone of educational practice- to be an expression of ideological activity; the understanding of ideology as lived experience; and subjectivity as a site of ideology mediated by language. By drawing on curricular and psychoanalytic theory, in this paper I claim that the ideological content gets established through curricular practices not only at the cognitive and conscious level of knowledge and disciplinary subject-matter contents, but rather - and more decisively- at the unconscious level of the construction of subjectivity through psychic processes mediated by language. The paper is an attempt to sketch a preliminary understanding of the processes that result in ideological positionings that challenge scrutiny and contestation, by exploring their rootedness in desire and the psychic formation of the self.