The visible and available store of knowledge that is made available in the learning situation (as opposed to the hidden curriculum). Critical Education Theory challenges curriculum issue questioning not only what is included, but also what is left out, and by whom.  Strenuous debate has taken place between conservatives (who wish to have a curriculum of the “great books and works” – iconic Western texts and representations and the critical theorists who challenge the essentially colonising aspect of this ideology. They call instead for a radical de-centering of the power to determine a uniform national curriculum, suggesting that the latter sets out to silence different or competing cultural views and to impose a monocultural ethos over the whole field of education that works in the interests of the already-powerful. See: Apple, M., W., Ideology and Curriculum, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1979.