A prominent thesis of British philosophy of education in the 1960s was that the pursuit of different forms of knowledge is central to education. The fact that the thesis is difficult to justify philosophically raises questions about its historical provenance. The idea of such a curriculum can be traced back through the history of the middle-class curriculum to the education of dissenters in the eighteenth century and further back still to sixteenth-century Ramism. There are indications that some leading 1960s philosophers of education were affected, positively or negatively, by these older religious ideas, but it is not clear how much should be made of this.