Curriculum decisions are increasingly seen as technocratic or bureaucratic problems, rather than democratic issues that must be deliberated over. As such, curriculum decisions are placed in the hands of a small minority of bureaucrats and business elites who assume the only purpose of education is to prepare children for college and/or the labour market. Within these times, it is essential to revisit classics works in order to move forward a critical theory of the curriculum. To develop a critical theory of the curriculum, I shall revisit two classic books in curriculum studies--R.S. Peters's "Ethics & Education" and Michael Apple's "Ideology and Curriculum". I place Michael Apple and R.S. Peters in conversation with each other because both believe, albeit differently, that the curriculum "stands in need of justification": both agree the curriculum must be publically justified through democratic deliberation. Furthermore, Apple and Peters develop different sets of tools for a critical theory of the curriculum--Apple provides tools for critique and Peters tools for the normative standards. However, both inadequately develop the normative standards for determining when the curriculum is democratically justified. These normative standards, I argue, are developed by Habermas's critical theory of discourse ethics which is capable of building upon and expanding the insights of Apple and Peters.