Despite its best intentions, social exclusion has grown rather than diminished under New Labour's education policies. In order to understand this, Ivor Goodson argues that we need to engage with the history of the formal curriculum and the long and continuing fight over what counts as proper knowledge. Taking science and environmental science as his examples, he reveals a shameful story of intellectual and social prejudice that remains immovably with us today. Commitment to social inclusion that ignores the exclusionary nature of the curriculum, we, who are required to teach, will inevitably and ironically defeat attempts to undertake deep reform of a profoundly unjust and in some respects intellectually dishonest system of education.