Students in South Africa also had a broad understanding of where controversial issues can arise in the curriculum. Language was mentioned as an example, as it can be another way of enforcing racist ideology: ‘English tends to dominate’ and, in one school where one of the students was teaching ‘there were many Xhosa speakers, but the Xhosa language was seen as being less important’. The students also mentioned what they termed the ‘hierarchy of knowledge’, i.e., that some subjects are accorded more importance than others, with specific mention being made of too much time being allocated to maths. Those students in England who were history/citizenship and geography specialists could identify where controversial issues arose in their own subjects, but were less forthcoming about controversial issues across the wider curriculum, tending to reinforce the point made above. Thus, in the case of both the students and tutors in England, a narrower range of subjects was mentioned as potentially containing controversial issues than in South Africa. This is possibly because of the strong emphasis in South Africa given to the political role of the whole curriculum (Department of Education 2001).