Our paper explores the contemporary curriculum ‘conditions of possibility’ for school based health education in Australia. Drawing on the field of governmentality studies we consider how health education is currently ‘assembled’ within contemporary curriculum documents given the social, economic and political forces that are at play (Foucault, 1991; Rose, 2000). We begin by providing an overview of the various governmental hopes that are enshrined in contemporary versions of health education curriculum. Our analysis reveals that health education curriculum draws from a vast array of discourses that privilege different approaches to health education to meet certain ends. For example, in the new national curriculum we have witnessed the privileging of five key propositions including a focus on educative purposes, developing health literacy, adopting a strengths based approach, including a critical inquiry approach and valuing movement. This is a complex curriculum mix that is intended to prompt a significant rethinking of the purposes and practices of health education. We suggest that the discursive complexity will impact on how the curriculum is translated as teachers endeavour to put the various imperatives to work. To illustrate our point we present a genealogically inspired analysis of ‘critical inquiry approaches’ (see Foucault, 1984). Our analysis reveals that there are significant discursive and practical tensions that exist within both curriculum and pedagogical enactments of ‘critical’. We conclude the paper by arguing that although critical approaches in health education have not been completely lost, they have been significantly compromised due the prevailing political conditions in which curriculum is developed.

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