School subjects do not hold an equally secure position in any educational system. Some subjects are required of all children, some are required of only some children, and some are not required at all. It is the task of this paper to show how people talk about subjects with respect to their place in the school curriculum. The social valuing of subjects involves justification, legitimation, ideology, and power. Some subject discussions, drawn mainly from Canadian and English curriculum guides and other curriculum publications, are described in light of the concept of legitimation. The publications examined provided discussions of aims, goals, and objectives, while avoiding or obscuring the ideological foundations of legitimation. The validating or a priori principles involved by the justification, both explicitly and implicitly, are assessed through a content analysis of the statements found in the curriculum publications examined. Quotations representative of the total range of justifications found in all the sources used in the fields of mathematics, science, Latin, drama, history, and modern languages are followed by an analysis. (Author/MLF)