In this chapter, I use the metaphor of a 45-degree pedagogical discourse to explore powerful knowledge as a relational concept. I discuss the need for history teaching to interrelate vertical knowledge discourses dynamically and systematically with the horizontal discourses of students’ life-worlds and the political world of public life. This relational understanding is not based on an idea of two equal knowledge systems. As Bernstein (1999) pointed out, these two systems do not fit within a shared hierarchy, because they apply to different dimensions. I would agree with Young and Muller that public education has a specific responsibility to give students access to vertical knowledge discourses, as there are no other institutions where this is done. However, knowledge for its own sake is not an accessible basis for building a curriculum and such a position will inevitably be transmuted into a neoconservative anti-intellectualism. Schools need a principled idea of what constitutes powerful knowledge, but educationalists must also ask the question: ‘powerful for what?’.