Th purpose of thi tudy is to analyse whether the Ethiopian Curriculum of primary school is work-oriented or not. To achiev this aim, textbook con n analysis and ques ionnaires have been used as data collection instruments. Four steps have been followed in analysing he content of the textbooks. The fir t step is concerned with text book selection. The second step involves defining the research problems in terms of categories in relation to the thesis basic questions. The third step deals with identifying the technique of measurement or unit of content. The last step identifies the system of enumeration. Then. data obtained from text b01k analysi and questionnairp are in erpreted and summarized. The rpslll s of thp ana 1 ys i S sh090 tat hi rty-seven percpn of the contents are wnrk-referpn ed . Of these wo rkrpfprpnce p~ragraphs, hirty-thr e perren are plue-collar refer nced and four perrent are whi te-co llar-90nrk-referenced. The qUE''':; n find ou he <; uden SOC'! a~io nal aspi r a i')ns has re 'ealed that contrary 0 the cnn::"' ... s n . heir 0(' upational aspi ration is incline categorie<; of occupa tions. he "xtbooL . o whi te-collar On the basis of the resul ts. it is concluded that, in most aspects, the present content of the Ethiopian elementary school textbooks do not contain a balanced proportion of contents which reflect work orientatio. Though the few work-orient d paragraphs reflected a lue-collar categ ry of work bias, they fail to develop on tud en.s po i ive attitude towards manual work