ABSTRACT
Both in this country and America interest in the field of curriculum history has developed considerably since the mid-1970s and attracts the diverse attentions of historians of education, sociologists and ethnographers of school knowledge, general curriculum theorists and school subject specialists. By contrast, some general curriculum theorists and sociologists have enthusiastically adopted historical perspectives on the curriculum as a natural development of interests in the sociology of knowledge. The choice of the period 1870–1940 was based on a belief that in relation to English conditions and secondary education in particular, it is potentially very rich in curricular terms, and particularly the sub-period 1890–1920. Collaboration among school subject specialists, working within some common framework in curriculum history, raises some new and potentially exciting possibilities. Some degree of selection is involved both in the themes and time scale for emphasis and in the methodology and style of curriculum historiography.
