ABSTRACT
Now that we have completed a rough mapping out of the concept ‘education’, it is important to continue our mapping out of some of the concepts entailed by it. We have observed that education implies knowledge and understanding in breadth and depth; but we said very little about the nature of knowledge nor precisely what constitutes breadth and depth. If we wish to start organizing a program of activities for children designed to bring about their education, then we must be clear about what must go into the program and how it is to be presented. In other words, to build a curriculum for education we must know more about both the nature and types of knowledge as well as about children and how to present knowledge to children. Accordingly in the next two chapters of the book we deal with these topics. In Chapter 5 we will focus on building a curriculum from the perspective of adults, viewing the curriculum as an organization of subject matter drawn from various kinds of knowledge. It is often called the subjectcentered approach to curriculum building. In Chapter 6 we focus on the child-centered approach to curriculum construction, an approach which centers on ‘needs’ and the nature of the child. We shall see that these two approaches are not necessarily in conflict.
