ABSTRACT
There is an increasing tendency in schools currently to think of the curriculum solely as a matter of teaching content: it may be tables in mathematics, facts about a historical character or products exported from a certain foreign country. But this is nothing new, as schools traditionally have been places where such things have been considered of great importance. While the acquisition of a knowledge base is of course essential, and in some cases basic to the educational process (tables in mathematics are a case in point), another element is of equal importance — the development of necessary intellectual skills. Facts by themselves are of little account unless we give children an opportunity to acquire the necessary skills and attitudes to use those facts in a constructive and meaningful way. Unless we allow the children to develop their critical faculties, to think deeply, to speculate and to experiment with ideas, the knowledge they acquire will be largely meaningless.
