ABSTRACT
Political elites and educational officials of different political suasions not only argued over the control and financing of schools, but also engaged in extensive debates over the content and organization of the school curriculum. The overall composition of the school curriculum was surveyed; in others, the emphasis on specific school subjects was compared in several nations. The business of discussing school curricula was done with much less enthusiasm than in the past, but it was done nonetheless. Interestingly, the cross-national surveys of national curricular patterns produced very little comparative research in the area of pedagogy and the curriculum. On the contrary, the formal content of mass education apparently became a matter of routine discussion—a kind of taken-for-granted matter—in such areas of specialized research. Official policies concerning the curriculum are simply ideological statements intentionally developed by national educational leaders to reflect the ‘proper’ educational standards of international donor agencies or other relevant internal audiences.
