ABSTRACT
In the lexicon of education, curriculum is one of the well-established concepts. In England and much of the UK, the concept of curriculum has become synonymous with the idea of a National Curriculum, involving centrally prescribed content, structures and assessment, as well as a given world view of what matters. This view of the curriculum as national and uniform is something of a misnomer, in that while each nation of the UK under devolved government has responsibility to design its own programme content, the prescribed subjects in fact only account for part of the total curriculum experience encountered by children and young people. B. Bernstein meanwhile notes that the selection, classification, distribution, transmission and evaluation of educational knowledge by society through a curriculum reflect both the distribution of power and also principles of social control. For other scholars of curriculum, currere emphasises the capacity of the individual to reflect upon and reconceptualise their own lifecourse.
