ABSTRACT
This chapter looks first at how people in Western societies have thought about schooling and its relationship to knowledge. We describe a set of traditional and progressive educational philosophies. We then provide a brief history that shows how people in the United States have mixed philosophy and politics in their struggles over the curriculum. Most of the time, when we hear teachers use the word “curriculum,” they’re referring to the program or content they teach day-by-day in their classrooms; later chapters explore the curriculum of the classroom in much more depth. Discussions about curriculum in this chapter, however, focus more broadly on the
curriculum of schooling-that is, on the ideas and events that have shaped and continue to shape people’s beliefs about what schools ought to teach and what students ought to learn. We conclude with an overview of recent debates about what schools should teach and the impact of these debates on teachers committed to social justice.
