ABSTRACT
Schooling, and the curriculum specifically, have been portrayed as both an extension of a society's culture (Reynolds & Skilbeck, 1976) and a forum in which a variety of interest groups within a society compete to promote their conception of valid knowledge (Goodson, 1994). This chapter explores the relationship between curriculum and culture through an analysis of the career of the Target Oriented Curriculum (TOC), which is the most comprehensive attempt to date to reform the curriculum of Hong Kong's primary schools. We shall trace the reform from its inception to its enactment in a school and identify how it was shaped by the multitude of interest groups that influenced its creation and subsequent adaptation in classrooms. The competition to define the nature of the curriculum was intense because the reform was systemic, comprehensive, radical, rushed, and introduced into a Chinese community by a departing colonial government within a period that was intensely politicized
