ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to bring the school curriculum into the analysis of gender, education and development. There is a marked absence of discussion both in the academic field of development studies and in the political domain of educational policy making around Education for All about what is required of the school curriculum so that it could help promote gender equality. All too often national school curricula reproduce gender inequalities in the public and private sphere and sustain hegemonic male regimes on a national and global scale (Arnot 2002). Curriculum research, however, can challenge these social messages embedded in curricular formations as well as raise deeper questions about whose forms of knowledge should be transmitted through official forms of schooling. Critical sociological research, for example, recognises the importance of the rules governing the access and redistribution of knowledge, and also the politics behind the selection, organisation and evaluation of legitimate knowledge through formal national educational institutions within developing economies and the impact these have on indigenous social stratifications. It can also critically assess new global interventions into the school curriculum whether in the name of economic progress, human rights or social justice. These global developments are controversial not least because of the challenge they represent to what has been considered the prerogative of national governments – to transmit its own selection of educational knowledge to its citizens, using its own contextualised pedagogic style. The study of national curricula therefore offers the possibility of exploring the equity dimensions of global-national and local educational interfaces and policy agendas.
