ABSTRACT
Former teacher and prolific writer on primary education, Colin Richards has asserted that the curriculum has remained substantially unchanged for the last twenty years. Curriculum seems to mean the areas named in the curriculum guidelines, together with the list of objectives and content listed under each one and all of that as it actually happens and is experienced by children. Downey and Kelly point to four areas of skill; first, numeracy and literacy; second, specialist skills forming part of other curriculum activities; third, social skills; and fourth, critical thinking. Analysts of the primary curriculum observe its main educational heritage in the work of Rousseau and Dewey and its psychological one in the work of Piaget which, together with the influences of Pestalozzi, Froebel, Montessori, and Isaacs on educational practice, and Bruner on learning theory, have cumulatively given rise to a distinctive child-centred ideology.
