ABSTRACT
The aims of the 1988 national curriculum It’s amazing how wrong one can be. It is nearly 20 years since I first began to argue for a national curriculum. In all that time, I have been assuming that once the need for such a curriculum had been established and people began to think about its more determinate shape, they would be embarking on a pretty complex task. They would have to work out a coherent and defensible set of overall aims; examine what sub-aims, or intermediate aims, these might generate on logical, psychological and other grounds; bear in mind the wide variety of ways by which aims might be realized; and try to work out criteria delimiting the role of central government from that of local government, governing bodies and schools . . . all of which would be a long and massive undertaking, requiring the collaboration of professionals, civil servants, politicians and others in some kind of semi-independent but politically accountable national educational council.
