ABSTRACT
The word ‘curriculum’ is used in different ways by different people, ranging from its use to refer to a course of study of some sort, through its use as a term to pick out a set of intended outcomes, to its use to refer to a set of actual outcomes in student learning. But in none of these senses is there a genuine complexity about the idea of curriculum as there is about the idea of love or the idea of education. In the latter cases, although different people may turn out to have completely different conceptions (different ideas of what love or education are), the initial presumption is that they are talking about the same idea, but that each finds it difficult to articulate precisely what this idea involves. In the case of curriculum, it is evident that different people just have quite different conceptions – that is to say, they use the word to refer to quite distinct ideas or concepts (any one of which may or may not turn out to be conceptually problematic in the way that love is). There may be various reasons why people should come to use the word curriculum in different senses. The most obvious one is that they come from different backgrounds (cultural, social, intellectual), but a person may also adopt a particular usage for certain practical or political purposes. It is obviously useful to define key words in an enterprise, as curriculum is a key educational term, in ways that reflect or reinforce one’s point of view. But whatever the explanation of the different senses of ‘curriculum’, the example usefully reminds us that concepts may be of different sorts – or rather that we have concepts of different types of thing. Some concepts are conceptions of what is to a large extent given and unalterable in nature: mountains, for example, are what they are, and, if it is the concept of mountain that one is trying to understand, one is to some extent governed by physical reality. Other concepts are primarily governed by laws of logic: whatever a circle is, it cannot be square. A third group of concepts are clearly man-made: they are ideas conceived, developed, and defined by man as, it may be said, the concept of chivalry has been. It is into this third category that curriculum surely falls.
