ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates the concerns of curriculum theory within what was described at the outset as the dominant paradigm of schooling. It is clear that these concerns are with knowledge, culture and power, and that recently they have found expression in such terms as ideology, reproduction and social control. At the same time as theoretical issues at this level were being debated, curriculum analysis and development was taking place in practice, in system, school and classroom. Radical curriculum theory tends to resist the reduction of substantive theoretical and ideological issues to the level of mere techniques: this is the basis of its criticism of progressive education. It has been suggested that the meaning of 'curriculum' has been shaped by schooling as a universal institution of modern societies rather than by any purely logical or conceptual features of the term.
