ABSTRACT
The process of curriculum development is unabashedly an institutional undertaking, one that is historically associated with the planning and operation of the whole school experience (Reid 1999). Because schools exist to serve normative purposes attendant to the maintenance and improvement of society, they need a curricular framework to capture and guide the full complement of functions needed to fulfil these normative mandates. The school curriculum exists to organise and activate an educational experience dedicated to learning the common skills, knowledge, values, and dispositions central to building a stable society and to living an individually empowered life (Tanner and Tanner 2007). Teaching children to read, to think critically, to write persuasively, to engage in cooperative behaviour, to understand and live by the expressed values of society, as well as to acquire some common knowledge of subject matter, are all central to this work.
