Comparing Curriculum-Making Processes

This book collects most of the papers presented in a symposium on curriculum research held in Zurich in December 1999. The contributions focus on curriculum-making between national and global codes, between politics and educational practice, between top-down control and bottom-up agreement. They look at curriculum-making as an enterprise of educational practitioners and they try to link the political and technical aspects of curriculum-making. While curriculum-making traditionally tends to stress a specific, national selection of educational goals and contents, it cannot neglect the existence of a global educational code as well as the pressures exerted on the selection of school knowledge and forms of school organisation by the global market. Do the global (cultural) code and the need for adaptation to globalisation reinforce a trend towards the convergence of different national educational systems in general and their curriculum-making processes in particular?