Notes for a genealogy of school curriculum

Abstract

This paper analyses the field of curriculum by proposing some notes that swow the emerging of senses that has taken place around it ali along the history of schooling: The notes start discussing the essentialism that underlines the attempts of establishing an origin for curriculum, and they remark the emerging of new senses, the retum to previous senses, and the adoption of senses that have been previously awarded to other concepts. As an outcome of this analysis, the author suggests that we now assist, in the 90's, to a new process of sense emergin: the reconversation of curriculum from a teacher-centered to testing-centered system. In the national curricula, testing fixed by central govemment for ali people in school tums out to be real curriculum.