European Curriculum Studies, Continental Overview

Curriculum studies as a field of education may today be found in continental Europe (including the Nordic countries) in most universities, teacher education institutions, and institutions of further training. This tendency represents in certain ways a late 20th-century development. It was in 17th century Europe that the concepts of curriculum and didactics were first used to denote educational phenomena. Didactics was linked to Wolfgang Ratke's (1571–1635) Methodus didactica and to Johann Amos Comenius's (1592–1670) Didactica magna. The use of the term curriculum may be linked to Daniel Georgius Morhof (1639–1691), professor in Rostock from 1660. From this century on, traditions developed in which the expression didactics became the usual one on the continent, while the term curriculum was the one adhered to in the English-speaking ...