International Perspectives

Despite the Western origins of the term curriculum (from the Latin, currere meaning “to run the course”), the basic concept behind this meaning has been broadly adopted across national boundaries and cultures. Most countries of the world have identified a period of time when it is compulsory for young people to attend school. At the heart of school attendance is the curriculum: a program of study or learning that has been designed to meet the needs of young people themselves as well as the communities in which they live. Yet the content and structure of the curriculum is not uniform across countries. Local priorities and issues, local cultures, and local pressures come together to influence the form that the curriculum takes. This emphasis on the local can be at odds with global influences that can exert pressures on the curriculum for uniformity and standardization. This tension between the local and the global is often influenced by the ways in which the school curriculum has been constructed historically (especially in countries that have come under colonial domination) and culturally (especially where cultural traditions have valued education and the preparation of young people for their future roles in society). From an international perspective, therefore, the curriculum shares similarities across the globe in [Page 494]terms of its basic purposes but takes on different forms to reflect local conditions. This means that student mobility can be limited since it can be expected that curriculum differences rather than similarities will predominate. This is not just a technical issue about curriculum content: It has more significant implications.

One important implication is that access to knowledge and skills across the globe is not the same for all students, just as it is not the same within most societies. On a global scale, however, these inequalities can be striking. In advanced industrial societies there may be debates about bandwidth and the size of computer memory to support curriculum innovation, but in other less privileged societies there may not even be electricity to support the most basic of household needs. The level of literacy is of concern in all societies but for some young people in developing countries, especially girls, attaining literacy may remain an unrealized dream. Issues of core curriculum, or what should be the essential components of the curriculum, are likely to always be debated and contested. Yet in some parts of the developing world the issue is not just an academic or even a political issue. In the case of a subject like health education, for example, having access to knowledge of health related practices may well be a matter of life and death. In such a context, it can be argued that health education cannot be debated: It must be mandated.

From an international perspective, therefore, diversity and variability characterize the school curriculum. What is important in one country and culture may not be significant in another and what one country may be able to afford in terms of curriculum provision may not be affordable in another. The equity implications of this are clear at the international level and this provides the curriculum with an important social function. The remainder of this entry provides an international perspective on the school curriculum, highlighting its diversity and social function while also identifying important equity issues that arise in specific contexts.

...