A Curriculum for the Future

Abstract

The paper argues that the changes in the social and economic circumstances which characterise the present period, make it essential to rethink the relation of curriculum, its purposes and shapes, to the social and economic environment of the near future. It offers some evidence of such change and its causes, even at the moment, and asks questions about essential characteristics of educational agendas in the near future. In particular, it argues that where the previous era had required an education for stability, the coming era requires an education for instability. The question then arises as to what the characteristics of curricula and pedagogies for instability are, and what dispositions for those who experience education are imagined and aimed for. It concludes with some comments on a curriculum of communication, in which facility with design has superseded competence in use, and where the broad social and cultural environment is one where identity is defined through a relation to consumption, where all commodities have taken on semiotic function so that the question of aesthetics (as the politics of style in all domains) is again in the forefront of concerns in the curriculum of communication.