Curriculum debate and policy change

Abstract

This article investigates the underlying themes and principles that inform curriculum debate and how they are articulated in current school policy discussions. This topic is approached with the help of a case study covering the debate on which subjects should be mandatory for students at the upper secondary school curriculum in Sweden. The focus is on the arguments for and against the inclusion of History among these core subjects. The aim is to order and structure this debate and to link the arguments found to basic underlying principles. Why was History considered important or unimportant? What arguments are found about the best way to teach History? This study employs a 4-fold distinction which distinguishes between perennialism, essentialism, progressivism, and reconstructivism as four schools of thought, each outlining its own particular view on what kind of knowledge is important and how such knowledge should be taught. One major finding is that two of the schools—progressivism and essentialism—completely dominate the debates under study. There existed a major fault line between those who emphasized the instrumental value of History as a tool for fostering good citizens, and those who considered History part of essential general knowledge about society.

Keywords:

• curriculum debate
• school policy
• history
• school of thought
• curriculum questions

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to express their gratitude to the Swedish Research Council for financial support.

Notes

1. There seems to be many similarities between Swedish and the Canadian debates on history as a school subject. By the end of the 1990s, a public debate broke out in Canada with the assertion that Canadians did not know their history and that, as a result, national unity and the quality of citizenship were at danger as its starting point (Osborne 2003). Osborne describes four broad strands of criticism, which all remind us of the Swedish debate (but of course with the differences caused by the Canadian federal system and the special situation of Quebec): that history was in danger of disappearing from curricula as a distinct subject, being threatened by interdisciplinary social studies; that a coherent national history aimed at giving Canadians a sense of national identity was no longer taught; that social history had replaced political history, resulting in fragmentation and conflict; that schools had abandoned knowledge for skills, replacing the teaching of distinct bodies of information with child-centred pedagogy aimed at fostering individual development.