Author Description

In 1998 the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) reported on its review of the National Curriculum. The QCA exercise included a wide-ranging consultation on what the aims of school education should be. The two papers published here both spring from the QCA initiative and were fed into the consultation process. In 'New aims for a new National Curriculum', John White asks how curricular aims should be determined, and how any procedure can avoid privileging the views of one section or another of the population. He suggests the only way to avoid sectional privilege is to derive aims from values implicit in the notion of democracy itself. In 'A Curriculum for the Nation', Richard Aldrich argues that the list of curricular aims should precede that of subjects, and that the very concept of a national curriculum presented as a list of subjects and confined to maintained schools should be questioned. Drawing upon the writings of John Locke, the seventeenth century educational and political thinker, he seeks a more fundamental basis for curriculum construction and implementation.