CURRICULUM CONTENT

CURRICULUM CONTENT

INTRODUCTION

The curriculum content is the aspect of the curriculum that focuses on the subject matter or the discipline to be included in the curriculum. It is concerned with the knowledge, skills, attitude, values, principles, etc. that the learners are expected to acquire as they pass through the school curriculum that will help them to have the expected change in behavior. It is the sum total of all the learning materials to be learnt in the school. It is referred to as the syllabus. Saylor and Alexander (1966) defined content as those facts, observation, data, so also is the perceptions, discernments etc. drawn from what the mind of men have comprehended from experience and those constructs of the mind that recognized the rearrange those products of experiences into core ideas. From the above definition it could deduced that content does not just mean what learning material that is package for the learner but the interpretation the learner gets from it also.

SOURCES OF CURRICULUM CONTENT

Just like the definition of curriculum continues to be a debate, so also is the controversy about what actually should be the curriculum, and where should the content come from. Curriculum experts have identified various source of curriculum content, some educational psychologists have turned to the learner as the source of curriculum content. They depend upon the other hand, sociologists regard society as curriculum source, meaning that the content must address social demands, social functions, and action oriented learning. Essentially, their content is drawn from social foundations of education. Philosophers who are proponents of education for the democratic way of life, of values clarifications and values analysis, turn to values as the source of the curriculum, the academic critics however insist that the content of the curriculum must come from the knowledge foundation of education described as separate Subject Matter. These favour a content that consist of established organized desciplines.

But modern curriculum development rejects the priority of any one single source as providing content all by itself. Instead they advocate that several sources of curriculum content must be considered. The most widely accepted source of curriculum content today are:

·       The learner

·       Society

·       Subject Matter.

Proponents of the concept of this tripartite curriculum include Taba (1945), Tyler (1949) some experts have also insisted on values, as a fourth