Abstract

Foreign Influences on Curriculum and Curriculum Policy Making in Canada: Some Impressions in Historical and Contemporary Perspective GEORGE TOMKINS University of British Columbia In this discussion I shall take "curriculum" to mean the ostensible or official curriculum as embodied in the course of study purportedly taught and learned in schools. As a set of planned intentional experiences for students, the curriculum-as-course-of-study ~ere includes what is taught (knowledge, skills, attitudes), how teaching is carried out, and the materials used by teachers and students in teaching and learning (Cuban 1979, p. 142). Following Lerner and Lasswell, Kirst and Walker (1977) define policy as "a body of principles to guide action" (p. 538). Curriculum policy per se can be defined as a set of uniform and consistent operational principles guiding the determination of what is taught and learned in schools. In considering foreign influences on curriculum and curriculum policy making in Canada, this discussion will be brief and impressionistic, and insofar as a historical perspective is taken, it will, if only for simplicity's sake, be roughly chronological. Impressionism and simplicity would seem prudent when, as yet, the systematic, historical study of curriculum development in Canada has hardly begun (Tomkins 1979). We have