History of curriculum: psychologies, technologies and regulation

Abstract

The essay sought to cast some of the central elements to consider the history of curriculum and take it as a social-historic construction and artifact. The psychologies consisted in important elements for scholarized education, especially mass education, by offering the technologies for the organization of school space-time. As theoretic-methodological sup-port studies of curriculum inscribed in the so-called “post-structuralist” studies were used. The notion of regulation constitutes itself a central concept in the analysis allowing one to think of the curriculum as establishing regulation in two levels: first, establishing restrictions over what must be known; a manner of “selection”; and, secondly, evidencing that this selection of knowledge extrapolates the definition of valid information and implies the establishment of certain “rules and patterns” that direct individuals by producing their knowledge about the world. The main conclusion refers to the need of historicizing, not just the school as an institution, but the scholarization process and our practices as teachers and researchers, taking the curriculum as an object that allows us to think about the way we are scholarizing, producing knowledge, electing methods which, in the end, will be a tool also for the students to think their worlds and themselves.