The curriculum, especially when schooling is under discussion, is usually defined as the content of what is taught by teachers and (supposedly) learned by students. As long as there have been schools there has been some kind of official or formal curriculum; and the debates about what it should contain, in what terms it should be expressed, and who should determine it, have been many and varied. When a society comes to accept the need for lifelong learning, does this make any difference to how we should talk about and determine the curriculum and shape policy decisions at national or local levels, in the school or in the classroom?

Such questions quickly touch on the fundamental purposes of education, in terms of both how they have come to shape the present and how they might need to change in a society in which lifelong learning is fostered. Four factors that drive discussion and debate about the curriculum may be identified (Figure 1).

All societies have to some degree used the school curriculum as a system of cultural transmission to the young. Culture is used in two senses. First, it concerns the fundamental values of a society and its social institutions. Currently the emphasis here is on citizenship education, following several decades of diffuse development of personal, social and health education, in addition to religious education. Second, it concerns ‘high culture’, or in Matthew Arnold's famous words, “acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said, and thus with the history of the human spirit”. Taken together, these constitute the heritage aspect of the curriculum with its purpose of socialising the young into society, into its values, traditions, culture and achievements.