Educational Ideology and the School Curriculum

Abstract

Education systems reflect and are shaped by ideological and organizational processes at the individual, group, societal and the even world level. At the world level, ideological processes appear to have been associated with the extraordinary expansion of education systems following the Second World War, and with an array of associated characteristics of national education systems (Ramírez and Boli 1987; Meyer, Ramírez and Soysal 1992; Wong 1991; McNeely 1995). The current research is an effort to assess the character and change in these ideological processes by examining the formally stated aims of education in countries throughout the world in the second half of the twentieth century. These aims serve as an indicator not only for an ideology of education at the societal and world level, but also an indicator of an intended curriculum of general goals for the content of schooling.