Overview
Education, Curriculum and Educology (2014) applies the analytic framework developed in the 2013 volume to one of the most practically important — and conceptually confused — domains of educational discourse: curriculum. The book distinguishes curriculum as a logical structure (a plan for organized learning) from curriculum as a social institution (the actual set of courses and requirements offered by a school or system) and from curriculum as a lived experience (what students actually encounter and learn). These distinctions are not merely academic; they have direct consequences for how curriculum is designed, evaluated, and reformed.
Components of Curriculum
Christensen identifies the essential components of a curriculum in the strict sense: the goals or intended outcomes of learning (specified in terms of his taxonomy of knowing), the content or subject matter through which those outcomes are to be achieved, the instructional activities through which content is to be engaged, and the assessment procedures through which achievement of the intended outcomes is to be verified. A curriculum that lacks any of these components is incomplete — it may be a course catalogue, a syllabus, or a set of standards, but it is not a curriculum in the full logical sense.
Curriculum Design as Normative Inquiry
A central argument of the book is that curriculum design is fundamentally a normative activity — an activity of deciding what is worth learning and in what order and through what means. This normative dimension is often concealed behind technical language about "alignment," "scope and sequence," and "learning progressions," which can make curriculum design appear to be a purely technical problem with a correct solution. Christensen argues that this concealment is intellectually dishonest and practically dangerous: it allows normative decisions to be made without normative justification, and it excludes from curriculum deliberation the stakeholders — students, families, communities — whose values and interests are most directly at stake.
Curriculum and the Taxonomy of Knowing
The taxonomy of knowing developed in Christensen's broader framework provides a powerful tool for curriculum specification. By requiring curriculum designers to specify not merely what students should know but what kind of knowing they are aiming for (knowing-that-one, knowing-that, knowing-how, knowing-to) and at what level of expertise (preconventional through postconventional), it forces a precision about intended outcomes that typical curriculum documents rarely achieve. This precision is a prerequisite for the design of appropriate instructional activities and assessment procedures.