[Book Review] School knowledge in comparative and historical perspective : changing curricula in primary and secondary education

Abstract

With reforms in curriculum development taking place in various parts of the world, this is a welcome publication. I have for a long time been feeling the need to see a publication analyzing developments in curriculum development from a comparative and international perspective. This volume is admirable as a compendium that provides such an analysis in a selection of regions, for which the editors, Aaron Benavot and the late Cecilia Braslavsky, are to be commended. We also learn that Braslavsky did not live long enough to see this project reach its final stages, a point emphasized at the very outset. As such, one reads this work feeling a twinge of sadness for the demise of a person who did much to develop the curriculum in her country of origin and who directed UNESCO’s International Bureau of Education until her untimely passing in 2006. Her contribution to curriculum development as researcher (at the University of Buenos Aires), as curriculum development practitioner (at the heart of curriculum reform in Argentina), and later as coordinator of an international, rather global, effort in this regard is well captured in an essay by Cristian Cox toward the end of the volume.