 We've heard in part one that it is best not to think of the concept curriculum too narrowly in terms of only what's prescribed or intended. But let's go back for a moment to that more straightforward idea of the curriculum as a learning plan. What goes into the process of creating an official curriculum? Say a new curriculum. Haroon Mohammed, head of the Institute for Curriculum Development of the Khau Teng Education Department, argued that, in a sense, a national curriculum should be based on the country's constitution, which would provide a foundation for many of the values and goals that would shape such a curriculum. We need to follow what can be called critical consensus in a particular society. So in South Africa's case, I think the constitution represents that minimum broad agreement, which says that based on the history of the country and based on whatever the experiences of the people are, those are the things that people think are desirable ways of governing a society. For me, governance is about establishing the minimum norms of expected behavior and within that then enabling as much freedom as possible. The curriculum, I think, is intended to follow the same process that you say, for particular age levels or levels of performance, you need to meet certain minimum expected requirements and within that, as much variety and freedom should be encouraged. Brenda Lieberwitz of the National Education Department's Curriculum Institute spoke of the curriculum designer's starting point being those things we want learners to have actually achieved in order to be competent in different areas of life. I think if we look at the notion behind art comes based to education, we're really looking at it as the end product, which is what we want the learners to have achieved to be able to do at a certain point. Then one is supposed to be designing down from that and saying, well, if they need this at a certain level, first of all, let's unpack that. What is that outcome? And then let's unpack that downwards to the lower levels of schooling. So for example, when they designed the art comes for the general education and training phase, they worked down from what they thought people actually required for the end of schooling and went back from that. I think that's a very powerful way of looking at the curriculum and it can be used at all levels. It's what we want a student to be able to achieve. We asked Brenda whether developing a national curriculum was a fairly scientific process in which planners would know what knowledge was important to include in the curriculum. Well, it's much more complicated than that. Maybe I could just sketch some of the complications. I wouldn't be able to sketch all of them. One of them might be level of expertise of the people who are designing the curriculum. Another one is politics. What is people's understanding of two issues here? The one is what is the understanding of curriculum? Who should be designing the curriculum? In this country, the notion is that we extend as much control as possible to the people in the provinces. In fact, they're the ones who are supposed to be doing the curriculum. And then to the educators so that they have a professional participatory role. Now that is a political stance that everybody should be playing their role. But another sense of politics is the values and attitudes that we are espousing. Take a subject like language. How we understand language? It's also political. Do we understand it as something where we need to be teaching 12 or 15 or 17-year-olds mainly poetry and high drama, or do we think it's really important that people can use advertising or the language of the community in a literature lesson? Now that's partly a political issue. So it is complicated. It's complicated for other sorts of reasons as well. For example, we're trying to overhaul the system and make it more efficient and more effective. So we've got conflicting priorities. Can people spend all the time in the kind of money we'd like on improving these outcomes and these curriculum statements? Or should we be spending more money improving the buildings, the school buildings? So they're competing interests in that way as well. Brenda Lieberwitz has given us a glimpse of the complexity involved in developing a new curriculum and some of the issues that planners need to try to resolve in deciding what knowledge to include. In replacing apartheid education with curriculum 2005, the South African government faced choices not only of what should be taught but how this should be structured. When curriculum 2005 was still the official policy, we asked Penny Wingerfold of the Joint Education Trust about the move from a subject-based curriculum to an integrated curriculum. I think that integration has been chosen as the mechanism, the vehicle to produce the kind of citizens we wanted. We want citizens who weren't disengaged from what it was that they were doing. They should be engaged both in the work that they're able to do, but also citizens. Citizens who engage in democratic institutions and in the democracy of South Africa. And it seems to me that we've forgotten that that's the big goal and that integration has become an end in itself. What teachers seem to be doing sometimes is just making absolutely sure that they're integrating with other subjects and with everyday examples, rather than saying, how do I make sure that my students are able to apply these things in their daily lives? So for example, somebody was going to teach bar graphs and they gave the learners some newspapers and asked them to look for crimes in reporting of crimes. And once they'd done this and they'd reported back, it was a wonderful lesson and the kids really enjoyed it. And she'd wrote the number of crimes on the board and from that she wanted the learners to draw bar graphs, but she hadn't taught them how to draw a bar graph. And I suppose that's my concern about integration, is that we must always focus on what it is we're wanting our children to learn conceptually which they can then apply in the world. And yes, the reason we use bar graphs is so that we can map crimes, that we can read bar graphs and construct them. But then the way it got taught was that the actual skill got backgrounded because of integration. As Penny Vingerfold pointed out, curriculum 2005 provided a good example of the difficult issues that curriculum planners need to resolve if they are at all concerned about how a curriculum will work out in practice. Not only the selection of knowledge that is to be taught in a new curriculum poses a problem, the way that knowledge is structured can also present real problems when it comes to how teachers interpret what it is they need to do in the classroom. It is to that very question of what happens in practice that we now turn to in part three of this audio tape.