Review article
EUROPEAN EXPERIENCE AND THE NATIONAL CURRICULUM FOR COMPULSORY EDUCATION IN CROATIA (Introduction to discussion of research results)
Branislava Baranović
; Institute for Social Research, Zagreb
Abstract
The article is an introductory summary of the thematic volume
that presents the results of the comparative analysis of the national framework
curricula of 11 European countries (a sample of old and new EU members) and
Croatia conducted between 2002 and 2005. The results of the analysis show
signifi cant conceptual, structural and content-oriented differences between
teaching programmes in Croatia and the national curricula of the countries in the
sample. Although there are signifi cant differences between the national curricula
of the countries in the sample, unlike Croatia, all the countries have outcome based
national curricula (documents focused on educational outcomes, or operationally
formulated goals of education). Furthermore, in contrast to the Croatian case where
the teaching programmes are centralised and insuffi ciently internally coherent (i.e.
with insuffi cient interconnections between the individual subject programmes),
the national curricula of the countries in the sample exhibit higher degree of
integration. Most countries have a national curricular framework that approaches
the national curriculum as a unifi ed whole, widely defi ned curricular areas whose
content is interlinked through common educational outcomes and explicitly
defi ned cross-curricular topics. The curricula of European countries also develop
students’ competences that are absent from the Croatian teaching programmes:
such as entrepreneurship, and information-communication competence as a crosscurricular
theme. Finally, the development of the national curricula in European
countries charts a course of development of key competences the students need in
order to live in the knowledge society. They are currently working on integrating the
key competences for knowledge society (the concept of lifelong learning) defi ned
on the pan-European level through the European competence framework.
Keywords
European countries; Croatia; comparative analysis; knowledge society; national curricula; compulsory education; key competences
Hrčak ID:
24600
URI
Publication date:
10.12.2007.
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