Creaciones prodigiosas: disciplinas escolares e historia del currículum

Abstract

Curriculum and school subjects do not have a fixed essence, they have history. The evolution of their meaning over time shows that the recent metaphorical and contextual turns we have seen in conceptual history help to avoid anachronisms and to better understand the complex and polysemic nature of those terms. Curriculum and disciplina, like inter alia «civilization», «culture» and «education» are part and parcel of the conceptual order in modern reason. For decades curriculum and school subjects historiography, although driven by different academic and cultural traditions in the Anglo-Saxon and the Southern Europeanspheres, has gone a long way toward explaining the specificities of school knowledge. Between the two traditions, the idea of a subject or discipline code [código disciplinar], coined by the author of this article, became a heuristic tool to understand, from a historical and critical perspective, the curriculum and those marvelous creatures of school culture which we call school disciplines or subjects.