The Foundations and Futures of Education series focuses on key emerging issues in education as well as continuing debates within the field. The series is inter-disciplinary, and includes historical, philosophical, sociological, psychological and comparative perspectives on three major themes: the purposes and nature of education; increasing interdisciplinary within the subject; and the theory-practice divide.

In recent years, much curriculum debate has focused less on wider issues related to the purposes of education and more on the content and "delivery" of school curricula themselves, including new and revised national curricula.

Schooling Society and Curriculum seeks to return curriculum studies to critical, generic debates about formal education and its relationships to the wider society, reminding readers of the key curriculum debates that have been present since formal state education began and reassessing them in the context of current curricular trends and polices. The approach goes further, however, by placing such debates within a future-orientated perspective and focusing on some of the key emerging issues of the twenty-first century. These include:

? "globalization" and reconstructed nationalism
? a revived interest and understanding of what it means to be a good citizen
? developments in the areas of cultural pluralism
? the rapid development of digital technology and its impact on learning
? changing relationships between the "state" and the "market" and their impact on formal education.

The book, part of the Foundations and Futures of Education Series, addresses these issues through eleven essays by prominent, nationally and internationally known experts. Centrally it looks at what it is young people need from a school curriculum to help them develop as happy, socially responsible adults, capable of managing and making the most of a very unpredictable future.