National curriculum making as more or less expressions of and responses to globalization

[Excerpt] This chapter, which reflects on the changing global, regional and national contexts of curriculum making, can be seen as a type of ‘curriculum criticism’, as Green (2018, p. 265) has put it. One aspect of such an approach to curriculum scholarship, which draws on literary criticism, is to regard a curriculum text as a ‘(con)text’, ‘a text made up of a range of other texts, related, similar, present, absent, actual, virtual....’, which precipitates the question, ‘How then will we read it’. This chapter will argue that one way, and I stress only one way, to read national curriculum developments over the last 30 years or so, is as expressions of and responses to globalization. Simultaneously, national curriculum documents are very much about the nation. As Green (2018, p. 265) has observed, when writing about the first national curriculum in Australia con-structed 2008–2010, ‘It is our epic poem, our grand narrative, our best account of who we are and who we hope to be, and indeed of our past, our present and our future’. This is a poetic rearticulation of Anderson’s (1991) argument that school curricula, specifically the production of universal literacy (and I would add universal numeracy), have been central to constituting the imagined com-munity which is the nation, as well as producing national citizens. This is the view of curricula as a national project.