Curriculum Defined  When I ask my students what curriculum means to them, they always indicate that it means the overt or written curriculum. However, the word "curriculum" as it is defined from its early Latin origins means literally "to run a course." If one thinks of a marathon with mile and direction markers, signposts, water stations, and officials and coaches along the route, this beginning definition is a metaphor for what the curriculum has become in the education of our children. Here are multiple definitions of curriculum from Oliva (1997). Curriculum is:       That which is taught in schools       A set of subjects.       Content       A program of studies.       A set of materials       A sequence of courses.       A set of performance objectives       A course of study       Is everything that goes on within the school, including extra-class activities, guidance, and interpersonal relationships.       Everything that is planned by school personnel.       A series of experiences undergone by learners in a school.       That which an individual learner experiences as a result of schooling. p 4  What kinds of beliefs direct curriculum?  The answer to this questions is subject to interpretation.   Since curriculum reflects the models of instructional delivery chosen and used, some might indicate that curriculum could be categorized according to the common psychological classifications of the four families of learning theories � social, information processing, personal, and behavioral. Longstreet and Shane have dubbed divisions in curricular orientations as: child-centered, society-centered, knowledge-centered, or eclectic. Common philosophical orientations of curriculum parallel those beliefs espoused by different philosophical orientations � idealism, realism, perennialism, essentialism, experimentalism, existentialism, constructivism, reconstructivism and the like. Whatever classification one gravitates to, the fact remains that curricula in the United States has a some level been impacted at one time or the other by all of the above. In essence, American curriculum is hard to pin down because it is layered and highly eclectic.    What kinds of curriculum are there? Back to the curriculum index The second principle of magic...things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.                                             Sir James Frazer