Curriculum and Human Development

Continuing the explorations of the public university as a real utopia, this chapter engages with the themes of curriculum and human development. As we shall see, a curriculum should be approached as reflecting the historical present. I suggest that curriculum theory needs a better understanding of the body in order to overcome its one-sided view of the human being; that is, the curriculum theory needs to address its Cartesian legacy of the body and mind dichotomy. Doing so will pave way for a more engaging curriculum. Higher education as a life of the mind remains an embodied endeavour. In the second part of the chapter, I will argue that, vis-à-vis the public university, critical thinking and the capacity of cooperation are central to human development. Critical thinking marks the chapter’s continuity with long-established ideas about the aims of higher education. In cooperation, there is the more practical side of a real utopian curriculum. It is a capacity on which the feasibility of a more cooperative socio-economic order in the future depends. Higher education can advance cooperation by way of providing experiences which instils belief in the value of cooperation. These should be characterized by a high degree of voluntariness.