The Cubic Curriculum

Professor Ted Wragg, University of Exeter, delivered a special lecture to staff, students and friends of the Faculty of Education during the summer. Professor Wragg is as well-known to readers of the back page of the Times Educational Supplement as Laurie Taylor is to readers of the Times Higher Educational Supplement, and he is frequently called on by press and television to comment on current trends in education, and on the development of the national curriculum in schools.

Professor Wragg's lecture 'The Cubic Curriculum: a curriculum for the twenty-first century' placed the discussion and reform of curriculum in a very broad context. Curriculum is not only school curriculum, and it ought to reflect seismic shifts in lifestyles, lifespan, aspirations and technologies. Much public discussion of curriculum is partial and timid, and fails to reflect the complex multidimensional character that any curriculum possesses. Illustrating his argument with wit and frequent observations drawn from classrooms, Professor Wragg suggested that a sort of three-dimensional Rubik's cube was a useful metaphor, or image, for thinking productively about the curriculum of the twenty- first century.

A dinner in honour of Professor Wragg was held on the evening of the lecture where he was warmly thanked by Dr Sylvia Harrop, Dean of the Faculty of Education for his stimulating and thought- provoking lecture. In his toast to the future of the Department of Education, the Dean of Social and Environmental Studies, Professor Peter Lloyd, paid tribute to the enriching experience of the lecture, and he looked forward to an equally enriching partnership with the Department, after its transfer to his Faculty in August 1996.