Falsafah pendidikan
Sukatan pelajaran yang digubal memberi penekanan kepada aspek kesepaduan dan
keseimbangan. Oleh itu konsep-konsep seperti penggabungjalinan ( penyatuan
kemahiran-kemahiran ) dan penyerapan ( penyatuan isi ) sentiasa dititik beratkan.
Penekanan baru diberikan kepada penerapan nilai-nilai murni. Ia seharusnya
diserapkan dalam setiap mata pelajaran yang diajar di sekolah.
Program pendidikan disusun agar dapat melahirkan insan yang seimbang dan
harmonis dari segi intelek, rohani, emosi dan jasmani berdasarkan kepercayaan dan
kepatuhan kepada Tuhan.
Program pendidikan yang menitik beratkan pendidikan umum diperkenalkan.
Penekanan diberikan kepada pendidikan teknik dan vokasional.
Penekanan juga diberikan kepada bahasa merentasi kurikulum.
Pemupukan budaya sains dan teknologi terus ditekankan.
Pemupukan budaya keusahawanan dan budaya niaga ditegaskan.
Pengukuhan dan perluasan bahasa Melayu sebagai satu cabang ilmu pengetahuan.
Peningkatan pendedahan dan penguasaan bahasa Inggeris.
Penekanan kepada melahirkan individu yang berkeyakinan diri dan bersikap
berdikari.
( Kamaruddin Haji Husin, 1994 )
3.0
Faktor politik
Di Malaysia misalnya, ketika British berkuasa di negara ini, dasar pelajaran hanya
bertujuan menjadikan anak-anak Melayu petani dan nelayan yang lebih baik
daripada ibubapa mereka. Pihak British tidak langsung menitikberatkan perpaduan
rakyat berbilang kaum di negara ini. Apabila negara mencapai kemerdekaan, Dasar
Pelajaran Kebangsaan turut berkembang dan berubah. Dasar Pelajaran
Kebangsaaan yang termaktub dalam Akta Pelajaran 1961 menitikberatkan aspekaspek yang berkaitan dengan perpaduan negara dan penghasilan tenaga kerja.
Melalui kurikulum Pendidikan disalurkan aktiviti-aktiviti yang boleh membentuk
keperibadian dan perwatakan individu yang baik dan oleh membawa ke arah
perpaduan. Sukatan pelajaran yang sama isi kandungannya yang disyorkan oleh
Penyata Razak 1956 dianggap sebagai salah satu asas sistem pendidikan
kebangsaan bagi mewujudkan perpaduan negara itu.
4.0
5.0
bersepadu untuk mewujudkan insan yang harmonis dan seimbang dari segi intelek,
rohani, emosi dan jasmani.. Dengan itu perkembangan kurikulum harus sejajar
dengan perubahan sosial agar nilai-nilai murni dalam diri individu tidak pupus
ditelan arus pembangunan (Mohammad Nor, 1990; Kamaruddin Hj. Husin, 1994).
6.0
Perubahan yang begitu pesat dalam masyarakat dan dunia membuat kurikulum hari
ini perlu disesuaikan mengikut peredaran masa. Sehubungan dengan itu perancang
kurikulum bertanggungjawab menyemak semula dari masa ke semasa.
Pengguguran, perubahan atau pertambahan terhadap kurikulum harus dilakukan
mengikut peredaran masa, kehendak masyarakat dan kemajuan negara.
Kita hidup dalam masyarakat yang berubah-ubah, iaitu pengetahuan baru sentiasa
ditemui, sementara pengetahuan lama yang dibuktikan kurang tepat
diperkemaskinikan. Masalah pertambahan pengetahuan yang banyak menimbulkan
masalah pemilihan apa yang hendak dipelajari serta pertimbangan semula
bagaimana pembelajaran harus berlaku. Dengan menyedari bahawa murid-murid
harus disediakan untuk menyesuaikan diri dengan permintaan masyarakat yang
cepat berubah, guru-guru dan perancang kurikulum harus menyemak semula apa
yang mereka kemukakan kepada murid-murid (Kamaruddin Hj. Husin, 1994).
Berdasarkan maklumat yang diperolehi daripada pelaksana kurikulum harus
sentiasa peka dengan perubahan yang timbul serta bersedia mencari penyelesaian
dalam mengubah kurikulum merupakan orang yang penting dalam
7.0
Pelajar sebagai individu mempunyai kehendak dan keperluan asas ytang melibatkan
kehendak dan keperluan asa yang melibatkan keselamatan, kasih sayang,
bermasyarakat dan kehendak penyempurnaan kendiri. Kurikulum yang akan
dibentuk sewajarnya dapat memberi ilmu pengetahuan dan kemahiran agar
kehendak dan keperluannya sebagai muriod dan individu dapat dipenuhi. Ini
bermakna, kurikulum yang dibentuk akan menyediakan segala ilmu pengetrahuan
dan kemahiran yang merangsang perkembangan potensi mereka secara
menyeluruh iaitu merangkmi intelek, jasmani, rohani dan sosial( Ee Ah Meng, 1995).
Perancangan kurikulum yang baik sentiasa mengambil kira keperluan murid serta
mampu memberi faedah secara menyeluruh. Ini bermakna faktor minat dan
perkembangan individu dalam bidang kognitif, psikomotor dan afektif perlu
difikirkan semasa membentuk kurikulum tersebut.
8.0
Masa yang berlalu turut membawa perubahan kepada masyarakat yang seterusnya
menuntut mereka menerima pendidikan yang lebih sempurna selaras dengan
keperluan kemajuan yang kian pesat. Ilmu yang bersifat dinamik menyebabkan ia
sentiasa berkembang. Perkembangan ini disebarkan kepada masyarakat menerusi
perancangan kurikulum 6yang lebih kemas dan sesuai dengan kehendak
masyarakat dan negara.
Penemuan baru dalam pelbagai bidang seperti perubatan, teknologi dan sebagainya
menjadikan bidang itu terus berkembang. Perekembangan ini penting dalam
pembentukan kurikulum supaya ia dapat dikemaskini dari masa ke semasa agar
ilmu -ilmu baru ini dapat dissalurkan kepada murid-murid bagi mengimbangi
keperluan zaman.
Selain itu, pengenalan ilmu atau bidang-bidang baru ke dalam pendidikan
membantu meningkatkan taraf pendidikan itu sendiri. Contohnya, mem[erkenalkan
ilmu pengurusan dan perhubaungan ke dalam biodang pendidikan, khususnya ke
dalam bidang kurikulum, meningkatkan lagi keberkesanan proses perkembvangan
kuriklum itu sendiri.
9.0
Teori disiplin mental yang berlandaskan konsep falsafah yang dimajukan oleh Plato
dan Aristotle banyak mempengaruhi pengajaran aritmetik pada abad ke 19. Salah
satu aspek disiplin mental yang penting ialah psikolgi fakulti. Psikologi Fakulti
mempunyai pengaruh yang begitu kuat terhadap isu mengapa matematik perlu
dipelajari oleh kanak-kanak. Manakala ahli ` fahaman perkaitan mengaggap
pembelajran sebagai pembinaan unit-unit kecil yang terdiri daripada rangkaian R-G
untuk menghasilakn tingkah laku. Fahaman ini telah menghasilakn startegi
pengajaran aritmatik kepada fakta dan kemahiran kecil untuk diajar dan dinilai
secara berasingan. Kesan utama pendekatan ini bterhadap sekolah ialah matematik
diajar semata-mata dengan menggunakan teknik latih tubi ( Nik Aziz Nik Pa, 1992).
Pemikiran psikologi `behaviourisme telah bertapak dalam kurikulum pendidikan
matematik sejak awal 60an. Dalam pemikiran ini murid telah dianggap sebagai
gelas kosong. Guru berperanan memasukkan pengetahuan matematik ke dalam
gelas tersebut. Pendekatan ini mengenepikan aktiviti pengembangan intelek yang
sekaligus membina sikap negatif dalam diri pelajar terhadap matematik.
Untuk mengatasi masalah itu, satu kurikulum matetamati yang memberikan
tumpuan kepada penyelesaian masalah dan pemikiran kritis telah diperkembangkan
pada penghujung tahun 70an. Seterusnya dalam KBSM pengajaran dan
pembelajran Matematik ditekankan kepada fahamanb binaan (konstuktivm) dan
kemahiran berfikir secara kreatif dan kritis.(Nik Aziz Nik Pa, 1992)
PENUTUP
Proses perkembangan kurikulum sebagai sifatnya yang sentiasa berubah turut
dipengaruhi oleh faktor-faktor persekitaran yang merangsang reaksi manusia yang
terlibat dalam kepentingannya. Hasrat terhadap perubahan kurikulum itu
menggambarkan keperluan pendidikan yang menjadi wadah peneerusan kepada
kemajuan tamadun bangsa dan negara itu sendiri.
BIBLIOGRAFI
Taba. H. (1962). Curriculum Development - Theory & Practise. New York: Harcourt,
Brace and World.
kehidupannya untuk menjadi individu yangberguna pada masa akan datang, dan
matematik juga memainkan peranan yang amatbesar dalam proses pertukaran
barang yang sangat diperlukan oleh manusia untukmeneruskan kehidupan
seharian. Tanpa matematik maka mundurlah pembangunanmanusia, pincang
pemikirannya dan bantutlah perkembangannya.
OVERVIEW
Curricula in both of these senses are seen as defining what schools purposefully do.
However, most scholars and administrators who work with curricula or evaluate the
impact of curriculum prescriptions or reforms do not believe that "curricula-asdocuments" direct the work of schools in significant ways. Curricula-as-documents
are more often than not developed after the fact, and are based on existing
practices of teachers or a simple listing of the content of textbooks being used.
Further, many teachers are not familiar with the curriculum their district has
mandated.
Nevertheless, curricula and curricular mandates are the objects of persistent and
hotly contested debates around schooling, and are widely taken to be important.
Interest groups, governments, school districts, and their staffs devote much time
and attention to discussions of the curriculum. Why does the idea of the curriculum
and curriculum reform assume such importance in educational discourse and
policymaking? Is it possible to direct the work of schooling?
All curricula emerge from ideas about what should be taught and learned, and how
such teaching and learning might best be undertaken and then certified. As a result
the fundamental question lying behind the prescription and development of all
curricula is often seen as "What knowledge is of most worth?"because it is the
knowledge that is of most worth that education should, seemingly, reflect. In its
ideological or philosophical aspect, much curricular thought seeks to articulate
reasoned starting points for one or another form of curriculum. Such work can
accept the framework of contemporary understanding of the scope and nature of
education and schooling. It can be critical, seeking to articulate the hidden
assumptions around such categories as race, gender, and class that have driven,
and drive, schooling in inappropriate, even morally wrong, directions.
However, looked at more analytically, the curriculum of the school reflects layered
cultural understandings of what is considered necessary for young people to know
or experience if they are to take their place in the social and cultural order. Thus, as
the central component of a pervasive modern institution, the curriculum is
necessarily a part of all of the sociological and cultural ambiguities within societies.
As such, the scope and nature of the curriculum are viewed as critically important
for teachers, parents, cultural critics, interest groups, and the employers of the
graduates of the school. As the curriculum as an idea is seen through the eyes of all
such groups, it becomes a mirror that reflects different visions of the society and
culture, and the tensions within the society around, say, the proper nature of the
work of schooling and/or status-attainment and employment possibilities. As a
result inevitable and unresolved differences of viewpoint characteristically surface
around all discussions of the curriculum as a symbol of both a normative order for
education and of the quality and character of what schools are understood as doing.
For these reasons the history of curriculum thinking and practice is marked, on the
one hand, by popular and professional conflict and debate about what the
curriculum should be and how teaching should be undertaken and, on the other
hand, by rationalization of the good and/or bad consequences of one or another
curriculum. What, for example, should the curriculum that is most appropriate for
young people be based on?
The classification of such different conceptions of education and educating has been
one of the core approaches used to give both teachers and laypeople a framework
for approaching the normative issues that circle around such starting points for
education and curriculum building. Often, as with Elliot Eisner and Elizabeth
Vallance's 1974 classification, these issues are presented as involving perennial
controversies. Thus in their frame there is a web of controversy built around an
unresolved conflict among five classical curriculum "conceptions": (1) curriculum as
the development of cognitive processes; (2) curriculum as technology; (3)
curriculum as self-actualization or consumatory experience; (4) curriculum for social
learning; and (5) curriculum for academic rationalization. But Eisner and Vallance
also point to other ways of framing such debates: child-centered versus societycentered; futurist, that is, socially reconstructive, versus presentist or adaptive;
values-centered education versus skills-training; and humanist or existential versus
behaviorist models of education and teaching.
Walter Doyle has sought to clarify the endemic questions around all curriculum
thinking by pointing out that curricular action occurs at three distinct levels.
For instance, all institutional work around either the scope and rationale of an
optimal mathematics curriculum or how the teaching of reading should best be
undertaken centers on metaphors that reflect idealized norms for an imagined
social institution. More often than not the discourse is framed in terms of reform and
the need for change if a convergence between a normative ideal and the ongoing
work of schools is to be achieved. Such discussions rarely, if ever, connect in any
immediate way to the central issues around either programmatic or classroom
curricula. There the effective delivery of existing procedures and practices, and not
reform, is the overriding preoccupation. Nevertheless, the image-making that is
characteristic of curriculum policy debates within and among interest groups is
important. Such debates symbolize and instantiate what communities should value.
In this sense curriculum discussion, debate, and planningand the public and
professional processes involved in such workis a social form for clarifying the role
that schooling as an idea plays in the social and cultural order.
Programmatic curriculum work has two tasks. On the one hand, it is focused on the
sociocultural, political, and organizational processes through which educational
visions that are accepted by elites or publics are translated into operational
frameworks for schools. Thus a policy language of "excellence" becomes the
introduction of gifted programs in elementary schools or Advanced Placement
courses in the high school. Programmatic work is also part of the search for
solutions to operational problems, such as a mismatch between the capacity of a
school system or school and enrollments, and the need to reconfigure a system
around, for instance, middle schools. All such programmatic discourse and action
seeks to precipitate social, cultural, and educational symbols into a workable and
working organizational interpretation and framework. Such organizational
frameworks, however, are only indirectly linked to actual classroom teaching. In
such discourse and program building, teaching is seen as a passive agency
implementing or realizing both an organizationally sanctioned program and its
legitimating ideology. Curriculum work in this programmatic sense frames the
character of schools and classrooms organizationally, as well as the ways in which
schools might be seen within their communities. It does not direct the work of
schools or teachers in any straightforward way.
But consistency among what a community's school does, the language and symbols
used to describe and project that work, and the dominant ideologies and values is
only one component of the framework for the school or district programs and
curricula. Financial and/or personnel issues, state-sanctioned or state-funded
mandates for programs such as special education or physical and health education,
and the incentives for program change offered by governments and/or foundations
are, more often than not, the immediate determinants of whether or not a school
offers a pre-kindergarten program or upper-level "academic" courses.
In other words, the curriculum is the symbolic center of a loosely coupled system of
ideologies, symbols, organizational forms, mandates, and subject and classroom
practices that instantiates collective, and often differing, understandings about what
is to be valued about the idea and the ongoing practice of education. At the same
time the myth of an authoritative and hierarchical framework by which legislative
bodies determine classroom work, with the curriculum as the agent of the linkage, is
necessary for the legitimacy of a public schooling that is subject to political control.
It is this paradox that gives all discussion of the curriculum its emotional force.
In an essay written at the beginning of the twentieth century, John Dewey declared
his pessimism about the implications for educational reform of a "settlement" he
saw between progressive educational reformers, who controlled educators'
ideologies, and conservatives, who controlled actual school conditions, and had little
or no interest in reform. The settlement he described has persisted and has
controlled most of the conventional historical writing on the twentieth-century
curriculum of the American school. The histories of the American curriculum across
the twentieth century offer accounts of the absence of real and lasting Progressive
curriculum reform in the school, along with a search for explanations of the
seemingly persistent failure of reform impulses. But it was fundamental change that
marked the history of the curriculum in the twentieth century. This reality is most
clearly seen in the history of the secondary school and its curriculum.
In the late nineteenth century the significant curricular questions around the idea of
what was later termed secondary education centered on the character of the
cultures present in secondary schools or academiesthe conflict between cultures
achieving its force from its interaction with the changing relationships between
social groups. Should the curriculum offer as its core the traditional humanistic
inculcation into the classical and liberal culture built around the teaching of Latin
and Greek, or should it embrace "modern" subjects like science and English
literature? Should the ideology of the high-status secondary school be exclusively
liberal (i.e., centered on high-status classical or modern academic knowledge), or
should it be directly or indirectly vocational in the sense that it might embrace and
give educational legitimacy to agriculture, engineering, applied sciences and arts,
and so forth?
In the 1920s and 1930s this situation changed dramatically in the United States in a
way that was not repeated in western Europe until the 1960s. Schooling began to
assume a much greater significance in the pathway to adulthood, with the result
that a new form of mass high school emerged as an alternative to apprenticeship as
the way to work and adulthood. This new school offered the symbol of a high school
diploma, along with a set of tracked four-year courses of study potentially open to
the adolescent age cohort. This new school was, in Martin Trow's words, a "mass
terminal" secondary school.
This new school required new legitimating ideologies that could serve to make it
appear inevitable and desirable to both the range of its external constituencies and
to the teachers who would work within it. Schooling as a preparation for work and
life, (i.e., life-adjustment; citizenship; Americanization; child-centeredness; and, in
the Great Depression, the vision of the school and the curriculum as a seedbed for
social and cultural reconstruction) emerged as new educational ideologies to
submerge (but not replace) the older public and professional ideology of academic
training and mental discipline as the legitimate core tasks of the high school.
The years after World War II saw the second major transformation of the American
school as a mass college-preparatory high school emerge from the prewar mass
terminal school. This new high school required a rearticulation of the ideology of the
high school curriculum with the ideology of the university, creating, in its turn, a
need for new ways to frame popular and professional understandings. This required
the rejection of the ideological platforms of the very different prewar high school.
Thus, the college-preparatory role of the school reemerged into public visibility, a
visibility most clearly symbolized by the comprehensive high schools being built in
the new suburbs.
The new mission of the high school was presented in terms of academic
development and the need to teach the intellectual structure of the now
symbolically important sciences of physics and matha goal that was interpreted as
having implications for national defense and the national welfare. Programs
embodying the new ideologies were aggressively introduced as symbols of the new
mission of the school, although the program-building practices of those years
centered overwhelmingly on merely serving the expanding number of students
enrolling in the traditional college-prep track.
The high school of the late 1960s and 1970s reflected the political and cultural
turbulence, and the rejection of tradition, of those years. These years brought a
renewal of the avant-garde ideologies and curricular platforms of the 1930s (often
with a countercultural gloss) as well as of a vision of the school as a site for social,
cultural, and racial reconstruction, social justice, and the like. Programmatically,
noncanonical works appeared in literature courses; environmentalism emerged as a
topic in science; courses in film, black studies, and so forth, emerged in many
schools. With these changes the ordered institution of the school was being
questioned symbolically and, as a result, appeared at risk. The subject categories of
the school seemed to lose their clear meaning and significance, and the quality of,
for example, urban schools became an issue as the racial and ethnic makeup of
their student bodies changed from majority to minority students. Public anxieties
around the symbolic meaning and effectiveness of the high school as the way to
adulthood became the focus of demands for a restoration of more traditional
understandings of the school.
Seen historically, it is clear that much, if not most, public discussion of the
curriculum should be seen as a rhetorical form that seeks to stake out positions in
the ideological space around the concept of the school. Such discourse, as Dewey
noted, does not directly influence programmatic or classroom practice, which have
their own logics. Thus looked at across the twentieth century, the Progressive
educational and curriculum philosophies, conceptions, platforms, and developments
that journalists' and educators' discussions have taken as significant have had little
demonstrable impact on the day-to-day work of the school. They are part of the
changing parade of ideologies and platforms that have been invoked to legitimate
one or another image of the school as an institution.
dominant role in the lives of children and youth across all developed nations. This
dominance is overwhelmingly accepted by the societies and cultures that host the
modern school, despite the tensions that can circle around it.
Elizabeth McEneaney and John Meyer have argued that all thinking and research
around the curriculum, and by extension all policymaking and program
development, must be grounded in the recognition of the overwhelming success of
the school as an institution. For McEneaney and Meyer an understanding of the idea
or model of the modern nation, and of the individually empowered citizen in the
nation, lies at the heart of any understanding of the success of the school and the
curriculum. Access to high-status forms of schooling has come to be seen as both as
a right of citizenship and as a way of integrating citizens within the framework of a
common national culture. This culture is, in its turn, seen as both inclusive and
rational, a self-understanding that must be instilled by way of the curriculum that
frames the knowledge and attitudes that are seen to undergird the modern nation
and modern society.
As the implicit expression of the pervasive modern self-image of the citizen and
nation, these changes have not, and do not, take place as a result of planned
activity or reform. Instead, they come about as the model of society, and modern
models for the curriculum, are incorporated, in routinized ways, in the work of
teachers and policymakers. Of course, this instantiation of the model of society in
the school and curriculum has not come about as a linear process. There are cycles
of reform and resistance, the product of the tensions between older and newer
models of society and the school and between the global and the local.
Organizational structures, as seen for example in the highly centralized French
system, can make change problematic at times. In the U.S. school system, with its
loosely coupled, locally based structures, many of the tensions that create the need
for major cycles of curriculum reform in other countries can be contained. As
McEneaney and Meyer point out, schools can be required at the policy level to teach
sexual abstinence and at the same time hand out condoms in the classroom. The
policy curriculum can be an object of controversy; but the programmatic curriculum
works in stable, deliberate ways at further incorporation of youth into the idea and
institution of the school, while the classroom curriculum selectively incorporates a
changing model of schoolwork in unplanned and unorganized ways. The evolving,
changing classroom curriculum can at times be celebrated symbolically at the
programmatic level, and made very visible to local communities. Or it can be
concealed by a skillful management of the programmatic models and symbols
presented to local communities, with their diverse publics.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
COHEN, DAVID K., and SPILLANE, JAMES P. 1992. Policy and Practice: The Relations
between Governance and Instruction. Review of Research in Education 18.
Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association.
EISNER, ELLIOT W., and VALLANCE, ELIZABETH, eds. 1974. Conflicting Conceptions
of Curriculum. Berkeley, CA: McCutchan.
FUHRMAN, SUSAN H., ed. 2001. From the Capitol to the Classroom: Standards-Based
Reform in the States. 100th Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of
Education, Part 2. Chicago: National Society for the Study of Education.
McENEANEY, ELIZABETH H., and MEYER, JOHN W. 2000. "The Content of the
Curriculum: An Institutionalist Perspective." In Handbook of the Sociology of
Education, ed. Maureen T. Hallinan. New York: Kluwer.
PINAR, WILLIAM F.; REYNOLDS, WILLIAM M.; SLATTERY, PATRICK; and TAUBMAN,
PETER M. 1995. Understanding Curriculum: An Introduction to the Study of Historical
and Contemporary Curriculum Discourses. New York: Lang.
TYACK, DAVID, and TOBIN, WILLIAM. 1994. "The 'Grammar' of Schooling: Why Has It
Been So Hard to Change?" American Educational Re-search Journal 31:453479.
WESTBURY, IAN. 1988. "Who Can Be Taught What: General Education in the
Secondary School." In Cultural Literacy and the Idea of General Education, ed. Ian
Westbury and Alan C. Purves. 87th Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of
Education, Part 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
IAN WESTBURY
Read more: School Curriculum - Core Knowledge Curriculum, Hidden Curriculum OVERVIEW - Schools, Education, Schooling, and Programmatic - StateUniversity.com
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PENGENALAN
Kurikulum
Kurikulum adalah rancangan pendidikan yang sentiasa mengalami perubahan.
Dalam konteks pendidikan di Malaysia, perancangan dan pembentukan kurikulum
(khususnya KBSR dan KBSM) adalah didasari oleh falsafah dan matlamat pendidikan
negara yang menentukan arah haluan, asas dan sumber inspirasi kepada semua
usaha dan rancangan dalam bidang pendidikan.
Kurikulum atau pun skop kandungan sesuatu pelajaran adalah asas penting dalam
sistem pendidikan sesebuah negara. Sebagai sebuah negara yang sedang pesat
membangun, Malaysia memerlukan suatu kurikulum yang kemas dan sesuai untuk
mewujudkan sistem pendidikan yang dinamik serta selaras dengan cita-cita dan
kehendak negara (Kamaruddin Haji Hussin, 1994). Perkembangan kurikulum tidak
berlaku dengan sendiri tanpa sebab yang mempengaruhinya. Ia berlaku sejajar
dengan kemajuan masyarakat dan negara dan ia dianggap sebagai satu proses
yang dinamik dan seimbang.
kurikulum. KBSR dan KBSM adalah hasil perubahan yang diaspirasikan dalam
Falsafah Pendidikan Negara. Pusat Perkembangan Kurikulum 2001
Dasar bagi sesuatu sistem pendidikan haruslah berpaksikan kepada falsafah yang
jelas. Biasanya falsafah inilah menjadi teras pendidikan kita. Ia mengandungi
matlamat, corak dan kaedah pendidikan secara kasar, ciri-ciri yang hendak dibentuk
dalam diri individu yang hendak menerima pendidikan tadi serta skop yang
dirangkumi oleh proses pendidikan itu sendiri. Sebagai perbandingan, negara
Amerika Syarikat misalnya tidak memiliki satu falsafah pendidikan yang digubal di
peringkat negara walau pun sistem pendidikannya adalah antara yang terbaik di
dunia. Howard D. Mehlinger (1995) mengenalpasti masalah ketiadaan falsafah dan
dasar memberi dua bentuk kesukaran. Pertama, pendidikan guru dan kedua,
pembaharuan pendidikan. Kesukaran yang kedua iaitu pembaharuan pendidikan
adalah antara isu yang amat menyeluruh kerana ianya meliputi isu-isu kurikulum,
sistem pendidikan dan kemajuannya daripada satu tahap kepada tahap yang lain.
Penbentukkan sesuatu kurikulum mahupun dasar pendidikan negara di negara kita
juga dipengaruhi oleh faktor politik semasa. Menurut Francis (1987):
"Curriculum Development is also a political process. It requires dealing with people
and their various power bases and their views of what makes for good education"
Wiles Bondi (1989) juga turut menjelaskan pengaruh politik dalam pembentukan
dan perkembangan sesuatu kurikulum. Ini jelas menunjukkkan bahawa
perkembangan kurikulum dipengaruhi oleh proses politik, kerana setiap kali pucuk
pimpinan sesebuah negara itu bertukar, maka setiap kali itulah kurikulum
pendidikan akan dikaji semula. Kurikulum pendidikan menjadi saluran penting bagi
kerajaan atau kementerian menguatkan pengaruh mereka. Kerajaan
bertanggungjawab menetapkan Dasar Pendidikan Negara sejajar dengan hasrat
pemerintah.
Setelah empat tampuk pimpinan negara kita bertukar tangan, maka dasar dan
kurikulum di negara kita berkembang mengikut ideologi masing-masing. Daripada
ordinan pelajaran 1952, Penyata Razak 1956, Penyata Rahman Talib 1960 sehingga
kepada Dasar Pelajaran Kebangsaan 1979 telah beberapa kali kurikulum diubahsuai
dan kini telah wujudnya pula Kurikulum Sekolah Lestari (LAMPIRAN B) sebagai suatu
usaha bagi melaksanakan Dasar Alam Sekitar Negara.dan juga Kurikulum Sekolah
Bestari. Oleh itu pembentukkan kurikulum matematik di Malaysia mempunyai
perkaitan yang kuat antara falsafah pendidikan dan politik.
Kurikulum matematik di Malaysia juga dipengaruhi oleh visi dan misi sistem
pendidikan negara. Jika dilihat melalui Falsafah Pendidikan Kebangsaan (FPK) telah
wujud visi dan misi yang tersirat juga ditonjolkan. Oleh itu FPK adalah penyumbang
terbesar faktor pembentukkan kurikulum matematik di Malaysia (LAMPIRAN C).
Memperkembangkan potensi individu secara menyeluruh dan bersepadu
terkandung dalam FPK. Ini bermaksud setiap individu perlu diajar secara bermakna