PLANNING THE EDUCATIONAL CURRICULUM
Héctor Correa · Kyklos · 1965
The preparation of an educational curriculum involves three stages. The first of these is the subdivision of knowledge into sciences, and of these sciences into courses. This stage should be carried out principally by scientists. The second stage is the determination of the prerequisites for each course. These prerequisites include not only the knowledge, but also the capacities of the students. The determination of prerequisites should be carried out by educationists, psychologists and scientists. The third step involves the selection of which courses, out of the list of possibilities with their prerequisites, should actually be taught. For the above-mentioned selection, some evaluation of the future benefits to be obtained from each course is required. The paper begins with the delimination of the three steps just mentioned. Then it is shown that the problem of selection in an optimum way of the courses which should be taught can be reduced to a quadratic programming problem. Finally, a method is presented for transforming such a problem into an integral linear programming problem.