The Philosophy of Higher Education Curriculum: Suggestion of a Framework for Philosophizing

Curriculum and higher education curriculum, like other scientific programs, have their own philosophy. There are different ways to study the philosophy of higher education curriculum. For instance, one may focus on metaphysical, epistemological or axiological questions and raise the following questions: How and which parts of the higher education curriculum are affected by the answers offered to the question of the nature of reality? Is reality objective, subjective or objective-subjective? How does it shape the subjects of the scientific courses and disciplines? For instance, it is said that considering the reality as dual has caused some parts of the higher education to be theoretical and pure and some other parts empirical and applied. There are some other relevant questions such as those about the fundamentals, objectives, the nature of methods and the nature of teacher-students relationship, etc. Sometimes an investigation may focus on the answers given by philosophers within the history of philosophy to the questions about the nature of higher education curriculum, which have been written down and turned into a separate discipline. The present study, organized in two parts, is an attempt to study the philosophy of higher education curriculum. Dialectic with self and conceptualizing based on the existing experiences is used in the first part; and, documental method is employed in the second part.