ABSTRACT
I am going to take the opportunity in this chapter to revisit, juxtapose, compare, extend and apply various ideas that I have developed during my long interest in higher education – particularly as applied to tourism – and I would like to start by reference to Anthony Giddens (1999), who proposed that we live in a runaway world. This is a world that is moving fast and somehow out of our control, so that we are often behind events and rarely able to shape them. The curriculum and what to teach face this very same problem. We are often squeezing curriculum design between other activities, playing catch-up, patching, mending, but rarely do we make the time to get ahead of things, to carefully and thoughtfully plan the crucial business in higher education of what to teach. We certainly very rarely approach curriculum design afresh with a clean sheet of paper.
