Book excerpt: Schooling, Society and Curriculum offers a much needed reassessment and realignment of curriculum studies in the UK and international contexts. Comprising a collection of eleven original chapters by prominent, nationally and internationally known experts in the field of curriculum studies, the book leads and fosters critical, generic debates about formal education and its relationships to wider society. Focusing on key debates that have been present for as long as formal state education has been in existence, the contributors contextualise them within a future-orientated perspective that takes particular account of issues specific to life in the early years of the twenty-first century. These include globalisation and nationalism; poverty and wealth; what it means to be a good citizen; cultural pluralism and intolerance; and - centrally - what it is that young people need from a school curriculum in order to develop as happy, socially just adults in an uncertain and rapidly-changing world. The book is organized into four sections: issues and contexts values and learners school curricula in the digital age exploring the possible: globalisation, localisation and utopias.