In liquid times when the social institutions have difficulties in adapting themselves to changes at the same time they happen (Bauman, 2007), one of the visible effects of the various processes of globalization has been the conduct of society in a more individualized way, which has a dual effect on education. On the one hand, the need to listen their actors and understand through this listening, how to build educational processes. On the other hand, to identify the social consequences that this individualization has on knowledge worked on school works and how does school react to these changes.

We assume curriculum knowledge as a social process, produced by multiple actors in different fields or levels, as well as curriculum construction, which has been taken as prescription, as the reproduction of inequality and social exclusion because it is based on existing models of power and symbolic and cultural capital.

Presenting a study on the history of the curriculum encourages us to observe the materialization of knowledge in the curriculum as a social and historical artefact, with changes and fluctuations. Still this historical research does not just place the description of the school knowledge organization, but also tries to explain how this artefact has become in what is currently and to describe the social dynamics that shaped it. This perspective implies approaching the curriculum as a process of conflicts and struggles between different traditions and social conceptions, and not just as a result of a necessary social process of transmitting values, knowledge and skills. The process of selection and organization of school knowledge should not be construed as an innocent epistemological process, rather as a social process that gather logical factors, epistemological, intellectual interests, rituals, symbolic and cultural conflicts, legitimation of conflict and control purposes of domination. The "manufacturing curriculum" is not performed from the valid knowledge but from the knowledge considered socially valid.

We start from a critical analysis of the construction of curriculum knowledge in Portugal between 1970 and 2009 at the macro level, directed to the dimensions of cognitive justice, relevance of curriculum knowledge and culture. We focused mainly on the relationship between curriculum policies and the personal dimension of his political actors, understood as a life history that is obtained from the juxtaposition of contexts that shape the political cycles and the stories of the life of each protagonist. The main objective relates to the identification of both political mobilization of knowledge and the cognitive dimension in politics. The identification of biographical dimension in the four political cycles in which we find the core curriculum legislative frameworks for nearly 40 years was also focused. We were interested in capturing who were those political actors, what did they knew and, as part of policy-making groups that constituted the legal and formal authority to propose and approve curriculum policy measures, what knowledge did they helped to build in such policies.

We did not forget that curriculum policies seemed to be determined by international agendas, using the major statistical projects as their agents. In each policy cycle we took the contexts of influence and of the text production and saw how did European and transnational agendas worked for national policies in curriculum. We looked into the national trajectory using the concept of refraction, which was very useful in the way that, assuming curriculum policies as a process, they are refracted when there is a change of level or actors.

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