Curriculum of science subjects – present and future In principle, however, it can be stated that the curricular content of science subjects at the individual levels has not recently changed much, despite many new recommendations and programmes. This is true, in principle, for the curriculum of physics, chemistry and biology in basic disciplines of these subject areas at universities but mainly for the curriculum at primary and secondary schools. The last considerable change of curricular content in science subjects was prepared in the seventies of the 20th century and consequently implemented from the eighties of the last century [Rámcový vzdělávací program pro obor vzdělávání Aplikovaná chemie, 2007]. Although, currently, new educational documents for primary and secondary schools are coming into effect – framework educational programmes and consequent school educational programmes, it is necessary to state that even if these documents give some space for innovation, the curricular content of science subjects remains virtually unchanged [Budiš & Šibor, Čtrnáctová, Bílek, 2005]. The content of each respective thematic area is more or less traditional and for more than 20 years almost the same. Only at the end of each respective area, the information is supplied about some applications of findings that form their content. This creates the impression of a “school” physics, chemistry or biology that have almost nothing in common with practice or everyday life. General chemistry 35 % Biochemistry Organic chemistry 25% 20% 22% Inorganic chemistry 40% Graph 5: Chemistry teaching at primary schools Analytic chemistry 5% General chemistry 30% Inorganic chemistry 23% Graph 6: Chemistry teaching at secondary schools Framework educational programmes briefly refer only to the thematic areas that should be acquired by the pupils/students but not to their sequence, content, scope and acquisition level. Teachers respect these generally formulated captions and expected outputs but they are usually not sufficient for real teaching and development of school educational programmes. Therefore the basis to determine the content and scope of chemistry curriculum are usually various course books that have been gradually published over the recent 20 years. In total more than 10 series of course books for science subjects at primary schools have been published; the most recent ones with colourful graphics and arrangement, supplemented by workbooks, teacher’s guides and also CD or DVD formats. For grammar schools, only 4 series of course books have been published; these are at the most two-coloured and supplemented only by collections of tasks for practising. The authors of course books attempt to introduce and characterise subject-field, topic-related concepts, which have recently become a part of curriculum. The example can be publications An overview of chemistry for primary schools [Čtrnáctová & Kolář, Svobodová, Zemánek, 2006] which contains more than 600 new concepts and terms, or An overview of chemistry for secondary schools [Vacík, 1995] containing more than 2000 concepts, terms, and names of substances. However within the general parts of science disciplines, only simplified basics of the discipline can be referred to at these levels; these basics cannot be sufficiently often used for subsequent applications. In this context, a number of questions have been raised [Čtrnáctová]. For example: Is such a large extent of general part of the subject useful – cca 30% of total curriculum that the pupils/students often learn only formally, they often cannot apply the acquired knowledge or their application only confirm the commonly known facts? Is it necessary to devote so much time to the acquisition of subjects-field nomenclature and 25