The implementation of any curriculum initiative at classroom level depends largely on teachers' existing ideas about their day-to-day teaching and the extent to which they regard the new policy as desirable and practical. Past records for curriculum initiatives show extraordinarily modest levels of pedagogical implementation, in part because curriculum innovators have failed to 'start where the teachers are'. The extent to which curriculum initiatives have an impact on teachers' thinking at classroom level is profoundly important given a world-wide trend towards the introduction of national curricula. In the context of research which has focused on teachers' classroom thinking against the background of Scotland's National Curriculum, the 5-14 curriculum development programme, this paper explores two broad issues, one methodological and the other substantive.The methodological concern is with difficulties in gaining access to teachers' classroom thinking. The paper argues that familiar interview approaches may well elicit teachers' reactions to conceptual frameworks presented by others (policy-makers or researchers), but they are inadequate for assessing the impact of initiatives on teachers' thinking. The authors offer an account of an open-ended, non-directive approach that is designed to access that thinking in the context of actual classroom teaching.The second issue concerns the impact of the 5-14 curriculum development programme on teachers' thinking in eight primary and secondary departments in Scottish schools. It is clear from the research that the concepts of the objectives-based initiative had been internalized hardly at all by the teachers. Where the ideas of attainment outcomes, strands, levels and targets were acknowledged, the teachers had subsumed these into their customary ways of construing their classroom teaching and their pupils.

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This paper draws on the philosophy of Karl Popper to present a descriptive evolutionary epistemology that offers philosophical solutions to the following related problems: 'What happens when learning takes place?' and 'What happens in human learning?' It provides a detailed analysis of how learning takes place without any direct transfer of information from the environment to the learner, and it significantly extends the author's earlier published work on this topic. She proposes that learning should be construed as a special case of 'problem solving' and as a fundamentally critical and creative process in which learning organisms develop 'expectations' that are not purely an outcome of genetic inheritance or random mutation. Human learning is then characterised with reference to: objectified knowledge; descriptive and argumentative language; theoretical problems; the search for error and specific limitation. If the author's evolutionary analysis of learning is valid, it would suggest that we should, if we wish to promote learning, be wary of corralling children and older students in environments that inhibit autonomous activity, that discourage criticality and creativity and generally limit opportunities for trial and error-elimination. But education institutions, particularly those for older children and adolescents, are very often environments of this constraining kind. Traditionally, educationists have vastly underestimated the human potential for imaginative criticism-because in general they have not recognised the extent to which it lies at the heart of what humans, including the youngest children, do in order to succeed at even the most basic tasks.

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