Difference Between 'Curriculum' & 'Syllabus'

"Syllabus" refers to the content or subject matter of an individual subject, whereas "curriculum" refers to the totality of content to be taught and aims to be realized within one school or educational system." Thus, a curriculum subsumes a syllabus.

Curricular guidelines lay out a program's educational philosophy, specify purposes and course content, identify implementational constraints and articulate assessment and evaluation criteria. They also include banks of materials that teachers can modify to meet the needs of their learners. Syllabuses, on the other hand, traditionally represent the content of an individual course and specify how this content is graded and sequenced. According to this traditional understanding of what a syllabus is, therefore, there is a further distinction between syllabus content and methodology, on the grounds that the "what" and the "how" of teaching should be kept distinct from each other.

More recently, however, it has been argued that syllabuses should also include the methodological procedures that are used to organize classroom instruction. According to this view, the traditional distinction between syllabus content (the "what" of instruction) and methodology (the "how" of teaching) therefore becomes blurred. It then becomes theoretically possible to speak of a "methodological syllabus".