To examine the relationship between society and curriculum, three research projects are analyzed. The first project, Beauchamp and Beauchamp (1967), which attempts to answer the question of how a curriculum comes to be what it is, examined the likenesses and differences in curriculum engineering practices among selected European countries. The second project, Anyon (1981), which investigated how, given a curriculum, a society uses it, is a study of curriculum use in five U.S. elementary schools differentiated by social class. The third, Ben-Peretz and Lavi (1981), is a study of the curriculum of the Kibbutz school system, exemplifying the investigation of curriculum as viewed in an interactive relationship with society. The analysis shows that in different societies and cultures, the school curriculum serves a major function of social control which may lead to the conservation of the status quo in society. The controlling function may be more or less deliberate. For example, the Kibbutz curriculum is deliberately and explicitly intended by the community to be a tool in the conservation of the social structure of the Kibbutz. National control of curriculum engineering in Italy and France may be viewed as a deliberate attempt to guide education from the top down and ensure curricular uniformity; even in England there is evidence of national curricular control through external examinations and governmental inspectors. In the case of the curriculum in use in the elementary schools studied by Anyon, the reproductive function is more hidden and may not be deliberate. (RM)