Our second phase was to develop a school curriculum that teaches tolerance, respect for differences, conflict resolution, anger management, and other attributes of peace.
According to a study by Achieve Incorporated, Texas is the first state to make a college-prep curriculum the standard coursework in high school, starting with this year’s ninth grade class.
At the age of 14, I moved across town to Magdalen College School, Oxford, where science played a much larger role in the curriculum.
Poetry is as vital as ever. The teaching of poetry reading, however, is sluggish and, often, slovenly. It needs to be expanded in the school curriculum and be more a feature of society at large. The newspapers should all be carrying a daily poem. It should be as natural as reading a novel.
The false pride of perennial celebration, of wearing flag lapel pins while betraying the values that the flag stands for, is like the self-esteem curriculum for toddlers, where everything is praised and no achievement ultimately has meaning.
But for the children of the poorest people we’re stripping the curriculum, removing the arts and music, and drilling the children into useful labor. We’re not valuing a child for the time in which she actually is a child.
The Biden administration has embraced the divisive curriculum of Critical Race Theory to rewrite history and paint the United States as a villain.
I obtained eight years of elementary education in a two-room school, where I encountered a stern but engaging teacher who awakened my intellect with instruction that would seem rigorous today in many colleges. History figured large in the curriculum, exciting for me what was to become an enduring interest.
Take all the courses in your curriculum. Do the research. Ask questions. Find someone doing what you are interested in! Be curious!
A simple way to address hidden curriculum issues is to spend time talking with staff and key leaders about their spiritual lives.
The yeshiva where I studied considers itself modern Orthodox, not ultra-Orthodox. We followed a rigorous secular curriculum alongside traditional Talmud and Bible study.
As long as my sixth graders showed an average improvement of five years, the principal and district pretty much left me alone to create my own curriculum and teach whatever I wanted.
I am trying to get permaculture on to the national curriculum to teach children how to take care of their own health, rather than relying on businesses to feed them.
Because I come from that old-school optics environment, I know stuff about depth of field and camera movement and things that are not necessarily a part of the curriculum for people who started on a box and have never done anything that wasn’t on a box.
We’ve set up groups in schools across North America. They apply and receive a curriculum about different issues facing the world – from environment to health to sustainability. Then, the students take actions from fundraisers to awareness raisers, and some of them even go overseas and volunteer.
There’s no reason why you can’t deliver a grammar-school curriculum to an all-ability intake.
As educators, we are only as effective as what we know. If we have no working knowledge of what students studied in previous years, how can we build on their learning? If we have no insight into the curriculum in later grades, how can we prepare learners for future classes?
In a world that places a growing premium on social skills, education systems need to do much better at fostering those skills systematically across the school curriculum.
I really am at a place where I think we need to feed every child at school for free and feed them a real school lunch that’s sustainable and nutritious and delicious. It needs to be part of the curriculum of the school in the same way that physical education was part of the curriculum, and all children participated.
In America, we have 19th century school conditions and a curriculum that prepares our kids for the 1990s.
