Real education is about genuine understanding and the ability to figure things out on your own; not about making sure every 7th grader has memorized all the facts some bureaucrats have put in the 7th grade curriculum.
We need to have a course in school that teaches about ecology and gastronomy. I could imagine that all children could eat at school for free and that the cafeteria would become part of the school's curriculum.
Every math curriculum in the world is based on the idea of hand-calculating, and most of what you're teaching is how to calculate. And I think the resistance to this is very variable.
I began thinking I would do musical theater because in high school that was really the only sort of curriculum they had as far as getting onstage and doing anything that anybody would see. So that's what I did.
School systems should base their curriculum not on the idea of separate subjects, but on the much more fertile idea of disciplines... which makes possible a fluid and dynamic curriculum that is interdisciplinary.
So many schools have cut the music classes out of their curriculum. We're trying to fill that gap by teaching the teachers how to educate the kids about their musical heritage.
The yeshiva where I studied considers itself modern Orthodox, not ultra-Orthodox. We followed a rigorous secular curriculum alongside traditional Talmud and Bible study.
When hiring somebody, I never ask to see a curriculum vitae. I feel that since I didn't have one myself, it would be a bit presumptuous to ask to see anyone else's.
I was never forced to write. At least, I was never forced or even encouraged to write fiction. Creative writing wasn't in the curriculum at my school when I was in sixth grade.
