The Curriculum Quotes & Sayings

We need to have making, including computer science, shop, etc. as part of the core curriculum from the beginning, not just an optional afterschool thing. Things like First Robotics and all of those great programs need to become mainstream. — Megan Smith

There are many challenges in the global education ecosystem: from top-down systemic issues in how educational services are organized and delivered, to bottom-up issues of curriculum effectiveness, accountability, and human resource allocation. — Adam Braun

In true education, anything that comes to our hand is as good as a book: the prank of a page- boy, the blunder of a servant, a bit of table talk - they are all part of the curriculum. — Michel De Montaigne

Schools are launching pads, launching our kids into their futures. Unfortunately, a lot of what we teach now looks identical to what we taught 40, 50, or 60 years ago. There's a need for both timeless curriculum content and timely content. What seems to be falling by the wayside is timely content. — Heidi Hayes Jacobs

West Side Story was a highly popular and successful musical play and now is a similarly well-received motion picture. (I would think that it could also be used shrewdly as a document for discussion in Sunday Schools, in place of some of the ridiculous curriculum materials now in use). — William Stringfellow

Yes, I share your concern: how to program well -though a teachable topic- is hardly taught. The situation is similar to that in mathematics, where the explicit curriculum is confined to mathematical results; how to do mathematics is something the student must absorb by osmosis, so to speak. One reason for preferring symbol-manipulating, calculating arguments is that their design is much better teachable than the design of verbal/pictorial arguments. Large-scale introduction of courses on such calculational methodology, however, would encounter unsurmoutable political problems. — Edsger Dijkstra

School programs the schooled to type a CV. Life inspires the unschooled to type a business plan. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

My own view is that the general education curriculum that a college picks has to be appropriate for the kind of student body that it has. — Louis Menand

I had thrived in Miss Popham's class because she was in charge of her own curriculum. She had a wonderful idea and freedom to teach as she wished. I still think hers is the best way to organize a literature class in high school if the goal is to encourage wide reading and the love of books. My own best teaching in high school reflected my attempts to replicate the spirit of that 1943 class — James Gray

Give a typical employee a million, and, he is most likely to use the money to print his CV on fancier paper. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Since free men cannot judge for themselves what endangers their freedom if they believe it is never in danger, it is the chief burden of the public school curriculum to persuade children that their liberty is always secure. — Walter Karp

I think my deepest criticism of the educational system ... is that it's all based upon a distrust of the student. Don't trust him to follow his own leads; guide him; tell him what to do; tell him what he should think; tell him what he should learn. Consequently at the very age when he should be developing adult characteristics of choice and decision making, when he should be trusted on some of those things, trusted to make mistakes and to learn from those mistakes, he is, instead, regimented and shoved into a curriculum, whether it fits him or not. — Carl Rogers

Make sure your LinkedIn profile has a targeted headline. Not only should the headline clearly state your career focus, it's also the most important place to add a keyword or two, because this influences how you appear in search results — Melanie Pinola

Like everybody at that age, I read an awful lot of pulp fiction. But at the same time, I also read quite a bit of history and read that as much for pleasure as part of a curriculum. — John Hume

One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child. — Carl Jung

A huge number of jobs that are filled are never advertised to the public, or if they are, they're filled by people who have a connection to the employer. — Melanie Pinola

The mistake that many policymakers make is to believe that in education the best way to face the future is by improving what they did in the past. There are three major processes in education: the curriculum, which is what the school system expects students to learn; pedagogy, the process by which the system helps students to do it; and assessment, the process of judging how well they are doing. — Ken Robinson

The content of the curriculum should never exclude the realities of the very students who must intellectually wrestle with it. When students study all worlds except their own, they are miseducated. — Johnnetta B. Cole

He argued that conservatives should control the political debate at its source by demanding "balance" in textbooks, television shows, and news coverage. Donors, he argued, should demand a say in university hiring and curriculum and "press vigorously in all political arenas." The key to victory, he predicted, was "careful long-range planning and implementation," backed by a "scale of financing available only through joint effort." Powell — Jane Mayer

The world no doubt is the best or most serviceable schoolmaster; but the world's curriculum does not include Latin and Greek. — E. V. Lucas

Those who can afford private schooling need not worry about their children being deprived of art, music and literature in the classroom: they are more sheltered, for now, from the doctrine of efficiency that has been radically refashioning the public school curriculum. — Azar Nafisi

discover that the quality of our relationships with our teachers, families, friends, and communities is as important to learning as the curriculum, testing, and technologies which usually occupy our attention. — Louis Cozolino

But curriculum-wise, I was drawn to the sciences and specifically to physics, and I really enjoyed it and I think for a little while there, I was really thinking my schooling would be in physics, that that was something I loved. — Brian Henson

A picture book is a motorcycle: small, loud, fun, and zippy.
An easy reader is a chartered bus: obliged to carry a rather dull passenger roster of sanctioned curriculum, plus the baggage of an approved, limited vocabulary. The trick is to design your chartered bus to be as cool and sexy as a motorcycle. — Mo Willems

I don't think film schools are mentoring kids. I think they just send them through the curriculum, so now you know how to hold a camera, how to use a Dx3 menu. You can learn that in five minutes from somebody that doesn't even know anything. But what do you know if you haven't read anything - studied art and studied literature - what do you have to contribute? — Rob Nilsson

The keys are, or were, the training methods used by the ancient mystery schools. We've got hints and tips, we've got little bits on the papyri, but we don't have, in our hands, a complete curriculum of the ways in which they induced altered states of consciousness and the projection of the mind. — Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki

The overemphasis on standardized tests forces teachers to teach the same restricted, unintuitive curriculum. Longtime educator Brent Evans has said that today's schools are organized as assembly lines, "(running at a set speed) and with each worker (teacher) at designated places (way levels) on the assembly line performing predetermined actions on products (students) considered to be somewhat generic (one-size-fits-all) and passive (waiting to be filled or formed to the desired shape). — Brent Evans

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. — Rodman Philbrick

The left sees nothing but bigotry and superstition in the popular defense of the family or in popular attitudes regarding abortion, crime, busing, and the school curriculum. — Christopher Lasch

It's obviously unfair to paint with a broad brush here, but the germ of an idea for a breakthrough in technology doesn't come out of a business school curriculum. It comes out of a laboratory or a math lecture or a physics tutorial. — Michael Moritz

As with all great teachers, his curriculum was an insignificant part of what he communicated. From him you didn't learn a subject, but a life ... Tolerance and justice, fearlessness and pride, reverence and pity, are learned in a course on long division if the teacher has those qualities ... — William Alexander Percy

Patience was not just a manner, it was the very form of seminar teaching. Columbia's core curriculum had been designed not to enshrine the authority of the lecturing professor (that was something done at Harvard) but to reach understanding through discussion, however clumsy and uncertain. Till this moment, I never knew myself. . . . Vanity, not love has been my folly! — David Denby

Is that why you came?'
'No, I came because I simply can't get enough of people looking down their noses at me. The girls at school are getting frightfully lax about it.'
'Are they? How remiss of them. We're taught from the cradle how to look down our noses, you know, we rich sons of bitches. Perhaps Westcliffe's curriculum is a tad too liberal these days. — Shana Abe

It makes a difference whether Moses or Jeroboam writes the history curriculum. — Douglas Wilson

I do believe that when your child does poorly on a test, your first step should not necessarily be to attack the teacher or the school's curriculum. It should be to look at the idea that, maybe, the child didn't work hard enough. — Amy Chua

The process of learning to be holy, like the process of learning to pray, may properly be thought of as a school - God's own school, in which the curriculum, the teaching staff, the rules, the discipline, the occasional prizes and the fellow pupils with whom one studies, plays, debates and fraternizes, are all there under God's sovereign providence. — J.I. Packer

Being homeschooled for half of my life allowed me to choose my own curriculum and find things I really enjoy, and that's kind of inspired me. I've always been intrigued in or interested in the topics I've been covering. — Yara Shahidi

The Yale graduate who had refused to read outside the course curriculum (the future Pres. Taft) suddenly found himself inspired. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

Not only does every Hebrew word have its own definition, but every Hebrew letter, within the word, has its own meaning. God placed before you a great banquet of universal truths. All this in 22 Hebrew letters. Every letter contains a progressive curriculum designed to teach you about this marvelous world that God gave us. These letters will flavor each word's definition claiming its place in God's well organized universe. — Michael Ben Zehabe

To learn theory by experimenting and doing.
To learn belonging by participating and self-rule.
Permissiveness in all animal behavior and interpersonal expression.
Emphasis on individual differences.
Unblocking and training feeling by plastic arts, eurythmics and dramatics.
Tolerance of races, classes, and cultures.
Group therapy as a means of solidarity, in the staff meeting and community meeting.
Taking youth seriously as an age in itself.
Community of youth and adults, minimizing 'authority.'
Educational use of the actual physical plant (buildings and farms) and the culture of the school community.
Emphasis in the curriculum on real problems and wider society, its geography and history, with actual participation in the neighboring community (village or city).
Trying for functional interrelation of activities. — Paul Goodman

For instance, few realize that we are changing the brains of schoolchildren through medication in order to make them adjust to the curriculum, rather than the reverse. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We have to stop delivering the curriculum to kids. We have to start discovering it with them. — Will Richardson

I definitely want to study global health. Right now I'm working on all the prerequisite core curriculum that Columbia has. So getting all of that out of the way. And I definitely want to pursue something along the lines of public health. — Kelsey Chow

After ten whole minutes of painful silence, I finally raised my hand and told Mr. O'Hara I loved Miranda Blythe's romance novels, and I decided I liked him immediately when he didn't laugh or reassure me that we'd be reading real books. Like Mrs. Andrews had last year.
He did say, 'I'm afraid Ms. Blythe is not on the curriculum this semester. We'll be starting your education with the epic poets - boring, I know, but necessary building blocks. However, an extra-credit book report is always welcome, and you're free to choose whatever topic you like.'
Then Mr. O'Hara added, 'I think Ms. Blythe's works would be a particularly interesting topic for a report. In fact, if you want an example of the archetypal hero journey - '
'Wait, wait, wait.' Fred raised his hand. 'You read romance novels?'
'My dear boy,' Mr. O'Hara replied, 'I read everything. — Caitlen Rubino-Bradway

Remedying the deficiencies of seminary curricula is a difficult question because of all kinds of vested political interests long at work in the building of any curriculum. — Thomas Oden

When I teach the formal curriculum, I have the chance to think about it ahead of time. I can rehearse it. I can illustrate it with self-deprecating humor and humble-sounding personal disclosure. I can try to make it comes out just right. — John Ortberg

I think that the Bible as literature should be a compulsory part of the national curriculum.. you can't understand English literature and culture without it. But insofar as theology studies the nature of the divine, it will earn the right to be taken seriously when it provides the slightest, smallest smidgen of a reason for believing in the existence of the divine. Meanwhile, we should devote as much time to studying serious theology as we devote to studying serious fairies and serious unicorns. — Richard Dawkins

We have so much to cover and so little time to cover it. Howard Gardner refers to curriculum coverage as the single greatest enemy of understanding. Think instead about ideas to be discovered. — Alfie Kohn

The school curriculum today, particularly American history, is a shame. — Rush Limbaugh

Teachers need to integrate technology seamlessly into the curriculum instead of viewing it as an add-on, an afterthought, or an event. — Heidi Hayes Jacobs

Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen? — Friedrich Nietzsche

I think at a place like Harvard, our experience, I was involved with, at various stages, in trying to implement a new general education curriculum, our experience was that Harvard's all about specialization, that's not just true of the professori, it's also true of a lot of the undergraduates, too, and they come, they kind of know what they want to do, they select it because they have a strong aptitude for something in particular. — Louis Menand

Bruner discusses the need for teachers to understand that children should want to study for study's own sake, for learnings's sake, not for the sake of good grades or examination success. The curriculum should, in other words, be interesting. (Yes, it sounds too obvious even to say, but sometimes the emphasis on content has trumped all other considerations, including that of making learning interesting.) — Gary Thomas

Differentiated Instruction is a teaching philosophy based on the premise that teachers should adapt instruction to student differences. Rather than marching students through the curriculum lockstep, teachers should modify their instruction to meet students' varying readiness levels, learning preferences, and interests. Therefore, the teacher proactively plans a variety of ways to 'get it' and express learning. — Carol Ann Tomlinson

The Common Curriculum can easily become the karaoke curriculum, where everyone just follows the bouncing ball of the script. — Andy Hargreaves

Your LinkedIn profile should leave no room for doubt about the kind of job you're looking for and why you're the best person for that position. — Melanie Pinola

Intercultural understanding is a key dimension of the Australian Curriculum. The deployment of technology opens up opportunities for global partnerships and collaboration to grow, increasing opportunities for greater understanding between cultures. — Susan Mann

Perhaps it's human nature: We want to shield our children from pain, and what we get instead is life and heartache and lessons that bring us to our knees. Sooner or later we are handed the brute, necessary curriculum of surrender, we have no choice, then but to bow our heads and learn. We struggle to accept that our children's destinies are not ours to write, their battles not ours to fight, their bruises not ours to bear, nor their victories ours to take credit for. We learn humility and how to ask for help. We learn to let go even when every fiber of our being yearns to hold on even tighter. — Katrina Kenison

I often suggest that my students ask themselves the simple question: Do I know how to live? Do I know how to eat? How much to sleep? How to take care of my body? How to relate to other people? ... Life is the real teacher, and the curriculum is all set up. The question is: are there any students? — Larry Rosenberg

Things like anatomy and drawing and design and color had pretty much been drop-kicked out of the curriculum in the '70s, when I was studying art, in favor of abstraction and minimalism. — David Small

The practice of discernment is part of higher consciousness. Discernment is not just a step up from judgment. In life's curriculum, it is the opposite of judgment. Through judgment a man reveals what he needs to confront and learn. Through discernment, one reveals what he has mastered. — Glenda Green

The school of hard knocks is an accelerated curriculum. — Menander

The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts it is judgment rather than rules that prevail. — Elliot W. Eisner

Be a role model not a critic. Don't tell your children, your peers, or your subordinates what to do - show them. And when the lesson is over, keep showing them by demonstrating that your actions are part of your character, not part of their curriculum. — Denis Waitley

That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior. — John Taylor Gatto

He talks some more about classes he likes--not many--and those he doesn't like, and it is clear that, whatever sophisticated planning has gone into curriculum design at Alan's school, the distinction between a good class and a bad class, from his point of view, has a lot to do with the freedom it offers to stand up and walk around. — Dan Kindlon

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. — Ken Robinson

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. — Alice Waters

Kids are intimidated by the way science and technology is presented. It's made, frankly, quite boring and it becomes part of a curriculum that chases particularly women and minorities away. — Dean Kamen

It's an absurd error to put modern English literature in the curriculum. You should read contemporary literature for pleasure or not at all. You shouldn't be taught to monkey with it. — Rebecca West

Engaging with children in troublesome thinking is problematic, but important. Ignoring the hard stuff and only engaging in the fluff and fun from curriculum choices is to keep underground issues of social justice and to further silence and compound the inequity — Janet Robertson

Every television program must be a complete package in itself. No previous knowledge is to be required. There must not be even a hint that learning is hierarchical, that it is an edifice constructed on a foundation. The learner must be allowed to enter at any point without prejudice. This is why you shall never hear or see a television program begin with the caution that if the viewer has not seen the previous programs, this one will be meaningless. Television is a nongraded curriculum and excludes no viewer for any reason, at any time. In other words, in doing away with the idea of sequence and continuity in education, television undermines the idea that sequence and continuity have anything to do with thought itself. — Neil Postman

There has been so much recent talk of progress in the areas of curriculum innovation and textbook revision that few people outside the field of teaching understand how bad most of our elementary school materials still are. — Jonathan Kozol

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. — Aaron Swartz

Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early. — Rita Dove

So when I went to school, I studied a Jordanian curriculum. We never studied anything about Palestine or its history. We never saw a Palestinian map. We studied the history of Jordan, of China, of Germany, of England - I remember learning about all the families who ruled England - but nothing connected to our history, nothing connected to our geography, nothing connected to our culture. — Cate Malek

The yeshiva where I studied considers itself modern Orthodox, not ultra-Orthodox. We followed a rigorous secular curriculum alongside traditional Talmud and Bible study. — Noah Feldman

Imprisoning philosophy within the professionalizations and specializations of an institutionalized curriculum, after the manner of our contemporary European and North American culture, is arguably a good deal more effective in neutralizing its effects than either religious censorship or political terror — Alasdair MacIntyre

Education has been a really big part of my life. I went to an all-girls school for most of my life, and the curriculum was definitely at the top of your list. — Holland Roden

tried to impose 'intelligent design' creationism on the science curriculum of a local public school - a move of 'breathtaking inanity', to quote Judge Jones — Richard Dawkins

I think it is very important to build the moral fibre of the youth. Moral education should be part of the curriculum, and I will work towards introducing that. — Pallam Raju

My colleague Sen. Rick Santorum, Pennsylvania Republican, erroneously suggested that I support the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to biological evolution. That simply is not true. ... Unlike biological evolution, intelligent design is not a genuine scientific theory and, therefore, has no place in the curriculum of our nation's public school science classes. — Edward Kennedy

Home is the first school for us all, a school with no fixed curriculum, no quality control, no examinations, no teacher training — Charles Handy

Sport is an important part of the development of kids, and hence, it should be made a part of their curriculum. — Gagan Narang

No one likes to feel used. When the perceived focus becomes the content over the person, people feel used. When teachers are valued only for the test scores of their students, they feel used. When administrators are "successful" only when they achieve "highly effective school" status, they feel used. Eventually, "used" people lose joy in learning and teaching. Curriculum does not teach; teachers do. Standards don't encourage; administrators do. Peaceable schools value personnel and students for who they are as worthy human beings. ... If your mission statement says you care, then specific practices of care should be habits within your school. — Lorraine Stutzman Amstutz

There used to be Boy Scout troops on Mars; it makes sense if you think about it. I got my badge in knots, among other things. That was a lifetime ago, but it's surprising how much of the Boy Scout curriculum is useful after the apocalypse. Scratch that. It's not surprising at all. In hindsight, it seems like the Boy Scouts is an end-times preparation service. — Branden Frankel

I have found that educators yearn to be told something like this: There will be no more initiatives - at least for a time. Instead, we will focus only on what will have an immediate and dramatic impact on learning in your classrooms: ensuring the implementation of a common, content-rich curriculum; good lessons; and plenty of meaningful literacy activities (such as close reading, writing, and discussion) across the curriculum. — Mike Schmoker

All the geography, trigonometry, and arithmetic in the world are useless unless you learn to think for yourself. No school teaches you that. It's not on the curriculum. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Students need to decide, 'All right, well, does the height matter? Does the side of it matter? Does the color of the valve matter? What matters here?' - such an underrepresented question in math curriculum. — Dan Meyer

Someday, hopefully very soon, 'diving within' as a preparation for learning and as a tool for developing the creative potential of the mind will be a standard part of every school's curriculum. — David Lynch

At a time when we need an urgent national conversation about how schools and curriculum should address the environmental crisis, we're being told that the problems we need to focus on are teacher incompetence, government monopoly, and market competition. The reform agenda reflects the same private interests that are moving to shrink public space-interests that have no desire to raise questions that might encourage students to think critically about the roots of the environmental crisis, or to examine society's unsustainable distribution of wealth and power. — Bill Bigelow

It costs the same to send a person to prison or to Harvard. The difference is the curriculum. — Paul Hawken

If you're a teacher you have to teach the curriculum, all that stuff, you have to teach morals, you have to teach values, and you have to teach, all-importantly, self-control. Because a lot of kids don't have it. — Tony Danza

The arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important. — Elliot W. Eisner

Business schools are failing to teach the students about the risks of market failures. We need to include some material on market failures in the core of curriculum. — Pankaj Ghemawat

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? — Heidi Hayes Jacobs

The art establishment has turned away from the old curriculum which puts beauty and craft at the top of the agenda. — Roger Scruton

I taught public school for 26 years, but I just can't do it anymore. For years I asked the school board to let me teach a curriculum that doesn't hurt kids, but they always had other fish to fry. If you hear of a job where I don't have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything, but blind obedience. — John Taylor Gatto

We do need curriculum reform. And it should happen at the state and local level. That is where educational policy belongs, because if a parent is unhappy with what their child is being taught in school, they can go to that local school board or their state legislature, or their governor and get it changed. — Marco Rubio

Personal responsibility is not only undervalued but actually discouraged by the standard classroom model, with its enforced passivity and rigid boundaries of curriculum and time. Denied the opportunity to make even the most basic decisions about how and what they will learn, students stop short of full commitment. — Salman Khan