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.
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.
Create a garden; bring children to farms for field trips. I think it's important that parents and teachers get together to do one or two things they can accomplish well - a teaching garden, connecting with farms nearby, weave food into the 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.
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.
The curriculum of the school did not neglect India's cultural, analytical and scientific heritage, but was very involved also with the rest of the world.
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.
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.
I'm not entirely sure why I write about family, but I do know that it hasn't stopped interesting me. You meet and leave other people at different stages of your evolution, whereas family is made up of people who are constant links in your life, who know you over the course of time and have your complete curriculum vitae in their heads.
I would argue that the charter schools are really good at building programming and curriculum around the issues and the interests of the kids that they serve.
