Philosophy for teens

"The learning of a dead subject requires a technical act of carving the knowledge into teachable bites so that they can be fed to the students one at a time by a teacher, and this leads straight into the traditional paraphernalia of curriculum, hierarchy, and control." The standards movement also narrows the curriculum immensely and in its comprehensive inclusion of benchmarks that need to be taught eliminates an infinite number of types of learning to occur or subjects to be examined.

I simply cannot escape the question: Why that millionth in particular?" Seymour Papert (1993)

"The planning of new educational systems...must not start with the question, 'What should someone learn,' but the question, 'What kind of things and people might learners want to be in contact with in order to learn?'" Ivan Illich (1970)

n each case, people craved a painting that featured a large body of blue water, some open grass, a human figure and a few animals.

the survey results reveal our hard-wired preferences, which developed when we were Pleistocene hunter-gatherers roaming the African savannah. The landscapes we find most beautiful are simply those from which we evolved. If we like paintings with a foreground of short grasses, it's because that habitat contains more protein per square mile than any other, which is a crucial perk for a meat-eating primate.