Creative Curriculum Quotes

A classroom needs to feel like a safe place for both students and teachers. In order for creativity and higher level thinking to be present in the classrooms, a feeling of safety must first be present in the classrooms.

Personalization means teachers taking account of these differences in how they teach different students. It also means allowing for flexibility within the curriculum so that in addition to what all students need to learn in common, there are opportunities for them to pursue their individual interests and strengths as well.

Teachers should encourage students’ creativity. That means that it’s okay for class to get a little wild sometimes. You can’t have creativity without getting a little wild sometimes. That means in our classrooms we should hear lively discussions, insightful debates, engaging conversations, exchanges of ideas, and informative play.

The most important subject in the curriculum in the future years will be how to love ourselves and be content.

Creative, exploratory learning requires peers currently puzzled about the same terms or problems. Large universities make the futile attempt to match them by multiplying their courses, and they generally fail since they are bound to curriculum, course structure, and bureaucratic administration. In schools, including universities, most resources are spent to purchase the time and motivation of a limited number of people to take up predetermined problems in a ritually defined setting. The most radical alternative to school would be a network or service which gave each man the same opportunity to share his current concern with others motivated by the same concern.

Making across the curriculum means students as novelists, mathematicians, historians, composers, artists, engineers—rather than being the recipients of instruction.

I hope, wherever we are, we start to decolonize knowledge production through rekindling that deep and strong spark between the heart and the mind; through understanding that the path to objectivity goes through the painful corridors of subjectivity.

I have never understood the importance of having children memorize battle dates. It seems like such a waste of mental energy. Instead, we could teach them important subjects such as How the Mind Works, How to Handle Finances, How to Invest Money for Financial Security, How to Be a Parent, How to Create Good Relationships, and How to Create and Maintain Self-Esteem and Self-Worth. Can you imagine what a whole generation of adults would be like if they had been taught these subjects in school along with their regular curriculum? Think how these truths would manifest. We would have happy people who feel good about themselves. We would have people who are comfortable financially and who enrich the economy by investing their money wisely. They would have good relationships with everyone and would be comfortable with the role of parenthood and then go on to create another generation of children who feel good about themselves. Yet within all this, each person would remain an individual expressing his or her own creativity.

What shapes the best in us dies when the best education dies! The best in us shall always be undermined when they that are responsible for shaping the best in us are always undermined! I stand for a different education: a different education where students will not just learn books but life! I stand for a different education: a different education where students will not just learn moral principles, but they shall be living examples of moral principles. I stand for a different education: a different education where students don’t just understand what they learn, but practice what they learn with understanding! I stand for a different education: a different education where students will not just learn about people of different beliefs, culture and backgrounds, but how to live with people who don’t share common perspective with them and know how to show their emotions of bitterness and misunderstanding rightly! I stand for a different education: a different education where students will be perfect ambassadors’ of God on earth and live their daily lives with all due diligence! I stand for a different education: a different education where students will understand why we all breathe the same air, sleep and wake up each day in the same manner to continue the journey of life! I stand for a different education: a different education where students will learn with inspiration even in their desperations! I stand for a different education: a different education where teachers are seen as true epitome of education! I stand for a different education: a different education in which the value of the teacher is well understood and the teacher is well valued as a treasure! I stand for a different education: a different education where students will not just learn, but they will reproduce great and noble things with what they learn! I stand for a different education: a different education where students will understand the real meaning of integrity and responsibility and with true courage and humility be that as such! I stand for a different education: a different education where education means creativity! Education is the spine of every nation! The better the education, the better the nation! The mediocre the education, the mediocre the nation! A good nation is good because of how education has shaped the perspective and understanding of the populace! A nation that does not know where it is heading towards must ask the machine that produces the populace who drive the nation: education! Until we fix our education, we shall always have a wrong education and we shall always see a wrong nation!

While the universality of the creative process has been noticed, it has not been noticed universally. Not enough people recognize the preverbal, pre-mathematical elements of the creative process. Not enough recognize the cross-disciplinary nature of intuitive tools for thinking. Such a myopic view of cognition is shared not only by philosophers and psychologists but, in consequence, by educators, too. Just look at how the curriculum, at every educational level from kindergarten to graduate school, is divided into disciplines defined by products rather than processes. From the outset, students are given separate classes in literature, in mathematics, in science, in history, in music, in art, as if each of these disciplines were distinct and exclusive. Despite the current lip service paid to “integrating the curriculum,” truly interdisciplinary courses are rare, and transdisciplinary curricula that span the breadth of human knowledge are almost unknown. Moreover, at the level of creative process, where it really counts, the intuitive tools for thinking that tie one discipline to another are entirely ignored. Mathematicians are supposed to think only “in mathematics,” writers only “in words,” musicians only “in notes,” and so forth. Our schools and universities insist on cooking with only half the necessary ingredients. By half-understanding the nature of thinking, teachers only half-understand how to teach, and students only half-understand how to learn.

It is strange when we expect all students to do well academically and ignore the fact that individuals' abilities vary. If a child/kid/teenager cannot do well in academics and shows signs of distraction, it is an indication that his mind isn't in the strict form and obligations of the school curriculum. His cleverness and creativeness could show in other aspects of life. It could be in arts, sports, photography, computer world, gardening, carpentry, or any other field in life. Judging students' based on their grades and accusing them of failure is an excuse for the limited space the educational system provides to students to succeed in life.

THE SIX-HOUR SEMINAR that Jack was forced to attend at the beginning of each new semester had been called Orientation until a few years ago, when the university changed the seminar’s name to Onboarding. The name change coincided with a revamp of the orientation curriculum, which had bloated into this all-day human resources horror during which members of the HR team attempted, at unmerciful length, to “socialize the mission statement’s DNA,” is how they put it. They were referring to the many-planked mission statement the university had spent two years and countless consultant dollars developing in a campus-wide effort to express everything the university did in just one sentence. This was the brainchild of the university’s new CFO, who told the faculty in all seriousness that developing a mission statement that captured everything the university did in just one sentence was akin to their “moonshot,” and he asked for their help in this endeavor “not because it is easy, but because it is hard.” Why the university needed to corral its collective intelligence and creativity and energy for the task of expressing everything it did in just one sentence was a mystery to most faculty, but this did not stop their administrator bosses from enthusiastically assigning them to “mission statement working groups” so that they could have a voice (unpaid) in developing this one magical sentence, this one statement that would distill everything everyone did into a phrase ideally small enough for letterhead.

I WANT TO end this list by talking a little more about the founding of Pixar University and Elyse Klaidman’s mind-expanding drawing classes in particular. Those first classes were such a success—of the 120 people who worked at Pixar then, 100 enrolled—that we gradually began expanding P.U.’s curriculum. Sculpting, painting, acting, meditation, belly dancing, live-action filmmaking, computer programming, design and color theory, ballet—over the years, we have offered free classes in all of them. This meant spending not only the time to find the best outside teachers but also the real cost of freeing people up during their workday to take the classes. So what exactly was Pixar getting out of all of this? It wasn’t that the class material directly enhanced our employees’ job performance. Instead, there was something about an apprentice lighting technician sitting alongside an experienced animator, who in turn was sitting next to someone who worked in legal or accounting or security—that proved immensely valuable. In the classroom setting, people interacted in a way they didn’t in the workplace. They felt free to be goofy, relaxed, open, vulnerable. Hierarchy did not apply, and as a result, communication thrived. Simply by providing an excuse for us all to toil side by side, humbled by the challenge of sketching a self-portrait or writing computer code or taming a lump of clay, P.U. changed the culture for the better. It taught everyone at Pixar, no matter their title, to respect the work that their colleagues did. And it made us all beginners again. Creativity involves missteps and imperfections. I wanted our people to get comfortable with that idea—that both the organization and its members should be willing, at times, to operate on the edge. I can understand that the leaders of many companies might wonder whether or not such classes would truly be useful, worth the expense. And I’ll admit that these social interactions I describe were an unexpected benefit. But the purpose of P.U. was never to turn programmers into artists or artists into belly dancers. Instead, it was to send a signal about how important it is for every one of us to keep learning new things. That, too, is a key part of remaining flexible: keeping our brains nimble by pushing ourselves to try things we haven’t tried before. That’s what P.U. lets our people do, and I believe it makes us stronger.

Following the practice of the times, the grand princes and, later, the kings of Poland acquired the right of patronage; that is, they could appoint Orthodox bishops and even the metropolitan himself. Thus, the crucial issue of the leadership of the Orthodox faithful was left in the hands of secular rulers of another, increasingly antagonistic, church… The results were disastrous. With lay authorities capable of appointing bishops, the metropolitan's authority was undermined. And with every bishop acting as a law unto himself, the organizational discipline of the Orthodox church deteriorated rapidly. Even more deleterious was the corruption that lay patronage engendered… Under the circumstances, Orthodoxy's cultural contributions were limited. Schools, once one of the church's most attractive features, were neglected. Unqualified teachers barely succeeded in familiarizing their pupils with the rudiments of reading, writing, and Holy Scriptures. The curriculum of the schools had changed little since medieval times. The fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 added to the intellectual and cultural stagnation by depriving the Orthodox of their most advanced and inspiring model. Lacking both external and internal stimuli, Orthodox culture slipped into ritualism, parochialism, and decay. The Poles, meanwhile, were enjoying a period of cultural growth and vitality. Benefiting from the West's prodigious outbursts of creative energy, they experienced the Renaissance with its stimulating reorientation of thought.

Fourth, we must integrate the curriculum by using a common descriptive language for innovation. There is no point in teaching a liberal arts and sciences curriculum that continues to fragment knowledge and creates specialists who cannot communicate across disciplinary lines. Education must focus on the trunk of the tree of knowledge, revealing the ways in which the branches, twigs, and leaves all emerge from a common core. Tools for thinking stem from this core, providing a common language with which practitioners in different fields may share their experience of the process of innovation and discover links between their creative activities. When the same terms are employed across the curriculum, students begin to link different subjects and classes.

Curriculum development is both an art and a science, requiring creativity, expertise, and a deep understanding of pedagogy.

Over the years I have written creative non-fiction related to the curricula I produced, first as an elementary school art instructor, then for nearly two decades as a museum education curator. While any curriculum I wrote was based on facts as well as best and accepted practices, to add imaginative interest and encourage my students’ engagement I put those facts in the context of stories, invented situations that brought to life the remote or unfamiliar

it’s important that the curriculum as a whole has these characteristics. Diversity: It should be broadly based to cover the sorts of understanding that we want for all students and to provide proper opportunities for them as individuals to discover their personal strengths and interests. Depth: It should provide appropriate choices so that as they develop, students can pursue their own interests in proper depth. Dynamism: The curriculum should be designed to allow for collaboration and interaction between students of different ages and teachers with different specialties. It should build bridges with the wider community, and it should evolve and develop in the process.

the founding of Pixar University and Elyse Klaidman’s mind-expanding drawing classes in particular. Those first classes were such a success—of the 120 people who worked at Pixar then, 100 enrolled—that we gradually began expanding P.U.’s curriculum. Sculpting, painting, acting, meditation, belly dancing, live-action filmmaking, computer programming, design and color theory, ballet—over the years, we have offered free classes in all of them.

curriculum committee were not entirely wrong. Death is not a philosophical issue; it is a literary one. And yet, if philosophy

Develop flourishing schools … The purpose of the education system should be to create capable and emotionally well-rounded young people who are happy and motivated. At its heart, education policy must acknowledge that the best way of enabling people to realize their potential is to value them for who they are rather than their measuring their performance against exams and targets. Children have multiple intelligences and all schools should have a strategy to develop pupils’ overall well-being. The curriculum needs to be broadened to include more opportunities around sports, arts, creativity and other engaging activities. An education system which promotes flourishing would lead to higher productivity, a more entrepreneurial society and greater active citizenship.

First, national standards and national curriculum, enforced by high-stakes testing, can at best teach students what is prescribed by the curriculum and expected by the standards. This system fails to expose students to content and skills in other areas. As a result, students talented in other areas never have the opportunity to discover those talents. Students with broader interests are discouraged, not rewarded. The system results in a population with similar skills in a narrow spectrum of talents. But especially in today's society, innovation and creativity are needed in many areas, some as yet undiscovered. Innovation and creativity come from cross-fertilization across different disciplines. A narrow educational experience hardly provides children opportunities to examine an issue from multiple disciplines.

Integrating arts into the curriculum cultivates creativity, self-expression, and emotional intelligence, enriching the learning experience and nurturing well-rounded individuals capable of making meaningful contributions to society.

Enlightenment is possible – for everyone. However, I don‘t think we will all awaken spontaneously in the way contemporary spiritual teachers Krishnamurti or Eckhart Tolle did. Most of us will never experience a voice from on high, a flash of life-altering insight, stigmata, or a transcendent miracle. Anything is possible, but the odds are not in our favor. What these teachers experienced is like winning the lottery. Yet, from the Buddhist perspective, most of us have already won the lottery: against all probability, we have been born as human beings with intact senses and a bit of interest in pursuing something spiritual. This is even more remarkable when we consider the obstacles and temptations of our materialistic culture, in which spirit is thrown out with the bathwater of religious dogma, God is proclaimed dead, consciousness is reduced to epiphenomena of the brain, and life‘s purpose is made a hedonic scramble on a treadmill to nowhere. What is far more likely than sudden enlightenment is gradual awakening. Following a systematic educational process like a college curriculum, gradual awakening builds on incremental insights into who we truly are, learning to care for ourselves and others, and discovering creative ways to engage the problems we all face. This gradual process of awakening doesn‘t offer an escape hatch to another realm of reality or disavow our human wounds, limits, and foibles in this realm; rather it embraces and transforms them, because the only way out is through.

The conventional academic curriculum is focused almost entirely on the world around us and pays little attention to the inner world. We see the results of that every day in boredom, disengagement, stress, bullying, anxiety, depression, and dropping out. These are human issues and they call for human responses.

Divination is not mere fortune-telling or superstition. Rather, it is an exceedingly subtle psychological technique whereby the secrets of the unconscious can be discovered, its powers (extrasensory and others) can be made accessible, and guidance for our confused and disordered lives can be obtained. The most important fact to fix in one’s mind is that there is nothing haphazard or accidental in the universe, and that external events—no matter how seemingly trivial—are intimately related to happenings within the human psyche. Thus, if we learn the art of discovering and interpreting the external signs, we may thereby gain access to the world of inward realities in our own souls and in the soul of the cosmos. The magic of Tarot divination is not in the cards but in ourselves. The cards can and do act as instrumentalities whereby the subjective reality within the unconscious becomes able to project a portion of itself into objective existence. Through this projection, a meaningful and useful relationship or a creative dialogue between the subjective and objective sides of our lives may be established, which is a great accomplishment. Thus divi­nation by means of the Tarot may be defined as a practical way in which a bridge is built between the temporal world of physical events, on the one hand, and the timeless world of the archetypes of the collective unconscious, on the other. It may be useful to recall that divination was considered an important part of the cur­riculum of certain mystery schools, not primarily in order to teach how to foretell the future, but in order to construct a psychic mechanism within the initiate whereby a source of guidance and insight might be made accessible to his conscious self.

Through reading, I have learned that a knowledge-rich curriculum is about developing ‘powerful knowledge’7 in students, that is, knowledge which takes them beyond their day-to-day experiences; knowledge which they would be unlikely to have encountered had they not gone to school. The purpose of learning this powerful knowledge is to develop ‘cultural capital’8, supporting students to play a full and active role in society and to get the most out of life. Not only is such knowledge powerful in itself, it also underpins the development of important skills such as creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving.

Asoka World School is a reputed international school in Kochi affiliated with CBSE. We have a student-friendly environment and has a very interesting syllabus. The STEM enriched curriculum helps to provide an in-depth learning experience for the students. We have a wide range of extracurricular activities for nurturing and developing a child’s creativity and imagination. Asoka World School can be an ideal option for your child. Here are some key reasons why Asoka World School is the best for your kid. Individualized attention in classes: Our student-teacher ratio arrangement is standardised in such a way that teachers are able to give individual attention to each child. Our teachers are well educated, experienced and constantly inspires their students. We follow the golden teacher-student ratio of 1:20. This helps students to gain the concepts of each subject easily hence they become more confident. This also enriches their knowledge, and they get more quality time to interact with their teachers. image Child Safe Environment: At Asoka World School, you will find your child is in extremely safe hands. Our classrooms are aesthetically designed and technologically equipped to disseminate learning through very many fun ways. Asoka World School has a world-class building design, infrastructure, fully integrated wireless network, climate-controlled smart classrooms, security features and no compromise hygiene and safeguarding policy that offers everything you have been dreaming for your child. Updated Curriculums: We have 4 levels of programmes prepared for our children. Foundational - KG - IInd Preparatory - IIIrd - Vth Middle School - VIth - VIIIth Senior School - IXth - XIIth These programs are framed by our school to focus on developing various vital skills in the students. Our teachers adopt a customised teaching approach that can help students of every category. Our flexible curriculum enhances the communication between the teachers and students to a great extent. Our school has result-oriented teaching methods, qualified and responsible teaching staff to help facilitate a learning environment that is both safe and nurturing. As the best CBSE school in Kochi, Asoka World School is a leader in its sector and we hope to continue rising and come out as the best school in Kochi.

Consider this excerpt from a speech delivered in 1940 to the Association for the Advancement of Science by the legendary political philosopher and journalist, Walter Lippmann: ...during the past forty or fifty years those who are responsible for education have progressively removed from the curriculum the Western culture which produced the modern democratic state...the schools and colleges have therefore been sending out into the world men who no longer understand the creative principle of the society in which they must live...deprived of their cultural tradition, the newly educated Western men no longer possess in the form and substance of their own minds and spirits and ideas, the premises, the rationale, the logic, the method, the values of the deposited wisdom which are the genius of the development of Western civilization...the prevailing education is destined, if it continues, to destroy Western civilization and is in fact destroying it. I realize quite well that this thesis constitutes a sweeping indictment of modern education. But I believe the indictment is justified and there is a prima facie case for entering this indictment.

suggest they add more limitations. This is one of the easiest ways to inspire creativity, and it can be done in any learning environment. I find that limiting materials and obvious solutions forces my students to find more creative solutions.

Part of the ambiguity that students need to learn to deal with in the course of their preparation to serve and be served by the present society is that it is a high form of art to ask the right questions. But it is also unrealistic to expect that someone else has answers for them. I said at the outset that many of the questions students have asked me during these days I regard as unanswerable except as one ventures into some experience and learns to respond, in the situation, to the immediate problems one confronts. And to do this one must have learned how to open one’s awareness to receive insight, inspiration, in the moment of need. One must accept that only venturing into uncertainty with faith that if one is adequately prepared to deal with the ambiguity, in the situation, the answer to the questions will come. The certainty one needs to face the demanding situations of life does not lie in having answers neatly catalogued in advance of the experience. That, in fact, is a formula for failure—one is surprised, sometimes demoralized, by the unexpected. Dependable certainty (which we all need a lot of) lies in confidence that one’s preparation is adequate so that one may venture into the experience without pre-set answers but with assurance that creative insight will emerge in the situation when needed, and that it will be right for the situation because it is an answer generated in the situation. A liberal education provides the best context I know of for preparing inexperienced people to venture into the unknown, to face the inexactitude and the wildness, with assurance. But, having said that the conventional liberal arts curriculum is the best context for such preparation, I must also say that it usually does not contain the preparation—and it should.

That means that however funds are raised for community projects, the highest amount goes to educational facilities and teachers. The curriculum would be based on learning what it means to be a human being, or rather, a spiritual being living in a human body/world. Courses taught would include how to develop creativity, what it means to clear the psychological and emotional self, how to be in relationship with others, what steps must be taken to ensure basic needs are met for all souls in physical embodiment, the study of different soul paths for the purpose of understanding the viewpoints and perceptions of each group, etc. Second, resources would be devoted to scientific research and application. Specifically, funding would be allocated for alternative energy projects, agricultural advances, transportation systems, cleanup of the environment, and exploration of the cosmos. Third, emphasis would be placed on cultural advancement, including creative architecture, community gardens, cooperative building and re-building projects, implementation of new economic paradigms including enlightened currencies, and providing of the latest technological systems in every household that desires them (but not necessarily with emphasis on the latest gadgets for hours of mind-numbing entertainment). The priority here is to enable more efficient communication and awareness of world events for all souls. Also, it is important to be sure and include entertainment and down time. Fourth, opportunities would be provided to help individuals express their spiritual freedom. Encouragement and support will be given for souls to build churches, mosques, temples, synagogues, monasteries, healing retreat centers, therapy and holistic bodywork facilities, and more. The truth may be within, but it is helpful to have an outer environment that reflects the inner truth.

Equating obscurity with rigor, while at the same time equating a clear and creative language with lack thereof is one of the most serious ills one faces in Western academia. Neither of these equations are accurate. They are certainly not mutually exclusive. Often feeble minds with mediocre arguments hide behind obscure and convoluted language. I am sure most readers have seen enough examples of clear writing that is profound, deep, and able to convey very complex ideas clearly. We simply must be careful not to confuse complexity with rigor and profoundness, as drunk people mistaken their foolishness for wisdom. Nor should we dismiss a clear language simply because it is conveying the point without unnecessary complexity or beating around the bush.

For me, to decolonize knowledge production does not mean to dismiss or never engage with Western knowledge. Rather, as many decolonial thinkers have repeatedly pointed out, it means that the terms of engagement must change. It means that we should not only engage with Western knowledge, but also deeply engage with knowledge from all over the world. It means that we must not use Western knowledge as a compass to measure the value of other forms of knowledge produced around the world…[T]o decolonize knowledge production is to reject and dismantle the Western hegemony of knowledge production; the Western control on what counts and what does not count as knowledge.

From kindergarten through senior year of high school, Evan attended Crossroads, an elite, coed private school in Santa Monica known for its progressive attitudes. Tuition at Crossroads runs north of $ 22,000 a year, and seemingly rises annually. Students address teachers by their first names, and classrooms are named after important historical figures, like Albert Einstein and George Mead, rather than numbered. The school devotes as significant a chunk of time to math and history as to Human Development, a curriculum meant to teach students maturity, tolerance, and confidence. Crossroads emphasizes creativity, personal communication, well-being, mental health, and the liberal arts. The school focuses on the arts much more than athletics; some of the school’s varsity games have fewer than a dozen spectators. 2 In 2005, when Evan was a high school freshman, Vanity Fair ran an exhaustive feature about the school titled “School for Cool.” 3 The school, named for Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken,” unsurprisingly attracts a large contingent of Hollywood types, counting among its alumni Emily and Zooey Deschanel, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jack Black, Kate Hudson, Jonah Hill, Michael Bay, Maya Rudolph, and Spencer Pratt. And that’s just the alumni—the parents of students fill out another page or two of who’s who A-listers. Actor Denzel Washington once served as the assistant eighth grade basketball coach, screenwriter Robert Towne spoke in a film class, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma talked shop with the school’s chamber orchestra.

In the pages that follow, I lay out the structure for a new curriculum—humanics—the goal of which is to nurture creativity, flexibility, and agency within the infinite situational contexts of life. Humanics builds on people’s innate strengths and prepares students to flourish in a world in which AI works alongside human professionals. And much as today’s law students learn both a specific body of knowledge and a legal mindset, tomorrow’s humanics students will need to master specific content as well as practice uniquely human cognitive capacities. In the chapters ahead, I describe both the architecture and the inner workings of humanics, but here I begin by explaining its twofold nature. The first side, its content, takes shape in what I call the new literacies. In the past, literacy in reading, writing, and mathematics formed the baseline for participation in society. Even educated professionals did not need any technical proficiencies beyond knowing how to click and drag through a suite of office programs. That is no longer sufficient. In the future, graduates will need to build on the old literacies by adding three more—technological literacy, data literacy, and human literacy. People can no longer thrive in a digitized world using analog tools. Assisted by AI, they will be living and working in a constant stream of information and instant generativity. Technological literacy gives them a grounding in how their machines tick. Data literacy enables them to analyze and judge the merit of these ever-rising tides of information. Human literacy teaches them creativity, culture, empathy, and connection, allowing them to flourish in the social milieu.