Creativity begins with an affinity for something. It's like falling in love.

I’d rather see the United States as a beacon of Good Work and Good Citizenship, rather than as #1 on some international educational measurement.

The Goal of Education is to Help People Use Their Minds Better

We've got to do fewer things in school. The greatest enemy of understanding is coverage... You've got to take enough time to get kids deeply involved in something so they can think about it in lots of different ways and apply it.

Hitler didn't travel. Stalin didn't travel. Saddam Hussein never traveled. They didn't want to have their orthodoxy challenged.

Any profession should have norms around the issue you raise. And, in the words of the great economic thinker Albert Hirschman, we all owe a measure of loyalty to professional norms. But when the norms seem unhelpful or unproductive, one needs to speak up - to activate voice. And in the extreme, if the profession and one's colleagues seem estranged from a thoughtfully selected course of action, you need to consider the possibility of exit. Of course, if you knowingly violate norms or laws, you need to be prepared to face the consequences - or to lead a revolution!

The biggest mistake of past centuries in teaching has been to treat all students as if they were variants of the same individual and thus to feel justified in teaching them all the same subjects the same way.