Whenever people try to create divisive standards or curricula, it quickly becomes a very heated discussion. I remember when the national curriculum was introduced in the UK, there was a lot of debate not about whether Shakespeare should be included; but which play. Education is a high-stakes cultural process, and this is something we have to recognise given how important cultural identity is in a precarious world; indeed many of the major conflicts that continue to plague humanity have cultural origins rather than economic. In America just now, there's been a problem where kids have not been completing high-school- I hesitate to use the word drop-out as this implies they've failed the system where, in fact, it's often the other way round- kids are just disengaging. As soon as we treat education as an impersonal process... a mechanistic and data driven process... as soon as we lose sight of the fact that we're dealing with living, breathing human-beings then education ceases to be anyt