New York’s Board of Regents has chosen David Steiner as New York’s new education commissioner, EdWeek reported earlier this week. Steiner’s move to Albany comes after four years as dean of Hunter College’s School of Education.
Why are we happy with the regents’ pick? Because Steiner is widely known for his commitment to a rigorous, comprehensive curriculum, and he has published quite a bit on the subject.
Don’t take our word for it, though – read how Steiner describes his schoolboy days:
“I read the classics as they were then understood—Austen, Brontë, Chaucer, Conrad, Dickens (not a favorite), Eliot, Hardy, Lawrence, Milton (sampled, and put aside for years to come), Mann, Kafka, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Flaubert, Zola—and many authors of the second rank. I recall Trollope, Webster, Spencer, “modern” novelists of every hue—Fitzgerald, Roth, Updike, Nicholas Monsarrat, Storm Jameson (a close family friend), John le Carré—and so many others lost to memory.”
We’ll be watching with interest.