Focus on Policy: For the Sake of Heaven: Locating Standards

This essay addresses issues central to educational discourse in the United States by calling on texts and forms of inquiry generally unfamiliar and often unrecognized in current conversations regarding schooling and education, the Jewish tradition of Talmudic studies. Although Rabbis in this tradition never doubted the necessity of standards, their advocacy of them in the Talmudic context offers a perspective distinct from that prevalent in our current, often contentious, conversations. The essay contains a brief history of the idea of curricular standards and some thoughts about what it means, as suggested by the issue theme, to “locate” standards.