average" range. Romesh Ratnesar, writing for TIME, reported on the dispropor- tionate amount of attention and funding going to students with special needs to the neglect of average students who are sometimes referred to as “woodwork chil- dren.Curriculum planners must be careful that attention to the needs of spe- cial groups does not far outstrip attention to the needs of the more numerous average student. 11. The needs of the academically talented or gifted and the slow. In recent times if we have stressed either group, we have catered to the needs of slow learners. Perhaps we as- sumed that the academically talented and the gifted will teach themselves in spite of school. Or perhaps we were guided by statistics; there are more slower students than academically talented (the top fifteen percent) and gifted (the cent). Awareness of the needs of the gifted is coming into vogue once again. 12. Metbods, experiences, and strategies. Teachers should use a mixture of techniques, in- cluding audio and visual media. Some schools rely almost exclusively on the printed word, which runs counter to the population's addiction to mediated learning- films, tapes, television, and the computer. Educators are pointing out the need for computer literacy, for example, and training in the use of the computer. 13. The immediate and the remote in both time and space. Some people would omit the study of ancient history (too remote) or the study of the non-Western world (too distant or irrelevant). In fact, some discount the value of history per se. They would design only sparkling, new, contemporary, "with-it" curricula. In an era of global- ization, people of the twenty-first century need a sense of the roots of civilization combined with an understanding of the many present-day diverse cultures on our shrunken planet.