To the Editor:
Your article essentially mirrored my experience when I recently visited one of the city's intermediate schools, hired as a consultant to a team of seventh-grade teachers essentially given a green light to effect change.
There is a need for a new curricular synthesis -- one that asks students to use their current sensibilities to examine both the present and the past. We do not have to choose one or the other, giving some children classical educations while entertaining others.
Curriculum reform needs to be based on our best thinking about what to teach, how to teach it and why to teach it. Without such information, the only reason students seem able to offer for learning what they acquire in school is that one day they might be contestants on ''Jeopardy.'' We can do better than that.
School of Education, Queens College