96 Teaching Minds A story-centered curriculum is intended to teach cognitive pro- cesses, not subjects. Subjects are, of course, covered, but they are not really the point. Certain things need to be done again and again in life, but those things can be learned only in context, not as an ab- straction. Different contexts must be provided in order to motivate students and to provide real-world skills that will be remembered, not because they were studied and tested, but because they were practiced again and again. What is life like in a story-centered curriculum? The first ones we built were built as master’s degree programs at Carnegie Mellon’s new West Coast campus. Here is Max Soderby, a mentor in the first one of those master’s programs, talking about his experience: Iam almost jealous in a way because I see that they are gaining skills more rapidly than I gained them when I was a student in Pittsburgh at CMU’s campus. They get exposure to things that we just talked about in a lecture hall, whereas they are actually doing it: implementing actual software and putting designs into practice. We mostly did homework and talked about it in a lecture hall. So I am jealous in that respect. It is also a lot more work, but that work pays off for the students. Subject-based education is not really supposed to be training for work. I once proposed to the president of Yale (Bart Giamatti) that we build a master’s degree program in an area of computer science that would help get people jobs after graduation. He said that that was training and that Yale does not do training. The academic subjects taught at Yale are meant to produce scholars. But, in a way, he was very wrong. Yale does do training. Yale and almost all other colleges are divided into departments, and a major in a department’s subject typically is seen by the faculty as preparation for an academic career in that subject. The students may well have a different point of view, however. Unfortunately, they