The oil merchant tycoon J. Paul Getty was an avid art collector and took his passion to extraordinary heights with the building of the Getty Villa. Off the Malibu coast in the dry Californian hills, he commissioned the building of a palace modelled on that of a Roman patrician’s palace in Herculaneum. Not only is the building a sublime replica of a Roman villa, it contains a wonderful collection of Greek and Roman statues which Getty purchased, mainly in the South of Italy, with passionate attention to detail.

There’s much to be said about museums, and not all of it is positive, since they are an ideologically and philosophically problematic assertion of decontextualised and frequently stolen works crowded in a slightly ersatz setting. I’ve often felt, wandering through the Louvre or the Prado, mild symptoms of the so-called Stendhal syndrome, a type of dizziness created by the sheer concentration of art. In fact, after an hour or two, no one can seriously take in yet more art, especially when it is crammed in such an industrial, exhibitory fashion. This is why it’s often more pleasant to view a single work, or a few, in their original setting, like Caravaggio’s paintings in the churches of Rome or the magnificent Colossi of Memnon in Luxor. In any case, I take little pleasure in viewing obelisks in the middle of Paris, Rome or London and even less the Elgin marbles packed in a type of curio shop of Graeco-Egyptian relics in the British museum only to find the frieze of the Acropolis’ Parthenon in Athens bare!

The comparison with education is simple: too often our curricula are jam-packed with items of decontextualised knowledge, sequenced in such a manner that the experience of incorporating all that information is neither ergonomic nor particularly enjoyable. It’s a kind of conveyor belt of transmission, forcing learning disparate “units” in a concentrated setting, ending with the fairly brutal episode of very high-stakes and narrow assessments which are equally compressed. Getty’s Villa, on the other hand, contains two extremely powerful lessons on the curation of art and, by analogy, the creation of curriculum design.

First, the aestheticism. Between the tall cypress and carefully planted pomegranate trees, the wistful stone pines, bronze statues in hedged gardens, marble-floored peristyles, fountains and gorgeous views of the Pacific Ocean, some of the most sumptuous sculptures, urns, and mosaics have been assembled at the Villa. One can stroll in and out of the spaces, from an exhibition hall to an outdoor cloister to a reconstructed temple at the end of a breezy vista. The whole experience has been crafted meticulously and lovingly, meaning that there is a harmony and construction in the viewing. This is how curriculum should be organised, as a story, with powerful concepts that cohere with one another, as an aesthetic experience that takes the learner on an unforgettable journey. In my philosophy classes I always teach the ancient Greeks within the overriding concept of the “Arche” – the fundamental stuff of the universe, and African thought systems such as Ubuntu and the Yoruba cosmology within the conceptual framework of ancestry and spirit, to make the learning flow like a narrative, to give the students some pleasure and interest in the story rather than the lesson. This is also why I’ve always been in favour of giving the history of the subject and some intriguing anecdotes about the people involved in whatever we teach. It’s pretty boring to simply hammer out science, mathematics, the arts and the humanities without some of the fascinating details of the lives and passionate stories behind the findings.

Instead, too often curriculum design treats learning it as a type of incoherent and strictly utilitarian assembly of subjects timetabled incongruously next to one other like an ugly city with buildings from different times dumped jarringly side by side with no urban planning, no rhyme or reason. This is why units of inquiry (although I’m not in love with the term “unit”) and transdisciplinary or interdisciplinary learning experiences are preferable to mere topic coverage: there is an architecture, a structure. It is the svelteness and elegance of cogency that makes the Getty Villa so much more than a simple museum and almost forces anyone strolling through it to slow down and appreciate everything around them as a whole.

Second, the fact that the villa is a reconstruction, carrying with it, of course, the hubris and potential kitsch that such an ambition announces, is nonetheless something that plunges you into the past wholly and remarkably, as if you were living as a Roman during the Roman period itself. Everything has been lavishly restored, the colours are vivid and alive. It is nothing of the grey and broken atmosphere of a ruin or the funereal, high-ceilinged abstractness of a museum for the sake of a museum. You feel transported to the South of Italy and at least 2000 years back in time. Likewise, curriculum should be contextualised in such a way that the imagination is plunged into its world. It should be relevant and vivacious to the learner just as standing on the beach means that you feel the salt of the sea on your face. It is the power and the imagination of the teacher who can do this, by evoking the universe of the subject and not just the content matter, by bringing the curriculum to life.

Whenever I speak at an assembly for students (and by the way, assemblies are part of the curriculum, please make sure they are not boring), there will be a story, and I always make sure that the story is framed in a setting with atmosphere, details, smells and textures, so that it does not come across as inert and dry information but rather as a psychic experience. This helps students connect with the information and remember it. Too often we rush from one lesson to another and “there is not enough time” to discuss the history of the subject because we have to “get through” what’s on the test. And yet, without the storytelling and the musical pacing, without the ability to slow down and unpack the wonderful anecdotes and intrigues within the history of the subject, without the necessary time etched out to focus and bring out some of the character of the subject matter, the enterprise can be fairly stagnant and uninspiring to the imagination. So very often, we need to stimulate the imagination for deep learning to occur.

The Getty Villa is a true gem and reminds all of us in education of the importance of beauty, and context; that curriculum is not an exercise on paper but a living, active phenomenon that, if assembled the right way, can have a deep and transformational effect on the mind and spirit.