How Design Can Change the Classroom -- and the World

By Marty Michaels

In the gift shop of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, here on Manhattan's "Museum Mile," visitors can find the type of beautiful, pricey objects they would expect the museum to sell — a $405 wall clock, a $110 baby rattle, a $44 sake glass. Form is function, function form, and the overall atmosphere is dignified and quiet, as befits a museum housed in a 64-room mansion on Fifth Avenue built for Andrew Carnegie.

But mere steps from the shop, down a metal staircase,