Initial teacher education programmes, in order to comply with the requirements for teacher registration, are usually expected to introduce student teachers to the mandated curriculum. Often this is done uncritically, so students tend to accept rather than examine the underlying epistemological model which partitions knowledge into distinct "pillars of wisdom". But there is little agreement over how knowledge is to be partitioned, which raises the question of if it can be partitioned at all. A different philosophical model--holism--is proposed based on the metaphor of a spider's web, and the Queensland "New Basics" project is given as an example which fits this alternative approach. A second problem is in the overcrowding of the curriculum and here Project 2061 offers a set of robust criteria for making rational decisions about curriculum content.