This post is a 2012 piece I published Journal of Curriculum Studies. Here’s a link to a PDF of the original. This piece is now a chapter in my new book, The Ironies of Schooling. Here's an overview of the story I’m telling: The USA is suffering from a school syndrome, which arises from Americans’ insistence … Continue reading School Syndrome
This post is a classic piece by Karl Marx, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof.” It’s the last section of the first chapter in Capital, volume 1. This analysis had a big impact on me when I first read it in grad school, and it has shaped a lot of my own work. At … Continue reading Karl Marx — The Fetishism of Commodities
This post is a piece I published in Teachers College Record in 2014. Here’s a link to the original. It is now a chapter in my new book, The Ironies of Schooling. It’s an analysis of two major players in the world movement for educational accountability: OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), and the US No Child … Continue reading Let’s Measure What No One Teaches
This post is a collection of some favorite cartoons about the Life of a Doctoral Student. All of them are from the website PhD, which stands for Piled Higher and Deeper. The author is Jorge Cham, who got his PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford and then taught at Cal Tech. Enjoy!
This is an essay about the historical construction of the American meritocracy, which is to say the new American aristocracy based on academic credentials. This essay is included in my new book, The Ironies of Schooling. Here’s a link to the original, which was published 2020 in Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal of the Historiography of Education. An overview … Continue reading Schooling the Meritocracy
This post is a commentary on a classic essay by Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” which appeared in the 1985 book Bringing the State Back In. Here’s a PDF of the original chapter. His essay is a riff on an aphorism he developed earlier: the state makes war and war makes the state. There’s … Continue reading The State as Organized Crime
This post is a lecture I gave at University of Luxembourg in 2011, which was published in a book, edited by Daniel Tröhler and Ragnhild Barbu, Education Systems in Historical, Cultural, and Sociological Perspectives. It draws on material from my 2010 book, Someone Has to Fail. This essay is one of 21 pieces included in my … Continue reading When Is School the Answer to What Social Problems?
My blog post today is a fascinating essay by Isaiah about writing, rhetoric, and Winston Churchill, which was published in the Atlantic in 1949. I find it a rich think piece that works, I think successfully, to rescue Churchill from his critics. Here's a link to the original. He starts with a vicious attack on … Continue reading Isaiah Berlin on Writing, Rhetoric, and Churchill
With this post, I am announcing the publication of my new book, The Ironies of Schooling. It's available as both an e-book and paperback. As I did with my last book, Being a Scholar, I published this one myself using Kindle Direct Publishing. One result is that the book appeared for sale one hour after … Continue reading The Ironies of Schooling
This post is an essay by Sara Weissman that appeared recently in Inside Higher Ed. Here's a link to the original. The title tells the story: More than Half of 4-Year College Grads Are Underemployed. That means they are in jobs that don't require a college degree. More than half of recent four-year college graduates, 52 percent, … Continue reading Sara Weissman — More than Half of 4-Year College Grads Are Underemployed
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 