This post is a piece I wrote recently about an issue that's been on my mind for a while. Here's a link to the article, and here's a link to the slide talk I gave on the subject. The story is in the title. You Don’t Need to Kill Yourself Trying to Get into the Ivies: … Continue reading You Don’t Need to Kill Yourself Trying to Get into the Ivies
This post is an essay by Adam Kirsch from the Atlantic. Here's a link to the original. It's the most heartening piece I've read about the crucial role for human creativity in the grim new world of artificial intelligence. As he points out, the rise of photography created a crisis for painters, who found that … Continue reading Adam Kirsch — Why AI Can Never Replace Human Ingenuity
This post contains all of the material for the class on the History of School Reform in the US that I taught for at the Stanford Graduate School of Education for 15 years. In retirement I wanted to make the course available on the internet to anyone who is interested. If you are a college … Continue reading History of School Reform Class Syllabus with Links to Readings and Slides
This post is an essay by Dominic Ng from his Substack, Brain Health Decoded. Here's a link to the original. His argument is that we too often think that consuming content is the same as learning it. And this is particularly true today, when such massive amounts of material are now available to us online. This … Continue reading Dominic Ng — Consuming Content Is Not the Same as Learning It
This post is piece was originally published in Aeon in December, 2018 (a British publication, thus the spelling). Here's a link to the original. It is an analysis of the engine for scholarly production in American higher education. The issue is that the university is a unique work setting in which the usual organizational incentives … Continue reading The Lust for Academic Fame
This post is an essay by Michael Elliott recently published in Atlantic. Here's a link to the original. In it he explores a topic dear to my heart, that college -- and intellectual life in general -- should be experienced as a form of play. It's not a chore that you need trudge through out a … Continue reading Michael Elliott — College Should Be Way More Fun
This post is an overview of my life as a scholar. I presented an oral version in my job talk at Stanford in 2002. The idea was to make sense of the path I’d taken in my scholarly writing up to that point. What were the issues I was looking at and why? How did … Continue reading Getting It Wrong — Rethinking a Life in Scholarship
This post is an essay by Steven Mintz from his Substack, which I highly recommend. Here's a link to the original. He starts with a tribute to the golden age of the Broadway musical, showing how it emerged from a particular immigrant culture with its own emotional register. As the culture changed, this style of musical … Continue reading Steven Mintz — Why We Cannot Recreate the Broadway Golden Age
This post is a piece I wrote for Kappan, published in the March 2020 edition. Here’s a link to the PDF. It was also reprinted in my recent book, The Ironies of Schooling. Bureaucracies are often perceived as inflexible, impersonal, hierarchical, and too devoted to rules and red tape. But here I make a case for these characteristics … Continue reading Two Cheers for School Bureaucracy
This post is an essay by my favorite Substack author, a philosophy professor at a regional state university in Pennsylvania, who has a wonderful pen name: Hilarius Bookbinder. Here's a link to the original. In this essay, he explores the way in which the rise of AI on college campuses has exposed the credentialing game … Continue reading Hilarius Bookbinder — The End of Credentialing
