What If Napoleon Had Won at Waterloo Today I want to explore an interesting case of counterfactual history. What would have happened if Napoleon Bonaparte had won in 1815 at the Battle of Waterloo? What consequences might have followed for Europe in the next two centuries? That he might have succeeded is not mere … Continue reading What If Napoleon Had Won at Waterloo
This post is an essay by Julien Lie-Panis from a recent edition of Aeon. Here's a link to the original. He's addressing a problem that is suddenly quite salient in the world of Trump2. Institutions make social life possible, but they depend on in formal social pressures: norms not laws. Past presidents behaved themselves because … Continue reading Julie Lie-Panis on Guarding the Guardians — How Institutions Make Social Life Work
This post is an essay I recently published in Kappan. Here's a link to the original. I also presented these ideas in a talk. Here's a link to the PowerPoint slides of that talk. The story is in the title. See what you think. Americans are overschooled By David F. Labaree | Mar 9, 2026 | Backtalk No … Continue reading Americans Are Overschooled
This post is a lovely essay by Michael Lind, which was published in Tablet magazine. Here's a link to the original. In this piece, Lind provides a rich analysis of the history of the American elite. The key to this story is that the elite used to be plural -- a set of local elites … Continue reading Michael Lind — The New American Elite
This post is a piece I wrote a couple years ago. I tried unsuccessfully to publish in five different venues and gave up, so I'm posting it here. It is also republished in my book, Being a Scholar. I focus on an issue that I've been thinking about for quite a while: How to understand … Continue reading Universities Give Away Knowledge and Sell Degrees
This post is an essay by Carl Hendrick -- The Blind Regulator: Ashby's Law and the Unavoidable Logic of Instructional Design. It appeared in his Substack, The Learning Dispatch, which I highly recommend. Here's a link to the original. In it he addresses a central problem facing systems of instruction. Here's the short version: "If learners … Continue reading Carl Hendrick — The Blind Regulator: Ashby’s Law and the Unavoidable Logic of Instructional Design
This post is an opinion piece that Deborah Malizia and I just published in EdSource. Here's a link to the original. This analysis builds on two previous op-eds that we published over the last several years: Schools Are at the Root of the Youth Mental Health Crisis School’s Shift from Community to Competition Can Harm … Continue reading How Our Education System Fuels Our Political Divides
This post is a recent essay by Steven Mintz about how to teach students to write effectively. It appeared in his Substack, which I strongly recommend. Here's a link to the original. It's a natural follow-up to my last post. "The Five-Paragraph Fetish." He talks about the difference between teaching writing based on rules compared to … Continue reading Steven Mintz — Learning to Write Like AI, and Then Beyond It
This is a piece I published in Aeon years ago about the persistence of the five-paragraph essay, which has evolved into the five-chapter dissertation and the five-section journal article. Formalism reins supreme. Here’s the link to the original. It's now a chapter in my book, Being a Scholar. The Five-Paragraph Essay Writing essays by a formula … Continue reading The Five-Paragraph Fetish
The post is an essay by Eli Stark-Elster from his Substack. Here's a link to the original. His argument is that -- although there's a lot of talk now about the damage that social media are doing to children and major efforts to ban social media use for anyone under 16 -- there's a bigger … Continue reading Eli Stark-Elster — School Is Way Worse for Kids than Social Media
