Today I'm posting a wonderful essay by Daniel Markovits about the social consequences of the new meritocracy, which he published in Hedgehog Review. Here's a link to the original. As you may recall, last fall I posted a piece about his book, The Meritocracy Trap. In this essay, Markovits extends his analysis of the role … Continue reading Daniel Markovits: Schooling in the Age of Human Capital
This post is a reprint of a piece I published in Quartz in 2017. Here’s a link to the original. It’s an effort to explore the distinctively populist character of American higher education. The idea is that a key to understanding the strong public support that US colleges and universities have managed to generate is their ability to reach beyond … Continue reading Nobel Prizes Are Great, but Football Is Why US Universities Rule
In this post, I reproduce a seminal essay by Michael Katz called "Public Education as Welfare." It was originally published in Dissent in 2010 (link to the original) and it draws on his book, The Price of Citizenship: Redefining the American Welfare State. I encountered this essay when I was working on a piece of … Continue reading Michael Katz — Public Education as Welfare
This lovely essay explores the most common question that modernity prompts strangers to ask each other: What do you do? The author is the philosopher Alain de Botton, who explains that this question is freighted with moral judgment. In a meritocracy, what you do for a living is not just your job; it's who you … Continue reading Alain de Boton: On Asking People What They Do
This post is a recent piece by Michael Massing from the New York Times. Here's a link to the original. The piece consists entirely of a remarkably inclusive list of common cliche's used by writers in English. An impressive display, I think you'll agree. As all writers know, it's hard to avoid using cliches. A cliche … Continue reading Michael Massing: Avoid These Cliches Like the Plague
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 