This post is an essay by Steven Mintz, published recently in his Substack, which I highly recommend. Here's a link to the original. It's the story of how the 1930s produced a distinct and new American voice. Not in the ornate cadences of the 19th century, nor in the provincial slang of earlier popular culture, but … Continue reading Steven Mintz — The Decade That Discovered a Distinct American Voice
This post is an analysis of alternative theories for explaining the historical development of American schooling. It was published in 2014 in the Encyclopedia of Educational Theory and Philosophy. Here's a link to a pdf of the original. I wrote it as a way to frame the major theories of schooling for students in my … Continue reading Theories of the Historical Development of American Schooling
This post is an essay by Chris Sibben, which appeared recently in his Substack Mere Orthodoxy. Here's a link to the original. In it he addresses what for me is the key challenge that artificial intelligence poses for education. AI illuminates a problem at the core of the educational enterprise, which is the danger that education … Continue reading Chris Sibben — A Hollow Crown: AI and the Formation of Students
This post is a tribute to the Normans and how they came to shape modern Europe. It draws primarily from the book The Normans: From Raiders to Kings by Lars Brownworth and also from an essay in Unherd by Ed West. The Normans were Vikings who in the ninth century conquered a piece of France … Continue reading How the Normans Shaped Modern Europe
This post is an op-ed by Harvard undergrad Aden Barton, which was published a few years ago in the Harvard Crimson. Here's a link to the original. To see the graphs he refers to, click on the link. The essay explores the reasons for the recent surge in careerism among Harvard undergraduate as a way … Continue reading Aden Barton — How Harvard Careerism Killed the Classroom
Social media provide a wide open space for social exchange and personal expression. This openness is both its strength and its weakness. Anything is possible, and in practice nearly everything does indeed take place online. For anyone entering into this space, you have to choose your online persona. Now that I've been posting on this … Continue reading Thoughts On My Online Persona
Good writers tell stories. This is just as true for academic writers as for novelists and journalists. The story needs actors and actions, and it needs to flow. A sentence is a mini-story. Each sentence needs to flow into the next and so does each paragraph. When readers finish your paper, they need to be … Continue reading Academic Writing Issues: Failing to Tell a Story
This post is a brief commentary on historian Walter Scheidel's book, Escape from Rome. It's a stunningly original analysis of a topic that has long fascinated scholars like me: How did Europe come to create the modern world? His answer is this: Europe became the cauldron of modernity and the dominant power in the world … Continue reading How the Fall of the Roman Empire Spurred the Rise of Modernity — and What this Suggests about Rise of US Higher Ed
