New Book: Essays on History, Writing, and Schooling

This post is the announcement of my new book, Essays on History, Writing, and Schooling.  It’s a collection of essays that I published on this blog since its start in 2019.  It is the fourth in a series of books that I self-published in the last four years using Kindle Direct publishing. 

I produced this book in spite of the overwhelmingly tepid consumer demand for the first three volumes.  Academics are accustomed to writing books that no one buys, so I didn’t listen to the market’s voice telling me to stop doing so. 

Putting out a book through Amazon is easy, free, and remarkably fast.  Publishing a book through a university press is a project that takes several years.  First there’s a book proposal, which is sent out of review and requires revisions before I get a contract.  When I finish the manuscript, it’s also sent out for review and leads to more revisions before being accepted by the press.  Then it goes through copyediting and more revisions, followed by page proofs that need to be corrected.  And finally, at long last, the book comes out in hard back at a substantial price.  

With my four Amazon books, the process has been speedy and seamless.  No reviewers telling me to write the book they would have written, no editor asking for revisions, no copyedits or proofs, and a price that only needs to be a little higher than the cost of printing.  And since I’m drawing on previously published work, developing the manuscript only requires me to copy and paste essays into a Word document.  Then I go on KDP, design my cover, upload the Word document, and press the button labeled “Publish.”  The digital version is available on Amazon in an hour or so and the paper version can be bought on the following day.  Books are produced on print-to-order, so there’s no inventory cost; and you can make any corrections you want after publication, with the changes appearing immediately.  Not bad, huh?

Below is the book’s introduction, which includes summaries of its 22 chapters.

 

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Introduction

This book is a collection of pieces I wrote over the last few years and posted on my blog David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing at davidlabaree.com.  I’ve also included a few articles published in a variety of other venues that were not reprinted in other books of mine.  It made sense to pull them together into a single volume, to make them more accessible to readers.

I started my blog in 2019, three  months after I retired as a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education.  I was following in the footsteps of my friend and colleague, Larry Cuban, who started his own blog at the point of retirement.  For me, the blog was a way to continue exercising my teacher voice outside the classroom.  It gave me the opportunity to explore the interests that I had long been pursuing, personally and professionally, and to express them in a form that could potentially reach a larger audience than I had as a teacher.  I’m a sociologist who has sought to explore the peculiar nature of the American system of education from a socio-historical perspective.  I also loved reading history of all kinds, as an escape from the often tedious and underwhelming literature in education.  (No one reads academic journal articles for the fun of it.)  And I’ve also had a longstanding passion for good writing in both fiction and nonfiction.  I tried to put all those pieces together during my career as a teacher, and the blog allowed me to keep doing so without the constraints that come with a formal curriculum and the norms of academic publishing.  Writing this blog has been liberating for me: free at last!

This book is the fourth in a series of books that I self-published in the last four years using Kindle Direct publishing.  The first three were largely collections of essays, book chapters, journal articles, and op-eds that I wrote over the course of my career and had never published in a book of my own: Being a Scholar: Reflections on Doctoral Study, Scholarly Writing, and Academic Life (2023), The Ironies of Schooling (2024), and The Emergent Genius of American Higher Education (2025).  Since my career was in the field of education studies, they all focus on issues around teaching, schooling, school organization, educational history, and higher education.  In this book the focus is on the work I posted on my blog, so there is a heavier weighting toward history and writing.

The essays here were written at different times and for different purposes.  So I have not tried to weave them together in a single story running through this book but instead simply clustered them into rough categories and left them in their original form.  As a result, you’ll find a fair amount of repetition, as central themes keep popping up in different chapters.  So it is less a book to be read from cover to cover than a collection of essays to be explored as you see fit.  Feel free to skip around and look for things you are interested in rather than plowing through from beginning to end.  I’m hoping some of these essays will be useful for teachers to use in class, for students to draw on in their studies, and for others to consider as they ruminate about these issues.[1]

Part I: History

       1. War! What Is It Good For?

This essay is a commentary on the 2014 book by Stanford classicist Ian Morris, War! What Is It Good For?  In it he makes the counter-intuitive argument that over time some forms of war have been socially productive.  In contrast with the message of 1970s song by the same name, war may in fact be good for something. The central story is this.  Some wars lead to the incorporation of large numbers of people under a single imperial state.  In the short run, this is devastatingly destructive; but in the long run it can be quite beneficial.  Under such regimes (e.g., the early Roman and Chinese empires and the more recent British and American empires), the state imposes a new order that sharply reduces rates of violent death and fosters economic development.  The result is an environment that allows the population to live longer and grow wealthier, not just in the imperial heartland but also in the newly colonized territories.  For most people, enjoying relative peace and prosperity within an empire is a lot better than the alternative.  But for the future global population as a whole, the greatest benefit may come from a sustained competition among warring states, which spur the breakthrough innovations that have produced history’s most dramatic advances in peace and prosperity.  In this sense, even the unproductive wars of the feudal period may have been productive in the long run.  Once again, war was the answer.

2. What If Napoleon Had Won at Waterloo 

This essay explores what would have happened if Napoleon Bonaparte had won in 1815 at the Battle of Waterloo.  The story revolves around two different Napoleons: the general and the ruler.  As a general, he was one of the greatest in history, who conquered or controlled most of Western Europe.  As a ruler, however, Napoleon looks quite different.  In this role, he was the agent of the French Revolution and its Enlightenment principles, which he succeeded in institutionalizing within France and spreading across the continent.  What followed his loss was a century of reaction across the continent of Europe. The Bourbons were restored and the liberal gains in Germany, Spain, Austria and Italy were rolled back.  These regimes persisted until the First World War, which they precipitated and which eventually brought them all down.  But if Napoleon had won at Waterloo, this history would have played out quite differently.  The existence proof of a modern liberal state in the middle of Europe would have shored up reform efforts in the surrounding monarchies and headed off the reactionary status quo that finally erupted in the Great War that extinguished them all.

3. The Beneficent Buffoon – The Case of Napoleon III

History is full of ironies.  One is that sometimes buffoons can be more beneficent national leaders than great men.  A case in point is Napoleon III.  Unlike his uncle of the same name, he was an overdressed twit who had a knack for bumbling into unnecessary wars in Crimea, Italy, Mexico, and Algeria, culminating in a devasting defeat by Prussia, whose troops marched into Paris and deposed the hapless emperor.  However, Louis Bonaparte’s heart was not in making war but in liberal reform, modernizing France, and support for the working class.  As a liberal reformer, he did some amazing things.  His most visible gift was the complete remaking of the city of Paris, which at the time he took power was a collection of medieval villages with narrow, filthy streets, no sanitation or running water, and an appalling death rate.  He turned it into the magnificent modern city that we all love, with broad boulevards, expansive squares, and stunning buildings.  At the same time, the vast rebuilding of the capital put many tens of thousands of the unemployed to work. Louis Napoléon also introduced farsighted job-creation and old-age pension schemes for the working class, not to mention mandatory education at the primary school level.  Sometimes it’s the doofus who does good.

4. We Live in the Best of Times

 We seem to be in a world that is overwhelmed with bad news.  War, terrorism, global warming, political dysfunction.  So let’s pause for a moment and consider just how lucky we are to be living in the present age.  The simple truth is that nearly everything is better now for human beings than it used to be.  And the progress has been remarkably recent.  The standard of living in Europe fell after the end of the Roman Empire and stayed at a low level until the dramatic inflection point of 1800, with the start of the industrial revolution, when all indicators of well-being began to skyrocket.  You can see the transformation in a series of hockey-stick graphs, that turn from horizontal to near vertical.  All the good stuff shot up: income, longevity, quality of life, health, and education.  And all the bad stuff went down: violence, murder rates, disease, and poverty.  In all the ways that matter, things are better now than they have ever been.  No sane person today would want to live in any era in the past, where nearly everything was worse.  

5. The Triumph and Tragedy of the Byzantine Empire — How It Preserved the West and Devastated the East 

The Byzantine Empire, though dismissed as “oriental” by later Western scholars, was the continuation of the Roman Empire and endured for more than 1,100 years, from Constantinople’s founding in 330 to its Ottoman conquest in 1453. Its political stability, wealth, education, and cultural achievements contrasted sharply with Western Europe’s post-Roman decline. Byzantine emperors preserved centralized authority, resisted aristocratic domination, maintained widespread literacy, and sustained Greek and Roman intellectual traditions. Justinian’s legal reforms, Byzantine art, architecture, and preservation of classical texts profoundly influenced later European civilization. Byzantium also shielded Western Europe from repeated invasions by Muslim armies and Asian nomadic peoples. This defensive role gave Western kingdoms time to survive and develop. Yet the empire’s success had an unintended negative effect. By preserving centralized imperial rule in the East, Byzantium prevented the political fragmentation that, despite causing poverty and insecurity, forced Western European states to compete and innovate. Rivalry encouraged advances in military technology, commerce, political institutions, individual rights, and economic organization, eventually producing modernity and Western global dominance. Thus, Byzantium both preserved Western civilization and contributed to Eastern Europe’s later relative stagnation.

6. The State as Organized Crime

This essay is an elaboration of two key insights by Charles Tilly: the state makes war and war makes the state; and a state is a stationary bandit.  He argues that modern states emerged largely as unintended consequences of rulers’ efforts to wage war. In early modern Europe, monarchs competed to finance, equip, and sustain increasingly large armies. To do so, they centralized administration, raised taxes, weakened local nobles, hired professional soldiers, and built bureaucracies capable of mobilizing money and manpower. State formation was therefore less a deliberate social project than a byproduct of military competition. Tilly compares this process to organized crime. Like a protection racket, the state offers security from external and internal threats while compelling residents to pay for that protection. The crucial difference is that states claim legitimacy and seek a monopoly over violence. War making, policing, banditry, piracy, and extortion thus exist along a continuum, with governments representing the most institutionalized and legitimate form of coercive extraction. As wars became more expensive, states expanded their fiscal and administrative capacities. Political concessions, including parliaments and certain liberties, helped rulers secure taxation and military participation. War also produced a ratchet effect: emergency wartime increases in government spending and organization often remained after peace returned. Although this process helped create modern European states and civilian institutions, Tilly warns that it does not reliably produce stable government elsewhere. In many contemporary client states, military organizations dominate civilian institutions, making the analogy between government and organized crime disturbingly relevant.

7. How the Normans Shaped Modern Europe 

The Normans, descendants of Vikings who settled in northern France, became one of medieval Europe’s most transformative peoples. After adopting the French language, Christian culture, and mounted warfare, they developed into formidable conquerors and administrators. William the Conqueror’s victory at Hastings in 1066 brought England under Norman rule, initially through brutal repression, land seizures, heavy taxation, castles, and aristocratic replacement. Yet Norman rule also abolished slavery and fused French with Anglo-Saxon, helping create the English language. Norman expansion extended far beyond England. In France, Italy, Sicily, and the Mediterranean, Norman adventurers replaced fragmented rulers with more centralized kingdoms. In Sicily, they governed pragmatically, retaining Arab and Greek administrators, encouraging trade, tolerating religious diversity, and creating the Mediterranean’s wealthiest state. Their conquests weakened Byzantine and Muslim power in Italy and Sicily, strengthened the papacy, and helped prepare the Reconquista and Crusades. The Norman era coincided with Europe’s population growth, urbanization, expanding trade, technological innovation, guild formation, communes, Gothic architecture, renewed classical learning, vernacular literature, Roman-law revival, and the founding of universities. By the twelfth century, Europe had shifted from a fragmented, defensive region into a more unified, confident, and expansive society. The Normans’ military energy and political state-building helped establish centralized kingdoms that later supported Europe’s global rise. Despite their violence, they were crucial catalysts of modern European development.

Part II: Writing

8. Mrs. Bridge: On the Quiet Desperation of Ordinary Life

This essay is about an overlooked classic of American literature, which I stumbled upon by accident through an old essay by Tom Cox.  It’s the debut novel by Evans Connell, Mrs. Bridge, which was published in 1959.  It’s unlike anything I’ve ever read.  The sheer simplicity of Connell’s prose is paralleled by the simplicity of the life he depicts.  It’s a novel in which nothing happens and yet everything is at stake.  It’s a model of how muted writing can pack overwhelming emotional power.  And it’s the only example I’ve ever encountered in which a man in his 30s is able to vividly portray the inner life of a middle-aged woman.  The structure of the book is unique — a collection of 117 short chapters, some only two or three pages long, which dole out brief vignettes in the life of the most ordinary of women.  As I read, I kept waiting for something dramatic to happen and yet kept reading anyway as I got increasingly drawn into Mrs. Bridge’s experience of her life.  Her husband provides security but cannot offer emotional presence.  She’s surrounded by people yet has no meaningful community. She senses that the world is changing but retreats toward preserving the familiar.  Time passes without purpose, while she waits for an unnamed event that might make life feel real.  At the very end of the book, with her husband dead and her children alienated, Mrs. Bridge decided to get in the car and go for an errand.  She backed part way out of the garage when the engine died, and she found herself unable to open the car door.  She calls out, “‘Hello? Hello out there?’ But no one answered, unless it was the falling snow.”  That’s the last line of the book.

9. Catch-22 

This essay is an appreciating of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), one of all-time favorite books. Set during World War II, it follows bombardier Yossarian, whose overriding mission is survival rather than military success.  He confronts Catch-22: you can escape combat if you’re insane, but anyone who seeks exemption is obviously sane.  Through absurd bureaucracy, circular logic, and grotesque humor, Heller exposes war as institutional madness.  Characters such as Colonel Cargill, Major Major, General Peckem, Milo Minderbinder, and Colonel Cathcart embody incompetence, vanity, profiteering, and the abuse of authority.  The hospital, paradoxically, offers Yossarian greater sanity than the world outside, where men die pointlessly and commanders increase missions for personal advancement.  Heller’s nonlinear structure and repeated foreshadowing gradually reveal the trauma beneath the comedy.  The recurring image of Snowden whispering, “I’m cold,” culminates in the horrifying account of his death after being wounded inside his flak suit.  The only thing Yossarian could do was to keep repeating, “There, there.  There, there.”

10. Getting Off to a Fast Start

The introduction to a paper or book is critically important.  This is where you try to draw in readers, tell them what you’re going to address, and show why this issue is important.  It’s also a place to show a little style, demonstrating that you’re going to take readers on a fun ride.  I explore two exemplary cases of opening strong, one is from a detective novel, the other from an academic book.  If you want to see how to draw in the reader quickly, a good place to look is the work of a genre writer.  Authors who make a living from their writing need to make their case up front – to catch readers in the first paragraph and make them want to keep going.  Elmore Leonard is a master of the fast start, as we can see in the opening page of his novel, Glitz.  But some academic writers are quite good at this as well, as we can see in the opening page of sociologist Philip Jackson’s book. Life in Classrooms.

11. Elmore Leonard and the Art of Setting the Scene

A key skill of a strong writer is the ability to deftly set the scene for the reader, to show rather than tell you about a character in a novel or a key issue in a research paper through a single vivid vignette.  No one is better at this than the novelist Elmore Leonard.  The case in point is his book, Be Cool.  The protagonist is Chili Palmer, a loan shark from back east who heads to Hollywood to collect on a marker; but what he really wants is to make movies.  As a favor, he looks up a producer who owes someone else money, and instead of collecting he pitches a story.  The rest of the story is about the cinematic mess that ensues.  In this vignette, Chili runs into a minor thug floating in a backyard swimming pool.  In the larger story this is a nothing scene, but it’s stunning how Leonard turns it into a tour de force.  In a virtuoso display of writing, he shows Chili effortlessly take apart the thug while also mesmerizing him.  Chili the movie-maker rewrites the scene as he’s acting it out and then directs the thug on the raft how to play his own part more effectively.

12. Writing Is All About Actors, Actions, and Cutting the Flab 

This essay is about two key elements in good writing, one of which is to focus on actors and actions.  Who’s doing what to whom?   In academic writing, the actors are often not people but social entities – bureaucracy, racism, curriculum, schools, universities – but the principle is the same.  Some force or factor or person is exerting an impact on some process or structure or outcome.  I explore some the key elements that help make prose more agentic and active.  A second key element of good writing is to remove the flab from your sentences.  Flab is any verbiage that is nonessential in telling your story.  These superfluous words and phrases create barriers that make it more difficult for readers to understand what you’re trying to say.  Academic writers tend to be bad at both of these skills.  I point readers toward an online resource for checking for flab in a text, Helen Sword’s Writer’s Diet.  When I paste a piece of prose from the sociologist Talcott Parsons into Sword’s website, the resulting analysis is devastating.  Try doing the same with a piece or your own writing – or of your least favorite scholar.

13. Wit and the Art of Writing

Wit is notoriously difficult to analyze, and any effort to do so is likely to turn out dry and witless.  But two recent authors have done a remarkably effective job of trying to make sense of what constitutes wit and they manage to do so wittily.  That’s a risky venture, which most sensible people would avoid like Covid.  In this essay I explore their insights into the nature and value of witty writing, drawing on the books Wit’s End by James Geary and Humour by Terry Eagleton.  Geary shows that, instead of avoiding ambiguity, as academics are wont to do, wit revels in it, using paradoxical juxtaposition to shake you out of a trance and ask you to consider an issue from a strikingly different angle.  Eagleton shows how humor gives us license to be momentarily freed from the shackles of reason and order, a revolt of the id against the superego.  But the key is that reason and order are quickly restored, so the lapse of control is risk free.  One problem with academic writing in particular is that it takes itself too seriously.  It pays for us to keep our wit about us as we write scholarly papers, acknowledging that we don’t know quite as much about the subject as we are letting on.  Conceding a bit of weakness can be quite appealing.  Oscar Wilde: “I can resist anything but temptation.”

Part III: Schooling 

14. The Problems that Accountability Metrics Pose for Schooling

 

This essay is my preface to J.M. Beach’s book – Can We Measure What Matters Most? – which critiques the accountability movement that has reshaped American and global education.  Beginning with U.S. curriculum standards in the 1970s, intensifying after A Nation at Risk in 1983, and becoming federal policy through No Child Left Behind, the movement defines educational success primarily through standardized test scores. Internationally, PISA reinforces this approach by ranking countries according to average performance.  Accountability and educational equity are legitimate goals.  Schools should serve students effectively, reduce the influence of social background on achievement, and prepare young people for democratic, economic, and social participation. However, narrow metrics undermine these purposes.  One major problem is Goodhart’s law: when a measure becomes a target, it is no longer a valid measure.  Pressure to raise scores encourages teaching to the test, producing higher measured performance without necessarily improving learning.  More fundamentally, standardized tests assess only limited subjects and cannot capture broader educational aims such as citizenship, creativity, motivation, social development, or meaningful opportunity.  Students must be motivated to learn, and effective teaching depends on relationships, professional judgment, and adaptation to individual needs. Top-down mandates therefore obstruct rather than support teachers.  Schools need resources, autonomy, and trust—not intensified pressure from simplistic metrics.

15. Theories of the Historical Development of American Schooling

This essay is an analysis of alternative theories for explaining the historical development of American schooling.  I wrote it as a way to frame the major theories of schooling for students in my classes.  The frame is organized around four polar tensions that animate these theories and distinguish them from each other: socialization and selection; consensus and conflict; function and agency; and substance and form.  Each theory is grounded in the work of a particular scholar.

Meritocratic functionalist theory: function, socialization, consensus, substance, Durkheim

Social reproduction theory: selection, function/agency, conflict, substance, Marx

Status-competition theory: selection, conflict, agency, form, Weber

Postmodern theory: selection, conflict, disciplinary power, form, Foucault

16. Why We Need Histories of Education

History of education, like history more generally, continually struggles to inform contemporary policy without simply becoming its tool.  How can we mine history selectively in order to meet our current needs without doing history a gross injustice?  We should aim to construct the history of education that we need at this historical moment, but we should not construct the history that we and our contemporaries want.  This means providing what we need to know and not what we want to hear – a history that is relevant but not necessarily convenient.  Such a history will make all parties to the debate both more informed and less confident – and that includes the historians themselves.  To do this the historian needs to be an iconoclast (seeking to shatter convenient fictions and reigning metaphors), a realist (focusing on the effects rather than intents of school reforms), and a resurrectionist (reconsidering fallen idols in light of current problems).

17. Scholarship Thrives on Peripheral Vision

The problem with scholarly focus is that it leads where you intend to go.  And this is a problem because when you get there, you’re likely to find that your destination isn’t all that interesting.  In practice, scholarship is not about effectively carrying out a plan but about exploring a terrain and developing the plan that is warranted by what you discover in that terrain.   The need to open ourselves to perspectives that are beyond the scope of our established conceptual frameworks is what calls for us to deploy our peripheral vision.  As I used to tell my students, the book you’re looking for may not be the one you need to read, which may be farther down the shelf.

18. The Attractions of Doing School 

            This essay is a response to an essay in Kappan by Jal Mehta proposing a new US grammar of schooling.  In he refers to a piece I wrote earlier about the roots of this grammar.  Here I explore why it’s risky to try to transform this grammar in the interest of deeper learning, since it meets so many normative and practical needs of schools and families.  For students and their families, the most compelling concern is for schooling to provide them with opportunities for social advancement. Learning is great but getting a good job and thereby living a comfortable life is higher in priority. The current grammar provides a proven pathway toward status attainment even if this comes at the expense of a rich and enjoyable learning experience. So a key message to reformers of the grammar is, don’t mess with my kid’s future. Better the devil you know than the angel you don’t.

19. Americans Are Overschooled

            Americans spend a very long time in school, which exercises excessive control over young people’s development. Schools are expected to solve nearly every social problem, from unemployment and inequality to health and criminality, encouraging the belief that more schooling is always better. However, prolonged schooling and tightly managed schedules deprive children of free time, independence, informal play, work experience, and opportunities to learn through personal mistakes. Constant parental supervision and organized activities leave young people simultaneously lonely and overregulated, preventing them from developing resilience and self-reliance. This may especially disadvantage boys, whose energy and activity conflict with rules requiring stillness and obedience. More broadly, schools reward compliance and discourage risk-taking, teaching students to avoid failure rather than recover from it. Since innovation, productivity, and social progress depend on initiative and resilience, reducing schooling’s dominance might ultimately help children become genuinely better educated and more capable of navigating adult life.

20. Schools Should Focus on Producing More Hustlers than Scholars

American schools are often portrayed in the media as being less effective that schools elsewhere, particularly in Asia, where students perform better on tests of how well they mastered the formal curriculum.  At the same time, the American economy is the most productive in the world.  I argue that focusing so heavily on learning the school curriculum is in fact counterproductive, undermining the social and even economic benefits that come from schooling.  Maybe the lesson from this is that it is dangerous to take school too seriously, for both individuals and societies. The result of an intensive focus on academic learning may be, at the individual level, a generation of stressed‐out students and, at the societal level, an accumulation of academic skills and knowledge that are not especially functional for modern political, social, and economic life. It may turn out to be advantageous for a society to have an American‐style educational system, which discounts academic learning and encourages students to game the system.

21. Know It Before You Mess with It: How the American System of Education Works

Educational reformers and technology developers must first understand how the American education system actually functions before trying to change it.  Because the system is historically complex, decentralized, and resilient, reforms focused on isolated problems often produce unintended harm.  American education emerged without a central plan and remains distributed across states, districts, schools, colleges, and autonomous institutions.  The system serves competing purposes: democratic equality, social efficiency, and social mobility.  As social mobility has become dominant, education increasingly emphasizes credentials – grades, credits, and degrees – rather than genuine learning.  Students therefore learn to pursue and sometimes manipulate measurable merit badges, illustrating Goodhart’s law: when a measure becomes a target, it is no longer a valid measure.  The system is also loosely coupled, meaning its levels and institutions retain substantial independence.  This makes reform difficult but protects local judgment and prevents widespread failure.  The resulting inefficiency can support effectiveness, because teaching requires flexibility, relationships, and adaptation rather than standardized delivery.  Competency-based programs and AI may make schooling easier and credentialing faster while reducing deep reading, writing, reflection, and understanding.  Education is not a setting where it makes sense to follow the longstanding Silicon Valley motto: “Move fast and break things.”

22. The Upsides of Credentialism 

Credentialing is the formal process through which schools award grades, credits, and degrees as evidence of learning and use them to allocate students to jobs and further education. In theory, this supports meritocracy: capable individuals receive desirable positions, while society gains skilled workers and citizens.  Credentialism, however, occurs when these academic “badges” become more important than genuine learning. Students therefore have an incentive to maximize credentials with minimal effort by cheating, manipulating teachers, studying only what’s likely to be on the test, or using artificial intelligence.  Education becomes a competition for points rather than an opportunity for intellectual development, weakening both learning and the meritocratic system.  But consider the possible benefits.  Students’ efforts to game the system can give them agency and autonomy within an educational structure that tightly regulates their time, movement, behavior, and choices.  School is an unnatural institutional environment, a daily grind in which children are separated from families, organized by age, governed by bells and rules, and required to complete standardized tasks.  For students gaming the system serves as a jail break.  And for society, it helps cultivate independence, initiative, and entrepreneurship.

[1] Out of sheer laziness, I used ChatGPT to produce many of the chapter summaries below.  You’ll be able spot the AI entries easily because of the change in voice.  Pangram says 25% of this intro is written by AI.