This post is the text of a lecture I gave in 2009 at the University of Berne. It was originally published in the Swiss journal Zeitschrift für Pädagogische Historiographie and then found its way into my 2010 book, Someone Has to Fail. Here is the link to the first published version. It’s about a longstanding problem in American … Continue reading What Schools Can’t Do
This is an op-ed I published in the Detroit News way back in 1998. It captures a key part of the argument about educational consumerism that I developed in my second book, How to Succeed in Schools Without Really Learning. And now it's a chapter in my new book, The Ironies of Schooling. EDUCATIONAL CONSUMERISM: BAD FOR SCHOOLS … Continue reading Educational Consumerism
This post is a recent essay by Peter Gray published on his Substack, Play Makes Us Human. Here's a link to the original. He is a research professor of psychology at Boston College, who has written a number of books about the importance of free play for children. Like me, Gray is concerned that we over … Continue reading Peter Gray: The Toxic Consequences of Attending a High-Achieving School
This post is a piece I that came out in 2021 as a chapter in a book edited by Kyle Steele, New Perspectives on the Twentieth Century American High School. The book was published by Palgrave Macmillan as part a series edited by Bill Reese and John Rury on Historical Studies in Education. Here is a link … Continue reading Politics and Markets: The Enduring Dynamics of the US System of Schooling
This post is a piece I published in 2021 in Kappan. Here’s a link to the original. It is now a chapter in my new book, The Ironies of Schooling. In this essay, I explore an issue about the “grammar of schooling” that bothered me over the years as I was teaching about this subject. … Continue reading The Dynamic Tension at the Core of the Grammar of Schooling
This post is a paper I published Educational Theory in 2008. Here’s a link to the original. In is included as a chapter in my new book, The Ironies of Schooling. In this essay, I examine the paradox of educationalization in the American context. I argue that, like most modern Western societies, the United States has displayed a … Continue reading The Winning Ways of a Losing Strategy: Educationalizing Social Problems in the US
This post is a 2012 piece I published Journal of Curriculum Studies. Here’s a link to a PDF of the original. This piece is now a chapter in my new book, The Ironies of Schooling. Here's an overview of the story I’m telling: The USA is suffering from a school syndrome, which arises from Americans’ insistence … Continue reading School Syndrome
With this post, I am announcing the publication of my new book, The Ironies of Schooling. It's available as both an e-book and paperback. As I did with my last book, Being a Scholar, I published this one myself using Kindle Direct Publishing. One result is that the book appeared for sale one hour after … Continue reading The Ironies of Schooling
This post is a piece I published in Kappan in 2000. Here’s a link to the PDF. It’s an analysis of why Americans have long resisted setting educational standards. Of course my timing wasn’t great. Just one year later, the federal government passed the landmark No Child Left Behind law, which established just such a system of standard mandates. Oops. This … Continue reading Resisting Educational Standards
This post is the text of a lecture I delivered in 2019 in Japan at Kyoto University and Keio University. It draws on the second chapter of my book, Someone Has to Fail (which has been translated into Japanese), and at the end I try to bring the analysis up to the present. The advantage … Continue reading From Citizens to Consumers: Evolution of Reform Rhetoric and Consumer Practice in the U.S.
