This post is a short piece I just published in Insider Higher Ed. Here's a link to the original. Scholarship Thrives on Peripheral Vision Don’t be limited by what’s straight ahead, David Labaree writes The problem with scholarly focus is that it leads where you intend to go. And this is a problem because … Continue reading Scholarship Thrives on Peripheral Vision
This is my first ever Pollyanna post. I wrote it last year in order to cheer myself about the world we live in. I think it still stands up. We Live in the Best of Times We seem to be in a world … Continue reading We Live in the Best of Times — Really
This post is an op-ed written by Deborah Malizia and me that was published on December, 2022 in the Mercury News. Here's a link to the original. It's about how the pressure for rigor and high academic achievement in American schools has been damaging the mental health of students. Another example of schooling's role in … Continue reading Schools Are at the Root of the Youth Mental Health Crisis
This post is a reflection on Max Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation,” which he gave in 1919 at Munich University. “Science as a Vocation” is the other famous speech he gave at Munich in 1917, which I posted here a few years ago. Compared to the science lecture, it’s very long — 23,000 words — so … Continue reading Reflections on Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation” and the Role of the Professor
This post is a piece I wrote for Kappan, published in the March 2020 edition. Here’s a link to the PDF. It was also reprinted in my latest book, The Ironies of Schooling. Bureaucracies are often perceived as inflexible, impersonal, hierarchical, and too devoted to rules and red tape. But here I make a case for these characteristics … Continue reading Two Cheers for School Bureaucracy
This post is 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, drawing on my book, A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education. The idea is that a key to understanding the strong public support that … Continue reading How Football Helped Make US Universities Great
on Getting It Wrong — Rethinking a Life in ScholarThis post is an overview of my life as a scholar. I presented an oral version in my job talk at Stanford in 2002. The idea was to make sense of the path I’d taken in my scholarly writing up to that point. What were the … Continue reading Getting It Wrong — Rethinking a Life in Scholarship
This post is a reflection on one particular component of the practice of teaching — the need for each teacher to construct an authentic and effective teacher persona. In the first part of the post, I draw on a section from chapter five of my book, Someone Has to Fail. In the second part, I explore the … Continue reading Teacher Persona
This post is the text of a lecture I gave in 2013 at the annual meeting of the John Dewey Society. It was published the following year in the Society's journal, Education and Culture. Here's a link to the published version. The story I tell here is not a philosophical … Continue reading College — What Is It Good For?
This is an essay that is published in my recent book, Being a Scholar: Reflections on Doctoral Study, Scholarly Writing, and Academic Life. For years, I'd been thinking about writing a piece about college teaching and I finally put it down on paper a couple years ago. Everyone complains about the quality of college teaching, … Continue reading College Teaching Is Better than You’d Expect
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 