This is a piece I published in Aeon years ago about the persistence of the five-paragraph essay, which has evolved into the five-chapter dissertation and the five-section journal article. Formalism reins supreme. Here’s the link to the original. It's now a chapter in my book, Being a Scholar. The Five-Paragraph Essay Writing essays by a formula … Continue reading The Five-Paragraph Fetish
This piece is an essay about my life in scholarship and some of the lessons I learned from it. It was written in mid career, after publishing The Trouble with Ed Schools, and it first appeared in print as the introduction to a 2005 book called Education, Markets, and the Public Good: The Selected Works of David … Continue reading Adventures in Scholarship
This post is a piece I wrote a few years ago, something I've been meaning to write for years. An alternative title is: "School -- Can't Live With It, Can't Live Without It." It's now a chapter in my 2024 book, The Ironies of Schooling. Here's a link to a pdf of the chapter. School … Continue reading School Gave Me the Creeps
This post is a piece I published in History of Education Quarterly in 2006. Here's a link to the original, complete with footnotes. It's an elaboration on the presidential address I presented at the annual meeting of the History of Education Society in October, 2005. It then became a chapter in my 2017 book, A … Continue reading Mutual Subversion: A Short History of the Liberal and the Professional in American Higher Education
This post is a piece I published in 2020 in the Chronicle Review. Here’s a link to the original. It’s about an issue that has been gnawing at me for years. How can you justify the existence of institutions of the sort I taught at for the last two decades — rich private research universities? These institutions … Continue reading How Not to Defend the Research University
This post is a talk I gave earlier this week -- Boys Are Falling Behind: Overschooling Is the Reason. Here's a LINK to the slides. Below is a brief overview of the argument, but I recommend looking at the slides to get the full story. Males are increasingly falling behind in our educational system Compared to … Continue reading Boys Are Falling Behind — Overschooling Is the Reason
This is an essay about the historical construction of the American meritocracy, which is to say the new American aristocracy based on academic credentials. Here's a link to the original, which was published 2020 in Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal of the Historiography of Education. It is republished in my new book, The Emergent Genius of American … Continue reading Schooling the Meritocracy: How Schools Came to Democratize Merit, Formalize Achievement, and Naturalize Privilege
This is a piece I published in Aeon in October, 2017. It provides an overview of my book that came out that year, A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education. It’s a highly improbable rags-to-riches story, in which the US system of higher education went from pitiful in the 19th century to powerful in the … Continue reading Rags to Riches: How US Higher Ed Went from Pitiful to Powerful
This is a piece I published in 2012 in Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education. It draws on my experience over the years working with doctoral students in education. The advice, basically, is to approach your apprenticeship in educational research doing the opposite of what everyone else tells you to do. Hope you like it. SERMON ON EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH … Continue reading Sermon on Educational Research
This is an essay about the historical construction of the American meritocracy, which is to say the new American aristocracy based on academic credentials. This essay is included in my new book, The Ironies of Schooling. Here’s a link to the original, which was published 2020 in Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal of the Historiography of Education. An overview … Continue reading Schooling the Meritocracy
