Tell me if you think this sounds familiar: in its latter years (500-700 ace), the roman empire faced a formidable challenge from two devastating environmental forces — dramatic climate change and massive epidemic. As mark twain is supposed to have said, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” During our own bout of climate … Continue reading Resilience in the Face of Climate Change and Epidemic: Ancient Rome and Today’s America
This post is a piece by Meira Levinson and Daniel Markovitz that was published recently in Atlantic. Here's a link to the original. It's an astute analysis of the harmful effects of the pandemic on American schooling. They argue that only part of the damage was done by school closures. A lot of the harm … Continue reading Levinson and Markovitz — The Biggest Disruption in the History of American Education
This post is a piece by Ethan Hutt (an education professor at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), which was originally published in Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education. Here's a link to the PDF. In this essay, he explores the way in which the Covid experience has revealed an ailment that has long … Continue reading Ethan Hutt — The Sickness in Our Schools
{This piece was originally published in the San Jose Mercury News in July, 2020. Here's a link to the original.] The current covid-19 pandemic has shown a lot of things that are wrong in American society, including terrible leadership, a frail social safety net, and a lack of investment in public goods. But one that … Continue reading The Triumph of Efficiency over Effectiveness: A Brief for Resilience through Redundancy
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 