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 … Continue reading New Book: Essays on History, Writing, and Schooling
This post is an essay I wrote recently and tried to publish in several different venues, without success. So I'm publishing it here on my blog, where editorial standards are a bit more flexible. After spending many years decrying the rampant credentialism in the modern structure of schooling, I'm beginning to think about its possible … Continue reading The Upsides of Credentialism
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
This post is a piece I originally published in a 2000 book honoring David Tyack, Reconstructing the Good in Education: Coping with Intractable American Dilemmas. which was edited by Larry Cuban and Dorothy Shipps. Here's a link to a PDF of the chapter. I republished it as a chapter in my recent book, The Ironies … Continue reading No Exit: Public Education as an Inescapably Public Good
This post is an overview of the book I published two years ago. It’s available on Amazon both as an e-book and a paperback. The title is The Ironies of Schooling. It's available as both an e-book and paperback. As I did with my earlier book, Being a Scholar, I published this one myself using Kindle Direct … Continue reading The Ironies of Schooling
This post is an essay by Carl Hendrick published on his Substack, The Learning Dispatch. Here's a link to the original. In it he develops a pleasingly optimistic argument about the increasing role that humans will have to play in the emerging world of artificial intelligence. Given all the gloom and doom surrounding the subject, I … Continue reading Carl Hendrick — AI Automates Scut Work But Requires Increased Human Supervision
This post is an essay by Katy Purviance from her Substack "the joy of learning." Here's a link to the original. She's exploring an issue that has became increasingly interesting to me: the damage that schooling can do to many students, especially boys (see here and here). The problem is the unnatural process that schooling inflicts … Continue reading Katy Purviance — Schools Don’t Just Fail the Kids Who Struggle. They Are Run by the Kids Who Didn’t.
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 post draws on a discussion I participated in that was published in Comparative Education Review in 2009. It brought together a variety of scholars to comment on a new film about schooling produced by Bob Compton called 2 Million Minutes. The film draws its title from the number of minutes that students around the … Continue reading Schools Should Focus on Producing More Hustlers than Scholars
This post is an essay by Dominic Ng from his Substack, Brain Health Decoded. Here's a link to the original. His argument is that we too often think that consuming content is the same as learning it. And this is particularly true today, when such massive amounts of material are now available to us online. This … Continue reading Dominic Ng — Consuming Content Is Not the Same as Learning It
