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
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 recent 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 reminder about my most recent books. As a retired guy with time on his hands, I decided -- what the hell -- to self-publish three books in the last three years. Kindle Direct Publishing makes this possible. I thought it might be useful to put together collections of my papers and … Continue reading Three Books
This post is an essay by Matthew Pittinsky, a sociologist of education who founded the ed tech company, Blackboard. Here's a link to the original. In it he assesses the value of my work for people in the field of educational technology, where he has constructed his career. I'm flattered by his praise, but I … Continue reading Matthew Pittinsky — Three Books, by One Author, that Every EDTech Entrepreneur Should Read…and Why
This post is an opinion piece that Deborah Malizia and I just published in Hechinger Report. Here's a link to the original. It builds on two earlier op-eds (here and here) we did about the negative impact of schooling on American students. OPINION: The standards-driven pressure cooker of public education is the real crisis we must address … Continue reading Labaree and Malizia –The Standards-Driven Pressure Cooker of Public Education Is the Real Crisis We Must Address
This post is an essay by Chris Sibben, which appeared recently in his Substack Mere Orthodoxy. Here's a link to the original. In it he addresses what for me is the key challenge that artificial intelligence poses for education. AI illuminates a problem at the core of the educational enterprise, which is the danger that education … Continue reading Chris Sibben — A Hollow Crown: AI and the Formation of Students
This post is a piece I published a few years ago in Kappan. Here’s a link to the original. It’s a response to an essay by Jal Mehta proposing a new US grammar of schooling, and it refers to a piece I wrote for Kappan with my take on understanding the roots of this grammar. In my response … Continue reading The Attractions of Doing School
