This post is a recent piece by Sam Leith about Prince Harry's recent foray into the PR business, published in Unherd. Here's a link to the original. The British royal family is a blogger's gift that keeps on giving. I certainly can't resist, as you can see from these recent posts: here, here, and here. … Continue reading Sam Leith — Harry, the Prince of PR
This is a new piece of mine, which has been brewing for a while. This issue is to figure out what role histories of education should play in the formation of educational policy. My short answer is that we should produce the histories we need rather than the histories we want. See what you think. … Continue reading Why We Need Histories of Education
This post is a recent piece by the Washington Post education columnist, Jay Mathews. Here's a link to the original. What I love about this column is the succinct way in which Mathews skewers the entire school standards movement. The targets we use for student learning, he says, are not things that students will ever … Continue reading Jay Mathews — We must dump marginal learning standards and other annoyances in return to classrooms
This post is a recent piece by Matthew Yglesias from his Substack site Slow Boring. Here's a link to the original. It's part of an ongoing series of posts here about the problems of meritocracy (for example, this, this, this, and this.) As Yglesias notes, most critiques of meritocracy are focused on the failures of … Continue reading Matthew Yglesias — Meritocracy Is Bad
For years, I've been thinking about writing a piece about college teaching now finally got it down on paper. Everyone complains about the quality of teaching colleges, and there's a lot of truth in the critiques. But what has struck me over the years is how college teaching is better than it should be in … Continue reading How Much of a Problem Is College Teaching? Less than You’d Expect
This post is an essay by Hilary Mantel published in London Review of Books in 2013. Here's a link to the original. I love this piece for two reasons. First, it's a stunning piece of writing by one of the great writers in the English language. If you've never read her trio of novels about … Continue reading Hilary Mantel — Royal Bodies
This post is a 2007 piece by Malcolm Gladwell published in the New Yorker. Here's a link to the original. In this piece, the author does a full Gladwell. He runs through the social science literature about a topic around an intriguing interpretive angle. Here the issue is to figure out what IQ really measures. … Continue reading Malcolm Gladwell on What an IQ Test Really Measures
This post is a 2012 piece I published Journal of Curriculum Studies, which draws on my book Someone Has to Fail. Here's a link to a PDF of the original. An overview of the story I'm telling: The USA is suffering from a school syndrome, which arises from Americans’ insistence on having things both ways … Continue reading School Syndrome: Understanding the USA’s Magical Belief that Schooling Can Somehow Improve Society, Promote Access, and Preserve Advantage
This post is a piece by Angus Fletcher about the limitations of artificial intelligence. In it he argues that computers can do a lot of amazing things that would stump simple humans, but they can't write a good novel. Here's a link to the original in NAUTILUS. The core of his argument is this. Computers … Continue reading Angus Fletcher — Why Computers Will Never Write Good Novels
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 