Cameron Hilditch — Why Meritocracy Makes Us Miserable

This post is a piece by Cameron Hilditch that appeared in the latest National Review.  Here's a link to the original. I've been exploring the problems with the meritocracy in this blog a lot in last two years, but of late I haven't been running into pieces that provided a fresh take on the subject …

David Cohen — Teaching Practice: Plus Ca Change

This post is a classic essay by David Cohen.  The version I'm reproducing here comes from a conference paper he prepared for the Benton Center at University of Chicago.  Here's a link to the original.  An earlier and shorter version was published as a chapter in 1988 in a book edited by Philip Jackson, Contributing  …

Why We Obsess about the Goals of Schooling even though Schools Continually Fail to Meet These Goals

This post is a paper I presented in 2008 at the annual meeting of the research group on the Philosophy and History of the Discipline of Education, Catholic University, Leuven, Belgium.  The theme of the papers for this meeting was "Proofs, Arguments, and Other Reasonings: The Language of Education."  The paper was published in a …

Garry Wills on the History of the Venetian Empire

This post is a reflection on the peculiar history and social structure of imperial Venice, drawing on a 2013 book by Garry Wills, Venice: Lion City -- The Religion of Empire.   On the surface of it, Venice was the unlikely hub of an empire. It was a city-state with a small population and no sizeable …

Schools Should Focus on Producing More Hustlers than Scholars

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 Two Million Minutes.  The film draws its title from the number of minutes that students around the …

McClay — A Distant Elite: How Meritocracy Went Wrong

This post is an essay by Wilfred M. McClay, published in Hedgehog Review in 2016. which explores the problems with meritocracy.  Here's a link to the original.  This is an issue I've explored a lot in this blog (see the list here), and I'll be coming back to it again from time to time. It's …

Pinker — Why Academics Stink at Writing

This post is a classic piece about academic writing by Stephen Pinker, which was originally published in 2014 in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Here's a link to the original.  It's a summary of his book from the same year, A Sense of Style.  Pinker provides an astute analysis of the factors that make academic writing …

Progressivism and Ed Schools — An American Romance

This post is the revised version of an invited lecture I gave in 2003 at the 25th annual meeting of the International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE) in Sao Paulo, Brazil. It was later published in Paedagogica Historica; here's a link to the PDF. It's the the of the love affair between …

The Five-Paragraph Fetish

Skip toThis is a piece I published in Aeon two 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. The Five-Paragraph Essay Writing essays by a formula was meant to be a step on the …