Commentary on James Sweet’s Essay about Historical Presentism

This post is a commentary on an essay by James Sweet, president of the American History Association, which appeared recently on the AHA site, along with an author's note in which he responds to the intensely hostile reaction his essay provoked from other historians on social media in just the two days after the original …

The Lust for Academic Fame

This post is an analysis of the engine for scholarly production in American higher education.  The issue is that the university is a unique work setting in which the usual organizational incentives don’t apply.  Administrators can’t offer much in the way of power and money as rewards for productive faculty and they also can’t do …

Suzannah Lipscomb — The History of Curse Words in English

This post is a short essay about language by Suzannah Lipscomb, which was recently published in History Today. Here's a link to the original. In it she traces the history of curse words in English. In medieval English, the most offensive  expletives were profanities.  More recently they became obscenities. Don't miss the first documented use of …

The Dynamic Tension at the Core of the Grammar of Schooling

This post is a new piece I published last year in Kappan.  Here’s a link to the original. In this essay, I explore an issue about the “grammar of schooling” that bothered me over the years as I was teaching about this subject.  The concept was originally introduced by David Tyack and William Tobin in …

Niall Ferguson — How Complexity Trumps History

This blog post is a recent essay by Niall Ferguson published in the Washington Post. Here's a link to the original. The prompt for the essay is the current surge in inflation and the difficulty of trying to predict how this round of inflation will develop over time.  But the most interesting part is the way …

Writing as an Exercise in Arrogance and Humility

This post is a piece of mine that was published last year in Inside Higher Ed.  Here’s a link to the original. It's about an inherent tension in the act of writing between arrogance and humility. An Exercise in Arrogance and Humility To be a good academic writer, you must deploy a judicious mix of two …

David Brooks — On the Art of Humblebragging

This post is a piece by David Brooks that was published recently in Atlantic.  Here's a link to the original.  It's all about the art of humblebragging, which is rampant on twitter and other social media platforms but which has been a core skill for many years among academics. The whole point of humility display is …

College — What Is It Good For?

This post is the text of a lecture I gave in 2013 at the annual meeting of the John Dewey Society.  It was published the following year in the Society's journal, Education and Culture.  Here's a link to the published version.            The story I tell here is not a philosophical …

Steven Mintz — Most Kids Find K-12 Education Boring and Stressful

This post is a lovely essay by Steven Mintz, which was published in January in Inside Higher Ed.  Here's a link to the original.  It connects with a piece I posted here a couple weeks earlier, looking at the way schools turn off students and what college might do to improve their own ability to engage …