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 … Continue reading College: What Is It Good For?
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 … Continue reading Niall Ferguson — How Complexity Trumps History
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 … Continue reading College — What Is It Good For?
This post is a reflection on Max Weber's "Politics as a Vocation," which he gave in 1919 at Munich University. "Science as a Vocation" is the other famous speech he gave at Munich in 1917, which I posted here three years ago. Compared to the science lecture, it's very long -- 23,000 words -- so … Continue reading Max Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation” and the Role of Professor
This post is a reflection on Edward Slingerland's new book Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization. John Tierney wrote a lovely review of the book in City Journal, which I'm reproducing below. Here's a link to the original. After the review, I provide some of my favorite passages from the … Continue reading Edward Slingerland on How Drinking Is Essential to Civilization
This post is a piece I published two years ago in Aeon. Here’s the link to the original. I wrote this after years of futile efforts to get Stanford students to think critically about how they got to their current location at the top of the meritocracy. It was nearly impossible to get students to consider … Continue reading Pluck and Luck
This post is an analysis of alternative theories for explaining the historical development of American schooling. It was published in 2014 in the Encyclopedia of Educational Theory and Philosophy. Here's a link to a pdf of the original. I wrote it as a way to frame the major theories of schooling for students in my … Continue reading Theories of the Historical Development of American Schooling
This post is a piece by Thomas Edsall published in the New York Times last week. It explores in detail the recent literature about the role that declining social status has played in the rise of right-wing populism in the US and elsewhere. Here's a link to the original. The argument is one that resonates … Continue reading Thomas Edsall: The Resentment that Never Sleeps
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 … Continue reading College: What Is It Good For?
Today I am posting a piece I wrote in 1995. It was the foreword to a book by David K. Brown, Degrees of Control: A Sociology of Educational Expansion and Occupational Credentialism. I have long been interested in credentialing theory, but this is the only place where I ever tried to spell out in detail … Continue reading How Credentialing Theory Explains the Extraordinary Growth in US Higher Ed in the 19th Century
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 