This post is an essay by Larry Cuban about how educational policy is a mix of policy from above and the pedagogical orientations of individual teachers and the choices they make in the classroom. Here's a link to the original. Kindergarten Teachers as Policymakers Larry Cuban Watching a policy travel from the White House, a … Continue reading Larry Cuban — Kindergarten Teachers as Policymakers
This post is a reflection on the conflicting worldviews that reformers and teachers use in trying to understand teaching and learning in classrooms. It draws on the insights from one of my favorite books, James Scott's Seeing Like a State. The text itself comes from chapter 5 of my book, Someone Has to Fail. The … Continue reading Insights from James Scott about the Conflicting Worldviews of Reformers and Teachers
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
on Course: School — What Is It Good For? This post is the syllabus of a course I taught for years at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. It’s called "School — What Is It Good For?" I’ve copied the syllabus below, to give you an idea of what it’s all about. The aim is … Continue reading Course Syllabus: School — What Is It Good For?
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 classic piece by Karl Marx, "The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof." It's the last section of the first chapter in Capital, volume 1. This analysis had a big impact on me when I first read it in grad school, and it has shaped a lot of my own work. … Continue reading Karl Marx — The Fetishism of Commodities
Last summer I posted a classic lecture by the great German sociologist, Max Weber, "Science as a vocation." Recently I ran across a terrific essay by George Blaustein about Weber's vision of the modern world, drawing on this lecture and two other seminal works: the lecture "Politics as a Vocation" (delivered a year after … Continue reading Blaustein: Searching for Consolation in Max Weber’s Work Ethic
This post is the syllabus of a course I taught for years at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. It's called School -- What Is It Good For? I've copied the syllabus below, to give you an idea of what it's all about. The aim is to provide a guided exploration of alternative theories of … Continue reading Course: School — What Is It Good For?
This post is a brief commentary on historian Walter Scheidel's latest book, Escape from Rome. It's a stunningly original analysis of a topic that has long fascinated scholars like me: How did Europe come to create the modern world? His answer is this: Europe became the cauldron of modernity and the dominant power in the … Continue reading Escape from Rome: How the Loss of Empire Spurred the Rise of Modernity — and What this Suggests about US Higher Ed
This post contains all of the material for the doctoral proseminar -- Introduction to Big Issues in the Field of Education -- that I taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Education for the last four years. The aim of this class is to give first-year doctoral students in education a grounding in some of … Continue reading Doctoral Proseminar: An Introduction to Big Issues in the Field of Education
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 