This post is an essay by Hrishikesh Joshi, a philosophy professor at University of Arizona.  It comes from his Substack, Desert Philosophy.  Here's a link to the original. He's dealing with an issue that has increasingly drawn my interest.  It's something that we in the 21st century too often forget.  In our focus on the multiple problems in our current time, we fail to recognize how much better off we are in every possible way than people living just a few centuries before us. 

North-South Italy redux

This is a piece I wrote about the harm that educational research has inflicted over the years.  Given a track record of making things worse for school and society, educational researchers would do well to heed the wisdom in the Hippocratic Oath.  If our work often fails to make things better, we should at least strive to do no harm.

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 book. Here's my favorite paragraph from the book:

This is a piece I wrote a few years ago, which had been rattling around in my head for a long time.  The 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.

This post is an essay by Devon Halliday. Here's a link to the original. She's exploring an issue that I have addressed here -- the importance of making the first page of anything you're writing a real grabber.  This is particularly a problem for academic writers, who tend to hold back the good stuff -- the key point you want to make and why it matters -- until late in the paper, after all of the throat clearing, lit review, research methodology, and detailed data analysis.

There’s a better version than the one you studied in poli-sci.

This post is a piece I originally published in a 2000 book honoring David Tyack, Reconstructing the Good in Education: Coping with Intractable American Dilemmas. which was edited by Larry Cuban and Dorothy Shipps.  Here's a link to a PDF of the chapter.  I republished it as a chapter in my recent book, The Ironies of Schooling. A few years ago I did a short…

Well that's the funniest, cleverest thing I've seen in weeks.

This post is an essay by Devon Halliday, "Literary Fiction Has Lost the Plot," recently published in her Substack.  Here's a link to the original. I'm less interested in her critique of literary fiction, which I generally don't read, than in her tight focus on the need for writers to grab the reader on the very first page.  I learned this during my brief and unhappy stint as a newspaper reporter (don't ask). 

For most of human history, kids learned how to become functioning adults with no formal classrooms, lessons or teachers

Why are we adults so unable to see (or say?) that school is a (the?) major cause of children’s psychological suffering?

This post is an overview of the book I published two years ago.  It’s available on Amazon both as an e-book and a paperback.  The title is The Ironies of Schooling. It's available as both an e-book and paperback.  As I did with my earlier book, Being a Scholar, I published this one myself using Kindle Direct Publishing. 

This post is a tribute to one of the great books of the last century and for me the greatest book about war, Joseph Heller's Catch-22.  Published in 1961 it became an instant bestseller.  Two years ago I highlighted another bestseller and first novel from the same period, Mrs. Bridge by Evans Connell, which was published in 1959.  Here's a…

Women are eager disciples of the “Never give up” dogma. But if we treat persevering and quitting as opposites, we lose.

This post is a piece I published several years ago in Inside Higher Ed.  Here's a link to the original. Advice for New Ph.D. Students David F. Labaree Entering into a Ph.D. program is a challenging endeavor for anyone, so I thought I’d pass on a little advice to those of you beginning such a program about how to best navigate your new environment. 

This post is an op-ed that Steven Pinker published in the New York Times in 1994. Here's a link to the original. It's about a tendency toward euphemism that was in its infancy back then but has how now become the new norm.  The bewildering feature of political correctness is the mandated replacement of formerly unexceptionable terms by new ones: "Negro" by "black" by "African-American"; "Spanish-American" by "Hispanic" by "Latino"; "slum" by "ghetto" by "inner city" by, according to The Los Angeles Times, "slum" again.

This post is a piece of mine that was published a few years ago in Inside Higher Ed.  Here’s a link to the original.  It's also included in my newish book, Being a Scholar. 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 CONTRADICTORY TRAITS THAT ARE A DISASTER BY THEMSELVES BUT TOGETHER MAKE MAGIC…

This post is a collection of some favorite cartoons about the nature of academic research.  All of them are from the website PhD, which stands for Piled Higher and Deeper.  The author is Jorge Cham, who got his PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford and then taught at Cal Tech. Enjoy!

This post is an overview of the book I published several years ago.  It’s available on Amazon both as an e-book and a paperback.  The title is Being a Scholar: Reflections on Doctoral Study, Scholarly Writing, and Academic Life.   Below is the book’s introduction, which provides the rationale for the book and summarizes the eleven pieces that you will find there.  

This post is an essay by Carl Hendrick published on his Substack, The Learning Dispatch.  Here's a link to the original. In it he develops a pleasingly optimistic argument about the increasing role that humans will have to play in the emerging world of artificial intelligence.  Given all the gloom and doom surrounding the subject, I find it heartening that a serious learning scientist sees a bright future for human cognition.

This post contains all of the material for the class on the History of Higher Education in the US that I taught for at the Stanford Graduate School of Education for the last 15 years.  In retirement I wanted to make the course available on the internet to anyone who is interested.  If you are a college teacher, feel free to use any of it in whole or part. 

Why organizations should account for attention as carefully as they account for money.

This post is an essay by Toke Reichstein from his Substack. Here's a link to the original. The key issue is the title: "Who Gets to Decide What Matters Most?"  In the course of this essay, he deploys economics at its best in trying to sort out this problem.   He shows that simplistic approaches to setting social priorities bring a ton of unintended consequences. 

We don’t speak just to say something. We speak to be heard.

This post is a set of slides for a talk I gave recently, "The AI Challenge to Education and the Triumph of Credentialism." It's an effort to put the challenge that artificial intelligence poses for American education in historical perspective.  Today, students can have AI do course readings for them and then write the required papers for them as well.  Soon, students will be able to hire an AI agent to sign into their account in the college course management system (Canvas, Blackboard, etc.), do all the readings, watch all the lectures, and submit all the papers -- without the student ever having to get out of bed. 

This post is an essay by Katy Purviance from her Substack "the joy of learning." Here's a link to the original.   She's exploring an issue that has became increasingly interesting to me: the damage that schooling can do to many students, especially boys (see here and here).  The problem is the unnatural process that schooling inflicts on students -- forcing them to sit quietly at their desks for 6 hours a day, 180 days a year, over 12 years. 

Sociology has long been tasked with investigating society’s most pressing challenges. But these days, sociologists’ greatest obstacle may be themselves.

This post is the text of a keynote address I gave on July 14 (Bastille Day!) at the Building Blackboard Together 2026 conference in Dallas. This is an annual event hosted by Blackboard -- the learning management systems (LMS) company -- which brings together the Blackboard staff and the system's users at colleges and universities to talk about new developments in the company's LMS. 

An open letter to every educator who loved school, written on behalf of those who didn't

It Is a Story About Life After the End of a World

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  to  Educational  Change: Perspectives on Research and Practice…