A couple of years ago, when writing a review of a rather thin offering by a respectable scholar, I found myself struggling to keep from becoming snide and catty. I had learned that writing a professional review is quite different from tossing off cutting remarks on a blog post; I felt I had a responsibility…
Last week, The New York Times published a piece concerning childhood reading–in this case, of Gone With the Wind. It appeared, oddly enough, while I was in the midst of re-reading a book I don’t think I’ve read since I was nine or ten, The Grapes of Wrath. I read it then with such attention that, even now,…
The dogs started in on it. I clicked off the computer screen and walked upstairs to answer the door. My wife was already on the stoop, talking to an earnest-looking couple. She had given them a dollar for a copy of The Militant, the small ‘paper associated with the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and was trying…
Is learning simply the acquisition of information? Is teaching nothing more than the successful transmission of “answers”? Seems so. Seems, also, that those who know next to nothing about education have so hijacked the discussion that we no longer are able to have nuanced discussions about its realities–the needs, methods and goals of systems producing…
If there was one thing I learned from my Peace Corps experience it was that people everywhere know a lot more than the lucky few in the worldwide elites believe they do—and that the idea of helping them is really, at its heart, an idea of helping that elite. We lucky ones, generally from industrialized…
This map comes from the U.S.Census Bureau (and thanks, Rodger Cunningham, for alerting me to it). It is based on self-reporting on the 2000 census. What is fascinating to me is the number of people who identified themselves simply as “American.” Their location covers almost all of Appalachia and, I suspect, if you took out “African…
The choices have been clear for a long time. One side, though, seemed to have won within the last decade. As Elaine Weiss, writing for the Huffington Post, says, there has been “a philosophical shift from education as a critical tool to advance democracy to a consumer-oriented system of individual choice, achievement, and even profit.”…
My apologies if the following seems too off-topic from what is normally on the Academe blog, and too self-serving. What has gone on in Washington these past couple of weeks has frustrated most of us Americans (and has amazed those watching from other countries) as a colossal waste of time and money, and for what? “We…
Whenever administrators take it upon themselves to pass judgment on the value of faculty research, bad things are likely to happen. Such has been the case this year at Long Island University (LIU). Harriet Malinowitz, a tenured full professor, has been denied sabbatical for research on “Zionism and Propaganda.” Not by her department or Dean…