Is Academic Freedom Only for US?
As American universities start to collaborate more closely with colleges and universities in other countries, ticklish questions are beginning to arise. Oh yes, the questions have been around for a long time, but only now are they beginning to have an impact on American faculties. Few places in the world outside of the US and…
Ravitch at the Bridge
Last night, at a church by Washington Square Park, Diane Ravitch spoke. She’s not the most long-term opponent of No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and all the other “reform” battalions, but she is proving the best. She is becoming our champion, our Horatio defending Rome: Alone stood brave Horatius, But constant still…
College Castes
In an article last week on School Board News Today entitled “The New College ‘Caste System’–and How We Might Change It,” Lawrence Hardy writes: At a Washington, D.C., forum this week called “2013 College Rankings and Higher Education’s New Caste System,” a Texas college president, journalists from the Washington Monthly and elsewhere, and a key Obama administration aide,…
The Cult of Individualism: A History of an Enduring American Myth
My latest book, The Cult of Individualism: A History of an Enduring American Myth was published today by Praeger. It is a study of the backgrounds of the Red-State/Blue-State divide that so bedevils American politics. The idea for it arose from explorations into the history of my own family, which has roots (not to mention contemporary…
Miracles and the “Bad” Teachers Who Can’t Perform Them
Miracles. That’s what the American public has been conditioned, this last decade, to ask from educators. No matter the level, not matter the economic background, no matter the differences in abilities, no matter the preparation of the students, teachers are expected to vastly improve them in a short period of time. In my last post,…
Just What Are We Teaching?
A couple of days ago, The New York Times published a piece by Gina Bellafante entitled “A Chance at Learning.” It ends with a couple of paragraphs that seem emblematic of the state of education in America today, a state created by No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top and, now, the Common Core curriculum……
What We Can Learn from Baseball
Former major-leaguer Doug Glanville long ago shifted from glove to pen, and quite successfully. Today, for The New York Times, he writes about Alex Rodriguez, discussing how the quest for numbers misses the real point and beauty of baseball. Two paragraphs stopped me: Now major league baseball is in overdrive, stalking the players who inflated…
Oh, Please
Let me make something clear: Teaching cannot be reduced to its tools. Let me give you an example, though I doubt anyone reading this really needs one. One of the devices I use in the classroom is the lecture. It allows me to introduce information to students in an organized fashion. I cannot package my…
The Heart of Learning
Two articles I read this morning, one from InsideHigherEd and the other from The New York Times, remind me how critical it is that we keep focused on the student and the basis of learning. The first article, “A Plea for ‘Close Learning’” by Scott Newstok, among other things reminds us that, for all of…