Schools are scenes of extreme manipulation and coercion. Our national and state interest in them is less than benign, or as the soft-hearted among us might say, less than caring. Let us, residents of our…
Browsing Category Education
A Commons Or A Prison
I prepared the following for the Bergamo Conference on Curriculum Theory and Classroom Practice. From Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall.” Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling…
Break It Up But Don’t Sell It Off
It’s quite simple to say there was, at one point in England’s history, shared or common land upon which groups of people subsisted and the method by which they managed these lands allowed for a…
Psychic Distress in Education
The sheer JOY of talking about something you love described by Donald Hall (and called “teaching”) in the essay “Coffee with Robert Graves.” (And I’ll admit that this is what has drawn me to the…
A Sane Impulse and a Clear Lesson: Charter Schools
Let’s dare to be honest about charter schools. There is no “testable” benefit. Which is to say that testing tells us the same thing about any school environment. Kids, as humans, grow and develop variably,…
The Privilege of the Engaged
In a recent “rant” about Indiana’s “testing regime” and its instrument of student “achievement” measurement, the I-STEP, posted on the blog page of the Indiana Coalition for Public Education, the Chair of the Monroe County…
UPDATE: About a Boy? Richard Linklater’s Critique of Woman
UPDATE, 1/5/2014: Patricia Arquette as quoted on IMDB concerning her character submitting to drunken abuse by men: “Now, I wouldn’t be like that. I would climb across the table and stab him in the head…
Clare’s Advice: Sink the Pequod!
Okay, so this might be a tad petty, but well, so what? On August 17th, Clare Spark of the blog YDS: The Clare Spark Blog, posted her incisive thoughts on “race relations” with the Ferguson,…
Invaluable Understrappers
[UPDATED due to Clare Spark saying more about teachers unions in a post at 4:22 pm today.] One thing is for certain: Eva Moskowitz’s charter schools in Harlem have established that black and brown children…
Neither Men Nor Toadstools
AUDIO: Neither Men Nor Toadstools I’m inclined to think “teaching” and “instruction” in institutional contexts are only misguided industrial practice. The best that can be done (and one might admit it’s not nothing though suspect) is…