Education
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Defending the Western Canon
A part of my mission at After the Future has been to save the Western Canon from being captured by conservative ideologues. That is a heavy lift these days, and it shouldn't be. There's a reason why people like Jacques Derrida and Hannah Arendt–and really anybody who is truly culturally literate–have spent so much time
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Forcing Change vs. Inspiring Change
Over the years, social scientists who have conducted careful reviews of the evidence base for diversity trainings have frequently come to discouraging conclusions. Though diversity trainings have been around in one form or another since at least the 1960s, few of them are ever subjected to rigorous evaluation, and those that are mostly appear to
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il n’y a pas de hors-texte
I'm no Derridean, but I've read enough of him and about him to know he was no nihilist. Neither was Nietzsche. But many nihilist have read both and appropriated what they think they've found in their texts for their cause. Both D. and N. grapple with the problem of truth and interpretation. Both have good
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Whither Scotland?
People have compared the U.K.-Scotland relationship, in the event of a split, to the United States and Canada, which of course is inexact and even absurd in all kinds of ways. But I will say this: whenever I’ve visited Ottawa and dipped a toe into the Canadian political experience, I’ve always come away impressed with
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The Dismal Science
First this from Krugmnan'a NYRB review of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century: But even those [economists] willing to discuss inequality generally focused on the gap between the poor or the working class and the merely well-off, not the truly rich—on college graduates whose wage gains outpaced those of less-educated workers, or on the
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The Elite Center of Gravity in the Democratic Party
Michael Lind nails it this morning: During the Progressive Era and the New Deal era that succeeded it, idealistic professional-class reformers were only one element of a coalition they were forced to share with the representatives of farmers and blue-collar workers — groups that made up a majority of the workforce in the mid-20th century.
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Race to the Top
This is the Obama Administration's name for its program to reform American education. Really. The Democrats' program suggests a Social Darwinian competition in which there will be winners and losers, and you better be a winner. At least the Republican program, entitled No Child Left Behind, suggested ithat we need to stretch out a hand to
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Neoliberalism and Public Education 3
This chart lays it out pretty well:
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Neoliberalism and Public Education 2
It's interesting to me that whenever I do a post on public education, the pageviews go down. My guess is that it seems like such a niche issue, and when people read me squawking about Charter Schools or the Common Core, they think that's my problem, but not theirs. But if anything I've been saying
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Neoliberalism and Public Education 1
I recently posted that the Democrats will be useless in supporting economic justice issues until being called a Neoliberal has the same stigma as being called a homophobe. Neoliberal ideology is just repackaged late 19th Century Social Darwinism, which is an ideological justification for social stratification that rewards winners and punishes losers, where the winners