With the economy in a downturn, there have been questions asked lately about the value of a college degree– will kids really earn more than they would have without that piece of paper or will they instead start their adult life with a minimum-wage job and a lot of student loan debt. (We’ll leave aside [...]
Michael Petrilli at Education Next has a very interesting video interview with Chester Finn and Terry Ryan about the new book they’ve written with Michael B. Lafferty. All three are from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. The book– Ohio’s Education Reform Challenges: Lessons from the Front Lines–chronicles Fordham’s attempts to help what they refer to [...]
Heather Horn at The Atlantic Wire looks at Stuart Buck’s thesis that an unfortunate and unexpected consequence of school integration was that many black kids associate doing well in school with acting white. So they choose not to achieve. John McWhorter, Richard Thompson Ford, Gene Denby, Jamelle Bouie, Matthew Yglesias, Megan McArdle and Reihan Salam [...]
Paul E. Peterson– Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government, Harvard University Director, Program on Education Policy and Governance and Editor-in-Chief of Education Next–has a new book out: Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning. (Which I haven’t read yet.) Marcus A. Winters, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, writes at City Journal: Across [...]
Scott McLemee—essayist, critic and blogger at Inside Higher Ed—takes a look at the publisher’s statement for historian Michael Bellesiles’ forthcoming book 1877: America’s Year of Living Violently. (We recently talked about the Michael Bellesiles scandal here.) From the publisher, New Press: “A major new work of popular history, 1877 is also notable as the comeback [...]
David Deming over at the American Thinker gives us a sampling of the good stuff to be found in his book Science and Technology in World History, Vol. 2: Early Christianity, the Rise of Islam and the Middle Ages: Both Greece and Rome made significant contributions to Western civilization. Greek knowledge was ascendant in philosophy, [...]
Robert Wright, at the NYT Opinionator blog, asks whether the huge growth in technology–specifically the internet–means that we’re in the process of building one big brain. We’re not just building a brain, we’re part of it—cells in a superorganism. We’re connected. To begin with, note that the new technologies, though derided by some of these [...]
If To Kill a Mockingbird is one of your favorite books ever– and if it isn’t what’s wrong with you?—you’ll want to check out this profile of Harper Lee at the Daily Mail.
Try as many have to deny the existence of the “acting white” phenomenon, evidence for it continues to pile up. Stuart Buck’s recent Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation puts the problem front and center. But, when the highly-regarded linguist, author, expert on race relations, and conservative think tank fellow John McWhorter writes about [...]
John Palattella, The Nation’s literary editor, writes this month about the shrinking – and in some cases, the disappearance—of newspaper books sections. He offers some context for the situation and some history of the written word and in the end argues that the time is ripe for someone to step up and do something about [...]