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Education

On infrastructures and practices of learning.
Brown University women's glee club, including Clara Gomberg, the first Jewish woman to graduate Brown.

“A Jewess Would Not Be Acceptable”

When it came to antisemitism, women’s colleges were no better than the Ivy League.
by Amy Sohn via Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera on May 8, 2025
Title card for "Legacies of Eugenics" series, with a drawing of a form board for teaching shapes.

Trumpian “Common Sense” and the History of IQ Tests

On the troubling history of IQ tests and special education.
by Pepper Stetler via Los Angeles Review of Books on May 8, 2025
Painting of a person doing arithemetic.
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Solve for AI

What the history of the pocket calculator reveals about the future of AI in classrooms.
by Bronwen Everill via HNN on April 30, 2025
Illustration of characters from "The Great Gatsby."

How “The Great Gatsby” Took Over High School

The classroom staple turns a hundred.
by Alexander Manshel via The New Yorker
This publication restricts nonsubscriber access to some or all of its articles.
on April 29, 2025
Edward Said.

Said’s Specter

Columbia is at war with its intellectual heritage.
by Timothy Brennan via The Chronicle of Higher Education
This publication restricts nonsubscriber access to some or all of its articles.
on April 14, 2025
Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and his aide Roy Cohn.

Worse Than McCarthyism: Universities in the Age of Trump

The target then was the nonexistent threat of Communist teachers; today, it’s the supposed radicalism of the academy.
by Ellen Schrecker via The Nation
This publication restricts nonsubscriber access to some or all of its articles.
on April 3, 2025
City College of New York in a still from Joseph Dorman’s Arguing the World, 1997.

The 176-Year Argument

How the City College of New York went from an experiment in public education to an intellectual hot spot for working class and immigrant students.
by Vivian Gornick via New York Review of Books
This publication restricts nonsubscriber access to some or all of its articles.
on April 3, 2025
Immanuel Wallerstein

Immanuel Wallerstein at Columbia University

C. Wright Mills, Karl Polanyi, and the Frankfurt School in postwar America.
by Sam Chian via Journal of the History of Ideas Blog on March 31, 2025
Eve Ewing, and the cover of her book "Original Sins."

How Do We Combat the Racist History of Public Education?

On the schoolhouse’s role in enforcing racial hierarchy.
by Naomi Elias, Eve L. Ewing via The Nation
This publication restricts nonsubscriber access to some or all of its articles.
on March 4, 2025
Erased chalkboard in empty classroom

Cruel to Your School

Public education is meant to be a great equalizer. That’s why Trump wants to do undo it.
by Jennifer C. Berkshire via The Baffler
This publication restricts nonsubscriber access to some or all of its articles.
on February 27, 2025
Minnijean Brown, Thelma Mothershed, and Melba Pattillo (three of the Little Rock Nine), and NAACP president Daisy Bates.

Selling Out Our Public Schools

For decades, the term “school choice” was widely and rightly dismissed as racist. Now it’s the law in thirty-three states.
by Diane Ravitch via New York Review of Books
This publication restricts nonsubscriber access to some or all of its articles.
on February 20, 2025
A group of adult students at Highlander Folk School holding class outside.

The Left Needs Its “Schools of Enlightenment and Revolution”

Throughout the entire history of left-wing organizing in the United States, the building of institutions of political education has been key.
by Nelson Lichtenstein, Steve Fraser via Jacobin
This publication restricts nonsubscriber access to some or all of its articles.
on February 9, 2025
Gov. Ronald Reagan confronted student protesters in Sacramento weeks before dismissing “intellectual luxuries.”

The Day the Purpose of College Changed

After February 28, 1967, the main reason to go was to get a job.
by Dan Berrett via The Chronicle of Higher Education
This publication restricts nonsubscriber access to some or all of its articles.
on January 26, 2025
Jimmy Carter receiving an honorary degree from Notre Dame in 1977.

Here’s How Jimmy Carter Changed Higher Education

He tackled segregation in the nation’s public colleges and fraud in student-aid programs, and established the Department of Education.
by Kelly Field via The Chronicle of Higher Education
This publication restricts nonsubscriber access to some or all of its articles.
on December 29, 2024
John Harvard statue in Harvard Yard.

American Marxism Got Lost on Campus

At universities, American Marxism has led to good scholarship, but it’s also encouraged hyper-specialization and the use of impenetrable jargon.
by Russell Jacoby via Jacobin
This publication restricts nonsubscriber access to some or all of its articles.
on December 8, 2024
Linda McMahon speaking at the Republican National Convention on July 18 in Milwaukee.

Back to the Future

Why “Let’s have public schools like the Founding Fathers had” is such a terrible idea.
by Adam Laats via Slate
This publication restricts nonsubscriber access to some or all of its articles.
on November 20, 2024
Children in a kindergarten classroom at the Horace Mann School, Tulsa, Okla., 1917.
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Yes, Schools Should Teach Morality. But Whose Morals?

Belief that schools must teach moral values is older than public schools themselves. But whose morals?
by Mallory Hutchings-Tryon via Made By History on January 9, 2024
New York Times headline about grade inflation at Yale.
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The Eternal Inflation of the Spotless Grade

For more than 50 years, we've been worrying about "grade inflation" at elite American universities. It's time to move on.
by Christopher Deutsch via HNN on December 20, 2023
Ripped green ScanTron sheet

The End of Scantron Tests

Machine-graded bubble sheets are the defining feature of American schools. Today’s kindergartners may never have to fill one out.
by Matteo Wong via The Atlantic
This publication restricts nonsubscriber access to some or all of its articles.
on September 19, 2023
Chairs on top of tables in an empty classroom

Are A.P. Classes a Waste of Time?

Advanced Placement courses are no recipe for igniting the intellect beyond high school. They’re a recipe for extinguishing it.
by Aaron R. Hanlon via The New Republic
This publication restricts nonsubscriber access to some or all of its articles.
on September 6, 2023
The American Vandal
Podcast
The American Vandal

The Chicago Fight & “Criticism Inc.”

A deep dive into the Chicago Critics, the literary scholars who inspired John Crowe Ransom’s 1937 essay, “Criticism Inc.,” as well as their working conditions at the University of Chicago, their afterlives in contemporary literary studies, and the seeding of the Chicago School of Economics.
September 5, 2023
Two African American boys working in the Freedom Press Office in Hattiesburg, Mississippi in July 1964.

Florida’s Stop Woke Act is Latest in a Long History of Censoring Black Scholarship

America has been declaring war on Black education since this country’s beginnings. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Stop Woke Act seeks to continue this tradition.
by Darryl Robertson via Andscape on February 23, 2023
Black and white photograph of students sitting in desks at with a teacher standing in the back

Who Gets to Be American?

Laws controlling what schools teach about race and gender show an awareness that classrooms are sites of nation-building.
by Jonna Perrillo via Boston Review on March 21, 2022
Children learning about Thanksgiving, with model log cabin on table, Whittier Primary School, Hampton, Virginia circa 1900.

Fugitive Pedagogy

Jarvis Givens rediscovers the underground history of black schooling.
by Lydialyle Gibson via Harvard Magazine on February 11, 2022
African American students and teacher in a classroom, Henderson, KY, 1916.

The Origin Story of Black Education

As Frederick Douglass’s master put it, a slave who learned to read and write against the will of his master was tantamount to “running away with himself.”
by Jarvis R. Givens via Harvard University Press Blog on February 1, 2022
Woman with sign protesting textbooks

This Critical Race Theory Panic Is a Chip Off the Old Block

How 20th-century curriculum controversies foreshadowed this summer’s wave of legislation.
by Adam Laats, Gillian Frank via Slate
This publication restricts nonsubscriber access to some or all of its articles.
on June 18, 2021
Black children learning in a classroom

What’s Missing From the Discourse About Anti-Racist Teaching

Black educators have always known that their students are living in an anti-Black world and that their teaching must be set against the order of that world.
by Jarvis R. Givens via The Atlantic
This publication restricts nonsubscriber access to some or all of its articles.
on May 21, 2021
Native Hawaiian schoolchildren around 1900.
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How Public Schools "Americanized" Hawai‘i

Colonial education administrators recruited teachers from the mainland, but soon realized another strategy was in order.
by Livia Gershon, Michelle Morgan via JSTOR Daily on February 3, 2020

How Educators Are Rethinking The Way They Teach Immigration History

At Boston Latin School teachers are changing the way they prepare their students to think critically about immigration policy.
by Anna-Cat Brigida via YES! on January 9, 2020
Girls and boys in a 19th century classroom.
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The End of Men, in 1870

In 1790, U.S. men were about twice as likely as U.S. women to be literate. But by 1870, girls were surpassing boys in public schools.
by Livia Gershon, David Tyack, Elizabeth Hansot via JSTOR Daily on December 2, 2019
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