Education
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The Missing Link in Higher Ed Reform May 29, 2025
The challenge of higher education reform can be boiled down to one issue: the talent pipeline. If we can reconfigure the academic talent pipeline and ensure that those who believe in the classical mission of the university both choose academia and pr...
A Pedagogy of the Empowered May 27, 2025
In 2020, Steven Wilson, former education adviser to the governor of Massachusetts, was condemned as racist and fired from his job for writing an essay on the educational philosophy underlying the network of charter schools he founded. Here’s my favor...
Is There Still a Republic? May 22, 2025
Keeping the Republic is a spirited defense of the original American regime and might serve to educate future statesmen tasked with founding a new American republic....
Lawfare Is a Bad Way to Set Education Policy May 22, 2025
Two lawsuits caught the public’s attention recently involving students who graduated from their high schools without knowing how to read and write. “William A.” in Tennessee sued the Clarksville-Montgomery County school system after graduating with a...
The Publishers Who Don't Run Away May 21, 2025
I’m posting here a slightly different version of my February essay from the Chronicle of Higher Education, just in the interest of helping the piece continue to circulate in forms that are easily shared. Big thanks to the Chronicle for their support!...
Learning to Be Social May 20, 2025
When my children were little, I found myself immersed in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile. Part treatise on education and part novel, Emile calls out the artificiality of social expectations, which can lead to suffering, anxiety, and physical ailments. ...
School’s Out Forever May 20, 2025
‘Five years after the global COVID pandemic was declared, there is widespread agreement that closing classrooms was devastating for children,” read a March 16 article in the New York Times titled “What We’ve Learned About School Closures for the Next...
The Work of Saving Higher Education May 15, 2025
I pushed my chips to the center of the table on a rain‑soaked April morning in 2015, halfway through a “young tenure‑track faculty breakfast” thrown by the president of the anonymous commuter university where I taught. We were supposed to beam with g...
On Mark Twain, a Biography May 15, 2025
Occasionally American genius favors those with little formal education. Benjamin Franklin, one of the greatest minds among the nation’s Founders, spent two years at Boston’s Latin School but withdrew at the age of ten, due to lack of funds. After a w...
A Revival of Classical Education is Underway May 15, 2025
In this episode of The Miller Report: Real Clear Journalism, we dive into the rise of two unconventional academic institutions in Austin, Texas — the University of Austin (UATX) and the School of Civic Leadership at the University of Texas. Both are ...
Can These Catholics Save the Art World? May 14, 2025
A particular piece of art was emblematic of my college artistic education: a massive rectangle, painted in the style of a Persian carpet, on a tiger, peacock, and doe. The focal point: two dark-skinned nude women. It’s an interesting painting, with b...
Journalism Needs Norman Mailer Types May 14, 2025
In a 2004 essay called “Social Life, Literary Desires, Literary Corruption,” Norman Mailer examined what he thought was wrong with journalism. It’s been taken over by elites who have a lot of education but not any real-life experience. They have no a...
The Invention of Close Reading May 13, 2025
I was an English major in college, but I didn’t like it. I didn’t understand why I should pay to study literature when I knew how to read and could do so more happily on my own time. Like many others, I majored in English for the creative-writing wor...
A Matter of Words May 13, 2025
Over the course of the past two years, university committees focused on the impact of artificial intelligence have assembled across the country. By now, nearly every research university has compiled some form of group-based academic “response” to the...
The Sleepers by Matthew Gasda May 12, 2025
A Contemporary Tragedy in a Classic StyleFour New Yorkers' paths collide in the days ahead of the 2016 election. Dan teaches Marxism while secretly courting a student. His girlfriend Mariko, an actress, finds refuge in her dying mentor's bed. When he...
Diversity Is Good, Actually May 09, 2025
If you’re tired of hearing about DEI and its associated problems, believe me, I’m even more tired of discussing it.Since 2020, I have publicly tackled this issue from a number of angles. I have recounted my own experiences with DEI training and highl...
In Austin, a Double Shot of Academic Counter-Revolution May 09, 2025
AUSTIN, Texas — Lacking three crucial components – students, faculty, and facilities – the two educational experiments proposed in this state capital sounded like moonshots just a few years ago. ...
Michael Jordan, Yes; Winston Churchill, No? May 09, 2025
Shocking as it is to report, Donald Trump has only been in office just over three months. In that short time, he has roiled the news cycles (and the markets) with radical changes to the status quo on immigration, trade, education, foreign aid, and mo...
The Perks of Being a University Dropout May 08, 2025
If you asked me what my biggest insecurity is — more than my skin, or weight, or weird anxiety around my coffee order — I would say it’s the fact that I don’t have a degree. No, not even a bachelor’s. In a world of peers with PhDs, MFAs and whatever ...
Ivy League Miseducation May 08, 2025
Cornell undergraduates must take courses in ten subject areas as part of their general education curriculum. This “distribution requirement” or “ways of knowing” approach offers no coherent articulation of what an educated American should actually kn...
Methodical Banality May 06, 2025
The Renaissance scholar and educator Erasmus of Rotterdam opens his polemical treatise The Ciceronian (1528) by describing the utterly dysfunctional writing process of a character named Nosoponus. The Ciceronian is structured as a dialogue, with two ...
The South's Public-Education Revival May 06, 2025
In this episode of The Miller Report: Real Clear Journalism, we break down the "Southern Surge" in public education, spotlighting a new RealClearInvestigations article by Vince Bielski. From dramatic gains in literacy to rising national rankings, sta...
Classical in Columbus May 02, 2025
When my guide and I enter the classroom and loiter inside the door, the teacher continues with a lesson on the grammar of interrogatives without a pause. A dozen kids turn their heads our way with a curious expression, but only for a moment. One of t...
Another Thing Folks Like About the South: Education's Revival April 25, 2025
GEO Prep Mid-City Academy, located in one of the poorest sections of Louisiana, did something almost unheard of in public education – it went from dying to thriving in just a few years. ...
Plathanasius of Massachusetts April 23, 2025
Sarah Ruden, translator of Aristophanes, Homer, Petronius, St. Augustine, etc., and the author of a study on St. Paul and a biography of Virgil, has now written an evaluation of Sylvia Plath as a poet, taking up six of her best poems for scrutiny. Th...
