Education
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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...
A TikTok Stepford Wives for the Pornhub Era April 23, 2025
Set in upstate New York, Sophie Kemp’s surreal satirical debut puts us in the uneasy company of a part-time model who calls herself Reality as she sets out on a crazed quest to become the perfect girlfriend. The chief beneficiary of her self-educatio...
Defusing Academic Freedom April 23, 2025
Through a decade of political innovations, shifting alliances, and emerging coalitions within American conservatism, few stances have remained as consistent as the right’s antipathy to the censoriousness and ideological uniformity of higher education...
Hands Off the University, Indeed April 23, 2025
The Trump administration has taken a wrecking ball to the Department of Education and to DEI programs at universities across the country. And, in typical Trumpian style, the President has escalated and retaliated against schools that refuse to comply...
Multiplication, Biden-Style April 18, 2025
While limiting strings-attached grants and curbing federal regulation, President Trump’s efforts to dismantle the Department of Education also take aim at a key tool bureaucrats use to oversee schools in all 50 states: civil rights investigations....
Richard Bernstein Warned Us About DEI April 18, 2025
Decades before terms like “virtue signaling,” “anti-racism,” and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” became ubiquitous, one author foresaw how they would come to dominate American universities and other elite institutions. Richard Bernstein, an esteem...
Leaving No Child Behind April 17, 2025
Two recent headlines illustrate where American education may be headed. First: “Trump signs executive order to dismantle Department of Education.” And second, a development that has received less attention—but is arguably more notable: “Trump’s DOJ s...
Can Everyone Be Religious? April 15, 2025
The sharpest and best insight at the core of New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s recent book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, is that religious disaffiliation is effectively the new norm, in practice if not in profession. In other word...
The Muscular Humanities April 14, 2025
These are peculiar and disorienting times for those who believe in the life of the mind. The old university systems, which were the bulwark of the postwar American boom, now seem in doubt. Fewer believe in the dream of college, especially when exorbi...
Up Close With the Beauty of Gatsby April 10, 2025
The Great Gatsby: If you went to high school in the United States, your parents read it, you’ve read it, your friends have some vague memory of the green light and Daisy and Nick, and your kids probably will too. I read it in high school and college,...
Paul Ricoeur and the Crisis of Atheism April 09, 2025
Twentieth-century French philosophy continues to inflame the passions of American readers in the 21st. While Anglo-American philosophy can seem impossibly dry and technical, the great French masters still speak to our most urgent concerns. What they ...
Why Can’t Our Kids Write? April 04, 2025
We need to talk about student writing.For the past decade or so, I have worked with students to help them prepare essays for applications to America’s top colleges and universities. Many of my students have historically matriculated to Ivy League and...
The Next Step for School Choice: Get It Right February 27, 2025
There is a common saying among writers inclined toward perfectionism: “Don’t get it right, just get it written.” A similar adage might work with certain public policy changes like school choice. If you aim at perfection, you may not accomplish anythi...
The Power of American Originals February 26, 2025
“In the US, voters just loosed a genuine bull into the china shop of the ruling class.”Karl Zinsmeister, 2025BACKBONE: Maverick Essays in Middle America: Why American Populism Should be Welcomed, Not Feared is a collection of short essays about Ameri...
Samuel Graydon's 'Einstein In Time and Space' February 21, 2025
Laments about the state of education are arguably as old as education is, or close to it. And they’ve always been a waste of time.That’s because knowledge isn’t bestowed on us as much as it’s created. The Wright Brothers didn’t attend college, but it...
Trump’s School Choice Executive Order is a Start February 20, 2025
President Trump signed an executive order last month directing the Department of Education to prioritize discretionary funding for school choice initiatives. This order is a step in the right direction and puts wind in the sails of the school choice ...
New Life for the Great American University? February 19, 2025
University education has long been both scorned and desired in America. L. Frank Baum’s classic The Wizard of Oz lampooned college students—both their failure to use their brains while thinking “great thoughts” and their laziness. Yet for most Americ...
TikToking American Democracy to Death February 18, 2025
Ask experienced teachers how things have changed in the American classroom in the wake of the COVID years, and after they are done sighing, they are certain to note a diminished capacity in their students to engage in good old-fashioned studying.Gone...
The Education—and Anointment—of Barron Trump February 14, 2025
The night before Donald Trump’s second inauguration in January, the 22-year-old conservative activist CJ Pearson threw a party in honor of the influencers who had rallied behind the Republican nominee. The following week he received an email from a j...
