This entry is going to proceed through some maddeningly vague statements, so I will start with the bottom line: currently my best idea for teaching critical thinking in social sciences or related areas is to have students wrestle with an important substantive question or puzzle in a reasonably-well-bounded area of knowledge. The structure may be [...]
Checker Finn and Mike Petrilli have a short essay this morning, Repairing the Conservative School Reform Coalition, that addresses their sense of fragmentation on the right in education policy. In the last few weeks, debates over both the Common Core and reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act have shown additional shredding of what was once [...]
What does an education historian bring to the table on national security debates? Just this: When have we heard government officials assure the public that they’re competent and the public doesn’t need to have more information? When we have heard government officials assure the public that there is sufficient oversight of activities? When has security [...]
During the past two legislative sessions in Florida, I have watched debates over the so-called parent-trigger bills with a mix of disappointment and resignation. Have we fallen so low in discussing parent involvement that a petition or plebiscite is considered involvement? Maybe this is the Facebook Era’s version of maximum feasible participation, a sort of [...]
I am starting a local chapter of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Metaphors. Part of my motivation is the release of another Dan Brown novel. But it didn’t hurt my motivation to read the awful thumbnail history in Arthur Levine’s column this week on teachers unions. Teachers’ unions are under siege nationwide…. What’s [...]
ISSN 1936-6701, "Sherman Dorn: Work to understand how schools have been social institutions" by Sherman Dorn, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. A work at www.shermandorn.com.
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