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Dude, where’s my psychohistory?
In a feature story for Nature at the beginning of the month, Laura Spinney writes about the latest generation of academics hoping to quantify historical patterns and make universal claims about “cliodynamics,” as U Conn’s Peter Turchin hopes to call his work. We’ve seen this movie before as quantitative social science history in the 1960s, cliometrics in the […]
Nation of patriots, nation of fandoms
In the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s schooling blog Sunday, Pelham City superintendent Jim Arnold explains his distrust of the Common Core, referring to old patriot Thomas Jefferson: Common Core is a standardized national curriculum. Why is this problematic? From an historical context, a centralized school curriculum serves the goals of totalitarian states. Jefferson warned us about that. […]
The different meanings of “public”
A brief gloss this morning on Bruce Baker’s take on whether (and the extent to which) charter schools are public schools: to historians this splitting of the meaning of “public” makes sense. As historians of education such as Michael Katz have noted, one of the consequences of the common-school movement in the 19th century was […]
Updated international attainment motion chart
For the Comparative and International Education Society meeting in Puerto Rico this month: Source: Minnesota Population Center, International Public Use Microdata Sample. The variable of interest is educational attainment (for those aged 25-29 at the time of an individual country’s census). In a few cases, I recalculated attainment based on my disagreement with the […]
Richard Arum is a smart guy, but he’s dead wrong on the history of student legal rights
Note [4/9/2012]: In publishing Arum’s column The Atlantic omitted the relationship between this column and Arum’s book Judging School Discipline. In an example of the interesting silos in education research, the 2003 book was never reviewed by history of education journals. To put it bluntly, yikes. I’ll leave this entry intact and write another one once I have […]