Articles and Blogging

My ASCD, PDK and NASSP memberships expired. I am not renewing.  Education will not improve until we define what it means to be educated, and these organizations are not interested in defining “educated.”  Instead, they are devoted to the democratic governance of public education, which means they are devoted to a never-ending debate about the purposes of American public education — a debate about which random knowledge and skills should be taught in schools.  For the last 60 years this debate has been framed by the social science improvement paradigm, even though what it means to be educated is a philosophical question and teaching is an art.

These organizations’ journals don’t publish my articles.  That is fine.  I publish them here.  When I get Education Week newsletters, they have links to both commentaries and blogs. Links to the newspaper commentaries are inactive because I am not a paid-up subscriber.  But the blog links work. Blogs are available to everybody online, free of charge. It will soon be the case (if not already), that educators will read more online blogs than Education Week articles.

Blogging is like a return to the good ol’ days of the internet — when people of good will shared worthwhile content free of charge. Imagine that — an internet site devoted to the free sharing of valuable ideas, instead of a thinly veiled plea to purchase something of little value. I like that my blogs are available to anybody with a computer and an internet connection. And I like that people can comment and reply here, too. (And there are no advertisements!)

Readers might be interested in this irreverent look at public education.  The writer uses profanity because that is part of his style and part of the message.  If you don’t like profanity, don’t go there, but if you have a sense of aesthetics and humor, you will appreciate it — profanity and all.

If you want to discuss what it means to be educated, which is the foundation for improving education, that is my “beat,” and nobody else has it. Simply log in and type in the comment box.