Education & Liberal Learning

Life Under Compulsion: The Dehumanities

Imagine a new father looking into the eyes of his child.  A wisp of blond hair curls about the scalp.  The fingers, wrinkled like...

The Learning and Limits of Libraries

Three articles recently caught my eye, all of which having to do with scholars' fame, only two having to do with their libraries. The bookless...

Glenn Beck Gives Utopia a Bad Name

So Glenn Beck has proposed his grandest scheme yet: the construction of separate planned community, literally built around (in terms of architecture and overall...

Life Under Compulsion: Bad Universality

I had not thought that the tsars of education could possibly have come up with another idea as inhuman or stupid as have been...

Continuing to Argue Against Abortion

“Yet because the decision will not allow the question to remain silent, and yet sounds an ambiguous note as to how it would be...

Life Under Compulsion: Curricular Mire

In my last essay, I took issue with the inescapable computer, that costly thing on the student’s desk in “good” schools, inducing the itch...

Life Under Compulsion: Human-Scale Tools and the Slavish Education State

When he was governor of Maine, Angus King made sure that there was a computer on the desk of every middle-school child in the...

Life Under Compulsion: If Teachers Were Plumbers

This is Part IV of a series of essays. For previous installments of "Life Under Compulsion," see Part I, Part II, and Part III. “Good morning,...

Life Under Compulsion: The Billows Teaching Machine

Charlie Chaplin is working on an assembly line.  He tightens bolts with a pair of wrenches.  He does this without stop, over and over,...

School Consolidation and Slow Democracy

April in West Virginia smells like wild leeks: pungent and oniony. In the woods, their slim green leaves look like lilies of the valley,...