Ignition for Education

This week, the Economist delivers a data-laden critique of rising high school graduation rates: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/03/10/new-numbers-show-falling-standards-in-american-high-schools In short, more kids are passing because high school is getting easier, not because of improvement in learning. Some people will argue that this means that the United States needs a national curriculum, or perhaps some sort of national or…

            When I last posted about curriculum, it was a culmination of posts about knowledge, skills, and “creativity,” all important aspects of a good school’s learning objectives. Since then, I’ve realized how many elements I left out. One is an idea that I find problematic: “leadership.”             Schools frequently boast of cultivating leaders, as though…

            I’ve been working up to this post for several weeks. I’ve examined knowledge, its organization, its origins, and its acquisition, as well as its relationship with opinion. I’ve grappled with skills and how they are acquired. And I’ve argued that “creativity” is not serial “making” but rather originality—something that school-aged children may build towards…

Invisible China: How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise, by Scott Roselle and Natalie Hell (2020, University of Chicago Press) Roselle (a development economist at Stanford) and Hell (a researcher who works with Roselle at the Rural Education Action Program) argue that China may become caught in a middle-income trap because of shortcomings in its…