Search Results for: Education

A Sentimental Education

Longreads Pick

Two years ago, Tilda Swinton co-founded a school for her twins to attend—the kind of school with “no exams, no tests, no hierarchies, no sitting at desks whenever possible.”

Published: Jun 14, 2015
Length: 13 minutes (3,323 words)

How Can Community Colleges Get a Piece of the Billions That Donors Give to Higher Education?

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Community colleges educate nearly half of all US undergraduates but their plight has yet to attract the wealthy donor class.

Published: Nov 14, 2014
Length: 13 minutes (3,352 words)

Anarchy and Education in 1970s Britain

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Idealistic British activists created a wave experimental schools in the 1970’s—places without rules, timetables or even compulsory lessons. So what became of the kids who attended these free-for-alls?

Source: BBC
Published: Oct 21, 2014
Length: 17 minutes (4,445 words)

We Don’t Need No Education

Longreads Pick

Ben Hewitt describes “unschooling” his children Fin and Rye, who do “self-directed, adult-facilitated life learning in the context of their own unique interests” rather than attend public schools or participate in the kind of homeschooling that mirrors a public education.

Author: Ben Hewitt
Source: Outside
Published: Aug 12, 2014
Length: 17 minutes (4,458 words)

Education Reform, Spent on Consultants

During the next two years, more than twenty million dollars of Zuckerberg’s gift and matching donations went to consulting firms with various specialties: public relations, human resources, communications, data analysis, teacher evaluation. Many of the consultants had worked for Joel Klein, Teach for America, and other programs in the tight-knit reform movement, and a number of them had contracts with several school systems financed by Race to the Top grants and venture philanthropy. The going rate for individual consultants in Newark was a thousand dollars a day. Vivian Cox Fraser, the president of the Urban League of Essex County, observed, “Everybody’s getting paid, but Raheem still can’t read.”

Dale Russakoff, in The New Yorker, on what happened to Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Christie and Cory Booker’s plan to reform schools in Newark.

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The Future of Online Education: A Longreads Guest Pick by Teddy Worcester

Above: Sebastian Thrun

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Teddy Worcester resides in San Francisco and helps to build products that support the free and open web.

Max Chafkin’s Fast Company story covering Sebastian Thrun’s change of course for Udacity is a must-read for anyone interested in online education. The brilliant Thrun admits that MOOCs are not necessarily the right course for Udacity, with staggeringly low class completion rates and weak test performance. Chafkin eloquently covers Udacity’s pivot toward offering a vehicle for “academic branding.” Highlighting Udacity’s recent deal powering Georgia Tech’s AT&T-sponsored academic program, Chafkin quotes Thrun lauding corporatized higher education, “If you focus on the single question of who knows best what students need in the workforce, it’s the people already in the workforce. Why not give industry a voice?”

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons

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Early Technologies That Were Supposed to Disrupt Education

“The dream that new technologies might radically disrupt education is much older than Udacity, or even the Internet itself. As rail networks made the speedy delivery of letters a reality for many Americans in the late 19th century, correspondence classes started popping up in the United States. The widespread proliferation of home radio sets in the 1920s led such institutions as New York University and Harvard to launch so-called Colleges of the Air, which, according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, prompted a 1924 journalist to contemplate a world in which the new medium would be ‘the chief arm of education’ and suggest that ‘the child of the future [would be] stuffed with facts as he sits at home or even as he walks about the streets with his portable receiving-set in his pocket.’ Udacity wasn’t even the first attempt to deliver an elite education via the Internet: In 2001, MIT launched the OpenCourseWare project to digitize notes, homework assignments, and, in some cases, full video lectures for all of the university’s courses.”

Max Chafkin, in Fast Company, on the difficulties of online education and the struggles of Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun. Read more from Chafkin in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: 29908091@N00, Flickr

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Creationists’ Last Stand at the State Board of Education

Longreads Pick

A history of the Texas textbook wars, and questions of whether those seeking to influence changes to textbooks can hold onto their power:

But highly placed stakeholders — ranging from those in publishing to sitting board members — believe the culture warriors are losing the ability to run roughshod over state education. After years of alienating the Legislature, the state board has seen its influence weakened. A changing textbook marketplace has eroded Texas’ clout, and technology is sweeping into the classroom, bringing with it the next generation of learning materials. The statewide reach of the culture warriors is ending.

The biggest test will take place when the state board considers a new high-school biology text next week. Another will follow in the ensuing months, as it takes up a new social studies text. How the state board and publishers respond to Bohlin’s critiques, to his evolutionary “gaps,” will determine whether the innuendo of God lingers in classroom discussions about evolution. It will determine whether the political ideology of an elected board shapes, by omission and addition, the history of America Texas students will learn for years hence.

Source: Dallas Observer
Published: Nov 14, 2013
Length: 20 minutes (5,072 words)

‘You’re in Trouble. Am I Right?’: My Unsentimental Education

Debra Monroe, 1977 (Photo courtesy of the author)

Debra Monroe | 2012 | 20 minutes (5,101 words)

Debra Monroe is the author of six books, including the memoir “My Unsentimental Education” which will appear in October 2015. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The American Scholar, Doubletake, The Morning News and The Southern Review, and she is frequently shortlisted for The Best American Essays. This essay—which is an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir—first appeared on John Griswold‘s Inside Higher Ed blog, and our thanks to Monroe for allowing us to reprint it here. Read more…

‘You’re in Trouble. Am I Right?’: My Unsentimental Education

Longreads Pick

A story of love, LSD and higher education. Monroe is the author of five books, most recently the memoir, On the Outskirts of Normal. This is from her sixth book, in progress.

Source: Longreads
Published: Oct 1, 2013
Length: 20 minutes (5,101 words)