October 2025 – David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing
6 posts published by David Labaree during October 2025| David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing
6 posts published by David Labaree during October 2025| David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing
This post is a recent essay by Hilarius Bookbinder from his Substack. Here’s a link to the original. He is my favorite read these days in my favorite new medium, Substack. He’s got a great nom de plume, don’t you think? Based on a few clues in his posts, I finally figured out his real name. … Continue reading Hilarius Bookbinder — There Is No Government Waste| David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing
When you’re interested in improving your writing, it’s a good idea to have some models to work from. I’ve presented some of my favorite models in this blog. These have included a number of examples of good writing by both academics (Max Weber, E.P. Thompson, Jim March, and Mary Metz) and nonacademics (Frederick Douglass, Elmore Leonard). … Continue reading On Writing: How the King James Bible and How It Shaped the English Language and Still Teaches Us How to Write| David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing
This post is an essay by David Brooks that appeared in the Atlantic in 2020. Here’s a link to the original. He takes advantage of the Covid hiatus in college commencements to give the kid of commencement advice that he could never deliver in front of the parents, faculty, and students assembled there. Things like: Use … Continue reading David Brooks — A Commencement Address Too Honest to Deliver in Person| David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing
This post is the text of the preface I wrote for the Chinese translation of my book, A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of the American System of Higher Education. The translators are Professor Sun Bi and research assistant Liu Zitai from the School of Education at South China Normal University. It will be published … Continue reading Preface to the Chinese Edition of A Perfect Mess| David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing
This post is about a 1975 paper by James G. March, which was published in, of all places, the Texas Tech Journal of Education. Given that provenance, it’s something you likely have never enc…| David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing
This post is a paper I published in Journal of Teacher Education in 2010. Here’s a link to a PDF of the original. It is republished as a chapter in my new book, The Emergent Genius of American Higher Education. This is a summary of the argument: Teach For America is a marvel at marketing, offering elite college … Continue reading Teach for America and Teacher Ed: Heads You Win, Tails We Lose| David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing
This post is a tribute to a wonderful essay by the great British historian of working-class history, E. P. Thompson. His classic work is The Making of the English Working Class, published in 1966. The paper I’m touting here provides a lovely window into the heart of his craft, which is an unlikely combination of … Continue reading E.P. Thompson: Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism| David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing
This is a short piece about the problems that professionalism poses for the academic historian. History is a different kind of subject, and too often academic rigor gets in the way of telling the kinds of historical accounts that we need. An earlier version was published in 2017 in the International Journal of the Historiography of Education. Perils … Continue reading Perils of the Professionalized Historian| David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing
This post is an essay by Joel Stein that appeared recently in the New York Times. Here’s a link to the original. It’s purportedly about the issue of how much authors are going to get paid for all the material that artificial intelligence systems are hoovering up from the world’s literature. The answer to this, of … Continue reading Joel Stein: What Should I Get Paid When a Chatbot Eats My Books| David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing
This is a piece I wrote about the harm that educational research has inflicted over the years. Given a track record of making things worse for school and society, educational researchers would do …| David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing
This post is an essay by historian Steven Mintz from his Substack. Here’s a link to the original. In it, he explores the need to balance structure and agency in the way we write history. A…| David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing
This post is a paper I presented as part of a panel on the politics of teacher education at the annual meeting of the American Association for Colleges of Teacher Education (AACTE) in 2005. It was…| David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing
