What is the purpose of education?

In the preface to his great book, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School, Neil Postman pointed out that in “in tracking what people have to say about schooling, I notice that most of the conversation is about means, rarely about ends. Should we privatize our schools? Should we have national standards of

3 Great Audiobooks for Children

Today I’m introducing a new section to the site: 3 Great … And I’m starting with 3 Great Audiobooks for children.

The Writing Revolution

It can be a dispiriting experience reading the first drafts of students’ personal statements – it can also be dispiriting to read the fifteenth draft but that’s another matter – because many students simply don’t write very well. Their grammar is creaky, their vocabulary is limited, and their paragraphing is all over the place.

Reading Reconsidered

I am currently reading Reading Reconsidered and will review it properly in the next week or so. However, I couldn’t resist mentioning a couple of statistics from the book (both from page 210) before I do so:

The Venerable Bede and Modern Education

In the introduction to her translation of Bede’s The Reckoning of Time, Faith Wallis has a fascinating aside about education in Anglo-Saxon England: