"A liberal arts education encompasses the arts, the humanities, the social sciences and STEM. It rejects the notion that some branches of knowledge are more important than others. Instead, it emphasizes that tackling the big questions of our current moment requires cross-disciplinary approaches."

I’ve only just started, but my word, Politically Red is a beautiful book—inside & out. Content & form. Amazing craftsmanship in every way.

Grioux (1995): "In responding to the assault by neoconservatives on the university as a critical public culture, [theorists] have recognized [...] this battle goes far beyond the specific issues of freedom of speech in the academy, affirmative action, or challenging the canon.

“So we’re fresh out of ancient Greek philosophers who’ve shaped western thought for thousands of years. Best I can do is a YouTube video of two silly sally narrators making dad jokes and drawing on a iPad while reading Wikipedia entries. Also—there’s an app with quizzes! Behold the power of EdTech!”

What we should be asking is why somebody like Thiel, whose fortune was subsidized by massive public investments at University of Illinois, & humanities granting organizations at Stanford, wants to dismantle that educational infrastructure now that he’s rich.

Most of these people are deeply trained, or at least highly educated, in humanities. Knowing isn’t being.

Bill Green’s framing of curriculum is feeling more urgent by the day. Teach to remember. Teach to renew.

1000% in agreement with all of this, but am also a bit nervous that the (very necessary) pushback against fads, hype, & fluff will morph into folks romanticizing the “good ol’ days” and/or lionizing ineffective, even harmful forms of “RETVRN Pedagogy” under the cover of being anti-edtech.

Derek R. Ford is great on this. Excerpt from his “Teaching the Actuality of Revolution.”

I should note that a lot of these wrong turns have been made despite the best efforts of scholars, researchers, and practitioners sounding the alarm for over a decade. 🫠

students are ends in themselves

This is a crucial problem in graduate training (such as it is etc. etc.)

We prepare students to position themselves within a discourse, & also to do institutional service work: but not “how to defend the humanities”

Does that really fall in the category of “things you can only do once hired”?

Appreciate an uptick in The Discourse™️ about addressing many of the wrong turns that have been made in English education. From my #literacies vantage point, the emphasis on amorphous, decontextualized, & universally transferable skills was detrimental. Turns out purpose and context matter!

We speak with Caroline Levine, Ryan Professor of the Humanities in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University, about her important book The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis.

moneyontheleft.org/2025/10/02/t...

What we do with our time together in school *does* matter a great deal in shaping the way we view ourselves and each other in relation to society and our shared interactions with the world.

So how should we spend that time?
What are we *building* together in our time at school?

We've lost sight of schools as places where we induct young people into the club of our shared humanity.

Instead, in the wealthiest nation on earth, we foolishly replicate scarcity models and force young humans to compete for time and rank over knowledge that is virtually free to access!

Somewhere in the recent past, a coup overthrew the spirit of education with the stuff of schooling, and we've seen the system remade entirely in that image.

I feel like I'm seeing a lot less "it's not my job to educate you" from people and that makes me very happy. Fighting disinformation and building revolutionary capacity is everyone's job, because the people in power ain't gonna do it for us

The amount of time I spend thinking about this can’t be overstated.

@scottstorm.bsky.social

let’s have a conference

I wrote about the divide between high school and college English, and what we might do to bridge it, for @publicbooks.bsky.social—part of an excellent roundtable on higher ed under Trump organized by @dennismhogan.bsky.social

www.publicbooks.org/toward-the-h...

As someone who’s designed lots of PD, it’s obvious teachers like it when you treat them like professional adults with intellectual interests/pursuits. As someone who’s endured lots of PD workshops, it’ll never cease to amaze me how many consultants (& the admin who hire them) don’t understand this.