education

Baylor transformed itself from a regional Baptist teaching institution into an internationally recognized Protestant research university—but not without scandal.

I used to lead activities like the "Privilege Walk" and "Cross the Line." I couldn't shake the feeling that they were not taking us very far.

Wonder is an essential disposition for Christian discipleship. According to Susan Engel, children learn to wonder by asking questions and receiving answers.

This has been the spring of discontent over standardized testing. Unfortunately, this has been closely tied to resistance to the Common Core standards.

In Ian Leslie’s telling, curiosity is far from a valued quality. Augustine, he notes, equated curiosity with temptation.

You’re asking small churches to give money to seminaries, some of which have massive endowments. Do you know how many secretaries some of these seminaries have? Their secretaries have secretaries. And they keep adding vice presidents. The weirdest thing about the addition of all the management? The student body keeps dwindling. Many of these seminaries have residential student bodies that are the same size of our small church.

Allison Benedikt’s anti-private-school manifesto is pretty entertaining:

You are a bad person if you send your children to private school. Not bad like murderer bad—but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad. So, pretty bad.

I am not an education policy wonk: I’m just judgmental. But it seems to me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve. This would not happen immediately. It could take generations. Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good.

Yes, this is a hyperbolic provocation. I agree with a lot of what Benedikt says, but I don’t think that private-school parents—or, for that matter, the many private-school teachers I know—are bad people.

A knotty issue in the Chicago teachers strike is teacher assessments.

I'm tired of seeing public education set up to fail and then blamed for its own failure, with special blame always reserved for teachers.

Undefeated is a solid piece of filmmaking that is also too little
too late. The Oscar-winning documentary by Daniel Lindsay and T. J.
Martin concerns the travails of a high school football team in a poor
black neighborhood of North Memphis that overcomes years of futility
thanks in large part to a white volunteer coach who inspires them to
believe in themselves both on and off the field.

Maybe it’s because I need easily digestible print reading for my train
commute. Maybe it’s my inevitable post-20s loss of hipster cred.
Whatever the reason, I seem to be reading a lot less of the humor
writing at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and a lot more of Joel Stein’s Time column.