First, some housekeeping. Welcome to Scholastic Alchemy, a twice-weekly newsletter where I write about education and share a handful of interesting links. My goal, at least right now, is to write about how the US arrived at the current moment in education, a moment where it seems like everything we know and trust about schools is about to go out the window. If you’re interested in this kind of thing, please subscribe. I plan to put up the paywall in early March. If you do not like Substack as a platform, I will be publishing a parallel version using Beehiiv.

Ending so we can begin

While I could write several more posts in the How did we get here series, I think it is time to move on. That doesn’t just mean a change of topic but a change in how I am organizing the blog/newsletter/thing. If you haven’t noticed by now, my posts tend to go on and on. It’s relatively easy for me to sit down and write 3000-4000 words on a Monday morning and then gather some links and do some edits to that post for the rest of the week. Thing is, that’s too long. I’m not a person who is usually interested in metrics or growth or being a serious content creator, whatever that is. I’ve been running a YouTube channel with a group of online gaming friends for almost 8 years and couldn’t tell you a single meaningful statistic about it. The point, for me, has never been any of that. I write (and record) because I enjoy expressing myself in those ways and because it helps me to think more clearly than just keeping it all to myself. Flannery O’Connor once said, “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” I think that explanation suits me well. Even so, the posts are going to become shorter and will go out on Wednesdays. I will be posting the links and related commentary separately on Fridays. My audience may be small, but I probably shouldn’t abuse them with too much reading in one go.

Beyond shortening and splitting my posts, I’m also moving away from these long-reaching historical posts (mostly). Much of what I’ve written in the previous seven weeks is simply stuff I had to get off my chest. As I said at the outset, people are prone to looking at schools and asking why such an arrangement came to be. While I haven’t covered every single little bit of influential history, I’ve tried to present what I think is a decent answer to some of that question. Why do we have phones in the classroom? Why have schools seemed obsessed with “21st century skills”? Why did we ever think there was a skills gap? How come school reforms always seem to be arguments over charter schools and why is that now changing? Whatever happened to all the effort expended on standardizing education? And why did we spend two decades listening to billionaire executives and their pet philanthropies when all the reforms seemed to fail? Along the way I argued that there was a misunderstanding of the lessons of Human Capital Theory. I explained that the direction and goals of school choice reforms are to create a system whereby tax dollars fund religious institutions and to undo the racial integration of schools. I noted that efforts to standardize ran afoul of parents’ perceptions of local control of schools and that the billionaires pushing these reforms fail to understand their own role at a fundamental level. If you’re looking at the state of US education and are asking how we got here, I think I’ve provided a good chunk of the answer. It’s also useful material to link back to if I need a reference.

Additionally, I introduced what I consider to be the thesis of this blog/newsletter/thing, Scholastic Alchemy. Scholastic Alchemy is, put simply, the tendency of things in education to turn out differently than expected. Alchemy, after all, was never a science and never did transform mundane substances into gold. It was, perhaps, a confidence game or a scam, but for all its falsity alchemy established techniques and processes that are familiar to chemists today. Studying the history of alchemy helped scholars develop a clearer record of the emergence of modern science during the Enlightenment. Disputations between early scientists and alchemists are some of the earliest western records of modern scientific thought. It is precisely because the alchemists had no idea of the true complexity they were dealing with that we arrived at real chemical knowledge. Anyway, this is all to say that there is value in looking at the decades of effort that have gone into reshaping US schooling, especially K-12, and analyzing how all those unintended consequences came about. I wish to turn that same lens toward current events in education since, as I’m sure the brilliant and highly aware readers of this humble blog/newsletter/thing know, we have entered a period of more radical educational change than we’ve seen since the 1960s. This also means I’ll let myself be a bit more freely critical in my writing.

Possible Futures

Here are some things, in no particular order, that I’d like to write about going forward:

• Everything is curriculum: Curriculum is more than the materials and content of a course. It’s what you do in the classroom. It’s what you choose not to do. It’s the physical layout of spaces, the noise and chaos, the deafening silences and orderliness, and so on. When you think about curriculum you quickly realize that everything connects with curriculum in some way. Maybe this is less of a post and more of a running theme I need to incorporate?

• Economic anxiety: I sort of got here in that early post on phones in school. Parents, educators, policymakers, and society at large are constantly worried that kids aren’t learning things they need in order to be successful in the workforce. This isn’t because of some passionate love for the idea of work but because without a good paying job, peoples’ lives suck. We underrate that anxiety as an important force motivating parents’ choices at school board meetings, ballot boxes, or even how they communicate about education with their kids. Also, if we had a better social safety net, would parents lighten up?

• Education and nation building: Did you know that school reform is a component of the IMF’s loan conditions? It’s not just them. NGOs and other aid organizations often expend time and effort at establishing western style school systems in places they provide aid. One of the first major non-combat initiatives of the US in Afghanistan was to establish schools and to let girls attend them. Compulsory mass schooling in the west has its roots in the development of nationalism and the need to develop a common identity and shared culture. If you’re going to build a nation, either historically or today, one of the big things you do is set up schools to further your cause. This is one reason I say schools are actually conservative institutions.

• Schools are conservative: Schools are often associated with liberalism and leftism. This is largely because the people who work there are most often liberals and leftists. As institutions, though, I think schools are quite conservative and folks of the liberal/left persuasion seem not to recognize this. One of schools’ roles is to literally produce the future body politic of the nation. This means schools, whether explicitly or implicitly, inculcate the values of that nation, the culture of that nation. Not only that, but as institutions, school systems operate to perpetuate themselves and maintain their power, often in ways that fall hardest upon students.

• Literacy: There are some specific alchemical developments in US literacy education that I’d like to write about (e.g. the “science” of reading) but I’d also like to write about literacy in a broader sense. I’d like to critique some of the commonly asked for literacies, while I’m at it. Financial literacy as a concept seems designed to obscure important drivers of inequality. Media literacy is constantly talked about as lacking but media literacy assumes a static text with a reader. We live with adversarial digital “texts” that actively work to trick and manipulate us. Our media respond to our attempts to be literate by working in real time to confound those attempts. Perhaps what is needed is not literacy but regulation and resistance?

• The kids who can’t: We don’t have a good answer about what to do with a group of kids I’m going to call the kids who can’t. Some kids can’t do some things. This might be because of disability, proclivity, inequality, or any number of reasons. In a system that tells itself that it is a meritocracy, the kids who can’t are left behind to… what? Nobody knows. Starve? Die? Become criminals? We certainly aren’t interested in providing a strong social safety net to care for the kids who can’t. One problem is that we don’t want to acknowledge difference in any meaningful way. If we assume every kid is capable of mastering calculus by 11th grade and then blame schools when not all kids master calculus by 11th grade, it’s much easier than developing a system that also works for the kids who can’t master calculus by 11th grade. Insert any number of standards or goals and then ignore any inequality and difference in the students. Seems bad! Seems like we can’t really care for every kid! What if we stopped assuming every kid had the potential to be every possible thing? What would that school system look like? What would it mean to seriously engage with the kids who can’t?

There’s probably more I could add here but I think this is a good stopping place for now. A lot of these ideas are interrelated, too, so it makes it hard for me to know how to slice them up into shorter posts. Still, I really need to try and keep this stuff under the 2000-word mark. Let me know if you, dear reader, have any suggestions or requests. Keep an eye out for the links on Friday.