you know what’s interesting about laguardia’s new york? ed policy

I was thinking about Zohran’s transition team and today’s anti-feminist piece in the New York Times, and my mother’s book on the first generation of women to work in the city government in New York City. global.oup.com/academic/pro...

👀

the…demos

the thing is, they are not and we should say so

“How do we make high school relevant, engaging, and purposeful?” teach philosophy www.edweek.org/teaching-lea...

The best scaffolding is like training wheels. The wheels have to be removed, and the bike rider has to do it with courage and determination until it becomes . . . Dare I say it? Like riding a bike. Some may forget this important part. We need our students to be able to read sophisticated text.

and you know what? even many 10th graders should be able to understand writing that’s “complex, erudite, punctuated by deep and fluent references” sometimes “meeting students where they are” means assigning something written by an adult for other adults

today a student informed me that a 2017 poem is "old"

Transcendentalism found poetry tomorrow, mixing and matching texts to make new texts, here we go. Then off to see Thoreau’s journals in the archives with the children next Friday.

Here's the text of the Every Student Succeeds Act. Ctrl+F "literature": www.congress.gov/114/plaws/pu...

what there is, still, to learn, i think, is that much of k16 ed policy is oriented towards "workforce development" and there are other things to do like read books

Identifying flaws in arguments is still a valuable skill

A canon frozen in amber is a great training set for an LLM, especially if all its books are in the public domain.

🤔

part of what we’re seeing now is the development of a “classical” infrastructure that’s compatible with the ESSA framework

it’s a pretty poorly constructed argument and I wish that people would take it more seriously because he’s got juice

even whole departments and institutions these days…

I, personally, have no money which is why I also have a full time job and such a thing requires money and time

I do wonder about the end game

Second is between "the questions we need to ask" and "the questions we need to ask the llm." Ok, wisdom is asking the right question, but is this the same as finding the right phrasing to get the llm to spit out the output you want? 2/

See also Jeremy Wayne Tate, founder of the Classic Learning Test, who recently argued, “In a word, using AI trains users to become wise.” www.dailysignal.com/2025/08/01/a...

Great thread and great response from Ada Palmer to it. I'd just add: The Renaissance is bunk, but maybe the renaissances aren't? Every heretic and every reformer (you can almost never pre-judge which is which) thinks they're "returning" to a golden age. Nostalgia is the enemy.

it’s my understanding that reading a book isn’t a gen ed requirement in a lot of places if it was, the ap program would have to account for it

best time to write better arguments is now

what do philosophy professors think about this claim?

JWT has shown his hand here: it was never about reading old books well. It was, and is, about money and power.

I would add that Kurtz does not dwell on AI as an enemy of "tradition"

one nice thing about the scarlet letter is that it's not a story by an algorithm specifically for one child

a thread.

write back against weak arguments

FOOTNOTE 2 @adapalmer.bsky.social also has a great book generally on what the "renaissance" really was bookshop.org/p/books/inve...

we should teach about long, strange, complicated narratives in schools

imagine what it might look like to automate a canon

yep, so the question is, “now what?”

you absolutely do not gotta hand it to him

These ideas are powerful and they appeal to a lot of people who are looking for meaning.

Agree in principle, but Kurtz's claim is way off. He says things have been anti-Western Civ for "two generations" now. That's what Bill Bennett said in the 1980s; Max Rafferty said in the 1960s; William J Bryan said in the 1920s..... It's a straw man. Vapid + only provocative.

this morning

Kurtz has, for years, been railing against the College Board. And he's the author of model "divisive concepts" legislation. It's worth reading what he's saying these days about education, even, maybe especially, if you disagree with his arguments-- www.nationalreview.com/corner/we-ne...

For all the talk about NCLB punishing teachers for test scores, ESSA is the thing that actually did, including closing/reconfiguring schools, making teachers interview for their own jobs, etc

but who has the attention to read 392 pages these days

scream it from the rooftops

understanding that there’s not just one way to read something—a story, what someone says—is a skill that’s been useful to me professionally and personally

It is a little silly but this is why I show my kid TV from my lifetime. Stories about characters at different life stages, written and performed and crafted for a wide imagined audience—not one person but not every person either

and consent

Because I teach an occasional education major, I try really hard to talk them through slightly antique poems, and to insist that they not settle for hocus pocus about a “deeper meaning” that isn’t set up by the actual words of the text. And I try to radiate some enjoyment of Hopkins, Shakespeare, &c

the right wing wants to ban particular books and the technocrats want to ban…books in general?

not only that it helps, it’s essential

Even Whitman, who liked to imagine that he was speaking to readers far in the future, did not imagine a time when getting from Brooklyn to Manhattan didn’t involve A BOAT RIDE. But these dead folks can’t change to compromise and meet you. You have to go to them, by learning their talk. (3/7)