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Tag: Education

Johanna Winant, Jessica Wilkerson, Rose Casey

The crisis here spells disaster for the future of public education.

Christopher Newfield

Institutional reform is no match for pervasive structural inequality.

Robin D. G. Kelley

In her scholarship, mentoring, and activism, Farah Jasmine Griffin brings a praxis of radical love to an unequal academy.

Silvia Ivani, Catarina Dutilh Novaes

Building public trust requires far more than the conveyance of facts and instruction in scientific thinking.

Judith Levine

“Don’t Say Gay” laws can be traced to the Reagan-era crusade to put “parents' rights” before the interests of children.

Jonna Perrillo

Laws controlling what schools teach about race and gender show an awareness that classrooms are sites of nation-building. During the Cold War, El Paso public schools knew this too when they taught the children of former Nazis how to be white Americans.

John Summers

The Judge Rotenberg Center, a Massachusetts school, still uses electric shock therapy to punish disabled students. How can an entire field of mental health accept this as fine?

Jared Loggins, Andrew J. Douglas
Even as they carve out space for Black scholarship, established universities remain deeply complicit in racial capitalism. We must think beyond them.
Victoria Baena

Education is not inherently liberatory: it has always been an arena for broader struggles over who has access to knowledge and to what ends learning is put.

Nichola Lowe
To support the work of the future, we must promote workers’ skills as crucial to technological progress.
Shellyne Rodriguez, Billie Anania

Artist-activist Shellyne Rodriguez speaks with Billie Anania about museum labor practices and how Strike MoMA imagines a future of art for the people.

Marshall Steinbaum

Why the left’s turn from higher education has coincided with a newfound conservative appreciation for it.

Robin D. G. Kelley
I wrote letters for West’s hire and renewal at Harvard. The school’s administrators completely miss the point of tenure.
Aaron Karp
The pandemic holds important political lessons for the climate crisis, but they must be taught.
Agnes Callard

Two new books take aim at the moral failures of meritocracy. But we can advocate for a more just society without giving up on merit.

Marcelo K. Silva, Gianpaolo Baiocchi
The Brazilian president’s offensive against universities threatens democracy and recalls the dark years of the country’s dictatorship.
Anne McDonough, Oluchi Mbonu, Daniel E. Ho

How faculty retirement policies shape racial and gender diversity on campus.

Todd Wolfson, Astra Taylor

Astra Taylor talks with Rutgers faculty union president Todd Wolfson about organizing academic communities in the age of COVID-19.

Roberto Rey Agudo, Alberto Bruzos Moro, Yuliya Komska
Media stories praising online language learning as an inexpensive way to take a “vacation” during COVID-19 have expressed astonishingly little curiosity about the conditions under which gig-economy language teachers labor.
Marina Magloire
“This sudden attention to the ongoing grief of black life can also feel like a slap in the face. Didn’t you notice we were dying?”
Mordecai Lyon, Lorgia García-Peña
In this interview, Lorgia García-Peña, who was denied tenure by Harvard in late 2019, discusses why ethnic studies has never been more urgent and the important role it can play in protest.
Farah Jasmine Griffin

“In a season of unimaginable death, my students emerged as visionaries. I hope to live to see the world they create." 

Angus Deaton, Joshua Cohen
Boston Review talks with Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton about COVID-19, the relationship between culture, financial hardship, and health, and why capitalism’s flaws are proving fatal for America’s working class. 
Jeffrey Aaron Snyder

COVID-19 will accelerate a number of troubling longer-term trends—including less public funding and a migration of courses online.

Lelac Almagor
Accountability is important. But tests that tie school funding to student performance only make things worse.
Joel Christensen

The beauty of the language should not keep us from reckoning with its history.

Shannon Ross

One man’s struggle to earn a degree while incarcerated shows how far tough-on-crime policies go to prevent prisoners from having a second chance.

Richard Ford

Elitism can't be democratized.

Jonathan Beecher Field
When conservatives declare the death of the English major, they highlight the need for the critical thinking skills that English departments excel at teaching.
Erik Loomis
Sixty-five years after Brown v. Board of Education, U.S. schools remain largely segregated. This matters not only because white and black students experience very different educational outcomes, but also because school is where children form many of their ideas about race and privilege.
Joshua Cohen, Samuel Bowles
The postwar generation understood why a prosperous working class is crucial to the economy. Can economics be accessible again to ordinary Americans?
Joseph J. Fischel
Debate over Title IX affirmative consent standards has assumed that consent is the best basis for a feminist sexual politics. But what if it isn’t?
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Michelle Obama’s memoir, Becoming, reduces racial inequality to a matter of psychological impairment that can be overcome through grit and grin.

Thomas Baxter

What happens when a school district votes to arm teachers? A Rust Belt educator takes us through the grim realities of training to kill one of his own students.

Albert W. Dzur
Education’s most important job is to teach students to take an active role in their democracy, starting in their own communities.
Jack David Eller
Few democracies require children to make a daily declaration of fealty to country.
Henry A. Giroux

Striking teachers and student activists have a common enemy.

Jeffrey Aaron Snyder
A controversial new book highlights the dire straits of the U.S. education system, but offers misguided and irresponsible ideas for fixing it.
Ayesha Ramachandran, Marta Figlerowicz

The best teaching is always intimate. Today's universities make it difficult to talk about that.

Michael Whinston

By attacking higher education, the new tax bill belies the GOP's ambitious political motivations. The investment we make in young adults today, after all, determines the electorate we have in the future.

Merve Emre

Bad readers were not born; they were created. To know them is to understand literature and politics in postwar America.

Marshall Steinbaum

When college is a prerequisite for getting a job that pays better than minimum wage, we cannot stop until it is free and accessible to all.

Archon Fung

Three books draw a disturbing picture of America as a system of compounding inequality driven by a hereditary meritocracy of professional elites.

Just in time for the holidays, get any three print issues of Boston Review for just $35 – that’s 40% off the cover price!

Before December 9, mix and match any three issues for one low price using code 3FOR35.

Just in time for the holidays, get any three print issues of Boston Review for just $35 – that’s 40% off the cover price!

Before December 9, mix and match any three issues for one low price using code 3FOR35.

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