Education

Tuesday

Spectator Editorial

The reviving of the American mind

From our US edition

In his 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom argued that higher education no longer taught US citizens how to think. “We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished,” he wrote. “The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.” Now, almost 40 years later, we’re even more clueless. The rot in academia has spread throughout the education system and can be found all over American life. Rational thinking has now been almost entirely usurped by the baser passions of anger and grievance, as we saw all too clearly in the collective insanity of the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020.

Trump
Peter Wood

The Trump administration is giving us excellence, not equity

From our US edition

Americans are not a naturally gloomy people. We don’t necessarily expect things to go our way, but when they don’t, we can laugh it off. In my part of Vermont there’s a place called Hateful Hill, for example, so-named by stagecoach drivers who had a tough time with the steep road. But Hateful Hill is also a beautiful elevation. Today, even those who don’t “get” Donald Trump need to start seeing the upside. He doesn’t always get his way, which is probably a good thing, but he is leading a long-overdue revival of the American spirit and allowing for the return of optimism and the pursuit of excellence.

Trump
universities
Amy L. Wax

Wokeism is stifling thought in America’s universities

From our US edition

The American education system needs drastic reform from bottom to top.  Our K-12 schools, both public and private, have come to be dominated by radical left-wing ideas. Schools not only indoctrinate students with a one-sided view of history and society, but they also increasingly fail in their core mission of imparting the basic skills needed to function in our advanced and complex society. Likewise, our universities, professional schools and graduate schools are in the grip of a far-left ideology that has compromised their traditional missions of truth-seeking, knowledge creation and the preservation and transmission of western culture and the advanced skills essential to its vitality and prosperity.

Rufo
Ben Domenech

How Christopher Rufo is changing American education

From our US edition

As fire-breathing counter-revolutionaries go, Christopher Rufo seems notably mild-mannered. Perhaps it’s his northern California roots and Pacific Northwest home that keep him from embracing the based lifestyle pursued by so many conservatives in the Trumpian era. He doesn’t like sports. He doesn’t enjoy UFC. He allows his four kids to watch Disney movies and admits he was once a vegetarian. Yet it’s also possible that the Georgetown-educated PBS documentarian turned right-wing iconoclast is effective precisely for that reason: he knows the people he is criticizing.

IQ
Sean Thomas

Why is intelligence declining?

From our US edition

In 1906, the famous polymath Sir Francis Galton visited a country fair on the edge of Plymouth, England. A bullock had been tethered for slaughter and almost 800 locals were invited to guess its dressed weight: how heavy it would be after butchering. Galton – an obsessive measurer of people, weather and intelligence – gathered the entries, calculated the average and found something remarkable. The crowd’s collective estimate came within a single pound of the ox’s actual weight. This elegant experiment would become one of the founding truisms of modern democratic thought. Galton had shown that while individuals may err, the group, in aggregate, can reason with uncanny accuracy and prescience. He had discovered “the wisdom of crowds.

ADHD
John Hasson

We shouldn’t downplay the risks of ADHD medication

From our US edition

I was diagnosed with ADHD in my freshman year of college. I’d suspected as much in high school, but I disliked the idea of taking medication. College was different. No matter what I tried, I kept finding gaps in my notes – and therefore gaps in my knowledge on test day. While I was prescribed so-called “smart drugs,” I didn’t delude myself into thinking they would magically make me more intelligent – which is why I laughed when I saw the ADHD research industry perform a volte-face in the pages of the New York Times, in a piece headlined: “Have we been thinking about ADHD all wrong?” The obvious answer is yes.

Thursday

Freddy Gray

Harvard’s intricate China ties

From our US edition

Scratch almost any major US political story and sooner or later you’ll hit a big red nerve that belongs to the Chinese Communist party (CCP). Tariffs, energy, TikTok, the border, Fentanyl, Greenland, Panama, the Gulf of America – on all these subjects the Trump administration is, one way or another, trying to limit Beijing’s power in the West. And Donald Trump’s "war on Harvard," it turns out, is no exception. It’s clear that the President is pushing against anti-Semitism and the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion madness on America’s most famous campus, as well as in countless other colleges and universities.

Harvard
Mary Wakefield

Lily Parr and the creepiness of AI resurrection

I’m not sure it’s possible to make a horror movie more sinister than the chirpy four-minute film on YouTube purporting to be an ‘interview’ with the late Lily Parr. Parr was a professional footballer who played as winger before the war, a chain-smoking 6ft Lancashire lesbian with that gung-ho spirit I remember from my girls’ boarding school, before the governors purged the spinster games mistresses. Three UK in collaboration with Chelsea FC have cooked up an AI version of Lily, which they insist can answer questions just as she would have done. They’ve persuaded Karen Carney (real, not AI), who played for England, to talk to AI Lily and then presented footage of the conversation as if it were a scoop.

Wednesday

Christopher Caldwell

How DEI destroyed itself

From our US edition

Those who wonder why more Americans haven’t risen up in rebellion against the Trump administration’s assault on affirmative action, its gutting of university departments, its violation of the neutrality of the American legal profession, should keep in mind the epigraph from the 20th-century philosopher Will Durant that appears in the opening moments of Mel Gibson’s 2006 movie Apocalypto: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” As he promised to do, Donald Trump is dismantling large parts of the government he conquered at the ballot box last November. You don’t have to approve. Roughly half of Americans do not. But the regime he is undoing has yielded diminishing returns for most of this century.

DEI market

Friday

Teresa Mull

Trump is right to eradicate the Department of Education

From our US edition

Teachers’ unions have donated millions upon millions over the years almost exclusively to Democratic candidates and left-wing organizations. So it’s no wonder Dems, realizing their cash cow could be on the verge of drying up, are losing their minds over President Trump signing an executive order yesterday to begin eradicating the Department of Education. If Americans get a real taste of school choice (Trump still needs a Congressional vote to end the agency), the left knows there will be no going back. Senator Chuck Schumer called the order “one of the most destructive and devastating steps Donald Trump has ever taken.

Education

Monday

James Heale

Can the Tories save their education legacy?

13 min listen

Bridget Phillipson's schools bill is back in the Commons today. The scope of the legislation is twofold: firstly, looking at the welfare of children in schools and secondly at fundamentally changing the landscape of secondary education by doing away with academies (and with it the legacy of the previous Conservative government on education). The plan has been read by many – including former head of Ofsted Amanda Spielman, who joins today's podcast – as Labour pandering to the unions and perhaps even prioritising the adults (union members) over the children. Amendments to the bill will be debated this afternoon, including a Tory amendment that would ban phones in schools, although it doesn't seem that Labour is in the mood to make any concessions. What is motivating Labour?

Saturday

Colin Freeman

Colin Freeman, Harry Ritchie, Max Jeffery, Michael Gove and Catriona Olding

35 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Colin Freeman explains how Islamic State tightened its grip on the Congo (1:23); Harry Ritchie draws attention to the thousands of languages facing extinction this century, as he reviews Rare Tongues: The Secret Stories of Hidden Languages by Lorna Gibb (8:00); Max Jeffery highlights the boxing academy changing young lives (13:20); Michael Gove reflects on lessons learned during his time as education secretary (20:30); and, Catriona Olding introduces the characters from her new Provence-based memoir club (29:27).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

The Spectator

School portraits: snapshots of four notable schools

Ludgrove, Berkshire Ludgrove, which was founded in 1892 by the footballer Arthur Dunn, is a boarding prep school in Berkshire and has 130 acres for its pupils to learn, run around and play in. The school is one of the last preps to provide full boarding (which is fortnightly). At weekends, boys can use 11 football pitches, four tennis courts, two squash courts and a nine-hole golf course. It’s not just Prince William’s alma mater: other old boys include Alec Douglas--Home, Simon Sebag Montefiore and Bear Grylls (who opened the new Exploration Centre in June 2021). Most of the boys go on to Eton, Harrow, Radley or Winchester.

Susan Hill

Why I’ve never forgotten Sister Cecilia

It is never people, always buildings. Faces change, time blurs them, but – unless they undergo a complete makeover – buildings remain pretty much the same, bar a few coats of paint. Along the second-floor corridor lined with arched windows that overlook the street. Buses grind by below. Up the last short steep staircase and along the very top corridor, which is narrower and lined with books. They call it the library and I am often here, tucked into the window seat reading, but otherwise heading for the arched door – everything is arched here – at the far end. It opens on to a low-ceilinged room with roof lights through which the sun seems always to be shining.

Monday

Charles Lipson

Columbia exemplifies the failure of universities

From our US edition

Yesterday, with growing sadness, I read a wonderful book about teaching and learning, written by one of the great teachers of the past century. Why the sadness? Because the author, Gilbert Highet, was a revered professor at Columbia in the Fifties and Sixties. It is impossible to read his paean to learning, written a half-century ago, without weeping for what his university has become. When Highet wrote of learning, he meant absorbing from history’s greatest minds, from Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Virgil, Cicero, Machiavelli, Hobbes and Locke, and teaching their lessons to students who wished to learn from them. Reading Highet’s words a half century later, we realize he was speaking of another time and place — virtually another university.

columbia

Thursday

Peter Jones

Aristotle and the leisurely pursuit of education

Nearly six million people are on out-of-work benefits. It is claimed that, for most of those, going back to work would not be financially worth it. Aristotle would have agreed with them because for him, leisure was the most important possession a man could have. The ancients generally had no concept of the dignity of labour, apart from idealistic views about the farmer working in harmony with gods and man for the moral betterment of mankind. For most people, work was a painful necessity whose only purpose was to keep you from penury. The farmer-poet Hesiod (c.

Thursday

Katharine Birbalsingh

What I learned from my meeting with the Education Secretary

Dear Secretary of State, thank you for meeting me and one of my deputies on Monday. You will have noticed in our meeting how disappointed we were with your responses to the questions teachers have about the government’s proposals. I assure you, we are not alone in that feeling. As teachers, we often hear politicians say how much they care about education. One of two things follows: either they turn out to be that rare politician who is truly interested in schools; or they are that all too common politician who simply wants to appear that way. Our meeting confirmed that you are firmly in the latter category. Politicians who truly want to raise standards for our most deprived communities would ordinarily be interested in hearing from the people who know best how to do it: teachers.

Thursday

Peter Jones

What Bridget Phillipson has in common with Plato

One does not like to disagree with one’s editor, but while the image of Rome salting the earth of its bitter rival Carthage is a striking way of describing Labour’s plan to wreck our current system of education, Rome was not in the habit of destroying the advantages that its conquests produced. The salting story is a 19th-century invention, endorsed by no less an authority than the Cambridge Ancient History (1930), but now rescinded. As Mr Gove made clear in last week’s magazine, the universal imposition of a national curriculum, among other measures, will remove the freedom and choice – the two words you will find nowhere in discussion of Labour education policy – which played such a crucial part in improving educational attainment.

Wednesday

Eliot Wilson

The ‘shocking tactics’ of Kemi Badenoch

Whitehall is being swept by moral outrage. Ministers, in full This Is Spinal Tap mode, have turned their pious horror up to 11 and Keir Starmer has accused the opposition of a ‘shocking tactic’, preferring ‘the elevation of the desire for retweets over any real interest in the safeguarding of children’. What dark perfidy has been done? What cynical political stunt have the Conservatives pulled, staining their hands with such baseness? Kemi Badenoch has tabled a reasoned amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which is being debated at second reading today. Let me explain briefly.

Oscar Edmondson

Michael Gove: why does Labour want to ruin state schools?

13 min listen

At PMQs today, the battle lines were drawn ahead of today’s vote on Labour’s Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which aims to protect children within the education system. Its contents have galvanised opposition parties, who are using the legislation to force a fresh inquiry into grooming gangs. Shadow Education Secretary Laura Trott has also been on the airwaves today, attacking some of the reforms detailed in the plan, specifically on academies and free schools. The government is set to take away many of their freedoms to set curriculum and pay, freedoms given to them by our now editor – then education secretary – Michael Gove. So, do academies have a future in the education system? What’s Labour’s motivation here?