politics

why educate?

I have a piece on Piers Plowman and 21st-century higher ed out this month in Boston College Magazine.

I have a new essay on David Perry’s blog, How Did We Get into This Mess?, called “What Is Education For? – To Kill a Mockingbird and Medieval Literature.” It’s about Biloxi School District’s decision last month to ban (then partially unban) To Kill a Mockingbird.

I have an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the symbiotic but asymmetrical relationship between knowledge and institutions.

I have a guest blog post at Fair Field out today, on the challenges of higher education as a social and ethical project, in the fourteenth century and today. It’s called “What’s the point of learning? Piers Plowman and education today.”

I have a piece out today in The Conversation comparing fourteenth- and twenty-first-century anxieties about the destructive power of young people.