Why is Mark Twain’s autobiography only coming out now, 100 years after his death? Because he stipulated so before dying. What he expresses in these screenshots from a PBS Newshour clip of the manuscript suggests why he might have wanted these thoughts to stay silent for a century. And they’re strangely resonant in our own [...]

[A fun little conversation I'm having with Laura in this comment thread includes her question about differences between Chinese literary types and Western ones. It reminded me of this post I wrote last year on Change.org, and planned to cross-post here eventually anyway. I hope you agree that its quotes are lovely things.] ~     ~     [...]

Readers of George Orwell’s Animal Farm should remember Squealer, the pig whose “journalism” manipulated the entire animal society into unquestioningly supporting the dictatorial pig Napoleon. If they studied Animal Farm in the classroom, the depressing odds are they learned it as a good, all-American attack on socialism. The most simple-minded of our teachers make a [...]

Lots of film-making skills to learn from — ironic soundtrack, archival footage editing, lighting and superimposition, on and on — in this staggering video. Oh, and the writing’s not shabby either: William Burroughs’ “A Thanksgiving Prayer”: . .(h/t Hullaballoo)

Alan Moore, author of The Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and so many other comic book masterworks, has this to say about education: All too often education actually acts as a form of aversion therapy, that what we’re really teaching our children is to associate learning with work and to associate work with drudgery so that [...]

I’m always looking for models of real readings to share with students. The Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein gives us a good one with his reading of a recent opinion piece by conservative NYTimes columnist David Brooks. At issue is Brooks’ argument that deficit spending during periods of debt crisis makes consumers insecure, and thus deficit [...]

The Inspiration Gap: it’s 0ne of the weirdest things about teaching teens. This Gap yawns between the adult who knows this stuff — history, literature, science, whatever — is endlessly wondrous, and the majority of students who haven’t figured that out yet and, worse still, in so many cases are so educationally poisoned they refuse [...]

[Note: I'm going to spend the summer cross-posting here any posts I wrote for Change.org's Education blog that I feel are worth the effort. This is the first.] U Virginia psychology professor Daniel Willingham‘s video below is about reading instruction. I recommend it to parents, students, teachers, administrators, and school board members – and especially [...]

Two reader requests that beg for a book-lovers’ crowd-sourced response. First, Richard writes a request that in itself stirs the literary imagination with echoes of Twain, Conrad, Crane: I just wanted to let you know that I really enjoyed your series on Gilgamesh.  I had read it a while back but forgot exactly where it [...]

Scot Aldred asks how I assessed projects like the Broken World Wiki textbook, and I tell him I haven’t the foggiest idea. It was too long ago. More to the point, he notes that since I said in my Australia keynote that whatever I did at that time led to burnout, the better question is, [...]