Here you will find articles about public education pedagogy and politics, school buildings and school teachers from elementary school to higher education, as published mainly in Illinois Issues and Illinois Times. 

 

The first serious writing I ever did (and boy, was I serious) was about schools. While still a student, I wrote about public schools, meaning the public schools in Springfield, meaning the Springfield public schools I attended—mostly polemics about relevance and group-think and kids as second-class citizens, half-digested from reading Goodman and Holt and Hentoff and other rabble-rousers. Out of school as a rookie author, I helped research and write a state agency report about school district organization in Illinois. Schools and kids also were the subject of the only article of mine ever to appear in a sort-of professional journal. (See below for "School Is Something You Put Up With . . . .") Higher education governance also occasioned the lengthiest article I ever got published. 

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School teachers were arguably the most important (which is not to say always the best) people I knew growing up. They were enormously influential, less for what they taught me—I was a classic self-teacher—but in how they shaped my notions of self. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that nearly all my friends have been teachers of one kind or other—indeed, I suppose I've always fancied myself a teacher of a sort too.

 

An adult life spent with a Montessori teacher/trainer/administrator meant that kids and schools and parents and governments and school organizations were staples of conversation and debate at our house. Thus it was that, while childless myself, I stayed focused on kids and schools as public issues. 

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Interested readers also should know that I devoted a chapter in my history of mid-Illinois—"The urge to improve"—to education as it affected that part of the state; see Corn Kings & One-Horse Thieves.