> I'd start with Diane Ravitch's "Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform" I'll do that. I haven't read any of Ravitch's work directly yet, and enou

> I'd start with Diane Ravitch's "Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform" I'll do that. I haven't read any of Ravitch's work directly yet, and enough time has passed since I heard her speak that I don't remember her position reliably anymore. > Start with John Dewey and William Torrey Harris (for a counterpoint to Dewey). I'm a fairly huge fan of John Dewey. I only barely hold back from calling myself a philosophical pragmatist in Dewey's tradition. On the other hand, I kinda recognize Harris' notion as a tradition I'd reject; Wikipedia's characterization of his supporters' arguments suggests that there isn't anything really useful in his ideas that doesn't require stripping it bare first. :P > Literally every point everyone has been making in this thread -- myself included -- was also being made by educational thinkers 100-150 years ago. But this is not experimentation. There is a difference between a thought experiment and an actual experiment. Schrodinger did not actually put a cat in a box and mysteriously wave his hands to express the quantum uncertainty of its aliveness. Yes, we have some tiny movements like Montessori schools or project-based learning or Quest to Learn or KIPP's character training or charter schools and so on and so on, but they make such an infinitesimal impact and are often so incomparable that it doesn't make sense to call it "experimentation". The fact that Will Wright, Sergey Brin, and Jeff Bezos are all Montessori graduates, for instance, gets noticed sometimes but also gets mocked a portion of that. (That is, the term "Montessori graduate" is sometimes used derogatorily.) > I meant to draw attention to exactly your point, that we've set up a situation where universities are directionless because we've asked them to be everything to everyone. I don't think that the answer is to unbundle it, though. That's an easy, dare I say Silicon-Valley-esque response to a difficult and multifarious beast, but it's not necessarily the right one. I think that it'd be worthwhile to shed some of those things, yes, but for their invalidity or overgeneralizations on their own merits, rather than because they detract from a university's capacity to be itself. I am working on an answer myself, naturally... but I've so far declined to try to untangle the nature of a university on my own. It feels like putting the cart before the horse to do so. I've mostly held to a single, simple principle: a university experience should be optional. If people feel compelled to go to a university after some particular amount of basic education, such as high school, then the problems of a university are symptoms, not causes.