Systems for human development evolve based on the fitness characteristics of those systems relative to the environment in which they evolve.  The current teacher training system selects for students willing to take education courses in order to obtain a teaching certificate.  They expect that a teaching certificate will give them a security.  But a different [...]

The traditional interpretation of human capital is formal education leading to increased earning power.  But investments in human capital, in the broadest sense, are resources devoted in the present in the development of a human being that result in greater lifelong happiness and well-being.  Improved test score performance and degrees from accredited institutions are merely [...]

Many people will acknowledge the existence of extraordinary teachers, such as Jaime Escalante (immortalized in the film “Stand and Deliver” as the teacher who created one of the best AP calculus programs nationwide in an East L.A. school).  Because none of these educators have succeeded in scaling their successes, the conventional [...]

I began my experience as an educator training teachers in Socratic Seminars in Chicago Public Schools for Mortimer Adler’s Paideia Project in the late 1980s. Paideia was a public school reform movement that aspired to give poor children as high quality an education as more fortunate children had.  The slogan was Robert M. [...]

This week is National School Choice Week. School choice is a subject we haven’t really discussed on this blog. But (at least in my own case), that’s a product of a relative lack of expertise, rather than a lack of interest. Bleeding Heart Libertarians care about the way in which freedom can serve [...]