At the end of the previous chapter, one question remained quiet and insistent: what, together, will we place in the highest place next? When I arrive at…
There are evenings that seem too modest to belong to history. I think of a narrow street giving itself over to dusk: the last errands, the scrape of bins,…
On certain winter mornings, in my mind, I find myself standing near the gate of a school in a small Finnish…
After the last chapter’s questions about children’s invisible wounds, I find myself returning to something even more basic: how schools learn to see the…
If the previous chapter followed the child into the age of dashboards, profiles, and warning scores, this one follows the same child into another room:…
If the previous chapter lingered over the power of labels and expectations, this one begins where those forces now often gather: on the glowing screen a…
After tracing how a culture of competition teaches the child to become a product, I want to move closer, into the classroom itself, where those wider…
If merit has become one of the reigning powers of our age, then childhood is one of the places where its demands are felt most…
In my journey through the history of divine power, I keep returning to ordinary scenes that do not look theological at all. One of them is the annual…
When I was a child, I did not know the phrase Gaussian distribution. I only sensed that some hidden pattern hovered over the classroom, quietly arranging…
When I picture the small testing room, I do not see a church. I see chalk dust, a blackboard, a row of child-sized chairs, a plain table, a stack of…
I begin this part of the journey with two small scenes. In one, I picture a boy in a German doorway, sounding out scripture in his own language while his…
