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…
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 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…
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:…
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…
On certain winter mornings, in my mind, I find myself standing near the gate of a school in a small Finnish…
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,…
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…
When I began this journey, I thought I was trying to understand history. In truth, I was trying to understand ordinary rooms. A classroom with a red mark…