Education
‘We pretend to teach, they pretend to learn’: the reality of lecturing Chinese students
Shanghaiing, the practice of drugging and kidnapping men on the US West Coast for service on ships bound for China,…
Cambridge’s Farah Ahmed: study engineering ‘to produce weaponry for Jihad’
Cambridge University’s education faculty – former home of Jason Arday – has appointed as assistant research professor a woman who…
Letters: universities have always been a little crazy
Universities’ challenge Sir: I have spent more than three decades in academia and so Lara Brown (‘Alma madder’, 15 August)…
Inside Arizona’s battle for school choice
Arizona families won big this week. The teachers union and Save Our Schools fell short (again) in their latest attempt to roll back the universal Empowerment…
Letters: the insanity of Labour’s attack on private schools
Bad education Sir: Lara Brown (‘Class warfare’, 1 August) lays bare the baleful consequences – intended and unintended – of…
How to fix education
The new prime minister’s eye catching opening announcement on education contains important truths, interwoven with equally important misconceptions. In implementing…
Farewell to the school I founded
My son Charlie sat his final A-level paper last week and the significance of this has only just sunk in.…
Were Britain’s postwar dons just having too much fun?
Hugh Trevor-Roper, for whom the university was a place of pleasure as well as learning, identifiedas early as 1951 a ‘party of darkness’ focusing on administrative efficiency and dullness
In praise of uncertainty over hollow conviction
Using his life as a case study, Brian Dillon sets out to demonstrate that education is just as much about questioning things as it is about obtaining answers
White working-class boys are being left behind
This week marks the fifth anniversary of the publication of the report of Lord Sewell’s Commission on Racial and Ethnic…
The hidden truth about our failing universities
Is it worth going to university? Since 1999, when Tony Blair declared higher education the answer to all society’s problems,…
Screens in schools have been a catastrophic failure
About a decade ago, the people I dreaded meeting most at parties were the ed tech evangelists – men and…
Letters: There’s no defending Robert Maxwell
Bring back wisdom Sir: Douglas Murray is right that reducing the educational attainment of politicians is not the answer to…
Who has been removed from the line of succession?
Out of line Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor may be removed from the line of succession. When was the last time this happened?…
Adventures in the City of Light: Rousseau’s Lost Children, by Gavin McCrea, reviewed
An academic specialising in Jean-Jacques Rousseau slips back in time to 1777 to accompany his hero on long philosophical rambles around Paris
Mamdani’s People’s Republic of New York
Proudly displayed in the window of my local Barnes and Noble are copies of a children’s book called Zohran Walks New…
The Chinese takeover of Britain’s public schools
Roedean is now known as ‘Beijing High’. Cheltenham Ladies’ College is ‘Hong Kong College’. In the country’s most elite boarding…
The five Haldanean principles that could reshape Britain
If Reform get into government, there is one man they seem likely to turn to for guidance. He is an…
The joyless reading app being forced on my son
It was only recently that I fully appreciated how the books I read as a child formed me. A pregnant…
Labour’s next rebellion
When Bridget Phillipson arrived at the Department for Education, she knew which issue would define her tenure. Within days, she…
The catastrophic dumbing down of German education
German teachers are a privileged species. Most of us enjoy the status of a Beamter, a tenured civil servant. We…
The pedant’s progress through history
The pompous know-it-all despised by classical philosophers became a stock comic character of 16th-century theatre – and finally a bore to be pitied
In praise of learning German
The University of Nottingham, one of the most prestigious Russell Group universities, is preparing to close its languages department, as…
How to make universities appeal to the working class
‘Long Eaton is dying a death. I was born and bred here, so I’ve seen it go downhill quite quickly.…
The folly of psychology
A young Chinese girl, at school in an English-speaking country, approached me after I gave a talk at a conference…
