The Modern Teacher: Reviving Humanistic Learning in the Age of EdTech Control.

In the political economy of U.S. schooling, so-called “standardized” tests are not neutral yardsticks. By design and in practice they embed cultural-linguistic hurdles and reproduce concentrated social advantage. In today’s capitalist, bourgeois school system, these regimes are policy instruments that sort, exclude, and legitimize austerity and privatization, useful to monopoly capital’s project of attacking public education (Hursh, 2013; Saltman, 2014). Bias is not a slur; i

If only my geometry teacher had realized I was a “kinesthetic learner,” I might have understood right triangles while doing cartwheels across the classroom.

The Museum of Science and Industry (MSI) has long been celebrated as one of Chicago’s great civic treasures. But behind its sleek glass exhibits and corporate “innovation” rhetoric lies a story of creeping privatization, ideological capture, and attacks on public education under the banner of partnership. Nowhere is this clearer than in the museum’s partnership with Collins Academy STEAM High School in North Lawndale. Through its Science Leadership Initiative (SLI), MSI prese

How do you know if an activity fulfills the criteria for authentic or student-centered instruction? Start by specifying for whom and by what criteria. “Authentic” isn’t a look or a theme; it’s a social relation. An activity meets disciplinary authenticity when students engage in the practices of the field (posing and refining questions, using warrants, revising to peer critique), not just producing polished artifacts. It meets community authenticity when people affected by t

In my experience, integration works when it is built around authentic public problems and a coherent question rather than a loose “theme.” For example, I recently framed a mathematics unit with community data, field observations, and resident voice such that the math functioned as a civic language: students used gap calculations, rates, and comparisons to advance public claims, not just to complete exercises. That alignment is consistent with research showing that integrated