Education Links, 8/1/2026

Robert Pondiscio questions Alpha School; Frank Furedi on Woke socialization; Aaron Renn on Vanderbilt; Hollis Robbins on learning outcomes

Robert Pondiscio writes,

School is a cultural habit. It’s an enduring social practice that persists not because no one has thought to improve or replace it, but because generations of people have found value in gathering children together to learn alongside one another under the guidance of adults. That habit encompasses academic instruction, certainly, but also routines, relationships, responsibilities, and the gradual formation of citizens.

…Alpha doesn’t need to overcome skepticism about AI. It needs to overcome skepticism about triumphalism, certainty, and over-confidence. The most persuasive and effective reformers eventually stop asking people to admire their vision and start inviting them to inspect their work.

…I’m asking for… enough transparency that independent researchers can answer the obvious questions without relying on Alpha’s interpretation of its own data.

Frank Furedi writes,

despite the occasional criticism of woke practices by politicians and corporates, wokism continues to enjoy a hegemonic status. Why? Because as long as it controls the institutions of socialization it will continue to influence the younger generation and in this is way remains deeply embedded in society’s cultural life.

…Children are indoctrinated to despise their society’s history. They are made to feel guilty about their white privilege if they are white. Worse still, they are taught that gender trumps sex and that, therefore, they should not take their biological sex as girls and boys too seriously.

…As long as young people are constantly subjected to the culture of repudiation by their educators, and the dominant institutions of culture all talk of a post woke era is immature. As long as woke ideals continue to influence the young in one form or another this ideology will continue to enjoy its commanding influence over the conduct of public life.

Aaron Renn writes,

As with trying to aggressively lure companies, Vanderbilt aggressively targeted high prestige students from Northeastern prep schools, as well as top Jewish talent:

The brunt of Vanderbilt’s recruitment strategy was focused on the Northeast, specifically on high schools that sent a lot of students to Ivies. “I’d been visiting those boarding schools when I was at Brown: Andover, Exeter, etc. So I started doing that,” Gee said. He also began “targeting Jewish students,” as he told The Wall Street Journal in 2002, explaining that “Jewish students … make a university a much more habitable place in terms of intellectual life” and were key components of his “elite strategy” of turning Vanderbilt into a direct competitor of the Ivy League.

This is an inversion of the midcentury era. Instead of putting quotas on Jewish students, they are actively recruiting more.

I am told that a disproportionate share of the incoming freshmen at UATX are Jewish. Go South, young Jew.

Hollis Robbins writes,

accreditors require learning outcomes for every degree program and every general education requirement; universities push the requirement down to faculty to put on every syllabus in every course, whether it is physics, economics, philosophy, civics, gender studies, everything. “Learning outcomes” are a list of “competencies” (like learning to read a graph) that students must “attain” to pass a course. Quality and rigor are irrelevant.

I saw this at UATX, which is hell-bent on getting accreditation. “Learning outcomes” make a course legible (in James Scott’s term) to those outside the university. They also allow any school, regardless of student or teacher quality, to claim to be doing what the best schools do. Robbins compares this to allowing a “knock-off” to masquerade as a Gucci.

while the law criminalizes the knockoff handbag and protects the brand, it requires universities to accept a knockoff course at full value.

substacks referenced above: @

Look on my Outcomes, ye Mighty and despair

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Prestige Moves South

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The impact of woke ideology on the socialisation of children