Ira David Socol

Featured Book

Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools

Making public schools humane places where deep learning happens, by authors who've done the work in every kind of school.

2018

Chad Ratliff, et al.

Chad Ratliff, Ira David Socol, et al.

Stories

No, I do not wish that my brain was “normal.”

a rant

Mar 24

Mar 24

Published in
Teachers on Fire Magazine

Attention and Freedom or Alienation and Risk. Which Path is Your School On?

“The most destructive forces in my childhood came from home, from teachers, from the YMCA. I could say, if banning those protects kids from…

Mar 6

A class photo with one very unhappy child.

Mar 6

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Published in
Age of Awareness

Police Work

I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a fight where you weren’t sure you were going to live through it. I hope not.

Jan 23

Names carved into the National Law Enforcement Memorial, Washington DC.

Jan 23

“Rules for all”? “Essential Technology”? What do “they” mean?

Perhaps the thing I struggle most with when I run up against the anti-technology-in-education crowd is their manufactured sense of moral…

Jan 20

teenager looking at their phone in class

Jan 20

Clickbait, Moral Panic, Eugenics, and the Profitability of Jonathan Haidt

He can’t sell himself for $100,000 per afternoon by arguing for real solutions to the problems bedeviling our children, but he can jump on…

Jan 2

Five elementary school students on their phones.

Jan 2

The assignment is the problem, not AI

If you ask kids a question best answered by keying six words into ChatGPT, your kids would have to be idiots not to key six words into…

Dec 20, 2024

Cover of book, Designed to Fail — showing an old academic at a drafting table drawing a 1910 high school as he is surrounded by contemporary students.

Dec 20, 2024

Systemic Anachronisms in Schools

When we refuse to understand the cognitive changes driven by technological change. Excerpt from Designed to Fail: A History of Education in…

Nov 13, 2024

The only obvious solutions were to (a) blame the kids — especially immigrant children, or (b) fudge…

Designed to Fail: A History of Education in the United States by Ira David Socol will be available in print and via Kindle on November 7…

Nov 5, 2024

Cover: Designed to Fail. Order on Kindle now, or on paper on November 7.