Rodney King famously asked why we can’t all just get along. Believe it or not, there may be some good evolutionary and biological reasons for that. It might well be that getting along is not the best way for humans to progress. There is also a difference between getting along and being without conflict and […] … learn more→

Parents and teachers are interested in ensuring children perform their best in school. Some believe putting smart students together can improve educational outcomes. But evidence about the impact of classmate or schoolmate quality (as measured by, say, test scores) on individual performance in an educational setting is only just beginning to accumulate. Establishing the presence and size of peer effects in education […] … learn more→

The number of students being suspended or expelled from Australian schools is “skyrocketing”, according to news reports. These note a 10% increase in suspensions over two years at NSW primary schools and that students in south-western Sydney are being suspended more than four times as often as students in other parts of the city. Suspension and […] … learn more→

I generally teach mathematics. While this subject is usually considered brutally objective, in a real sense it’s an ideology: the ultimate goal of my class is, indeed, to get all my students to chant the same thing at the same time, like a pack of local news journalists (and I use that word with maximum […] … learn more→

The importance of higher education in our lives is undoubtedly high. To gain a respectable job, one must possess certain qualification certificates. Only if a person has well recognized certificates to back its higher educational skills, he can get a good job. This so called not only strengthens you with monetary support but also elevates […] … learn more→

If you go by the ads for some language learning apps, you can “have a conversation in a new language in three weeks”. But the experience of most Australians when trying to learn a new language is more likely to resemble that of our prime minister who, a few years ago, wrote: Learning any language at school is…difficult […] … learn more→

My complicated relationship with libraries dates to my childhood. I love books, but sometimes returned them late feeling a naughty child under the librarian’s stern gaze. Last December, when I tried to borrow books, I realised a freeze was placed on my library card. Internally I groaned. At the library desk, the librarian suggested checking […] … learn more→

I first came to fairies after a brush with mortality in my mid-thirties. I’d been trained as a medievalist, but under the strain of my treatment, the Monumenta Ger­maniae Historica lost their charms: the memory of their leather covers, their weight in my hand, their smell, still make me nauseous almost a decade later. I’d […] … learn more→

When we first visited the school that is the focus of our forthcoming book, “Navigating Conflict: How Youth Handle Trouble in a High-Poverty School,” back in 1995, students were free to move about campus during lunch and other free periods and a culture of trust prevailed. All that changed during the 1999-2000 school year. That’s […] … learn more→

While fiction writers have a special dispensation to scatter sentence fragments and comma splices throughout their ripping yarns, writers of academic prose are held to higher standards. Examiners of theses and reviewers of journal articles expect to see punctuation in the ‘right’ places; that is, correctly deployed according to the current conventions of formal writing. […] … learn more→