Online Great Books Podcast

Scott Hambrick interviews podcaster, author, former test prep educator, and education contrarian Brett Veinoitte about the rapidly changing role of school and, particularly, secondary school. As the recent scandal involving celebrities paying bribes to obtain university admissions for their children has revealed, college has become so ingrained as a symbol of status and opportunity that an entire industry has sprung up to facilitate the admission of subpar students. Meanwhile, the costs of college steadily rise, in both dollars and time.   Brett offers a history of schooling, tracing the modern public school system we are familiar with back to the Prussian educational reforms in the late 18th and 19th centuries. The Prussian system groomed common-born children for military service by establishing free, taxpayer-supported schools with a basic curriculum of technical skills needed in a modernizing world (such as reading and writing). The curriculum attempted to impose a strong sense of national identity and a s