January 2025 Has schooling killed learning? Blum, Susan. 2024. Schoolishness: Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Learning. NY: Cornell University Press. In Schoolishness I ask all the ways—I analyze 10—conventional institutional education leads to alienation, and then all the ways it could be better, more authentic, more joyful, more meaningful. The book is deeply anthropological, drawing on what we know about how humans learn “in the wild,” and comparing this to the ineffective and often harmful schoolish ways that increasingly all humans are expected to experience in the contemporary world. The book is manifesto and tirade, pamphlet and prayer, autoethnography and annotated bibliography, lament and dream. It’s about education, but it’s also about psychology. And it’s a moral undertaking too. As an anthropologist, I feel compelled to take them all on—as an observer and participant in this strange human experience. Find Blum’s book here   Susan D. Blum is a professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of a trilogy about education: Schoolishness: Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Learning (2024); “I Love Learning; I Hate School”: An Anthropology of College (2016); and My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture (2009), all published by Cornell University Press, and is the editor of Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead) (West Virginia University Press, 2020). She has taught in higher education for thirty-five years, and at Notre Dame since 2000.       Back to Top of Page Find out how to submit your … Continue reading Spotlight on Scholarship