Putting the Band (Barrier) Back Together?

Earlier today, May 28, 2025, Finnish President Alexander Stubb gave an interview with CNN, reproduced on YouTube, here.

I strongly suspect that Stubb's sense of geopolitics is not especially informed by George Friedman's book, The Next Hundred Years (2009, Wikipedia summary here), but both noted the rise of Turkey and Poland as regional powers, and Finland, especially if combined with Sweden and the Baltics, might fairly constitute a third player in that bloc.

But wait!

There was a time when one might identify a Finno-Sweden, Poland-Lithuania, and Turkey with some Balkan allies, as forming a bulwark against Russian ambitions in Eastern Europe. The three powers among themselves did not exactly form a coherent coalition, yet what brought them together on one side was, indeed, the ambition of Russian leaders like Peter the Great, and on the other, Western support. In particular, France was notable for lending subsidies, political support, and at least on occasion, arms — what we would today call foreign aid, diplomatic cover, and, still, arms! The French knew this combination of powers as the Barrière de l'Est, or eastern barrier, broadly intended to keep Russia out of the affairs of the rest of Europe.

There seems to be even more to the conversation, as the Guardian notes here, and not for the first time. Invoking Peter's endurance in the Great Northern War (1700-21), Russian diplomats in the recent Istanbul summit hinted at their intention simply to outlast Western aid to Ukraine. President Putin does correctly note Russia's victory in the Northern War, though this was also the major occasion, at least at times, when France, Sweden-Finland, Poland-Lithuania, and Ottoman Turkey came together most coherently.

Putin might also note that Peter (fl.1682-1725), and pretty much all the rest of Russia's leaders of the 18th and 19th centuries, and well into the 20th, all had their eye on penetrating this eastern barrier so that Russia could not only march west, but also, and rather, engage with the West. Carrying forward Peter's legacy, Russia as a state wanted to be Western, to fit into the European systems of commercial and intellectual exchange, as well as foreign relations!

I opened this blog post thinking that I would discuss the Eastern Barrier coming back together, which it may well do. I close it, however, thinking about Putin not as repeating or even emulating the achievement of Peter the Great, but rather profoundly reversing it, and undoing some 300 years of Russian strategic thought. Thinking on earlier generations, the Treaties of Nerchinsk (1689) and Kiakhta (1727, 1768) were all designed to define and stabilize the East so successive Russian leaders could turn their attention to the West. If Putin and his successors in the coming years put Finlandization to rest, and truly have a NATO-Russia border, then well might we see, not even so much the renewed rise of the old Barrier powers, but rather the return of Russia to what it was before Peter's time: primarily a power of the Eurasian steppe lands, largely excluded from the community of European states.

Revival

Ten years ago, I started the Schumanities Blog as a scratch site to capture some ideas-in-progress as a professional historian, casual commentator on modern politics, and emerging hobbyist in the teaching and learning realm.

As decades go, it's probably been about average for anyone at any time, but it's felt very full.

My personal life has been very full and fulfilling, with marriage, kids, and a reasonable social life. I also survived the pandemic, changed jobs and churches a few times, and shifted my interests ever more toward instructional design, as well as scholarship of teaching and learning.

Professionally, I won a teaching award for how I designed a Historiography class, got a very full taste of faith and learning integration by teaching dual-enrolled courses at a Muslim high school, earned a graduate certificate in Instructional Design and Technology, and published a chapter on multipolar power politics for the New Makers of Modern Strategy (Princeton, 2023).

All of this to say that it's been a pretty busy decade, and yet, I still stand by a lot of what I wrote before all of this happened. It's not just that I look back with a certain amount of reverie and agreement with my younger self, but also, as an historian, I think the older posts do set up what I think and hope is coming. So here, I'll label them as prequels.

Going forward, I think I have a lot to comment on, both from my ongoing scholarship and with current events both globally and in American education. I'll do my best to tag appropriately.

Knowing is (Only) Half the Battle

A week ago, the New York Times published a commentary on U.S. higher education that seems well worth considering: in short, if students want to know where their skyrocketing tuition is going, look no farther than the burgeoning administration. This is something that attentive faculty have probably known for a long time, and it doesn't help the administration's case that their current bloating resembles Big Auto in the 1970s--not exactly history's best business model.

And yet, I feel like this covers only part of the story, as if Immanuel Kant, in one of my previous posts, had stopped merely with his comments on the Austrian system of education in his time, without remarking on the Dessau School in Prussia. Austria's problem, in the event, was not merely the bureaucratization of its education system, but also its over-regulation. Hence its rigidity as compared to the experimentation that Kant extolled at Dessau.

Are American universities over-regulated, when they offer courses ranging from 'parageography' to particle physics, often with only a minimum of oversight for instructors? At first blush, certainly not! But then, that's not where the regulation really kicks in. It has more to do with accrediting bodies that mostly lie beyond the knowledge (and probably care) of most students, parents, and local businesses. Add to that the multiplication of university-affiliated unions, and these two phenomena alone--one might easily imagine--could account for the vast proliferation of paperwork in recent decades, that would supply the 'market' for administrators mentioned in the article's second-to-last paragraph.

I feel like this is where Kant's reference to the Austrian and Dessau systems is really relevant, despite its age. Sure, it could be nice to loosen restrictions on transfer credits, but Kant's discussion really went beyond mere rigidity in the Austrian teaching curriculum. It was about bureaucratization across the whole academic process--in essence, the demand for administrators, rather than their existence as such. Dessau, by contrast, seems in Kant's time to have placed a premium merely on well trained students and experimental teaching. Unlike in the Austrian system of Kant's time, the Prussians placed a lot of trust in their faculty, administratively as well as pedagogically.

It would be interesting to see a U.S. school with these kinds of priorities, reorienting its demand (or spending, as the case may be) from the concerns of regulation and administration toward simple good teaching, and even some experiments in the classroom. Perhaps Iowa State? One can only hope…

Teaching Notes, part II: Faculty Development?

I guess it's worth reaffirming here that this is a personal blog. As ambitious as I can be about wanting to change global education culture at the levels of policy and philosophy, I must continually realize that my biggest qualification (and contribution) for discussions on education is my ten years of experience in the classroom, and a dozen or so invited lectures, conference presentations and the like.

It's interesting to reflect on these ten years, and to think back on what Kant said about the distinctives of the Dessau school: it's not that the teachers in the old Prussian system really knew what they were doing, so much as that they conferred, sought advice, continually experimented, and--though one certainly hopes it was not merely for novelty's sake--never contented themselves with thinking that they had education all figured out.

This, I think, might be a mistake I've made in recent years. I'm thankful to many cohorts of students for thinking that my libertarian and inquiry-based approaches were a good launching point. I'll probably keep those in many of my future pedagogical thoughts, and practice. But how to do them better--especially for students who are not quite as well prepared to launch into independent thinking, to express themselves in any form whatsoever (let alone formal academic essays), or even to schedule regular times of research and writing.

Even here, I can't really claim my methodology as a cure-all for the ills of contemporary liberal arts instruction, but I wonder: where others perhaps have different ideas for encouraging their students, yet as immature as mine or in some cases even more so, how can I be of service? "Faculty development" is clearly a key phrase, and an important if sometimes under-appreciated activity for teachers at the college level (and other levels of education).

Teaching Notes

Interesting to see that Finland is moving to a pedagogy based on "topics" more than "subjects," perhaps in part to maintain their reputed educational lead over the rest of mankind. I think it's easy to see the "topic" thing and think, "well, that's neat," but what might be lost in the mix is a much more important word: change.

Good to see Finland's government and teaching establishment acting nimbly, and in response to the right stimuli. It's not about testing and the state-level Bureau of Statistics, or profit margins for textbook companies, or the latest demand from teachers' unions. It seems to me that the major impetus for change in Finland's school system is really one coin with two sides.

1. As a society, reflected through its government (the Nordic countries themselves are not perfect at this, but we'll say pretty good…), the Finns are expressing an interest in adapting to changed circumstances in the global economy, and still wanting to be world beaters.
2. Like parents in so many other countries, Finnish parents want the best for their kids. But perhaps unlike in other countries, they have a good and responsive venue in which to express their wishes.

Note #1: keep track of student wants and needs.

Note #2: adapt accordingly, and creatively.

Note #3: keep adapting.

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Another note set, from a book I've been reading: How to Write A Lot, by Paul J. Silvia.

Note #1: read this book. It will seriously change your life as a writer.

Note #2: some great teaching techniques in here, as well, about getting students beyond content, beyond even forms, to even more fundamental structures of learning. Yay schedules.

Note #3: Pilot some of these techniques in my own life and among a few peers, before I inflict them on my students.

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Last note set, from reflections on a variety of inputs from different cultures.

Note #1: The psych and anthro people say that people broadly all learn in similar ways.

Note #2: My older forays into inquiry-based learning didn't turn out too bad. Contrary to the first note set, don't just change for change's sake. Make sure to keep what works.

Note #3: Question: what does learning mean for cultures at varying levels of literacy / pictography? Can I oralize and kiesthetize my learning outcome assessments? How so?  And are oralize and kinesthetize even real words?

A Different Kind of Privilege Check

I've recently been reflecting on the plight of contingent faculty in U.S. higher education, and running that thought against a recent little scandal at Princeton, in which students were asked to "check their privilege."

I think the Princeton exercise was a little uncharitable to the students. It reminds me a bit of Rudyard Kipling's poem, The White Man's Burden (1899): the actual builders of empire--soldiers, sailors, merchant-mariners, teachers, postal workers, lower-level bureaucrats--see their efforts satirized and maligned, while the genteel upper-crust of imperial society (American and British in this case) revel both in their own insulation from getting their own hands dirty, and in the notionally-positive "judgment of their peers" in the last line--fellow genteel imperialists.

If one would like to see the Princeton equivalent of those genteel imperialists of 116 years ago, one needs look no farther than the faculty. I don't mean to single out Princeton's faculty, but it may be worth your effort, dear reader, to look at most U.S. faculties, in any department, at any university--and especially the Liberal Arts. Among the faculty, see if you can find Harvard, Princeton, Michigan, Cambridge, Yale, Columbia, California-Berkeley, Oxford, Brown… and then try to look for the schools where the vast majority of the population actually do their learning: Virginia Tech, Texas A&M, Liverpool, Western Michigan, Colorado State, Bristol. These are also good schools, and they do, some more often than others, occasionally place their Ph.D. graduates into reasonably good departments. And yet in the scarce academic economy of the present day--whether actual or artificial scarcity might be another matter…--it's not just the elite students who need to check their privilege. It's the elite former-students, as well.

And as in Kipling's poem, it's not just the lower-level functionaries--the students--who are confronted with the subjects of this intellectual empire. It's also the detached, genteel administration and faculty, whose platitudes about privilege-checking and the tragedy of subjection to empire (by other names) fall a little flat as they name, rename, sanitize and broadly ignore the plight of the real subjects of their empire, the ones upon whose backs they stand in their privilege: graduate teaching assistants (who now do a lot more than merely assist…), part-time and full-time lecturers, contingent faculty, adjuncts.

An astute student of history might recall that Kipling's empire--the British Empire--experienced rapid and violent decline within about two generations after his poem. The judgement of Britain's peers made itself manifest precisely when Kipling wrote, as plucky American and Japanese societies joined the imperial game; within a decade the rise of the German Kriegsmarine made it clear that Britain had viable and hungry challengers among its peers; and the two World Wars--especially the second and its immediate aftermath--starkly revealed Britain's limitations as an Imperial power. The concentration of wealth and power, and the gentrified concern that fretted much and acted little, anticipated doom for the empire in the face of more vibrant, better-balanced societies that valued, not just the upper crust of their communities, but also the oft-excluded middle. Today, 116 years after Kipling, it may be worth reflecting on some societies that are doing exactly that, "broken" as they might seem from the outside: places like China.

So in sum, we have a critique of adjuncts' position not only from the well-established Left, with its tropes about workers' rights and so forth; but also, and critically, from what might be called the Imperial Right. From this perspective, there is simply a way of doing things that predicts a flourishing empire--like the middle-class rhetoric of British society 150 years before Kipling's poem--and a way of doing things that does not. So as the faculty and residential life folks at Princeton continue their salutary "privilege-checking" exercise with students, here's an invitation not only to turn that gaze upon themselves, but also to shoulder differently the burdens of their academic empire.

Gramsci the Libertarian?

I don't think I would take this little article as the best or last word about Antonio Gramsci's thoughts on education, though they are rather provocative. Gramsci was a noted Italian Communist in the 1910s and 20s, jailed and eventually executed by Mussolini's Fascists. His prison notebooks gained international acclaim in the 1970s, and they continue to inspire social theorists up to the present day. It is interesting to note Gramsci's seeming appreciation that schools in nationalist Italy (one would guess Fascist Italy only more so) were too centralized, and too much under the control of the state. How neat, also, to see his ideas line up with the notably Libertarian rhetoric in Richard Neal's book, Escape to Learning.

It is obviously a step too far to see Gramsci and Neal on the same political page, or promoting anything like the same pedagogy. Notwithstanding the obvious anachronism of the comparison, it is nonetheless striking to see their broad agreement on local schools and raising individual consciences. Likewise with their shared, strident-yet-thoughtful opposition to their respective (and remarkably similar) "Educational Establishment" regimes. They even appear to agree that the primary-secondary school system imprisons students' minds in an ideology that supports a stable status quo, rather than being truly generative of new ideas and societal progress--what Gramsci would identify as the seeds of revolution.

Gramsci and Neal broadly agree on the need for students, parents, and the larger society to be aware of shortcomings in government, the state, and the education system. Both call for activism of some sort: Neal for market-based rejection of the state monopoly, Gramsci (and his Communist-leaning contemporaries even more so) for violent revolution against the ruling classes. As with Kant in my previous post (albeit, again, anachronistically), I am left with the impression that Gramsci and Neal would like to see education most in the hands of teachers, students and their parents, with support from the state, perhaps, but as free as possible from its control.

Kant Touched on This

In Austria the greater number of schools used to be normal schools, and these were founded and carried on after a fixed plan, against which much has been said, not without reason. The chief complaint against them was this, that the teaching in them was merely mechanical. But all other schools were obliged to form themselves after the pattern of these normal schools, because government even refused to promote persons who had not been educated in these schools. This is an example of how government might interfere in the education of subjects, and how much evil might arise from compulsion.

This would be the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant in his little treatise, On Education, paragraph 20. He hits on a very interesting point that seems to be the bane of contemporary education at least in the United States, and perhaps globally: a lack of trust between government and educators.


Over the past month or so, I've gotten to see several articles on parents, teachers, even a few self-aware students, opting out of standardized tests, for which the consensus number now seems to be 113 on average for an American student in the thirteen years between Kindergarten and 12th grade. One proposed solution? Accreditation for primary and secondary schools, equivalent to the U.S. university system. (Because one thing the education system across the board sorely needs is more bureaucrats…)
A little over 200 years ago, Kant was very much on the opposite side of this issue--and quite like Rousseau and Burke. He wanted a much smaller system of public schools--strangely enough, on account of their expense!--while most education lay in the hands of parents and perhaps private tutors. Yet one thing that seems to emerge out of Kant, notwithstanding massive, global economic changes since his time, is his general trust for teachers, and this in a rather interesting pronouncement, also in paragraph 20:

People imagine, indeed, that experiments in education are unnecessary, and that we can judge from our reason whether anything is good or not. This is a great mistake, and experience teaches us that the results of an experiment are often entirely different from what we expected… (The Dessau Institute) was in a certain way the only one in which the teachers were free to work out their own methods and plans, and in which the teachers were in communication with each other and with all the learned men of Germany.

Kant would not dare claim that teachers' experiments were free from mistakes, but he trusted, in general, that the experiments were meant for the good of the students, and ultimately for the society that those students would build as they came to maturity. Rousseau demanded the same kind of trust as he mentored the hypothetical Émile (and Émile's consort, Sophie); and Burke implied that same kind of trust, once again, in those teachers who would lead their students into their own (i.e. the teachers' own) tracks of discovery.

It is interesting on one side to see the call for this trust manifest in resistance to standardized tests; on the other, political conservatives might bristle about the power of teachers' unions, and their tendency to preserve on their muster rolls teachers who are demonstrably lazy, greedy, incompetent, etc. It may be worth noting of unions that their fundamental mission--especially in the public sector--is antagonistic. In good Marxist form, many unions of all varieties oppose the power of the managerial class, and to some extent rightly so. As Kant noted of the Austrian system of normal schools, the managers managed rather poorly! But the solution set for these kinds of problems tended not to be more bureaucracy and management and regulation. Rather, it often involved the people being managed and regulated speaking or writing rather loudly--sometimes violently--to the managers and regulators, and telling them to back away.

No doubt this cost a few bureaucrats their posh government jobs, but even relatively poorly-educated Americans today might remember an event in the eighteenth century--during Kant's lifetime, in fact--when a certain group of people, contemporary Americans' political ancestors, spoke out against a bureaucratizing government that was intruding itself a little too far into their affairs: the War of Independence.

In a Universe Far, Far Away

Today I have the privilege of presenting from a friend's debrief from her own teaching experience--in the eastern part of Indonesia. It's amazing to see her pedagogy, and how closely it mirrors my own reading of Burke and Rousseau:

Oh ya, about my citizenship class… my class is learning about the constitution, the history and the importance of it, also how it applies in the real life of Indonesia. So I assigned my students to do a survey in the community about what people think of the constitution. They were surprised when they found out that more than 50% of the samples knew nothing about it and even didn’t care about it. And I challenged them “What can we do?” (our class’s motto this semester is think global, act local) So my students made a plan to go back to the society and make the principles of Indonesia country be known in the society. So I approved their program. After some preparations, finally last Tuesday we went into the society. The students were working in two groups. The first group easily met friendly people, and they did their mission smoothly. The other group got rejection from the people 2 times and it made them start to be discouraged. I was afraid that they would be really discouraged and not want to go out any more. So I prayed to God for this group. In our walk back to the school, a man called us and asked who we were. Then I introduced my group to him and asked if he and his family had time to meet my students. And they said yes! So the group 2 talked with the family and really had a wonderful discussion. I’m amazed by God. He didn’t only give my student a family for their project, but He’s chosen this family to bless my group. The family was a Christian. The mom shared Gospel to my students. She emphasized to my students that God is working in Indonesia, He loves Indonesia. I’m amazed how this little project can turn to be a great blessing both for the people in the school’s neighborhood and my team. At the end of our short trip, all of my students were happy and were excited to write a paper about their project.

Some observations:

• It's interesting and inspiring to see Inquiry Based Learning here, with students asking questions and discovering truths not just about the Indonesian constitution, but also about their own community. And it seems like students might easily reproduce both paths to discovery--for the Indonesian constitution and for their community.
• The active community engagement also fits with Burke's social context. It seems to me that a subtext of Burke's "lead people into the path of discovery" is for students, fairly rapidly, to become teachers in their own turn; and doing so by taking their learning and inquiries outside the classroom… is this not some of the original rationale for homework? Both taking learning outside the classroom, and getting input and shared experiences with someone other than the teacher?
• The teacher's social engagement and sense of deep commitment with group 2, also… just, wow. One of the things I felt so often was missing in my own education was a teacher's genuine concern not just for my intellect, but for my very self. How ably can a student follow in a teacher's path of discovery, if along that path either one--and especially the teacher--remains emotionally disengaged? How open is the path to discovery, really, if the focus remains merely on the content of the learning, and does not also include meaningful care for the student?
• The involvement of the Christian family in Group 2's project also sticks out, again speaking to Burke's communal subtext. How great it is for students to see that a whole community supports their education, rather than feeling like the path of learning is one that they must walk alone? 
• Proponents of secular education might bristle at the Christian references, but I think it's important to observe here Jesus' adage that a tree is judged by its fruit. The evident motivation in the students--their desire to reflect and write about their experiences--seems to me to indicate pretty well not just that the lesson was sound, but the teaching methods, as well.

Naturally, I am glad to see some of my own thoughts and values being lived out in a far corner of the world, but I think it's also a spur and a challenge, wherever I might teach in the future. Even as I see that it is not all on me to teach the students laid to my charge, it also is my responsibility as a teacher and a scholar to engage more than the interest of those students. Thanks for the call and the reminder to invest deeply in their lives so far as I can, and to involve the larger community.

Abelard's World

Peter Abelard was a teacher around the time of the First Crusade. No doubt there were some constraints on his teaching imposed by the Catholic Church, yet the Church was also the major source of his funding. And notwithstanding the pitfalls described in his Historia Calamitata, Abelard seems not to have wanted for much during his entire time as a teacher and abbot.

Among his peers, Abelard did as most academics do today, arguing over the finer points of topics of some cultural significance--in his case a variety of theological issues, and not least the equal personhood of the Holy Spirit within the trinity. Mainstay as this was, however, Abelard was also a teacher. Burke would have approved Abelard's bringing younger scholars into the track of his discoveries, whether as a peripatetic (traveling) scholar around Paris, or later in his abbey. Modern sensibilities would likely approve Abelard's special attention to Heloïse, as well, at least until that attention became too special. And of course, Heloïse's family let Abelard know their disapproval of that liaison in no uncertain terms.

The point I want to make here is that while Abelard had no end of intellectual disputes with his peers, still he enjoyed a certain freedom in his teaching that modern instructors lack; and I wonder how much this has to do, not with changing educational norms as such--though of course they have changed--so much as trends toward monetizing everything. For any given definition of "good", what dollar value (or pound, Euro, rouble, peso, yen, yuan, won, rupee, rupiah, etc.) really attaches to a "good" education?

Whether in my own experience as a unionized adjunct instructor, or considering all the hoopla about teachers' unions in Wisconsin and California these days, or charter schools here in Michigan, I feel like so much of the debate about education concerns what amount of money to throw at what part of the problem, and accountability for how it is (or is not) spent. In Abelard's day, some 900 years ago, well, a couple of observations:

1. Money seems not to have been an issue. The Church and Western society in general at the time seemed to value what little formal education was available, and paid for it accordingly, whether privately or through the Church. Direct payment of any kind appears only once in Abelard's history--in chapter 6--and quite clearly as a ruse, rather than concerning the necessities of his life.
2. A fair bit of secular education was craft-specific, and would continue to be for some centuries after Abelard's time. JF Bosher notes in his book, The Canada Merchants, some writings on commercial education that disdained the learning of the nobility. As it should have done: the two were clearly different. Likewise with Church learning in Abelard's time: as important as spiritual and moral life could be in the medieval world, the less formal, family- and craft-based education that took place in homes across France, Europe, perhaps the whole premodern world, rarely if ever presupposed uniformity of curriculum, or public money set aside for (this kind of) education.

A critical observation here, on pre-modern France: with some 90% of the population doing farm work, monetization was of little concern. A good bit of subsistence came "free" from the land, trade in goods and in kind remained  acceptable as a form of commerce, and economic interdependence--especially across long distances--was relatively limited. Yet how many farmers would gladly have given housing space, textile work and excess crops for a teacher like Abelard to come and educate their children? Not in the state curriculum, mind, but in exactly the thing that Burke proposed: means by which to follow in the track of the instructor's musings and discoveries.

And so for a question that superimposes the mores of Abelard's time on our own: Setting aside the obvious anachronism, what kinds of economic wizardry or revolutionary shifts of mind would it take for the "educational establishment" or even world culture at large to recognize that money may not be the central issue in education?