Hello,

Thanks for looking me up.

Currently, I work as an independent scholar, writing books and essays about education and formative experience. For 50 years, I studied and taught at Columbia University, retiring from the Teachers College faculty in 2011 as Weinberg Professor in the Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Education.

Having lived reflectively, I've formed, and am still forming, a few ideas I'd like to share, now primarily through a project in the digital commons, A Place to Study, which I'm busy prototyping. It will provide inclusive, well-organized resources for study by persons seeking self-formation and liberal learning in the digital commons. Check it out if you like, but recognize it's a complex project, slowly developing, looking a bit finished here, a mess there. A production version will go online in late 2022.

Here are couple recent publications:

• In a long essay, Formative Justice (2019, print version via Amazon), I advance a theory of justice to help people guide their self-education, and I suggest dumping efforts to reform educational institutions in order to foment an educational reformation, each person following her inner light.
• And in a long essay, "Dewey in His Skivvies: The Trouble with Reconstruction," I explain how educational philosophers are inflating John Dewey's deserved reputation and thereby misdirect current educational theory (published in Educational Theory (67:5, 2017).

And here are some earlier books and essays that each in its way still has some currency:

• In Enough: A Pedagogic Speculation (2012), I reflect on the current paralysis of education and public life and speculate that a more constructive spirit can arise in a distant future.
• In Homeless in the House of Intellect: Formative Justice and Education as an Academic Study (2005), I called for a significant restructuring of how American universities support the study of education. Of course, that won't happen, so I've become a bit more extreme in Enough and Formative Justice.
• Back in the day, in Man and His Circumstances: Ortega as Educator (1971), I reflected on my education to the age of 30 by exploring the life and work of José Ortega y Gasset.
• At the same time, in "Towards a Place for Study in a World of Instruction" (1971), I defined my basic professional commitment. I'm still on that track.
• For 20 years, I experimented with technology in education, and in Power and Pedagogy: Transforming Education through Information Technology (1992) and other writings, I diagnosed how digitizing culture and communication is leading, through historical intention and irony, to a new way of life

Recently, Avi Mintz, Ellen Lagemann, David Mathews, Walter Feinberg, Bertram C. Bruce, and Grace Roosevelt honored me with a Festschrift on my work in Educational Theory (68:3, 2018).

You can get the details of my academic career from my CV, which lists all the usual stuff. It also links to the full-text of most of what I’ve published and to documents about some activities I've initiated.

In 2011, Joe Levine, a good writer working for Teachers College, did a profile about me as "The Accidental Technologist." And in 2007, I told my story in a few pages—-what I then anticipated hasn’t quite panned out, but it is true enough in spirit.

I've given up on Facebook & Twitter--too much distraction, deception and exploitation. I'm still on web 2.0, however, shy and reticent, at LinkedIn, Academia, LibraryThing, and Goodreads.

To interact, use robbie@aplacetostudy.org or rom2@tc.columbia.edu.

\Robbie McClintock