Education is something we’re deeply passionate about, but the fact remains that today’s dominant formal education model is a broken system based on antiquated paradigms.
While much has been said and written about education reform over the past couple of years, the issue and the public discourse around it are hardly new phenomena.
Today, we round up the most compelling and visionary reading on reinventing education from the past century.
The popular 18th-century lexicographer Nathaniel Bailey had trouble with some definitions.
When he came to “spider” he copped out, with “an Insect well known”. Mind you, he had already dug deep into his reference file and told us that a cherrywas “a fruit well known”.
Nowadays dictionaries are, for the most part, serious, sober documents, with little room for excitement.
Butwords are fun; language is fun. The Word Detective is my story of how a naive Eng Lit student with an inherent distrust of old-style academia landed an editorial job on the
Oxford English Dictionary back in 1976, and gradually became engrossed in the people, the friendships, the words, the places and how the OEDitself gradually adapted to the digital era.
These are 10 of the books that helped me along the way, and which showed me that I wasn’t the first person to discover there was more to lexicography than meets the eye.