Deep Thinking with Dr. Steven Stolz

Prof. Todd McGowan & Prof. Ryan Engley: The Why Theory: Psychoanalysis, Ideology & Why We Think the Way We Do | EPS 019

What if the way we think, desire, and enjoy is not freely chosen, but structured by forces we can barely see? And what if the frameworks we most commonly use to understand human behaviour, psychology, economics, political science, self-help, are precisely the frameworks that prevent us from seeing those forces clearly? In this rare and intellectually exhilarating double-guest episode, Dr. Steven Stolz is joined by Prof. Todd McGowan of the University of Vermont and Prof. Ryan Engley of Pomona College, the acclaimed hosts of the "Why Theory" podcast, which has spent over 200 episodes bringing Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hegelian philosophy to bear on everything from blockbuster superhero films and television Christmas specials to contemporary politics, ideology, desire, and the deepest questions of what it means to be a human subject in a capitalist world. McGowan and Engley are not merely academic commentators. They are genuinely original thinkers who have built one of the most intellectually serious and consistently surprising podcasts in the English-speaking world, one that has demonstrated, episode after episode, that psychoanalysis and continental philosophy are not museum pieces but living tools for understanding the world we actually inhabit.

Prof. Gert Biesta: What Is Education Actually For? A Philosopher's Answer | EPS 018

Prof. Biesta has spent his career developing a body of work that is both philosophically rigorous and urgently practical. His books, including "Good Education in an Age of Measurement," "The Beautiful Risk of Education," "The Rediscovery of Teaching," and "World-Centred Education", have been translated into multiple languages and have shaped education debates across Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia. He is one of the most cited education scholars in the world. In this conversation, Dr. Steve and Prof. Biesta explore: 📚 The three purposes of education: qualification, socialisation, and subjectification, and why subjectification, the most important of the three, is the most neglected 📚 "Learnification" — Biesta's landmark concept describing how education discourse has been quietly hollowed out by the language of learning, outcomes, and measurement, hiding the crucial questions about content, purpose, and relationship 📚 Why the shift from talking about education and teaching to talking about learning has been far more damaging than it appears 📚 "The Beautiful Risk of Education" — why attempts to eliminate risk, uncertainty, and difficulty from education make it un-educational, or even anti-educational 📚 Teaching as interruption — why genuine teaching is not about facilitating what students already want, but about presenting them with genuine otherness that challenges their existing orientations 📚 World-centred education — what it means to put the world, rather than the child or the curriculum, at the centre of education 📚 The difference between helping students express their existing subjectivity and the genuine process of subjectification — becoming an independent subject 📚 Why education must be, in Biesta's word, "obstinate" — why giving people what they say they want is not education's task 📚 The problem with reducing teaching to research, and when educational research serves education versus when it undermines it

Prof. Jack Schneider: What Counts as Evidence? The Real Battle Behind Education Reform | EPS 17

In this episode, Dr. Steven Stolz sits down with Prof. Jack Schneider of the University of Massachusetts, historian, policy researcher, and founder of the Beyond Test Scores Project, for a conversation that cuts through the noise of education debate to ask what evidence in education actually means, where it comes from, and who controls it. Schneider's work sits at a rare and important intersection: he is both a rigorous academic researcher and a fearless public intellectual willing to name the forces, political, ideological, and financial, that shape education policy in ways that have little to do with what is good for children or communities. His books include "Beyond Test Scores," "Education and the Commercial Mindset," and "A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door" (co-authored with Jennifer Berkshire), which documents the well-funded movement to privatise public education in the United States. In this rich and searching conversation, Dr. Steve and Prof. Schneider explore: What standardised tests actually measure, and the vast terrain of what they miss entirely, including the things parents, teachers, and communities value most in a school The Beyond Test Scores Project: what happens when you ask communities what they actually want from schools, and then try to measure it Why powerful narratives about "failing schools," "accountability," and "school choice" keep driving policy despite weak or contradictory evidence, and how those narratives are constructed and maintained The privatisation agenda: the economic motivations behind school vouchers, charter school expansion, and sustained attacks on teachers' unions, and who benefits when public education is weakened Why there is such a consistent and curious gap between how people view "schools in general" versus their own local school, and what that gap reveals about how public perception is shaped The culture wars targeting public education: what is really driving the assault on public schools, how it differs from past conflicts over education, and what is genuinely at stake How misleading rhetoric, about "failing schools," "rigour," "choice," and "merit", gets translated into policy, often with damaging consequences for the most vulnerable students What the history of education policy keeps trying to teach us that we stubbornly refuse to learn What a genuinely honest, community-centred, and educationally meaningful approach to school quality and accountability could actually look like, and whether the political will exists to build it Prof. Jack Schneider is Associate Professor of Education at the University of Massachusetts and one of the most widely read education policy scholars in the United States. He is the founder of the Beyond Test Scores Project, a research initiative that works with school districts to develop richer, more meaningful measures of school quality. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Education Week, and numerous academic journals.

Prof. David Labaree: Why Schools Were Never Meant to Change: The Hidden Logic of Education | EPS 016

Prof. Labaree has spent decades studying the history, sociology, and politics of American education. His books — including "How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning," "The Trouble with Ed Schools," and "Someone Has to Fail" — have fundamentally shaped how scholars and policymakers understand why schools behave the way they do. In this conversation, Dr. Steve and Prof. Labaree explore: — Why schools are pulled in three fundamentally incompatible directions: democratic equality, social efficiency, and individual social mobility — How the credential has replaced genuine learning at the heart of education — and why students, parents, and institutions all play a role in this shift — What meritocracy actually does in practice versus what it claims to do in theory — Why educational reform so consistently fails to achieve its stated goals — and whose interests that failure actually serves — The difference between education as a public good and education as a private commodity — and what happens when the latter wins — What genuine, lasting educational reform would have to look like if we were truly serious about it — How technology , from computers to AI, keeps promising to transform education and keeps falling short

Fred Stolz: Master Craftsman: Leadership, Legacy & the Art of Teaching Well | EPS 15

Fred W. Stolz spent 54 years in education. He taught in New South Wales state schools before spending 15 years in Papua New Guinea as the Foundation Principal of Balob Teachers College in Lae, where he helped train over 1,500 teachers during a critical era of nation-building. Returning to Australia in 1980, he became the Foundation Headmaster of Grace Lutheran College in Queensland — arriving to a muddy construction site and 55 students — and grew it into a community of over 1,600 over the next 30 years. He has been honoured with the Officer of the Order of Logohu in Papua New Guinea (2018) and the Order of Australia (2023). In this rich and wide-ranging conversation, Fred and Dr. Steve discuss: — The difference between holding a leadership position and practising leadership as a craft — What it means to be "called" to education in the Lutheran tradition — and why Fred is the last headmaster in Australia still operating under a call rather than a contract — How to sustain passion, standards, and integrity across five decades in the classroom and the principal's office — The qualities Fred looks for when hiring staff — and why one poor hiring decision can undo twenty good ones — His views on Christian education, equal opportunity, school culture, and the future of Australian schooling — What he would tell the next generation of educational leaders if he had one conversation with them This episode launches the 2026 season of Deep Thinking, titled "Reconsidering Education" — a season featuring conversations with leading education scholars from Stanford, Edinburgh, Berkeley, UMass, and beyond. 📄 A free companion PDF — "Fred W. Stolz: A Tribute to a Master Craftsman," the original 2009 published interview conducted by Dr. Steven Stolz — is available for download at stevenstolz.com [http://stevenstolz.com] Deep Thinking with Dr. Steven Stolz is produced in Adelaide, Australia and releases every second Wednesday on all major platforms. Hosted by Dr. Steven Stolz, educator, philosopher, and academic at the University of Adelaide.