Prof. David Labaree: Why Schools Were Never Meant to Change: The Hidden Logic of Education | EPS 016
Why does education reform keep failing? Not occasionally, not in isolated cases, but persistently, across decades, across countries, across political administrations of every stripe? And why do the same cycles of optimism, intervention, disappointment, and renewed optimism keep repeating as if the previous round never happened?
In this episode, Dr. Steven Stolz sits down with Prof. David Labaree of Stanford University, one of the most important education scholars working today, to pursue these questions with rigour, honesty, and no small amount of provocation.
Labaree's answer to the reform question is not the one most people expect. It isn't that teachers are resistant, or that politicians are corrupt, or that researchers don't know enough. It's that schools are structurally caught between three fundamentally incompatible social goals, and that this structural contradiction makes deep change almost impossible from the inside.
Those three goals are democratic equality (schools should treat all children the same), social efficiency (schools should sort children into the roles the economy needs), and social mobility (schools should give each individual child a competitive advantage). As Labaree has demonstrated across decades of scholarship, these goals don't merely create tension, they actively work against each other, and the result is a system that looks like it's always changing while its core logic remains remarkably stable.
In this rich and wide-ranging conversation, Dr. Steve and Prof. Labaree explore:
The structural reasons why education reform consistently fails to achieve its stated goals, and whether those failures serve anyone's interests
How the credential has displaced genuine learning at the centre of education, and why students, parents, universities, and employers are all complicit in this shift
What meritocracy actually does in educational systems versus what it promises, and why the gap between the two matters enormously
The shift from viewing education as a public good to treating it as a private commodity, and what that shift has done to student behaviour, parental expectations, and teaching itself
Why waves of educational technology, from film to computers to AI, keep promising transformation and delivering disappointment
What the student experience has become over the past few decades, and what that means for learning, development, and democratic life
What genuine, lasting educational change would actually require, and whether our current systems are capable of producing it
Prof. David Labaree is a Professor Emeritus at Stanford University's Graduate School of Education. His books include "How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning," "The Trouble with Ed Schools," "Someone Has to Fail," and "A Perfect Mess." He is one of the most widely read and cited education scholars in the English-speaking world.
🔗 David Labaree online: dlabaree.people.stanford.edu | davidlabaree.com
This is episode two of the 2026 season of Deep Thinking, titled "Reconsidering Education" — a season featuring conversations with leading education scholars from Stanford, Edinburgh, Berkeley, UMass, Vermont, and beyond, asking the questions that matter most about what education is for and why it so rarely changes.
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.
