Deep Thinking with Dr. Steven Stolz

What can sport teach us about identity, belonging, and purpose that no classroom ever could?

It is a question that sits at the heart of this season finale of Deep Thinking with Dr. Steven Stolz, and it is a question that Bharat Sundaresan is uniquely qualified to answer. Because Bharat's journey to becoming one of the most distinctive and celebrated voices in cricket journalism did not begin in a press box or a university lecture theatre. It began in Mumbai, at rock bottom, surviving two drug overdoses, with cricket becoming the lifeline that pulled him back toward purpose, direction, and eventually a life built entirely around the stories that sport makes possible.

Bharat Sundaresan is the author of "The Dhoni Touch", widely regarded as the definitive biography of MS Dhoni, one of cricket's most private and enigmatic figures, and one of the most recognisable and respected cricket journalists and commentators working today. He has covered Indian and Australian cricket at the highest level for over a decade, navigating two very different cricket cultures with insight, warmth, and a fearlessness that has made him stand out in a media landscape that has historically been, as Pat Cummins and Pete Lalor have noted, pale, male, and stale. He has experienced racism in Australian cricket spaces, built a career on radical authenticity, and pursued his passions, cricket journalism, professional wrestling, heavy metal, with an intensity and commitment that speaks to something deep about what human beings need to feel truly alive.

So why does this cycle keep repeating? Why do educators, policymakers, and technologists keep making the same promises, and why do those promises keep falling short? And, most urgently, what should we do differently this time, before we make the same mistakes all over again with AI?

These are the questions at the heart of this episode of Deep Thinking with Dr. Steven Stolz, in which Dr. Steve sits down with Prof. Norm Friesen of Boise State University, one of the world's leading scholars of e-learning, educational technology, and the history of educational media, and a researcher who has been studying these questions since 1995.

Prof. Friesen is not a simple technophobe or a nostalgic defender of chalk and blackboards. He is a rigorous and historically informed scholar who has spent three decades developing a genuinely sophisticated understanding of why the relationship between technology and education is so consistently and surprisingly resistant to the transformations that each new wave of innovation promises. His books and research, including "The Place of the Classroom and the Space of the Screen" and his extensive work on phenomenology and educational technology, have shaped how scholars around the world think about digital pedagogy, e-learning standards, and the lived experience of teaching and learning in digital environments.

In this rich and timely conversation, Dr. Steve and Prof. Friesen explore:

✓ Why every generation of educational technology promises to revolutionise learning and consistently fails to deliver — and what this remarkably stable pattern reveals about the fundamental nature of teaching and learning that we keep trying to technologise away

✓ What the enduring resilience of the classroom and the textbook actually tells us — why these apparently old-fashioned and technologically unsophisticated forms have survived wave after wave of disruption, and what their survival reveals about what education genuinely requires

✓ The fundamental differences between face-to-face and digital pedagogical relationships — what is lost, changed, or irreversibly altered when the teacher-student relationship moves to a screen, and why better technology cannot simply bridge these differences

✓ Why "digital literacy" is a misleading and ultimately unhelpful concept — how treating digital skills as simply a new form of literacy obscures the deeper questions about what it means to be educated in a digital age, and how we should think about this differently

✓ What phenomenology and the lived experience of education reveal about teaching and learning that data-driven approaches, learning analytics, and algorithmic assessment systems simply cannot capture — and why this matters for how we design and evaluate educational technology

✓ The crucial insights from German pedagogical traditions — Pädagogik and Bildung — that are almost entirely absent from Anglo-American educational technology discourse, what these traditions understand about the relationship between education, culture, and human formation, and why their absence from our technology debates is a serious problem

✓ What media theorists like Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and Friedrich Kittler teach us about how different media shape not just what we learn but how we think, perceive, and relate to knowledge itself — and why educational technology designers need to take media theory seriously

✓ The relationship between technical standardisation in e-learning — including Prof. Friesen's own work developing ISO standards — and pedagogical practice: can we standardise educational technology without standardising and ultimately limiting teaching itself

✓ The history of educational technology from the perspective of someone who has studied it since 1995 — what patterns keep repeating, what lessons we stubbornly refuse to learn, and what genuine progress, if any, has been made

✓ How we should think about artificial intelligence in education differently from every previous wave of technological optimism — what history teaches us, what is genuinely new and different about AI compared to previous technologies, what the specific risks and possibilities are, and what questions educators, policymakers, and technologists must ask before the hype cycle runs its course and leaves another generation disappointed

✓ What a genuinely honest, historically informed, phenomenologically grounded, and pedagogically serious approach to educational technology could look like — and whether the education system has the intellectual and institutional resources to build it

Prof. Norm Friesen is Professor of Education at Boise State University, co-editor of the journal Phenomenology and Practice, and one of the world's leading scholars of e-learning, educational technology, and the phenomenology of education. He has been involved in developing international technical standards for e-learning through the ISO, and his research bridges German and North American educational traditions in ways that are rare and genuinely illuminating.

🔗 Prof. Norm Friesen: experts.boisestate.edu/en/persons/norm-friesen

🌐 Show notes and resources: stevenstolz.com

For centuries, mathematics has been understood as the paradigm case of abstract, disembodied thought. Numbers, equations, and geometric proofs seem to exist in a realm entirely separate from the physical world of bodies, movement, and sensation. And our classrooms reflect this assumption: students sit still, look at symbols on a page or screen, and are asked to manipulate abstractions in their heads.

But what if this picture is not just incomplete, but fundamentally mistaken? What if mathematical understanding is not abstract at all, but is deeply, irreducibly rooted in physical experience, bodily movement, and gesture? And what would it mean for how we teach, design classrooms, and understand intelligence and ability if this turned out to be true?

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. 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

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. 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 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

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.

⚠️ CRITICAL WARNING: Not all humor heals - discover when teasing and sarcasm become psychologically harmful, especially for children and in workplace dynamics.

🎯 Perfect For: Parents seeking research-based family bonding strategies | Healthcare professionals interested in therapeutic humor | Anyone struggling with stress, anxiety, or depression | Comedy enthusiasts curious about the science behind laughter | Educators and workplace leaders building positive environments

🔬 Featured Research: Robert Provine's social laughter studies | Penn State family humor research | Stanford gelotology findings | Cross-cultural studies on humor and mental health | Neuroplasticity and positive emotion research

📚 Key References: 

Patch Adams, Sigmund Freud; Jerry Seinfeld; Plato; and Aristotle.

Key insights include:

The 60% creativity boost from walking vs. sitting

Neurological mechanisms behind the "feel-good" effect

Cultural walking practices from Japanese forest bathing to Aboriginal walkabouts

Practical frameworks for sustainable movement habits

The philosophy of "the good life" and physical activity's role in human flourishing

This isn't another fitness podcast—it's an invitation to discover how movement shapes consciousness, relationships, and meaning itself.

For listeners interested in: Philosophy, neuroscience, mental health, creativity, personal development, walking culture, and the intersection of ancient wisdom with modern research.