Earlier this year a paper of mine was accepted, after peer review, for presentation at the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) 2026 in Tampere, Finland.

ECER is one of the largest gatherings of education scholars in the world, drawing roughly three thousand researchers from more than seventy countries.

I was accepted into Network 14: Communities, Families and Schooling in Educational Research with the title:

“Immigrant Family School Choice and Pedagogical Identity: A Case Study of Classical Humanities Schooling in Silicon Valley.”

Why this question is worth asking

Silicon Valley is the most aggressively future-facing place on earth. It is the global capital of optimization, AI disruption, and the conviction that what is “newest is best.”

If there were anywhere you would expect families to chase pure technical credentialing for their children and to treat education as job training is here.

So my question began with this this question: Why are they choosing Latin, Homer, logic, and the long inheritance of the Christian West when so many STEM options are available.

My paper was intended to study that choice and perhaps develop our own program to better suit their needs.

But I Had to Withdraw

The conference falls during the opening week of our Canterbury school year. As headmaster, that important week belongs to my students (their parents) and faculty, and so I withdrew from presenting in person this August. I was really looking forward to visiting Finland! I’m also hoping to be invited to a future ECER conference.

What comes next

I think this work and research deserves a wider hearing than a single August afternoon in Finland anyway, and I want to continue this project and perhaps give it a home here on my blog or maybe even a short book.

The thesis underneath all of it is one I hold with some real confidence: the recovery of the humanities is the most forward-looking thing a family in Silicon Valley can do.

I was just speaking with an instagram engineer last week who remarked they are explicitly hiring English majors to work with the LLMs!

Leave a comment if you want me to send you any of my updates on this project.