I have started more planners in my life than I can count. Paper planners, app-based ones, even a chaotic color-coded sticky-note phase I would rather forget. Not to mention the 24x18 whiteboard calendar that still read “September” as Thanksgiving approached, a loving tribute to my gift for starting systems and my brain’s total indifference to maintaining them. I am twice-exceptional, and for a long time I assumed the unused planners meant something was wrong with me. It took an embarrassingly...

If Stanford educational psychologist Sam Wineburg is right that historical thinking is a “unnatural act”—a set of cognitive moves that seemingly run against the grain of how human minds actually work—then modern schooling might deserve the same description (1). We tend to imagine that school, like breathing, is just something humans do. But the institution we send our kids to every morning is a surprisingly recent invention, built for a very specific kind of learner. The School That History...