For example, teaching digital skills would include showing students how to download images from the Internet and insert them into PowerPoint slides or webpages. Digital literacy would focus on helping students choose appropriate images, recognize copyright licensing, and cite or get permissions, in addition to reminding students to use alternative text for images to support those with visual disabilities.

My students don’t have tutorials. And most are not habituated to discussing their classwork outside of class. I don’t judge them for this. Most of them have been taught, since middle school, on a kind of factory model – you go to class, you learn things, you regurgitate them on tests (or, very occasionally, in papers) and then you either (if you are poor or working class) go to your job, or (if you are middle or upper middle class) devote yourself to being a semi-professional athlete, or musician, or actor, or debater, or whatever.[2] Learning from (as opposed to getting good grades in) classes (as opposed to from ‘activities’) is devalued both by their families and by the schools that they attended and therefore by them. But even the students acculturated to, or hungry for, intellectual excitement relating to their classes have their time structured in a way that makes it difficult to talk with their classmates. They are taking different classes, have conflicting schedules, and find their community in their dorms or their clubs, rather than in their classes.

I was a voracious reader and an intent listener. I used to (from age 4 at the latest) demand that my parents let me go to bed early so that I could listen to the radio (not music – but Radio 4: documentaries, comedies plays and, when I was 9, a 13×1 hour radio dramatization of Nicholas Nickleby, on Sunday evenings. By the time I was in college, listening to someone talk about philosophy for an hour was almost effortless – I did the reading, listened carefully, and took extensive notes. I also wrote a weekly essay… So who needed classroom discussion?

Undoubtedly one of the strengths of social history today is the encouragement it has given to, and the response by specialists in such fields as the history of law and its enforcement, of medicine and its practice, of industry, commerce, shipping and seamanship, vernacular architecture, domestic furnishings, costume, the fine arts, music and, to a lesser extent, of literature, to provide for their subjects a social dimension.

Computers cannot, of course, write history, though from the evidence of some recent historical literature it would seem that they have a good try.

American sociology in general – can be exposed for what it was: a parochial if not provincial body of thought that reflected little else than the worldview and groping aspirations of a handful of middling white men whose interests were tethered to the interests of the American empire: men who had to suppress those others from whom insights they drew in order to be.

The implications are far-reaching. If the Chicago school is not the originator of sociology, then why spend so much time reading, thinking about, or debating it?

We were taught that sociology as a scientific enterprise, rather than a philosophical one, began with Albion Small and his successors; that The Polish Peasant by W.I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki was the first great piece of American sociological research; and that the systematic study of race relations and urban sociology originated with Robert E. Park and his students.