Hoover History Skills Academy for High School Students (July 21 to Aug. 1, 2025)

From my colleague and historian Stephen Kotkin at Hoover (formerly at Princeton):

As part of the Hoover History Lab's commitment to the development of educational programs that address the needs of high school students, we have recently launched an exciting new program, the Hoover History Skills Academy.

This Academy will provide high school students with an unparalleled two-week learning opportunity on the Hoover campus to master best practices for designing, researching, and writing a substantive historical research paper, taking advantage of the extraordinary historical materials in the Hoover Library and Archives.

Students may also submit their finished paper for possible publication in The Concord Review (our partner for this event) as a pre-collegiate academic accomplishment….

As there are only 24 seats available, we expect this program to fill up quickly. Interested students should apply ASAP.

Learn more about the program: Hoover History Lab Launches History Skills Academy For High School Students | Hoover Institution

Apply for the program:  History Skills Academy 2025 | Hoover Institution

Tuition ranges is $3950 for commuter students and $4950 for those who need room and board (plus a bit extra for PayPal payments). The tuition payments are to The Concord Review, which runs the camp; I'm told that Hoover doesn't get any of the revenue.

Comments

[Frank Drackman]

Don’t kids already spend enough time in school? Time would be better spent playing outside, surfing, of course the geeks who would want to do this class probably don’t do any of that stuff. My 2 overachieving daughters managed to get Engineering degrees, complete military flight training, and the only extracurricular summer activities they did was Juniors Tennis and this quaint old thing we used to call “Summer jobs”, humans weren’t designed to sit in cubicles all day (OK I’m one to talk I’m a gas passer) or classrooms listening to some dickwad, don’t know shit bout nuthon anyway, allriteallriteallrite

Frank

[Stupid Government Tricks]

Unless, of course, they want to. You'd be OK with that, I hope.

[Frank Drackman]

Let kids do what they want to do? I'd have stayed in my room smoking marriage-a-juan-a, that's what parents are for (to make you do the right thing (HT S. Lee), not let you stay in your room smoking marriage-a-juan-a) Camp Mesorah in NY used to have a summer "IDF Program" that both my daughters went to, although I think they learned more shoveling shit at Kibbutz Kfar Menahem summer after their Freshman year, no more talk of "Gap Years" after that summer

Frank

[Satchmo_Lives]

"Don’t kids already spend enough time in school?"

Compared to what? Japan and China?

"Time would be better spent playing outside…"

No doubt. But the choice isn’t “outside” or attending a high-level course in historical research. It is Instagram, TikTok, or video games.

[AmosArch]

How many high school students are here scrolling through Ilya’s longwinded pro-openborders diatribes and Josh’s reminders of when some obscure Reconstruction era justice farted? How many of them are able and willing to pay 4k to attend some workshop from an organization nobody under 30 has heard of and most people over 30 fall asleep if they listen to some of their talks?

[Eugene Volokh]

1. My thought was that some of our readers might be closely related to high school students.

2. As to "how many," it doesn't have to be that many; there are only a few spots available in any event.

[AmosArch]

If the establishment libertarian/center right intelligentsia draws from the ranks of former high schoolers who were dorky and rich enough to attend Hoover Institution symposia in their free time. It would certainly go a long way toward explaining why they might as well be on another planet when it comes to understanding why Trump got elected and other movements among the rank and file right and the larger world.

[Stupid Government Tricks]

Do you have a side of the bed which is right (as opposed to wrong, not left)?

[JerKat]

What options are available for academically qualified students whose parents cannot afford the $3,950 to $4,950 tuition payment?

[Stupid Government Tricks]

Oh, they go to Harvard and pay $56,000.

[Satchmo_Lives]

Or ask middle income and non-degreed people to pay it for them.

[Dr. Ed 2]

$500/week for R&B seems pricy — the whole thing does.

Concord Review is out of Sudbury, MA.

[Noscitur a sociis]

$70 a day in Palo Alto? That doesn’t seem crazy to me.

[Dr. Ed 2]

It would be nice if you'd specified the city and state as I honestly don't know and suspect others might not as well.

[David Nieporent]

If only there were a link right in the post that said "Learn more about the program: Hoover History Lab Launches History Skills Academy For High School Students | Hoover Institution."

[Dr. Ed 2]

Some of us are familiar with the Concord Review...

[David Nieporent]

And some of Dr. Ed aren't, but what does that have to do with anything?

[Sarcastr0]

Why all the salt?

No one is forcing you or your kids to take this opportunity.

Unless you are just against private expensive academic opportunities, in which case America may not be a great country for you.

[AmosArch]

I actually kind of like the romantic throwback of the rich and privileged and beautiful kids unashamedly hanging out together at elite private academies without the need to virtue signal about it. Makes for good movies and books.

I’m just not sure theres very many of these ultra rich ultra cloistered ultra academic conservative/libertarian child preppies among or closely related to Volokh readership or that they’ve made for the most in touch scholars or especially leaders to understand the current political movements and ordinary rank and file.

[Krayt]

When I was a kid, my bud down the street went to summer school. His mom portrayed it as a bonus educational opportunity for the smart, a reward. It was remedial school though. I was offended I didn't get that "opportunity" at the time.

Who knows what space campy things I was missing out on, I imagined.

[Frank Drackman]

in California, pre Prop 13, you could take regular HS classes during Summer School so you could graduate early or take more advanced classes during the regular school year, at the end of 10th grade I'd taken enough I could have skipped a year, only went to 12th grade to play baseball and you got "Work/Study" credit for working at a job during the school day, my "Work/Study" was flipping burgers.

Frank

[Stupid Government Tricks]

Like Harvard, $56,000 a year.

[Sarcastr0]

I mean, the fact that it's posted here means it's not seeking the next generation of the old boy's club, so dunno why you think that'd be futile.

I also don't think 'best practices for designing, researching, and writing a substantive historical research paper' is a priori a conservative/libertarian indoctrination project.

[Stephen Lathrop]

These are presumably brilliant high schoolers, right? My suggestion, have historian Stephen Kotkin teach the conservative philosopher of history Michael Oakeshott’s essay, On History, to the high schoolers.

Based on Kotkin’s linked biography, he would probably have to get busy with Oakeshott himself to be ready to do it. Nothing in the Kotkin biography suggests readiness to take on the challenge suggested by this description from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

By detaching historical knowledge from present concerns, Oakeshott articulates a theory of history as a distinct and coherent mode of inquiry and understanding. Implicit in this claim for the autonomy of historical inquiry is a distinction between naturalistic and hermeneutic ways of understanding human affairs.

In fairness to Kotkin, the more recent the period of the historian’s specialty expertise, the less engaged with historical methodological difficulties the historian needs to be. But even so, it would probably have been hard to sell to Oakeshott the notion that a career built around anti-Stalinism even involves the practice of history. On the other hand, plenty of good historians would judge that kind of insistence over-rigorous.

But whatever level of methodological rigor is necessary to engage post-19th century events, it will be far less than that required to do historical justice to earlier times. The farther back you go, the more Oakeshott-style rigor is required. The Civil War was a long time ago. The founding era still more remote. The era of American pre-revolutionary colonial history is another world altogether.

Nothing in Kotkin’s biography suggests he even needs to know that. But high schoolers offered a purported History Skills Academy deserve at least to be presented with an explanation why analytical complications multiply as remoteness in time increases.

[David Nieporent]

I'm sure that Stephen Kotkin, possessor of a PhD in history and who has taught the subject for over 30 years at an elite institution, is looking for advice on the field from a retired newspaper editor/amateur photographer & hydrologist.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Nieporent — I concede Professor Kotkin his due. It is, after all, extraordinary to see an academic historian of any description associated with the VC, so let's see more of them, and not just in reference to what they plan to do elsewhere.

It is on that basis that I can be certain that in the unlikely event Kotkin ever sees our comments, he will understand the point I am making. From what I wrote, he might reasonably conclude I have had academic historical training. You, however, will remain clueless.

By the way, I have practiced photography for decades, as a journalist, as a designer, and as a fine art photographer, but never as an amateur. You would never be as careless with facts in a courtroom as you habitually are when you comment on this blog.

[ReaderY]

The University of Nevada has a human sexuality program rumored to be attractive to women interested in entering a certain profession and learning more about it.

I’ve always thought that the Hoover Institute might make an attractive institutional partner for a certain part of the skills set of such a curriculum. I suspect such a course might need to include an oral presentation and/or exam.