James Traub is a journalist, author, and scholar. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the New York Institute For The Humanities, and the Society of American Historians.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and James Traub discuss why progressive pedagogy is failing American students, how classical schools are achieving better outcomes through traditional teaching methods, and whether learning facts versus critical thinking represents a false choice in education.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: Your latest book is about how to educate citizens in the United States, a relevant topic today. A lot of the debates in this area are about what students should be taught: are they being indoctrinated in woke ideology, or are they being indoctrinated in right-wing thought that downplays the evils of slavery? You think that in some ways, those very ideological debates are a little bit beside the point.
James Traub: These are the sexy things everybody wants to seize on—the whole right-left thing, which is an important part of my book. But if you go to school, which of course the people who are having this fight don’t, I spent a year in classrooms. One thing that struck me is the relatively-less-politicized-than-I-thought character of classrooms. You can go to a red state which has very red state standards written into its laws, and the teachers aren’t thinking about that. They often don’t know what’s in the standards. Teachers have a strong ethos that says, I don’t want to impose my views on the kids. Though that is an important part of my book, the thing that troubled me more was not what they’re taught. It’s how they’re taught. It’s pedagogy as opposed to politics.
American education, as far as I can tell, is ideological in a way that’s not true elsewhere. What I mean by that is not the right-left thing we were just talking about. It’s the notion that there is a progressive way to teach and there’s a conservative way to teach. That makes it very hard to have a sane and sober conversation about what’s an effective way to teach. The classes that I was in—many history, government, social studies, and other classes over the course of a year in many different places—the thing that troubled me was not the politics. It was how vacuous, how empty, how silent many of these classes were. It was how poor the reading comprehension of many students was. It was how little was assigned to them, how few books there were in the schools and in the classrooms.
The thing that I focused on, and I think is terribly important, is a pedagogy—the one called progressive pedagogy—that has this idea, which you could trace back to John Dewey and others, that learning facts, learning information, learning names, dates, places, the things you do in a history class, or for that matter an English class, is coercive, that it’s jamming things down children’s throats. A more effective way of teaching, in this view, is to engage their wish to ask big questions, to engage in critical inquiry and so forth, and, through that, they will come to know things. I don’t think that’s how most educated people got educated. Educated people got educated because they learned, they loved to learn, they found a way of learning. When you learn things well, you are naturally launched into the world of critical inquiry and thinking critically.
Mounk: Let me play devil’s advocate on this, because I’m a little bit torn. Even though I lived in mostly left-leaning parts of Germany and was taught largely by students who were part of a generation of 1960s student radicals, the education I received was, by that definition, quite conservative. History class was an unending parade of years and battles, learning off by heart various kings. The stakes of this were never made clear to me, and I was tremendously bored—it just felt like a rote exercise. I still grew up in an old world Europe where the idea of general knowledge about the world was really prized, and I had intellectual aspirations even relatively young. But it really felt like a rote exercise. Why does it matter that Frederick the Great ascended the throne at a certain point and died at a certain point? Well, part of why it matters is that he had a certain set of views and personality that shaped Prussia, and there’s a debate about whether something like enlightened monarchy actually existed. When you explain those stakes, then it becomes relevant when Frederick the Great ascended the throne. If you’re just learning that he was an influential king, these were his dates, and then a couple of dates of battles, you just don’t start to have a stake in this debate in the first place.
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On the other hand, I know that you need a certain set of facts and figures in order to actually engage intelligently in a conversation. I’ve been trying to learn more about China and I’m learning Chinese. I worked my way through a very good history of China, but I had real trouble retaining a lot of information because I don’t have enough context on the Song dynasty to really be able to place things in a scaffolding, and so I retained less. I certainly understand why you need some facts as well.
To give a third kind of alternative, I was always struck by the way that history is taught in Britain. It’s always taught through debates. Right from day one, it is: here’s one view of what happened in this period; here’s a second view of what happened in that period. That involves learning dates and facts that are contested, or the interpretation of which is contested. But the stakes are immediately made clear because you’re thrown into a debate about how to understand a period of history. Perhaps that’s a third possibility. I have to say that I’m slightly sympathetic to this idea that just throwing names and dates and battles at people is not going to get them interested.
Traub: Two thoughts. First, I’m fascinated that all of your super left-wing ’60s German professors were nevertheless still so unconsciously rooted in the pedagogy in which they had grown up that they repeated it. That’s in itself very interesting. Second, yes, there’s a reason why there was a progressive revolt against traditional forms of pedagogy—it’s because rote learning of facts with no larger purpose in view is boring and pointless.
For the purpose of this book, I read about the first times that American public education became a matter of debate, which was the 1890s or so. In the debate over what should be taught to American students in history, Woodrow Wilson was one of the members of the panel, and the great historian Frederick Jackson Turner was a consultant. You would have thought they would have said students must learn more history. What they said instead is that history must be presented in a way that makes it meaningful to students. For them, that did not mean students must not learn an important body of information. That body of information has to matter because you need teachers who are—and this was the language they would use—fired with enthusiasm for the subject.
The classes that I was in over the course of this year where I felt that learning a lot of material was always directed towards inquiry were the Advanced Placement classes or the International Baccalaureate classes. That made me think: can it really be that only 10% of the kids in the school are able to do the kind of work where real substantive learning leads to thoughtful conversation? The best schools that I was in were schools where I found that to be much more widespread—where it was simply taken for granted that if you’re in 11th grade, you are able to think important thoughts.
I’ll give you one last example. I was in a class the week before last, sitting with ninth graders—14 and 15 year old kids—who were having a deeply thoughtful conversation about the Aeneid. Ninth graders in America do not read the Aeneid. They don’t read whole books. But these kids were having a deeply searching conversation about it. The two are not in necessary tension. That’s what good teaching is.
Mounk: Let’s take a step back. One thing that I was always struck by coming from Germany is just the huge range of quality in American public schools in particular. Europeans often have this image that American schools are all quite bad. I didn’t find that to be true at all. I never went to an American high school, but based on what friends told me about the schooling over the years, I feel like I have a relatively good sense of it. When you look at the most failing schools in the country, you have a vast majority of students graduating barely literate, barely numerate—a complete disaster. Then when I hear about some of the schools that my friends went to in the suburbs of major metropolitan areas, which are public schools but in fancy neighborhoods—one friend of mine was in a rocket club where they had to call up NASA before launching some of the rockets because they were going to go up that high. I’d never heard of anything like that in Germany.
Traub: I went to one of those schools myself—a school full of neurotic, highly literate Jewish kids, a public school. It was great because it was a well-to-do suburb. We had great teachers and there was a huge emphasis on learning.
Mounk: Just to get a level reading here—the schools you’re going to: are you seeking out the worst and the best schools to contrast, or are you trying to look for average schools? What kind of schools should we be imagining when you’re talking about your experience reporting on this?
Traub: The first chapter of my book talks about schools in a suburb of Chicago—a big suburban area, largely middle-class and highly diverse. The first school I was in was the kind of school where almost everybody was going to go to college, probably many of the parents had gone to college, they had great facilities, the school was clean and nice. It was a majority white school, with Asian students as the second largest group—relatively high achieving students. And yet, when I was in a class of 10th and 11th graders reading the Declaration of Independence, it was very hard for a lot of them. I don’t think it was vocabulary in that sense—I suspect what defeated them more was unfamiliar syntax. Their reading ability, broadly understood, not just the ability to say or know the words, was surprisingly poor. What that meant is that those kids could not have had the conversation like the one I heard among the ninth graders about the Aeneid. They were not academically prepared to do it.
When you have this big fight about whether students should be learning a left-wing or a right-wing version of American history, you have to say: before you get there, they have to have the ability to think their way through a difficult text.
Mounk: Why is it that these ninth graders were able to have a certain conversation about the Aeneid, but these older kids at this other school—which is not a failing school, which is a pretty good and probably above-average school—could not? What explains the difference between these two schools?
Traub: The good story in my book involves what are called classical schools—a term I’d never heard before I set out to write this book, and a kind of school that would be unfamiliar to many listeners, in part because they’re seen as conservative. The word “classical” probably doesn’t help. They’re much more common in red states than blue, but it’s one of the most rapidly growing forms of schooling in the country. These are public schools—charter schools, which allows them to do things differently if they want to, but public schools nonetheless.
Mounk: Part of what you mean by private schools in this context is that they’re not fee-paying. So there’s not an extra financial burden for kids to attend these schools.
Traub: These schools are free and they have to take everybody who applies—they’re not selective. That’s very important, because if they were selective, you could say of course they’re taking especially talented kids. They are selective only in the sense that the parents choose to seek to have their kids get in.
These schools are self-consciously traditional in their pedagogy—a belief in vocabulary, learning stories, reading books. You may think that reading books is simply what you do in school, but the book is a rare thing in American public schools. Kids are not asked to read a book because it’s too taxing for their now very short attention spans. These schools assume that a kid can read a book, likes to read a book, wants to read a book. By fifth or sixth grade, kids are reading great novels—The Count of Monte Cristo—and talking about them. They learn Latin from an early age. They read the Iliad and the Odyssey—first in adapted versions, and then in grown-up versions later on.
These schools tend to have a lot of rules. Kids wear uniforms. They’re schools that a lot of parents probably wouldn’t like—too strict, they would say. One of the things I say in my book is: let’s think about what general principles we can learn from these schools, even if you don’t like them. One of those principles is that kids can do a lot more if from an early age you start them with higher expectations and more rigorous forms of learning. I went to another school like that with only Hispanic kids, many of them from impoverished backgrounds. Their conversations weren’t as searching, but they were reading Crime and Punishment in 10th grade—which is pretty remarkable if it’s your second language and you didn’t grow up in an educated household.
Mounk: Do you think this is something that could be rolled out more broadly, and it’s really just a question of the wrong approach having gained too much ground in a lot of public schools? Or do you think there is a selection effect? You’re saying rightly that these schools have to admit everybody, but one of the big indicators of success in life is how educated your parents are. If you have educated parents and you have to flee your country penniless, come to a new country where your parents don’t have any social capital, don’t speak the language particularly well, don’t have any connections—statistically, the kids of those parents are going to do very well. So the self-selection by the parents may still play a crucial role here. How much do you think the education of our kids would improve if a lot more schools adopted either this classical curriculum or a modern version of it—not necessarily learning Latin and reading the Aeneid, but reading the great novels in the English language and great contemporary novels?
Traub: My little dream is to rename this form of education “liberal education,” which is what it would have been called in the Renaissance. If you took that word away, maybe you could have more of these schools in the blue world—and if you had them in the blue world, they would have different ideas about the way you want to shape a young person, which would be a good thing.
As for your first question, there are no studies of this yet. There is something called Core Knowledge—E.D. Hirsch, a great literary scholar at the University of Virginia, created a pedagogy which assumes that you need to have high familiarity with a lot of words and expressions in order to read your way through a text. It’s a focus in curriculum across almost all the major subjects on learning particular things as a means towards becoming a more thoughtful and critical actor. There are a lot of studies that show that it works. If you were to ask what can be generalized from these schools, that pedagogy is the big thing.
The people who say their daughter is not going to be happy in such a strict school, that she’s a free spirit—they shouldn’t go there. But there is nothing conservative about learning in the Core Knowledge way. There is nothing liberal—speaking as a liberal, a left liberal—about the other thing that calls itself progressive learning, though it has a liberal pedigree. When I talk to people, I get the strong sense that America is full of people whose politics are liberal but whose intuitive pedagogy is traditional, like me.
Mounk: What about the selection of the teachers? I assume that a lot of these classical schools also have teachers who may be more educated, may have a deeper love of learning, who are excited to be part of one of these model experimental schools because perhaps they are disenchanted with how normal schooling works. I imagine that the quality of the teachers in these schools may also be higher than in regular public schools.
More generally, what did you think about the quality of teachers in the schools you were in? I’m really struck by the fact that if you go back to the 1950s and 1960s, a lot of teachers were women who had graduated in the top 10% of their class. There obviously weren’t other job opportunities, or there was an expectation that they would do that job for a number of years and then get married and leave the workforce—so it was for bad reasons, produced by bad background conditions. But it was a great thing for the students of that age, because they were taught by very, very smart people. My understanding is that today the average, or median, teacher graduated in the bottom half of their class. If that’s the case, how can you get teachers who were not among the best and brightest when they were in school to inspire students who, even though they may not be getting a great education at 15 or 16, are in some ways smarter than their teachers? That is a hard setup.
Traub: If I were king, this is what I would do: increase teacher salaries—by a lot. Who knows what number, 50%, I don’t know. Then you not only would have a better pool to select from, but you could make different demands than the ones you make now. The schools that I was so admiring rarely take teachers whose graduate degree is in education. They take teachers whose graduate degree is in a subject matter. The school that I write about the most—a school in a middle-class, working-class suburb outside of Dallas called Louisville—the principal there said to me: I can help a teacher who doesn’t have the pedagogical background be a better teacher. I cannot take a teacher who doesn’t have the love for his or her subject and infuse that. He only hired teachers who had a master’s degree in a subject. Most of the other schools I went to, almost all the teachers—except the best ones—had an education degree and not a subject matter degree.
My book is not about teachers’ colleges, so I don’t hold myself out as an authority on the subject. But the overwhelming impression I got was that if a teacher isn’t fired with enthusiasm—to go back to that 1890s language—for the subject matter, then it’s very hard to fire the students with enthusiasm. The only way to get teachers who are fired with enthusiasm is to get people who are intellectually alive, and those people need to get paid better to go into teaching.
Mounk: Let me play devil’s advocate here, and this is perhaps my least popular position. When you look at the OECD studies of teacher pay, the United States is well above the average of OECD countries. Part of that is that the United States is rather richer than a number of other OECD countries. The way in which the United States stands out is not that teachers make comparatively low pay. Having lived in both the United States and Europe, I think the average American teacher has a better standard of life than most teachers in other countries. The problem is that lawyers and doctors in the United States earn so much more than their peers in other countries that the economic gap is very difficult to bridge. But I don’t know that the way to solve that is to get a teacher to earn 75% or 50% of what a doctor earns, when the doctor’s pay is already so high that it’s basically unsustainable for patients to seek medical care.
The other thing to note about teacher pay is that when you look at the LA School District, for example, teachers actually make a lot of money. One of the problems is the structure of it—in the first few years you earn very little, but once you get a certain kind of tenure, you actually make a great deal. Part of this is the teachers unions, which structure pay in such a way that senior members of the profession live very well for years, with extreme job protections. But that’s not enticing younger talented people to go into the profession. How do you solve some of those structural issues?
Traub: I think you’re exaggerating the steepness of that curve. Salary structures in the teaching profession tend to follow a steady, stepwise progression, with a bigger step if you’ve gotten another diploma or achieved certain milestones. It’s not as radical as that. I don’t think you have a whole lot of teachers earning $160,000—that’s quite rare. But when your starting salary is $48,000 or something like that, that’s tough.
Interestingly, at these classical charter schools, teachers are paid less, for reasons having to do with how they’re compensated by the state. How do they get decent teachers? The answer, in some of these schools—not all of them, some had fairly normal teachers and nevertheless the kids were still doing well—but at the best one I went to, when I talked to the teachers and asked why they were there, they would say: “Because I get to teach beautiful things. I get to have elevated conversations. I get to talk about great books with the kids.” I admit there’s a limited number of people who will do that—it takes real dedication. But it does tell you that the atmosphere of the school matters a lot in terms of the kinds of teachers it’s going to attract.
Mounk: Let me push back on that a little bit, because I think it’s important to understand the incentives here. The first thing you said is that a lot of the teachers you were disappointed with had gone to teachers colleges. It’s interesting to talk about what teachers colleges teach and how they shape education. From my understanding, these are extremely ideological places, not just in the content they convey but also in what they teach about the right approaches to pedagogy.
We’ve been talking about kids that are older, but for a long time a lot of American school kids weren’t even taught how letters work—how letters correspond to particular sounds and how that allows you to form a word. It took me years of ambient awareness of this debate to understand what was even at issue, because it seemed so incomprehensible that you wouldn’t learn that.
Traub: That’s the most notorious aspect of what I’m calling progressive pedagogy. The premise behind what’s called “whole language” is that children acquire reading ability naturally—that if you place them in an immersive bath of language, they will learn to read. That’s wrong. You don’t acquire reading the same way you acquire talking. But that was based on a kind of ideological predisposition, a Rousseauian view of the child. It’s very hard to break that view. But that view has been broken.
Mounk: Just to go back to this question about teachers, because I think it’s helpful to have a sense of it: a new teacher with a regular credential in Los Angeles has a typical starting salary of about $69,000. That’s not a ton of money, but for a young person—presumably most of these people are in their 20s—that is about average household income in the United States. If you’re a couple and you’re both teachers, you start off at double the typical household income. You live in a high-expense area, and Los Angeles is an expensive place—that’s important to acknowledge. But that is hardly catastrophic. By the time you’ve taught for about 10 years, a typical veteran teacher can expect to make around $110,000. On your own, you’re making about twice US household income. If you were a couple where both people are teachers, you make about four times the average US household income. It’s just not clear to me that the solution is for teachers to be making significantly more than that. That doesn’t seem to me to be the crux of the problem.
Traub: Let’s ask ourselves a question: as a society, do we feel that teachers or lawyers play a more fundamental role in shaping good collective outcomes? These are market-driven things, but if we do feel that we have an educational crisis—and my general view is that most spending in schools doesn’t produce any different outcome at all, whether it’s fancier buildings, swimming pools, or even smaller classes—then the only place where I would be in favor of spending more money is in some agreed transaction between paying more and demanding more. Your point, I believe, is that we’re already paying enough to make bigger demands than we’re currently making. That may be true. All I would say is it isn’t working now, and so I’d be in favor of trying to find some other way of making it work better. That said, it’s not going to happen anyway—these are local decisions.
Mounk: Let me make myself even more unpopular with two other segments of my listeners. If the problem isn’t that, as an individual earning $110,000, you can’t have a decent life in LA, or as a couple earning $220,000 you can’t have a decent life in LA—and I don’t think that is the problem—then a lot of the problem is relative prestige. A young person in Germany who thinks they’d like to become a teacher might worry that classmates choosing to become doctors or lawyers are going to have higher social status and more money. But the gap isn’t that large, so they pursue their love of teaching. Whereas in the United States, that same person at a good college who’s excited about teaching might in the end decide they don’t want to be in such a different earnings category than their friends, don’t want to have such a different level of social status, don’t want their friends always feeling sorry for them or to wonder if they can go out to dinner with them. Perhaps they’ll go and apply for that job in consulting or tech or investment banking instead. I’m sure that happens a lot—I know people like that.
Traub: Except that you can go to Teach for America—that’s one prestigious thing you can do. You can spend two years as an enrollee in one of these programs. But then the question becomes: how do we keep those people? How do we make them feel like this should be a lifetime vocation?
Mounk: Part of the answer is that we can’t have the taxpayer try to compete with the salaries currently paid to doctors and lawyers, because they’re completely disproportionate. The best-paid doctors and lawyers are always going to earn more, and there’s nothing we can do about that in a free society. But there is one thing we can do, which is to bring down the salaries of lawyers and particularly doctors. The way to do that is to recognize that those salaries are kept artificially high by licensing. Particularly in the case of doctors, the American Medical Association refuses to credential new medical schools, which would lead to many more doctors being trained. America has one of the lowest rates of doctors per capita in the developed world, and that is one of the reasons why the salaries of doctors are so high. So rather than taking the politically more left-leaning solution of increasing teacher pay, perhaps what we should do is push against some of those artificial regulations that create that disproportion in the first place.
Traub: The lawyer situation is really driven by their clients. Law firms are always seeking corporate clients because that’s where the money lies, so having more law schools may not have much of an effect. In any case, we are now talking about what I offered as an idle fantasy—I don’t have an overwhelming belief in it.
Mounk: What is the role of teachers unions in all of this? I had Randi Weingarten on the podcast for an interesting and at times somewhat contentious conversation a few months ago. To what extent do these classical schools that you admire have less influence from teachers unions, or perhaps the teachers aren’t generally part of unions?
Traub: Probably not, because these tend to be red states—though I don’t know that for a fact, since municipal teachers unions are pretty widespread and individual schools can choose to have a union or not. I was on the board of a charter school in New York City for many years and the teachers—I think through our own fault—were unhappy. They said they needed the protection of a union, they joined one, and I thought this was going to be the end of the school. It didn’t make that much of a difference.
If you ask me whether the world would be better with or without teachers unions, it’s a hard question because there are positives and negatives on both sides. Teachers unions view charter schools as competition and oppose them—that’s the worst aspect of unionization, the closed-shop mentality where you’re not thinking about what’s good for the kids but about what’s good for you as a professional. That’s bad. On the other hand, raising salaries is good. If you said to me there should not be public sector unions—which is an interesting claim made by some on the right who believe in unionization but not public sector unionization—I might say, perhaps in an ideal world you’re right. There should be more unionization in the private sector and less in the public sector.
Mounk: I want to make sure that we circle back a little bit to the content. What did you see people being taught about America? The cliché is that in progressive schools, students are taught that America is bad and evil, and in conservative schools, they’re taught that slavery never happened. I’m sure the reality is much more subtle on both counts.
I happened to have had a conversation with some of my undergrads about this recently. There was a big range in what they were taught depending on where they were from. Students from blue suburbs of cities in Texas, for example, reported a fairly middle-of-the-road education. Students from somewhat more conservative-leaning parts of Kansas reported much the same. But the students who had gone to schools in the suburbs of New York, LA, and San Francisco reported two things. First, that they had a very identity-focused education, to put it as neutrally as possible. Some of these kids agreed with that education and were shaped by it; some had rebelled against it in various ways. But they agreed that it had really been the prevailing focus of everything in any social science related subject they studied. Second, a good number reported that some of their teachers were highly ideological in a way where it was clear you had to agree with them to get a good grade.
That’s the thing that really troubled me. I think it’s fine for teachers to betray their worldviews in some ways. I try in the classroom to always play devil’s advocate and present the strongest version of different views. But I’m also a public figure—my students can easily figure out what my views are and I don’t hide them in the classroom. What is really important to me is to empower each student to think for themselves. One way I put this is in how I give advice on writing an essay: if I already agree with your thesis, I want to make sure it’s the best version of that thesis. A lot of the time I’m not going to agree with your thesis at the beginning or at the end. What I’m going to judge the essay on is whether it moves me towards your position. Do I think, at the end of reading this essay, that there are arguments here I should grapple with, even if I’m unlikely to change my mind? I’d much rather you put forward a thesis I disagree with, smartly and in a logical, coherent way, than that you echo back something you think I might believe.
The students I spoke with were not particularly exercised by what they had been taught one way or the other. But you could see the seething anger in those who had felt that teachers were highly ideological—where you knew you could write really badly and get an A if you reflected back what the teacher believed, and you knew that no matter how well you wrote, you would be in trouble if you wrote something else. Sometimes these were students who actually agreed with their teacher and didn’t have a problem with the substance of their views, but they still chafed against that dynamic.
How did you experience in the classroom both what students were taught, and whether teachers empowered students to argue, to disagree, to put forward their own point of view—or whether they abused the power of the classroom?
Traub: In general, I found classrooms less ideological than people think they are. I remember a conversation I had with a teacher who said that when he was a college student, he wrote an essay defending the surveillance act that was passed after 9/11 and his teacher gave him a D simply because the teacher was a liberal and thought it was a bad thing. He said that stuck with him, and he would never do that to a student. His goal was to help students arrive at their own views. I found that to be the default position of teachers.
When I read a lot of the conservative critique of schools, I thought I needed to find out whether it was really true that there are whole parts of the country where schools are deeply ideological. So I went to some schools in Minneapolis. As it happened, the high school I went to was in the catchment area of George Floyd’s neighborhood, so it was profoundly affected by what had happened there. The principal—a person I admired in many ways, ambitious, active, and restless—was deeply committed to the anti-racist notion that all white people harbor innumerable unconscious racist impulses and that one of the purposes of education is to bring them out into the open. That was relentlessly part of the educational program. I said to her: do you really want to create a situation where a student who doesn’t hold that view is told that that’s probably a sign that he or she is racist? Her response was: what are you saying, that there’s no such thing as structural racism? So yes, that exists, and I have a whole chapter about it in the book.
One of the most fascinating things I saw was a meeting of this principal with her council of teachers, where she was saying they had to make sure they were not punishing students of color by giving them bad grades—that they should have the same fraction of good and bad grades among white students and students of color.
Mounk: That is a remarkable demand—a demand to not grade people on the basis of their individual work. The fact that a principal of a school is demanding this should be a national scandal. The fact that students on the basis of race are not going to be able to get the same grade in a public school is a national scandal.
Traub: It’s a terrible misfortune. The teachers pushed back and said: the white kids who go to this school come from a middle-class background, while the children of color come from a pretty impoverished background—they don’t have the same academic preparation and they’re not going to do as well. She backed off a little bit. At least it was a matter of debate and discussion. But it is true that she had these strong priors that made her insist on things that I thought were just wrong, and that showed me that the right-wing critique is not totally off base.
Mounk: Interesting. Was your impression that this is a subset of schools that are like that?
Traub: I didn’t go to that many of the kinds of schools you’re describing—well-to-do, very progressive suburban areas. That’s probably true of those. But here’s a counter example. I went to a school in New York City, in Long Island City, that was like the school you’d see in a TV show—kids of every color, race, and ethnicity. I never heard a word about identity. It was called the Academy of American Studies, and the premise of the school was to teach much more about American history, government, and economics than you would get in a normal school. Interestingly, it wasn’t the kind of well-to-do, progressive, largely white school that maybe your students went to—the kids who went there were working-class immigrant kids. Even though they lived in the very progressive culture of New York City, they were perhaps less inclined to think in identitarian terms than left-wing white kids. I didn’t encounter that kind of ideological atmosphere nearly the way I did in Minneapolis.
Mounk: For the record, the students I talked about were mostly non-white themselves. My impression is that they probably went to schools that were predominantly Asian, white, and high-achieving Latino, in quite multi-ethnic and multicultural parts of the country, but probably quite affluent districts. That is an interesting point of context.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and James discuss practical steps to reform education and whether boys and girls have different learning styles. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
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