I think it’s time for a weeds episode on public education in America. I spent two years working in a Title 1 Charter School in New Orleans and I was dismayed at the literacy rates of our 3rd grade students. I’ve always been in favor of sensible CRP proposals but my unpleasant take is that I feel the anti-empirical, woke national dialogue has as much to do with lack of ideas and worsening outcomes.
Great article. With respect to this idea, more people should know about the work of the Young People's Project in computer science and math education using near-peer mentoring and culturally relevant pedagogy and curricula: https://bit.ly/351JGHe
We've used a half dozen different 'correct' words for Black Americans. And yet cops are still killing unarmed Black men. If we come up with a whole new word will it change that? No. Because words are not magic, they are tools, just tools.
I grew up in the north of England where it was commonplace for the older generation to call people 'luv' and anyone under 30 would get 'lad' or 'miss' and it never occurred to me that this could offend anyone until I came to the US. My grandparents would be so confused and upset!
Honestly, I’ll be bringing up the backdrop with people in the future more or less in the form of “I’d love to discuss the merits of a Great Books or ‘Western Canon’ approach right after we’ve ensured children learn enough to engage with it in the first place.”
When I talk about this stuff in person, being able to bracket discussions about conservative utopia and focus on the slough of reality has always proved useful.
I'm pretty much in Matt's camp here, but I do think there's something to be said for the "Lindy Effect," i.e. that time tends to filter quality. Most books are not very good; we publish something like 5,000 books every day worldwide. Furthermore, there are a lot of books that _seem_ good to us today but that end up being pretty silly in retrospect. _The Promise of American Life_, when it came out, was hailed as perhaps the most extraordinary text in America by practically every intellectual; today it's barely read anymore (for good reason; it's a really weird and not very good book).
Much writing is intended to capture the current moment in a way that feels very authentic, and as such tends to be very tethered to its time. I tried reading _Herzog_ recently and just couldn't get through it; it seemed derivative, irrelevant, and boring. I wondered what I was missing or what was wrong with me, but in reading more about it's popularity, it made sense: Bellow was pulling on cultural concerns that were very present in the minds of people in the 50s but seem distant and almost silly today. My reaction of "I just don't care what happens to these people" actually makes a lot of sense in that light.
The "Great Books" that have survived for centuries have, generally, demonstrated a timeless quality about them that justifies their fame. If the purpose of the humanities is to teach about human nature and timeless truths, there's a good argument that old books that remain relevant are more likely to do that than new ones. Certainly, _some_ modern books accomplish that goal and will remain relevant for ages, but we can't really know which ones yet.
A lot of what's written for kids today also seems almost comically woke, aimed at the hearts of far-left academic types who can't get enough identity politics. The idea these works could survive even a decade into the future seems fanciful.
All that said, I'm pretty open to the idea that we really do need to make reading more fun. Reading Shakespeare is hard; it feels like work. The language has changed so much that it almost needs to be presented in translation; few of the (actually really funny puns) are visible to a current audience, and just understanding what is happening can be a challenge. To read it well, you need a copy of the OED next to you to know what certain words meant in the 17th century. IMHO, a lot of teachers miss how _hard_ these texts are to read for the first time, because they've been teaching them for decades.
So my proposal: by all means, teach some of the Great Books. Learn how to read difficult texts, how language changes, and how human nature stays the same. But also let's let kids read approachable books that speak to their current culture. Even if many of them won't go down as future "greats," the conversations these books can engender and the love of reading they might inspire are, to me, worth the tradeoff. Reading cannot just mean grinding through difficult works from a remote time and culture.
Unfortunately, my position doesn't really appeal to anyone. The ultra-woke just want to burn down the patriarchy, so reading _any_ books by dead white dudes is "problematic." And the conservatives---to the extent they stand for anything these days---are just opposed to any change at all and would view any compromise as unilateral disarmament. So, as with all things, our kids will suffer for the performative virtue of childish adults.
"Reading Shakespeare is hard; it feels like work. The language has changed so much that it almost needs to be presented in translation" What worked for me is seeing the plays in the theatre, first. Reading them afterwards is a lot more interesting and fun.
Totally agree! I have a whole album cover on how Shakespeare is taught. In most cases, it seems like teachers just toss the material to students and have them read it like a novel. Trips to a local Shakespeare society or even just screening some of the better films makes such an enormous difference.
In my school, the film or play was treated as a kind of reward for making it through the text, which seems totally backwards to me, but at least we did get to see it performed.
Nobody is like “hey go read the screenplay for Ben Hur; it’s a classic.”
Had the *exact* same experience with Herzog. I love some of Saul Bellow's books (like Seize the Day) and others are just the frothy, vapid intellectual foam of an intellectual culture that no longer really exists.
“people on both sides of this argument have an obligation to take curriculum development seriously” - I doubt most conservatives would agree. The current curricula works fine for them and their children, so why would they even consider changing it?
“ expand the successful math curriculum for Alaska Natives to other marginalized groups and run the RCT again” - Yes! We need to do much more experimentation.
“ the conservatives who were mad about the Common Core would dislike both the centralization on principle and also the reality that a national curriculum would inevitably reflect a political sensibility that’s several clicks to the left of the typical small town or rural community.” - Suppose the proposed national curriculum were designed by Christian schools based on ideas from the 60’s-80’s. Conservatives would be all over it, and given the US Senate, I don’t think that would be impossible.
"Some people are going to not care about any of this and say that we just need to have a common culture founded on the great books and that’s that. [...] Recall that the Common Core, which was very much not a national curriculum, prompted a huge freakout mostly from the right just because it vaguely hinted at possibly someday looking something like a national curriculum."
I think there's a tendency on the left to conflate conservative arguments about culture with arguments about the state.
It's totally possible to argue that we should have at least certain elements of shared culture in the country, while also believing that as far as the state goes, curriculum decisions are best made at a more decentralized level. I don't see these positions as contradictory.
curriculum decisions being made at a decentralized level leads to kids in Mississippi thinking the Civil War was the North's fault. Most implementation and a lot of curricular decisions can be left to states or districts, but there shouldn't be discretion on things like should high school students read a single author who isn't a white dude in high school or learn about genocide against Native Americans.
Why do you assume a curriculum designed at the national level would avoid teaching kids things like "the Civil War was the North's fault"? I shudder at the idea of something like the Trump Jr. administration rolling out a national curriculum in 2026.
I don't think the nativist wing of the GOP has the attention span to redesign curriculum. Practically, I think it's way more likely that a Biden undersecretary of education for k-12 would get this done and Republicans don't care enough to undo it. Philosophically, national politics tend to demonstrate less variance than state politics so even if we were to go back and forth between equally competent and motivated democratic and republican administrations I think it'd still be a net benefit to the median student to have federally mandated curriculum. Lastly, while it might be 50/50 that a Republican administration in 2025 or 2029 or whenever would roll back federal curriculum standards, I'm 100% sure something drawn up by Republican legislatures in the Deep South and some of the Plains states will be ahistorical.
Interesting, hadn't thought of it like that! The idea is that state-level Republicans are very much interested in actual education policy but national/presidential admin ones aren't?
I don't think it's quite that distinct, more that there are probably 15 states that'll go decades without Democrats controlling the legislature or Governorship and states don't handle that many different policy areas. Controlling the Presidency for 4 or 8 years is really not that long of a time horizon to enact changes in every one of the vast policy areas handled by the federal bureaucracy whereas time-indefinite control of a state government with a far more limited policy scope allows for them to get really into the weeds on everything.
The message of the data seems to be that elementary education should be segregated into cultural groups as the habit of reading is established. And this would seem to be where the woke mentality is going, starting with the habit of labeling literature or history as “black” and “white” with the implied trashing of the latter, not even searching for commonality.
In my children’s elite, extremely progressive private school, at the elementary level, the administrators have established affinity groups, a highly controversial move, not least because the criteria are purely racial. (Jewish parents were told that their culture doesn’t count for this purpose). Many parents, white and non-white, were extremely offended as they did not send their children to a progressive school to have them educated in segregated classrooms.
It is all deeply puzzling to this old guy who learned that segregation is second-class citizenship and therefore is just wrong. It also tends to make me question the argument that as a nation we need to do radical and coercive things to address existing segregation. Why repeat the trauma of the Sixties when it seems that the tribunes of black children want them to be separated from white children in school anyway?
Defining reading in this narrow framework of culturally relevancy, means that only the children of educated, well-read parents will read the classics. I think this would reinforce the existing distrust between the highly educated among those not highly educated. It’s a big enough problem as it is.
So, I don’t think you can just follow the data (and the highly politicized pedagogy) without considering the follow-on results and implications for the wider society. Something has to hold together this large, culturally-diverse nation of ours.
"In my children’s elite, extremely progressive private school, at the elementary level, the administrators have established affinity groups, a highly controversial move, not least because the criteria are purely racial."
Do you mean they grouped the kids racially and then split them up to study independently in single race groups? If so, what was the justification/rationale/theory behind this?
At the beginning. it was as simple as putting all the black and brown kids together in one class for representation, leaving the other class to be entirely white. It has involved into exactly what you are describing (though not the whole time). The justification seems to be the emotional comfort and support of the students, considered to be beneficial to learning.
Wow. Was there a parent revolt? In an elite private school how much is the administration beholden to grumpy parents and how much can they say "my way or the highway"?
There was quite a lot of dissension in the community which really hit the fan after my children graduated. It got into the pages of the New York Times. I was incredibly disturbed by the report (not otherwise confirmed) that the head of school blamed the opposition to the plan on "the Zionists" (note that this is a historically and still significantly Jewish school). But, as parents were told by a previous head of school when our kids were small. "If you don't like it, you can leave. There are plenty of people out there to replace you."
I am thankful that much of this really hit the fan after my children graduated.
The general quality of education is extraordinary in spite of its faults. Nevertheless I would be reluctant to start them today, for a number of reasons (the entitled rich-kid culture being at least as important as the wokeness).
I think something that's quite nice about this is you can get a lot of mileage just by talking to teachers. Not about politics but about really boring blocking and tackling parts of teaching. Like the vast majority of the text I put in front of students is me and my grade level's team choice. What will be our daily read aloud picture book? What will be our end of the day chapter book? What am I using for supplementary instruction etc. There's a small portion of it that's mandated by the school but a lot of it is really easy to get to.
The biggest trick is you just need someone who is actually personally committed to it who will speak up for it at the meeting. It's not even that there's that much resistance to it in my experience this is rare, it's just that well we've got a lot of shit to do.
A tangential point in response to "it’s dangerous to discuss K-12 policy with normies because everyone went to school and has an opinion about it, even if they haven’t done any research or given it serious thought": I do wish, though, that the K-12 policy discussion I see would pay a lot more attention to what people say they wish their K-12 education had *felt* like, rather than exclusively focusing on the measured *outcomes* of that education. K-12 takes up thirteen years of a sentient human's life. We owe it to children to make it a positive experience, not merely a crucible for The Future.
For example, I hate arguments that boil down to "high academic achievers turn out fine no matter what you do to them, so we don't have to think about them at all". Being bored out of your skull for thirteen years waiting for any teacher to challenge you with anything *sucks*, even if hypothetically the opportunity cost of all that wasted time made absolutely no difference to your future productivity (which I doubt, but that's not the point).
I guess this is also an argument for kids reading things they like.
Smart kids need different education than average kids or kids who are struggling. It is a waste for all if this is not understood, or is denied. And I would disagree that smart kids denied the education appropriate for them, will necessarily "turn out fine"
I grew up in rural Tennessee in the 50s. I became an avid reader at an early age and would still read except I spend most of my time writing. The books we were taught reading from were not really relevant to our culture. One reading book called Singing Wheels was about a boy on a wagon train going to Nebraska. Most of the children's books I read were about New York City. I only remember one or two books relative to my culture and they were books I found in the library about events of pioneer times. Later I read books by Alfred Leland Crabb, an educator who wrote about the times prior to, during and immediately after the "Civil War." Our literature books had stories from people like O'Henry and Mark Twain as well as some more recent materials by people like Pearl Buck and Col. Robert L. Scott. The one book I remember from English literature was Silas Marner, and I don't remember a damn thing about it other than the title. We also read Shakespeare, which didn't appeal to me, and other English writers, stories that I read then forgot. Personally, I read books by people such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper and Sir Walter Scott. That was all a long time ago but the truth is that I put everything I was exposed to in school behind me the day I first encountered an Air Force training instructor at the airport in San Antonio. In short, "culture" only applies to educators and journalists. By the way, I now live in a state with a very diverse culture and we get along quite well. I just watched the first part of the Netflix series on Selana, the Texas Tejano singer, who grew up a few miles south of me. She and her brother and sister were raised to speak English and she had to learn Spanish in order to converse with crowds in Mexico. She thought of herself as a Texas girl, not Mexican or Hispanic. She was aspiring to become an English language singer when the woman who (mis)managed her fan club shot her. Oh, before I forget - although he was raised a slave, Frederick Douglass was actually of mixed race with probably about two thirds white ancestry with some Indian ancestry thrown in to the mix.
This a great post. Maybe my favorite Slow Boring post so far and there have been a lot of great ones! I appreciate the point that just because something may use some "woke" language or ideas doesn't make it instantly radioactive. I too, am very woke skeptic but find a lot of the anti-woke commentary itself very overwrought and dismissive and this post does a great job of threading the needle. I think Yglesias is dead on that some of these ideas need to be sold differently. When you say "decolonize" or "diversify" if just closes a lot of people off instantly to any proposal. Understandably so, as I personally feel like "decolonize" especially is used more to troll and as a signifier than to actually convey anything meaningful. Not to get too literal but can you really call Irish authors of classics "colonizers"?
I think exposure to the classics is important but that broadening what is considered a classic is necessary. You can obviously go off the deep end with this (even though I would love to see old Star Wars EU books in curricula I can admit it would be unhelpful) but there are a number of novels written in the past 50 years that could probably help broaden interest in literature amongst high schoolers from all backgrounds.
Actually, when I was in high school we watched Star Wars (in a unit about Joseph Campbell.) A lot of the kids in my (mostly Black) HS hadn't seen it and I found that shocking. They were equally shocked that I hadn't seen Clockers. Later in the year we watched that. Now, Clockers is one of my favorite movies, and I watch the same folks who had never seen Star Wars get excited about introducing their kids to it.
It's _good_ to get exposed to art outside your cultural comfort zone, and it's _good_ to see yourself represented in the art you see.
A couple months ago, I might have said that the SW EU books are irrelevant since they were decanonized, but in light of recent "events", I find myself rereading the Thrawn trilogy. :)
The Thrawn books are SOOO good! Zahn's new Thrawn trilogy, which is considered canon, has been good too thought I am only on the second book, Alliance. The first book, just called Thrawn, was excellent!
I think it’s time for a weeds episode on public education in America. I spent two years working in a Title 1 Charter School in New Orleans and I was dismayed at the literacy rates of our 3rd grade students. I’ve always been in favor of sensible CRP proposals but my unpleasant take is that I feel the anti-empirical, woke national dialogue has as much to do with lack of ideas and worsening outcomes.
Great article. With respect to this idea, more people should know about the work of the Young People's Project in computer science and math education using near-peer mentoring and culturally relevant pedagogy and curricula: https://bit.ly/351JGHe
We've used a half dozen different 'correct' words for Black Americans. And yet cops are still killing unarmed Black men. If we come up with a whole new word will it change that? No. Because words are not magic, they are tools, just tools.
I... what’s wrong with “straw man”?
I grew up in the north of England where it was commonplace for the older generation to call people 'luv' and anyone under 30 would get 'lad' or 'miss' and it never occurred to me that this could offend anyone until I came to the US. My grandparents would be so confused and upset!
The 1970 equivalent of Matt's list would have had "Ms. for "Mrs." or" Miss"
Honestly, I’ll be bringing up the backdrop with people in the future more or less in the form of “I’d love to discuss the merits of a Great Books or ‘Western Canon’ approach right after we’ve ensured children learn enough to engage with it in the first place.”
When I talk about this stuff in person, being able to bracket discussions about conservative utopia and focus on the slough of reality has always proved useful.
I'm pretty much in Matt's camp here, but I do think there's something to be said for the "Lindy Effect," i.e. that time tends to filter quality. Most books are not very good; we publish something like 5,000 books every day worldwide. Furthermore, there are a lot of books that _seem_ good to us today but that end up being pretty silly in retrospect. _The Promise of American Life_, when it came out, was hailed as perhaps the most extraordinary text in America by practically every intellectual; today it's barely read anymore (for good reason; it's a really weird and not very good book).
Much writing is intended to capture the current moment in a way that feels very authentic, and as such tends to be very tethered to its time. I tried reading _Herzog_ recently and just couldn't get through it; it seemed derivative, irrelevant, and boring. I wondered what I was missing or what was wrong with me, but in reading more about it's popularity, it made sense: Bellow was pulling on cultural concerns that were very present in the minds of people in the 50s but seem distant and almost silly today. My reaction of "I just don't care what happens to these people" actually makes a lot of sense in that light.
The "Great Books" that have survived for centuries have, generally, demonstrated a timeless quality about them that justifies their fame. If the purpose of the humanities is to teach about human nature and timeless truths, there's a good argument that old books that remain relevant are more likely to do that than new ones. Certainly, _some_ modern books accomplish that goal and will remain relevant for ages, but we can't really know which ones yet.
A lot of what's written for kids today also seems almost comically woke, aimed at the hearts of far-left academic types who can't get enough identity politics. The idea these works could survive even a decade into the future seems fanciful.
All that said, I'm pretty open to the idea that we really do need to make reading more fun. Reading Shakespeare is hard; it feels like work. The language has changed so much that it almost needs to be presented in translation; few of the (actually really funny puns) are visible to a current audience, and just understanding what is happening can be a challenge. To read it well, you need a copy of the OED next to you to know what certain words meant in the 17th century. IMHO, a lot of teachers miss how _hard_ these texts are to read for the first time, because they've been teaching them for decades.
So my proposal: by all means, teach some of the Great Books. Learn how to read difficult texts, how language changes, and how human nature stays the same. But also let's let kids read approachable books that speak to their current culture. Even if many of them won't go down as future "greats," the conversations these books can engender and the love of reading they might inspire are, to me, worth the tradeoff. Reading cannot just mean grinding through difficult works from a remote time and culture.
Unfortunately, my position doesn't really appeal to anyone. The ultra-woke just want to burn down the patriarchy, so reading _any_ books by dead white dudes is "problematic." And the conservatives---to the extent they stand for anything these days---are just opposed to any change at all and would view any compromise as unilateral disarmament. So, as with all things, our kids will suffer for the performative virtue of childish adults.
"Reading Shakespeare is hard; it feels like work. The language has changed so much that it almost needs to be presented in translation" What worked for me is seeing the plays in the theatre, first. Reading them afterwards is a lot more interesting and fun.
Totally agree! I have a whole album cover on how Shakespeare is taught. In most cases, it seems like teachers just toss the material to students and have them read it like a novel. Trips to a local Shakespeare society or even just screening some of the better films makes such an enormous difference.
In my school, the film or play was treated as a kind of reward for making it through the text, which seems totally backwards to me, but at least we did get to see it performed.
Nobody is like “hey go read the screenplay for Ben Hur; it’s a classic.”
Had the *exact* same experience with Herzog. I love some of Saul Bellow's books (like Seize the Day) and others are just the frothy, vapid intellectual foam of an intellectual culture that no longer really exists.
“people on both sides of this argument have an obligation to take curriculum development seriously” - I doubt most conservatives would agree. The current curricula works fine for them and their children, so why would they even consider changing it?
“ expand the successful math curriculum for Alaska Natives to other marginalized groups and run the RCT again” - Yes! We need to do much more experimentation.
“ the conservatives who were mad about the Common Core would dislike both the centralization on principle and also the reality that a national curriculum would inevitably reflect a political sensibility that’s several clicks to the left of the typical small town or rural community.” - Suppose the proposed national curriculum were designed by Christian schools based on ideas from the 60’s-80’s. Conservatives would be all over it, and given the US Senate, I don’t think that would be impossible.
"Some people are going to not care about any of this and say that we just need to have a common culture founded on the great books and that’s that. [...] Recall that the Common Core, which was very much not a national curriculum, prompted a huge freakout mostly from the right just because it vaguely hinted at possibly someday looking something like a national curriculum."
I think there's a tendency on the left to conflate conservative arguments about culture with arguments about the state.
It's totally possible to argue that we should have at least certain elements of shared culture in the country, while also believing that as far as the state goes, curriculum decisions are best made at a more decentralized level. I don't see these positions as contradictory.
curriculum decisions being made at a decentralized level leads to kids in Mississippi thinking the Civil War was the North's fault. Most implementation and a lot of curricular decisions can be left to states or districts, but there shouldn't be discretion on things like should high school students read a single author who isn't a white dude in high school or learn about genocide against Native Americans.
Why do you assume a curriculum designed at the national level would avoid teaching kids things like "the Civil War was the North's fault"? I shudder at the idea of something like the Trump Jr. administration rolling out a national curriculum in 2026.
I don't think the nativist wing of the GOP has the attention span to redesign curriculum. Practically, I think it's way more likely that a Biden undersecretary of education for k-12 would get this done and Republicans don't care enough to undo it. Philosophically, national politics tend to demonstrate less variance than state politics so even if we were to go back and forth between equally competent and motivated democratic and republican administrations I think it'd still be a net benefit to the median student to have federally mandated curriculum. Lastly, while it might be 50/50 that a Republican administration in 2025 or 2029 or whenever would roll back federal curriculum standards, I'm 100% sure something drawn up by Republican legislatures in the Deep South and some of the Plains states will be ahistorical.
Interesting, hadn't thought of it like that! The idea is that state-level Republicans are very much interested in actual education policy but national/presidential admin ones aren't?
I don't think it's quite that distinct, more that there are probably 15 states that'll go decades without Democrats controlling the legislature or Governorship and states don't handle that many different policy areas. Controlling the Presidency for 4 or 8 years is really not that long of a time horizon to enact changes in every one of the vast policy areas handled by the federal bureaucracy whereas time-indefinite control of a state government with a far more limited policy scope allows for them to get really into the weeds on everything.
The message of the data seems to be that elementary education should be segregated into cultural groups as the habit of reading is established. And this would seem to be where the woke mentality is going, starting with the habit of labeling literature or history as “black” and “white” with the implied trashing of the latter, not even searching for commonality.
In my children’s elite, extremely progressive private school, at the elementary level, the administrators have established affinity groups, a highly controversial move, not least because the criteria are purely racial. (Jewish parents were told that their culture doesn’t count for this purpose). Many parents, white and non-white, were extremely offended as they did not send their children to a progressive school to have them educated in segregated classrooms.
It is all deeply puzzling to this old guy who learned that segregation is second-class citizenship and therefore is just wrong. It also tends to make me question the argument that as a nation we need to do radical and coercive things to address existing segregation. Why repeat the trauma of the Sixties when it seems that the tribunes of black children want them to be separated from white children in school anyway?
Defining reading in this narrow framework of culturally relevancy, means that only the children of educated, well-read parents will read the classics. I think this would reinforce the existing distrust between the highly educated among those not highly educated. It’s a big enough problem as it is.
So, I don’t think you can just follow the data (and the highly politicized pedagogy) without considering the follow-on results and implications for the wider society. Something has to hold together this large, culturally-diverse nation of ours.
Oh boy.
"In my children’s elite, extremely progressive private school, at the elementary level, the administrators have established affinity groups, a highly controversial move, not least because the criteria are purely racial."
Do you mean they grouped the kids racially and then split them up to study independently in single race groups? If so, what was the justification/rationale/theory behind this?
At the beginning. it was as simple as putting all the black and brown kids together in one class for representation, leaving the other class to be entirely white. It has involved into exactly what you are describing (though not the whole time). The justification seems to be the emotional comfort and support of the students, considered to be beneficial to learning.
Wow. Was there a parent revolt? In an elite private school how much is the administration beholden to grumpy parents and how much can they say "my way or the highway"?
There was quite a lot of dissension in the community which really hit the fan after my children graduated. It got into the pages of the New York Times. I was incredibly disturbed by the report (not otherwise confirmed) that the head of school blamed the opposition to the plan on "the Zionists" (note that this is a historically and still significantly Jewish school). But, as parents were told by a previous head of school when our kids were small. "If you don't like it, you can leave. There are plenty of people out there to replace you."
I am thankful that much of this really hit the fan after my children graduated.
This seems like a remarkably terrible idea
*evolved
The general quality of education is extraordinary in spite of its faults. Nevertheless I would be reluctant to start them today, for a number of reasons (the entitled rich-kid culture being at least as important as the wokeness).
I think something that's quite nice about this is you can get a lot of mileage just by talking to teachers. Not about politics but about really boring blocking and tackling parts of teaching. Like the vast majority of the text I put in front of students is me and my grade level's team choice. What will be our daily read aloud picture book? What will be our end of the day chapter book? What am I using for supplementary instruction etc. There's a small portion of it that's mandated by the school but a lot of it is really easy to get to.
The biggest trick is you just need someone who is actually personally committed to it who will speak up for it at the meeting. It's not even that there's that much resistance to it in my experience this is rare, it's just that well we've got a lot of shit to do.
A tangential point in response to "it’s dangerous to discuss K-12 policy with normies because everyone went to school and has an opinion about it, even if they haven’t done any research or given it serious thought": I do wish, though, that the K-12 policy discussion I see would pay a lot more attention to what people say they wish their K-12 education had *felt* like, rather than exclusively focusing on the measured *outcomes* of that education. K-12 takes up thirteen years of a sentient human's life. We owe it to children to make it a positive experience, not merely a crucible for The Future.
For example, I hate arguments that boil down to "high academic achievers turn out fine no matter what you do to them, so we don't have to think about them at all". Being bored out of your skull for thirteen years waiting for any teacher to challenge you with anything *sucks*, even if hypothetically the opportunity cost of all that wasted time made absolutely no difference to your future productivity (which I doubt, but that's not the point).
I guess this is also an argument for kids reading things they like.
Smart kids need different education than average kids or kids who are struggling. It is a waste for all if this is not understood, or is denied. And I would disagree that smart kids denied the education appropriate for them, will necessarily "turn out fine"
I grew up in rural Tennessee in the 50s. I became an avid reader at an early age and would still read except I spend most of my time writing. The books we were taught reading from were not really relevant to our culture. One reading book called Singing Wheels was about a boy on a wagon train going to Nebraska. Most of the children's books I read were about New York City. I only remember one or two books relative to my culture and they were books I found in the library about events of pioneer times. Later I read books by Alfred Leland Crabb, an educator who wrote about the times prior to, during and immediately after the "Civil War." Our literature books had stories from people like O'Henry and Mark Twain as well as some more recent materials by people like Pearl Buck and Col. Robert L. Scott. The one book I remember from English literature was Silas Marner, and I don't remember a damn thing about it other than the title. We also read Shakespeare, which didn't appeal to me, and other English writers, stories that I read then forgot. Personally, I read books by people such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper and Sir Walter Scott. That was all a long time ago but the truth is that I put everything I was exposed to in school behind me the day I first encountered an Air Force training instructor at the airport in San Antonio. In short, "culture" only applies to educators and journalists. By the way, I now live in a state with a very diverse culture and we get along quite well. I just watched the first part of the Netflix series on Selana, the Texas Tejano singer, who grew up a few miles south of me. She and her brother and sister were raised to speak English and she had to learn Spanish in order to converse with crowds in Mexico. She thought of herself as a Texas girl, not Mexican or Hispanic. She was aspiring to become an English language singer when the woman who (mis)managed her fan club shot her. Oh, before I forget - although he was raised a slave, Frederick Douglass was actually of mixed race with probably about two thirds white ancestry with some Indian ancestry thrown in to the mix.
There's a big gap between pedagogy that students find interesting and pedagogy that's "culturally relevant."
There's some overlap though, no?
This a great post. Maybe my favorite Slow Boring post so far and there have been a lot of great ones! I appreciate the point that just because something may use some "woke" language or ideas doesn't make it instantly radioactive. I too, am very woke skeptic but find a lot of the anti-woke commentary itself very overwrought and dismissive and this post does a great job of threading the needle. I think Yglesias is dead on that some of these ideas need to be sold differently. When you say "decolonize" or "diversify" if just closes a lot of people off instantly to any proposal. Understandably so, as I personally feel like "decolonize" especially is used more to troll and as a signifier than to actually convey anything meaningful. Not to get too literal but can you really call Irish authors of classics "colonizers"?
I think exposure to the classics is important but that broadening what is considered a classic is necessary. You can obviously go off the deep end with this (even though I would love to see old Star Wars EU books in curricula I can admit it would be unhelpful) but there are a number of novels written in the past 50 years that could probably help broaden interest in literature amongst high schoolers from all backgrounds.
Actually, when I was in high school we watched Star Wars (in a unit about Joseph Campbell.) A lot of the kids in my (mostly Black) HS hadn't seen it and I found that shocking. They were equally shocked that I hadn't seen Clockers. Later in the year we watched that. Now, Clockers is one of my favorite movies, and I watch the same folks who had never seen Star Wars get excited about introducing their kids to it.
It's _good_ to get exposed to art outside your cultural comfort zone, and it's _good_ to see yourself represented in the art you see.
A couple months ago, I might have said that the SW EU books are irrelevant since they were decanonized, but in light of recent "events", I find myself rereading the Thrawn trilogy. :)
Agree completely with the rest of your post.
The Thrawn books are SOOO good! Zahn's new Thrawn trilogy, which is considered canon, has been good too thought I am only on the second book, Alliance. The first book, just called Thrawn, was excellent!