DEI and the left critique

 

In January, Times reporter Nicholas Confessore published the results of his investigation of what he said was a concerted effort by “conservative activists” to abolish DEI on public university campuses. They had managed to get almost half the states to at least consider banning campus D.E.I. programs “even as polling has shown that diversity initiatives remain popular.”

Based on “thousands of documents obtained by The New York Times” including “casual correspondence” among “like-minded allies around the country,” full of “unvarnished views on race, sexuality and gender roles” in private emails, the report left the impression of a sinister right-wing conspiracy among racist homophobes against blameless and popular diversity programing.

After that report, Confessore decided he “needed to see D.E.I. programs up close,” so he traveled to the campus of the University of Michigan, home of a particularly extensive and longstanding DEI program.

It turns out that it’s not just far right, politically motivated conspirators who have a problem with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs.

Some excerpts from his very long piece, published Wednesday in the Times Magazine, which I assume gets into today’s print edition.

Programs across the university are couched in the distinctive jargon that, to D.E.I.’s practitioners, reflects proven practices for making classrooms more inclusive, and to its critics reveals how deeply D.E.I. is encoded with left-wing ideologies….

Some researchers argue that teaching students to view the world chiefly through the lens of identity and oppression can leave them vulnerable instead of empowered. Psychologists have questioned whether implicit bias can be accurately measured or reduced through training. The notion that microaggressions are not only real but ubiquitous in interracial encounters is widespread in D.E.I. programs; a 2021 review of the microaggressions literature, however, judged it “without adequate scientific basis.”...

Some evidence suggests that the steady expansion of D.E.I. into campus life is actually constraining student interaction across political and cultural divides. One recent analysis by the political scientist Kevin Wallsten found that the larger the D.E.I. bureaucracy at a university, the more discomfort students felt expressing their views on social media and in informal conversations with other students....

Even some liberal scholars believe D.E.I. looms too large. Amna Khalid, a historian at Carleton College in Minnesota, argues that modern D.E.I. is not, as some on the right hold, a triumph of critical theory or postcolonialism but of the corporatization of higher education, in which universities have tried to turn moral and political ideals into a system of formulas and dashboards. “They want a managerial approach to difference,” Khalid said. “They want no friction. But diversity inherently means friction.”

According to Confessore, UMich has spent a quarter of a billion dollars on DEI programs and expanding administrative positions and has had profound effects—largely negative—on campus culture and politics.

These growing bureaucracies represented a major — and profoundly left-leaning — reshuffling of campus power. Administrators were even more politically liberal than faculty members, according to one survey, and far more likely to favor racial preferences in admissions and hiring. They promulgated what Lyell Asher, a professor of English at Lewis & Clark College in Oregon, has called “an alternate curriculum,” taught not in classrooms but in dorms, disciplinary hearings and orientation programs.

Some administrators discovered that student activists could be a potent campus constituency. The former president of one top research institution recalled for me how students once came to his office with demands, presented in a kind of theatrical performance, to enhance the university’s D.E.I. program. The former president, who asked for anonymity for fear of risking his present job, later learned that some of the program’s senior staff members had worked with and encouraged the students to pressure the administration on their behalf. “That was the moment at which I understood that there was a whole part of the bureaucracy that I didn’t control,” he said.

When I read Confessore’s January piece, I knew he was leaving something out. It’s true that conservatives have used DEI and other examples of what they call the woke ideology to discredit any policy or politician they don’t like. While some of their criticism is affirmed by this new reporting, much of it is cynical and dishonest.

The more incisive, measured, and accurate criticisms of both woke ideology and diversity programs have come from the left or the center—or from non-politicized subjects of DEI programming.

For example:

* Back in June of 2020, journalist/podcaster Katie Herzog interviewed with Shannon Loys, a graphic designer who participation in DEI training at the Seattle Repertory Theater, run by none other than Robin DiAngelo, the “Patron saint of DEI.” At the end of the interview, Loys and Herzog, both progressives, concluded that the training did more harm than good. Loys said she became “more cautious” in her interactions with Black co-workers, more likely to avoid interactions rather than risk causing offense.

* Like many self-identified Marxists, Freddy De Boer, has been a frequent critic of the woke left for its focus on racial and gender identity (what fellow socialist Adolph Reed refers to as “ascriptive” categories) to the exclusion of class. His book “How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement,” is a scathing and revealing explanation of how Woke identity politics like DEI serve the interests of elites at the expense of the truly disadvantaged. DeBoer and Reed see DEI as essentially a conservative effort to coopt progressive movements. These critiques are nothing new. Reed has been sounding the alarm for decades, and in 2001, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn published Race Experts claiming that the race relations consultants that proceeded DEI had “hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution.”

* In 2022, Maurice Mitchell, national director of the very progressive Working Families Party, which touts him as “a nationally-recognized social movement strategist, a visionary leader in the Movement for Black Lives, and a community organizer for racial, social, and economic justice,” wrote an essay, “Building Resilient Organizations,” in which he revealed how identity politics like DEI had hampered the progressive organizations he has served in.

* Other critics from the left that come to mind at the moment include Tyler Austin Harper, Michael Powell, Jonathan Haidt, Greg Lukianoff, Yasha Mounk, Sam Harris, Matt Yglesias, Catherine Liu, the socialist magazine, Jacobin (sometimes), and Musa al-Gharbi. 

* I wrote this piece in 2021 about how one staple of DEI training, getting white people to “check their privilege,” does more harm than good to the cause of racial justice.

And then there are very quiet critics, like those quoted in Wednesday's article, who work or study at the institutions where these programs have proliferated. One Michigan professor who had been investigated for causing offense in his class said the school has created a “gotcha culture,” in which students scrutinize their teachers’ comments for offensive words or comments and the “Bias Response Team” launches investigations based anonymous complaints, often for “offensive” or “disrespectful” word choices.

Unlike the conservative anti-woke activists or the many left-leaning critics outlined above, these mostly left-leaning folks keep reservations about diversity programs to themselves to avoid conflict or  discipline imposed by administrators whose job is to enforce DEI cultural norms.

Michigan may be an extreme example, but based on my own experience, and the research Confessore did beyond Michigan, the problems catalogued in the article seem to be typical of institutions that have introduced these programs. 

But Confessore's expose seems to be an indication that DEI and other elements of identity politics are on the wane at institutions like the Times itself.  A burning question among observers: have we passed "peak woke?" 

Also, isn't there a better word for woke?

Thoughts on artificial intelligence

AI: The end of thinking?

I’ve been in denial about Artificial Intelligence since I dipped into a book on the subject about 10 years ago. In The Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (2015) an AI company executive predicted that in 15 years 90 percent of news articles would be “written algorithmically” (85). The book also included an algorithmically written article that made the claim seem plausible.

I put the book down and tried not to think about it. Then, last year (or so), Open AI launched Chat GPT and suddenly everybody was either using or talking about artificial intelligence and quite a lot of students were using it to write papers. 

For five decades I’ve made my living in large part by writing or teaching writing, and now technology was coming for my job.

In the short term, while I still had employment, I would have to pay attention to the AI monster, since even my students might be tempted to turn in AI-written work. All this makes me wish I could sign up for a modern-day Luddite movement—the 19th-century British textile workers who broke up the mechanical looms that were eliminating their jobs. The closest I could come to vandalizing the AI machinery was to issue this statement to my students:

YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO USE CHAT-GPT, BARD OR ANY OTHER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE DEVICE IN THE PRODUCTION OF WORK FOR THIS CLASS.

And I wrote it all caps!

I also started assigning more in-class writing assessments; but truly, I’ve mostly remained in denial. Unlike some of my younger colleagues, I never actually tried using AI myself.

Until this summer, when AI imposed itself on me via my Google Pixel phone.

On a Sunday in August I received this text in my message app:

Hi, I’m Gemini in Google Messages. Chat with me to draft messages, brainstorm ideas, plan events or simply have a fun conversation.”

Right. “Fun conversation” … with a machine. Eventually, though, I couldn’t resist.

My first conversation involved finding employment for my artsy daughter and it turned up some websites that list jobs in her field. My next question was more whimsical: “What’s the point of remembering dreams, anyway?” I got a paragraph on each of four points: Emotional processing; problem solving; personal growth; inspiration. Essentially it was a summary of what you’d get in an internet search but it saved a lot of time. It took one second instead of maybe a half hour.

Google has inserted Gemini into my internet search results as well. A few weeks later a Google search for a famous comment by Karl Marx about the nature of work in the communist utopia came up with the quote (“hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon,” etc.) along with a brief commentary by Gemini at the top of the results.

Later I called up the Gemini app on my laptop for the first time and asked: “How would this quote apply to the life of a retired person?” The first response wasn’t helpful, but after a few follow-up questions I got another good summary of the sorts of things you get when you watch You Tubers give advice to retirees (feel free to skip this if you aren’t worried about how you’ll spend your retirement):

1. Embrace Diversity of Interests: Just as Marx envisioned a society where individuals could engage in various activities, you can strive to explore different interests and hobbies. This can enrich your life and prevent boredom.

2. Challenge Societal Expectations: Don't feel pressured to conform to societal expectations about how retirees should spend their time. If you have a passion for something unconventional, pursue it.

3. Build Strong Relationships: While Marx focused on economic structures, strong relationships are crucial for a fulfilling life. Invest time in building and maintaining connections with family, friends, and community members.

4. Give Back: Consider ways to contribute to your community or society. Volunteering can provide a sense of purpose and connection.

5. Learn Continuously: Just as Marx believed in intellectual growth, you can continue learning throughout your retirement. Take classes, read books, or explore new subjects. 6. Prioritize Health: A healthy lifestyle is essential for enjoying retirement. Make time for exercise, proper nutrition, and adequate rest.

7. Find Meaningful Work: Even if you're retired from a traditional job, consider finding meaningful work or projects that align with your values. This can provide a sense of purpose and fulfillment.

Remember, while Marx's quote is a powerful ideal, it's important to be realistic about the constraints and opportunities you face in your own life. By embracing a diverse range of activities, building strong relationships, and finding meaning in your retirement, you can strive for a fulfilling and enriching experience.

Having watched probably hours of YouTube videos about retirement, I recognized most of this as the standard advice. And I also noticed that it took five minutes instead of hours to get Gemini to get me this information.

I had to wonder: why anyone would ever again bother to do the kind of writing that makes up 90 percent of our work-related writing tasks—mundane reports, cover letters, grant applications, teacher comment slips, summaries of things.

Productivity growth has slowed in the US in the last few years, from 3% annually to 1.5%. I can’t imagine that AI won’t be incorporated into just about every industry to boost productivity—just like mechanical looms did in the 19th century. As bad as it was for the Luddites, it was good for wearers of clothing, a larger group than the weavers.

As much as I sympathize with the Luddites, I’m afraid we can no longer just simply ban artificial intelligence from the classroom. Instead of a policy that bans it altogether we will have to come up with ways to help our students learn how to use this tool they’ll inevitably need to use in the workplace of their future.

So is it pointless for a teacher to ban AI and to spend so much time teaching students to write, rather than teaching them how to use AI to write everything?

I do think my total ban no longer makes sense. We don’t tell students they can’t use spellcheck or software like Noodle-tools or Zotero that automatically produce citations.

We’ll have to figure out how to integrate AI into our teaching—probably in every discipline. I agree with writer Stephen Marche, who said, “The transition will be a humongous pain for people who teach students how to make sense with words.”

But I hope Marche is wrong when he predicts the end of the undergraduate essay.

I’ve had no problem with my students using auto-citation software, but if they’ve never had to write footnotes and bibliographies manually, they don’t know how to notice when auto-cite messes up, as it often does.

Similarly, I imagine that you won’t be able to get the best results from AI-written essays without having some experience writing yourself.

The process of writing also facilitates the thinking process. I often don’t know just what I think on a particular topic until I’ve gone through the difficult process of writing about it (it's why I keep a blog). In-class writing assignments aren’t a good substitute for take-home writing where students have the time to reflect and think and revise and rethink. 

Last spring I attended a few different congressional hearing on AI. Democrats on the committees were generally more concerned about mitigating the harms by imposing regulations while the Republicans were more worried about the US falling behind other countries, and opposed government regulation that might slow down research and development. 

I think my first impulse was to adopt a Democratic Party approach, with my ban on the use of AI in my classes, but the Republicans have a point, and I don't want my students to fall behind in their ability to use a ubiquitous tool.  I’m at a loss as to how to balance these two concerns in my teaching, but more tech-savvy (and probably younger) teachers seem confident it can be done. 

Marche talks about assigning less formulaic prompts on “established problems,” because that’s all that AI is able to handle (for now!), and said that AI will end up being to writing what the microwave oven was to cooking—just another tool. I didn’t find his optimism all that convincing but like anything, it will take a lot of trial and error and probably a matter of years not weeks to work out satisfactory solutions.

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Note: I got the stats on productivity from this Bookings Institute article.

11 Strategies for depolarizing tomorrow's citizens

To conclude this series of posts on “I could be wrong” stickers and civics education, here are some of the things I do to to promote epistemic humility and tolerance of opposing viewpoints—and thus, I hope, good citizenship.

1. I hand out the stickers to remind students of their mental fallibility. I also give out the “You Could be Wrong Uncle Sam” poster, with a list of quotes by famous people endorsing epistemic humility.

2. I have them read articles about cognitive biases that prevent objectivity and clear thinking. The Cognitive Bias Codex identifies 188 such biases and hangs on the wall of my classroom and a bulletin board outside in the hallway.  Motivated reasoning, for example, compels us to seek out information that confirms our beliefs and dispute information that contradicts them.  Lest they think their world-class education will inoculate them against these biases, we read about studies that show that more education just makes people better at using their "critical thinking" skills to dispute information they don't like and shoring up their world view. 

3. I try to balance the reading list across the political spectrum and make sure to pick well-argued essays from points of view they won't agree with. I’ve had students complain that my reading list is too conservative, even though my politics are about as far left as anyone on campus.  Unless there’s a good pedagogical reason, I don’t share my political viewpoint. When students try to guess, they usually get it wrong.

4. I expose them to theories that examine the moral basis of political differences, like Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations theory, or the Schwartz Theory of Basic Human Values, which suggest that people who disagree with them aren’t morally deficient.  

5. I have them read the history of the two parties and conservative and liberal ideology over the past 60 years and the rise of right and left populism over the past decade, beginning with the Occupy and Tea Party movements. It's hard to view either of the two parties or any social justice movement as beyond criticism. 

6. We read about how the contemporary media environment has created information bubbles with different, flawed views of reality. 

7. I try to make them see the limitations of the left-right/ liberal/conservative binary, as a way of categorizing American political ideologies, by exposing them to heterodox thinkers and a website called the Political Compass, which plots ideologies onto a four-quadrant grid. 

8. We read about the erosion of the political norm of "mutual toleration."  I hope they come away seeing that treating those who disagree with you as either stupid or evil is not conducive to building social harmony or fostering the compromises that are necessary if we want to make any progress toward solving complicated social problems.   

9. I try to focus half the course on policy issues, which show there are no simple answers and that political ideologies and partisan politics often get in the way of adopting the best solutions to our common problems.

10. I have them attend a meeting of the Exeter Board of Selectmen to expose them to local politics. Culture wars are trickling down to the local level, but town politics--at least in Exeter--still offer an example of more collaborative, non-partisan governance than we see at the national level.

11. I’ve used role playing, especially in the law course I used to teach, where students re-enacted  Supreme Court oral arguments, taking positions they may disagree with. It’s an excellent exercise in cognitive empathy. (Joel Kushner’s more elaborate legislative re-enactments are described in The Political Classroom, Chapter 6). 

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Readings.

Eitan Hersh, Politics Is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change.

M.C. Nisbet, "The Science Literacy Paradox: Why Really Smart People Often Have the Most Biased Opinions,” Skeptical Inquirer, 2016, 21-23. Link.

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion .

Shalom H. Schwartz, “Understanding values: Schwartz theory of basic values,” Integration and Implementation Insights, May 10, 2022. Link.

This series: Part 1: Could I Be Wrong?  (civics education and epistemic humility); Part 2: Social Justice?  (Teaching citizenship to students with different values) and Part 3: Believe Science?  (curbing meritocratic hubris in tomorrow's leaders); Part 4: 11 Strategies for Depolarizing Tomorrow's Citizens.

Believe Science?

(Third in a series. Also: Could I Be Wrong?  Social Justice? 11 Strategies for Depolarizing Tomorrow's Citizens.)

During the pandemic, lawn signs appeared on some of my neighbors’ lawns proclaiming what “in this house, we believe.”

The signs were taken by some people to suggest that folks in houses without the signs—and certainly people in houses with Trump signs on the lawn—might think that Black lives don’t matter, that love and science aren’t real, that some humans are illegal, that women aren’t entitled to human rights.

In fact, though, each of what seemed to be incontestable statements of fact—love is love—or unassailable ethical propositions—Black lives matter—were hiding issues over which reasonable, decent people might differ. Wanting more border security doesn’t make you think some humans are illegal. Opposing abortion doesn’t mean you think women don’t deserve human rights.

At the heart of the list is the slogan, expressed elsewhere, “Believe Science,” as if science is a set of uncontested facts that you either believe or don’t.

In fact, the sciences are specialized fields of mostly contested and developing knowledge that are difficult or impossible for most non-specialists to understand, so it’s hard to know which science to believe.

What “believe science” really ends up meaning for most of us is “trust experts” who interpret science for us. Or perhaps more often, “believe journalists” who sift through the various controversies and disagreements among the scientists, and write about it for a general audience in the popular press.

Let’s face it, though, journalists, experts, and even scientists often get things wrong, and so people who don’t share the general liberal inclinations of the vast majority of journalists and credentialed experts and are skeptical of claims to objective neutrality or uncontestable truth, have come up with their own slogan along the lines of “do your own research.”

Even those of us who might be more inclined to rely on experts and journalists surely have to be aware of the many failures of scientific and expert authority.

Not only do scientists disagree with each other on most matters, but even an apparently settled scientific consensus will occasionally get overturned. It seems that every day a new study comes out challenging the existing “science” of human nutrition, for example. Should I avoid fats or not?

When we get away from the hard sciences into social “sciences” like economics, psychology or sociology, the knowledge becomes increasingly shaky, more susceptible to bias, blind spots, social pressure, groupthink, and self-interest.

Perhaps the most consequential recent failure of one of these would-be sciences caused the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression. Some of the most respected economists (think Ivy League) were paid hefty consulting fees to give positive credit ratings to banks that had invested in badly inflated real estate before the melt-down in the market that caused widespread misery during the Great Recession of 2008. In the documentary film, Inside Job, one of the Ivy League professors who took consulting fees to give ill-conceived AAA ratings responds to an interviewer who challenges his integrity by shutting down the interview. He seems offended that anyone would question his righteousness.

Performances like this contribute to a growing disillusionment that leads more and more of us—not to think that science isn’t real—but to question the rule of the educated class of elites who claim exclusive access to scientific understanding. The past 40 years of technocratic rule have led to things like the rust belt, atomization and loneliness, rising homelessness, stagnant wages and a decline in social mobility, deaths of despair, mass incarceration, economic insecurity, declining mortality, obesity, and the collapse of unions. Every institution led by this meritocratic elite has seen a dramatic decline in public confidence.

For the past quarter century, I’ve worked at one of the world’s most prestigious educational institutions, preparing my students to enter the class of the best educated people in the world—our future rulers. One of the most powerful members of the contemporary ruling class, in fact, sat in my classroom for a term.

I’ve had to ask myself if maybe we’ve been doing something wrong in the way we prepare our students to rule. Are we generating hubris in tomorrow’s ruling class? Could it be the inflated grades? The caving in to demanding parents? The constant stream of assembly speakers who call our students the “best and brightest”? Our claim to be teaching “goodness” and “anti-racism” and “social justice” along with knowledge? Or maybe it’s the demanding workload we impose on them. Previous generations of elites didn’t have to work so hard for their diploma and graduated with a better understanding of how their success rested on privilege and class, not just their own merit.

Old alums have told me that they got into Harvard back in the day with C grades at Exeter. Today, only straight-A students get in, but even that’s not enough. They need a long list of extra-curricular achievements, preferably featuring entrepreneurship in the service of a humanitarian cause.

Humility might not come easy to people who have sacrificed their childhoods to a steady stream of achievement and have come out on top in the college admissions Hunger Games (Harvard’s acceptance rate has gone from 30% in 1960 to 3.4% this year). The process makes it “impossible to view success as anything other than the result of individual effort and achievement” and leads inevitably to “meritocratic hubris,” Michael Sandel argues in his book, The Tyranny of Merit.

How did we get to this point? According to Sandel, sometime in the middle of the 20th century, leaders in the field of higher education, led by Harvard president James Conant, campaigned to turn American high schools into “sorting machines” for college admissions’ offices of top universities. Our increasingly complex world was going to need really smart people to run it, he believed, and the most elite colleges and universities would be the place to educate these leaders. High schools should be “reconstructed” for the “specific purpose” of identifying the brainiest students to send to the best colleges. “Abilities must be assessed, talents must be developed, ambitions guided. This is the task for our public schools,” he said (159).

This reconstruction of high school did not achieve Conant’s goal of eliminating class boundaries to the elite. The college admissions system disproportionately rewards children from families that have the resources to pay for enrichment activities that will give their kids an edge, and working class kids are more thoroughly excluded than ever. Notwithstanding all the boasting about diversity, equity and inclusion, a 2017 report by the New York Times showed that 38 of the top colleges in the US had more students from the most affluent 1% of families than from the bottom 60%.

Meanwhile, the elite institutions charged with preparing the meritocracy for leadership “place relatively little curricular emphasis on moral and civic education, or the kind of historical studies that prepare students to exercise informed political judgement about public affairs,” says Sandel, who teaches at Harvard. They rarely ask students to “reflect critically on their moral and political convictions” (192). And yet they also leave those students with a feeling of moral and intellectual superiority to the losers in the competition for credentials—the citizens they will be governing.

Sandel argues for an overhaul of this system. In the meantime, is there something those of us toiling away in its bowels can do to lessen meritocratic hubris?

That’s been the goal of my approach to teaching—especially in my two classes on American government and politics—and of this series of blog posts. Does it have an impact? I’ll surely never know. After reading Sandel’s book, it feels a bit like spitting into the ocean. But it’s worth trying.

The next post in this series will offer a brief outline of the strategies I’ve developed in my puny efforts.

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Notes and references on lawn signs, meritocracy, and elite hubris.

The Meritocracy

Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? (2020). A section of the book that particularly resonated with me was “Wounded Winners,” which spoke of the “damaging toll on the winners” in the race for success. He quotes a researcher who says that today, “the most troubled adolescents often come from affluent homes.” Sandel argues that it’s caused by an “unrelenting pressure to perform” (180).

On how the upper middle class has dominated the college admissions game, see Matthew Stewart, “The 9.9 percent is the New American Aristocracy,” The Atlantic, June 2012.

On income distribution of students at elite schools, see: “The Upshot: Some Colleges Have More Students From the Top 1 Percent Than the Bottom 60,” New York Times, Jan. 18, 2017.

Lawn signs.

An irony of the lawn signs that promote unquestioning adherence to the dictates of established authority is that they adorn the lawns of people on the left, who in the past were more likely to sport bumper stickers saying: “question authority.” Some more readings on the signs and the sentiments behind them:

Kate Arnoff, in “Believe Science is a Bad Response to Denialism,” The New Republic, April 27, 2020, wrotes: “Liberals’ glorification of expertise amid the coronavirus and climate crises reveals their own distrust of democracy” and:

Appeals to “capital-s science,” as the theorist Donna Haraway has put it, tap into a basic mistrust of democratic institutions’ ability to navigate uncertain times: trust the experts, and give them whatever they need to get things back to normal. “Both the constructive disagreement intrinsic to science and the adversarial scrutiny necessary to politics disappear in this invocation of science as the ultimate authority—this trick will become familiar in the coming months,” James Butler wrote for the London Review of Books recently. “An extraordinary emergency requires extraordinary powers; no one disagrees with that. But it is politics, not science, which grants these powers legitimacy.” 

 

Hadley Heath Manning, “Your social justice yard sign contributes to division, not discourse,” Denver Post, Sept. 7, 2020: “The signs give cheap cursory treatment to a series of serious issues and imply that only one worldview is acceptable. The signs suggest that, outside of homes displaying them, hatred and bigotry are the norm and only hatred and bigotry can explain any departure from the sign’s political creed.” The signs amount to “collective shaming of those who hold conservative beliefs.”

To understand Manning’s response, it’s helpful to consider Monica Guzman’s discussion of the Schwartz Theory of Basic Human Values. The wording of the lawn signs suggests a one-dimensional moral problem. Either you believe in Justice or equity, or tolerance, or you don’t. In reality, though, each of those issues “puts some fundamentally good values into tension with one another … It’s easy to mistake a different ordering of values for an absence of the ones we care about most—and judge people accordingly.” All policy decisions involve trade-offs between competing goods. See Monica Guzman, I Never Thought of it That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times, 171-172.

Economy experts.

Inside Job, won the Academy Award for best documentary in 2011. It’s hard to watch this film and keep trusting economic experts.

Many academic economists who had advocated for deregulation for decades and helped shape U.S. policy still opposed reform after the 2008 crisis.…. Many of these economists were paid consultants to companies and other groups involved in the financial crisis, conflicts of interest that were often not disclosed in their research papers. Wikipedia

The essence of the film is captured in this segment about it on the PBS NewsHour.  The clip featuring Glenn Hubbard, Dean of the Columbia business school, gives a flavor of how the film undermines faith in the expertise of academic economists.

Larry Summers is an economic expert—and a former President of Harvard University—who has played an enormous role in shaping policy since the 1990s. In this interview, non-expert John Stewart makes the case that Summers’ policies always squelch inflation in a way that keeps profits flowing to capital at the expense of labor and wages.  If you are interested in the relationship between inflation and wages, and an alternative to the policy the FED is following and that Summers favors, see Dean Baker & Jared Bernstein, Getting Back to Full Employment.  See also.

We need a revival of the term “political economy,” which acknowledges that there is no one scientific answer to every question about economic policy, but rather that every policy involves trade-offs that help some and hurt others, and so can only be addressed through a political process. When policy makers seek a balance between fighting unemployment and fighting inflation, for example, they will inevitably be making a choice of who benefits from the policy and who has to make a sacrifice (see Danielle Allen’s revealing discussion of sacrifice in the context of unemployment/inflation in Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education, 37-49).

The attempt by the economists to frame their discipline as a hard science revealing laws of nature that must be obeyed, somehow always ends up supporting policies that serve the economic class interests of the economists—or their financial patrons. And it’s not the only field where scientific authority is mobilized in support of a particular group’s economic interests. In the 90s, the FDA’s new Food Pyramid exaggerated the amount of grains you should eat in deference to the interests of agribusiness. See Wikipedia.

The podcast “Pitchfork Economics” seeks to debunk the natural-law conceit of economics.

Health experts

Robert Lustig challenges much of the scientific consensus on human nutrition in Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutriton, and Modern Medicine, the segment under the heading, “A Fat is Not a Fat,” pp. 187-191, for example, argues that the consensus on saturated fat turns out to be wrong. One of his chapters is entitled “Dietitians Lost Their Mind.” It could be Lustig who turns out to be wrong, of course!

As a close relative of people with chronic disease, I know that the science of medicine is not good at treating it. Often, instead of admitting their lack of understanding, doctors will tell patients who suffer from long-term lingering after-effects of illnesses like Lyme disease or COVID that it is all in their heads. Lisa Miller chronicles this problem in, “The Mystery of Long COVID Is Just the Beginning,” New York Magazine Intelligencer, August 29, 2023. It’s a profile of Lisa Sanders, who was the inspiration for the TV show “House,” and is currently working on diagnosing and treating Long COVID. It’s bad that medical experts don’t understand these sorts of chronic illnesses. It’s worse that doctors dismiss patients’ concerns and tell them it’s psychosomatic.  Sanders might consider handing out "I could be wrong" stickers to her fellow doctors. Excerpts: 

A tenet of her [Sanders’] value system ... was that doctors should become more comfortable with uncertainty and more willing to cop to what they do not know. “The fact is that, more often than doctors would like to admit, they cannot find a cause for a patient’s symptoms,” she wrote. Unknowing is the first step to solving the puzzle, she believed… 

Young doctors, having spent the past three or four years with their heads in their books, can be “ready to feel absolutely certain that they know what to do,” Sanders tells me. … 

“Super-success” for Sanders would be to be succeeded in the clinic by a team of young, ambitious doctors who can find the same satisfaction that she does in uncertainty: “At the end of every appointment, every doctor has to ask, What am I going to do for this patient—today—to make it better? It’s a more nuanced question, and the answers come from a not totally absolute sense that you know what to do.”  

Some more readings on the misrule of experts

See Ewald Engelen et al., “Misrule of Experts? The Financial Crisis as Elite Debacle,” Center for Research on Socio-Cultural Change, March 2011. The paper questions “the politicized role of technocrats after the 1980s and emphasizes the need to bring private finance and its public regulators under democratic political control whose technical precondition is a dramatic simplification of finance.” The promise of the technocrats is that we can move all kinds of decisions out of the realm of politics into the hands of experts armed with science, creating what James C. Scott calls “antipolitics machines.” See Scott’s, Two Cheers for Anarchism, 111, for a discussion the problem with those machines and a defense of politics.

Christopher Lasch has written extensively about the failure of elites, especially in The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy.

Jesse Singal’s book, The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills, offers a “powerful indictment of the thought leaders and influencers who cut corners as they sell the public half-baked solutions to problems that deserve more serious treatment” (Amazon blurb). Among other things, Singal argues that a shortage of replication studies is undermining the credibility of social science research.

For a critique of the discipline of sociology that says liberal groupthink—opposing any idea that might be seen as blaming victims—has made the field irrelevant to public policy debates, see Chapter 6 of Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars, "Sociology, Social Justice, and Victimhood."

History is no less subject to these forces, but at least most of us don’t call ourselves scientists. Historians are practicing a humanity. Peter Novick chronicles the misguided and hopefully now abandoned effort to turn history into a science starting in the late 19th century in That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession.

In this 2022 Washington Post op-ed, conservative pundit George F. Will decries the “insufferable and sometimes mistaken certitudes” of the credentialed “mandrins” who set government policy. COVID 19, he writes, “revived, and then weakened, Americans’ reflex of deference” to experts. But then their policies and recommendations “about masks, school closures and economic shutdowns took a toll that is difficult to quantify, but certainly huge, measured in learning loss, blighted lives and the leakage of trust from public life.”

Echoing Sandel, Will argues that the education and career success of these leaders makes them blind to the limits of their own understanding: “in eluding failure they come to ignore their own fallibility.”

In a recent piece in the Times, Sam Adler-Bell, the liberal historian of conservatism and co-host of the excellent podcast on conservative thinkers, “Know Your Enemy,” discusses the political power of anti-elitism in the Republican Party, and how it favors Trump at the expense of DeSantis in the upcoming presidential primary, revealing a schism between party leaders and most of their voters.

Mr. DeSantis has managed to corral key Republican megadonors, Murdoch media empire executives and conservative thought leaders from National Review to the Claremont Institute. He polls considerably higher than Mr. Trump with wealthy, college-educated, city- and suburb-dwelling Republicans. Mr. Trump, meanwhile, retains his grip on blue-collar, less educated and rural conservatives. For the G.O.P., the primary fight has begun to tell an all-too-familiar story: It’s the elites vs. the rabble. Mr. Trump, for his part, appears to have taken notice of this incipient class divide (and perhaps of the dearth of billionaires rushing to his aid). In the past few weeks, he has skewered Mr. DeSantis as a tool for “globalist” plutocrats and the Republican old guard. Since his indictment by a Manhattan grand jury, Mr. Trump has sought to further solidify his status as the indispensable people’s champion, attacked on all sides by a conspiracy of liberal elites. While donors and operatives may prefer a more housebroken populism, it is Mr. Trump’s surmise that large parts of the base still want the real thing, warts and all.

If his wager pays off, it will be a sign not just of his continued dominance over the Republican Party but also of something deeper: an ongoing revolt against “the best and brightest.”

Meanwhile, DeSantis seems to share the elite snobbery toward the “rabble” that Trump has mobilized against:

In his 2011 book, Mr. DeSantis railed against the “‘leveling’ spirit” that threatens to take hold in a republic, especially among the lower orders. His principal target in the book is “redistributive justice,” by which he apparently means any effort at all to share the benefits of economic growth more equitably—whether using government power to provide for the poor or to guarantee health care, higher wages or jobs.

This profile of Naomi Klein in the Times illustrates how the left wing “question authority” mistrust of elite rule has been adopted and transformed by conspiratorially minded thinkers on the right: Grant Harder, “When Your ‘Doppelganger’ Becomes a Conspiracy Theorist,” New York Times Magazine, Aug. 30, 2023. The essay tells the story of how radical left-wing author and activist Naomi Klein’s “doppelganger,” Naomi Wolf, has taken some of her ideas and turned them into conspiracy theories appealing to the right.

As much as Klein recoiled at what Wolf was saying, she also felt the sting of recognition. Klein recalls the uncanny spectacle of seeing a version of her systems-level thesis in “The Shock Doctrine—that elites will take advantage of a crisis to impose their will—twisted by the likes of Wolf, who has described COVID as “a much-hyped medical crisis” that “has taken on the role of being used as a pretext to strip us all of core freedoms.” Klein became both obsessed and repulsed, fascinated and appalled: “I felt like she had taken my ideas, fed them into a bonkers blender and then shared the thought-purée with Tucker Carlson, who nodded vehemently.”

The widespread erosion of faith in any kind of reliable version of reality is a big problem. This piece in the Times shows just how far such skepticism can be taken. Tiffany Hsu, “Falsehoods Follow Close Behind This Summer’s Natural Disasters,” Aug. 30, 2023.  

This series: Part 1: Could I Be Wrong?  (civics education and epistemic humility); Part 2: Social Justice?  (Teaching citizenship to students with different values) and Part 3: Believe Science?  (curbing meritocratic hubris in tomorrow's leaders); Part 4: 11 Strategies for Depolarizing Tomorrow's Citizens.

Should we teach social justice?

(Second in a series: Could I Be Wrong?  Believe Science? 11 Strategies for Depolarizing Tomorrow's Citizens)

Diversity, equity, inclusion, social justice. Who could be against any of these things?

Protest movements for social justice are undeniably an essential element of democracy. My book looks at African American social justice advocacy during World War I and my US history courses spend a lot of time on how social movements improved American democracy. From time to time, I’ve joined campaigns for contemporary causes.

In the absence of protest, modern representative democracies act almost exclusively in the interest of the classes that control the levers of government—at best about 20 percent of the population. Only under pressure from protest movements do they sometimes throw the bottom 80 a bone. The history of American democracy is unthinkable without the abolition, women’s suffrage, labor, and civil rights movements.

But while I want my students to understand the role those movements played in history, I think it would run counter to my role as a teacher to recruit them into a movement that I support or to embrace one particular vision of social justice. I know that many of my colleagues disagree with me about this. And it has often seemed that my school does too.

But we don’t all agree on the same vision of social justice. If teachers can promote a particular partisan agenda, half the nation’s schools will cultivate right-wing crusaders, and the other half will produce left-wingers, and the electorate will become ever more polarized.

And the dispositions, inclinations and tactics of citizens are the opposite of those required for a political campaign. Where citizens should be open minded, aware of the likely flaws in their thinking and open to compromise, activists and campaigners must suppress their doubts as they crusade for the cause.

I do think it’s possible to play the role of citizen in a spirit of “political friendship” with rivals and still campaign for certain partisan outcomes—but it’s essential to understand the difference between the two and to be able to make the shift into the different roles as appropriate.*

As a teacher at Exeter I try to be as politically neutral as possible in the classroom. When students try to guess my politics, they are wrong more than half the time. But in my free time, I helped students canvass for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 and 2020 New Hampshire primaries. These students came to support Sanders on their own. I just gave them rides in my car—which still has a “Feel the Bern” bumper sticker.

Meanwhile, in the classroom, I make a special effort to support conservative students because they are in such a small minority at the school and I value their presence because it makes for a more realistic political environment in my classroom. They also improve the thinking of liberal students by forcing them to defend their positions.

But we are increasingly living in ideological bubbles. The US is “more geographically polarized today” by party affiliation “than at any point since 1860.”  Which means that public schools have less ideological diversity, and students encounter fewer people with different viewpoints than their parents. Private—especially boarding—schools might offer more diversity, since they can bring students together from different communities, yet they seem to be getting more polarized as well, as Michael Powell showed in his reporting on liberal, elite New York City independent schools and as the recent 12% rise in enrollments in conservative Christian schools suggests.

Teachers can open students’ minds to opposing views by playing the devil’s advocate. But that’s less useful in helping students develop cognitive empathy than encountering real people with sincerely held views (Hess and McAvoy, 117). But in a school where the devil’s advocate is seen as an actual devil, teachers may be wary of making his case.

For example, during a DEI faculty workshop I attended, I posed a question to the presenter we had invited to speak. How do we protect the feelings of African-American students in a discussion about Affirmative Action? I was concerned that the conversation might turn to questions about the qualifications of students at our highly selective school who might be perceived as beneficiaries of racial preferences.

His answer: the teacher should intercede in the debate and explain why the student opposing affirmative action is wrong.

I agree that some opinions should not be given serious consideration in any classroom. But an important difference between, say, slavery and affirmative action is that one is a settled question in contemporary national politics, and the other is still open and subject to debate. A majority of the US population and the Supreme Court and a significant minority of African Americans oppose affirmative action according to some polls, and opponents raise legitimate questions about its effectiveness.

If we shut off debate on unresolved questions, how will we resolve them if not through violence and intimidation, or the suppression of basic political rights? And if they can be discussed in Congress and the courts and the nation’s press, to shut them down in schools is to prepare students for a political fantasy world.

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Things to read in relation to the above. 

The other Blog posts in this series: Could I be Wrong? Believe Science? and 11 Strategies for Teaching Politics.

I wrote on this topic back in 2022.  See "On Teaching Social Justice."  Here's a passage: "To advance any version of social justice in a democracy (or republic, if that’s your preferred term), we need to be willing and able to deliberate, compromise and form coalitions with fellow citizens and that requires mutual respect even between rivals. The best contribution teachers can make to advancing social justice is to graduate citizens with that sort of democratic disposition."

*In The Spirit of Compromise: Why Governing Demands It and Campaigning Undermines It, Amy Gutman and Dennis Thompson argue that in a representative democracy elected leaders need to be able to shift back and forth between campaign mode and governing mode if they want to govern effectively. One cause of polarization, they argue, is that US election seasons—especially for the presidency—last so long.

For a more useful answer to my question about affirmative action, see Hess and McAvoy, Chapter 5, “A case of Political Friendship,” which looks at the methods that a masterful teacher of politics, Joel Kushner, employed to “mitigate negative costs” in discussions of controversial topics. Also relevant to teaching affirmative action is chapter 8, “Ethics of Framing and Selecting Issues” which makes a helpful distinction between open and closed political debates and how to deal with them differently. I wrote a summary of the chapter here. 

Public opinion on affirmative action varies according to how the question is asked and who is doing the polling. This June, 2023 poll by Pew says 50% of Americans (including 29% of African Americans) oppose affirmative action in selective college admissions, while only 33% approve.  Like so many issues, if you search hard enough, you can find a poll to support many different positions on affirmative action, but you will never find one that suggests it is not still a matter of controversy. On the other hand, no one even bothers to run polls on whether slavery is a legitimate system of labor.

For an example of an essay that raises legitimate questions about the effectiveness of race-based affirmative action by an Exeter Latina student, see Nataly Delcid, “At private school, my family’s income sets me apart more than ethnicity,” Washington Post, July 12, 2023. She agrees with the 60% of surveyed Americans who told Rice University pollsters in 2019 that affirmative action should be based on family income not race or ethnicity.

Quite understandably, DEI training like the session I mentioned, often backfires. See “Is Your Company’s Diversity Training Making You More Biased?” Psychology Today, June 7, 2017.

According to a recent paper by the economists Ethan Kaplan, Jörg Spenkuch, and Rebecca Sullivan, the U.S. is more geographically polarized today than at any point since 1860, when a geographic cleavage in political preferences was about to send the nation into the Civil War.  See: “The Real Culprit Behind Geographic Polarization,” Atlantic, Nov. 26, 2018.

The term social justice is associated with left-wing causes, but conservatives have their own version of what is socially just—they just call it something different. Efforts in New Hampshire and Florida by conservative politicians to insert content from the conservative online propaganda website PragerU into public school curricula are no better than liberal teachers basing their history courses on content from the Howard Zinn Education Project.  See Steven Porter, “Top education official in NH recommends unaccredited PragerU course for academic credit,” Boston Globe, Aug. 9, 2023. See also my thoughts about the NYT 1619 project as a source for US history educators. 

 This series: Part 1: Could I Be Wrong?  (civics education and epistemic humility); Part 2: Social Justice?  (Teaching citizenship to students with different values) and Part 3: Believe Science?  (curbing meritocratic hubris in tomorrow's leaders); Part 4: 11 Strategies for Depolarizing Tomorrow's Citizens.

Could I be wrong?

(First in a series. See also: Could I Be Wrong?  Believe Science? 11 Strategies for Depolarizing Tomorrow's Citizens)

Sometimes I give my students a sticker with the phrase “I could be wrong.” Here’s why. 

My school doesn’t have a required civics course. I teach the one class that comes closest, so I’ve given some thought to what an American civics course should do.

The nuts and bolts of government and the US Constitution are obviously essential and students should discuss contemporary policy issues. Some teachers think it’s more important to instill a passion for “social justice,” and to foster a sense of political efficacy and encourage political engagement.

Perhaps, but more than that, civics ed should cultivate certain dispositions toward fellow citizens and the truth.

These dispositions are particularly important at a time when Americans are dividing themselves into antagonistic political tribes and mutually incomprehensible information bubbles—deplorables on one side, libtards on the other—and when political commentators speak seriously about the possibility of civil war or the end of democracy.

It’s tempting to think the point of democracy is to win elections for our side. But before you can have an election you need a citizenry that trusts the system and each other enough to abide by the results.

How do we build that trust? How do we manage the sacrifices that are imposed on the election’s losers? These are the sorts of questions that Danielle Allen asks in her brilliant book on citizenship, Talking to Strangers. I’ve discussed her notion of “political friendship” and how it might guide the education of citizens in an earlier blog post.  Political friendship is difficult to practice in the best of times; it’s especially challenging with a deeply polarized citizenry when even family members are breaking up over political differences. 

Students who embraced political friendship would become agents of depolarization.  They would cultivate open minds, and learn skills related to listening, deliberation, and compromise.  They would develop toleration of fellow citizens with different opinions.  To that end, they would resist an attitude of disgust or condescension toward people who think differently by cultivating “cognitive empathy,” the inclination and ability to understand fellow citizens who think (and vote) differently. And they would be advocates of forbearance toward those opponents in the exercise of power by democratic majorities.

And perhaps most importantly they would be encouraged to practice epistemic humility, by recognizing the shortcomings of their own cognition and the assumptions of their tribe. A way to remind ourselves of those shortcomings is to frequently ask, while engaged in politics: “Could I be wrong?”

A civics course ought to teach these dispositions, inclinations, skills and values.

Hence the stickers. 

Next in this series: Should social justice be a goal of civics education?

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A note on sources

Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers, on political friendship.

Hess and McAvoy, in The Political Classroom, guided me to Allen, and gave me the most important citizen question: “Could I be wrong?”

Moira Kelly’s talk, “Promoting Cognitive Empathy in a Polarized Society,” at the AISNE Annual Diversity Conference, Nov. 1, 2016, gave me the term “cognitive empathy.” She argued that it should be the first priority of citizenship education and that the Harkness Method (pioneered by my school, Phillips Exeter Academy) is the best way to teach it.

Jonathan Haight’s moral foundations theory has helped me to understand people on the other side of the political divide. See The Righteous Mind.

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, in How Democracies Die identified the democratic norms of mutual tolerance and institutional forbearance (Chapter 5).

As it happens, my bosses gave the faculty a book to read over summer that closely echoes these views. See Monica Guzman, I Never Thought of it That Way. The whole book is a brief for Cognitive Empathy and epistemic humility. “Say I don’t know when you don’t know,” for example, is a subheading in a chapter on why we should question our opinions (p. 148). Guzman is also an executive with the Braver Angels organization, which I first read about in the Atlantic in a 2017 issue devoted to depolarization, and have been following ever since. Guzman was a host of the Braver Angels podcast.

John Keane’s global history, The Life and Death of Democracy, shows how fragile and ephemeral democratic systems have always been and why we should not take them for granted. 

This series: Part 1: Could I Be Wrong?  (civics education and epistemic humility); Part 2: Social Justice?  (Teaching citizenship to students with different values) and Part 3: Believe Science?  (curbing meritocratic hubris in tomorrow's leaders); Part 4: 11 Strategies for Depolarizing Tomorrow's Citizens.

Harm

A word I heard quite often last week at a conference of teachers on seminar style instruction: “harm.” As in: how can we make sure our students are not harmed by what happens during class discussions? As one participant put it “the texts we assign may do harm to some students and we might or might not be aware of it. We need to move this burden onto the educator. It’s our job to protect and deflect and make sure everybody is supported.”

Earlier in the week, we’d watched a video showing an “adventure playground” where “kids are encouraged to participate in healthy risk-taking.” Adults lurk around the edges removing hidden hazards, like rusty nails. But mostly they leave the kids alone, and refrain from interfering in risky behavior like climbing too far out on a thin tree limb 20 feet off the ground.  “Even when you feel uncomfortable, that should not inform your next move,” the adult says afterwards.  Children experience danger.  They are allowed to light fires and wield hammers and wallow in mud puddles. 

Adventure playgrounds were conceived by Margory Allen of Hurtwood (1897-1976) who said: “it is better to risk a broken leg than a broken spirit. A leg can always mend. A spirit may not.” 

It reminded me of my childhood, though no one was getting rid of rusty nails around the forts we built in the woods far away from the parental gaze. A trip to the doctor for a tetanus shot and to get the sneaker bits removed from your foot was a rite of passage in our neighborhood. We also rode bikes and cars without helmets and or seatbelts. One study found that kids today experience a total of 7 minutes per week of play unsupervised by adults.

How is it that as we parents of the post-missing-child-milk-carton era have made childhood increasingly safe, our children have become so increasingly anxious and sad?  Maybe Ms. Allen was right. Maybe danger is good for the spirit.

References

Adventure playground video.

Margory Allen bio.

Latest news about the bubble wrap generation.  Just before I posted, these two pieces showed up in news sources I consume.  

This one, in the Times on July 4, showed how high school theater teachers are being required to protect students from evil content in plays like "Bye Bye Birdie" and "The Addams Family" ("It’s Getting Hard to Stage a School Play Without Political Drama" by Michael Paulson).

This article appeared on the front page of the Atlantic website on July 5: "The Gravitational Pull of Supervising Kids All the Time," by Stephanie H. Murray. It traces the rise of safetyism in parenting, which is closely related to safetyism at school and around the Harkness table.

On teaching social justice

Over the past decade or so, independent private schools have increasingly adopted the teaching of social justice into their mission statements. One strives to “bring an anti-racist, intersectional social justice lens to every aspect of our school community.”  Another has established a social justice “Institute.”

Trustees at my school called for “a new cross-department faculty working group to focus on incorporating themes of race, equity and justice into the curriculum of each department.” 

An article on the NAIS website acknowledges that elite private schools are “primary sites for the production and perpetuation of unequal social relations,” but says they nonetheless “can and should play a key role in social justice education” and train their students to be “agents” of “systemic change.”

Often, social justice at these schools seems to mean little more than recruiting a more diverse group of students and faculty and treating them fairly. (See, for example the blurb under this “Social Justice” heading on the Independent Schools of St. Louis website.)

But if schools do want to train students to become agents of systemic social change, they face a big problem. 

We don’t all agree on what constitutes social justice or how to bring it about. “Conservatives Do Believe in Social Justice,” a Heritage fellow writes. It involves “fulfilling our duties” and “empower[ing] more people to engage themselves in the market and flourish.”

A conservative vision of social justice would not include things like redistribution of wealth, affirmative action, abortion rights, or other elements of the left version.

In fact, conservatives tend to avoid using the term because of its historic linkage to progressive causes going back to the early 1900s.

And when they hear it used to describe a curriculum, they assume it means the school intends to indoctrinate students into a liberal or even radical-left political program.  They are not wrong.  After all, 83 percent of campaign contributions from teachers go to Democrats.  And even a self-described “left-wing New York City Democrat” describes the social justice curriculum at her son’s private school as “Maoist social reeducation.” 

So, though everyone on some level might hope for more social justice, the term—especially when used by schools—has become a source of division, contributing to the polarization that makes it harder to achieve any kind of social reform at all.

I would like to suggest that schools can graduate students who will be agents of a more just society not by “teaching Social Justice,” but by cultivating an attitude toward fellow citizens that will facilitate democratic problem-solving.

More and more of us have come to see those who disagree with us as enemies, bent on destroying society and scheming to oppress political opponents. That attitude justifies preventing political rivals from voting, or cancelling and silencing them—and it erodes support for democracy itself. The number of voters who say it is essential to live in a democracy has declined significantly in recent years especially among younger people. Even before Donald Trump began running for president, an increasing share of Americans were saying that army rule would be a “good” or “very good” thing.

The loss of faith in democracy is understandable, given the inability of our governments to solve our most pressing problems. But to advance any version of social justice in a democracy (or republic, if that’s your preferred term), we need to be willing and able to deliberate, compromise and form coalitions with fellow citizens and that requires mutual respect even between rivals. The best contribution teachers can make to advancing social justice is to graduate citizens with that sort of democratic disposition.

These citizens must understand that everyone has a different idea about what “social justice” looks like but that we can still approach each other in the spirit of what Danielle Allen calls “political friendship,” a term she borrowed from Aristotle, and updated for our current predicament.

Allen holds that all citizens in a democratic polity have an overriding interest in resolving our differences peacefully. The alternative—unrestrained political rivalry—generates distrust, resentment, and enmity that is likely to result in breakdown of democracy and in extreme cases, civil war.

(Read an earlier post for a more complete explanation of “Political Friendship")  

“Political friendship” lacks the partisan connotations of “Social Justice” and is inherently unifying rather than polarizing.

Teaching it in schools would do more to advance a liberal policy agenda than explicitly promoting a particular version of social justice. Attempts at indoctrination tend to backfire. If you’ve ever tried to tell a teenager what they should think, you know what I mean.  

(Go to the notes, below, for some examples of liberal indoctrination backfiring)

And advancing the progressive vision of social justice, with its heavy emphasis on reforming social and economic systems, depends on positive legislation more than the conservative vision, which tends to favor the status quo.

(See my post on how capitalism leads to ever more inequality in the absence of countervailing legislation)

Polarization of the electorate feeds the gridlock that makes it so difficult to pass the legislation that might advance progressive causes.

Political friendship holds the promise of reducing polarization. It says that today’s rivals maybe tomorrow’s allies on a different issue, so it’s best to treat them like future allies rather than permanent, irredeemable enemies.

Allyship is a popular theme in the contemporary social justice movement. My school organizes “affinity groups”: one each for Blacks, Hispanics and Asians based on their race, and a fourth for “white allies,” based on support for an anti-racist, social justice agenda, in the apparent expectation that white people have no interests of their own and could be relied on to think only of the interests of people with different skin color.

In these sorts of programs, white allies are asked to “check their privilege” and commit themselves to fight racism, calling out or cancelling other white people who show signs of bigotry.

This strategy relies solely on the altruism of white descendants of Europeans, who are simultaneously condemned as the historical perpetrators of racism, imperialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy.

It is a doomed strategy, because it misunderstands the basic nature of political alliances.

In a 1967 essay defining “Black power,” Martin Luther King explains, “Our victories in the past decade were won with a broad coalition of organizations representing a wide variety of interests,”

A true alliance is based upon some self-interest of each component group and a common interest into which they merge. For an alliance to have permanence and loyal commitment from its various elements, each of them must have a goal from which it benefits.

To wait passively for “allies” with nothing to gain for themselves to be “somehow infused” with the “blessings of good will,” would be the “height of naiveté,” he wrote. See below for more on King's essay.

Alliances get things done and they require bargaining and compromise, tolerance of differences, and some common interest.

The future electorate will be made up of our current students. Given the divided nature of US government, an electorate that is steeped in the concept of political friendship and a more realistic understanding of political alliances would seem better prepared to build the coalitions and work out the compromises necessary to get any legislation passed to engage in collective problem-solving and advance social justice.

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Notes and further thoughts and readings on teaching social justice

The private school paradox.

According to the NEA website:

Social justice is about distributing resources fairly and treating all students equitably. … Sadly, a look at schools across the nation makes it clear that fair distribution of resources and equitable treatment don’t always happen. Students in poorly-funded schools don’t have the technology, new books, or art and music programs that create a well-rounded education, while students in affluent areas have the latest academic resources, school counselors, librarians, and more to help them succeed. 

As this Times piece indicates, private schools have seemed more enthusiastic than public schools in promoting social justice. But it seems fairly obvious that in spite of their well-crafted statements on social justice and whatever social justice lessons they are teaching their highly privileged students, those schools, by their very existence, do much more to exacerbate the problem of educational inequality, which is one of the worst examples for liberals of social injustice.

As a student at one private school put it:

Students who choose to attend private schools deplete public funding for public schools, divert private funding and weaken public classroom environments. If these students are to serve as advocates for social justice, they must first condemn how their choice to attend private school contributed to socioeconomic inequality.

Backfire

In an Atlantic piece, “The Terrifying Future of the American Right” (Nov. 18, 2021), David Brooks suggest that trying to teach social justice in schools may backfire. He points to younger conservatives he met at the National Conservatism Conference, held in Orlando in Nov. 2021, who are coming to dominate the movement. Speaking about liberals, one said: “What they want is to destroy us.” These conservatives, Brooks adds, “went to colleges smothered by progressive sermonizing. And they reacted by running in the other direction.” Brooks thinks he would have done the same if he had attended college in that environment.

The LA Times tells the story of how this happened to Stephen Miller, who rebelled against what he saw as a “campus indoctrination machine” at Samohi High School in “The People’s Republic of Santa Monica.” It's where he mastered the tactics of lib-baiting that catapulted him to prominence as a Trump troll and White House aide.

And of course conservatives make up for their weak policy agenda by using indoctrination in schools to stoke the culture war. At times they seem obsessed with educational institutions, teachers,  professors, and administrators.  For example, this website tracks everything elite educational institutions (including Phillips Exeter) do under the banner of DEI, critical race theory and social justice education.

Even many liberals are opposed to what they see as political indoctrination in their children’s schools. “Most of the teachers and parents I talk with just want school to be school—not some kind of Maoist social reeducation,” writes the parent of a fifth grader at an independent private school, who describes herself as a left-wing New York City Democrat. Issues associated with social justice and characterized by the right as “wokeness” and cancel culture, tend to unite Republicans and divide Democrats, according to the data analysts at Five-Thirty-Eight.

Conservatives and Social justice

The Heritage fellow’s Conservative vision of social justice can be found here.

A conservative critique of teaching “social justice” in schools is J. Martin Rochester, "Social justice miseducation in our schools," Nov. 1, 2017, Thomas B. Fordham Institute (a conservative education think tank).

 

First, schools should mainly stick to what they are uniquely entrusted to do—teaching math, physics, English, and other subject matter and, beyond that, a love of learning. Schools should not aspire to be churches or social work agencies. In an already overcrowded school day in which our schools struggle to find the time to get students to become proficient in “the three R’s,” social justice training can be a huge distraction.

Second, more importantly, it is sheer hubris for teachers to bring their own personal political agenda into the classroom. What happened to free inquiry? In my own teaching, I try to keep my ideological dispositions to myself rather than using my lectern as a bully pulpit, if only to promote critical thinking as opposed to indoctrination. I expose students to a wide range of views from left to right. For example, when I teach about multinational corporations and globalization, I have them read everything from Karl Marx to Milton Friedman.

Educators for Social Justice talk a lot about diversity, but do they promote the most important type of diversity—diversity of ideas? Contrary to their claim that they celebrate “disagreement,” they seem to promote only a politically correct, left-leaning perspective.

King on alliances

The quote above is from King, “Martin Luther King Defines Black Power,” New York Times, June 11, 1967. I first heard this quote in an interview with Jared Clemons on The Dig podcast, June 24, 2022. Clemons adds that for King, 

successfully combating race prejudice meant successfully changing the material circumstances in which individuals found themselves. This latter point is critical, for it implies that the only way to reduce race prejudice is to alter the conditions that exacerbate the perpetuation of race prejudice. In other words, the causal pathway is such that material conditions change human practices, which shapes attitudes, not the other way around.

See Clemons’ essay, “From ‘Freedom Now!’ to ‘Black Lives Matter’: Retrieving King and Randolph to Theorize Contemporary White Antiracism,” Perspectives on Politics, Cambridge University Press, June 8, 2022. Go back up to essay.

Teaching citizenship in a polarized society

And why treat dissenters properly? Why not just forget about them? Because the process of negotiating differences allows for social stability, and the alternative is civil war, whether in major or minor key (Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers, 98).

In the past decade, the American electorate has become so polarized that scholars are beginning to wonder if democracy can survive here. We increasingly see politics as an ongoing battle between ideological opponents with no common interests. Political rivals are seen as illegitimate, opposed to the common good and threatening to our way of life. An election victory by the opposition is seen as endangering democracy or Western culture and that justifies norm-breaking responses. On the left, we might pack the Supreme Court; on the right, storm the Capitol.

At the root of this polarization is what Danielle Allen refers to in her primer on citizenship as “congealed distrust,” an insurmountable road block to solving “collective problems” because democratic problem-solving “depends on trustful talk among strangers.” (Monk; Allen, xiii; See also, Hess and McAvoy, xvi).

Schools, unfortunately, are contributing to the polarization of the American electorate. As Americans increasingly sort ourselves into ideologically homogenous communities, more and more schools fall into a category that two scholars of political education call “like-minded schools,” in which the vast majority of students hold similar political values. 

Studies show that "when we live and work among people who generally think as we do, our views tend to become more extreme and less tolerant," which "ferments extremism and causes demonization of legitimate political difference" (Hess and McAvoy, 26).

Parents (especially conservative ones) are increasingly worried about the politicization of schools. A 2011 survey found that half of Americans think social studies teachers use their classes as political platforms (Hess and McAvoy, 205). And that perception has surely deepened in recent years. Conservative fears of liberal indoctrination in schools are not altogether unfounded. FEC data show that 83 percent of political donations made by high school teachers went to the Democratic Party.

But teachers in like-minded schools can push against the intolerance that festers in ideologically homogeneous bubbles and do their part to depolarize our democracy.  I think it's their civic duty to at least try. 

Most teachers seem to agree. One survey found that 65 percent of teachers say they try to keep politics out of their classroom.

But that approach won’t solve the problem for teachers of politically charged subjects like history and civics. And politics is likely to sneak into the room no matter what subject you’re teaching.

Also, disengagement from politics is one of the negative consequences of polarization. According to a recent study by Reuters, 40 percent of Americans have stopped following the news, a higher rate of news-avoidance than almost every other democratic country. People, it seems, are tired of reading about problems that can’t be solved.  And the ones who disengage tend to be more moderate and less intolerant than the ones who don't.

All of America’s teachers should be asking whether there is a way to teach politics that diminishes rather than increases polarization. After all, today’s students are tomorrow’s voting citizens.

Conservatives might argue that a proper education for citizenship should focus on teaching students the nuts and bolts of America’s Democratic institutions and instilling patriotism and admiration for the handiwork of the founding fathers. Many liberals have concluded that a civics education should instill a passion for social justice and foster engagement in that system to improve it.

Danielle Allen’s work, elaborated on by Diana Hess and Paula McAvoy in their study of political education at America’s high schools, points in a different direction. A citizen, they argue, needs to understand the inevitability of sacrifice and its role in democracy, to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate sacrifice, and to become capable of deliberating with fellow citizens who have opposing interests and different convictions about what constitutes “social justice” and the common good. This requires the skills of listening and understanding the views of people you disagree with, what civics advocate Moira Kelly referred to as “cognitive empathy” at a conference I attended.

They would likely agree with conservatives about the need for knowledge of the system, but perhaps not about instilling a particular notion of patriotism. They would agree with the liberals about engagement but would warn against imposing a particular vision of social justice.

This last point is essential. A proper education must be non-partisan. Teachers must refrain from imposing their own policy preferences on their students. This is the bedrock of teaching political subjects, according to Hess and McAvoy’s Political Classroom. This principle of neutrality applies, the authors argue, to any issue that is currently open—a matter of live controversy in our national politics. It does not apply to issues that are closed or settled, like slavery or women’s suffrage. (Hess and McAvoy address open and closed questions in Chapter 8).

Joel Kushner, a teacher profiled in the book, treats the issues of abortion and affirmative action as open questions, upon which he cannot impose his liberal preference, or even slant the readings in one direction. When, faced with a balanced selection of evidence, some of his liberal students end up agreeing with the conservative position in a court case on religion in the public sphere, Kushner, a liberal, is unfazed (114-115). Instead of persuading his students to adopt his own policy positions, Kushner wants to teach them about how democracy works and how to harmoniously and productively engage with fellow citizens and engage in collective decision-making.

Democracy and Sacrifice

One of the most important lessons students need to learn to become democratic citizens is that in spite of the individual freedom and sovereignty that democracies promise their citizens, we don’t always get our way even in a well-functioning democracy and are often asked to sacrifice our personal preferences and interests for the good of the whole, the survival of democracy, and the maintenance of peace. When our candidate loses the election, when we are drafted and sent into battle, and when policies favored by the majority disadvantage us or go against what we think is good, we are sacrificing something.

To illustrate the inevitability of sacrifice, Allen points to the Federal Reserve’s decision to raise interest rates in 2000 to tame inflation. That decision imposed a disproportionate sacrifice on some citizens when unemployment inevitably increased and wages flat-lined as a result. Others gained when investors reacted to the news of impending recession by bidding up the price of stocks.

Learning how to negotiate the losses one experiences at the hands of the public is fundamental to becoming a political actor, not only for minorities suffering political abuses, but for all citizens. (Allen, Talking to Strangers, 30)

Allen explores the difference between legitimate and illegitimate sacrifice. She begins her book with a discussion of the central failure of American democracy—the disproportionate and illegitimate sacrifices that African Americans like her have been forced to bear. Not until the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement, she argues, did America become a true democracy.

How, she asks, can democratic citizens avoid imposing illegitimate or disproportionate sacrifice on fellow citizens and “generate enough political friendship” to “convert the distrust arising from political disappointment [and sacrifice] into trust” (Allen, 30)?

The interest rate hike might be seen as a legitimate sacrifice if it saved the majority of citizens from ruinous inflation. On the other hand, when stock-holders repeatedly win and wage workers repeatedly lose, congealed distrust is a likely result.

Societies can maintain or restore trust by recognizing and honoring citizens' sacrifice, Allen argues. We recognize the sacrifices of soldiers—the VA, Memorial Day, Veterans’ Day, Arlington National Cemetery, countless monuments all over the country, like the one in the photograph above. America has also begun to recognize the tremendous, usually illegitimate sacrifices made by African Americans throughout our history: the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Martin Luther King Jr., Memorial on the National Mall, Bryan Stevenson’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice—and the monument depicted above. Other sorts of sacrifice quietly endured may be less costly, but are also important for the preservation of peace in a democratic system.

Can they be recognized and honored too? As interest rates rise again, is anyone acknowledging how low-wage-earners and the unemployed are likely to be sacrificed to save the rest of us from inflation? How do we deal with sacrifice aside from building monuments?

Political Friendship

Allen has developed, a theory of “political friendship” as a way of strengthening democracy by better managing sacrifice and building trust among citizens. Hess, and McAvoy argue for making that theory the basis of political education in grade school.

In a democracy, our collective fate depends on the maintenance of good will among strangers. Citizens must recognize this mutual dependence and treat these strangers, in a sense, as friends.

Friends often willingly restrain their own individual interests for the sake of what they see as a greater good: maintaining the friendship. Sometimes friends will even compete to make a sacrifice, as when they fight over who will pay the lunch tab.

Political friends are likely to have even greater competing interests and more diverse values and beliefs than intimate friends, but like intimate friends, they have an overriding interest in peaceful coexistence. Good citizens know that to keep the peace and nurture democracy, they must embrace the value of fairness and consider who is being made to sacrifice when particular policies are enacted. Citizens need to balance their own self-interest with the rights and well-being and interests of fellow citizens and not ask others to make illegitimate sacrifices. 

Like real friends who keep track of who paid for lunch the last time, citizens should always be asking what costs they are passing on to others, and whether the policies they favor are advancing the general good, or just the interests of a more powerful class of people (Allen, 119).

Elections and policy decisions can't be winner-take-all. Citizens must reject an attitude of rivalrous self-interest in which people compete for benefits with no concern for the impact on others or the collective.

Allen's concept of friendship is preferable to the currently fashionable notion in progressive circles of allyship because it acknowledges the fact that all political actors are entitled to and will inevitably pursue their own self-interest in the political world. And they need to be able think and reason for themselves. But if citizens pursue their own interests without restraint—without considering the impact on other citizens—distrust increases and democracy weakens. Thus, citizens can and will act in their own interests, but they should consider the harmonious relationship with "political friends" and important interest and move from rivalrous self-interest to what Allen calls "equitable self-interest."

Friends know that if we always act according to our own interests in an unrestrained fashion, our friendships will not last very long. Friendship teaches us when and where to moderate our interests for our own sake. In short, friendship solves the problem of rivalrous self-interest by converting it into equitable self-interest, where each friend moderates her own interest for the sake of preserving the relationship (Allen, 120).

Friends don’t push their advantages to the limit because the friendship, it turns out, is worth more than the sacrificed advantages. Citizens too, gain more from the peace that comes with treating fellow citizens fairly and from exercising forbearance—self-restraint in the exercise of power.

Teach political friendship

Danielle Allen was a contributor to the December 2019 “How to Stop a Civil War” issue of The Atlantic magazine, which featured articles about polarization and what might be done about it. One of the articles in particular stood out because of its focus on an excruciatingly earnest effort to overcome polarization by getting people from opposing political sides talking and listening to each other, developing cognitive empathy and practicing epistemic humility. The group was calling itself “Better Angels,” a phrase taken from Lincoln’s first inaugural—an earlier earnest but failed effort to prevent a civil war. Though they don't use the term as far as I know, they seem to be fostering something like Allen's notion of political friendship.

Their group is small compared to the size of the problem, but the effort is commendable.

Teachers should follow the example of Better Angels—who later changed their name to Braver Angels to reflect the courage needed to engage in that work—and do whatever they can to depolarize the future electorate, which is now in their hands. 

If they use Allen and The Political Classroom as guides, that would mean getting students to think about who is sacrificing as a result of a given policy, to recognize the difference between legitimate and illegitimate sacrifice and equitable and rivalrous self-interest, to see the connection between rivalrous self-interest and illegitimate sacrifice, and to appreciate the importance of trust among citizens in a healthy democracy. They might also examine how communities honor some sacrifices and ignore others. 

The task is particularly challenging for teachers like me who teach in like-minded schools, where students rarely encounter people with opposing viewpoints and are likely to think of them in abstract terms, as unreasonable, ignorant, or acting in bad faith.

A case study by Hess and McAvoy of Joel Kushner’s classes—at a school where 94 percent of students identify as Democrats—offers some suggestions for how to overcome those challenges. 

Kushner’s curriculum pushes against that attitude by assigning readings that make persuasive arguments on different sides of policy issues and encouraging students to listen and understand (cognitive empathy) before criticizing and rebutting. He plays devil's advocate when necessary, but  thinks its better for students to encounter actual people who disagree with them. To make that happen, he invites guest speakers who hold views uncommon in his school community. For example, he invited an anti-abortion activist to speak to his mostly pro-choice students.

And significant differences often arise even within a group of liberal students.  Kushner shapes "discussion questions so students will naturally disagree" (Hess and McAvoy, 117). When they do, he doesn’t stop emotional exchanges. In a discussion of Affirmative Action, a Black girl defended the policy by bringing in her personal experiences of racism, which in the context of a court case they had studied, seemed to be irrelevant to the question at hand. Rather than steering the conversation away from her emotionally charged comments toward more relevant information in the assigned readings, Kushner let the discussion unfold from there without intervention.

Kushner’s restraint in that case is supported by Allen’s comments on the role of emotion in politics:

It is just as impossible to exclude emotion from politics as to ban interest.... As soon as one begins to take trust and distrust seriously, and to ask how trust can be generated, one realizes that reason, interest, and emotion cannot be disentangled (Allen, 56).

Expression of emotion between citizens humanizes us and is an essential ingredient in the generation of trust. “Sociability, not rationality, produces agreement” Allen writes, and only in emotionally honest conversation do citizens find out “what their fellow citizens are worth to them” (Allen, 96).

Our political “disagreements have as much to do with reciprocity and issues of mutual esteem as with the substantive issue under discussion.” Trust among citizens is fragile and tenuous, given our geographic separation and conflicting interest and values, and so we “must be committed to [trust generation] in perpetuity” (Allen, 97).

The emotion that occurs naturally in political discussions is an aspect of the authenticity that Kushner values in the teaching of politics. It is preferable for students to encounter authentic political viewpoints expressed by those who hold them rather than listening to him play the devil's advocate. The devil's advocate removes the personal from the political. When students encounter real people holding real views, not just intellectual abstractions, it helps them see those people as having moral worth. To be good citizens they need to learn how to talk about differences in ways that preserve relationships and respect. They need practice responding to such others in a way that promotes goodwill, respect, and humility. (Hess and McAvoy, 117, 127).

Humanizing political rivals is important, but so is understanding them—developing "cognitive empathy," as Moira Kelly put it. It helps if you keep an open mind.  Hess and McAvoy say that citizens should always be asking themselves: “could I be wrong?” Humanities teachers put a lot of emphasis on critical reading of documents, and training students to look for hidden meanings and unconscious bias in the thoughts of others. But first we should be teaching them to be aware of their own unconscious drives and hidden biases and to develop "epistemic humility." An effective visual tool is the “cognitive bias codex.” When students read about some of these they should recognize how they are just as prone to faulty thinking as people they disagree with.

Schools would make a significant contribution to saving American democracy if they would produce a new generation of citizens with more cognitive empathy, epistemic humility, an understanding of what citizens owe each other, and a determination to foster trust among their fellow citizens. It’s not an immediate solution, and it may not work as intended, but it would be inexcusable not to make the effort.

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Notes and sources

On polarization, see Yasha Monk, "The Doom Spiral of Pernicious Polarization," The Atlantic, May 21, 2022.  For a right justification of norm-breaking, see Michael Anton, “The Flight 93 Election,” Claremont Review of Books, originally published under the pseudonym, Publius Decius Mus on Sept. 6, 2019; for a Left-justification, Corey Robin, "Democracy is Norm Erosion," Jacobin, Jan. 29, 2018.

For an example of the perception that schools indoctrinate students in progressive or liberal values, see Ethan King, Letter to the Editor, Caledonian Record, Sept. 2, 2021.

FEC data on teachers and others' political contributions is listed in numerous places.  This one shows high school teachers as 95% Democrat in a graph at the top; below it gives the 83% number.

Amanda Ripley, “I stopped reading the news,” Washington Post, July 8, 2022.

Moira Kelly, Executive Director and President of Explo and Associate Producer for the Commission on Presidential Debates spoke about cognitive empathy in her talk, “Promoting Cognitive Empathy in a Polarized Society,” at the AISNE Annual Diversity Conference, Lexington, Mass., Nov. 2016. Kelly argues that citizenship requires cognitive empathy rather than emotional empathy, which can be counter productive. On this negative potential for emotional empathy, see Jodi Clarke, “Cognitive vs. Emotional Empathy” at Verywellmind.com: “When our vicarious emotional arousal becomes too great, it can actually get in the way of us being compassionate and empathizing. Feeling emotionally dysregulated can become overwhelming and result in feeling burned out. Ultimately, this leaves you not wanting to practice empathy because it's too painful to be there for someone else. Our ability to practice emotional empathy becomes a threat to our own well-being when it results in feelings of isolation, being misunderstood, and feeling inauthentic.”  Kelly also argued that the best method for teaching cognitive empathy is the Harkness Method, pioneered at Phillips Exeter Academy.

On “Forebearance,” see Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die, (2018).

The “How to Stop a Civil War,” Atlantic issue was December, 2019. See, esp. Andrew Ferguson, “Can this Marriage be Saved?” 86-90.  See also, the Podcast featuring Danielle Allen discussing the issue. A  Single copy of the December 2019 is available on Amazon.

Braver Angels website. 

Upcoming related posts on this blog (maybe--school year starts soon): How Joel Kushner seeks to foster trust among students in his racially and socioeconomically diverse classroom; My reading notes: the source of “Political Friendship”; You could be wrong; Teaching citizenship vs. teaching social justice.