School’s Out

Chris Stirewalt is back in the driver’s seat on today’s Remnant in place of Jonah. ...

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Chris Stirewalt is back in the driver’s seat on today’s Remnant in place of Jonah. This time, his guest is Robert Pondiscio, a newly minted fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and expert on education policy. Together, they explore how various deficiencies in American schooling can be overcome. Can patriotic civics and history be taught without indoctrinating pupils? How significant of a threat is critical race theory? And will discussing their own high school experiences force Chris and Robert to confront painful repressed memories?

Show Notes:

– Robert’s page at AEI

– The National Assessment of Educational Progress

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  1. DocHeartless

    Ugh, Chris, this is the second or third screed I've written on CRT and teaching from my perspective, but I always seem to get around to it a week after the podcast or article comes out. It seems to be a perspective that I don't see much of, but I really do have the sense that there's some truth here. I hope you look up these old comments -- keep on, keeping on, brother! You are a fabulous addition to the pirate skiff and I'm so happy you've upgraded from your previous employment.

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  2. DocHeartless

    This was a fabulous podcast, and Chris did one of the best jobs I've seen from him. This was an excellent job of balancing commentary with letting the guest really go after it -- great!

    But there are so many points of enormous frustration for me personally here. This has everything to do with my background, I am sure. I've been teaching history at the college and high school level for about 25 years now and it drives me bonkers hearing about this latest furor over "teaching the correct thing" in schools.

    Now, don't get me wrong. I am as frustrated with anyone with the extreme anecdotes, whether they be some social justice warrior preaching white guilt all day long, or some yee-haw white washer fanatic. But the concern over this issue astounds me because everyone dramatically overestimates the impact a history class has on a student.

    First of all, if you want a shocking experience (and quite a humbling one for teachers) do a little research on Ebbinghaus' "forgetting curve," a concept addressing how much humans remember from raw data measured as a function over time. Spoiler alert: painfully little. Any teacher in a history class knows that if they give a pop quiz in the spring on material that her students aced for the winter exams, they will fail that pop quiz. Students just do not retain that sort of factual data when it has no recurring relevance.

    Now, I can hear the gears in Chris' head turning and thinking how ridiculous and nihilistic that sounds. I'm sure he remembers many things from his middle school and high school history classes. But that is the error inherent in so many pundits and commentators' perspectives. They unconsciously assume that their own knowledge of history, their love of politics, their desire to endlessly debate minutia of policy, was somehow instilled in them by some one. Surely it came from a history class? Surely if we can just find the magic sauce of that one special class and make all classes like it, it'll solve our problems.

    I say with enormous confidence that such assumptions are wrongheaded. First of all, Chris became Chris because of an enormous variety of factors, the largest of which are his own mental capabilities, his family, his friend networks, and his presence in the particular zeitgeist of his time. Barring some clearly inappropriate brainwashing from a young age that, if we're honest, is happening rarely if at all, the impact of class curriculum in one or two classes have on the castle of his life is going to be the pea shooter amidst the artillery's barrage.

    Imagine that we ran an experiment in which we randomly picked out students from Chris' history classes and the students from the local public school classes. Then we controlled for important factors like home life, pre-existing political beliefs, religious affiliation, wealth, etc... Would we find that, in fact, there were classes that radically changed students' perspectives? Or would we find that the substantial majority of classes didn't have that much impact at all? I'll bet you dollars to donuts on door #2.

    Yes, of course, this isn't true all the time. Some students lives are indeed impacted deeply from the perspective in a class. But that's the way anecdotes always work, about anything! They don't represent the vast majority of experiences in history classes around this country. Take the conversation starting around 26:00 when Chris and Robert are talking about the general norm of perspective in the history class, how much of it is white washed or not. Robert concludes that he'd like to visit one of these classes that don't teach Jim Crow, but he doubts they exist. I would say that the flip side is also true. Show me one of these classrooms that do nothing but preach social justice all day long. If we look long enough, I suspect that we could absolutely find history classrooms somewhere that are peddling white guilt nonsense, and we could find white-washed team 'merica classrooms. But my point is that these are the exceptions from the rule. And the rule isn't wonderful engaging classrooms with insightful topics and debates, the rule is horrifically boring watered-down nothing-ball classes taught, as mine was in high school, by the offensive line football coach.

    Now, I agree that education is a liberal bastion, especially higher education, and that is a huge issue to which we should turn as a culture, immeasurably more important and impactful than the kerfuffle over CRT in middle schools. But we are treating this critical theory issue as a problem that has a manageable solution (changing curriculum) when I would argue forcefully that it is a displaced frustration of our national politics. We are like a family in a Kansas basement with a tornado and a rain storm outside, and as our house is being ripped to shreds a drop of water falls on our face and we think, "wow, I've really gotta find and fix that leak or it's going to ruin my resale value."

    I have been going to school board meetings and listening to the debates, and I strongly disagree with Robert that this has much to celebrate at all. I have seen high school students breaking down crying at the injustices taking place in their public school in Iowa. Some teacher let slip that they may have some liberal beliefs and now these students' world is about to be ruined. In their minds the teacher is now incapable of grading them fairly, so they have to mimic the same liberal thoughts. They will have to betray their own values, lie to themselves and their peers, and deal with the psychological damage that comes from not living their truth (all arguments I heard in person from students and parents). All this just to get the essential A in a class that will make or break their admission to Brown and, thus, their future life worth. No discussion as to whether or not those goals and perspectives are healthy or important. No discussion concerning the evidence that the teacher was prejudicing against students as she was accused (hint: no evidence as far as I could tell). No awareness over the bigotry of assuming liberals are incapable of treating their students fairly. It was so depressing.

    Is all of this furor over CRT going to improve of politics, our culture, or our students' lives? I say absolutely not. The most likely effects are that it will inflame the passions yet more, lead to further snowflakery and belief that "ideas are violence," and convince yet more teachers to jettison the most interesting and heated parts of their curriculum in favor of boring rote memorization. Well done, us.

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    Angie

    This was good, I really enjoyed it, and always a pleasure to hear your voice Chris...

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    Ben Connelly

    When I was in school (more recently than the host and guest), my peers (and even some teachers and parents) used to complain all the time about how unimportant history class was, “We’ll never need to know this etc. etc.” This actually seems a prevailing attitude among my generation (Millennial) and the one behind me. Sad. But it’s a factor. If children don’t want to learn, they’ll tune it out. I actually got a fairly rigorous history education by the standards of the rest of the country according to this podcast. Mostly I lucked out in getting good teachers. Occasionally I didn’t - had a world history class where a teacher just copied text from Wikipedia and read it to us each day and another where I could guess the content of the next slide before it appeared.

    We did not learn that the South was right in the Civil War (perhaps some of my peers would have been more keen if we had) but we did learn that it “wasn’t about slavery - it was about states rights.” At the same time: we learned all the bad stuff about slavery, racism, Jim Crow, Trail of Tears, Chinese exclusion, Japanese Internment, etc. So it sure wasn’t a whitewashing of history. If anything I thought some of my teachers Blamed America First (and probably told them as much).

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  5. Frederick F

    Good podcast. I was unfamiliar with the ED Hirsch theory but I like it. It fits well with my tangential, Wittgenstein-influenced approach to pedagogy! I am a big supporter of going down rabbit holes when teaching and that theory helps explain the value

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    J. Eric

    Great podcast! Chris is clearly an asset to TD team. Thanks

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  7. N Heg

    Interesting listen. I think Robert Pondiscio hits on some important issues around civic education and paints others in too broad of a brush. Civic education is neglected at the elementary level. His statistics cited 8th grade knowledge. Civics in K-8 is unfortunately often a once a week topic, but I am not sure there is a high school in the country that does not require its students to take American History and American Government course.

    The technical definition of CRT gets a lot of attention, but the definition of CRT that I am seeing in political advertisements seems to me more about patriotic education. My understanding of all the CRT talk is about the difference between teaching patriotic education and the anti-racism type ideology mentioned by Chris. Hard history has to be taught and wrestled with, and it's not indoctrination. I disagree with the anti-racism and white privilege view, but the Uber-patriotic vision pushed by others does not seem to me to include the hard history that is an essential part of civic education.

    I've long hoped the Republican Party would develop a deeper education platform than simply school choice, and civic education would be a great branch of that platform. Everyone agrees we need more civic education, this feels like a layup issue for either party. Instead we get this CRT nonsense where people around the country are attacking civics education and history teachers and injecting the culture wars into our kids schooldays.

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    Justin Perry-Naw Dawg Doctrine

    Felt like I was listening to a lecture by Wittgenstein post-Philosophical Investigations.

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    1. Frederick F

      Isn’t that just dead Wittgenstein?

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      1. Frederick F

        (big fan of the PI, tho)

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    CynthiaW

    I think Mr. Stirewalt is a vocal "reflector" rather than just someone who sounds like Jonah Goldberg. As a podcast progresses, Mr. Stirewalt sounds more like the person to whom he's talking.

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  10. Mike Wells

    Mr. Pondiscio knows a lot about critical race theory. If one is to judge by this interview, Mr. Stirewalt knows nothing about it. He should read William Galston's columns in the Wall Street Journal the past couple of weeks. CRT is not something one meets halfway; it is something one just has to fight.

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