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- [00:01]
Yasha Monk
Expedia and visit Scotland invite you to
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James Troup
come step into centuries of history that await in Scotland. Castles steeped in legend.
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Yasha Monk
Walk along cobblestone streets.
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James Troup
Come share the warmth of stories passed down through generations. This is a place with a past
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Yasha Monk
that is fully present today and all yours to explore.
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James Troup
Plan your Scottish escape today@expedia.com visitscotland the thing that troubled me more, if I were to make that comparison, was not what they're taught, it's how they're taught. It's pedagogy as opposed to politics.
- [00:42]
Yasha Monk
And now the Good Fight with Yasha Monk. Are American schools doing a good job of educating future citizens? What do they teach about American history? Do progressive schools claim that America is a terrible racist country from the start? Do conservative school districts teach that slavery was a minor footnote in American history? Or is the picture rather more complicated than that? More profoundly, is the important question to ask about the content that students are taught in their few civics lessons, or is it about the quality of instruction they receive? Is it about whether or not schools are actually succeeding and giving them the basic skills to read and reason and argue? Well, for this conversation, I am trying to get to the bottom of these questions by speaking to James Troup. James is a veteran reporter and journalist who writes for New York Times Magazine, and he's the author of a new book called the Crad of Citizenship How Schools Can Help Save Our Democracy. In the last part of this conversation, I ask about whether some of the solutions that James finds, some of the ways in which classical schools, for example, can instill a genuine love of reading and of learning and of reading whole books in students could be rolled out nationwide. Are these going to improve a few schools in some places, or is this an actual path forward around the country? And secondly, we talk about the different performance of boys and girls in school. Richard Reeves, one of my former podcast guests, argues that there are things that schools are doing to make it harder for boys to succeed. James disagrees. We get into his reasons why in the last part of the conversation, which is reserved for paying subscribers. So if you want to have access to to that part of the conversation, if you want to support the work we do here, please go to writing.jaschammonk.com and become a paying subscriber. James Straub, welcome to the podcast.
- [03:05]
James Troup
Well, thank you. Happy to be here.
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Yasha Monk
So your latest book is about how to educate citizens in the United States, a relevant topic today. And a lot of the debates in this area are about what should they be taught. Are they being indoctrinated in woke ideology? Are they being indoctrinated in right wing thought that downplays the evils of slavery and so on? You think that in some ways those very ideological debates are a little bit besides the point.
- [03:33]
James Troup
Yeah, you know, they're the sexy things. Everybody wants to seize on that. You know, the whole right left thing, which is an important part of my book. But if you go to school, which of course the people who are having this fight don't. I spent a year in classrooms and one thing that struck me is the relatively non, the less politicized than I thought character of classrooms. And so you can go to a red state which has very red state standards written into its, into its laws. The teachers aren't thinking about that. They often don't know what's in the standards. And teachers have a strong ethos that says, I don't want to impose my views on the kids. And so though that is an important part of my book, the thing that troubled me more if I were to make that comparison, was not what they're taught, it's how they're taught. It's pedagogy as opposed to politics.
- [04:35]
Yasha Monk
So we'll get back to the politics in a little while. What's wrong with the pedagogy?
- [04:39]
James Troup
Well, so now, so here is so American education, so far as I can tell, is ideological in a way that's not true elsewhere. And what I mean by that is not the right left thing we were just talking about. It's the notion that there is a progressive way to teach and there's a conservative way to teach. And that makes it very hard to have a sane and sober conversation about what's an effective way to teach. And so the classes that I was in, and again, this is a, you know, many history, government, social studies, et cetera, classes over the course of a year in many different places. The thing that troubled me was not the politics, it was how vacuous, how empty, how silent many of these classes were. It's how polite, poor the reading comprehension of many students were. It's how little was assigned to them. It's how few books there were in the schools, in the classrooms. And so there are many reasons for this. But the thing that I focused on and that I think is terribly important is a pedagogy. This is the one that's called the progressive pedagogy that has this idea which you could trace back to John Dewey and other progressives. Though I don't want to make Them quite guilty of this sin, that learning facts, learning information, learning names, dates, places, the things you do in a history class, or for that matter in English class, that's coercive, that's jamming things down children's throats. And a more effective way of teaching is to engage their wish, to ask big questions, to engage in critical inquiry and so forth. And through that they will come to know things. Well, I don't think actually that's how most educated people got educated. Educated people got educated because they learned, they loved to learn, they found a way of learning stuff. And when you learn stuff well, you naturally are launched into the world of critical inquiry and thinking critically and so forth.
- [06:56]
Yasha Monk
Let me play devil's advocate on this because I'm a little bit torn on this, right? I suppose even though I lived in mostly left leaning parts of Germany and was taught largely by students who are part of a kind of generation of 1960s student radicals and so on, that the education I received was by that definition quite conservative. History class was never ending parade of years in battles, you know, learning off by heart, you know, various kings. And I felt that sort of the stakes of this were never made clear to me. And so I was tremendously bored because it just felt like, you know, and I didn't really question it that much at the time. And I still grew up in a kind of old world Europe where in some way sort of the idea of general knowledge about the world was really prized. And I had intellectual aspirations even relatively young. And I felt like, you know, of that is to go learn all of these things. But it just really felt like a road exercise. I mean, why does it matter that Frederick the Great ascended the throne at a certain point and died at a certain point? Well, part of why it matters that he had a certain set of views and personalities and that shaped Prussia. And there's a debate about whether or not something like enlightened monarchy actually existed. And you know, when you explain those stakes, then it becomes relevant when Frederick the Great ascended the throne. If you're just learning, you know, he was an influential king, these were his dates, and then a couple of dates of battles. You just don't start to have a stake in this debate in the first place. Now, of course, on the other hand, I know that you need a certain set of facts and figures in order to be able to actually engage intelligently in a conversation. I've been trying to learn more about China and I'm learning Chinese and I worked my way through a very good history of China. But I had real trouble retaining a lot of the information because I don't have enough context on the Song dynasty to really be able to place things in a scaffolding. And so then I retain less. So I certainly understand why you need some facts as well. But to give a third kind of alternative, I was always struck by the way that history is taught in Britain, where it's always taught through debates. From day one. It is, here's one view of what happened in this period, here's the second view of what happened in that period. And that involves learning dates and facts that are contested, or the interpretation of which is contested. But it's immediately sort of the stakes are made clear because you're thrown into this debate about how to understand a period of history. And so perhaps that's a third possibility. But I have to say that I'm sort of slightly sympathetic to this idea that just throwing names and dates and battles at people is just not gonna get them interested in this stuff.
- [09:38]
James Troup
Well, okay, so two thoughts. One, I'm fascinated that all of your super left wing, 60s German professors were nevertheless still so maybe unconsciously rooted in the pedagogy in which they had grown up, that they repeated it. That's in itself very interesting. But two, yes, there's a reason why there was a progressive revolt against traditional forms of pedagogy. It's because simply rote learning of facts with no larger purpose in view is boring and is pointless. And if you can go back, I mean, I, for the purpose of this book, read the. The first times that American education, public education, became a matter of debate was the 1890s or so. And in the. The debate over what should we be teaching American students in history? Woodrow Wilson was one of the members of the panel. The great historian Frederick Jackson Turner was a consultant. You would have thought they would have said students must learn more history. No, what they said is history must be presented in a way that makes it meaningful to students. Now, for them, the idea that that meant that you must not learn an important body of information. No, of course not. Of course not. That body of information has to matter because you need to have teachers who are, and this was the language they would use, fired with enthusiasm for the subject. Now, the classes that I was in, in the course of this year, where I felt that, where I felt that the learning of a lot of stuff was always directed towards inquiry were the Advanced Placement classes or the International Baccalaureate classes. And it made me think, can it really be that only 10% of the kids or whatever the number was in the school are able to do the kind of work where real substantive learning leads to thoughtful conversation. And the best schools that I was in which we can talk about were schools where I found that to be much more widespread that it was simply taken for granted that if you're in 11th grade you you are able to think important thoughts. I mean, I'll give you one last example. I was in a class for an article I'm writing for the New York Times the week before last and I sat in a class of 9th graders. These are 14 year old, 15 year old kids who are having such a thoughtful conversation about the aeneid. The aeneid. Ninth graders in America do not read the aeneid. They don't read whole books. They don't. But these kids were having a deeply searching conversation about it. So the two are not in necessary tension. That's what good teaching is.
- [12:40]
Yasha Monk
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James Troup
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Yasha Monk
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James Troup
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Yasha Monk
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James Troup
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Yasha Monk
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James Troup
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Yasha Monk
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James Troup
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Yasha Monk
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James Troup
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- [13:36]
Yasha Monk
Visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-844botox to learn more. So let's take a step back here, right? One thing that I was always struck by coming from Germany is just the huge range of quality in American public schools in particular. You know, Europeans often have this image that American schools are all quite bad and so on. I didn't find that to be true at all. I mean, I never went to an American high school, but based on what, you know, friends and so on told me about their Schooling over the years. I feel like I have a relatively good sense of it. And you know, when you look at the most failing schools in the country, you have, you know, a vast majority of students graduating, barely literate, barely numerate, you know, a complete disaster. And then when I hear about some of the schools that my friends went to in the suburbs of major metropolitan areas, which are public schools, but in fancy neighborhoods, you know, one friend of mine was in a rocket club where they have to call up NASA before launching some of the rockets because they've got to go up that high, right? I'd never heard of anything like that in Germany.
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James Troup
I went to one of those schools myself. I was, I went to a school full of, you know, neurotic, highly literate Jewish kids like me. A public school. And it was great because it was a, you know, it was a well to do suburb. We had great teachers, there was a huge emphasis on learning. So yes, that's all true.
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Yasha Monk
But so, so, so just, just a question, like the schools you're going to, right? Just just to get a kind of level reading here, you're not seeking out, are you seeking out the worst and the best schools to contrast? Are you trying to look for average schools? You know, what kind of schools should we be imagining when you are talking about your, your experience reporting on Vlastia?
- [15:10]
James Troup
Here's a good example. So the first chapter in my book, I talk about schools in a suburb of Chicago, a big, huge, huge suburban area, largely middle class, highly diverse, you know, but so the first school I was in was the kind of school where almost everybody was going to go to college. Probably many of the parents went to college. They had great facilities, the school was clean, it was nice. You know, it was, it was majority white, second group Asian. You know, so these were relatively high achieving students. And yet, and yet, you know, when I was in a class of 10th and 11th graders and they were reading the Declaration of Independence, it was very hard for a lot of them. They simply didn't have either. I don't think it was vocabulary in that sense. I suspect what defeated them more was unfamiliar syntax. And so their reading ability, broadly understood, not just, I can say the, I can know the words, was surprisingly poor. And what it meant is that those kids could not have had the conversation like the one I heard among the ninth graders about the aeneid. They were not academically prepared to do it. And so when you have this big fight about should they be learning a left wing or a right wing version of American history, you have to say no before you get there. They have to have the ability to think their way through a difficult text.
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Yasha Monk
And so why is it that these ninth graders were able to have a searching conversation about being neared, but these older kids at this other school, which is not a failing school, right? Which is a pretty good school, probably an above average school.
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James Troup
Yeah, it was.
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Yasha Monk
So what's the difference? What explains the difference between these two schools?
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James Troup
So the kind of, the good story in my book involves what are called classical schools. Now, this is not a word I had ever heard before I set out to write this book. And it's a kind of school that would be unfamiliar, I'm sure, to many of your listeners in part because they are seen as conservative. This word classical probably doesn't help. They're much more in red states than blue. But it's one of the most rapidly growing forms of schooling in the country. And classical schools are schools. And these are public schools, by the way. They're public schools, they're charter schools, which allows them to do a different thing if they want, but they're public schools.
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Yasha Monk
And part of what you mean by public schools in this context is that they're not fee paying. So there's not an extra financial burden for kids to attend these schools?
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James Troup
Well, no, I would say, I mean, two things. One, they're free. Two, they have to take everybody who applies. They're not selective. So that's very important because if they were selective, that would tell you. Well, of course they're taking these especially talented kids. No, only selective in the sense that the parents choose to seek to have their kids get in. So these schools are self consciously traditional or back looking in their pedagogy. And so they have the kind of pedagogy I was talking about, this kind of belief in vocabulary, learning stories, reading books, reading books, reading books. Now you may think reading books, that's what you do in school. No, the book is a rare thing in American public schools. Kids are not asked to read a book ever because it's too taxing for their now very short attention spans. Okay. These schools assume you're a kid, you can read a book, you like to read a book, you want to read a book. And so by fifth or sixth grade, kids are reading, you know, great real novels, the Count of Monte Cristo, and they're talking about them. So these kids, they learn Latin from an early age, they learn the classics, they read the Iliad and the Odyssey and so forth. First little kid versions and then grown up versions when they're older, these schools tend to have a lot of rules. Kids wear uniforms. They're schools that a lot of parents probably wouldn't like. They would say it's too strict. And one of the things I say in my book is, okay, fine, let's think about what general principles we can learn from these schools, even if you don't like them. And one of the principles is kids can do a lot more if from an early age you start them in with these higher expectations and more rigorous forms of learning. And so I went to another school like that with only Hispanic kids, many of them from impoverished backgrounds. Well, okay, they weren't as good, their conversations weren't as searching, but they were reading Crime and punishment in 10th grade, which is pretty darn good if it's your second language and you know, you didn't grow up with, in an educated background.
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Yasha Monk
And so do you think that this is something that could be rolled out and it's really just a question of, you know, the wrong approach having gained too much ground in a lot of public schools, or do you think that there is a selection effect? Right. I mean, you're saying rightly that these schools have to admit everybody. But of course, one of the big indicators of success in life in general is how educated your parents are. I mean, if you have educated parents, you have to flee your country penniless, you come to a new country, your parents don't have any social capital in that place. They don't speak the language of a new country particularly well. They don't have any connections. Statistically, the kids of those parents are going to do very, very well. Right. So the self selection by the parents may still play a crucial role here. But I also believe that the difference in pedagogical approach is going to be really important. So how much do you think the education of our kids would improve if a lot more schools adopted either this straightforwardly classical curriculum or a modern version of it? Right. It doesn't have to be learning Latin and reading via neat. It can be reading the great novels in the English language and reading great contemporary novels.
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James Troup
Yeah. So my kind of little dream is to rename these schools, to rename this form of education liberal education, which is what it would have been called in the Renaissance. And if you took that word away, maybe you could have more of these schools in the blue world. I mean, and if you had them in the blue world, they would have different ideas about the way you want to shape a young person. And so that would be good. Now, as for your first question. There are no studies of this thing yet. And so there are studies of. There's something called core knowledge. I don't know if you're familiar with that. Ed Hirsch, who was this, a great literary scholar at University of Virginia, created the pedagogy of which assumes that you need to have high familiarity with a lot of words and expressions in order to read your way through a text. And so it's a focus in curriculum in almost all the major subjects on learning particular things as a means towards becoming a more thoughtful and critical actor. There are a lot of studies of that that shows that it works. So if you were to say, what can be generalized from these schools? Well, that's one. That pedagogy can be generalized to me, that's the big thing. So the people who say, you know, my daughter is not going to be happy in such a strict school. She's a free spirit. Right? You shouldn't go there. But there's nothing. This is where I get so troubled by the kind of politics of this. There is nothing conservative about learning in the core knowledge way. There is nothing liberal. To me, as speaking as a liberal, a left liberal, not an old fashioned 19th century liberal. There's nothing liberal about the other thing that calls itself progressive learning, though it has a liberal pedigree. And so, and I believe, by the way, when I talk to people, I get the strong sense that the world is full of people. America's full of people whose politics are liberal but whose kind of intuitive pedagogy is traditional like me.
- [23:37]
Yasha Monk
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James Troup
didn't have other job opportunities. Right.
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Yasha Monk
Didn't have other job opportunities or there was an expectation that they would do that job for a number of years and then get married and stop being in the workforce. So it was obviously for bad reasons. Right. Those bad background conditions have produced that. But it was a great thing for the school students of that age because you were taught by very, very smart people. My understanding is that today the average student, the average teacher or the median teacher graduated in the bottom half of a high school class.
- [26:15]
James Troup
That's. That's probably. I don't know that, but that's almost certainly right.
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Yasha Monk
So if that's the case, I mean, how can you get teachers who were not among the best and the brightest when they were in school? Inspiring, you know, many students who, you know, even though they may not be getting a great education, even though they may not know very much at 15 or 16, are in some way smarter than them. That is a hard setup.
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James Troup
That's true. You're right. Listen, if I were king, this is what I would do. I would increase teacher salaries. Now, of course, these things are set locally, so even the king couldn't do it. You would increase teacher salaries by a lot. Who knows what number? 50%? I don't know. Then you not only would have a better pool to select from, but you could make different demands from the ones you make now. So the. The schools that I was so admiring, they rarely Take teachers whose graduate degree is in education. They take teachers whose graduate degree is in a subject matter. And so the school that I write about the most, which was a school in a middle class, working class suburb outside of Dallas called Louisville, the principal there said to me, he said, I can help a teacher who doesn't have the pedagogical background be a better teacher. I cannot take a teacher who doesn't have the love for his or her subject and infuse that. And so he only hired teachers who had a master's degree in a subject. Now, most of the other schools I went to, almost all the teachers except the best teachers had an education degree and not a subject matter degree. And so now my book is not about teaching, about teachers, colleges. So I don't hold myself out as an authority on the subject. But that was the overwhelming impression I got that if a teacher doesn't have that isn't fired with enthusiasm to go back to that 1890s language for the subject matter, then it's very hard to fire the students with enthusiasm. But the only way to get teachers who are fired with enthusiasm is to get people were intellectually alive and those people need to get paid better to go into teaching. So that's what I would do if I were king.
- [28:48]
Yasha Monk
Let me play devil's advocate. This is perhaps my least popular position ever. And I'm going to get lots of emails about this. So when you look at the OECD studies of teacher pay, the United States is well above the average of the oecd, well above the average of developed countries. Now, part of that is that the United States at this point is rather richer than a number of other OECD countries.
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James Troup
Oh yeah? How about compared to other professions in those countries?
- [29:13]
Yasha Monk
Well, so here's the problem. The way in which the United States stands out is not that teachers make comparatively low pay. I still think, having lived in the United States and having lived in Europe, that the average American teacher has a better standard of life than most teachers in other countries. The problem is that lawyers and doctors in the United States earn so much more money than the peers in other countries that the economic gap between those is just very difficult to bridge, you know, but. But I don't know that the way to solve that is to get a teacher to earn 75% of what a doctor pays earns or 50% of what a doctor earns when the doctor's pay is already so high that it's basically unsustainable for patients to seek medical care. Right.
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James Troup
Well, then, yeah, the clear solution is to pay lawyers and doctors less.
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Yasha Monk
Well, how are you going to do that?
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James Troup
I don't know. I don't know.
- [30:08]
Yasha Monk
The other thing, just to talk about teachers pay is that, you know, when you look at the LA school district, for example, you know, actually teachers earn a lot of money. One of the problems is the structure of it, where in the first few years you earn not very much, and then as soon as you get a certain kind of tenure, you actually make a ton of money. And so part of this is the teachers unions, which structure pay in such a way that senior members of a profession live very, very well for years with extreme job protections. But you're not enticing younger people who are talented to go into those professions. So, you know, how do you solve some of those structural issues?
- [30:46]
James Troup
I think you're exaggerating. I think you're exaggerating the. What's the word? I want the steepness of that curve because I think if. Because I know the way salary structures in the teaching profession tend to look. And what happens is there's a steady stepwise thing, and then you get a bigger step. If you have gotten another diploma or you do this or do that, and then the step gets bigger, it's not as radical as that. So I don't think you have a whole lot of teachers who are earning, you know, $160,000. I think that's quite rare. But when your starting salary is, you know, 48 or something, you know, that's tough. Now, interestingly, at these classical schools, charter schools pay teachers less for reasons that have to do with how they're compensated by the state. By the state, they pay the teachers less. How do they get decent teachers? You know, and the answer in some of these schools, not. Not all of them, some of them, I think, had kind of normal teachers. And nevertheless, the kids were still doing. But the best one that I went to, when I talked to the teachers, why are you here? And they would say, because I get to teach beautiful things. I get to have elevated conversations. I get to talk about great books with the kids. Now, I admit there's a limited number of people who will do that. That takes real dedication. But it does tell you that the atmosphere of the school matters a lot in terms of the kinds of teachers they're going to attract.
- [32:29]
Yasha Monk
Let me push back on that a little bit. Right. Because I do think it's important to get into understanding the incentives here. So the first thing you said is all of the bad teachers, not all the bad teachers, but A lot of the teachers you were disappointed with had gone to teachers colleges. And I do think it's interesting to talk about exactly what teachers colleges teach and how they shape education. And from my understanding, these are extremely ideological places, not just in the content they convey, but also in what they teach. About the right approaches to pedagogy. We're talking sort of a little bit about kids that are older than the kids who are just starting to learn to read. But the fact that for a long time a lot of American school kids weren't even taught how letters work, how letters correspond to particular sounds, and how that allows you to form a word, which it took me years of ambient awareness of this debate to understand what was even at issue because it just seemed so incomprehensible to me. But you wouldn't learn that.
- [33:26]
James Troup
But by the way, that is, that's the most notorious aspect of this broad thing I'm calling progressive pedagogy. Because the premise behind what's called whole language is that children acquire reading ability naturally. If you place them in an immersive bath of language, well, that's wrong. You don't acquire reading the same way you acquire talking. But that was based on a kind of ideological predisposition, a kind of Rousseauian view of the child. It's very hard to break that view.
- [33:58]
Yasha Monk
Some follow the noise.
- [34:00]
James Troup
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Yasha Monk
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James Troup
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- [34:10]
Yasha Monk
Subscribe now@bloomberg.com so we agreed on that, you know, just to go back to this thing about teachers because I think it is helpful to have a kind of sense of it, right? So a new teacher for a regular credential in Los Angeles, typical starting salary is about $69,000, which is not a ton of money. But for a young person, presumably most of these people are in their 20s. That is about average household income in the United States. So you start off as an individual at the average of the U.S. household. If you're a couple and you're both teachers, you start off at double typical household income in the United States. Now you live in a high expense area. Los Angeles is an expensive place and that's important to acknowledge, but that is hardly catastrophic. Right. By the time that you've taught for about 10 years, a typical kind of veteran teacher, you can expect to make around US$110,000. So you know, on your own, you're making about twice U.S. household income again. If you were a couple where both people are teachers, you make about four times average U.S. household income. It's just not clear to me that the solution is that teachers should be making, you know, 12 times household income rather than they're a couple, four times household income. That. That doesn't seem to me to be the crux of a problem.
- [35:29]
James Troup
Well, let's ask ourselves, I mean, you may be right, it's a fair point. But let's ask ourselves a question. As a society, do we feel that teachers or lawyers play a more fundamental role in shaping good collective outcomes? And so obviously these are things that are market driven. But what I'm saying is, if we do feel like we have this educational crisis, and my general view is most spending in the schools doesn't produce any different outcome at all, like fancier schools or swimming pools or even smaller classes, they don't make much of a difference. And so the only place where I would be in favor of money is some agreed transaction between paying more and demanding more. Now, your point, I believe, is we're already paying enough to make bigger demands than we're currently making. That may be true. All I would say is it ain't working now. And so I'd be in favor of trying to find some other way of making it work better. All that said, it's not going to happen. These are local decisions.
- [36:42]
Yasha Monk
Well, let me make myself even more unpopular. I've made myself unpopular with one segment of my listeners so far. Let me make myself unpopular with two other segments of my listeners. Right. If a problem isn't either that, you know, as an individual on 110,000, you can't have a decent life in LA, or as a couple with 220,000, you can't have decent life in LA, which I don't think is the problem. But a lot of the problems are relative prestige, right. That, you know, a young person in Germany who thinks, I'd like to become a teacher, but I'm a little bit worried that some of my classmates who are choosing to become doctors or lawyers are going to have a higher social status and more money than me, but, you know, the gap isn't that high, so I'm going to pursue my love of teaching. Whereas in the United States, that same kid who's, you know, at a good college, who's excited about going into teach, might in the end decide, you know what, I don't want to be in such a different earnings category than my friends. I don't want to have such a different level of social they always going to feel sorry for me. I'm not going to be able to know if I can go out for dinner with them. Perhaps I'll go and apply for that job in consulting or tech or investment banking instead, which I'm sure happens a lot. I know kids like that.
- [37:51]
James Troup
Except that you can go to Teach for America. The one prestigious thing you can do is you can spend two years as an enrollee in one of these programs like Teach for America. And then you would say, how do we keep those people? How do we make them feel like this should be a lifetime vocation? Sure.
- [38:07]
Yasha Monk
And that's one part. But to me, part of the answer is we can't have the taxpayer try to compete with the salaries that currently are paid to doctors and lawyers because they're completely disproportionate. And of course, it's largely a market system. So the best paid doctors and lawyers are always going to earn more. And there's nothing we can do about that in a free society. But there is one thing we can do, which is to bring down the salaries of lawyers and particularly doctors. And the way to do that is that they are kept artificially high by licensing, particularly in the case of doctors. It's the American Medical association that refuses to look at evidence in many areas, but particularly they refuse to give credentials to new medical schools, which would lead to many more doctors being trained. America has one of the lowest rates of doctors per capita in the developed world. And that is one of the reasons why the salaries of doctors are so high. So rather than saying, you know, let's take, you know, the kind of, in this sense, politically more left leaning solution of increasing teacher pay, perhaps what we should do is to push against some of those artificial regulations that create that disproportion in the first place.
- [39:24]
James Troup
Okay. I don't know how that's going to work with lawyers because the lawyer thing is really driven by their clients. And so. And law firms, as we know, are, you know, always seeking corporate clients because that's where the money lies. So may not work so well. In that case you can have more law schools. And I don't think that's going to have an effect. But in any case, we are now talking about what I sort of offered as an idle fantasy. So I don't actually, you know, I, I don't have an overwhelming belief in my own idle fantasy. I just. It was an idol fantasy.
- [39:56]
Yasha Monk
No, of course. What is the role of teachers unions in this? I had Randy Weingarten on the podcast for an interesting and at times somewhat contentious conversation a few months ago. To what extent do you think, do these classical schools that you admire have less influence from teachers unions? Or perhaps their teachers aren't generally part of unions?
- [40:16]
James Troup
Yeah, probably they're not because they're red states. But I don't know that for a fact because, you know, municipal teachers unions are pretty widespread. So I don't know the answer. You know, individual schools can choose to have a union or not. Now, having said that, I was on the board of a charter school in New York City for many years, and the teachers, this was, I think, our fault. The teachers were unhappy. They said, we need the protection of a union. They joined a union. We thought, oh, this is going to be the end of the school. Didn't make that much of a difference. And so if you asked me, do I think the world would be better with or without teachers unions? It's a hard question because I think there are positives and negatives on both of those things. I do think teachers unions, for example, charter schools, which I don't think are the answer to everything, but they're good. Teachers unions view that as competition. Bad. Charter schools, bad. Well, that's the worst aspect of unionization, the kind of closed shop thing where you're not thinking about what's good for the kids, you're thinking about what's good for, you know, you as a professional, that's bad. You know, on the other hand, raising salary is good. I don't know. I mean, if you said to me there should not be public sector unions, which is an interesting claim that I know from people who on the right who believe in unionization, but not public sector unionization, I might say, yeah, maybe in the ideal world you're right. There should be more unionization in the private sector and less in the public sector.
- [41:52]
Yasha Monk
That's an interesting way of putting it. I want to make sure that we circle back a little bit to the content. What did you see? People being taught about America. So the cliche is that in progressive schools, they're taught that America is bad and evil and so on, and in conservative schools, they're taught that that slavery never happened. And I'm sure that the reality is much more subtle on both of those counts. You know, having said that, I happen to have had a conversation with some of my undergrads about this recently, and you certainly saw a big range in what they were taught depending on where they were. You know, there were people who were taught in probably mostly blue suburbs of cities in Texas. For example, who I think had had a kind of red V. Middle down the road education. People in somewhat more conservative leaning parts of Kansas, for example, who had a rather middle down the road education, I think. But certainly the kids who had gone to schools in the suburbs of New York, of la, of San Francisco, did report two things. The first, that they had, you know, a very identity focused education. To put it as neutrally as I can. Some of these kids agreed with that education. They were shaped by it. Some of them had sort of rebelled against it in various ways, but they agreed that that had really been the prevailing focus of everything in any kind of social science related subject that they studied in school. And then the second, a good number of them reported that some of their teachers were highly ideological in a way where it was clear you had to agree with them to get a good grade. And that's the thing that really troubled me. I think it's fine for teachers to betray in some ways their worldviews. I try in the classroom to make sure that I always play devil's advocate and I always present the strongest version of different views. But I'm also a public figure. My students can easily figure out what my views are and I don't hide them in the classroom. But it is really important to me to empower each student to make very clear to them. You know, one way I'm putting this is when I give advice on how to write an essay, if I already agree with your thesis, I want to make sure that it's the best version of that thesis, that I feel like that point of view is represented a lot of the time. I'm not going to agree with your thesis at the beginning, I'm not going to agree with it at the end. Right. What I'm going to judge the essay on is whether it moves me towards your position a little bit. Right. Do I think at the end of reading this essay, oh, you know what, there's some arguments here that I should grapple with even if perhaps I'm unlikely to change my mind on the subject of an essay. And I'd much rather that you write, put forward a thesis that I disagree with smartly and in a logical, coherent way than that you echo back something to me that you think I might believe. That's not going to go very well. And I have to say, the students, again, none of them were particularly exercised by what they had been taught one way or the other. But you could see the kind of seething anger in the students who had felt that teachers were Highly ideological in a way where you knew you could write really badly and get an A if you reflected back to the teacher what they believed. And you knew that no matter how well you wrote, you would be in trouble if you wrote something else. And sometimes these were students said, look, Raji, I agreed with my teacher. I didn't have a problem with the substance of their views, but they did really chafe against that. How did you experience in the classroom both what the students were taught and whether teachers sort of empowered students to argue with them, to disagree with them, to put forward their own point of view, to actually develop their own viewpoint about the world, or whether they, I would say, abused the power in the classroom.
- [45:27]
James Troup
So I would say in general, I found classrooms less ideological than people think they are. And in regard to what you just, just said, I mean, I remember a conversation I had with a teacher who said, he said, when I, he said, talking about himself was a high school student. He said, I remember. No, he was a college student. He said, I remember writing a essay about whatever George Bush called the Surveillance act that was passed in 2002 after 9, 11. And he said, he defended it and his teacher gave him a D or something just because the teacher was liberal and thought this was a bad thing and you shouldn't be defending a bad thing. And he said, that stuck with me and I will never do that to a student. Students don't know what my beliefs are. My goal is to help them arrive at their own views. And I found that to be the default position of teachers. Now when I read a lot of the kind of conservative critique of the schools, I thought, I need to know, is it really true that there are these whole parts of the country that really are schools, are really ideological? So I went to some schools in Minneapolis, as it happened by accident. The high school I went to was in the catchment area of George Floyd, so profoundly affected by that, but already the principal, who was a person who in many ways I admired and was an ambitious, active, restless person, but deeply committed to the notion, to the anti racist notion that all of us white people harbor innumerable unconscious racist impulses. And one of the purposes of education is to bring them out into the open. And that was relentlessly part of the educational program. And I said to her, I said, do you really want to create a situation where a student who doesn't hold that view is told that that's probably a sign that he or she is racist? And her response was, oh, what are you saying? There's no such thing as structural racism. So yes, that exists. And I have a whole chapter about that in the book. And I was very troubled by it and so were many teachers in the school. And one of the fascinating things I saw was a meeting of this principal with her kind of council of teachers where she was saying to them, we have to make sure that we are not punishing our students of color by giving them bad grades. We should have the same fraction of good grades and bad grades to white students and students of color.
- [48:09]
Yasha Monk
But that is a remarkable demand. I mean, that is a demand to not grade people on the basis of individuality. The fact that a principal of a school is demanding this should be a national scandal.
- [48:21]
James Troup
Well, okay, there are national scandals and national scandals, but I. They thought the importance.
- [48:26]
Yasha Monk
I think the fact that students on the base of a race are not going to be able to get the same grade in a public school is a national scandal.
- [48:34]
James Troup
I think it's a terrible misfortune. Okay, I don't know if it's a national scandal. But anyway, the teachers pushed back and said, listen, the white kids who go to this school come from a middle class background. The children of color who come to this school come from a pretty impoverished background. They don't have the same academic background. They're not going to get the same number. They're not going to do as well. And she kind of backed off a little bit. That was interesting. So at least it was a matter of debate and discussion. But it is true that she had these strong priors that made her insist on things that I thought were just wrong. And that showed me that, you know, the right wing critique is not totally off base.
- [49:22]
Yasha Monk
Interesting. But your impression was that this is kind of like a subset of schools that are like that, or how would you relate that?
- [49:28]
James Troup
No, I didn't. Look, I didn't go to that many of the kinds of the students you're talking about from, you know, well, to do very progressive suburban areas. That's probably true. Then again, I went to. Here's a counterexample. So I went to a school in New York City, in Long Island City. And it was like the school you'd see in a TV show. Cause kids were of every color, race, ethnicity, everything. And there was no. I never heard a word about identity. It was really interesting. It was a school where it was called the Academy of American Studies. And the premise of the school was, we're going to teach you much more about American history, government, economics, et cetera, than you would get in a normal school. But it wasn't, interestingly, the kind of well to do, progressive, largely white school that maybe your students went to because the kids who went there were working class immigrant kids. And so even though they live in this very progressive culture of New York City, maybe they were less inclined to think in identitarian terms than left wing white kids. And so it wasn't like that at all. I didn't encounter that stuff nearly the way I did in Minneapolis.
- [50:47]
Yasha Monk
Interesting. Yeah. I mean for the record, the students that I talked about were mostly non white themselves and my impression is that they probably went to schools that were predominantly Asian, white, high achieving Latinos, et cetera. But you know, probably quite multi ethnic, quite multicultural parts of a country, but probably quite affluent districts. So that is an interesting point of background there. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Good Fight. In the rest of this conversation we talk about solutions. Can some of the positive models that James found in his reporting be rolled out and applied nationwide? If not, how can we actually make a difference to most school students? And I press him a little bit on the subject that people like Richard Reeves have warned about. Why is it that only 42% of students at American colleges now are male? Why is it that so many boys in particular seem to be struggling to pick up the basic skills that will serve him well in life? Are there reforms to schools that we should undertake to boost the performance of those boys? And why does he think that that is a dangerous line of inquiry to listen to that part of the conversation? To support the podcast, please become a paying subscriber. Go to writing.yashamunk.com Listen if you are paying subscriber and you're getting this message, you are listening to the wrong feedback. You can go to writing.yashamunk.com listen click on set up podcast and make sure that you get a little icon called premium feed on the top left of the icon so that you are listening to the ad free version with a full interviews and without these annoying messages. Writing. Monk.com Listen,
- [53:01]
James Troup
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