James Traub on Why American Classrooms Are Failing Democracy
Listen to the original audio · Transcribed with NVIDIA Parakeet · Why times can differ in your player
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 it's pedagogy as opposed to politics. 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 is the author of a new book called The Cradle of Citizenship: How Schools Can Help Save Our Democracy.
We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (51 minutes, 9,173 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.
No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.