I recently finished James Traub’s excellent book The Cradle of Citizenship. Traub spends a year visiting classrooms throughout the United States, trying to understand how schools promote and teach our young people how to be citizens. As an AP US History and AP Government teacher in a majority minority public high school, with a large immigrant population, this topic is important to me. Along the way, Traub exposes the follies of both the right and the left, with Florida and Minnesota playing lead roles.Traub makes clear there are some stupid practices and ideas on both sides of the political spectrum when it comes to education. I certainly see this in my job here in Portland.

Traub defines himself as being center-left, which is how I see myself. Not surprisingly, I agree with many of his conclusions. With regards to one current debate in education, he makes the point that knowledge is the foundation of higher-order thinking and thereby citizenship. One can’t form an educated opinion on tariffs, for instance, if one doesn’t know what a tariff is. However, focusing on facts, and chronology (as opposed to thematic learning in history), and often, ‘dead white guys’, are practices associated with the conservative view of education. However, I agree whole-heartedly that Traub’s conclusion about this debate is correct; in this case, the conservatives are mostly right. For more on this topic, see this free pdf titled Developing Thinking for Deep Thinking.

I enjoyed the book as well because it gave me a peak inside other classrooms. One of the problems with teaching is that we work in a bit of a bubble. It is often difficult to see what is happening outside one’s own classroom walls, not to mention in other buildings, in other states.

Unfortunately, the book did not lessen my worries about the intellectual (and spiritual) rot of Christian Nationalism. There are some very ignorant people in this country that would turn our schools into madrasses. That is no bueno and is a reminder that there is a culture war being waged in our nation, one that is tied to the class war that continues to be waged by the Epstein class in this country. And schools are increasingly a battle ground in those wars.

If you’re at all interested in the relationship between schools and democracy, read this short gem of a book.