"The falcon cannot hear the falconer" or why you are not worthy of progressive texts

From Schools should try to teach kids the basics by Matthew Yglesias.  A very revealing piece.  He is reacting negatively to an op-ed piece in the New York Times, School is for Making Citizens by Heather McGhee and Victor Ray.  McGhee and Ray are progressive leftists and want public schools to be an instrument for making children into their ideological mold.

Yglesias is uncomfortable with that argument but his discomfort is not based on the fact that it is a bad goal.  He believes two things which make McGhee and Ray's approach a bad one.  First is that school teachers lean left and the intent of McGhee and Ray would put teachers and parents at permanent odds.

Fair enough.  I think that is true.  And it is also already obviously true.  We are already there.  

But I also think that it is true and worth affirming that public schools should reflect the goals and values of the communities in which they function.  Broadly, it doesn't matter what left leaning teachers want (or right leaning ideologue teachers).  They should be delivering on the content approved by their community.  

McGhee and Ray would disagree with this.  Yglesias also seems not to subscribe to this perspective.  

More specifically, parents are the key stakeholder as well as the primary consumer of the product of K-12 public education.  They are the primary funders of K-12 public education as well.  Like it or not, they should have a critical involvement in the nature and direction of K-12 public education.

It is obvious from the nationwide protests against public school shutdowns, mandatory school masking, public school vaccine mandates for children, teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools, and public school secrecy around trans issues that there is a serious disconnect between parents and K-12 teachers/public school boards.   

McGhee and Ray's approach would exacerbate this already existing problem and Yglesias does not want it made worse.

The second issue for Yglesias is also true.  Any complex system has to be organized around simple objectives or it spins out of control and delivers nothing.  For K-12 public schools, Yglesias argues that the progressive agenda would be better served by simply increasing the basic skill sets of reading, writing and arithmetic.  If students are better skilled at reading more sophisticated texts, communicating more artfully and analyzing data more effectively, they will be better citizens.  And better progressives. 

I agree that public schools should stick to their knitting and educate, beginning with the most basic skills.  Foundational knowledge and basic skills are the beginnings of a good education.  Trying to load Critical Race Theory, Trans agendas, and Social Justice Theory on top of those basics is simply too much for the system.  Everything spins out of control and little is achieved.  

For those such as McGhee, Ray and Yglesias who see K-12 public school education as a means towards an ideological end, the opening lines of William Butler Yeats's The Second Coming are a good description of how that actually works.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Teachers committed to unpopular ideologies are the falcons in a widening gyre, further and further removed from parents (the falconers).  

Yglesias's objection to McGhee and Ray's argument is a dispute about means and not ends.  They both want public schools to further the progressive left ideological objectives and want to circumvent or suppress their centrist, libertarian and conservative opponents.  

What I found most intriguing and illuminating was these passages.

While I didn’t agree with the op-ed, I thought McGhee’s recent book “The Sum of Race: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together” was insightful and full of powerful examples of the broad cost of divisiveness and the possibilities of shared prosperity through solidarity. The NYT published a long excerpt of the book in February 2021.

It’s a well-written, broadly accessible book, one that tries to deal seriously with important topics and discuss academic research without being a woolly, unreadable academic text. I put the NYT excerpt through a readability analyzer, and its scores ranged from grade level 10.86 on Fleisch-Kincaid to 13.43 years on the SMOG scale. This strikes me as appropriate for a book aimed at the lay public.

Unfortunately, the median American reads at something like a 5th or 6th grade level, based on representative samples tested by the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies. Diving into the data does show that the foreign-born population brings the average down a bit, which doesn’t really reflect on the school system. The typical person born in the United States is probably at an 8th grade level rather than 6th. Still, that’s low. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Case for Reparations” scores as more readable than McGhee, but at a bit over 9th grade, is above the reading level of the typical American. Richard Rothstein’s book, “The Color of Law,” is one of the best treatments of how systemic racism perpetrated through the housing market leaves very visible scars on the American landscape today. His NYT excerpt scores at a grade 14-16 level.

All of which is to say that improving the level of basic reading competency is basic citizenship education.

To read the books that progressives see as foundational to their understanding of race in American history, you need to be able to read better than the typical American can. And of course to really receive a well-rounded citizen-like education in these subjects, you also need to read good books written by people on the other side of some of these arguments. None of this is to defend weird gag orders that restrict what teachers can talk about, but to underscore that even within the parameters of a McGhee/Ray program, we really need to improve literacy education.

Yglesias's first argument against the McGhee/Ray approach is that explicitly and visibly using K-12 public school curriculum to deliver a progressive education is that it would be counter-productive by inducing parental opposition.  I agree.  It is already creating public discord as parents have gained visibility during the Covid remote learning period as to what their children are actually being taught ( and not taught.)

His second argument against the McGhee/Ray approach is that the most important progressive left texts are written at such a level of complexity that most people can't actually read and comprehend them.  Yglesias seems to be arguing that we need to improve reading skills in public schools so that students can better understand and avail themselves of the wisdom of progressive literature which is so sophisticated that few people can comprehend it.

What a worldview!  What a lack of awareness.  Talk about missing the forest for the trees.

I'm not even going to touch on how strongly Pareto-distributed is reading in all developed nations (80-90% of all reading is done by 10-20% of the population.)  Even if everyone is inculcated with excellent reading skills (which is an estimable goal), most won't use those skills for reading The Sum of Race, Case for Reparations, or The Color of Law.  Because most people don't use their reading skills to read for discretionary purposes.  Much less for reading ideological tripe.  

What strikes me as a missing insight from Yglesias is this.  He complains that the ideological texts of the left are too unreadable for people.  Instead of arguing that the ideological texts should be made more accessible, he focuses on making the readers better prepared.  There is a logic to that.  

But it is the same logic that complains that socialism hasn't worked anywhere because the populace was simply not adequately prepared for it.  

But think about other cultural lodestones.  The King James Version of the Bible (a challenging text) is retold in a thousand different versions from simple excerpted childrens' stories to abridged and bowdlerized versions.  They are not substitutes for the real thing.  But they are pathways towards it.  

Same with Shakespeare.  Same with the Odyssey and Iliad.  Same with all culturally important texts.  There are many avenues to get to the difficult source.

So why not take that approach with the progressive left texts?  Why does Yglesias insist that people's reading skills should be lifted up to that needed to read the progressive left canon rather than make the canon more accessible and easier to read?

Yglesias definitely does not address this issue.

My suspicion is that it is because there is no there there.  If you simplify Critical Race Theory texts, you make it obvious that they are racist and divisive.  If you simplify Social Justice Theory texts, you make it obvious that they are coercive and authoritarian.  

These texts have to be dressed up in complexity in order to disguise their noxious underpinnings.  That is why they can't be simplified and why, instead, the people need to be made more worthy and capable of reading those texts.   

Yglesias's arguments are flawed but fascinatingly revealing.