An American Education | 2. Testing Teachers for 'Wokeness'

Radio Atlantic

The Atlantic

Politics, News, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 25 September 2025

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Hanna Rosin sits down with Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters to ask him about a purity test for teachers and a nearly scandalous incident that happened days before the interview. And two Oklahoma high-school teachers take very different paths. This is the second episode of a two-part series from Radio Atlantic. (This episode has been updated from a previously published version to include additional news.) --- Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Subscribe today at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	11 Labs powers AI voices that don't sound like AI voices, like this one.
0:05.1	Eleven Labs voice agents are used to handle everything from customer support queries to appointment scheduling.
0:10.8	Get started for free at 11 Labs.io slash Atlantic.
0:16.6	Pornography.
0:18.0	Pornography should not be in our schools.
0:20.1	No parent should send their child to school
0:23.2	and their child have access to graphic pornography.
0:28.2	In our first episode about Oklahoma Public Schools,
0:31.6	we talked about the rise of state superintendent Ryan Walters
0:35.3	and all the changes he's making.
0:37.8	In this year's new curriculum, he added dozens of references to Christianity,
0:43.1	an instruction to high school history students to identify discrepancies in the 2020 election,
0:48.9	although those standards have just been paused for now by the Oklahoma Supreme Court.
0:54.7	Walters announced an ideological purity test for some teachers coming in from out of state.
1:00.5	And he tried to make sure that certain books were not on the shelves.
1:05.3	Hey, when we send our kids to school, you know, we are not expecting them to be able to check out a book from the library that's got explicit pornography in it.
1:12.6	And unfortunately, this is a tactic we've seen to the far left.
1:15.6	We also talked to a pair of former students of Coach Walters.
1:20.0	That's what they called him, who described him as an exceedingly cool history teacher.
1:25.7	A secret Democrat one of them had guessed.
1:29.3	His whole thing about wokeism,
1:31.3	I truly don't understand because he was woke.
	...

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