Hey there, Karen Feeding listeners. You've likely noticed that today is a holiday. Merry Christmas to all who celebrate and happy Hanukkah, happy Kwanza, and all the other holidays this time of year to everyone. Like many of you, we have the day off. So today's episode is actually coming to you from a fellow Slate podcast. What

Next? It's called What Kids Aren't Learning about U.S. history? It's an absolute banger.

I really think you'll find it as fascinating as we did. Conservatives have long complained that

teaching American history with slavery and genocide and systematic oppression is just too

negative. And the Trump administration has gone as far as attacking the Smithsonian for focusing too much on how horrible our country is. But omitting the shameful aspects of America's past doesn't just distort history. It impairs our ability to understand the present. What Next host, Mary Harris, sits down with Clint Smith,

staff writer at the Atlantic, an author of How the World Has Past, a reckoning with the history of

slavery across America, and the new poetry collection above ground. It's a fascinating conversation,

and we hope you'll enjoy it. We'll be back on Monday with a special year-in-review episode.

Talk to you then.

One of Clint Smith's first jobs out of college was as a teacher, high school English, in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.

It remains the most fun job I've ever had.

Like for me, sitting around and reading books with teenagers and like talking about literature

and watching them as they connected to

their lives and connect their lives and the literature to one another's lives and sort of

triangulated to the sort of larger society. It's so invigorating. But it was also really hard.

It was hard because Clint was young, teenagers or teenagers.

But it was also hard because of the books they were reading.

We read Night Every Year by Ellie Vizel, And it was the first time many of my students encountered stories of the Holocaust.

And we read it, you know, in the context of a sort of larger unit where we were reading

first person accounts of slavery. We were reading first-person accounts of slavery.

We were reading first-person accounts of segregation.

We were reading first-person accounts of the treatment of people under Japanese internment

...