Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs Magazine.

And I am joined today by the writer Lauren Faderman. She is an assistant editor at Jacobin Magazine.

But more importantly, she is a writer for this magazine, Kurt Affair.

And she has written several times for us now.

And the latest article of hers available in our May, June edition, is called Remaking the School. It is about the history of

utopian experiments in education and what we on the left can do to improve the experience

of children in school.

Lauren Faderman, welcome to Karen Affairs.

Thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here.

I want to open by reading a quote to you.

This is from the Secretary of Education.

And this quote is from December, and he got a lot of blowback on the

internet for saying this. He said, every student, he tweeted this, every student should have

access to an education that aligns with industry demands and evolves to meet the demands of

tomorrow's global workforce. What was interesting about this was kind of, you know, he's the Secretary of tomorrow's global workforce.

What was interesting about this was kind of, you know, he's the Secretary of Education's, and we could assume this is a kind of pithy summary of how he thinks about what schooling is and ought to be.

I just want to ask you for your reaction.

What do you think when you hear the Secretary of Education say that?

Yeah, I mean, it's an extremely jaundiced perspective

on what education could or should be. I think there's something really sad about, you know,

the kind of heights of educational theory reached during the, you know, the enlightenment

through the early 20th century that we've fallen so low as to kind of be oriented

...