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The Good Fight

James Traub on Why American Classrooms Are Failing Democracy

The Good Fight

Yascha Mounk

News

4.7963 Ratings

🗓️ 23 May 2026

⏱️ 53 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Yascha Mounk and James Traub examine how progressive teaching methods are producing citizens who can't think critically. James Traub is a journalist, author and scholar. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the New York Institute For The Humanities and the Society of American Historians. In this week's conversation, Yascha Mounk and James Traub discuss why progressive pedagogy is failing American students, how classical schools are achieving better outcomes through traditional teaching methods, and whether learning facts versus critical thinking represents a false choice in education. If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following ⁠this link on your phone⁠. Email: leonora.barclay@persuasion.community Podcast production by Jack Shields and Leonora Barclay. Connect with us! ⁠Spotify⁠ | ⁠Apple⁠ | ⁠Google⁠ X: ⁠@Yascha_Mounk⁠ & ⁠@JoinPersuasion⁠ YouTube: ⁠Yascha Mounk⁠, ⁠Persuasion⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠Persuasion Community Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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The thing that troubled me more, if I were to make that comparison, was not what they're

0:30.1

taught.

0:30.8

It's how they're taught.

0:32.1

It's pedagogy as opposed to politics.

0:35.9

And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.

0:45.1

Are American schools doing a good job of educating future citizens?

0:51.3

What do they teach about American history?

0:54.1

Do progressive schools claim that America is a

0:58.0

terrible racist country from the start? Do conservative school districts teach that slavery was a

1:03.4

minor footnote in American history? Or is the picture rather more complicated than that? More

1:09.2

profoundly is the important question to ask about

1:12.4

the content that students are taught in their few civics lessons, or is it about the quality

1:19.5

of instruction they receive? Is it about whether or not schools are actually succeeding and giving

1:23.4

them the basic skills to read and reason and argue. Well, for this conversation,

...

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