Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where Free Thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

Our podcast is a team effort and is jointly hosted by myself, associate editor Toby Young,

and Canadian editor Jonathan Kay. You can support our podcast by visiting

Patreon.com forward slash quillet and becoming a monthly patron. By becoming a

monthly patron you'll also receive our weekly newsletter.

Thank you for joining us on the Quilett podcast.

I'm Jonathan Kay, Quilett's Canadian editor.

From 2001 to 2010, writer, translator, and educator, Mary Hudson worked as a teacher within New York City's

public school system, first at Washington Irving High School, then Brooklyn Tech, and finally Victory Collegiate High School and what she

experienced during those years was shocking and perhaps even traumatizing.

In a recently published essay for Colette titled Public Education's Dirty Secret, Miss Hudson describes a school

system in chaos, in large part because teachers are prevented from properly asserting

order in their own classrooms, and the goal of anti-discrimination now serves to

legitimize all manner of counterproductive policies.

Following the publication of her article, I spoke to Miss Hudson, who now lives in Europe via Skype. Here are excerpts from that interview.

Could you tell listeners why you chose now as the time to tell your story publicly?

I happened to meet Professor Glenn Lowry a few months ago. He was kind enough to let me visit him at Brown.

Because I had heard him say on the Glenn show that one of the problems

certainly in the public school system was bad teaching and I thoroughly disagree with that.

I've met wonderful teachers in the system mostly very talented and dedicated

certainly teachers who tend to love children and love the job. When I spoke to him

...