Tabia Lee On How To Teach Kids

The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan

Politics, News, Religion & Spirituality

4.6 • 836 Ratings

🗓️ 23 June 2023

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.com

Dr. Tabia Lee is an educator and consultant. She was the faculty director for the Office of Equity, Social Justice, and Multicultural Education at De Anza College until she was fired for her heterodox views on DEI. (Her GoFundMe is here.) She’s also a cofounder of Free Black Thought.

For two clips of our convo — on teaching kids as individuals, and the wrong way to ask for pronouns — pop over to our YouTube page. Other topics: Lee as a gifted-and-talented student; her mentoring kids as a kid; graduating high school in two years; critical thinking as a core value; intellectual humility and curiosity; Lee teaching public school in LA; California voters banning affirmative action in 1996; how teacher ideology clouds the classroom; humanism over identity politics; Lee as a pioneer of pronoun use in the early Internet; “inquiry-based” teaching and holistic instruction; the race of students being just one of many factors; not focusing on stereotypes; the moral certitude of DEI; the need for viewpoint diversity; the “neo-reconstructionism” of Kendi and DiAngelo; the dangers of teaching as activism; the abandonment of SAT and other standardized testing; the wasteful spending in public education; and the attacks that Lee faced as a heterodox DEI director.

Browse the Dishcast archive for another conversation you might enjoy (the first 102 episodes are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Erick Erickson on the showdown between Trump and DeSantis, Dave Weigel on all things politics, Jean Twenge on the key differences between the generations, and Matt Lewis on ruling-class elites. Send your guest recs and pod dissent to [email protected].

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Hi there. It's another Friday, I guess, to you. It's another Tuesday for us, and we record the dishcast. And I am, as you know now, as you now know, it's scanced in Peatown, having my usual
0:44.6	province town frustrations.
0:46.2	Nothing works.
0:47.2	Everything's broken.
0:48.7	And there's nobody around to fix it.
0:50.7	But, you know, that's the price of having a rotting wooden cottage on the beach.
0:56.0	As I'm settling in, one of the bright spots is we have a list of really quite remarkable
1:01.2	people coming up and talking to us on the dishcast.
1:05.0	Patrick Janine on a post-liberal future.
1:08.0	David Gran on his new book, The Wager, a tale of shipwreck mutiny and murder.
1:16.1	What? And Matt Lewis. Later in the summer. Sorry, that's Chris bishing in. And many more
1:24.1	be filled in. But this week, we have Lee.
1:29.2	She goes by Lee.
1:32.8	Her full name is Dr. Tavia Lee, and she's an educator and consultant.
1:37.2	And she was the Faculty Director for the Office of Equity, Social Justice,
1:41.5	and multicultural education at De Anza College until she was inspired recently.
1:46.5	But her heterodox views on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
1:53.9	She also serves on the board of directors for free black thought. Lee, thank you so much for coming.
2:05.0	Thank you for having me. Glad to be here. I want to start by asking you where you grew up and who your parents were and and how that manifested itself in your early years into your view of the world. Yes. So I am a California
2:13.3	native. I've grown up in the state of California my whole entire life. My formal education
2:19.9	has all been in public schools and the state of California. And it's just been a part of my life
2:28.5	to be involved in education. Sometimes people ask me, how long have you been teaching? And I say as
	...

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