“Woke” Schools
City Journal Audio
Manhattan Institute
4.8 • 615 Ratings
🗓️ 24 June 2020
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Max Eden joins Brian Anderson to discuss how America's latest culture war appears headed for public schools—the topic of Eden’s latest story, "'There Is No Apolitical Classroom.'"
Across the country, schools are preparing to reopen in September with rigorous hygiene protocols to protect against Covid-19. Now, in the aftermath of nationwide protests in response to George Floyd's death in Minneapolis, activists are making a renewed push to incorporate "antiracism" content into classrooms. According to Eden, "antiracist schools will teach very different material from the schools of yesteryear."
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello again, everyone. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal. |
| 0:19.9 | Joining me on today's show is Max Eden. He's a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, this is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal. Joining me on today's show is Max |
| 0:21.6 | Eden. He's a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where his work focuses primarily on |
| 0:26.6 | early education, school choice, and federal education policy. You can follow him on Twitter |
| 0:32.5 | at Max Eden 9-9. Max Eden is written over a dozen articles for City Journal over the last few years, |
| 0:39.9 | and we're happy you can join us on the podcast today. His latest piece, which we released last |
| 0:45.2 | week and has been generating a lot of attention, is entitled, There is No A Political Classroom. |
| 0:52.1 | And it explains why a culture war that is raging in a country today |
| 0:56.5 | is going to be heading to the public schools this fall, whether parents like it or not. |
| 1:03.4 | So Max, thanks very much for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me, Brian. |
| 1:08.1 | Public schools across the country, as everyone knows, have been |
| 1:12.7 | closed for the last few months due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But when they do eventually reopen, |
| 1:19.7 | whenever that is, either in the fall or next year, it's likely that those schools could have a different |
| 1:26.4 | feeling from before in terms of the kind of pedagogy and content that's being taught in the classroom. |
| 1:36.3 | It's a quite striking thing that you described in your piece. |
| 1:39.3 | Anti-racism has become an incredibly popular rallying cry for progressive activists, |
| 1:47.8 | especially after the recent unrest that broke out in the wake of George Floyd's horrible death in Minneapolis last month. |
| 1:57.4 | There was a book called How to Be an Anti-Racist that is generating a lot of sales these days, |
| 2:02.6 | and educators are looking to that for inspiration in part. So to just start off, let me quote |
| 2:09.1 | from a recent announcement, which you quote in your piece from the American Association of School |
| 2:13.9 | administrators. Quote, equity is more than making things more accessible, |
| 2:20.2 | and our work on equity must go further and become actively anti-racist. |
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