America's Report Card – The Woke Left Catastrophically Fails Students | The Close Read Podcast

Why should we teach the history of bad guys? Students who hear, when they're 16 years old, and they're getting lessons taken from the 1619 project about America really has kind of a shameful history and systemic racism is alive and well, is that going to make them want to read more about the American past? No, it's the estrangement factor that is going to come in and a lot of the liberal teachers are kind of surprised that these kids are already thoroughly disenchanted, estranged from the traditional American conception of things and you want to say to them, you guys are surprised by this? I mean, you're into debunking, right? That's one of the great jobs but you know what? You can't debunk when kids don't even have the bunk. They haven't even learned the things about which they're supposed to be critically thinking about. Hello and welcome to The Close Read, the official podcast of the Claremont Review of Books. I'm your host, Spencer Clavin, Associate Editor of the Claremont Review of Books and we have been reading through the summer 2026 issue of CRB with some of its authors. Today, I'm very glad to be joined by first-time guest but long-time friend of mine, Mark Bauerlein. He's Professor Emeritus of English at Emory University and a contributing editor at FirstThings. He's also got long experience with America's troubled education system and that's what this piece is about. It's called Saving Civics, a review of James Traub's The Cradle of Citizenship, How Schools Can Help Save Our Democracy. Mark Bauerlein, welcome to The Close Read. Glad to join you, Spencer. Love the Claremont Review. Yep, we always love having you and this was a really interesting piece. James, I guess it's Traub, I'm not entirely sure how to pronounce this fellow's last name, but he's a self-styled, middle-of-the-road, reasonable both-sides-er as you portray him. Writer for The New Yorker, New York Times and now this book on what's going wrong in American primary and secondary education, so he goes into schools and observes classrooms. Comes away with the conclusion, as you quote him, the left and the right share the illusion that America's public schools have been seized by the other side, whereas in fact the reality is in many ways bleaker but also less partisan. He wants to tell us that actually the real problems are literacy and reading comprehension and blue-haired teachers don't even have time to indoctrinate your kids into their woke cult, but Mark, you write in your review that no, actually, one side is more at fault than the other here. That's what I take you to be saying but I would love for you to just put some meat on those bones and tell us what you think is wrong with this both-sides thesis. Sure, well, James Traub is to be applauded for actually going into the classrooms, watching lessons, interviewing teachers, getting out from behind his desk, his computer screen, and seeing what's actually going on in the schools. And I'm sure that he finds that well, as we all know, that when students in 11th grade can barely understand one sentence in the Declaration of Independence, then it's really hard to indoctrinate into left-wing ideology when, again, basic literacy, the lack of any background knowledge at all, I mean, people probably who are outside the K-12 public school system probably don't know just how bad it really is. I mean, Spencer, every time the National Assessment of Educational Progress is administered, you know, the Nation's Report Card as it's called, the NAEP exam, every time the test in U.S. history is administered to 12th graders, more than 50% score below basic. That's an F. And we all know the surveys, you know, they don't know when the Civil War took place and what the separation of powers includes. That's all true. It's all out there. But I do think that because Traub, he's a New Yorker, a New York Times writer, you know, a Manhattan longtime liberal, that he, I think he was actually searching for ways to soften the general impression that social studies, education, history and civics, social sciences is heavily skewed to the left. And the problem is that if you look at the website of the American Social Studies Association, the teachers of K-12 social studies, everything is hard left. If you look at the American Library Association website, I mean, the American Library Association has packages to teach libraries to do drag queen story hour. You have the institutions of state standards in social studies. If you look at them in blue states, in Minnesota, for instance, the layout of U.S. history is all imperialism, colonialism, slavery, genocide, the Native American, it's all the victim narrative, which is out there. Twenty-five, thirty years ago, when history and social studies teachers put together the U.S. history standards, it was an NEH, initially an NEH project, they asked the lead historian there, it was a 60 Minutes episode, Gary Nash, what is the most important thing that students learn about George Washington? You know what I'm going to say, Spencer, number one, he owned slaves. And I think it was Leslie Stahl interviewing him who said, that's the first thing they learn about George Washington? My goodness. So, the ideological orientation of the field is obviously to the left, and what happens is that liberal journalists seize upon any example of some parents, organizations, or teachers wanting a book removed from the library because it's got too much sex in it, or because it's anti-Americanism. One example, they elevate into some characteristic movement going on on the right. And I don't buy it, I've visited schools before, I've been working in K-12 standards for many years, no way. Well, there is something, as you point out, you have the baseline problem, just common knowledge, which has deteriorated. If you do spend any time in classrooms, this becomes really clear, and there is an element of this which I think arises from larger technological, cultural shifts that don't just have to do with politics. I'm sure you and Traub would both agree about this, that the iPhone and the kind of end of mass literacy that we're living through is all a part of this story. But there's another part which is kind of uncomfortable, and that is, might there be a connection between some of that deterioration of general knowledge and the political bias that you're describing? In other words, if it's the case that George Washington was nothing but a nasty slaver and the typical story of America as a good country is wrong-headed, then you're less likely presumably to teach kids what's in the Declaration of Independence so have them memorize the preamble or whatever. I mean, is that an unfair criticism, or are these two things connected? No, I think that you're exactly right. Spencer, why should we teach the history of bad guys? Students who hear when they're 16 years old and they're getting lessons taken from the 1619 Project about America really has kind of a shameful history and systemic racism is alive and well, is that going to make them want to read more about the American past? No, it's the estrangement factor that is going to come in, and people are going to say, young kids especially, do I want to read things that are a big downer, that are going to make me feel alienated from this world that I'm about to enter? I mean, one thing that struck me in sort of the liberal cosmopolitanism that has grown against nationalism, right? The populist MAGA, whatever, is something that leads ultimately to a vicious form of nationalism and chauvinism, and you want to say to these people maybe you guys fly to Europe too much, maybe you jump from campus to campus too much, but don't you understand people want to feel good about their home? Don't you understand that patriotism is a more satisfying feeling than anti-patriotism? Don't you think it's better to know that this country that I'm going to enter as an adult citizen in a few years when I turn 18 is kind of a good place to be? I mean, these are sort of a world nature of world nature of reality conceptions that actually play a large role in what's going to be motivated to pursue. So the guilt trip that a lot of teachers do buy into, it's a momentary thrill, right? It's the cachet that comes with, I'm going against the bourgeois, middle class, traditional, mainstream American theme because I'm an intellectual and I've got critical thinking and these stupid dyed-in-the-wool patriots, they really don't. They just don't know, and I'm in possession of the true history. I tell inconvenient truths, right? I've got the courage to face the areas in which we fell apart. Yeah, good for you. That's great. I do wonder, there seems to be a little bit of unease going around, especially in higher ed. So this is the later grades than Traub and Bucher are talking about, but in the university I get the impression that some professors who kind of played around with America's fundamentally flawed idea are surprised to find that more and more generations of students kind of believe them and now want to dismantle the entire thing, and there's a degree of radicalism that's been let loose on campuses that I think some of the old school liberals, in good standing, and Traub seems like one such person, are getting a little bit hot under the collar, like, oh, maybe it was not such a good idea. Besides which, of course, it takes a lot of effort to learn anything, and our natural inclination is going to be to cut corners, so if somebody tells you, well, these founding fathers were villains and scoundrels, that's a good excuse to take one thing off your list of learning and then you end up with a bunch of people that know nothing and hate everything, which is kind of a fair description, right? Do you think that under the surface of some of these liberal reviews of what's gone wrong with education, you get these kind of left-wing investigations into the problem. Do you think there is a fair amount of discomfort or cognitive dissonance, or do you think that there hasn't really been enough of a reckoning for the left to understand that this is unsustainable? In other words, they can keep bashing on conservatives, but they might also course correct, or do you think that that's just not in the caucus? You know, it's very interesting. It was a couple of decades ago, Spencer, that undergraduates started to appear more radically critical, anti-patriotic, challenging the traditional American conception. It's like they bypassed their teachers a little bit, and what you said, that a lot of the liberal teachers are kind of surprised that these kids are already thoroughly disenchanted, estranged from the traditional American conception of things. You want to say to them, you guys are surprised by this? You're into debunking, right? That's one of the great jobs, but you know what? You can't debunk when kids don't even have the bunk. They haven't even learned the things about which they're supposed to be critically thinking about. Can we give the triumphant story of the founders, can we talk about the great strides of the progressive era, I mean like food and food safety and child work welfare laws? Can we give the positive version and let that sort of settle in? Then we can come in later on. In a higher ed, and not even in freshman classes, I think, actually later on in their studies, then we'll get a little bit of the critical side. We'll get the undoing of things. But I mean, 1619 project lessons in elementary schools, which do happen in some places, you know, you're just shutting off any historical curiosity from the start. Yeah, no, it's actually one of the great delights of teaching, and you know this better than I, but it's something you discover is that when you're teaching people, you're encountering people who have no reason to know the basics, the commonly accepted story. So you get to rediscover, this is kind of who Homer was, and this is the story of the Odyssey. You get to do the thing that you always want to do, but you're afraid of boring people at parties, where you're like, did you know that Homer was a very old poet? So yeah, to begin with the 1619 project is to say, you look out on a classroom full of 6th graders and you say, you may have heard that the founding fathers were heroes and triumphant statesmen. It's like, these are 6th graders, they haven't heard that yet. They have to hear it from you first, and then you can color that in and question it. I want to ask you about the right-wing response to this, because you alluded a little bit to the fact that there was, especially in the wake of the 2020 debacle, there was some pushback, there were movements at school board meetings and protests against some of the curriculum. But there's, I think, two schools of thought, broadly speaking, about what should be done here. One says, that's to say, conservatives but also just patriots, people that want kids to get educated at a basic level. We should really fight for reform within the schools as they exist, and we need to be going to these school board meetings and volunteering for the PTA and doing all the stuff that will hopefully reform from within. And then there's another side that says, actually, this whole thing is so captured, and especially the universities but also the teachers' unions and the school board are just, you know, as you said, they're kind of completely in hock to an ideological point of view, and so what we need instead is to create parallel institutions and build up schools like Hillsdale. New College Florida has kind of become one of these as well, and you and I have spent some time there, and there are a bunch of these other alternative models of homeschooling as well. Do you have a view on which one of those ways is better? Do we need both at the same time? Where do you think is going to succeed most? Let's go on all fronts, Spencer. Let's go on making our own schools, and there's sort of the classical education movement, which, you know, the funny thing about the classical education movement or the liberal education reform, say, in general education, Spencer, liberals in 1965 would have been 100% in support of that kind of curriculum. You go back to general ed requirements in 1965, and it's the great books tradition, but the great books tradition was understood roughly from, well, not Hobbes, but Voltaire onward. Spencer, it's a liberalizing tradition in 80% of it. I mean, for every T.S. Eliot, there's Byron and Shelley and Mill, so they didn't see the old tradition as the old canon as at all a conservative one. It's a conservative one. It's a liberal one. It's got a lot of variety in it, but generally, the tendency is toward enlightenment, individual rights, and personal autonomy, so the reinstitution of some of those gen ed requirements that were more traditional, that were Western Civ. It's happened in Florida. It's happened in Iowa, in Ohio. These are done by legislators, not by the faculty. Certainly, a lot of faculty resent it, but the moves by the legislators, again, I don't see those as conservative. They are sort of old-fashioned liberal education. South Carolina had the REACH Act, as it's called, and what the REACH Act did was said they all need to take a class in all public colleges in which they read the Constitution, the Declaration, some Federalist Papers, a little bit of, I mean, and one civil rights document of your choice. That's all. That's all it was. I think that the moves by conservatives, I would actually say traditionalist is a better term for the actual policies, laws, regulations taking place. What really infuriated the left was the school board meetings in Virginia, right, when the parents rose up against the sexually explicit stuff in elementary school. They weren't talking about seniors in high school reading about different romances of different kinds. They were talking about kids. That's what elected Governor Yunkin. I think those maneuvers by the far right, they'll be called. I don't think they're far right. Again, I think that those are elevated by moderate liberals because they want to equalize. They have a great interest in equalizing threat from the extreme left and from the extreme right. I think it's a tactical exaggeration of the right going on right now. It's very interesting. When you get specific about the titles they were concerned with in Virginia and those other school board meetings, they really are quite graphic. Some of them are in fact graphic novels in the sense that they're illustrated sexual romances between people of any number of genders. There is clearly a little bit of hiding the ball going on here. There's also something, and I'd like to get your opinion about this as well. There's this ongoing debate right now about whether woke is over or in abeyance and whether there's a new form of wokeness coming and so forth. This seems really pertinent to schools because in 2020 at least it felt like, well, this stuff is quietly going on in our schools until it's not so quiet. You have these crazy campus debates. They seem contained. People maybe graduate and they moderate. Then in fact it turns out, no, sometimes one little spark can light up this whole tinderbox. What's your understanding of how schools in the Trump 2.0 era, has the leftwards drift of the schools remained basically unchanged? Has there been any sort of adjustment for the so-called post-woke era or is that really an illusion? There has certainly been a pushback. The pushback has been so much so far here and here and here. I think it's been a varied environment. Some places, strong pushback. Other places, weak pushback. Whether the woke outlook and woke power has been vanquished, no. I don't think it has. Whether it will come back if the Democrats win the House and Senate, if they get the White House and they will reverse every one of Trump's executive orders on education on day one as Joe Biden did in January 2020. It's an open question, Spencer. I think it's up in the air. I don't know where it's going. We have no choice but to do what we can where we can and fight the fight. Just remember that the left seized the schools in the softer subjects in particular over decades. A 50-year process. The long march through the institutions, it's going to take a long march through the institutions to bring a more conservative vision, traditionalist vision of education. It is happening. Again, I don't know. You get a lot of colleges now that are reconsidering things. Chicago's statements on free speech a few years ago, that was very good. Some of the schools settled with the Trump administration and I don't think it was entirely a matter of financial pressure that made them do so. I think there was a lot of sentiment. Boy, stuff is going on here that is no good at all. We want to thank the Trump administration silently for forcing us to do this while we pledge our sympathy with the faculty and the lower administrators over these things. I think it's a very dynamic, fluctuating environment right now. It could be it's all going to depend on, it could all depend on the White House, 2028, or Capitol Hill. We'll see what happens in November, in a few months. Fascinating. It's really intriguing. That part that you mentioned about silently thanking the Trump administration, I think that's very apt. It's a dynamic you see at play in a lot of places. I've been keeping track of it myself in the New York Times. You watch these long pieces that come out about how we were actually kind of misled about school closures during COVID. Maybe we were a bit out over our skis when it came to the trans stuff and how medically sound it really was. What's funny is that the people who at the time were doing the misleading were all writing for the New York Times. You get this weird sort of double tap where you walk the position back, but you also don't make any concession to your critics who were saying this at the time. One senses I think among Democrats that there's a real hesitancy to touch anything that looks like woke. What they're not thinking of is woke one. The loud and prominent voices in the party are suggesting this was a bad move. If we let this get out of hand again, we're going to lose again, even though we have the advantage. Whereas at the same time, some of this stuff, especially the kind of Howard Zinn-esque 1619 project critique of America really is central now to the left-wing point of view in this country. As you alluded to, and this is where I'd like to close because I think it's a huge question for the future. There was a time when a liberal education was just that. It was liberal. In fact, many of the authors in the core curriculum were thought to encourage a certain open-mindedness, a certain free thought, besides which if you look at some of the defenses of the canon from the left before all of this went wild, it was also seen as a democratizing force. You're from New Jersey, I'm from California, but we both read the same classic text. Doesn't matter how we grew up, whatever, we have something to share. This is an American common ground. Do you think that there is a room for that kind of as you called it traditionalism, or does that now belong exclusively to the right? In other words, is it right-coded, as the kid said, to be a traditionalist on the canon, or is there a place for moderate liberals to recover their senses here? I think there are a lot of political liberals who are education conservatives. These are people who have progressive views about things, but they believe that reading in the Western tradition actually reinforces those progressive views. E.D. Hirsch, the famous educator who created this core knowledge curriculum, which was very much about the tradition, knowing the core, the foundations of things. Hirsch was a political liberal. Don Hirsch is still alive. He never voted Republican in his life, and yet he was cast after cultural literacy came out and became a bestseller in 1987, outsold Alan Bloom's Closing the American Mind that year. Hirsch was cast as a right-winger. Hirsch used to tell Bill Bennett, he told me this once, he said, I used to tell him, stop quoting me. You're harming my impact in the schools with the left. Leave me alone. But Hirsch said, if you want to have a progressive society, you must have a conservative education system. And by that, he meant you've got to teach the less privileged kids the same curriculum that the rich kids are getting in their private schools, because that's an equalizer. You need to have that kind of cultural literacy in order to do well on SAT tests, to go to college and prosper and get a good degree and enter the professions. So he regarded the more traditionalist curriculum not as the reinforcement of the status quo, but actually ensuring social mobility, a rise on the income ladder. I think, Spencer, many, many liberals feel this way. They like Jane Austen, and they're not interested in the Edward Said reading of Jane Austen as an apologist for colonialism and slavery. E.D. Hirsch is actually somebody I had in mind when I was alluding to this idea of the democratizing force of the canon. It does seem as if there are people on the left still who feel that way. In fact, as you say, many. The question is whether they will have the courage and the ability to pursue that point of view, or whether radicals own the party and the movement now. Mark Bauerlein, this has been a true delight. Thank you for coming on. We didn't have time to get to it, but you do have an exchange, actually, with James Trout in the next issue of CRB, in which he responds to your review and you respond to his response. So look out in the correspondence section for that. And if you're not yet a subscriber to the Claremont Review of Books, and yet you're listening to these conversations, I don't know what to tell you. You need to reexamine your life choices. And you can do that very easily by going to claremontreviewofbooks.com You can become a subscriber, you can get behind the paywall. Right now because we're so generous, I believe you can read Mark's piece, Saving Civics for free. It's out in front of the paywall. But once you do, you're going to want to get all the rest of our terrific reviews and essays and so you're going to want to become a subscriber. Our fall 2026 issue is just coming together, taking shape now. And so if you subscribe now, you will be in time to get it in the mailbox. When it comes out, it's got lots of goodies in there. And just in general, of course, there's always more stuff coming down the pike. One more time, thanks very much, Mark Fauerlein, and thanks to all of you for listening. We will talk to you next time. Thank you.