The September 1, 2023, episode of CounterSpin was an archival show, featuring interviews with Alfie Kohn, Diane Ravitch and Kevin Kumashiro on education and media. This is a lightly edited transcript.

 

 

Janine Jackson: It’s back to school week here in the US. Schools—pre-K to college—have been on media’s front burner for at least a year now, but education has always been a contested field in this country: Who has access? What does it teach? What is its purpose? Do my kids have to go to school with those kids?

So while what’s happening right now is new, it has roots. And it does no disservice to the battles of the current day to connect them to previous battles and conversations, and that’s what we’re going to do today on the show.

We will hear from three of the many education experts it’s been our pleasure to speak with: Alfie Kohn, Diane Ravitch and Kevin Kumashiro.

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Today’s media debates about education always include politicians politicking; often include right-wing parents, who watched a video and now say their kids are being indoctrinated because queer people…exist; and they sometimes include teachers who say they are underpaid and beleaguered.

You know what they rarely include? Kids: the ones going to school and dealing with the daily fallout of arguments had about them, but without them. What children are, mainly, is fodder, proof of this or that argument. They’re stupid, they’re entitled, they’re, frankly, whatever a pundit needs them to be.

No one wants reporters to shove a microphone in a 10-year-old’s face, but if you’re doing a story about children, shouldn’t you be at least a little bit interested in children?

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CounterSpin has talked many times with one of the researchers genuinely interested in kids, and the way they are treated and portrayed, Alfie Kohn. He is author of many books, including The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting.

CounterSpin’s Peter Hart spoke with Alfie Kohn in April of 2014. Let’s start with Peter’s introduction for some context.

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Peter Hart: Kids these days. They think they’ve got it all figured out. Their self-esteem, for no good reason, is through the roof, and they get trophies just for showing up.

You hear this stuff almost everywhere, from casual conversations to the newspaper op-ed pages.

A new book argues that this conventional wisdom about kids and parenting isn’t just misguided or inaccurate; it forms a worldview that is not only deeply conservative in many ways, but it is one that reinforces and recommends a specific political ideology.

Alfie Kohn is the author of the new book The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting. It’s out now. Alfie Kohn, welcome back to CounterSpin.

Alfie Kohn: Thank you.

PH: Now, I used to keep a file of these “Every kid gets a trophy these days” newspaper columns, and I was always surprised that there wasn’t much of a political pattern to it. The right wingers and the liberals both had the same complaints.

And it seems that this is part of what inspires the book, that a set of very conservative ideas about parenting and about children, these ideas have become a kind of conventional wisdom.

AK: Yes, that’s quite right. And interestingly, the charges hurled at kids and parents sometimes are hard to reconcile with each other.

On the one hand, we’re told that parents are too permissive, that they don’t set limits for kids, and in the next breath, we hear that parents are overprotective, that they’re being helicopter parents. They don’t let kids experience frustration and failure and so on.

And there are these charges that kids get things too easily: We praise them when they haven’t earned it. We give them stickers and A’s and trophies without their having shown adequate accomplishments, and kids are growing up narcissistic and entitled and so on.

And the truly extraordinary thing is how, as you say, regardless of where people are on the political spectrum on most issues, they tend uncritically to accept this deeply conservative set of beliefs about kids and parenting.

PH: Teaching kids to be tough, and to expect or maybe anticipate failure, and to really put their nose to the grindstone, all of this—this just seems like good advice. Part of the book is arguing that there isn’t a lot of research that suggests that kids are better off as a result of these lessons we’re teaching them.

AK: That’s right. But what’s fascinating is the kind of defenses that are argued of this notion that kids have to be rewarded when they accomplish something impressive, and conspicuously go unrewarded when they don’t.

And, in fact, it’s not enough to accomplish something impressive; they have to defeat other people. There’s this notion that scarcity defines the very idea of excellence. If everyone is celebrated, that means we’re endorsing mediocrity. There must always be losers: That’s built into the American concept of excellence and success.

And I think underlying a lot of this is the notion, something I call BGUTI, which stands for “Better Get Used To It,” which basically says it’s a tough world out there, it’s very unpleasant, kids are going to experience a lot of unpleasantness when they’re older, and the best way to prepare them is to make them miserable while they’re small.

And when you show the illogic of this, and the fact that evidence, psychologically, shows exactly the opposite, they quickly pivot and reveal the ideological underpinning of this argument: Well, they lost! They’re not supposed to get a trophy, for Pete’s sake! You know?

And it’s very clear that it’s really a moral conviction underlying this, that you can’t get anything, including love and appreciation, or feel good about yourself, until you’ve earned it.

And so in the book I say, this is where the law of the marketplace meets sermons about what you have to do to earn your way into heaven. It’s an awful hybrid of neoclassical economics and theology, and it’s been accepted, even by liberals.

PH: And so many of these stories have a distinct media component. You kind of pull them all together in the book. A school wants to get rid of dodgeball, and suddenly that’s a national news story, because it teaches us some fundamental lesson about how soft kids are these days, and how they’re not taught to take their abuse from, I guess, the stronger kids. The self-esteem movement in the mid- to late ’90s—suddenly we’re teaching kids self esteem, and it’s a big waste of time. Why do you think media latch onto these stories?

AK: I think there’s a softer, more ideological idea that’s just in the water in this culture, and that has achieved the status of received truth.

Just like you can smear a political candidate with untruths and political ads to the point that people start to see the candidate that way, regardless of whether it’s accurate, or you hear this claim that self-esteem isn’t earned, that kids feel too good about themselves. And very few reporters or social commentators take a step back and ask, “Well, wait a minute, what does the psychological research say?”

Actually, what it says is that unconditional self-esteem, where you have a core of faith in yourself, your own competence and value, is tantamount to psychological health. Where people get screwed up is precisely where they’re taught as children, “I’m only good to the extent that I….”

That conditionality is what’s psychologically disturbing, and that’s at the core of this conservative notion that hasn’t been identified as conservative.

The amusing thing is that when you read yet another article in the vi or the Atlantic, or hear yet another radio commentator on this, what’s amazing is that all these writers and commentators congratulate themselves on their courage for having the nerve to say exactly what everyone else is saying.

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JJ: That was Alfie Kohn, interviewed by CounterSpin’s Peter Hart back in 2014.

Alfie Kohn mentioned charter schools and the attacks on teachers unions in that conversation. We talked about that with education historian and author Diane Ravitch in May of 2020, in the midst of the Covid lockdown, when politicians couldn’t fix their face to say whether people needed to be in the workplace, or needed to be remote, or which people or why.

And some of them somehow landed on the side of, “You know who we don’t need to show up? Teachers.”

I asked Diane Ravitch, co-founder and president of the Network for Public Education, why billionaires like Bill Gates, who dabble in life-or-death issues, call themselves, with media accolade, “reformers” when it comes to education.

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Diane Ravitch: In my book Slaying Goliath, I refer to Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, and all these tech titans, and Wall Street and on and on, as “disruptors.” They have lots of ideas about how to reinvent and reimagine American education. It always involves privatization. It always attacks public control, and democratic control, of schools. And it very frequently involves technology, because what they’re interested in is cutting the cost of education, and the most expensive aspect of public education is teachers.

And also, from a different point of view, the most important part of education is teachers, because I think that we’ve learned during this pandemic that sitting in front of a screen is not the same as being in a classroom with a human being.

What frightens me is that if these people get their way—and we have a very conservative Supreme Court, that’s on the cusp of ruling that states are not allowed to deny funding to religious schools—we will see this country go backwards educationally, because having a strong public school system is a pillar of democracy.

A public school system that’s open to all kids, that doesn’t push out kids because they can’t speak English, that doesn’t exclude the kids because they have disabilities, and that has a full program, and doesn’t indoctrinate kids into a religious point of view: This is what made America great, and because of the people like DeVos and Trump, and the Bill Gateses and other billionaires in the world who are funding all this privatization stuff, we can see our country go backwards. And that’s what’s frightening.

JJ: Finally, it’s galling to see the Gates Foundation issuing a response to complaints about this New York initiative, saying, “We believe that teachers have an important perspective that needs to be heard,” as though that were a gracious concession. But then, media and others still hanging on to this notion that riches equal expertise, and pretending that we don’t know what actually works. If I see another report about, “Hey, there was a study that said kids do better in smaller-sized classes”—we know this. It’s just about who they listen to. What would you like to see more of, or less of, in terms of education reporting?

DR: The scary thing about the pandemic is that every school system in the country is going to be faced with dramatic budget cuts. And what I would like to see reporters focused on is the funding. And the funding should be, not following the child—I mean, this is what Betsy DeVos wants, and what all the right-wingers want, is to see the funding diverted to wherever the child goes. If they go to religious schools, the money goes there. If they homeschool, the money goes there. This is public money; this is our taxpayer dollars—and it should go to public institutions.

I would like to see reporters understand that children learn best when they have human teachers, and when they have interaction with their peers.

And I would like to see them follow the money. Who is funding the charter movement? I know who’s funding it, read my book: It’s mainly the Walton Foundation, which hates unions, and which is responsible for one out of every four charter schools in the country. I would like to see them follow the money to the extent of saying, “What really matters is that kids have small enough classes”—and the research on small class size is overwhelming. And I would like to see them expose this hoax that somehow promoting privatization benefits the neediest children, when, in fact, privatization hurts the neediest children.

And they need to look at the research, the research on increased segregation and the defunding of the schools where the poorest kids attend. This has now grown overwhelming.

And when Betsy DeVos publicly urges the states to split the money between low-income public schools and high-income private schools, this is sick, and it should be reported as a disgrace. And so many disgraceful things are happening in education, and the reporters need to be all over it.

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JJ: That was Diane Ravitch on CounterSpin in 2020.

And, finally, we see that many of the most visible attacks right now are on teachers themselves, or on teachers unions. But it’s also become clear that the heart of many of these attacks is actually on education itself, on the very notion that anyone from any walk of life could be exposed to critical thinking, basically.

This is not new. The decisions about who gets to learn what have been part of this country since before it was a country. So if we’re going to have this conversation around education now, well, let’s have it.

That was the message from Kevin Kumashiro, former dean of the School of Education at the University of San Francisco, and author of, among other titles, Bad Teacher!: How Blaming Teachers Distorts the Bigger Picture, when we spoke with him in June of 2019. We started out on the issue of student debt.

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JJ: When you’re watching corporate media debate on an issue you care about, it’s hard to know whether to spend time combating the particular myths and misinformation in the conversation as it is, or to simply have a different conversation, with different premises and, frankly, participants.

If people are saying they oppose “government handouts,” for instance, you may feel a need to say, “Well, what about handouts to corporations?” But then you’re still stuck in this frame of seeing government as a separate force, apart from people, that’s giving things and taking them away, rather than a system that’s meant to be working to serve the common good.

Can we begin, though, with your overall take on the plans put forth by Sanders and Ilhan Omar, by Warren and Julián Castro, among others, as compared to the status quo? And then, what do you make of the arguments, those that we are hearing, against those plans?

Kevin Kumashiro: I think it’s really exciting that student debt relief is being elevated to the level that it is. It’s about time that we’re having this conversation. As you’ve mentioned, we know that there is over $1.6 trillion in student debt currently; that affects about 45 million people in this country. And this is a number, this is an amount, that has actually ballooned over the past couple of decades.

So one of the things that I think the proposals force us to think about is, what are our priorities right now, and how should that be reflected in our national budgets? Budgets reflect priorities, and if we were to fairly tax the rich and the corporations, and if we were to invest in education rather than in instruments of violence and repression, like prisons and war and so on, I think we would be able to create a budget that reflects that. This is absolutely affordable.

One of the things that I like to argue, however, is that as ambitious, as controversial as some people think that these proposals are, I actually would say that they don’t quite go far enough, in the way that we’re talking about it still.

And what I mean by that is, right now, the debate seems to be, how do we make education more affordable?—as if education is a commodity, where those who have the wealth can afford to buy the best.

And what I would say is, “Yeah, we could engage in that debate, but maybe the bigger debate is, should education be seen and treated as a commodity in the first place?” Right?

Education, I think many of us would argue, is so fundamentally important, not only to individual wellness and livelihood and success, but also to the health and well-being of the community and the society, right? It strengthens democracy, it strengthens participation, social relations, global health.

And so one of the things we should be thinking about is how education should be a fundamental human right for everyone. And what does it mean to invest in that? Where pre-K through college, you have the right to get the level of education that you need to be successful and happy in the world. And I think that’s where I would like to see the conversation going. And, hopefully, that’s a reframing that we are heading towards.

JJ: I have seen sympathetic portrayals of people trapped in student loan debt. USA Today, on June 26, had an article evoking how people can get caught up, and how they are left open to predations from scam debt-consolidation companies, for instance. And then, on another tack of the issue, the Washington Post had a data-driven piece about the negative impacts on the overall economy of student loan debt, which is something that I know that you’ve thought about, and that noted that the $1.6 trillion in debt that US families are carrying has doubled since the mid-2000s, which you also just said, and which a lot of newspaper articles leave out.

I would also say that media are doing a pretty good job of leaving most of the moralizing to the op-eds—you know, things like “I Worked as a Janitor to Keep My Student Loans Low. Wiping Debt Punishes Students Like Me,” which was in USA Today.

But what I’m not getting is what you’re talking about, which is the idea that, in reality, this is a bigger question about the role of education in society. I wonder how you see us moving the conversation from this specific conversation about Warren, about Sanders, and those plans: How do we push it to that bigger dialogue that you’re looking for?

KK: Yeah, it’s a great question, because overlapping with the ballooning of student debt over the last two decades is something that’s fueled that ballooning, which is the disinvestment by the public sector in public education.

So higher education is a great example, where it’s hard to call public universities public universities, because such a small percentage of their budget actually comes from the public sector. So what we’ve seen in the past 20 years is a massive decline, in some cases half, maybe even more than half, lost—in terms of what the states used to be contributing to, for example, state-run universities.

And where does that shortfall now get taken up? Well, some of it gets taken up in fundraising. And some of it gets taken up in corporate sponsorships. But the vast majority of budget shortfalls gets taken up by tuition increases. So there’s a direct connection between disinvesting in public institutions—in other words, making them less public—and seeing the students take on the burden.

And when we talk about the difference between public and private education, I think it’s also important to think about who these universities serve. Right? Public universities serve a far more racially diverse population, they have more first-generation students, more working-class students, more immigrant students; it’s actually serving the students most in need.

And I think for many public universities, that was the vision, right, is that they would actually be the universities for the people; they were a counter to the elite private universities.

And so when we see public universities less able to serve their mission of reaching this much more diverse, underserved population, because we’re disinvesting in them, why are we now surprised, then, that the people with the least resources are now shouldering the greatest burden, in terms of trying to get education?

So, yeah, I think pushing the conversation, in terms of saying, well, what is the responsibility of society to educate its next generation? And how do we build up institutions where everyone can really benefit from that?

And let me just say one more thing, to even push the conversation a little further. One of the things that I like to argue is that we should not be debating, how do we give equal access to higher education as it currently exists? That actually isn’t what we should be debating.

Because the reality is that higher education is not equitable right now. The current state of higher education is that it’s sort of like public schools—you have a handful of very elite institutions that serve the more elite population. And then you have a vast number of underfunded, under-resourced institutions that are serving the masses.

We don’t want to give equal access to that. What we actually want to do is level the playing field, by saying that the institutions themselves need to be more equitable.

So when I talk about reforming education, and thinking about the funding of education, I don’t argue that we simply need to equalize how individuals finance their education. I actually argue that we need to be thinking more equitably about the funding of the system, and how that then changes the hierarchy that currently exists between educational institutions. We need to be changing the system of education, not simply individual access.

JJ: And some of the opponents, on this particular issue of debt forgiveness, I think have a more comprehensive vision, because some of them are the same people who are also fighting affirmative action—in higher education, in particular; some of them are the same who are against the very idea of public education that you’re talking about.

And I feel like latent in a lot of debate is the idea that education is supposed to be unobtainable for many, because otherwise, it’s not as valuable as a stratifier, as a screen. And among other things, to pick up on what you just said, that’s not the historical vision of education in this country, is it? I mean, if you look back at the history, education had a democratizing impulse behind it.

KK: So that’s such a great reminder, is that the history of education in this country is a very complicated and contested one. And when we look throughout the last century and a half, for example, what we can see is that different groups have argued for competing purposes of education. They’ve put forth different arguments of what education should be about.

So what I like to argue is that, let’s start with public schools, K–12, elementary, secondary schools. When we first created public schools in this country, we didn’t create them for everyone; we created them for only the most elite. And as we were forced to integrate more and more, we just came up with more and more ways to divide and sort them, such as through segregated schools, or tracked classrooms, or labeling, discipline and disenfranchisement.

And so, when we think about the achievement gap, or this gap in performance among students, many people say that that’s a sign that schools are failing. I like those who make the slightly more provocative argument, that actually the achievement gap is a sign, in some ways, that schools are succeeding, that they were doing exactly what they were set up to do.

So one of the things that we need to be arguing is not that we simply need to tinker with the system because it’s not really working well. What we actually need to recognize is that the system was built on really problematic assumptions, ideologies and exclusions from its very beginning. And our job is not to wish them away; our job is actually to dive into that contradiction and that messiness, and to say, “Well, how do we work in institutions that maybe were never intended for us, but still make them into the liberatory, revolutionary, democratizing institutions that they have the potential for?” Right?

Alongside the history of sorting and stratifying, you have an equally long history of people arguing that schools can play a democratizing force, and have been very forceful and persuasive at changing policies and institutions to move us in that direction. Schools have always been the site of struggle.

And this is another moment when we need to dive in and say, “Yes, we need to struggle, and we need to put forward a much bolder vision than we’re currently pursuing.”

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JJ: That was author and advocate Kevin Kumashiro, talking with CounterSpin in 2019.

 

 

 

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