Links 2/21

Raised to Obey, Disability Rights, Tracking Trump, Universal Pre-K, Social Mobility, Male/Female Friendships

Author

James Shanahan
February 21, 2025

First, some housekeeping. Thank you for reading Scholastic Alchemy, a blog/newsletter/thing about education. On Fridays I post a collection of links and commentary about things I found interesting over the previous weeks. On Wednesdays I publish a longform post looking more deeply at topics I care about. If you’re enjoying Scholastic Alchemy, please subscribe. I plan to put up the paywall in early March. If you don’t like Substack as a platform, I am also going to maintain a version using BeeHiiv and you can subscribe there.

Raised to Obey

Sometimes there’s a kind of serendipity to writing that encourages me to keep thinking and putting it all down somewhere publicly accessible. In my Wednesday post I mentioned that education and nation building were a topic I wanted to write more about in the future:

Compulsory mass schooling in the west has its roots in the development of nationalism and the need to develop a common identity and shared culture. If you’re going to build a nation, either historically or today, one of the big things you do is set up schools to further your cause. This is one reason I say schools are actually conservative institutions.

Yesterday I came across the most recent episode of Jerusalem Demsas’ Good on Paper podcast. She interviewed political scientist and historian Agustina Paglayan about her new book, Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education. I immediately bought the book and will be reading it ahead of writing my longform post about education and nationalism next Wednesday. Your homework this week is to listen to the interview. The main point of the book:

what the book argues, essentially, is that the expansion of primary education in the west was driven not by democratic ideals but by the state’s desire to control citizens and to control them by targeting children at an age when they are very young and susceptible to external influence, and to teach them at that young age that it’s good to respect rules, that it’s good to respect authority—with the idea in mind that if you learn to respect rules and authority from that young age, you’re going to continue doing so for the rest of your life, and that’s going to lead to political and social stability and, in particular, the stability of the status quo, from which these political elites who are using primary education benefit from.

So that it’s essentially a social-control argument about the origins of primary education and an indoctrination argument about the origins of these western primary-education systems. And by indoctrination, I do want to clarify that I’m following the definition from the dictionary, because the term indoctrination has all kinds of connotations, especially in the United States. But the dictionary defines indoctrination as the process of teaching someone to accept a set of beliefs uncritically.

*chef’s kiss*

Shut up and learn to engineer AI prompts. Certainly, no harm to critical thinking there, right?

Specifically, higher confidence in GenAI is associated with less critical thinking, while higher self-confidence is associated with more critical thinking.

Oh.

Disability Rights

There are several threats to disability rights as they relate to education (and other aspects of, you know, being a human in a society) in the United States. First, we have a lawsuit filed by 17 states against the federal government trying to get section 504 of the rehabilitation act of 1973 ruled unconstitutional. Section 504 makes it illegal to discriminate against people with disabilities in a variety of specific settings, including schools. If this section is ruled unconstitutional, schools are free to refuse some categories of disability accommodations. The Supreme Court is also hearing a case related to Section 504 as well as Title II of the ADA. Second, influential people and politicians on the right seem to be questioning the nature of mental illness and of disabilities. See, for example, Marc Andreessen who says,

“Take what you would think would be a bulletproof program, like child disability in schools. It’s far from clear to me that the median taxpayer would support that if they really knew what that was. As you and I both know, what that has become is basically a medicalized mental illness. To the point where students in schools now are basically using fake diagnoses of mental illness in order to get drugs and in order to get extra time on tests. That whole program has run completely out of control, and everybody with kids knows that, but it’s not a discrete thing that people can wrap their heads around and understand.

Or Alabama Senator Tuberville who argued the solution to attention deficit problems was to beat children with belts. And, of course, RFK Jr wants to throw kids using psychiatric drugs into wilderness camps or some such thing. The right in this country seems to be operating as if they do not believe disability and mental illness are real. Given that they hold all the power, this doesn’t bode well for students with disabilities.

This all comes on the heels of years of conservatives trying to weaken federal civil rights protections for students in public charter schools, for example by arguing that they are not, in fact, public schools. That said, with the advent of widespread voucher programs, they may have a new avenue to discriminate against students with disabilities, as private schools simply are not required to accommodate them. Indeed, choice for some seems to be the rallying cry.

Tracking Trump’s EOs on Education

Speaking of federal mismanagement of education, the Hechinger Report is keeping an active track of Trumps various actions related to education. Since it’s hard to keep up with the firehose of news emanating from DC, this is a useful place to look to stay informed. For example, I missed the “Dear Colleague” letter that the White House sent to literally every college and university in the US threatening to pull federal funding if they don’t comply with Trumpism. Can you believe it’s only week 5? At some point your eyes glaze over.

What do we want? Universal Pre-K! When do we want it? Now!

Looking for sources of common ground where you could potentially peel away some republicans and start working together on important issues? Would you believe that education is actually one of those issues? Well, okay, not all of education but it turns out that republicans want Pre-K or at least some kind of support in getting childcare for young children.

A new national poll conducted by the Republican polling firm UpONE Insights on behalf of First Five Years Fund and First Five Action shows child care expenses continue to be a major financial burden on working families. The poll, which surveyed more than 1,000 registered voters nationwide as well as an oversample of Republican primary voters, also found an overwhelming majority of Republicans want the White House and Congress to take action.

Obviously, Congress and the White House don’t care at all. But that’s the point! It’s a wedge that you and I can use to remind them that some problems can’t be solved with tax cuts. And, sometimes, a universal program, like K-12 schooling or universal pre-k and 3-k is the best solution. If republicans say they support families, appeal to them around the need to support families.

Geographic Mobility didn’t die, it was Murdered.

You’ll probably hear soon about Yoni Appelbaum’s new book, Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. In the latter half of the 19th Century, an average of 1/3rd of Americans moved every year. In the 1970s it was 1/5 Americans moving every year. Today it is 1/13. Appelbaum makes the point that,

There’s a lot of good social science research to suggest that moving doesn’t just change people’s economic destinies and the prospects of their children, it shifts their whole mindset. Researchers have found that people who relocate to new places are more open to new experiences, they tend to necessarily be more open to diversity, and conceive of the world as a place where there can be win-wins.

People who want to move, and can’t, grow more cynical, more pessimistic, more inclined to see the world as zero-sum. They may also grow more isolated, more set in their ways and habits. I think that a society that ties people down is likely to produce a politics that views change as threatening and diversity as dangerous.

And it turns out that in 2016 one of the predictors of voting for Trump or Clinton was whether you lived within 200 miles of where you were born or not. He also takes Jane Jacobs to task for a certain kind of, let’s just call it gentrification, that yielded overly strict zoning and obsession over neighborhood character which, in turn, led to our current housing crisis. There’s a reason we call it new urbanism, after all.

Can men and women be friends? Depends on where you live.

Found on page 3 of the paper.

Two quotes from the ‘stack talking about the paper.

Bailey and colleagues’ global analysis reveals that cross-gender friendships remain rare in societies where male honour depends on female seclusion. This culture predicts both low female labor force participation and more patriarchal beliefs. By using actual data on friendships, rather than self-reported survey data, they make a hugely important contribution.

In a previous paper, Bailey, Johnston, Koenen, Kuchler, Russel and Stroebel use Facebook data to track social integration. Rather than tracking ties between genders, they examine migrants’ friendships with German natives.

Over time, Syrian men integrate but women do not.

“Three years after arrival, male Syrian migrants who moved to Germany between ages 13-18 had 14.4 native German friends, compared to 4.3 such friends for similarly aged females”

Again, this reflects honour culture and ultra low female employment. Among Germany’s Syrian and other refugees, only 20% of women have found employment.

Fascinating!

That’s all for today. Thanks for reading!