Snapshots from the First Day of School

I begin my first day of fiftieth grade working at home, prepping tomorrow night’s seminar. New this year is historian Catherine J. Denial’s A Pedagogy of Kindness, which I have slipped into the syllabus sight unseen. When we talk about teaching, my graduate students will consider Denial’s suggestion that teaching begin with kindness, toward ourselves and our students.

When I am on campus, printing out the class list, news of the killings at Apalachee High School comes across my newsfeed. I gird myself, pray about the body count, turn my mind sideways, do the mental calisthenics I learned somewhere between Sandy Hook and Parkland. I carry my books and papers and welcome the undergraduates to class.

I begin with my values. I tell my students I know they are people first. They have complicated lives that will sometimes get in the way of their ability to do the work we are meant to do together. I value their physical and mental health. Last fall a student told me no professor had ever offered that message before. I tell them teaching is a sacred trust.

I assure the students that the deadlines are soft. We will have ungrading instead of rubrics and graded assessments. When they do the work in good faith, I will give them the same engaged feedback I give my colleagues. They will not lose points for lateness or misplaced apostrophes or less than fully-formed ideas. Learning to please their own standards outweighs the anxiety of trying to meet mine, still unknown to them. I also ask them for their grace. I am a caregiver for a relative in hospice. Soon I may need them to forgive my distraction and absence. I too am a person with a complicated life.

The class meeting is full of laughter, with more instantaneous connection, engagement, and pleasure than I have ever experienced on the first day of school. The students are genuinely enjoying themselves. They are also giddy with relief. They may have come to class knowing about the news from Georgia, done their own psychological gymnastics. They are mostly no older than Columbine. They have grown up in the shadow of school shootings and the heat of a warming planet. They have chosen higher education despite it all. My classroom will provide a little respite from the grief.

After dinner I deal with my high school senior’s back-to-school paperwork. I read and sign a syllabus. It is fierce and adversarial. It admonishes and threatens. It tells students they must do the reading, come to class fully prepared, not hide in the nurse’s office during a test, write an extra test if they miss the AP exam next spring. It looks like the kind of syllabus that many of us wrote before the pandemic. But at least my child came home today.

Sometimes it’s hard not to feel defeated in this vocation. Educators feel ourselves so thoroughly devalued. Policies set us at odds with our students: following the curriculum is more important than learning, judging our students is more important than loving them. Our schools have been stripped of funding. We show up for the first day of school knowing that somewhere in the country, dozens of our colleagues and students will be murdered at work this year. Perhaps in ours. In school, the Second Amendment outweighs our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I no longer hope that we will renounce the madness of the guns. The worst has already happened, over and over again, and nothing has changed. Kindness is not the kind of structural transformation that can counteract the consequences of bullying, abuse, illness, and rage. It is a pedagogical strategy, or perhaps a tactic. It is not enough. But it is something that I can bring to my teaching, to how I work with students and how I set up my classes.

After I walk the dog in the dark, I have a free hour to write. I contemplate the metaphors of conflict built into my vocabulary: snapshots, gird, deadlines, defeated, strategy, tactic. I consider whether to free my language of their taint or to keep them, markers of how hard it is even to speak peacefully.

Earlier this week, another teacher reminded me that in the long run students will forget the content of my class, but they will remember how I made them feel. I am not so naïve as to think a million teachers infusing our courses with kindness will be enough to stop school shootings. But as I peer over the rim of my own despair, I wonder whether being kind might be enough to give pause to the shooter who walks through my hallway. He might point his gun downward as he passes our classroom door, away from my beloved, laughing students, full of the joy of learning.

Pandemic Learning

Let’s talk about the suffering of American schoolchildren, shall we?

Until the 20^th century, children were entitled to a rudimentary education of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Most families could not spare their children’s labor—bodily labor on the farm, wage labor in the factory—so basic literacy was the maximum they got.

During the Great Depression, Americans started implementing universal high school education. Not because they really believed in the benefits of a superior education, but as a way of keeping youth off the job market. If they were in school, they would stop competing with grown men for family-supporting wages.

But that’s all taken care of right? That’s history.

Consider also these conditions that continue into the present.

Local municipalities and states denied African Americans the resources to run adequate schools. Buildings were ramshackle, teachers taught 100 children in a classroom. After the Brown I and II decisions, black children had better access to schools that had been built for white children. But African Americans and other families of color often have to make a trade-off: send children to schools built around white children so they can learn in well-resourced conditions, or keep them in a culturally-supportive, close-to-home environment where they are not subject to racist hazing and daily micro-aggressions.

Children with disabilities received either no education or entirely segregated education until the Americans with Disabilities Act meant they were entitled to education in the least restrictive environment. Even now, however, because schools cannot be bothered to implement Universal Design and the states have not quadrupled educational funding, they continue to learn on the margins of an educational system built for neurotypical students.

What of gifted/asynchronous learners? The schools have no obligation to meet their educational needs. The states have chosen to build schools around the learning needs of children of normal intelligence who meet a suspect set of developmental norms. They cannot have access to academic content appropriate to their intellectual gifts until their behavior meets the age-related criteria specified by developmental psychologists. Some gifted/asynchronous learners suffer their entire educational careers in schools that are built to prepare children for work and careers rather than for curiosity, wonder, and learning.

Some children are natural nightowls. Leave them alone and they will do their best and most creative work between about 10 p.m. and 3 a.m. But can they have a school experience that encourages them to learn? No, because school has to start at 7 a.m. so that student athletes are not denied the opportunity to practice and compete in the afterschool hours.

So, forgive me if I am not entirely sympathetic to the complaints of parents whose children would learn better in the school building than through temporary virtual learning. Your children are operating in a context that has simply not prioritized education for all students. Here in Wisconsin, the state and the public have decided that keeping tavern owners in business and going on with church services and weddings are all more important than keeping children in school buildings. They have taken this decision even though the entire planet is dealing with an emergency like World War II that requires everyone to sacrifice in order to keep our health care system functioning.

If you want an educational system that spares your child the indignity of learning from the comfort of home instead of with the direct supervision of teachers, then you have to work to build a system that prioritizes the education of all children. Because we haven’t had that yet in America. Maybe it’s time.

A letter to school board and administrative staff

Dear [school board and top administrators]:

Like you (I am sure), I have been giving a lot of thought to school reopening in the fall; I am literally losing sleep (hence the time stamp on this email). Thank you for surveying the staff and families about options. I suspect you have come to the conclusion that there are no good choices, only less bad ones. I personally have volunteered to teach my classes at [my university] face-to-face; but in light of the increasing prevalence of COVID in [our state], I am less and less sure that is a good idea, even for my classes that are smaller and less socially complex than classrooms full of children. I am particularly concerned about the [middle] school building, with few windows that would allow immediate fresh air to ventilate classrooms.

The more I think about it, the more I have circled back to the following principles that I would like to see govern the return to school in the fall:

• No staff member or students should be required to be in a school building unless they volunteer to be present
• Students with special educational needs and whose families cannot manage with them continuing to be at home should have top priority for being supervised at school.
• Regular in-building instruction should resume only when COVID is not still actively circulating in our community, according to public health authorities, and even then we probably need social distancing measures to begin.

These principles to me imply that the district should adopt a flipped-classroom model. Here's what I would suggest:

• All formal instruction takes place online, with Chromebooks issued to students and financial support for internet access for families who cannot afford it on their own. As occurred in spring, minimize the requirement to attend sychronous sessions (but make them available), to prevent bandwidth conflicts within households.
• The school buildings are opened up with staff and other supervising adults (volunteers?) who are willing to be physically present. The combination of the number of voluntarily-present adults plus social distancing factors should determine how many children can be present at the school together. The in-person adults can then a) supervise the work of students who need direction to get going and stay on task; b) provide additional tutoring and instruction to meet the needs of the particular students they have with them.
• Priority for access to the in-person building time should be explicitly allocated to families with the greatest needs (I don't have a system for determining priorities, but I assume school administrators including guidance counselors will have a good sense of this). The district should explicitly encourage families who can manage with their children at home and whose students will suffer the least from continued lockdown not to opt for the in-person option. Note that access to the physical school could rotate, or people could sign up on a drop-in model so that even mostly locked-down students could have some opportunity to connect with peers in person.
• Everyone in the building needs to wear a mask.
• Return to in-school instruction should not begin until the public health gating criteria indicate that it is safe to do so. I personally consult the [state recovery] plan every day; although [our state] was briefly at 5 out of 6 green lights, we are currently back down to 2 out of 6 gating criteria met. Even then, students and staff will need to practice social distancing until COVID is not actively circulating in the US or most of us are vaccinated.

I know that this will not be an easy decision to make. I am an educator myself and have placed a central value on education in my life. But I do not want our students and staff to face death or life-long health effects for the sake of keeping up with standards of achievement that were imposed in more normal times. We continue in a state of emergency, and our choices about how to proceed should reflect that state of emergency--the situation is substantially worse now in [our state] than it was four months ago when the schools (rightly) shut down. Humans have a long adolescence. For those who survive this pandemic, there will be plenty of time to make up for "lost" learning. Let's maximize the numbers of our children and staff who have that opportunity.

Sincerely

Amanda

Reflection on Our COVID Scare: Instruction

While we were waiting for our COVID test results, one of the things I did was to complete the university's online tutorial for teaching online. I'm very glad it was available, because I've never taught online, and I know I need to do more reading about how to teach online. Over the years, I've migrated some of my course materials to the CMS, including handouts, PDFs of readings, the syllabus, and the slideshows I make for every class meeting. But as a teacher, I know that the heart of my instructional style, and my best capabilities, lie in the face-to-face relationship, in reading the room to know whether the silence is complete comprehension or befuddlement. So I've never said yes to the option of moving my whole class online.

As I took the tutorial, believing as I did then that I would be under quarantine for a full 14-day period, it became evident to me that even if some classes are scheduled to be face-to-face in the fall, it is imperative to plan and make available remote learning alternatives for each class session. We absolutely MUST make it possible for instructors and students who are symptomatic or under quarantine because of contact with someone infected to stay away from the classroom. That means not only not penalizing absences but also making it possible for students to keep up with their coursework even if they aren't able to be in the classroom. Even before I needed testing on my own, I started making backup plans for my fall courses in case we need to shift to remote. But once I couldn't leave my house for any purpose, I saw that I needed to do more. I have to plan for students who can't come to class, and for me who can't leave my house.

Two points about this immediate circumstance. One, it's a ton of work to double-plan an entire course for two different modalities. Unless the whole class operates either online or FTF, something is going to be lost because we won't all be on the same page (literally speaking). Two, because this planning has to be done in the summer when we aren't on payroll, we aren't going to be compensated for this work. My husband is planning to record a couple hundred hours of lecture this summer so that he can operate a flipped remote classroom next year if necessary. And he's contingent labor. While his department would like to keep him on and has him in the schedule for next year, there is no guarantee in this climate that he's not going to be laid off. She he's going to do hundreds of hours of work that will never be compensated, on spec.

Additionally, and this makes for even more work, it also became clear to me that going forward I should always make backup remote learning opportunities for my students. I've always told students that if they miss class, there is just no way for them to make it up; I'm not delivering the lecture again; there is no way to duplicate class discussion (however feebly I think it went). I also tell students they are autonomous adults, and that it's up to them if they come to class. I don't expect or accept excuses if they miss class. But I am happy to make the course materials available for them to make what they will of them. At the same time, I know this about my students: they don't miss class capriciously. It's not that they slept until 2 in the afternoon (like my daughter is currently doing), or that they were hungover. It's that they had a sick parent to take to chemo; they couldn't change their shifts; they have a chronic illness; they can't get childcare when schools are closed; their military reserve duty demands them to go to extra training. If my students' learning is my highest goal--and I believe it is--then I should make course available to them the opportunity to learn a day's or a week's worth of material even if they can't come to class. And of course that means double-planning the whole semester.

Suddenly my teaching job got a lot more full. I'm not complaining, and I'm a tenured full professor with plans to really hone in on my teaching over the next decade. But, wow, it's a daunting lot more work. Right now I'm optimistic that re-planning everything will improve all my teaching, both face-to-face and my non-extant online skills. Ask me again in a year if I still think this.

A Letter to My Future Self: How to Get Ready for a New Career Or, How Teaching Career Diversity for Historians Opened the Door Leading out of the Academy

Dear Future Amanda,

If you’re reading this missive, it means that you’ve started to give serious consideration to leaving the professoriate. I might say, “Congratulations,” but I don’t know the circumstances. Maybe you’ve stopped looking forward to being in the classroom. Maybe you’ve run out of research ideas (I know, this sounds unlikely). Maybe you can’t stand your colleagues any longer but know the odds against lateral move. Or maybe the state government has succeeded in destroying the public university system. I don’t know what’s brought you to this point, but I do have confidence that you can make this transition to a new career.

Do you remember when we decided to pursue a doctorate? Super-Past Amanda decided to go to graduate school when she was a young pup of 20. Super-Past Amanda really enjoyed her first US history classes and thought she’d like to learn more. Although she gave herself permission to drop out if so inclined, once she got to graduate school she just kept going. When she finished the PhD in 1999, landing an academic job was a crapshoot with even odds. The “jobs crisis” dating to the 1970s hadn’t yet turned into the structural divide of the twenty-first century academic job market. When she lucked into an academic position that the first choice candidate turned down, she settled into the job and built a life around it. A good life, until now, when you’re considering whether to leave the faculty.

You don’t have to be trapped by Super-Past Amanda’s myopic decision-making. You aren’t less competent than she was. You know from parenting your daughters that you can’t map out your whole life. You should make the next right choice. Perhaps that means it’s time to leave the academy.

It might have been a while since you taught a course on Career Diversity, so I want to remind you some of what Past Amanda learned this spring semester teaching graduate students about planning their own professional paths.

There are plenty of resources for PhDs seeking careers outside the academy. I know that you know about Imagine PhD, Basalla and Debelius’s “So What Are You Going to Do with That ?,”[1] the AHA’s first-person essays from a broad range of historians, VersatilePhD, and Beyond the Professoriate. I won’t try to summarize their insights. Instead, here are some personal suggestions to lay the groundwork for your next steps. Hopefully you are still cultivating these practices, but in case you forgot about them, here’s a reminder from your past self about why they are worthwhile.

First, you should use your energies for your community, outside your formal job. Volunteering for the public good helps you recognize your existing skills that non-academics see as valuable. Is the mayor of your small city (himself a former humanities professor turned politician) still giving you opportunities to participate in local government? Past Amanda has already worked her way up from chairing a short-term task force on the city’s housing code to membership on the relatively relaxed Architectural Review Board and now the city’s Plan Commission. Keep it up and build your local network. When your neighbors know what you can do, they might open professional doors for you.

Second, you should deliberately undertake professional development, even though professors generally don’t use that term. The PhD is a terminal degree, but it shouldn’t be the end of your education. Obviously your teaching and research have taught you more about history. But you should also keeping learning new skills. Remember that writing project that introduced you to WordPress? The time you put in then paid off when your digital history project ended up on a WordPress platform. You started playing with coding after a visit to your daughter’s middle school Tech Ed class; how far did you get on Code.org? I’m not saying you ever have to penetrate the mysteries of the photocopier—there are limits after all—but do welcome the possibilities that intrigue you.

Finally, keep up those connections with your students. Your decades in the classroom mean that you have already built relationships with students who are now embedded in work environments that welcome historians. Other professors probably won’t be helpful building your new career, but the students who remember you fondly might be excited to have the chance to return your service with an informational interview or an entrée to a position. Your students already know you respect them as whole people whom you want to help for their own sake. They might welcome the chance to see you as a whole person as well.

Know that your PhD is not an anvil weighing down your job search. Rather, like other forms of education, a PhD is a battery: it powers you, and it fits a wide variety of machines. Whether you want to leave your career or are feeling forced to, you can adapt your PhD to many different applications. To be sure, your PhD is a C battery—suited for flashlights, radios, toys, and tools. To fulfill your childhood dream of a seat on the Supreme Court, you will need to earn that (J)D battery instead. But your PhD is never wasted, even if it is time to try it out somewhere new.

Love,

Present Amanda

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[1] Susan Basalla and Maggie DeBelius, “So What Are You Going to Do with That?’: Finding Careers Outside Academia, 3^rd edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015; originally published 2001 by Farrar Straus and Giroux).

Admit Ivy League Students by Lottery

The time has come to say this aloud. Admission to the most selective colleges and universities in the United States simply is not an academic meritocracy. The current lawsuit against Harvard—accused of discriminating against Asian Americans—charges that admissions staff use not just grades and test scores, not just records of extracurricular activity, but also intangible factors of personality to decide who gets in and access to the treasury of Croesus. How those readings of applicants’ personalities shade over into culture and race seems to be the core of the case. The underlying logic is that applicants who are better students are being passed over because the portraits their portfolios paint are not sparkly enough.

            But for decades it has been the case that the nation’s most selective colleges make their admission decisions not solely on the basis of academic merit. When I was admitted to Princeton back in 1986, getting in was relatively easy—only 80% of applicants were rejected, compared to the 95% routinely rejected today. At some point in the distant past there was an academic cutoff—if your scores were good enough, you got in.* Now there are always fewer seats available than there are valedictorians, people with perfect test scores, and students with flawless GPAs bolstered by extra points for AP and honors classes in the applicant pool. In short, there are far more students who could clearly benefit from the rigorous academics of elite institutions than can be admitted. If you wanted an entering class that was nothing but wrestlers, you could surely build one from the qualified applicants.

            We also know that university admission is not an academic meritocracy because the faculty’s preferences are not the ones used to make most of the decisions. I am haunted by a scene in Jean Hanff Korelitz’s novel Admission, based on her experience on the decision-making staff at Princeton. Unable to make sense of an applicant’s essay about zombies, the protagonist sends it to a philosophy professor asking whether it is the real deal. The professor responds “Definitely. Absolutely. Yes, please.” A student like this is admitted as a rare “one for the faculty.” The balance of the applicant pool can certainly do the work required to earn an Ivy League degree, as testified by graduation rates, but it is their potential contributions to the rest of the university’s community life that tips the scales toward their admission: their prowess in fencing, their French horn, their entrepreneurial spirit, their proven leadership in student government.

There does exist an admissions meritocracy in American universities, one that culminates in the PhD. If you want to go to an academic (as opposed to professional) graduate school, you apply to a department and the faculty of that program decide whether to take you (assuming you meet the minimum criteria set by the university). Although faculty selection processes are surely far from perfect, they are skewed much more to the question of academic achievement than to a holistic view of an applicant’s potential community contributions. But imagine if you will what would happen if faculty got to select as the entering class at Harvard the students with the most potential for earning a PhD. They would pick the people most like themselves. You would get a yard full of nerdy gifted kids gleefully oriented to lab and library and a football team the size of the basketball squad. If Harvard wants to graduate a class that influences every corner of society, then it cannot leave admissions up to a faculty-based predilection for outstanding academic potential.

            So, what is an elite university to do? I suggest a more randomized approach to admissions. Use the admissions staff to identify everyone who is capable of thriving academically at Harvard and its peers. Then hold a lottery for admission among those applicants. Assuming the university doesn’t put its thumb on the scale—for the children of alumni, for “one for the faculty,” for tuba players, for underrepresented minorities, for first-generation college students—you would probably end up with a student body that looked pretty much like the applicant pool AND that would spread itself out into a broad range of post-graduation endeavors. The universities could even put their thumb on the scale for some percentage of the class that it needed politically or socially—or as an experiment to see how this idea works out—and leave the rest up to the lottery admissions. At a 5% admissions rate, it already feels like a lottery from the outside. Maybe it’s time to make it one on the inside as well.

*Unless, of course, you were a member of a group that was systematically excluded (women, African Americans) or capped (Jews). The history of the intersection of inclusive admission criteria and the cranking up of competition to get in is unclear to me. It is simple to say that with the widening of the applicant pools, standards went up and competition became more intense. But without inside information about actual admissions practices, it is hard to when the use of cutoffs shifted to evaluation of non-academic criteria.

Tara Westover’s EDUCATED: A MEMOIR

Tara Westover’s Educated is marketed as 2018’s Hillbilly Elegy. The surface level plot is about how your family—in Westover’s case, insular Mormon survivalists in Idaho—can mess you up, and how education can save you. Westover’s publisher won endorsements from J.D. Vance as well as Vance’s Yale Law School mentor Amy Chua. It is centrally about the redemptive power of education.

Educated’s effectiveness, though, lies in charting the path of education and its political significance. Hillbilly Elegy’s power is in J. D. Vance’s intimate descriptions of the chaos in his family, especially the ever-shifting cast of boyfriends in his mother’s life. Vance grew out of that experience into a moderate Republican, convinced of the power of the disciplined individual to move into a stable and gratifying personal life. Educated’s politics are more basic, not partisan, but about the polis. Westover’s political message lies in her unpacking of how education works. For her first sixteen years, Westover had no formal education. Although she was nominally homeschooled, her formal teaching was limited to reading and basic arithmetic. In its etymological Latin sense, to educate someone is to “lead them out.” Westover’s education leads her inexorably away from her natal family by teaching her how to see the world from multiple perspectives. While education permanently fractures her family, it also liberates her.

            Drawing on the tools from her doctoral studies in history, Westover’s primary sources for reconstructing her escape are her journals and emails and the memories of some of her siblings, as well as her own recollections. It takes some three quarters of the memoir for Westover to unfold the horror at the core of her family. Her father’s extremist stance against public education, the government, and the “Medical Establishment” animate the book from the start. But it is not his beliefs themselves that are the core problem for his daughter. What Westover ultimately cannot live with are the physical and emotional abuse from her brother, her father’s prioritization of his patriarchy and business over his children’s well-being, and her mother’s willful blindness.

Overlapping with her slow recognition of her willingness to rupture the family bond is Westover’s narrative how accessing a formal education allowed her to see the world entirely differently from the paternal indoctrination that shaped her childhood. In the second three quarters of Educated, we slowly watch the scales drift from Westover’s eyes. As she realizes that her new educated worldview will permanently sever her from her family, she falls into a temporary madness, wasting her a fellowship at Harvard binge-watching television instead of working on her scholarship. But by the end Westover has triumphantly earned a PhD with a dissertation that includes, inter alia, an analytical reading of the Mormon sacred texts that she grew up studying with religious eyes—a radical break.

            Westover never went to school until she was seventeen. After teaching herself enough mathematics to win a high-enough ACT score to be admitted to Brigham Young University, Westover begins to learn about events that her parents never bothered to let her know existed, starting with the Holocaust. More important than her ever-increasing knowledge, though, Westover shows herself moving through three essential epistemological problems. First, she has to learn how to distinguish what is true. The process starts in her dormitory, where she is astonished that the roommate with “Juicy” written on her backside goes to church. Initially, most of the other (similarly immodest) Mormon students at BYU seem to be what her family would have called “gentiles.” After several false starts, Westover learns that her roommates and new friends can teach her valuable things about how to get along in the world—including the importance of washing one’s hands after using the bathroom and that you have read the art history textbook, not just look at the images.

            Next, Westover reveals herself discovering the existence and value of perspectives other than the sole view cultivated by her family. That there is more than one way to see the world comes home to her most dramatically when her abusive older brother mocks her face blackened with dirt from summer work and spends months calling her the N-word. Westover narrates how she suddenly connected his taunts with the images of Civil Rights demonstrators she had learned about in a history class at BYU. Recognizing that her family “had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others,” Westover stops laughing along; “The word and the way Shawn said it hadn’t changed; only my ears were different.” (pp. 180-181).

            Finally, Westover explores whether one’s own memories can be trusted. In the book, she narrates several events whose exact sequence and details she remains unsure of, even when she was present as a witness to their aftermath—one brother’s burn, and another’s brain injury. Rather than just accept her own versions, historian that she became, Westover consults with the siblings who are still speaking to her to reconstruct what probably happened. She also flags those narratives as potentially unreliable and what the uncertainty over the exact details means for what kind of man her father actually is, softening his portrayal from a dictator to a fallible and flawed man. As further testimony to her intellectual honesty, Westover also marks passages where she has paraphrased emails instead of quoting them directly.

In short, Westover’s memor shows how far she has come from the certainties of the single worldview of her childhood. While there are things that are true, there is also more than one way to see the world, and a careful person acknowledges the limitations of her vision.

In these senses, Educated is a paean to the value of a liberal arts education. The education Westover received at conservative Brigham Young University, and then the venerable University of Cambridge and Harvard University, was not indoctrination in politically liberal values like tolerance, compassion, and the Democratic party—not the brainwashing of “liberal professors” (p. 134) that her father railed against. Instead, it was liberal in its fundamental (again etymological) sense: liberal as free. Westover’s education literally freed her from the bonds (=chains) of her family, whose patriarch systematically forced them to acknowledge only a single point of view—his. Westover shows us that education that is liberal—literally liberal—sets you free.

This praise for education is a vital political message for 2018, which perhaps explains why this book is resonating so deeply with American audiences.[1] If Hillbilly Elegy gives us insight into Trump voters, then Westover’s memoir reminds us how the skills embedded in liberal education—delivered with nuance, modesty, and skepticism—matter in securing American freedom and democracy.

Tara Westover, Educated: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2018).

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[1] As of this writing, Educated is #44 on Amazon’s bestselling books list, with 906 customer reviews. There are a few negative reviews, including one that doubts Educated’s credibility and compares it to James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces.