February Q&A

John and I are back with our monthly Substack subscriber-only Q&A session. We’re here to answer your questions, but we begin with a brief comment about the cancellation of Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams, who had his long-running comic strip dropped from many national papers following his comments about black people. John and I both think it was unjust, and John is even threatening to start reading Dilbert again!

But on to your questions. Yan Shen asks whether we’re talking enough about vocational training. Are we too focused on elite education? As John notes, other nations have vocational education tracks, and it seems to work for them. Jevon Jaconi asks what we think about Nikole Hannah-Jones ripping on Thomas Sowell. I don’t like it! Carina writes in looking for advice about how to talk to her five-year-old son about racism. John offers some sage counsel, including not introducing the child to the concept of “racism” yet. M. James Dowd asks us to consider the waning influence of religion on race matters in the US. I think that, in some ways, we’ve lost something to increased secularization, but we’re not likely to return to an era of consensus around religion in public life. Still, we need something that transcends politics to ground our humanity.

Phil, a high school teacher, asks what we think of his school’s very lenient grading policy. It’s a question that engages broad trends in education in K-12 and college. Lesley B. asks why it is that NPR has stopped using judgment-neutral terms to describe certain phenomena, like “systemic racism” instead of just racism or “human-caused climate change” instead of just climate change. She also asks whether we get invited onto PBS and NPR. The answer to the latter is absolutely and quite frequently.

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