Robert D. Putnam with Shaylyn Romney Garrett, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again (2020)

The specific impetus for reading this book - beyond my general veneration for Putnam's work - is a project I've just started working on with my good friend Paul Lachelier. We want to place the current youth crisis - the anxious generation, the disengaged teen - in a longer-term context of capitalism and modernity. (Paul and I met more than twenty years ago when we taught the sophomore tutorial in Harvard's Social Studies concentration, a wonderful great books course focused on capitalism and modernity.) Putnam's latest book seemed right up our alley since it, too, examines our current predicament by placing it in a broader context. Roughly 125 years ago, namely, in the first Gilded Age, conditions were quite similar to today: wealth and income were distributed very unequally; politics were polarized and bitter; social ties were frayed; and the culture was narcissistic. Then, things turned around on all four dimensions from roughly 1910 to 1970 - this is the "upswing" of the book's title. In this middle, We-phase, there was much greater concern for the common good, stronger institutions, greater social capital.Since the 1970s we've returned to a second Gilded Age. Putnam and Garrett thus refer to the three phases of the cycle as I-We-I. Putnam's message is optimistic - if America came together 125 years ago, we can do it again today. Putnam provides plenty of evidence that the country indeed followed an I-We-I cycle. He also includes nuanced discussions of the more complicated cases of African-Americans and women. The book doesn't go into great detail about the Progressive Movement which launched the country on its turn from I to We. However, Putnam and Garrett identify several features of that earlier movement that, they believe, a new turn to We will also require: the movement was very broadly based, with innumerable individuals and initially small groups taking action, eventually inspiring policy change (Paul, who runs a non-profit dedicated to civic activism and "family diplomacy," will be happy to hear this); the progressives saw the challenge as starting with moral reform, not only of others, but also of themselves; women played an important role. I think in our essay Paul and I should reflect on whether these features are likely, or even feasible, today.

Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (2006)

I just finished this for my Zoom book club. Four of us (the others are Paul Lachelier, Eric Kurlander, and Christian Thorne) have been meeting every few months since 2015! Sometimes we share some comments ahead of time (more often, though, afterwards). Here's what I wrote to the others ahead of our meeting: The book is well argued and full of shocking data and descriptions. I hadn't read or thought much about the problem of slums. Now it's on my radar. However, I have two main critiques: 1) What is the scope of the problem, exactly? The title, of course, would seem to suggest that much of the world's population will one day fill the slums. Davis's observations that the world is becoming more urban and that urban residents are increasingly slum dwellers point to the same apocalyptic end-state. But what do the numbers so far show? I found Davis frustratingly elusive about the scope of the problem. Of course, Davis does include lots of data -  we hear estimates of the numbers of slum-dwellers in many places and even globally. But we never hear, as far as I remember, about proportions. Has the percentage of the world's population living in slums grown over time? What was it in, say, 1945 and 1970 and at the time of writing (2006)? Most of the things I've read about global trends in income and wealth (and by extension, in slum-dwelling) over the last 50 years, say, suggest that the problem of dire poverty has remained intractable for some billion people. That accords with Davis's numbers. However, the other six to seven billion have fared better (of course, with tremendous internal variation) over the same period. As a proportion of the world's population, dire poverty is a diminishing - not a growing - problem. Two relevant, widely cited works are Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion and Angus Deaton's The Great Escape. And this is a great website with all sorts of data: Our World in Data. Davis's work would be just as searing - and more credible - if it dropped the apocalyptic framing. 2) Davis's Causal Account He points the finger at neoliberal policies from the 1970s to 1990s. But much of his own evidence attributes the growth of slums to other factors, many predating the 1970s. The drive to industrialize and urbanize at any cost characterized both communism (at least in its Soviet form) and import-substituting industrialization, the policy pursued in many newly independent countries after 1945. This isn't to discount the role of neoliberal policies in perhaps accelerating slum formation in some or even many cases - just to suggest it's implausible to pin all of the blame on them. I also wonder about population growth as a driver of slum-building and the "bright lights" phenomenon attracting people from the dreary (and dark) countryside.

Randall Collins, The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification (1979)

For some time I'd been meaning to read two widely cited classics from the 1970s about American education: Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis's Schooling in Capitalist America and Collins's book. I thought of the books as rivals, offering different accounts of education: Bowles and Gintis, who were Marxists at the time, argued that schooling primarily served the function of instilling discipline in workers for the rigors of capitalist work. I assumed that Collins, one of the leading advocates of a conflict theory in sociology, would offer a largely empirical account of how individual competition fueled the race for credentials. The race for credentials, I expected, would only modify, but not constitute, the educational system. To my great and pleasant surprise, Collins turned out to be much more theoretical, and theoretically bold, than I had expected. He argues that education does not provide productivity-enhancing skills. Rather, it's all about carving out "property in positions," i.e. sinecures. Collins supports his claims with evidence of various kinds. Whether he's right or not, I'm not sure; but I found his ideas highly thought-provoking, to say the least. Throughout Collins acknowledges his intellectual debts to Weber and, indeed, reminded me in many ways, both substantively and styllistically, of the master.

E.D. Hirsch, Jr.: Why Knowledge Matters: Rescuing Our Children from Failed Educational Theories (2016)

Through his writings and organizational work (establishing the Core Knowledge Foundation in 1986), Hirsch has done more than anybody else to promote the importance of knowledge - rather than generic skills and "creativity" - in education. In this persuasive book, he presents evidence that our educational system has been failing for much longer than I understood - since the 1960s, reading comprehension scores of American 17-year-olds have been declining or flat. He attributes this failure to three key ideas of progressive pedagogy: that children's natural curiosity, inclinations, and developmental stages should guide teaching; that education needs to be tailored to each individual ("child-centered" pedagogy is a phrase one hears constantly, and without further explanation, as if its value were self-evident, in these parts); and, most fatally, that schools should aim to teach general skills, rather than knowledge. Hirsch offers plenty of evidence in his indictment of these erroneous idea, but perhaps his most telling evidence comes from France, where a knowledge-centered curriculum was replaced, in 1989, by a progressive approach. Over the next two decades, French education declined on all sorts of measures (see below for more on these criteria). Finally, Hirsch presents his alternative, vocabulary-building and knowledge-rich, curriculum in some detail, and again proffers significant evidence as to its efficacy. In what, though, does this efficacy consist, according to Hirsch? For Hirsch, the advantages of a knowledge-rich curriculum are three fold: it improves all students' chances of becoming competent, successful adults; it especially helps students from poor and otherwise deprived backgrounds, thus helping to close the achievement gap (something that Hirsch comes back to repeatedly); finally, a common foundation of knowledge is necessary for meaningful citizenship, and hence for the health of our democracy. Since his 1987 book Cultural Literacy, which put him on the map in the education wars, Hirsch has often been tarred as a conservative. (It didn't help him in this regard that Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, which was, in fact, conservative, came out the same year.) In fact, though, Hirsch's approach is not conservative in any simple sense of the term. It's true that he believes that for children to become successful (in a broad sense of the term) adults, they have to be familiar with what what other adults know - the shared knowledge of the culture, a public good. He thus values this knowledge for pragmatic reasons. But he acknowledges - and even welcomes the fact - that what's shared can grow and change. Another criticism has been that Hirsch's approach requires an even greater emphasis on testing than is the case now. In fact, however, Hirsch expresses criticism of the current scale (and content) of testing, which absorbs a large portion of school time and which, given the fundamental error of trying to teach students generic skills, is bound to produce poor results and frustrated students, teachers, and parents. Hirsch's argument resonates with, and greatly deepens, what I've seen during my last decade of teaching high school. Students' vocabularies and knowledge of the world are suprisingly limited and fragmented. Too seldom does one feel part of a system that is building systematic knowledge.