It

sounds like you're the closest to what I think of as the labor school where people can learn about labor and organizing, but also study philosophy and history and all the liberal arts and other kinds of subjects to give people a wider perspective. I've never

really thought about it that way, but you're kind of right, actually. I might start describing ourselves that way. Yeah,

there is a great exhibit here in the tenderloin about a labor school that existed in San Francisco for almost 20 years, which was organized by union and provided workers with education on everything from unions and the workings of the union, but also produced theater productions and educated people in the arts and philosophy and history, the real education.

Yeah, that's fascinating. I'd love to hear more about that. Which

kind of leads me to your book. And I just have to say, as I was reading your book, I was so happy that you wrote this because your main thesis of a kind of the education myth is something I've been trying to communicate

for probably

10 years, if not more, and have found a lot of resistance to that or a lot of like, okay, yeah, we know, but hey, let's continue doing what we're doing. So that's one part of it. And the other part of it was that it sort of explained to me why I was getting this kind of like, oh, yeah, you're right. And the data shows this. And it is a myth. But hey, let's continue with the myth because of various interests. So before we start, let's just give you time to just outline your main thesis of the book.

Yeah, and thank you. And I appreciate those kind words, because this book is really meant to provoke us to think differently. And I know I think differently after thinking about this stuff and writing about it. So the education myth, right, simply defined, is the idea that education, and maybe more specifically, investment in human capital, can magically overcome all of the other economic and social inequalities that exist in our society. And so what I argue in the book, trace essentially how Americans think about or have thought about what public education should do. And I had to go back to the nation's founding to do this, which was something I didn't think I was initially going to do, but wanted to really show the full sweep of how things changed over time. And so really, for the first like 150 years of American history, Americans who are pushing for more public education really weren't doing it because they were arguing that American workers needed job skills. Now, I don't want to romanticize things, so you've got some of the things I talk about in the book are Thomas Jefferson, who pushes for free public education in Virginia. Of course, that expands the promise of public education beyond elites, but doesn't include African Americans or Native Americans who Jefferson thought didn't have the same capacities as whites. But Horace Mann in the 1830s and 40s pushing for public education to ensure that people are responsible citizens in a democracy. But African Americans after the Civil War, right, one of the first things they're pushing for as a great book by James Anderson points out is public education. And in order to instill citizenship and create political equality, nothing about job skills. So that's really the kind of dominant way of thinking about education for a very long time. It doesn't mean that other people aren't pushing for skills. That does start to happen at a certain point. But the main way that working people in the late 19th and early 20th century were pushing for more economic equality was almost not related to education at all, right? They were pushing for things like labor unions and social reforms, minimum wage laws, workers' compensation, all those things. And that push really is made manifest in many ways in the New Deal, where you've got these significant reforms that institute at least partially some of those things. And then this big promise of what I call social democracy, and to me, the exemplar of that is FDR's second bill of rights speech in 1944, the economic bill of rights, which basically says, we've got a very different world than we had when the original bill of rights was written. We need a whole set of social and economic rights. Education's there, but it's literally the last item on the list. So that promise continues to inform American politics from about the 40s through the 70s. But at the same time, this idea of human capital is invented by some economists, Theodore Schultz and Gary Becker primarily at the University of Chicago in the 1950s and 60s. And so what I argue is that from about the 60s through the late 70s and 80s, this promise of social democracy is literally competing in American politics with this growing push for human capital, the education myth, which offers easy answers because if you just invest in education as the argument goes, then you don't need to change any of the other social and economic inequalities that exist. You don't need to empower workers, for example, because all they need to do is get the right education. And so then the second part of the book is how that myth continues to rise through prominence. And I'm sure we'll get into some of this, but it's everything from a nation at risk to the sort of Clinton DLC reforms in the 90s through no child left behind. And then the very last part is, okay, so like what's happening now? And I argue that the myth is coming undone in some important ways. And I'm looking forward to getting into that conversation a bit.

Yeah.