Frustrated Rick: It’s a huge problem with grave consequences. We’re in a 21st-century environment where education is foundational for employability and citizenship. This was less true half a century ago, before the rise of the digital economy. Today, though, skills and knowledge are non-negotiable. While 19th- and 20th-century schooling featured lots of culturally fraught fights, recent decades have featured a lot of education bipartisanship precisely because we’re in an education economy and need to prepare students accordingly. The sudden return of the culture wars is a massive and unnecessary distraction.
Fatalist Rick: Look, you’re obviously right that there have been big changes over time, especially when it comes to the workforce. But let’s not overstate things. Schooling may have been less essential a century ago, but it still played an important role in fostering opportunity. And public education is always going to spark conflict simply because it brings together people who hold different views on intensely personal questions. I mean, it’d be odd if education debates weren’t value-laden in an era when there are raging disagreements about issues related to identity, ideology, and equity.
Frustrated Rick: Sure, there’ll always be tensions, but bad actors are weaponizing cultural disputes to score political points. In 2024, students need a whole set of skills and competencies to thrive after graduation. That’s why we need to focus on early childhood, the science of reading, intensive STEM instruction, and meaningful career pathways. There was broad recognition of this in the 1990s or early 2000s. It feels like we’ve backslid. The information age has gifted us new data, research, and management tools. We need to use these. In the 21st century, education matters more than it used to. The world has changed. We need to change with it.
Fatalist Rick: That sounds to me a bit like the education version of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis. Remember when he argued that we’d reached the end of mankind’s ideological evolution—that the “universalization of Western liberal democracy” was the “final form” of the nation-state? Well, we’ve seen how that prediction turned out. Fukuyama made it back when the Soviet Union was disintegrating. Three decades later, his argument reads like wishful thinking. That’s how your “world has changed” shtick hits me. I’ll grant that education in the Clinton-Bush-Obama era set a high-water mark for bipartisan reform efforts. But I don’t think that heralded a historic shift in our understanding of education. It reflected a centrist, post-Cold War era in our national politics—one that’s now in the rearview mirror. People are back to fighting about the things that matter to them. That’s normal. Heck, it’s healthy. Or at least it’s healthier than bizarre, histrionic intra-elite fights about “n sizes” or the validity of “value-added” measurement.
