A Most Tolerant Little Town: The Explosive Beginning of School Desegregation
by Rachel Louise Martin
Simon & Schuster, 2023, $30; 362 pages.

As reviewed by Matthew Levey

We know of the nine Black students who bravely enrolled at Little Rock Central High School in the fall of 1957, despite the Arkansas governor’s attempts to bar them. Many recall Norman Rockwell’s portrait of first-grader Ruby Bridges walking past a wall splattered with a tomato and a scribbled racial slur on her way to William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans in 1960. But the 1956 desegregation of Clinton High School in Anderson County, Tennessee, preceded both events. While it received extensive media coverage at the time, including photo essays in Look and an hour-long See it Now documentary by Edward R. Murrow, it has since been forgotten.

Rachel Louise Martin attended elementary school not far from Clinton. Researching in her university’s extensive civil rights archives for an oral history of the era, Martin was struck that Clinton was not mentioned once. With A Most Tolerant Little Town, she seeks to honor the 12 students and their families who led this early integration fight and to draw lessons for today’s reformers.

While the specifics are little known, the story is familiar. In 1950, Joheather McSwain and four other Black students sued Anderson County on the grounds that bussing them one hour away to a failing all-Black high school in a different county was separate and unequal. At trial they lost; white students, the judge said, were often bussed just as far. But in 1954, as McSwain’s appeal was winding through the Federal courts, the Supreme Court reached a decision on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. In January 1956, a judge ordered Clinton High School to enroll Black students that fall, consistent with the mandate to desegregate with “all deliberate speed.

That August, 12 Black families risked their lives to integrate Clinton. They and their children faced unreconstructed racists who shouted slurs, burned crosses, and pressured politicians to preserve their “way of life.” Terrorists made bombs with dynamite stolen from local mines; luckily, some did not explode, but many did. And through it all, a handful of imperfect white leaders allied with the students to end segregation.

Martin centers A Most Tolerant Little Town on the students. For her, they are the ones who desegregated the school, not the lawyers, judges, and National Guardsmen. They did not seek martyrdom but simply wanted to be treated equally. Yet they saw many of their neighbors turn on them, both with vicious acts and by ignoring the injustice being perpetrated. The experience left them with what today we might call post-traumatic stress. “In a larger town,” Martin writes, “each faction could have retreated into their own community. . . . In Clinton this wasn’t possible, [so they] stopped talking about those years.”

But even as she elevates the bravery of the students, Martin acknowledges the critical role of three white leaders.

Born in 1899 in a tiny mining town in northeastern Tennessee, Federal Judge Robert Love Taylor was named for his uncle, a Union-supporting Tennessee governor. His father also served as governor. Like most white men of his era, Bob Taylor did not believe in racial equality, but he understood the primacy of the Brown decision. As Martin writes, Taylor

wished he could speak out, could tell everyone that yes, of course he believed in white supremacy. But the bench was to be above politics and personal convictions. . . . If the judge had spoken, he would have told everyone he agreed with the law-and-order white leaders in Clinton: integration might be bad, but lawlessness was worse.

Facing down slurs, taunts, and threats of violence, the 12 Black students enrolled at Clinton High in September 1956. Rather than work with principal D. J. Brittain Jr. to plan for the students’ safety, the school board mailed a letter to the Justice Department abdicating responsibility for the events. (Celdon Medaris, a teacher and daughter of the former mayor, called them “pantywaists.”) This abdication “convinced the virulent segregationists that D. J. had a choice.” But unlike most of his neighbors, Brittain “had never believed the county would win” the McSwain lawsuit. As he saw it, “his only option was to obey the law, whether he agreed with it or not. And if he was going to obey the law, then he would do so with the efficiency with which he did everything else.”

A former football coach, Brittain told the high school team, “When you lose, you lose. You go ahead and play the game by the new rules.” In the months ahead, the football players, all white, proved valuable protectors of the Black students. The only explanation for Brittain’s “race traitorship” that the segregationists of Clinton could adduce was that he was a Jew.

A third ally to the students and their families was Paul Turner, the pastor of Clinton’s First Baptist Church. While he did not believe in racial equality either, he told his congregation, “It is important to be a Christian first and a segregationist second,” and he pleaded with Willard Tills, a leading white supremacist, to drop his activities. “I cannot see how a conscientious Christian can be part of mob violence.”

Instead, Tills dropped his membership in the church. In November, after Turner escorted the Black students to school one day, he was savagely beaten by a mob that included Tills. The following July, an all-white jury convicted Tills and six others on the first ballot, much to the surprise of most observers.

Bobby Cain, the only senior among the original 12 Black students to make it through the year, graduated in May. That September he began studying sociology at what is today Tennessee State University.

A month later, at 4:30 on a Sunday morning, terrorists blew up Clinton High School. A sloppy police investigation meant that the criminals were never caught. The school board traveled to Washington to ask President Eisenhower for rebuilding assistance, but he did not want to interrupt his bridge game. Department of Education officials offered $20,000 towards the $750,000 cost of a new school.

Brittain and Turner eventually left Clinton, to New York and Nashville, respectively. But the experience never left them. In the 1980s, they both committed suicide.

*    *    *

Johns Hopkins professor Yascha Mounk has noted our political polarization leads some to believe the situation is so desperate that the ends justify the means. We saw this in the acts of white supremacists who bombed schools, churches, and synagogues and murdered activists. More recently we have seen it in the twisted logic that led supporters of Donald Trump to assault the Capitol. But we also see it, Mounk writes, in intra-group demands for ideological purity. In a Manichean world, men with mixed motivations like Taylor, Brittain, and Turner get little sympathy.

Martin’s polemical conclusion, calling for “reconstructing every part of our society” and electing leaders “willing to intervene quickly and decisively whenever the vulnerable among us are at risk,” sits uneasily at the end of a well-researched history. But whether one agrees with her policy proposal, she has performed an important service by acknowledging the absurdity of demanding perfection from our friends and allies. “When we tell people they do not belong in our movement, that they must go out . . . and do the internal work before they can be of use to us,” she writes, “we are ignoring the ways actions themselves can invoke internal change.” Like us all, Judge Taylor, Principal Brittain, and Reverend Turner were imperfect. But their recognition that our democracy places no one above the law is a lesson as needed today as it was in 1956.

Matthew Levey founded the International Charter School and writes on K–12 education.

This article appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Levey, M. (2024). Tolerance in Tennessee: A compelling history of school integration considers the complexity of unlikely allies. Education Next, 24(3), 74-75.

Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See
by Richard Kahlenberg
Public Affairs, 2023, $30; 352 pages.

As reviewed by Matthew Levey

Richard Kahlenberg, a bespectacled, balding, Harvard-educated lawyer who grew up in a well-off suburb of Saint Paul, Minnesota, is a curious character to be called controversial. He has long advocated for progressive education policies, particularly school integration, doing so for the last 24 years from a perch at the left-leaning Century Foundation. Two former college presidents, William G. Bowen of Princeton University and Michael S. McPherson of Macalester College, wrote that Kahlenberg “deserves more credit than anyone else for arguing vigorously and relentlessly for stronger efforts to address disparities by socioeconomic status.”

Kahlenberg supports class-based (and race-neutral) affirmative action in education. So, in 2018, when he wrote expert reports and testified for the plaintiffs in cases that led, in June 2023, to the U.S. Supreme Court barring the use of race in college admissions, his arguments seemed consonant with his prior views. Nonetheless, this spring he left his longtime employer “to pursue new opportunities.” The New York Times ran a 2,200-word profile of the breakup.

But questioning race-based affirmative action isn’t his only offense against progressive politics. In Excluded, Kahlenberg wonders why reliably liberal voters in places such as Great Neck and Scarsdale (New York), Atherton (California), and Brookline (Massachusetts) practice extreme forms of housing discrimination. “Single-family zoning,” which limits and often prevents the construction of more-affordable duplex and triplex apartments, Kahlenberg writes,

is a more indirect, but perhaps no less effective version of China’s household registration [policy]: it effectively bars many would-be migrants from seeking good jobs and pursuing the American Dream by keeping housing unaffordable in high-growth regions, at a terrible cost to individuals and society.

Lawn signs in these communities may claim all are welcome, but their zoning laws are a neon “no vacancy” sign. Kahlenberg argues that laws constraining the housing supply and excluding low-income families from living in areas with greater opportunity are a major cause of both educational disparities and housing shortages. Although the author might demur, Excluded reminds this reviewer of Ronald Reagan’s 1987 plea to Mikhail Gorbachev, standing at the Brandenburg Gate, to “tear down this wall.”

Six years ago, in The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Richard Rothstein catalogued federal policies that, for decades, made home mortgages unavailable to most people of color. Kahlenberg writes that this discrimination was compounded when, between 1916 and 1936, 1,234 cities established zoning density rules. When the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968, the suburbs adopted their own density rules. Today, on one side of Nassau County’s Meadowbrook Parkway, the town of Merrick has a population density of 5,200 residents per square mile and an average household income of $184,000. Just 4 percent of families rent their homes. Across the highway in Freeport, the population density is 81 percent higher, the median income is 46 percent lower, and 33 percent of families rent.

How is this relevant to education policy? While education reformers celebrate the expansion of charter schools, vouchers, and Education Savings Accounts, most parents send their children to nearby schools. Even in Brooklyn, with one of the densest public transportation networks in the world, the school I led struggled to enroll students from neighborhoods filled with failing schools just a few miles away from us.

Excluded’s case for how zoning reform could support school choice is illustrated by several case studies. Trapped in high-poverty Springfield, Massachusetts, Samantha (for privacy reasons, Kahlenberg does not give her last name), a single mother of three, dreamed of leaving. A high school dropout, she worked as an aide at a rehabilitation hospital while her kids, two of whom have autism, struggled in schools where most students couldn’t read or add. But in 2019 Samantha caught a break and received a type of Section 8 voucher that allowed her to move to nearby Longmeadow, where the median household income is triple that of Springfield. Longmeadow students achieve at rates far above the state averages. Samantha worried that the neighbors would be wary of her low-income status, but she told Kahlenberg that “the neighbors are great. . . . They play with my kids perfectly fine.” She loves her kids’ schools.

Unfortunately, only 45 such vouchers were available in Massachusetts in 2021. School reformers should be natural allies with capitalist property owners in unleashing the power of markets to supply more housing at lower cost. Demanding full funding for the Section 8 program that helps needy families pay market rent might feel just, but this is but shouting in the wind, given Washington’s partisan gridlock. Families like Samantha’s need access to duplex and triplex apartments with more-affordable rents. Now.

In 2007 I was witness to an unplanned experiment along these lines. The elementary school serving a public housing complex in a once-redlined neighborhood two miles from my own family’s apartment had declined to the point where its low academic results coincided with dangerous structural failures. The school was shuttered, and its 400 or so students were redistributed to four of the most highly sought-after elementary schools in one of the wealthiest zip codes in the country. And that’s how my son met his friend Richard.

My primary recollection of this centers on what didn’t happen. No protests, no comments about students who didn’t “belong.” I met Richard’s mother a few times when the boys played together after school. She worked at the post office. I remember that Richard could mimic the subway-train conductor’s spiel for almost any stop on the route. In middle school he and my son lost touch, but Richard eventually attended a selective high school where 40 percent of low-income graduates finish college in four years. The national average for the general population across all income brackets is 46 percent.

In many metropolitan areas, such as Dallas and Columbus, Ohio, which Kahlenberg also profiles, there are opportunities to increase school choice and improve educational outcomes by eliminating or reducing exclusionary zoning. He praises Minneapolis for eliminating single-family zoning but notes that this change was part of a package of reforms, including removing off-street parking requirements and up-zoning transit corridors, that led to the Twin Cities’ housing boom.

Zoning reform alone will not be a silver bullet that fixes American educational dysfunction. Social factors, such as family structure and parents’ prior education, will continue to influence student achievement even as areas of highly concentrated poverty are broken up. But at a time of low social cohesion and few opportunities for bipartisan political effort, freeing property owners to build more housing more easily could furnish another arrow for the reform quiver. Wise planning officials, smart philanthropists, and ambitious mayors would do well to consider Kahlenberg’s latest recommendations.

Matthew Levey founded the International Charter School and writes on K–12 education.

This article appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Levey, M. (2024). Zoned In: Zoning reform could expand school choice and promote educational equity. Education Next, 24(1), 86-87.

A Nation at Thought: Restoring Wisdom in America’s Schools
by David M. Steiner
Rowman & Littlefield, 2023, $80, 225 pages.

As reviewed by Matthew Levey

In the four decades since A Nation at Risk warned that American schools were failing, we’ve increased education spending, tried to improve curriculum and teacher training, unleashed market forces, attended to the “whole child,” and imitated Finland—among other efforts. Yet millions of K–12 students still read, write, and add as poorly as ever.

David Steiner, former head of Hunter College’s School of Education and later state education commissioner of New York, has seen it all, and now he offers his approach. As his book’s title signals, he believes the fundamental challenge is that high school students are not asked to think deeply enough.

Based on his family history—which he elides—his concern is not surprising. David Steiner is not only an education scholar and administrator but also the son of George Steiner, one of the 20th century’s most revered literary critics and scholars of language. George Steiner was an unapologetic elitist. When he was six, his father taught him to read the Iliad. In Greek.

The apple fell right under the tree. David Steiner grew up in Cambridge, England, attended Oxford and Harvard, and went on to a career in academia, the arts, and education leadership. The state of K–12 education is grim, he tells us. But, borrowing from John Webster, one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known contemporaries, Steiner declares, “Look you, the stars still shine!” By “thinking further,” we can help children realize the pursuit of happiness promised them in the Declaration of Independence. We must ground education firmly in ethical reflection, aesthetic sensibility, and academic learning, Steiner tells the reader. “All three are crucial in forging a fulfilling life.”

Steiner believes every child can rise to the highest heights, if only leaders and educators aim higher. Schools should impart eudaimonia, “the shared and universal telos of human existence,” he writes. Guided by Aristotle, students should be taught to steer themselves, using reason. “In contrast to previous failed efforts at teaching explicit ‘rudimentary ethical systems,’” Steiner argues,

we need to reconsider ethical behavior from the ground up. Aristotle is especially helpful here because he directly links eudaimonia (human flourishing) and ethics. He also argues that it is our ability to employ reason guided by virtue that is indispensable to a well-lived life.

Steiner asks us to “imagine a student in front of a Rothko painting.” The student struggles because “there is no immediately accessible ‘meaning.’” She wants to walk on. “Aware of this reaction, the teacher prompts the student to stop, to encounter, to keep looking, making the student hyper-aware of what is going on in the visual encounter.” A high school run in accord with this vision would be a wonder to behold.

Steiner knows “raising educational outcomes will almost certainly lead to more students being overqualified for the jobs they will occupy.” Nonetheless, he writes, “a higher level of education is desirable because it represents an absolute good.” The thought reminds me of playwright Garson Kanin’s line, engraved on the sidewalk leading to the main branch of the New York Public Library: “I want everybody to be smart. As smart as they can be. A world full of ignorant people is too dangerous to live in.” Observing our current politics, many readers will agree with Steiner.

Steiner acknowledges that we have to ameliorate several problems with K–5 schooling before we can tackle his lofty goals for learning. Because phonics is not taught consistently, despite growing awareness of its foundational importance, students struggle to read fluently when they begin to encounter more-sophisticated books. Because curricula vary from classroom to classroom, students don’t build background knowledge from a set of common texts. Because advances in cognitive psychology are not incorporated into teacher-training programs, teachers are less effective than they could be.

The author recognizes that myriad “shiny distractions” like grit, growth mindset, and social-emotional learning further impede progress toward his vision. He worries that the public-education system’s “conflicted and fragmentary aims and disparate educational tools” make realizing his ideals “next to impossible.” Regardless, he says, “the most pressing problem in American K–12 education is that the teaching of academic knowledge in our middle schools, and still more so in our high schools, leaves students bored, undermotivated, and often unable to move beyond the most basic levels of understanding.”

If Steiner had supported this inspiring vision with the wisdom he has gained from experience, it would have strengthened the book. He curiously avoids recounting lessons he learned as dean of an education school and then education commissioner of one of the nation’s largest states. His support for Hunter College’s alternative teacher-certification program, developed in partnership with leading charter-school networks, garnered headlines and criticism. Did teachers certified under this program prove more effective than their traditionally certified peers? Does he think we should change the way teachers are certified in general? I agree that “policymakers and parents cannot give up pressing for . . . educational changes across the entire spectrum of public schools,” but Steiner provides few insights from his career as to how these reformers can be more successful at improving student outcomes.

A second challenge is that many parents don’t share Steiner’s aspirations for their children. They’re not philistines, but they define success differently—perhaps in terms of athletic achievement or working in a part-time job. Like it or not, the number of parents concerned that their high school graduate doesn’t understand Kant’s deontological ethics is small. American school governance tolerates such dissent, as we’ve seen in recent debates over how to teach about race, gender, and even the Holocaust. Sharing any lessons he learned about the compromises democracy demands would have enriched Steiner’s book.

Independently run schools like the one Steiner attended as a child can pursue academically demanding approaches because they do not serve all students. The closest public-school analogues in America are charter schools. Steiner knows of Success Academy, the largest charter network in New York, which makes no excuses for students or staff who don’t aim high. He cites charter schools’ academic achievements and popularity among Black families but doesn’t comment on whether Success or other charters could help realize his vision.

Finally, Steiner discounts the impact of curriculum reforms of the last decades. He praises the Common Core State Standards because they “insist on the importance of teaching decoding skills in early education” but then decries as “drastically reductive” standards that call for students to “analyze” and “determine” points of view or central ideas of a text. He concurs with E. D. Hirsch that “building a storehouse of knowledge is indispensable” to becoming a fluent reader but later calls Hirsch’s “overarching claim about the importance of background knowledge . . . flawed.” Steiner agrees that, to change society, students need to acquire the language and knowledge “of those protecting the status quo.” But Hirsch’s approach is too transactional for Steiner, producing “impoverished” English and history classes. Hirsch doesn’t demand enough of teachers, in Steiner’s view. Steiner wants students “to develop a more sophisticated experience of reading, and at an earlier age.” As a guide, he offers an excerpt from Book 10 of Plato’s Republic.

I share Steiner’s wish, but, having used Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Language Arts curriculum—which Steiner promulgated as exemplary—I can say teachers are still learning how best to teach reading; few are ready to follow the guidance of ancient philosophers. Hirsch’s transactional approach may not lift us to Steiner’s Platonic ideal, but it strikes me as a predicate step, and one that we do poorly, if at all, in most schools.

A system of school choice that allows sympathetic leaders to put Steiner’s vision into action and attract families might realize his admirable and beautiful ideals to some degree. That was my intention with the International Charter School, which I founded in Brooklyn 10 years ago. The Great Hearts network does similar work, at a larger scale, in Arizona, Texas, and Louisiana. Classical Charter in the Bronx is a third example. The school system imagined in A Nation at Thought would be a light unto nations, a city upon a hill, inspiring to us all. Alas, despite his decades of experience, Steiner includes little concrete advice on how schools might realize this inspiring dream.

Matthew Levey headed the International Charter School and writes on K–12 education.

This article appeared in the Summer 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Levey, M. (2023). Think Deep, Aim High: A grand vision of American education, with scant practical advice. Education Next, 23(3), 72-73.

The Battle of the Classics: How a 19^th Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today
by Eric Adler
Oxford University Press, 2020, $35; 256 pages.

As reviewed by Matthew Levey

America’s educational and political dysfunction stems substantially from the outcome of a 100-year-old debate over what Harvard students should learn, according to Eric Adler, associate professor of the classics at the University of Maryland.

Adler’s hero is Irving Babbitt, a classics major, Harvard professor of comparative literature, and a humanist. “Humanists,” in Adler’s telling, “either believe their subjects can help shape students’ souls, or they are not humanists.” If we heeded Babbitt’s call to put the humanities at the core of the college experience, and avoided the tactical errors he made, Adler argues, our civilization might yet be saved.

Babbitt, a bright but impoverished Ohio native arrived in Cambridge in 1885 as an undergraduate just as Harvard President Charles Eliot, a chemist by training, was eliminating required classes and character grading. “In education, as elsewhere, it is the fittest that survives,” Eliot said. “The Classics, like other studies, must stand upon their own merits for it is not the proper business of universities to force subjects of study, or particular kinds of mental discipline upon unwilling generations.”

Prior to Eliot’s ascent, teaching young people right from wrong had been a primary concern of philosophers and teachers. But scholar-reformers like John Dewey, channeling Rousseau and Darwin, declared students were inherently good. Encouraged to follow their natural instincts, they would engage more effectively in their education. Ethics instruction was unnecessary; given freedom to choose, rather than dusty examples from ancient history, students’ natural self-control and self-reliance would blossom. Pedantic lecturing on truth, beauty and goodness was unnecessary.

Wealthy industrialists (and potential donors) like Andrew Carnegie shared Eliot’s thinking. Carnegie, who left school at 12, warned the graduates of Curry Commercial College:

Men have sent their sons to colleges to waste their energies upon obtaining a knowledge of such languages as Greek and Latin, which are of no more practical use to them than Choctaw… They have been crammed with the details of petty and insignificant skirmishes between savages, and taught to exalt a band of ruffians into heroes; and we have called them “educated.”

Despite the modern trends, Babbitt studied the classics, graduating magna. He aspired to teach at Harvard, but his “unfashionable views … and scholarly specialization ensured that he had a rockier career than he had hoped.” Adler suspects Babbitt’s professors recalled his “obstreperous undergraduate” days and “wanted nothing to do with him.”

But, in 1894, when a French instructor was abruptly fired for plagiarism, Babbitt returned to Cambridge, where he developed into a “popular and influential teacher” whose students included T.S. Eliot, Walter Lippmann, and a future Harvard president, Nathan Pusey.

Babbitt’s outlook was broad. “In accordance with what he took to be much classical, Christian, and Buddhist thought,” Adler writes, “Babbitt stressed the duality of human nature” – the tension between good and evil. His “New Humanism” acknowledged this friction and argued that by studying time-tested works students would develop self-control and a sound philosophy of life.

At the same time, Adler notes, Babbitt did not put “ancient authors on metaphorical pedestals, as purveyors of timeless wisdom whose ideas could not be improved upon.” As for practical skills, “a constant process of hard and clear thinking,” developed verbal dexterity and analytical chops. Babbitt’s “forceful personality and powerful opinions” earned him the sobriquet the “Warring Buddha of Harvard.”

In Rousseau and Romanticism (1919) Babbitt criticized scientific naturalism and sentimental humanitarianism as corrosive to ethical standards. Long before the impact of Hitler and Lenin was clear, he wrote “The man who does not rein in his will to power and is at the same time very active according to the natural law is in a fair way to become an efficient megalomanic.”

Because he “linked his philosophy to his political outlook, [Babbitt] open[ed] up his views to criticism and limit[ed] their appeal.” Adler says Babbitt was not a conservative, but his critics successfully painted him as one.

Adler makes Eliot out to be Babbitt’s nemesis, but the Harvard president correctly judged that science could better society. Work on atomic fission and radar at the University of Chicago, Harvard, and MIT helped ensured the Allies’ defeat of fascism in World War II, while Katalin Karikó’s dogged mRNA research at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1990s laid the foundation for Covid-19 vaccines.

Even in a world where science is ascendant, however, morality still plays an essential role, setting guardrails for the ethical use of technology and informing the causes for which weapons and medicines are used. Adler proposes that university leaders restore soul-crafting to its rightful place. College curriculum can and should support “the drive to improve the material conditions of the world and to improve one’s self.”

Adler insists that regardless of the demand, colleges must “encourage students to grapple with life’s animating questions,” and “use the classroom to focus on issues of importance to all people who aim to lead a serious life.” Such a turn toward the humanities is necessary to avoid “the abyss of tribalism and warmongering” in which we find ourselves.

Columbia requires classes, largely focused on the Western canon, for all undergraduates. The University of Chicago retains a core, albeit slightly vague, in the humanities and physical sciences. Even when not required, the ancients attract some students, especially when offered in the company of social science: Adler notes that a class about Plato and Psychology is one of Yale’s most popular courses and Donald Kagan’s Greek history classes were similarly popular prior to his 2013 retirement. More elite schools could follow Adler’s advice and oblige their undergraduates to take a core set of humanities classes. Students wouldn’t be asked to decline Latin nouns, but they would learn how Aristotle and Plato agreed (and differed). It could help today’s students better understand that theirs is not the first generation to grapple with questions of identity and inclusion, individualism and universality, or to strive for eudaimonia—a life of human flourishing—acquired through the struggle to be virtuous.

Matthew Levey founded the International Charter School in Brooklyn in 2014.