Who Failed Schools?

I appreciate Mark Bauerlein’s fair-minded summation of my findings in The Cradle of Citizenship (“Saving Civics,” Summer 2026). He and I agree on the failures of progressive pedagogy and the merits of classical schooling. We differ over the relative responsibility of the Left and the Right for the grim state of civic education in America and for the larger crisis of civic identity. That’s what makes horse races.

But like many conservatives, Bauerlein does not feel that he needs to set foot in an actual classroom, or to cite evidence from someone else who has done so, to know that our schools are aflame with identity politics, structural racism, contempt for America, and the like. For Bauerlein, the Left owns the culture; the Left owns the failures. If someone takes the trouble to immerse himself in that world, as I did, and finds—to his surprise—that classrooms are much more neutral spaces than the Right imagines, it must be because he’s surrendered to the “groupthink” of the “elite zones of Manhattan.”

On the other hand, maybe I’m right. If I am, then we should think of those laws in Florida and elsewhere prohibiting teachers from saying certain things and requiring them to say others not as necessary correctives to woke madness but as an egregious form of censorship that will make teachers default to vapid banalities in order to avoid getting in trouble. And that’s why the Right is at least as big a problem as the Left.

James Traub
New York, NY

Mark Bauerlein replies:

James Traub begins his defense by assuming I have not “set foot in an actual classroom,” but I have done many such visits, sitting in classrooms, interviewing teachers and staff, and lunching with kids one-on-one before writing up my observations in First Things, City Journal, and elsewhere. I did the same tours while working on arts education at the National Endowment for the Arts, where I also reviewed hundreds of grants to in-school and afterschool programs. Traub says, too, that I allege schools are “aflame” with leftist ideology, but in the essay I agreed with him that the exigencies of teaching high-schoolers who can barely read frequently take precedence over instruction in politicized content. He correctly summarizes my belief that “the Left owns the culture,” which I take as an empirical fact, though one less perceptible to liberals who don’t feel much ideological friction when the Left advances—for example, when the Obama Administration issued a letter of “clarification” stating that gender identity was included under “sex discrimination” in Title IX and made the schools set about complying.

As for his final point about “egregious censorship” in Florida that restricts the content of instruction, I have no response. On this issue we’ve heard liberals speak out many a time lately, hot with indignation and eager to show their probity. And yet, these same voices of noble defiance and freedom of expression have remained silent as political correctness has conquered the education world for a half-century. They uncover a case of right-wing overreach here or there, lightly acknowledge what is, in truth, a mountain of leftist suppression, and proceed to claim an equality of guilt. They’ve blinked at education schools that care more about training teachers in white privilege and social change than in the science of learning, shrugged as curricular materials from hack organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and 1619 Project have been widely adopted by districts and individual teachers, and downplayed a cancel culture that has kept conservatives out of the system. Has Mr. Traub ever been hustled out of an education meeting by police officers who held back the woke mob, as I and a few other CRB contributors have?

Traub is to be praised for his field work and showing that terrible student abilities often put politics in the classroom aside. His recent op-ed in The New York Times defending the Texas school board for including Bible passages in a mandatory reading list is likewise commendable. But on the censorship issue, liberals lost any credibility long ago.

Spain and NATO

With his essay on Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and the current plight of Spain, Christopher Caldwell establishes himself once again as a gifted observer of the current malaise that affects much of Western Europe (“Pedro Sánchez’s Kingdom,” Summer 2026). My interest in Spain is personal: I was assigned to the U.S. embassy in Madrid from 1978 to 1982 and witnessed the country’s transition from fledgling democracy and NATO ally to the early stages of socialist dominance. When an unnamed Pentagon source earlier this year stated that Spain should be suspended from NATO, it triggered a memory of the considerable amount of time and effort spent to bring Spain into NATO in the first place.

After I arrived at the embassy, I was tasked with organizing “NATO tours,” in which opinion “influencers,” such as writers, journalists, and politicians, were taken on a ten-day trip to NATO facilities. These visits were organized to demonstrate the seriousness of the Soviet military threat and how to deal with it. After four such “tours” in May 1982, the Spanish Cortes (Parliament) agreed to Spain’s entry into NATO. Later that same year, however, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, or PSOE, came to power under Felipe González, and from that point on, Spain’s participation in NATO never remotely approached what was expected. Much as I wish otherwise, I doubt it ever will.

Vincent Chiarello
Reston, VA

Franklin’s Happiness

Christopher Flannery has proclaimed Benjamin Franklin “Our Happiest Founding Father” (Summer 2026). Flannery’s essay is rich with historical vignettes describing the origins of Poor Richard’s Almanack and its words of wisdom for flourishing in those times. Equally valuable to the young country was Franklin’s The Way to Wealth, and Flannery alludes to the literary and political figures—especially Max Weber and D.H. Lawrence—who later commented on it. Lawrence, as Flannery notes, criticized Franklin for overlooking the (sexual) pleasures of life, locked instead in his supposed “iron cage” of the joyless pursuit of conformity and making money. Franklin, for his part, espoused leading a virtuous and productive life to attain happiness.

As I read to the end of Flannery’s delightful portrait, I kept expecting to find yet another of Franklin’s practical and heartfelt essays, his 1745 letter Advice to a Young Man on the Choice of a Mistress. Curious readers can find it online. The virtuous image of Franklin shines through as he strongly advises the young man to seek marriage, but if that is not possible, he gives a logical analysis of what might be the next best alternative. Readers may also find it and have a better understanding than Lawrence of Franklin’s happiness.

Charles G. Battig, M.D.
Crozet, VA

Freedom Fighters

In her review of Ken Burns’s twelve-part television series The American Revolution (“Stop, Look, and Listen,” Summer 2026), Martha Bayles states of black Americans that

[i]t is true that a larger number served in the British army than the American, because a few British commanders promised them freedom. Those commanders were hardly abolitionists, though. They needed labor, and on their Southern campaigns, they hoped to terrify white rebels with the specter of slave rebellions.

This seems somewhat mealy-mouthed toward us British, as in fact those slaves who fought for the king in the American Revolution were indeed given their freedom and settled in Nova Scotia, the Caribbean, and Britain after the war, whereas those who fought for the Continental Army were often returned to their servitude, especially in the South. Offering freedom for labor and scaring white Southern rebels enough to remain in place were perfectly reasonable wartime strategies. King George III, whom the Declaration of Independence thrice denounces as a “tyrant,” signed the Slave Trade Act of 1807, abolishing the practice. Slavery itself was abolished in the British Empire in 1833—a full 32 years before it was ended in the United States—and it didn’t take 700,000 to be killed in a civil war to do it.

I think under those circumstances, Ms. Bayles would have done better not to cavil ahistorically over whether every British commander was personally an abolitionist during the American Revolution, and remember that given the choice in 1776, any slave yearning for his and his people’s freedom would have done much better to join the British army than the Continental one.

Andrew Roberts
London, England

Martha Bayles replies:

Regarding Lord Roberts’s letter, four points:

First, the object of his criticism is my review of a television series that concludes with the inauguration of George Washington as the first president of the United States on April 30, 1789. The series does not address the subsequent events referenced by Lord Roberts’s letter. And neither does my review.

Second, my review does not “cavil ahistorically over whether every British commander was personally an abolitionist.” It refers to the particular commanders who offered freedom to enslaved blacks willing to join their ranks, and notes that those commanders were “hardly abolitionists.” The most prominent would be Lord Dunmore, whose 1775 Proclamation has acquired a posthumous halo from historians such as Jill Lepore, who wrote in her 2018 book, These Truths: A History of the United States, that it was “[n]ot the taxes and the tea, not the shots at Lexington and Concord, not the siege of Boston; rather, it was this act, Lord Dunmore’s offer of freedom to slaves, that tipped the scales in favor of American independence.”

This conceit—that the principal reason why the Continental Congress declared independence in 1776 was that the British were on the verge of abolishing slavery—was blown way out of proportion a year later by Nikole Hannah-Jones in her poorly-researched introduction to the 1619 Project for The New York Times. It appears that Lord Roberts embraces this view when he asserts, unequivocally, that “in fact those slaves who fought for the king in the American Revolution were indeed given their freedom and settled in Nova Scotia, the Caribbean, and Britain after the war, whereas those who fought for the Continental Army were often returned to their servitude, especially in the South.”

Roberts is correct to observe that “[o]ffering freedom for labor and scaring white Southern rebels enough to remain in place were perfectly reasonable wartime strategies.” But the same cannot be said of Lord Dunmore’s eagerness to accumulate wealth in the form of land and human beings. Had the posthumous halo been placed on Lord Dunmore’s head by the series, I would have sought to remove it by recalling that, during his brief tenure as governor of New York, he acquired 50,000 acres of farmland in the Hudson River Valley. Such a tract could not, and would not, have been worked without slaves at the time. But before he could visit the booming slave markets of New York City, Lord Dunmore was transferred to Virginia, where he sought the favor of the social elite by purchasing two plantations and 100 slaves.

Third, my review contains not a word about King George III. Lord Roberts’s corrections on that topic are better directed toward Mr. Thomas Jefferson.

Fourth, with regard to the postwar fate of the thousands of blacks who sought their freedom by joining either the British or the American side, the series does not pass judgment on which side treated them more unjustly. And neither does my review. Reflecting the series’ treatment of the topic, I merely report that, because the Continental Army “was always struggling to fill its ranks, it welcomed free blacks from the beginning, and over time turned a blind eye to the legal status of others. But even in the North, it was dicey to include emancipation among the goals of what was called the Cause.”

My review attributes the excellence of the series to its being built on the bedrock of “a certain hard-won wisdom about the American colonies’ decisive break with Great Britain…accumulated by generations of historians, biographers, political theorists, librarians, archivists, government agencies, philanthropists, and educators unafraid to correct, criticize, and confirm one another.” I hope Lord Roberts will take these remarks in that spirit.