Top ILYBYGTH-themed stories from the past week:

Wait…what? Can Trump eliminate birthright citizenship? HNN collected historians’ comments.

• E.g. Martha Jones on the history of birthright citizenship at The Atlantic.

How have textbooks portrayed climate change? At TC.

It’s not college that frightens conservatives, it’s just the wrong type of college–a conservative plea for more evangelical colleges, at NR.

If anything, we should be sending more students to college — opening up further avenues of funding, both public and private, even as we pursue policies that might lower tuition or challenge the progressive domination of our campuses. Colleges will have to change, to be sure, but in the meantime conservatives would be wise not only to celebrate but to actively advance the interests of those institutions that are educating students properly right now.

Diversity training is good, says Eboo Patel at CHE. But why doesn’t it include religion?

What’s the deal with “messianic Judaism?” Neil J. Young describes the unique meanings at HuffPost.

When did evangelicals get involved in politics? Clyde Haberman tells the old myth about the 1970s at NYT.

• What’s wrong with that story? It’s just not true. Here at ILYBYGTH.

The new digital divide, at NYT.

It could happen that the children of poorer and middle-class parents will be raised by screens, while the children of Silicon Valley’s elite will be going back to wooden toys and the luxury of human interaction.

Atheism in America: A review essay in the New Yorker.

The radical-creationist view on climate change: It’s not a shame, it’s not a crisis…it’s a sin, at AIG.

How many people really believe in a flat earth? NCSE’s Glenn Branch takes another whack at the poll numbers, at SA.

Class war or culture war? The divide in the Democratic Party, at Politico.

Ocasio-Cortez, the young Latina who proudly identifies as a democratic socialist, hadn’t been all but vaulted into Congress by the party’s diversity, or a blue-collar base looking to even the playing field. She won because she had galvanized the college-educated gentrifiers who are displacing those people. . . . Energized liberals, largely college-educated or beyond, have been voting in a new breed of activist Democrat—and voting out more established candidates with strong support among the party’s largely minority, immigrant, Hispanic, African-American and non-college-educated base.

• When it comes to schools, rich progressives have always balked at any change that threatens their status. Here at ILYBYGTH.

Have schools become a “Constitution-free zone?” Interview with Justin Driver at Slate.

Academia as a cult at WaPo. HT: MM.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I just don’t care. Not just in a passive, lazy way, but in an aggressive, assertive, in-your-face sense. When it comes to creationism and evolution education, I insist on not caring if people think the earth came from Yahweh 6,000 years ago, a raven in the distant past, or a flying spaghetti monster.

If we want to make progress in our tired old creation/evolution war, I’m arguing in my new book, we all have to stop caring about those things. We have to stop thinking it is our business if students have the correct religious beliefs about evolutionary theory. So if a conservative evangelical pastor tells me that he can put evangelical theology first and still embrace mainstream evolutionary theory, I’m all for it. Not because his theology is correct, because I don’t care about that.

In this case, the pastor is Todd Wilson. He took to the pages of the BioLogos Forum to explain his method for bridging the angry divide between young-earth creationists and evolutionary creationists. All evangelicals, the Rev. Wilson argues, can agree on some faith basics:

1. The Bible, both Old and New Testaments, is the Word of God, inspired and authoritative. Therefore whatever Scripture teaches is to be believed as God’s instruction, without denying that the human authors of Scripture communicate using the cultural conventions of their time. . . .

2. Christians should be well-grounded in the Bible’s teaching on creation but always hold their views with humility, respecting the convictions of others and not aggressively advocating for positions on which Evangelicals disagree. . . .

3. Everything in creation finds its source, goal and meaning in Jesus Christ, in whom the whole of creation will one day achieve eschatological redemption and renewal. All things will be united in him, things in heaven and things on earth.

What do these ideas have to do with evolutionary theory? Nothing, in one sense. They are all about evangelical theology, not evolutionary science. On the other hand, these ideas might hold the key to evolution education in the United States.

The Rev. Wilson hopes that he can use these points to connect better with different types of evangelical creationists. Young-earth creationists, old-earthers, evolutionary creationists, intelligent designers…all of them disagree with one another, sometimes with great vituperation.

Is his theology correct? I have no idea, and this is where those of us watching these battles from the outside should cultivate an awkward and principled indifference. Speaking in terms of public policy, we just shouldn’t care WHAT people believe about creation. What we should always do is help people develop a thorough and meaningful knowledge about evolutionary theory. What they choose to believe about it is not a question public schools can care about.

It is not—it should not be—the purview of the public schools to encourage or discourage students from having any particular religious beliefs. It IS the goal of public schools to teach students the best of everything.

Combined, those two goals mean we should teach mainstream evolutionary theory to all students. And we should be painfully aware not to step into the regions trod by the Rev. Wilson. If his young-earth creationist congregants want to believe that the Bible is the “inspired and authoritative” Word of God, that’s fine. If they want their children to believe that their religion dictates a belief in a young earth, that’s fine too.

Is Wilson right? Not only don’t we care, we shouldn’t care. We should not involve ourselves in big-picture religious beliefs that touch on questions of speciation and evolutionary theory.

It can be nervewracking. With a new book out, it is difficult to wait for the academic reviews to come in. After all, with any luck, journals will find the toughest experts to weigh in on your book. Reviewers’ reputations are on the line, too, so they don’t want to go too easy.

For all those reasons and more I was ecstatic this morning to read the latest review of Fundamentalist U. The author is a top-notch historian I really admire. Not only did Professor’s Turpin‘s book, A New Moral Vision, win a hatful of awards, it profoundly changed the way I understand the historical landscape of American higher education.

So I was understandably nervous to see what she had to say in the new issue of History of Education Quarterly. Here are some of the highlights:

As a sympathetic outsider to the institutions he studies, Laats pairs depth of research and analysis with a commitment to rigorous fairness to his subjects. In Fundamentalist U, Laats does not merely explain the internal logic of an interesting, but isolated, group of colleges and universities; he also raises critical questions about the nature of broader American higher education and culture in the twentieth century. . . . Laats is an engaging writer, and the book’s chapters are filled with fascinating stories cleverly told. . . . Fundamentalist U reshapes our mental landscape of twentieth-century American higher educational institutions and is essential reading for understanding both their history and their present.

It’s bigger than charters. Bigger than vouchers. Bigger than flipping, or common-core testing, or APPR, or any other school reform idea out there. Those things are important, but only if we talk about them AND the biggest real issue. If we talk about other reform ideas INSTEAD of the biggest real issue, we’ll always miss the point.

Reform schemes might be great, but they can’t do it all on their own. This pic shows one Lancasterian’s plan to revolutionize mathematics ed, c. 1830.

And the point is grim. According to my local paper, child-poverty rates in my neighborhood are shockingly high. In Rochester, New York, 56.4% of children live below the poverty line. In Syracuse, that number is 47.4%. Buffalo stands at 43.6%.

Depressing, you might say, but what does it have to do with school reform?
Everything. For centuries, well-intentioned reformers have tried to “solve” the problem of poverty by fixing American schools. It doesn’t work that way.

Yes, school reforms can help. Public schools can work well as convenient distribution points for poverty-alleviation reforms. Free breakfasts and lunches, for example, can help. So can school-based health care schemes.

Too often, though, reformers don’t talk about alleviating the effects of poverty AND improving education. Smart, well-intentioned people often simply assume that improving education can eradicate poverty on its own.

It was ever thus. As I’m finding in the research for my new book about Lancasterian reform plans, early 19^th-century reformers often glibly assumed that tweaking schools would have an immediate and total effect on the rest of society. By giving low-income students a basic education, they thought, poverty would dissipate overnight like an unpleasant dream.

Just over two centuries ago, for instance, New York Governor DeWitt Clinton called the Lancasterian reform

as creating a new aera [sic] in education, as a blessing sent down from Heaven to redeem the poor and distressed of this world from the power and dominion of ignorance.

Or, as the New York Free School Society wrote in 1814, thanks to the “Lancasterian system of education,”

the darkness, which has overshadowed the minds of the poor, will gradually disappear.

In Philadelphia in 1819, thanks to the Lancasterian reform plan, reformers promised a speedy end to urban poverty. As they put it, since they adopted Lancasterian schools,

we may confidently look for that ameliorated state of society, which attempts at reformation, not in themselves radical, have hitherto failed to produce.

Perhaps most colorfully, one rapt devotee of the Lancasterian system told Lancaster in 1819,

Universal education must be the means of introducing and ushering in this Sun of Glory whose beams shall melt the chain of adamant and drive the infernal practice [of slave-holding] into outer darkness.

Two hundred years later, of course, we can see with depressing clarity: Simply changing classroom methods and schoolhouse design will not, can not, solve the problems of an unequal society.

In fact, for schools to work, we have to alleviate poverty first. Trying to fix social problems by fixing schools misunderstands the relationship between formal educational institutions and society. There is no way schools can fix society on their own. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Schools don’t fix society; schools ARE society.