A Golden Hour with Anya Kamenetz

In which Dan chats with Anya Kamenetz, an author, speaker, and reporter who's done lots of big thinking on the most important issues facing our world. Anya writes The Golden Hour Substack; she covered education for many years for NPR; and her newest book is The Stolen Year: How Covid Changed Children’s Lives, And Where We Go Now.

Dan and Anya talk discuss capitalism, measurement in education, climate change as school curriculum, Wikipedia, AI, and more. 

As always, I welcome comments and feedback on Bluesky (@dankearney) and Instagram (@BigIdeaEd).

Mentioned in the episode:

The Golden Hour on Substack
The Stolen Year: How COVID Changed Children's Lives, and Where We Go Now by Anya Kamenetz
The Test: Why Our Schools are Obsessed with Standardized Testing–But You Don't Have to Be by Anya Kamenetz
The U.S. Economy Is Racing Ahead. Almost Everything Else Is Falling Behind by David Leonhardt, NY Times
How to Raise Kids to Identify Misinformation by Anya Kamentez, The Integrity Project
NJ Climate Change Education Resources
An Educator's Guide to Climate Emotions
Tech Won't Save Us, a podcast from Paris Marx
The Generative AI Con by Ed Zitron

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:18

The shock of COVID did force a reanlightment in a number of different ways. One is that, you know, it sort of the music stopped, right? And people had to sort of reevaluate what they were doing because business as usual was not there anymore. And even in that spring of 2020, when you saw schools sort of lift graduation requirements or colleges get rid of SAT scores, it was like, well, what are we doing and why are we doing it? Is it really the most important thing here?

SPEAKER_00 1:01

Welcome to What's the Big Idea? I'm your host, Dan Carney. Have you ever heard the term polycrisis? I think it's a relatively new one, meant to encapsulate the idea that we are living in an age of accelerated crises, new crises coming at us. And I know there's people out there that sort of scoff at this notion and would say that that's just history, same as it ever was. As someone who works in progressive education, I have to say the term rings true to me when I think about my own students and their relationship to things like the pandemic, global wars, climate change. And so this term led me to today's guest.

SPEAKER_01 1:40

Hi, my name is Anya Kamenetz. I'm a journalist and an author of several books about education, and I write the substack, The Golden Hour.

SPEAKER_00 1:48

You might know Anya from her work as an NPR education reporter for a number of years. She's also written on education, specifically testing and the effects of the pandemic on learning. She's also written about screen time and parenting. This was such a fun conversation because Anya has so much unique perspective and insight on so many different topics. This is an episode where you definitely should check out the show notes because I linked so many things that we talked about in our chat. Definitely check out her substack. It's called The Golden Hour, as well as any of her books. And with that, here's Anya Kamenet's. I hope you enjoy it. So you live in New York, right?

SPEAKER_01 2:41

Yes, in Brooklyn.

SPEAKER_00 2:42

So yeah, I mean, I'm New England born and raised, so I feel somewhat culturally obligated to ask you how the weather is today.

SPEAKER_01 2:50

You know, we had a pretty good, we've had a pretty good winter. Um we've had a a a bit of snow and there was some more snow this week. Today the sun came out, so it's it's kind of nice.

SPEAKER_00 3:02

Yeah, I live in California now and people don't talk about the weather really. It's just not a topic. Something has to happen for the weather to be a topic. Yeah. You know, you know, in the Northeast, it's just like a daily topic. It's an hourly topic in the Northeast, yeah. Um yeah, your Substack is great and it touches on all these different interests you have and areas of expertise. Why do you did you name it the golden hour?

SPEAKER_01 3:26

So this is a phrase that I really love because it has uh a bunch of different valences to it. I mean, if you're a photographer, you know, you know about the most beautiful time, right? Of of dawn and of dusk, um, when it's great to shoot, when the light is amazing, but it's also a very fleeting moment. Um and that relates to me to uh, in the one uh sense, the really critical period of our children's development, the time that they're not going to get back, as well as uh the crucial moment. So when I went to do um uh hostile environment training for NPR when they sent me to Ukraine, um in trauma medicine, they also use the phrase the golden hour, and they mean that window of time after a traumatic, violent event where you can save a life. Um, so that um idea of a fleeting, precious, high-stakes um moment that we're living in is really what I wanted to evoke.

SPEAKER_00 4:26

And really addresses so many of the different areas that you work in and think about. And I we could talk about education, we could talk about AI, we could talk about climate change, but I wonder to what extent when we talk about any of those things, we're just talking about capitalism.

unknown 4:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:45

Yeah, I think that's uh that's a very fair and a very powerful, I think, lens or framework to use um when you talk about the the systems that have been put in place, corporate capitalism, extractivism, legacy of imperialism and colonialism, um, you know, different levels of subjugation um of groups of people. These are these are important frames and they explain a lot.

SPEAKER_00 5:10

What's your sense of our relationship with the mechanisms of capitalism? I'm using our here in the most broad sense, but you do talk to a lot of people, you interact with a lot of different people in your work. What's your sense of how Americans feel, understand capitalism?

SPEAKER_01 5:31

Yeah, it's really interesting. So you could answer that question um in so many different ways. Um one lens that I think is powerful to put on it is to think about the amount of time that we give to sort of loosely speaking, market versus non-market activities, right? Um, and so uh that would include, you know, the unpaid work, the out of the out-of-market work is um care work, right? It's kinship work, it's caring for children, it's caring for yourself, it's it's um all the things that we do to um have healthy relationships so we can keep going, um, you know, mental health, um, uh it's spiritual work, it's going, you know, maintaining communities. And none of those things are respected by the market, none of them are counted by the market. People who engage in those things, um, if their work, if their paid work overlaps with care duties, if they're in education, if they're in social work, they're paid less. So uh there's a real sense that we don't know how to value those things, and we don't know how to value anything except by counting it. Um but in a more optimistic sense, when you look at your day and you look at your life and you look at what's really meaningful, most for most of us, it's not um the the paying activities that we engage in or the consumption that we engage in of things. It's it's this very this very realm of life that capitalism doesn't know how to touch and therefore it doesn't really touch.

SPEAKER_00 7:01

There's so many lessons to education, what you just said, the power of measurement or the abuse of measurement and what truly can be measured. I was thinking about um, I think his name is David Lionhart, and the New York Times had an article recently about how despite the continued growth of the US economy, most measurements of quality of life continue to drop.

SPEAKER_01 7:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:26

Um, I wonder what you think about that. And I I I know you've written a bit about or a lot about the paltry amount that the US spends on pre-K education, and that seems to fit into that discussion.

SPEAKER_01 7:41

It really does. I mean, um, you know, there's there's different ways of measuring quality of life that we don't necessarily um spend a lot of time doing. But for my, you know, there's been a long um history of research that has confirmed and underlined again and again that the years from zero to five are the most important in some ways in a person's life. And um, that is really the time where uh investments in communities and in families and in institutions can do the most. And the fact that we don't respect that and we don't begin, you know, public free education until pre-K level, I mean, expanding it down to pre-K has been an achievement and has been a very good thing. Um, but it it sort of shows that we're not really willing to make the investments where they really count. Um, and I think we see that across the board. In uh there's been a very strong political movement for decades in American society that has successfully argued that anything that we hold in common is somehow going to take away our freedom. Um, and uh that's been, I think, you know, really detrimental.

SPEAKER_00 8:53

Do you think that lack of attention on early childhood is a characteristic of our system or a bug in our system? And do you think it's do you think that our our relationship with our capitalist system, but also our view of what it means to support and be more socialistic? Do you think that in a in a way we are the word doomed is too strong? But do we get to a place where we really value those early years?

SPEAKER_01 9:27

Um for me, what's hard-coded is the tension around the role of women and the role of men and the role of home and the role of work, right? So the stress about whether we're going to have a collective care for children and babies, um, that is stressful because there are always factions in the society who say, well, that is a mother's job. And we need to set up society to that so that mothers can stay home with their children and control that environment. And, you know, there's there's many different, there's sort of a trad wife version of that where it's really about, you know, um a completely patriarchal and uh imaginary traditionalist right um idea. Uh, but then there's a there's a different kind, I mean, there's a crunchy sort of left-wing version of that, which is about attachment parenting and having the child next to you, you know, constantly and never having any childcare because you're showing your devotion and your complete, you know, um uh abnegation of your own needs for the for the sake of the child. Um and I think that's something that has also gone in a little bit, it's become more ideological than it is really listening to what the collective needs. Um But we have a lot of trouble in America negotiating between those things. And I think as someone who has children of her own, I've been on different sides of that tension myself. It hurts sometimes to go to work and leave your child even in a great child care. Um, it also hurts sometimes to be, you know, elbowed out of opportunities because you're being, you know, placed in a situation where you're torn between different responsibilities. And so it's uncomfortable no matter what we do. Um, but the way that we care for children continues to be sort of tossed on these ideological horns, right, of this dilemma as people work out their own individual as well as collective conflicts about what the proper role is. When the reality is that there is no one, I mean, we need to be able to solve this in a way that allows for individual freedom of choice without making value judgments, as long as we decide collectively that we're going to put the children's needs first.

SPEAKER_00 11:39

We have such a strange relationship with collective in this country.

unknown 11:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:45

You know, I I think you just said that so nicely, the individual choice, but then there's also systemic considerations that require collective action. If you don't mind me asking, what would when you reflect back on your own early years, you know, as far back as we can kind of remember our early childhood, what stands out to you, how you were raised as a young child?

SPEAKER_01 12:08

Wow. Um so you know, pertinent to what we're talking about, my parents both worked in the same English department of the same university. So they had relatively like equal arrangement. Um, and they really had to, they didn't have family nearby. So it was daycares, preschools. Um, sometimes their graduate students would babysit. I was cared for by the wife of another faculty member alongside her children. Um, and so they made it work in a whole bunch of different ways. I think, in terms of the kind of parenting that I got as a young child, my parents were teachers. They were in love with English literature and they were enthralled with the learning and developing brain. I mean, so the happiest moments of my early childhood had to do with sort of discovering the world and being witnessed by my parents in that discovery and their kind of excitement as I encountered nature, encountered books, um, you know, art and different different things. Um, so yeah, I think that delight, and that's something I get to see now with my um my children and my and their grandparents, they still have that same kind of um delight in in the child's brain.

SPEAKER_00 13:25

Yeah, the things that we can provide for our children just by what we do, what we have around is really powerful. My mom was a teacher, my dad worked for a newspaper, and so same idea of the things that were sort of always around, um, particularly newspapers. We're such a newspaper family. And only realize later that wasn't really the norm. I mean, it's certainly like, you know, the 90s. Do you like how decentralized American education is?

SPEAKER_01 13:51

Well, I'll say this, Dan. At the moment, with the federal threats, it feels like a good idea. I'm glad that there's so much local control because um it's it's going to, whatever we, you know, we go through in this current political cycle, I feel like there will be something on the other end of it because we have this very distributed model. Um when I think about America and the way that we actually unified behind the idea of public, universal free public education for everyone, even for immigrants, um, it seems like a miracle that we got that together and that we're able to establish that as a known idea in so many different kinds of places. And even after decades of attacks on public education, we still have, I just checked the other day, 90% of children are in public schools. Um, and and I'm including charter schools there, but not private and not homeschool. So I think it's a pretty the the common characteristics of the system are what really stand out to me. Um, I think arguably, if you look at other countries, you can imagine higher educational standards if we had a standard more standardization, um, more standardization and perhaps elevation of how we train teachers and how we vet curricula and materials. Um, all of that could be a lot more, I think, better done on a national basis if we look at countries like Canada or Japan. Um however, uh there's uh we are very different from a lot of countries. And so it's sort of hard to make a one-to-one comparison.

SPEAKER_00 15:31

How much does our multiculturalism play into that, do you think?

SPEAKER_01 15:34

Hugely. Hugely. I mean, there's a hundred languages spoken just in the New York City public schools. Right.

SPEAKER_00 15:39

Yeah. And yet we continue to want to measure. Uh we continue to want to report and display progress through numbers. Um and how does that to what to what extent does our obsession with measurement hold us back from um a lot of human potential in schools?

SPEAKER_01 16:08

You know, in my book, The Test, uh, my argument is that the standardized test regime really is stopping our schools from moving to meet the moment and to evolve in the way that they need to, because they are really an antique technology. I mean, standardization is a product of the industrial age of the 19th century where every student is supposed to give the same answer to a test, um, to any question, any item. And as long as we go for cheap machine gradable tests, we're gonna have sort of cheap learning to go with it. Um, the reinvention of schools of education, the reorientation around different kinds of metrics, um underway in fits and starts. I don't think there, I've never met a teacher who's totally complacent about the way that we do these things now. And I think that most schools and most school leaders would tell you that they're trying to introduce multiple measures. Um, and in fact, I mean, I think that's true in the sense that you see school leaders putting emphasis on things like attendance and things like student satisfaction or um, you know, even kind of um fuzzier measures around, you know, school climate, those types of things, which are really important and create the container for learning. Um but there are other practices like um in portfolio schools, um, in uh having you know teachers from different schools look at student work and compare and create a common measurement that doesn't, those practices don't seem to spread because they're much more labor intensive and we don't reward them or recognize them.

SPEAKER_00 17:47

We are struggling to simplify in schools. There's only there's always more information, more uh ideas, more ways of doing things. But I think it in schools, in my experience, we're not very good at taking things out. So things more gets added, but we don't take anything out. And so you know, I I mean I teach eighth grade, so I see just the wonderful, crazy creativity of adolescents every day, and yet I often feel like that we are doing the exact opposite so often of harnessing that because of accountability, because of new pressures to do this, to add this new measurement tool, or or to try this new um way of organizing the day, or this new curriculum. And yeah, how do we find that space, that middle ground where we can let kids be kids with the caveat that as schools, as public schools, there has to be some accountability to the public. And that's a balancing act that I feel like we're not doing a great job of right now. Um, but I'd be curious if you if you think differently.

SPEAKER_01 18:59

Um I don't think that we're doing a great job. I do think that um the shock of COVID did force a realignment um in a number of different ways. One is that, you know, it sort of the music stopped, right? And people had to sort of reevaluate what they were doing because business as usual was not there anymore. And even in that spring of 2020, when you saw schools sort of lift to graduation requirements or um colleges get rid of SAT scores, it was like, well, what are we doing and why are we doing it? Is it really the most important thing here? And every single teacher that I know rediscovered the importance of relationships in keeping students engaged in school. You know, if the students don't have trust, they don't have a reason to come back or the reason to show up or the reason to turn their Zoom camera on. They need to have an attachment to the school and to the mission of the school and to their fellow students and to their teachers. Um, otherwise, it's not going to succeed. And I know that there's been, you know, we've rushed back without a real mourning period, without a real recognition of what was lost, of what was forgotten. Um, and that part is very, very painful. And I know that teachers feel the ones that I've talked to feel very that they were put right back under pressure and under stress, and we have to catch up and we have to keep going. But I also think that there's a lingering, and I wonder how you feel about this. There's a lingering memory of actually no, what's really important is that my students are not depressed, that they're able to be together and and their emotional well-being is is actually the North Star.

SPEAKER_00 20:38

Yeah. The focus on mental health, student mental health that COVID brought about is certainly one of the lasting legacies we I know like where we where I am now are keep having kids together in school is the most important thing. You know, we're we can talk later a bit about um you know the fires we had here in Los Angeles. And that put us out of school for a while, but it also made it has made it difficult for students to get to school if they live in the affected area and just the way the traffic is going. And there's students in Malibu and are just just getting to LA is difficult. But it's such a we're realizing the lesson from COVID is it's really important that they get to school. We figure out a way to make it happen because as you said, the learning is not gonna happen on that deep level, the the where the emotions are if they can't be together and they can't feel safe. And I know I know you teen mental health is first and foremost for you, I know. And I and I um you know, when you talk to teachers, how are you know, what's your sense of where um kids are um, you know, as we're you know, I feel like we're at this point now. Where there's this sort of thing where in schools we would say, okay, I think this was the last class that was really affected by COVID. And they go on, well, how are they doing? Well, you know, I don't know. This this might be the last class that was really impacted by COVID. When I think we're probably just sort of, you know, being a little bit um, we're playing a little games here because everybody was impacted by COVID. But I wonder what what have you kind of picked up in your own conversations?

SPEAKER_01 22:29

I mean, another way of looking at that is that the baseline might have really shifted in terms of, you know, on a whole community level. Um and I mean, I knew at the very beginning of the COVID shutdowns, looking at the research, that it would be a generational impact. It impacts every child, the ones that are in utero on up. And so that wave is going to continue to proceed. But as it does, our expectations shift, you know, our beliefs about what can or can or should be done within a school year shifts. And that's why, you know, some people reported this mishmatch between how teachers say kids are doing and what parents perceive, because again, their baseline, their expectations have shifted. If there's a lot of kids in your kindergarten class who aren't reading, then you know, that becomes the new normal. Um and perhaps it's returning to the normal of a generation ago because we have had a creep up of the purely academic standards, right? In terms of expectations on our youngest kids. Um, but you know, in terms of like how the kids are doing, I have an eighth grader also. Um, and he's been really resilient, but he's also had his ups and downs. And the normalization of mental health conversations is overwhelmingly, I think, a good thing. Um, but people like Lisa Damore, who I really respect, adolescent psychologist, uh, they she says sometimes, you know, it there's such a thing as too much feelings talk. And there's such a thing as sort of like, you know, if you're nervous about a test, it's not the same thing as having clinical anxiety. And do we have a discourse that is empowering kids with understanding themselves, understanding their conditions, having a passion for other people? Or do we have a discourse that's tilting toward pathologizing the normal ups and downs of being an adolescent and foregrounding your emotional sort of experiences in the moment-to-moment at the expense of perhaps other goals? And the one thing I try to always just incorporate is that part of the mental health function of schools is experiences of efficacy and and overcoming challenge, right? And so the warm-demanding school that gives you a lot to think about, a lot to be curious about, a way to achieve is also part of how schools are healing.

SPEAKER_00 24:53

Yeah, you can definitely overdo it. I mean, we came back from after the fires. Um I think one of the greatest things was our our uh our head said, our head of school said, you know, we got together as a community, and he told the staff ahead of time, faculty had a time. He said, We're gonna get together as a community. I'm gonna say some words, I'm gonna let students say some words, and then that's a I don't want to hear that you're bringing it up in class. Obviously, the student needs to talk about it, that's different, but we're moving on. And that's what the students wanted. They want they want to get back to learning. They don't want to, as you say, they don't want to turn this into a into a clinical study of their uh their uh feelings at that every moment of the day. Um, but you also, you know, you you you said this um somewhere that this idea of kids being resilient and resilience and grid and perseverance, and we want all those things in children, but if we're expecting students to have that, but they don't have the the network, the safety network, then we're really we're there's a disconnect there. And and COVID did reveal some of that, right?

SPEAKER_01 26:02

Yes, yes, definitely. I mean, the the resilience I compare it to right to grass, which bounces back up, but that's because it has this underground network of very thick roots that keep it fed and keep it nourished. And um, yeah, that's really what we need to be constantly building and reinforcing for our kids. And um, you know, it's really interesting that you bring up the fires because I think that what we're also seeing um, and I co-wrote the paper kind of arguing this, that you know, the interruptions of climate change and extreme weather are getting more and more frequent all over the world. And um, when interruption becomes a norm, it subtle it shifts how you approach the entire school project because the school itself has to be resilient, right? You can't count on having 180 days in the order that you expected them to. And in some ways, it's like another blow against the sort of um traditionalist standardized version of education where it's day five of week 10 and we're teaching this, right? You need to be it, it needs to work very differently in this kind of in this certain senses.

SPEAKER_00 27:08

100%. I mean, I think the teachers, teachers that are nimble and can respond to student needs and the ebbs and flows of the year and the week are the most successful, and then you could just take that out to the school of view. Schools need to be organic and responsive. But that climate change, I originally I did contact you because I was thinking a lot about climate change and and how schools talk about it, and back to this idea of resilience and the network. And I just I've been feeling a lot, even before the fires, that you know, kids are inundated with climate change uh doomsdayism, right? And social media and in the media. And I just don't feel like schools take it that seriously. And I don't know if it's just because climate change feels so big that schools don't want to touch it, or because our curriculum is already overstuffed. Like as I was saying, we don't take anything out, we just put things in. And there are there are programs out there that that can help schools address climate change, but by and large, you don't see, I mean, even as an example here, New Jersey recently was the first state. But I was I'm reading an article about it, and the article even said something like Um, New Jersey seeks to um address climate change in the classroom, even in classes, even in um surprising classes like social studies and art. Like that's not surprising. You know, climate change is not just a science topic. And I think schools uh either see it that way or maybe just don't even want to go there.

SPEAKER_01 28:45

Yeah, I mean, so you know, I'll just say, like, um, you know, this is a huge paradigm shift. And I've had some people tell me that they think it's the most exciting movement in education because it is not just a content area, it is a mindset shift. And obviously, I mean, climate change, one term for it is that it's a hyper object, which means it's so big, it envelops everything. It is, it is the jar of honey, and we are the the wasps climbing around in it, right? We just can't, we can't get away from it. And uh there's no way it's gonna fit into one science lesson in middle school, right? It just permeates everything, including whether or not you can even come to school in the first place, right? Um, and so fascinatingly, they're they're working on incorporating climate literacy into the PISA tests. And so I was talking to uh Andrea Sleisher the other day of the OECD, and his contention is that a very big component of climate literacy is personal agency. Um really uh what you might call action civics, but an understanding of your own connectivity to what's going on in the world and your own ability to act on what's going on in the world. Um and that really, I think, shows an orientation that yes, they need to understand the science, yes, they need to understand that it's human cause, they also really need to understand the solutions, and they need to understand what they can do about it and how they can be part of the solutions. Um, and that, I mean, you could you could easily imagine, and many some schools are, you could reorient the entire educational effort around that set of challenges. It's that big, it's that systemic.

SPEAKER_00 30:30

Pretty telling that it's the OECD and not an American institution that's coming up with these ideas. I agree. I I mean I always thought that the sustainable development goals of the UN are also a great framework for thinking about these things because they basically all 17 of those goals are directly touching on climate change. I've done a lot in my own classroom around responsible consumption and production. To your point, like how do you bring it down to a point where students can feel empowered that they can do something and not sort of doom scrolling and hearing that um that everything's going to hell, particularly when you read that there are energy companies that actually promote that idea, right? They're trying to promote paralysis so that we don't do anything about it. And so, how do you overcome that and help students feel like, no, you don't have to solve the world's problems? You can do something at your own level.

SPEAKER_01 31:25

So there's an educator's guide to climate emotions that I really uh recommend to teachers who are thinking about this. Um, because I think, you know, you can all of the objections you raise are valid, right? The curriculum's overstuffed, there's not enough time, there's not enough resources, there's not enough training for teachers. But on top of that, teachers tell us that it's a big problem because students get upset when you talk about climate change. If you manage to break through and explain to them what's going on, it is scary and it is upsetting. And so this educators guide is sort of full of um ways to in lesson plans incorporate space for those feelings and expressions of them, as well as toggling back and forth between lessons that have sort of upsetting content and um, you know, things that are are more reassuring. Because just as your principal said, I mean, you can't you can't be talking about the wildfires all day long. Um, it's just it's too much, it's too real.

SPEAKER_00 32:21

What do you think is the most important idea that teens today need to understand about climate change? Ooh. That's a really good question. It's because you said it's what was the term you use? It's the the hyper object. Hyper object, right? I was thinking polycrisis, but that's another one.

SPEAKER_01 32:41

Um if there's one thing I wish that every teen understood, I would say that every fraction of a degree of warming that is preventable is going to be worth worth preventing. I think that there's so you know, that that sort of statement, unpacking that, understanding we're talking about average degrees of warming. We're talking about yes, there's thresholds, but also we need to prevent every single um piece of warming that we can, and that this is the effort and this is the urgency. Um that that's I think that's sort of the core message.

SPEAKER_00 33:17

Sorry to drop that on you.

SPEAKER_01 33:19

No, it's a great question.

SPEAKER_00 33:21

Yeah. I was something back for a second. We were I was talking about Doom Scrolling and um, you know, the the amount of misinformation, disinformation, yeah, crazy information that's out there. And um, I'm a huge fan of Mike Caulfield. Um I know you are too, and his sift method. Um you know, how does that resonate when you talk with people about how to handle misinformation, young people, but also adults, and and whether you're talking about the sift method or other ways of processing? Do you feel like again, kind of back to this idea that we're just getting more or not taking anything out? Yeah. How do you feel like people are processing the information landscape?

SPEAKER_01 34:09

I think people are struggling. I think that it seems like a large proportion of Americans are becoming deliberate or semi-deliberate news avoiders. Um, you know, it it it's it's really interesting to think about, you know, media, media regimes kind of rise and fall with technology, and that's happened for generations, right? So clearly, obviously, people in the Middle Ages were quite misinformed. And in the American Revolution times, I mean, what percentage of people actually could read and follow what was going on in the Constitutional Convention? You know, otherwise, what was people's main source of information? Maybe somebody, you know, gossiping at the at the town tavern. Um, and then you had the Penny Dreadful newspapers, right? You had uh basically rags telling scandal sheets and this and that. And then you had, then there was perhaps a golden age that people imagine as being, right? The but I mean you had uh Father Coughlin in the 30s just spewing propaganda across the entire country, horrible racist propaganda that most people believed. Um and then you had uh, okay, maybe for like a few decades there were there was television news. It was super, it was still super censored. It was like exactly what the the US government wanted it to say. It wasn't that independent. Um, and then newspapers, you know, got pretty serious and and and there was, you know, there was nightly news. So then at least people are tuning into the same like 15 minutes of information on a nightly basis. Um and then we had this, you know, explosion of then we have cable news, 24 hours news cycle. Whether there's 24 hours of news or not, there's a 24-hour news cycle. Um and uh coming up to today. So I think there's always been, there's always been some great journalism, great storytelling, um, at least for the last few generations. And there's always been a lot of nonsense because people like nonsense. Um and so there's there's I don't think there's like a single golden age of maximal informed, ex maximum informed or or um educated population that we can compare it to. Um but it's still clear to say that yes, there are people now are being in the position of being overwhelmed by too much information, even if it's true, it's not always relevant or important.

SPEAKER_00 36:31

Yeah, I saw a somewhere that every day we encounter, not that we can process, but we encounter more information than a person in the Middle Ages would have encountered in their entire life.

SPEAKER_01 36:47

Right.

SPEAKER_00 36:48

Um But I wonder though to what extent it feels more this era feels more cynical, there's less trust. You know, back to Mike Caulfield for a second. He uh he has the this this line that I come back to a lot, even with my own students. He said, you know, you have to think of media trust like a currency. He said, you have to be careful where you spend it, but you have to spend it. Because if you if you decided that nothing can be trusted, you're exposing yourself to um all kinds of misinformation. You have to kind of figure out where the those trust points can be. And I wonder, do you feel like one of the characteristics of media today is we just don't trust it?

SPEAKER_01 37:38

Uh absolutely. Um, and I would like to point out that that's a classic strategy of authoritarianism as well. Um when I was uh in college, I visited Moscow for a summer. And they uh the it was publicly announced that the there would be no hot water in certain sections of the city because they had to clean the pipes. Um but that was obviously not true. They were, it was because they didn't have enough energy to heat the water. And everyone knew that that was the real, the real fact of it. And I was so puzzled to be in a place where people were that there was a public lie that everyone was supposed to just accept as a fact. Um, but when the government is lying habitually to people, it produces the cynicism that you're talking about and the mistrust. And it it leads people to be very ill-informed because they mistrust absolutely everything they hear. They don't know when to trust anything, so they don't trust anything. And then they don't know anything because they don't believe anything.

SPEAKER_00 38:41

Yeah. And we see that play out in so many places. You know, we weren't when we're having someone being confirmed for a cabinet position, and when we know that everyone sitting in that confirmation hearing knows that person's unqualified. We know that person's not qualified, they know it, but we also know they're going to be confirmed. Um, to your point, which maybe you know is a good time to talk about one of my favorite websites. And I think one of your favorite websites, Wikipedia.

SPEAKER_01 39:13

That's true. I love Wikipedia.

SPEAKER_00 39:14

Which is, you know, I and I'm not even being facetious here. I mean, I think Wikipedia is the greatest website, it's not even close. And but it speaks to collective human action, a desire to learn, a desire to work together, to get something right, um to be, you know, to be creative uh in collaborative in a collaborative way. And I know you've you've you think a lot about Creative Commons and and and these, you know, particularly when it comes to AI and how the intersection of these, but um I don't know. There's not even a question here. I just wanted to talk about Wikipedia for a second.

SPEAKER_01 39:55

Wikipedia is amazing. Um an interesting thing I've seen crop up in the last three weeks are volunteer uh data collectors, so people that are downloading um information from government websites that they've been trying to obfuscate or hide or just take down and then putting it back up on publicly hosted sites. Um it's almost like a renaissance of some of the open source um hacking of the decade and a half ago, which you love to see. And you love to see that because it's really a re I mean, we've lived, we've lived through an enclosure of the internet, right, where all of these platforms are fully monetized and they the user experience gets worse and worse. And you know, there is an alternate way that this could go because we have HTTPS, right? We have these um uh a web that could belong to everybody, a web that can be, you know, non-commercial and that can be uh you know, be interactive without being forced to rely on these platforms. And so thinking about that as an alternative and using those kinds of things make g does give me a lot of hope and excitement.

SPEAKER_00 41:01

Yeah, they were they're having a cool conversation on this um this podcast, Tech Won't Save Us.

SPEAKER_01 41:06

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:07

And they were talking about Spotify, but they were so they spent the hosts spent a lot of time talking about the you know the age of like the Pirate Bay and these times when music was just sort of flying around. And um I mean back to our beginning of this conversation, we're talking about capitalism and exactly you have this in some ways to me, Wikipedia represents that idea that we don't need to enclose things, as you say. That we don't things don't have to be perfectly lined up, they don't have to be uh monetized, they don't have to be they don't have the purpose, doesn't have to be growth, the purpose doesn't have to be uh profit. Um I'm just trying to pull all these threads together here because in in school, this is also a message that I feel like standardization, capitalism wants standardization. And I think when we can look to examples that push back against that, we're healthier as humans.

SPEAKER_01 42:09

Definitely. Absolutely. And I think that just looking to examples is one thing, but also just noticing and experiencing the amount of things you're doing in a day that have nothing to do with the marketplace. I mean, I don't know any teacher who sees their job as just being a job. You know, you're you're hosting a community, you're part of a web of relationships, and you're um overseeing people's growth and challenge. And and none of that really can, I mean, even if it were paid adequately, it wouldn't come down to a paycheck. It couldn't be captured that way.

SPEAKER_00 42:40

How much of a threat to our to this non-standardization, this idea of collective, more organic um way of seeing the world. How much of a threat is AI to that, do you think?

SPEAKER_01 42:55

AI is stressful to me because I mean, I think that I think the capitalistic lens, and I've been paying a lot of attention to Ed Zitron's um criticisms recently, the capitalistic lens is probably the easiest way of understanding AI in the sense that just the tech industry needed a bubble. And so they pushed a lot of money into this and they made a lot of promises and a lot of hype that really didn't match the payoff. Um and large language models, I mean, artificial intelligence in terms of algorithms and and machine learning are real and they're in our world right now. They don't have the potential to capture um the amount of economic growth that the investments in them suggest that they do. I just don't believe it. I think generate, I think general intelligence is BS. I just don't think it's gonna happen in any real way. Um, and so but what is happening is it is disrupting education, not because it's so great for teaching, but because it is challenging to. To certain kinds of assignments, right? It's giving students a very easy way to cheat on things that used to be seen as not easy to cheat on. And that's very disruptive. And the results of that I think are still kind of unwritten.

SPEAKER_00 44:15

For sure. I think it does. I think one nice thing about AI's disruption in education, though, is it has made us look very closely at what we're asking students to do.

SPEAKER_01 44:29

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 44:29

What are we measuring? You know, I think teachers that were already creating uh learning experiences and assignments that were more reflective, that were more personal, they find they suddenly found themselves like way ahead because they weren't the ones being assaulted by the teacher saying, I don't get it. Like they're just turning in Chat GPT. Yeah, well, you're just giving them an essay question that they could, you know, plug in. Right. Maybe it's time to rethink that. But how do you feel as a person, as a creative person, knowing that these LLMs have just like trawled the internet for intellectual property?

SPEAKER_01 45:07

Um, I think that I mean, it doesn't feel great. Um, it is part of the devaluing of writing work that's happened for a long time. I mean, when I started writing 20 years ago, $2 a word was a good rate. And today it still is. So there's been a real, a real issue when it comes to supply and demand for people that write for a living. Um, and that's just in the that's outside of the world realm of books. I mean, the the proliferation of books and self-publishing and Amazon, Kindle, Direct is is just a whole other, you know, can of worms. But um, so that's been very hard. And then yes, AI is another level on top of that where, you know, it seems to be replacing kind of the most, it replaces writing that people don't care about. I would say that that's, you know, and and that is too bad. Um, but at the same time, it perhaps shifts your perception of what it is that you really do care about. And I think just as you said, in the in the context of a teacher's assignment, it's like, well, that challenges me then to produce the things that only I can produce. Um, because if it's something generic, then that can be produced generically.

SPEAKER_00 46:23

At this point, I don't see AI as a highly valuable classroom tool as a teacher. It does just cool stuff, like kind of organizing information and and consolidating some things. I know there's the the the next frontier seems to be AI tutors. Right. Um, and I and I I my initial, I actually talked to someone recently about this on this podcast, and she was very excited about this possibility. And and I, you know, I'm pretty skeptical um of what kind of tutoring this would be. But then I also feel sometimes feel like I need to check myself and I wonder if am I just coming at this from a perspective of privilege? You know, feeling like, but maybe there are students that this technology really could help, even if it's imperfect. Um, and that I don't want to just dismiss it because I feel like, well, you know, I know what good feedback and tutoring looks like. Um, but I know you have thoughts on AI tutoring, I've heard you.

SPEAKER_01 47:24

Well, I I think it's a little bit, I mean, we've we've been down this road before about this idea of automating teaching, right? Yeah. And I think what it continues to misunderstand is what is the role of the teacher, especially when a student is struggling? Encouragement, motivation, making them believe that they can do it. And in engaging with a little animated character is not going to give you those things.

SPEAKER_00 47:51

But it's so cute, Anya.

SPEAKER_01 47:55

It can be so cute. And you know, and parasocial relationships are real. And if you know, if your child is like Elmo's, like, yay, you did it, like it could do, it can be a fraction of something, but it's it's just the tea the tutor's not there to sort of tell you. I mean, part of it is yes, giving you strategies for problem solving. But what's gonna make you engage with those strategies? What's gonna make you think that you can do those things? Um, it's gonna be a person who cares about you.

SPEAKER_00 48:24

Yeah, the emotional component of learning can't be overstated and on a screen with, you know, as you said, Elmo. Probably not gonna get there.

SPEAKER_01 48:35

I mean, I was talking to a an in-home daycare provider um with a bunch of kids who are from newcomer immigrant families, and they have a much higher rate of referrals for uh developmental disabilities in the last few years since COVID. And the city doesn't have any therapists. She's like, and the woman is like, they have tablet therapists, but a three-year-old's not gonna learn from a tablet. Like, give me a break. You're gonna give give a three-year-old speech therapy on a tablet. Like, she was just like completely dismissive of the idea. And I think that's that's the problem, right? Like if they have this inequity, and then you're giving a tablet as a way of addressing it, and it doesn't work.

SPEAKER_00 49:14

And that's the you know, back to this um, you know, resilience without a network. I mean, I've seen this, I've experienced this therapy online, and it's just it doesn't, it just doesn't work. I mean, I'll just speak for myself, but and my own son had did speech therapy. They they wanted to do it online. Well, this online option, we don't have the resources, you know, to necessarily have face-to-face for all the time. And it's like, that sucks because that face-to-face is exactly what it needs to be. Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_01 49:45

Mm-hmm. And uh it's really tricky. I mean, I I I live in that world. I live in a world of Zooms, and I've I also have been to a Zoom therapist, and I feel like there's yeah, I mean, there's there's such a desire, I think, for human beings to try to find, you know, find that easy way and bridge the gap. And it's like it's very close to being what you want it to be, but there are these there are these factors missing. And yeah, it's it's tricky.

SPEAKER_00 50:13

What's your next project?

SPEAKER_01 50:16

I am working on a book about the emotional landscape of the polycrisis. Um, so really it's about sort of uh the paradigm for sanity or stability or you know, happiness, maybe, I think needs to be a little bit different in the world we're living in. And um, I sort of liken it to um a gyroscope where instead of like you, you know, you you go along and you hit an obstacle and then you keep going, it's like you're constantly spinning just to stay upright. And you, you know, but I think there are tools and there are resources and and worldviews and behaviors that we can use to actually thrive in this really, really difficult time.

SPEAKER_00 51:02

Because it's not so linear, it's sort of around us all the time. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 51:07

It's all it's really, it's all the time.

SPEAKER_00 51:10

Is this do you come up with an idea that you pitch to a publisher, or does someone come to you and say, hey, Anya, we think this is something you could um it can happen either way at this uh right now I have a I'm working with an agent um who's gonna take the book out to publishers, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 51:25

Awesome.

SPEAKER_00 51:25

Well, I can't wait to see that. And I want to thank you so much for taking the time to join me. Just you're such an interesting thinker, and I and I uh appreciate you kind of going down these rabbit holes with me.

SPEAKER_01 51:36

It was really fun, Dan. I bet your students really love you.

SPEAKER_00 51:41

Hopefully.