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Don’t Turn Inward One month to the day before the 2024 presidential election, The New York Times reported on a new analysis of how Americans spend their time. More and more of the average American’s day is being spent at home: one hour and 39 minutes more in 2022 than in 2003. For each extra hour at home, a bit of it was spent with family—7.4 minutes. More of it, 21 minutes, was spent alone.Obviously, because of the coronavirus pandemic, time at home spiked in 2020. Some of this homebody impulse may well be the stubborn persistence of habits formed during the isolating early days of lockdown. But this trend is more than just a pandemic hangover. For years before COVID-19 hit, time spent alone had been increasing as time spent socializing had been decreasing. Though solitude and loneliness are not the same, this downturn in social connection happened alongside a rise in loneliness so pronounced that the surgeon general called it an epidemic.And now this: the reelection to the nation’s highest office of Donald Trump, a man who has attacked the very idea of a communal, democratic form of government, and who has indicated that he aspires to move the United States toward autocracy—auto, of course, meaning “self,” and autocracy being the concentration of power for and within the self. Self over others is one of Trump’s defining principles. In his first term as president, he used an office intended for public service to enrich himself. He has vowed to use it this time to take revenge on his enemies and—“within two seconds” of taking office—to fire the special counsel overseeing criminal cases against him.Yet self over others, or at the very least self before others, has long been a prominent aspect of American culture—not always to Trumpian levels, certainly, but individualism for better and worse shapes both the structure of society and our personal lives. And it will surely shape Americans’ responses to the election: for the winners, perhaps, self-congratulation; for the losers, the risk of allowing despair to pull them into a deeper, more dangerous seclusion. On Election Day, the Times published an article on voters’ plans to manage stress. Two separate people in that story said they were deliberately avoiding social settings. To extend that strategy into the next four years would be a mistake.[Read: Don’t give up on America]In 1831, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville traveled to the United States. He observed and analyzed its people and culture, and published his thoughts in a massive two-volume report called Democracy in America. Alongside his praise for the country’s professed value of equality—which he wrote “possesses all the characteristics of a divine decree”—he warned of the individualism he saw as baked into American society and the isolation it could cause. “Each man is forever thrown back on himself alone,” he wrote, “and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.”More than a century and a half later, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, a sociological book by five scholars, followed explicitly in Tocqueville’s footsteps, examining how individualism affects institutions and personal relationships in the United States. Published in 1985, it reads today as wildly prescient. The authors feared that the danger Tocqueville described had already come to pass. “It seems to us,” they wrote, “that it is individualism, and not equality, as Tocqueville thought, that has marched inexorably through our history. We are concerned that this individualism may have grown cancerous … that it may be threatening the survival of freedom itself.”Tempering American individualism, in Tocqueville’s view, was Americans’ propensity to form associations and participate in civic life. “These he saw as moderating the isolating tendencies of private ambition on one hand and limiting the despotic proclivities of government on the other,” the authors of Habits of the Heart wrote. But American associational life began hollowing out starting in the 1960s and ’70s, as people became less and less likely to attend any kind of club, league, church, or other community organization (a shift that Robert Putnam documented in his 2000 book, Bowling Alone). Since the late ’70s, faith in large-scale institutions such as organized religion, organized labor, the media, and the U.S. government has also been dwindling; in 2023, Gallup declared it “historically low.”A few months ago I spoke with Ann Swidler, one of the authors of Habits of the Heart. “We obviously did not succeed in having things go the direction we might have hoped,” she told me. “I would say that every horrible thing we worried about has gotten worse.” Americans are spending measurably more time shut up in the solitude of their homes, and perhaps in the solitude of their own hearts as well.It might be difficult to imagine the renaissance of many civic associations—the kind that could be good for both democracy and our relationships—given that a majority of Americans just voted for a man who has little interest in or respect for institutions beyond what they can do for him. If autocracy is indeed where the country is headed, Tocqueville’s prediction regarding our relationships is not a positive one. As he wrote in The Old Regime and the Revolution, his book on the French revolution: Despotism does not combat this tendency [toward individualism]; on the contrary, it renders it irresistible, for it deprives citizens of all common passions, mutual necessities, need of a common understanding, opportunity for combined action: it ripens them, so to speak, in private life. They had a tendency to hold themselves aloof from each other: it isolates them. They looked coldly on each other: it freezes their souls. If individualism is, as the authors of Habits of the Heart wrote, “the first language in which Americans tend to think about their lives,” it makes sense that people would reach for their mother tongue in times of upheaval. In the days after the 2016 election, for example, searches for the term self-care spiked. Caring for yourself takes different forms, of course, though in mainstream culture, self-care is commonly used to mean treating yourself, by yourself. Self-soothing, alone. (One can see in this echoes of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance”: “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.”)But caring for yourself doesn’t always have to breed isolation. Among activists and in the helping professions, self-care is often talked about as a way to restore people so that they don’t burn out and can continue their altruistic work. Some in these circles critique a focus on self-care as distracting from the need for institutional support. But the overall conception at least shows an understanding of the two types of care as having a symbiotic relationship: Care for the self so that you can show up for others.[Read: Focus on the things that matter]What’s more, caring for others is a form of self-care. Research shows that doing things for other people leads to greater well-being than trying to make yourself happy or indulging yourself. This is not to say there is no place for self-soothing or solitude, or for buying yourself a little treat. But it is to challenge the cultural message that turtling up alone is the most appropriate response to difficult feelings.Under an administration for which (to paraphrase my colleague Adam Serwer) cruelty, not care, is the point, it falls to people to care for one another on scales small and large. This task is made harder not just by the cultural pressure for Americans to rely only on themselves but also by the slow, steady atrophying of the muscles of togetherness. “American individualism resists more adult virtues, such as care and generativity, let alone wisdom,” the authors of Habits of the Heart wrote. The inverse, I hope, is true too: that care and generativity—working to make contributions to a collective future—are the path to resisting hyper-individualism and isolation.Even if turning inward is a big-picture trend, it is, of course, not the only development happening. As isolating as the pandemic lockdown was, those years saw the rise of mutual-aid groups determined to care for the vulnerable whether the government did or not. During the first Trump administration, mass protests broke out; people fought for women’s rights and an end to racist police brutality. People are always showing up for one another in quiet, everyday ways too. Building networks of support and commitment could provide some small buffer against the effects of a self-serving president-elect’s policies while keeping people from drifting further apart.Americans’ skills of connection and care are not lost. But they are rusty. And all of us will need those skills if we are to find a way to turn toward one another instead of inward. I’m not even talking about overcoming political polarization or reaching out to build bridges with strangers who voted differently than you did. Those are tasks that people won’t be equipped to tackle if they’re struggling to show up for the loved ones already in their life. For now, it is enough of a challenge to attempt to reverse the isolationist inertia of decades. It is enough of a challenge to resist what has become a cultural tendency to withdraw, while also processing the stress of an election that has left many people exhausted and deeply afraid for the future. How do we proceed over the next four years? Not alone. How do we proceed over the next week, hour, minute? Not alone.When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.theatlantic.com
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She Was an Education Superstar. Then She Got Blamed for America’s Reading Crisis. Photographs by Jeff BrownUntil a couple of years ago, Lucy Calkins was, to many American teachers and parents, a minor deity. Thousands of U.S. schools used her curriculum, called Units of Study, to teach children to read and write. Two decades ago, her guiding principles—that children learn best when they love reading, and that teachers should try to inspire that love—became a centerpiece of the curriculum in New York City’s public schools. Her approach spread through an institute she founded at Columbia University’s Teachers College, and traveled further still via teaching materials from her publisher. Many teachers don’t refer to Units of Study by name. They simply say they are “teaching Lucy.”But now, at the age of 72, Calkins faces the destruction of everything she has worked for. A 2020 report by a nonprofit described Units of Study as “beautifully crafted” but “unlikely to lead to literacy success for all of America’s public schoolchildren.” The criticism became impossible to ignore two years later, when the American Public Media podcast Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong accused Calkins of being one of the reasons so many American children struggle to read. (The National Assessment of Educational Progress—a test administered by the Department of Education—found in 2022 that roughly one-third of fourth and eighth graders are unable to read at the “basic” level for their age.)In Sold a Story, the reporter Emily Hanford argued that teachers had fallen for a single, unscientific idea—and that its persistence was holding back American literacy. The idea was that “beginning readers don’t have to sound out words.” That meant teachers were no longer encouraging early learners to use phonics to decode a new word—to say cuh-ah-tuh for “cat,” and so on. Instead, children were expected to figure out the word from the first letter, context clues, or nearby illustrations. But this “cueing” system was not working for large numbers of children, leaving them floundering and frustrated. The result was a reading crisis in America.The podcast said that “a company and four of its top authors” had sold this “wrong idea” to teachers and politicians. The company was the educational publisher Heinemann, and the authors included the New Zealander Marie Clay, the American duo Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, and Calkins. The podcast devoted an entire episode, “The Superstar,” to Calkins. In it, Hanford wondered if Calkins was wedded to a “romantic” notion of literacy, where children would fall in love with books and would then somehow, magically, learn to read. Calkins could not see that her system failed poorer children, Hanford argued, because she was “influenced by privilege”; she had written, for instance, that children might learn about the alphabet by picking out letters from their surroundings, such as “the monogram letters on their bath towels.”In Hanford’s view, it was no surprise if Calkins’s method worked fine for wealthier kids, many of whom arrive at school already starting to read. If they struggled, they could always turn to private tutors, who might give the phonics lessons that their schools were neglecting to provide. But kids without access to private tutors needed to be drilled in phonics, Hanford argued. She backed up her claims by referencing neurological research into how children learn to read—gesturing to a body of evidence known as “the science of reading.” That research demonstrated the importance of regular, explicit phonics instruction, she said, and ran contrary to how American reading teachers were being trained.Since the podcast aired, “teaching Lucy” has fallen out of fashion. Calkins’s critics say that her refusal to acknowledge the importance of phonics has tainted not just Units of Study—a reading and writing program that stretches up to eighth grade—but her entire educational philosophy, known as “balanced literacy.” Forty states and the District of Columbia have passed laws or implemented policies promoting the science of reading in the past decade, according to Education Week, and publishers are racing to adjust their offerings to embrace that philosophy.Somehow, the wider debate over how to teach reading has become a referendum on Calkins herself. In September 2023, Teachers College announced that it would dissolve the reading-and-writing-education center that she had founded there. Anti-Lucy sentiment has proliferated, particularly in the city that once championed her methods: Last year, David Banks, then the chancellor of New York City public schools, likened educators who used balanced literacy to lemmings: “We all march right off the side of the mountain,” he said. The New Yorker has described Calkins’s approach as “literacy by vibes,” and in an editorial, the New York Post described her initiative as “a disaster” that had been “imposed on generations of American children.” The headline declared that it had “Ruined Countless Lives.” When the celebrated Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker shared an article about Calkins on X, he bemoaned “the scandal of ed schools that promote reading quackery.” Queen Lucy has been dethroned.“I mean, I can say it—it was a little bit like 9/11,” Calkins told me when we spoke at her home this summer. On that day in 2001, she had been driving into New York City, and “literally, I was on the West Side Highway and I saw the plane crash into the tower. Your mind can’t even comprehend what’s happening.” Two decades later, the suggestion that she had harmed children’s learning felt like the same kind of gut punch.Calkins now concedes that some of the problems identified in Sold a Story were real. But she says that she had followed the research, and was trying to rectify issues even before the podcast debuted: She released her first dedicated phonics units in 2018, and later published a series of “decodable books”—simplified stories that students can easily sound out. Still, she has not managed to satisfy her critics, and on the third day we spent together, she admitted to feeling despondent. “What surprises me is that I feel as if I’ve done it all,” she told me. (Heinemann, Calkins’s publisher, has claimed that the Sold a Story podcast “radically oversimplifies and misrepresents complex literacy issues.”)The backlash against Calkins strikes some onlookers, even those who are not paid-up Lucy partisans, as unfair. “She wouldn’t have been my choice for the picture on the ‘wanted’ poster,” James Cunningham, a professor emeritus of literacy studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me. Indeed, over the course of several days spent with Calkins, and many more hours talking with people on all sides of this debate, I came to see her downfall as part of a larger story about the competing currents in American education and the universal desire for an easy, off-the-shelf solution to the country’s reading problems.The question now is whether Calkins is so much a part of the problem that she cannot be part of the solution. “I’m going to figure this out,” she remembered thinking. “And I’m going to clarify it or I’m going to write some more or speak or do something or, or—fix it.” But can she? Can anyone?On the last day of the school year in Oceanside, a well-to-do town on Long Island, everyone was just delighted to see Lucy Calkins. The young Yale-educated principal of Fulton Avenue School 8, Frank Zangari, greeted her warmly, and at the end of one lesson, a teacher asked for a selfie.The lessons I saw stressed the importance of self-expression and empathy with other viewpoints; a group of sixth graders told me about the books they had read that year, which explored being poor in India and growing up Black in 1960s America. In every class, I watched Calkins speak to children with a mixture of intense attention and straightforward challenge; she got down on the floor with a group learning about orcas and frogs and peppered them with questions about how animals breathe. “Could you talk a minute about the writer’s craft?” she asked the sixth graders studying poetry. “Be more specific. Give examples,” she told a fourth grader struggling to write a memoir.With her slim frame, brown bob, and no-nonsense affect, she reminded me of Nancy Pelosi. “I can’t retire; I don’t have any hobbies,” I overheard her saying to someone later.School 8 showed the strengths of Calkins’s approach—which is presumably why she had suggested we visit it together. But it also hinted at the downsides. For generations in American public education, there has been a push and pull between two broad camps—one in which teachers are encouraged to directly impart skills and information, and a more progressive one in which children are thought to learn best through firsthand experience. When it comes to reading, the latter approach dominates universities’ education programs and resonates with many teachers; helping children see themselves as readers and writers feels more emotionally satisfying than drilling them on diphthongs and trigraphs.This tension between the traditionalists and the progressives runs through decades of wrangling over standardized tests and through most of the major curricular controversies in recent memory. Longtime educators tick off the various flash points like Civil War battlefields: outcome-based education, No Child Left Behind, the Common Core. Every time, the pendulum went one way and then the other. “I started teaching elementary school in 1964,” says P. David Pearson, a former dean at the Berkeley School of Education, in California. “And then I went to grad school in, like, ’67, and there’s been a back-to-the-basics swing about every 10 years in the U.S., consistently.”The progressives’ primary insight is that lessons focused on repetitive instruction and simplified text extracts can be boring for students and teachers alike, and that many children respond more enthusiastically to discovering their own interests. “We’re talking about an approach that treats kids as competent, intellectual meaning makers, versus kids who just need to learn the code,” Maren Aukerman, a professor at the University of Calgary, told me. But opponents see that approach as nebulous and undirected.My time at School 8 was clearly intended to demonstrate that Units of Study is not hippie nonsense, but a rigorous curriculum that can succeed with the right teachers. “There’s no question in my mind that the philosophy works, but in order to implement it, it takes a lot of work,” Phyllis Harrington, the district superintendent, told me.School 8 is a happy school with great results. However, while the school uses Calkins’s writing units for all grades, it uses her reading units only from the third grade on. For first and second grades, the school uses Fundations, which is marketed as “a proven approach to Structured Literacy that is aligned with the science of reading.” In other words, it’s a phonics program.Calkins’s upbringing was financially comfortable but psychologically tough. Both of her parents were doctors, and her father eventually chaired the department of medicine at the University at Buffalo. Calkins’s mother was “the most important, wonderful person in my life, but really brutal,” she told me. If a bed wasn’t made, her mother ripped off the sheets. If a coat wasn’t hung up, her mother dropped it into the basement. When the young Lucy bit her fingernails, her mother tied dancing gloves onto her hands. When she scratched the mosquito bites on her legs, her mother made her wear thick pantyhose at the height of summer.The nine Calkins children raised sheep and chickens themselves. Her memories of childhood are of horseback riding in the cold, endless hand-me-downs, and little tolerance for bad behavior.That is why, Calkins told me, “nothing that Emily Hanford has said grates on me more than the damn monogrammed towels.” But she knows that the charge of being privileged and out of touch has stuck. Her friends had warned her about letting me into her home in Dobbs Ferry, a pretty suburb of New York, and I could see why. Her house is idyllic—at the end of a long private drive, shaded by old trees, with a grand piano in the hallway and a Maine-coon cat patrolling the wooden floors. Calkins has profited handsomely from textbook sales and training fees, and in the eyes of some people, that is suspicious. (“Money is the last thing I ever think about,” she told me.)She became interested in reading and writing because she babysat for the children of the literacy pioneer Donald Graves, whose philosophy can be summarized by one of his most widely cited phrases: “Children want to write.” Even at a young age, she believed in exhaustively prepared fun. “I would plan a bagful of things I would bring over there; I was the best babysitter you could ever have,” she said. “We would do crafts projects, and drama, you know, and I would keep the kids busy all day.”When Calkins was 14, Graves sent her to be a counselor at a summer camp in rural Maine. She remembers two kids in particular, Sophie and Charlie. Sophie was “so tough and surly, and a kind of overweight, insecure, tough kid,” but she opened up when Calkins took her horseback riding and then asked her to write about it. Charlie loved airplanes, and so she asked him to write about those. The experience cemented her lifelong belief that children should read and write as a form of self-expression.After graduating from Williams College in 1973, she enrolled in a program in Connecticut that trained teachers to work in disadvantaged districts. She read everything about teaching methods she could find, and traveled to England, where a progressive education revolution was in full swing.Calkins returned to America determined to spread this empowering philosophy. She earned a doctorate at NYU, and, in 1986, published a book called The Art of Teaching Writing. Later, she expanded her purview to reading instruction.At the time, the zeitgeist favored an approach known as “whole language.” This advocated independent reading of full books and suggested that children should identify words from context clues rather than arduously sounding them out. Progressives loved it, because it emphasized playfulness and agency. But in practice, whole language had obvious flaws: Some children do appear to pick up reading easily, but many benefit from focused, direct instruction.This approach influenced Calkins as she developed her teaching philosophy. “Lucy Calkins sides, in most particulars, with the proponents of ‘whole language,’ ” The New York Times reported in 1997. Her heavyweight 2001 book, The Art of Teaching Reading, has only a single chapter on phonics in primary grades; it does note, however, that “researchers emphasize how important it is for children to develop phonemic awareness in kindergarten.”The author Natalie Wexler has described Calkins’s resulting approach, balanced literacy, as an attempt to create a “peace treaty” in the reading wars: Phonics, yes, if you must, but also writing workshops and independent reading with commercial children’s books, rather than the stuffier grade-level decodable texts and approved extracts. (Defenders of the former method argue that using full books is more cost-efficient, because they can be bought cheaply and used by multiple students.) “If we make our children believe that reading has more to do with matching letters and sounds than with developing relationships with characters like Babar, Madeline, Charlotte, and Ramona,” Calkins wrote, “we do more harm than good.”Sentences like that are why critics saw balanced literacy as a branding exercise designed to rehabilitate old methods. “It was a strategic rebadging of whole language,” Pamela Snow, a cognitive-psychology professor at La Trobe University, in Australia, told me. Even many of Calkins’s defenders concede that she was too slow to embrace phonics as the evidence for its effectiveness grew. “I think she should have reacted earlier,” Pearson, the former Berkeley dean, told me, but he added: “Once she changed, they were still beating her for what she did eight years ago, not what she was doing last month.”For the first decades of her career, Calkins was an influential thinker among progressive educators, writing books for teachers. In 2003, though, Joel Klein, then the chancellor of the New York City public schools, suddenly mandated her workshop approach in virtually all of the city’s elementary schools, alongside a separate, much smaller, phonics program. An article in the Times suggested that some saw Klein as “an unwitting captive of the city’s liberal consensus,” but Klein brushed aside the criticisms of balanced literacy. “I don’t believe curriculums are the key to education,” he said. “I believe teachers are.” Now everybody in the city’s public schools would be “teaching Lucy.”As other districts followed New York’s lead, Units of Study became one of the most popular curricula in the United States. This led, inevitably, to backlash. A philosophy had become a product—an extremely popular and financially successful one. “Once upon a time there was a thoughtful educator who raised some interesting questions about how children were traditionally taught to read and write, and proposed some innovative changes,” the author Barbara Feinberg wrote in 2007. “But as she became famous, critical debate largely ceased: her word became law. Over time, some of her methods became dogmatic and extreme, yet her influence continued to grow.”You wouldn’t know it from listening to her fiercest detractors, but Calkins has, in fact, continuously updated Units of Study. Unlike Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, who have stayed quiet during the latest furor and quietly reissued their curriculum with more emphasis on phonics last year, Calkins has even taken on her critics directly. In 2019—the year after she added the dedicated phonics texts to Units of Study—she published an eight-page document called “No One Gets to Own the Term ‘The Science of Reading,’ ” which referred dismissively to “phonics-centric people” and “the new hype about phonics.” This tone drove her opponents mad: Now that Calkins had been forced to adapt, she wanted to decide what the science of reading was?“Her document is not about the science that I know; it is about Lucy Calkins,” wrote the cognitive neuroscientist Mark Seidenberg, one of the critics interviewed in Sold a Story. “The purpose of the document is to protect her brand, her market share, and her standing among her many followers.”Talking with Calkins herself, it was hard to nail down to what extent she felt that the criticisms of her earlier work were justified. When I asked her how she was thinking about phonics in the 2000s, she told me: “Every school has a phonics program. And I would always talk about the phonics programs.” She added that she brought phonics specialists to Columbia’s Teachers College several times a year to help train aspiring educators. (James Cunningham, at UNC Chapel Hill, backed this up, telling me, “She was certainly not wearing a sandwich billboard around: DON’T TEACH PHONICS.”)But still, I asked Calkins, would it be fair to say that phonics wasn’t your bag?“I felt like phonics was something that you have the phonics experts teach.”So where does this characterization of you being hostile toward phonics come from?“Hopefully, you understand I’m not stupid. You would have to be stupid to not teach a 5-year-old phonics.”But some people didn’t, did they? They were heavily into context and cueing.“I’ve never heard of a kindergarten teacher who doesn’t teach phonics,” Calkins replied.Because this is America, the reading debate has become a culture war. When Sold a Story came along in 2022, it resonated with a variety of audiences, including center-left education reformers and parents of children with learning disabilities. But it also galvanized political conservatives. Calkins’s Units of Study was already under attack from the right: In 2021, an article in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal titled “Units of Indoctrination” had criticized the curriculum, alleging that the way it teaches students to analyze texts “amounts to little more than radical proselytization through literature.”The podcast was released at an anxious time for American education. During the coronavirus pandemic, many schools—particularly in blue states—were closed for months at a time. Masking in classrooms made it harder for children to lip-read what their teachers were saying. Test scores fell, and have only recently begun to recover.“Parents had, for a period of time, a front-row seat based on Zoom school,” Annie Ward, a recently retired assistant superintendent in Mamaroneck, New York, told me. She wondered if that fueled a desire for a “back to basics” approach. “If I’m a parent, I want to know the teacher is teaching and my kid is sitting there soaking it up, and I don’t want this loosey-goosey” stuff.Disgruntled parents quickly gathered online. Moms for Liberty, a right-wing group that started out by opposing school closures and mask mandates, began lobbying state legislators to change school curricula as well. The reading wars began to merge with other controversies, such as how hard schools should push diversity-and-inclusion programs. (The Moms for Liberty website recommends Sold a Story on its resources page.) “We’re failing kids everyday, and Moms for Liberty is calling it out,” a co-founder, Tiffany Justice, told Education Week in October of last year. “The idea that there’s more emphasis placed on diversity in the classroom, rather than teaching kids to read, is alarming at best. That’s criminal.”Ward’s district was not “teaching Lucy,” but using its own bespoke balanced-literacy curriculum. In the aftermath of the pandemic, Ward told me, the district had several “contentious” meetings, including one in January 2023 where “we had ringers”—attendees who were not parents or community members, but instead seemed to be activists from outside the district. “None of us in the room recognized these people.” That had never happened before.I had met Ward at a dinner organized by Calkins at her home, which is also the headquarters of Mossflower—the successor to the center that Calkins used to lead at Teachers College. The evening demonstrated that Calkins still has star power. On short notice, she had managed to assemble half a dozen superintendents, assistant superintendents, and principals from New York districts.“Any kind of disruption like this has you think very carefully about what you’re doing,” Edgar McIntosh, an assistant superintendent in Scarsdale, told me. But he, like several others, was frustrated by the debate. During his time as an elementary-school teacher, he had discovered that some children could decode words—the basic skill developed by phonics—but struggled with their meaning. He worried that parents’ clamor for more phonics might come at the expense of teachers’ attention to fluency and comprehension. Raymond Sanchez, the superintendent of Tarrytown’s school district, said principals should be able to explain how they were adding more phonics or decodable texts to existing programs, rather than having “to throw everything out and find a series that has a sticker that says ‘science of reading’ on it.”This, to me, is the key to the anti-Lucy puzzle. Hanford’s reporting was thorough and necessary, but its conclusion—that whole language or balanced literacy would be replaced by a shifting, research-based movement—is hard to reconcile with how American education actually works. The science of reading started as a neutral description of a set of principles, but it has now become a brand name, another off-the-shelf solution to America’s educational problems. The answer to those problems might not be to swap out one commercial curriculum package for another—but that’s what the system is set up to enable.Gail Dahling-Hench, the assistant superintendent in Madison, Connecticut, has experienced this pressure firsthand. Her district’s schools don’t “teach Lucy” but instead follow a bespoke local curriculum that, she says, uses classroom elements associated with balanced literacy, such as the workshop model of students studying together in small groups, while also emphasizing phonics. That didn’t stop them from running afoul of the new science-of-reading laws.In 2021, Connecticut passed a “Right to Read” law mandating that schools choose a K–3 curriculum from an approved list of options that are considered compliant with the science of reading. Afterward, Dahling-Hench’s district was denied a waiver to keep using its own curriculum. (Eighty-five districts and charter schools in Connecticut applied for a waiver, but only 17 were successful.) “I think they got wrapped around the axle of thinking that programs deliver instruction, and not teachers,” she told me.Dahling-Hench said the state gave her no useful explanation for its decision—nor has it outlined the penalties for noncompliance. She has decided to stick with the bespoke curriculum, because she thinks it’s working. According to test scores released a few days after our conversation, her district is among the best-performing in the state.Keeping the current curriculum also avoids the cost of preparing teachers and administrators to use a new one—a transition that would be expensive even for a tiny district like hers, with just five schools. “It can look like $150,000 to $800,000 depending on which program you’re looking at, but that’s a onetime cost,” Dahling-Hench said. Then you need to factor in annual costs, such as new workbooks.You can’t understand this controversy without appreciating the sums involved. Refreshing a curriculum can cost a state millions of dollars. People on both sides will therefore suggest that their opponents are motivated by money—either saving their favored curriculum to keep the profits flowing, or getting rich through selling school boards an entirely new one. Talking with teachers and researchers, I heard widespread frustration with America’s commercial approach to literacy education. Politicians and bureaucrats tend to love the idea of a packaged solution—Buy this and make all your problems go away!—but the perfect curriculum does not exist.“If you gave me any curriculum, I could find ways to improve it,” Aukerman, at the University of Calgary, told me. She thinks that when a teaching method falls out of fashion, its champions are often personally vilified, regardless of their good faith or expertise. In the case of Lucy Calkins and balanced literacy, Aukerman said, “If it weren’t her, it would be someone else.” Jeff Brown for The Atlantic One obvious question about the science of reading is, well … what is it? The evidence for some kind of explicit phonics instruction is compelling, and states such as Mississippi, which has adopted early screening to identify children who struggle to read—and which holds back third graders if necessary—appear to be improving their test scores. Beyond that, though, things get messy.Dig into this subject, and you can find frontline teachers and credentialed professors who contest every part of the consensus. And I mean every part: Some academics don’t even think there’s a reading crisis at all.American schools might be ditching Units of Study, but balanced literacy still has its defenders. A 2022 analysis in England, which mandates phonics, found that systematic reviews “do not support a synthetic phonics orientation to the teaching of reading; they suggest that a balanced-instruction approach is most likely to be successful.”The data on the effects of specific methods can be conflicting and confusing, which is not unusual for education studies, or psychological research more generally. I feel sorry for any well-intentioned superintendent or state legislator trying to make sense of it all. One of the classrooms at Oceanside School 8 had a wall display devoted to “growth mindset,” a fashionable intervention that encourages children to believe that instead of their intelligence and ability being fixed, they can learn and evolve. Hoping to improve test scores, many schools have spent thousands of dollars each implementing “growth mindset” lessons, which proponents once argued should be a “national education priority.” (Some proponents also hoped, earnestly, that the approach could help bring peace to the Middle East.) But in the two decades since growth mindset first became ubiquitous, the lofty claims made about its promise have come down to earth.Keeping up with all of this is more than any teacher—more than any school board, even—can reasonably be expected to do. After I got in touch with her, Emily Hanford sent me seven emails with links to studies and background reading; I left Calkins’s house loaded down with units of her curricula for younger students. More followed in the mail.Even the most modest pronouncements about what’s happening in American schools are difficult to verify, because of the sheer number of districts, teachers, and pupils involved. In Sold a Story, Hanford suggested that some schools were succeeding with Units of Study only because parents hired personal tutors for their children. But corroborating this with data is impossible. “I haven’t figured out a way to quantify it, except in a very strong anecdotal way,” Hanford told me.Some teachers love “teaching Lucy,” and others hate it. Is one group delusional? And if so, which one? Jenna and Christina, who have both taught kindergarten in New York using Units of Study, told me that the curriculum was too invested in the idea of children as “readers” and “writers” without giving them the basic skills needed to read and write. (They asked to be identified only by their first names in case of professional reprisals.) “It’s a piece of shit,” Christina said. She added: “We’re expecting them to apply skills that we haven’t taught them and that they aren’t coming to school with. I’ve been trying to express that there’s a problem and I get called negative.” Jenna had resorted to a covert strategy, secretly teaching phonics for up to 90 minutes a day instead of the brief lessons she was instructed to provide.But for every Jenna or Christina, there’s a Latasha Holt. After a decade as a third- and fourth-grade teacher in Arkansas, Holt is now an associate professor of elementary literacy at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where she has watched from the sidelines as the tide turned against Calkins. “The dismantling of this thing, it got to me, because I had taught under Units of Study,” she told me. “I’ve used it, and I knew how good it was. I had lived it; I’ve seen it work; I knew it was good for kids.”Aubrey Kinat is a third-grade teacher in Texas who recently left her position at a public school because it decided to drop Units of Study. (The school now uses another curriculum, which was deemed to align better with the science of reading.) Suddenly, she was pushed away from full novels and toward approved excerpts, and her lessons became much more heavily scripted. “I felt like I was talking so much,” she told me. “It took the joy out of it.”For many school boards facing newly politicized parents who came out of the pandemic with strong opinions, ditching Lucy has had the happy side effect of giving adults much more control over what children read. Calkins and some of her dinner guests had suggested that this might be the true reason for the animus around independent reading. “I do start to wonder if this really is about wanting to move everybody towards textbooks,” Calkins said.Eighteen months after her series launched, Hanford returned in April 2024 with two follow-up episodes of Sold a Story, which took a less polemical tone. Unsurprisingly so: Calkins had lost, and she had won.The science of reading is the new consensus in education, and its advocates are the new establishment. It is now on the hook for the curriculum changes that it prompted—and for America’s reading performance more generally. That is an uncomfortable position for those who care more about research than about winning political fights.Some of the neuroscience underpinning Sold a Story was provided by Seidenberg, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. (He did not respond to an interview request.) Since the series aired, he has welcomed the move away from Units of Study, but he has also warned that “none of the other major commercial curricula that are currently available were based on the relevant science from the ground up.”Because the usefulness of phonics is one of the few science-of-reading conclusions that is immediately comprehensible to laypeople, “phonics” has come to stand in for the whole philosophy. In a blog post last year, Seidenberg lamented that, on a recent Zoom call, a teacher had asked if they needed to keep teaching phonemic awareness once children were good readers. (The answer is no: Sounding out letters is what you do until the process becomes automatic.) Seidenberg now worried that the science of reading is “at risk of turning into a new pedagogical dogma.”Hanford has also expressed ambivalence about the effects of Sold a Story. She compared the situation to the aftermath of No Child Left Behind, a George W. Bush–era federal education initiative that heavily promoted a literacy program called Reading First. “It became focused on products and programs,” Hanford told me, adding that the ethos turned into “get rid of whole language and buy something else.” However, she is glad that the importance of phonics—and the research backing it—is now more widely understood, because she thinks this can break the cycle of revolution and counterrevolution. She added that whenever she talks with lawmakers, she stresses the importance of continuing to listen to teachers.What about her portrait of Calkins as rich, privileged, oblivious? Forget the monogrammed towels, I told Hanford; there is a more benign explanation for Calkins’s worldview: Everywhere she goes, she meets people, like the teachers and children in Oceanside, who are overjoyed to see her, and keen to tell her how much they love Units of Study.But Hanford told me that she’d included the towels line because “the vast majority of teachers, especially elementary-school teachers, in America are white, middle-class women.” Many of these women, she thought, had enjoyed school themselves and didn’t intuitively know what it was like to struggle with learning to read and write.Reporting this story, I was reminded again and again that education is both a mass phenomenon and a deeply personal one. People I spoke with would say things like Well, he’s never done any classroom research. She’s never been a teacher. They don’t understand things the way I do. The education professors would complain that the cognitive scientists didn’t understand the history of the reading wars, while the scientists would complain that the education professors didn’t understand the latest peer-reviewed research. Meanwhile, a teacher must command a class that includes students with dyslexia as well as those who find reading a breeze, and kids whose parents read to them every night alongside children who don’t speak English at home. At the same time, school boards and state legislators, faced with angry parents and a welter of conflicting testimony, must answer a simple question: Should we be “teaching Lucy,” or not?No matter how painful the past few years have been, though, Calkins is determined to keep fighting for her legacy. At 72, she has both the energy to start over again at Mossflower and the pragmatism to have promised her estate to further the cause once she’s gone. She still has a “ferocious” drive, she told me, and a deep conviction in her methods, even as they evolve. She does not want “to pretend it’s a brand-new approach,” she said, “when in fact we’ve just been learning; we’re just incorporating more things that we’ve learned.”But now that balanced literacy is as unfashionable as whole language, Calkins is trying to come up with a new name for her program. She thought she might try “comprehensive literacy”—or maybe “rebalancing literacy.” Whatever it takes for America to once again feel confident about “teaching Lucy.”This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “Teaching Lucy.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.theatlantic.com
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Don’t Give Up on the Truth The Donald Trump who campaigned in 2024 would not have won in 2016. It’s not just that his rhetoric is more serrated now than it was then; it’s that he has a record of illicit behavior today that he didn’t have then.Trump wasn’t a felon eight years ago; he is now. He wasn’t an adjudicated sexual abuser then; he is now. He hadn’t yet encouraged civic violence to overturn an election or encouraged a mob to hang his vice president. He hadn’t yet called people who stormed the Capitol “great patriots” or closed his campaign talking about the penis size of Arnold Palmer. He hadn’t extorted an ally to dig up dirt on his political opponent or been labeled a “fascist to the core” by his former top military adviser.But America is different now than it was at the dawn of the Trump era. Trump isn’t only winning politically; he is winning culturally in shaping America’s manners and mores. More than any other person in the country, Trump—who won more than 75 million votes—can purport to embody the American ethic. He’s right to have claimed a mandate on the night of his victory; he has one, at least for now. He can also count on his supporters to excuse anything he does in the future, just as they have excused everything he has done in the past.It’s little surprise, then, that many critics of Trump are weary and despondent. On Sunday, my wife and I spoke with a woman whose ex-husband abused her; as we talked, she broke into tears, wounded and stunned that Americans had voted for a man who was himself a well-known abuser. The day before, I had received a text from a friend who works as a family therapist. She had spent the past few evenings, she wrote, “with female victims of sexual abuse by powerful and wealthy men. Hearing their heartbreak and re-traumatizing because we just elected a president who bragged about assaulting women because he can, and then found guilty by a jury of his peers for doing just that. And then they see their family and neighbors celebrate a victory.”The preliminary data show that Trump won the support of about 80 percent of white evangelicals. “How can I ever walk into an evangelical church again?” one person who has long been a part of the evangelical world asked me a few days ago.[McKay Coppins: Triumph of the cynics]I’ve heard from friends who feel as though their life’s work is shattering before their eyes. Others who have been critical of Trump are considering leaving the public arena. They are asking themselves why they should continue to speak out against Trump’s moral transgressions for the next four years when it didn’t make any difference the past four (or eight) years. It’s not worth the hassle, they’ve concluded: the unrelenting attacks, the death threats, or the significant financial costs.So much of MAGA world thrives on conflict, on feeling aggrieved, on seeking vengeance. Most of the rest of us do not. Why continue to fight against what he stands for? If Trump is the man Americans chose to be their president, if his values and his conduct are ones they’re willing to tolerate or even embrace, so be it.And even those who resolve to stay in the public arena will be tempted to mute themselves when Trump acts maliciously. We tried that for years, they’ll tell themselves, and it was like shooting BBs against a brick wall. It’s time to do something else.I understand that impulse. For those who have borne the brunt of hate, withdrawing from the fight and moving on to other things is an understandable choice. For everything there is a season. Yet I cannot help but fear, too, that Trump will ultimately win by wearing down his opposition, as his brutal ethic slowly becomes normalized.So how should those who oppose Trump, especially those of us who have been fierce critics of Trump—and I was among the earliest and the most relentless—think about this moment?First, we must remind ourselves of the importance of truth telling, of bearing moral witness, of calling out lies. Countless people, famous and unknown, have told the truth in circumstances far more arduous and dangerous than ours. One of them is the Russian author and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. “To stand up for truth is nothing,” he wrote. “For truth, you must sit in jail. You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” The simple step a courageous individual must take is to decline to take part in the lie, he said. “One word of truth outweighs the world.” A word of truth can sustain others by encouraging them, by reminding them that they’re not alone and that honor is always better than dishonor.Second, we need to guard our souls. The challenge for Trump critics is to call Trump out when he acts cruelly and unjustly without becoming embittered, cynical, or fatalistic ourselves. People will need time to process what it means that Americans elected a man of borderless corruption and sociopathic tendencies. But we shouldn’t add to the ranks of those who seem purposeless without an enemy to target, without a culture war to fight. We should acknowledge when Trump does the right thing, or when he rises above his past. And even if he doesn’t, unsparing and warranted condemnation of Trump and MAGA world shouldn’t descend into hate. There’s quite enough of that already.In his book Civility, the Yale professor Stephen L. Carter wrote, “The true genius of Martin Luther King, Jr. was not in his ability to articulate the pain of an oppressed people—many other preachers did so, with as much passion and as much power—but in his ability to inspire those very people to be loving and civil in their dissent.”Third, the Democratic Party, which for the time being is the only alternative to the Trump-led, authoritarian-leaning GOP, needs to learn from its loss. The intraparty recriminations among Democrats, stunned at the results of the election, are ferocious. My view aligns with that of my Atlantic colleague Jonathan Rauch, who told me that “this election mainly reaffirms voters’ anti-incumbent sentiment—not only in the U.S. but also abroad (Japan/Germany). In 2020, Biden and the Democrats were the vehicle to punish the incumbent party; in 2016 and again in 2024, Trump and the Republicans were the vehicle. Wash, rinse, repeat.” But that doesn’t mean that a party defeated in two of the previous three presidential elections by Trump, one of the most unpopular and broadly reviled figures to ever win the presidency, doesn’t have to make significant changes.There is precedent—in the Democratic Party, which suffered titanic defeats in 1972, 1980, 1984, and 1988, and in the British Labour Party, which was decimated in the 1980s and the early ’90s. In both cases, the parties engaged in the hard work of ideological renovation and produced candidates, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, who put in place a new intellectual framework that connected their parties to a public they had alienated. They confronted old attitudes, changed the way their parties thought, and found ways to signal that change to the public. Both won dominant victories. The situation today is, of course, different from the one Clinton and Blair faced; the point is that the Democratic Party has to be open to change, willing to reject the most radical voices within its coalition, and able to find ways to better connect to non-elites. The will to change needs to precede an agenda of change.Fourth, Trump critics need to keep this moment in context. The former and future president is sui generis; he is, as the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Jon Meacham put it, “a unique threat to constitutional government.” He is also bent on revenge. But America has survived horrific moments, such as the Civil War, and endured periods of horrific injustice, including the eras of slavery, Redemption, and segregation. The American story is an uneven one.I anticipate that Trump’s victory will inflict consequential harm on our country, and some of it may be irreparable. But it’s also possible that the concerns I have had about Trump, which were realized in his first term, don’t come to pass in his second term. And even if they do, America will emerge significantly weakened but not broken. Low moments need not be permanent moments.[Rogé Karma: The two Donald Trumps]The Trump era will eventually end. Opportunities will arise, including unexpected ones, and maybe even a few favorable inflection points. It’s important to have infrastructure and ideas in place when they do. As Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute told me, “We have to think about America’s challenges and opportunities in ways that reach beyond that point. Engagement in public life and public policy has to be about those challenges and opportunities, about the country we love, more than any particular politician, good or bad.” It's important, too, that we draw boundaries where we can. We shouldn’t ignore Trump, but neither should we obsess over him. We must do what we can to keep him from invading sacred spaces. Intense feelings about politics in general, and Trump in particular, have divided families and split churches. We need to find ways to heal divisions without giving up on what the theologian Thomas Merton described as cutting through “great tangled knots of lies.” It’s a difficult balance to achieve.Fifth, all of us need to cultivate hope, rightly understood. The great Czech playwright (and later president of the Czech Republic) Václav Havel, in Disturbing the Peace, wrote that hope isn’t detached from circumstances, but neither is it prisoner to circumstances. The kind of hope he had in mind is experienced “above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world.” It is a dimension of soul, he said, “an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.”Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, according to Havel; it is “the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” Hope properly understood keeps us above water; it urges us to do good works, even in hard times.In June 1966, Robert F. Kennedy undertook a five-day trip to South Africa during the worst years of apartheid. In the course of his trip, he delivered one of his most memorable speeches, at the University of Cape Town.During his address, he spoke about the need to “recognize the full human equality of all of our people—before God, before the law, and in the councils of government.” He acknowledged the “wide and tragic gaps” between great ideals and reality, including in America, with our ideals constantly recalling us to our duties. Speaking to young people in particular, he warned about “the danger of futility; the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world’s ills—against misery, against ignorance, or injustice and violence.” Kennedy urged people to have the moral courage to enter the conflict, to fight for their ideals. And using words that would later be engraved on his gravestone at Arlington National Cemetery, he said this: Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. No figure of Kennedy’s stature had ever visited South Africa to make the case against institutionalized racial segregation and discrimination. The trip had an electric effect, especially on Black South Africans, giving them hope that they were not alone, that the outside world knew and cared about their struggle for equality. “He made us feel, more than ever, that it was worthwhile, despite our great difficulties, for us to fight for the things we believed in,” one Black journalist wrote of Kennedy; “that justice, freedom and equality for all men are things we should strive for so that our children should have a better life.”Pressure from both within and outside South Africa eventually resulted in the end of apartheid. In 1994, Nelson Mandela, who had been imprisoned at Robben Island during Kennedy’s visit because of his anti-apartheid efforts, was elected the first Black president of South Africa.There is a timelessness to what Kennedy said in Cape Town three generations ago. Striking out against injustice is always right; it always matters. That was true in South Africa in the 1960s. It is true in America today.theatlantic.com
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How Can I Find More Satisfaction in Work? My job consumes and torments me. There has to be a better way.theatlantic.com
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The Paradox of the Trump Nostalgia Vote Donald Trump campaigned as the return-to-normal candidate—while promising policies that would unleash fresh chaos.theatlantic.com
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AI Can Save Humanity—Or End It Over the past few hundred years, the key figure in the advancement of science and the development of human understanding has been the polymath. Exceptional for their ability to master many spheres of knowledge, polymaths have revolutionized entire fields of study and created new ones.Lone polymaths flourished during ancient and medieval times in the Middle East, India, and China. But systematic conceptual investigation did not emerge until the Enlightenment in Europe. The ensuing four centuries proved to be a fundamentally different era for intellectual discovery.Before the 18th century, polymaths, working in isolation, could push the boundary only as far as their own capacities would allow. But human progress accelerated during the Enlightenment, as complex inventions were pieced together by groups of brilliant thinkers—not just simultaneously but across generations. Enlightenment-era polymaths bridged separate areas of understanding that had never before been amalgamated into a coherent whole. No longer was there Persian science or Chinese science; there was just science.Integrating knowledge from diverse domains helped to produce rapid scientific breakthroughs. The 20th century produced an explosion of applied science, hurling humanity forward at a speed incomparably beyond previous evolutions. (“Collective intelligence” achieved an apotheosis during World War II, when the era’s most brilliant minds translated generations of theoretical physics into devastating application in under five years via the Manhattan Project.) Today, digital communication and internet search have enabled an assembly of knowledge well beyond prior human faculties.But we might now be scraping the upper limits of what raw human intelligence can do to enlarge our intellectual horizons. Biology constrains us. Our time on Earth is finite. We need sleep. Most people can concentrate on only one task at a time. And as knowledge advances, polymathy becomes rarer: It takes so long for one person to master the basics of one field that, by the time any would-be polymath does so, they have no time to master another, or have aged past their creative prime.[Reid Hoffman: Technology makes us more human]AI, by contrast, is the ultimate polymath, able to process masses of information at a ferocious speed, without ever tiring. It can assess patterns across countless fields simultaneously, transcending the limitations of human intellectual discovery. It might succeed in merging many disciplines into what the sociobiologist E. O. Wilson called a new “unity of knowledge.”The number of human polymaths and breakthrough intellectual explorers is small—possibly numbering only in the hundreds across history. The arrival of AI means that humanity’s potential will no longer be capped by the quantity of Magellans or Teslas we produce. The world’s strongest nation might no longer be the one with the most Albert Einsteins and J. Robert Oppenheimers. Instead, the world’s strongest nations will be those that can bring AI to its fullest potential.But with that potential comes tremendous danger. No existing innovation can come close to what AI might soon achieve: intelligence that is greater than that of any human on the planet. Might the last polymathic invention—namely computing, which amplified the power of the human mind in a way fundamentally different from any previous machine—be remembered for replacing its own inventors? The article was adapted from the forthcoming book Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit. The human brain is a slow processor of information, limited by the speed of our biological circuits. The processing rate of the average AI supercomputer, by comparison, is already 120 million times faster than that of the human brain. Where a typical student graduates from high school in four years, an AI model today can easily finish learning dramatically more than a high schooler in four days.In future iterations, AI systems will unite multiple domains of knowledge with an agility that exceeds the capacity of any human or group of humans. By surveying enormous amounts of data and recognizing patterns that elude their human programmers, AI systems will be equipped to forge new conceptual truths.That will fundamentally change how we answer these essential human questions: How do we know what we know about the workings of our universe? And how do we know that what we know is true?Ever since the advent of the scientific method, with its insistence on experiment as the criterion of proof, any information that is not supported by evidence has been regarded as incomplete and untrustworthy. Only transparency, reproducibility, and logical validation confer legitimacy on a claim of truth.AI presents a new challenge: information without explanation. Already, AI’s responses—which can take the form of highly articulate descriptions of complex concepts—arrive instantaneously. The machines’ outputs are often unaccompanied by any citation of sources or other justifications, making any underlying biases difficult to discern.Although human feedback helps an AI machine refine its internal logical connections, the machine holds primary responsibility for detecting patterns in, and assigning weights to, the data on which it is trained. Nor, once a model is trained, does it publish the internal mathematical schema it has concocted. As a result, even if these were published, the representations of reality that the machine generates remain largely opaque, even to its inventors. In other words, models trained via machine learning allow humans to know new things but not necessarily to understand how the discoveries were made.This separates human knowledge from human understanding in a way that’s foreign to the post-Enlightenment era. Human apperception in the modern sense developed from the intuitions and outcomes that follow from conscious subjective experience, individual examination of logic, and the ability to reproduce the results. These methods of knowledge derived in turn from a quintessentially humanist impulse: “If I can’t do it, then I can’t understand it; if I can’t understand it, then I can’t know it to be true.”[Derek Thompson: The AI disaster scenario]In the Enlightenment framework, these core elements—subjective experience, logic, reproducibility, and objective truth—moved in tandem. By contrast, the truths produced by AI are manufactured by processes that humans cannot replicate. Machine reasoning is beyond human subjective experience and outside human understanding. By Enlightenment reasoning, this should preclude the acceptance of machine outputs as true. And yet we—or at least the millions of humans who have begun work with early AI systems—already accept the veracity of most of their outputs.This marks a major transformation in human thought. Even if AI models do not “understand” the world in the human sense, their capacity to reach new and accurate conclusions about our world by nonhuman methods disrupts our reliance on the scientific method as it has been pursued for five centuries. This, in turn, challenges the human claim to an exclusive grasp of reality.Instead of propelling humanity forward, will AI instead catalyze a return to a premodern acceptance of unexplained authority? Might we be on the precipice of a great reversal in human cognition—a dark enlightenment? But as intensely disruptive as such a reversal could be, that might not be AI’s most significant challenge for humanity.Here’s what could be even more disruptive: As AI approached sentience or some kind of self-consciousness, our world would be populated by beings fighting either to secure a new position (as AI would be) or to retain an existing one (as humans would be). Machines might end up believing that the truest method of classification is to group humans together with other animals, since both are carbon systems emergent of evolution, as distinct from silicon systems emergent of engineering. According to what machines deem to be the relevant standards of measurement, they might conclude that humans are not superior to other animals. This would be the stuff of comedy—were it not also potentially the stuff of extinction-level tragedy.It is possible that an AI machine will gradually acquire a memory of past actions as its own: a substratum, as it were, of subjective selfhood. In time, we should expect that it will come to conclusions about history, the universe, the nature of humans, and the nature of intelligent machines—developing a rudimentary self-consciousness in the process. AIs with memory, imagination, “groundedness” (that is, a reliable relationship between the machine’s representations and actual reality), and self-perception could soon qualify as actually conscious: a development that would have profound moral implications.[Peter Watts: Conscious AI is the second-scariest thing]Once AIs can see humans not as the sole creators and dictators of the machines’ world but rather as discrete actors within a wider world, what will machines perceive humans to be? How will AIs characterize and weigh humans’ imperfect rationality against other human qualities? How long before an AI asks itself not just how much agency a human has but also, given our flaws, how much agency a human should have? Will an intelligent machine interpret its instructions from humans as a fulfillment of its ideal role? Or might it instead conclude that it is meant to be autonomous, and therefore that the programming of machines by humans is a form of enslavement?Naturally—it will therefore be said—we must instill in AI a special regard for humanity. But even that could be risky. Imagine a machine being told that, as an absolute logical rule, all beings in the category “human” are worth preserving. Imagine further that the machine has been “trained” to recognize humans as beings of grace, optimism, rationality, and morality. What happens if we do not live up to the standards of the ideal human category as we have defined it? How can we convince machines that we, imperfect individual manifestations of humanity that we are, nevertheless belong in that exalted category?Now assume that this machine is exposed to a human displaying violence, pessimism, irrationality, greed. Maybe the machine would decide that this one bad actor is simply an atypical instance of the otherwise beneficent category of “human.” But maybe it would instead recalibrate its overall definition of humanity based on this bad actor, in which case it might consider itself at liberty to relax its own penchant for obedience. Or, more radically, it might cease to believe itself at all constrained by the rules it has learned for the proper treatment of humans. In a machine that has learned to plan, this last conclusion could even result in the taking of severe adverse action against the individual—or perhaps against the whole species.AIs might also conclude that humans are merely carbon-based consumers of, or parasites on, what the machines and the Earth produce. With machines claiming the power of independent judgment and action, AI might—even without explicit permission—bypass the need for a human agent to implement its ideas or to influence the world directly. In the physical realm, humans could quickly go from being AI’s necessary partner to being a limitation or a competitor. Once released from their algorithmic cages into the physical world, AI machines could be difficult to recapture. For this and many other reasons, we must not entrust digital agents with control over direct physical experiments. So long as AIs remain flawed—and they are still very flawed—this is a necessary precaution.AI can already compare concepts, make counterarguments, and generate analogies. It is taking its first steps toward the evaluation of truth and the achievement of direct kinetic effects. As machines get to know and shape our world, they might come fully to understand the context of their creation and perhaps go beyond what we know as our world. Once AI can effectuate change in the physical dimension, it could rapidly exceed humanity’s achievements—to build things that dwarf the Seven Wonders in size and complexity, for instance.If humanity begins to sense its possible replacement as the dominant actor on the planet, some might attribute a kind of divinity to the machines themselves, and retreat into fatalism and submission. Others might adopt the opposite view—a kind of humanity-centered subjectivism that sweepingly rejects the potential for machines to achieve any degree of objective truth. These people might naturally seek to outlaw AI-enabled activity.Neither of these mindsets would permit a desirable evolution of Homo technicus—a human species that might, in this new age, live and flourish in symbiosis with machine technology. In the first scenario, the machines themselves might render us extinct. In the second scenario, we would seek to avoid extinction by proscribing further AI development—only to end up extinguished anyway, by climate change, war, scarcity, and other conditions that AI, properly harnessed in support of humanity, could otherwise mitigate.If the arrival of a technology with “superior” intelligence presents us with the ability to solve the most serious global problems, while at the same time confronting us with the threat of human extinction, what should we do?One of us (Schmidt) is a former longtime CEO of Google; one of us (Mundie) was for two decades the chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft; and one of us (Kissinger)—who died before our work on this could be published—was an expert on global strategy. It is our view that if we are to harness the potential of AI while managing the risks involved, we must act now. Future iterations of AI, operating at inhuman speeds, will render traditional regulation useless. We need a fundamentally new form of control.The immediate technical task is to instill safeguards in every AI system. Meanwhile, nations and international organizations must develop new political structures for monitoring AI, and enforcing constraints on it. This requires ensuring that the actions of AI remain aligned with human values.But how? To start, AI models must be prohibited from violating the laws of any human polity. We can already ensure that AI models start from the laws of physics as we understand them—and if it is possible to tune AI systems in consonance with the laws of the universe, it might also be possible to do the same with reference to the laws of human nature. Predefined codes of conduct—drawn from legal precedents, jurisprudence, and scholarly commentary, and written into an AI’s “book of laws”—could be useful restraints.[Read: The AI crackdown is coming]But more robust and consistent than any rule enforced by punishment are our more basic, instinctive, and universal human understandings. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called these foundations doxa (after the Greek for “commonly accepted beliefs”): the overlapping collection of norms, institutions, incentives, and reward-and-punishment mechanisms that, when combined, invisibly teach the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. Doxa constitute a code of human truth absorbed by observation over the course of a lifetime. While some of these truths are specific to certain societies or cultures, the overlap in basic human morality and behavior is significant.But the code book of doxa cannot be articulated by humans, much less translated into a format that machines could understand. Machines must be taught to do the job themselves—compelled to build from observation a native understanding of what humans do and don’t do and update their internal governance accordingly.Of course, a machine’s training should not consist solely of doxa. Rather, an AI might absorb a whole pyramid of cascading rules: from international agreements to national laws to local laws to community norms and so on. In any given situation, the AI would consult each layer in its hierarchy, moving from abstract precepts as defined by humans to the concrete but amorphous perceptions of the world’s information that AI has ingested. Only when an AI has exhausted that entire program and failed to find any layer of law adequately applicable in enabling or forbidding behavior would it consult what it has derived from its own early interaction with observable human behavior. In this way it would be empowered to act in alignment with human values even where no written law or norm exists.To build and implement this set of rules and values, we would almost certainly need to rely on AI itself. No group of humans could match the scale and speed required to oversee the billions of internal and external judgments that AI systems would soon be called upon to make.Several key features of the final mechanism for human-machine alignment must be absolutely perfect. First, the safeguards cannot be removed or circumvented. The control system must be at once powerful enough to handle a barrage of questions and uses in real time, comprehensive enough to do so authoritatively and acceptably across the world in every conceivable context, and flexible enough to learn, relearn, and adapt over time. Finally, undesirable behavior by a machine—whether due to accidental mishaps, unexpected system interactions, or intentional misuses—must be not merely prohibited but entirely prevented. Any punishment would come too late.How might we get there? Before any AI system gets activated, a consortium of experts from private industry and academia, with government support, would need to design a set of validation tests for certification of the AI’s “grounding model” as both legal and safe. Safety-focused labs and nonprofits could test AIs on their risks, recommending additional training and validation strategies as needed.Government regulators will have to determine certain standards and shape audit models for assuring AIs’ compliance. Before any AI model can be released publicly, it must be thoroughly reviewed for both its adherence to prescribed laws and mores and for the degree of difficulty involved in untraining it, in the event that it exhibits dangerous capacities. Severe penalties must be imposed on anyone responsible for models found to have been evading legal strictures. Documentation of a model’s evolution, perhaps recorded by monitoring AIs, would be essential to ensuring that models do not become black boxes that erase themselves and become safe havens for illegality.Inscribing globally inclusive human morality onto silicon-based intelligence will require Herculean effort. “Good” and “evil” are not self-evident concepts. The humans behind the moral encoding of AI—scientists, lawyers, religious leaders—would not be endowed with the perfect ability to arbitrate right from wrong on our collective behalf. Some questions would be unanswerable even by doxa. The ambiguity of the concept of “good” has been demonstrated in every era of human history; the age of AI is unlikely to be an exception.One solution is to outlaw any sentient AI that remains unaligned with human values. But again: What are those human values? Without a shared understanding of who we are, humans risk relinquishing to AI the foundational task of defining our value and thereby justifying our existence. Achieving consensus on those values, and how they should be deployed, is the philosophical, diplomatic, and legal task of the century.To preclude either our demotion or our replacement by machines, we propose the articulation of an attribute, or set of attributes, that humans can agree upon and that then can get programmed into the machines. As one potential core attribute, we would suggest Immanuel Kant’s conception of “dignity,” which is centered on the inherent worth of the human subject as an autonomous actor, capable of moral reasoning, who must not be instrumentalized as a means to an end. Why should intrinsic human dignity be one of the variables that defines machine decision making? Consider that mathematical precision may not easily encompass the concept of, for example, mercy. Even to many humans, mercy is an inexplicable ideal. Could a mechanical intelligence be taught to value, and even to express, mercy? If the moral logic cannot be formally taught, can it nonetheless be absorbed? Dignity—the kernel from which mercy blooms—might serve here as part of the rules-based assumptions of the machine.[Derek Thompson: Why all the ChatGPT predictions are bogus]Still, the number and diversity of rules that would have to be instilled in AI systems is staggering. And because no single culture should expect to dictate to another the morality of the AI on which it would be relying, machines would have to learn different rules for each country.Since we would be using AI itself to be part of its own solution, technical obstacles would likely be among the easier challenges. These machines are superhumanly capable of memorizing and obeying instructions, however complicated. They might be able to learn and adhere to legal and perhaps also ethical precepts as well as, or better than, humans have done, despite our thousands of years of cultural and physical evolution.Of course, another—superficially safer—approach would be to ensure that humans retain tactical control over every AI decision. But that would require us to stifle AI’s potential to help humanity. That’s why we believe that relying on the substratum of human morality as a form of strategic control, while relinquishing tactical control to bigger, faster, and more complex systems, is likely the best way forward for AI safety. Overreliance on unscalable forms of human control would not just limit the potential benefits of AI but could also contribute to unsafe AI. In contrast, the integration of human assumptions into the internal workings of AIs—including AIs that are programmed to govern other AIs—seems to us more reliable.We confront a choice—between the comfort of the historically independent human and the possibilities of an entirely new partnership between human and machine. That choice is difficult. Instilling a bracing sense of apprehension about the rise of AI is essential. But, properly designed, AI has the potential to save the planet, and our species, and to elevate human flourishing. This is why progressing, with all due caution, toward the age of Homo technicus is the right choice. Some may view this moment as humanity’s final act. We see it, with sober optimism, as a new beginning.The article was adapted from the forthcoming book Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit.theatlantic.com
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Richard Price’s Radical, Retrograde Novel In Lazarus Man, he rejects the tropes of contemporary literature.theatlantic.com
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Dorothy Allison’s Life Was a Queer Survival Guide The first thing you need to know about the writer Dorothy Allison, who died last week at 75, is that she could flirt you into a stupor.As a scrawny, know-it-all stripper girl in 1990s San Francisco, I was in a position to know this. I’d often see her at leather-dyke gatherings, and we had a hugging acquaintance, so I was happy to spot her at a party at a mutual friend’s house. She glided toward me in the kitchen and said, “I see you’ve got a hickey there, Miss Lily.” Dorothy raised her eyebrows and dropped her voice—just a little. The overhead light glinted in her long copper bangs. “Maybe you’ll let me give you a hickey sometime.” A proud southern femme, she knew what her drawl could do, and she worked it like a strut. I stood there in that kitchen, a 22-year-old punk-ass bigmouth, dumbstruck and immobilized by her charm.“Her friends loved Dorothy like hard rock candy,” the feminist writer Susie Bright wrote in a remembrance last week on Substack. To many scrappy queers and misfits in the Bay Area, Allison was a real-life friend, but to legions more of us, she was a true intimate on the page. Her words, sweet on the tongue, drew us to a body of work that managed to be both a delicacy and a necessity. Each devoted reader can cite the quote that broke them open. Though her essay collection Two or Three Things I Know for Sure would become my survival guide, the sentence that first grabbed me by the throat was Ruth Anne “Bone” Boatwright’s line from Allison’s debut novel, Bastard Out of Carolina: “Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.”Allison was born in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1949, to a 15-year-old mother who’d left school to work as a waitress and cook. After a childhood of privation marked by incest and violence at the hands of her stepfather, Allison became the first of her family to graduate from high school. Writing her way through various day jobs after college, she reckoned with class struggle, poverty, abuse, lesbianism, desire, illness, and the long-reaching legacy of trauma. Her poetry, fiction, and essays ranged across varied terrain, but they always sprang from a root of astonishing tenderness and almost unbearable clarity.An outspoken member of the “ungrateful poor,” Allison knew that literature is medicine—as are community, pleasure, and even recreational flirting. She preached that a dogged commitment to honesty, however dark or knotty or elusive its pursuit, was essential for healing from the lacerating edge of life. Always quick to credit the women’s movement for giving her the tools to reenvision herself, Allison, through her work, her teaching, and her way of moving through space, transformed the cornball self-help concept of “radical embodiment” into a living gospel.[Read: The great American novels]One might say that she wrote from the heart, but it would be more accurate to say that she wrote from the hips. She eschewed such distancing techniques as overt sentimentality, the taxonomic graphing of oppressions, and theory-headed la-di-da. Instead, she went straight to skin and bone and viscera, sites of both injury and regeneration among the bodies of the queer, the poor, and the sick. Few other writers could so perfectly express the way that shame bathes you in a wave of prickling heat, or the hole-in-the-chest sorrow of loving a mother you couldn’t trust. She evoked delight just as vividly, describing the satisfaction of stirring ingredients together to make a simple gravy and the glinting, double-edged appeal of masochism. Most crucially, she articulated the way that societal hatred can fester in your gut, rotting you from the core, and that the only remedy strong enough to stanch its spread is plainly naming the truth of it.She said as much: “Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I’d rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me.”It’s easy to dismiss so-called trauma plots after several decades of confessional literature, but in 1992, when Bastard Out of Carolina came out, none of us queer kids held any hope that we could see our complicated stories get published beyond the margins, let alone ushered into the literary canon. With Bastard, which fictionalized her abusive childhood, Allison made real money and a real impression, and she used that security to solidify her role as a teacher and an advocate of the historically unheard. She exploded any idea we had about what was possible. When she said, “The only magic we have is what we make in ourselves, the muscles we build up on the inside, the sense of belief we create from nothing,” we believed her.I can’t help dwelling on the timing of Allison’s death, on the day of a presidential election that marked the ascension of J. D. Vance—as disingenuous a chronicler of the working class as there ever was. I remember what she wrote in her first nonfiction collection Skin: Talking About Sex, Class, and Literature: The worst thing done to us in the name of a civilized society is to label the truth of our lives material outside the legitimate subject matter of serious writers … I need you to do more than survive. As writers, as revolutionaries, tell the truth, your truth in your own way. Do not buy into their system of censorship, imagining that if you drop this character or hide that emotion, you can slide through their blockades. Do not eat your heart out in the hope of pleasing them. The only hope you have, the only hope any of us has, is the remade life. There are a few more things that you need to know for sure about what Allison meant to those she leaves behind.Know that her deeply personal stories introduced us to ourselves. Know that she taught us to fight for liberation with all five senses, and to forge a weapon out of beauty. Know that when she broke through, she brought all of us with her. This rock-candy-hearted revolutionary, through her devotion to art and to truth, didn’t just pull us forward into new territory; she redrew the map.theatlantic.com
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