Tabia Lee On How To Teach Kids

The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan

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Dr. Tabia Lee is an educator and consultant. She was the faculty director for the Office of Equity, Social Justice, and Multicultural Education at De Anza College until she was fired for her heterodox views on DEI. (Her GoFundMe is here.) She’s also a cofounder of Free Black Thought.

For two clips of our convo — on teaching kids as individuals, and the wrong way to ask for pronouns — pop over to our YouTube page. Other topics: Lee as a gifted-and-talented student; her mentoring kids as a kid; graduating high school in two years; critical thinking as a core value; intellectual humility and curiosity; Lee teaching public school in LA; California voters banning affirmative action in 1996; how teacher ideology clouds the classroom; humanism over identity politics; Lee as a pioneer of pronoun use in the early Internet; “inquiry-based” teaching and holistic instruction; the race of students being just one of many factors; not focusing on stereotypes; the moral certitude of DEI; the need for viewpoint diversity; the “neo-reconstructionism” of Kendi and DiAngelo; the dangers of teaching as activism; the abandonment of SAT and other standardized testing; the wasteful spending in public education; and the attacks that Lee faced as a heterodox DEI director.

Browse the Dishcast archive for another conversation you might enjoy (the first 102 episodes are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Erick Erickson on the showdown between Trump and DeSantis, Dave Weigel on all things politics, Jean Twenge on the key differences between the generations, and Matt Lewis on ruling-class elites. Send your guest recs and pod dissent to [e-mail].