If We Want Better Schools, We Need to Be a Serious People

Our schools are failing not because of what happens in the classroom, but because of what happens—or more to the point, what doesn’t happen—at the dinner table. If we wish to be a serious people, then we must bolster our institutions with the power to humanize and domesticate the bedlam within us all.

In the final season of the wildly popular series Succession, fictional media tycoon Logan Roy sobered his four children with the ultimate oratorical coup de grace: “I love you, . . . but you are not serious people.”

Not only was it a striking emotional dart of paternal honesty, Roy’s bitter honesty also captured the take-no-prisoners ethic of personal ambition untethered to any trace of sentimentality. Could this sentiment—that we are no longer “serious people”—be applied more widely? To the American electorate writ large? To the modern American demos? To many of us living in both the red and the blue states?

I think so.

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