Read the full transcript of Episode 64 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, which features Eboo Patel, author and director of Interfaith America. He sits down with NAIS President Debra P. Wilson to talk about his work on the role of pluralism in schools. Pluralism, as Eboo defines it, results from people of diverse identities working positively together.
Debra Wilson: Hello, friends. It's great to be back on New View EDU. I am thrilled that we have Eboo Patel with us today. He's the founder and president of Interfaith America, the leading interfaith organization in the United States. Eboo and I met, actually, last year through a mutual friend, Adam Weinberg, who is the president of Denison College. And we met after Adam and I were just talking about what we were seeing on so many campuses in higher education last year, particularly in light of the Israeli Gaza war. And he found Eboo’s support and work that he'd done on Denison's campus very helpful, and he's done a lot of work in higher education. And so we had a great conversation and I thought it might be useful to bring his perspective to our audience.
So I'm looking forward to talking with Eboo. It's never boring to have a conversation with him.
His organization, Interfaith America, has worked with governments, universities, private companies, all kinds of organizations. And really what they focus on is making faith a bridge of cooperation rather than another barrier of division. They're dedicated to really engaging around religious diversity. And I just can't wait for this conversation. So let's go.
Eboo, it's so wonderful to have you on here today. Thank you for playing along.
Eboo Patel: Debra, I've been looking forward to this. I love the world of independent schools. I speak at three to five a year. I've done that for probably 20 years. And I just think what, what is possible there and what is—what's both possible, and what I've seen happen there, is really exciting.
Debra Wilson: I'm just thrilled and I'm really looking forward to diving in. We've done a little bit of intro for our listeners, but I'm really going to start at the beginning because I don't think I got to ask you this the last time we talked. Just talk a little bit about how you got into this work. This is such fascinating work and probably some of the most timely work in education right now. So tell me a little bit about how you got into doing what you're doing.
Eboo Patel: Sure. So I lead an organization called Interfaith America, I’m the founder and president of that organization. We are one of the largest diversity organizations in the country, actually. We have 70 full-time staff, and we have a network of something like 1,000 campuses. We work with dozens and dozens of independent schools. And what we're really about is this concept that we call pluralism.
And religious diversity and religious identity, we think of as kind of the yeast of that, particularly in the United States, where kind of the great innovation of the United States is the ability to bring people from different religions together without them killing each other, at least most of the time, and to build a nation together. But we've really expanded beyond religious diversity to work in pluralism more generally.
So how did I get involved in this? Well, I was kind of an angry identity activist when I was in college in the mid 1990s. When I heard words like white supremacy and institutionalized racism, there's lots of things about my own personal life that clicked. And all of those things are true. Like I grew up facing an awful lot of racist bullying, and it's ugly and it's real and it's terrible. And part of what happened to me in that phase of angry identity activism was that I thought that everything in my life and in the world could be kind of squeezed into that paradigm. And I failed to see how identity could be a source of strength, how it could be a source of pride, how there was this really beautiful cooperation across identities in human history.
Everything for me back then was about the oppressed and the oppressor. And I was the oppressed. And what's interesting is that I didn't actually learn enough about my identity because I was so busy opposing other people's identities. So thankfully, I get out of that paradigm. And I start to read a lot more in American political philosophy. I start to read a lot more of my own religious tradition, the Islamic tradition, particularly the Ismaili interpretation of that. And what's central in both my religious tradition and in American political philosophy is this concept of pluralism. And we'll talk a lot more about that, Debra. But basically, I have, with a set of terrific colleagues, built this educational diversity nonprofit, Interfaith America, out of the experience of being an angry identity activist and then moving into kind of an intellectual and ethical framework that views identities as a source of pride, not a status of victimization, that says that cooperation is better than division, that says that diversity is a treasure, faith is a bridge, and everybody's a contributor.
Those are really kind of the principles of my organization. I'll repeat those. Diversity is a treasure. Identity is a source of pride, not a status of victimization. Cooperation is better than division. Faith is a bridge. Everybody's a contributor.
Debra Wilson: Excellent. Thank you. So let's talk about pluralism, because I feel like there's a sort of a few different variations of definitions out there and I'd love to hear yours, and maybe a little bit of a window into sort of the different types of pluralism that you see. You and I had an email exchange a couple weeks ago and we were emailing about that and I found that just really interesting to hear about from you. So would you share a little bit on that front?
Eboo Patel: Sure. So I want to distinguish between three types of pluralism for the purpose of this podcast. Incidentally, I'm writing a book on this right now. And so my, I'm like, you know, deep in lots of very geeky political philosophy in this, I'm going to try to be as clear and simple as possible for the purpose of this podcast. But I want to distinguish between three kinds of pluralism.
One is identity pluralism. How do you bring together Muslims and Jews, black folks and white folks, South Americans and Eastern Europeans, what does it mean to have those groups of people together in a small geographical space, like a school, let's say, right? And what's interesting is that Diana Eck, who is really the kind of key scholar for me on the question of identity pluralism, she says, listen, the presence of people from different identities in close quarters, that's diversity. And that diversity is just as easy to become a civil war or conflict as it is to become something positive like cooperation.
Diversity is a fact. Pluralism is an achievement. Pluralism is when you have people from diverse identities working positively together. And that actually takes a lot of work. You have to build patterns of activities. You have to build ecosystems. You have to build proclivities that incline people towards positive cooperation. And you know, huge amounts of the field of social psychology are really about how do you get people from different identities to cooperate together. This is the Alport studies, this is the Sharif studies, etc, etc. So that's one important part of pluralism, it's identity diversity or identity pluralism.
The second part is intellectual pluralism, which is different worldviews, different explanatory frameworks. What, what is happening here, right? When you look at something that's going on, so I'll give you a very interesting statistic. In college, the gender balance in higher education is now 57% to 43%. 57% female to 43% male. That's a fact. What's the explanation?
And smart people will have different explanations. And what a school is about, or what an intellectual space is about, is people with different intellectual explanations, different explanatory frameworks, engaging one another to come up with what the most accurate explanatory framework might be. And of course, we very rarely settle on a single one. Right? We very rarely settle on a single one. But that's intellectual pluralism. It's diverse explanatory frameworks to make sense of the world in which we are in.
And the third kind of pluralism is values pluralism. And that's most associated with the great British philosopher Isaiah Berlin. And what Isaiah Berlin says is that in any society, but particularly a democracy, which is a place that we all build together, you are never going to have a total alignment or coherence of the great values in a society, freedom and equality, for example.
But let me give you the example that that is closest to my heart. So you know, I have two kids, two sons, both have played lots and lots of sports, and I was a coach for a while. And any coach of eight year olds faces the question every single game, who do you play and why? Do you play the best players to win the game? Do you play them even if you're up 100 to nothing in basketball? Do you give equal time to all players? Do you play the worst players so that they improve? Each of those is based on a different value. One is based on the value of excellence. One is based on the value of equality. One is based on the value of uplift. Right?
And literally, every game, particularly of like six to 12 year olds, you will see coaches on the sidelines just deeply concerned about who to play. That is the perfect example of values pluralism, right? Which value are you enacting? What's interesting is, by the time kids are 14, 15, and 16, there's kind of very little question about who gets to play. The people who get to play are the best players. Right? So it's really interesting, and very few people at the high school level would argue about that. So we have implicitly made a decision that merit and excellence matters most when you hit say 13, 14, 15. That raises the very interesting question. So what matters? Why does something else matter most when you're seven, eight, nine, right? Discuss.
And now, of course, a values pluralism question has become an intellectual pluralism question, because we now have to engage in diverse explanatory frameworks for why people tend to do one thing versus another at different ages. See how much fun this is? Right? This is what a school should be.
Debra Wilson: Well, it's, know, what I, what's really resonating with me, even if it's, you know, my son loves to play games and he loves any games that go three dimensional pretty quickly, because it does, it feels like sort of three dimensional chess when you're playing on a few different levels, is it does require you to slow down and be deliberate in the choices that you're making. You know, so if you're truly reflecting on the values in play, values of the school, what those conversations have sounded like and what that looks like in action. Those are hard questions and, you know, it's sort of interesting to think about how much do we actually think about that in the moment on the side of the game, at a given school, right?
Eboo Patel: In high school, coaches aren't thinking are not thinking about that a ton, especially in close games, right. But in anything under seventh grade, you can literally see the looks on coaches’ faces. Like, what do I do here? I promised everybody would play a quarter. But we're at the end of the game. And the score is tied. And I know I have a best player on the bench. What do I do? Right? And it's a fascinating question.
It's a fascinating question.
Debra Wilson: I was going to ask another question, but I'm going to start with this one. Like, what does this look like when it's going really well? If you're looking at an education institution and like...they're thinking well about all three of these types of pluralism and they've, you know, approached frameworks and we'll get a little bit into how you do that work, but like, does, what does that look like?
Eboo Patel: So I'm going to tell you a story from an independent school, this is from a long time ago, and maybe this guy is listening. But what he said at the Kentucky Country Day School in like 2008 or 2009 impacts me to the day. Head of school named Brad Lyman. And this is actually, I remember it, this is 2008 because it's the election of 2008.
And I'm walking into the school. It's in Louisville or Lexington, I forget which. But Brad says, look around the parking lot. And at 8 in the morning, here's what you'll see. You'll see virtually every car that's parked in the parking lot, which by definition is a teacher's car, has an Obama-Biden bumper sticker. And virtually every car that is dropping a kid off has a McCain-Palin bumper sticker. And he said, that's the strength of our school. Because the kids know that there are responsible adults who have different worldviews about the world.
Some of it is based on values. Some of it is based on different intellectual frameworks, you might have the same value about let's, let's say equality, but somebody believes that equality is, is, happens through government programs. Another person believes it happens through the market economy, right? And you have people from different identities, Democrats and Republicans, but also city and country, right, black and white, in the same school together. And I thought to myself, that's really profound, that the strength of an institution is its ability to bring together diverse identities and divergent ideologies in positively engaged ways.
And actually, that line is from the work of the great Jesuit political philosopher, John Courtney Murray. He says that that's the secret of a diverse democracy or what he calls pluralist civilization, the ability to build communities that bring together diverse identities and divergent ideologies. And Brad was like, literally, my parking lot, our school parking lot at 8am every morning is a demonstration of that. Our students know there are responsible adults who care about them with different views about the world. And those views should be in conversation. Because if the parents wanted to find a school where every teacher had a McCain-Palin bumper sticker, they could have done that. They didn't. They did not do that.
Debra Wilson: That's really interesting. And it's such a good concrete example, too.
Eboo Patel: Right. And so the conversations that happen as a result of that, I think are so important.
Here's the thing, if you live in a community where every responsible adult has basically the same identity and ideology, when you encounter somebody of a different identity and a different intellectual worldview, what are you inclined to think about them?
That's a problem. That's a problem.
Debra Wilson: Well, particularly when our students go away to school, right? As they move through their education, just given the world today, you will run into people who have many different ideas than you. I mean, like, at least I would hope that would be the case.
Eboo Patel: I remember I remember this so, so powerfully, I actually wrote a Washington Post piece about this back in 2016. So Donald Trump comes down the escalator in 2015, right? And the world that I live in, Whole Foods America, right? Urban, multicultural, highly educated, etc. Like my whole world goes berserk. OK. And I am going to speak at Princeton in April 2016. And the guy who's driving me there from the Newark airport is this kind of heavy set white guy, long ponytail, name is Mickey. And he says jovially in the first five minutes, hey, man, you going to the Trump rally?
I'm like, what? And I'm like, I'm like aghast, right? And then I'm like, in a minute I was like, my gosh, like Donald Trump is about to win the nomination for the Republican Party for president.
And I've never met a live Trump supporter. Like that's a problem. That's a problem. That's my problem. It's been, it’s six months this guy has been on the national stage like this.
I mean, I'm sure that I was around them. But it just goes to show, like, how narrow the conversation was, right? And it is an exercise of citizenship in a diverse democracy to come to know something about your fellow citizens who are from different identities, including different political parties, including different regions of the world, and from different intellectual frameworks and maybe of different values. I mean, you know, did I think diversity was just the differences I liked?
Debra Wilson: So what did you do?
Eboo Patel: I talked to this guy. I was fascinated. I was totally fascinated. And here's the thing, the story he told me, super compelling. Again, I wrote a Washington Post piece about this.
And we get to Princeton, and, and the guy drops me off and he looks at all of these like beautiful imposing stone buildings and he says, “Man, what I wouldn't do to be a student here.” And I go into the session of Princeton students. And all they do is talk about how oppressed they are. And I'm like, oh my gosh, like I was literally dropped off by a guy who went from a union job at 35 bucks an hour to 12 bucks an hour driving guys like me to Princeton. And he's like, I wish I could be here. And all you guys are doing is complaining about being here. And I was just kind of struck by that contrast.
Debra Wilson: Yeah. Yeah.
Eboo Patel: By the way, I don't want to be super judgmental. You know, I was a brown kid at the University of Illinois. Like I know what it feels like to be an outsider. I was a state school kid who went to grad school at Oxford. Like, I remember how intimidated I was by even the cover of the New Yorker. I had never seen a New Yorker before. And I was so intimidated by it. Right? Like I know what it feels like to be an outsider. And at the same time, you know, at the end of the day, I'm at Oxford, right? Like my PhD advisor is like, so read the New Yorker, stop being intimidated by the cover. You have something you could do about it. You know, like what do you want me to tell you? Like stop complaining, read the New Yorker.
Debra Wilson: But do you think that's part of the, you know, you build it up in your head, right? It becomes more than reading the New Yorker. It's kind of wondering if you belong to the group that reads the New Yorker.
Eboo Patel: Yes. And this is why I think part of the job of teachers and education leaders is to be like, read the New Yorker. Get out of your head. Stop obsessing about this. You know, like, again, I have two kids, played a lot of sports. And one of my kids at one point, talked to one of his coaches, he's like, I just, it just feels like everybody's stronger and faster than me. Like I'm, I kind of feel intimidated. Coach was like, work out more. That was it. All right. Like welcome to life, kid, work out more. What do you want me to do? Right.
And I don't think that that's like tough love. I just think that that's like reality. You know, like that is an excellent pedagogical move. You can do something about it. There's lots of people on the planet that can do virtually nothing about their condition. If you can do something about your condition, you should.
Debra Wilson: So I want to blow that sort of up and out a little bit.
Like, let's talk a little bit about why is this so important right now? I love the coaching analogies, and I'm a terrible tennis player, but I live with a lot of really good tennis players. So we've had a lot of these conversations in our house, but like when you think about education and what we've seen happening, I know you've spent a lot of time with our schools and a lot of times around higher education, of course, there was a lot of focus on higher education this past spring.
Why is this so important right now, particularly in education? Like, so as we think about that kind of, know, a little bit of a bubble that we all live in to some degree, and how you poke through that bubble and become very just aware of like, what is happening out there, and why do people have different points of view? And I've never met anybody with a different point of view from, you know, whichever perspective.
Why do you think this is? We are in this moment right now where this just feels so incredibly relevant.
Eboo Patel: Yeah. So let me say, I think, I think what a school should be about is the engagement with these three types of pluralism. Values pluralism, intellectual pluralism, identity pluralism. And collectively, I call that civic pluralism. A school's purpose is to be about civic pluralism, you engage with people of different identities, and you learn how to cooperate with them. You look at the facts of the world, and you discuss different explanatory frameworks about those facts. And you try to come to the most accurate one. But you know that there's always going to be differences because people will, will emphasize different things.
And you recognize that there are deep and powerful values in the world. There's the value of equality, there's the value of freedom, there's the value of civility, there's the value of fairness, there's all of these values. And you are constantly seeking how to balance those values, knowing that, that they're never going to be in total coherence. And you're going to have to choose one over the other at some point. And the school should be about modeling that as a school. And it should be about discussions about that.
And I think part of what's happening is there's been so many macro level changes, right? Like we're living in the equivalent of the invention of the printing press and the shift from the country to the city and the shift from agrarian to industrial economies. We're living through like those three great revolutions at once. And so there is going to be an awful lot of kind of chaos on the ground. And part of that chaos, I think, has been the introduction of easy, simplistic and unhelpful ideologies, right? And if there's anything that a school should be, it should be a place that is immune to the kind of ideologies that shut down the conversation.
I want to quote John Courtney Murray again. I think it's so powerful. He says, civilization is living and talking together. That is the definition of civilization. And the definition of the barbarian is the person who shuts down the conversation. And the introduction of ideologies that shut down conversations about, for example, how people from different identities should relate to one another.
If you say the only way people should relate to people is to say one group is oppressed, the other is the oppressor, you have shut down a conversation, right? If you say the only explanatory framework possible is that racism is the answer to everything, you have shut down a conversation. If you say the only value we ever or we're ever going to care about is a particular notion of equality, everything else, right? Excellence, freedom, all of those other things are going to be marginalized, you have shut down a conversation.
And Debra, I have watched this happen in so many places.
Debra Wilson: So what do you do when you go into a university or a school and you see that? Like, so where does a school start? They're just, they just run into this barrier. And I would argue sometimes we run into a value of niceness. So people don't want to call things out, too. And that stops some progress going sometimes.
Where do you start? And I know you've articulated some steps for higher education, but I'm curious about higher ed and independent schools. So you go to the school, you have that experience. If you're an institutional leader at that point, where do you go from there?
Eboo Patel: So I think you can start in one of two places. Number one, you can articulate from the jump, the value of this school is pluralism. And we mean that in these three ways, values pluralism, intellectual pluralism, identity pluralism. Collectively, we call that civic pluralism. And here's how we practice it. And as you know, Debra, my organization, Interfaith America, has an article that,
it's called The Practices of Pluralism for Universities. And virtually every one of those practices, from the president of university giving a talk at the local Chamber of Commerce or the local Rotary Club about how pluralism is going to work at her campus, you know, head of school can do that all the way to what you do for a first year orientation, right?
Everything but like the research component of this, I think independent schools could follow. So you define the ethos of the place. Look, here's, here's my best example of this. If you're a football coach, you don't open the first practice by saying we're going to score a lot of runs and throw a lot of strikes. You're like we're going to put on our pads, we're going to tackle hard, we're going to pass the ball down the field, we're going to run it up the gut, right? Like, there are rules to the game, there's things that follow when you say we're a football team and not a baseball team. OK.
So that's one thing is, you can define what the nature of the institution is and then you articulate what its practices are. The second way you could do this is by using case studies. Like just use precise cases and say, these are the kinds of problems that we want our students to solve. If you hire a graduate from our school, you should feel confident that that graduate can navigate this kind of a problem. Right? Let me give you a perfect example of this. If you're United Airlines, and you're hiring a graduate from Embry Riddle aeronautical university, you are pretty sure that person can fly a plane. If I hire a graduate from The Lab School or Latin School or Parker, these are elite independent schools in my city of Chicago, what should I be confident that graduate can do? And I think a head of school should say, my graduate can navigate pluralism.
They can navigate identity pluralism, they can help turn diversity of identity into cooperation. They can navigate intellectual pluralism, they are able to understand the diverse explanatory frameworks for interesting facts on the ground. And the third is they are excellent at values pluralism, they, they know the trade offs between playing your best players versus playing all players versus playing the players that need the most help at different times in the, in the nine year old little league game. And they can tell you what those trade offs are. And they have a point of view on what trade off should be made. And they're willing to listen to other points of view as well. That is what our students, that is the equivalent of us graduating people who can fly planes, right.
And so you actually give students cases. And I have an excellent suggestion for this. Read Kwame Anthony Appiah every week in the New York Times magazine. The Ethicist. Every week, Professor Appiah chooses three or four of the most interesting cases that demonstrate either identity pluralism or intellectual pluralism or values pluralism. And he navigates the case using philosophers and ethicists and sociologists. He basically says, when somebody says, can we cast non-Jews in Fiddler On the Roof? Should I require my Muslim taxi driver to carry my bags with alcohol to the front door even though he doesn't want to? What should I tell my kids, my atheist children to do when their grandparents say it's time for the prayer before the Thanksgiving meal? These are fascinating questions.
We are going to use these questions as teacher training. This is how I would train teachers. We're going to discuss this. And then we're going to practice how we get our ninth grade world religions class or our 10th grade ethics class to discuss this. Right. And part of what Appiah is doing is he is choosing the hard cases. That is so important pedagogically. The easy cases are for third graders, right? That's kindergarten level stuff. What smart people do is they choose the hard cases, and they, and they figure out the balance of values and frameworks and identities in the hard cases.
And so I think that, that, these are two ways to get to the same thing. One is you begin by defining your institution as an institution of pluralism. By the way, I think the, the Deerfield framework, I mean, I've got this up in front of me. I love it so much. I love, I love what you, I love what that group has done there, right? I love the idea of intellectual diversity and expressive freedom and disciplined nonpartisanship. I think that's exactly the mode that a school should be in it, and and why? Because pluralism is at the center and case studies the ability to navigate particular cases is what demonstrates you do this well, just like you know what, United Airlines will have pilots that's looking to hire, do like OK, we're going to have you fly through these four types of weather. We're going to have you engage with this type of turbulence, right?
I thought about something, Debra. I think about pilots a lot actually, I fly a lot. And that's why I think about pilots a lot. I think to myself, like, I've been in I don't know, two, 3000 flights in my life, like a lot of flights, a lot of flights. I have been in turbulence hundreds of times. I have never, ever, ever heard a pilot come on the intercom with anything other than total calm.
You know, your schools graduate pilots, not passengers. That's how, that is how you should literally present your school to the public. We graduate pilots, not, it's—passengers are supposed to be scared in turbulence. They don't know what's going on.
The job of the pilot is not only to navigate effectively through turbulence, it is to be the kind of leader that calms passengers. Like literally, the pilot's voice sounds calm, I feel calm.
Debra Wilson: And I love that, because we do talk a lot about leadership, right? How do we develop leaders? Like what skills will our students need as they go on to the next level of education and they go out into life? And when you think about the skills you're talking about, I do think they exemplify what you're looking for in future leaders. And the world's getting more diverse in every possible kind of way, and you're going to need these skills to navigate pretty much any role out there, I would imagine.
Eboo Patel: Yeah, I absolutely think that's the case.
Debra Wilson: How young do you think schools should be thinking about this with their students? Like you mentioned the easy cases going down to like kindergarten, third grade. You know, I try not to experiment on other people's kids, but I always experiment on my own. So like, you know, I ask them all kinds of crazy questions just because of what I do. So we started kind of having some of those kinds of examples you were throwing out when they were pretty young. But when you think about schools, you know, particularly our K, K-5, K-6, K-8 schools. How do you think this manifests in those lower grades?
Eboo Patel: So if you take the example of a tee-ball coach of six year olds, and you say, you know, you have 13 players on the team, only nine can hit. And the coach is going to make decisions about who those nine players are, right? Or basketball is the obvious one. You have 14 kids on a team, only five can play at a time. I think that anything that somebody is a participant in, you can ask them the question about. Hey, Jack, six-year-old, Who should the coach put in the game and why?
You can ask, right? Like if it's, if it is a concrete scenario, then, then the kid has something direct to, to reflect on.
Debra Wilson: That’s really interesting.
Eboo Patel: And the kid will come up with all kinds of, like, you should put Bill in the game because he's my friend. And the coach will think, well, I like, literally never thought about putting your friend in the game, but then thought to himself, but you know what? My friend, like I am friends with this person's dad, and I have to say that plays a role in, in when I play him or not. Like I pay attention to when that person is present and I'm more likely to play his daughter when he's present.
So, but if the situation is concrete and you're making decisions about it, you can ask somebody else how they might make decisions, what decisions they would make and why.
Debra Wilson: It’s so interesting. My son plays on club tennis and he's president of club tennis for a while. And they get to do this weird thing in club tennis where you pull kids out, you can pull them out mid match. You know, it's almost like when they tag, they tag out basically. And he entered an essay into an ethics contest around specifically that, like, what are, what, what are you thinking about when you make that decision, and what impact does it have on that individual who you might be pulling out or leaving in? So interesting.
So I have a kind of an interesting question and I know it'll come up in some way, shape or form. Like, you shared your beginning as sort of like an angry activist, an angry identity activist. What do you say to people who are concerned that pluralism and these frameworks don't necessarily address systemic bias or systemic racism in how an institution operates or functions?
Eboo Patel: Yeah, I have lots to say about this, because I think it's such an interesting question. But I think the first thing I would say is make it a question. Make it something to discuss. And I'm even happy if we assume that systemic bias exists. So which is the most pernicious form of systemic bias?
Those are the most interesting questions, when you don't have an answer, right? When you're asking a question that's kind of obvious, is it not obvious that some kids have fabulous educational opportunities and other kids don't? That is obvious, right? OK, so is it not obvious that, that some educational opportunities are going to lead to better life outcomes than others? That is also obvious. Would we call that systemic bias? Discuss.
Isn't that interesting? And then I think it is super interesting to say actually, other forms of bias really matter more. Great, discuss. So the whole point is, systemic bias is a part of the fact pattern of our society. And it implicates our values. Let's have interesting conversations about this. But if you begin with the conclusion and format the conversation to only lead to that conclusion, then you are doing ideology and not education. And by the way, that's not rocket science. That is just obvious. OK. Niels Bohr once famously said, you're not thinking, you're only being logical. I don't think too much logic is the great problem of our culture right now, frankly, but, but maybe too much ideology might be, right?
So if you have come to a conclusion, and the only discussion you allow leads to that conclusion, you are doing ideology and not education. By the way, there's other, go do ideology somewhere, just don't do it at a school. I think a school should begin with a question, not a conclusion. Because people are forming their views, right? But if you're talking to 10th graders, you want to create an environment where people can say half-baked thoughts aloud. And then they can decide they're actually only one-tenth baked. Or they can decide, I want to bake this further. That's what education is, right?
I will tell you a hilarious story, though. So I'm sitting around with a group of Rhodes Scholars at Oxford. Like I said, I'm a state school kid.
Debra Wilson: As one does.
Eboo Patel: Yeah, I Well, I'm going to, look, I'm a state, like my parents owned Subway sandwich stores. I grew up middle class in Glenelg, Illinois, went to the University of Illinois. And then I, you know, did well in school. And I got a Rhodes scholarship. What are you going to do? Right? So, so I’m sitting around with a bunch of Rhodes Scholars at Oxford, and somebody says, somebody says, we should abolish private schools. Like he goes all in on it. And, and like, I'm listening, I'm listening, I'm listening. And it suddenly occurred to me, I'm like, Josh, you've never been to a public school in your life. Like you're, like you went to like Choate, Groton, Yale, and Oxford. Who are you to say we should abolish private schools?
And it was one of these great moments because actually it was a connection of identity with, with intellectual framework with values right? Like, wait a second. Do you have, does your identity give you like, does it give you more standing to make that statement or less standing to make that statement? But this is part, it's you know, that conversation happened 25 years ago, and I still remember it because it was so much fun. It was so interesting, right?
And this is where I get back to John Courtney Murray. Civilization is living and talking together. And the definition of the barbarian is the person who destroys the conversation. If you are destroying conversations, if you are not letting people play around with how different values might be balanced. Articulate what's important from their identity. Offer diverse explanations for fact patterns. You're destroying the conversation.
Let me give you something really important for my identity. My parents knew the world was racist and unfair. And you know what their answer to me about that was, based on our identity? Work harder. I don't know what else there is. I'm not saying that's right or wrong. I'm saying that was their view of the world. The world is racist and unfair, but you know what? You weren't born to a poor family in a Bombay slum. You were born to a middle-class family in an American suburb. We're sorry that kids make fun of your name. We're sorry that the prom queen turns up her nose at your skin color. That's bad.
We're sorry that your dad doesn't have a network of friends that can get you a job in finance when you graduate. Work harder. That is part of my identity. And I have to tell you something, in conversations about equity, I want to be able to share that. I'm happy to have the conversation. It's an interesting argument, but I do not want to lie about where I come from. I come from a place where my parents took a great deal of pride in saying, we just work harder.
I take pride in that. I just work harder.
Debra Wilson: You know, as you touched on the conversations that you can have, particularly in these developmental years, when you're in school, when you're in college, when you're in grad school, to be able to have richer conversations that touch on those things without ending the conversation is, it's a much richer experience. And to your point, it's fun, right? Like that should actually be the fun part of education, is learning to engage like that with your peers, and then taking those skills that you've learned out into the world and making a difference.
Eboo, this has been a fabulous conversation. Thank you for joining me. I know we'll have resources on this episode page so that people can read more and learn more. We've touched on a lot of different kinds of things. And I just, I so appreciate you spending time with us today.
Eboo Patel: I have such admiration for your leadership, Debra, and I really love independent schools. And the reason is because they produce leaders. And so keep on doing the work of pluralism and leadership. And I look forward to seeing at your next school.
Debra Wilson: Great. Thank you, Eboo.
I really wanted to have this conversation with Eboo today, and I knew that it was possible we were going to have a discussion that might raise some ideas or concepts that would make people uncomfortable, maybe sometimes including me. And I don't think I was wrong. And that's sort of the point, both of this podcast and the work he is doing. In talking about these various kinds of pluralism, we are talking about divides and how to bridge them. And we're talking about how to have, ultimately, the uncomfortable and challenging conversations we all probably need to have more often, particularly as the world gets more complex.
But I also love the idea that we need to start those conversations as questions and not as statements, to sort of get us out of our entrenchments there. I'm also drawn to the idea of schools as a place where we need to create environments where kids can speak and ask about their half-baked ideas, and then decide if they want to bake them further. If we do it well, there should be a real sense of security there that I really think we should explore. Sometimes we think of providing intellectually and emotionally safe environments as creating places where maybe no one will be offended or challenged in their thinking, when really what we might want to be talking about are creating places to experiment and build and really understanding them that way. And Eboo’s definition of civic pluralism, I think, seems to embrace that.
Maybe we should be creating spaces where it's safe to explore ideas and viewpoints, even if they are unpopular, until we can all come to new understandings. I think about this a lot when I reflect on my own time in education, in places where you could raise unpopular, uneducated, uninformed viewpoints, and really being gently and thoughtfully guided by either my classmates or my professors. And as an adult in 2024, really being glad that there were no phones around back then. That we actually had the liberty to explore in a time when everything wasn't being recorded.
When Eboo advocates that we should be able to articulate what our graduates will be able to do upon leaving our schools, one thing that really sticks with me is that we want graduates of our schools to be able to navigate those ideological differences. But that's really something we have to train them to be able to do so they actually understand what they're engaging in. And I do think that we are up to that challenge.