Top Stories
What we’re reading, watching and listening to this week.
The School Choice Landscape Is Shifting
Ashley Berner, an associate professor the the Johns Hopkins University School of Education, was interviewed by Rick Hess and Education Week about how the school choice landscape is evolving with new programs like ESAs and vouchers, challenging the zero-sum mindset around public education. They explore how parental choice, supported by diverse funding models, can enhance options and academic rigor for all students, drawing from Berner’s insights on educational pluralism.
BERNER: My view has long been that choice is hard-wired into education, which is why it’s weird that everyone keeps getting told to pick sides between school choice and their local schools. For many years, choice advocates have talked about “blowing up Zip code education” and opponents about shadowy conspiracies to promote “privatization.” But you know who doesn’t think this way? Actual parents. I mean, more than two-thirds of parents say they’re satisfied with their child’s public district school, and two-thirds or more endorse education savings accounts, school vouchers, and charter schools.
Love is Universal
Scott Barry Kaufman, with a brief post in his Beautiful Minds newsletter, presents a new study suggesting that romantic love is a universal human experience across diverse cultures, challenging past skepticism, with evidence of its core components; intimacy, passion, and commitment.
To date, most studies on romantic love have been conducted on “WEIRD” samples (drawn from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic populations). Verena Klein and colleagues found that 68-88% of studies in top sexuality journals were based on WEIRD samples.
This has caused some anthropologists and psychologists to cast doubt that romantic love really is a human universal experience. If you go back early enough, you also see that philosophers such as Foucault denied that love is a universal and in the 1920s and 1930s Polish anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski was skeptical that romantic love was universal arguing instead that sexuality is the dominating universal human drive.
Jill Carey on The Third Space Podcast with Zander Keig
Prohuman Foundation advisor Zander Keig, in The Third Space Podcast, interviews Prohuman Ambassador Jill Carey, who shares her experience navigating stereotypes as a devout Christian, and explains how her work encourages people to bring their full, complex selves—including genuinely held values—into harmonious dialogue with others.
CAREY: We're saying, show up . . . with your values, with your identities, with the complexity of who you are, and we're going to just sit with that. We're not necessarily going to agree with everything that you believe. We're not going to debate it. We're going to have dialogue around it.
American Nazi author and former radical joins Derate the Hate
Prohuman Foundation advisor Wilk Wilkinson, for his Derate the Hate podcast, interviewed Jeff Schoep, a former neo-Nazi leader turned peace-builder. They discuss Schoep’s raw memoir American Nazi: From Hate to Humanity. Schoep’s journey from extremism to redemption offers a powerful case study in deradicalization, and a tribute to the capacity for personal transformation.
SCHOEP: The same skill set that I used to bring people into that movement, I use now to help get people out. So it's like I was the venom, I was the poison. Now I'm the antidote. . . .
You know, I stayed so long, looking back—I wish I wouldn't have obviously—you know, there's a lot of regret, guilt, and shame—but what the driving force was, is that I believed that I was doing something honorable and noble. . . And so once I realized it was wrong . . . I felt like, how can I fix this?
This Thursday (June 26)!
Prohuman Foundation advisor Rob Feld will join the Prohuman Book Club as we screen and discuss his film, Jesters and Fools. The film, both funny and illuminating, makes a compelling case that America is less polarized than mass media would suggest. Feld draws on the wit and wisdom of Colin Quinn and other comedians, as well as the work of Duke University Polarization Lab founder Chris Bail.
Opinions expressed in selected articles do not necessarily reflect those of the Prohuman Foundation. We value diverse perspectives that enrich our understanding of topics close to our mission: to promote the foundational truth that we are all unique individuals, united by our shared humanity.