"Luxury Beliefs" in Education Hold Many Students Back

Educators themselves are often insulated from the devastating consequences of prevailing educational approaches

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The term “luxury belief” has become ubiquitous. As applied to education, it can shed light on some longstanding assumptions that have unintentionally held back many students—especially those at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum.

The phrase was coined by author Rob Henderson, who arrived at Yale after a rough childhood—drug-addicted single mother, dumpster-diving, foster homes—to find his elite classmates pooh-poohing things like monogamy. Henderson himself would have given anything to have grown up in a stable, two-parent family. When he asked his monogamy-skeptical classmate about her own background and intentions, it became clear that she had grown up in just such a family and intended to have one of her own.

Henderson’s definition of luxury beliefs—a category in which he also includes ideas like defunding the police and legalizing drugs—is as follows: “ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class but often inflict real costs on the lower classes.” The concept has come under attack from some, and according to Wikipedia (“luxury beliefs” has its own Wikipedia entry), one study found no evidence that people were using it to signal social status.

I tend to agree with Yascha Mounk that the “signaling social status” part of the definition is dubious and unnecessary. But the other part—a belief that has negative consequences for others from which you yourself are insulated—has resonance. It’s not necessarily a hypocritical stance. More likely, it’s a matter of good intentions combined with limited information or awareness.

Luxury Beliefs and Education

I’m not the first to notice the applicability of the luxury belief concept to education. For example, some have argued that opposing school choice is a luxury belief; others have argued that promoting school choice is a luxury belief.

In a 2023 book called Reconnect: Building School Culture for Meaning, Purpose, and Belonging, Doug Lemov and his co-authors argue that rejecting the idea of a teacher’s authority in the classroom—a rejection that has long been an undercurrent of education orthodoxy and has more recently been taken up by the left as an anti-racist stance—is a luxury belief. “The students who are harmed most by the idea that schools should not set and enforce clear rules for young people are the young people themselves,” they write, “especially those who as a result do not learn how to control their impulses, delay gratification, and exert self-discipline.”

Reading Mounk’s piece on luxury beliefs recently, my thoughts went immediately to curriculum and instruction. Others have thought along similar lines. On her Substack, Australian educator Rebecca Birch cites the longstanding belief that learning to read and write are essentially natural processes and therefore don’t need to be taught explicitly.

Cognitive science tells us this is simply not true. Yes, some kids do just pick up the ability to read and write—often, kids from highly literate families who are immersed in print from a young age—but most don’t. When kids in affluent communities fail to thrive under a laissez-faire regime, their parents get tutoring or special services or send their kids to private schools that provide the support they need.

The result is that in affluent communities it may look like the unsystematic approach to teaching reading and writing is working, but its failure is masked by the resources parents are able to deploy. And the education system has often portrayed students’ difficulties in learning to read and write as individual problems, for which parents need to seek outside help, rather than problems caused by the system itself.

In lower-income communities, the lack of effective instruction is often a disaster, leaving many middle and high school students unable to decode text fluently or write coherently.  And yet the belief that kids don’t need explicit instruction in decoding and writing has persisted, perhaps because the people perpetuating that belief are largely insulated from its consequences.

Back in 1995, education writer Lisa Delpit alluded to this phenomenon in her book Other People’s Children. Delpit quotes a friend who, like Delpit herself, is Black, and who teaches at an alternative high school.

“These people keep pushing this fluency thing,” the friend tells Delpit, referring to middle-class white writing gurus. “Our kids are fluent. What they need are the skills that will get them into college. This is just another one of those racist ploys to keep our kids out. White kids learn how to write a decent sentence. Even if they don’t teach them in school, their parents make sure they get what they need. But what about our kids? They don’t get it at home and they spend all their time in school learning to be fluent. I’m sick of this liberal nonsense.”

Unlike Delpit’s friend, I don’t see the failure to teach writing explicitly as some kind of conspiracy, nor do I see Black students as the only ones who suffer from it. I’ve never met a teacher who didn’t want her students to succeed, no matter their background or ethnicity. I think educators who embrace these methods genuinely feel they’re fostering a love of reading—which they fear systematic phonics instruction will destroy—and developing students’ creativity as writers. They may be unaware of the devastating consequences the approach can have for students whose families lack education and resources.

Effects Go Beyond Basic Skills

But the consequences of luxury beliefs in education extend far beyond the failure to teach the basic skills of reading and writing. In fact, I think they explain much of the reason our education system doesn’t work well for most students.

Schools of education often instill prospective teachers with beliefs about learning that conflict with evidence from cognitive science, making schooling more difficult for many kids. Among these beliefs are that it’s not important for students to retain information such as names and dates, and that it’s better for students to discover concepts on their own rather than to have a teacher provide explicit instruction.

A minority of students—generally those who are self-disciplined, highly motivated, and blessed with well-educated and supportive parents—will thrive under this approach, but they would probably be fine no matter what. The majority are likely to struggle.

If those struggling students come from affluent families, they’ll often get what they need. Years ago, friends of mine were distraught when their young daughter—who was floundering in a highly sought-after private school—was diagnosed with an executive function deficit. That essentially meant she had difficulty planning and executing the kinds of tasks necessary to succeed academically.

My friends, just like many parents whose children struggle with reading, felt this was their daughter’s individual problem rather than anything stemming from the somewhat chaotic environment of the school. They found another private school that provided more structure and explicit instruction, where their daughter did just fine. In fact, she eventually graduated from Yale Law School.

Nevertheless, my friends didn’t connect the first school’s educational philosophy with their daughter’s early struggles—at least, not until I suggested the possibility. Apparently, they’re not alone. A few days ago, I saw a notice on the listserv in my affluent neighborhood from a parent seeking a tutor to help her child with “executive functions.”  She got two recommendations from other parents almost immediately. So even when luxury beliefs have negative consequences in privileged communities, parents don’t necessarily see the relationship.

But what about parents with fewer resources? Their children are even more likely to need explicit teaching and an orderly classroom environment, but they rarely get those things. They’re also more likely to be missing the kind of academic knowledge and vocabulary that children from highly educated families often pick up at home—knowledge and vocabulary that enable reading comprehension and learning in general.

There is much that schools could do to make learning easier—like guiding students to recall information they’ve recently acquired but may have slightly forgotten, through quizzes or writing activities. Evidence from cognitive science tells us that this kind of “retrieval practice” is hugely helpful for students. But teachers rarely learn about the concept during their training, and their instructional materials seldom incorporate it.

Decolonizing the Curriculum as a Luxury Belief

In recent years another kind of luxury belief has emerged—namely, that students in historically disadvantaged groups will succeed only if the curriculum centers their own culture and experiences. This belief has led some left-leaning educators to reject curricula that build knowledge of mainstream Western culture. If students see themselves reflected in the curriculum, the theory goes, they will be more motivated to learn, and they will achieve academically.

As with the other beliefs I’ve mentioned, I have no doubt that this one is sincere and well-intentioned. And all students should see themselves and their culture reflected in the curriculum to some extent. But that’s unlikely to be enough to guarantee their academic success. If it were, we wouldn’t be seeing millions of white children, mostly from less highly educated families, scoring low on standardized tests and floundering academically. Presumably they do see a lot of people who look like them in the curriculum.

The consequence of a belief in the power of a “decolonized” curriculum is that it leaves students ill-equipped to function in a society that, despite its increasing diversity, still assumes a lot of familiarity with Western culture. As Baltimore City schools chief Sonja Santelises has said, students from historically marginalized communities need knowledge of both mainstream culture and that of their own communities.

Some parents recognize that, even if some left-leaning educators don’t. I once gave a remote presentation about knowledge-building curricula for an education organization that worked with schools serving mostly Black and Hispanic students. During the question period, I could see that most of the faces on my screen belonged to white people who appeared to be in their 20s and 30s. One asked a question I’ve often gotten: Whose knowledge should we teach, and who decides? Others nodded their agreement.

Then a Black woman who held an administrative position with the organization raised her hand. She noted that she had made sure her son studied Latin in school, because she knew it would help him with his vocabulary. This seemed like a gentle—and on-point—rebuke to the white progressives who presumably would oppose teaching Latin to kids like hers, on the grounds that it would harm them.

Rejecting the Idea of Building Academic Knowledge

It’s certainly possible for students to acquire academic vocabulary through any coherent sequence of knowledge, including one that decenters Western culture. You could learn the meaning of a word like dynasty, for example, through learning about African dynasties or Indigenous American dynasties. You might still be confused in a college class on European history if you’ve never heard of the Bourbon or Hapsburg dynasties, but at least you would be familiar with the concept.

But some on the left go even further to argue against the very idea of building the kind of knowledge and vocabulary students are likely to encounter in complex text. An article by one British academic criticized the concept of Tier Two vocabulary—a term used to describe words that appear frequently in written but not oral language, like industrious or benevolent. Here’s an excerpt from his argument:

These deficit framings co-articulate with raciolinguistic ideologies to represent racialised bilinguals as lacking academic language. Yet in reality, the heterogenous language practices of racialised bilinguals simply transcend the rigidity of the academic/non-academic borders which themselves are based on idealised versions of white, print-centric, monolingual understandings of language. Put simply, the distinctions which underpin the tiered vocabulary framework do not reflect actual language use, yet are still used to frame racialised, working-class, and bilingual children as lacking capabilities in the kind of language necessary for success in school.

The luxury belief here is that it’s disrespectful or damaging for teachers to provide “racialized, working-class, and bilingual children” with knowledge of words like ideologies, heterogenous, and transcend. But the author himself has clearly learned this vocabulary, and it’s enabled him to embark on an apparently successful academic career. Would he want his own children to be prevented from acquiring it?

In identifying these beliefs as “luxury,” I don’t mean to cast blame on individuals. As with so much in education, the problem seems to me to be fundamentally systemic: Educators are surrounded by colleagues and mentors who hold these beliefs, and even if they have doubts, it can be difficult to challenge them.

But even if individuals aren’t to blame for these beliefs, they can only be changed if enough individuals are able and willing to point out the devastating effects they continue to have on untold numbers of students. Some individual educators are now undertaking that work, but to solve this enormous problem, we desperately need more.