Posted on 10/29/2025 4:47:56 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
Yoni Appelbaum’s grandfather was a mailman. Appelbaum shared this fact with me in Charlottesville last week, onstage at a “Democracy360” event hosted by the University of Virginia and cosponsored by The Atlantic, where he is an editor. We were there to talk about “building the American dream” and, by Appelbaum’s account, being a mailman was once a way to do that. “He was proud of that job. And it was enough, together with my grandmother’s job, that they could buy a row house in Canarsie and raise a family.”
That was not, however, the point of the story. Rather, Appelbaum wanted to emphasize that his grandfather:
didn’t, though, hope that his son would grow up to be a letter carrier. In fact, when he retired from the postal service, what he did was he went and enrolled at night school so he could earn the university degree he’d never had a chance to have because, from his perspective, the American dream included education and included access to ideas, to culture, to art, to the things that a kid who grew up in the circumstances he grew up in didn’t have when he was a kid, but maybe could earn over the course of his life.
The letter carrier’s son, Paul Appelbaum, went on to Columbia College and Harvard Medical School, with a stint at Harvard Law School along the way, became chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and served as president of the American Psychiatric Association. Paul’s sons, Yoni and Binyamin, attended Ivy League universities themselves, became published authors, and write for The Atlantic and the New York Times, respectively.
That’s wonderful. I’m happy for the Appelbaums, truly. But does such an anecdote provide a basis for...
(Excerpt) Read more at commonplace.org ...
I read the article plus a lot of the comments yet I still haven’t fully processed what the author believes to be the better way. All of us see the world through the lens of our experiences so the anecdote is a great way to understand why a speaker or writer advocates for a position. Losing that context takes away from the ability of the listener or reader to measure that position against their own views.
I also think the author misses a big point regarding the successes of the Apelbaum family and that is their Ivy League education. Today’s DEI-driven departure from ability & performance for admissions seems a fertile ground to explore on whether that family could have similar outcomes and anecdotes in today’s educational framework.
“Fast-forward 80 years, and most Americans still read at an elementary school level.”
“Which is a more important purpose for public education: helping students develop the skills and values needed to build decent lives in the communities where they live, or helping students maximize their academic potential and pursue admission to colleges and universities with the best possible reputations?”
IMEO (In my exalted opinion) at this late hour:
Before worrying about “tracking”, education, public or private, needs to provide a base from which to expand onto a “track”. A proper grounding in “reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmatic”, civics, history, geography, maybe more, all including guidance on how to think and get along in society would provide such a base and need to come first.
The anecdote provided only reflects the experience of some who have been so educated, at least partially, and is unhelpful because of the jump into “tracking” without properly addressing the base on which to lay the track.
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