What if the real story of American education isn’t test scores or culture wars, but air you can breathe, roofs that don’t leak, and the invisible money pipes that decide who gets both? We sit down with David I. Backer, associate professor of education policy and author of As Public as Possible, to follow the cash from property taxes to Wall Street and back again—and to sketch a better way forward.

We start with how school finance became hyperlocal. Once, statewide property taxes aimed at broad access; over time, home rule and municipal boundaries pulled control downward. That shift tied school quality to real estate markets, creating districts that can tax less and spend more next to neighbors who tax more and get less. State aid helps unevenly, federal support is thin, and court victories often stall when legislatures refuse to act. Then there’s the four-trillion-dollar municipal bond market. Districts borrow for buildings, HVAC, security, and disaster repairs, paying fees and interest that quietly shape decisions about class sizes, salaries, and programs. Credit ratings become a cudgel, and information asymmetry leaves public officials outgunned by financial intermediaries.

Facilities emerge as the missing protagonist. Decades of reform ignored basics like ventilation, temperature, and mold. Data shows over half of schools need significant repairs, and climate stress—from floods to heat to earthquakes—raises the stakes while schools double as community shelters. We explore how costs balloon through compliance, legal mandates, healthcare premiums, pension liabilities, and security measures, all while teachers shoulder unfunded social work. Against that backdrop, David outlines practical options: decarbonize and modernize buildings, revive low-cost public lending modeled on the Fed’s pandemic facility, reform Title I allocations, and create a national investment authority to finance public goods. We dig into tax-base sharing from the Twin Cities, regional joint authorities that share both revenue and debt risk, and even pension funds underwriting school bonds to keep value in public hands.

This is a map for organizing as much as policy. Cross district lines, learn how the money actually moves, and translate moral urgency into precise demands that land where decisions are made. If schools mirror society, then changing the money can change what they reflect—safer, greener, and truly public. If this conversation sparked ideas, follow David at “School Daves,” share this episode, and leave us a review so more people can find it.

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Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

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Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn

Links and Social Media:
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Current Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf, DRV, Kenneth McKee, JY Chan, Matthew Monahan, Parzival, Adriel Mixon, Buddy Roark, Daniel Petrovic,Julian

What if the real engine of socialist history wasn’t just theory, but teaching? We sit down with historian Edward Baring to trace a vivid, often-misread story: Marxism as a mass educational project designed to turn scattered grievances into class consciousness. From best-selling primers that outsold Capital to study circles in factories and party schools, we unpack how organizers taught at scale—and why the word “vulgar” once critiqued bad teaching, not bad thinking.

We map the fault line between Kautsky’s “teach the conclusions” approach and Lukács’s insistence on method and totality, and we ask the hard question: how do you teach complexity without losing people who work ten-hour days? Lenin’s What Is To Be Done and State and Revolution reveal the same tension, combining textual trench warfare with tactical clarity for a revolutionary moment. Hendrik de Man’s psychological critique raises a chilling possibility: if capitalism deforms worker experience, will the versions of Marxism that spread most easily become the most mechanical?

Gramsci offers a different path. His organic intellectuals don’t deliver doctrine; they nurture a counter-hegemony by working inside communities’ common sense and everyday practice. Education becomes a two-way process that builds agency, not dependency. We follow this thread beyond Europe with Mariátegui, where translating Marxism for peasant contexts demanded creativity over orthodoxy—and exposed the classist edge to accusations of “vulgarity.”

If you care about political education, labor organizing, or the history of socialist strategy, this conversation brings fresh clarity to how ideas travel, who carries them, and what actually changes minds. Subscribe, share with a comrade, and leave a review telling us: what’s the one teaching practice you think movements should revive today?

Edward Baring is a Professor of History and Human Values at Princeton University. An expert in modern European intellectual history, he is the author of several award-winning books, including The Young Derrida and French Philosophy and Converts to the Real. Today, we focus on his book, Vulgar Marxism His latest research focuses on the intersection of revolutionary politics and pedagogy.

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Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Support the show

Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn

Links and Social Media:
twitter: @varnvlog
blue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.social
You can find the additional streams on Youtube

Current Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf, DRV, Kenneth McKee, JY Chan, Matthew Monahan, Parzival, Adriel Mixon, Buddy Roark, Daniel Petrovic,Julian

A century ago, philosophy split its seams. Cambridge’s revolt against British Hegelianism promised “clarity,” Vienna’s scientific modernism tried to rebuild from scratch, and postwar America professionalized it all while quietly erasing the politics that once burned at the core. We invited Christoph Schuringa, editor of Hegel Bulletin and author of A Social History of Analytic Philosophy and Karl Marx and the Actualization of Philosophy, to map the break—and to argue why Marx didn’t abandon philosophy so much as put it back to work.

We start with Russell and Moore’s rebellion and the Bloomsbury circle that treated linguistic precision as a moral breakthrough. Then we step into Red Vienna, where the Unity of Science lived alongside adult education, social housing, and austro‑Marxist reform. Wittgenstein links both worlds: sanctified by the Vienna Circle, wary of their empiricism, mystical yet method-obsessed, and ultimately a catalyst for the linguistic turn that reshaped Anglo‑American departments. The Cold War’s shadow looms large here; McCarthyism and professional incentives sanded down the political edge of philosophy of science, leaving behind procedures without projects.

From there, we pivot to Marx. Schuringa makes a provocative case: Capital is philosophical not because it states doctrines, but because it enacts dialectical thinking adequate to its object. Rather than a self‑contained logic applied to reality, Marx tracks how concrete oppositions ripen into contradictions—how specialization collides with labor mobility, how accumulation breeds crisis. Ethics reenters the frame too. Instead of rulebooks, we get the hard work of situated judgment and character, closer to Aristotle than to textbook deontology. Species‑being names our capacity for freedom and mutual recognition within social life; its glimpses are already here in imperfect forms, like care untethered from payment.

If you’ve ever wondered why analytic philosophy persists, why Wittgenstein feels both central and strange, or how Marx can guide action without sanctifying dogma, this conversation connects the dots. Join us for a tour from Cambridge to Vienna to London and back to the workshop of history—and stay for a clear, practical case for philosophy that helps us think and act together. If this resonates, share it with a friend, leave a review, and tell us: what should philosophy dare to do next?

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Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Support the show

Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn

Links and Social Media:
twitter: @varnvlog
blue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.social
You can find the additional streams on Youtube

Current Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf, DRV, Kenneth McKee, JY Chan, Matthew Monahan, Parzival, Adriel Mixon, Buddy Roark, Daniel Petrovic,Julian