As an anthropologist, I spend a lot of time listening to how people make sense of their world—how they talk about institutions, respond to uncertainty, and express fear and wield power. Recently, I listened to three FreshEd interviews with David Harvey, Michael Apple, and Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider, all reflecting the state of American public education and democracy.

Harvey, Apple, and Berkshire and Schneider each describe familiar cultural patterns. Deepening political divides, fraying public institutions, and the narratives people create to explain these shifts. Their insights help us understand the terrain we are living in.

But they share a key limitation: diagnosis without risk. From an anthropological perspective, they overlook that strategic silence can be a tool, that clear offensive vision is necessary, and that discontent transforms powerfully into action. Progressive politics has become so focused on consensus that proponents forget that transformation begins when someone steps into the unknown. And it is precisely at this threshold—where the unspoken becomes visible—that anthropology urges us to pay attention not only to critique, but to where uncertainty is actively negotiated.

That is why, as an anthropologist affiliated with the Council on Foreign Relations, I stepped into Congress as a site of participant-observation. Alongside drafting memoranda and working on legislation, I attended open Senate hearings—spaces anyone can enter—and spoke with witnesses afterward, asking what went unsaid, what was deferred, avoided, or too risky to enter the record.

Anthropology teaches us to attend to absences in speech; here, those absences matter. David Harvey describes corporations’ tightening grip on higher education and the loss of critical thinking. He maps the shifting symbolic terrain—how students, faculty, and administrators come to see debt and precarity as ordinary—and he shows how these conditions narrow the space for critique.

Yet Harvey remains committed to diagnosis rather than strategy. He does not consider how stepping into political risk—such as pushing the US Congress for bold restructuring of corporate philanthropy and campaign financing, or demanding federal labor and student-debt protections—might unsettle the very cultural patterns he critiques.

Harvey’s analysis helps us see the problem, but he stops short of imagining how a deliberate political vision might reshape the larger system. He sees the trap but does not ask us to venture beyond it.

Michael Apple, meanwhile, examines the culture wars shaping K–12 schools. He maps how fear and identity shape schooling in deep ways. His Gramscian lens highlights how battles over curriculum serve as battles over democracy itself.

Yet Apple, too, frames the work ahead primarily as resistance rather than risk-taking. He describes groups pushing back through local, affective mobilizations over culture and curriculum, but does not test new narratives or consider how strategic silence on certain topics might build new coalitions.

Anthropologists know that when communities feel threatened, they often freeze and turn inward. They perform loyalty to their group to signal safety. But real cultural change requires boundary-crossing, not boundary policing. Risk is not the opposite of trust—it is what enables new social formations to emerge.

Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider zoom out even further, showing how a fifty-year cultural and political project has reshaped education at the state level. Their analysis traces a powerful network of ideas, donors, laws, and stories that have slowly redefined what “public” and “school” even mean.

From an anthropological perspective, Berkshire and Schneider are charting a long arc of cultural transformation. Yet even as they reveal the depth of these changes, they do not imagine how federal-level action could interrupt these patterns. Nor do they consider how diverse communities might be brought together through careful messaging, selective silence, or shared values around democracy and education.

Their work helps us understand the terrain, but it does not offer a strategy for moving across it.

So, here’s the anthropologist’s conclusion. We need to stop staying safe inside critique and inside our political or intellectual lanes and instead start taking risks that can create cultural change. Trust matters, yes, but we cannot wait for perfect trust before acting.
We need to stop treating critique as the endpoint and start making allies out of rivals—and let that risky closeness change who we are. We need to allow ourselves to get messy, make mistakes. (Wasn’t there a Ms. Frizzle who advised her students to “take chances, make mistakes, get messy”? Perhaps it’s time we follow the advice teachers give every day.)
Democracy is not just a set of institutions; it is a lived practice created through everyday interactions. If we want to protect public education, we must engage state and federal legislatures because that is where durable cultural and structural change can be made. And we must accept that disagreement is normal.

So, step into a Senate (or State or Municipal) Education hearing and talk to witnesses afterward. Start a risky conversation. Progressives, conservatives, activists, educators, and scholars must embrace the messy, everyday reality of collective life. Because transformation happens not from standing safely at a distance but through participation—the kind of fieldwork where we enter situations we don’t fully understand, remain open to being changed by the encounter, and in turn change the people and communities we interact with.
Participant-observation, at its best, teaches us that we learn by doing and by risking misunderstanding, discomfort, and surprise. The time has come to stop merely observing and start actively building the democratic world we value. Enough with safe.

January 1, 2026