Lies My Teacher Told Me

A year inside High Tech High, a San Diego charter school built entirely around project-based learning instead of standardized instruction, following two classes of ninth graders.

Why it’s here: Makes the most vivid case in documentary form for project-based learning over the standard model — but its history of how American schooling got this way has been disputed by actual education historians, and its producers have their own stake in the reform it's arguing for. Worth watching with that critique alongside it, not instead of it.

While grappling with personal loss, Pulitzer-winning writer Isabel Wilkerson traces a hidden architecture connecting racial hierarchy in America, the caste system in India, and the machinery of Nazi Germany. Adapted from Wilkerson's book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.

Why it’s here: Punk in daring to name America's racial order as a caste system, kin to India's and Nazi Germany's, rather than a uniquely American aberration. Pedagogical in dramatizing how a writer's own grief becomes the engine of rigorous, world-spanning research.