Podcast: Ilana Horwitz on Educational Performance and Religion

Image for Podcast: Ilana Horwitz on Educational Performance and Religion

Press play below to listen to the podcast, download it in the iTunes Store, or stream it via Stitcher.

Why do some American children do better in school than others? Social scientists tend to look to family structure, race, class, and gender in an effort to find factors that correlate to better or worse performance at school. But there are other significant variables that affect the education of America’s children too.

A recent book finds that religion is one of them. Its author, the Tulane University professor Ilana Horwitz, joins this week’s podcast episode to discuss her findings, which suggest that children who hold religious beliefs and are members of religious communities tend to perform, on average, better in school than their non-religious counterparts. In conversation with Mosaic’s editor, Jonathan Silver, she explains how she found her results, and what they say about religious children and American education.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

More podcasts: