“As the Covid-19 pandemic entered its third year, with inflation rising and the supply chain faltering,” writes Paul Tough in the preamble of our Fall 2022 issue, “many American voters were fixated not on the economy or the virus but on a quite different topic: education.” Questions of education have become a matter of intense debate at school board meetings and in elections across the country; as our Education issue demonstrates, these battles are nothing new.

The issue includes original essays by Moudhy Al-Rashid, Ian Altman, Michael D. Hattem, and Eleni Schirmer; Voices in Time contributions by Catharine Beecher, Cassiodorus, Cesar Chavez, W.E.B. Du Bois, John Dury, Abraham Lincoln, Maria Montessori, Jotirao Phule, William Shakespeare, and others; and art by Thomas Hart Benton, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, and others.