Mercedes Schneider offers her reaction to Diane Ravitch’s new memoir. Reposted with permission.
One of my favorite genres is the biography (and by extension, the autobiography). In my early years, I was taken with the life of Abraham Lincoln, and I read biographies about him often. I find it both alluring and educational to consider the lives of those who have become famous, whose names are familiar to the public but whose lives, especially life prior to fame and life out of public purview, provide a connection with those unfamiliar with any notable limelight.
It is this connection that intrigues me. In short, those with significant portions of their lives lived in the public eye also have less-known but more identifiable components– joys, struggles, mishaps, shocks, contentments– appealing to readers of both biographies and autobiographies. Readers like me.
Of course, when an autobiography is available, I prefer it. However, my foray into the life and history of, say, Anne Boleyn (fascinating reading) offered no opportunity at autobiography. In such cases, relying on noted scholars of history must do. Indeed, those who draft their own stories should become scholars of their own pasts and should base their recollections not only on their memories and perceptions but also on artifacts and discussion of events with those who shared the situations so that the recollection may be as authentic and correct as possible for the readers of the story, even if it means acknowledging that others remember events differently.
Being a historian and writer both is a handy combination for one who would take what has been a public life and genuinely and honestly bring the reader behind the scenes.
Bringing a reader behind the scenes can prove quite the self-reckoning. Once a sensitive, embarrassing, or controversial experience is in print, there’s no going back.
As such, I think authentic autobiographies are noteworthy acts of bravery.
At many points in education historian Diane (Silvers) Ravitch’s An Education: How I changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else (Columbia University Press, 2025), I realized that I was reading a noteworthy, brave act.
What is unusual for me about this autobiography is that I know the author. Specifically, I have known Diane since 2012, which, as of this writing, is for fourteen years. In that period, I have been able to spend time with her in person, just the two of us on occasion, and I have also had a number of private phone calls with her over the years, so some of the stories she relates in An Education are familiar to me because I knew of them in real time. Others I know because I have had the chance to ask her about certain life experiences (like attending state dinners) and have had the privilege of hearing about a firsthand, insider experience I will likely never have. Such is one of the joys of being a listener to a great story.
However, there aren’t enough hours or leisurely circumstances for me to hear Diane’s life story from start to finish, and therein lay for me the magic of her autobiography.
As I was reading her memoir, I could hear her voice telling her story. I have no doubt that her words are genuine and that her goal was to relay her story for better or worse, so to speak. And there are some parts that are terrible for any woman to experience but that many women have experienced (and continue to experience). Some are ground in time and place: The ubiquitous expectation that a married woman would forego her own personhood in the name of dutifully become a shadow of her husband, a prevalent assumption in America prior to the 1980s, for example. Other awful experiences transcend time and place. Here I struggle as I write because I do not want to give away what I believe future readers should experience on their own without my preface, but I will tell you, there are points at which I had to put the book down and process my own disappointment and grief at learning that this woman, this friend, carries such pain as part of her past.
Yet she is willing to share it undiluted with the world.
There is courage.
I expect that there is also a catharsis in the revelation, as well, and also pressure, perhaps from others who are privy to certain appalling truths and would have them remain buried.
Diane Ravitch has chosen to do what a true writer of a memoir must do: reveal not only the triumphant but also the terrible.
Such is life, even for those who have achieved notoriety.
A healthy modesty is also a component of her memoir as Ravitch tells on herself. One of my favorite points occurs when Diane accounts being semiconscious after open heart surgery and thinking the New York Times carried a banner headline, RAVITCH DEAD. In her account, her son Michael wonders why she thinks she is worthy of a banner headline.
There is so much to this book. Please read it for yourself. Diane uses her research skills to begin before her beginning, with the histories of her parent’s parents emigrating to America, of her mother’s mother only speaking Yiddish and her mother being born in Bessarabia, of her father’s father owning a kosher butcher shop in Savannah, and of her family eventually settling in Houston, Texas, where her parents owned a frequently-robbed liquor store in the 1930s and where she and her seven siblings grew up poor.
Of the eight Silvers children, Diane arguably had the most pronounced academic bent (perhaps driving her sister to set a closet fire in their shared bedroom, but you’ll have to judge that for yourself as you read). Her sophomore year in high school proved a turning point, as her rabbi (a “highly literate man who loved books and classical music”) became a mentor to her. During her senior year, her rabbi’s wife, a Wellesley alumnus, invited Diane to a reception “to meet with representatives from the Seven Sisters, the elite Eastern women’s colleges.”
That opportunity proved monumental in altering the trajectory of the life of a poor Jewish girl born and raised in Houston, Texas, worlds away from the prestigious halls of the private liberal arts college located in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and is in and of itself, “an education.”
In fact, so many turns in Diane’s life thus far have been little educations, which have both fostered Ravitch’s continued self-growth and solidified her reputation as an internationally recognized and respected education author, historian, and tireless advocate for traditional public schools.
Diane Ravitch’s An Education is a master class in how to fit a remarkable 87 years into 223 pages.
I invite you to experience it for yourself.