William Blake gives us a schoolboy’s lament: “to go to school in a summer morn, / O! it drives all joy away; / Under a cruel eye outworn. / The little ones spend the day, / In sighing and dismay.”

The new issue of National Review has the antidote to dismay: America is in the midst of “An Education Reset,” with promising developments for students and their parents. Frederick M. Hess kicks off our special section on education with good news about the Southern surge. Amid “a grim stretch for America’s schools,” a handful of red states — Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee — have seen student performance improve markedly. “What’s driving these results? A commitment to basic skills, especially through phonics-based early-literacy instruction, and rigorous classroom materials.” As Hess explains, these states have a lot to teach the rest of the country about teaching.

Nicole Stelle Garnett looks at the promising legal and legislative landscape for parental rights in education, and James Lynch recounts a string of victories for the school-choice movement. Not all the news is good, of course. Robert Pondiscio explains how “trauma-induced pedagogy,” touted as sensitive to students’ needs, may in fact be traumatizing children. And Kayla Bartsch reports on the Tulsa Honors College, a beacon of classical education in the heartland that has been undermined by the university that hosts it. Andy McCarthy takes us out of the classroom and into the stadium, showing us how money is changing college sports.

Elsewhere in this issue, Noah Rothman retails the rise of a new generation of urban radicals, most notable among them Zohran Mamdani. He and other darlings of “white progressives, one of the most unrepresentative demographics in the American political spectrum,” represent a “repudiation of the accumulated wisdom Democrats gleaned from their failures over the course of this decade.” And Dominic Pino explains that the negative effects of tariffs, “a particularly destructive form of taxation,” are not limited to the economy.

And there’s more:

In our famous Books, Arts & Manners section (confess, when reading an issue, do you start at the back?), you’ll find reviews of books on the mythology of the New Deal, the age of wokeness, and one of NR’s most storied figures, along with indispensable TV and movie reviews. In Richard Brookhiser’s “Night Quotations: A Miscellany,” see how many authors you can identify. In the Happy Warrior, Joseph Epstein offers “A Thought for Your Pennies.” And, going back to where this missive began, there is of course the monthly poem, about a rare flower.

The October issue is great reading. If you don’t already subscribe, right now you can try NRPLUS (which provides access to the normally paywalled magazine) for just $1 per week.

Or, if you’d like to receive the next twelve issues of the print magazine in the mail, try the print-and-digital bundle for just $65 (that’s 50 percent off the cover price). The bundle is the best way to support NR’s conservative journalism.