Mind of State:

The Curriculum

Dear professors, students, and citizens,

As we were wrapping up season 2 of Mind of State, it became increasingly clear that there was no real wrapping up of the myriad issues we explored. The end of the second decade of the twenty-first century was just the beginning of America’s needing to grapple with a newly shuffled deck of old and new issues.

Although each episode of Mind of State was recorded at a specific time and in a specific context of events surrounding the 2020 presidential election, it was also clear that the issues raised were setting an agenda for the century’s third decade. Each episode has a continuing timeliness and timelessness that, like so many fragments from a recurring collective nightmare, reveals the depth and breadth of our disturbed relationships between psyche and polis.

In response to the growing sense that we were just beginning rather than ending, we imagined a free, open-source curriculum that would accompany and unpack the rich material from each season two episode by asking a series of Socratic questions about the issues, which range from malignant normality to race to voting rights to ambiguous loss to underlying mythic structures to the impact of the internet, gun laws, the nature of truth, and a host of other themes that continue to challenge the American people to make choices for our future democratic process.

Welcome to Mind of State: The Curriculum!

Betty Teng, Jonathan Kopp & Thomas Singer

Download Mind of State: The Curriculum. (Yes, it’s free!)

Questions? Please email info@mindofstate.com.