A Liberal Without the Elitism: Robert Coles, RIP ^40%

Washington Monthly - By Richard D. Kahlenberg - 6/10/2026, 9:00 AM

Appeal to Emotion 26.6% - Hasty Generalization 25.6% - Anecdotal 24.4%

Renowned child psychiatrist Robert Coles, who died June 4, is being lauded as a moral giant and a voice of liberal conscience, which he surely was. But the Harvard professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Children of Crisis was much more than that. He was a liberal without elitism—someone as concerned with the fate of working-class... more