Aug. 31, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:07:50
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
(upbeat music) | |
| Joining me today is a New Zealand born author, speaker and founder and headmistress | ||
| of Michaela Community School, a free school established in London | ||
| all the way back in 2014. | ||
| Catherine Burblesingh, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, hi. | |
| I'm very happy to have you here. | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| I have heard a rumor that you sometimes play my videos in your classrooms. | ||
| Well, I don't know about the classrooms, but among staff, yeah. | ||
| Among staff, in the school, somewhere in the school. | ||
| Yeah, in the school, definitely. | ||
| We're all great fans. | ||
| Thank you, thank you. | ||
| Far too controversial to play in the classroom. | ||
| Yeah, I think so, I think so. | ||
| There's so much I want to talk to you about, about education, your personal sort of political evolution, all the things that you've been through, so I always like finding out a little bit. | ||
| about somebody's history at the top. | ||
| And you come from a long line of teachers and some interesting background stuff. | ||
| So tell me a little bit about young Catherine. | ||
| Well, I mean, my parents, my father is Indian Guyanese. | ||
| My mom is Jamaican, black Jamaican. | ||
| I say that because the whole race thing is important, you know, bizarrely, because these days, you know, people are so much more interested in who said it as opposed to what is being said. | ||
| And, you know, some random person set up a Wikipedia page for me, and there was this kind of major argument going on between my detractors and the people who support me. | ||
| People who support me wanted the truth to be there. | ||
| The people who didn't like me wanted me to be Indian rather than black, because black was kind of a bigger victim. | ||
| And to discredit me, they needed to push me up the victim pole, you know? | ||
| So, my mother was a nurse. | ||
| My father taught at university and came from, you know, dirt poverty in Guyana, but is one of those extraordinary people who made something of himself through hard work. | ||
| I was born in New Zealand, and then I grew up in Canada, and then I've now been in London for, you know, nearly 30 years. | ||
| And I went to Oxford University, and I've been a teacher ever since. | ||
| And I was a very left-wing teacher, a very typical teacher in that way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I used to write a blog, which was called To Miss With Love, based on the book and film To Sir With Love. | ||
| You know, Sidney Poitier was in the film. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I wrote this blog. | |
| You know, a few times a week I'd go home and write about how little Johnny had his money stolen and that kind of thing. | ||
| Things that made me really upset about the education system. | ||
| Wait, let's pause for a second before you get to the point where you sort of woke up and got into trouble and now have people fighting on your Wikipedia page. | ||
| So what sort of education did you have that pushed you towards leftism or was it just Just how it was, kinda. | ||
| Where did those ideas come from? | ||
| Did that come from schooling? | ||
| Did that come from family? | ||
| Was it media? | ||
| I suppose my family. | ||
| It's really interesting, because I think ethnic minorities really are small C conservative, naturally. | ||
| But because the black vote normally goes to the left, my family was no different from a typical ethnic family in that sense. | ||
| And so I was brought up in a left-wing household. | ||
| Yeah, why do you think they generally vote small C conservative? | ||
| Not vote, not vote. | ||
| Why do they internally either think it or have been taught to think it? | ||
| I think they come from small C conservative backgrounds. | ||
| So when I say that, just the belief in pulling yourself up with your own bootstraps, hard work will get you somewhere, personal responsibility, being stoical when things are difficult. | ||
| That's the kind of thing that makes people successful. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And I think minorities, especially the ones who've been immigrants, moved somewhere new, they believe in giving their children a better life and in working hard in order to be able to do so. | ||
| So it fits with them. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So now, so you come from a small C conservative family, but kind of voting left. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And I'm a teacher, so everyone I know is on the left. | ||
| And I don't speak to any conservative people, because that's how it is. | ||
| There's this big divide and nobody ever speaks to each other. | ||
| I didn't know any conservative people or the way conservative people thought. | ||
| And then I was writing this blog. | ||
| And that's where I started meeting conservative people. | ||
| And I say meet on my blog. | ||
| So, Twitter didn't exist in those days. | ||
| People would have discussions on the blog comment section. | ||
| And all these left-wingers would come on and start attacking me and telling me how awful I was with the stories that I was writing and how could I judge the education system as I was judging it. | ||
| And all these conservatives would come on and defend me. | ||
| And I'd be saying to the left-wingers, no, no, no, I'm one of you. | ||
| I'm with you. | ||
| I'm a good person. | ||
| And they'd say, no, you're a right-winger. | ||
| And I'd say, well, of course I'm not on the right. | ||
| Of course I'm not conservative. | ||
| I'm a good person. | ||
| So how could I possibly be conservative? | ||
| And the conservatives would come on and say, I think you'll find that you are. | ||
| And over years of me writing and me insisting that I was on the left, I came to realize that I wasn't. | ||
| You know, that my instincts, the things that I valued, the values, it was those basic values of personal responsibility and perseverance and being happy with competition and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| I liked, and then I realized, I came to realize slowly, and then I met a few people. | ||
| So like I met, you would be interested, because you're always interested in meeting people who don't think like you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I met this guy, so there was this guy who used to come onto my blog called British National Party Member. | ||
| So he was, he was this, I mean, people call it the fascist party, you know, and in the day, they had a lot more power than they do nowadays. | ||
| And so he was part of the BNP. | ||
| And I would let him come on my blog. | ||
| So all of these kind of lefties were outraged. | ||
| How can you let him come on your blog? | ||
| You need to ban him. | ||
| But I always thought... What do you mean come on your blog? | ||
| Just commenting? | ||
| Just commenting. | ||
| He would comment and get into discussions sometimes with me and sometimes with other people. | ||
| And some of the left-wingers would refuse to talk to him at all. | ||
| And they would get really angry with me. | ||
| That you didn't ban him. | ||
| That I should just say you're not allowed to be on here. | ||
| And then—you know, he was on there for ages. | ||
| This is over years. | ||
| And then I said, you know, it would be really interesting to meet you, because you're very different from anybody I know. | ||
| And so, I met this guy. | ||
| And, you know, I mean, he was a racist. | ||
| You know, I mean, he was. | ||
| You know, the things that he believed about black people and so on, he was a racist. | ||
| What I always say is some of my best friends are racist, you know? | ||
| It's like Avenue Q, you know, the musical with, you know, everyone's a little bit racist, and people are racist on different levels, you know? | ||
| Sometimes you're really racist, sometimes you're just a little bit racist. | ||
| Anyway, I met with him. | ||
| He was wearing a suit, he was a young white guy, wearing a suit and nice shoes, and he went, he took me for lunch, he paid for lunch. | ||
| So the racist took you for lunch? | ||
| That's right! | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's what's so interesting about life, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And so we went for lunch, and he was hobbling along. | ||
| And I said, you know, are you all right? | ||
| And he said, oh, you know, the thing is, I bought this suit and these shoes because I was meeting with you. | ||
| And you know, you went to Oxford University. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I figured, I've got to get dressed up, you know. | |
| But the shoes are new, and they're really hurting my feet. | ||
| And I thought, isn't that interesting? | ||
| Here's this racist who was taking me for lunch, who's wearing new shoes that he's bought because I've been to Oxford, you know? | ||
| And that's what's so interesting about life, is that it's not as easy as some of the left put people, you know, you're a racist, you're not a racist, you're a good person, you're a bad person, you're this. | ||
| It's not like that. | ||
| There's a whole variety of different ways of seeing people and learning from people. | ||
| And was he able to learn from you after that lunch? | ||
| Well, we met a second time and You know, I mean, when I say he was... I mean, like, he was telling me about how that morning he'd been to see his girlfriend, and they have a toddler. | ||
| And he'd gone to see her and see the baby. | ||
| She wouldn't let him hold the baby because she knew that he was coming to see me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And she said, you're going to contaminate him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So that's true racism. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| Maybe that's like truly... Exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| But, you know, he was a good guy in so many other ways. | ||
| And that's what... | ||
| That's what's interesting about life, is what I'd say, is that nobody's perfect. | ||
| And people change their minds. | ||
| You know, I think about my parents, who lived in the same house for 46 years in Toronto. | ||
| And there was a man called Mr. Snow, who lived opposite them. | ||
| And when they moved into the area, it was all white. | ||
| And he was outraged, because he was a racist. | ||
| And he thought, no way, I don't want these people living there. | ||
| And over the years, over the 46 years, they got to know each other, and they became friends. | ||
| And in the end, Mr. Snow's wife, you know, she got cancer and she died. | ||
| And Mr. Snow had to depend on my parents for a whole lot of help. | ||
| And my parents loved Mr. Snow, and Mr. Snow loved them. | ||
| You know, things can change. | ||
| People can change. | ||
| And when Mr. Snow died, my parents moved house, because The community they lived in had died with Mr. Snow, and this was a man who was so racist he didn't want them to live there, you know? | ||
| Isn't it personally powerful, too? | ||
| I mean, I can feel it when you're saying it, that when you can accept some people for all their flaws, that it actually allows you to figure out how to grow, instead of just othering them forever, even if they might do that to a whole set of people for awful reasons. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, and they can change. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They can change. | |
| I mean, people change their minds. | ||
| You know, I have this quote in my office from Muhammad Ali that says, you know, if a man at 40 still thinks the same way as when he was 20, then he's lost 20 years of his life, you know. | ||
| And thank God we can change. | ||
| I mean, when I think about how I used to think, you know, and how I think now, well, that's what life's all about. | ||
| Right, so let's back up to some of those ideas. | ||
| So you were a lefty, and then you started teaching in inner-city schools. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's when you started waking up, and that's what led you to write the blog. | ||
| What were some of the ideas that you were seeing specifically that you realized, wow, this is not working in these schools? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So, one of the big things that I used to think before going into teaching, and everyone used to just accept, was that black kids failed at school because white teachers are racist. | ||
| The system is racist. | ||
| The white teachers are racist. | ||
| And that's why black kids are failing. | ||
| A lot of teachers go into teaching for racist purposes, don't you think? | ||
| Well, this is what's so crazy! | ||
| I was thinking, but I've met hundreds, thousands of teachers. | ||
| Not one of them has ever said to me, I'm a racist and I want to stop black kids from succeeding. | ||
| In fact, they are killing themselves. | ||
| You know, working all hours, giving everything that they can to the job. | ||
| And I started to question the kinds of things that the normal way of seeing things was what I was being told. | ||
| And it wasn't just that, you know, which we might get into later about teaching methods and about discipline and so on, the kinds of things that worked and didn't work. | ||
| The whole second half is going to be on your solutions. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Now we're just dealing with the initial problems. | |
| So, yeah, I started to question all of that. | ||
| And I went—there was this Black Achievement kind of conference that used to happen once a year, which was about improving black achievement and how—what do we do raising black achievement. | ||
| And there was a labor—so that's our left political party—black woman MP, so one of our politicians who used to run this thing. | ||
| And I went along, and I took one of the white teachers who I worked with—and he was older than me. | ||
| He's retired now. | ||
| And he'd been doing this for 25 years and had given everything to the job. | ||
| And I took him along, and these people were standing up on stage, essentially saying that white teachers were racist. | ||
| I was so embarrassed. | ||
| I was so humiliated that I had taken this man, giving up his Saturday to go and sit and be told that he's a racist, when he had given everything to these black boys. | ||
| So, we worked in this boys' school, and it was mainly black boys in this school. | ||
| And I was just—I was mortified. | ||
| So, gradually, I started to change my mind on these sorts of things. | ||
| And then I started to see that there was, it had to do with our expectations of kids, | ||
| it had to do with our expectations of parents, it had to do with the kinds of values that we | ||
| were giving them. | ||
| So, if we were saying to them, poor you, you're a victim, life is so difficult, you're black, you'll never be able to get anywhere, then it's quite hard for the black inner-city boy to go, oh, well, you know, actually, it's about working hard. | ||
| It's about—we always say at school, even when it's difficult, especially when it's difficult, you do what's right, right? | ||
| And as opposed to saying, "It's difficult. | ||
| I can't do it," right? | ||
| Except, before Michaela, that business of—even when it's difficult, especially when it's | ||
| difficult—that value, that business of believing in hard work, I didn't see it so much. | ||
| And we would give kids excuses. | ||
| We would give kids excuses to fail. | ||
| And I wouldn't do it in my classroom. | ||
| And the kids behaved for me. | ||
| And the kids learned with me. | ||
| And of course, I'm not the only teacher who was doing that. | ||
| There are teachers all over the place in their own classrooms who are doing that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What did the administration think of you? | |
| Because it sounds like, you know, oh, we've got you, and obviously, as you said, you weren't the only one, but we've got people pushing against the very, because that's the fabric of what these schools eventually become, that it's not, It's not on them, it's on the system that has ruined these people's lives. | ||
| Well, they're poor kids. | ||
| Before they've even begun, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, they're poor. | ||
| I mean, I don't suppose people realize what I was saying, you know? | ||
| I mean, you're talking to kids privately, you do your own thing, and if kids are behaving for you and you're getting good results, then the principal loves you, you know? | ||
| It just works, and people don't know why. | ||
| And I'm not even sure I realized why. | ||
| You know, you just, you build up an experience over years and you know what works | ||
| with the kids and how you get them on board and how you show them that you're in charge | ||
| and then you teach them properly and they love you for it. | ||
| Did you realize that your political evolution was happening at the exact same time? | ||
| Because it was sort of very personal in the classroom but then that you were evolving sort of in another sense. | ||
| Did I realize? | ||
| 'Cause I think that's how it is for a lot of people. | ||
| When people come up to me on the street or email me they're saying you know something's happening at work I'm dealing with this and now it's starting to make me think differently about politics or I used to always vote Democrat but you know something happened here in my family we got in a conversation and now I'm starting to think something else is a little bit different. | ||
| Well, that was the blog. | ||
| So it was the conservatives on my blog that I was realizing, I'm agreeing with you, and I'm not agreeing with the left-wingers on the blog. | ||
| And it was then that I just thought, well, maybe I am just a conservative. | ||
| So, you know, I accepted it, and then in—you know, I accepted the idea of being conservative. | ||
| And then, in 2010, I voted conservative, which was a major deal for me. | ||
| And it was funny, because, you know, after I did that, I remember—this was after I ended up in the press and so on. | ||
| I was speaking to a friend of mine, and I said to her—and she's Indian—and I said to her, you know, Well, obviously, you've seen me in the press and everything and how I voted conservative. | ||
| And she said, well, you know, I have something to tell you, Catherine. | ||
| I voted conservative, too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that's the thing. | |
| People are doing this, and they can't admit to it. | ||
| It's so crazy. | ||
| So, I voted conservative in May 2010, and then in October 2010, I was invited to go to the Conservative Party Conference to give a speech. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And that's like a convention. | ||
| You guys have conventions here. | ||
| I was a teacher. | ||
| I never really took much notice of political things. | ||
| I mean, I was a bit naive and a bit stupid, to be honest. | ||
| And anyway, I went along and I gave this speech, which the audience really liked, and then I ended up all over the press. | ||
| Yeah, so this is the speech, really, that changed everything. | ||
| That changed my life, yeah. | ||
| For the worse, at the time. | ||
| I mean, I think now I can look back and say it was for the better, in many ways, or, you know, at least... Yeah, I mean, I... | ||
| Every cloud has a silver lining, and my silver lining has been a good one because I've made it into a silver lining, but I could have been destroyed by it quite easily. | ||
| I mean, in the end, I ended up without a job. | ||
| I was told that I would never get a job in state education ever again. | ||
| Yeah, wait, can you just lay out some of the things that you talked about in the speech? | ||
| Right, so I talked about black kids failing and that I talked about I talked about us not expecting enough of kids, and how we are constantly making excuses for them, and how we label them with things like anger management or, you know, dyslexia or—all these kind of labels that we give the kids. | ||
| Oh, he can't possibly behave. | ||
| He's got issues. | ||
| That's what we always say. | ||
| They have particular needs, and we have to meet their needs. | ||
| as opposed to just expecting them to behave. | ||
| Everybody has different needs. | ||
| Nobody—we can't expect anything of them. | ||
| And that's just the norm. | ||
| It's the norm. | ||
| So, I talked about all of this. | ||
| I talked about competition and how it was needed in schools, that kids need to feel | ||
| as if they're competing against somebody else and so on. | ||
| They need to feel like they're being inspired to work hard, as opposed to being indulged | ||
| and constantly let off the hook, because, well, it's not your fault. | ||
| Your parents are divorced. | ||
| It's not your fault, because you live on an estate and you're black, and your mom | ||
| is a single mom, and you can't possibly do your homework. | ||
| I mean, I don't understand this, you know? | ||
| And that was because over the years, you know, I'd visited, I'd worked for a summer once | ||
| in South Africa. | ||
| I'd been to see schools in China and Brazil and India and all of these countries where the kids were far poorer. | ||
| And yet they were walking five miles, getting to school and working really hard. | ||
| So why was it that those kids could do it and apparently our kids couldn't do it? | ||
| You know? | ||
| So, that was why I questioned it. | ||
| And I said all of this stuff at the conference, and the conservatives liked what I said. | ||
| Because nobody ever says this sort of thing. | ||
| And then, as I say, I was out of a job, and then I thought, what do I do? | ||
| How does that happen? | ||
| So you give this speech, you're fired the next day? | ||
| Well, no, I resigned in the end, but it was just untenable. | ||
| The press, I was everywhere. | ||
| It was like one of those Hollywood films, I couldn't go outside my door because there were press waiting outside to talk to me. | ||
| She says personal responsibility is a thing, go get her! | ||
| This is what's so crazy! | ||
| All I'd said was... | ||
| Ultimately, I was saying that the education system was broken, and people wouldn't have that. | ||
| And the thing is, I do feel it's like the emperor's new clothes, which is that everybody knows that there's a problem with the education system, but nobody's willing to say it. | ||
| And I got hundreds, if not thousands, of emails from teachers all over the country saying, thank God someone said something. | ||
| Thank you for saying something. | ||
| I won't tell you my name. | ||
| I can't tell you my name, because I'll lose my job. | ||
| Because they're all terrified, right? | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| So, I then thought about the private sector for a bit, but then I thought, I love working with disadvantaged kids. | ||
| I love working in the inner city. | ||
| This is what I do. | ||
| This is what I know. | ||
| I'm not giving up. | ||
| So, we had just—you've had charter schools in America for a long time. | ||
| We—it was only in 2010 that free schools, which are charter schools, started in—you know, there was the possibility of setting one up. | ||
| So, I decided to set up my own school. | ||
| And I got a group of people together, and then we started trying to set it up. | ||
| Now, this was not easy, because I had a lot of people who hated me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I still have a lot of people who hate me, except I do think the number's probably reduced, | ||
| or at least they've just left me alone, actually. | ||
| I don't know if the number's reduced. | ||
| I think they just leave me alone. | ||
| I think at some point they see that you keep going. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| And that you keep becoming successful. | ||
| And then they'll always find someone new to feed on and to scare. | ||
| But it's like, you know what I mean? | ||
| At some point they're like, wow, we haven't got her yet. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's it. | |
| And then they run out, they're not into hard work really. | ||
| So they're kind of like, all right, let's move on to an easier target. | ||
| Yeah, and it's harder now because I have the school, and it's really hard, although they do try. | ||
| When we were trying to set up a school, I used to say, gosh, it's like we're making nuclear bombs. | ||
| I mean, all we're doing is setting up a school. | ||
| We would have parents' evenings. | ||
| So, first of all, I'd be out in the street handing out flyers, running into hairdressers and saying, does anybody have any children who might want to go to the secondary school? | ||
| And, you know, women would be coming out of their hair dryer saying, OK, I'll have one, I'll have one, going into churches and mosques and temples and all sorts. | ||
| And then we would have a parents' evening. | ||
| Once we had it in the pub and all these parents were arriving, our detractors are outside They've got, like, posters saying "Tori teacher," all sorts | ||
| of insults, screaming obscenities at me, calling me names. | ||
| And we had to hire a bouncer, because we were so worried about the possible violence. | ||
| And then, when I was talking to the parents—these are parents finding out about a school. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| And they're all poor parents from the inner city, right? | ||
| So you've got all these black moms, black single moms, sitting there, trying to find | ||
| out about this new school. | ||
| And all these white middle-class people—and when we say "middle class," we mean people | ||
| with money. | ||
| You guys use it as a working—when we say "middle class," | ||
| you guys say "middle class," we mean working class. | ||
| When I say "middle class," I mean well-off people. | ||
| OK. | ||
| So these white, you know, well-educated, well-off people have infiltrated and are sitting amongst | ||
| all of these inner-city people who are wanting to find out about the school. | ||
| And when I'm talking, they're standing up and shouting abuse deliberately, because | ||
| they're trying to disrupt. | ||
| Kind of like when you do stuff, and like the shaking pennies and jars and stuff. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, we're gonna talk about that, because I know you had a little criticism of the way I dealt with one of the issues there related to education. | ||
| We'll get to that. | ||
| But yeah, let's just focus on that for a second. | ||
| What do you think it is about the intentions of those people? | ||
| I try not to judge people's intentions, I try to judge their actions. | ||
| But these working class, and I know you're not into identity politics, but they happen to be white, which you're illustrating here, that they're the ones that are attacking the black mothers that are trying to take care of their kids. | ||
| What is it that these people, what do you think they really think? | ||
| Why do you think they really are so invested in keeping everything the way it was? | ||
| They'll say that they're for helping these people all the time, then they'll look at a system that does not help these people, then someone comes in and says, I'm gonna help these people, here's a track record of doing it, and they hate you and them. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, they do. | ||
| And so just so I'm clear, these are white, well-off people, right? | ||
| These are people who have everything. | ||
| Some of them have been privately educated, right? | ||
| I think it's because they believe in making people equal, that the state should make people equal, as opposed to giving people equality of opportunity. | ||
| Because I'm all about giving people equality of opportunity. | ||
| I want to make it so that schools are so good that everybody has an equal chance of making something of themselves and changing their stars, right? | ||
| That's what I want to do. | ||
| They don't like that. | ||
| They want these people to continue not being successful and then they as kind of these white knights in shining armor can come down and the state can provide you with money and a free apartment and all sorts of things and then they can sit at dinner parties and feel very good about themselves because, well, you know, I vote on the left and I'm a very good person. | ||
| Even though none of it works. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, this is it. | |
| So they're not interested in whether or not it works. | ||
| They're interested in feeling good about themselves, and they genuinely believe that the state is going to make things better for these people. | ||
| And free schools, charter schools, while they are state schools, they break up the education system, right? | ||
| So the unions aren't as powerful anymore. | ||
| And they very much believe in the power of the unions, and they want them to have their collective bargaining. | ||
| And if too many schools break out of the system and break up the system, then it devalues that power of the unions. | ||
| So I think that they convince themselves that what they're doing is right, even though there are all these poor moms wanting to find out about another option for their child, and they're desperate. | ||
| I mean, when I say desperate, I've had mothers crying. | ||
| You know, in front of me, crying, saying, I don't want my child to get knifed. | ||
| I want my child to have a decent education so that maybe he'll have a chance to get to university. | ||
| I just want him to be safe, right? | ||
| And then what they'll do is they'll deny that that's the case, that there are schools where children aren't safe. | ||
| They'll deny. | ||
| They just lie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're just bold-faced lies about the system. | |
| So what other... | ||
| What kind of pushback did you get as you were creating the school? | ||
| Like, what is it like to, okay, you fill out some paperwork, I assume, and now you talk to some people and maybe you talk to some teachers and like-minded people and some administrators and things, but what's that like to go, I gotta find a building, I gotta find funding? | ||
| That's right, so it's a total nightmare. | ||
| It's a total nightmare. | ||
| I mean, really, whenever any group comes to me and says, we want to set up a school, I always say, OK, well, dig deep, right, because you're going to have to get every bit of energy you've got to be able to push through on this. | ||
| I mean, it took us three years. | ||
| And it took us three years to find a building. | ||
| There were so many people against us. | ||
| And as you were saying earlier, I just kept going. | ||
| And I mean, I kind of had to keep going, because otherwise I wasn't going to be able to do the job that I love. | ||
| So, I had to. | ||
| And, eventually, we found this building. | ||
| I mean, so, first, you apply. | ||
| You have to go for interviews, you know, the panel interviews and blah, blah. | ||
| And then you get approved, and then you're looking for a building. | ||
| And, oh, it's just all a nightmare. | ||
| But eventually, we got this building, which, you know, isn't the greatest building. | ||
| And when I say it's not great, you know, there's no grass. | ||
| There are no trees. | ||
| There's no car park for the staff. | ||
| There's just the old car park, which is used as a playground for the kids, which is tiny. | ||
| You know, it isn't ideal. | ||
| But I always say it's the people inside the building that matter. | ||
| And we've made a real go of it. | ||
| And, yeah, it's great. | ||
| It's—and what is great? | ||
| What really is great? | ||
| And this is where, you know, I'm really— I feel really optimistic, is that we have five to ten teachers from all over the world that come and visit the school every single day, mainly from the U.K., but we get Americans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders. | ||
| I mean—and they come because they've heard about us through social media, and they want to see what we do. | ||
| And then we get loads of letters from teachers, from principals, who say, I've taken these ideas. | ||
| Put them in my school, and it's really helped, and it's made things better for our kids. | ||
| So I feel like we're not just having impact in our school on our kids, but on kids all over the world, you know? | ||
| All right, so let's really focus on what you've done with the Michaela School that you started in 2014. | ||
| There was a lot in the research that I was doing about discipline, really. | ||
| Before you even get to education. | ||
| So you guys do a boot camp. | ||
| Before you get to teaching them anything, you're actually teaching them some things purely about discipline and sort of how to live. | ||
| How to behave, yeah. | ||
| And that's because we believe if you haven't taught them how to behave, then you can't give them attention for it because they don't know how. | ||
| And the reason why they don't know how is because we know that elsewhere they haven't necessarily been taught. | ||
| They haven't necessarily learned it at home. | ||
| They certainly won't have learned it at other schools. | ||
| And that's because our expectations are really high. | ||
| And so, we teach them. | ||
| We have silence in the corridors, for instance. | ||
| So that's something people come and they say, why do you have to be so extreme? | ||
| I'll tell you why you have to be so extreme. | ||
| Because otherwise, you've got kids fighting in the corridors, bashing each other's heads against the wall. | ||
| Some schools where teachers are scared to walk through the corridors. | ||
| because it's such mayhem. You have silence. Everybody just moves really quickly to their lessons. | ||
| You've got changeover that takes maybe a minute and a half. | ||
| Children aren't losing loads of time from their lessons. | ||
| I always say 59 minutes out of every 60 minutes in the lesson, you've got it at Makayla. | ||
| And we're trying to catch them up. | ||
| You know, a lot of our kids come to us for the reading age of a five-year-old, six-year-old when they are 11 years old, | ||
| in fact. | ||
| I mean, some of them aren't like that. | ||
| Some of them are Oxbridge material and will go to Oxford or Cambridge. | ||
| And some of them need real help, so that they don't leave school illiterate and innumerate. | ||
| Twenty percent of the kids in Britain leave school illiterate and innumerate. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| Twenty percent. | ||
| One out of five kids. | ||
| Now—and that's functionally. | ||
| So, it looks like they can read, but they can't really read. | ||
| Right? | ||
| This is happening across the country, and it's become normal to expect that. | ||
| Now, none of our kids are going to be in that position, because we teach them. | ||
| And we teach them in an environment where the children are able to respect their teachers. | ||
| They love their teachers. | ||
| They thank them for their lessons, at the end of their lessons. | ||
| They say, good morning, and good afternoon, and so on, and things that you would never imagine. | ||
| You know, inner-city kids, you You know, if you have an idea in your head of what New City kids are like, you imagine the boys walking with their trousers down here in that bop kind of way, and girls dressing in a way that isn't appropriate at our school. | ||
| None of that exists. | ||
| So you do have a dress code, right? | ||
| Well, they have a uniform. | ||
| A uniform. | ||
| And that's normal. | ||
| In Britain, everybody has a uniform. | ||
| But the thing is, we actually stick to the uniform. | ||
| So, you go elsewhere, their ties are down, their shirts are untucked, they look like a mess, they walk like a gangster. | ||
| I'm always saying to the kids, if they start, if they ever start bopping like that, I say, you look like a gangster, you need to stop that, right? | ||
| And they get it. | ||
| They say, yeah, yeah, mess, yeah, yeah, I get it, I get it. | ||
| And then they start doing it. | ||
| Because we talk about getting to the best universities. | ||
| We want you to get to Ivy League universities, to get to Russell Group universities in Britain, And we want you to have, you know, you aim for the moon and you land amongst the stars. | ||
| That's how we think, right? | ||
| And so they're all really ambitious and they're all working hard. | ||
| Why anyone would be against this as a concept, I don't know. | ||
| So when you hear pushback against that, I guess it's that people think it's like presumptuous or something to imply that their parents can't do it, even if often the parents are failing. | ||
| Or the parents just have to work too hard and they don't have time to do the things that you're doing. | ||
| And I think then people think there's a racial element to that, sort of, if you even address that. | ||
| I actually think they have a problem with it itself. | ||
| They don't like the idea of us being in authority. | ||
| They don't like, they think being in authority means that we must be Nazis. | ||
| I've been called a Nazi many a time, which is a bit ironic when you think that what the Nazis would have done to somebody like me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've been called a Nazi, too. | |
| Exactly. | ||
| And they don't like the idea of us being in authority and us being in charge. | ||
| So, one, we're really key on discipline, but two, we want the discipline so that we can teach them properly. | ||
| And this is where you're referring to what you said. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I was watching you at the Oxford Union, and you said about how kids need to be taught properly, and you'd said they need to be taught critical thinking. | ||
| Take me to task, teacher. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| The thing is, is that... | ||
| You can't teach critical thinking, right? | ||
| People are critical in their thinking or independently minded or inquisitive when they know lots about something. | ||
| And it's only by knowing lots, it's like the 10,000 hour thing, you know, you got Malcolm Gladwell, you got, you know, Steve Jobs, you got the Beatles. | ||
| You spend a lot of time doing something, you will get really good at it, and then you'll be able to break the rules. | ||
| But if you're trying to break the rules right away when you don't know anything, then you end up with kids, and the public don't realize just how bad things are, where kids don't know where Paris is. | ||
| Kids don't know in Britain who Winston Churchill is. | ||
| They genuinely have no idea. | ||
| And that's because nobody's taught them. | ||
| People are anti-knowledge. | ||
| So, the grandfather to, like, the whole knowledge movement is E.D. | ||
| Hirsch, and he's an American. | ||
| His most recent book is Why Knowledge Matters, which I would encourage all of your viewers to read. | ||
| You know, education is the most important thing in any country, right? | ||
| And that's one of the reasons why I'm so pleased to be talking to you, because people need to realize, you know, you can have all your arguments about free speech and about—I don't know—guns and about whatever it is you want, but if the schools are not teaching children properly, then that is the end of Any country, right? | ||
| And I am desperately trying to shout as much as I can to tell people that we need to do something. | ||
| And we are doing something. | ||
| I mean, we're doing something. | ||
| And other people—we're not the only ones. | ||
| You know, there are other people who are doing things. | ||
| We named Michaela after a woman who died of cancer, who I used to work with. | ||
| And she, in her own classroom, used to do exactly this. | ||
| And there are teachers all over America and all over Britain doing this in their own classrooms. | ||
| We need it to be more than that. | ||
| We need entire school districts. | ||
| You know, we need people to get this point. | ||
| And when you said about teaching critical thinking, it's a romantic view that comes from Rousseau. | ||
| So, 18th century philosopher Rousseau, and he said, you know, man is born free, but everywhere in chains, this whole idea of They allow you to pursue all those avenues of knowledge, basically. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| This is what the progressives think. | ||
| And actually, self-control brings you freedom, right? | ||
| It's counterintuitive, but actually order and structure make you free. | ||
| They allow you to pursue all those avenues of knowledge, basically. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Because you have a sort of center. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| If you learn lots about something, then you're able to apply that knowledge in different ways. | ||
| So, I mean, as an example, you know, if you take a maths question that a primary school kid might be given, you know, John has eight cents at the end of the day. | ||
| It's one quarter of what he had at the beginning of the day. | ||
| How much money did he spend during the day? | ||
| I think I can do it. | ||
| And I think you can, too. | ||
| And I'm terrible at math, but I think I can do it. | ||
| You know why I think you can do it? | ||
| It's because you've got short-term memory and long-term memory. | ||
| And you've got a whole bunch of math facts in your long-term memory that you're able to draw out. | ||
| You're able to go quarter. | ||
| No, there's four of those in a whole. | ||
| And then you're able to go four times eight, because I know my four times table. | ||
| That's literally what I did in my head. | ||
| And I can take it to 32. | ||
| And then I can do subtraction. | ||
| So I can take it to 24, right? | ||
| Now, if you're seven years old, however, If you have to hold all those facts in your working memory, working memory can't do it. | ||
| You have got to drill and practice those timetable facts, for instance, and put them into your long-term memory, and put those fractions into your long-term memory, so that when somebody gives you something more complex, you can go, bam, bam, bam, and bring it out, and then you've got the answer. | ||
| Sadly, what happens is people say, no, what we need to do is teach them complex problem solving. | ||
| Let's give them that. | ||
| First, you've got to break it down. | ||
| What are the bits underneath that you've got to build up from? | ||
| And that stuff is a bit boring. | ||
| And because it's boring, it isn't very romantic. | ||
| This Rousseau, I was talking about Rousseau. | ||
| So Rousseau, this idea that you bring it out of the child, right? | ||
| So they have this phrase which says, you know, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a spark to be ignited. | ||
| And it all sounds really exciting and thrilling, right? | ||
| And that's the thing. | ||
| It's so seductive. | ||
| It pulls everybody in. | ||
| But the reality is that actually what you need is a whole lot of facts in your memory there that you can then go, boom, boom, boom, and apply. | ||
| Now, that doesn't mean that you're just a parrot and you just end up learning a whole load of facts, which you then can just, you know, regurgitate. | ||
| You need to apply them, and you need to give children the chance to apply them and have a class discussion, and we do paired work and so on. | ||
| Often in more progressive places, they'll do group work. | ||
| They'll put five kids, four kids around a table, and they do group work. | ||
| And then what happens is the teacher moves amongst them as a facilitator of learning, | ||
| as opposed to the teacher who's driving the bus. | ||
| I always say the teacher needs to sit in the bus and drive, and the kids get on the bus | ||
| with you and go. | ||
| The more progressive way, you're there just keeping them on task. | ||
| You do that. | ||
| Let me come and see you. | ||
| You do that. | ||
| But they don't learn very much. | ||
| And then, they don't succeed. | ||
| And then we say, it's because they were black. | ||
| It's because they were poor. | ||
| What we need to do is give them welfare, and then they'll be okay, because that will make them equal. | ||
| And my point is, no! | ||
| Fix the education system. | ||
| Give them an education, and then they'll make themselves equal. | ||
| Gosh, this reminds me of, so I mentioned I'm not that good at math, and I remember the day, I haven't thought about this in probably 15, 20, I don't know, maybe, literally maybe 20 years. | ||
| I remember being in sixth or seventh grade, and we were doing division for the first time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And I remember the teacher gave us, we had a quiz or something, and I was able to do it in my head. | ||
| And I, so they had, you know, the equation, and I just wrote the answer. | ||
| And she gave me a, I failed, or I got a zero or something, even though I had all the answers right, and she said, you didn't show your work. | ||
| And I remember saying to her, but I got all the answers right. | ||
| And she said, no, no, I need to see how you do work. | ||
| Now, I didn't know how to do it that way, but somehow I was able to do it in my head. | ||
| And I remember thinking that if that was all necessary to show the work, that at some point I would get to a place where I would have to do it, but somehow I had figured out my little trick first. | ||
| But because of the way she kind of just failed me for it, it completely turned me off math. | ||
| I literally haven't thought of that in probably 20 years or something. | ||
| That's this total sidebar all together. | ||
| But I guess it just goes to show that we all kind of learn differently and you need teachers that can kind of embrace the way you do it a little bit rather than just jam it down your throat. | ||
| Which is probably a little bit of the progressive thing that you don't like in a way. | ||
| Yeah, what I would say is You remember that particular incident and think that's all it was, but I guarantee you that had you been taught properly in that classroom, you would have known her methods. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You would have known what to write down. | ||
| You didn't know what to write down because there was too much chaos in the classroom. | ||
| You weren't listening. | ||
| You were busy talking to your friend because she let you talk, because she didn't have high enough standards of behavior. | ||
| Well, we've been there. | ||
| That sounds pretty spot on. | ||
| Yeah, well, and that's it, because this is just standard. | ||
| This is just what happens in all classrooms. | ||
| And then People think it's mean to make kids behave, and after a while, the thing is, is that, remember, there's more of them than there is of us, right? | ||
| So we're not actually making them do anything. | ||
| They want to behave. | ||
| We're just creating an environment where they're able to do it, right? | ||
| That's all. | ||
| Now, there's the 10%. | ||
| There's the 10 percent on the outskirts, that the detentions and so on keep them in line, right? | ||
| But the vast majority—you need that tipping point. | ||
| The vast majority buy into what we do. | ||
| And if you come visit our school? | ||
| The kids will say to you, yeah, it's super strict, and yeah, we get detentions, but you know what? | ||
| I get a great education, and that's what I want, because I want the opportunity to be able to change my stars. | ||
| And if you believe that, if you believe in equality of opportunity, which sadly I think too many people in education don't believe in equality of opportunity, if you do, then you want to provide an environment where they're going to be able to do that. | ||
| And that's what we do. | ||
| And I really hope those teachers who come and visit us, that they're able to take from that and do something in their schools. | ||
| Yeah, well, first off, I told you before we started, I'm going to be in the UK with Jordan Peterson for a couple stops, so I will do everything I can to stop by and maybe I can get Jordan to swing by, too. | ||
| And his daughter is Michaela, by the way. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Deep and powerful. | |
| What about the type of kids? | ||
| You've mentioned that there's some diversity in the type of kids that are coming in. | ||
| How do you guys decide who actually can cut it and who can afford it? | ||
| Well, it's not up to us who comes to us. | ||
| It's the local council that kind of send kids to us. | ||
| How do they decide who goes? | ||
| Well, it's a lottery, and people apply, and then they get picked out of a hat, literally, and then they come. | ||
| Some of the people, you know, some of the kids who end up with us didn't even necessarily want to be with us. | ||
| They just end up being pushed towards us because that's the way the system goes. | ||
| I mean, frankly, I don't even understand the system, but we get a bunch of kids. | ||
| We get 120 kids in every year. | ||
| So it's a pure lottery to get to the school. | ||
| And basically, if they don't win the lottery, so to speak, they're just going to the public school. | ||
| Because at that point, most likely, the parents can't afford a private school, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, no, definitely the parents can't afford a private school. | ||
| But there's no... I mean, you talk about it as if we're different. | ||
| I mean, like, we're just another school. | ||
| There's loads of schools like us, in that sense, around. | ||
| I mean, we are a free school, but... | ||
| Yeah, it doesn't—it's not like we're the free school and then there's the local public school. | ||
| There's loads—there's lots of schools. | ||
| And parents will choose us if they want to. | ||
| And as I say, sometimes we end up with kids—because the system is such that you have to choose your top five schools. | ||
| And, you know, if you've chosen us fifth, you probably don't want to be with us. | ||
| But in the name of fairness, as it always goes— The people who have chosen us fifth have just as much of a chance getting in as the people who have chosen us first. | ||
| I like how your accent got very American there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, did it? | |
| Well, because I grew up in Canada. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So, you know, it kind of changes. | |
| But yeah, so people who don't want to come to us, come to us. | ||
| And people who do really want to come to us, come to us. | ||
| And look, you know, I call myself the Dragon Lady, and I say, you know what? | ||
| I'm not going to change. | ||
| And if you're happy to put up with me, these are the rules and this is what we do. | ||
| So if we hear your phone or if we see your phone, we'll take it and we will keep it for | ||
| up to 16 weeks. | ||
| And that's the way that it is. | ||
| You know, these smartphones are killing kids. | ||
| I wanted to get there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do you make of that? | ||
| Because it's a disaster. | ||
| And in 20 years, people are going to know. | ||
| You know, when I say it now, people say, oh, you're being extreme. | ||
| You know, some schools, they actually have these phones out in lessons. | ||
| Lots of schools, they have them out in corridors and in the yard and so on. | ||
| We have them banned completely. | ||
| And I'm even trying to get parents to take them away at home. | ||
| You know, we sell brick phones, so a phone that you can't access the Internet, so that we try and encourage parents to give them that. | ||
| You want to keep in touch with your kid? | ||
| Fine, I understand. | ||
| But you don't need to give them a smartphone that accesses the Internet. | ||
| You know, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, all of those big guys in IT, they don't give their children | ||
| phones until they're 15. | ||
| They keep them away. | ||
| When Steve Jobs in 2010 and the iPad came out, and he was interviewed, and they said, | ||
| "What did you think about—what do your kids think about the iPad?" | ||
| And he said, "I don't know. | ||
| I wouldn't give my kids the iPad." | ||
| Right? | ||
| His—they— He, he, he's, they | ||
| They protect their children. | ||
| Meanwhile, our parents have no idea. | ||
| They're saving up for months to give the kids this Christmas present. | ||
| And it's like giving them heroin. | ||
| I say it's like playing Russian roulette, you know? | ||
| You give anybody access to your child on this phone, right? | ||
| Any weirdo out there knows where your child lives, knows how they go to school, knows where they go to school, knows who their friends are. | ||
| I mean, I don't understand. | ||
| The reason why people do this is because they don't know, and they don't think about the dangers, not just with random people, but also lovely girls who get involved with the bad boys at school, bad boys who might be criminals elsewhere, etc., and they quite like them, and they wouldn't otherwise known them, but, oh, maybe he's going to add me on Snapchat. | ||
| Woo! | ||
| You know? | ||
| And this is the kind of—it's terrible. | ||
| What about just for attention spans? | ||
| Because I would imagine you're dealing with a lot of that for young people right now. | ||
| Massive problems. | ||
| Because of Snapchat, as you just said. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So, you know, before when they used to watch, you know, Dallas and Dynasty and so on, at least there was a narrative arc that went like this and it told a story and then something bad happened and then it gets resolved and so on. | ||
| That doesn't happen anymore. | ||
| You've got, like, 22nd, I went to the hairdressers, look at this man's bald head, ooh, end of the little ditty. | ||
| That's what they're watching, right? | ||
| It's terrible. | ||
| So smartphones are a huge problem for the inner city. | ||
| But the biggest problem, I would say, are progressive teaching methods that have infiltrated our schools, and sadly this kind of Rousseauan idea that you're drawing something out of the child as opposed to putting something in. | ||
| The way in which, over the last 50 years, we have turned away from knowledge as being really important. | ||
| This hits, of course, the most vulnerable. | ||
| So, working-class kids in our country—you know, that tends to be a black thing in this country. | ||
| In our country, you know, in Britain, it'll be black kids, but it'll also be white working-class kids. | ||
| It'll be a variety of different kids who get hit by this. | ||
| Because if you are from a richer background, your parents—you know, you sit around the dinner table at night, and you have dinner, and you talk about the politics of the day, and you learn about different countries and science and all sorts of things just through talking to your parents and to your parents' friends and your uncle and your aunt and so on. | ||
| With kids whose parents are not well-educated, they don't get that at home. | ||
| So they're depending entirely on the school to give them what they need to be able to succeed. | ||
| And sadly, because schools are convinced about this idea of this romance around thinking critically, and that's not to say we don't want them thinking critically. | ||
| We do. | ||
| But you need to give them lots of stuff to get them to that point. | ||
| Right, so when I said that at Oxford Union about teaching critical thinking, it's not that you don't believe in critical thinking, of course, it's that you really, that's not something to teach at least at first. | ||
| It's that you have to give them all the breadth of knowledge first, and then they will learn how to critically think about all of these issues. | ||
| Fair enough, I like taking some criticism. | ||
| Exactly, exactly. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| Have you seen any instances where this doesn't work? | ||
| you're having to fight all over the place. | ||
| And it's that idea of giving them that equality of opportunity, you see, | ||
| which is what I keep coming back to, because-- | ||
| Have you seen any instances where this doesn't work? | ||
| I mean, have there been kids that come through and just for whatever reason, | ||
| this concept that you've built that you're instilling in all these other students, | ||
| it just does not work for them, either because of something about them or the family-- | ||
| Yeah, so I've had to exclude a few children from knives. | ||
| You know, that is something in the inner city. | ||
| That's a problem You know when we talk about inner city, you know, we've got kids showing up You know young men showing up on bikes with masks carrying knives waiting to meet some of our kids You know this this is the inner city. | ||
| So there are some of those issues that can take over, you know, but that | ||
| doesn't mean that it hasn't worked. | ||
| It always works. | ||
| The kids always learn more than they've ever learned anywhere else. | ||
| The kids always are stunned by their own intelligence and what is possible, because we show that | ||
| to them. | ||
| And it's—you know, and what kind of breaks my heart is that even those who are conservative—so, | ||
| you have—I watch all your programs, and you have all these great people who come on, | ||
| but nobody ever talks about education. | ||
| You know, Larry Elder, for instance, who I love and I think he's brilliant, you know, he talks about all these things plaguing the black community and he has all these stats that he always comes out with and there's that thing where he takes you apart, you know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You watched all my real moments, didn't you? | |
| But what he doesn't do—he talks about absent fathers, he talks about crime, he talks about drugs and so on, but they never talk about education. | ||
| And the thing is, education, that's not black people's fault, right? | ||
| That isn't. | ||
| That is the state, right? | ||
| And the state needs to be held to account for this, because we spend, in Britain, £80 billion a year on the state education system. | ||
| And yet we are failing all of our kids, and that isn't right. | ||
| And Larry Elder and all of these people who talk, they need to be able to say, no wait a minute, there's something going wrong at a very low level. | ||
| Because you can talk all you want about personal responsibility, but if you haven't got an education, it's very hard to make anything of your life. | ||
| So is the problem then that, at least in the American context, the answer always is throw more money at it? | ||
| So it's not the real answer, which obviously we've spent 45 minutes talking about, which is why and how you have to clean up these schools, but the easy answer is always throw more money at it if they just need more money. | ||
| You know, you always hear these things, well they don't have enough pencils and they don't have enough, you know, other supplies and notebooks and things, and that people don't take the next step, which would be the critical thinking step of the whole thing, It's not about money. | ||
| You could throw money at anything. | ||
| Yeah, the irony is they all go on about critical thinking. | ||
| They're not doing any critical thinking. | ||
| You know, if only they would. | ||
| But I wish—well, look, I mean, the left really refuse—they refuse to recognize there's even a problem. | ||
| The right will recognize that there's a problem, but they don't talk about it. | ||
| So that's what I'm saying about the people who you interview and so on. | ||
| I just wish more people would say, actually, the solution is in education. | ||
| Because it really is. | ||
| The black community, for instance, would transform if they were given the opportunity to have a great education. | ||
| And that's not to say that all the things that Larry Elder talks about, about absent fathers and so on, aren't a problem. | ||
| I mean, they are, absolutely. | ||
| But it's really important to call them out on it, and it's really important to call You see, and this is where I would disagree. | ||
| You know, I consider myself a conservative, I'm a black conservative, but I would disagree | ||
| with some of the black conservatives out there who refuse to recognize racism as a problem | ||
| at all. | ||
| You know, they kind of just dismiss it. | ||
| And I would say, no, it is a big problem. | ||
| And the reason it's a big problem is because the left, in so many ways, are racist. | ||
| You know, when they want to own us, and they want to tell us how we can vote, and they want to tell us how we can think, that is racism. | ||
| And when they refuse to recognize what works in education that's going to help poor kids, black kids, you know, white working class kids in Britain, when they refuse to look at that, well, that's racist. | ||
| And I'd say it's racist against the white working class. | ||
| The way the white working class is spoken about in Britain is the way that sometimes the black communities are spoken about in America, which is like there's some kind of different They're aliens. | ||
| Oh, well, you know, that's just the way they are. | ||
| No, that's not the way they are, actually, if you give them the opportunity. | ||
| But you all want to sit around dinner parties and talk about how kind you are and how great you are, because you're virtue signaling and voting on the left, you know? | ||
| And I just wish, I suppose, that there were more conservatives who were speaking out about this and saying something. | ||
| I guess there's a weird reflex for them where they've been called racist for so long, even though often they are minorities or whatever, where they don't want, I see this, I definitely see this, where they don't want to use the same tactics. | ||
| So what you just said right there is such a flip on the way we think of racism. | ||
| I tend to agree with that line of thinking, obviously. | ||
| The people that are screaming about racism all the time now are the people who are racist. | ||
| They really are. | ||
| I don't say that lightly because I don't like calling people racist, but they're the ones who are demanding we look at everyone based on race and sexuality and the rest of this nonsense. | ||
| And we have to call it out, right? | ||
| But I think there's a hesitancy from, at least from sort of where I sit, because I don't want to become what they became, but I know you're right at the core of this. | ||
| Look, I understand. | ||
| You don't want to say everything is racist, but when there is real racism, you need to point it out. | ||
| And you know, the fact is that, The fact is that if we don't call it out, all of these kids are going to keep failing, right? | ||
| What we don't realize is that all of these kids are going through school and are being taught to make sure that they're going off and voting on the left. | ||
| That's how it is. | ||
| Like, that is—that's how everyone thinks. | ||
| Like, it's so standard in the education, you know, system to think on the left, that the few conservative teachers that there are out there, they're quiet. | ||
| They never say anything, because they're terrified, right? | ||
| There is no balance of thought. | ||
| And that's really scary, I think. | ||
| And for the future of our countries, we need people to talk to each other, the stuff that you're always talking about, about talking to each other and sharing ideas and thinking about how the other side thinks. | ||
| And I worry that we don't do enough of that. | ||
| We don't do enough of it in school, that's for sure. | ||
| And then those kids turn into adults eventually, don't they? | ||
| And then we just, you know, well, I don't know. | ||
| And then they're really pissed at the system that they believe has failed them. | ||
| And then they just perpetuate that through the next generation too. | ||
| And then eventually that's unsustainable actually because then you have enough people that are turning against the system that's failed them. | ||
| It's because no one stood up and did what you're doing. | ||
| But it's interesting because this is where a good old American classical liberal And I know you guys, at least in the UK, have a better understanding of what classical liberalism, I think, than we do here. | ||
| We talked about this a little bit before, that these words are all getting muddled and mangled and all that. | ||
| But this is a place where, to me, where the government should be involved. | ||
| I'm all for using tax dollars to do the things you're talking about, where some, I think there are plenty of people that are American conservatives, at least, that wanna just cut funding from all of these things and endlessly cut funding. | ||
| As I said, I'm not for throwing Money at them just because that's just the easy answer, but yeah, let's figure out how do we wisely use money to empower these teachers, and that sounds like that's exactly what you're doing. | ||
| Well, exactly. | ||
| It's the power of bad ideas at the moment, that over the last 50 years, you know, 60, 70 years ago, the schools that were out there were more like our school now. | ||
| It's just that things have changed so radically, where knowledge has been sidelined. | ||
| It's all about skills. | ||
| People talk about skills and drawing it out of the child, like I was saying. | ||
| And we've lost—we've lost the purpose of education, and we've lost—you know, | ||
| the ideas that we have about perseverance, even when it's difficult, especially when | ||
| it's difficult, personal responsibility, you know, if you didn't bring in your homework, | ||
| then you are responsible for that. | ||
| Whereas elsewhere, they'll say, oh, well, it's not your fault. | ||
| You come from a difficult family, difficult background. | ||
| We're going to give you an excuse. | ||
| And if you're constantly being given those excuses, and if later on getting into university there are quotas and if | ||
| you're likely to get in because you're black or you're There there's there there are things that allow you. Oh, I | ||
| tick that box. I tick that box I'm gonna be able to get in with a lower score | ||
| Then you stop setting those standards for yourself, right? | ||
| And then we don't we eventually degrade the whole system Because if you let someone in at a lower level, and then also let them get a job at a lower level, or get into grad school at a lower level, and then the job at a lower level, and everything else, well now whatever you've created as a professional is a degraded version of whatever that's supposed to be. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And that is what's happening, sadly. | ||
| There's a whole campaign at the moment in Britain for this to happen with Oxford and Cambridge University, to essentially allow kids—I mean, it's just—it's really sad. | ||
| And the reason why is because they say, hey, look, there aren't that many black kids at Oxford and Cambridge. | ||
| We need to fix this. | ||
| We do. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| We need to fix it. | ||
| So we need to fix the education system. | ||
| We need to fix our schools and make sure that they're given equality of opportunity. | ||
| Well, I'll tell you, that day that I spent at Oxford was such an absolute joy and talking to so many kids just in the streets and just everybody was so like excited to learn and obviously they were sympathetic to a lot of the things that I talk about and all that. | ||
| I'm curious, so I get it sort of on the Sciences and math, and that you really want to teach them facts on this stuff. | ||
| On things like history. | ||
| Yeah, well, are there facts in history? | ||
| No, no, no, there are facts in history, but I wonder now, these days, where it seems like young people are kind of into socialism, or young people are kind of into communism, or Marxism, or the rest of it. | ||
| Have you found that teaching history has become oddly, I was gonna say oddly political, I mean, of course it is political, but oddly politicized? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, like, Hitler, for instance, is taught to death. | ||
| But, say, the atrocities of communism and so on are not taught so much. | ||
| Or, even then, so rarely is—so little is taught full stop, because they're not being taught properly in the classroom, because you are facilitating learning, and kids are just teaching themselves. | ||
| I mean, that—I can't stress how much of that is actually going on. | ||
| So, yes, things are politicized. | ||
| And children are not able to access the kind of education that they were able to access before. | ||
| And it's hard—because I'll say that, and then people will just deny that that's what's going on. | ||
| But you can see by—if you talk to university—kids at university and ask them, what do they know about the world and so on, what do they think, they'll tell you, and you'll see how much they've been taught—what they've been taught at school. | ||
| So few of them have an understanding of communism and what it is. | ||
| And that's because they're not learning it properly at school. | ||
| School is—sadly, it's—it's I wish that there was more diversity of thought amongst teachers. | ||
| So, one of the reasons why we watch a lot of you, The Rubin Report, is because I want my staff to try and think outside the box. | ||
| What I always say is, I can predict everything that you think about every issue out there. | ||
| So, if I know that you definitely voted Remain, as opposed to Brexit, with regard to the European Union for us, or if I know for sure that you would vote for Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party in Britain, or If I know, you know, what you would have to say about a whole variety of different things, even what newspaper you read, if I can make all those predictions, there's something wrong. | ||
| Because, you know, with me, I'm conservative on some issues, but I'm anti-guns, for instance. | ||
| I'm pro-choice and pro-gay marriage. | ||
| There's all sorts of things that I'm very much on the left on, but there's other things that I'm more conservative about, you know? | ||
| And that's because I'm a thinking person. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, a classical liberal, yeah, I suppose, in many ways, one might say that. | ||
| You know, I'm... | ||
| Yeah, the point is, I just want people to think outside the box, right? | ||
| And I wish teachers would, and that there was more diversity of thought. | ||
| And there is some diversity of thought, but they have to keep quiet, because they're terrified of thinking differently. | ||
| How do you ensure that you get the right teachers? | ||
| Well, in a way, it's self-selecting. | ||
| So, when they apply, they're already people who are somewhat thinking outside the box. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And then they come. | |
| And I think being at the school also changes their minds about things. | ||
| They start to think differently, because they're seeing what's possible. | ||
| But people can't imagine what's possible with inner-city kids until they come to our | ||
| school. | ||
| I have visitors, teachers who are visitors. | ||
| They're nearly in tears. | ||
| They're saying, "I can't believe that these kids are so nice." | ||
| So that's what we're trying to do. | ||
| And the point—and it happens here. | ||
| You know, I've been to see—so I said E.D. | ||
| Hirsch, you know, some of the schools where they use his materials and they place knowledge | ||
| at the heart of their curriculum. | ||
| I've seen some of those schools in the Bronx and in various—in Queens and so on. | ||
| And they're doing a great job, too. | ||
| I just wish more of it was happening and that we could get a bigger platform to talk about | ||
| it, because it's just so important. | ||
| But people don't—people don't get that. | ||
| They don't get that. | ||
| They're starting to get it. | ||
| You think so? | ||
| Yeah, I do. | ||
| I think that's why these types of things are working. | ||
| That's why you're half a world away, thousands of miles away, and you've shown this, the conversations that we're having here, to your staff. | ||
| And the amount of people that are showing up to these live events now, the amount of people that are downloading these podcasts and all that, it's starting to happen. | ||
| At least. | ||
| Well, I hope so. | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| I mean, there's so much to be had. | ||
| You know, I've known tens of thousands of kids—people often say, why do I do what I do? | ||
| Because I've known tens of thousands of kids who could have been so much more, right? | ||
| Who could have been in a position to change their stars, and they weren't able to, because the state is spending so much money on their education and isn't able to provide them with a decent education. | ||
| And that's really sad. | ||
| All right, one more for you. | ||
| I want you to offer, so I know that I have a lot of young people, obviously, that listen to this show, high school, sometimes junior high school, but college, whatever else, just for the general young person out there that's watching this, that's in a school, that's not doing these things, that's trying to figure out how to learn and think critically and get a good, wide breadth of knowledge, but the situation that they're in is not everything you've offered here. | ||
| What would you say to them to just start doing it for themselves? | ||
| You've got to take personal responsibility, so you can't be a victim. | ||
| You know, the whole victimhood thing is just stoked all the time in schools and indulged. | ||
| You've got to think, it doesn't matter where I am. | ||
| Great, I haven't had the best luck, right? | ||
| I would have loved to been able to go to that local private school, but you know what? | ||
| So what? | ||
| I'm going to sit down, and I'm going to work, and I'm going to work really hard, and I'm going to go to the library, and I'm going to find the books, and I'm going to teach myself, if necessary. | ||
| And I've known kids like this who have done this. | ||
| I've known colleagues of mine and people who I've known. | ||
| They just—they make it their business to teach themselves what they need to know, and they need to know that knowledge is at the heart of it. | ||
| You need to know lots of stuff, and then you can manipulate that stuff, and then you can be intelligent with that stuff, right? | ||
| You can do it. | ||
| You can. | ||
| The thing is, is that it's rare that a 15-year-old takes that upon themselves to do it. | ||
| By definition, they're exceptional. | ||
| Most kids need somebody to guide them. | ||
| And if their parents aren't doing it, then I think the school certainly can do it. | ||
| Whether or not the school should, there are people who will say, well, it's not fair. | ||
| Schools shouldn't have to do that. | ||
| The parents should do that. | ||
| And it's true. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| If welfare were not as generous as it is and so on, the parents probably would. | ||
| have more agency and self-determination about themselves and... | ||
| The incredible catch-22. | ||
| Yeah, they would take more responsibility and they would do something and sadly the state hits them in both ways, right? | ||
| Because it gives them the heroin of welfare and then it suppresses them by not giving them a decent education. | ||
| And then they sit around and they talk, oh, and they say, oh, | ||
| I'm a really good person because I believe in giving people loads of welfare and in having terrible education. | ||
| I mean, you know, you punch somebody on one side, then you punch them on the other side. | ||
| How on earth are they meant to succeed, right? | ||
| And the thing is, we spend a lot of money in tax to have a state. | ||
| And I'm a classical liberal, so I believe in a small state. | ||
| We do have a state. | ||
| Let's use it for what we can, for the good. | ||
| But we're not doing that. | ||
| And that's what's really scary. | ||
| And we need us all believing in this idea of equality of opportunity. | ||
| Teaching children self-control will make them free. | ||
| And having an ordered environment where children can learn will enable them to learn lots of stuff so that they can then be motivated to do something with their lives, because they will make themselves free. | ||
| By grabbing that opportunity. | ||
| And it's that agency, it's that sense of self-determination that the conservatives, people on the right, right-leaning, tend to believe in more, as opposed to mummy state coming in and looking after it for you and taking care of you. | ||
| Because if that's what you aspire to, then what's the point of living, right? | ||
| But you know, you have to teach dead white men, right? | ||
| Like, one of the big problems we have is that they don't want to teach dead white men, because they're dead white men, and that's a problem, right? | ||
| So they only want to teach—recently, we had the situation where, in Manchester, these | ||
| students painted over a mural of Kipling. | ||
| So Rudyard Kipling's poem was up there, and they painted it over and put Maya Angelou's | ||
| poem by Maya Angelou. | ||
| Now, I'm a great fan of Maya Angelou. | ||
| I think she's brilliant. | ||
| But one of the reasons why she's a great writer is because she read a lot of Kipling, | ||
| and she read a lot of Shakespeare. | ||
| In fact, she said of Shakespeare that she thought, when she first read him, that he | ||
| must have been a black woman, because he would have—he had to be a black woman to have | ||
| understood the plight of black women, right? | ||
| Because he speaks to the human condition, right? | ||
| But he's a dead white male. | ||
| Oh, we don't want to teach him. | ||
| Oh, Kipling, he was a racist. | ||
| We don't want to teach him. | ||
| But at our school, we've got them reciting, you know, the poem If, if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, and blaming it on you, you know, but at the But at the end of it, it says, "The Earth is yours and | ||
| everything that's in it, and what's more, you'll be a man, my son." | ||
| And that, "You'll be a man, my son." | ||
| But what about the women? | ||
| How can he not be recognizing the women? | ||
| And in a day and age where men can be women and women can be men— | ||
| We can't allow this poem. | ||
| I said, well, he's obviously speaking to me, too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But there's outrage. | ||
| Oh, no, no, no. | ||
| He's only mentioned men, right? | ||
| It's the most beautiful poem. | ||
| Our children learn it off by heart, right? | ||
| But children elsewhere will never have access to Kipling. | ||
| Now, everyone needs, has to be taught Shakespeare. | ||
| By law, you have to be taught Shakespeare. | ||
| But the fact is, we indulge in Shakespeare. | ||
| We love Shakespeare because Shakespeare is so beautiful and extraordinary. | ||
| And just because he's a dead white guy, well, does that mean that he didn't write beautifully, you know? | ||
| There are just some beautiful—I mean, you know, love is not love, which alters when an alteration finds or bends with the remover to remove. | ||
| It's all so beautiful. | ||
| And you want the children to be able to access this. | ||
| And we teach them other poems, like Invictus, which means unstoppable, and it was one of Mandela's favorite poems. | ||
| And, you know, they say at the end, I am the master of my fate. | ||
| I am the captain of my soul. | ||
| And all of our kids put their hands on here when they say, I am the master of my fate. | ||
| And there's nearly 200 kids in the lunch hall, all just belting this out and loving it, because they are the masters of their fate. | ||
| And it's teaching the kids that and inspiring them to make a difference with their lives, whatever their color, as opposed to saying, oh, well, there's racism and sexism in the world, therefore you're never going to be able to succeed, because then you just give up. | ||
| And don't worry, because there's welfare. | ||
| So you can always just—you know, you can just take the welfare instead of making something of your life, you know? | ||
| That is what it is to kill a man. | ||
| When you kill his self-determination and you kill his agency and you kill his motivation to do something with his life, that is to kill a man. | ||
| And that is what the left is doing. | ||
| And I say that's about—that is racism. | ||
| I do. | ||
| And we should say it out loud, but we never do. | ||
| The conservatives never call it. | ||
| And they should call it what it is. | ||
| And, you know, well, what can you do? | ||
| You've just got to keep going, right? | ||
| What a beautiful ending! | ||
| That's an ending right there. | ||
| We're gonna clip that one and do something with that, because that was just perfect. | ||
| Well, this is what it's all about. | ||
| Everything that I'm trying to do here, you're talking about the roots and the foundation of all that, and you're doing it, and I promise you, I will make it to the school when I'm... | ||
| Oh, well that'd be great. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You'll see. | |
| That'd be lovely. | ||
| That would be lovely. |
Export Selection