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Feb. 2, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
41:04
83 Public Schools (Part 2)
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Time Text
Good afternoon, everybody.
It's Steph.
It is 5.09pm on Thursday, February 2nd.
I hope you're doing well.
I've got to tell you, I got this funny email today from a guy.
No disrespect intended to him.
I always appreciate any email that I get.
But he was sort of saying, listen, Steph, quantity is not quality.
And was sort of, not chiding me exactly, but sort of saying, you know, it's hard to keep up.
You do an hour a day and we only have so much time to listen.
And look, I fully understand that.
I'm not expecting anybody to keep up.
But the truth of the matter is I just don't have that long to live and I have to get all my words out.
No, I don't.
I'm fine.
I'm actually in perfect health.
But, look, I'm the ferret on the double espresso, chattering away into the microphone here.
I'm certainly not expecting everybody to listen to me for an hour a day.
You know, if you want to and you enjoy it, fantastic.
If not, you know, skip some time, pick and choose, mix and match.
It could be a bits and bytes kind of intellectual smorgasbord buffet that you can pick from.
Because, you know, not all topics are of equal interest to everybody.
But, you know, I sort of have to do an hour because I'm going to do them during my drive because otherwise, you know, I'm just left alone with my own thoughts and that's no good.
So I'm going to, you know, I sort of have a 30 to 40 minute commute each way each day.
And, you know, making audiobooks, I guess, is a little bit more exciting than listening to them.
As what I used to do, and if you were sort of like this, it's a sort of neat idea, is you can buy the sort of text-to-speech programs, and you can grab a bunch of articles from LewRockwell.com or Harry Brown or Antiwar or wherever it is you go for your information, and you can just sort of have them read as into an MP3 file by these programs, put them on your portable player, your Rio, your iPod or whatever, and play them through your car stereo.
So I used to sort of pick up a lot of information that way.
You know, recently I've listened to a whole bunch of libertarian stuff from Charles Murray, Libertarianism in One Lesson, Economics in One Lesson, and so on.
And of course all of the Harry Brown stuff, and all the stuff from Mises.org.
So I guess I spent the last couple of years with this commute picking up ideas on economics and philosophy and history and so on, which were all great fun.
But I think I have absorbed as much as I I care to at the moment, and now it's time to speak.
So I apologize if this seems overwhelming.
You log into the podcast after a couple of days, and it's like, oh my god, doesn't this man ever shut up?
And I fully understand that.
I would suggest that you use EAX to speed up my voice, but then I'm just going to sound like a fax machine, because I'm already kind of fast as it is.
So I really can't help you other than to say, pick and choose.
And the other thing, too, is if me or other people that you listen to, you feel that it's worth keeping up, well, obviously, if you're in a commute that's about as long as mine, then we're kind of compatible that way, right?
But the other thing, of course, is that I listen to audiobooks or sometimes music when I'm, obviously, when I was driving, but when I go to the gym, if I can't go with Christina for whatever reason, I'll listen to an audiobook or to music.
You can do it while you're cleaning out your eaves troughs.
I'm the guy who cleans the bathrooms, the three bathrooms in our household, so I do it then, and I do it when I'm tidying.
I mean, I just like it.
I also do it... I'm trying to sort of... I never have had to wear glasses, and I'm trying to sort of extend my eyesight as much as possible by listening to audiobooks rather than reading books at night, because I work with computers for a good chunk of my day.
So, you know, there's lots of places you can listen to audiobooks if you like, or to me or to other people.
So what I'm saying is suck it up.
Just get it done.
I can't do less than half an hour or 40 minutes in my car because I have the laptop in the passenger seat and it's chugging away.
I can't just sort of up and put it on pause.
I've got to do a stream of consciousness from beginning to end because I'm not going to get much of a chance to do it in the evenings when I get home.
Because I'm busy and I want to spend time with my wife.
But I can't sort of stop it, because I don't mind doing a podcast while I'm driving, but I do kind of draw the line at working a mouse and clicking around to pause and stop and so on.
So I apologize if it's overwhelming, but of course it's completely under your control.
You can turn me off at any time.
So to continue with public education, a fascinating, fascinating topic, and something which we all have direct reference to.
I mean, most of us, those of us who didn't go to Montessori or were homeschooled or something.
I sort of wanted to point out the topics that are not present in public school educational curriculum.
Curriculae?
Curriculums?
And it's fascinating, really, when you think about what's not there, right?
I mean, what's sort of missing?
Well, of course, logic is missing.
And logic is one of the most difficult sciences, particularly sophistical or abstract logical reasoning.
In other words, not the manipulation of symbols in math or physics or whatever, but syllogistic reasoning is very hard because it's where you run bump up against your emotional prejudices and your own propaganda.
Logic is, of course, the opposite.
Logic and evidence, the opposite of propaganda and sophistry.
And so it's pretty hard for teachers to be able to teach that, right?
I mean, because they're, you know, it's sort of well known that teachers, particularly in the public school system, are, you know, they come from the bottom half of the academic world.
It's not like you get all the people who are making 90s or, you know, high 90s or even 100s in their classes Those people don't become teachers in general.
The vast majority of the teachers come from the bottom half of the academic scale, so you're not getting the highest quality minds who are going into teaching.
So they're not going to be able to deal with the really difficult questions, in other words, the most essential and important questions.
And also, it's very hard for a teacher to, for instance, To use the argument from morality, right?
To teach you something as basic and simple about morality.
Something simple like, you know, what's good for one is good for all.
Moral rules should apply to everyone equally throughout time.
You know, because it's just so blatantly obvious that if you start going down that path, then the public school system is revealed as, you know, a catastrophic moral evil.
And it is, in my view, the most catastrophic moral evil that exists in the world.
And it's the major source of all of the horrors that are in the world, right?
It's a sort of public school education.
And so a teacher cannot teach any kind of logical consistency because the ethics of using violence to force an education on children and to use violence even against those who don't have children or who educate their children themselves, to use violence to get people to learn is kind of obviously evil and illogical and immoral.
So you have an enormous central fuse that is built into the teaching of logic to children in public school.
I mean, it's pretty obvious, right?
It would be like expecting the mafia school to teach pacifism.
Or a military school, which is pretty much the same thing, or a military school to teach pacifism.
It is counter to the very nature of the institution, the very foundations of the institution.
So, you know, the idea of teaching any number of subjects within schools is completely impossible.
And this is as true for most universities as it is for all public schools.
So, for instance, they can't teach you philosophy.
Of course, philosophy would be offensive to the majority of parents, right?
And the fact that you have to kind of bake all of these different viewpoints into one public school pie is one of the reasons why you get this absurdly content-less Education in the public school system, right?
So if I'm, you know, if I'm an atheist and I have a couple of Muslims in my class, what's the teacher going to teach us about logic and about reality and about empiricism, about the evidence of the senses and the role of the mind in perceiving reality and so on?
Because all of those questions are going to have explosive ramifications on things like the existence of God.
So is she going to teach, you know, Allah Akbar, Allah Allah, God is great, or is she going to teach There's no such thing as God, which would be a logical, philosophical approach, and offend the Muslim kids or, if not offending them, in fact they'd probably be pretty happy to be relieved to hear there's no God to vastly offend the parents of the Muslim kids.
Not that that's a bad thing, but it's not something that most teachers and schools are willing to do.
So you can't talk about anything important in in public school because there's such a wide diversity of opinions and you can't even teach a methodology for determining truth for falsehood that has any validity because everything that everyone believes, including the teacher, is based on falsehoods and corruption and is immoral.
So public schools have both practically and logically, both at the surface level of conflicting belief and at the deeper level of everybody has corrupted belief systems that they view as virtuous, you really can't talk about anything In public school.
And this extraordinary vacuum that is a public school education where you're trapped in this dead, empty, airless cell with other people who are asphyxiating around you for 10, 15, 20 years.
Kind of significant, right?
This is kind of how you kill a mind, right?
You don't kill a mind by teaching it bad things.
You kill a mind by teaching it nothing.
You don't kill a body By giving it exercises that are not optimal, you kill a body by strapping it to a bed and not allowing it to move.
That causes atrophy and destruction.
I mean, it's amazing.
Within seven days of being in a hospital bed, you've lost like 50 or 60 or 70 percent of your muscle mass.
So that's sort of important to understand, that to keep a curious and intelligent and alert child, as we all are, away from discovering the horrible truth about his society and his family, that is illogical and violent and hypocritical and destructive.
You have to teach the child empty positive slogans, of course, but more fundamentally than that, you have to asphyxiate the child through a complete withdrawal and keeping away from that child any information of any kind of importance.
And then you have to humiliate the child for that lack of knowledge, right?
That's another sort of very important thing.
So when I got to university and we were doing, I took a course on law.
And, you know, so, you know, when we were teaching, when we were being taught law, you know, the question between natural and positive law, right?
Is law a reflection of sort of basic moral truths that exist in the world or in reality?
Or is it just A statement of a relationship of command, right?
Of violence.
So, is murder wrong because... Like, does the law say murder is wrong because murder is wrong?
Or does the law say murder is wrong because the society happens to believe that murder is wrong?
So, of course, I took a very strong naturalistic law, even back in my early 20s, as you can imagine.
And it was painful.
It was absolutely painful to listen to the other, I guess, young adults try and argue anything.
Because, first of all, it's a matter of definition.
I don't want to get into this whole argument, but it's just a matter of definition, right?
If you define law as that which represents what is valid and true, then it's obviously naturalistic, and if you decide that it's just what everyone believes, it's just a different name for the same thing.
So, A, it didn't matter, but B, if law were to have any moral content, it had to be based on absolute moral rules.
Otherwise, it was simply just a matter of opinion, and I could pass a law in my own household that said, you know, anybody who Glances at their feet should be put to death, and it's perfectly valid, and blah blah blah.
And of course, you know, most of the people were into positive law because they hadn't had direct exposure, as most of the older generation did, to the horrors of Nazism, where they had a perfectly valid legal system that sent millions of people to their deaths.
You know, which you may think might give the positivistic lawyers or legal theorists some sort of pause, but apparently not.
So, of course, the last thing that you want to do is is to teach anyone anything of any value whatsoever, anything that's reproducible, anything that allows them to judge the present with reference to the past, anything which gives them principles that will be useful to them later in life.
You can't allow any of that sort of stuff to happen in public school.
And then later what you do is you humiliate the children for not knowing stuff, right?
So, you know, when we got to, this was I think first or second year university, when we were doing this course on natural law, or natural versus positive law, So everybody gets humiliated for not thinking through the basics, right?
It's like, well, that may seem clever, but it's obviously this, or have you thought about that?
So the professor's obviously read a lot more than he's actually taught.
And then you humiliate children for not knowing what has never been taught to them, and which it took mankind thousands of years to develop.
I mean, it's all a wonderfully tight, empty, and sadistic little system.
So, you know, you can't teach logic.
You can't teach philosophy.
You can't really teach that much about foreign affairs or foreign policy, particularly in the United States.
Although I think there's a little bit more of that in university when you get to your lefty professors, but you can't teach a lot about that.
You can't teach much about law at all because, you know, the laws of a country, you know, there's like two laws, right?
Don't use violence and keep your promises, right?
That's it.
There's two laws.
I mean, and I'm not saying that that would be true in an anarchist...
Sorry, in an anarchistic society, because you could have as many laws as you wanted in the sort of community that you were building.
You could have, you know, the tomes of Hammurabi stretching from here to infinity as far as laws went.
Or you could just have two laws, like don't use violence and keep your promises, your legal, your contractual promises.
But, you know, the laws in any given society are just so completely ridiculous.
I mean, it's sort of occasionally struck me that if I ever get nailed for tax evasion, not that I've ever done anything wrong in that area, but, you know, you can always find something, right?
That if I were ever in court being arraigned on charges of tax evasion, you know, I wouldn't hire a lawyer.
What I would do is simply bring in book after book after book of Canadian tax law.
And there are hundreds of these thick tomes, right?
And just saying, so this is the law that you expect me to obey.
And there's not one person alive who can tell you the whole law.
So there's no one that I can go to unless I'm willing to go to dozens and dozens of experts, each of which are going to have slightly contradictory opinions.
This is the law that you expect me to obey and which you are punishing me for not obeying.
You're insane.
This simply is impossible.
This is a scam.
This is just a joke.
And it's true.
I mean, the moment you start teaching the laws of the country, the country looks so ridiculous, it's ridiculous.
There's no redundancy there, he said again.
So, they can't teach you anything about law.
They can't teach you anything about economics, for sure.
For sure, you're not going to learn anything about economics.
I mean, they'll give you all of the standard lefty insinuations of, you know, corporations are evil, and the media is evil, and globalization is evil, You know, all those transnational corporations of the devil's spawn and so on.
But they can't teach you anything intelligent about economics because, you know, it quickly becomes clear then that there's a big gap between the free market and the coercive state.
They sure as heck can't teach you anything about the nature of the government.
I mean, that's sort of number one in terms of things that you can't be taught about, right?
Which is why people who've been paying taxes for 60 or 70 years are shocked When I tell them that the government is based on coercion, although they understand it within about 0.02 seconds, it's never been made clear to them, which is something that's so completely self-evident and obvious that you're never going to hear it in public school.
Just never.
I mean, if you do hear it, the guy's going to be fired.
Whoever told you he was going to be fired within about, oh, I guess 0.02 seconds, right?
I'm sure they have voice recognition, two-way stuff in the PA system, which listens for the state.
The state is evil, taxation is coercion, or whatever.
Immediately just generates a pink slip for that teacher.
So they can't teach you anything about the government, they can't teach you anything about the political system that you live under, they can't teach you anything about the nature of democracy and majority rule and so on.
And of course, because they can't teach you anything about any of these things in the present, they also can't teach you anything about them in the past.
So it's not like you can talk about brute majority rule in ancient Athens any more than you can talk about it now, because it would be just so obvious that, you know, any teacher which tells you these things, oh, you know, ancient democracy, they could do whatever they wanted, and the majority ruled, and you say, well, how is that different from now?
Well, you know, teachers don't like those kinds of questions, right?
Because they're not there to educate the children, right?
They're there to pick up a paycheck and dream about their two months off in the summer.
Oh, I know, I know, everybody knows a nice teacher, and everybody knows a good teacher, but let me tell you a short story about a teacher whose names I can never remember, because I can never remember details of any kind.
I'm more of a satellite view.
There was a movie in the 80s called Stand to Deliver about a Hispanic teacher in a very rough section of, I think it was Los Angeles.
He was just a brilliant teacher.
His math students, these Hispanic students who everybody writes off as go nowhere, do nothing kinds of kids, They end up, like, he sparks their brains up something fierce.
And they end up competing mightily in statewide math contests, coming in first, second, third, like, capturing their top 15 spots and so on.
And these are kids that, you know, everybody's given up on.
Half of them are in gangs.
There's unwed mothers and, you know, all this sort of crap.
And, you know, he sparks up their brains and really makes them cook.
And so what happens?
Well, you'd think that, of course, I mean, if you didn't know anything about the state, you'd think, wow, Of course, the Union, and everyone's going to be really happy about this, and they're going to try and figure out its methods and reproduce them as much as humanly possible.
Nooooooo!
That's not going to happen!
Oh, I just sounded a bit like Dr. Cox from Scrubs there.
Ne-hoo!
What happens, of course, is the Union gets him dismissed.
The Union fights him and fights him and fights him, and finally gets him disbarred, and then cheers and sends a letter around to everyone saying, hey, we finally got rid of that bastard.
And why?
Because, of course, when you have an exceptional teacher in a union environment, he exposes everybody else as the vicious, dumb, brute frauds that they are.
So, you know, there's simply no possibility that teachers of any quality can last within a school system, a public school system.
What you end up is a sort of droning, empty-headed zombies that I had all the way through my school system.
And this wasn't just in the public school system.
I also went to boarding school when I was very young, and there were some private school teachers.
And they were accepted.
Of course, most of them had been raised in the public school system as well, so, you know, they're all the same empty-headed zombies that are droning away and boring the pants off everybody else in high school.
I think it's in Ferris Bueller's Day Off where they just do a wonderful imitation of one of these just cripplingly dull teachers, you know.
Anybody know who caused the Great Depression of 1929?
Anybody?
Anybody?
Yes, it was the Federal Tax Fund.
He's just brilliant.
I mean, how you get and everybody's just drooling and staring and, you know, just and there's some fantastic songs about school, of course, you know, there's, you know, it's not not so much now, because, you know, it's important to talk about TNA and puppy love.
But you know, in the past, you had some great songs about school, which I think were pretty accurate in terms of their ability to cut to the core of what was going on in school, right?
So you had, you know, We Don't Need No Education by Pink Floyd.
I said, brick in the wall part two, I know, I know.
For those 70s freaks, I know what the name is.
I left the album.
And, you know, we don't need no education.
We don't need no thought control.
No dark sarcasm in the classroom.
Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone.
That is a fantastic song.
Because it does sort of get, particularly in the British school system, not so much in North America, this black sarcasm and hostility and destruction of teachers is pretty legendary.
And then there's School by Supertramp.
So you think your schooling is funny.
I guess it's hard not to agree.
You say it all depends on the money and who is in your family tree.
And I don't agree with that last statement so much.
But, you know, there's this wonderful thing about towards the end.
You know, you're supposed to sit down and shut up and not take anything.
And it says, if you want to be that way, you're coming along.
Which is just wonderful.
Because you are, because you're coming along, right?
They want to slowly erase your personality and erase your capacity to think and reason and question and challenge and grow and learn and all the wonderful things that human beings can do when they're free.
You know, and sort of incidentally, since somebody wrote me the other day and said, you know, well, if there's no God, there's no meaning of life and blah, blah, blah.
It's like, you know what?
You only search for a meaning for life if you're not happy already.
I gotta tell you.
What's the meaning of my life?
I don't really have to worry about it because I'm really enjoying my days, my nights, my time, my thoughts, my conversations with all you wonderful people, you geniuses of the Internet.
I'm having a wonderful time talking and listening and thinking and writing and loving and learning.
So, you know, what is the purpose of my life?
I mean, that's sort of silly, right?
I mean, I don't need a purpose.
I'm enjoying myself.
I mean, of course, that's the result of me having a purpose, like to learn and to grow and whatever, right?
But you know that somebody's depressed when they're asking you what the purpose of life is, because it means that they're not happy and therefore they need some larger purpose.
And of course, that larger purpose is just going to make them more unhappy because it's about them serving something other than their own happiness, which is really what we should be doing, logically and with an eye to long-term gains as well as short-term gains.
But, you know, happiness is the point, purpose of life.
And if you've achieved it, then you don't ask what the purpose of life is because you're happy.
I don't think anybody, while actually having an orgasm, asks what the purpose of life is.
You know, I was going to mention something about heroin, but like I know anything about drugs.
So that's sort of an important thing to understand about public education, right?
I mean, it is a holding pen, right?
It's a zoo where you keep children.
And in particular, right, I mean, particularly it's bad for boys, right?
Especially these days.
I mean, you know, junior high, grades seven and nine, Forget about it.
You can't think of a damn thing.
Your hormones are just going over your brain like a tsunami.
You really need to be out there and doing things and building things.
You're stuck in there listening to somebody drone on and on about how to divide fractions and how to do algebraic division and so on.
It really is just the worst possible place that you can put an active young mind, especially the sort of aggressively and outwardly active young minds that Boys generally have.
I mean, women have their skills.
Girls have their skills and talents too, but boys, you know, we learn by doing and we learn by, you know, arguing and we learn by, you know, that kind of stuff.
Whereas girls say, you know, yeah, I don't want to get all, you know, sugar and spice and all things nice, but, you know, they really, boys are made of puppy dog tails.
I think that's scientifically valid.
So that process of making sure that you never communicate anything of substance is absolutely crucial.
To understanding why people grow up with such a completely empty-headed and vacuous notion of the world that they live in.
And, of course, why people are depressed and prone to addictions and abuse and overweight, eating too much and ending up overweight, and why they don't like to exercise and why they sort of veg out in front of television.
Yeah, it's because they're mental cripples and they're systematically crippled by the public school system.
If you have evidence to the contrary, fantastic.
I certainly would be happy to hear it.
I'm talking about my own experience, of course, and the experience of a large number of people that I went to school with, and we all look back and it's like, well, what did you learn from school?
And you tell me this, if you like.
What did you learn in the 14 years or 15 or 16 years that you were in school, or the 25 if you're a grad student or a PhD graduate?
What have you learned that is a principle that you can apply to your life in general?
I mean, that you didn't pick up from reading sort of sideline libertarian books that you can't bring up in class or reference as primary materials because everybody thinks you'd be ridiculous, right?
I mean, I tried that with Ayn Rand, and I mean, good luck.
Nobody's going to let you get away with that at all.
But, you know, let me know.
Let me know if you did pick anything up that was of any value whatsoever.
You know, there's just a couple of things that I remember from my education.
One is some history teacher saying to me, saying to the class as a whole, he'd actually written his own paper about the Cold War, which I thought was pretty cool, you know, he cared enough to write his own paper and hand it out in class.
And the one phrase that I do remember from it was, he was saying, this is back before the, after the Sino-Soviet split, but before the fall of the Soviet Empire, of course, he said, you know, Russia and China, though they appear superficially different, have A great deal in common, right?
I can't remember anything other than that sentence.
And of course, in hindsight, it's pretty clear to me that what this did was it helped me to understand my mother and my brother, who were fighting like cats and dogs during this time in my life.
I guess I was 15 or 14 or something.
And so you would sort of superficially think, oh, these people are so different.
But I think that these two totalitarian systems that are fighting at each other constantly are fighting because of their similarities, not because of their differences.
And I think that's sort of what I got psychologically tweaked onto from that.
And that's sort of the phrase that I remember.
Gosh, other than that, you know, and I look back on, you know, 12 or 14 years of, I guess, was it 14 years of primary school, junior high and high school?
Well, of course, you know, I have some math skills, but you know, nothing that you couldn't teach me in a couple of days.
History, I remember almost nothing.
English?
Yeah, I read some okay books.
But of course, you know, they were never anything sort of important or anything that could give me any kind of relevance to my adult life.
They're all kind of depressing, right?
And weird.
So yeah, we did Catcher in the Rye, which is, you know, a funny, a funny and horrible little tale about the after effects of sexual abuse.
We did The Diviners, a Margaret Lawrence novel.
We did Stone Angel, which was just, I mean, a straight shot of Novocaine to the brain.
I mean, that, I swear to God, I was reading that and like every 10 pages I'd realize I'd read 9 pages without absorbing anything.
I'd go back and I'd fall asleep.
Because, you know, it's the memories of an old woman in Ontario, Canada.
I mean, it's like, oh man, could you give anything less exciting to a 15-year-old boy?
We did some Shakespeare, which everybody read out loud in class because, you know, having us drone and mush-mouth Shakespeare is a lot easier than having a teacher actually learn something about it and teach you.
about it, or should they wheel in the movies, right?
And so they show us a movie, right?
Because it's a lot easier to do that than to teach us anything.
We had lots of spaced-out teachers.
Lots of them had body odor problems.
Lots of them were just bizarre, and they're damn rough, and they're just, you know, the life's losers, right?
Sitting there in their unionized positions, boring to mindless, mad frustration, or sort of apathetic indifference.
Kids, right?
And, you know, there were the disruptive kids, the kids who, you sort of, one or two kids would beat their heads against the wall, and they'd get sent to the principal's office, and, you know, we had the good kids, and the bad kids, and all this kind of stuff.
And, I mean, everybody was just so lost and pathetic, and just, we had to make up everything as we went along, because we weren't given any rules for living whatsoever, or any exposure to any knowledge that had any traction, or depth, or relevance, or richness, or, you know, anything like that.
Because you have to sort of stay on the shallow surface emptiness of things, because that's what a sociopathic personality does.
And, of course, because the entire public school system is based on violence and brutality, it is, by its very nature, sociopathic, right?
Which is why you end up with this shallow, surface skimmery of everything with no depth and, you know, this series of disconnected, empty factoids that add up to absolutely nothing in your life.
I mean, that's what the public school educational system is really all about, is, you know, providing a few technical skills so that you'll go out there and be a good taxpayer.
But, you know, anything that you need to learn that has any economic relevance, you absolutely are going to end up having to learn on the job.
And, you know, public school won't help you at all with that.
And the teachers are completely indifferent to the progress of the students, right?
I sort of remember one teacher said to me, you know, well, Mr. Molyneux, if effort matched ability, you'd be an A+.
Right?
Because I, you know, I was obviously intelligent, but I guess I was obviously intelligent.
You know, I never did any work, right?
I never did any homework.
I never did any... I mean, I took my books home every night and this sort of vague optimism that something might happen.
A lightning might strike.
But I never did any homework.
I mean, other than I studied for a couple of tests and I would read the books that I was supposed to read.
But I mean, in my home environment, it was impossible to do any homework in.
And so, you know, this was a sort of comment that stuck with me because it was just so obviously Stupid and insulting, right?
So if you have a kid, say like me, who's obviously got, you know, a couple of brain cells and yet is not doing very well.
I mean, I never got much more than B's or B pluses or A pluses in English and so on.
But, you know, I was almost 50 to 60 percent in math and science was like 60 to 70 percent.
And then, you know, I got B's in histories and B pluses and A's in English and so on.
So the teachers were, you know, I guess this teacher was frustrated by what he considered to be my lack of willingness to apply myself.
And so, of course, he said to me, well, if effort matched ability, you'd be an A+, right?
So basically he's saying all you need to do is work a little harder.
And I just found that to be a very telling comment about the psychology of public school teachers, because it wasn't the only person I got those kinds of comments from.
This was just the most succinct one.
And it is really fantastic, really, when you think about it, that Of course, a teacher's job is to motivate a pupil, right?
A teacher's job is to help, you know, set on fire somebody's young mind and get them excited and curious and so on.
I mean, in my own sort of little way, I guess I'm sort of trying to do that with people through these podcasts, right?
To just sort of say, you know, here's some logical structures, here's some possibilities, here's some thoughts that I have, here's the way that I work them out, and here's the evidence that I can bring to bear, and let's throw away our prejudices and really dig in and learn something independent of just everything we've been programmed to believe or not believe.
I hope that's exciting for people.
It certainly is exciting for me.
And, you know, I don't think I've had a single email since I started doing this a couple months ago which has said, you know, your podcasts are boring.
You know, they may be lots of things.
Long-winded, repetitive, jammed with way too many you-knows, never-ending, with lots of pauses and the occasional slips from my coffee cup.
But I don't think that they're boring.
And so I know a little bit about what it is to try and motivate somebody to think.
And, of course, there is this complete lack of self-criticism on the part of teachers and teachers' unions, of course, right?
Who knows about teachers?
But, you know, this guy was saying to me, look, if you could simply rouse yourself to a higher degree of effort, you would do much better in terms of marks.
Never sort of questioning, well, why is this kid not expending any effort?
Right?
Isn't that sort of your job?
Right?
I mean, it's sort of like if I'm a I guess I am a manager, right?
But if I'm a manager and my sole contribution to an underproducing employee who shows great potential is to say, you know, you should work harder.
I mean, really, how difficult is that to say?
You know, you should work harder.
I mean, you could just put a tape recorder on that and say, well, you should work harder.
And nobody would respect that as a manager, right?
As a manager, you've got to dig in and figure out what the blocks are and figure out how to make it worthwhile for people and all that kind of stuff.
And of course, as you can imagine, what also happened with me in school was that, particularly in England, not so much in Canada, but in England, I mean, I was always put into, you know, a self-directed activity, right?
So there'd be all the, you know, regular, I sort of hesitate to say dunderheads, but it's not far off from that.
All the regular kids would be in the class and I was sort of writing short stories at the age of six and, you know, coming up with all these sort of ideas and drawings and, you know, all this kind of stuff.
And, you know, obviously you had strong verbal skills and so on.
And so what happened?
Well, I was just, you know, here, here's a book on grammar.
Go teach yourself.
Here, here's two books to read.
Go, go read in a corner and you can, you can give me a book report later, maybe.
I mean, that's just kind of funny when you think about it, right?
I mean, this is the level of teaching that you get in these kinds of institutions.
Right?
You get the kind of teaching which is, you know, if you're sort of the dull average, then we'll sort of drone along like a bunch of sheep.
But if you're not, right, if you're sort of high or low on the, on the, or sort of to either side of the bell curve, you just, you jam you in a corner and you will just end up having to teach yourself because, you know, I can't conceivably accommodate you in this kind of way.
When I was in university, I also worked as a teacher's aide for a time in a school, in a class for gifted children.
And really, in a more sophisticated way, it was just the same kind of nonsense.
For instance, one of the things was, you know, make your own movie!
What the hell does that have to do with learning anything?
Write your own play!
Well, about what?
Based on what principles?
Based on how do you construct a play?
It's just nonsense, right?
So you just get more sophisticated emptiness when you move up the sort of academic food chain.
That's sort of another thing that's very important.
I remember when I was going into my master's as well, oh boy, what did I do?
I sat down and said, well, what do you want to do?
I had a thesis advisor.
What do you want to do?
Well, I want to prove that the Industrial Revolution, the bias against the Industrial Revolution is irrational.
So eyes widened.
Oh, really?
What else would you like to do?
Well, you know, I've been thinking of doing this thing about how saying if you believe in higher realities that you end up having to advocate dictatorship as the ideal political model.
And I want to prove that for a number of different philosophers along the This sort of rationalist slash irrationalist spectrum.
And there was no response, right?
You never get any response for this.
Nobody even says, well, that's just ridiculous, right?
They just sort of give you that thousand-yard stare and hope that you're going to become embarrassed and somehow put yourself down, right, through that process.
And that is something that you see just so often.
This heavy-handed criticism is also very big in public schools, right?
So you get just Unbelievable levels of hostility and criticism when you're just doing things that just make you, as a kid, a kid.
And, you know, there's never any definition, right?
So, I mean, one of the things that sadists or brutal systems will always do is, you know, criticize you heavily but never give you any reasons or any definitions, right?
So, it's an extension of the Catholic principle of original sin, right?
Why are you evil?
Why am I evil?
You're breathing.
Really?
I don't really get how that sort of makes sense, right?
I don't really sort of understand that logically.
Nonetheless, right?
I mean, you're just a bad kid in school.
Like, in schools, you're just a bad kid.
And sorry, but you just are.
And it's because you've done something to disobey or these rules that just don't make any sense.
You've just had the temerity to question them or anything, or to come up with any original thoughts, or to go to outside sources than what the teacher is familiar with, and so on.
And, you know, I just remember in a I've already told that story about the class and racism, but this is sort of important, right?
I mean, that you really do face a sort of gut-level bedrock hostility towards curiosity and intellectual exploration.
So, of course, it is a kind of scholasticism, right?
I mean, our schools have become exactly what religious education was in the Middle Ages, where you're debating all of these nonsensical, empty definitions of words within the Bible for no particular progress or understanding or logic.
I mean, that's exactly what our schools have become.
It's sort of empty waste of time to get a whole bunch of people paid, right?
It's not that the teachers sort of wake up every morning and say, ah, how am I going to be able to best destroy the minds of the youth of today?
I mean, it's nothing like that.
All that happens is that it's the logic of the situation, right?
It's not like everybody who ended up being a sort of prison camp guard in the Nazi world sort of woke up when they were kids and said, you know what I want to grow up to be?
You know, Hans the butcher at Treblinka.
No, this is just the logic of the situation and what ends up happening.
So if you are taking money, if you are sort of the recipient of the blood money that comes from the state by force, you are going to be very hard-pressed to ever talk about the state in honest terms, right?
Which is why the old people never talk about the state in honest terms, because they feel entitled to Social Security, right?
So once you're on the receiving end, Which is why the government wants to give money to people, not to help them, but to buy them.
Once you're on the receiving end of this kind of state coercive blood money, you really can't look at the state in any kind of honest or logical way.
And so, you know, slowly what happens is you sort of swallow more and more illusions.
And you're overpaid for what it is that you're doing, and we know that they're overpaid because there's a union.
And you get these two months off in the summer, which is a complete hangover from when kids were needed to do help with the harvesting and the seeding, and still carries on to this day because, heaven forbid, anything should be made convenient for the parents who are working.
So once you start to accept these kinds of benefits, then you really don't have any choice but to reject logic and moral and open interpretation.
So that's sort of another important aspect to understand about public school education, that it's not that every teacher is evil and wants to cripple the minds of children.
It's just that by having been corrupted by state money and state privilege, they have no choice but to support it and to refuse to ever look at it logically or consistently.
And that becomes more and more true the higher they move up in the hierarchy and the longer that they have worked there.
So I've made it to the gym, so I guess we're going to close this one off, just so I'm not overburdening my delicate listener who doesn't want as much quantity as he does quality.
Hopefully I can provide both.
So thanks, as always, for listening.
I hugely appreciate it.
Every time I get a chance to make a podcast, I do it because I know that people are listening, and so your participation in the conversation, even if you never drop me a single line or vote for the quality of this podcast anywhere, Your participation in the conversation is simply by being on the receiving end and I always and hugely appreciate that.
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