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Feb. 3, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:09
85 Public Schools (Part 4 - Alternatives)
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So I hope you're doing well.
I'm on my way home and I just wanted to sort of finish up this last couple of days of podcasting to go over what I think might be interesting to talk about in terms of alternatives to existing school systems.
And what I mean by that is when I was talking about roads, I was saying that we have no idea whether we know whether roads are or are not a beneficial situation or circumstance or way of transporting people because it's state-subsidized.
And when something gets subsidized by the state, It really does tend to get stuck in time.
So, as I mentioned before, we have this ridiculous situation where children are put in school, and they are in there from nine to three, and then they don't end up coming back out.
Only at three o'clock when the parents are working till five, and they have two months off in the summer, and so on.
All of which are pretty bad situations.
And sometimes, or often, could be considered dangerous for children as well.
So, for instance, because parents have to work, particularly poor parents, they have a habit of jamming their children into social activities, after-school activities and, of course, summer camp activities, which might expose their children to sexual predators and other kinds of bullies and other child bullies and so on.
So, it's not sort of neutral, this situation.
It can be sort of risky, right?
Anytime you create a situation where children have to be sent away from the parents, you are creating a situation of risk.
Now, I don't think it's a huge risk, but it is nonetheless a risk which we should be aware of.
So, what else could occur in terms of education?
Well, there are some skills.
To me, the closest metaphor or approach for education, in a positive sense, would be some sort of combination of what I have experienced as an athlete when I was younger, which is coaching, and also what What I have performed as an adult, which is sort of mentoring.
And I think that sort of combination of coaching and mentoring would be a very good approach to education.
Now, heaven forbid I come up with any sort of particularly, you know, sort of brilliant solution to education.
I'm just sort of tossing out ideas to get us out of the idea That there's just sort of the one approach to education that all we can do is to, you know, have this sort of existing system and photocopy it and put it in the private sector.
Now once we put it in the private sector, we're going to have a far different way, a far different methodology than anything that exists right now.
So we really have no way of predicting what sort of costs are going to be.
Now, the current system of education, which is sort of one teacher, 25 to 8 million kids in a classroom, Of all different levels of learning and social skills and intelligence, of course.
That particular situation was set up in the 1860s.
And, you know, possibly before that, but for sure it was around in the 1860s or 1870s.
And we know that because that's exactly the way that it's done now.
You have a chalkboard, you have a teacher, you have some pictures on the wall, and you have a bunch of kids sort of staring and taking notes.
Well, that was all fine and dandy for an educational situation where you had a bunch of kids going to grade six in rural, often rural, but sometimes urban educational settings.
And it really didn't help.
It sort of doesn't help when you're talking about knowledge workers in the 21st century to have a teaching system that was adopted in this sort of rural Non-mechanized, non-knowledge worker situations of the 1860s.
So, you know, we know for sure that it's not going to be that way anymore.
Well, what would be convenient ways to educate children?
And, you know, I'm also sort of drawing a little bit on my experience as a daycare teacher for a number of years when I was in my teens, where I did get to teach children.
So it's not, I mean, It's not as sort of abstractly nonsensical as some of my other sort of solutions.
I do have some slightly more tangible experience in this area.
And as I mentioned, I've also was a teacher's aide to a school of gifted kids, so I had some chance to sort of talk with them about what worked for them.
Now, the approach that it's, I think, valuable to take when it comes to educating children is to say, Look, you are a kid and so there's some basic functional stuff that you need to get into your head that you're going to be primed to learn in particular windows of life.
So if I think it's from like 18 months to two and a half years or three years, you have this language window where the kids are learning like 300 words.
A week or something like 30 words a day.
It's some lunatic amount of imprinting that goes on from a language standpoint.
And Noam Chomsky has some excellent lectures on the commonalities of language across cultures and so on, which, if you're interested in the subject, and it is an interesting subject, you know, I would sort of search and download.
I think they're available as podcasts or mp3 files for sure, and you won't have to pay for them.
So, you know, there's this window of language where language gets wired into the brain, so you want to facilitate that process as much as possible.
And, of course, you want to get rid of this sort of whole word learning thing, where this sort of see-and-say method of learning, where instead of learning morphemes, which are the very sort of smallest sections of speech, which are combined to make syllables, which are combined to make words, you can see I took phonetics once, didn't you?
You want to make sure that you teach language at the greatest level of abstraction possible, because that's what kids want to drink up, and that's going to make them not only more effective masters of their own language, but it's going to make it far easier for them to learn other languages if they so desire.
So you want to not sort of have a picture of a cat and have them learn the word cat, but to learn the k-a-t morphemes and then use those to puzzle out the rest of the words so they can deal with words they're not familiar with.
Because otherwise you're sort of force-feeding them a whole meal, which they then have to break down into its component parts sort of in their system.
So you want to, and I think this is fairly well recognized, that the whole generation of kids who now have to be sort of doused with Ritalin and put in special learning and have this dyslexia and so on, that this is largely the result of this abysmal experiment in whole word language instructions, which is that this is largely the result of this abysmal experiment in whole word language instructions, which is based on the sort of see a picture of a cat, say the word cat, see the picture of a dog, say the word dog, so that you've given the hundreds of thousands of words available in the language instead of storing the, I think, 80 or
so that, you know, you've given the hundreds of thousands of words available in the language instead of storing the, I think, 80 or 120 morphemes and the 26 letters that English has, you instead have to learn tens of thousands of whole words, some of which make sense when you break them down into their component parts some of which make sense when you break them down into their component parts and And you really don't want to do that to a child because that's a pretty horrible way to teach something.
So, you want to teach them the rules of grammar.
You want to teach them how to read, and that's sort of a top-down instructional set.
Now, once they have learned to read, and you've sort of started to get them involved in math, there's a lot of top-down stuff that still needs to be done.
I mean, science, you obviously can have them puzzle out certain experiments, but you really do have to learn science in and of itself as a discipline.
But, of course, the question is, for things like science and mathematics, which only a small minority of people are going to have as part of their job, Particularly in the age of Excel spreadsheets and tax programs and calculators and databases and ERP systems and so on, math skills have become that much less required.
I mean, it's sort of silly.
I mean, I still have a program that I use for converting metric to imperial because I do cross-border software stuff and, you know, that's...
Even at that level, I just download a program and run it.
So, unless you're going to be a mathematician or a physicist or somebody who teaches math or somebody who is involved in those kinds of differential equations and calculus and functions and relations stuff, the question always has to be explained to children.
Why are we teaching you this?
Why is this important?
If you're never going to use it as your job, then why would you be taught it?
I mean, it would be as sensible to teach mathematics to a child who's never going to use it, or only going to use the kind of stuff that you can teach in about two weeks, like the sort of multiplication and division and, you know, the four majors and so on.
I mean, who even does long division anymore?
I mean, it's sort of ridiculous, right?
When for, you know, a five dollar calculator you can reproduce all of the stuff that is achingly difficult to work your way through, and boring.
Sorry, not achingly difficult, achingly boring to work your way through.
I don't want to sort of give the impression that I'm that math illiterate, but...
But you want to sort of teach the child, well, why?
Because if you don't teach them why, then it makes as much sense to teach higher number functions to a non-mathematician as it would be for you and I to go out and take a course in tax law when we're going to hire an accountant to do our taxes.
It really wouldn't make any sense, right?
It would just be a sort of painful and difficult thing to do.
Or to take a course in ancient Latin when we were never going to use it.
So we weren't a sort of archaeologist or, I don't know, history professor or something.
So, of course, the thing that you absolutely want to make sure that you do at all times is to refer to the purpose of learning for the child.
And once the child understands why they're learning, then they're going to be much more self-directed, and they're going to be much more self-directed than anything that a teacher could come up with.
So there is this sort of duality in the educational theories.
I'm sure it's more than this, but these are just the two major ones that I think are the most important.
The first is that they say, I teach math.
So they say, math is the subject that I'm going to impart to Johnny.
And I'm gonna do that through, you know, showing, explaining, assigning homework, doing tests, so I'm gonna just sort of drive the knowledge into Johnny's head, like sort of railway spikes into a track, and then he's going to store it for about as long as it takes To answer the math test, and then he's likely going to forget it.
And in particular, I mean, the two months off over the summer, combined with all the other time off during the year, but particularly the two months over the summer, that's pretty bad.
You know, when you're looking to impart knowledge to someone, giving them two months away from it every year is really not a very good way, because everything is supposed to build on the year before.
That's not a very good way, I think, of doing it.
I mean, that's sort of another reason why it's just so ridiculously inefficient the way it's done now.
But, you know, the fact of the matter is... Sorry, the one side is that I teach math, and that's how you... The other side is I don't teach math, I teach Johnny!
And what that means is that I don't sort of put a whole bunch of stuff up on the board and expect everyone to learn it.
What I do is I sit down with Johnny and I find out what he's interested in, and that's what I teach him.
Uh, or that's what I guide him, right?
I'm not a teacher, I'm a guider.
I'm a mentor, or whatever.
And I think that's great.
At the very beginning, you want to start out with getting them the basics, like the basic math, the basic language skills, grammar, and so on, writing.
But then, you know, the problem is that There's no point just sort of throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks, right?
I mean, the idea of sort of creating this well-rounded person who knows history and geography and math and science and so on, I mean, that's got nothing to do with what is an effective teaching methodology.
I mean, please understand that nobody sat down and thought, you know, we could teach any which way we wanted, but the best way to do it is to cram all the kids into one room and have the teacher teach everyone the same information and have them cycle through different rooms or have teachers cycle through their room.
I mean, no single human being ever sat down out of all the possible options and put that one in place as the one that was most effective in terms of teaching.
What that is, is the cheapest way to teach.
And it's the cheapest in terms of overhead, and it also is the one that takes the longest and requires the most labor.
So, please remember that this is a unionized environment.
So, like all unionized environments, education, public education in particular, of course, those environments want to make the education as long as possible, and involve as much labor as possible, and have it to be as cheap as possible.
That's the fundamental reason.
Unions want to keep the costs down when they control the entire environment, so there's less overhead.
And bureaucracies want to keep the costs down, so there's less overhead, which means that there's more money for the bureaucrats and for the union.
They want to keep costs down, which means cramming all the children into one classroom and teaching them like they're the one kid photocopied 40 times.
And you want to teach all the kids the same thing.
You never want to have individual curriculum, That would be tailored to each child.
Now the natural objection to that, of course, if you say that, you know, I want to teach the individual rather than teach a bunch of topics to the same, to a whole group of individuals as if they're the same.
The natural response to that is to say, well, we can't do that because, you know, it takes too much labor.
The labor is too high.
And, of course, you would completely agree with that, except that you would not need the kid for fourteen years if you were able to teach according to his desire.
I mean, when you get right down to it, I'm going to take myself as an example here.
I mean, 100% of what I taught was nonsense, but even if we count the stuff that sort of got me reading stuff that later interested me in topics like philosophy and history and economics...
95% of what I was taught I don't remember and will never use in my life.
It was a complete waste of time.
In fact, it was a negative waste of time, because any time... Like, if you go the opposite direction when you're driving that you were supposed to go, and you drive that way for an hour, it's not like you've just wasted an hour, right?
You've wasted two hours, because it's going to take you another hour to drive back to where you were leaving from.
So that's important to recognize that all the time, 95% of the time, which I guess is, I don't know, 13.7 years that I was spending, that was a complete waste of time, is also 13.7 years of boredom and misinformation that I have to hack my way through.
So, you know, the fact that I was in school for 20 years and only began to really clarify my thinking sort of 20 years later meant that, you know, I got badly programmed for 20 years and had to deprogram myself for 20 years before I reached some sort of level of common sense again.
And maybe in 20 years I'll be where I could have been if I'd launched myself from an early age into a logical framework.
So, you know, of course, the question is, if you teach all the kids in one room, as if they're one photocopied kid, over and over and over again for 14 years, So, if you have 28 children in a classroom, then for each teacher to teach that child takes a certain amount of time per child, per year, and so on.
And you can sort of work that out to whatever it comes to.
But that amount, let's just call it, I don't know, 5,000 hours, that amount of teacher time that is then attached to that child is spread over 14 years.
Now, what if it would be possible to take each individual child and teach them everything that they needed to start learning for themselves in four years.
Well, you know, so basically you've got something that's seven times more efficient than the existing system.
So whatever it's going to do in terms of taking, it can take sort of seven times more effort in the same amount of teacher time in those four years.
As long as it's going to be less than the total time over 14 years, you have a kind of efficiency in place.
Now that's just an efficiency in terms of labor.
But if it is an efficiency also in terms of, you know, you actually produce a child who wants to think and wants to learn and is happy and productive and skilled and so on, then economically over one's whole life that becomes an unbelievable net positive.
For sure, you know, fourteen years is just way too long to keep children in school.
In sort of my particular view, you should take children when they're five or so and you should put them in school until they're ten or eleven maximum.
And, you know, teach them everything they need to know.
Boy, when you see some 10 or 11-year-olds, they're precocious, they're curious, they're interested, they're engaged, they're skilled.
I mean, one of the Pope's astronomers in, I think, the 14th or 15th century was like 11.
I mean, the amount of intelligent work that children can do, we vastly underestimate it because we see them sort of in this brain-dead, zombie-like public school system and then vegging out in front of TVs and chat rooms and video games.
But that's ridiculous.
I mean, that's like saying that, you know, everybody who sits on a couch and is vastly overfed Can, you know, if that's all you see, then, you know, say, well, athletics are impossible because everybody's far too heavy.
Well, of course it's not.
That's just because that's how they are trained or constrained into being.
So I think that by the age of 10 or 11, 10 for sure, or maybe 11, depending on the kid's intellectual capacities, You know, if the kid wants to have higher education, great!
Let's start them at higher education at that age.
And if they don't, then by all means, apprentice in some honorable trade and learn to work with your hands and so on.
That's a fantastic thing to do as well.
But there's absolutely no reason why children should be kept at this sort of retarded level for such a long period of time.
So that they have to go through all of their puberty and so on, with no access to stable sexual relationships.
And again, this is just my opinion.
Please don't take this as anything I'm advocating.
It's something that should be social-wide.
These are just sort of possibilities that I think would be explored in a free market.
I mean, wouldn't it be great if children, you know, when they reach physical maturity, you know, which is sort of 12, 13 years old, wouldn't it be great if we could actually have them be sort of productive and intelligent members of the workforce, and if they could get married at 15, and not the sort of half-retarded man-child or woman-child 15-year-olds that we see right now, but children who've been intelligently taught to their skills and abilities and desires,
for, you know, six or so years, where they would actually know what they wanted, be able to think clearly and logically, and so on.
And so in that sort of post-puberty, but before the whole, you know, hormonal cookery machine shuts down when they're 16 or 17, they could actually be doing something outside, something productive, they could be self-studying, they could be studying for themselves in higher education, they could be learning on their own, or they could be working as a tradesperson, Or they could take that time off to work in some sort of laborious area, which may not be a sort of labor-intensive area, physical labor-intensive.
That might not be a bad thing, right?
You've got a lot of energy to bleed off.
But they may have the capacity to be married at that age, right?
It's not that unknown.
Of course, in Romeo and Juliet, Juliet was 13, and there was no hint of pedophilia at that time.
In fact, I remember some British show many years ago I saw, which was an improv show.
And they said, you know, one of the improvs was, be the guy you'd least want to hire for the role of Romeo in Romeo and Juliet.
You know, the actor audition actor, right?
You know, and one guy sort of pushed his ears out into jug ears and stuck his teeth out into buck teeth and said, it's not all about looks, you know, it's about passion!
You know, which I thought was kind of funny.
And the other guy, though, the guy who won that particular round, just sort of slithered up to the microphone and cocked one eye at the audience and sort of, with his lips sort of puffed out in sensual abandon, said, So, this Juliet, she's like 13, right?
And, of course, everyone started laughing because, I mean, that would be the worst guy you'd want to put in the modern world next to a 13-year-old.
But, you know, this was all perfectly possible and not unknown, of course, at all.
In the past, what we think of as children, up to sort of the age of 16 or 19, We're perfectly capable of leading very advanced intellectual and romantic and sexual lives after puberty, which of course is exactly how nature designed them, right?
I mean, puberty is not early, right?
I mean, our capacity to get married is late, right?
Because we're all just so retarded from being baked under the stupefying sun of public education.
So, I think that would be a much better approach.
Now, what would that cost?
Well, if you look at, you know, more individualized education, let's just say that it's more expensive.
I mean, I've got no problem with that, right?
So, let's just say you've got, I don't know, six kids in a classroom instead of 28 or whatever.
Or maybe it's even one-on-one, who knows, right?
But all you do is you've amortized that, it's going to be more expensive, maybe it's twice or three times the cost up front, but so what, right?
If you get a kid out of the workforce at 13, then, you know, instead of them having to wait till they're 19 or 18, you've got an extra five years of labor, which is going to more than pay for any of the expenses that they incurred by having more individualized learning when they were younger.
And even if they don't end up, maybe they end up going into higher education and everyone gets a university degree by the time that they're 17 instead of 23 or 22 or whatever.
Then you get an extra five years of working, but you get the extra five years of working, sort of 17 to 22 or 23, five or six years extra of working when you already have a university degree and your pay is going to be that much higher and so on.
And of course, you know, I'm not sort of suggesting that you have to get married at 13 or anything like that, but it would certainly be a possibility and, you know, not that economically relevant other than, you know, it would sort of cut down on teen pregnancy, unwed pregnancy and so on.
And those who get married tend to do economically better than those who don't.
I can certainly testify to that, having married a financial genius in my wife and, you know, much richer now than I ever was when I had my own money.
So, these are just sort of options or possibilities.
There are also things, of course, like remote learning, like self-directed learning, like on-the-job training.
You know, once you've figured out, look, I'm never going to be a mathematician.
I don't like math.
I'm not very good at it.
Then, you know, you can cut that crap right out of your curriculum and then you can focus a lot more on the stuff that you know you're going to be good at.
If you look also at something like the computer industry or the computer software industry, a lot of people in that industry are self-taught, and a lot of them have arts degrees.
And why?
Well, because software is just another kind of language.
It's one of the reasons why I'm so good at it.
People say, oh, you never take training, and you don't like math, and yet you're really great at computer programming.
Sure, I mean, I've written entire development architectures for other programmers to work in.
And I've written sort of report wizards and query building wizards and database, metadata table-driven database interfaces and, you know, web interfaces that inherit from Windows interfaces, the forms, drop-downs, data navigation, query forms and all that.
So, I mean, that's stuff that I just have a good knack for and it's because it's language-based.
So, I mean, I loved computers from the first time that I ever started playing around with them at the age of 11.
And I never took a course for a variety of reasons.
I actually took one course, but it was a punch card course, which I failed.
But I knew that it was going to be something to do with language, something to do with the arts, and something to do with computers.
I knew that at the age of 10 or 11.
If I'd been able to specialize even earlier, and I knew by the age of sort of six that I didn't have any interest in math and I was never going to be a scientist.
And yet I still had to keep going for another, oh lord, what was it, twelve grueling years.
And also I had to take French and all these other things that I just... I wasn't going to be a biologist.
I wasn't going to be a physicist.
I wasn't going to be a polyglot.
I wasn't going to be a mathematician.
And yet I continued to have to keep taking all this crap That was just sort of painful and stupid and humiliating and annoying and so on.
And I was never allowed to choose my own specialties earlier on, although it was perfectly clear to anyone with a brain what it was I was good at and what it was I wasn't good at, and where I should focus my time and energies.
So if you look at all of the waste that goes on in that area where you have kids Who, you know, are forced into these topics that they just have no aptitude for or interest in.
It's sort of ridiculous.
So that's an enormous waste of time and energy.
And so, you know, all of this kind of stuff is just so ridiculously inefficient and so obviously bureaucrat-driven and union-driven that there's so many other possibilities about how education could work And of course, on-the-job training we've only sort of touched on.
On-the-job training is where I got my computer science expertise.
Everything that I learned to program, I learned to program while I was being paid to do it.
And that's fairly important.
Obviously, it's much, much better to get an education when you're being paid to do it rather than paying to do it and then hoping that you can get a job and hoping that the job market is the same when you get out of your educational area than it was when you went in, right?
So you had a four-year computer science degree.
If you went in sort of in the year 1998 and graduated in 2002, you're kind of hosed, right?
So you've really got to roll the dice when it comes to getting a big education and then finding out later if you can actually sustain I've never taken any courses on business.
I've never taken any courses on management.
I've never taken any courses on computer science and so on or sales or marketing.
Yet I've had primary director and above-level responsibility for all these areas at one time or another in my career, because, you know, I'm a fast learner, I'm willing to be instructed, I love getting mentored, I'm open to... I mean, I have a lot of self-doubt in areas where I haven't thought a lot, and even in other areas, of course, self-doubt never completely goes away, because that would be kind of psychotic, right?
I mean, doubt is an essential aspect of the scientific method and of, you know, mental growth and emotional growth.
But I would manage to sort of get myself paid and paid pretty well to do all of these things.
Did that mean some overtime?
Sure.
Did that mean sort of travel and having to travel at Sunday morning at 6 a.m.
sometimes for a Monday meeting in the middle of nowhere?
Sure, but so what?
You know, that's a heck of a lot better than having to spend You know, two years getting an MBA or four years getting a marketing degree or whatever, and end up praying to God that the field was still in higher demand when I graduated.
So these are all other options, right?
I mean, if I was interested in being a computer programmer, and I love computers from the age of, say, six, Then wouldn't it sort of make sense to, you know, when I'm 9 or 10 or 11 years old, given that my self-esteem hasn't been broken by, you know, dull public school education and, you know, people trying to force a round peg into a square hole by making me have to study things that I have no aptitude for or interest in, why not?
Why shouldn't I get a job?
I mean, I got my first job when I was 11 and I enjoyed it thoroughly.
Actually, I worked in a bookstore putting the New York Times together on Sundays and it was a great job because I got books for free, of course.
Not because I stole them, but because there was this policy that, you know, if you rip the covers off book and send them back, then they're remaindered and so on.
I don't know if it was ethical.
You know, I'm probably not in hindsight, although I didn't know that at the time.
But I had my first job and I've worked continuously since I was 11 and there's nothing wrong with it.
It was a perfectly valid thing to have.
I had that job and I had tons of other jobs.
I worked in a convenience store.
I had a paper route.
I worked as a waiter.
I worked in a hardware store for a number of years.
I worked in a daycare.
These are all in my teens.
Nothing wrong with that at all.
Children are really competent.
You just have to give them the opportunity and they take the responsibility.
They like it.
Because it's, you know, fundamentally healthy to continue to expand your skills.
That's how life gets, you know, stays interesting, and that's how you continue to progress.
You know, you don't want to keep playing the same bad tennis player.
You want to continue to get better tennis players because progress is fun.
Mastering new things is fun.
So, I mean, I have no doubt, just based on my own personal experience, that I could have been Productively in the workforce by by puberty You know married by 15 and a grandfather at 17.
No, I could have been Productively in the workforce much earlier much more sorry much earlier, but to a much greater degree than I was and You know if I just simply been alive since I self-specialized Anyway, I ended up, you know being drawn towards the things that I was good at then I could have done that much earlier I could have been mentored in the way that I am in the business world and I could have earned money at the same time There's so many options that could be explored that would be so much more beneficial to society.
Assuming that the current system of jamming 30 kids in a room like they're all photocopies of each other is the best approach.
We know for sure it's not.
It's not the best approach because it's surrounded by barbed wire, guns, bombs and the police.
through the agency of taxation that we know for sure it is absolutely not the best and most optimum solution.
You know, one possibility that I sort of talked about here is, you know, I mean, as I've mentioned, you know, get them more close attention for a couple of years and then, you know, they can do self-study, they can do specialization in university, they can get on-the-job training, they can join the trades, and then you're not wasting everybody's time with all of this nonsense where you're just humiliating children and destroying their self-confidence, self-esteem, and self...
Self-sense of self-efficacy by forcing them to do things that they don't want to do and have no interest in, you know, that's ridiculous.
And of course it's enormously expensive, both in terms of the sort of $6,000 a year, which I think it's up to now in Canada to educate a child every year.
Not even counting the national debt.
So it's enormously expensive from that standpoint, but think of all of the opportunity that is lost for people to sort of make some extra bucks, get into the workforce quicker, and have a sort of head start in the real sense, based on where they are now, which is sort of stultified in this childlike existence.
Forever.
Which, you know, it seems like forever when you're in it.
I hope that that's helpful.
I think that that's sort of all I'll do on education for now, although it is a fascinating topic, and if you have other things that you think would be worth discussing, please, as always, feel free to let me know.
And I hope you have a fantastic weekend!
Thanks so much for listening, as always.
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