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Nov. 3, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:10:07
1498 Liberty Roundtable #1: the State and Education

A rousing discussion between Wes Bertrand and Brett Veinotte.

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Well hello everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio and we have arranged Wes Bertrand Russell, Brett Easton, Alice Vignard, and Stefan Molyneux to join us on a Liberty Roundtable.
We have also cunningly arranged the video windows so that it is, I believe, youth to cryptkeeper age, I think, from left to right, so we can look at the various advanced stages of liberty decryptitude as we move through the video cycle.
So I'd just like to thank Wes and Brett a great deal for agreeing to or suggest, I think it was Brett who suggested the video chat, which I think is a great idea.
And it's just a free-for-all discussion of thoughts that we have about liberty politically, economically, personally, socially, educationally.
And so thanks very much for joining us, guys.
And I thought, Wes and Brad, if you guys wanted to introduce yourselves, mention your website, because I'll probably put this on the Freedom Main Radio channel.
So I'd like for people to be able to find you if this is the first time they're meeting you.
Great. I guess I'll start first.
My name's Wes Bertrand, and my website is completeliberty.com, and I wrote a book called Complete Liberty.
So it's basically portraying a society without coercion, a voluntary society, and then contrasting that with the madness that we see today.
So it's kind of painting a vision of what It's a short book, but it's covering all the bases of what we discuss about personal and political freedom.
I also wrote a book called The Psychology of Liberty.
Which deals with kind of the whole philosophical spectrum, A to Z. I wrote that just a couple of years after immersing myself in Ayn Rand's objectivism and, of course, ferreting out the contradictions there, especially in politics.
So I've been having the Complete Liberty podcast for, I guess, about a year and a half, maybe coming up on two years.
And Brett's been a co-host numerous times.
We did a whole series on education.
Thanks. My name is Brett The Knot.
I'm the host of School Sucks podcast and right now my website is edulution.com and within the next couple of months that will probably be redesigned to be something a little bit larger and a little bit more forum friendly.
But I'll keep it nice and short.
That's my introduction there. So, Wes, you had a book that you've been reading or a topic that you had been interested in recently that you had talked about bringing up in this chat?
Yeah, I thought we would start out by talking about some of the ideas in this book by Alfie Cohn, Punished by Rewards.
He's written quite a few books about social dynamics, and I really like this one because it delves into the kind of the empirical side of We're good to go.
One is parenting and childhood, and the other is education, and the other one is in the workplace, like incentive plans and pay raises and stuff to motivate employees to do things.
And of course, we're all familiar with the political realm, which Conan doesn't really address, where they use laws as a form of punishment to get desired behavior.
And I just had a psychology meetup group here last Sunday And we kind of kick these ideas around, but I think they're just pervasive, and they're hardly ever made explicit, and, you know, it's something that is responsible for the way that people interact with each other and the society we live in,
because they are full-on fearful of authority, and they obey authority instinctively almost, and this is the process by which people get enslaved in society, right?
No, and I think you're right, and I think that, or the author is right, and you're both right, but I've never, ever been a fan of the punishment and reward system, and it goes all the way back to religion, right, with heaven and hell.
But the punishment and reward system fundamentally has at its basis the premise that people don't want to be good, that students don't want to learn, that children don't want to behave, that fundamentally human nature, in a sense, is cursed by oppositional defiant disorder, so to speak.
I just use that term as an amateur, of course, but human nature is cursed by this and because we are defiant and we are willful and we want to set fire to kittens and we want to rape trees and all this kind of stuff, we need this heavy clampdown of hierarchical authority to keep us restrained or pointed in the right and wrong way.
My daughter is ten and a half months old, so I'm still early in the parenting thing, but I'm not using any punishment and reward because I assume, and so far it's been entirely the case, that she wants to please her parents, that she wants to explore. I mean, obviously I need to keep her safe and so on.
But the idea of using punishments and rewards to get her to do what I want her to do, it would be entirely foreign to both my nature and my philosophy.
And so far it's been working beautifully.
I mean, she never cries, she's very affectionate, she's very happy, she's very secure.
I really dislike the idea that people are fundamentally broken or bad or willful or disobedient and therefore we need punishments and rewards.
I think quite the opposite is true.
When we have a society based upon punishment and rewards, people become Willful and defiant and evasive and slimy in a way, and they're always trying to either manipulate or evade or get their hooks into the power of authority.
But I think its cause and effect is entirely reversed.
People dislike being good because being good is something that you are rewarded for and punished for if you're not, which is a control mechanism that strips, I think, the dignity and choice from people in a terrible way.
Yeah, and Cohen actually contrasts it with intrinsic motivation.
Sorry, Brett, go ahead.
I was just going to say that it's so verbatim.
It takes so many forms as well.
I'm sure you've both watched the game that parents like to play with young children where they try to force them to eat a certain quantity of food or a certain type of food in exchange for the privilege of eating some other type of food after that.
I mean, that's just...
I watch that, you know, multiple times a week.
But, obviously, that's just reform.
We could get into school and we could see this just go absolutely wild, but I think we will.
So, go ahead, Wes. Yeah, because the fundamental distinction is Intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivation.
Operant conditioning and pot behaviorism is based on extrinsic rewards and punishments as a means to get someone to do something.
So there is that lopsided one-way street of morality being imposed on people.
With the rationalization that human beings can't be autonomous, they can't make their own decisions, they can't self-regulate, which just begs the question as to the people that are imposing these things, are they special?
Are they somehow different than everyone?
But I think that, and there was a couple parents at this meetup that I had, That were really trying to justify the way that they dealt with their kids and were still dealing with their kids.
Like one of the women had a son that's going to Berkeley and apparently he can't even choose what major he wants without consulting her.
So she's always offered help, more than enough help, and I think The main issue was he has not learned the skill by which to make his own decisions.
And so if a parent thinks that the person, the little child, can't make their own decisions, it becomes self-fulfilling prophecy because they step in and then the child never learns that skill to make their own decisions and to self-regulate.
Right. And I mean, again, I'm not going to claim to be any kind of parenting expert, but You know, just looking at the expansion of skills that children develop.
I mean, my daughter is, you know, just starting to sort of a totter walk at the moment and so on.
And you never want her to get hurt, of course, right?
And so there's, you know, at the beginning of a child's life, you need to keep the child safe and protected and warm and so on.
And she's also eating adult food now, right?
So we can give her a whole meal of just adult food.
And we're obviously concerned, like all parents are, about choking hazards and so on.
But we don't want to just feed her soup for the rest of her life because she's not supposed to choke, right?
There is a certain amount of you have to give her some latitude to fall and give her some latitude to make mistakes.
And so there is a sort of process where you push your own comfort boundary levels as a parent, and that's something which I think parents need to sort of recognize and work with productively, rather than just say, well, I'm not going to let him make his decisions because he's not good at making decisions.
And you're right, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
You're actually robbing the child of the right, so to speak, to make wrong decisions, which is an essential part of learning how to live.
Yeah, it is so pervasive, the idea that without having a ruler over the child, they're just going to eat donuts 24-7 or play video games seven days a week.
That is just so pervasive that without that parental discipline, they're just going to turn out to be wrecks.
And what they turn out to be is obedient and not thinking for themselves and having less self-esteem and then recapitulating that process, the intergenerational transfer, where they grow up to be adults and they do the same thing.
But what do you think it is that it's almost second nature for adults to step in and assist the child rather than letting them kind of figure it out?
Well, Brett, I'm sure, will have a lot to say, so I'll just touch on it very briefly.
But I can imagine that it's got something to do with an ego investment of the parent into the child, right?
So if my child seems, you know, advanced or smart or is doing the right thing, then I feel good as a human being.
It reflects well on me.
Whereas if my child is not doing something right or is doing something that's sort of, you know, considered dumb or bad or whatever, then that reflects badly on me.
So I think it's a vanity thing on the part of the parent.
I mean, as a parent, I will let my daughter crawl across the floor in a store because she loves to explore.
I take her to, like, electronic stores.
She just loves them. She's got this little toy where she goes behind and it's a push-wheeling thing and she just goes racing down the aisle, stops, You know, tears apart some display, which I then patiently put back together.
And I've had some people who come up and say, you know, they'll say things to you like, she should have rubber shoes on, she's going to fall, right?
And like I'm some, you know, oh yeah, I just let her topple over like the Tower of Pisa, right?
Or they'll say, you know, there's dirt on the floor, you know, you shouldn't let her, you know, pick, you know, but it's like, I got a sanitizer, I can spray her hands when she's done, she's fine, right?
She's never actually even had a cold.
And so I think that if people are not comfortable with either the self-criticism or the external criticism that comes from giving your child latitude, then they will control the child's behavior, either because they're concerned about criticisms from other people or because they feel that the child's behavior will reflect badly on them.
And the last thing, which I won't be able to answer for a couple of years, is I was just saying this to my wife the other day.
I don't know how she's going to sit in a classroom for six hours a day because she's such a go-getter explorer.
How does a child fit in society where most of the children are raised with sort of kibbles and whips, so to speak?
How does a child fit into a structure that's really designed to accommodate those kinds of children if you're going to give the child complete latitude?
I don't have the answer to that at the moment, but I think that would be it.
But I'm sure Brett has much more intelligent stuff to add because of his experience with kids in this area.
Well, I would just think, from my experience, from my line of work, I come to know a lot of young people from like middle school on up to high school.
Because as a tutor, I'm called in if grades slip, things like that, and I find that the parents are so much, they're hovering around their children's entire life already.
They call these helicopter parents.
I don't know if you guys have heard that term before.
You know, just sort of a continuous hovering over everything that their child is doing.
And I think part of it, Steph, is the enmity on their part, but I think part of it is their own good intentions for their child mixed in, but they just have never given any consideration as far as how do I treat this smaller or younger person with the same respect that I would treat An adult.
They don't know how to do it.
They've never considered it.
A lot of times it seems that the parents...
You know, sometimes it seems like the parents almost view the child as their property.
And it can be a source of...
I've had a couple of instances where the parent expressed a lot of embarrassment over what the child didn't know or what the child was struggling in in school.
So I did see that was like a major vanity issue for the parent if the child's perceived lack of knowledge or lack of expertise in a certain subject was showing up as embarrassment or shame for the parent.
So I think there's two things at work there, and I think there are some good intentions mixed in, but just good intentions powered by cluelessness as far as how to respect a young person is concerned.
Yeah, it's almost as if they see the child as a piece of clay to be molded in their vision rather than an autonomous person deserving of equal respect.
And I guess because of the physical differences in size, that power relationship just creates that imbalance in somewhat of a natural way, because parents naturally have authoritativeness, but they lack trust in themselves to I don't know, set a good example to be a good model.
So they transfer that lack of trust onto the child and they do the helicopter hovering around them.
And I think a good question to have the child ask of the parent is, or the parent can ask the child, do you feel that I trust you?
Do you feel trusted? Like, do you feel that I trust your decisions?
And I think nine times out of ten, most kids would say no in family environments.
And if you look at it in the educational context, if you want to bring it into that realm, it's all about lack of trust.
Because, you know, if you're not crammed into a classroom with a whole bunch of your peers and told what to study, you're just going to, you know, become a loser, right?
Right, right. And I think podcasters have a different vision of people's commitment to education than most, I guess, teachers in the public school system would.
Because we all do shows which are dense and challenging and complicated and highly conceptual and difficult to implement in your life.
And there is a real hunger out there.
And of course, we're not granting degrees.
We're not paying people to take these courses.
We're not promising heaven and hell.
In fact, a kind of social hell can come out of really thinking philosophically.
So I think we have a different view of people's desire to learn and to understand the world.
And it struck me, just as you guys were talking, that there are two classes or two relationships or two classes of people who are still treated with the stick and the carrot outside of the world of religion, which we would never accept in any other realm, right?
So it would be crazy for a husband to say, well, you know, I... I will yell at my wife if she does something wrong, but then I'll buy her a necklace if she does something right because I want to reinforce good behavior and diminish bad behavior.
That would just be a sexist pig of the century thing to say.
It used to be the case where when slavery was around, there would be particular minorities.
Well, they have to be slaves because they have no incentive and blah, blah, blah.
It's like, well, of course they have no incentives.
They're slaves, right? And so all of that is gone, where you'd say, well, I have to beat my slaves if they don't do anything right, and then I'll give them an extra meal if they do something right.
We all recognize that that's terrible, but there really is only two spheres of life, in the West at least, where this remains, and that is the relationship between parent and child, in many cases, though not all, and in almost all cases between state and citizen, this idea that There's this sort of willful disobedience, primitiveness, and therefore we need this system of punishment and rewards in order to achieve desired behavior.
I have argued...
I've argued for a long time in my podcast that it's not accidental that it's parent-child and state-citizen.
I think that those two things are kind of intertwined.
But I can't think of another other than maybe, well, teacher-pupil is very much state future citizen, I suppose, in the public school system.
I can't think of any other place where that sort of punishment and reward system goes on that way.
Work is not kind of the same thing because there is sort of a mutual exchange of value in terms of labor and salary.
Can you guys think of any other in terms of that, you know, really hyper-controlled punishment-reward situation?
Well, I know Cohen, again, focuses on parenting and education and the workplace, and of course, we've focused on politics.
I think that pretty much covers all the bases.
What do you think, Brett? Yeah, I would say so.
I mean, you know, there...
I would have added the...
I find the student-teacher...
Relationship to be like parent-child relationship light.
You know what I mean? I agree with you, Steph.
I think we've certainly covered all the bases where a relationship like that exists in our society today, for sure.
Yeah, I think that, you know, the parent-child and citizen-state just fit together perfectly, because it all revolves around lack of trust and human autonomy, right, and sovereignty, because if you ask the typical parent what happens when you don't discipline your child, well, they go crazy, right?
The disciplining is going to calm them down anyway.
It's just going to send the message that they're not able to think and judge for themselves and take respectful action.
And then, of course, if you get rid of government, then you have anarchy, right, and chaos.
People are just doing crazy things in the streets.
So it's the same sort of psychological model that people have in their heads.
Right, like we're these crazy, feral animals, and we need to be chained and drugged in order to get through the day, because otherwise, you know, our heads are going to spin, there's going to be lava and fire shooting out of our necks, and, you know, trees and birds are going to explode, and it's just complete, it's the argument from Apocalypse, which you often hear whenever you talk about freedom, right?
The idea of taking the chains off humanity, it's like, you know, unbinding the demon in the heart or something, you know, it's just going to come out like Charles Manson out of your eyeballs or something and stare down the world.
It's a It's a crazy argument, but it does, I think, come from a big problem within society that I really do sympathize with parents a great deal about this.
We have a great deal of difficulty educating children as a society because our society is founded on such enormous sanctimonious layers of bullshit that it's really hard to educate children in an intelligent way.
As I've mentioned a couple of times in podcasts, if you are a public school teacher and you say to a kid, don't hit.
Violence is not the way to solve problems.
Then any intelligent kid is going to say, well, wait a sec, aren't my parents forced to pay for your salary and you're two months off in the summer and this, that, and the other?
So doesn't violence solve problems for you?
Why does it not solve problems for me, but it solves problems for you?
And those basic questions which children will inevitably and very accurately and perceptively ask, those inevitable questions really can't be answered by society.
And so as a result, we can't teach our children how to think.
Because when we teach our children how to think, We are holding a mirror up to ourselves, and very often we don't like that sort of cryptkeeper thing that looks back at us, the hypocrisy and falsehoods that we have founded our society on.
And so we kind of have to distract them and sometimes drug them and keep them bored and keep them alienated.
And so as a result, they don't like us, in a sense, as educators, as a society.
And then we feel, well, we need all these controls.
But it really comes down to the fact that society doesn't have Many good reasons for what it does and we really don't want to face those questions and so we kind of have to channel the young into places where they're just not going to ask those questions if that makes any sense.
Yeah, and I think the typical response of the authority figure is, do what I say, not what I do, right?
Or do as I say. And of course, that just reveals the lack of integrity.
But somehow that's justifiable because there are things, some things in life that you just have to do, right?
And that process of coping with external injunctions and, you know, forced edicts from other people is just things that you have to go through, and that's supposedly called an education.
And I remember, I think it was John Holt that said, only in just a screwed up educational system would you threaten to impose more learning, i.e.
homework, As a punishment for not learning.
It's just so insane.
It's upside down. And I think my favorite phrase from all the educational stuff that I've read is from Maria Montessori, the famous educator from Italy, who has quite a following.
I mean, lots of Montessori schools throughout the United States now.
Not many of them actually practice what she preached.
They basically start Selling out different principles based on what parents are anxious about in terms of discipline and all that and assignments.
But she did say this.
She said that the child has a teacher within.
And I think if there's one thing that adults need to integrate, it is that.
The child is a self-learner.
They're a little scientist. And they're going to learn in spite of all the other stuff that's imposed on them.
There's another book that I recommend as well called the Teenage Liberation Handbook, where these...
What you just said, Wes, was covered as far as the...
The learner has the built-in teacher.
You know, teachers and the public school bureaucrats and the politicians that pontificate about public education are great at leading in front of that parade that young people do through their own curiosity and through their own individuality when they're young, do manage to learn quite a few things.
But just to continue what Steph was saying, 12 years is plenty of time to solve the curiosity problem in young people.
Like, how many questions can you ask?
How many why questions can you really ask when the answer is, because I said so, because that's the rule, because that's the law, with no other explanation?
Before all the why questions that a young person has just dries up in adolescence.
And I think we certainly see that happen through public education as well.
Yeah, if you were to look, Brett, at the typical classroom, whether it's private or public, what do you think the percentages are of kids asking the teacher questions versus the teacher asking questions of the kids?
And that includes exams, of course.
Well, it depends on what kind of questions, because there's plenty of questions that are more than just acceptable in a public school.
Like, I don't understand why, you know, line segment A, B is equal to line segment B, C. Can you explain that?
Like, that's a totally acceptable question.
Or, you know, how do I conjugate this verb in Latin class?
But, like, if the question was, like, What the hell am I doing here?
Now you've kind of stepped into, why am I here all day?
I haven't learned anything in years.
Then you would be kind of in the realm of unacceptable questions.
But as far as students, when you ask that question, do you mean questioning what they're being told by the teacher?
You know, the nature of the educational methods that are used, it would seem to me that...
Say in an unschooling environment where the kid is learner-directed, they're self-directed in their learning process, they're going to seek out a resource, i.e.
a teacher, to pick their brain, to ask questions.
And if you look at, like, in the workplace, an apprenticeship, it's a similar sort of model of interacting with someone that has more knowledge.
They're asking the questions, whereas in the typical classroom, it's the teacher that's asking the students questions.
And in my experience throughout high school and college, it's like, When a teacher or professor asks a question, it's pretty much silence.
It's crickets, you know?
And then there's maybe one or two students that will say something.
But it's almost like if you probably talk to teachers, it's really hard to get information out of the students.
It's like they clam up and they're not really curious.
But the teachers never really realize that the method of education is responsible for that.
I was just going to say, they ask questions like, does this have to be on the test?
What do we have to know for the exam?
Those are the questions that are asked.
Right, right. Even the question of, when am I ever going to need the notice, is rarely asked.
I mean, the kid who asks that question in school is the oppositional defiant one.
He's the one who...
His mom needs to take him to CVS to fill a prescription if he's asking questions like that.
There's, you know, emotional disturbance there in the eyes of a school psychologist.
But, no, I don't think students have ever...
And obviously I'm generalizing, but I don't think typically students question the methodology at all.
Like, they're...
I think as you put it one time, Seth, a fish in water doesn't know it's in water.
So they...
They have no clue that there's any alternatives.
I mean, I guess they know they go to a public school and rich kids go to a private school and children of lunatics, complete lunatics, homeschooled.
I think that's pretty much the framework that most children understand when they're going through the public school system.
Yeah, the idea of asking a teacher, can you explain this curriculum to me?
Can you explain why am I learning this?
Why are my classes set up this way?
Why am I learning this this year?
Why am I learning this? What is the end goal of what it is that I'm...
The idea of asking that, which...
I mean, children ask that of every other sphere, right?
Why do I have to do this? Why do I have to do that?
Why do I got to do this? Why do I got to do that?
But the idea of... I think children are very...
Sensitive to asking questions that really make adults uncomfortable.
I mean, they're very sensitive to that, I think.
And I think that they get that these are just not questions that you ask because it's really going to make people upset with you.
And I think also there's something I think that's not humble about adults in society with relation to children.
Statistically, children get smarter every single generation.
My daughter is going to be way smarter than I am.
Thank heavens. I think that's great.
Also, she won't have to wait until she's in her mid-teens to start thinking reasonably.
I hope I'll at least be able to teach her some good thinking practices ahead of time.
Plus, she's got exposure to much higher quality entertainment.
I mean, the stuff that you can buy for your kids to play with these days is Astonishing.
You know, I had to, you know, hey, here's a pair of old skates, have some fun.
It's like, but we don't have any ice.
Anyway, so, you know, she's got much better stimulation.
I hope she's got better parenting than I had.
Genetically, she's just, people get smarter in the same way that we generally get taller as a species as time goes forward.
And I'm sort of really aware of that as a parent.
I have to plan that my child is going to outstrip me intellectually, probably in her early to mid-teens.
And in some ways, she's going to outstrip me ahead of time before that.
I mean, I'm excited about all this because she just used her first correct word today at ten and a half months, right?
I was teaching her all afternoon egg, you know, because I'm making her an egg so I can feed her the yolk.
And my wife came home and I said, oh, I was teaching her the word egg, right?
And so, you know, we showed her the egg, my daughter, and she said the word egg.
And I said, but I don't think she really gets what an egg is, right?
Because blah, blah, blah, right? And then my wife had her on her hip and she was taking the egg and putting it in the fridge.
And she picked up the egg and my daughter said, egg.
And it's like, so she got it, right?
And ten and a half months is, you know, pretty good, I think.
Certainly faster than I was.
The idea that I'm going to be able to instruct my child, because of my lofty and superior knowledge, wisdom and intelligence, when she has access to the internet from, you know, pretty much day one, and I didn't get it until I was in my twenties, there's no way in hell that I'm ever going to be able to stay ahead of her.
And I think that humility, that I have as much to learn from her, because she has a much more advanced view of the world than I did at her age, and in some ways even now, Because she won't have to unlearn the things that I had to unlearn.
She's going to have a great deal to bring to me as a human being, even now, but from the moment that she can start speaking, she's going to ask those kinds of questions that I was never allowed to ask when I was a kid, and that's going to be really stimulating for me.
I just really like to think of it as more of a teamwork thing rather than a top-down, let me tell you about the world, because I got so much wrong about the world for so long, it's embarrassing, and she, I don't think, is going to have the same issues.
And I think we need that humility to recognize that it is a two-way learning experience to be around a child.
Yeah, in a month or two, Stefan, she'll be saying the incredible edible egg Incredible edible egg, right.
And then, you know, because sometimes different skill sets go, she'll try and eat it through the shell.
Because, you know, sometimes it doesn't all go lockstep and barrel.
Yeah. She'll be asking for the eggs that have the omega-3 fatty acids in them, because they're better for you, Dad.
All right. If I came from an egg, am I eating a baby?
Yeah, something like that. Yeah.
I think that one of the themes that's missed on a lot of people that have been reared in an environment of operant conditioning is doing what you want versus what someone else tells you to do.
And that inner guidance system is just stripped of people, you know, from the family environment, from the educational system, and then into politics.
It's... It's a situation that is multifaceted how you go about fixing this, but I think you're right about the Internet.
The memes are going to be spreading so much faster, and we can't even predict when the tipping point is going to happen, because these things are flying, and it won't be too long until most people will at least become aware of these ideas, if not understanding them.
Well, I think that's right.
Sorry, Brett, I'm talking too much.
You go ahead. I'm being very rude. I apologize.
Go on. I just quickly want to say I think it's interesting how All of this extrinsic motivation that people deal with as they're going through school, certainly that answers the question that I think both of you were asking about why children aren't more challenging about both the methodology and, you know, what's going on in school generally and why they have to be there.
There's no extrinsic reward for those questions.
You know, there's no cookie.
There's no sticker. There's no check plus.
There's no A for asking those kind of questions.
It's all that there is is a stick for that.
And I think it's interesting, too, how that scales up to adult society and to political life as well.
I've often heard people use interesting phrases to sort of ascribe goodness to themselves, like to say, I'm a law-abiding citizen.
Like, if somebody writes it down on paper, if a stranger writes it down on paper, I'm doing it.
I'm there, no questions for me.
Or, you know, I'm a tax payer.
So these are things that people have come to believe are just ways of showing that they're good.
I'm a law-fighting citizen who pays my taxes.
And I think that that's certainly a product that comes up from extrinsic motivators and awkward conditioning in education as well.
Do you guys agree with that?
I think so. And I think that in the absence of teaching children how to think, right?
Brett, you've mentioned a number of times in your School Sucks podcast that When you teach children some principles of thinking that they're like, oh, I can't believe I went through, you know, 12 years or 10 years of education.
I've never been taught how to think in this way.
And, you know, so teaching methodology, the methodology of thinking, right?
Reasoning from first principles with reference to evidence and, you know, the scientific or Socratic method of questioning and observation and conclusion and testing and hypothesis and all that.
When you teach children how to think, And hierarchies dissolve, because the only thing that then becomes the greatest value is the theory that best approximates the truth.
And that is not a hierarchy, that is a participation in the way that science and conversations like this are a participation.
But when you have a hierarchy, you can't teach a methodology for truth, because the methodology for truth Undoes the hierarchy and then because you can't teach children how to think you have to teach them what to think you have to give them stupid ass memorization exercises and You have to teach them inconsequential facts and a series of meaningless things about history and You have to have to memorize you know speeches and all that kind of junk For no reason whatsoever because you can't teach them how to think so you have to teach them what to think and then they can't think and I think the more that we can teach I don't really talk to children through my show at all,
but if you can teach adults how to think, then when they have kids, or if they have kids already, they hopefully will be able to teach their children how to think.
Once the children know how to think, the argument from authority, from a person who has authority, doesn't win anymore.
Anymore than if I go to a physics conference and say, You should believe my physics theory because I'm me!
They just sort of say, no, that's not even an argument from authority.
That's just an argument from pasty shininess or something, right?
But the argument from authority only works when people don't have an objective methodology for thinking, which is why hierarchical societies such as ours have to keep that methodology away from children as much as possible because it dissolves their authority, both within the family,
I think, but particularly within society or within the school's Yeah, from my frame of reference, I think philosophically the most important task is to rectify or resolve or remedy contradictions that you encounter.
And in most school environments, you run into contradictions the first time you step through the door.
But those aren't even mentioned or noticed or, you know, focused on.
And it's this running roughshod over contradictions and not paying attention to one's internal signals that yields a society that is at a real lower level of awareness.
And they just take the status quo as something that's You know, you have to deal with and there's no sense of, like, trying to achieve something better for yourself and better for society in a fundamentally different way than what people are doing today.
Just one point of clarification.
I made a mistake about that quote.
It was actually not John Holt.
It was Cohn, Alfie Cohn, that wrote about the teachers hold out the possibility of more academic work as a punishment or the possibility of less work as a reward, which drives home the lesson that learning is something a student should want to avoid.
So that's pretty insightful from Cohn, but it could as well have been from Holt, too, because he was so focused on independent learning.
And to me, here in San Diego, there's a woman who's trying to start up a Sudbury Valley School, which I don't know if you're familiar with that, Stefan, but it started in Massachusetts back in the late 60s, and there's a book called The Sudbury Valley School Experience, And the model of educating kids there is one that is basically anarchistic.
There are no rulers.
There are no authorities. The kids make their own decisions.
As a matter of fact, they even decide who's going to be their teachers.
And the nature of the functioning of the school...
And so it's a really brilliant model of the future and the final outcome for what happens when you respect kids and you don't use these operant conditioning methods anymore.
No more carrots, no more sticks, no more grating, no more tests, no more hoops to jump through.
What happens when you take all that away?
Well, you get these spontaneous manifestations, as Montessori said, of kids and they just become independent.
They'll look you in the eye.
They're very You know, forthright and opinionated, and they can think.
But the Achilles heel of this model that this guy Daniel Greenberg set up is he basically swallows the political system hook, line, and sinker.
He writes glowingly about the nature of the American justice system, for example.
It is just amazing, it's astounding that he just falls flat on his face in that regard, because It just shows that if adults can't, when you talk about how to think, if adults don't know how to think, they can't be a model to kids about how to think.
So when I got together with these other parents and some other adults that want to start this school, I asked them, you know, so why aren't you advocates of a voluntary society?
Because you're advocating it for kids, right?
You're advocating anarchy for kids.
Why not for And it's almost as if they fear that exploration into that realm, because it means now they have to start thinking and passing judgment and, you know, they can't just place the burden on the kids in terms of developing a little security realm for them and the anarchy.
But then when they get into the adult world, And Friedberg actually implements this sort of justice system and meetings, and their coercion starts to seep into the model that he presents so that they can fit into the society at large, right?
So they become slaves to the state, and that's just terribly unfortunate.
And I've been working with her trying to figure out, okay, what is a better way to do this, that we can keep the model as it is in terms of advocating intrinsic motivation for the kids, And then not doing the democratic thing, because Brett and I talked about that on a podcast, this democracy model that he has implemented into the system just undermines the whole nature of independent learning.
Right. I mean, and I'll pass it off to Brett for a more intelligent response, but the first thing that I would say is the people who...
Don't follow through principles into the political realm.
Usually fall into one of two camps, to oversimplify.
The first is a sort of Richard Dawkins camp, which is, you know, he's skeptical, but a statist.
And because he's, you know, funded and paid and, you know, his whole environment is statist, right?
And he's a professor and so on, right?
So it would be kind of tough for him to maintain what he's doing, like Christopher Hitchens, right?
To maintain what he's doing and also to criticize the state would be tough.
Free market economists manage to pull it off, but not many other people can with a clear conscience.
And so that would be maybe they're getting some state funding or state money or whatever.
But the second thing is that, of course, as an alternative school, they are constantly probably concerned or anxious about the possibility of being closed down by the state, of losing a license, of losing some sort of operating grant or operating license.
So it may be that if they taught their children...
And remember, of course, a lot of the parents of these children...
We'll get some form of income or be directly employed by the state, right?
So if you start talking about the state as a coercive, I mean, it has huge ripple effects.
So they just, it might be, you know, here's what we can do with our resources, but, you know, we don't want to, you know, keep poking the lion until it mauls us.
That's one possibility. But I also did want to ask, because, and we have a question from the chat room, which I get to in a sec, but the one thing that I find very interesting about conformity among children is the degree to which it's horizontal and not vertical.
In other words, the degree to which children conform because they're afraid of attacks or ridicule or condemnation or ostracism from other children.
And how do you think? I've never really been able to figure out how that in particular is taught.
How does that come about so seamlessly that you get this kind of horizontal slavery, in a sense?
And the hierarchy definitely profits from it, but it really does seem to be very horizontal, and I'm not really sure how that comes about.
I wonder if you guys have had any thoughts or experiences in that area.
Brett, you've probably seen quite a bit of this in your classes.
Well, I've never taught in a public school, but I think that that milieu is really what's responsible for that across-the-board but I think that that milieu is really what's responsible for And it's obviously a gradual process.
It obviously takes time for, and I think it really, Wes and I were talking about this on my show a couple weeks ago, but I think it really ramps up as we're going through high school.
We're just absolutely terrifying to not fit in, to not be able to work yourself in appearance and action to a certain click.
But how is it actually taught in a sort of top-down manner?
I think that it's interesting because the book that I referenced a couple of times was written in 1919 by Alexander Inglis, who was one of the John Dewey horseman camp educationists, talked about This integrating function of education that would be very,
and he doesn't really elaborate, but how it would be very seamlessly integrated itself into the curriculum, into the way that the school marched along through each day.
But one of the things that English talked about was how This integrating function, to make everybody part of the same homogeneous population, to deal with the issue of religious differences in the 1800s and early 1900s, to deal with the problem of all kinds of ways of immigration, or immigration from all different places in the first two decades of the 20th century.
He also saw this differentiating function, sort of this These were not his words.
These are the words that I would use to describe.
It was sort of divide and conquer.
And if you kept people moving through the same type of routine, but you found you were ever developing new ways to separate them and divide them and isolate them, that somehow the integrating piece would become even more seamless.
Does that make sense? I mean, I... I think there's a sort of ebb and flow between those two pieces, integrating and differentiating.
So mixing together, like isolation within, you know, these two massive people.
Right, right. Oh, I think we just lost one of our, we just lost Wes, but I'll invite him back in and just see if we can get him back in.
Oh, I think he's crashed.
All right, so now let's talk about Wes.
No, I'm just kidding. Finally!
We have had two questions from the chat room and I'll let you take a swing at them if you do not mind.
Somebody has asked, can you discuss lying to children specifically involving the rationalization that they can't understand?
This is in the realm of truth and God and society and so on.
And there have been a number of studies recently that have come out that It can be quite surprising the degree to which adults lie to children.
Parents lie to children, adults lie to children or misdirect them or avoid their questions.
Have you had any sort of experience with that or seen that in action or have any idea as to why that might be so prevalent?
Yeah, I think You know, I had two parents that I felt like when I was growing up with would try to give me honest answers to the questions that I would have as a little boy, but certainly there were times in my own childhood and really throughout my life where I've seen that and the parent is very much playing a role with the child.
I think I kind of talked about that earlier as far as Almost viewing the child as their property.
Let's see if I can put Wes back in here.
You keep talking.
I'll see when he comes back online, and I'll put him back in.
So go ahead. Okay.
But... There's certainly some fear and apprehension on the part of parents that they need to make up answers to questions if they don't know the answers.
You know, I don't know is not a good answer to give to a child, especially if it's an important question.
So I think that obviously things like religion, And law have provided excellent shortcuts towards looking not only like the authority, but also like a sort of intellectual authority to the child by, well, the Bible says this or the law says that.
And, you know, that's it.
Right, so you don't have to, when the question is, you know, what is goodness and why should I be good, which is a very fundamental philosophical question, in a way, the most fundamental philosophical question, so people can say, because Jesus wants you to, or you'll be thrown in jail if you're not, and that's sort of the appearance of an answer that's not really an answer, it's just a substitution of threat for knowledge, which I think is quite tragic.
Oh yeah, it's hell or hell or cell.
I'm going to add him to the conference and see if we can get him back there.
That's really all I had to say about Wes.
He's so tanned, he just looks like a walnut with a nose.
Oh, you're back! Sorry.
You know that's just envy from the guy in Canada.
My tan is pretty good, I've got to admit.
We had just talked a little bit about the degree to which somebody was saying, you know, why is lying to children so prevalent?
And there have been some studies that have recently come out that are quite surprising the degree to which parents and other authority figures around children will simply lie to children many, many times a day about a wide variety of things.
And Brett had just sort of chimed in with his thoughts.
I wondered if you wanted to add anything.
Lying to children, huh?
Around things like God and goodness and what society is about and why you have to obey authority and so on, people will often just make up stuff or misdirect or evade.
Yeah, what you call the invisible apple, making them eat all these invisible apples, right?
Where their perceptions directly contradict what they're being told.
You know, it's just a self-esteem nullifying process, isn't it?
And I wanted to actually make a comment on that previous thread about the process in which kids conform with each other and there's all the peer pressure.
And it reminds me that a movie to watch about this is called Mean Girls, and it's an example of what happens with clicks and so forth.
And actually, Daniel Greenburn talks about This process of getting kids segregated based on age and how that just creates an artificial model of human functioning, because you never really see it in the normal world, the outside world of school.
But the lies that adults voiced on kids are pretty much from almost day one.
Nathaniel Brannan has actually written about this quite a bit, where the self-lies, I think, are the main A starting point of that process.
The adult lies to themselves about what they're doing and the beliefs that they have, and then for some twisted reason they want to foist that lie onto a consciousness that Should be operating in an objective way, but they don't want that to happen.
They want that conscience to be dependent on them for the beliefs and to believe a bunch of nonsense.
And pretty soon you've got people that are worshipping all these hawkshops of authority, right?
Did you guys copy that?
Yep. I was listening and I was just crapping my bookmark of the study and I obviously won't read.
A new study by the University of Toronto shows that almost all parents lie, even the ones who say that honesty is an important trait.
The researchers point out that lying to kids to shape their behavior, expectations, and or beliefs may result in mixed messages, may harm parent-child relations, and may even prevent the child from learning certain rules.
In the study, nearly 130 parents were asked to evaluate a variety of situations in which a parent told the truth or lied to a child to either shape behavior or emotions, In ranking the scenarios presented, nearly 70% of the parents said that they tried to teach honesty to their children, but nearly 80% of the parents also admitted that they lie to their children.
And again, there's a number of studies that have come out recently about this, and it is tragic.
And I don't think it's because the parents are just malevolent, nasty web spinners.
I think they just... I think there are a number of reasons, right?
So if kids ask about God, maybe the parents have different beliefs, or maybe the grandparents have different beliefs, and they don't want to go down that road.
Or if it's about politics, maybe that parents have, or grandparents or extended family have different beliefs.
And because of the fragmentary nature, we are a society in transition, for sure, away from superstition and collectivism and irrationality towards a more philosophical, scientific and rational way of looking at the world.
Because of that, there's a lot of fragmentation of belief within society, which means taking any principle is just going to enormously annoy at least two-thirds of the people in your life if you're lucky.
And I think parents do that to sort of minimize, or they'll just make up.
I was taking my daughter for a walk the other day, and I saw a mom was just coming out of the driveway on a bike with two of her daughters.
And the mom had this sort of big bushy hairdo that I'm sure was quite a lot of work.
And the daughters had helmets on.
And the daughters said to the mom, they stopped, because the mom didn't have a helmet on, and they said, Mom, you need to put your helmet on.
And she said, No, we're just going around the block.
And they started getting quite upset with their mom.
And they said, Mom, no, no, no.
You told us that you have to put your helmet on at all times when you're biking.
And it's adults and children.
That's what she told us. Right?
That she came up with this. And then she's like, no, no, no.
And I knew, because she didn't want it on, because then she'd have to redo her hair and all that.
But she didn't want to say, you know, I said it was a rule, but now it's not, and here's why, because that makes her job as a parent more complicated.
And I didn't... I normally would stop and say something, but my daughter was getting quite hungry and fussy, so I wanted to bring her home to feed her.
But I could see this very clearly, that the parent...
I had come up with a rule and was now breaking the rule and just wanted to avoid and make up some new rule.
I thought, what a great time to engage your kids in a discussion about rules and cost benefits, right?
That things are more complicated sometimes, but what a missed opportunity to talk about the complexities of some of the decisions that we make, but rather it was just, you know, a hedge and a sort of, ah, you know, it's just around the block.
It doesn't count. Oh, it counts for you, but it doesn't count for me, even though I said it counted for both of us earlier.
And the kids were really getting quite upset about this, and I think I can understand why, because you don't like to think that you're being given rules in order to control you.
You like to think that you're being given rules to sort of help and liberate you and give you good guidelines, not to get you to do what other people want.
Yeah. To bring orders to society, right?
That's what people think in society.
Politics, yeah. We have to have those stoplights, and you can't roll through stop signs, are you kidding me?
There'd be, you know, mass carnage if people disobeyed all those rules, which again is reflective of the fact that people don't trust the self-regulatory, the self-guidance aspects of human awareness, and just my way of the highway rules is typically what we get, huh? Right.
And actually, I did a podcast recently and a video on, I think it was someplace in the Netherlands, where they had such a problem with traffic accidents.
And they tried putting down every single light and lane marker and stop sign.
And they eventually just cleared everything away completely.
And traffic moves like many, many times faster.
There's been a huge drop in accidents because people, they don't rely on external cues.
They actually have to think about what they're doing.
Somebody also asked in the chat room, why do you think that the only fond few times and memories I have of public high school is for some of the art classes?
I had a hippie and quite politically incorrect art professor or teacher.
I liked him for his laissez-faire attitude for art experimentation and so on.
I think a lot of people have had that same experience where there is a kind of self-expression that is available in the arts that does not seem to be available anywhere else.
A lot of people I've talked to about high school do have some fond memories of that.
I was wondering if you guys had any thoughts about that.
Artistry, Brett?
I mean, I never actually had any art in theater classes, but I could definitely see that there's a lot more self-expression going on in those venues than there is in a typical classroom.
I Yeah, it was really, I think, I remember that, too.
And I mean, the teachers that I had for those subjects were horrible.
But I do remember, like, sort of the head depressurizing in those ceramics classes.
I remember we had one creative writing class, and in addition to, obviously, there being far less rigidity and far less expectation of conforming to a certain routine or a certain way of, you know, a certain type of classroom behavior, obviously these classes were far more lax than any other.
But yeah, it was like all of that self-expression, all of that creativity, that originality.
It was like a class where even if you were just trying to do it to amuse your friends, you were trying to be original.
You were trying to be creative.
Even if it was just to make everybody in the class have a good laugh.
It was okay to let loose, to make something funny out of the play, or to write a funny story.
And I think that it's interesting that you said that because I really identify with that.
You know, now I'm thinking about my experience in high school, and there might have been like three or four classes in four years that allowed for something like that.
And really, it was just that all the things, all the ways that we used to be, all of those natural creative instincts that we had when we were little that had just been pressed down get to come out a little bit.
I mean, that was my experience.
Wes, what do you think? Do you agree with that?
Yeah, I think so.
And aren't they mostly pass and fail classes rather than grades in theater and art?
Yeah, and I think if you show up and do something, you pass, right?
Yeah, yeah. How do you grade a work of art, right?
Speaking of grades, I mean, this is one of the big sticks that they use in schools, and most people don't bet an eye at the fact that they use them.
There was a writer in Alfie Cohn's book, Punished by Rewards, that had a great quote.
I put this in my Psychology of Education section in the Psychology of Liberty section.
And he wrote, But other than that, it was for them, right? If I understand.
If I'm reading between the fogs there, yeah.
Exactly. So why not have them, right?
Yeah, no, I mean, I think that the art side of things is around exploration and so on, and the pass-fail stuff, I mean, there is stuff that is right and wrong in the world, right?
Two plus two is four, you know, as opposed to a unicorn or five.
So there is stuff that is right and wrong.
wrong.
The problem with the pass/fail stuff is it externalizes your desire to get things correct to rewards and punishment.
That is a shame because when you externalize people's judgments, they remain dependent upon authority.
That's sort of the point, right?
When you externalize people's capacity to judge and to evaluate themselves, A, they do worse and that's actually fairly well proven.
I was just reading a book called The Nurture Shock.
Basically, it's about when you praise children for achievements, you praise them for being smart, they actually become demotivated.
If you say, oh, you're so smart, you did that, you're so great, you're so smart, what happens is the kids become quite insecure about doing things that may make them feel dumb because their value is that they're smart.
Not that they worked hard, not that they achieved something that was interesting by some reasonable standard, When you praise a child's attributes, the child stops wanting to do things that don't rely on those attributes or enhance those attributes.
I think really the purpose of education in many ways should be to give the child a methodology for judging the value of what it is that he or she is doing and to internalize the standard of true and false, correct and incorrect, right and wrong, where that's appropriate, where else it should be like art exploration.
But of course, When you do that, you lessen the need for people to have external authority and to run around like chickens with their heads cut off looking for validation, which is a huge amount of things I mean,
it's not like I'm going to get to quiz people You don't get to quiz people on your book or your podcast or anything like that.
I don't get to grill people.
I mean, that would be silly because that would be to say that they're reliant upon me or some external person for the quality of what it is that they're learning.
Yeah, it's as if the way that parents treat children and the way that teachers treat students, if you see it in the adult world, all that behavior does look really silly.
I mean, it's typically noted that That parents treat strangers better than they do their own kids.
Well, why is that, right?
They're in a model of interaction that they think that they can rule over someone else because that other person, I mean, the rationalization is that the person can't make decisions for themselves, and they can't learn on their own, and so all these rationalizations are used as ways to I've enjoyed the plain truth that if the so-called authority figure would work on their self-esteem a bit,
they could take the blinders off and realize that, hey, other people can actually function without you stepping in to tell them what to do all the time.
Yeah. Somebody's just asked, said, given the child a methodology, how is that distinct from a value system?
Well, that's a big question, but very, very briefly, I mean, I've thought about this for many years about what I want to do as a parent.
I've been asked this question a lot, so I'll keep the answer brief.
I'm not going to teach my daughter that there's no such thing as a god.
I'm not going to teach my daughter that statism is immoral.
I'm not going to teach my daughter that concepts are derived from instances and do not exist independently of that which they describe.
I'm not going to teach her any of those things.
What I'm going to do is if she says, I heard that there's this thing called God, I'm going to say, well, let's think about it, right?
Let's think about it together. What do you think and how would you know?
Because she already has a great methodology for determining truth and falsehood and existence and non-existence.
She had that at the age of three months.
I mean, if you gave her an empty hand, she wouldn't pretend to eat food, right?
She knows what's there and what's not.
I don't need to teach her that because she already knew that at the age of three months or probably even earlier.
The purpose is not to teach the child the conclusions, but to teach the child the methodology.
In the same way we understand in math, you don't want to teach a kid the answer to every math problem because it's impossible.
What you want to do is teach them how to reason through math problems on their own.
That's good education so that they gain the power.
A value system to me is more around conclusions, right?
I don't want to teach her stealing is bad.
Stealing is wrong. Because that's just an abstract order with no context.
It doesn't mean anything. It's just don't do it.
Why? Well, I want to teach her, well, you know, what would it mean if stealing were something that everyone should do?
How would the world look if everybody was stealing from everybody else that was the right thing to do?
And we'd make fun of it.
It would be a funny thing to explore.
And so I really want to teach her not the value conclusions, but the process of achieving true and false statements, the process of understanding true and false statements, so that she can do all of that herself.
The purpose is not to teach her my conclusions, even though I think a lot of my conclusions are pretty valid, because the point is not to make her into a copy of me, but to make her most fully herself, and that means to think for herself.
Yeah, I think a lot of objectivists, the orthodox objectivists, have this notion that you need to inculcate into the child all of this framework of philosophy, otherwise they're never going to learn it.
Because I guess that's...
They weren't taught it, but somehow they think that it's necessary to teach it to kids.
I mean, they are self-taught objectivists, aren't they?
Unless they took classes at ARI or something.
But there's almost a fear of having the child grow up to be a socialist or a true believer in something rather than an objectivist if you don't explicitly teach them these philosophical principles.
But I think as a parent, because you're actually living with this human being, you're going to be passing judgment about all kinds of stuff.
In other words, you're going to be a model of how to think for that child.
So you don't need to actually sit them down and say, this is how I think.
You're going to be showing them how you think.
And that's the most important thing, being that role model.
Yeah, that's a daunting thing to say, but you're absolutely right, of course.
I mean, it's so funny.
The level of imitation that goes on among babies is astounding.
I was playing with her today, and I was chewing some gum.
After I have some lunch, I'd like to chew some gum.
And she started chewing.
She didn't have any gum. She didn't have any food.
She sees me chewing and she starts chewing.
It's the degree of photocopying that children do.
It's really quite astounding. And it is something that makes you kind of like, all right, daddy is itchy down there, but for once he's not going to scratch because I have a child in the room.
You really have to start to notice these things, right?
So she doesn't pull a Michael Jackson in public.
Yeah, and pretty soon you'll be saying, do as I say, not as I do, right?
Right, right.
Now, we've been going for almost 70 minutes, so I think we should probably wind things down just so we don't bring YouTube down with the video.
But I'd like for you guys just to also mention your websites again, if you could.
And I certainly really, really enjoyed the conversation.
We've been getting great feedback from the people listening in, and of course we'll get feedback on YouTube, which is always quite exciting, plus or minus.
So if you'd just like to, again, Wes and Brad, if you'd like to mention your vital statistics again, then we can wind up.
I could talk all night, but again, we try to keep these shows at a reasonable amount of time.
Yeah, it's good to philosophize.
My website is completeliberty.com, not 70%, not 80%.
We're talking Complete Liberty.
You can find a link to the podcast from there.
And my website is edgelution.com.
edu-lu-tion.com.
The podcast is available at schoolsucks.com.
And every episode of Complete Liberty that Wes and I have done together is also linked on my website.
There's a tab for it. The video of our earlier chat staff from about a month ago is there as well.
And like I said earlier, hopefully within the next month, There will be some large-scale redesigns to maybe both of those places, and setting up a forum will be right around the corner.
Fantastic. And I'll put links to that on the YouTube page as well.
And I'd just like to thank you so much for taking the time.
It was a really, really enjoyable conversation, and I hope that we can do it again.
And maybe what I'll do is I'll put a post out on the board for topics that people may be interested in hearing us discuss.
And I can gauge the interest that people might have to call in and harangue us, which is always an exciting thing to achieve.
So thanks so much, guys. I really do appreciate it.
And have a great, great night.
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