Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

Dec. 29, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:04:06

1542 'The War on Kids' The Freedomain Radio Interview

An interview with Cevin Soling, the creator of a powerful new documentary about the war against children being waged in American society.

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Well, hello everybody. This is Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio.
	I have on the line the esteemed Kevin Soling, the director of a powerful must-see new documentary entitled The War on Kids.
	And thank you so much for taking the time to chat.
	I just wanted to, first of all, thank you for lifting the lid off a truly nasty cauldron in terms of the dehumanization, control, and drugging of children.
	I can't help but look at certain moral quagmires that we inhabit as a society today.
	I sort of shudder to think what the judgment of the future will be.
	Like we look back on things like slavery and we say, good God, how could people have ever believed that?
	How could that ever have occurred within a society?
	Well, of course, to the people in those societies throughout history where slavery existed, it seemed purely commonplace.
	It was just the way of the world.
	There were beasts of burden and the same thing with women's rights and the same things with the rights of minorities and so on.
	I just can't help but in the future they're just going to be kind of dumbfounded as to how we could allow this despoilation of the most precious resources that we have.
	And it's a cliche that we say as a society that children are our most precious resource, and I believe that it's true, but lord above, we really can't seem to get our act together to treat them with the humanity and dignity that they so truly deserve.
	And I just wanted to give you my thanks for putting the film out there and really strongly, strongly urge Listeners and interested parties to order it.
	It's a really, really powerful work, and thank you so much for taking the time to put it together.
	Oh, well, thank you. I appreciate that.
	I appreciate those words. It's funny because I've actually used a lot of those same analogies and thought about the same thing as far as perspective-wise in terms of the optimistic view of the future that someday there's an enlightened generation that can look back.
	Oh, they'll be simply astonished.
	I think what will make them the most astonished is the degree of difference between our sentiments and our actions.
	I mean, at least in slavery-based societies, they didn't say slaves are fully human and we should treat them with dignity and respect.
	They said they're beasts of burden, they're animals, they're heathen or whatever.
	But we have this rhetoric around children and childhood that is so fundamentally at odds with how we act that I think it's going to be mind-blowing to people in the future.
	Because it's not like we don't know how to treat children well.
	Everybody has, you know, the Hallmark commercials playing in their heads and hugs and kisses and respect and so on.
	When we translate that into a kind of social action, it just seems kind of chilling.
	And so I'd like to start if we could.
	There's a common myth.
	I don't particularly believe it, and it doesn't sound like you do as well.
	And it is the myth that seems to occur with all kinds of collective action.
	That, okay, it's shit now, but boy, back in the day, it was golden.
	There was a golden age of public school.
	And in the movie, you don't touch much upon the history of Of the public school system for reasons that make perfect sense to me, but in the interview you had on the Colbert Report, you talked about the Prussian style influence on the original.
	A foundation, I guess, in the mid-19th century of the public school system.
	So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit to sort of help people to dispel this idea of the golden age when, you know, kids were orderly and were attentive and the worst problems you had were gum-chewing and running in the hallways and we produced all of these great citizens because it doesn't really seem to be true when you dig into the actual history of the public school system.
	Oh yeah, that's absolutely correct.
	Nostalgia is one of the greatest distorting lenses in terms of trying to analyze things.
	The school system originally, first off, it's actually a very recent invention and that's something few people can appreciate or realize.
	Most people think we always had schooling but it only was introduced in America in the 1850s and the first state to introduce that was Massachusetts and not without a great deal of resistance and police had to be brought in.
	People didn't want to surrender their children voluntarily to have a bunch of strangers indoctrinate them.
	And it was not easy going.
	Eventually, with the decrease in states rights, the model became more prevalent but it actually was a military model and you still see those elements.
	The concept was you have a number of children Sitting in a cold, sterile room, isolated from their communities, from their families, from their culture, who are presented in front of an authoritarian figure and they're made to take orders in a docile manner.
	And that aspect hasn't changed and those are still the core key elements that persist today.
	What happened then later was during the Industrial Revolution, The factory model was added and you still have elements of the military model, but it became adapted so that people would learn to be able to endure the tedium and boredom of working in a factory.
	In fact, when Henry Ford first tried to get laborers for his factories, I think he had to hire about eight times as many.
	I think it was 800 for every 100 that would stay for any length of time.
	Because it just was something that people just couldn't endure.
	They weren't prepared for that kind of repetition and boredom.
	And so schools were then adapted to create people who could work in the factories.
	And you have the bells ringing in the classrooms and this whole notion of dependency and pedium of labor that ultimately amounts to very, very little.
	After that, as we witnessed today, most people can adjust to factory life.
	Now, what's taken place is you have this increase in security.
	One could cynically make comments about the fact that the United States has over 2 million people in prison and that we're basically training people to endure prison life.
	There are many elements of school that are remarkably similar to the conditions in prison, in some cases obviously better, in some cases in fact worse.
	Prisoners have some degree of civil rights, which children don't have.
	There is a prevailing philosophy in public education that civil rights are incompatible for some reason with getting an education.
	And that's been upheld repeatedly by the Supreme Court.
	Clarence Thomas, if you ever read his readings, he doesn't believe kids should have any expectation of First Amendment rights whatsoever.
	Some recent rulings.
	So it's all very disturbing.
	But not only were schools not better in terms of the environment in the past, But also, there have been studies showing that people weren't coming out of schools any better educated in the past than they are today, that the quality of work that was done wasn't superior to what kids are producing today.
	Right. It has struck me, though, I think it would be a very difficult thing to prove, of course, that The general de-religisizing, if I can invent a word, the de-theologizing of education that occurred throughout the Renaissance, and particularly into the Enlightenment, produced the sort of completely aberrant 19th century of relative peace for Western Europe.
	And then, once between 1850 and 1875, you get a generation or two coming out of those schools, once more you have the indoctrination that previously was achieved by the church, was now achieved by the state, and then you get good cannon fodder for World War I again,
	because it sort of struck me that people didn't really want to go to war when schools were privatized, but then a generation or two after schools get turned over to the state, you have, you know, hundreds of thousands of people willing to sign up for the most ludicrous wars that can be imagined.
	Again, I mean, it's not a thesis that's easy to prove, but it's something that did sort of strike me as that really aberrant century was the century where there was not much influence in religion or in And statism into the education and just gives a sense of how much could be shaped by this kind of ideology.
	Well, there's this one education critic, John Taylor Gata, who is fairly well known, and he likens public schools to religion and points out that teachers like priests and rabbis are excluded from malpractice lawsuits.
	He goes on to show further about how school is a kind of religion in and of itself.
	Yeah, I gave a speech at a Liberty Forum in New Hampshire in March, and he was a speaker ahead of me.
	And I found his words to be, well, I mean, they're very powerful.
	And he has very, very, I mean, the challenge is solutions, right?
	And we can sort of get into that a little bit later.
	I'm sure you've been asked this before, and I'm sorry for such an obvious question, but what was the genesis of this kind of project?
	Because, I mean, it's a monstrous project that you undertook.
	And, I mean, the people that you interviewed that find the traveling, the editing, the music, the compilation, I mean, it's a huge, huge job.
	And clearly, it's a labor of love because very few of us can retire on documentary incomes.
	But what was the genesis and propulsion?
	What kept you going through this ordeal?
	Well, it took me seven years to make this film, and I guess certainly the idea was there longer in some capacity.
	I found growing up to be a very humiliating experience.
	Children have no sense of dignity, and I never afforded none.
	I just didn't let go of that.
	I think I was told when I was young that once I was older and I was either no longer in school or no longer subjected to that kind of oppression, that I would let go of that.
	I think that probably fueled me.
	Even more so to make sure that I maintain that drive to fight for the civil rights of youth.
	Kids are just horrifically and unfairly treated.
	They're held to much higher expectations than adults hold themselves to.
	They're expected to abstain from all sorts of behavior that certainly Adults indulge in and the punishments that they're subjected to are actually much greater.
	There was a study showing that when someone under the age of 18 is punished for an offense and tried as an adult, that the time that they're given is on average much longer or significantly longer than an adult.
	So there is this cultural vindictiveness and repression of kids.
	I think pretty much every community has on their books some form of curfew law.
	It's not necessarily enforced, but it can be and sometimes it certainly is.
	The problems with society that we believe are pervasive Issues like drug abuse and issues with drunk driving, all sorts of things we blame kids for and there's this whole scapegoating approach but if you look at the actual numbers,
	they don't even remotely bear themselves out and yet drug abuse is only considered to be a youth issue.
	No one thinks of it outside.
	Even teen pregnancy Usually, it's someone over the age of 18 who was involved.
	The whole discussion of all these different issues that we blame kids for the deterioration and degradation of society are just ill-directed.
	Someone needed to stand up and fight for these civil rights abuses.
	It was certainly something that was always on my mind.
	I didn't know exactly what medium it would take shape in, but film became certainly the most obvious and best way to distribute that message.
	But I really saw things getting worse with zero tolerance and the drugging of kids.
	It was those aspects where I just thought things had just entered a whole other realm of forced coercion that was really disturbing.
	And actually there was one other thing and it was that came along with the drugging with this whole pathologizing of youth culture.
	Normal childhood behavior was treated as a pathology now or is now.
	You had mentioned the issue of slaves, and one of the things that there was a doctor, Samuel Cartwright, I think, I might get his name wrong, but he had this condition called drapetomania, which was this Mental disorder that slaves would have that caused them to want to run away,
	and that means of treating something like that was to basically beat them, was to whip them, and that was how you'd cure them of this strange mental disorder that some of them would have.
	Well, we now have conditions like oppositional defiance disorder, which is A condition where kids who don't submit to authority are considered to have some mental problem and the result that always happens in these cases is there's some kind of drug that's given to make them docile and take orders and accept whatever oppressive conditions that we subject them to.
	Yeah, and of course another precedent which I'm sure you're aware of is Throughout the Middle Ages through to the late 19th century, the condition of hysteria was considered to be a biological problem to do with the female reproductive organs when, of course, it was women who'd experienced, you know, rape and abuse and the general restrictions of rights that was the women's lot throughout most of history had pathological symptoms.
	And, of course, it was blamed on a biological ailment when it really was any natural living organism's response To stress and brutality, and they always try to make it an organic disease because they don't have to look at the environmental causes then, which I think is really tragic.
	Yeah, it's always looking at the symptoms rather than the underlying conditions.
	And the underlying conditions of school is that you have kids forcibly required to be in an oppressive environment where they have no say and no rights.
	Right. I mean, I think...
	And this is not a thesis that's in your film.
	And I just say that so that people don't think that you're thinking anything this nutty.
	But, you know, one of the things that I've sort of noticed is that the more irrational a culture is, the more problem it has with children.
	Because children are naturally empirical and rational.
	At least that's been my experience.
	I used to work in a daycare and I've had nieces and now I'm a father.
	Children are incredibly rational and empirical, like the example being that if you give a kid an empty box for Christmas and say there's an imaginary iPod in there, they won't believe you.
	They'll just be upset and, you know, they won't play any postmodernist games with you.
	But the more irrational the culture is, the more problem it has with children because children...
	Children are openly bewildered and prior to being cowed by the application of power, they reflect back to us the irrationalities of our culture, particularly religiosity and patriotism and some of the class structures that we have.
	Children are bewildered by the craziness, the crazy aspects of our culture.
	And that makes us feel really bad and makes us feel like they're attacking us.
	And of course, hierarchical power is based upon A fundamental irrationality that some people are automatically better and wiser if we give them laws and courts and prisons to inflict their will on people.
	Children fundamentally don't get hierarchy.
	They don't get power. They don't get religion.
	They don't get culture. And they sure don't get patriotism.
	And their skepticism, I think, for those who are in power, it really chips away.
	And the moral basis for that power, and it's just one of the reasons why I think there is this escalating war on kids, that the more power you get, the more kids are skeptical of it, and therefore the more power you need to cow and control them.
	That's a fascinating argument.
	My operating, I guess, thesis is something that I thought I'd come up with independently and then discovered that Margaret Mead had proposed it 10 years before.
	But the thing that I noticed was that ever since the Industrial Revolution, children for the first time had developed their own culture that was independent of their parents' culture.
	And people are instinctively just possessive of their culture.
	And when they see kids with different literature, different music, different clothing, there is this resentment and there is this desire to control them, to sustain and maintain the culture of their parents.
	And historically, that's been seen in terms of Most people aren't aware that there was a vicious attack on comic books that resulted in Senate hearings.
	Ultimately, the comic book industry had to oversee themselves in order to avoid censorship.
	Half the industry went bankrupt within a few years.
	Sorry, when did that occur?
	That was right before the McCarthy hearings.
	That was the late 40s, right after World War II. There was this one psychiatrist that did this study where he kind of led the charge.
	He noticed that all these kids who were juvenile delinquents all read comic books, and so he came to the conclusion that the comic books were responsible and didn't bother examining the fact that all kids read comic books.
	But it actually resulted in Senate hearings.
	Maybe the psychiatrist knew and he just hated comic books for that same instinctual reason, that it was something foreign and chewed away at the fabric of the world that he knew and appreciated.
	But then you have the 1950s, the attack on rock and roll was the same thing, having their own form of music, and you see that up and through today.
	Any type of heavy metal music was blamed for suicide and murder and all sorts of things.
	Anything that's foreign that's part of youth culture, which is this subsequent generation, is considered a threat.
	I think the baby boomer generation is one that was just Something about that, the zeitgeist and the psyche of that generation is just one that's particularly egotistical and I think their methods of attacking anything foreign are just more severe than anything seen in the past and I think that's why the length they've gone to to protect and preserve the image of themselves has been addressed and focused at children who are presenting something different.
	Right, right. I think that's a damn good thesis, too.
	There is, I think, also an interesting and kind of chilling aspect to the war on kids, which is that in any situation where you have a number of fixed numbers, so to speak, there is one variable that always has to change.
	And I was really struck in watching your documentary the degree to which the adults Even the virtuous adults, the good teachers, the good educators, the good theoreticians, They felt completely helpless to change the system.
	Like, I didn't see any particular next steps.
	And then, of course, I mean, I know that would be a lot to put in a documentary, and we can talk about that if you like.
	But it sort of struck me, like, if you or I ended up being a teacher in one of these schools, well, what could we do?
	Well, we couldn't get the bad teachers fired.
	We couldn't appeal to the market forces because, of course, parents are forced to pay for these monstrous institutions, whether they like it or not, through taxes.
	So there's no consumer influence to cause things to change.
	And so because there's, you know, and of course if the schools don't teach the right things then they lose their funding and people who are higher up who can be fired because they're not part of the union do get fired.
	Any principal who tries to fire a teacher is going to wind up for spending two years of a part-time job dealing with grievances and legal motions and so on.
	And so in a sense there's so much that's rigid and enforced and controlled from very distant Entities and through the power of coercive taxation that in a very real sense the only variable that can be changed you know brutally biochemically authoritatively is the children because they're the only Variables that can be changed easily they're not unionized they don't vote they don't have the rights they the parents are helpless and I think that's really the great tragedy of these very strict and rigid and really at the very essence enforced Yeah,
	well you touched on a few issues there.
	One is I tried not to impose blame on anyone.
	I tried not to blame the teachers, the parents, the administrators, and I really tried in the film as best as I could to look at them sympathetically and tried to convey that they're just victims to a corrupt system, this institution that's inhibiting their actions and The higher up you get, the more people you have to answer to and the harder it is to do anything.
	So that is definitely one problem.
	There's one teacher who I'd spoken to in Oregon who's in the film and he was just painting such a profoundly dismal picture of schools where he was helpless and participating in this.
	I asked them with your understanding of how do you sleep at night knowing that you're part of this institution and he said he just kind of sees his position and you know kind of the way doctors have the Hippocratic Oath and he just you know tries to do as little harm as possible but essentially his conscience really got to him and he quit and he you know started his own you know he's kind of a day school preschool environment now where Where kids are,
	you know, integrated into society as best as, you know, the law would permit.
	But he's much happier, and so he's doing good now.
	Right. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't look at any particular individual to blame.
	It's sort of like saying, who's responsible for the economic disasters of the Soviet Union?
	Well, there's no evil bureaucrat who's sending all the food to the wrong place.
	It's just there's an entire system that simply can't work.
	And individuals are trapped in it.
	But I think there's a fallacy that, you know, if we had better teachers, you know, that everything would be better, you know, if the teachers cared and the teachers got the kids engaged.
	And there's, you know, there have been, you know, a number of super teachers out there who, you know, who have been successful in getting the test scores up.
	And that's kind of, you know, the ideal that's presented, but that doesn't do it.
	And people don't, you know, can't really comprehend that.
	And certainly not the teachers that think they're helping don't understand that.
	If you look at what is the ideal, if people were trying to say, well, if we had unlimited funding and we had the best teachers, what would schools look like?
	Well, they're still going to have a rigid curriculum and the best school is one where the kids are the most docile and easily coerced and are willing to go about their daily existence without ever expressing their own interests or opinions because You know, those are more likely than not going to be outside the curriculum.
	Right. I mean, and that's the crazy thing.
	You know, you see these movies, Dangerous Minds, and there was one about the math teacher.
	I can't remember. Edward James almost played him.
	Stand and Deliver. And you see these movies about these, you know, wonderful, inspirational teachers in the inner city, and people take some comfort in that.
	But to me, that's completely insane.
	I mean, why would you need to make a movie about something that's common?
	You know, you don't see movies like, here's a really great Walmart greeter.
	You know, he's the only great Walmart greeter.
	He's so rare that we had to make a feature film out of him to tell his story.
	And it's because those are pretty common.
	But if these teachers were common, there never would be movies about them.
	It's because there's such rare exceptions.
	And of course, that math teacher, the one in Stand and Deliver, in the real world, Ended up being forced out of the profession because he wanted to change the way that things worked based on empirical results-based studies and he ran right up against the brick wall of the bureaucracy and they hit the eject button pretty quickly.
	So those movies have a really sad ending.
	Almost all of them either get forced out or they go on the lecture circuit or write books.
	None of the teachers of the year, very few, I think that they're more destructive because they get people to buy into the system and they actually are We're good at creating conformity in terms of how the classrooms operate.
	Yes, they're good at getting test scores up and the kids' achievement in terms of reading and writing is superior to other classrooms, but how does it compare to self-directed or other methods?
	Oh, right. So you're comparing those teachers to the rest of the public school system versus free-range schooling or homeschooling or other kinds of self-directed schooling.
	So you're kind of comparing, you know, a bad crop to a worse crop, in a sense.
	Yeah, precisely. Right, right.
	Okay, that makes sense. That makes sense.
	I have to ask one question.
	Well, not just one, but there's a scene.
	I mean, a lot of the scenes I found hard to watch.
	I mean, especially of the kids.
	And seeing the despair, you know, etched...
	You know, like with this Kafkaesque gray charcoal on the faces of the children talking about their school environments.
	And it really, really takes me back to all of the cynicism and hatred that I and my friends had when we were in school as well.
	Just the idea that it was a ridiculous gulag, that you had to follow these ridiculous dance steps for no particular purpose.
	But there was a scene, and you put it right at the end of the film, which I thought was great.
	And oh my god, I found it so hard to watch emotionally.
	I was really tempted to turn away, and that's a scene where the black girl was being arrested.
	Tell me a little bit about that, because, oh man, that was an unbearable thing to watch.
	The way that she burst into tears is...
	It was a six-year-old girl and she had thrown a bunch of books around the room and was just having a temper tantrum in class and was unruly and the teacher tried to restrain her.
	While the teacher tried to restrain her, she was struggling and kicked the teacher through the struggling process and was placed in a room where she calmed down, where she's seen and the police were called in.
	That was just That was only one instance where the handcuffing of a child was on camera.
	So unfortunately, there are a number of other instances where this has occurred.
	And one of the things I told one of my friends in women's studies is, for some reason, and I don't know, I haven't investigated this on my own, but just as far as all the news stories, so it could just be anecdotal, but it seems that All the cases where children have been handcuffed who are under the age of nine, they all seem to have been girls.
	And I don't know what to make of that, and I'm not sure if that's true or not, but I've read of other instances of a seven-year-old who stole two dollars from a classroom, and the police came to the house and took her away in handcuffs, and a number of other things that were just minor offenses or non-offenses where kids are taken away in handcuffs,
	and it's just because You have resource officers, you have police officers in school now, so you have all these little pushing and shoving or even more insignificant issues that just naturally take place in a school environment because it's a prison-like environment and kids are powerless and the only way they can exercise any degree of power is against one another.
	So you have these situations and now they're dealt with by the police.
	You have this kind of culture also where people are just much more alienated from one another.
	And the responses, you know, that get tough on kids.
	We need to, you know, really teach them a lesson.
	One of the things that I didn't cover, for instance, in that Goose Creek, South Carolina raid where the principal at the school had suspected that there was drug use going on in the school, that kids were...
	Oh, yeah, where they had the dogs and the SWAT teams in the hallway and the kids all piled up in the corners.
	Oh, yeah, that was surreal.
	One of the things that I didn't get to introduce, you know, unfortunately, in the film about that raid, for example, was that the community, by and large, came out in support of the principal.
	I tried to get some interviews with some people on camera who actually marched in front of the school and it was a much, much smaller group that was protesting the raid than the ones that came out in support of the raid.
	They felt that yes, even though none of the kids had drugs, the kids need to understand the potential danger of drugs and what could happen if they get involved with drugs.
	And they supported the use of police force, massive police force with guns pointed at the kids.
	The police tried to defend the guns by saying, oh, the guns were all pointed down.
	They had their guns down.
	But yeah, the kids were forced to lie on the ground.
	So when the guns were pointed down, they were all pointed down at the kids.
	So the pervasive The feeling in society is, you know, no, no, no, we have to get as tough as we can on these kids.
	Like, you know, kids are lazy and kids, you know, could get involved with drugs and, you know, we have to, you know, basically, you know, have them operate in a fascist type of society in order to, you know, make them, you know, go on the straight and narrow path.
	Right, which is, I mean, fundamentally a medieval belief in virtue and vice.
	It's very, very primitive.
	One of the things that was also, and I was sort of waiting for this in the film, and I kind of knew that it wasn't going to be there.
	And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that.
	Because to me, the central character of the film was missing.
	And I think it was very important that it was missing.
	And the central character of the film was a classroom with a teacher and with the children.
	I mean, it's always astounded me That we're forced to pay for these institutions.
	In a sense, we're forced to hand our children over to them, but you can't get a camera in to see what's going on.
	That just seems to me completely bizarre.
	I mean, it's public. It should be as open as humanly possible.
	Did you try to get cameras into the classroom?
	Did you try to negotiate that with any school districts or principals?
	Because to me, it was kind of surprising.
	You didn't actually get any shots of people or kids being taught in a classroom.
	Oh yeah, all the time.
	And there's an audio tape of this one that exists there, this teacher who's We're spouting all this abuse about how the kids in the class are stupid and how she's entitled to be mean to them and just all sorts of unbelievable abuse.
	But no, no, that actual point was addressed when one of the central students who I followed around, the student in Colorado who was actually a student at Columbine years after the events that took place there.
	And he was talking about how, you know, he addressed the whole issue of us trying to get into the classroom.
	And he said, I can't understand why I can't bring cameras into the school.
	There are cameras everywhere. Right, right.
	Oh, no, no, we're against cameras unless they're mounted and pointed at the children in the hallways.
	Right. So, yeah, we certainly tried.
	And there were a lot of things that we tried to do.
	I spent two years trying to get the...
	A pharmaceutical company to have a rep talk to defend, to either talk to us or just provide us with some kind of stock footage that they must send out to doctors or something that advocate and encourage the use of Adderall, Ritalin, other stimulants to kids and antidepressants.
	They would not talk to us, and we certainly didn't present our case as if we were making any kind of statement either way.
	In fact, we always try to coerce people to be interviewed to express that I'm subtly trying to demonstrate that I'm sympathetic to whatever their cause is.
	And it would be nice to hear the other side.
	I mean obviously if these millions of kids are being medicated, it would be great to hear the side that says, you know, here's the science, here's the proof, here's the medicine.
	I mean that would be comforting and I'm sure you wouldn't deny that.
	But so you didn't get any access to the pharmaceutical companies who are drugging the kids or to the actual classrooms.
	The thing that I found actually is generally The case for one side or the other side is typically supported and comes off much better when someone presents an opposing case because there are some cases that are just very hard to prove and it just really strengthens the other side.
	I certainly didn't want to come across as being propagandistic.
	I tried really, really hard to avoid that appearance.
	To that end, I documented sources everywhere I could where I thought it was relevant and wouldn't slow down the pacing of the film.
	That was something I was very conscious of.
	I had that same issue with No Child Left Behind.
	Ultimately, that chapter got cut from the film and eventually it'll be a bonus feature on a DVD. I kept going to the Department of Education and pleaded with them to provide anyone who would talk to me about defending No Child Left Behind.
	And finally, after literally two years of pleading with them, they directed me to someone who was the head of a foundation, Excellent Education for Everyone, And 10 minutes in the interview, I kind of broke protocol and I scratched my head and I was just like, well, I'm really confused because the Department of Education said that you've defended No Child Left Behind and here are the things you've been saying are criticisms.
	And he said, oh, you won't find anyone who knows anything about No Child Left Behind who will support this.
	It was a wonderful moment on camera, but it just kind of showed how hard it was.
	And he agreed with the whole concept of accountability, which was, I guess, the spirit of No Child Left Behind, and how it was that, I guess, they referred us to him.
	But it just became very troubling on certain issues to try to find The other criticism that's been levied, which I think is more ironic than anything, is the fact that I intentionally didn't include any prescription, that there isn't a solution that's offered.
	And that was done very intentionally because for a number of reasons.
	The first and foremost is there is no perfect solution.
	And the problem with human nature is that people are incredibly resistant to change and if you propose anything, there's no perfect solution and people will find a flaw in it.
	Even if it's a million times better than the current status quo, people will reject anything that they can find has some kind of minor flaw in it.
	I definitely didn't want to go down that path and provide fodder for that kind of approach.
	It's also kind of like what you mentioned about institutions like slavery.
	The abolition of a corrupt institution, even if society can't accommodate the consequences of that wholly appropriate behavior, doesn't It requires that one not take the appropriate steps.
	I mean, here it is 150 years or so since the abolition of slavery and there's still social problems as a result of that horrible institution and yet no rational person would think that that was the wrong thing to do.
	Right, right. No, I think that's quite right.
	And I was pleased by that choice for what it's worth, because to me, you're making a film about education, and the purpose of education is not to provide answers, but to stimulate thought.
	You want to learn how to think, not what to think.
	So if you'd provided answers, I think that would have been less discomforting for people.
	And I think that discomfiture is very important when facing something so that your creative juices and your solution...
	Brain begins to kick into overdrive.
	Whereas if you give an answer, people would say, I agree or I disagree.
	But in a sense, that would not challenge them to think about the issues.
	Yeah, I think people don't want to think about the issue, and I think I blame school for that.
	School creates this dependency that you're supposed to be told all these different things, and so people aren't prepared to not be told, okay, you've made these complaints, now feed us the solution so we can get on and do these things.
	And it's like, you have to think beyond how you've been educated and actually try to come up with solutions on your own.
	Right, right. I'd like to talk a little bit if you...
	Sorry, go ahead. Oh, the other thing is, I kind of liken myself to, you know, I'm a documentary filmmaker.
	My profession would be, if I were doing an examination of how a war is being fought, and I can show that air raids are not going to win the war, and more and more air raids are not going to win the war, we need to do something different.
	I show conclusively that that's the case.
	I'm not a general, so I'm not going to be the one to turn to to say, how should the war be won?
	You've got other people who analyze and do that kind of thing.
	I'm just here to give you the bad news about this one particular approach.
	Right. A nutritionist doesn't cut your food up for you, right?
	I mean, some part you have to do yourself, right?
	Now, the medication stuff, I mean, it's hard to talk about it without feeling just this deep sense of anger.
	I mean, that's what I feel about it.
	Because, of course, there are a number which we mentioned earlier are historical precedents to this kind of stuff.
	One which may be even more appropriate, which I'm sure you've thought of, is, of course, in the Soviet Union.
	And in other dictatorships, disagreement with the pervading ideology was considered a mental illness that was treated with some pretty brutal medications and incarcerations.
	It was a mental illness to disagree with those in authority.
	And it's chilling in a sort of much more enlightened and free country in the West that this paradigm To an admittedly diluted form, but still being applied to younger and younger people is still there.
	If you disagree with people in authority, you have a mental ailment that must be treated by drugs which make you less alert, which as one of your interviewees reports, results in slower or diminished growth in just about every organ system within the body, including the brain. I mean, that is a really unbelievable finding.
	I mean, was that something you knew going in, or was that something you kind of uncovered more and more of?
	I mean, we've all heard about it, but the degree to which it is medically questionable at best and the prevalence of it is really, really quite shocking.
	Yeah, no, I became radicalized in the process of making the film.
	There were definitely a number of issues that I came in not knowing anything about, and Yeah, which was good.
	I really tried as best as I could to maintain, you know, journalistic integrity and objectivity.
	And as far as the issues with medication, I was profoundly curious myself to find out why there were these massive numbers of children on these different drugs.
	And I was willing to accept the possibility that, okay, you know, the parents were, you know, We took all these psychedelic drugs in the 60s, maybe there were some genetic issues, something along those lines.
	So I was kind of open to any kind of possible explanation and what I found was precisely what you're describing and it was horrific and disturbing and I think it's one of the greatest crimes of our era.
	It's horrific. It's worse than the cigarette companies when they knew that nicotine was addictive and didn't disclose that information and that it also caused cancer.
	You could argue that it's much worse because it's being inflicted upon children.
	Children don't have the choice that adult smokers have.
	Adults who smoke are impacting an already existing and developed adult body, whereas this stuff is impeding the very organic process of growth that leads to adult capacities.
	Exactly, and this information is not being disclosed.
	Even if it were disclosed, it's getting out now to some degree, but it's certainly being kept back.
	It's still being given to kids who aren't making the choices for themselves whether the benefits outweigh the risks and it doesn't seem like there are any benefits either or very marginal, if any.
	I don't know. They're questionable.
	But it's very difficult.
	That for me was one of the more disturbing things I came across.
	There were others, but that was certainly among the hardest to delve into.
	I'm trying not to give the film away, but the link between the youth violence and these kinds of medication, the sort of explosive shootings that occurred that are so heavily publicized, I'd never heard that link.
	I mean, I've studied this stuff quite a bit, and there was a lot in your film that I'd never heard before, which is one of the reasons I wanted to talk and help get the word out.
	But the link between these medications, for want of a better phrase, these drugs, and extreme youth violence, I'd never heard about before.
	I talked to a number of children and adults who have been on various medications, Prozac and others.
	I think a lot of the antidepressants in particular and they told me just these stories of both pleasurable and nightmarish but they just developed this kind of sociopathic response in terms of Them feeling completely isolated from society.
	Someone described visions of seeing people's heads exploding and all sorts of amazing disturbing descriptions of either fantasies or senses of detachment that the drugs induce.
	They're drugs that are affecting people's brains and They're being disseminated in ways that are, I don't think, very conscientious and are instead very widespread.
	It's disturbing and if we're seeing many interviews and discussions with people who are on these drugs, it's pretty scary.
	Right. And this is, as we mentioned at the beginning of our chat, we have this social sanctimoniousness about children.
	I mean, if you flip on the nightly news and it's like, you know, here's the common garden implement that can disembowel your children, you know, that there's all this stuff.
	That is constantly being talked about.
	Oh, there's lead in toys from China.
	There's BPA in baby bottles.
	There's all this stuff that's talked about that may be threatening to your children.
	Of course, the odds of these are completely minuscule, if they even exist.
	But something like this, where children are being fed very powerful drugs for ailments that appear to be entirely environmental, for which no biological basis can be found.
	Which is really for the convenience if not the outright hostility and brutality of those in authority and the effects of which have not been studied in the long run and those that have been studied even in the medium run are horrendous in terms of what it does to the kids and you get these problems whether it's correlational or causal it's not entirely clear with this sporadic violence.
	I mean, screw the lead in the Chinese toys.
	Let's get the Prozac and the other drugs out of the children's systems.
	But I mean, I don't know.
	That's a very topic I get quite passionate about because the children are so fundamentally helpless in this situation.
	I mean, they can't go to school if they don't take these drugs.
	The parents who have to work two jobs to make end meets, if they even have two jobs anymore, can't take the kids out of school and homeschool them because they don't have the resources.
	And so it is really just a meat grinder that is morally reprehensible, in my opinion.
	It just sums it up brilliantly, and that's the tragic thing also, is that the schools won't let the kids, you know, in many schools, like I said, it's universal, but many schools will not let Kids in unless they are on these drugs that they've been prescribed and the prescription process can just be a 15-minute interview or something and often it's done through a referral by a teacher who's been taught that certain types of classroom behavior is indicative of a disorder and then for the rest of their lives,
	the child who's been given these drugs feels that there's something wrong with them, that they're And that's a whole other side effect that's not even discussed, is the mental repercussions of feelings of lack of self-worth and issues and concerns about one's own being.
	Yeah, the self-labeling.
	There was the boy that you were talking to who said, you know, it's just a little bit crazy or something like that.
	And that's a term that, of course, he's been given to one degree or another.
	Based upon this kind of stuff and it's amazing to me though not shocking given what governments as a whole generally do that I mean you you can't fire someone for being pregnant or black or gay or whatever but you can fire a kid for refusing to take medication and give him no place to go and and take the money as if he was still there from his parents for refusing to take medication that is objectively harmful and whose benefits are questionable at best it's It's the complete disparity.
	It's like we as adults live in a post-enlightenment era and the children live in a sort of prison society, in a sort of Soviet or medieval guild society.
	And this is so bizarre because, I mean, babies are incredibly curious and they hunger for learning and for knowledge.
	And I can't teach my daughter new words fast enough.
	She wants to get into everything and explore everything and she's really passionate about learning about the world.
	And then we put them into these sepulchers of the brain and just rot them with boredom and authority and drugs.
	And then we want them to pop out and be participative citizens in an enlightened democracy.
	It's completely strange.
	It's like trying to reassemble a cow after it's gone through a hamburger machine.
	No, that's precisely it.
	The other thing that I get so frustrated about is when I bring up these criticisms of school, people say, well, if kids didn't go to school, they would just stay at home and play video games and watch TV all day long or surf the internet, whichever.
	And I was like, no, no, people are naturally curious.
	It's school that takes an act of them.
	People want to learn.
	Right. It's like saying if this guy who was unjustly imprisoned was taken out of prison, he'd just lie around an 8x10 cell all day doing nothing.
	It's like, no, no, no, he's doing that because he's in prison.
	You take him out of prison and the whole equation changes.
	But as you said, it's babysitting.
	It wouldn't change overnight with the kids that have already been subjected to school for a certain period of time.
	It's hard, you know, they don't quite get that back, you know, right away.
	So it's not, you know, it really is a very destructive influence.
	Now, you've gotten some great feedback on the film, for which I think you should, you're entirely, it's entirely deserved.
	How's the film been doing? What's new?
	I mean, I've only read what I've seen on the DVD cover, but how is the film going?
	Where can people see it?
	Where can they get a hold of it?
	I really want to make sure that people can get a hold of this material easily.
	Well, for the time being, the film is only available at thewaronkids.com website, thewaronkids.com, and that's because I'm waiting for HBO to come back.
	They had expressed some interest.
	I'm supposed to hear something, hopefully today, from them, and they won't pick up something.
	It had a run in New York City, but they don't want it to be seen in other theaters if they're going to pick it up, so I'm kind of waiting for And it makes a great Christmas present for the teenager in your life.
	It's really something that will get arousing discussion around the turkey table without a doubt.
	Definitely makes a great Christmas present, and it can arrive, you know, in time for Christmas too.
	So, yeah, thewaronkids.com, plug that, plug that.
	And also, sorry, if you do get any times, I don't know if you have an email subscription list on the website, but if not, I'll sign up for it if you do, and other people can as well.
	But if you do get a time for airing, if you don't mind shooting me an email, then I'll publicize it through my venue to make sure that people can watch it on HBO or wherever else it ends up.
	Yeah, definitely will.
	But yeah, so far I've been pretty pleased.
	It's definitely a polarizing film in terms of response, but most of it's been very good.
	There are a few people that just, you know, One or two people that just, you know, kind of missed.
	Maybe one. One person that just didn't understand.
	Well, no. See, if everybody understands it, then you're aiming too low.
	If a certain segment of people are not pissed off and irritated, confused, baffled, and annoyed by what you're doing, then you're just not aiming at the right place.
	If you capture everyone, then you're missing the important people, in my opinion.
	Yeah, yeah. The people who have been, you know...
	I've done a number of showings at schools.
	A number of universities have...
	I have shown the film and invited me to speak.
	The students absolutely go wild.
	They love it because this repressed collective psyche is finally being expressed.
	So there's a lot of excitement there.
	The administrators at schools have been very respectful, but teachers are the ones that tend to be the most threatened.
	I think it inspires some kind of existential crisis of sorts.
	I certainly try to console them as best as I can, and I'm not trying to attack teachers, but rather, again, the institution.
	It becomes very personal for many teachers.
	Oh, absolutely. Because there is also the myth of teacher virtue, which is really upheld in society.
	And so if you've based your identity on that kind of collective appearance of virtue, and then that's called into question, not in a personal, but in an institutional way, I mean, that can be quite disorienting for people, for sure.
	Yeah. Yeah, definitely.
	Alright. Well, I'm trying to keep my interviews, particularly with filmmakers, shorter than the actual films themselves, because that just seems a little ridiculous otherwise.
	Is there anything else that you'd like to add, or projects that you've got coming up next?
	I know after a seven-year, you know, head-pounding stretch of labor, it might be time to take a break, but do you have any thoughts about what you might be up to next?
	Yeah, actually, I'm way too busy for my own good.
	I'm editing two other films and in production on the third.
	They're happier projects, I guess, by and large, for the most part.
	The two that I'm editing, one is a documentary on a tribe in Uganda that no one has seen for 40 years, and they had been severely maligned by an anthropologist who's written a book about them that's written pretty much all the Anthro 101 classes in college and also a bunch of sociology classes and so I decided to try to track them down and film that.
	Another one is about a tribe in Vanuatu that worships America and that's a very interesting film.
	Worships America? Go on.
	Yeah, yeah. But for the right reasons.
	So that's kind of amazing, too.
	It's actually, it's a nice piece.
	It's, you know, the Americans, you know, had been on the island during World War II. Oh, this is, sorry to interrupt, this is the cargo cult that Hitchens writes about in his God Is Not Great book?
	Quite possibly.
	They seem to come up a lot in different texts.
	I know... Was it Dawkins once referred to them in one of his lectures?
	He talks about it in terms of the formation of a religion, that they've built up the control towers out of bamboo and they believe the planes are coming back with gifts or something.
	I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	That would be...
	Oh, that's great. I would love to see more of that.
	So I think that would be...
	Yeah, yeah. So they actually like America for the right reasons.
	The American soldiers that were there...
	The military behaved virtuously and upheld the ideals of America as we, you know, present them.
	So it's actually pretty heartwarming.
	And that persisted even after the war in terms of defending the natives' practices from the European colonialists who still wanted to crush their native culture.
	You know, America stood by the natives and, you know, Defended their practices and enabled them to live freely in that way.
	They have this amazing admiration and respect for America, again, for the right reasons.
	I'm in production right now on a documentary about Gilgames Island.
	Yes, I knew that was going to be the next topic.
	I mean, that just follows so logically from the previous two.
	Yeah, what? I presented as being one of the most radical programs ever on television.
	It aired from 1964 to 66.
	The pilot was filmed shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis when American-Soviet tensions really peaked.
	And here the show presents Seven Americans living in this ideal communist paradise.
	And presents communism as just the happiest and best form of society.
	And in fact, most of the conflicts of each episode occurs when some vestige of capitalism threatens to disrupt the society and has to be overcome, you know, with the return to communism where everyone can then be, you know, content and happy and peaceful.
	That's right. And what was the colour of Gilligan's shirt in every episode?
	Ah, it's all coming clear to me now.
	That's why it's his island.
	So it's kind of interesting, and I've spoken with Don Wells and Sherwood Schwartz and Russell Johnson, and just had an interview yesterday with a professor at Harvard to discuss a little bit about the background.
	So that one's coming along, too.
	That's interesting. Yeah, it's sort of like the mirror image of the centrally controlled, fascistic military universe of Star Trek.
	You have the sort of hippy-dippy, Haight-Ashbury on a beach world of Gilligan's Island.
	That sounds like a very enjoyable project to work on.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is.
	And they've been kind of fascinated to see that approach there.
	And it's been really enjoyable interviewing them, the actors and creator of the show.
	That's been kind of a fun project, certainly after the intensity of this one.
	And there will be a sequel to The War on Kids.
	The War on Kids was at one point, you know, going to be like this Ken Burns 10-part project because it wasn't so much just about school.
	Really, the point is, ladies and gentlemen, The War on Kids was really to show all aspects of how Kids are an underclass in American society, and as bad as things are in school, I've got some really horrific things to report in the War on Kids Part II that is really mind-blowing and disturbing, particularly with religious reform schools.
	That was quite the worst nightmare, and I'm amazed at how few people know about this.
	How brutally those places are run and there are three states that they are able to, you know, that they predominantly thrive in because there are various laws that protect them and that's Utah, Missouri and Florida and they, you know, the things that they subject the kids to is absolutely It's just horrific and disturbing.
	I can't say enough bad things about the people that run those places and what should be done to them.
	I take a very Yeah.
	Yeah.
	such a big force you know nobody I know is fundamentalist and so on and it's like well yeah if you stay inside your you know pretty well educated mostly secular urban environment then you don't particularly see it but you got to cast your net a little bit wider to see the people who are out there particularly the children of who again of course have no particular say in in this kind of environment you
	You know, the fundamentalist religion is a very strong and powerful force, and in many places in the world, it's growing in vehemence and intensity, and you know, the Dark Age is not a good thing when you have nuclear weapons, so we do need to take that stand against this encroach of superstition.
	I look forward to that segment of the film with great interest.
	Yeah, that's going to be tough to stomach.
	If you thought the visuals in War on Kids was bad, I mean, unfortunately getting visuals for this is going to be really, really challenging.
	I don't know how, but the stories are just devastating.
	I believe it. Well, listen, I really do appreciate and applaud your courage in tackling these topics.
	I hope that the film can get as wide a distribution as possible and I hope it provokes some fun...
	Like, I hope as a society we can just find enough love in our hearts for children as a whole to change the environment that they're in because, you know, most of the world's problems come down to, in my opinion, come down to a fundamental lack of love.
	And if we love children enough in the abstract and in particular then We will stop at nothing to improve the quality of their environments.
	And if we don't, then the way the world goes will not be pretty.
	And we won't really have many excuses for how those children turn out and the perspectives and opinions that they have of us.
	So I hope that your film Helps people to see the suffering of this terrible underclass who are our future citizens and leaders and that we can turn the tide to something much more beneficial and gentle and positive and child-centered.
	So the child has a say, the child has rights.
	I just really, really applaud and was very excited to hear about the film and even more excited to see it.
	So thank you so much for the work that you're doing and a huge, huge recommendation to anybody who hears this to just go to thewaronkids.com And, you know, cough up your last shekel to get this film.
	It's well, well worth it. Well, thank you very much.
	I appreciate that. All right.
	Take care. Best of luck with your next projects.

▲