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Aug. 24, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

12:25

1733 Dead-ucation - Freedomain Radio

Kids keep getting smarter. School stays as dumb as ever. References: http://www.fdrurl.com/odd

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	Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Made Radio.
	I hope you're doing very well. Let's talk just a little bit, shall we, about the fracked-upness of modern educational systems.
	The systems that you, my friends, were entrapped and ensnared within just as I was for many, many hellacious years.
	The first thing to understand about education is that it is controlled By the government, it is in a coercive and involuntary situation, even in the private sector, which is largely controlled, regulated, and manipulated by the state.
	So we are using coercion, the coercion of property taxes or other forms of taxes which are used to pay for We are using coercion to educate our children.
	We are using violence to extract money from people to pay for education.
	Now, one of the main problems with violence as an institution is that it freezes Situations in time.
	Once the free market, once voluntarism, once choice is no longer part of the interaction, the social institution is frozen in time.
	It no longer adapts.
	It no longer progresses in any fundamental way.
	What's the proof? Well...
	What was the educational environment in the mid to late 19th century when government education landed like an asteroid on the skull of a T-Rex on education?
	Well, you had usually a woman, or you had a teacher, you had a room, you had rows and rows of chairs, you had a blackboard, and you had chalk!
	And that was how education was provided.
	Fast forward. About 150 years or so.
	What is the environment?
	Oh look! It is a room, a rows of chairs, A teacher, a blackboard, and chalk!
	It's insane when you think about it how much has changed in every other field of private endeavor.
	From cars to airplanes to the internet to everything that you can imagine in the free market has changed and progressed to the point where you simply can't find technology from the 1860s and 1870s in use today.
	Look at farming. It would be like going back to scythes.
	No, we have giant combine harvesters now.
	I mean, it's completely insane.
	Once you wrap the coercion of the state around an institution, that institution gets frozen in time and no longer progresses.
	So we are basically educating our children in an environment that was developed 150 years ago and has barely changed since despite the amazing and immense changes in almost every other field of human endeavor.
	The first thing to understand, that's bad enough.
	It's bad enough that our basic approach to education has not changed in 150 years.
	What's even worse is that the children have changed hugely, significantly, enormously.
	I was at the park yesterday.
	My wife and I took our daughter to the park yesterday, and this girl who lives nearby, who's very nice and very smart, came along with us.
	She's about seven or eight years old.
	And we asked her parents if she could come with us.
	She wanted to come with. And my wife asked the parents, and I took my daughter to the park.
	This girl we then sort of sent back, and I said to her, well, I have to take you back because we agreed with your parents that you'd be back by such and such a time.
	And she immediately turned to me and said, well, you didn't.
	And I'm like, you're exactly right.
	That's incredibly smart. You're exactly right.
	You're seven or eight years old. You know that I didn't enter into a verbal contract with your parents about bringing you back in time.
	Boom! She got it right away, and it was just smart.
	And it was just tragic to hear how little she liked school, how much she hated school, how much she loathed being there, because she's just smart.
	It's really, really important to understand.
	This is called the Flynn Effect.
	And it's somewhat controversial, but the basics appear to be pretty incontrovertible.
	The intelligence of children has risen significantly by up to seven IQ points.
	IQ points per decade.
	Some have argued with good credibility that since the Second World War, IQ has risen by 35 points.
	35 points! That's...
	Mind-blowingly huge.
	So, not only has the educational system not changed in 150 years, fundamentally, but children have become many times smarter than the relative dunderheads of the mid-19th century.
	So, not only have we kept education at a crushingly low level of expertise and sophistication, but children keep bumping up their heads, literally against the incredibly low ceiling of statist and coercively funded education.
	Let me give you some facts here, just so you can put this in perspective.
	Let's just say, you could argue that 50-point IQ has gone on since the 19th century, you could argue even higher, but let's just be conservative and say that it's only 30 points, only 30 IQ points have accumulated to children.
	And it's partly because of nutrition, and it's also partly because if you look at The kind of quality that children are experiencing from the private sector.
	The toys that are available to my daughter are incredible.
	They have little computers and ding-dongs.
	She can paint on my little iPod touch.
	She can do just the most amazing things.
	She has, you know, dancey, happy videos.
	She has the most amazing technology to amuse, entertain and stimulate her.
	We can listen to classical music.
	We can watch dancing and gymnastics on YouTube.
	We can do the most amazing things to stimulate her.
	So not only is she smarter because of her nutrition and all of that sort of stuff, but she's just getting far more stimulation.
	So what's happening is children are getting smarter and they're getting much more stimulation.
	From the free market, from the private sector.
	And then they go straight into the intestinal brain-corroding goo of the public school system.
	And then, of course, there's a huge mismatch between their raw intelligence and potential and this stupid, retarded, idiotic...
	Cattle prod rows of indoctrination that is occurring in the state education.
	So let's just say the children have gained 30 IQ points over the past 150 years.
	That's totally conservative and easily defendable.
	IQ is not linear.
	IQ is asymptotic.
	Somebody with an IQ of 150 is not just 50% smarter than somebody with an IQ of 100.
	They're many, many, many times smarter.
	In fact, it's barely even the same scale.
	An IQ of 130 or higher is 2.2% of the population.
	2.2% of the population have an IQ of 130 or higher.
	So let's say that the median IQ in 1870 was 100, and let's just say it's only been 30 points.
	You could make it an argument for twice that.
	Let's just say 30 points. What it means is that the smartest 2% of the population in 1860 or 1870 is now the norm In 2010.
	And yet our educational environment has barely changed.
	It's beyond staggering, beyond monstrous.
	So, and why do I say 30 points?
	Dutch conscripts gained 21 points of IQ during only 30 years, or 7 points per decade between 1952 and 1982.
	So if it's 21 points in 30 years, can we go to 30 points in 150 years?
	I think you can. A psychologist, Neisser, estimated that if he extrapolates beyond the data, which shows this 21-point gain, an even larger gain of 35 IQ points can be argued for in just the post-war period.
	So we're talking 150 years.
	I think we can easily say 30 and much, much higher.
	There's this invented ailment called ADHD and oppositional defiant disorder, which, of course, I'm sure all of the founding fathers would have been happy to be medicated into not having a revolution, because they seem to have an irrational problem with authority.
	And diagnosis of ADHD has increased an average of 3% from 1997 to 2006.
	Ah, the diagnosis is significantly higher Among Hispanic children.
	And also, interestingly enough, it's higher among children who have insurance.
	In other words, so that the drug companies and the doctors can get paid for diagnosing and drugging these children.
	Wretched! Wretched, wretched, wretched.
	From 2000 to 2010, the diagnosis of ADHD has increased 4% per year, making it the number one mental health concern in children.
	Boys are twice as likely to be diagnosed as girls.
	This is down from 10 to 1 in 1997.
	Slightly less than 5.5 million children ranging in age from 5 to 17 were diagnosed with ADHD in 2009.
	60% of all children with ADHD are receiving medication for treating the disorder.
	The most highly medicated age demographic for these children from 9 to 12 years of age.
	65% of children with ADHD exhibit performance in defiance or problems with authority figures.
	Problems with authority figures?
	Can you imagine? Because the teachers in public school are so wonderful and so voluntary and so concerned with the children and so demonstrative of the value of volunteerism and peaceful interactions because they, of course, are fed with the blood-soaked state money From coercive taxation.
	So they're modeling the effects of aggressive and coercive behavior.
	And strangely enough, when the children do that, when the children use aggression to get what they want, unlike the public school teachers with their salaries and benefits and two months off in the summer, they don't use aggression to get what they want.
	Of course not. When children do it, it's wrong and it's bad.
	And it must be medicated and drugged.
	This is the one thing that society really doesn't like about children, is that children will hold up a mirror to who you actually are.
	Who you actually are. They're not trained into pretending that you aren't who you are in the way that adults are.
	So children will reflect back to society what society is really doing.
	And children are smart enough now to know, to get to understand in their gut that their entire system is run on coercion and control and indoctrination and dominance and humiliation and aggression.
	And they act that out. They model that out.
	And then, of course, we see that mirror held up to ourselves and we're like, oh my God, that's terrible.
	Let's drug it. Let's control it.
	Let's crush it. It really, fundamentally, comes down to one four-letter word, which is love.
	Love! We need to love our children enough, enough to take on this crippling, statist, coercive monopoly that currently has It's primordial chained fist around the necks and minds and souls of our children.
	This is not a system that was designed, this was a system that was inherited from Prussians, and of course the Prussians did a wonderful job of keeping the German children peaceful in the 19th and 20th century.
	We have to love our children enough.
	We have to love our children enough to stand up to this crazy, insane, coercive, destructive system.
	Because right now, children's brains are expanding beyond the ancient, ridiculous skull of government-run schooling.
	Our children are too smart to sit in rows and vegetate while being indoctrinated.
	They're too smart. They need to be out in the world.
	They need to be engaged. They need to be curious.
	They need to not be drugged like Soviet-era, quote, mental health patients because they fundamentally don't like the bullying of this destructive system.
	We need to stop doing that. We need to stand up.
	Stand up against these special interests and save our children from this ridiculous and destructive system.
	And brain-destroying system.
	And then our children will respect us.

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