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Dec. 1, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
25:55
3516 How Trump Can Transform Education | Duke Pesta and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux.
Hope you're doing well.
Back with a good friend, Dr.
Duke Pesta, a tenured university professor, author, and the academic director of Freedom Project Academy, a live online school.
Individual classes, complete curricula for students in kindergarten through high school.
You can find out more about this at fpeusa.org.
Dr.
Pesta, we have a new administration for those who may have missed that.
Perhaps you're just coming out of an isolation tank for a couple of months or cryogenic freezing or something.
You've arrived from some other gas giant.
But we have a new administration.
And let's just say that the Trumpentastic new administration does seem to be willing to shake things up with regards to education.
Now, of course, you provide education both at the university and through Freedom Project Academy.
If you could...
Take the American educational system on a wild ride through your unconstrained preferences.
What sort of advice would you give the president-elect at the moment?
Well, I'm a little nervous.
I mean, I'm thrilled that he won, obviously.
A Hillary Clinton administration would have magnified exponentially everything that's wrong with American education in the same way that the Obama administration did.
We're exponentially worse now education-wise than we were eight years ago.
Eight years or even four years of Hillary would have exponentially made that, kind of like the national debt, growing, growing, growing.
There's hope.
Donald Trump has said that he wanted to get rid of the Department of Education.
Donald Trump said that he wanted to get rid of Common Core.
Donald Trump said that we need to turn education back to the state, which is a step.
The state is not the answer either.
However, with his new education pick for secretary and some other things, Every Republican candidate, pretty much, and every Republican president since 1980 has said they were going to do this, and none of them did it.
Not one of them has followed through.
In the case of Ronald Reagan, in the case of George Herbert Walker Bush, in the case of George Bush, and the candidates, people like Mitt Romney, when we narrowed down, back in 2008, when we narrowed down eight presidential candidates to one, Mitt Romney, he never mentioned it again.
So here's what has to happen.
First and foremost, the Department of Education has to go.
What Jimmy Carter did for arguably the most failed president in American history, I think you have to argue, given how important education is, he may be in retrospect the most successful president in American history in enforcing something really bad.
By creating the Federal Department of Education, he guaranteed now That American education by default would all have to subordinate itself to what came out of that Washington entity.
What happened immediately was the Department of Education became responsible for deciding who got all that tax money that was going to pay for education.
So of course what they started to do immediately was reward schools, states, districts, reward people who conformed and punish people who didn't.
So well before you had Common Core.
You had an out-of-control government organization who was using the power of the purse to buy what it wanted and punish what it didn't, progressive liberal education.
If you don't get rid of the Department of Education, whatever gains Donald Trump makes will be lost by the next Democrat president.
Whatever he manages to do, right will be undone whether it's four or eight years by the next Democrat president.
And so you have to get rid of it.
And the argument that has to be made is, look, if I were in his shoes, the first thing I would do, I might not be able to formally abolish the organization without the help of Congress.
But as we've seen with President Obama, you can certainly shape the organization.
Here's why we lose.
Whenever Democrats take office, the first thing they do is they clear out all the old Republican stink and they put all new people in who believe what they believe.
Presidents come and go.
Congress comes and goes.
But you know what stays the same?
The same bureaucrats who are working in the Department of Education for the last 40 years have never left it.
The Department of Organization from top to bottom is progressive and liberal.
I guarantee you there aren't one in a 5,000 or so employees, the Department of Education, not one in a thousand is a conservative.
So Republicans come in.
They can tinker with who's at the top, but the culture stays the same.
If I were President Trump, the first thing I would do is I take the top 5,000 people, I take the top 1,500 who are 50 and above, and I give an option.
We're going to buy you out and retire you right now, or we're just going to cut your jobs.
They're all going to jump for the retirement.
Then the lowest 1,500, 2,000 who are relatively new, I'd reassign them.
I'd give them two choices.
We're going to reassign you to the Department of Homeland Security, something, something, something, or we're going to terminate you.
Get rid of that, right?
So you make it absolutely as small as you can.
Then with your Republican majorities, you make over the next two years, you make the case.
This is unconstitutional.
It is clearly a huge drain of resources.
I mean, my God, they have their own SWAT team at the Department of Education, right?
I mean, a huge drain on resources.
It's economically unfeasible, right?
How much better off would we be to let the states decide?
A portion to each state – I'd like to see them get out of – the feds should get out of funding them altogether.
But in the short term, a portion to each state based on number of school kids – Apportion certain federal monies that you then let the state legislatures decide how to spend it.
That's a step down.
Once you've done that, absolutely zero need for the Department of Education.
I would immediately then close it, sell the building, and salt the ground so nothing grows there again.
Then when you've done that, and maybe in your second four-year term, because this would be such a radically popular idea among everybody but radical lefties, you're going to get elected to four more years.
Then the second time around, then you put some pressure on the state legislatures to, state by state, begin to shrink the role of the state in education.
Education should be a school district thing.
It should actually be a school thing.
Every American school in this country should know how much money it's going to get based on the size and the number of students they serve.
It should be absolutely formulaic.
And then you hold that local school accountable.
Here is what a fourth grade reading level is.
Here's what a ninth grade reading level is.
Here's what a college reading level is.
Here's what a third grade, fifth grade, eighth grade, ninth grade math student should know.
If your students aren't getting there, clean out the school district and bring in teachers will do it.
No complicated standards, no centralization, no nationalization.
Bring in real teachers and give them a simple basic chore.
This is what a fourth grade level reading is.
You either get your kids there or you don't.
And when moms and dads then are empowered, because then Who decides who the teachers are?
The school boards.
And then if the teachers are being hired by the school boards and they're not getting the job, then all of this lies in moms and dads.
And this would clean up the problem in our worst school districts in the inner cities.
You give that money to the district, to those schools, and you put the teachers, the parents in charge of electing people who are going to get their kids to the basic standard of reading, writing, and math.
That fixes it.
That's why our education system was the envy of the world through the 1960s, because that's kind of what we did.
So you have to break up the monopoly from the top and then at the state level and then even at the district level.
Because you could hold an individual school accountable.
You could hold an individual group of teachers at a school accountable.
You give the parents back control of the purse because they vote in people who are going to manage that money correctly.
All of this cronyism and all of this bribery, blackmail from the federal government, even the state governments, goes away.
Education is fixed.
That's the template.
A lot of things have to happen, but that's the template.
And it's not new.
It's not a radical experiment.
It's a return to what things were not two generations ago.
Yeah, through the 1960s and what happened.
In the 1960s, 70s, the standards got bumped from the schools to the districts.
Then in the late 70s and 80s, from the districts to the states, and ever since then, with goals 2000, no child left behind, it's the federal government now that's calling the shots.
And as in every aspect of American life, the more the government takes over, the less effective and the more expensive everything is.
And that's true of healthcare, obviously.
It's true of what happens now in every walk of life.
Land management, resource management, everything they do, they do less effectively, more levels of bureaucracy, more corruption, more wasted money, more bribery, more federal intrusion.
I talked to a mom just the other day in California, and her kid goes to a school, primarily Hispanic school in California.
And typically, as we said, we've been saying for five years, The kids that get hammered the most by things like federal government and intrusion and Common Core are the inner city kids.
These kids are underperforming.
And so all the teachers are telling the parents, don't worry.
We're having federal agents in next week.
And you can tell them why your school needs more money.
And that was the whole thing for the teachers.
The federal government will give us more money to keep doing what we're doing.
That's the system, not just in education, but across the country that has to be broken.
Where do you think the voucher question should settle?
You know, as bad as the public schools are, I understand voucher and charters.
In fact, the woman he appointed, Davos, who he appointed to be the next Secretary of Education, she is a big charter school voucher school proponent.
She's also deeply in bed with Jeb Bush and Jeb Bush's organization.
Jeb Bush, of course, is the The only Republican screaming bloody murder about how wonderful Common Core is.
So you can buy – if we leave Common Core in place, we leave all of this federal control in place if we do that, but then open up charter and vouchers, you're going to have the same problem.
Because inevitably, and we've seen this – I've seen it in 14 states already, that ultimately charter and voucher schools, they're getting money from the state or the federal government.
And what the states and federal government does is, okay, you want to open a charter school that's classical education, do it.
And then six months later, oh, and by the way, you're using state money to fund that, or you're using federal money, which means you're going to have to take our common core tests.
So you're a voucher school, charter school, that's teaching classical education.
Then the state turns around and says, your kids have to pass common core state tests or no more money.
Guess what happens to the classical education?
Goes out the window, in comes the common core.
That's happened already in 14 different states.
So all you're doing is giving more choices for the same education.
That's why it's doomed to fail.
Unless, if you could create a voucher or charter system where the money went directly to the parents and there were no strings.
If you could do that, you'd have something.
Because then they wouldn't be stuck, right?
If the money belonged to the parents as long as they spent it responsibly on education, then they could vote with their feet.
They could choose non-charter, schools that take not a penny of government money, right?
Freedom Project, we're one of those schools.
We don't take a dime of state or federal money precisely because we know at Freedom Project, if we did, they'd start telling us what we could and couldn't do.
So you lose – it's a catch-22.
If you give the moms the money, in other words, let them keep that money or give them tax rebates or, hell, just cut a check for every family for this amount for education with no strings whatsoever, I think you would see a much better, fairer system than the one you see now.
And kids in struggling school districts and inner cities would have the ability to use that money to access private schools that they otherwise couldn't or to do online schooling.
If you're giving that money back to moms and dads, we're spending about $17,000 a year.
To educate a single kid.
Can you imagine giving an inner-city mom who has to work two jobs $17,000 a year in education money to homeschool?
I mean, obviously this would have to be watched.
Like everything else, it could be abused.
But that's a system that's much more on the ground and direct, right?
It's much easier to fix it if people are abusing it, and it's much easier to empower genuine educational alternatives for families.
If you can start there, that's the only way I would argue that the voucher charter system would work.
Genuine choice, not stipulated choice.
And from what I can tell, Mrs.
Davos is on the stipulated choice.
Well, the fact that she's going to be the Secretary of the Department of Education, right?
And still argue for these charters vastly better than what we've had for 20 years.
But you see the problem.
The next Democrat president comes in.
And we've got this elaborate charter system and then starts pulling that string.
Oh, and by the way, in the name of testing, in the name of equality, we have to make sure that everybody's education is the same.
Some people are using their charter dollars to educate their kids really well.
Others are using them to educate them poorly.
So we need centralized tests again, at which point every charter school has to conform to the test.
That's where we are now.
Well, and, you know, it's like the drug dealer who says, well, your first couple of hits of heroin are free.
Now, after that...
That was common core!
Yeah.
Now, what about the teachers' unions?
Another thing that happened in the 60s that is often unremarked upon is that it became basically impossible to fire teachers.
And this challenge as well, can you really be said to have a lot of choice if everyone's part of the same teachers' union, they can't be fired?
Isn't there going to have to be some changes in this sort of...
You know, last in, first out, seniority, and what do they put them in?
Rubber rooms if they're like caught molesting children.
Well, we can't fire you, but we can put you in a place where you can read magazines all day.
A lot of that's going to have to change.
Do you think there's a way that the president can affect any change in that area?
Yeah, I think the second thing that I would do, and I didn't mention it because it's not primarily government-directed, we have to break up the monopoly on teacher accreditation.
Now, in order to teach, you have to generally go to these big campus departments of education.
You've got to get – there is no more worthless college degree than an education degree.
I mean think about it, Stephan.
And I teach future teachers.
So when an education department with all these kids studying to be teachers, when the teacher wants to teach English, they send them to us.
The education department doesn't teach English.
I do.
When a kid wants to be a high school math teacher, the education department sends them to the math department.
So there is no content in education other than all this ridiculous progressive ed theory, right, ed psych.
All this garbage about the correct way to organize your classroom.
All this stuff about multiculturalism in the classroom.
All this BS that has nothing to do with teaching.
And you can't teach in this country without that stupid degree.
And it drives away the smartest people oftentimes who are like, I don't think I can go through two years of this leftist garbage in order to get my hands on some young brains.
What I would do is I would redirect the money that we gave to colleges from the federal government.
I would start funneling money.
To those universities who allowed the teachers within the discipline the ability to assess the skill competency.
Allow that to be enough.
If you come through with a degree in math from a good university, you should be able to teach math.
With very little outside preparation.
And then what I would do is I would try to institute in the public schools a way for the schools themselves to bring new teachers in and give them immediate classroom experience with basic supervision, right?
So that you would really cut out this education, university education middleman garbage.
You would get more students studying math and science with math people and scientists who also...
Could include in their classes for their teachers components on how to deliver this information in a classroom.
I trust my scientists to teach young teachers how to teach science much more than I expect my education department to do it because they're just going to politicize it.
So these are all things that you could do.
Wouldn't fix the problem completely.
I think in the best of all possible worlds, my platonic ideal… We would get rid of public school altogether, right?
It should be absolutely driven not by any state, local, or federal government.
It should be a contract between parents and professionals, like in the same way we pay daycare centers, in the same way we pay our doctors.
Oh, that's got corrupted now.
In the same way we pay for almost any other resource, right?
And you give tax breaks, all the money we're taxing people, real estate property taxes, right?
How much lower would our property taxes be, right, if we didn't have these huge burdens For this collective – the highest-achieving countries in the world, places like South Korea, they spend about $4,000 a year on their kids.
Four grand.
That's it.
We're spending three, four, five times that for worse results.
Well, it is very tough to produce criminals using the South Korean system.
And of course, they're getting their money's worth.
Now, let's end with colleges.
I don't think I need to say much more other than I think most Americans feel that they've drifted a little bit from the, you know, the areopagitica ideals of John Milton and free speech.
So what could be done with colleges at the moment?
You know, I really do think that So many of our biggest universities, the one that set the trends, all the Ivy League colleges, Michigan, Ohio State, the UC system in California, the ones that pedagogically and philosophically set the trend for the tens of thousands of four-year colleges and two-year colleges, almost all of them are sitting on these huge endowments, billions and billions of dollars of endowments, and they don't have to spend it or much of it.
Because they're getting this huge influx of federal dollars.
I would like to see a situation where if you're going to have this kind of obvious in-your-face ideological imbalance, I would cut off the till.
I guarantee you if you – even a place like Harvard with a $24 billion endowment, you cut off their government money until they demonstrate a commitment to ideological free education, to relative balance, particularly in the humanities, amongst philosophical perspectives.
Cut off all the money.
I promise you.
Real diversity.
Real diversity.
I guarantee you that even the richest schools would balk at that.
They want their endowments more than they want the liberal pedagogy.
They change.
They would change.
It would be hard at first, but they would.
And if you could change that, the 30 top colleges in this country, if you could redirect them that way, then all the real, the hundreds and hundreds of schools that follow would change by attrition, right?
It's a philosophical problem.
Well, there's very little that a smaller college would gain by saying, we do things the opposite of Harvard.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
So you got to lean heavy on the leading schools.
And if you make an example out of them, so to speak, Look, and you brought it up, the hypocrisy of this all.
They would scream academic freedom is being challenged.
They would scream, right, that President Trump is forcing us to teach a certain way.
No, he's not.
He's asking you to practice what you preach, diversity, and intellectual diversity.
If you don't have that in the college campus, you got nothing.
Well, and I think it would, of course, only serve to increase the effectiveness of leftist professors if they had competent conservatives to argue against.
Now, some of them might not want that.
You know, I'm not getting into the ring with the rock, you know, but it would be for the better.
And, of course, it would be great for the students.
You know, the students need to see clashing and opposing viewpoints so that they can learn to sharpen their intellectual acumen and learn how to debate better.
You know, there was an old approach to debating that I, when I was first debating in college, that I, and even in high school, I got into, you have to be able to state your opponent's argument very well.
And it's a very effective thing that used to be done.
It's not done really in the media anymore, because it's just everybody's Hitler.
But there used to be a wonderful thing where you'd say, and this came out of Augustine as well, Aristotle, here's the great arguments that I'm about to disagree with.
And you put them forward as forcefully as possible, and then you show how they're weaker.
And that really is how people learn how to think.
And it's really not happening.
Everyone's just presenting their own best cases and suppressing dissent from the leftist orthodoxy.
And I'd really, really like to see that.
That's what people are missing without this diversity.
You are exactly right.
I mean, if conservative and Christian arguments are so transparently stupid, so nakedly racist, you should be the easiest thing in the world to have half a department of straw men to argue against, excuse me, straw people to argue against, right?
And so you're right.
They don't want that because it's really – the modern university has become a place that's really comfortable with groupthink because the hard work of defending your ideals, the hard work of convincing skeptical students that your ideas are better… We don't have to worry about that anymore.
We just spoon-feed it to them.
I think, look, I dislike liberal philosophy and I dislike progressivism.
I think having genuine, genuine diversity on college campuses, it would be better for liberalism.
Because the arguments would be hard-earned if they were able to win them.
And by having really smart conservative professors be able to come back and – now, of course, the consequence is you wouldn't be getting 90% graduation rates of liberals.
In fact, I would bet if you did that, if you had genuine diversity, I bet it would reflect the country.
What is it?
About 25% of people define themselves as liberal.
35% to 40% is conservative.
I bet you that's what would happen, and you'd have an ideological flip.
Well, the great thing for the leftists is, and I noticed this even when I was in graduate school in Canada here, that if you agree with the general lefty principles, you don't need to footnote.
You don't need to reinforce your arguments.
Because, you know, if I say the world is a sphere, I don't need to put a footnote down to whoever came up with the first idea, the Egyptians, I think.
I think I'm going to go.
If you learn to swim against a current, you're going to end up a stronger swimmer.
And the fact that a lot of these guys just seem to be leaves on a stream floating down, they're lifting feathers and thinking that they're Arnold Schwarzenegger.
And it would be so much better for everyone.
But of course, there would be a number of people who would find that they're not particularly well suited for that, which is great.
We should save society's scarce educational resources for those best able to utilize them for the betterment of the world.
So...
I think that kind of cutting of funding would make them more market-focused.
And whoever did that first, their graduates would be well understood very easily to be better thinkers, more critical thinkers, and better able to entertain alternative viewpoints, and better able to navigate and negotiate in a diverse environment.
Because, of course, if it's 95% liberal in a campus while you go out into the workforce, it ain't 95% liberal, I guess, unless you're in the mainstream media or something like that.
And they're going to be much better prepared for the world, and that's going to raise the value of that degree considerably.
And that's why the kids are protesting on campus, because they don't understand a world Because they've been in school their whole life.
They no longer understand a world where people disagree with them.
They no longer can – this is how pathetic it is.
How weak is this?
They can no longer process a world where there might be a valid opinion that's not theirs.
And so you're getting – get rid of the Constitution.
Get rid of the electoral college.
Let's just overturn the election.
Let's have a riot.
Look, I was – when I went to college, I had 18 years of school.
When I went to college, I was on a leftist course.
Just because I thought that was all I knew.
But as I got to the university, I started to see how irrationally liberal, how angry they were, how unwilling to discuss things when I would raise a point, right?
How unwilling to engage in genuine debate the liberal progressive professors were.
And that's what, like you, that's what pushed me to the right.
Not because I was inherently going that way.
I wasn't born this way.
But I saw how weak their arguments were and more than that.
Not just how weak their arguments were, how unwilling and churlish they were when they were asked to defend them in a university setting.
And so I started looking at the opposite way.
And the more I did that, the more I had to orient my education against what I was getting at the university, the stronger a thinker it made me.
Well, there's an old methodology of pretending.
Yeah, I think that's a good one.
And if they do hit any opposition, they get called the airstrikes of Nazi and fascist and racist.
You know, they can't lose.
And, you know, the only reason they're not bored is because I think their intellects are not the sharpest.
Well, you know, I have a friend who's figured out a cheat code for Trivia Crack, the trivia game, and he never loses.
And he just keeps playing it, playing it, playing it.
You would think they would find it boring, but I think you're right, the God mode.
There's something...
With my friends who have these sort of cheat codes they never lose, there's something – a one-to-one correspondence between that attitude and what we're doing in the classroom with one-sided argumentation.
That for these kids, being morally, ethically, even logically correct doesn't matter.
It's just winning.
My idea is winning.
Me being on the winning side.
And it's one more way that we are dumbing down education and we are prolonging the juvenile period of our kids' evolution.
We are not exposing them to defeat, to counter arguments.
We're not teaching them how to lose gracefully.
We are not teaching them that they can be wrong, really wrong, because if you teach them that, then maybe they'll change.
We don't want them to change.
Right.
Well, thanks for those thoughts.
I just wanted to remind people, please go to fpeusa.org to check out Freedom Project Academy.
Dr.
Duke Pesta, always a great pleasure.
I'm sure we'll talk again soon.
Thanks so much for your time today.
Love it.
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