All Episodes
Previous Next
July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
18:54
The Truth about American Teachers (and Education)
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
Good morning.
Good morning.
It's time to philosophize.
It's a lovely day in the neighborhood.
A lovely day for thinking good.
I hope you're doing all well.
Thank you for dragging your philosophically bleary eyes out of bed at this crack of 10am, getting up at the crack of noon.
And it's great to chat with everyone.
Thank you so much for your time and for your support.
So I'm going to do one more round of the martial arts thing.
I really want to thank everyone Thank you for giving thoughts and opinions and ideas.
It's been very, very interesting and I appreciate it.
It's good to be controversial.
It means that you're either completely right or you're doing something completely useful.
So time will tell.
Let's talk a little bit more about education.
I think it's quite interesting.
So you know the teachers all sort of talking about being underpaid, underpaid.
Well, it's hard to find some of the new information, but in 2001 and This would be, of course, compared to the private sector, and I know for sure that gap has widened quite a bit.
Weekly pay for teachers in 2001 was about the same, i.e.
within 10%.
As for accountants, biological and life scientists, registered nurses, and editors and reporters, teachers earned a heck of a lot more than social workers and artists.
In fact, the only group out of seven professionals in the survey with a higher weekly pay were lawyers and judges.
And they of course don't get summer vacations, PD days off, professional development days off, snow days, federal holidays, and so on.
So hourly wages, and this is based on self-reported data compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, teachers earn more per hour than architects, civil engineers, mechanical engineers, statisticians, biological and life scientists, atmospheric and space scientists, registered nurses, physical therapists, university level, foreign language teachers, librarians, technical writers, musicians, artists, and editors and reporters.
And of course you get massive pensions, you have health insurance plans which mostly require no contribution, and you have pretty much absolute job security.
Now, maybe the very best people are going into education and that's why they can command such high salaries.
Ah, sadly, the data does not support that.
So, undergraduate education majors typically have lower SAT and ACT scores than other students.
And there's quite a strong correlation.
The lower the quality of the undergraduate institution a person attends, the more likely he or she is to wind up in the teaching profession.
In 2001, only 60% of education students, i.e.
people who want to become teachers, only 60% of education students could pass the basic teacher licensing exam in Virginia.
Virginia's stalwart response?
Well, the State Board of Education lowered the requirements.
Ooh, isn't that just precious?
In Massachusetts, they lowered the passing grade for a basic skills test for teachers in 1998, when nearly two-thirds of the teachers failed it.
So fail the test, you get an F. No, no, no, if you're a teacher who's administering the test, you get to take the test again, but they make it a whole lot easier for you.
And I've had some questions about this information.
I'll put the sources for this in the notes for the podcast, in the link or the video below.
So Professor Charles Shakespeare Interesting.
Analyzed data from the American Association of University Women Education Foundation survey, and quote, estimates that between 1991 and 2000, roughly 290,000 students were subject to physical sexual abuse by teachers or other school personnel.
Right?
So you understand when priests and coaches do it, everyone goes insane.
That's right, they should.
But have you heard this statistic?
That almost a third of a million students were subjected to physical sexual abuse.
This is not emotional abuse, this is not physical abuse, this is not Verbal abuse, this is just physical sexual abuse by teachers or other school personnel.
Do you hear about that?
Heck no!
Only 12% of American students attend private schools, but 39% of Chicago public school teachers send their children to private schools.
And of course those politicians who were against school choice all send their kids to private schools.
President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Jesse Jackson, Hillary Clinton, and Al Gore.
To name just a few.
And how is all of this Wonderful education.
Year after year after year of monopoly education doing.
Well, the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs commissioned a civic education poll among public school students.
77% didn't know that George Washington was the first president, couldn't name Thomas Jefferson as the author of the Declaration of Independence, and only 2.8% of the students actually passed the citizenship test.
The Goldwater Institute of Phoenix did the same survey, and only 3.5% of students passed The civics test.
According to National Research Council report, only 28% of high school science teachers consistently follow the National Research Council guidelines on teaching evolution.
And 13% of those teachers explicitly advocate creationism or intelligent design.
How is our critical thinking skills?
On the eve of the first Iraq war, almost 70% of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9-11 attacks.
Four years later, even though proof had been provided that he was not, over a third still believed that he was.
an analysis of 300,000 Torrance creativity test scores of adults and children in the U.S. found creativity and IQ scores rose steadily until 1990 and were in decline thereafter, and the most serious decline occurred for the youngest children.
In 1966, oh, a banner year for the birth of philosophy, I would say, in 1966 to 67, about one and a half million students who took the verbal portion of the SAT had a score of 700 or more, and sorry, a score of 700 or more was achieved a score of 700 or more was achieved by 33,000 students in In 86-87, almost 2 million students took the test and fewer than 14,000 achieved that score.
Should we go on?
Ah, one or two more.
We could go on.
According to the National Endowments for the Arts report in 82, 1982, do you think this is better?
82% of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure.
Two decades later, only 67% did.
More than 40% of Americans under 44 did not read a single book, fiction or nonfiction, over the course of a year.
The proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing, unless required by school, has doubled between 1984 and 2004.
Between 1968 and 1988, the average soundbite on the news for a presidential candidate, featuring the candidate's own voice, has dropped from 42.3 seconds to 9.8 seconds.
seconds to 9.8 seconds.
By 2000, according to another Harvard study, the bite was down to 7.8 seconds.
More than 50% of students at four-year schools and more than 75% at two-year colleges, this is after high school, lacked the skills to perform complex literary tasks.
This is three kinds of literacy, analyzing news stories and other prose, understanding documents and having the math skills needed for checkbooks or restaurant tips.
This is completely shocking.
Completely shocking.
Almost 20% of students pursuing four-year college degrees had only basic quantitative skills.
For example, the students could not estimate if their car had enough gas to get to the service station.
Most Chicago public schools alumni must take remedial classes at the Chicago City Colleges.
74% must take remedial English.
94% must take remedial math.
More than 20% of adults in the U.S.
read at or below a fifth grade level, far below the level needed to earn a living wage.
Nearly half of America's adults are poor readers or functionally illiterate.
They can't carry out simple tasks like balancing checkbooks, reading drug labels or writing essays for a job.
44 million adults in the US can't read well enough to read a simple story to a child.
Do we need to go on?
Approximately 50% of the nation's unemployed youth ages 16 to 21 are functionally illiterate with virtually no prospects of obtaining good jobs.
Well anyway we could sort of go on, but I mean this is absolutely catastrophic.
And one of the things I think that's happened is that people who are older, and you know in my sort of category, the education that we got wasn't so bad.
Remember it takes a generation.
It takes a generation after the socialization of a particular program for the real rot to set in.
Right so I was being taught like the okay so the public sector unions really took over education and made it impossible to fire people in the 60s.
So in the 70s and 80s you still had teachers who'd come in and came in through the voluntary system.
I mean voluntary relative to a still government system still paid for through taxation but you weren't heavily unionized and you could get fired for being a bad teacher.
So in the 70s and 80s, education wasn't so bad.
It's like all of the people in NASA who came in in the original space program came from the private sector and were really good and kept that work ethic and then it decayed over time.
That's why you went to the moon very quickly and then had the space shuttle for the next 30 years.
And so the education that people received in the 70s and 80s, maybe even into the early 90s, was not nearly as bad as it is now because now it's a whole different kind of teacher who's in there.
And of course, the people who have a lot of influence look back and say, education was pretty good for me.
These kids must be unmotivated.
Well, I would doubt that.
Human nature doesn't really change that much generation to generation.
So I would look at the quality of education.
Now, people have said to me, a very interesting thing, they say, well, it's the families.
It's the families.
Well, you know, you need to read The Bee Eater, a biography of Michelle Rhee.
It's available on Kindle.
It's a couple of bucks.
You can also read How the worm in the apple, I think it's called, how the teachers unions destroyed public education.
And you need to know that when bad teachers are replaced with good teachers, students do a whole lot better.
Teachers have a huge, huge impact on students.
I mean, you understand, teachers see students more than parents do, for the most part.
So I think, and certainly interact with them more.
So I think that's important.
That scores do go up when the quality of education improves, and not just empty scores, but actually quite useful scores, like can you read and understand something?
So to say it's just families is nonsense.
Families, of course, are important.
But the reason families are so important is because education is so bad.
If you have a good family, you get educated at home, and that gives you a huge advantage.
If you have a bad family, and you're not educated at school, you're screwed.
Well, you become part of the permanent underclass that socialism has created and always will create and always has created.
The last thing that I wanted to say before we get on to the most excellent callers is now excuse me for being outraged but I am and maybe I'm wrong I'm happy to be corrected as always but these are my thoughts so I don't know how many teachers wrote to me and said you don't understand man okay they didn't say man they said I spend a lot of time creating lessons Lesson plans.
This is like the magic spell word that everyone uses who's a teacher to explain why they only teach for about two and three quarters hours a day.
No, no, I'm doing my lesson plans.
And I must say I have a little bit of trouble understanding what is meant by this.
It's a very confusing thing.
You do go to teacher's college to learn how to teach, and I assume that you create some lesson plans and get them vetted by your teachers in teacher's college, right?
The professors in teacher's college must be teaching you how to do a lesson plan and what the best lessons plans are, which are validated and vetted by statistical analysis and all that kind of stuff.
You also know what you're going to be teaching, I assume.
You study science and end up teaching the humanities.
And so by the time You graduate and get a job, you should already have lesson plans.
Now, if you don't have lesson plans, then what the hell are you doing creating them as a new teacher?
I mean, you understand, that's insane.
If you're a new teacher, by definition, and you don't already have lesson plans that have been vetted by how well they work and so on, best practices, then you damn well shouldn't be creating them because it is absolutely unfair to experiment on children, on something so important as education.
Why are you creating lesson plans as a new teacher?
Do you not know what works?
Do you have no idea what works?
Do you have no clue what's been proven to work?
You should not be creating lesson plans if you're a new teacher.
You should be using lesson plans that have been proven to work.
Can you throw a little personal idiosyncrasy in?
Sure.
But you don't go to McDonald's and say, I want a Big Mac.
And the McDonald's says, I'm sorry, we don't have any because we're still trying to figure out how to make them.
It's like, no, no, no.
There's already a recipe for a Big Mac.
You don't need to do that.
Go to a surgeon who says, I'm going to try doing an appendicitis by going in from the foot and blindfolded, because I want to retain my intubate.
No, no, no.
That's the best way of doing an appendicitis already.
You don't need to reinvent the wheel.
I did a search on Google.
There are thousands of websites with literally thousands or tens of thousands of lesson plans available.
That's pretty scary.
That is pretty scary.
Why the hell are there so many lesson plans?
Is there nothing that has been proven to actually work?
Is it just make up whatever shit you want, call it a lesson plan and consider yourself an individual?
Why are there so many lesson plans?
I mean imagine, you do some research, you have to get your gallbladder out or something, you do some research and there are thousands of different ways to take out your gallbladder.
Every surgeon has their own way of taking out your gallbladder.
How does that sound to you?
How does that sound to you?
And there are lesson plans, of course, already.
There are lesson plans already.
And you understand, if you're making up your own lesson plan, how do you know if it's going to be the most effective way that you could spend your time in the classroom?
How do you know it's the best way to teach kids?
How do you know?
Don't make up lesson plans!
That is irresponsible.
That is experimenting on children.
Plus, you have all summer to make up your lesson plans.
Yeah, I just... lesson plans is just something that people say that makes no sense to me whatsoever.
If you're a new teacher, you should be using lesson plans already.
If you're an experienced teacher, then you already know how to teach the subject.
Maybe you make some notes or maybe you found a slightly better way to improve it.
But of course, if you have found the best way to teach history, then you should make sure it gets standardized as best you can, right?
But this individuality stuff, I mean, it's really crappy.
It's crappy for the kids.
It's really crappy for the kids.
And, of course, if they move from one school to another, or even a new teacher comes along, how the hell is anyone supposed to know what's going on?
You move to some new school where some teacher is working on their own individualized lesson plan, and there's no standardization.
And where there's no standardization, there's no possibility of excellence.
Where there's no standardization, there's no possibility of excellence.
is measurability.
If you can't measure it, you can't manage it.
If you can't manage it, you can't improve it.
It sort of reminds me of when Bill Gates started working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and they were trying to get mosquito nets, you know, to people and they just gave, you know, they wanted to give a bunch of money to people and then they said, okay, well, how do you measure your success?
How do you measure how many people are using them?
They're like, oh, we don't, you know, we're, we're a non-government organization.
We're an NGO, man.
We don't do that.
We just, you know, Hand out, hold hands, sing kumbaya, have a firelight, get stoned.
And Bill Gates was like, no, no, no, no, come on.
I'm going to give you this money.
I'm going to give you these.
You need to track where they're going.
You need to report back to me.
They had no idea what he was talking about because they're socialized.
Meeting a pseudo-capitalist.
So I'm afraid, I am tempted, I am tempted to call extreme bullshit on the lesson plan claim.
I just, um, Again, I'm happy to be proven wrong.
But here, you know, for those who don't know how to prove me wrong, here's a tip.
So you have to show me why everybody should be creating their own lesson plan.
You have to show me how those individually created lesson plans are objectively the best thing for the students.
And a couple other things.
I mean, I don't even need to go on because you can't.
The moment you create an individual lesson plan, you're immediately saying, I have no idea whether this is going to work or not in any statistically significant way.
I mean, teachers resist standardization for a very simple and obvious reason.
And not all teachers, right?
A couple of good teachers out there, I'm sure.
I never met them, but maybe there are.
But teachers resist standardization because standardization means you can be measured, right?
So if you are supposed to, on the fourth week, if your kids are supposed to know X, Y, and Z, then they can be tested whether they know X, Y, and Z. If you fall in your own lesson plan, man, you're hiding, you're camouflaged, you're a chameleon in the undergrowth.
You can't be measured.
The whole point of individualized lesson plan, if it's nonsense.
Lesson plan means going to the internet and downloading something.
But the whole point of individualized lesson plan is simply to avoid being measured.
And the only people who are afraid of being measured are the people who don't measure up.
So anyway, sorry for a long intro.
Thank you for your patience.
I wanted to get those few things off my chest.
But I'm happy to hear from the brains of the outfit, the listeners.
And oh, if you do get a chance to donate, I would really appreciate it.
Handicap money, hand over fist to make this documentary.
Thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars to make this documentary.
And it's only going to get worse.
So if you would like to support, I would really appreciate it.
It's been a rather exciting week for donations.
It's been, what, yesterday I got $5 from someone.
And let's see.
On Friday I got $20, Thursday $25, $15 on Wednesday and $25 on Wednesday as well.
So what I'm saying is that you really do need to help out if you could.
I would really appreciate it.
It's very important.
I'm happy to spend this money but I do need the support of the community to make it work.
So please go to freedomandradio.com forward slash donate to help out.
Thank you so much.
▲
Export Selection