Ep. 010: What is Wrong with Government Schools -- and Can They be Fixed?

Many people realize that government (public) schools are terrible. But what are the exact problems? From where in our culture do they arise? Can they be fixed? Mike Gustafson is a former government school teacher. He and his wife now run their own flourishing private school. He is our guest this week as we attempt to answer these questions.

Transcript

0:00

everybody out there in the freedom of speech land welcome back to truth in politics with your hosts andrew bernstein and bosh forsten i'm andrew bernstein and here's bosch foster how are you doing tonight bosh very good thank you well you are very welcome we have a we have an esteemed guest uh tonight michael gustafson owner of atlas academy i know i know you're in massachusetts somewhere mike i don't remember the exact location it's near lowell thanks thank you for uh for asking me to come on andy and bosh thank you yeah yeah you're welcome yeah thanks for coming on given the state of american education i think this is this is the foundational issue of of everything that's right or wrong in a society it's true i i definitely think so oh yeah yeah i absolutely absolutely think so so i think this is the most fundamental the most fundamental issue of all you know before we get going let me say something i've i've known mike when he since he was a young guy a student was the university of massachusetts at lowell was that is that right that's about a decade ago now yeah 10 12 years ago uh mike brought me in to speak at umass lowell i don't remember what the topic was i know capitalism um as like the cure to world uh like poverty or something like that great great um you know selection for the iron random student mike brought me in uh to speak he was obviously a bright guy in his early 20s and i was very you know i was impressed with how you know his uh what mike with your intelligence and your integrity and here we are 10 12 years later you have your own school look at you all grown up married a father have your own school you know experience in the government schools right before you all right well there's there's where we uh yeah let's do it yeah that's where we want to go what's wrong with the government schools and can they be fixed so uh anything you want to say at the outset mike about your school about atlas academy and about how uh how six what methods you use and how successful you are with the with these young with these young children yeah i can just give a brief kind of background so yeah i taught kindergarten in the public school for a few years got a master's in education learned about montessori approach and then my wife and i um we wanted to build our own school for our kids all the way through and so we started that and now we're in our third year we're up to third grade we'll keep growing it through high school we are based on the montessori approach and um and we're also adding in some of our own curriculum development as well and that's kind of based on the work of uh of leonard peacock and his philosophy of education that's good stuff how the results been with with the kids oh man we're mostly doing montessori at this point it is amazing um so even just take um just take with literacy so my son's not four years old and he's starting to read and write now like phonetically i don't that's great yeah and then with math our kindergarteners are doing adding numbers in the thousands and most of it is thanks to the montessori math materials these hands-on math materials that help kids to learn abstract concepts but like see them in front of them and manipulate them and uh so that's a few years ahead of their uh public school counterparts right right passionately pasha and i are both products of the government school system in the in in new york city yeah me when me went to government school when i was in uh yeah in the bronx and then in new jersey let me ask you mike when did your interest in education begin i mean when did you decide or think about being a teacher or getting into education it was definitely a conscious choice um it was about eight years ago and i was just waiting tables at a restaurant where i met my wife that's where i did as well i waited tables for years wow you guys have very romantic background i like it i like that that's fun but i wanted some more and so i was thinking i needed to satisfy three criteria i needed something to do with philosophy because i had read atlas drug and i was way into that and then um i needed uh something that i could get going with right away and i knew i could become a substitute teacher so that was that was actually my first step and then um the philosophy and uh substitute teacher and i forget the third one but that and then i picked education started substitute teaching and maybe you care about kids no oh the third question the third criteria was that i wanted to have something on my own and i knew that future i could have my own school great of course i care about kids nice yeah but those are people i can see you're working with young children in both the government schools and your private school and you're the you're the daddy of two of two young children and you were teaching you were teaching in government schools so after substituting then i got a job quickly very quickly got a job as a teacher and did that for four years and then my master's was in a teacher education program so i have experience with that too and then um and then i opened up this school and we're in our third year now that's great well it sounds like it's going really well so i hope you know i hope you get uh you know a lot of a lot of students you know to it uh we started with one classroom second year two classrooms this year four classrooms and um and i think next year we'll have five or six classrooms excellent next so if um education is the foundation of a culture and every i think every everything that's good or bad in a society i think it could trace back to the education uh and i think to me anyway reading is the foundation of the foundation the it's the it's the fundamental skill and so i don't know yeah you guys probably remember rudolph flesh's famous book why johnny can't read you know which was 1955 it goes back a long ways but it was an ode to phonics as the proper method teach reading was opposed any version of the whole the whole word method whether say or something else uh and so yeah i certainly a big supporter of phonics and i know the government schools very often uh oppose it so what what's been your experience with teaching meeting mike both in the government schools and in your own school yeah well first of all i absolutely agree that reading is um just becoming a literate person is um sometimes your key to a bright future if you haven't been set up in other areas through parenting or through education um because if you can read then you can educate yourself and i think that's what a lot of um i think a lot of the great things that despite our poor education public education system i think a lot of the great things that we have have come from people who have educated themselves in their 20s and have gone on to done a great thing to do great things um so i do think producing math literacy is is yeah if you literate the whole world of books is open to you the whole world of knowledge is open to you absolutely yeah yeah yeah that's right so but my experience with um so the public schools do produce readers kids do end up reading but it's just and and that's good but it's they don't they still don't do a good job at it um so when i was teaching kindergarten i realized that it's basically there's two separate approaches to teaching reading and it's a little bit of phonics which is basically just the sounds of the 26 letters and then they then they then kids start to try to read with those 26 sounds and they're not able to because most words you can't read with just the sounds of the 26 letters and so anywhere any any um any word that doesn't fit into that they have to memorize and these are what they call sight words or high frequency words so it's a mix of two approaches there's phonics and then there's memorizing sight words and i i i wanted to see if there's another way and i found this curriculum called the logic of english and it totally explains the english language which is what children that's the content of when children are learning to read it's about learning what the english language consists of the code of the english language and the logic of english curriculum teaches that uh and and what i found out was that in addition to the 26 sounds there's also 48 combinations of sounds like o u and o w and then there's a bunch of rules like that c and g soften to su and j before e i and y there's a bunch of rules and there's a bunch of monograms and when you give kids the full phonics system which i did my last year teaching kindergarten they they learned to read much faster my the students in my class that year were the best readers in the district montessori also uses the phonics-based approach and we've been using the logic of english here and we've had great results with it so if you teach kids the full phonics system that give really gives them the best foundation for learning to read right what are they like in english there's like 43 or 44 sounds this is 64 total or 74 really i don't know no sir for sounds 42 phonemes yeah yeah okay yeah and and so i'm thinking everybody you know that this is a a very delimited number of of sounds that the child the child needs to you know to learn less than hundreds of thousands of words exactly exactly and even in english which is a a a non-considered a non-phonetic language some from what i what i've read something like 87 of all english language words can be sounded out it could be it's it could be more than that it's hard to put a number on but it's a lot it's a lot um and even the words that can't be sounded out sometimes there's um i like etymological reasons like from the language that it comes from that you can understand why they're spelled that way there's there's a most words you can explain why they're spelled that way most yeah yeah i think with the with a with a young with a young child who's motivated i know i know what i used to do with my daughter who's now who's now 18 but she was a like baby uh borders was still you know in operation and you know we we go out for day of fun and uh you know we go to the park and you know and stuff like she's like two years old and i'd included that we go to borders you know to the children's section and i let her pick out whatever she want whatever she wanted you know about dogs that could fly or whatever it was because i wanted her to you know and she's pick out a book she sit down and she's pat the floor next and she'd say sit down and read to me daddy so you know i i'd return she have i don't want i wanted you know her to pick out the book because i wanted her to realize that reading was fun right stuff in books that was fun and i think once you motivate a child like that by the time they're four or five you know they they're ready they want to start to learn to read themselves they don't want to depend on mommy or daddy to read to them and 26 letters 44 sounds it's they can master that in a matter of months like you said in contrast to the whole word method well you've got to memorize the shape of thousands and thousands and thousands of words it's vastly more difficult to learn how to read that way yeah and then when you get once it's about reading comprehension that's what they say in public schools but that's not the way i think of it it's about getting into content and actually learning about things and um you just mentioned um that um you want them to you want you think the kids should have a love of reading they should like to read but i think that can only happen if you if they're using the right kinds of books there's a lot of books out there that are just kind of senseless um like uh um like there's a book about like like alligator like an alligator under your so i i watch uh to do research sometimes about what's going on in public schools because i haven't been there in a while there's tons of youtube videos about just not about just of public school classrooms and i was just watching one of us first grade second grade teacher who first they were doing phonics in second grade those kids should be reading at that point and then they started talking about a book um about like an alligator under a bed and they were gonna try to figure out like um like what the main idea of the no they were gonna try to predict what the book was about this is this like um cognitive like skills approach to education where it's not actually about reading to grasp something so either to grasp the nature of characters and the the actions that they take in a plot right or to grasp something about science or something about history it's not reading to grasp something it's like almost reading for nothing like just to predict to predict what's going to happen in the book so the teachers like here the title is there's an alligator under my bed and what do you think is going to happen here turn and talk to your friends about what might happen in this book that's it that's idiotic what books do you recommend in terms of that young age i mean are there some authors some yeah yeah yeah well um so there's two different genres there's there's there's so for for nonfiction what i do here is um so i i get them books from whatever i'm teaching in history or whatever i'm teaching in science so um so the bookshelves here have books about egypt books about greece books about kingdoms and nights and castles and stuff like that uh and then and then same with the different topics in science so that they can actually because uh so i'll first go to fiction and then i'll jump back to that with fiction um i really just pull the list honestly from uh from lisa van damme's uh website lisa lisa is doing a great job i think i'm gonna mention discuss her a little bit later you know you know guys and everybody out there in in freedom of speech land as i like to think of it because that's what we that's what we uh we really want to defend here um if up to me we we would teach reading in kindergarten you know when the kids are generally five at the latest because i think i think they could probably the kids could probably learn before you know using yeah four or five in kindergarten you know you uh using phonics like with full phonics like you were saying and read hero stories i'm not you know i'm uh in veterinary yeah read stories about heroes and heroines that that the kids i remember when i was a kid privately the boys all read the hardy boys back then the girls were reading there and she drew and i used to trade some of the hardy boys books with some of the girls for the nancy drew but i like nancy true she was smart and she was plucky you know she was she was a real heroine you know the detective i read stories like that and in the hood where these poor kids you know get you know a lot of you get these kids get very little education you know read heroes stories whether it's your real life biographies or fiction about some of the great black heroes who've done you know men and women have done these great things and you really get the kids i think hero stories really inspire people and uh they did me they did me when i was very young it was the best and it was fun to read yeah exactly no yeah so i um the the students that we have here aren't yet able to read um books that would contain hero stories but i tell them i tell hero stories to them myself but it's really in the form of history and i've just completed two so we got ourselves up to america in our history class this year and um or you know to the 1800s and i just told them two hero stories the first one was of edwin jenner and because it's kind of relevant to what's going on they know with with the taxis and the people you know cow pox and how this kid he he put a little bit of cow pox in this kid and it turned out that and then they gave him smallpox it turned out he didn't get it i mean it's amazing story and then more recently than that just last week i told him the story of fritz haber and i think it's carl boss you ever heard of these guys no they think fritz tape is familiar good one they're the guys that invented modern fertilizer but in order to get this it sounds boring but it's it was this in germany where was this mike so i got to try to give the quick version here but it's just an amazing hero story that uh that i told the students here for history so um plants need nutrients right in the soil and once you plant them and you pick them up then there's no there's less nutrients and so it's a problem and so like in the in egypt the nile river would flood and you'd get more nutrients in in the middle ages they would rotate the fields and let one life follow so that it could get nutrients again and then in the 1800s people found this this uh this mineral called salt peter it was in a desert in chile and they would mine it and it it really uh helped uh agriculture around the world uh but then they were people were afraid it was gonna run out so there was like this contest between scientists to uh and i can explain this to seven eight nine year olds in a way they can understand do it much slower than this uh but there was like a contest among scientists to figure out a better way to to to get a fertilizer for plants and uh it took about a decade but then this guy named haber basically what i tell my students is he was like a magician scientist who figured out how to take air and turn it into fertilizer plant food because he took the nitrogen in the air and he turned it into liquid nitrogen which can be used as a fertilizer and then this other guy bosch industrialized it and made it into a factory factory process and that's what allowed a huge agricultural boom and just to support the growing population i know how how do the kids react to this to your stories tell them about the hero stories yeah this one they they're into it if you can uh if you explain anything the right way in really simple terms um and like i don't say fertilizer i say plant food right right you can explain things in really simple terms and take them through a story step by step um and a lot actually one of the things you have to do in the beginning is give them a little bit of a hook like um like when i when i did to give them the story about vaccines i said we used to have this horrible disease called smallpox and now it's totally gone no one's had it in 40 years how did that happen you look you motivate them you tell it in simple terms you you make it a logical sequence like a story and uh and they're into it and so they're they're um learning something they're interested they're going to want to know more um and they're learning the process of um of like um of thinking because it's a logical story and so we're seeing how that how that works and they can ask you can see that they're learning thinking because they ask questions that are like real like relevant questions like what happened to the minds in the desert after these guys um after these after um the the new fertilizer was discovered well they became ghost towns but they they could ask that kind of question that they're thinking yeah you know i'm a literature guy it's always been my my first love and the essence of great literature is conflict somebody wants to read some goal that's important to him or her there's something or somebody stands in their way they they clash and it leads you know leads to a struggle that's that's got to be resolved and you know you want to well how'd it turn out you know did the person was able to whenever they reached their goals or did the antagonists you know vanquish them you want to know how it how it turns there's life versions of it yeah there's there's great fiction you know and children in children's books um you know this this peter pan peter pan's a good example you know and the secret garden's a good example this of chris haber is actually it's a lot like john galt uh his motor right and he takes atmospheric electricity turns it into yeah that's right that's a good thing it took air and turns it into fertilizer that's a that's a that's a good point but whether the stories are fictional or or real life you know the kids will be really motivated will the hero triumph over the antagonists to reach his or his or her goal so i think i think uh you know the hero stories combined with full phonics and i think the kids will be reading you know the overwhelming bulk of kids will be reading young four five six at the latest i just told that story to my uh my high school nephew and he was like he told me that he he was after i told him he was like i just learned more than i have the whole year so far in my history class yeah there's the good news and the bad news right right so what about in your experience mike uh when when you're teaching in the government schools and now you said you keep abreast of what of the developments and the and i like the term government schools because it's it's it's literal public schools is a euphemism you know all private schools are offered to the but government schools makes it clear these are these are schools run by the government they're funded by tax you know coercively by taxpayer the kids are dragged in you know until they're 16 years old uh in your experience i know i know they stopped teaching history 100 years ago a little more than 100 years ago and introduced some weird hybrid called social studies how much history have you seen taught in your years in the in the government schools so so i'll tell you one one one thing about frameworks and one thing about a curriculum so in terms of frameworks this is what the state says they want children to learn in social studies it's a mix so right now in massachusetts you'll have four different topics one of them is history and then there's civics so an example of a civics framework would be um demonstrate understanding i'm reading it demonstrate understanding of the benefits of being part of a group right well there's we can see where that's gonna go ahead and then geography you know and then uh economics so for economics it's gonna be something like um distinguish uh first graders just in massachusetts distinguish a renewable resource from a non-renewable resource yeah that's the environmentalist propaganda by the way going back to that question about the group mike notice every everybody's it didn't the question was not discuss what's beneficial about being in a group that respects your right as an individual they're gonna say you know because you got to make a life and death distinction between you know a society or a group and explain what it means to be a member of a group yeah well i mean a group follows the group's rules it gets better follow the group's rules limits responsibilities and expectations go ahead and conform and then later on politically obey obey the state now there's another uh that's that's in terms of framework so history is one of four and then um there's a curriculum that's uh kind of new i don't know if it's new but it's new to me it's called uh children discovering justice and um i i don't know if i can remember any of like the lessons from it could use the word justice or social justice no curiosity children discovering justice okay one of the lessons was white people are evil or what yeah i forget what the lessons are but um but it's being used and um in a local in a town near near me so not much history but i teach history here so i taught cavemen early farmers egypt greece rome dark ages kingdoms explorers pilgrims america vehicles vaccines or medicine and then um modern modern farming that's where we're at now whole gamut from cavemen to the 21st century yeah told in like little like uh um like stories that they can understand so also you were you were teaching government schools so you more or less learned what not to do to bring it into your own school and also in terms of your own education you started three years ago your school uh one more point on that in the younger grades there is no history there's no history but below third grade because um there's no uh it's only if you happen to pick up a book about george washington uh in february because it's president's day in your second grade classroom that would be and that would be your history um or it's uh you know you learn about the pilgrims on thanksgiving or something like that but yeah so sorry what was your question no not just in terms of uh you learned what not to do into your in your private school from government school but also in terms of where you began to now a few years removed what have you you know how you learned i mean how to do a better job let's say now they did three years ago or more or less it just been a continuation of it you you clearly will probably understand a lot better owning the school running the school and just so like what's the difference now then three three years ago when you began if you can if you just you know point anything out in terms of something better the way you understand the uh i mean deal with parents it must be also uh uh something new i mean in terms of you know you're dealing with the parents of these children that you're that are in your care and you got to deal with them in certain certain ways that maybe might not be you know uh okay so one thing um that i've learned that i've learned over the course of this past year since we've been because we've only been doing elementary this year before that it was montessori um in the younger with the younger kids um so um one thing i've learned is that so what what i've what i'm really passionate about is developing curriculum that's what i want to do over time to develop curriculum in different areas myself or or with with teachers here and um we started off this year trying to do that in like all the subjects and then i quickly realized that you definitely can't do that and so um we're we're using more what i learned was that the montessori math materials are amazing so we're just going to use those montessori language stuff is great um and then i also uh and then in the the three like content areas science history and social studies we're going to continue to develop curriculum in those areas that's that sound that sounds excellent my this is two points i want to make i notice in the chat our good friend dan sullivan you know uh you know outstanding dentist from st louis who fought his fought successfully against tooth decay for many years and now was living out in colorado i noticed he he wrote up in the chat about how he he was they tried to teach him with look saying how frustrating that it was and eventually you know learn to read via phonics so i'm glad i'm glad for that dr dan who's you know my uh spiritual brother glad because the otherwise you would have been tough to read out was shrugged on the look side method wouldn't it so i'm glad you introduced the phonics um but also secondly and this is um what i mean it's both serious points i you know and in the college classroom i you know i get the uh you know the results of the american educational system and some of these kids go to private schools uh but you know many of them go to go to the government it's not too much of a difference because private schools have to buy a correct unless they're making curriculum which none of them do you got to buy a curriculum they buy the same ones public schools buy yeah well you are right about that my brother because you know i see you know i've been teaching at the college level for 40 years now and back in the day you know maybe until about 10 years ago you could tell the difference generally between kids who went to private schools catholic schools of which there are many in the new york area uh and the kids that went to the government schools today it's indistinguishable or largely indistinguishable but the point i want to make these poor kids and they're good kids you know i i mean i love a lot of these kids i would adopt them if they didn't you know if they didn't have parents they're good they're good american kids you know they they want to have a successful career they want to have you know a fulfilling romantic relationship they want happiness you know uh you know but history they don't know if they don't know a freaking thing uh the the exact i mean even i was flabbergasted last year before we went for the pandemic and we went you know at everything being online was it was still in the classroom uh even i was flabbergasted and i've told this story a million times but i'll tell it a million one at 20 kids exactly 20 kids in college class i won't even mention the school i don't want to embarrass anybody 20 kids because it's the same way in old schools like it may be in the elite schools you go to princeton it's different i'm sure but you know for the like the average garden variety college and 20 kids in the class 10 of them had heard of james madison they don't know they don't know what he had done they knew he was he was president that was about 10 out of 20. 50 had never heard of him they didn't know who james madison was i mean my jaw hit the floor there's the guy who who's the lead author of the us constitution virtually the sole author of the bill of rights and 50 of a college class never heard of them they teach very little american history i can tell you that from from the college kids that i have in class they teach very little american history uh and and sometimes not always but sometimes when they do teach it they're using writers like howard zinn you know whose bait was basically it was a member of the communist party and his his uh his book on on the united states is just an american history system is a compendium of lies uh so that it's it's really but but the it's even the the leftist propaganda is not even the war or something it's the non-teaching of of history they don't know the kids don't know anything about their own country never mind world history it's just it's not like it's it and i'd like to try to move into what is really wrong about the two different approaches that are in public schools if we can get there and i can do that with the example you just gave is that okay yeah sure go ahead so it's not that they're not actually teaching are not teaching history it's that they they're teaching it but the kids don't remember it they don't know any they don't actually know it they didn't actually acquire any knowledge and that's because um it's just taught as isolated facts with no context with no explanation with no connections to anything else right so it'll just be like you know here the the um like you'll have um you'll have a history class about like the bill of rights you know and then it'll be like the you know before class read read up on the the different um different rights and um and and then they'll just go over quickly what each one is and then the teacher will say something like in for you know the second amendment why don't you all um um like uh get in a group and talk about what what you what you believe about the second amendment and guns and should people be able to have guns and then they'll discuss it and then everyone then they'll like go back to the class and uh the teacher will like take you know who wants to say what they think about the second amendment and then like you know five different kids will say what they think and they're all struggling they don't really have they don't have any way to even deal with that content and um and but everything that they say is valid because they said it and then the class ends so there's no like history behind you know gun ownership there's no um there's no philosophy behind rights there's like there's no context of rights there's no you know there's nothing behind it and and and so they don't actually acquire any knowledge of it it's either like they're just told the facts without any explanation or context or connection or they're asked to think about these facts but they don't have any way to do that right and these are the two basic approaches that you see so you see the traditional approach you can go into any classroom you'll see they're both kind of the same in that there in in neither of these cases it's very rare that you'd walk into a classroom and see the teacher trying to connect a child to content that's the objective approach if there's some content and there's a child we need to figure out how to help the child to grasp this content that's the objective approach to education or a reality-based approach right uh you that's not but you won't see that you'll either see a traditional approach where it's just content being delivered for the students to passively absorb but it's memorized it's memorized information that's the traditional approach and then you have the progressive approach and various there's a really three main forms of it and in the progressive approach it's um it's about them developing a skill uh right now the the progressive approach is about kids developing cognitive skills like if you go on if you go into any classroom in america you'll see on the whiteboard students will be able to they have to write this teachers have to write the students will be able to and then it says analyze whatever compare contrast evaluate and it's a skill and it's supposed to be a cognitive skill and the whole common core is actually like a hierarchy of cognitive skills that the children are supposed to be developing to be prepared for for college or career and um but the problem with these is that they're not actually skills so if you're just letting kids talk about what they think about the second amendment they're not actually acquiring a skill there um but more than that like if um i can get into some other examples but um they're they're really just memorized skills i guess a quick example would be um with math with math a lot of the times the teacher will just teach like some concrete skill like um like um how to how to how to um how to solve a problem using multiplicative comparison so like you know susie has three apples and dan has five times as many apples how many does dan have and the teacher shows a really specific way how to solve this problem and the students memorize how to solve that problem so if they see it on the test they can do it that way but there's no really grasping about how this is helping you to to relate quantities and understand have a different perspective on the quantities involved like i go if you make three times as much money in one year then you kind of have a better sense of the amount of money you're making there's no like um like um help it's not really helping them to to use the math to understand things about the world it's just this isolated skill learn it done um and it's not actually like cognitive think of it that way because they're not actually learning something about the world cognition is something where they're they're having to like grasp something about reality and that's not that's not what skills do so the progressive approach is these empty non-cognitive skills the kids learn like find the main idea and a text instead of understand the content of a text right or learn or learn how to write a paragraph to persuade your reader of something instead of writing to clarify your knowledge well how about how about you know learn how to pass a test do they do they do they teach that skill but that's all they're thinking right yeah right right you don't you don't learn to gain knowledge you learn to pass the test and then once the test is over you can forget it uh yeah you know you know guys i i really want to focus on what what can we do to make this better you know what's the right approach to education i know there's a lot of disagreement amongst rational people on this and you know that's that that that that's good but i don't even know if the government schools can can be fixed by the way next week we're having dr bradley thompson on to discuss the need to abolish the the government schools and privatize the school system that's one way to fix it yeah yeah exactly but i want to focus on you know the positives what's what is what would a real rational positive productive approach education look like and i think a good place to start is we have a question in the chat guys from stacy case uh asking what do you think is great about montessori so that may be a good place to start with how to you know how to really improve education this country i know you're an expert on this bike so um one thing that we could do and i know um there are some people doing this right now is to frame is to underst really understand montessori and pull her out of the progressive tradition she does not belong in the progressive tradition so progressives are our subjectivists fundamentally that it's about it's either about your your socialized uh learning to socialize and um or as dewey would put it participating in the social consciousness of the race that sounds scary that's not evil oh my god it sounds nationals it sounds vaguely national socialist and i don't know dewey was more of a communist than a nazi but that sounds that sounds nice that's how we put it so that's that's the socializing version of progressivism then there's the self-expression version uh you know just do what you want kind of thing and then there's the cognitive skills version i was talking about and people think of maria montessori as being in this kind of subjectivist progressive tradition because she's child centered in a sense that her focus is on the construction of a child so it isn't just about learning certain skills um to hit a milestone or to pass a test uh maria montesquire's focus is on the child's in kind of internal development and growth it's a very organic kind of biological perspective on children but the thing that's different about her that than the other progressives is that growth to her the it's really that the essential aspect of a child is his intelligence and therefore the main thing that a child needs to do is acquire knowledge of reality is be aware of reality that's what makes her different from the progressives because there's a huge development in montessori of uh of content there's a huge content out there's certain skills that kids have to learn and um her way of the way she does it is um she takes these uh like uh like curriculum for students and instead of having a teacher deliver it to kids she puts the curriculum in materials and puts the materials around the class so that by interacting with these materials the children are learning knowledge and skills and one main aspect of the materials that makes it um totally not progressive is that there's a right way to use the materials you can't have that in progressivism you can't have a right way to do something um it's got to just be the child expressing himself now immediately you've got to flip over to the other side and say kids are never forced to do things a certain way it's just that the teacher is always there to show the child this is how you push in your chair this is how you fold a napkin this is how you trace the letter with your finger this is how you say the sound of the letter you know this is how you add numbers in the thousands with this material this is how you roll up a rug when you're done with it this is how you say excuse me instead of bumping into someone because it's younger mostly 300 kids right there's a right way to do everything and but kids aren't forced to do it and that's where the child centered part it's about them learning to do it on their own but there's all it's this like wonderful balance between like respecting the motivation needs interest of the child but then also they got their stuff that they got to learn for their life and just to cap it off there's one quote from montessori that encapsulates both of these and really makes me think of her as uh as very similar to iran and it's that she said that the primary uh the primary like role of an educator or a teacher is to aid life leaving it free and that's both aspects that you have to aid a child's life you have to give them the things that they're gonna need to be an independent adult but you also have to leave it free for them to pursue their interests make choices learn from their mistakes that kind of thing um well that's i really see her as a it's objective because you have both sides and the focus on academic training on on academic education on teaching academic subjects which yeah she was progressing he went to really great lengths of experiments to figure out the best way that that she could find to teach kids math and reading and gra and language math and language rather because she teaches kids grammar too she has these wonderful materials the children can use to learn geometry and and arithmetic and and and then wonderful language materials to learn grammar and to learn how to read and the whole point is that they're going to learn these things but they're going to do it in a way that that they develop an interest in it that they're motivated to do it that they're choosing to do it so you're not like forcing kids to do things and and um and like dampening their spirit how about the uh the individuality of children of the students yeah if they're good at drawing if they're good at certain things do you have like a gift and talented type of you know area we can take them and focus more on those things yeah you don't need to because like because it's montessori is an individualized education itself to begin with right begin with and the way that she did it is with that i don't know it's called material materializing a curriculum it was a really awesome idea um to put curriculum and materials and then and then the kids uh learn by using them and so that's how you that's how it's individualized right each child is on learns at their own pace it's on their own path so they could take a day off you know they could do you know they could paint and and read books and the next day they get back into wherever they were with with grammar you know yeah it really respects the kids free will and yeah you need to do that too you can't just do dr i mean the the dry cramming information into students that's the traditionalism that the progressives were rebelling against and they were right in a certain sense to do that it's just that they threw the academics out entirely yeah which is which is even worse than the traditional right approach so i like correct me if i'm wrong because i i don't know montessori that i don't know her system that well but as i understand it there's parts of the day where you need to be studying academic subjects but you could focus on which one you like if you like for me i would it would have been literature of somebody else it might be math or somebody else might be science is is that accurate that that are going to be able to pursue your uh you are going to be able to pursue your own interests but the teacher's going to make sure that you um that she finds a way to interest you and and the all the areas that are available right right now stacy asked about algebra and i'm assuming that maria montessori's approach was mostly for young children did she did she go as far as as to teach algebra you know i'm not sure yeah okay all right so i'm not i don't i don't know either and i know the focus was on childhood education algebra is usually taught later on but who knows with advanced kids maybe they could be studying algebra you know at a very early age but anyhow uh i i have here it's a copy of uh of my essay on education heroes and heroes and villains in american education have us on the cover because they couldn't fit america but this is this from the objective standard a couple of years ago and i just wanted to want to read a brief excerpt him here mike right around the time of world war one hundred years ago a little more than 100 years ago as the progressives dewey and william heard kill patrick and people like that at future college columbia university were pretty much taken over the american educational system there was the uh the commission that was appointed by the bureau of education the commission on the reorganization of secondary education move into the secondary schools here for a second crsc the curse what a perfect perfect acronym that is and the curse issue the new cardinal principles of secondary education in 1918. to this day this this was published in 2018 so it's like there was like the centennial uh to this day a full century later remains the foundational document of modern american education moving forward the report declared the schools would quote concern themselves less with academic matters right than with preparation for effective living unquote that is for playing one's part in the scientifically engineered society the this meant curtailing courses that would enable students to reason independently and amplifying those that would imbue students with a passion for pursuing the common good there was little focus on teaching math science literature history there was a lot on on health uh there was stuff on what was it uh vocation or like the shop classes that i was taking uh physics which became you know preaching collect collectivism uh ethical character imagine having the government schools teaching teaching the kids teaching the kids ethics but there's less and less and less on academics there's just one last point here from diane ravitch i if anybody out there doesn't know her she's she's one of the leading maybe the leading historian of american education and diane ravaged commented quote the driving purpose behind the curse the the seven objectives the the cardinal principles was socialization teaching students to fit into society the overriding goal was social efficiency not the realization of individual desire for self-improvement yeah this is the same time this is the social version of progressivism in education and this is um the same time that they had tracking for students and some students would end up on an academic track and others would end up on a on a vocational track because it's all about your social utility right and by the way guys that's not what we have now though but but it was still in existence when i was in elementary school there's elements of it okay well i was in elementary school a while ago the group projects um and the consensus uh and socratic discussions and that kind of thing there's still definitely elements of the social approach too yeah well okay i just want i just want to say this from my experience uh they were still tracking kids in the 1950s and early 1960s at least in the government schools in brooklyn when i was there and you know you know and they had the academic track these are the kids who are really smart yeah they iq tested everybody like in the third grade these are the kids are really smart they're gonna go to college they need the you know the academic curriculum they're gonna be society's future leaders and these other poor kids they're a little slower you know they're gonna we're gonna we're gonna give them shop classes and you know get home economics and stuff we kind of have the opposite now um where special education departments in every district are so bloated um i think i saw a statistic in california one in eight students is a special education student and in many districts it's like half of the funding is on special education so now we every child has to get the same education um it's like the exact opposite of that before they were tracking students into different tracks now you have to give the same exact education as much as possible to every child um and that it sounds noble but um in my experience certain uh not every child would benefit most from the same type of education i don't think yeah it's an interesting it's it's an interesting question um and you and and you know much more about this than i do at at that level uh with this the foundation level when you really got to start when the kids very young um but certainly certainly i think to me one thing we're talking about improving education in in this country if if there was a god which i don't believe but but if there was and and god came down and said bernstein well dr bernstein because blood would want to be respectful right uh dr bernstein you could do one thing to improve american education you name it and i'll do it and i would say god let's teach phonics you know to the kids when they're four or five have them read stories about heroes and really motivate them to become readers and i think that would be if i could do one thing to improve american education that would be that would be the that would be the thing i would do all right my turn now yeah yes absolutely uh my uh yeah you're the guest i'm so i talked to once no no i meant my turn with the god analogy oh yeah yeah yeah go ahead yeah yeah like my turn to say what to do about uh about american education i could do one thing so it's it's um i don't know like politically what to do about it because it's a huge behemoth i wouldn't know anything about that but just just focusing on the education stuff um we need to totally the the progress the traditional and progressive approaches that we've been swaying back and forth between for a hundred years is entirely and completely bankrupt it's done and we've done both of them we need something else and montessori is a great start but it's limited it really only goes up to through elementary and a little bit into adolescence and not not into high school at all um i think we need to develop i mean that this is what i'm doing obviously it's what i think we need to do i think we need to develop a new totally new approach i don't think it exists and i think it needs to be created and so if anyone else wants to hop on board start doing it also i mean because you need to take each subject in each grade and figure out the best way to teach kids and that the essential element is that i think that biologically what drives kids and what they need also is to be a is awareness look at an infant so interested in its in their hand they want to be aware of their hands on how to move their hands or they need a stimulating environment to be aware of the world or or a toddler that you go you like you're you if i walk into the toddler room like oh what's this and i'm holding something in my hand they all want to come to be aware of what it is or an elementary student that i'm i really hook into a story about history and they want to be aware of it or an adolescent who surrounds himself with friends to have to have constant feedback about himself so he can be more aware about himself i really think that children are driven by awareness i think that's their bit also what they basically need in order to become an independent adult awareness of the world awareness of themselves their bodies their eye hand coordination playing instruments and playing sports awareness of how to use their bodies to accomplish those tasks and then once you get into adolescence awareness of yourself your values your interests i think education needs to train children in awareness and that's pretty much the same thing leonard piqof is saying train the mind right but by by that i mean training and awareness which means that you need a content you need to something that they're aware of and you need to you need to figure out how based on the child how to connect them to that and right now i see the traditional approach as presenting content but not caring about how to connect the child to it and the progressive approach pretending to develop skills in the child and totally neglecting content but the thing the like crucial yeah we don't we don't teach math we teach johnny right yeah but they're not actually teach johnny why do you what she's johnny what so they're not actually teaching johnny right that one of the things i just realized is that it's not like it's both or neither and i think this is the same with it either you connect children in their mind with their motivation and their cognitive processing either you connect them to content or you don't and so if a traditional person is trying to pack information into kids not caring about their motivation they're not learning anything there's no there's no awareness and if a progressive is trying to teach a cognitive skill without actually having any content involved or teach socialization or teach self-expression without any without any learning or awareness of something real they're they're not actually even developing any skills so it's either both so content and connecting kids to it or neither and right now our public schools do neither and that obviously if there's a good teacher that that wants to do it go for it like that happens right but system system-wide it's neither no i hate i hate it like no one is presented with content and the teacher is trying to figure out like how can i get this kid to understand this thing what context do they need and in in elementary and secondary it's first of all context it's not we're teaching you about george washington because it's president's day and so we're teaching you about george washington because that's the next that's the next step chronologically in history then this and we're following a path or um so you need to set context you need to put things in terms that the kids can understand it's amazing to me how many um how easy it is for adults to talk over students like you got to use their words to communicate with them um to teach them something new so you put you have to put things in simple turns you got to give them context you got to make connections like when i was teaching about vehicles i told them i taught i told them the story of the steamboat races on the mississippi and then i made a connection to science that they learned how the water in a river goes from the mountains down to the to the ocean and so i showed them that the steamboats were going upriver that's only something steamboats could do and they must take anyway this is an example of making a connection so there's things you have to do to connect students to content and that's how they acquire awareness and if it's literature and they're adolescents they're acquiring awareness of character traits and what they and themselves and what they want to be like as a person and so you're training children and awareness if you're connected to the content if you're not doing that they're not they're not growing it's like it's like they're not developing the um the faculty that they need to be in a to be a human being really right and so so i think a lot of people graduated like 18 at 8 right at 18 and then they're 20 and they're not really a fully human you know and like the basic sense of having um a sense of self and values and passion and long range vision for their future and um and uh you know and an ability to achieve goals yeah a critical rational faculty yeah it's and so they spend their 20s kind of figuring that out i mean this is why we see uh marriage uh first aid the age of people get married the age of people have kids the age of people get their first house it's much later than it was even 20 years ago it's in the 30s now right now i think this is somehow related to the default of education and training a person's mind you know our good friend dan sullivan commented in the chat the prerequisite of this is to privatize education system i absolutely agree ultimately get it out of the hands of the government who's incapable of educating anybody even if they wanted to makes my job harder to have a freak a competitor offering a free service right right and and like i would just be plugged the show here as i said before next week professor bradley thompson is going to be on to discuss the necessity to abolish the the government's government schools and he's he's uh brad thompson is a modern day abolitionist who wants to abolish the government schools for the same reason if we wanted to abolish slavery so i think you're right dr dan i think that's one thing that needs to be done also as leonard pickoff pointed out many years ago we need to shut down the teachers colleges we need to shut down the schools of education they i think they they very often stifle the teaching ability that some that you know that some prospective teacher teacher has but but okay so in that context here's what i want to suggest to see what you think mike is this because you know teaching young children and i don't i know how to motivate you know 18 19 20 year old college kids uh but six year olds you know that's a whole that's all a different matter but i certainly i certainly think education should focus on academics you know i think you know hygiene and sex ed and driver's ed and you know and sports which i love all that's important but i think that should be done outside of schools by mom and dad or you know you take the kid to vocational school over the summer or you know whatever that the school should be the one place in society focused on training the mind as iran said the human survival instrument trained the mind teaching math and reading literature science history um and then how do we motivate young children and occurs to me i know not everybody's an inveterate hero worshiper like i am but still i think a lot of people respond to heroes you know and so i can start like with math class you know with some of the great heroes of mathematics who who who oh you know and like you said simple stories for kids when they're five or six in simple terms so and so you know archimedes did this or you know uh you know some of the some of the great mathematicians the history descartes or whoever you know whoever whoever it is you know overcame this obstacle to reach and it gets and the kids are i think you know you motivate the kids and similarly the the great scientists in history who overcame various struggles and obstacles to reach this new knowledge and some of the great writers and you know and the great figures in history and i would i would introduce these subjects with you know hero stories and i would keep peppery in the subjects with all kinds of hero stories i think that's one way that people are motivated and certainly at the same time while we're teaching in math or science or history we're also showing them the human potential really all these people do all these great things you know it's implicit in the lesson that human beings can be achievers that can be good and great they're not necessarily murderers and rapists and violent slave drivers and everything so yeah that's one thing i would do yeah i have two thoughts on that the first is that if you i i like the approach of taking a historical um historical approach to um topics like science and math even um for instance one of the first things we did in math here was um they were uh learning to tell time and i was and i wanted to give them a whole lesson or a number of lessons on on where we even got clocks from because o'clock is a really cool invention right and uh so we went into that for a little while first so i like the historical approach to um to math and science and i think that if you do it that way then they're seeing the heroes that have um have um contributed or that have you know made big contributions to those fields um and then on the other comment is that i i'm not sure about this but it seems to me like younger kids are mostly mo they're not as motivated by um that like like values out in the world it seems like they're more motivated by their own awareness of things like um like their and their own efficacy like their ability to do things their ability to understand things and it's less about what the thing is and more themselves being able to understand it and do it effectively if it's a skill and and and it seems like it's later on more towards adolescence where you can develop specific areas that you're interested in specific authors specific book series right and or specific subjects in school that you're interested in and they can motivate you i really think younger children are just motivated in terms of motivation by just um their own awareness and intense and sense of efficacy sorry mike in terms of your fairly new owner of the school yeah when that pandemic hit i mean you stayed afloat you're still alive you're still doing it but it must have been really really difficult as it was for everyone yeah we had to close for a little while we we opened up as an emergency program for like uh children for um for emergency workers um and then um then we were closed again and then we opened up under under a weight of new regulations um we've lucked out um for a long while i could say that we never had an exposure um we had one but it was very minimal um but it's definitely a hit yeah we've somehow been able to manage to keep growing despite this right um i'm glad to hear and hope you continue to grow mike um okay so the one of the questions we had here is can government schools be fixed i think we've concluded they can't be they need to be polished they need to be privatized uh no but they are kind of being privatized in a sense now but it's not really the right use of that term they're being corporatized i guess you could say where um like college board right and like the people that make the tests are the same people that make the curriculum and there's big big big money in man if you have a curriculum and you can you can sell it to every public school it's huge money so it's being like um um good thing you told me maybe maybe i should go into this you're not you don't work at columbia or university oh yeah you know yeah i got yeah i gotta get a job but teaches college columbia yep yep that's where it comes that is still where it comes from after 100 years wow yeah well that's why there's a place i want to shut down but but anyhow you know uh so one of the things we've said how to improve american education that's really the the the yeah yeah abolish the government schools right is is is is one thing uh use phonics and phonics alone to teach reading start at the very earliest days four or five and use hero stories to to motivate the kids that's that's that's one of my suggestions uh now lisa van damme who i know you you're familiar with uh mike and um if everybody out there in freedom is speechless if you're not familiar with her she's an objectivist private school owner out in california i think she does she has a really good job generally she one of her suggestions that i found striking i think she wrote this in a an essay in the objective standard back back in the day uh let's just talk about teaching science and and she she recommended teaching science historically that is that's where i got the idea from yeah yeah no no no that's great it made sense to me yeah the way the human mind you know um learned these principles the order there's a there's a hierarchy there the order in which they learn them oh yeah the facts they identify the experiments they perform that enable them to establish this first principle and then move on to you know the the second principle you teach teach science historically it's tied to reality that right the kids can tie it to facts and the actual experiments these great scientists before that amazing it's an amazing insight that the same way that humans discovered this knowledge it's similar to the best to a way that students can come to understand that themselves right they discover it by the same in the same order and by the same method i think this ties in with what you were saying before mike uh i i think the school should focus on academics teach the kids how to think and all this other stuff is great sex education driving but the kids you can learn enough mom and dad outside of school school's focused on academics and then like you were saying we need like this whole new approach to figure out how to best best how do we taste math how do we teach life okay we're going to teach these academics but how by what method i think lisa lisa has insight here at least about how to teach science right right um right it's not just academics because it's like the whole you have to figure out how how students can actually be taught these subjects in a way that it's firsthand knowledge that's the goal is for them to understand these things for themselves not memorized so for instance we teach grammar right and i was working with one student and i realized that i asked her what an adjective was and she's doing sense diagramming and she said an adjective is the thing that the line that goes down and that was a red flag to me that means she's memorizing this as a skill she's not actually understanding an adjective as a modifier of a noun the role of the which is not understanding the role of the word so then i knew with that student we got to backtrack i know where she got off the rails so she can she can actually understand and grasp apprehend what an adjective is not just being able to do the worksheets you know or the sense diagramming uh as a memorized skill um so it's not just academics because if you you can teach academics in a wrong way where to memorize skill there has to be a way for them to grasp it firsthand but i was just thinking um i don't i haven't looked through this a lot but i ran talks uses the word bankrupt a lot right like intellectual bankruptcy moral bankruptcy these kind of things and it's when an account is totally overdrawn right and that is definitely the state in education right now so how like if you want to fix american education it might be as simple as having a viable alternative there's just no alternative i mean number one taking down the public schools and the whole political stuff right which i guess we'll hear about next week but in terms of sure we sure will say it's just not an alternative there isn't one i mean montessori's got a great one and there are some people really pushing montessori into our culture right now and i'm really excited to see where that's gonna go um but yeah there's and then there's there's lisa van damme school um which i mean she made that documentary right where she's saying hey we got we have this um this approach that other people can learn from um and that's very valuable um but there's not a full alternative that's what i'm trying to do but it's going to take some time and it's just one school right now what would you start would you say that the government schools have gotten worse over the decades i mean i i went to government schools and you did i think you did as well and uh yeah they were bad but i mean the whole idea that government should be involved with school yes but would you say that's worse than that than it's ever been today yeah well one thing that's worse about it is that they're more standardized now so since the 90s there's there's been these curriculum frameworks that that's new that's we've only had curriculum frameworks for 30 years and more recently the past decade we've had this experiment with common core so it's that really entrenched now the standards are most no they're actually in every area that really entrenched the certain you know ideologies that that exist and it made it like uniform um uniformly bad at all schools you know right right right um so yeah i just want to recapitulate here so we're going to teach academic subjects and and you've made a really good point we need a revolution we you know we need we need new methods on how to do this nobody knows for sure the best way to teach academic subjects at different ages hard you can't do it without doing it you know and and i think i think lisa van dam's made progress on this but you're right there's a there's a whole er you know we we've we've revolutionized a lot of different fields i mean you know elon musk says we're going to go to mars you know in the next you know 20 years uh and i or 30 years and i think he's probably right but education in many cases we're still doing it the way that we did a hundred years ago or even or hundreds uh you know of years ago you you pointed out with the rote memorization and or the progressive approach which has been a failure for us a century that so we we need a a revolutionary approach to teaching academics bring bring back academics uh to into the schools as the focus of the schools exclusive focus of the schools i think and then revolutionize our methods so there's there's room here for innovative thinkers for the howard rocks of the field of education i think you're one of them mike i think lisa van damme is one of them to you know to revolutionize the methodology of teaching academic subjects at different ages for different grade levels you know different different kids with different interests and cognitive abilities it's a real challenge then there's the there's the business challenge too like yeah on the one hand you you do need people to develop the the curriculum and the approach the method the curriculum and the method right it's your a real approach to sad to like letter p cop said to train the mind and content and method right through from birth to maturity so that you can have real full human beings normal people but by normal in the rand sense we mean galt and and and uh francisco and ragnar right norman dagny and howard rock yes but just normal like that should be normal right and and we want to train children like i was saying before the show that my my kids are just so happy and i just want to find a way to help them stay that way and just be really happy um successful people um and so number one you have to develop that approach but number two you have to scale it you know and that's right then the problem there is the culture because then you're dealing in order to scale it in order for it to be via a viable business you have to convince people of it and people have stopped thinking about education i don't know how long ago but they don't because well one thing i hear a lot is that parents just trust you they just trust the school they trust the public school they trust the teachers they basically say this is a division of labor society i'm not going to i'm doing my work i'm not going to think about that so how do you scale uh and and sell a new approach to education with um kind of a not like an audience that's not very or a culture that's not very receptive to it that's another whole challenge i really see two challenges there three taking down the public schools developing a new approach and scaling it now i understand and you know and dr dan's pointing out properly in the chat that the new methods have to be designed to rationally teach these these subjects not like the new math or the new new math which cripples a kid's mind i'll tell you one thing one uh one advantage that that we have today that the the once once we're able to convince the parents that they need to think about education i'll tell you what advantage they have is this um with the technology we have available zoom you know and and everything we could find tutors all not only all over the country but but around the world because remember today in the government schools the the teachers have to take a lot of education classes so the math teachers aren't taking as many math classes as math majors are and the literature teachers aren't taking as many literature classes as the literature majors on by the way one example is from 20 years ago it's probably worse since 1999 2000 cliff notes hired me to write the notes for the for three line rant titles you know for for anthem the fountainhead and atlas shrugged which i did and the general editor of cliff notes this is an email from the general editor of cliff's notes told me you know when cliff's notes started and for many years our demographics were high school and college kids he said now most of our customers are high school english teachers who never read these books and have to teach them in their class they never read them because they're taking all these education courses rather than literature courses in college so you know we have to keep in mind that a lot of the teachers are not experts in their subjects because they're taking these useless education courses and fewer content classes but you can find tutors graduate students around the country all over the world or get a phd in chemistry let's say or in literature or mathematics or whatever they're taking courses in their field they're not taking education courses and they're starving graduate students so you could get them cheap you know to tutor your kids you know in real content courses and real academic and you could do it via zoom you know in the in your living room and good friend of mine i'll mention her uh you know on the echo she's a real good objectivist melanie hoffman out in minneapolis and hired me to tour to her kids in philosophy they're teenagers we do it you know we do it via zoom and you know it's it's a real advantage today all right there's a lot of parents now that they could do that yeah so some of them some of them realizing what you said before that we can't trust the schools to educate our kids we have to take responsibility ourselves it is worthwhile to to say something for parents in general because a lot of people have kids that in public schools right or a lot of people just have kids so i mean if you can homeschool and try to then that's that's a great option and you can like andy said look for tutors in different areas uh someone that really knows a subject is probably going to be better off than than a public school teacher that's just you know vaguely familiar with it another option would be to look for montessori and i think there's some virtual montessori programs now as well and then the third option would be if your child is in a public school um take a look at the work that he's doing and if it's um if it's a math skill where it comes from in the real world and and how it could actually um be useful for him or if it's um if it's like history and he's supposed to memorize these different facts try to put in context somehow the connection to something else you know or if it's um if it's uh if it's if he's a third grader doing just like reading comprehension trying to and and it's just about like like understanding the main idea and supporting details when he has books look at the content of it and dive into the content a little bit with with your child there's ways that you can take whatever you know your child's doing in a public school and deepen it if it needs to be if it needs to get more deep or or explain it in a better way that mine can access it well this has been a great discussion mike i've uh you know i've run out of questions and and said what what what i wanted to say on the topic bosh you have you have more questions or comments you want to make i'm just curious how you deal with others like uh if you have uh some friends in public schools who still teach there and if you relate to them if you if you talk to them how bad things might be and do they maybe resent uh school private schools i mean is there an attitude about that towards them also one thing which i mentioned before in terms of it's easy to vilify maybe the the individual teachers as well in these in public schools right but they might not be as bad as as we think they're still clinging to that lit to the last message of what they want to do in terms of teaching kids yeah it wants to just talk about that there's going to be a just a huge variety of teachers so i don't think it's possible to cast the net and catch them all so there's gonna be some that have really detrimental ideas and that is every opportunity they can they they feed them to their students and others are going to be much more dry and an objective in the in the like non-biased sense of that word and keep their personal opinions out of the classroom um and then also on the positive side there's going to be teachers that when they're reading a a novel to their students um really want to connect it to them and if you'd if you know so they're paraphrasing they're they're skipping certain parts that they think might be too confusing and they're they're pulling in other information that they know and they're stopping in certain areas that students need you know and they're really trying to help the children understand the characters so you're going to have good teachers they really really try to connect with their students and then you're going to have not so good teachers that are trying to just pass on their id their you know your idea mike let me tell you something what you want you want a horror story but no the horror story but then uh it leads us to what we you know the bad leads us to what the good is that we should do so my daughter graduated from high school last year she's your freshman right now in college and i won't i won't mention the names i don't want to embarrass anybody but it's a suburban you know westchester new york you know wealthy area suburban school very highly rated high school large percentage of the graduates go on to go into college and you know and and and so on so consider like an elite so that she just created huh you said she just graduated yeah last year she's a freshman right now in college so it's like considered an elite government you know suburban high school so last year her senior year you know the whole year from the time you know before the pandemic and then through the pandemic 12th grade literature you know what novels or plays on their reading list 12th grade reading 12th grade uh readingless elite guys i'll tell you what was on their reading list zippo zero they didn't read a single book for the entire 12th grade literature class they focused on writing the college essays that's what they did now yeah yeah now they're writing so that's good and getting to college is is is important but is a whole year of of wasting whole year high school wasted where they could be reading shakespeare dostoyevsky you know that when they could be reading real you know at 17 having been at the top public school you think you know i went when i was in high school the government schools weren't that good then but i you know but i was in a garden variety you know brooklyn high school and because i was such a troublemaker i got kicked out of every honors class every hp class every every advanced placement class i was just in a garden variety 12th grade you know english class in a garden variety brooklyn public school and i remember we we read macbeth i remember we read crime and punishment uh yeah you could have 12th graders read so there's the bad news the good news or the the takeaway from this is no no no no no no no in english classes read literature you know have have teachers who have degrees in literature not focus on education courses but degrees of literature experts in literature english just great yeah yeah but they love literature they know how to write they work you have the kids writing papers on macbeth and you know crime and punishment you work with the kids on their on their writing this is what a 12th grade literature class your english class even in a garden variety high school should be never mind in elite schools with your advanced placement courses you know and and and and stuff like that so there's the horror story leading into you know the takeaway as to what what we should teach academics uh but with people who are experts in the academic field and like you said mike you know we need to revolutionize the methods lisa van damme i think is a is a good is good on this i think what you're doing is really important on this this might revolutionize the methods for teaching we need howard rock types in this field innovative thinkers like we've seen in rocket science and medicine and so many other fields we need to revolutionize the field of education i think maria montessori made a great start i think you and lisa van damme are contributing to this what that we need and objectivism of course thank thank god for iran gives us gives us the philosophic foundation to do it that's what that's what i think on this absolutely me too thanks for coming on mike i appreciate it thanks for having me guys nice talking with you two big thumbs up mike thanks a lot for coming on uh next week again continuing with education professor frat thompson going to tell us why and how we need to abolish the government school system and i think that's going to be a great show it'll build up it'll build on the things that you were talking about mike yeah it sounds great i'm looking forward to it yeah me too well bosh another episode in the books episode 10 wow that's uh that's uh impressive we've been rocking and rolling yes we have i'm enjoying it as always yeah this is this is this is great so let's uh again thanks for coming on mike uh bosh mike have a great weekend everybody out there and freedom of speech land we're gonna keep we're gonna keep rocking and rolling you know in in in this standing up for for freedom of intellectual expression so uh have a great week everybody we'll see you next week when we discuss abolishing the government school system or