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Speaker 2: Remaining and live Man like this man letting butterfly, flatten
in wing dig down in un force, Man it gon
cause a tree fall, letting five thousand miles away, Man,
nobody see nobody else.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: And you gottacted night on the panel.
Speaker 3: All right, Aaron McIntyre, Welcome to the Jay Burdon Show.
How you doing man?
Speaker 4: Hey man, thanks for having me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's funny. I you and I speak enough. Obviously,
I come on your show fairly frequently, and I forget that.
I think I've only had you on two times. Seems
like it's much more than that. But yeah, man, I'm
excited to have you on my show, particularly to talk
about education. You said that you wrote your column about
exactly that subject. I know that you worked in education,
So if you could, one, I guess, explain why we
should listen to you, and also I guess why this
issue came up.
Speaker 4: Sure, I've been a teacher more than i've been anything else.
I've had a couple different professions in my life, you know,
local reporter, other things. But I was a teacher for
many years in Florida, and in my experience, the introduction
of chromebooks and generally like constant screens and technology has
been a just radical detriment to learning. I started teaching
when I first came out of college, and then I
went on to work in politics and reporting, and then
I came back to teaching. So I have this rare
kind of ten year gap in my teaching experience. So
I got to teach before there was a single computer
in a classroom, and I got to teach when they
were ubiquitous. They were being rolled out as something every
single student would have, and the difference is just mind blowing.
The amount of distraction in the room who is just overwhelming.
Imagine we'll get into the different aspects of how it
negatively impacts people. But we just got a story from
the mainstream media. I believe it was Fortune magazine or
something like that, and they said that the United States
has been something like thirty billion dollars to get screens
into classrooms. And now the research is coming out and
neuroscientists and others are saying, oh, actually, we can directly
correlate the drop in the quality of education with the chromebooks.
So we you know, we understand there are many reasons
why the American educational system is failing. We know that
the increase in non English speaking students, foreign students is
driving down scores as well. So you know, we could
just go with the oh, well, correlation doesn't you know,
prove causation, And that's true, of course, but the fact
that you can track it one to one in many
instances means there's probably more fire there with all that smoke.
And so I think it's very obvious is that we
made this incredible investment in a technological classroom, and it
has destroyed the ability of students to learn. And many people,
myself included, we're saying this as it was occurring, and
no one would listen, and we were told we were
ludites and fools and behind the times, and don't you
understand this is what's necessary. And it turns out we
were right the whole time. But I don't even think
with this data any of this will change. I think
we're too heavily invested in a system that has already
gone through this process. So I think it's critical at
this moment that we maybe stopped for a moment and
think about where we're at, because if we don't change
what we're doing this and we're probably not going to,
this is going to seriously destroy the ability of generations
of young American children to learn. Well.
Speaker 3: This is something that comes up often when I speak
to older Americans. Realize the term boomer is a weighted
one will use that for this discussion, And I think
of my own grandfather, who, after coming back from the
military and the sixties, went and became a teacher, a
very brief career there. Because it turns out being a
white teacher in a diverse area in the late sixties
early seventies was fraught, shall we say that, with issues.
This was the time when they were making a big,
organized labor push where that was highly tied towards black separatism,
for instance, the Black Panther Party and others. And so
this is someone who even decades ago saw the in
built failures in American education. He grew up and graduated
in an era where the Department of Education did not exist,
where many of the issues had not yet started, and
so once he came back, got to see it firsthand.
But nonetheless, one of the things that constantly comes up
when we talk about this is, well, don't they understand
that this is creating a problem. Don't they understand that
this is make students less competent? And that assumes, and
it's a reasonable assumption, that the purpose of public education
is to educate the public. That's what it says on
the tin, right, that's why it's there. But that is
not at all the purpose of public education. It's not
the entire purpose, but a large part of it is
as a jobs program. And the amazing thing about chromebooks,
the amazing thing about these different student portals. Is that
they take being a public school teacher, which is not
a particularly difficult job, and make it even easier. You
don't actually have to do anything. You can just let
the computer do it. And so it's created this sort
of weighted interest or tested interest rather in not changing
that because if you're not particularly motivated to do your job,
as many public school teachers are not, well, just stick
the kids in front of a computer in front of
a TV is way easier than actually doing anything. I've
said this on air before. My wife has still does
work as a teacher. First job in education was, you know,
shortly after school, got a job at a very poorly performing,
sort of ghetto school in a crime written American city.
And this was the first time she'd experienced these chromebooks.
A couple things. One, they are given to the students
for free. These students do not care about them and
routinely sell them, destroy them, But because they need them
for their coursework, they're just given new ones. But she
was in a second grade class, but even in that setting,
she could tell that these kids were basically cooked. The
vast majority of them were illiterate. They were using the
sort of speech to text functionality, just talking into it
and also using that they were able to come across
things that you are not supposed to be able to access, right,
extremely violent material, extremely disturbing material. Setting aside that just
time wasting games and things like that, and the teacher,
the administration basically didn't care because it kept them placated,
it kept them from causing chaos. And so really the
purpose of that school was not to educate those children
but sort of function as a containment block for eight
to nine hours a day. That was the reason that
school existed, and also to funnel resources to the teachers.
It's basically why it existed.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean this is something that is extremely evident,
as you say, when you teach at a lower income school.
If you're teaching at a high performing, well funded school,
then you might actually see some education occur. But when
you are teaching I also taught my majority minority school
that had multiple prison riot style fights breakout, you know
that back kind of thing, you know, had had assistant
principle knocked out by by a student that that you
know that that really was the type of school I
was in. And when you show up there, you recognize
very quickly as you say that you are not educating students,
you are holding them for nine hours. Why their parents
go to work or do drugs? That is really your job.
The many of my students parents would block the number
of the school because they got called so often by
the school about their child's behavior, and they just didn't
want to be bothered, you know, didn't want to be
reached by the school at all, so they just blocked it.
You could, you couldn't reach them at all. This is
a very common occurrence, and so there's an incentive there too,
as you say, just kind of distract the students. But
I think the more important thing that you also hit
on there was school as a jobs program. A lot
of people don't think about this, but in most counties,
for instance, in Florida where I live, the top two
employers are the hospital system and the school system. It's
usually you know, between one and two. You know, they'll
kind of alternate, which means that the majority of the
biggest employer, the one that is keeping most of the
people there in business, is the government system, and they
are the education. We talk about the military industrial complex
or you know, the big pharma, but big ED is
huge like, there's billions, billions, probably trillions of dollars tied
up in public schooling, and so the incentive is not
to find something at works and allow it to work.
The incentive is to create new systems and sell them
to people. There's a lot of money in training. There's
a lot of money in maintaining these chromebooks there, all
the techts involved, everything, software to sell, all these things
are incredibly profitable. And so we've known for probably at
least one hundred years that direct instruction is the most
useful way to teach a child. Like, we know how
to do this, we know how this works, but there's
no money in training teachers in the most basic form
of education. There's no extra textbooks to be sold, there's
no software, there's no maintenance, there's no additional supervision. So
we don't use what we know works. We specifically avoid
using what we know works because we can't sell it
to teachers. So that's a massive part of this. You
know this, Chromebooks aren't just in classrooms because they're useful.
They're in classrooms because there's a giant profit motive behind
them that is very obvious. The other aspect of this
is you know, before you even get to the discipline
and everything else, is that Google obviously has a massive
incentive to have their computers in every classroom. So it's
not just the computers they're selling. I believe originally they
were offered at discounts, and you know, deep, deep discounts
to get them in the room. Well, once in the
room and you've acclimated every teacher and every student using them,
they become ubiquitous. Now Google can start jacking up those prices,
It can pull back all of those incentives, it can
roll back all of those deals, because what are you
gonna do. You're gonna run a classroom without a Chromebook.
You don't even you don't even know how to do
that at this point. Students don't know how to operate
without one. So now you have an entire captured audience
for your product.
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Speaker 4: And there's a further incentive that Google then becomes ubiquitous
to the student when it comes to understanding things, learning things,
presenting things. The Google search engine is truth. That's how
you interact with the world. You don't go to textbooks,
you don't listen to the teacher, you don't do any
research yourself. You type things into Google and what Google
says is the answer, including the fact that you're using
all of the different Google software, the docs and the
spreadsheets and the slides, and every aspect of your interaction
with knowledge and how to present it is tied to Google.
So now you have an audience that is not only captured,
but is being trained from their youth to associate Google
and all of its products with edgetion, with truth, with
how you communicate and learn things. And finally, and I
think very importantly that no one ever talks about you
are an absolute insane person. If you think that Google
is not keeping every bit of that data. If you
don't think that they are mining every single bit of
data out of those students and out of those crowbooks,
you're just an insane person. So on top of all
of this, there's the personal security and privacy issues that
are tied to this. And again, we can talk about
the discipline and the learning and everything else, and I'm
sure we will, but just at the outset people who
are really big on these conspiracies of corporations owning entire
industries and perverting the incentives and controlling your health care
or the military or all these things, we'll just kind
of not notice that we have a giant educational industrial
complex that controls everything that young people learn, understand know
to be true.
Speaker 3: Well, and there's a to your point about what is
the best method of teaching, Just look at what rich
people mean, Like really really rich people who you know,
don't have to play by the same rules that I do.
They either send their kids to exclusive private schools, right
the kind of private school you might have, you know,
twenty to fifty students, or they get a private tutor.
They don't buy their kids chromebooks, which is you know, Okay,
maybe it's not the most intellectual test, but I think
it's it's one to examine. And one of the more
sinister things on this is for a long time, people
of kind of our general persuasion, we're early adopters in
homeschooling and private schools.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: Look at the you know, the inception of you know,
the homeschooling movement kind of in the late eighties, early
nineties when it really started to pick up steam, let
alone right, the kind of classical school movement, which you
know started again in kind of the mid nineties and
then exploded over the two thousand and intends well. In
my state, for example, they are attempting to mandate the
same standards quote unquote the SOLS and also the diversity
requirements on private institutions, including private undergrad institutions and also homeschoolers.
So basically, you will not be allowed to opt out
of that incredibly broken system. You have to hire the
sort of diversity commissars, and you have to teach to
the same tests that are effectively cooking the brain of
every young person in America. I think that we can
understand the rationale or having some sort of standard for education,
but the problem is the incentive, again as with anything else,
is that it pushes people towards gaming that system instead
of actually educating their students. Right, the joke from The Simpsons,
which is now what thirty years old, of the students
memorizing the scantron orders in class. Okay, sure it's a joke,
but not by much.
Speaker 4: And again, sorry sorry to interrupt you here, but this
is so this proves your point so much. I just
have to to interject with this real quick. I promise
I'm not making this up. I promise I am not
you know, fabulousize, uh, you know, manufacturing this to make
it more exciting or whatever. I was sitting in a
meeting with the principle of my school and she directly said,
we need to do nothing but teach the children the
answers to this test. That is all you should be
doing at every moment. And someone had the temerity to
raise their hand and say, isn't that bad, Like, aren't
we not educating children? Isn't that not doing them a service?
And again, it would have been nice if you, like,
I know what the answer is going to be, but
a little bit of obfuscation, a little bit of well, no,
this is ultimately showing reflecting. She just point blake this
is what we need to do to get the students
out of here. This is the goal, is to get
them through the door, in and out after hitting the metric.
I do not care if they learn. I only care
if they pass the test. Again, I knew that was true,
but the fact that she couldn't put even the smallest
amount of shine on that apple just blew me away.
Like that level of candor of just nakedly Yeah, we
are only here to get these kids to check the
box and walk out the door. That is all that matters.
And if you don't do it, I'm gonna fire you.
Like that was just incredible.
Speaker 3: Well, and to that point, I was speaking to a
girl at church who is I think she's a first
grade teacher her first year, and she was complaining about
the fact and she hasn't know who I am, just
someone you know, met at church, about the fact that
at her school they've instituted scripts so effectively, every single
day of teaching is planned. It's like reading your lines
for a play. There is no space for teaching. It
is simply, you know, going through a script written to
accomplish that end. Right, The idea that this is a
system that educates people is more and more laughable. It
clearly is not, and I understand why people are confused
or angry about that fact. But at a certain point
it simply is not the case. There's really no more
questioning that premise. So you said earlier, right, that you
wrote an op ed about this. I'm curious who are
you writing that to? Right? Is it just a general
analysis piece? Do you see this sort of confusion kind
of commonly in the discussion around this issue.
Speaker 4: I am really just hoping that anyone will pay attention
to this issue at all, Like I don't think anyone don't.
I just don't see anyone addressing it. I think Jonathan
Hite has talked about screens and classrooms, and you know,
there's a couple of people talking about it, so that's good,
but just the you know, and of course we can
go you know, the the chromebooks are just the tip
of the iceberg. The American educational system is just a
absolute moral travesty on every level. But since that's what
the small portion of this absolute war zone we're discussing,
I need people to grasp what we're doing, because, as
you say, you know that, you know, I talk a
lot about the managerial system and revolution and how it's
affected everything, But it has hit nothing more completely than education.
As you say, you're basically a telemarketer. As a teacher
at this point, you're just running through a script. You're
you're flipping through and hitting buttons to tell people what
to say. There is no critical thinking, learning understanding of
any kind occurring in a classroom, not just on student
and but also on the teacher. There. Everything has to
be highly regiment and there's many reasons for this.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 4: Part of it is relatigious nature of the American educational system.
You step off the road at all, you're gonna get sued.
One big part of it is the multicultural nature of
our system, the fact that half the students can't speak English.
They don't have the cultural background to understand the lessons
you're learning. You know, we used to laugh at the
woke saying, oh you know, oh, well, you know, your
education is too white, it's too Western, it's too American.
Other people from other places can't understand it. Well, I
can tell you from firsthand experience that's true. Like they
literally don't have the cultural background understand Shakespeare. It's not
just that they can't read it. It's that they even
if they could, they can't grasp it. They don't they've
never read the Bible. They don't know any of the history,
they don't know any of the illusions that are in there,
and you can't. The problem is that education is layered.
You can't teach everything at once, and you can't. You know,
math is great, but everything is at math, Like a
lot of things request are a high degree of cultural contexts,
and you can't just speed run it by being like,
here's Moby Dick. You have to actually build up to
that point. Kids need to know all the illusions, the idioms,
all of the things that you are ultimately pointing to
when you're trying to dissect the novel or when you're
trying to understand history. But they don't and they don't
care because it's not their history and it's not their culture.
And so the chromebook allows you to just kind of
flatten all that stuff out and force these kids through.
Also the explosion in IEPs in alternative requirements for students
learning because they have some kind of learning disability. They
have add they have ADHD, they have all these different things.
They can't speak the language they need the Chromebook to
basically cover for all of those things that all of
the new accommodations are basically built into the technology, and
so the Chromebook really allows you to kind of achieve
all these things without having to think about it, without
having to reason your way through it, and that's one
of the reasons it's become again so ubiquitous. It is
to the point now where if a teacher is out
of the classroom, you just put another substitute into the
classroom and the kids hit the same button on the
same computer and then they do the same lesson and
you don't even notice the teacher's gone, which is exactly
what school district wants. They want that interchangeability where your
relationship with the students, your knowledge of them, is completely
immaterial because you're probably gonna leave in six months anyway
because teaching is horrific, and they can just slot the
next guy in and not miss a beat. Those things
are all very attractive aspects of the Chromebook to your
wider educational system on top of everything else that it does.
Speaker 3: Well, and there's sort of a piece of received wisdom
in our spheres that basically runs if you want to
know what actually happened in any historical event. Read a
book written before nineteen forty five. It's sort of a
joke there. But in my own school district, at least
for elementary schools, had a standing policy to read no
books written before twenty twelve. I think the one exception,
the oldest book on the curriculum was The Hunger Games
assigned reading, and sure, okay, that might not be the
most objectionable individual book. I don't know if there's a
ton of weight to it per se, but we see
that same erasure of any culture, any idea before the
kind of eternal woke present. Right, it simply does not
even exist. You might be introduced to it as a
negative example, right, this horrible, evil, racist time. You will
have no first hand interaction with it whatsoever. It is
effectively a sort of educational year zero. And one of
the things that I think people don't understand about Generation Z,
why that generation is so messed up for any number
of reasons, is that effectively, in large part they were
taught by millennials in public school, and I mean less
so in college, although that's becoming more and more the case,
and so all of the values of the kind of
you know, great opening took a while to percolate through
the system. Well, let me tell you, they hit education
like a wrecking ball. Oh yeah, And so all of
a sudden, you know, your teacher isn't some you know,
well meaning fifty five year old liberal lady. You know, okay,
she's a little bit kooky. It is the most stereotypical,
blue haired person you can imagine, and with what latitude
they do have. And we understand, of course they are
pushing through an open door. They are moving with the
system instead of against it. They can take those policies
and ram them down your kid's throat. I think really
this was, you know, the reason that you know, homeschooling
and private schools blew up during the pandemic because for
the first time you had parents at home next to
their kids on zoom looking over their shoulder like, wait
a minute. You know, missus Smith has been teaching you
this the whole time. And what we've seen in Virginia
as well as others, is that they will not let
you retreat. They will export that exact same system to
wherever your kids are because they understand. And I think
this is a comment from you know, it was either
Luther or cow and I can't remember which. Where it's like,
if you have a child, you can change how they
think for the rest of their lives. We are very
accurate in pointing this out with you know, the baby
boomer generation that effectively, you know, that system of thought
has been kind of burnt into their brain. But there
is a project to do the exact same thing. There
is also an element to which education is a thought
control and some of it is political, but as you
mentioned earlier, some of that is also corporate right, putting
in Google as the arbiter of truth in every child
in America's mind. It's incredibly sinister, and I think that
we need to understand that. You know, when we look at,
you know, the attempt to trans your kid, which is
very real. By the way, you think it's your kids teacher,
it's actually your kids counselor guidance counselor school psychologist. Look
for those. Those are real sinister. But also we keep
reading all of these horrific stories about kids getting groomed
over the Internet, and the controls, the parental controls on
these chromebooks are so porous that it is not particularly
difficult to get to apps like Discord, games like roadblocks,
or any other of the numerous kind of other you know,
third parties. Two groom children, You're basically leaving an open
door in their backpack for the worst people in the
world to come and get them. It's quite literally that simple.
Speaker 4: You know, I've become somewhat known for a sign, you know,
tapping a sign about. You know, it's not rocket science.
They just want to deal with your kids. And a
lot of people, you know, will give me the oh,
you know, you're being hyperbolic, that's not the motivation. But wow,
And I know they're wrong, and I know they wrong
because I taught public school and it is as bad
as you were saying. In fact, it is much worse.
I promise you you listen to this right now, whoever
you are, if you have a child in public school,
the job of their guidance counselor is to trans your kid.
I'm not being hyperbolic. I really am not joking at all.
Like every incentive exists, I have watched this happen. I
have been sat in a room the minute I knew
I had to get out of public education, and the
minute I knew that if I ever had a voice
like I do now, I would spend it screaming from
the rooftops about this issue. Was when I got sat
down in Florida, the state famous for pushing back against
the woke, you know revolution and they don't say gay
Bill and all that stuff. In Florida, I was sat
down and told specifically that I had to lie two
parents if their child decided that they were trans I was.
I would be fired from my job if I did
not lie to a parent about their child becoming trands. Now,
luckily I did not have to make that decision, because
if it came to it, I would have just been fired.
I would never have done that. But the fact that
that came down directly from the school in Florida, which
is supposed to be like the most aggressively against this
is absolutely insane. And as you say, they're you know,
moving on from that, since we were mainly talking about
the technology, but the chromebooks themselves are just portal to hell.
As you point out that you know, oh, we're going
to put parental controls on that. Oh okay, well, luckily
no child has ever circumvented a parental control, right, like,
especially when you put this in front of them all
day long. So you have thousands of children all sitting
in the same place for six to eight hours a
day in front of these screens. The first thing they
do is crack the parental controls. We went through at
least five different versions of parental Controls while I was
teaching with chromebooks, and without fail, by the end of
the week, the students had hacked every single one of them.
And you know, they're they're playing video games, of course,
they're watching YouTube constantly. They're you know, watching their movie
sites where they can you know, download you know, pirated
movies from China, all that stuff that they're watching the
entire time they're never paying attention to. But on top
of that, they can do far more dangerous things. I
had several students who eventually completely lost chromebook privileges because
they had become addicted to pornography and could not stop
watching pornography in class constantly, just constantly, they like like
a like a like a heroin addict or you know,
some guys sitting at a slot machine, you know, like
they just could not stop themselves. It's not even that
they were sneaking around anymore, like they were compulsively watching it,
and that again, those are just the worst cases. Of course,
there's tons of kids involved in this. On top of that,
you have things like Google Docs. If people aren't aware,
this is like Google's version of Microsoft Word, and it's
always online and you can share the Google docs with
other people and the ideas while we can all work
on this together, and it's very helpful when we're trying to,
you know, work on a group project or assignment of
some kind where most people have to contribute. Well, the
other thing you can do with this is just use
it as a texting service. So basically everyone in the
school gets in these shared documents like little chat rooms,
and they're constantly talking to each other. So you can
even a few band phones, which that's its own conversation.
But even if you band phones entirely and students are
never using it, they're basically texting each other all day
in these docs, and they are bullying each other. They're
coordinating literal crimes, to the point where we had a
school assembly where we had to, in painstaking detail explain
to students that if you plan a crime on a doc,
we can see it like that. That's not something that's hidden,
that's not your private information. The school can see it.
Kids would literally do sex X in the bathroom, take
pictures of it with their chromebook, and literally share child
pornography on their laptops that they had created. We had
students facing child pornography charges because of their chromebooks. This
is all very common and parents are never told about it.
They're specifically, you know, this stuff is censored. It doesn't
go to the news. Nobody talks about this, even though
these kind of like, if you had a ring of
child pornography going on in a school in a previous era,
this would be the greatest scandal of the century, and
yet it's happened commonly. It's happening in your child school,
I promise you and parents. Administrators are hiding it from
you on purpose. The sheriff's office, the police there aware,
but nobody wants to address this. The implications are too
vast and too devastating, and so we just kind of
keep moving on as if this is not having a
diletarious effect on children.
Speaker 3: Well, and even in a much more benign example, I
think of a you know, local Christian school to me,
which is relatively speaking, very restrictive on technology, and they
only allow sign in sign out access to laptops for
juniors and seniors. Right, the idea that this is used
for you know, applying to colleges, applying for internships, things
like that. And very quickly the children realized that every
single person's login was a derivation of the same formula.
So if you knew their first and last name, which
in a high school of one hundred you certainly did.
They were signing into each other's accounts, which I'll be honest,
would I do that at five or seventeen?
Speaker 4: Yes?
Speaker 3: Was it very fun that they were, you know, signing
it as their friends and sending out an email to
everyone saying I am gay and I like men. Yes,
that is funny. Be you know, these are good kids,
They're not doing anything that bad. But still it shows
you that, you know, the vulnerability to these systems. Those
kids had been more maliciously minded, had been more interested
in causing chaos, they certainly could have done it. And look,
that's even in a system that is relatively speaking locked down. Right,
no other technology other than laptops you have to sign
your name to get one, right. This reminds me very
much of a case from Appomattox, Virginia. There was an
episode on Benjamin Boyce's show in the last year. I
can't remember who where one of the women on his
show went into this case. Effectively, what happened is that
this girl living with her mother in a very rural,
conservative area. Right This place is Ruby Red and it
is a town of basically nobody, right. Well, she had
through her school laptop discovered that she was transgender. She
was being groomed, and when she told her school guidance counselor,
they basically kidnapped her. They sent her to Maryland, which
is a trans sanctuary state, which means that if you
are a quote unquote transgender miner and you run there,
they will not send you back. So this girl ends
up in the foster care system, ends up really receiving
a horrific abuse of really every time you kind you
can think of. And basically it's because even in a
conservative area, her school psychologist, I believe it was the
psychologist was basically an undercover activist. And even though that
is highly illegal, it is kidnapping a minor, which produced
in addition other crimes, this person still has a job.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: Sure, there's a civil suit now, but even in conservative areas,
these systems exist to basically trans your kids. That's why
they are there. Sure there's also the element of a
jobs program. But the role of these school psychologists, these
school counselors is particularly sinister because basically what happens is,
I'm sure you're aware, psychology degrees are one of the
most popular degrees out there. There's sort of that I
don't know what I want to do, which has created
a glut of these people on the jobs market, so
many of them are ending up in education. If you
have ever taken even a single psychology course in college,
you are aware of what these people's politics are like.
And they are being seated by mandate from you know,
many of these states, in every school in America, and
they are given extreme latitude with your children. They can
take them out of class whenever without asking. They don't
actually do anything really other than kind of hover around
the building and look for a kid. And you see
the same pattern of you know, some kid who's having
a tough time for whatever reason. You know, maybe there's
there's trouble at home, maybe they're just a little bit neurotic,
getting sucked into this and these psychologists have the ability
to refer for diagnosis your children, so even if they
don't trans them, they are getting your kid hooked up
to powerful mind altering chemicals in elementary school. You do
not have to be notified in many states that your
kid has gotten a diagnosis and a prescription for SSRIs
and one of the things.
Speaker 4: In some cases, the teachers or people are being threatened
if they want to even tell you, like even right.
Speaker 3: And again in not all but many states, if you
do find out and you object, they can take your
kids away. So is an incredibly sinister system. And I'll
throw it back to you. Are but just one more anecdote.
My my wife is married to me, so you know,
her politics are some of what you'd expect, and she
was horrified, like genuinely horrified by the fact that, you know,
many of her coworkers we're celebrating, you know, like, oh,
Billie's dosage got doubled, and the kid's a catatonic zombie.
But at least he's not acting crazy and do his
parents know? Probably not. And he's getting dosed at school
every morning. He's literally having his brain cooked by legalized
crystal meth. It's incredibly sinister.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm increasingly sure. And look, look I'm sympathetic. I
know a lot of people are working two three jobs,
both parents, just to stay above water.
Speaker 1: Right now.
Speaker 4: I know cost of living is is terrible. So you know,
when I say this, please understand this is not an
individual judgment on people's situations.
Speaker 2: But I am.
Speaker 4: Increasingly of the persuasion that if you're leaving your child
in public school at this point, you're just co signing
child abuse. But I've been in these exact discussions you're
talking about where I've had, you know, other teachers talk
about the fact that they have boys in their classroom
and that's a problem, like, oh, they're almost half my
classes boys. I need to fix that because boys are
the problem because the way we teach is incredibly feminine,
and we don't know how to deal with boys, and so,
you know, just their presence is derided by the teachers themselves.
If they are in your room, then they need to
be heavily medicated. I too, have literally seen multiple teachers
excited when a child comes back with a new diagnosis
or a higher amount of a drug that they're on,
because now they'll just shut up and sit down, and
they won't bother, you know, the teacher anymore. These are
all very common practices. And again this all leads us
back to the chromebook and everything else. You know, it's
there's a weird dichotomy when I was teaching, because at
some level, I of course didn't like bad behavior. I
didn't like students who were misbehaving or not paying attention
and not learning of those kind of things. But in
another way, the oftentimes the students that were the most
unwilling to kind of go with the system, unwilling, you know,
we're disobeying and behaving poorly, were the ones that were
least likely to buy into the radical leftist politics. They
were less likely to be brainwashed. And so it was
somewhat of a relief to, you know, see a child
behave poorly, because at least they weren't, you know, at
least they still had some independence, at least they weren't
completely molded by the system at that point. At least
they were rejecting part of, you know, what they were
being told. And so it really is just increasingly a
bunch of people who really hate your children and want
to destroy them being given complete control over those children.
And I want to say there are good teachers, okay,
like that. I've seen people who go out there and
they bleed every day, you know, to try to help
a child. They truly care. So I'm not saying they're
not good teachers. I'm not saying that every teacher is
a disaster. I mean, your wife's a teacher. I'm sure
she cares about her children. You know, he is trying
to do a good job in the system, but just
increasingly the entire system is a complete disaster from head
to toe. Again, I worked in a school where multiple
teachers were assaulted or put in the hospital by students.
And there was one guy sitting in our mailroom for
six months because he tried to break up a fight
in his classroom and one of the students slipped and
hurt himself while he was being pushed away from the
student he was attacking. And basically that they couldn't fire
the teacher, but he wasn't allowed back in the classroom
for breaking up a fight. So that, you know, that's
kind of where you're at when it comes to actual
classroom management. Even if there's a complete you know, like
violent sociopath trained to beat your child the teacher cannot
involve themselves. They cannot get between them because they will
either themselves get hurt or if they actually successfully stop
the fight, they could lose their job, they could go
to jail. These are all very real possibilities. And so
I know we're a little far to feel from the
technology point at this point, but it really is a
scenario where basically you're just putting your kids there literally
so they stop bothering you while you're working. And you know,
I had to work very hard to get a lot
of the technology stuff out of my classroom. I kind
of successfully did that right kind of before the pandemic.
I finally got okay, well, chromebooks only for the standardized
tests only when we absolutely have to have them. Otherwise
they're completely shut out of my classroom. And then the
pandemic hit and everything had to be back on chromebooks
again obviously because he had to do all their work
remote and when the kids came back from that, nothing
was allowed to change. Everything had to say say on
there forever. So now your kids really can't escape this,
Like they really can't learn. It's illegal basically for them
to like learn in a jradial manner in the classroom.
Speaker 3: Well, and one of the other the other things is
that the the weaponized allegation right where. And it's somewhat
understandable that schools are hyper sensitive to allegations of abuse.
But basically what this has created is a massive exploit
where quite simply, children can just claim that they were touched,
that they were struck by teachers they don't like, which
tend to be the student or the teachers rather that
restrict access to technology that are particularly interested in taking
away phones. And so you know, I can think of
a music teacher that you know, I know, and he
was under investigation for like six weeks. Couldn't work because
you know, some kid said he picked him up and
threw him during class. Is that a credible allegation? No
one else saw this happen, There's a camera in the room.
It's not clearly right, the kid was unmarked, no one
else could corroborate it. But simply because that had been
you know, put forward, well not only does that kid
basically get revenge on that teacher, but also every other
kid is like, oh wait, I can just pull this ripcord.
Now I can just put this person, you know, an
incredibly uncomfortable situation. Uh, with little to no backup for it.
It is a extremely perverse incentive, and you see that
weaponized constantly.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean there's Yeah, the the better you are
as a teacher, the more vulnerable you are too. Exactly
the type of allegations you're talking about. Students, don't they
want you to rest to the mean, they want you
to just do what everyone else is doing. And so
if you're a teacher who is restricting their access to
that stuff, yeah, they're they're going to take advantage of that.
But ultimately, I just I don't know, man, It's it's
so insane that, you know, I got to the point
where there are principles were just going around and threatening
to fire teachers who would not doctor grades and just
pass everybody. And again, this is not hidden. This was
not some you know, policy that they needed to sweep
under the rug or you know, hush hush, heavily implied. No,
they would just tell you directly, like, too many of
your students are failing, you must bring their grade up
the end, you know, too many of your students, especially
if there if they're English is the second language students,
they pass no matter what, it doesn't matter if they
didn't learn a single thing. If they didn't because there's
always some little technicality that you did not complete in
an IEP form or did not provide a classroom. And
if you don't do what the administration tells you to do,
they're just going to use that to leverage you out
of there. And so anyone of quality teaching realizes they
immediately need to get out of there, Like there's just
if you have any if you have any morals, if
you have any sensibility, if you have any capability, then
you're getting out of there. So the only people left
in a classroom at this point are people who are
dumb or evil or lazy, like that's all that's left
in many of these places. Again, there are good teachers,
but this is just increasingly the case. These are the
incentive structures that exist. You know, if you are still teaching,
especially at you know, some of the worst schools, it's
because you failed, you know, And that's that's how the
teacher you know, that's how the teacher allocation works. You
put the worst teachers in the worst school, right so
so so it's just all feeding into each other. You know,
these people in many cases don't want to go to
another school, not because the students aren't great, but because
the teachers there just they have zero scrutiny. Nothing's ever
going to happen to them. They can you know, sit
around all day, do nothing, walk out the door, and
no one's ever going to care. The parents are going
to care, administrates aren't gonna care as long as the
great book lines up and the you know, you didn't
write too many disciplarity referrals or something, and you know
that's it, like that's all that matters. And so it's
just this is the spiral of you know that everything
pushes back against a good teacher. You know, there's just
zero incentive for anyone who cares about kids, cares about education,
has some level of integrity or intelligence for them to
stay at the very least in schools that need them,
and in many cases in the educational system at all.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean to that point, like there's a reason
that the burnout is so high, And yeah, sure is
some of it. You know, irritating people who have you know,
no capacity to work a job one hundred percent. I'm
sure you saw those where someone calls out sick ten
times in their first quarter. Okay, sure, right, that happens.
But I mean that's a big part of the reason
my wife no longer works in the public school system.
Everything you have mentioned one of the other things that's
particularly inious, insidious, insidious, excuse me. And this relates to
the conversations about both you know, like the IEPSE, the
kind of certain you know programs for people who have
you know, disabilities. If you are in a special category,
there is a quota to how much trouble you were
allowed to get into. You can't have a disproportionate number
of your discipline going to X, y Z type of student,
and so this creates a huge double standard where if
you are in a group that doesn't habitually cause trouble,
you will be crucified for something minor, largely just to
get the spreadsheet to balance. And if you are a
part of a protected group, you're basically bulletproof. Things that
would get criminal charges brought up against a you know,
a person of a different demographic background roll off your back,
and you can be pushed through school at a you know,
at an absolutely absurd rate because again, nobody wants to
keep you around. That's effectively the attitude of, well, let's
just shuffle this problem on to someone else, And so
very often you have these, you know, late teenagers who
are borderline illiterate, have what is effectively a criminal record,
or really should have one, kind of in school with
normal everyday kids, and the kind of violence that you're
talking about is a direct consequence of that. Even if
they do get sent to you know, some sort of remediation,
you know, some sort of juvenile hall, what they do is,
and this is deliberate, is because there's a whole bunch
of gamesmanship with where they send bad students, because the
idea is, once you're clearing a bar of passing or
you have your accreditation, there's no benefit for being better
than that, but there's a huge penalty for being below it.
So what they'll do is they'll basically send kids who
are coming out of juvenile hall, who are coming out
of remediation, and put them into good suburban schools because
that school can of absorb the low test scores, the
low results, and that school can't necessarily afford to kick
them out or actually punish them. And so basically you
have like these kids from Gladiator School being dumped in
with like the children of doctors and engineers, and it's
a free for all, and as you've said, teachers literally
cannot do anything about it.
Speaker 4: So as I said, I taught at a majority minorities
school and we had insane discipline problems. As I said,
you know multiple scenarios where teachers were knocked out, you
know that kind of thing, And we were not allowed
to suspend students. And the reason you're not allowed to
spend students is they're black and brown. They were eighty
percent black or hispanic in that school. And they say
you're suspending too many minority students, Like, well, that's everyone
in the school, so if we suspend anyone, they will
be a minority. They're like, yeah, but you're disciplined. The
number of students you are suspending is so high that
you're hitting the weighted average for a black and brown
suspensions for the rest of the district. Like that's how
bad your discipline problem is. So basically we just created
and I'm sure you've heard of this before, we created
the we use a failed prison system for discipline. I'm
trying to remember the name of it has suddenly escaped
my mind, but it's basically rather than discipline the child
in any traditional sense, you have them talk it out
with the peer counseling and these kind of things. And
the idea is if you confront the student, you know,
they hear the harm they've done to someone else, then
they'll just stop it and you don't need to suspend
them or anything. Of course, none of this happens. In fact,
most of the time, the student just ends up intimidating
whoever they were bullying or harassing or assaulting in the
first place into saying that yes, they've worked it out,
and they go by right back in the class room
and start doing it all again. And this is the
official structure of the disciplinary system. And so the you know,
the funny thing is that because it's basically impossible to
have any discipline in the school, obviously, like the permission
just gets more and more aggressive. So, as I said,
we had multiple prison style riot fights and they were
captured on cell phones because they wouldn't ban the stupid
cell phones in the school. They finally banned the cell phones,
not because they were distracting children in class, not because
they were making impossible free for teachers to teach, not
because students, but because they were capturing too much of
the bad stuff that was happening at school, and it
was making it to the news. They also allowed for
about five or six months first to actually suspend students
after the third prison riot, and guess what behavior was great.
All of a sudden, we could actually teach in classrooms.
Things were getting done, you know, we would didn't feel
like you're war zone all the time. The discipline worked,
but the numbers went up in the district, and so
slowly they rolled back to the oh, no too many,
maybe we should stop doing no too many, And eventually
we went right back to where we were. So we
know what works, we know how to make it work,
but we are intentionally not doing it for metrics and optics, right,
And it got so bad that the principle, and I
promise you this is like the most leftist woman in
the world. Okay, she is everything you think a female
public school principle is going to be. She has every
woke opinion you can imagine. But even she would just admit, like,
we cannot increase our scores or discipline with the current demographic,
by which you mean we have too many black and
brown kids in the school, and they're not gonna learn
stuff and they can't be disciplined. So her plan was
to turn the school into a magnet school to literally
gentrify the school. We'll bust in a bunch of white
kids and Asian kids. They'll drive up our store, our
scores and the other You know, our current students will
have to go to the other schools in the area.
That's how we solve our problem. We don't get better
at this, we don't change our policies. We literally changed
the population of the school. That that's how we fix it. Again,
this is the she would call you a racist in
a second, but she knows when it comes to her
actual job, she knows the truth right, And this is
a common tactic. I remember I was one of the
gifted kids in middle school, right, and so I went
to a gifted middle school in my area. They had
dropped the gifted program into the worst ghetto school in
the entire school district, and so we were like cordoned
off in a separate area. Now, my mom did not
understand this, so she also sent my sister, who was
not in the gifted program, to the same school because
she's not going to drive to separate schools. She's just
gonna drop her both her kids off at the same school. Well,
my sister was in gin Pop, you know, basically while
I was. While I was you know, it cloistered away
in the gifted area, and so it was like watching
her run through like this battlefield every day with the fights.
I was fine, I was, you know, my two hallways
were perfectly safe, everything was great, but the rest of
the school was a complete war zone. But it adjusted
the demographic dials, it changed the you know, the different statistics.
So that's what you did.
Speaker 3: Well, and it's it's funny you bring it up because
in my district it's the exact same thing. The worst
elementary school in town, the fourth floor at the top
of the building is the gifted program. Literally just kind
of like they have the doors blocked off. But I
mean on the high school level, right the Governor's school,
right the area, the place you really want to send
your kids for that great education, and you know the
arts are in stem, it's the exact same dynamic. And
the kid got stabbed there.
Speaker 4: He died.
Speaker 3: And it's because again it is one third this perfect
public scho and two thirds a prison. Is basically why
it exists, and this is maybe a discussion for another time,
but it's led to me being so incredibly skeptical of
the kind of liberal idea of an education where you
can fundamentally change someone with, you know, by sending them
to the right type of school, because and look, I
have not directly worked in education. I have you know
family members who have. And the thing I've come away
with is basically, we all kind of know which students
are going to perform and which ones aren't, and all
we're doing is trying to balance that precarious system as
best we can. Because actually, as you've said, restoring order,
giving a chance for those kids who are in should
we say, underprivileged populations but do have a chance, would
require things we can't countenance. Would require being mean, would
require maybe making someone cry, and that going into social media,
and that is simply unacceptable. And so this system will
continue to degrade effectively forever because one of the things
that and I'll bring up my grandfather again that he
said that I thought was particularly incisive is he was
echoing points that you made that effectively we know how
to teach this is a solved bit of technology, but
effectively that doesn't work for the career advancement of school
administrators in the same way that being in charge of
a failing school or having you know, inconvenient you know,
demographic punishment data come out doesn't work for them. And so,
just like in the corporate world, the incentive is to
try something novel, right, introduce that you can use your
doctoral thesis or whatever implement that cook the books so
it looks like this was a great success, and then
go onward and upwards two years later into a role
where you were never at actually held responsible for what
a mess you have made. And if he is telling
me about that issue fifty years ago, I am seeing
it firsthand now in current year. At a certain point,
unless some change is made, this trend will continue forever. Effectively,
it requires the will to actually fix it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and this is just creating a bifurcated society. You
know that you have the Brazili brazilianification of education, where
the people who can afford it, you know, move their
kids behind gated walls and private tutors or you know,
homeschool or those kind of things, and the average person
who's got to work, you know, two jobs and their
spouse has to work a job just to you know,
pay for an apartment or something. You know, their their
kid is going to just go to these war zones.
And that was the in theory, the idea of the
public education was that you kind of leveled the playing field.
Everybody got the same opportunity, everyone had this shared experience.
By ensuring that kind of everyone went through the same process.
You you know, some people were going to succeed, some
people are going to fail, but you gave people kind
of a similar starting place. You know that they could
escape some of the lows of their socioeconomic class, and
maybe you'd shave some of the high end off of
the kids that went there, and you'd kind of create
this leveling experience. And now you have radically the other direction,
where like the only people again who are going to
in ten years, the only people leaving their children in
public school will be those who absolutely you know, hate
their children, are entirely indifferent, or have been dropped entirely
out of the economic system and have no other option
but with their kid there. And all of this creates
downward pressure. So you know, we've talked in our circles
endlessly about the population decline, and young people needing to
start families. Well, the number one cost in any urban
area for a child is education, because you can't send
them to public school. They're like, they're a disaster. You
can't live in a major city and send your child
to a public school, they're going to get sacked and
so or you have.
Speaker 3: To move to an extremely exclusive zip code, in which
case your housing expense is basically an education expense exactly.
Speaker 4: And so what we what we're doing is creating the
scenario where I lost my momentum there.
Speaker 3: Sorry, oh sorry, you were talking about this brasilification and bifurcation.
Speaker 4: Yes, yeah, yeah, So we're creating this scenario where there's
just no way that a parent can or someone can
build a family and have multiple children because the investment
in education is just too high. You can't have eight
kids when you're spending fifty grand a kid to send
them to a school. You can have three kids when
you're spending fifty grand a year a piece to send
them to a school. Like that insane, But that is
increasingly the options we're leaving young people. And so if
we don't figure out a way to solve this problem,
you're the only people who are gonna have children are
the extremely rich and the extremely poor, which is kind
of already what we're seeing, right, And so you know,
the education problem isn't just a problem now for students
now or children now. It's literally going to it's depressing
our birth rates and making impossible for people have future
generations of Americans. So this is a problem that is
just it hits every aspect of our society. Uh, and
it's only going to get worse again as these public
schools become more dangerous and less capable of educating anyone.
You know, students who are already losing out because of
the pandemic and that gap and their education and everything
else on top of that are you know, whatever education
they can receive is of disastrous quality. It's increasingly the
same level education that got when they were sitting home
in front of the chromebook, because they are effectively sitting
at home at the chromebook at the school. It's the
same method of teaching either way. We've seen the disastrous
results when it came out of the pandemic. We're going
to keep seeing them roll out in post pandemic education.
People are not ready for this. They don't realize that
at least a generation of Americans has just been socially
promoted through all of their classes and has literally no
competence in what they are doing. They can't read, they
can't write, none of it. And this is going to
be a massive problem, especially if you start automating away
all these you know, entry and mid level jobs with
AI like there's just they're going to be generations with
just no sellable skills besides maybe like raw physical labor.
Speaker 3: At this point, Darren, I realize that we're about at time,
but I'm going to ask you a seeming non sequitur.
I have a point here, I promise, Arran. Do you
have your high school diploma displayed in your house?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 3: No, no, I don't either. I don't actually know where
it is. The only person I know who does is
my grandparents. Different set. They're luckily all still alive because
they grew up in an era when getting a high
school diploma was a difficult thing to do. It was
a small majority of people who's like fifty five to
sixty percent got all the way through, but it was
a filter mechanism, and neither one of them pursued any
sort of you know, educational career past that, but it's
remarkable how well educated they are. You see this with
with penmanship and writing. You know, I'm a professional writer.
So my grandfather if he has to do you know,
a reading or something prepared for his you know, church
Bible study or whatever, he'll send it to me. And
I'm always incredibly impressed by how good of a writer
he is for a guy who hasn't been in a
classroom since like nineteen sixty six plus or minus. Right,
because there were incredibly high standards relatively speaking, for even
a blue collar guy in a blue collar high school
in rural Virginia. Right, we understood that in order for
something to mean something, it had to be to a
certain degree exclusive. And as education, both higher education and
also simply high school has become less and less exclusive
now to the point where many people graduating aren't even
just Americans. Setting aside the level of performance, Well, the
standards have gone down with it, and we've explained why
for any number of reasons. But to me, that's one
of those things that it just kind of proves it
to me that like, no, this is possible, we learned
how to do this. This isn't some sort of impossible
houcion goal. It's something that's beyond human capacity. But we
can't do it like this simply a non tenable system.
Arn this has been a ton of fun. Man, I
appreciate you coming on my show. Where can people find you?
Where can they find your work?
Speaker 1: Sure?
Speaker 4: Thanks again for having me. I'm over at Blaze TV
with the oron MacIntyre show. You can also find that
on YouTube and Rumble and Odyssey and you know all
your favorite podcast places, Apple, Spotify, all that, and of
course I'm oron McIntyre on Twitter as well.
Speaker 3: I just want to say you're very good at Twitter.
Your tweet from this morning we're recording on twenty six
particularly good. That is some of your best anyway, as
far as my stuff, the Jay Burton Show, Apple, Spotify, YouTube,
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Speaker 4: Two things.
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the ads on YouTube. YouTube does, and I don't get
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Your alternative is giving me money, so you're paying one
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because I forgot to make coffee. I have been normally again, Uren,
thanks so much, Ben, it was a ton of flyn.
Speaker 4: Thanks for having to everyone I know him.
Speaker 3: Keep your head up. I can't last forever. Good night,