RPF0090-School_Sucks_Interview_2of2
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00:00:27.300 | Welcome to the show. My name is Joshua Sheets, and I'm your host.
00:00:32.900 | Today is Tuesday, October 28, 2014.
00:00:36.300 | And today I'm releasing part two of my interview with Brett from the School Sucks podcast.
00:00:42.100 | Yesterday was all about the history of school.
00:00:45.300 | Today is about some of the solutions and a continuation of our conversation.
00:00:51.900 | I hope you enjoy today's show.
00:00:53.700 | Please, I think this is one where if you didn't hear yesterday's show, you will want to go back and hear it.
00:01:00.100 | If you need to find it online, yesterday, part one can be found at radicalpersonalfinance.com/89.
00:01:07.300 | And today is episode 90.
00:01:09.300 | And today is radicalpersonalfinance.com/90 if you need to reference the show notes.
00:01:14.300 | Stay tuned at the end of the interview. This interview portion is just about an hour long.
00:01:18.500 | But I'm releasing an essay, just simply, that I found that I think would be interesting to you, also at the end of today's show.
00:01:25.300 | So feel free to just simply stop after the interview, or feel free to continue on and enjoy the essay that I just thought was incredibly thought-provoking about what color of bus do your children ride?
00:01:40.300 | What I just observed is I observed that the average three or four year old that I knew was precocious and interested in life and happy and loves learning.
00:01:52.100 | I have a one year old son and he loves to learn. You can see it. Children love to learn.
00:01:57.100 | And then I noticed that the average 18 year old that I knew, or even many of the average 30 year olds that I knew, hate learning.
00:02:04.700 | And I said, "What is wrong here?"
00:02:07.100 | The only thing that we've effectively done is taught people to hate learning.
00:02:11.100 | And how did this happen? Because I love to learn. I feel like I'm one of the few that escaped.
00:02:16.100 | And maybe the reason I escaped was for the first seven years, with the exception of third grade, when I went to a government school.
00:02:22.100 | I was educated at home, so I could learn about what I wanted to learn about.
00:02:25.100 | And I would sit there and read the encyclopedia because I thought it was so interesting to learn about all these things.
00:02:30.100 | So I had a little bit of kind of that built up before I went into a formal school.
00:02:36.100 | I'm ranting a little bit, but if you could step in and help a parent, helping someone like me,
00:02:44.100 | I'm in the process of trying to understand how to design my son's educational plan, and what I'm going to hold before him and what I'm not.
00:02:52.100 | What would be the guiding principles? You mentioned self-direction and voluntary learning about areas of interest.
00:02:58.100 | What other guiding principles would you give to encourage a parent like me?
00:03:03.100 | Well, first of all, I just want to say I really second what you just said.
00:03:08.100 | It was really an important realization for me, even though I had developed a lot of attitudes about schooling.
00:03:18.100 | It was this first-hand experience, and it was probably around 2007-2008, where I'm tutoring.
00:03:26.100 | I'm working with the cream of the crop high school students in Needham, the wealthy community of Needham, Massachusetts.
00:03:33.100 | Very competitive, all AP kids, and just very generally unmotivated, not curious,
00:03:43.100 | feeling like they're just kind of trudging their way through all of these pursuits.
00:03:48.100 | At the same time, I'm watching in my own family my brother's young daughter, three, four, five years old,
00:03:56.100 | and her insatiable curiosity and this incredible appetite for new information and new experience, and that contrast.
00:04:09.100 | I look at her now, five years later, and it's sad. I wish I could have intervened more or been more influential in one way or another.
00:04:24.100 | It's very difficult to do with other people's kids.
00:04:27.100 | She is starting to look more like those 16, 17, and 18-year-olds than she looked when she was three.
00:04:37.100 | It was night and day when she was three, but now I say, "What's new? What are you doing?"
00:04:44.100 | Nothing. Where's the device that will distract me from social interaction?
00:04:51.100 | It's frustrating.
00:04:53.100 | As far as your question is concerned, I think that people should first know their options for what exists outside of the government school, the public school program.
00:05:11.100 | Obviously, the first thing is private school. A lot of people might say, "I can't do it. I can't afford it."
00:05:16.100 | I would investigate voucher programs where you live.
00:05:20.100 | Are you familiar with vouchers?
00:05:22.100 | I am, yes, but go ahead and give a quick overview.
00:05:25.100 | I'm kind of philosophically opposed to the idea of vouchers because I think they would actually expand state control.
00:05:33.100 | But if people are looking for a quick fix and the system exists and it can help your child find a better educational experience, it might be, for some people, something that's worth investigating.
00:05:45.100 | There's a good resource called Federation for Children. It's federationforchildren.org.
00:05:52.100 | One of the headings on their page is "EdChoice 101."
00:05:56.100 | You can go and search and find out some of the facts, new legislation, what's available in your state as far as programs.
00:06:09.100 | I do know that it was over 300,000 children participating in private school voucher programs during the last school year.
00:06:19.100 | That's pretty significant.
00:06:23.100 | People would also be surprised. Private school tuitions are often lower than what the cost is to taxpayers to send someone to public school.
00:06:34.100 | Obviously, if you're a homeowner, there's no way out of funding the public school in your district.
00:06:39.100 | But if there is a voucher program, that money could be reallocated. It's worth investigating.
00:06:46.100 | My fear with voucher programs is if people can use taxpayer money, which the school establishment and the teachers' union see as their money that they earn, and it can be sent to private institutions that would be framed as unaccountable, not having the same rigorous standards as the public system,
00:07:08.100 | then we could see expanding state and federal control over private institutions.
00:07:16.100 | But we could also see the possibility—and I hope this doesn't sound like a slippery slope argument here—but I think there's also a real possibility that the unions could want to invade private schools and get those people in their ranks as well.
00:07:32.100 | Let's leave the voucher conversation there. It's a valuable conversation.
00:07:39.100 | I struggle personally with the question of, "Is it better to move a little bit in that direction, or is it better to be hardcore?"
00:07:49.100 | Do you support something like the voucher program because you say, "Oh, well, maybe it'll bring people more choice, and then that'll allow them to do that," or do you stick hardcore to principles?
00:07:58.100 | I still have never been able to figure out how to settle that.
00:08:01.100 | But for the purpose of today's show, I love talking about the politics of things, but let's leave it on the checkout vouchers.
00:08:11.100 | And then one other comment on that. What I'm seeing here—and I'm interested in knowing if you've seen this from a national perspective—I have been finding that here where I live in West Palm Beach, Florida, that some of the charter schools that are coming out are really not in the mainstream.
00:08:28.100 | And so the charter schools are funded. They are official public schools.
00:08:33.100 | But what's interesting is that I think many of the teachers that are still involved within the system and the administrators have looked at things and said, "Look, this isn't working, so we're going to apply something different."
00:08:44.100 | And they've been able to start charter schools, whether it's the most well-known different approach would be—in my area, Montessori schools are very popular, and many of them are tax-funded.
00:08:58.100 | It doesn't solve the tax-funded political philosophical issue that you and I both share and the point of theft at the point of a gun, as I would say.
00:09:09.100 | But ignoring that for a moment and just focusing on solutions, I find that even for parents here locally, there are some charter schools that seem very different than the mainstream industrial school system as it is designed.
00:09:25.100 | And maybe that might be a resource for those who aren't ready to go farther out.
00:09:31.100 | What do you think? Are you seeing that across the country?
00:09:34.100 | It's tough to say. I haven't had a lot of faith in charter schools, but I understand there's probably a considerable degree of variance from place to place.
00:09:46.100 | I know mostly about what's going on in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Those are the states where I've lived and worked.
00:09:53.100 | My point with the private school thing—or I guess we could add charter schools to that—is people should investigate the options. They should see what the laws are in their area, in their state, and go from there.
00:10:10.100 | It would be my third—of the three options that I'm going to give, that's number three.
00:10:15.100 | Agreed. Agreed. A hundred percent.
00:10:17.100 | Another private school option that is surprisingly affordable, and more of them seem to be popping up around the country, is Sudbury schools.
00:10:26.100 | I've never heard of that. What's that?
00:10:28.100 | Sudbury schools basically use this self-directed or unschooling model where students have essentially complete responsibility over their own education.
00:10:38.100 | The benefit, and I think one of the reasons why maybe this is thriving, is that it's a physical location where parents can send their students for essentially an unschooling experience.
00:10:53.100 | You're going to pay for it. I think we went toward the original Sudbury school, which is near Framingham, Massachusetts, which is outside of Boston.
00:11:05.100 | There were things we liked. There were things we didn't like.
00:11:10.100 | It was obviously very affordable compared to the cost of Massachusetts public education per pupil, which is approaching probably $20,000 a year.
00:11:19.100 | Wow.
00:11:20.100 | I think their tuition was somewhere around $5,000, $6,000, $7,000, $8,000 a year for Sudbury.
00:11:27.100 | Obviously, students go there, they decide what to do with their time, and the school is basically managed through a direct democracy where students and staff basically have equal say.
00:11:45.100 | Hiring and firing of school personnel is actually done by votes that involve students.
00:11:51.100 | Really? Interesting.
00:11:52.100 | I don't love the whole tyranny of the majority thing.
00:11:57.100 | Right. That makes me uncomfortable, too.
00:11:59.100 | There is a curriculum of collectivism going on there, even if it's subtle. I guess it's not so subtle.
00:12:08.100 | But that's something that I think parents could deal with at home.
00:12:12.100 | It's a pretty barbaric idea that because one group is bigger than the other group, they're in charge of that group or they decide what's good for that group.
00:12:21.100 | It goes back to "I have the bigger stick."
00:12:25.100 | I'm not a fan of the direct democracy aspect of Sudbury School, but some aspects of life are democratic.
00:12:33.100 | If you're with six friends and five of them want Chinese food and you want Indian food and you want to continue to be with them, you have Chinese food.
00:12:42.100 | There is a give and take democratic aspect to life, I guess, in some cases.
00:12:52.100 | But I think that if people had a problem with that aspect of the school, they could counter it with lessons at home.
00:13:00.100 | Like, why democracy is not ideal, why individualism is superior to collectivism.
00:13:07.100 | We went and saw the Sudbury School, like I said, and we were just a little antsy around this whole democratic thing.
00:13:16.100 | The third option would be home education.
00:13:21.100 | A lot of people would say, "I can't do this." "Hey, that's nice that people can do this." "I gotta work."
00:13:26.100 | There are homeschool co-ops that you can investigate.
00:13:32.100 | There's a good resource for that in New Hampshire that I found, newhampshirehomeschooling.org.
00:13:38.100 | I'm thinking most states would have something like that.
00:13:41.100 | Unless you live in a state where the homeschooling laws are really, really strict, you can probably find support groups and resources for the establishment of a homeschool co-op where people all pitch in.
00:13:54.100 | Can you do one day a week of hosting or teaching, depending on what people want to do?
00:14:02.100 | But the most important thing for me is that whatever path people choose, that the education is self-directed.
00:14:14.100 | So Sudbury or home education are the best ways to achieve that.
00:14:22.100 | I think that's just, I mean, of your question, just investigating options is just the first step to me answering it.
00:14:28.100 | What's out there for you?
00:14:30.100 | That idea of a self-directed education is fear-inducing in my observation, probably the vast majority of the population.
00:14:41.100 | Because many of us cannot even conceive of how, if you leave it up to self-direction, then how would they learn anything that matters?
00:14:56.100 | How would you address that fear?
00:14:58.100 | I think that's how you learn anything that matters.
00:15:02.100 | It's interesting, and I can go into more detail.
00:15:08.100 | Please do.
00:15:09.100 | It goes back to what I was saying.
00:15:11.100 | Learning is living.
00:15:13.100 | It's not the controlled environment of the schools.
00:15:18.100 | I think that one of the most important things for young children, especially, is the idea of play.
00:15:27.100 | Play is very self-directed.
00:15:29.100 | If you're six, what opportunities do you have for feeling like you're in control of your own life?
00:15:36.100 | Very few.
00:15:37.100 | But that's a great way to learn.
00:15:39.100 | I think that it goes along with and also encourages another thing that is not being taught to young people, or really, more importantly, modeled for young people.
00:15:51.100 | That's the concept of not just this intelligence like, "Oh, here's the checklist. Do you know your multiplication tables? Do you know the first five presidents? Do you know the capitals of all the states?"
00:16:02.100 | The things that people misconstrue as education, that's not intelligence.
00:16:09.100 | I think a big part of intelligence is critical thinking, but a huge part of intelligence is emotional intelligence.
00:16:16.100 | There are several attributes of emotional intelligence.
00:16:19.100 | There are a lot of ways to learn them, but especially for young children, the ability to be able to do free play that a Sudbury environment or a home education environment would allow for
00:16:31.100 | can develop some really, really valuable...
00:16:38.100 | I don't want to call them skills. I don't feel like skills. Equalities.
00:16:43.100 | One would be self-awareness.
00:16:47.100 | The confidence that can come from that.
00:16:50.100 | Not being controlled by fear or feelings.
00:16:54.100 | Understanding, recognizing them, but not being ruled by them.
00:17:00.100 | From self-awareness, I think you get a kind of self-regulation.
00:17:06.100 | Being thoughtful, being adaptable, comfortable with change.
00:17:11.100 | Being self-assertive is part of self-awareness and self-regulation.
00:17:16.100 | Saying what you want. And more importantly, something that people are really bad at, saying what you don't want.
00:17:22.100 | The ability to say no. The ability to say, "I've had enough. I can't handle anymore."
00:17:27.100 | When it comes to workload or responsibility.
00:17:31.100 | Motivation, I would say, is another very important part of emotional intelligence.
00:17:38.100 | And we've addressed this already, with people running away from challenges.
00:17:44.100 | I think part of motivation in a self-aware person is loving a challenge, finding a challenge.
00:17:50.100 | Taking pride in their effectiveness with what they do.
00:17:55.100 | Things like social skills, empathy, I would put under emotional intelligence as well.
00:18:03.100 | The ability to communicate, to deal with disagreement, to deal with disputes, to maintain relationships.
00:18:13.100 | I think that's a more important foundation than multiplication tables.
00:18:20.100 | And that kind of intelligence is not being modeled in the schools at all.
00:18:27.100 | I think that the milieu in school is communicating a kind of helplessness for young people.
00:18:34.100 | And they've also been stripped of opportunities to play.
00:18:39.100 | Even just to experience themselves in an unstructured way.
00:18:43.100 | To be in charge of their own time.
00:18:45.100 | More and more and more young people's time has been eaten up in the last 30, 40, 50 years.
00:18:52.100 | My parents, or maybe our parents are about the same age,
00:18:56.100 | they had to make a total investment in their public education of about 10,000 hours.
00:19:03.100 | We probably did 15,000.
00:19:06.100 | Today, kids are probably doing over 20,000 if you add up all the homework.
00:19:11.100 | I mean, there are kids in elementary school and middle school who have multiple hours of homework per night.
00:19:17.100 | So, the important part of their lives are essentially being stolen from them.
00:19:27.100 | And also starting younger and going later.
00:19:31.100 | Yeah, and at the very least correlated with the expanding time commitment that young people are forced to make
00:19:41.100 | are all of these negative trends.
00:19:43.100 | Lower academic performance by the school's own metrics.
00:19:47.100 | Increased diagnosis of mental illness.
00:19:49.100 | Labels like ADHD, depression, teenage suicide.
00:19:54.100 | So, what's the answer?
00:19:56.100 | What's the answer to all these apparent ills of childhood and adolescence?
00:20:01.100 | Well, we can go back to 1850 and ask Horace Mann.
00:20:04.100 | He'll tell you, "More school."
00:20:06.100 | Do more. Right.
00:20:07.100 | Do more. Spend more.
00:20:09.100 | And that's been the trend.
00:20:11.100 | So, I think not just giving young people control over their educational experience,
00:20:19.100 | but giving them control over their lives, over their time,
00:20:24.100 | as soon as possible.
00:20:26.100 | And testing them and letting them test themselves.
00:20:30.100 | There's this great author that I would recommend in personality to a lot of your listeners,
00:20:39.100 | especially if they have young children.
00:20:41.100 | Her name is Lenore Skanezy.
00:20:45.100 | And Lenore spelled exactly how it sounds in Skanezy is S-K-E-N-E-Z-Y, I think, or A-Z-Y.
00:20:56.100 | And she has a blog called Free Range Kids.
00:20:59.100 | And she became famous because the mainstream media dubbed her the world's worst mom
00:21:07.100 | because she let her eight or nine-year-old son ride the subway in New York by himself.
00:21:13.100 | And not even, I think, maybe not even in Manhattan, maybe in Queens, by himself.
00:21:18.100 | Home. From school.
00:21:20.100 | And this was found out.
00:21:22.100 | And this woman, somebody called Child Productive Services.
00:21:25.100 | This woman is insane.
00:21:27.100 | But this was something that they planned to do.
00:21:31.100 | This was something that they talked about and they prepared for.
00:21:36.100 | And then when the time was right, she let her son do this.
00:21:39.100 | It wasn't just some haphazard, irresponsible neglect that led to that happening.
00:21:45.100 | But most people don't understand that.
00:21:47.100 | They see this world as being incredibly dangerous.
00:21:53.100 | And they see young people as being incredibly dangerous and helpless.
00:21:58.100 | There's another great author that comes to mind.
00:22:00.100 | He's been on my show a couple of times.
00:22:02.100 | His name is Mike Males.
00:22:04.100 | He wrote a piece in 1994 when I was a junior in high school or a senior in high school,
00:22:09.100 | junior and senior in high school, called "Bashing Youth, Media Myths About Teenagers."
00:22:15.100 | And he goes into all of these misconceptions that are being essentially created
00:22:22.100 | by this media fear culture of young people.
00:22:30.100 | And I think ironically, most people, or a lot of people anyway, too many people,
00:22:37.100 | are living in a pretty disconnected world in the 21st century.
00:22:40.100 | And it seems alien and scary.
00:22:44.100 | And of course, children are sponges for the attitudes of their parents.
00:22:48.100 | But no one knows their neighbors anymore.
00:22:52.100 | And to know your neighbors, to know your surroundings, I think would lead to a lot of parents
00:22:58.100 | not only connecting with people in ways from which their children can benefit,
00:23:02.100 | but also feeling safer.
00:23:06.100 | I mean, I remember being six in the '80s, and I would just get on my--we lived in a neighborhood.
00:23:11.100 | And my mom knew everybody.
00:23:13.100 | So I would just get on my bike and ride.
00:23:16.100 | After school, after first grade, that is something that I could be stolen from her today if that happened.
00:23:24.100 | If I was six and I was doing that.
00:23:26.100 | The police could come and take me away and put me in foster care by today's standards.
00:23:31.100 | Right. And the remarkable thing is that violent crime has dramatically decreased since you were doing that.
00:23:37.100 | And that it is actually safer today to do that than it was back then if you go based upon statistics.
00:23:44.100 | Now, obviously, you'd have to apply good judgment to where you actually live.
00:23:48.100 | But going based upon pure averages, it is safer today to do exactly what you just described
00:23:54.100 | than it was when you were doing it.
00:23:56.100 | But the perception has dramatically changed, and today your mom would be locked up.
00:24:00.100 | I mean, there's been enough stories of that.
00:24:02.100 | She would at least be hauled away.
00:24:03.100 | What was that lady that a couple weeks ago--I don't remember the name, but exactly that thing happened.
00:24:08.100 | The kid was playing in the front yard, in her front yard.
00:24:11.100 | And she was watching, and she was hauled away.
00:24:13.100 | It was a horrific story.
00:24:16.100 | Yeah, we actually--I just talked about this with a former child protective services worker on my last show.
00:24:22.100 | Really?
00:24:23.100 | We talked about this very trend and that specific event as well.
00:24:29.100 | And it's this combination of, obviously, a more fearful society.
00:24:33.100 | I really blame mainstream media, cable news, really, for that.
00:24:38.100 | And also the mission creep of organizations like CPS, you know, always kind of looking for the next thing that they can do.
00:24:46.100 | Right.
00:24:47.100 | Or the next people that they can save.
00:24:50.100 | So, yeah, I think a big part of moving the whole education conversation forward and creating conditions for better lives for these young kids starts with changes in attitudes.
00:25:06.100 | And those changes in attitudes come from people stopping and actually thinking, you know, which they're--it's hard, you know.
00:25:13.100 | It's an inheritance.
00:25:15.100 | One school generation makes the next school generation.
00:25:19.100 | Right, right.
00:25:20.100 | And I've seen it close up and personal in my own family in some ways that really, really bother me.
00:25:27.100 | Just things being passed along without thought and the question of whether or not I should intervene and how to intervene, right, because I have a lot to say on these things.
00:25:39.100 | And, you know, I see just the kind of thoughtless transmission from the past generation to the next, some of these attitudes towards children.
00:25:48.100 | And obviously I see a lot of things that, you know, my siblings, I think, do better than my parents.
00:25:53.100 | But there's certainly not enough of that in the country and around the world.
00:25:58.100 | So the change in attitude is very important.
00:26:01.100 | And I think it starts with more information and starts--and most information or actual, you know, real intelligence starts with definition.
00:26:11.100 | Right. So school is not education.
00:26:14.100 | Those are not synonyms.
00:26:16.100 | Education is a lifelong experience.
00:26:19.100 | It's not something that you pin down to six years, 12 years, four years at some, you know, university.
00:26:26.100 | It is lifelong.
00:26:27.100 | It needs to be self-directed.
00:26:30.100 | It needs to be intrinsically motivated.
00:26:33.100 | So when people ask the question of how will the children be educated, what does that mean?
00:26:39.100 | You know, to the person asking the question, does it mean--do you want someone to babysit them while you're at work?
00:26:44.100 | Is that what you really mean?
00:26:46.100 | Often it is, and that often is exactly what it is.
00:26:50.100 | I like to ask this question to people, and people often say, "Oh, you know, I bought this house because it has good schools."
00:26:59.100 | Or, you know, "We live in X county instead of Y county because it has better schools."
00:27:05.100 | And I like to ask, "What makes a good school?"
00:27:07.100 | And what's remarkable to me is how few people, how few of us can answer that question.
00:27:13.100 | It's such a big deal.
00:27:15.100 | You ask a real estate agent, they tell you it's a big deal.
00:27:17.100 | You want to be in a good school district.
00:27:19.100 | What is a good school district?
00:27:21.100 | Define that for me.
00:27:23.100 | And the reason why I think that history is so important--and I'm going to tie it into inflation here--excuse me, not inflation.
00:27:29.100 | I'm going to tie it into finance again to show these threads as we kind of wind down the show.
00:27:37.100 | But I like to start with saying, "A, what is a good school?"
00:27:40.100 | Define that.
00:27:42.100 | Because then you have to go back and say, "What's your purpose?"
00:27:44.100 | And here's what I observe.
00:27:46.100 | And the history, I think, is helpful to give this context, but here's what I observe.
00:27:50.100 | Ostensibly, I think probably my guess of what the general understanding of the purpose of school would be, would be to prepare students for life skills and job skills.
00:28:01.100 | And my proof for that statement would be that generally we're advised to finish high school so that we can get good jobs.
00:28:08.100 | So what I would take away from that is that we need to finish high school to get good jobs, so therefore one of the important reasons for schooling is to create good jobs.
00:28:19.100 | And then we're often taught that we need to go to college so that we can get a better job.
00:28:23.100 | So therefore one of the important goals of college is supposedly to be able to prepare you for job skills.
00:28:29.100 | So A, not only is that statement have – I mean there's a lot of hubris to say that you can prepare someone, but I just say look at the facts.
00:28:39.100 | When I graduated from high school – I'm 29 years old – when I graduated high school 11 years ago, the iPod didn't exist.
00:28:46.100 | The iPhone didn't exist.
00:28:48.100 | The entire idea of a smartphone didn't – maybe it existed in somebody's mind, but it wasn't in mainstream.
00:28:54.100 | Blogs didn't – maybe a little bit existed.
00:28:57.100 | Podcasting didn't exist.
00:28:59.100 | YouTube didn't – like YouTube was in its infancy.
00:29:02.100 | And I would guess – I can't remember the official statistics.
00:29:05.100 | I would guess 50 percent of the ways that people earn their income today probably were either in their infancy or didn't exist 10 years ago.
00:29:12.100 | So I am a young, young man.
00:29:15.100 | Now how on earth could you tell me that you could design for me in 12 years an educational curriculum that is supposed to be able to prepare me for the job skills that I need to function in today's environment?
00:29:26.100 | So, A, that's a prideful statement.
00:29:29.100 | B, worse than that, if you actually go and look at the subject matter, none of it is practical as regards job skills.
00:29:36.100 | It's generalized knowledge.
00:29:38.100 | And then what's the most frustrating thing for me is I feel like the older I get and the more I study, the more I feel like everything I learned in school, either A, I forgot it because even though I was an excellent student, I don't remember it, but B, the things that I do remember turn out to be wildly inaccurate upon a further study.
00:29:54.100 | So I almost feel like I was kind of tricked into thinking that I knew something.
00:29:58.100 | And because I felt like I understood why we fought the Revolutionary War and I understood why this happened and why that happened, that then I was kind of satisfied with that instead of going and searching something else out.
00:30:10.100 | And so I look at it and I say to think that I could build for my son the idea that I'm going to give you in a high school curriculum over this 12-year period of time, I'm going to give you what you need to know in order to succeed in the job market is absurd.
00:30:29.100 | And all of the real skills that he needs, skills like social skills, what's the better way to learn social skills?
00:30:36.100 | In a classroom of sixth graders or spending time with me?
00:30:39.100 | So why would I allow my son to be locked up away from me where he can't learn how to actually engage with people and how to engage in conversations and business deals and business skills?
00:30:49.100 | Instead, I'm going to lock him up in a room with a bunch of sixth graders where they're going to teach him social skills.
00:30:54.100 | I'm sorry. Sixth graders are not qualified to teach my children social skills.
00:30:58.100 | And the sixth grade teacher is qualified probably in a context of adults, but in a context of sixth graders where they're primarily observing the teacher, that's not the social skills that my son would need to learn.
00:31:14.100 | So it's like everything, if we don't grasp onto the idea of education, and so to me one of the primary goals is my wife and I talk about what our vision is for our son's education is more than anything, I want to inspire a love of learning.
00:31:31.100 | And then I want to teach how to go about the process of learning, how to learn, how to learn, so that whatever the subject of interest is, that that can be, here's how we can use this and become an expert in it.
00:31:44.100 | Because that's what we do as adults, and if we want to be even financially successful, that's what we must do, is we must educate ourselves.
00:31:52.100 | And the biggest travesty that happens is that people graduate from school and they feel like, "Oh, I'm educated."
00:31:57.100 | No, you're schooled, and now you've got to go figure out how to get educated because you didn't learn anything that really mattered, really.
00:32:04.100 | I mean, with some, there are exceptions, so maybe in an architecture school is a good example, you know, you need to learn that.
00:32:11.100 | But how much quicker if you can learn that from an earlier age?
00:32:14.100 | So just define what is the goal of education, and all of a sudden, without even knowing the history, you can start to say, "Wait a second, this mainstream approach is not necessarily very effective."
00:32:26.100 | The fact that there's a need for this conversation, right, it says a lot about what actually is being taught, or more importantly, not being taught in the public schools, and probably in a lot of the private schools.
00:32:41.100 | And the most crucial foundation, you definitely said this, and I'll reiterate it, emotional intelligence and critical thinking.
00:32:50.100 | And I think a lot of the love of learning comes from the attributes of an emotionally intelligent person, right?
00:32:59.100 | The motivation, the willingness to accept a challenge, to self-regulate, to accept feedback, all of those things that are part of the love or enthusiasm for learning.
00:33:09.100 | And then the process of actually how to do it, which we could call critical thinking. On my show, we've talked a lot about the trivium method of critical thinking. Are you familiar with that?
00:33:21.100 | I'm familiar upon—I've listened to your four shows that you did on the trivium, so yes, I am familiar with it, but go ahead and give a quick overview for the audience.
00:33:30.100 | Yeah, absolutely. I would really just recommend, as a starting point, there's a piece by Dorothy Sayers, S-A-Y-E-R-S, or maybe there isn't an S, but anyway, the piece is called "The Lost Tools of Learning."
00:33:47.100 | And this is a guideline, you know, take what you like, leave what you don't, but it provides some guidelines for when is it appropriate to introduce young people to different parts of this process.
00:34:02.100 | The trivium, or tri-via, three ways or three paths in Latin, grammar, logic, and rhetoric are the three parts of the trivium.
00:34:16.100 | Grammar is essentially the definition, the identification, something that I've stressed a couple times already is very important, that we define our terms, that there's no point in having a debate if two people don't know what they're talking about.
00:34:30.100 | What do you mean by this? What does this mean to you? What is the research that you've done that you bring to this discussion, trying to encapsulate this term "school?"
00:34:42.100 | From the grammar or the background knowledge, we move to logic, which is essentially the removal of contradictions and the integration of that to put things together and to make connections.
00:35:02.100 | And the third step of the trivium is rhetoric, the communication or the making useful of the grammar and the logic, you know, the application, the action.
00:35:13.100 | And this applies to everything, you know, this input-process-output model is essential in learning.
00:35:23.100 | This is a process that our mind wants to go through. School replicates it in many ways, you know, like, I mean, you will do the trivium in school, but this process will never be made explicit.
00:35:35.100 | You'll never be told, "This is the natural process of your mind," you know, and always remember it.
00:35:41.100 | When you're stuck, make sure you're not doing things out of order. Make sure you're not going into it blindly because you don't know all the pieces that you're working with.
00:35:50.100 | In a lot of times, school works against the trivium.
00:35:54.100 | But, you know, the piece that Dorothy Sares wrote is "The Lost Tools of Learning," the lost tools of learning, because they're not explicitly taught in the schools.
00:36:04.100 | That's critical thinking, and I think that, you know, good, peaceful parenting sets a beautiful stage for the development of an emotionally intelligent child.
00:36:18.100 | And upon that foundation, you know, the process of critical thinking can go.
00:36:24.100 | And from there, the sky's the limit for most people, you know.
00:36:27.100 | It's those two things that form the foundation of a lifelong education, as far as I'm concerned.
00:36:34.100 | I'd like to close with a final question.
00:36:38.100 | Sure.
00:36:39.100 | Do we need teachers? And if no, why not? And if yes, why?
00:36:46.100 | And then, if we do, what is a path that somebody as a teacher can take in today's context to be able to teach others?
00:36:56.100 | Okay, well, I would say yes, absolutely.
00:37:00.100 | Teachers are very important, but that's a term that might need redefinition.
00:37:07.100 | Right?
00:37:08.100 | So the idea, the current conception is basically the unionized public school professional or private school or college professor.
00:37:20.100 | And it does not need to be that, you know.
00:37:24.100 | I think the credentialing of teachers is way out of control.
00:37:29.100 | It's almost like it's trying to prevent people.
00:37:32.100 | The hoops you need to jump through, as far as licensure is concerned, it seems like it's trying to keep ambitious people out of the profession,
00:37:39.100 | because they don't want to go through all of those demeaning steps.
00:37:42.100 | There are people who are more than qualified to teach or act as mentors just based on their own experience, you know.
00:37:48.100 | I mean, I used to train people to take the certification exams for elementary and early childhood education.
00:37:55.100 | And it was scary what they didn't know.
00:37:59.100 | So experience is one of the best teachers, for sure.
00:38:06.100 | And we all need mentors, I think.
00:38:12.100 | And we live in a world today where people can be teaching you and they don't even know it.
00:38:17.100 | You know, YouTube is full of teachers.
00:38:19.100 | Wikipedia, the Internet is full of teachers.
00:38:22.100 | Right.
00:38:23.100 | And I think it was probably Einstein who talked about that teacher within.
00:38:31.100 | Right. The most important teacher, which is curiosity.
00:38:34.100 | So the idea of the teacher as a person, I think, is something that we're always going to need.
00:38:42.100 | But the relationship between teacher and pupil is obviously has changed dramatically in the last 20 years.
00:38:50.100 | So how do people position themselves to be teachers today?
00:38:55.100 | Well, I would say most importantly, get out there and do something that's valuable and important to you, you know, and share it with people.
00:39:06.100 | Right. And let other people learn from your experience.
00:39:10.100 | Make your experience available somehow, which is getting easier and easier to do.
00:39:17.100 | Right. Whether you want to learn how to do DSLR filmmaking or put on your makeup correctly, there's a teacher out there for you for free.
00:39:25.100 | Right. Right. It's typing a couple of keywords into Google or Startpage or YouTube or whatever, you know, and you're there.
00:39:32.100 | So we see and really like I remember this whole Wisconsin Union thing that happened in 2011.
00:39:40.100 | You see desperate people trying to hold on to a dying profession. Right.
00:39:44.100 | They don't have that exclusivity. They don't have that monopoly anymore.
00:39:48.100 | They're becoming increasingly irrelevant all the time. The same thing is true with college professors.
00:39:52.100 | Right. College used to be for the elites. Right.
00:39:55.100 | And now you can go to iTunes University and find an audit, you know, these, you know, classes from the best universities in the country.
00:40:06.100 | Right. You can't get the piece of paper. Right. Which is really what you're paying for.
00:40:11.100 | But you can get the knowledge. Right.
00:40:15.100 | If you don't want to deal with some some crusty old Harvard, you know, leather elbow patch, you know, lefty intellectual type, get a syllabus, you know, and go go find that information for yourself.
00:40:30.100 | Right. You know, as long as the syllabus, as long as it's not like economics or something or history of the progressive movement.
00:40:37.100 | You might want to go elsewhere for those topics. But yeah, so I it's a difficult question to answer, but I hope I've and what I've said I've provided people at least maybe a slightly new way of thinking about it.
00:40:49.100 | And that's the reason I picked it there is because one of the biggest issues that's important to me is that people we have concepts in our mind.
00:40:58.100 | So, for example, if you say I'm anti school, then people hear that as probably one of two things. I'm anti education.
00:41:06.100 | Yeah. Actually, one of three things. I'm anti education. I'm anti academics or I'm anti teacher.
00:41:11.100 | And so I am anti school. But I think education is having how do we grow if we don't have an education?
00:41:19.100 | And I think academic excellence is incredibly important. And I think teachers are how do you learn without a great teacher?
00:41:28.100 | But the system in which those things can exist is so much more can be so much better.
00:41:36.100 | And there are so many amazing teachers and both within the school, within the formal school system and without.
00:41:43.100 | I'm one of those people. I thought about teaching. And recently, so what happened is you probably don't know.
00:41:49.100 | I shut down my financial planning practice in order to start this show because I can't I couldn't do it as a financial advisor because of the licensing restrictions on and basically the limitations on my profession around marketing.
00:42:00.100 | Any kind of public communication would be would be marketing if I were to speak to the public. So I couldn't do it.
00:42:05.100 | So I had to close down a business that I'd spent six years building to do this show.
00:42:09.100 | But the reason that I did it is because I said nobody is teaching financial planning. Nobody's doing a good job of it. Teaching financial planning.
00:42:16.100 | So I said I'm going to go teach it. Well, I needed a way to fund the transition because I didn't want to spend all my savings on some extremely uncertain.
00:42:23.100 | You know, who knows? I may never make a dime on this. I'm hoping I'm hoping that it can support me. But I mean, it may never actually go.
00:42:29.100 | So I needed I needed a job. I thought about going and teaching because there's a high school right near my near my house.
00:42:35.100 | And I thought, oh, I'll go teach economics. I love history. I like economics. I have a master's degree. You know, I'll go and this would be this would be easy.
00:42:43.100 | I'm like, I don't want to go through this certification process and I got to go take classes on instruction.
00:42:47.100 | I said this is this is pointless. And then I'm going to get stuck into the system.
00:42:52.100 | So you have I mean, this is not egotistical, but frankly, I'm highly qualified to be a teacher in terms of academic credentials.
00:43:00.100 | But I don't want to go and deal with that system. But there's no reason for me not just to start teaching.
00:43:05.100 | So I started a show and I started teaching. And this is the opportunity that exists because we as a teacher, I believe I will inspire more people to become financial planners and more financial planners to elevate their game and inspire more people to want to learn about finance because I love the subject.
00:43:24.100 | And this is one of the most valuable things that a teacher can do if a teacher is great. But I think back to when in eighth grade I had a dear teacher.
00:43:32.100 | She was a wonderful lady, but she was teaching about Shakespeare. And I'm just, you know, I'm looking at it saying this is just stupid.
00:43:38.100 | I don't care about Shakespeare. Recently, I found somebody who was talking about Shakespeare. You know who? I think it may have been Gatto.
00:43:45.100 | No, no, no. It was something. He was talking about the history of Shakespeare and the impact of the rhyme and the rhythm of it and the specific stress and this art form.
00:43:55.100 | And I found myself so fascinated that I'm like, I got to go find a Shakespeare podcast and learn about Shakespeare because everyone says he's great.
00:44:02.100 | But I had this mediocre experience because I didn't have a teacher with passion.
00:44:06.100 | And A, if you're a teacher working inside the school system, keep it up because some of the teachers – meaning keep it up in the sense that ignore the system and help your students because you can make a direct impact on those that you're there and we need that.
00:44:22.100 | And if you're outside, start teaching. And if you're inside, start teaching those who are outside because over the next 20 years, I'm convinced that there's an opportunity for world-class teachers to just teach about what they care about.
00:44:35.100 | And even to the point where like physical proximity, it's easy to wax on and on about how great the internet is.
00:44:44.100 | But you know what? There are times when the internet is not enough.
00:44:47.100 | And so more and more, if I could go to – I was looking recently at the programs for the Chautauqua up in New York where they do these summer programs.
00:44:58.100 | And I had heard about that and I was like, "Wow, that's interesting." So I'm looking at their course curriculum and thinking, "Wow, how fun would it be to go and take three weeks in the summer and go and get a chance to study with a world-class expert on a specific subject?"
00:45:10.100 | And I find myself doing that and people are organizing conferences and organizing seminars and organizing week-long classes.
00:45:17.100 | And so all of these things that school has bastardized and kind of taken over, we still need them, but within the context of free will, of interest, and of passion, and of desire to learn, and then the ability to do it on a voluntary basis, the results are so much more remarkable, at least in my observation.
00:45:39.100 | So that's – I mean we need great teachers. This is not anti-teacher. This is anti-school in the control sense.
00:45:48.100 | And I think a lot about academic rigor and academic rigor and academic excellence is extremely important to me for my son and we're hoping to have more kids.
00:45:59.100 | But that's extremely important to me to have academic excellence.
00:46:03.100 | But yet there's a difference and I think I can inspire that. I think I can inspire that through example and through inspiration.
00:46:13.100 | And I do think that I have – and feel free to disagree. I'm not sure if you would agree or not.
00:46:18.100 | But I feel that I as a parent, I have a responsibility to inspire the direction of my – it's not as – I don't see it as a hands-off thing as far as saying, "Oh, son, you just go and do whatever you want all day."
00:46:32.100 | My job is to inspire and to expose and then to watch the individual characteristics of my son develop.
00:46:41.100 | Yeah, absolutely. I think that people's expectations and desires for what they want to see in their children should really be limited to what they as parents can model.
00:46:56.100 | I mean, I grew up around a lot of dads who were putting their kids into hockey.
00:47:05.100 | And man, did they want to be hockey players when they were teenagers.
00:47:09.100 | And damn it, junior was going to carry it out for them.
00:47:14.100 | And obviously, you can add the sport of your choice to that example.
00:47:21.100 | But parents wanting to live, whatever it is, vicariously through the children or correct their mistakes through their children, if they can't model it, it's just going to – it's not going to have positive results.
00:47:35.100 | It's going to be a strained relationship and I think in most cases a failure in one way or another, even if the child achieves what the parent wants.
00:47:48.100 | Is that their will? Is that the child or the teenager's will to achieve that?
00:47:55.100 | Seldom is the answer yes.
00:47:57.100 | So I think that's really important.
00:48:00.100 | And just on something that you said earlier, every time I post something new, in the next 24 hours, it reaches as many people as I could have reached through traditional teaching in 10 or 15 years.
00:48:14.100 | I mean, I couldn't have had more than 200 students a year that I could imagine in any public school setting.
00:48:23.100 | So the great thing about that is not just the new technology that makes that possible.
00:48:29.100 | It's that every single one, like let's just say I post something and in the first 24 hours, 2,000 people see it.
00:48:36.100 | 10 to 20 years of public school students coming and going.
00:48:42.100 | The beautiful thing is that all of those 2,000 people came to it voluntarily.
00:48:48.100 | No one is being forced to listen to it.
00:48:51.100 | And that's one of the best things for making real education happen, the choice, the desire, the intrinsic motivation.
00:49:02.100 | I couldn't ask for that out of 25 of the 200 students that I might have had in one year as a public school teacher.
00:49:14.100 | And I remember working in private school and really, really having to focus on the three kids in my class who were engaged in some way that made me feel effective.
00:49:23.100 | So, yeah, it's an exciting world for this concept of teaching.
00:49:28.100 | And people just have to be flexible, I think, with what that means today.
00:49:33.100 | Right. Well, Brett, I really appreciate your being willing to come and talk about these things.
00:49:40.100 | And it's such a challenging subject to work through in today's world because there's so much emotion around it.
00:49:46.100 | And I hope that we have, I believe we have succeeded this morning in kind of laying out maybe just some thoughts and some ideas.
00:49:54.100 | And I would encourage people, you know, hopefully use this as a jumping off point.
00:49:58.100 | And I never was exposed to any of these concepts.
00:50:01.100 | I wish I had been exposed earlier.
00:50:03.100 | And it was through a very circuitous path that I started to be exposed to some of these ideas and some of the research that's been done.
00:50:10.100 | But I hope that this would just simply be a jumping off point for people to go and do their own research because this is such an important area.
00:50:20.100 | It's too important to not dig deeper.
00:50:24.100 | And I would encourage people to do that.
00:50:26.100 | In an audio format, your show is an awesome resource for people.
00:50:30.100 | It's called the School Sucks Podcast, right?
00:50:32.100 | So you can find it everywhere.
00:50:34.100 | It's at schoolsucksproject.com, right, I think?
00:50:36.100 | Schoolsucksproject.com.
00:50:37.100 | And if people are looking for a couple of shortcuts, right, we all have those habits.
00:50:43.100 | We want to get through things quickly.
00:50:45.100 | You can search by series.
00:50:47.100 | So if there's some particular educational or historical topic that you're interested in, you can get right to it.
00:50:54.100 | There is a YouTube channel that we have.
00:50:57.100 | It's called School Sucks Podcast.
00:50:59.100 | That's our username on YouTube.
00:51:01.100 | And I do this series of videos based on the underground history of American education, this book we've been talking about by John Taylor Gatto,
00:51:08.100 | where I'm just taking excerpts from that massive book and turning them into five to ten minute videos that hopefully when all is said and done,
00:51:16.100 | we'll tell at least part of the story from that book.
00:51:19.100 | So if people want to see what Gatto's writing is like, what my work is like, that's an interesting place, hopefully an entertaining place to start.
00:51:26.100 | It's called The Best of John Taylor Gatto or The Underground History of American Education on the School Sucks YouTube channel.
00:51:34.100 | Right. And his work is so good.
00:51:36.100 | It's so challenging.
00:51:38.100 | I found myself when reading it, every single page I had to circle a word and go look it up and learn the vocabulary.
00:51:45.100 | I felt so dumb reading his book.
00:51:48.100 | He writes in what's supposed to be a very mainstream, accessible style, and there was a new word on every page, basically,
00:51:55.100 | that I had to go and research and figure out what it meant.
00:51:58.100 | It was amazing.
00:51:59.100 | Yeah, absolutely.
00:52:00.100 | And I think I really like his writing.
00:52:02.100 | Some people don't, but I really do.
00:52:04.100 | I really find it entertaining.
00:52:06.100 | I like his sense of humor.
00:52:08.100 | Unfortunately, a lot of his books are just way too obscure, considering how mainstream I would like them to be.
00:52:18.100 | So that was why I tried to bring some of it to the young YouTube audience.
00:52:24.100 | Hopefully, those videos will continue to get views there.
00:52:27.100 | Right. Awesome.
00:52:28.100 | Brett, thank you for coming on.
00:52:30.100 | I really appreciate it.
00:52:31.100 | Keep up the good work.
00:52:32.100 | Keep up enlightening people with your message and teaching people.
00:52:35.100 | I appreciate everything that you do.
00:52:37.100 | Well, my pleasure, Joshua.
00:52:38.100 | Thank you so much for having me.
00:52:40.100 | I really enjoyed this conversation.
00:52:42.100 | It's been almost two and a half hours.
00:52:44.100 | It flew by.
00:52:45.100 | Right.
00:52:46.100 | I'll have to figure out whether I'm going to release this as one or split it up into two, but it was really good.
00:52:50.100 | Cool.
00:52:51.100 | Well, again, thank you so much.
00:52:52.100 | I really enjoyed it.
00:52:53.100 | Challenging stuff, huh?
00:52:58.100 | Between yesterday's interview and today, I am challenged, and I hope that you are as well.
00:53:04.100 | My purpose in releasing these shows to you is to give you some context, expose you to some new things that I hope are new to you, but not to tell you what to do or to tell you what to think.
00:53:13.100 | I do hope to foster a healthy debate.
00:53:15.100 | I think that's a good thing, to debate things, because out of debate, oftentimes comes out a better solution.
00:53:22.100 | But I don't have any interest in telling you what you should do.
00:53:25.100 | So don't take the information in today's show as the wrong way.
00:53:28.100 | I don't prescribe what you should do.
00:53:31.100 | That's not in line with my values.
00:53:33.100 | I just try to give you some information and let you choose.
00:53:35.100 | So I hope that you found that to be interesting.
00:53:38.100 | I am going to close today's show.
00:53:39.100 | That's the end of the formal interview.
00:53:41.100 | However, I found two resources I'm going to release to you.
00:53:45.100 | Number one is I'm going to close by reading an essay entitled "The Story of Two Buses."
00:53:50.100 | And in today's file, you can now hear that, or you can shut the show off and be done for the day.
00:53:55.100 | I'm also going to release into the feed as a separate audio file the essay that Brett referenced by Dorothy Sayers entitled "The Lost Tools of Learning."
00:54:09.100 | I'm going to release that as a separate audio file.
00:54:11.100 | So if you're interested in that, it's an excellent essay.
00:54:14.100 | I think you would enjoy it.
00:54:15.100 | But it's easy to find online in written form, but it's difficult to find in audio form.
00:54:21.100 | And sometimes I know many of you who are listening to a podcast are doing so because it's inconvenient for you to be reading the same information.
00:54:27.100 | Maybe you're driving or something similar to that.
00:54:29.100 | So that's it for the interview.
00:54:31.100 | I hope you enjoyed that.
00:54:32.100 | We'll get back to kind of some more mainstream financial planning topics on tomorrow's show.
00:54:36.100 | And stay tuned for this essay entitled "The Story of Two Buses."
00:54:43.100 | "The Story of Two Buses" by Gary North.
00:54:46.100 | Picture this.
00:54:48.100 | You're driving down the highway with your nine-year-old son.
00:54:51.100 | You're in the middle lane.
00:54:53.100 | On your right, one behind the other, are two buses.
00:54:56.100 | The bus in the front is painted white.
00:54:58.100 | The bus behind is painted yellow.
00:55:01.100 | The bus in the front has its windows painted over.
00:55:04.100 | The bus behind does not.
00:55:07.100 | Your son asks you a question.
00:55:09.100 | "What are those two buses, Daddy?"
00:55:11.100 | You tell him that they are two very different kinds of buses.
00:55:15.100 | "How are they different?" he asks.
00:55:17.100 | You explain that on the first bus are prisoners who are being taken to jail.
00:55:22.100 | On the second bus are students who are being taken to school.
00:55:26.100 | "But how is that different?" your son asks.
00:55:29.100 | "That's what I'm asking, too."
00:55:32.100 | You tell your son that the men on the first bus are required to get on that bus.
00:55:37.100 | Then your son asks you if the students on the yellow bus have a choice in the matter.
00:55:41.100 | You think about it.
00:55:43.100 | Neither group has any choice in the matter.
00:55:46.100 | Somebody tells the members of both groups that they must get on that bus
00:55:50.100 | and stay on that bus until the bus comes to its destination.
00:55:55.100 | Your son says he doesn't understand, so you try to make it clear to him.
00:56:00.100 | You tell him that the people on the white bus have committed crimes.
00:56:03.100 | They are bad people. They are being taken to jail.
00:56:07.100 | The people on the yellow bus are good people.
00:56:10.100 | They are being taken to school.
00:56:12.100 | Your son asks, "Why do they make the good people go on the bus?"
00:56:16.100 | "That's what I'm asking, too."
00:56:19.100 | Remember, you're talking to a nine-year-old.
00:56:21.100 | Nine-year-olds are not very sophisticated.
00:56:24.100 | They need clear answers, so you had better be prepared to provide clear answers.
00:56:29.100 | You tell your son that the good people on the yellow bus are being taken to school for their own good.
00:56:34.100 | Your son asks if the people on the white bus are being taken to jail, but not for their own good.
00:56:39.100 | "No," you tell him. "They are being taken to jail for their own good, too."
00:56:44.100 | Your son asks, "Then what's the difference?"
00:56:46.100 | "The difference is," you explain to your son, "that the people on the white bus are very bad,
00:56:51.100 | and society intends to make them better."
00:56:54.100 | Your son asks, "Is society taking the people on the yellow bus to school in order to make them worse?"
00:57:00.100 | "No," you tell him. "Society is taking them to school in order to make them better people, too."
00:57:05.100 | "Then what's the difference?"
00:57:07.100 | "The difference is," you explain to your son, "that the people on the white bus are dangerous people.
00:57:12.100 | In order to make society safer, society puts them in jail.
00:57:15.100 | The people on the yellow bus are not dangerous."
00:57:18.100 | "Then why are they forced to go to a place where they don't want to go?" your son asks.
00:57:22.100 | "Because it's good for them," you answer.
00:57:25.100 | "But isn't that why the people on the white bus are being taken to jail?" he asks.
00:57:30.100 | You are getting frustrated.
00:57:32.100 | You tell your son that they're required to get on the bus because when they are young,
00:57:35.100 | they don't know that it is a good thing for them to go to school.
00:57:38.100 | They don't want to go to school, but they're supposed to go to school.
00:57:42.100 | Your son replies that this sounds just like the people on the white bus.
00:57:46.100 | "But they're supposed to go to jail," you tell him. "It's for their own good.
00:57:49.100 | They're going to be better people if they go to jail."
00:57:52.100 | Isn't that right? Isn't the whole idea of sending people to jail to rehabilitate them?
00:57:57.100 | Aren't they supposed to become better people in jail?
00:58:00.100 | I mean, if they aren't going to become better people,
00:58:03.100 | why not just sell them into slavery and use the money to pay restitution to their victims?
00:58:07.100 | Why build jails? Why paint buses white?
00:58:11.100 | You tell your son that the bad people have to go to jail in order to keep them off the streets.
00:58:17.100 | The problem is, this is one of the reasons why society requires students to go to school.
00:58:22.100 | People want to keep the kids off the streets.
00:58:26.100 | They want to make certain that somebody in authority is in a position to tell the children what to do.
00:58:32.100 | They don't trust the children to make their own decisions.
00:58:36.100 | They also don't trust the criminals to make their own decisions.
00:58:40.100 | This is more complicated than you thought, but you keep trying.
00:58:43.100 | You explain to your son that the bad people must be kept from doing more bad things.
00:58:48.100 | Your son asks, "What are the bad things that kids do?"
00:58:52.100 | The light comes on.
00:58:54.100 | You tell your son that the children are dangerous to themselves,
00:58:57.100 | but the prisoners are dangerous to everybody else.
00:59:00.100 | The children may hurt themselves, but the prisoners may hurt other people.
00:59:04.100 | But your son wants to know why it is that the children must be taken to a school
00:59:08.100 | in order to keep them from hurting themselves,
00:59:11.100 | when they can stay home and not hurt themselves.
00:59:15.100 | You tell your son that it's because people are not able to stay home with their children.
00:59:19.100 | Your son wants to know why not.
00:59:21.100 | You explain that both parents have to work to make enough money to live a good life.
00:59:26.100 | This means that somebody has to take care of their children.
00:59:29.100 | Your son wants to know why parents don't hire somebody to come into their home
00:59:33.100 | and take care of the children.
00:59:35.100 | Why don't they hire a teacher to take care of them?
00:59:38.100 | You explain that it is cheaper to hire one teacher to look after lots of students.
00:59:43.100 | Your son wants to know why it's cheaper to send children to school,
00:59:46.100 | when it costs money to build schools, buy buses, hire drivers, and pay for gasoline.
00:59:51.100 | This is a smart kid.
00:59:54.100 | You explain that the people who have children
00:59:56.100 | force people who do not have children to pay for the schools.
00:59:59.100 | Your son asks if this is the same thing as stealing.
01:00:02.100 | Isn't that what the people on the white bus did?
01:00:05.100 | No, you explain, it's not stealing.
01:00:07.100 | Your son asks, "How is it different?"
01:00:10.100 | Now you have a problem.
01:00:12.100 | You have to explain the difference between taking money from someone
01:00:15.100 | to benefit yourself as a private citizen, which is what a criminal does,
01:00:19.100 | and taking money from someone to benefit yourself as a voter.
01:00:22.100 | This is not so easy to explain.
01:00:25.100 | You explain to your son that when you vote to take money away from someone
01:00:29.100 | so that you can educate your child,
01:00:31.100 | this is different from sticking a gun into somebody's stomach
01:00:34.100 | and telling him that he has to turn over his money to you.
01:00:37.100 | Your son asks if it would be all right to stick a gun in somebody's stomach
01:00:41.100 | if you intended to use the money to educate your child.
01:00:44.100 | No, you explain, it's not the same.
01:00:46.100 | When you tell someone that he has to educate your child
01:00:48.100 | in a school run by the government, it's legal.
01:00:51.100 | When you tell somebody that he has to educate your child in a private school
01:00:54.100 | where parents pay directly to hire teachers, it's illegal.
01:00:58.100 | Your son then asks you if it's all right to take money from other people
01:01:01.100 | just so long as you hand over to the government
01:01:04.100 | the money to do the things that you want the government to do.
01:01:08.100 | You explain that this is correct.
01:01:11.100 | But what if other people don't think that the government ought to be doing these things?
01:01:15.100 | You explain that people don't have the right to tell the government
01:01:18.100 | not to do these things unless they can get more than half of the voters
01:01:21.100 | to tell the government to stop doing them.
01:01:23.100 | Your son sees the logic of this.
01:01:25.100 | He asks you, "Are the people in the white bus being taken to jail
01:01:28.100 | because there were not enough of them to win the election?"
01:01:32.100 | You know this can't be right, but it's hard to say why it's wrong.
01:01:37.100 | Here is where you are so far.
01:01:39.100 | Society makes the prisoners go to jail.
01:01:41.100 | It sees these prisoners as dangerous.
01:01:43.100 | It wants to teach them to obey.
01:01:46.100 | Society makes children go to school.
01:01:48.100 | It sees these children as dangerous to themselves.
01:01:50.100 | It wants to teach them to obey.
01:01:53.100 | If it can teach both groups how to obey,
01:01:55.100 | society expects the world to improve.
01:01:58.100 | Society therefore uses tax money to pay for the operation of jails and schools.
01:02:03.100 | This includes paying for buses.
01:02:06.100 | But there is a difference.
01:02:07.100 | Prison buses are white.
01:02:09.100 | School buses are yellow.
01:02:11.100 | Well, there must be more to it than this.
01:02:13.100 | So you keep trying.
01:02:15.100 | Schools are run by the government to teach children how to make a living.
01:02:19.100 | Jails are run by the government to teach people how to stop stealing.
01:02:22.100 | Here is a major difference.
01:02:24.100 | Do they teach prisoners how to make a good living, your son asks?
01:02:27.100 | No, you tell him.
01:02:29.100 | The prison teaches them to obey.
01:02:31.100 | He asks, "Then why will they stop stealing when they get out of prison
01:02:35.100 | if they don't know how to make a good living?"
01:02:37.100 | Because, you explain, they will be afraid to do bad things anymore.
01:02:42.100 | Your son asks if people in prison learn how to do bad things in prison.
01:02:46.100 | You admit that they do.
01:02:48.100 | So, he asks, we send people to prison and school
01:02:51.100 | so that they will learn how to make a good living.
01:02:53.100 | Only the difference is, the government pays for a place
01:02:56.100 | where bad people teach other bad people how to steal without getting caught.
01:03:00.100 | But in school, the government pays good people to teach children
01:03:02.100 | how to be good citizens and vote.
01:03:04.100 | So, the bad people learn how to steal from the good people without voting.
01:03:08.100 | And the good people learn how to steal from each other by voting.
01:03:11.100 | Is that how it works?
01:03:13.100 | That's how it works.
01:03:15.100 | Both systems use buses to take the students to school.
01:03:19.100 | But the colors are different.
01:03:21.100 | In prison, prisoners sell illegal drugs.
01:03:24.100 | Students do the same in school.
01:03:26.100 | In prison, the food is terrible.
01:03:28.100 | It's not very good in school, possibly prepared by the same food service company.
01:03:33.100 | In prison, there are constant inspections.
01:03:35.100 | Guards keep taking roll to make sure everyone is present and accounted for.
01:03:39.100 | Teachers do the same in school.
01:03:41.100 | In prison, you aren't allowed to leave without permission.
01:03:44.100 | The same is true in school.
01:03:46.100 | In prison, bullies run the show.
01:03:48.100 | In school, they do too.
01:03:50.100 | But there is a difference.
01:03:52.100 | Prison buses are white.
01:03:54.100 | School buses are yellow.
01:03:56.100 | This is too extreme.
01:03:58.100 | The systems are different.
01:03:59.100 | Criminals are convicted in a court of law before they are sent to jail.
01:04:03.100 | Students, in contrast, are innocent.
01:04:06.100 | Some prisoners can get parole.
01:04:08.100 | The average term in prison for murder is under 10 years.
01:04:11.100 | Students are put into the school system for 12 years.
01:04:14.100 | There is no parole.
01:04:16.100 | Be thankful you are not in one of those buses, either color.
01:04:22.100 | May 28, 2004 by Gary North, published on lewrockwell.com.
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