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Dec. 6, 2022

Why Johnny Still Can't Think

Why Johnny Still Can't Think
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For episode 62, we talk with our friend, Andy Bernstein, who's new book, Why Johnny Still Can't Read, or Write, or Understand Math - and What We Can Do About It, is our topic for the day.

At the end of the show, Martin is giving a shout-out to fellow podcaster, McIntosh of Generational Wealth with Cryptocurrency podcast, for his support and boostagram with Satoshis (bits of Bitcoin).

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Show notes with links to articles, blog posts, products and services:


Episode 62 (67 minutes) was recorded at 2200 Central European Time, on December 3, 2022, with Boomcaster. Martin did the post-production with the podcast maker, Alitu. The transcript is generated by Alitu.

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Transcript
Blair:

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and good evening.

Blair:

Martin hello.

Blair:

This is a live episode of the secular foxhole,

Blair:

and today we have the great Andy burnstein with us.

Blair:

Andy, how are you?

Andy:

I'm good, blair.

Andy:

Martin thanks for having me on your show.

Andy:

Appreciate it.

Blair:

Today we're discussing Andy's newest book, why Johnny still can't read or write or

Blair:

think and what we can do about it.

Blair:

Or understand math and what we can do about

Blair:

it.

Andy:

Andy, why can't spell.

Andy:

All right.

Martin:

Andy, what's yoni what's that coming from?

Andy:

Well, in 1955, Rudolf flesh published a classic book titled why Johnny can't read.

Andy:

Flesh was an austrian immigrant, and he was he was horrified to find I think flesh had was an

Andy:

austrian jew, fled the nazis, came to America.

Andy:

I think he had a law degree from university of

Andy:

Vienna, and he got a PhD in library science at Columbia university.

Andy:

He was horrified to find so many remedial reading cases in the United States.

Andy:

And he did all his research.

Andy:

He knew that there were very few in Austria or

Andy:

in western Europe, and his research showed that there were very few in America prior to

Andy:

right around world war i. His research showed that in the countries where they use phonics

Andy:

to teach reading, systematic phonics, where you teach the kids the alphabet, the sounds of

Andy:

the letters, the sounds of the combination of letters, and then you teach the kids to

Andy:

identify, you have to sound out the words on the page.

Andy:

In other words, to match.

Andy:

By the time the kid is four or five years old

Andy:

and ready to learn how to read, he or she is, generally speaking, could speak thousands of

Andy:

words in the mother tongue.

Andy:

And then once they know phonics, they could

Andy:

sound out the words on the page.

Andy:

They can match the verbal symbols that they

Andy:

already know with the literary symbols on the page.

Andy:

And reading becomes very easy.

Andy:

The United States, flesh realized, educators

Andy:

start to militate against phonics for versions of the whole word method looks say was, I

Andy:

think was the initial one.

Andy:

By the time of world war I created the method

Andy:

doesn't work.

Andy:

It created an enormous amount of reading

Andy:

problems.

Andy:

The textbooks had gone away from phonics in

Andy:

the United States and so on.

Andy:

Flesh's book in 1955, why Johnny can't read,

Andy:

was a big best seller and really motivated the parents to militate for phonics.

Andy:

And phonics made a comeback for several decades in the United States, roughly 30 years

Andy:

or so.

Andy:

Why Johnny can't read.

Andy:

Rudell flesh's book, he's very famous in the United States.

Andy:

So here I am, 70 or so years after flesh.

Andy:

So the title of my book is why Johnny still

Andy:

can't read or write or understand math or what we could do about that.

Andy:

So that's the background.

Andy:

Flesh's book is a classic.

Andy:

It's very, very good and still timely because the schools of education still war against

Andy:

lions.

Blair:

One of the things that came out of this COVID shenanigans was the exposure of the

Blair:

teachers unions and the frauds that they are.

Blair:

At least that's my take on it.

Blair:

And I think parents were alarmed at a very high rate to see just how it was astonishing

Blair:

for parents to see that the teachers and teachers unions, they're our children, they're

Blair:

not your children, or things like that.

Andy:

Right.

Blair:

These were bold statements by these people.

Blair:

And so there's been a reawakening, I think, because of COVID to privatize education, which

Blair:

I've been advocating since my 1980s myself.

Blair:

So what do you think of that?

Blair:

Do you agree with the reimbursements of that?

Andy:

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Andy:

You raised a number of points.

Andy:

Blair definitely covered the lockdowns.

Andy:

One good thing that came out of all of this

Andy:

horror was, like you said, parents got to look over their kids shoulders and see what was

Andy:

going on in the schools.

Andy:

And they were shocked very often at the lack,

Andy:

one, at the lack of academic education in American schools, and two, is the degree of

Andy:

political propaganda, of leftist propaganda that's being rammed down the kids throws, how

Andy:

man made global warming is going to destroy the planet.

Andy:

Or there's any number of genders we could choose what gender we want to be.

Andy:

And young kids, five, six, seven year olds should choose what gender they want.

Andy:

Socialism is morally, spiritual, capitalism and so on and so forth, but above all, a lack

Andy:

of academic training in reading, writing, math, history, science and so on.

Andy:

And parents are horrified by that.

Andy:

And I think it comes into context where the

Andy:

test scores in the United States have been in the toilet for a long time.

Andy:

They either continue to get worse or at best, they remain stagnant.

Andy:

And most people know that.

Andy:

We could discuss the test scores if you want,

Andy:

but I think parents probably knew a lot of that.

Andy:

And then when they saw what was going on in their kids schools, I think it drove home the

Andy:

point, this is why.

Andy:

This is why the kids don't do well on academic

Andy:

test.

Andy:

The schools, for the most part, don't teach

Andy:

academic subjects nearly as widely or as deeply as they should, and not nearly as

Andy:

widely or deeply as they do in many European and Asian countries.

Andy:

Which is why in international tests, the American students tend to score much lower.

Andy:

It's not a mystery.

Andy:

American kids aren't any less intelligent than

Andy:

kids in other countries.

Andy:

They score poorly on academic tests because

Andy:

the American schools don't teach academic subjects not nearly as widely or fully as they

Andy:

should.

Andy:

So I think parents were properly horrified.

Andy:

You saw what happened in Virginia a few years ago.

Andy:

They're railing against the school boards.

Andy:

The Biden, Department of justice is labor them

Andy:

domestic terrorists in that gubernatory election.

Andy:

Terry McCall have said the Democratic candidate, friend of the Clintons said in so

Andy:

many words, your parents shouldn't have much already say in what the schools teach their

Andy:

children, something that was just echoed recently by some prominent Democrat in

Andy:

California.

Andy:

I forget the name offhand, but oh.

Andy:

Swarwell was Eric Swalwell us? Congressman, just said the same thing, like a

Andy:

couple of weeks ago.

Andy:

So parents are properly horrified by that.

Andy:

They're up in arms.

Andy:

But we could discuss homeschooling is growing.

Andy:

It's good.

Andy:

And one, it's good and of itself.

Andy:

And two, it's a step in the direction that you mentioned, Blair, towards ultimately

Andy:

privatizing the school system.

Andy:

Because when you pull kids out of the

Andy:

government schools, you're depriving the monster of victims.

Andy:

And it's a step towards privatization of the school system.

Blair:

Yeah. And you can see the contradiction.

Blair:

I would say almost every elected official across the country who has children, they're

Blair:

in private schools and not the public schools.

Blair:

We don't want that to be public.

Andy:

Knowledge, but that's very often the case.

Martin:

Andy and Blair, you will continue with all your great questions.

Martin:

Here in Europe, home schooling is not so common.

Martin:

But if you have good home schooling and good ideas like Maria Montessori and others, that's

Martin:

great.

Martin:

And look at the individual, the child as an

Martin:

individual.

Martin:

But you could also have others like religious

Martin:

ideas, like teaching creationism or other things like that.

Martin:

Of course it's parents.

Martin:

They're right to do it.

Martin:

But what's your thought about that? Could there be a trend going in the wrong

Martin:

direction with home schooling, or do you think it will solve it by itself?

Andy:

Well, I think first of all, as a devout atheist, I want to thank Christian

Andy:

conservatives because they were the ones who spearheaded the homeschooling movement in the

Andy:

United States.

Andy:

And home schooling is now legal in every state

Andy:

in the country.

Andy:

And not entirely, but I think largely it was

Andy:

Christian families who pushed for that.

Andy:

To your question, the religious families are

Andy:

going to teach their kids religion no matter where the kids go to school, right?

Andy:

I mean, the kids go to government schools, they go to private schools or their home

Andy:

school.

Andy:

The religious families are going to have their

Andy:

children read their Bible, as is their right.

Andy:

Have the kids read the Bible, take them to

Andy:

church on Sunday, taking the Sunday school.

Andy:

They're going to get religious training

Andy:

regardless.

Andy:

But the good news is the home school is by any

Andy:

metric you want to mention, any type of measurement you want to mention, the home

Andy:

school is outperform.

Andy:

The government school kids, they're roughly

Andy:

equivalent to private school students, but they're definitely better educated in terms of

Andy:

academic subjects than most of the kids that go to the government schools.

Andy:

So I think it's a net gain, a huge net gain, even for these poor kids who have to be taught

Andy:

creationism and everything, but also for the more secular.

Andy:

Parents now have the right to homeschool their kids and get them away from the propaganda and

Andy:

the very antiacademic program mentality of the government schools.

Andy:

And by the way, I think government schools is the right term.

Andy:

Public schools is a euphemism.

Andy:

Any private school is open to the public

Andy:

school.

Andy:

They're government schools.

Andy:

They are funded by government coercion to taxpayers dollars.

Andy:

They get victims, commonly known euphemistically called students.

Andy:

They get victims by truancy laws.

Andy:

They force these kids to go there.

Andy:

So close to 90% of American kids go to the government school, which explains why I guess

Andy:

we could get into the deeper reasons why.

Andy:

But that's part of the main reason why some of

Andy:

these kids come out of high school.

Andy:

I teach college.

Andy:

I get these students.

Andy:

They're good kids.

Andy:

They're good American kids.

Andy:

I like them a lot.

Andy:

But for the most part I hate to say this about my students they're freaking ignorances, man.

Andy:

I mean, these poor kids don't know anything, and it's not their fault.

Andy:

They robbed the education that they should properly get.

Blair:

Following that line of thought in your book, you claim or you said that there is a

Blair:

war on learning.

Blair:

What do you mean by that?

Andy:

Oh, man, we got to go back.

Andy:

That's a big question at least 100 years to

Andy:

John Dewey, your philosophy professor at Columbia University, godfather of the

Andy:

Progressive movement in education.

Andy:

His leading disciple, William Heard Kilpatrick

Andy:

was the chair of the Philosophy of Education Department at Teachers College, Columbia

Andy:

University.

Andy:

When Teachers College was training many

Andy:

American teachers from around the country, the progressive mentality and, you know, this

Andy:

sticks in my truck calling it progressives because, you know, a long time ago, confucius,

Andy:

the great Chinese philosophers, said that the beginning of wisdom is to see to it that

Andy:

things are called by their right names.

Andy:

And these guys are socialists and statists.

Andy:

And there's nothing progressive about socialism or statism.

Andy:

They're regressives, but they're commonly known as progressives.

Andy:

And the idea and this goes all the way back to Plato don't forget, Dewey was a brilliant

Andy:

philosophy professor, but many of your audience members probably know a fair amount

Andy:

about the history of philosophy.

Andy:

Plato in the Republic, cultural philosopher

Andy:

king, and the dictatorship of the educated elite and the wise and everything.

Andy:

And this is the mentality filtered into 20th century America through Marxism, scientific

Andy:

socialism.

Andy:

You planned the economy, planned society, the

Andy:

economist, the sociologists.

Andy:

You'll plan out production and plan

Andy:

everybody's lives.

Andy:

The conceit is that the educated intellectual

Andy:

elite know how to govern my life better than I do, know what's best for me better than I

Andy:

know, know what's best for my children better than I know, and so on.

Andy:

And so the idea was, this is 100 years.

Andy:

I didn't get really excited on this topic, but

Andy:

this is right around the time of World War One.

Andy:

IQ testing had just become available.

Andy:

It's very popular back then.

Andy:

You can't give IQ tests today because they're racist.

Andy:

But back then, you IQ test the kids.

Andy:

This was the progressive mentality.

Andy:

You IQ test the kids.

Andy:

You find the brightest, and they get the full

Andy:

academic program.

Andy:

You teach them use phonics, teach them to

Andy:

read, teach them writing skills, teach them mathematical calculation, science, history,

Andy:

literature.

Andy:

They get the full academic program because

Andy:

they're going to go on to college, and they're going to be society's future leaders.

Andy:

They're going to govern in the classroom and in the legislation.

Andy:

The rest of us, we're a bunch of rules.

Andy:

We're not that bright.

Andy:

We don't need that much academic training.

Andy:

A modicum of it just enough to read or write.

Andy:

What we need is vocational practical skills, vocational training.

Andy:

So we need drivers ed, hygiene, sex ed, and in the cities, wood shop, metal shop, so we could

Andy:

be factory workers in the rural areas, agricultural training, because we're going to

Andy:

be farmers.

Andy:

The idea is for the overwhelming bulk of the

Andy:

population.

Andy:

We don't need much academic training, you

Andy:

know, a moderate amount, because the goal for us is, one, to be good at our jobs, and two,

Andy:

to obey the wise rules of the state.

Andy:

And so that's the beginning of dumbing down

Andy:

the American school system.

Blair:

Let me jump in there real quick, though, Andy.

Blair:

I'm sure you didn't mean it in the way I'm thinking.

Blair:

I just don't want to dis those professions.

Blair:

I mean, to be an electrician, to be in a

Blair:

plumber, to be a farmer, to be those are some of the stuff is the backbone of how old it is.

Andy:

And in the United States, the hardworking guys who are, like you said,

Andy:

they're farmers or plumbers or truck drivers.

Andy:

We saw the truck drivers rebell for freedom

Andy:

against the Cohort restrictions.

Andy:

They were, like, the only ones who did.

Blair:

Yeah.

Andy:

One, these are enormously productive jobs.

Andy:

Two, they tend to be having gone to work rather than go to college, which I think is a

Andy:

very wise choice today.

Andy:

They tend to be the most freedomloving people

Andy:

in the country, whereas the college graduates, as a general, tend to be socialist.

Andy:

Destroy capitalism, destroy individual.

Andy:

Right?

Andy:

So I have enormous amount of respect for the hard for the hard working guys that we're

Andy:

talking about.

Andy:

But here's the thing.

Andy:

You're right.

Andy:

Those are let me tell you a quick story.

Andy:

Sure.

Andy:

I grew up in Brooklyn, New York.

Andy:

People don't know that.

Andy:

They hear me talk.

Andy:

They think of from Louisiana.

Andy:

But they're wrong.

Andy:

I'm not.

Andy:

You're right.

Andy:

That's a joke.

Andy:

But I had a good friend, let's call him Mike.

Andy:

That's not his name.

Andy:

He was a bus MCAP and he was a really good bus

Andy:

McCabe.

Andy:

We used to play basketball all the time in the

Andy:

park.

Andy:

And he made a lot more money as a bus

Andy:

mechanic.

Andy:

And all of them make teacher philosophy.

Andy:

Plus being a bus mechanic.

Andy:

I mean, it's enormously satisfactory because

Andy:

you're fixing stuff, you're repairing things, you're taking things that are broken,

Andy:

important things like school buses, you know, and you're making them work again.

Andy:

So there's a lot of satisfaction that there's good money in there, so on.

Andy:

But he went to Kingsburg Community College part time, like one class a semester.

Andy:

Took about six years to get an associate degree.

Andy:

And then he went out to Brooklyn College again, one class a semester.

Andy:

Because he was working full time, it took him ten or twelve years to get a bachelor's

Andy:

degree.

Andy:

But he got it in liberal studies or liberal

Andy:

laws, something like that.

Andy:

And, you know so he's taking English classes,

Andy:

philosophy classes, music appreciation, and he tells me these stories.

Andy:

He goes into work carrying back then there was LPs, there weren't CDs back then.

Andy:

He's carrying vinyl.

Andy:

Yes, vinyl.

Andy:

Vinyl.

Andy:

He's carrying vinyl.

Andy:

Beethoven's 9th and copies of Dust or yepskis, Crime and Punishment.

Andy:

He tells me bus mechanics.

Andy:

Why are you listening to this?

Andy:

Or why are you reading Shakespeare? Whatever.

Andy:

You're a bus mechanic.

Andy:

And my friend Mike said, I'm a bus mechanic,

Andy:

does? Yes, proudly so.

Andy:

Doesn't mean I have to be an uneducated bus mechanic.

Andy:

So that's the point.

Andy:

That's the point I'm making.

Andy:

Butcher, baker, candlestick maker.

Andy:

We're all human beings with a human brain, and

Andy:

we all deserve and need.

Blair:

The rights to the best of our ability.

Andy:

Yeah, absolutely.

Blair:

Now, another astonishing revelation that came out of COVID was the Biden Justice

Blair:

Department declared mothers domestic terrorists.

Blair:

Can these people be any more unhinged themselves?

Andy:

I would say no, but I'm probably wrong.

Andy:

They'll probably do something more unhinged

Andy:

tomorrow.

Blair:

Yeah. What time is it exactly?

Andy:

They put us established a division of disinformation at Homeland Security, which is

Andy:

terrifying because allwell had a better name for it, right?

Andy:

The Ministry of Truth.

Andy:

But to answer your question, Blair reminds me.

Andy:

I spoke to Terry McAuliffe just before in the 2021 gubernatorial election in Virginia, and

Andy:

they voted in the Republicans and everything.

Andy:

Of course, the leftists were calling them

Andy:

white supremacists.

Andy:

So I'm watching Fox News and they're

Andy:

interviewing some mothers.

Andy:

She's like, I don't know, maybe she's 30 years

Andy:

old, she has young kids in the schools, and she's like a really good person, really good

Andy:

heart, and she's talking very earnestly about her kids and her kids education.

Andy:

And she's obviously probably shouldn't seem that philosophical.

Andy:

So she's taking the leftist accusations seriously and she's like pleading into the

Andy:

camera, we're not white supremacists, we're nice people.

Andy:

She said, My heart broke for this poor woman.

Andy:

If you take the position that parents should

Andy:

have a big say and the final say in what the children are educated with that the children

Andy:

should get academic education, they should not be indoctrinated with leftist propaganda.

Andy:

They should not be inculcating the kids with white guilt, the idea that white people are

Andy:

inherently racist, so on and so forth.

Andy:

If that's what you stand for, then the left

Andy:

reviles you as a white supremacist.

Andy:

If that automatically qualified you as a

Andy:

member of the Ku Klux Klan or the American Nazi Party or the Aryan Brotherhood or some

Andy:

horrible outfit like that.

Andy:

It's unhinged.

Andy:

These parents who are concerned about their children's education are not domestic

Andy:

terrorists and white supremacists.

Andy:

It's evil.

Andy:

It's so dishonest.

Andy:

It's evil.

Andy:

The whole idea that parents shouldn't have a say in the education of their children.

Andy:

No, the truth is parents should have the final say in the education of their children because

Andy:

their children belong to when they're minors, they belong to the family, to the parents, not

Andy:

to the state.

Andy:

And that's this dirty, shabby, shoddy little

Andy:

secret here.

Andy:

The school system and the leftist philosophy

Andy:

that drives it.

Andy:

The idea is, no, the children belong to the

Andy:

state, not to the families.

Andy:

And that is a National Socialist or Nazi

Andy:

communist.

Andy:

That is a totalitarian manifestation.

Andy:

The children belong to the state, not to the family.

Blair:

Is that what you meant by the impregnable fortress, the educational

Blair:

establishment itself?

Andy:

Well, that's another that goes back also because there have been brilliant writers and

Andy:

intellectuals who've railed against the government school system for 100 years without

Andy:

any effect.

Andy:

And I'm getting that terminology from some of

Andy:

those readings, by the way.

Andy:

The newspaper columnist, the commentator, a

Andy:

shall mindset who's famous for his caustic wit.

Andy:

Yeah, I think he died in the 1950s.

Andy:

So this quote from Mink has got to go back to

Andy:

the 30s or forty s. It goes back a long ways.

Andy:

When he said I don't remember the exact word,

Andy:

but he said the only thing necessary to fix American education is to burn down the

Andy:

teachers colleges and hang all the professors.

Andy:

That's all it takes.

Andy:

He said, that must have been 80 years ago.

Andy:

It was true there that it's even trueer now.

Andy:

So early 1950s, Arthur Bestow, who was a PhD in history, was an American professor of

Andy:

history at some American universities I can't remember which, wrote a book called

Andy:

Educational Wastelands.

Andy:

It's very good.

Andy:

This is after like 25 or 30 years of the progressive dominating the school system.

Andy:

And Bestor coined the term interlocking directorate about who has the power, who has

Andy:

the power in the American school system? Who's made it into the mess it already was by

Andy:

the early 1950s.

Andy:

And he points out the teachers colleges or

Andy:

schools of education like Columbia University Teacher College two, the state departments of

Andy:

education and three, whatever the forerunner was of the Federal Department of Education,

Andy:

which is now that's the interlocking director.

Andy:

They hold the power in the American school

Andy:

systems and they are dead set on what I discussed before.

Andy:

Only the brightest kids get the academic program.

Andy:

The rest of us get vocational training, practical skills, because the goal what are

Andy:

the post modernists like to say? Everything is politics.

Andy:

Well, under this mentality, everything is politics.

Andy:

You want the kids, you want the rule of the elite, the educated intellectual elite,

Andy:

plato's philosopher king or Marxist social scientists planning out the economy and the

Andy:

society.

Andy:

And the rest of us obey the wise rules of the

Andy:

state.

Andy:

So that's the mentality.

Andy:

So the interlocking director is committed to that.

Andy:

Now we fast forward 40 years to the 1990s, and E. D. Harsh, humanities professor at the

Andy:

University of Virginia, also wrote an excellent book, the Schools We Need and Why We

Andy:

Don't Have Them.

Andy:

And Hirsch called the school system

Andy:

impregnable fortress.

Andy:

That's his term.

Andy:

He's absolutely right.

Andy:

He talks in his book, he's speaking to groups

Andy:

of professional educators principals, supervisors, district superintendents, always

Andy:

professional educators in the school system, charter members of Best Doors interlocking

Andy:

directory.

Andy:

He's arguing in favor of factual knowledge.

Andy:

So they ask him, what's your first grade of his knowledge?

Andy:

What's your young children? He's saying, well, they should all the

Andy:

continents, geography in the continents, in the rivers and the oceans and everything, and

Andy:

they should know some astronomy, that the Earth revolves around the sun and so on and so

Andy:

on.

Andy:

And they disagree.

Andy:

They said nobody but him in the room supported factual knowledge.

Andy:

Somebody asked them, well, will this make the kids, the young child, a better person?

Andy:

And when I was telling the story of my book, I interjected to say, if it were me, I would ask

Andy:

these guys malignant to make the kid a better person.

Andy:

But they were against factual knowledge.

Andy:

And I pointed out, since I put logic for 40

Andy:

years, what does logic do? My logic students will tell you after the

Andy:

first week of class when I tell them what logic does.

Andy:

I'll come into class every day.

Andy:

The first step put my books down.

Andy:

I'll sing out to the class.

Andy:

This is the philosophical catechism.

Andy:

What's the purpose of logic? And the kids have to sing out to show us how

Andy:

to provide evidence for a conclusion.

Andy:

To show us how to provide evidence for a

Andy:

conclusion.

Andy:

Well, how is anybody going to provide evidence

Andy:

for a conclusion when the school system is opposed to factual knowledge?

Andy:

If you don't know facts that you can't provide evidence to support any conclusion, which

Andy:

means you can't think.

Andy:

And that's exactly what the school system is

Andy:

designed to do.

Andy:

You obey the wise rulers of the state.

Andy:

It's like bad made global warming is going to destroy the planet.

Andy:

Well, actually, it isn't.

Andy:

And if you know any science, and if you do

Andy:

some research and get the evidence, you'll see that the modern Warm Period is simply part of

Andy:

Earth's evolution from cold to warm.

Andy:

Prior to the modern Warm Period was the Ice

Andy:

Age, and prior to the lightsay was the Medieval Warm Period.

Andy:

Prior to the Medieval Warm Period was the Dark Gates Cold Period.

Andy:

You know, in the Earth cycles, the natural climate cycle.

Andy:

If you know some science or you know some history, you have evidence to support your

Andy:

conclusion.

Andy:

But if you never taught any factual knowledge,

Andy:

you have no evidence to support your conclusion, and you just obey the wise rulers

Andy:

of the state and the media and the school system will tell you that man made global

Andy:

warrants to destroy the planet, and you simply accept it and obey.

Andy:

That's the point.

Andy:

That's what the schools do, and that's what

Andy:

they're designed to do.

Blair:

Can you regale us with one or two of your own horror stories?

Andy:

Oh, God, yes.

Andy:

Some that I use in the book.

Andy:

Just a couple of years ago, it was logical, as a matter of fact, before Colby shut us down.

Andy:

So it would have been like, February 2020.

Andy:

So almost three years ago, I had 20 students

Andy:

in the class.

Andy:

I remember this because it kept the arithmetic

Andy:

it keeps the arithmetic very simple.

Andy:

And they're all American kids born and reared

Andy:

here, all went to the government school system, teaching logic.

Andy:

Logic, it's a difficult subject, and philosophy in general is very abstract.

Andy:

So I'm just a kid from Brooklyn, and I try to always do this inductively, give a bunch of

Andy:

stories and examples and polar principles.

Andy:

So I think you know, American history.

Andy:

I mentioned James Madison.

Andy:

Figured that was he's so famous, I figured

Andy:

it'd be pretty safe.

Blair:

One of my heroes.

Blair:

Yeah.

Andy:

Yeah, me too.

Andy:

My good buddy Eric Daniels, who is an American

Andy:

history professor, says that James Madison is his favorite of the founders, and we'll see

Andy:

what in just a second.

Andy:

But these poor kids, 20 American college

Andy:

students, ten out of 20.

Andy:

Never heard of them.

Andy:

They looked at me like, who's that? Is he playing right field for the Yankees?

Andy:

Who's that? Never heard of James Madison.

Andy:

The other ten heard of them, at least, and knew he was past POTUS, president of the

Andy:

United States.

Andy:

But not one out of 20 American college

Andy:

students knew that James Madison was the lead author of the US.

Andy:

Constitution and virtually the sole author of the Bill of Rights, which is why I'm such a

Andy:

big fan.

Andy:

Not one out of 20.

Andy:

This is not atypical.

Andy:

This is fairly common.

Andy:

They don't teach.

Andy:

Some school districts are better than others,

Andy:

and there are still a lot of good classroom teachers.

Andy:

But as a general rule, they teach very little American history.

Andy:

Very little history of any kind.

Andy:

They don't call it history anymore.

Andy:

100 years ago, they dropped the name History for this weird hybrid called social studies,

Andy:

which is an undefinable term.

Andy:

It means anything that any school district

Andy:

wants it to mean and often means just socialist, anti capitalist, anti American

Andy:

propaganda.

Andy:

Speaking of which, in many of the few

Andy:

instances where they do teach American history I shouldn't even say teach where they call it

Andy:

American history, they'll use the textbook written by Howard Zinn.

Andy:

What is it? Yeah, exactly.

Andy:

A people's history of the United States.

Andy:

Now, howard Zinn wasn't just a Marxist.

Andy:

Your typical Marxist.

Andy:

Professor.

Andy:

According to the FBI, he was a member of CPUSA.

Andy:

He was a member of the Communist Party.

Andy:

And his book is just trash.

Andy:

I mean, it is just one lie after another.

Andy:

The one consistent theme that runs through

Andy:

Zinn's book is that America is evil.

Andy:

The United States is never right.

Andy:

It's never good.

Andy:

On a single instance in his book in which the

Andy:

United States is good.

Andy:

It's just a communist diatribe against

Andy:

America.

Andy:

And in many of the few instances where they

Andy:

call across American history this is the most popular textbook.

Andy:

And by the way, we just want to mention Mary Greybar wrote a good book on debunking.

Andy:

Howard Zinn, I think, is the title.

Blair:

Something like that?

Andy:

Yeah, it goes through Zinn's book chapter by chapter.

Andy:

It shows the errors, the lies.

Andy:

Just a flat out lie.

Andy:

And the fallacies and everything is very good.

Andy:

But yeah, so the kids get very little actual

Andy:

American history.

Andy:

That's one horror story.

Andy:

Some of the spelling I mentioned in the class, it's a college paper.

Andy:

Some kid says people loosely do this or they loosely do that.

Andy:

She used that term losh ly.

Andy:

She used that term looshly a number of times

Andy:

in her paper.

Andy:

What word is that?

Andy:

And then I finally realized from the way it was used in several contexts that she meant

Andy:

usually that people usually do this, that or the other thing, which I realized is a very

Andy:

loose spelling of usually.

Andy:

And that's fairly typical.

Andy:

These poor kids very often can't write a coherent paragraph, never mind a college level

Andy:

essay.

Andy:

And their spelling is like Mars.

Andy:

Sometimes I try to figure out what word is that logic class, I was asking the kids.

Andy:

You were talking about the parts of speech and various types of sentences, declarative

Andy:

sentences and derogative sentences.

Andy:

This is fourth grade grammar.

Andy:

And the kids looked at me, I said, do they teach grammar in fourth grade anymore?

Andy:

And one of the kids said, Well, I studied grammar in 8th grade.

Andy:

And I said, well, better late than never.

Andy:

They don't touch grammar, so they can't write

Andy:

coherent sentences, never mind college level essays.

Andy:

And now they're not even teaching cursive anymore in many of the schools.

Andy:

So when I'm writing a script on the board, one kid said to me this was a good kid.

Andy:

She seemed like a bright enough kid, reasonably, until she said, dr.

Andy:

Bernstein, could you print it? I was, like, surprised because this was the

Andy:

first I heard of it a few years ago.

Andy:

I said print it.

Andy:

Why? And she said, Well, I can't read cursive.

Andy:

And I realized the school's decreasingly teaching.

Andy:

That and consequently how do the kids sign their names?

Andy:

They just print their names.

Andy:

Unbelievable.

Andy:

It really is.

Blair:

I want to go back to our America's founding and that atmosphere, that era where

Blair:

you had this wellspring of intellectual growth, if you will, in freedom.

Blair:

Can you describe briefly what the education system was like back then?

Blair:

I'm pretty sure they were all private.

Blair:

Although I know Jefferson, which I think was a

Blair:

mistake.

Blair:

He wanted the public schools or government

Blair:

schools because in a way, I don't blame him.

Blair:

But also because that area, everything was

Blair:

america was blossoming, becoming great, if you will, and yeah, why not spread that knowledge

Blair:

throughout the colonies?

Andy:

Yeah. Jefferson could not foresee what the government schools could be.

Andy:

How could he? The government schools he dies in marx is

Andy:

eight years old at that point.

Andy:

Marxism doesn't become dominant almost 100

Andy:

years after Jefferson's death.

Andy:

So you can't foresee that the schools are

Andy:

going to be what? The schools are going to become riddled with

Andy:

Marxism and then later on with postmodernism.

Andy:

But anyhow, about American education back

Andy:

then, yeah, we have a lot of proxy data.

Andy:

First of all, there's no government school

Andy:

system in this country till the mid 19th century.

Andy:

Prior to that, all schooling, all education is private.

Andy:

Many parents do what today's known as home school.

Andy:

There's a lot of evidence.

Andy:

One of the pieces of evidence I cited in the

Andy:

book was Philadelphia newspapers in the 18th centuries, in the 18th century, during

Andy:

America's late colonial and early revolutionary period, dozens of schoolmasters

Andy:

advertising in newspapers that teach foreign languages, teach mathematics, teach English

Andy:

literature, teach history, science, and so on and so forth.

Andy:

Let's not forget, Benjamin Franklin was one of the first to establish subscription libraries,

Andy:

colonies, and yeah, reading levels.

Andy:

We have a lot of proxy data showing that

Andy:

reading levels in revolutionary in the early 19th century America were very high writers

Andy:

commenting on it.

Andy:

Some were Americans.

Andy:

Some were European visitors, usually French.

Andy:

That every man in the United States is better

Andy:

educated than every man anywhere in the world.

Andy:

It's not just the topfield in the 1830s, but

Andy:

earlier French visitor.

Andy:

Was it Dupont?

Andy:

No, mores the pont.

Blair:

Sound familiar, but I can't bring it up.

Andy:

Yeah, but he was commissioned by Vice President Thomas Jefferson, so this was around

Andy:

1800, and he pointed out that it was one of them, and it might have been him, might have

Andy:

been to toefillo, like, roughly 30 years later, it might have been both.

Andy:

Pointed out that the United States doesn't have the eminent scholars that you'll see in

Andy:

many of the European countries, but every man is much better educated than anywhere in

Andy:

Europe.

Andy:

And we have a lot of proxy data showing

Andy:

literacy levels, for example, backing that up, several examples.

Andy:

Thomas Payne's common Sense, which is written in plain style but dealing with sophisticated

Andy:

political principles, sold hundreds of thousands of copies to a free to a free

Andy:

population that was just several million.

Andy:

It would be equivalent to selling like, I

Andy:

forget about millions and millions of copies today.

Andy:

Even more so, the essays are the Federalists that Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and

Andy:

John Dorsey wrote in support of ratifying the Constitution.

Andy:

Very, very, very sophisticated.

Andy:

Your political science, political philosophy,

Andy:

I think many, many, many American college graduates say would struggle with The

Andy:

Federalist.

Andy:

Those essays were largely written as newspaper

Andy:

editorials for every man to read.

Andy:

The levels of literacy were very high.

Andy:

Going to the early 19th century when the American population, I think, did not reach 20

Andy:

million.

Andy:

The novels of Sir Walter Scott and James

Andy:

Fanimore Cooper, again, not easy reading.

Andy:

My college kids would struggle with that.

Andy:

Those books sold millions of copies, millions of copies in a very small country.

Andy:

One last data point.

Andy:

McGuffy's Readers is extremely religious, by

Andy:

the way.

Andy:

Sure.

Andy:

But the intellectual level of the academic training, I mean, they're using words like

Andy:

Benighted and words like that in the early grades.

Andy:

I think they're excerpts from the thangel Hawthorn and the fourth grade Reader, from

Andy:

Shakespeare and the fifth grade Reader.

Andy:

They're at a vastly higher intellectual level

Andy:

than what we do in the elementary schools today.

Andy:

And Thomasol, the great scholar, America scholar THOMASAL points in his ninety s and

Andy:

still rocking on, hopefully Thomas Sole and Leonard Peak, well, also, who is pushing 90s,

Andy:

hopefully both of them brilliant intellectuals, hopefully keep going.

Blair:

Yes. For many more years.

Andy:

Yeah, absolutely.

Andy:

In good health.

Andy:

And Thomas sold points out, I think it's between 1836 and 1920, McGuffy's Readers sold

Andy:

120,000,000 copies.

Andy:

So this was not the textbook of the elite.

Andy:

This was the textbook of the American people, of every man and every woman.

Andy:

This is the books that children were used to learn their ABCs, and they were set up to use

Andy:

either phonics or the whole word method.

Andy:

But the overwhelming majority of Americans

Andy:

were using phonics back then.

Andy:

The kids learned to read readily.

Andy:

Learning how to read is easy.

Andy:

It's easy.

Andy:

It's very easily done.

Andy:

It's not this tortuous process that the

Andy:

schools have turned it into.

Andy:

A lot of proxy data showing how good American

Andy:

education was for a long time.

Andy:

And that's not the reason.

Andy:

It's mythology that the leftists have hatched said, well, we needed government schools in

Andy:

the mid 19th century because people were literally there's a technical term for that

Andy:

claim in philosophy.

Andy:

It's called bullshit.

Blair:

I love it.

Andy:

I know that's pretty technical.

Andy:

But there were two reasons for the imposition

Andy:

of government schooling.

Andy:

One is a number of Protestant and one is more

Andy:

disreputable than the next.

Andy:

But one is that a number of Protestant

Andy:

Americans were very concerned about the influx of Irish immigrants and they thought the

Andy:

United States was become a cesspool of potpourry, of papism I see of Catholicism.

Andy:

And the panacea for that was to be government schools where every compulsory school system

Andy:

where one, all kids had to go, and two of them were going to use the Protestant Bible.

Andy:

So they were going to turn these Catholic kids into good Protestant Americans.

Andy:

That's one reason.

Andy:

And the other reason perhaps even more

Andy:

disreputable is that leading American so called educators like Harris Man journey to

Andy:

what country? Germany.

Blair:

Germany.

Andy:

Germany, yeah.

Andy:

And the German school system.

Andy:

The government schools were designed to train the kids not to be selfish, not to be

Andy:

individualist, not to place the family first, but to always serve the state first.

Andy:

And those American so called educators were appalled by American individualism and

Andy:

selfishness, and they were good Kantians or collectivists.

Andy:

They wanted a society once the state came first and individuals served.

Andy:

America shouldn't be america.

Andy:

It should be like Germany.

Andy:

And so the American school system was going to be the cure for that.

Andy:

It's going to teach kids that their lives belong to the state, not to them, not to their

Andy:

families.

Andy:

Why government schools will impose this

Andy:

country.

Blair:

There'S an echo of that today, that America should be more like Europe, and that

Blair:

kind of mess, that kind of.

Andy:

Crap, should be more like Europe and teaching the kids academic subjects, but not

Andy:

in a lot of other ways, not.

Blair:

In anything else, I don't think.

Blair:

Sorry, Mark.

Martin:

It is the renaissance.

Martin:

It's coming from Europe, so I have to find

Martin:

that true.

Andy:

Well, there was a Renaissance in Europe earlier.

Andy:

Maybe there could be another one.

Martin:

Yeah, the Second Renaissance.

Blair:

One of the things let me just throw this in there, because I think the TV show A

Blair:

Little House on the Prairie, they had the one room schoolhouse, and that wasn't a myth or a

Blair:

fable or anything.

Blair:

That was okay, a small child, three, four,

Blair:

five to a young teenager, and the one teacher could handle all of that, and everyone learned

Blair:

at their own level.

Blair:

I mean, it worked.

Blair:

To me.

Blair:

It worked.

Andy:

The school normal.

Andy:

Yeah, sometimes it was men, but generally

Andy:

women, because that was one profession that was open to women back then.

Andy:

There's a lot more open to women today.

Andy:

But in the 19th century, that was one of one

Andy:

of the few.

Andy:

And, yeah, it does work because the

Andy:

overwhelming majority of school moms taught their children to read, using their students

Andy:

to using phonics.

Andy:

And once the kids can read, the whole world of

Andy:

knowledge is open to them, especially today with the Internet.

Andy:

I just want to say something about reading because this is the most important cognitive

Andy:

skill by far.

Andy:

It's very easy.

Andy:

And here's what all parents got to do.

Andy:

One, you'll motivate the child, show the child

Andy:

that there's things in books that are really fun.

Andy:

So when my daughter is 19 now, and she's a junior at college, my ex wife and I adopted

Andy:

her from China, and I'd see her at least once a week.

Andy:

We have a day together, sometimes more than once a week.

Andy:

You know, she was little.

Andy:

She's two, three years old.

Andy:

We do all kinds of fun things.

Andy:

We go to the park and everything.

Andy:

And as part of fun things and playing, I think Borders were still in existence then, but

Andy:

today you could go to Barns and Noble, go to the library and let her pick out a book.

Andy:

She had to pick out the book, had to be something that she thought was fun, and so she

Andy:

picked out a book.

Andy:

And she usually at two or three years old,

Andy:

there was some goofy story about dogs that could fly or kittens who thought the full moon

Andy:

was a bowl of milk or something like that.

Andy:

And she'd sit down and pat the floor next to

Andy:

her and say, Read to me, Daddy.

Andy:

And so I read her, and she found out that

Andy:

there's cool things in books.

Andy:

They're fun that way.

Andy:

You motivate the child, the child knows, hey, there's stuff in books that I want to be able

Andy:

to read.

Andy:

I don't want to have to depend on mom or dad

Andy:

or the teacher the kids motivate.

Andy:

And then by the time the kid's four years old,

Andy:

don't have to wait till a child six, four or five years old using systematic phonics, you

Andy:

could teach the kid to read in a couple of weeks.

Andy:

It's no more difficult for a healthy child to learn how to read than it is to learn how to

Andy:

swim or ride a bike.

Andy:

It's easy.

Andy:

Reading is easy, and it's fun.

Andy:

And once a child has mastered reading, a whole

Andy:

world of cognition is open to that child.

Andy:

That's why the school norms was successful.

Andy:

They used phonics, and the kids learned how to read.

Andy:

And one last thing on this, guys, what they call the return of the one room schoolhouse

Andy:

today is one of the most exciting developments in education, the Socalled microschools.

Andy:

Yes, because I said before, there's still a lot of good classroom teachers in the

Andy:

government school system, and there are, but they have to fight against this stifling

Andy:

bureaucracy, and some of them opt out.

Andy:

They quit.

Andy:

The great Marvin Collins did that, you know, like 40 or 50 years ago to start West Side

Andy:

Prep in Chicago, and she was a consummate teacher.

Andy:

But you don't have to be a supervisor.

Andy:

She's like the Michael Jordan of teaching

Andy:

elementary school.

Andy:

You don't have to be funny.

Andy:

It's the same city as Chicago.

Andy:

But you don't have to be world class.

Andy:

Teachers have to be a good teacher.

Andy:

And there's a lot of good teachers opting out

Andy:

of the government school system with disgruntled parents forming small community

Andy:

schools where they're called microschools.

Andy:

Today you got four or five kids or four or

Andy:

five families, and one of the families has a basement.

Andy:

You set up a little classroom with whiteboards and chairs and books and everything.

Andy:

And this is becoming so widespread a phenomenon in America that Forbes, which is a

Andy:

business magazine, ran a story on this a year or so ago, and, you know, on the microscopes.

Andy:

And one way to look at this is it's the return of the oneroom schoolhouse.

Andy:

And I think this is a tremendous step forward in American education, by the way, because if

Andy:

you want to start your own school, if you're one of these redneck states, they probably

Andy:

won't have too many hoops you have to jump through.

Andy:

But if you're one of the real leftist states, you're in Massachusetts, New York, California,

Andy:

Connecticut.

Andy:

Yeah, there's a lot of hoops you need to jump

Andy:

through.

Andy:

But if you're a certified teacher starting the

Andy:

school with a bunch of families, a few families to start school, then there's not

Andy:

much they could do to stop you.

Andy:

So any state in the country my buddy Mike

Andy:

Gustafson up in Massachusetts, certified teacher, started a Montessori school with his

Andy:

wife.

Andy:

He has very few hoops they made him jump to.

Andy:

This is Massachusetts.

Andy:

So if you get disgruntled teachers who have a

Andy:

teacher degree, this becomes very feasible to start a micro school or a small community

Andy:

school, and then you go from there.

Andy:

You teach the kids to read.

Andy:

You teach the kids basic writing skills.

Andy:

You teach the mathematical calculation.

Andy:

It's not that hard.

Andy:

You know, this is the most fundamental level

Andy:

of education is in the elementary schools.

Andy:

It's not that hard.

Andy:

Anyway.

Blair:

My final question, I guess, Andy, is what do you see the future of education?

Blair:

Obviously, those people are going up against Goliath, but do you see a positive future?

Andy:

It's hard to say, but I'll do my best to answer the question.

Andy:

By the way, go back to the book.

Blair:

Yes, please.

Andy:

There's a lot in here about the microschools in the book.

Blair:

Good.

Andy:

And you could also go to microschoolrevolution.com if you want to find

Andy:

out more about this going against Goliath.

Andy:

That's correct.

Andy:

The good news is the parents are realizing how bad the schools are.

Andy:

There was a recent poll done over this past summer for the American Federation of

Andy:

Teachers, a real leftist teachers union did, and I don't remember the exact question was

Andy:

how to improve American education to the parents.

Andy:

And the parents were loud and clear.

Andy:

And it's very simple.

Andy:

More academic education, less propaganda.

Andy:

That's all it takes.

Andy:

That's all it takes.

Andy:

But the interlocking director at the

Andy:

impregnable fortress doesn't want that.

Andy:

Now, the good news is the parents are waking

Andy:

up to that.

Andy:

But they're rallied against the school boards.

Andy:

I'd like to reach out to them.

Andy:

That's one of the reasons I wrote this book.

Andy:

You're wasting your time and energy.

Andy:

ETH is 100% right.

Andy:

This is an impregnable fortress.

Andy:

It can't be overrun.

Andy:

It can't be changed, it can't be altered, it can't be reformed, but it can't be

Andy:

circumvented.

Andy:

So you need to conduct a guerrilla war against

Andy:

Goliath.

Andy:

You pull the kids out of the government school

Andy:

system.

Andy:

You starve the monster of victims.

Andy:

You teach them at home via homeschooling, or you hire tutors, which you could do online or

Andy:

in person.

Andy:

Or you join or form a home school co op, which

Andy:

is easier in the redneck states than in the leftist states.

Andy:

Or you find disgruntled teachers who start a small community school, a microschool.

Andy:

But there's a number of options.

Andy:

But you got to get the kids out of the

Andy:

government school if you want them to be educated rather than doctrinated.

Andy:

You got to understand, with few exceptions here or there, but overall, the government

Andy:

school system is truly in a pregnant fortress.

Andy:

Ed her said that almost 30 years ago, and he's

Andy:

even more correct today than he was back then.

Andy:

So homeschooling is the future.

Andy:

Micro schools are the future.

Andy:

If there's going to be a future in education,

Andy:

home school costs.

Andy:

Do you have a minute?

Andy:

I want to say something about tutors.

Blair:

Go for it.

Andy:

Yeah, I'm a tutor, and there's plenty of others.

Andy:

Here's the interesting thing, one reason of many why the school system is so bad.

Andy:

Okay, tell your story.

Blair:

Go for it.

Andy:

So the year is 1999.

Andy:

True story.

Andy:

Cliff's Notes hires me to write the Cliff Notes with three iron rampit.

Andy:

Now, Cliff Notes are study guides for great novels and everything to show your audience

Andy:

those Iron Rand.

Blair:

I mean, it's my share.

Andy:

Yes, I'm sure your audience knows iron Rans is the brilliant novelist.

Andy:

Right away, those guys out there, if you haven't read Iron Rand's novels, in a way, I

Andy:

envy you.

Andy:

You have the chance to read Iron Man for the

Andy:

first time, to read about headed out with Shrunk for the first time, but so the general

Andy:

editor of Cliff Snow is a really good guy, tells me.

Andy:

Back when Cliff Snow started 1950s 1960s, our main demographic was high school and college

Andy:

kids, which I can remember because I was in high school.

Andy:

I remember the English teachers telling us, don't read the Cliffs Notes.

Andy:

We're reading Charles Dickens, David Copperfield or whatever.

Andy:

The English teachers were clear.

Andy:

They didn't want us to read the Cliffs Notes,

Andy:

not because they thought the Cliff Notes were bad.

Andy:

They weren't.

Andy:

They're good.

Andy:

But they didn't want us to read the Cliff Notes instead of the novel, so okay, that's

Andy:

fair enough.

Andy:

So I went out to college.

Andy:

I was an English major, and the English professor systems don't read the Cliff Notes.

Andy:

We're reading Shakespeare's tragedies.

Andy:

We're reading King Lear.

Andy:

Okay, so main demographic back then, 1970s, high school and college student, the general

Andy:

letter tells me 19 99 20 00.

Andy:

Today, our main demographic is high school

Andy:

English teachers because they've either never read the novels in college that they're now

Andy:

assigned to teach, and or worse, they didn't understand.

Andy:

Why is that? Because to teach in the American in the

Andy:

government school system, you need a degree in education.

Andy:

So you're taking many education courses, and so fewer content courses.

Andy:

You're taking all these method courses, how to teach rather than what to teach.

Andy:

Yeah, exactly.

Andy:

So you had this tragic situation where in

Andy:

fact, one leading example from the various sources I use, Blair, is in Connecticut, which

Andy:

prides itself on its school system.

Andy:

But a math major at the University of

Andy:

Connecticut needed to get a math degree, I think needed 40 hours in math and then 12

Andy:

hours in cognate, science, physics, chemistry, and so on, 52 hours.

Andy:

But to get a teaching degree from the Connecticut school system, you needed only 30

Andy:

hours of math and 9 hours of, you know, of science, 39 rather than 52.

Andy:

And so the math majors are getting far more math and science than are the future math

Andy:

teachers.

Andy:

And it's same in literature.

Andy:

You know, the literature majors, which I was in college, are getting far more literature

Andy:

than the future English teachers are.

Andy:

So the English teachers, same in science, same

Andy:

in history, and so forth.

Andy:

So the point is that teachers don't know a lot

Andy:

of content.

Andy:

They don't know nearly as much content as they

Andy:

should because they're taking all these education courses.

Andy:

So that's a real problem in the American school system.

Andy:

So I was talking about tutors.

Andy:

Well, say you want somebody to teach a kid

Andy:

chemistry, let's say.

Andy:

And so the science teachers in the high

Andy:

schools have a mind in the elementary schools have had very little science in their own

Andy:

college career.

Andy:

But you find a tutor.

Andy:

And today another good thing that came out of the pandemic is the WhiteSpeed use of zoom in

Andy:

various video technologies like that.

Andy:

So you don't need in person is always best.

Andy:

If you can find a local graduate student who's getting a PhD masters or PhD in chemistry, who

Andy:

will do it in person, even better.

Andy:

But even if you can't, let's say you're in

Andy:

Michigan and you're online on LinkedIn or on various websitevacitytours.com and so on or on

Andy:

Facebook, there's all through word of mouth, all different ways you can find tutors.

Andy:

But you find a kid at the University of Oregon, let's say, who's got a PhD in

Andy:

chemistry.

Andy:

Well, this kid has, first of all, majored in

Andy:

chemistry.

Andy:

And if he's in a PhD program in chemistry,

Andy:

he's majored in chemistry.

Andy:

He's got a BS in chemistry.

Andy:

His degree is not in education.

Andy:

His degree in chemistry already knows more

Andy:

science than the high school science teachers do.

Andy:

Second of all, now he's on his way to a master's or a PhD in chemistry.

Andy:

So he's taking all these advanced courses in chemistry.

Andy:

He knows vastly more science than any other high school teachers do.

Andy:

Second of all, he's a graduate student, which means he's probably starving.

Andy:

He's got very little money, so you could get him cheap.

Andy:

Third of all, it's not a support, because paying for tours can add up.

Andy:

You can get him inexpensively.

Andy:

Third of all, it's in his self interest, too,

Andy:

because this is teaching experience.

Andy:

He's making money of expertise.

Andy:

If he does a good job, he puts it on his resume.

Andy:

He gets a strong reference from the parents.

Andy:

I mean, I didn't have that opportunity when I

Andy:

was in grad school.

Andy:

I ran from one school to another as an

Andy:

adjunct, driving, you're keeping the roads hot.

Andy:

One of the chairman of the philosophy department who hired me and said, you know,

Andy:

you're preparing yourself for your future career as a taxi driver.

Andy:

That's what a PhD philosophy is good for.

Andy:

So I had to run around from one school to

Andy:

another well, now you can do a lot of this online, right, from your dorm room or your

Andy:

living room.

Andy:

So the tutors know vastly more of the subject

Andy:

matter that they're going to teach that even the high school teachers do.

Andy:

Never mind the elementary school teachers.

Andy:

You can get them inexpensively for the most

Andy:

part.

Andy:

So there's a lot of options for parents pull

Andy:

their kids out of the schools and there's a lot of options for them to get a much better

Andy:

education for their children.

Blair:

That's fantastic news and great for our audience to know that as well.

Andy:

Again, it's in part two of my book on what we could do about it@varsitytours.com.

Andy:

If you're looking there's a number of websites vivostytutors.com is a good one.

Andy:

If you're looking for tutors for your kids, there's a lot of resources out there for

Andy:

parents who pull their kids out of the schools.

Andy:

And parents will tell me, I'm not a teacher.

Andy:

And I'm thinking to myself, yeah, it's a good

Andy:

thing you haven't gone through an education program.

Andy:

I'm not a teacher.

Andy:

And I'll say to them, seriously, how much of a

Andy:

teacher do you need to be to do a better job than the government schools are doing right

Andy:

now?

Blair:

Yeah, that's true.

Andy:

Just go back to the basics.

Andy:

Show your children that books are fun and then

Andy:

use systematic phonics to teach them to read.

Andy:

You've already done a great thing.

Blair:

Yeah. They're leapfrogging ahead already.

Andy:

Yeah.

Blair:

I've got one final question that I want, and it will tie into the micro schools

Blair:

and the tutoring.

Blair:

Why is it well, why is it important to teach

Blair:

an integrated hierarchical system or subject matter to a child?

Andy:

That's a complex, difficult question.

Andy:

But first of all, there's some people alisa

Andy:

Van Dam, who's an objectivist educator in California, she's written on this several

Andy:

essays in the Objective Standard that I'm sure you could find on the objective standard

Andy:

website.

Andy:

I can't remember the titles offhand, although

Andy:

I discussed it in the book.

Andy:

But there's a book by who I call The Wise

Andy:

Girls.

Andy:

Jessica Wise and Susan Wise.

Andy:

Bow.

Blair:

Yeah.

Andy:

Well trained in mind, right? I think it's the well educated mind.

Andy:

But anyhow, it's a brilliant book for home schoolers.

Andy:

You don't have to follow everything in it, but it shows some ways that you could approach

Andy:

your homeschooling a kid and the way to integrate the curriculum so that the students

Andy:

have a systematic view of the world and how things hang together.

Andy:

So, for example, they recommend you're dividing your history program into four parts.

Andy:

Ancient was medieval, early Modern and late modern and contemporary.

Andy:

And so when you're studying, for example, when you study in ancient history, in your

Andy:

literature classes, you read some of the great books by the ancients, the Iliad, The Odyssey,

Andy:

Edipus, the King, you know, and so on.

Andy:

The and you're integrating the literature with

Andy:

the history.

Blair:

Right.

Andy:

Similarly, in the science curriculum, you could integrate the advances made by

Andy:

ancient scientists.

Andy:

Aristotle, biology, joachamedes with

Andy:

engineering, some of erotosthenes and some of the early scientific advances.

Andy:

Like Lisa van Dan points out, this is the way to teach science chronologically.

Andy:

First of all, you perform the experiments that these scientists perform and show the kids in

Andy:

action what it looks like.

Andy:

And second of all, it stands to reason that

Andy:

the simpler truths were identified by scientists before the more complex truths

Andy:

which build upon it.

Andy:

So you're doing the ancient experiments and

Andy:

replicating the ancient finding, making scientific discoveries at the same time you're

Andy:

studying ancient history, at the same time you're reading ancient literature.

Andy:

Similarly with mathematics, you could integrate well, I guess Euclid was ancient.

Andy:

I don't know that you'd want to start with Euclidean before you do arithmetic, but

Andy:

mathematics may be a little bit different, but you can always when you get to geometry and

Andy:

Euclidean geometry, but you already have this basis in ancient history, literature and

Andy:

science that you can then integrate.

Andy:

You can integrate Euclidean geometry with what

Andy:

the kids learned, you know, by the ancient world earlier, but they have this integrated

Andy:

approach.

Andy:

It's just brilliant.

Andy:

And it can be done.

Andy:

It can be done.

Blair:

Very good.

Blair:

Andi very good.

Blair:

Ladies and gentlemen, we've been talking to Andrew Bernstein, philosopher all around great

Blair:

guy, and his new book is Why Johnny Still Can't Read or Write or Understand Math and

Blair:

What We Can Do About It.

Andy:

Andy, available from Amazon bondingglobal.com guys.

Blair:

That's right.

Blair:

Great to have you in the fox hole again today.

Andy:

Thanks for having me on.

Andy:

Martin and Blair, it's always a pleasure

Andy:

talking to you guys.

Andy:

So I had a great time and thanks very much.

Martin:

You're welcome.

Martin:

And Blair and Andy, I will end here.

Martin:

Also a shout out to a fellow podcaster called Macintosh and he sent us a boost to Grant of

Martin:

48 satoshis on November 22.

Martin:

And he said, regarding our interview with Ken

Martin:

West your interview, nice interview, guys.

Martin:

So thanks again for shouting out.

Blair:

I don't know if Fanny knows what a satoshi is.

Andy:

Good.

Blair:

We're advocates of bitcoin.

Blair:

We become advocates of bitcoin.

Blair:

And satoshi's is like the fraction of a Bitcoin, like a penny, if you will correct, if

Blair:

you want to compare it to the fiat currency.

Blair:

But we think Bitcoin is the future of a stable

Blair:

currency and that is part of the value for value, I want to say ecosystem, the model for

Blair:

change that's happening in the podcast world.

Martin:

And that's something that you could apply in the future, like micro schools,

Martin:

international that you have great examples of in very far off places.

Martin:

Sure.

Martin:

And to send Van Satushi's and micro payments

Martin:

and Direct without any middleman to.

Blair:

The tutors also right, Andy, if you're or if you were already knowledgeable about it,

Blair:

we could send you whatever we received for this podcast.

Blair:

We'd send you a third, we'll do a second.

Andy:

Thanks guys, I appreciate it.

Andy:

By the way, bitcoin is the future of money.

Andy:

I think microscopes, like you said, Martin, is the future of schools.

Andy:

And just to conclude, there's these tiny little schools in Africa all throughout age,

Andy:

every African country.

Andy:

The English education researcher James Toole

Andy:

has written books on this, and it's really encouraging to see these small, private,

Andy:

sometimes for profit schools in the poorest countries in the world.

Andy:

If they could do it there, we could replicate here.

Andy:

They don't have an entrenched teachers union and a government bureaucracy against that, but

Andy:

they have a lot of other obstacles, namely starvation, for one.

Blair:

We don't drink the water, I think.

Andy:

Yeah, exactly.

Andy:

Really good schools.

Andy:

Really Good Schools, I think, is the title of Tuli's second book on these small private

Andy:

schools internationally that are vastly outperforming the government schools in almost

Andy:

any number of poor African and Asian countries.

Blair:

Since our podcast is downloaded in 80 countries, hopefully Africa is one of more

Blair:

than a few of them, then.

Andy:

Yeah, I agree.

Blair:

All right.

Blair:

Thank you, gentlemen.

Blair:

I appreciate it.

Andy:

Thanks, guys.

Andy:

It's been a pleasure.

Blair:

Take care, Andy. Bye bye.

Andy:

You too, guys.