Peterson on the Ed Schools

 

You want the truth? Resentful radical leftists took over the Faculties of Education in the 1960s.

Now they control the entire K-12 system and half (half!) of all state budgets.

The Ed schools are among the worst faculties in the increasingly demented universities. Every bit of the "research" they have conducted in the last sixty years was a lie: whole word reading, multiple intelligences, self-esteem. Nothing but destructive.

Their students are by and large lazy, unintelligent, uninterested and ideologically captured.

The worst of them become administrators.

These are the people to whom we give our children, and much of our tax money. And we've done it for four generations, with no end in sight.

The Faculties of Education should be eliminated. They have done a worse than terrible job, and they are destroying our culture. Intentionally. Starting with your kids.

Jordan Peterson on X (Twitter)

All true; I agree 100% and have been saying the same thing for some years. We must abolish the Ed Schools. Having graduated from one should be a disqualification, not a qualification, as a teacher. They deliberately teach how to teach badly, so that any homeschooler can actually produce better results than their "professionals." And this is measurable. 

The Need for Smaller Class Sizes

A new study suggests that classroom size does not affect student results: smaller classrooms are not better. But this has been known for years. Many previous studies have shown the same. It is an eternal surprise only because teachers’ unions eternally assert the opposite.

They do so, I imagine, because a larger class demands the lecture format, whereas a small enough class can be run as a seminar, a group discussion.

The currently fashionable education philosophy, “constructivism,” holds that truth is not a constant, there is no objective truth. Knowledge is “constructed” in groups, making the seminar approach mandatory. If the group decides that China is in Europe, then it is in Europe. If they decide the sun goes around the Earth, then the sun goes around the Earth.

Constructivism does not account for what happens if groups in contact with one another arrive at different conclusions. Might makes right seems the inevitable, necessary approach: you pass a law or fight a war and force submission.

This is how fascism works. And this is how our schools currently work. Increasingly, under the influence of the schools and constructivism, this is how our society works.

The attraction for the teaching tribe, however, is that running a seminar takes no effort on their part. There is no need for them to either actually know anything about the subject, or know how to explain it. They just get to sit in judgement over the conclusions the students come up with in their seminar. And on what basis can they judge, given that there is no truth? The only possibility is to object if any group comes to an opinion that differs from that of the teacher. Meaning the teacher has no responsibilities, but gets to be the absolute dictator in the classroom.

It's a good life, as long as the money keeps pouring in.

The Joy of Learning

 

Remarks from a Beaches-East York All-Candidates Meeting on May 12, 2022:

I have spent my life in and around education. You’d think by now I would have learned something.

More than that, I’m a father. Education matters to me deeply. 

Simply spending more money on schools is not much help.

As of 2022, Ontario spends $14,821 per pupil. That’s in line with other provinces, more than the US, more than Finland or Korea or Singapore, all of which do better on the OECD’s measures of student success. 

Yet the schools are in crisis.

Why do the rich send their children to private schools? Why do private schools consistently get better results with less money? Why do homeschoolers get better results?

The most urgent matter is to get Critical Theory out of the schools, and keep it out. 

New Blue has been the leader in alerting us to this issue. Every other party endorsed Bill 67 on second reading, and Bill 67 would actually mandate Critical Theory in our schools and colleges at every level.

Aside from destroying civil society, Critical Theory makes education itself meaningless. If you believe there is no objective truth, there is nothing to teach, and nothing to learn. Everyone just makes up whatever they want to believe, and tries to impose it on others. 

Or their students.

This is the emergency. But over the longer term, the way to improve education is to introduce competition.

New Blue wants tax credits to allow more parents to choose their children’s education. 

Since at least the early 20th century, our public schools have not been designed to produce excellence. They have been designed to produce workers for industry. The rich can sent their kids to private schools that teach leadership, and this perpetuates class divisions.

Most of the work of my own online academy is teaching students the skills the public schools will not teach.

We need to level this playing field. 

Could we not fix the public system? To some extent, no doubt; but this will take more time, tears, and sweat. The forces against this are entrenched and powerful. In the meantime, too many young minds will be wasted. 

And even if we can, school choice is needed in a pluralistic society. 

Our founders and our constitution understood this. Diversity is our strength. So we have the separate school system, originally one system for Catholics, and another for Protestants. 

But two systems are hardly adequate any longer. They are laughably inadequate. We need to extend equal rights to other faiths and life philosophies. Values are the core of education, and parents must be able to pass their values on to the next generation. This is what parenting is about.

Let’s bring the joy of true learning to the schools.

Shut Up and Think for Yourself

 

Christina Wyman has written a piece for NBC decrying parents who want to interfere with their children’s education. She laments that “parents think they have the right to control teaching and learning because their children are the ones being educated.” “It’s sort of like entering a surgical unit thinking you can interfere with an operation simply because the patient is your child.” After all, “Teaching, too, is a science. Unless they’re licensed and certified, parents aren’t qualified to make decisions about curricula.”

This is eleven different kinds of wrong. It is wrong on every point. And not list a little wrong on them. 

To begin with, overseeing their children’s education is the primary duty of parents.

"The role of parents in education is of such importance that it is almost impossible to provide an adequate substitute." The right and the duty of parents to educate their children are primordial and inalienable. – Catechism of the Catholic Church

Wyman cites the analogy of medicine. Fine. Here the patient has the right to choose their own doctor, and then to refuse any given treatment—for themselves and for their child. Let it be so in education. Let parents choose the school and curriculum.

And make the teachers liable to be sued for malpractice, as doctors can be.

I’m good with that.

But unlike medicine, teaching is not a science. It is not evidence-based. There is no empirical—which is to say, scientific—evidence that certified teachers teach better than a random person off the street. In fact, the evidence shows the opposite. Those who are homeschooled do better than those who come up through the public schools on standardized tests and in university—literally, then, a random member of the public can do better. Those who attend private schools, where teachers do not have to hold professional qualifications, also do better. Sending your child to a “qualified teacher” is the worst available option.

Wyman goes on to assert that “An educator’s primary goal is to teach students to think.” This is an odd thing to say to justify refusing parents the right to think about their children’s schooling. The public schools deliberately repress this, and were designed to do so in the early 20th century. One of the great attractions to private schools is that they, unlike the public schools, do teach students how to think. That means teaching them philosophy, logic, rhetoric, formal debating. Subjects definitive of the private schools, and rarely seen in public schools. It would mean teaching using the Socratic Method. What public school does?

The question: is Wyman that stupid, or that corrupt?

And how stupid or corrupt are our politicians if they accept this?

Root and STEM

 

When I taught in China back in the early 90s, I was appalled to learn that the university had no Department of Humanities. Purely a mechanistic view of the cosmos and of human life, it seemed. When the Berlin Wall fell, the countries of Eastern Europe understood the problem: their scholars rushed to the West to get a grounding in the Humanities.

I am alarmed to see that Humanities is now also no longer taught in high schools in Tennessee. A list of subject areas ESL students must be prepared for gives Language Arts, Math, Science, and Social Science. 

A disease is spreading, and it is deadly. It is deadly not just to democracy, but to civilization itself.

If our culture were sane, Humanities would be the entire high school curriculum.

After the basic skills of Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic, taught to mastery in elementary school, the Humanities is the one thing everyone needs to study. It is the reason and grounding for everything else. If you do not pass it on, individuals despair and civilization dies.

Today, we waste our students’ time for four to six years, years when they are full of energy and desperate to learn. Many turn off at just this point. 

Math? It is a common observation, a truism, that we never use our high school algebra, trigonometry, or calculus again. So what is the justification for teaching it? Geometry would be useful—to teach logic. But it is never presented in those terms; just as a set of axioms that obviously do not relate to the real world.

Science as taught in the schools is the antithesis of science. It is taught as a body of knowledge; stuff to memorize. This specific knowledge, taught as certain in high school, is probably false and will probably be shown by science to be false in time. Much of it is already known to be false while the textbook is still in circulation. The essence of science is to doubt you know anything, and to test everything; it is the scientific method. That is not taught. If experiments are done, the result is always predetermined. Anyone genuinely likely to excel in science is only likely to be turned off it in high school.

Language Arts? The grammar of English should have already been learned in elementary school. As to other languages, if it is a matter of learning to speak them—our current emphasis—the classroom is the worst place to do so. The place to learn a language is by speaking it regularly, something the classroom is designed to prevent. Language, when taught as a Humanity, is an exercise in logic: the old grammar-translation method. It is no longer taught in such terms.

Social Science? A mathematician back in the fifties made the observation that anything that has ever been discovered by the Social Sciences is either trivial, or it is wrong. This is still true, and will forever be true. Rather than adding to our knowledge, the social sciences have subtracted from it, by introducing serious errors to the popular mind. Human beings are not objects, and cannot be studied as objects. Even if this were possible, it would be morally offensive. And teaching Social Science is therefore teaching immorality.

The wealthy and the upper classes pay huge sums to educate their own children at private schools that do concentrate on the Humanities: on logic, philosophy, rhetoric, debate, history, classical literature. They know what they are doing. The British Empire was built on the quality of its private schools. The modern public school systems of North America were intentionally designed, in the early twentieth century, to produce cogs for the industrial machine. What they teach is submission and acceptance. The Humanities teach leadership; for they teach how to think. As Confucius said, “a superior man is not a tool.” Without the Humanities, the schools are turning out workers, meant as a means, not an end.

The world may need more STEM. But the problem with STEM is that whatever is taught today is obsolete tomorrow. To teach it at the high school level is a waste of time. Even to teach it later, at university, when specialization is possible, is probably too soon. It needs to be taught continually, over one’s professional career. Something now entirely possible, with distance education.

But what is needed even more than STEM, and all the more so in times of rapid change,  is minds that are adaptable, have initiative, and know the ultimate goal.

The TED Commandments

 

TED Talks is reviving the vital art of the lecture. People commonly think that lectures are boring. That is because we've lost the art of lecturing.

Each prospective TED speaker is send these ten "TED Commandments." A decent guide for any lecturer. This is how to make a lecture interesting.

Thou Shalt Not Simply Trot Out thy Usual Shtick

Thou Shalt Dream a Great Dream, or Show Forth a Wondrous New Thing, Or Share Something Thou Hast Never Shared Before

Thou Shalt Reveal thy Curiosity and Thy Passion

Thou Shalt Tell a Story

Thou Shalt Freely Comment on the Utterances of Other Speakers for the Skae of Blessed Connection and Exquisite Controversy

Thou Shalt Not Flaunt thine Ego. Be Thou Vulnerable. Speak of thy Failure as well as thy Success.

Thou Shalt Not Sell from the Stage: Neither thy Company, thy Goods, thy Writings, nor thy Desparate need for Funding; Lest Thou be Cast Aside into Outer Darkness.

Thou Shalt Remember all the while: Laughter is Good.

Thou Shalt Not Read thy Speech.

Thou Shalt Not Steal the Time of Them that Follow Thee

Their Truth

 

At the supermarket checkout, I saw the cover of People magazine had a photo of Prince Harry and Megan Markle, with the heading “Our Truth.” (If I recall correctly, it was “Our Lives, Our Truth.” 

To speak of “our truth” is simple insanity. Truth is truth, unconditionally, one truth cannot contradict another, and you cannot declare yourself Napoleon Bonaparte as “your truth.” What Harry and Megan Markle claim is either true, and the Royal family is guilty of racism, or it is false, and the Sussexes themselves are guilty of slander. It is unjust to the innocent to leave the matter ambiguous, and say that anything said must be true. Nor can Hitler escape censure by declaring that Aryan superiority and Jewish depravity is “his truth.” People magazine is either endorsing insanity, or endorsing evil.

This same day, I witness a video clip of Don Lemon on CNN objecting to the Vatican refusal to bless gay marriage because “God would never judge us.”

Judgement is what we are here for.

Did God not judge Adam and Eve in the Garden? Is Jesus not coming again to judge the living and the dead? Why then did God create us? Just as cute pets? With no responsibilities? And if everyone gets to heaven, why did he not create us in heaven, and instead leave us to suffer here on Earth?

And why does the Bible condemn Pontius Pilate for refusing to judge Jesus? Why is Pilate the villain, and not the hero of the piece?

Why do we condemn the neighbours who reputedly let Kitty Genovese be stabbed to death in a stairwell rather than intervene? Who were they to judge?

As infuriating is the often-repeated claim that parents are supposed to show their children “unconditional love,” and never discipline.

That’s a perfect way to raise a psychopath or a narcissist. Or a helpless house pet.

Unconditional love is not love at all. It is ownership.