Full Comment - Best of 2023： England’s ‘strictest headmistress’ on how old-school education saves kids

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00:01:58.720 When I look back over the myriad of topics and guests that we had here on Full Comment Podcast over 2023,

00:02:08.980 it really does look like a fascinating year of discussions.

00:02:13.000 Hello, I'm Brian Lilly, host of the Full Comment Podcast,

00:02:15.600 and I'd like to take a moment to say thank you for all the time that you've given us out of your busy days over the last year.

00:02:22.460 We've talked to newsmakers who were at the center of the story we were discussing.

00:02:26.920 We've had two premiers on this year.

00:02:29.280 The leader of the opposition.

00:02:30.760 We've spoken to big American political celebrities like Ben Shapiro.

00:02:35.760 We've talked to former cabinet ministers, ambassadors, people at the heart and center of stories that were shaping the news.

00:02:42.400 One of the stories or one of the issues that kept coming up over 2023 was the issue of education.

00:02:50.180 How are our school boards run?

00:02:51.620 What are our kids being taught in the classroom?

00:02:54.520 Can you reject wokeness and still be a teacher? 0.96

00:02:58.140 One of our guests found out the answer is no.

00:02:59.980 But at the heart of this, it's how we reform education.

00:03:05.280 And that was the episode we brought to you with Catherine Burbleson.

00:03:08.940 She is the Canadian woman who now runs an inner-to-city school in London, England,

00:03:13.640 and is known as England's strictest headmistress.

00:03:17.380 She brought about old-school education reforms that she says is helping save kids.

00:03:23.900 I hope you enjoy this conversation once again.

00:03:27.000 Catherine, thanks for the time.

00:03:28.340 Well, thank you for having me.

00:03:30.240 Explain to me before we get into this discussion of how to push back on this agenda and why you think it's so important.

00:03:38.420 Tell me about Michaela.

00:03:40.540 Explain the school to me because your school system is quite different than what we have in Canada.

00:03:47.340 Yeah, well, it's a high school and our high schools start at grade 7.

00:03:52.060 So the kids arrive from elementary at grade 7 and then they stay with us right until they go off to university.

00:03:58.080 We have just over 700 kids.

00:04:02.420 We opened in 2014.

00:04:04.380 It was a school that I set up with a bunch of people.

00:04:07.920 It's called a free school here in the UK, but it's based around the same idea that charter schools follow in the U.S.

00:04:16.140 Although you have some.

00:04:17.180 I know in Alberta you have some charter schools.

00:04:20.780 So it's not totally foreign to Canadians.

00:04:23.900 And it means a group of people set the school up.

00:04:27.120 We follow the normal admissions code.

00:04:29.780 Unlike the charter schools in the U.S., we follow the normal admissions code that everyone else follows here.

00:04:34.860 And we're just a normal school in that sense once it's running.

00:04:37.560 We have a very traditional school.

00:04:40.740 So I think in 1953 in Canada and in the U.K., our school would have been considered much more normal.

00:04:48.300 Nowadays, it's considered quite radical.

00:04:50.820 So we have strict discipline.

00:04:53.100 Our corridors are silent because, well, we're in the inner city.

00:04:56.560 Therefore, we have quite a challenging intake.

00:04:58.660 And when I say quite challenging, you know, the kind of films that come out of Hollywood about kids, you know, being surrounded by gangs and people carrying knives, you know, kids who get killed on the streets and that kind of thing.

00:05:11.260 We are in inner London.

00:05:13.000 And frankly, if you just allow the behavior to go, well, to do whatever they want, you end up with kids being beaten up every single transition in the corridors.

00:05:25.180 You end up with their heads being smashed against the walls.

00:05:28.160 I mean, it can be quite horrible, you know.

00:05:30.480 So that's why we have silent corridors and they walk in single file very quickly to their lessons.

00:05:35.260 We have the desks in rows in an old fashioned way.

00:05:38.600 And the teachers teach in a much more traditional fashion as opposed to desks being in groups, for instance, and the children would be teaching themselves.

00:05:49.040 And that would be what would be called child centered learning instead of teacher led learning, which is what we do.

00:05:54.360 And then I'd say our values are very traditional.

00:05:56.200 We believe in personal responsibility, a sense of duty towards others, an idea of self-sacrifice.

00:06:02.700 You're part of a team.

00:06:03.860 When you get a detention, you don't get a detention just for you.

00:06:06.560 You're letting the whole team down.

00:06:07.920 So we're trying very much to encourage our children in an ordered and structured environment with ordered and structured learning to be ambitious and determined and to get to the best universities and to go off and do something amazing with their lives.

00:06:25.340 Now, that doesn't mean, you know, I recognize that some of our kids might become dentists, but some of them might become revolutionary radicals.

00:06:34.840 You know, I think it's a mistake that we often make in thinking that wanting children to be creative or wanting them to be to think outside the box.

00:06:44.200 We imagine that that means just letting them go free to do whatever they want, when actually radicalism and out of the box thinking comes from a more traditional knowledge base.

00:07:00.960 You cannot think independently about something unless you know lots about it.

00:07:05.980 And I think it's our role as teachers to teach children, really, and to teach them lots.

00:07:10.560 And sadly, I'd say in 2023, there isn't much teaching that goes on in schools.

00:07:14.800 I'd say that's across the Western world.

00:07:16.820 Well, that interesting part where you've got to know a lot about something to engage in critical thinking.

00:07:24.260 I appreciate that because quite often what you hear is people don't actually know an awful lot about the subject.

00:07:32.760 But they think if they ask questions that they sound smart by questioning things, but they're questioning them and their questions show they don't quite understand what it is they're pushing.

00:07:43.600 Exactly. And the thing is, school is about giving children a basic knowledge about things.

00:07:51.960 So I expect our children to leave with a basic knowledge of math and English and history and geography and science.

00:07:59.440 And then, of course, they'll go off and specialize later.

00:08:01.640 And, of course, at university, they might do a whole variety of things that you wouldn't necessarily specialize in at secondary school.

00:08:08.660 But in order for them to learn anything in the first place, they need to be behaving themselves.

00:08:12.220 They need to be interested. They need to be putting their hands up and being excited about learning.

00:08:18.320 And again, I think progressives make the mistake of thinking that the way you get children excited about learning is by just peppering them with a whole load of stuff.

00:08:27.500 No, it needs to be ordered. You need to think very carefully about cognitive science, how the brain learns, how children are motivated.

00:08:34.980 And, of course, if you actually spend time becoming knowledgeable about this stuff and reading books on this stuff, you realize the best way is to do so in an ordered environment.

00:08:44.300 So that's especially the case for children who are coming from more chaotic backgrounds, more disadvantaged backgrounds, because they depend entirely on their school to be able to give them the knowledge and the skills that they need to go out there and make something of their lives.

00:09:01.220 You see, the thing is, is that if you look at a school that has more middle class kids, the parents will often make up for the deficits of the school.

00:09:09.500 So what I mean by that is the school might not be that great, but the parents take them to museums and watch documentaries with them and read books with them.

00:09:18.060 And because the parents are doing such a good job, it looks like the school is doing a good job, when in fact it's not the school, it's the parents that are making up for the problems with the school.

00:09:27.720 And not all families can do that.

00:09:30.820 In fact, for our families, very, very few of the families we have here would ever be able to do that.

00:09:36.480 The children here depend entirely on us to give them the knowledge and the skills that they need to be able to keep doors open to them in terms of choices for their lives.

00:09:45.180 And what people don't get is you need to restrict the freedom of children when they're younger.

00:09:52.040 You don't say do whatever you want, because if you say that, well, they'll just sit on video games all day.

00:09:56.780 They'll just go on social media.

00:09:59.180 So you need to, exactly, you need to restrict their freedom now, and you have them learning Shakespeare and Dickens and so on, which they wouldn't normally, they wouldn't pick up Macbeth and think, oh, I'll just have a look at Macbeth on my own here.

00:10:11.180 Obviously, they're not going to do that. So we restrict their freedom now so that later they can be truly free.

00:10:18.340 The progressives get it the other way around. They decide that when they're children, that's when you're going to have loads of freedom.

00:10:24.140 Do whatever you like. And then later, we're going to remove your freedom of speech.

00:10:28.180 We're going to remove various freedoms that you think you ought to have.

00:10:30.860 But it's the other way around. Kids shouldn't have that much freedom. Adults should have a lot more freedom.

00:10:36.560 And if we've done our job as adults with the kids and properly molded them and given them an understanding of the difference between right and wrong,

00:10:47.920 then you have a bunch of adults who are truly free to understand what is happening around them in the world.

00:10:54.020 Because they have not just knowledge, they also have values. And, you know, they have more traditional values where and those traditional values will take you through life, really.

00:11:03.580 However clever you are, however talented you are.

00:11:07.220 And that's the other thing to remember is that I think people often just think often the people who are writing in the media and who are just in clever positions, politicians and that kind of thing.

00:11:17.180 They think to themselves wrongly that everyone's just as clever as they are. And that's not true.

00:11:22.240 There's a whole variety of children out there. And there are some children who are going to go to Oxford and Cambridge.

00:11:27.140 And there are other children who are really going to struggle, you know, and they're going to struggle to get some base, a basic knowledge of math and English.

00:11:34.340 But they deserve to know that stuff. And if we're not teaching them properly, those kids simply won't learn it.

00:11:40.440 And I know in Britain, we have, you know, around about 20% of children are leaving school, functionally illiterate and functionally innumerate.

00:11:49.100 In Canada, you know, for those poorer children, you will find a similar situation.

00:11:56.060 So I'm talking about the children where the families cannot make up for the deficits of the school.

00:12:02.000 And I think sometimes we can be somewhat dishonest with ourselves, especially those of us who are more middle class.

00:12:07.880 Because then we say, oh, isn't it wonderful? The school system is just wonderful.

00:12:11.000 Meanwhile, we are hiring tutors in the background to make sure that our children are one step ahead.

00:12:16.000 We are doing the right things by our kids. I'm not criticizing people for hiring tutors.

00:12:20.660 Well done, you. You care about your kids.

00:12:22.960 But we do need to give thought to those children who do not have access both to the financial means to be able to do that and also the thinking around that.

00:12:35.320 Their parents don't realize that there are even options.

00:12:38.100 You know, they just they give their kids to school and imagine that the school is going to do right by them.

00:12:42.460 And I would say too often in Britain, but I'd say, you know, very often in Canada, I'd say Canada is actually further down this road than we are in terms of being far too progressive.

00:12:52.020 And I'd say that the schools are letting the kids down.

00:12:56.080 We have had never ending debates, it seems, on the basics of education here in Canada.

00:13:03.300 And I'll speak primarily from Ontario because that's where I live.

00:13:07.800 That's the school system that I went through.

00:13:10.960 My kids went through.

00:13:11.720 And it's the one I cover as a journalist.

00:13:14.300 But, you know, everything from should there be any rote learning in math, that was considered controversial.

00:13:21.480 And we had to get rid of that.

00:13:22.460 And they brought in a whole new math system more than a decade ago that failed miserably on any standardized tests, although teachers in this province don't like standardized tests.

00:13:33.560 And then recently, the education minister had to step in and tell them to remove from the curriculum all these statements that math is actually just a tool of white supremacy.

00:13:48.080 And that's how deep the identity politics have gotten, that inside the math curriculum, math is a tool of white supremacy.

00:13:58.700 And it was more controversial in our media that the minister stepped in to take that out than it was that it had ever been in there.

00:14:10.340 Yeah.

00:14:11.020 And that's my worry about Canada.

00:14:13.100 I am in Canada twice a year because my parents live in Toronto.

00:14:16.740 So does my sister.

00:14:17.760 And I listen to the radio when I'm there.

00:14:20.920 And I find it very difficult to listen to, to be honest, because it is so woke and so out there.

00:14:26.380 I find myself just shouting at the radio.

00:14:28.700 And it is so what you just said is crazy.

00:14:32.240 I mean, math is I don't understand how it can be how it can be filled with white supremacy. 0.98

00:14:38.800 It's just insane. 0.93

00:14:40.180 That's just an insane idea. 0.98

00:14:41.840 Black children need to learn that two plus two is four just as well as white kids do. 1.00

00:14:46.600 And if you don't teach them that, then you are going to put them in a position where they will never be able to have successful lives.

00:14:51.800 And frankly, I feel that that kind of talk is pushed by a whole bunch of progressive people who feel very guilty about the fact that they themselves feel privileged.

00:15:03.300 So there are some people, some of them are just white privileged people who feel guilty.

00:15:08.260 Some of them are black privileged people who are benefiting from pushing that kind of agenda because it gives them, you know, more social, you know, kudos.

00:15:20.700 You know, it just it gives them something to talk about at dinner parties and everybody looks to them like they're some kind of expert.

00:15:26.460 You know, I'd like them to come and join me in the inner city.

00:15:28.660 What I'd always like to say to anyone who has opinions on these things is how long have you been working with children and what have you done for them?

00:15:35.440 Because I can give you 25 years of always having worked in the inner city and having transformed the lives of black and brown children in the inner city.

00:15:43.520 So my position is always, look, you can criticize me, but look at what I've done for these kids.

00:15:49.640 What have you done?

00:15:50.760 And if that person is able to show me how they've brought out hundreds upon hundreds of children of these, the very children they say they're trying to help,

00:15:58.720 and that those children are now experts at math and English and geography and history and so on,

00:16:03.620 and that they get great grades and they go off to the top universities, if they can do that, then listen to them.

00:16:09.480 But if they can't do that, then you need to question their motives in them speaking like this.

00:16:14.460 Because to anybody who has any common sense, it is obvious that black children or white children are, they're all the same. 0.91

00:16:21.120 They're kids.

00:16:21.880 That's the whole point.

00:16:22.540 If you're not a racist, then you see all children as being the same.

00:16:25.980 And to all of those children, two plus two is four.

00:16:28.220 And they should be taught this.

00:16:29.940 It's wrong for them not to be taught it.

00:16:32.100 The idea that there shouldn't be any rote learning in maths is crazy.

00:16:35.640 You cannot learn your times tables if you're not rote learning them, right?

00:16:39.700 And I'm not saying that doesn't mean that you can't put two Ps and two Ps and do, you know, and show it in other ways.

00:16:45.820 Do all of that, fine.

00:16:47.240 But in the end, you are going to have to rote learn them.

00:16:50.640 And the thing is, once you've rote learned those timetables, it gives you access to huge amounts of maths out there.

00:16:58.220 Right?

00:16:58.780 If you never learn your times tables like that, and rote learning means they're then at your fingertips.

00:17:04.420 You can just, you know, two times two is four.

00:17:07.560 Two times three is six.

00:17:08.620 And so on.

00:17:09.140 You're just able to go boom, boom, boom quickly.

00:17:11.760 And the fact that that then becomes automatic means that you can then do more.

00:17:15.820 It's like when you are driving a car.

00:17:18.500 So when you first learn to drive a car, you're holding, you know, 10-2 and 10-past, and you're on the steering wheel, and you're looking out the rear-view mirror, and you're really frightened.

00:17:31.920 And then after a while, you find that you can do it so easily that you can have a conversation at the same time.

00:17:37.400 And that is because the skill of driving, the various skills, the things that you are doing in that moment, have become automatic to you.

00:17:45.300 When you rote learn your times tables, they become automatic to you.

00:17:49.060 And then that means that your working memory is able to hold on to more maths, and you're able to push your mathematical thinking further.

00:17:57.260 So in order to be creative with your maths and out of the box in your thinking, unless you have a knowledge base there, think of it as coat hooks in your head, where you can just hook on more knowledge each time you're being taught.

00:18:11.420 And every year you go through, you hook on more, you hook on more.

00:18:15.140 That's how you become creative in the end.

00:18:17.160 If you think about me, I'm very creative with education, right?

00:18:21.260 I'm doing things that other people don't dare do.

00:18:23.220 I'm a real radical, right?

00:18:24.600 That's why you're interviewing me.

00:18:26.860 Now, why am I so creative and out-of-the-box, out-of-box thinker with education?

00:18:32.440 Because I know education inside out.

00:18:34.080 I've been doing it for 25 years.

00:18:35.640 If you asked me to be really creative with cars, right, I wouldn't know what to do.

00:18:40.340 I don't know anything about cars.

00:18:41.640 So you give me a car, you know, you can leave that to Elon Musk.

00:18:44.400 He knows about cars.

00:18:45.280 I don't know anything about cars.

00:18:46.500 And if you asked me to be creative about, frankly, anything else, I wouldn't be able to do it.

00:18:50.360 But I can do it with education because I know it inside out.

00:18:53.600 You have to have loads of knowledge about something before you can twist it and turn it and do fascinating things with it.

00:19:00.300 And, frankly, before you can have a real opinion about it that matters.

00:19:03.200 And that's why I say to you or to your listeners that when somebody starts talking to them about what black children need, you need to ask them, how much work have you done with black children?

00:19:13.720 How much success have you had with them?

00:19:15.540 How long have you been working in that school down the road or as a social worker or something?

00:19:20.980 What have you done?

00:19:21.860 And most of the time you'll find that they're just talking heads and that actually what they're interested in is their own careers and the advancement of those careers, as opposed to dedicating an entire life to working with these children and helping them succeed.

00:19:34.820 You talked about the discipline that you bring to the school, including silent hallways.

00:19:41.360 I remember the elementary school that my children went to early on, there were discipline problems and the school wasn't functioning right.

00:19:52.100 And then there was a change in the principal or headmistress, as you would call it.

00:19:57.420 And the new principal brought in simple rules.

00:20:00.880 It wasn't as strict as what you're describing.

00:20:03.560 They didn't have to have silent hallways, but the students were told that they were expected to speak to teachers in a certain way, that as soon as you walk through the door, your ball cap came off.

00:20:14.800 There were no hats allowed in the school.

00:20:16.420 Even the UPS and FedEx drivers showing up with deliveries were told at the front door they had to take their hats off.

00:20:23.840 No gum.

00:20:25.440 And these small changes brought about dramatic improvement in the school.

00:20:31.920 Exactly.

00:20:32.880 Exactly.

00:20:33.280 So that's broken windows.

00:20:35.100 So Giuliani did the same thing in New York in turning it around.

00:20:38.160 And he turned it around by removing the graffiti off the subway cars and by making sure that everyone who got on the subway paid their fare.

00:20:48.780 And it's the same idea.

00:20:50.120 Why would it be the case that you take graffiti off the subway cars and suddenly the murder rate goes down in New York?

00:20:55.800 Why is it that you get kids to take off their baseball caps and not true gum and suddenly they're getting really great grades?

00:21:02.620 How are the two connected?

00:21:03.980 It's because of broken windows, which I'll explain.

00:21:05.960 You know, you have a house in an abandoned area.

00:21:10.700 And if all the windows stay intact, they will remain intact and they'll never get broken.

00:21:18.180 All you need to do is break one window and within a couple of days, all of the windows will be broken.

00:21:23.680 And that's because details matter.

00:21:26.200 And if you look after the small details, the bigger things will take care of themselves.

00:21:30.780 So I think people imagine that I'm the strictest headmistress in Britain and all this.

00:21:34.820 They imagine that I'm walking through the corridors with whips and chains and I get some kind of weird, you know, I have a weird fantasy about, you know, putting kids in detention or something.

00:21:44.000 When the actual fact is most of the time I'm not even out of my office.

00:21:46.540 I'm meeting with staff in my office and things.

00:21:49.500 But the fact is that people imagine it has to be this horrible place.

00:21:54.740 All of our guests, and we get 800 visitors a year here, they come and they say, oh, my goodness, the children are so happy.

00:21:59.720 They're so engaged. They're learning so much. This is amazing. How do you do it?

00:22:03.400 Well, we look after the small things, just like you said.

00:22:05.340 We have a uniform. The shirts have to be tucked in. The ties need to be at the top.

00:22:09.340 They need to be on time to school. They get homework every day.

00:22:12.300 We have high expectations of them. And, of course, they get detentions when they're naughty. 0.70

00:22:17.520 And they attend detentions every day. And that happens, you know, regularly and it's not a big deal.

00:22:23.240 And the thing is, the kids don't mind.

00:22:25.800 And they don't mind because they know they're learning a lot.

00:22:27.960 And they feel really clever in comparison to their friends who are at other schools.

00:22:31.780 And isn't that a good thing? I mean, isn't it a good thing that kids coming from poor families then know a lot and are then going to succeed? 0.98

00:22:37.120 Wouldn't we want that for all the kids as opposed to saying that math is white supremacy? 0.79

00:22:41.840 I mean, it is, you know, that that it's not just math.

00:22:46.100 I mean, that, you know, use that as an example because it's more extreme.

00:22:48.820 But the fact is, this has been happening in subjects like history and geography and English for decades.

00:22:53.860 You know, it's only more recently that it's moved into the area of science and math.

00:22:59.120 And it prevents, the saddest thing is that it ruins the lives of the very children these people say they want to help.

00:23:07.840 And I've been part of this my whole life.

00:23:10.220 And when people talk, they say, oh, my goodness, you're so passionate.

00:23:12.680 Why do you get so angry about these things?

00:23:14.120 I get angry about it because I've spent 25 years working with these kids, seeing what they're up against.

00:23:19.480 And the thing is, everybody says what they're up against is white supremacist racists.

00:23:24.360 Well, actually, the biggest thing they're up against are the progressives. 0.95

00:23:27.100 Those are the people that are ruining their lives, right?

00:23:29.940 And the progressives think they're doing them good.

00:23:32.800 And what I would say to the progressive is, look, are you actually helping these people?

00:23:38.760 Look at the outcomes of what you're doing.

00:23:41.420 Or are you making yourself feel better?

00:23:43.500 Is what you're doing making yourself feel like you're a good person?

00:23:47.400 And is that why you're doing it?

00:23:49.240 Because I can tell you, all of my teachers, they don't want to give detentions.

00:23:52.760 Nobody likes giving detentions.

00:23:54.480 I have to teach my teachers that, in fact, you are helping the kids by giving them detentions. 0.99

00:24:00.160 You're making them better and ensuring that they will have successful lives by holding your standards high and by holding the line for them.

00:24:07.280 And once teachers come to see that, they realize that the best way of being compassionate is by holding the kids to account.

00:24:15.200 But if you're on the outside and you're a politician or you're in the media or you write books or whatever, then you don't have any idea because you've never met my kids.

00:24:23.960 You've never worked on the street.

00:24:25.480 You have no idea what it is to be on the ground, you know?

00:24:28.920 And so you keep doing what you're doing and it makes you feel better about yourself.

00:24:32.160 And those of us who are on the ground, we're fighting against all the stuff, all the hardship that you cause us.

00:24:38.320 And you actually make our lives much more difficult in trying to help these kids have successful lives.

00:24:43.800 You said the claim of math being white supremacy was the most extreme, but that's gone through everything, all the subjects.

00:24:50.080 And I watched one of your speeches recently to the National Conservatism Conference in the UK.

00:24:55.520 And you talked about reading the poem If by Rudyard Kipling.

00:25:01.240 Beautiful, beautiful poem.

00:25:03.520 I think it would be banned in most schools, along with all of his other works.

00:25:09.120 Yeah, well, I do remember the Sunday Times once journalists came to the school and he heard them.

00:25:14.340 Well, I think I say this.

00:25:15.340 And he heard them talking about, you know, reciting it here.

00:25:19.620 And he said to me, Catherine, are you trying to be deliberately controversial?

00:25:23.220 And I just thought, no, Kipling is British and Kipling is a great author and we want to celebrate him.

00:25:34.340 And this particular poem speaks to what, you know, our values.

00:25:42.860 You know, we often refer to it.

00:25:43.920 So if the kids are going off for a football match or something, we always say triumph and disaster.

00:25:49.480 You know, you've got to keep your, you know, you've got to keep your head.

00:25:53.520 It doesn't matter if you win or if you lose.

00:25:55.540 It's okay.

00:25:56.880 You just got to be, you got to be calm about it.

00:25:59.220 Don't go crazy if you win.

00:26:00.560 And don't be too upset if you lose.

00:26:02.980 We refer to that all the time because, because it just has so many different pieces of wisdom in it.

00:26:10.660 And we want our children to carry those.

00:26:12.520 So, I mean, I haven't spoken that much about our values.

00:26:14.360 I always call them small C conservative.

00:26:16.140 I'm not a big C conservative.

00:26:17.960 I'm not a member of any political party.

00:26:19.640 And I would argue that many big C conservatives are not small C conservative.

00:26:24.420 Fair enough.

00:26:24.860 And I would also argue that, indeed.

00:26:27.000 And I would argue that old school lefties are also small C conservative.

00:26:31.540 It's just that many of them are now dying out because they're quite old these days.

00:26:35.560 And so, but it used to be the case that I'd say many people on the left were definitely small C conservatives.

00:26:40.920 And what is that?

00:26:42.700 It's a more social conservative.

00:26:44.800 So, you know, belief in a sense of personal responsibility.

00:26:51.940 And, you know, you're always thinking, how am I responsible?

00:26:56.660 What can I do better?

00:26:57.720 As opposed to always just blaming somebody else, you know.

00:27:01.380 We don't believe in victimhood.

00:27:04.760 You know, we don't want our children to say, well, I can't make it because I'm black.

00:27:07.580 Well, I can't make it because I'm poor.

00:27:08.980 You know, the establishment is going to be against me.

00:27:11.680 So, what's the point of getting my grades?

00:27:13.440 Well, there's a lot of point, actually, because you want to be responsible for yourself.

00:27:16.540 And there may be obstacles out there.

00:27:17.840 I'm not saying that there aren't obstacles.

00:27:19.600 But concentrating on those and encouraging children who are coming from more disadvantaged backgrounds

00:27:26.560 to concentrate on what the obstacles are in front of them instead of thinking,

00:27:31.940 how do I gain the knowledge and the skills that I need in order to make a success in my life,

00:27:36.440 whatever the obstacles may be in front of me, that is just the wrong way of going about things.

00:27:42.480 So, as I say, our kids will have obstacles in front of them.

00:27:45.260 I'm under no illusion of that.

00:27:46.780 But they're obviously much stronger and much more likely to succeed in their lives

00:27:50.580 if we've taught them properly and given them the kinds of values that mean that they will be resilient,

00:27:56.100 that they will have a sense of discipline,

00:27:58.160 that they will understand the idea of hard work.

00:28:01.740 So, our motto was, work hard, be kind.

00:28:06.500 And your listeners may notice, if they know about education,

00:28:10.640 that we sort of half stole that from KIPP, the charter school in America.

00:28:16.400 So, KIPP, their motto used to be, work hard, be nice.

00:28:20.560 The two guys who set it up in the early 90s actually had a book called,

00:28:24.480 their book about KIPP and how they set it up was called, work hard, be nice.

00:28:27.780 And that was what they wanted for all their kids.

00:28:29.900 And the idea was, if you can get kids to do at least those two things,

00:28:33.500 to work hard and to be nice people, you've succeeded.

00:28:36.240 Now, we needed it to be a little different, so we call our motto, work hard, be done, be done.

00:28:41.000 And then, most recently, since George Floyd's death,

00:28:47.560 they came under a lot of pressure in the U.S. to change their motto because it was said that

00:28:56.840 white teachers teaching black children to be nice was racist because they were being taught to be subservient.

00:29:06.860 Now, being kind or being nice is lending a pen to your friend, opening up the door,

00:29:13.900 being friendly to them when they're down, making sure they don't get bullied, that kind of thing. 0.95

00:29:19.580 The idea that this is somehow teaching children to be subservient to white people is just mad.

00:29:26.740 You know, and so KIPP had to abandon this motto.

00:29:30.000 They no longer have the motto of work hard, be nice.

00:29:32.840 And you can see it on their website.

00:29:33.980 They explain it.

00:29:34.640 And I find it really sad that a successful charter school, you know,

00:29:39.780 there's hundreds of them across America, should have been prevented from teaching black children 1.00

00:29:49.120 the two most important things, which is to work hard and be nice.

00:29:53.540 So the idea that we should only teach white children to be nice, 0.86

00:29:55.940 but we can't teach black children to be nice. 0.66

00:29:57.700 Don't we understand how racist this is?

00:29:59.540 Don't we understand that, you know, seeing this difference between children is part of the problem

00:30:04.500 when it comes to racism, that black children, of course, they should be taught how to be nice

00:30:09.020 to their friends and to their, and to strangers.

00:30:11.860 You know, we teach our children to stand up when they're in the subway and give up their,

00:30:16.140 or on the bus, give up their seats for other people.

00:30:20.180 We teach them to be kind to people.

00:30:22.160 I, you know, like in our dining hall, so all my life working in the inner city,

00:30:27.460 and I say, so always in challenging schools, when children would drop a plate in the dining hall,

00:30:35.840 what the other children would do, and as I say, this is most of my career,

00:30:40.420 what would happen is that all the other children would go,

00:30:43.140 that's what they do.

00:30:45.120 Basically humiliating the kid who's just dropped his plate,

00:30:49.100 and everybody's laughing and carrying on.

00:30:51.620 At our school, if a child drops his plate of food,

00:30:54.820 five or six children will run to help him pick it up, pick up the food.

00:30:58.600 Even, I've seen children even putting their hands into wet lasagna on the ground,

00:31:02.800 trying to pick it up just to help their, you know, one of their classmates.

00:31:06.580 And I just, I don't see why that's not a nice thing.

00:31:10.200 Why wouldn't we want that for all children?

00:31:11.980 But apparently that is to teach subservience and is therefore white supremacy.

00:31:18.660 Want to get into how to fight back against this,

00:31:21.740 because you speak extensively on that, but we have to take a quick break.

00:31:24.940 But when we come back, that's where I want to go, is how can we fight back?

00:31:29.680 Because we can't easily set up our charter school like you have,

00:31:33.480 not in Ontario anyway, in Alberta, but in much of the country it can't be done.

00:31:37.540 But that doesn't mean you can't fight back.

00:31:40.000 So we'll get to that when we come back.

00:31:45.560 Bank more encores when you switch to a Scotiabank banking package.

00:31:50.060 Learn more at scotiabank.com slash banking packages.

00:31:53.840 Conditions apply.

00:31:55.620 Scotiabank, you're richer than you think.

00:31:58.460 Catherine, in your speech to the convention a few weeks ago, or a few months ago now,

00:32:04.300 you told the story of an American father who was so upset at what his daughter was being taught in a prestigious private school.

00:32:14.780 A lot of people think, well, I just put my kids in private school and that'll solve the problem.

00:32:19.860 But he was in the most prestigious school that he could get his daughter into in New York.

00:32:25.700 And this political agenda of identity politics first, learning second, was even there.

00:32:33.660 And he tried to get other parents involved and he just couldn't.

00:32:38.260 They weren't interested.

00:32:40.720 That was my experience in pushing back against this sort of thing years ago,

00:32:44.880 trying to get other parents to realize that there was a problem.

00:32:48.380 And once you told them, oh, here's what they're doing, they'd say, oh, well, I don't like that.

00:32:51.840 Well, we should do something about it.

00:32:53.420 Oh, really?

00:32:56.140 And most just wouldn't care.

00:33:00.020 I'm at the point where if I had young children today,

00:33:03.060 I wouldn't put them in the public school system in this country.

00:33:06.520 But you say that's the wrong way to go about it, that parents should get engaged.

00:33:12.620 Why?

00:33:13.140 Why is it so important?

00:33:14.060 Well, actually, I don't say you shouldn't homeschool.

00:33:20.140 That is getting involved.

00:33:22.280 So when you homeschool, you are making an active decision to say the school system is not right.

00:33:27.980 There's something wrong with it.

00:33:29.360 And if everybody homeschooled, then actually you'd see some impact.

00:33:33.080 Something would happen.

00:33:33.940 Something would change.

00:33:35.100 So I strongly encourage people to homeschool, actually.

00:33:38.940 One, I think it's great for your kids.

00:33:40.980 I think it's great for the families.

00:33:42.320 Now, families will say they can't afford it.

00:33:44.680 And people who do homeschool will say, yes, well, you do have to take a financial hit.

00:33:48.260 But in many ways, in so many ways, it's worth it.

00:33:51.860 Now, you could do even more than that than just homeschool.

00:33:54.260 You can write letters to your local political representative.

00:34:00.840 You can write articles in the newspaper about how outrageous X, Y, and Z is and so on.

00:34:05.680 You can also speak differently about things.

00:34:08.340 And so what I mean by that is when you run into your friends at dinner parties and things and certain things are said in conversation and you know that they're wrong, speak up.

00:34:19.800 Say something.

00:34:20.880 You know, we need to make it okay to have the opinions that I suspect most of your listeners have.

00:34:25.860 And the only way we can make it okay is if all of us say what we think.

00:34:30.420 There are too many of us who think what I think and they don't say so because they're worried about losing their jobs.

00:34:37.820 They're worried about losing their friends.

00:34:39.320 And so they just keep quiet and they just do whatever they have to do to have a quiet life.

00:34:45.760 Now, the other thing is if your child is in school, let's say financially you need to do that.

00:34:49.680 I'm not saying everybody should go homeschool their kid.

00:34:51.660 I get it.

00:34:52.020 Not everybody wants to do that.

00:34:53.960 But you do need to complain to the school.

00:34:56.200 You do need to complain loudly about what's going on.

00:34:58.740 And the reason, I would just say, the underlying reason why people don't complain and why they don't care, you found this, Brian.

00:35:07.120 I mean, this guy, Andrew Guttman, who you said, you know, he went across America.

00:35:12.120 He tried to find other schools.

00:35:13.920 The people at his kid's school in New York, the parents there, they just didn't care.

00:35:19.560 And he couldn't believe it.

00:35:21.800 What I've come to realize over the many years that I've been doing this is that people care what university their child is going to.

00:35:28.740 And they care what job their child is going to get.

00:35:31.740 But if they're going to get that by sending their kid to X school, and if the X school is teaching them stuff about race and gender and all kinds of things that they don't agree with,

00:35:43.940 or not even teaching them any history and teaching them that math is white supremacy and so on, they don't really care.

00:35:50.240 As long as they can get to the best universities and get a good job.

00:35:54.080 Because that's what they think school is.

00:35:55.780 It's a kind of stepping stone to getting to a good university and getting a good job.

00:36:00.060 And I find that a lot of people don't really care if the kid doesn't know much math and doesn't know much history.

00:36:05.940 The value that used to be placed on knowledge has disappeared.

00:36:10.300 And there's something quite sad about that, that as a country, you know, Canada or Britain, we don't have any sense of pride in knowing about our own country,

00:36:23.700 knowing about the world, wanting our children to be able to get excited about forests and about the seas and about, you know, the animals.

00:36:33.060 And I'm just thinking science, but they could get excited about Shakespeare and Dickens and so on, wanting to go and see an opera, wanting to play an instrument and so on.

00:36:42.260 I mean, I could go on and on about the different things that make life interesting.

00:36:45.860 Now, I find it odd that we, as people, as adults, aren't wanting our children to know lots and to really engage with the world with that knowledge.

00:37:01.480 And parents, I would ask you all to be more interested in that.

00:37:06.600 Don't just be interested in the superficial.

00:37:08.240 I find that parents often as well, they don't just care about what university they go to and what job they get to.

00:37:15.040 They might care about getting them into a top prestigious school, but that's because they get to go to dinner parties and say,

00:37:21.260 my child goes to this school in Upper Canada College in Toronto, for instance.

00:37:28.800 They get to be able to say, my boy, he's at UCC, you know, and it's always at UCC.

00:37:33.040 He must be very smart, and you say, oh, yeah, you know, he's a chip off the old block.

00:37:38.220 Yeah, yeah, yeah, and it's also brilliant.

00:37:40.000 And meanwhile, your boy is being taught a whole lot of craziness at school, but you don't care because you get to go to dinner parties and say, yeah, your kid's at UCC.

00:37:46.880 And, you know, anytime I've tried to, people complain to me in the U.S., in Canada, in England, and my advice is always to people,

00:37:56.780 well, take your child out of the school if you don't like it.

00:37:58.860 They never do.

00:37:59.700 They never, ever take their child out of the school.

00:38:01.440 And that is because the name of the school is more important to them than their child's education.

00:38:06.680 But that's, and I get that for the people at the top, but that doesn't help lower, even middle class families that don't have those opportunities.

00:38:18.920 And you're teaching kids who come from families that would never be able to do that, would never be able to have those options.

00:38:29.440 So do you, you know, in that case, the school system, if just left to go the direction that the folks writing the Ontario curriculum would have it go, well, it would rot.

00:38:40.820 And we would just write off a whole section of the population in terms of education.

00:38:47.220 That's right.

00:38:47.780 That's right.

00:38:47.860 It's not wood rot.

00:38:48.720 It is rotting right now.

00:38:50.440 And those of us, like me, because I'm not the only one, obviously, who are fighting it, we're fighting that rot.

00:38:56.320 And we're in the middle of it.

00:38:58.320 And what is unfortunate is that the people who are fighting us, they're not in the school system.

00:39:05.440 They don't know anything.

00:39:06.860 They just, they're ruining the lives of children who they say they care about.

00:39:12.000 And, I mean, look, all any of us can do, we're only on here for a short period of time on earth.

00:39:18.820 You know, you want to be able to get to 85 and look back at your life and say, I did something.

00:39:23.040 You know, I contributed and tried to make the world into a better place.

00:39:26.780 And so my contribution is in the world of education.

00:39:29.620 That's what I'm trying to do.

00:39:31.160 And, you know, I've contributed in the sense that I've established Michaela.

00:39:35.500 Thousands of teachers have been through here.

00:39:37.740 Some from Canada.

00:39:38.860 They come over on planes to come and see us.

00:39:41.040 And your listeners will be welcome to come as well.

00:39:43.140 Not just teachers.

00:39:43.860 All kinds of people come.

00:39:45.580 And it helps to change the minds of teachers about what's possible.

00:39:51.040 What teachers always say when they see our lessons is, my goodness, I can't believe how much the kids know.

00:39:55.220 And how excited they are about learning.

00:39:56.840 And how resilient they are.

00:39:58.140 And how ambitious and determined they are.

00:40:00.640 You know, it can be done.

00:40:02.220 It's just that you need a more traditional approach.

00:40:04.640 And the more progressive approach, it might make us feel better about each other.

00:40:08.600 And make us feel like we're compassionate people.

00:40:10.900 But we're not actually helping anybody.

00:40:12.620 So that's the key thing that we all need to kind of understand.

00:40:16.280 And once we get that, then we can change lives.

00:40:19.940 And you see this, you know, like we play a film for the kids or a reward event called Coach Carter.

00:40:30.240 And it has Samuel L. Jackson in it.

00:40:32.560 He plays a basketball coach with these kids in the inner city.

00:40:37.220 And, you know, if you want to hear my understanding of things, like watch Coach Carter.

00:40:41.480 Because he and I, Samuel Jackson's character in that, and I are exactly the same.

00:40:45.720 You know, he takes these boys and he makes them work, you know.

00:40:51.720 And when all they want to do is play basketball, he says, no, you're going to get the grades.

00:40:56.240 And you're going to work for it.

00:40:57.340 And if you're not going to work for it, his job is on the line.

00:41:00.020 And everybody's fighting him.

00:41:01.200 The parents are fighting him.

00:41:02.300 The school board is fighting him.

00:41:03.920 And the reason why everybody's fighting him is because there's nothing in it for them.

00:41:07.960 They don't actually care about those kids.

00:41:09.680 They just care about what it looks like for them.

00:41:12.180 That's all they care about.

00:41:13.240 He actually cares about those boys and wants them to succeed.

00:41:16.820 And there are people like him all over the world trying to do that.

00:41:21.580 And we're all very similar, you know.

00:41:23.780 And our enemies are very similar.

00:41:25.520 You know, I have given talks in New Zealand and Australia and in the U.S.

00:41:31.980 and all over Britain at various different schools and so on.

00:41:36.800 Everywhere I go, it's the same problem, okay.

00:41:39.680 Everywhere I go, it's the same issues and the same madness that we're all fighting, right.

00:41:45.340 And it doesn't matter where you are.

00:41:46.920 Like I went to Spain last year.

00:41:48.380 It was the same issues there.

00:41:49.360 It's the same everywhere.

00:41:50.120 It doesn't matter what language.

00:41:51.280 I was in Sweden recently.

00:41:53.780 Same issues, right.

00:41:54.840 I tell you, it doesn't matter where you are.

00:41:58.460 We're all fighting the same craziness that is against common sense.

00:42:05.160 And how do you fight back?

00:42:07.320 Well, I get stronger.

00:42:09.220 Like I have a number of Twitter followers, for instance.

00:42:11.540 And they come out and fight for me sometimes.

00:42:14.160 And that helps me.

00:42:15.640 So there are those of us who are kind of louder, like me and the Coach Carter types.

00:42:20.880 And we are out there fighting the battle.

00:42:23.600 And if there are a number of just normal, ordinary people out there saying the same things at their dinner parties and at their swim clubs and so on.

00:42:31.800 And if they're on social media saying this stuff and we're growing and growing in number, rather than us all being cowed into being quiet because we're worried about being seen to be a bad person.

00:42:44.620 If we all stand up for what's right and speak out, we might be able to turn things around because things are only going in one direction at the moment.

00:42:54.080 And five years ago, life now is unrecognizable.

00:42:57.820 If somebody who had died five years ago came back to life now, this is just five years I'm talking, they would be in shock at what 2023 looks like in comparison to 2018.

00:43:08.360 When I think about when we set up the school in 2014, the Western world was very different in 2014 to the way it is now.

00:43:14.940 So we have to fight.

00:43:17.920 We have to.

00:43:18.940 Because otherwise the world that we know and have known, it's going to disappear.

00:43:23.020 Remember, and the kids who are coming through the school system, remember, children are the future, right?

00:43:28.500 They are the ones that are going to be carrying this later.

00:43:31.120 We will be dead.

00:43:32.260 And if we care about our countries, we've got to fight for it.

00:43:35.820 And that just means speaking up.

00:43:37.700 That means saying something about your child's education, saying something to the teachers, saying something to your friends, and not keeping your mouth shut when everybody says something that you know is wrong.

00:43:46.720 Last year, we had a teacher in Oakville, and this made international headlines.

00:43:52.100 You may have heard about it.

00:43:53.680 I did.

00:43:54.780 Well, that teacher who made all kinds of claims about why he had to dress with giant prosthetic breasts and a blonde wig is now teaching in Hamilton, Ontario.

00:44:06.440 Dressed as a man.

00:44:07.540 Completely punked the school system.

00:44:10.240 And people did speak up, though.

00:44:11.700 But the school system was too afraid that the board administrators and the trustees to actually do anything.

00:44:20.620 That's true. 0.99

00:44:21.660 But the thing is, what I would say is that one guy with silly breasts, I mean, yes, it's outrageous and ridiculous, and I agree with your position on that. 1.00

00:44:30.380 But he's just one guy. 1.00

00:44:32.520 The school system is on fire. 1.00

00:44:34.200 So the fact that we're all squabbling over some stupid guy is like rearranging the chairs on the Titanic while the whole boat is going down, right? 1.00

00:44:42.860 So parents notice that one guy, and it's absolutely right to be critical of him. 0.99

00:44:47.000 I'm not saying that's not right, and I totally agree with the people who are critical of him.

00:44:51.020 But I'm trying to say that the stuff that I'm talking about, child-centered learning, adults no longer being the authority in the classroom or the authority at home,

00:45:00.160 feeling bad about punishing your children, there should be punishments and there should be praise.

00:45:06.680 Children react to both of them well.

00:45:08.700 And that's how you raise a child, both in the school and in the home.

00:45:12.980 All of these ideas that used to be normal in 1953 in 2023 are totally abnormal.

00:45:19.880 I tweeted the other day about doing an hour's worth of homework every night.

00:45:23.720 The world went crazy.

00:45:25.160 I just saw this morning, three million views for this tweet.

00:45:28.240 I mean, I'm like, because it was so outrageous.

00:45:31.060 People are so outraged, and this is both on the left and the right, politically,

00:45:34.780 who are outraged at the idea of their child doing an hour's worth of homework every evening.

00:45:39.340 Now, they don't understand.

00:45:41.280 There's loads of right-wingers there, because they're not progressive, who are saying this. 0.96

00:45:46.480 And what they don't get is their position on not doing any homework is why that guy is in that school with his breasts. 0.62

00:45:55.040 They don't get the connection.

00:45:57.100 They don't get that when the adults are no longer in authority, when we're not trying to get the most out of kids and pushing them and expecting them to do homework and expecting them to drill things and to rote-learn some things.

00:46:07.080 Obviously, you're not rote-learning everything.

00:46:08.560 You might rote-learn historical dates and French verbs and times tables, but you wouldn't rote-learn Macbeth because that would be really weird.

00:46:16.040 Obviously, you pick and choose what you need to rote-learn according to what you're learning, right?

00:46:21.540 Now, the fact that we are fighting all of those things that used to be normal, that has completely undermined the normal basis for learning and for structure.

00:46:31.280 The child knows less than the parent.

00:46:33.340 The child knows less than the teacher.

00:46:35.160 And the adult is meant to be an authority leading the way for the child.

00:46:38.920 Once you've lost that, then you have chaos.

00:46:42.540 And so that guy in Hamilton is just an example of the chaos that is everywhere. 0.94

00:46:48.440 It's just that the parents have only reacted now at this last 11th hour when it's obvious that there is chaos because of this guy with his breasts. 0.60

00:46:57.540 And everybody goes, ooh, look at that. 0.88

00:46:59.780 Look, I mean, yes, I looked at that and thought, what on earth?

00:47:02.580 Yes.

00:47:03.180 But I've been saying this for decades, right?

00:47:05.660 I've been saying, this is where we're going to end up.

00:47:08.340 This is going to be the final stage.

00:47:10.000 We're now at the final stage.

00:47:11.400 We're at the 11th hour.

00:47:12.580 Can everybody look at that and then think, oh, but it's not just about stopping him.

00:47:17.000 He isn't the problem.

00:47:18.360 He's just a symptom of the problem.

00:47:19.980 All these things that I've been talking about over the last hour are the problem.

00:47:23.760 Does that make sense?

00:47:24.300 It absolutely does.

00:47:25.320 And so I encourage everyone to listen to you, Catherine.

00:47:27.820 And if not, well, detention.

00:47:30.920 Thanks.

00:47:31.360 Thanks so much for the time today.

00:47:33.320 It's been wonderful.

00:47:34.880 Thank you for having me.

00:47:36.040 All right.

00:47:36.340 Full Comment is a post-media podcast.

00:47:38.560 My name is Brian Lilly, your host.

00:47:40.060 This episode was produced by Andre Pru with theme music by Bryce Hall.

00:47:44.140 Kevin Libin is the executive producer.

00:47:46.420 Again, remember, you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, Amazon, what have you.

00:47:51.180 Help us out by giving us a rating or leaving a review and telling your friends about us.

00:47:56.160 Thanks for listening.

00:47:56.980 Until next time, I'm Brian Lilly.

00:48:01.360 Bye.

00:48:04.160 Bye.

00:48:08.100 Bye.

00:48:12.400 Bye.

Full Comment - December 25, 2023

Best of 2023： England’s ‘strictest headmistress’ on how old-school education saves kids

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