When I look back over the myriad of topics and guests that we had here on Full Comment Podcast over the last year, it really does look like a fascinating year of discussions. We ve had two premiers, the leader of the opposition, the prime minister, the head of the education board, big American political celebrities, Ben Shapiro, former cabinet ministers, ambassadors, people at the heart and centre of stories that were shaping the news, one of the issues that kept coming up was the issue of education. How are our school boards run? What are our kids being taught in the classroom? Can you reject wokeness and still be a teacher? One of our guests found out the answer is no. And that was the episode we brought to you with Catherine Burbleson, who now runs an inner-city school in London, England.
00:04:53.100Our corridors are silent because, well, we're in the inner city.
00:04:56.560Therefore, we have quite a challenging intake.
00:04:58.660And 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.
00:05:13.000And 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.
00:05:25.180You end up with their heads being smashed against the walls.
00:05:28.160I mean, it can be quite horrible, you know.
00:05:30.480So that's why we have silent corridors and they walk in single file very quickly to their lessons.
00:05:35.260We have the desks in rows in an old fashioned way.
00:05:38.600And 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.
00:05:49.040And that would be what would be called child centered learning instead of teacher led learning, which is what we do.
00:05:54.360And then I'd say our values are very traditional.
00:05:56.200We believe in personal responsibility, a sense of duty towards others, an idea of self-sacrifice.
00:06:07.920So 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.
00:06:25.340Now, that doesn't mean, you know, I recognize that some of our kids might become dentists, but some of them might become revolutionary radicals.
00:06:34.840You 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.
00:06:44.200We 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.
00:07:00.960You cannot think independently about something unless you know lots about it.
00:07:05.980And I think it's our role as teachers to teach children, really, and to teach them lots.
00:07:10.560And sadly, I'd say in 2023, there isn't much teaching that goes on in schools.
00:07:14.800I'd say that's across the Western world.
00:07:16.820Well, that interesting part where you've got to know a lot about something to engage in critical thinking.
00:07:24.260I appreciate that because quite often what you hear is people don't actually know an awful lot about the subject.
00:07:32.760But 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.
00:07:43.600Exactly. And the thing is, school is about giving children a basic knowledge about things.
00:07:51.960So I expect our children to leave with a basic knowledge of math and English and history and geography and science.
00:07:59.440And then, of course, they'll go off and specialize later.
00:08:01.640And, of course, at university, they might do a whole variety of things that you wouldn't necessarily specialize in at secondary school.
00:08:08.660But in order for them to learn anything in the first place, they need to be behaving themselves.
00:08:12.220They need to be interested. They need to be putting their hands up and being excited about learning.
00:08:18.320And 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.
00:08:27.500No, it needs to be ordered. You need to think very carefully about cognitive science, how the brain learns, how children are motivated.
00:08:34.980And, 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.
00:08:44.300So 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.
00:09:01.220You 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.
00:09:09.500So 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.
00:09:18.060And 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.
00:09:30.820In fact, for our families, very, very few of the families we have here would ever be able to do that.
00:09:36.480The 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.
00:09:45.180And what people don't get is you need to restrict the freedom of children when they're younger.
00:09:52.040You don't say do whatever you want, because if you say that, well, they'll just sit on video games all day.
00:09:59.180So 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.
00:10:11.180Obviously, they're not going to do that. So we restrict their freedom now so that later they can be truly free.
00:10:18.340The 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.
00:10:24.140Do whatever you like. And then later, we're going to remove your freedom of speech.
00:10:28.180We're going to remove various freedoms that you think you ought to have.
00:10:30.860But it's the other way around. Kids shouldn't have that much freedom. Adults should have a lot more freedom.
00:10:36.560And 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,
00:10:47.920then you have a bunch of adults who are truly free to understand what is happening around them in the world.
00:10:54.020Because 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.
00:11:03.580However clever you are, however talented you are.
00:11:07.220And 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.
00:11:17.180They think to themselves wrongly that everyone's just as clever as they are. And that's not true.
00:11:22.240There's a whole variety of children out there. And there are some children who are going to go to Oxford and Cambridge.
00:11:27.140And 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.
00:11:34.340But they deserve to know that stuff. And if we're not teaching them properly, those kids simply won't learn it.
00:11:40.440And I know in Britain, we have, you know, around about 20% of children are leaving school, functionally illiterate and functionally innumerate.
00:11:49.100In Canada, you know, for those poorer children, you will find a similar situation.
00:11:56.060So I'm talking about the children where the families cannot make up for the deficits of the school.
00:12:02.000And I think sometimes we can be somewhat dishonest with ourselves, especially those of us who are more middle class.
00:12:07.880Because then we say, oh, isn't it wonderful? The school system is just wonderful.
00:12:11.000Meanwhile, we are hiring tutors in the background to make sure that our children are one step ahead.
00:12:16.000We are doing the right things by our kids. I'm not criticizing people for hiring tutors.
00:12:20.660Well done, you. You care about your kids.
00:12:22.960But 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.
00:12:35.320Their parents don't realize that there are even options.
00:12:38.100You know, they just they give their kids to school and imagine that the school is going to do right by them.
00:12:42.460And 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.
00:12:52.020And I'd say that the schools are letting the kids down.
00:12:56.080We have had never ending debates, it seems, on the basics of education here in Canada.
00:13:03.300And I'll speak primarily from Ontario because that's where I live.
00:13:07.800That's the school system that I went through.
00:13:22.460And 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.
00:13:33.560And 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.
00:13:48.080And that's how deep the identity politics have gotten, that inside the math curriculum, math is a tool of white supremacy.
00:13:58.700And 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.
00:14:41.840Black children need to learn that two plus two is four just as well as white kids do.
00:14:46.600And 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.
00:14:51.800And 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.
00:15:03.300So there are some people, some of them are just white privileged people who feel guilty.
00:15:08.260Some 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.
00:15:20.700You 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.
00:15:26.460You know, I'd like them to come and join me in the inner city.
00:15:28.660What 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?
00:15:35.440Because 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.
00:15:43.520So my position is always, look, you can criticize me, but look at what I've done for these kids.
00:15:50.760And 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,
00:15:58.720and that those children are now experts at math and English and geography and history and so on,
00:16:03.620and that they get great grades and they go off to the top universities, if they can do that, then listen to them.
00:16:09.480But if they can't do that, then you need to question their motives in them speaking like this.
00:16:14.460Because to anybody who has any common sense, it is obvious that black children or white children are, they're all the same.
00:17:18.500So 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.
00:17:31.920And then after a while, you find that you can do it so easily that you can have a conversation at the same time.
00:17:37.400And that is because the skill of driving, the various skills, the things that you are doing in that moment, have become automatic to you.
00:17:45.300When you rote learn your times tables, they become automatic to you.
00:17:49.060And 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.
00:17:57.260So 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.
00:18:11.420And every year you go through, you hook on more, you hook on more.
00:18:15.140That's how you become creative in the end.
00:18:17.160If you think about me, I'm very creative with education, right?
00:18:21.260I'm doing things that other people don't dare do.
00:18:46.500And if you asked me to be creative about, frankly, anything else, I wouldn't be able to do it.
00:18:50.360But I can do it with education because I know it inside out.
00:18:53.600You have to have loads of knowledge about something before you can twist it and turn it and do fascinating things with it.
00:19:00.300And, frankly, before you can have a real opinion about it that matters.
00:19:03.200And 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?
00:19:13.720How much success have you had with them?
00:19:15.540How long have you been working in that school down the road or as a social worker or something?
00:19:21.860And 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.
00:19:34.820You talked about the discipline that you bring to the school, including silent hallways.
00:19:41.360I remember the elementary school that my children went to early on, there were discipline problems and the school wasn't functioning right.
00:19:52.100And then there was a change in the principal or headmistress, as you would call it.
00:19:57.420And the new principal brought in simple rules.
00:20:00.880It wasn't as strict as what you're describing.
00:20:03.560They 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.
00:20:14.800There were no hats allowed in the school.
00:20:16.420Even the UPS and FedEx drivers showing up with deliveries were told at the front door they had to take their hats off.
00:20:35.100So Giuliani did the same thing in New York in turning it around.
00:20:38.160And 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.
00:21:26.200And if you look after the small details, the bigger things will take care of themselves.
00:21:30.780So I think people imagine that I'm the strictest headmistress in Britain and all this.
00:21:34.820They 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.
00:21:44.000When the actual fact is most of the time I'm not even out of my office.
00:21:46.540I'm meeting with staff in my office and things.
00:21:49.500But the fact is that people imagine it has to be this horrible place.
00:21:54.740All of our guests, and we get 800 visitors a year here, they come and they say, oh, my goodness, the children are so happy.
00:21:59.720They're so engaged. They're learning so much. This is amazing. How do you do it?
00:22:03.400Well, we look after the small things, just like you said.
00:22:05.340We have a uniform. The shirts have to be tucked in. The ties need to be at the top.
00:22:09.340They need to be on time to school. They get homework every day.
00:22:12.300We have high expectations of them. And, of course, they get detentions when they're naughty.
00:22:17.520And they attend detentions every day. And that happens, you know, regularly and it's not a big deal.
00:22:23.240And the thing is, the kids don't mind.
00:22:25.800And they don't mind because they know they're learning a lot.
00:22:27.960And they feel really clever in comparison to their friends who are at other schools.
00:22:31.780And 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?
00:22:37.120Wouldn't we want that for all the kids as opposed to saying that math is white supremacy?
00:22:41.840I mean, it is, you know, that that it's not just math.
00:22:46.100I mean, that, you know, use that as an example because it's more extreme.
00:22:48.820But the fact is, this has been happening in subjects like history and geography and English for decades.
00:22:53.860You know, it's only more recently that it's moved into the area of science and math.
00:22:59.120And it prevents, the saddest thing is that it ruins the lives of the very children these people say they want to help.
00:23:07.840And I've been part of this my whole life.
00:23:10.220And when people talk, they say, oh, my goodness, you're so passionate.
00:23:12.680Why do you get so angry about these things?
00:23:14.120I get angry about it because I've spent 25 years working with these kids, seeing what they're up against.
00:23:19.480And the thing is, everybody says what they're up against is white supremacist racists.
00:23:24.360Well, actually, the biggest thing they're up against are the progressives.
00:23:27.100Those are the people that are ruining their lives, right?
00:23:29.940And the progressives think they're doing them good.
00:23:32.800And what I would say to the progressive is, look, are you actually helping these people?
00:23:38.760Look at the outcomes of what you're doing.
00:23:41.420Or are you making yourself feel better?
00:23:43.500Is what you're doing making yourself feel like you're a good person?
00:23:54.480I have to teach my teachers that, in fact, you are helping the kids by giving them detentions.
00:24:00.160You're making them better and ensuring that they will have successful lives by holding your standards high and by holding the line for them.
00:24:07.280And once teachers come to see that, they realize that the best way of being compassionate is by holding the kids to account.
00:24:15.200But 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.
00:33:42.320Now, families will say they can't afford it.
00:33:44.680And people who do homeschool will say, yes, well, you do have to take a financial hit.
00:33:48.260But in many ways, in so many ways, it's worth it.
00:33:51.860Now, you could do even more than that than just homeschool.
00:33:54.260You can write letters to your local political representative.
00:34:00.840You can write articles in the newspaper about how outrageous X, Y, and Z is and so on.
00:34:05.680You can also speak differently about things.
00:34:08.340And 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.
00:35:21.800What 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.
00:35:28.740And they care what job their child is going to get.
00:35:31.740But 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,
00:35:43.940or not even teaching them any history and teaching them that math is white supremacy and so on, they don't really care.
00:35:50.240As long as they can get to the best universities and get a good job.
00:35:54.080Because that's what they think school is.
00:35:55.780It's a kind of stepping stone to getting to a good university and getting a good job.
00:36:00.060And 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.
00:36:05.940The value that used to be placed on knowledge has disappeared.
00:36:10.300And 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,
00:36:23.700knowing about the world, wanting our children to be able to get excited about forests and about the seas and about, you know, the animals.
00:36:33.060And 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.
00:36:42.260I mean, I could go on and on about the different things that make life interesting.
00:36:45.860Now, 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.
00:37:01.480And parents, I would ask you all to be more interested in that.
00:37:06.600Don't just be interested in the superficial.
00:37:08.240I find that parents often as well, they don't just care about what university they go to and what job they get to.
00:37:15.040They might care about getting them into a top prestigious school, but that's because they get to go to dinner parties and say,
00:37:21.260my child goes to this school in Upper Canada College in Toronto, for instance.
00:37:28.800They get to be able to say, my boy, he's at UCC, you know, and it's always at UCC.
00:37:33.040He must be very smart, and you say, oh, yeah, you know, he's a chip off the old block.
00:37:38.220Yeah, yeah, yeah, and it's also brilliant.
00:37:40.000And 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.
00:37:46.880And, 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,
00:37:56.780well, take your child out of the school if you don't like it.
00:37:59.700They never, ever take their child out of the school.
00:38:01.440And that is because the name of the school is more important to them than their child's education.
00:38:06.680But 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.
00:38:18.920And you're teaching kids who come from families that would never be able to do that, would never be able to have those options.
00:38:29.440So 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.
00:38:40.820And we would just write off a whole section of the population in terms of education.
00:42:15.640So there are those of us who are kind of louder, like me and the Coach Carter types.
00:42:20.880And we are out there fighting the battle.
00:42:23.600And 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.
00:42:31.800And 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.
00:42:44.620If 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.
00:42:54.080And five years ago, life now is unrecognizable.
00:42:57.820If 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.
00:43:08.360When 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.
00:43:37.700That 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.
00:43:46.720Last year, we had a teacher in Oakville, and this made international headlines.
00:43:54.780Well, 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.
00:44:21.660But 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.
00:44:34.200So 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?
00:44:42.860So parents notice that one guy, and it's absolutely right to be critical of him.
00:44:47.000I'm not saying that's not right, and I totally agree with the people who are critical of him.
00:44:51.020But 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,
00:45:00.160feeling bad about punishing your children, there should be punishments and there should be praise.
00:45:57.100They 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.
00:46:07.080Obviously, you're not rote-learning everything.
00:46:08.560You might rote-learn historical dates and French verbs and times tables, but you wouldn't rote-learn Macbeth because that would be really weird.
00:46:16.040Obviously, you pick and choose what you need to rote-learn according to what you're learning, right?
00:46:21.540Now, 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.
00:46:33.340The child knows less than the teacher.
00:46:35.160And the adult is meant to be an authority leading the way for the child.
00:46:38.920Once you've lost that, then you have chaos.
00:46:42.540And so that guy in Hamilton is just an example of the chaos that is everywhere.
00:46:48.440It'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.
00:46:57.540And everybody goes, ooh, look at that.
00:46:59.780Look, I mean, yes, I looked at that and thought, what on earth?