In this episode, I interview Dr Erik Lidstrom, author of Education Unchanged, about the state of education in Sweden, the knowledge problem, and the pitfalls of centralizing education. We also discuss why I think there are reasons to be optimistic about Scandinavia and Sweden at the moment.
00:00:00.000Hello and welcome to this interview. I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Erik Lidstrom, the author of Education Unchanged, and we spoke about several matters such as evolutionary psychology, the knowledge problem, and the pitfalls of centralizing education. Please enjoy.
00:00:16.980Right. So first of all, let me just start by asking you, what's going on in Sweden at the moment? Because we are listening to news that say that there are several bombings in the country.
00:00:30.300It's not good. At the moment, I don't see any hope for improvements either. It's sort of the perfect storm.
00:00:43.440As you may know, there's a bombing a day and there's people being shot here and there. And it's a combination of, I would say, the world's silliest legal system introduced in the 1960s.
00:01:03.040So if you murder someone when you're 17 or 15 or so, then you get at maximum four years of closed youth care that might not even be an enclosed prison for you because you're a child.
00:01:23.700You have to, it's an illness to commit a crime. So you have to be, you have to be, you have to be, people have to be nice to you and then you'll be good again because you're only a child.
00:01:36.100If you're under 15, nothing at all happens basically. And so a crime here, a brutal rape could give you two years of that compared to 30 years in prison in France.
00:01:48.320That's the, and that was introduced in the 60s. And then we have the welfare state so that people are, if they have lots of children and don't work, they get essentially more money than if they, they worked.
00:02:03.240And then mass migration, mass immigration. And you combine those, then, then you get, you get what you get.
00:02:15.080It looks like this is basically late stage statism where people are incentivized to not work. And those who do work are disrespected because they are somehow forced in order to procure welfare for those who are unproductive and sometimes downright.
00:02:34.560In a sense, in a sense. But if you compare it to France, France, the French have a rather cynical view of human nature. They, they don't trust people.
00:02:45.720Whilst in Sweden, the official dogma is that everyone is nice, basically. And you can't be harsh, too harsh on them.
00:02:54.280After all, and I use square quotes, they are small brown people. And then they are treated like children, even though they are mass murderers.
00:03:04.640I'm not going to lie. I remember some years ago, I was reading a newspaper about Scandinavia and prisons, especially. And they were showing prisons in Scandinavia. And they showed the images that would remind people of really luxurious hotels.
00:03:28.260No, no, the prison from this article from 2014. Sweden had the most expensive prisons in Europe per prisoner, except for San Marino. But San Marino only had one prisoner six. So it's a six times the average in Sweden.
00:03:44.260In Sweden. And we have extremely low incarceration rate. And if you look at data from 2004, I think it was, you have, we have three times the criminality of the United States, for example.
00:03:59.260But, and now after that, a million, million and a half immigrants have arrived from culturally incompatible nations, to a large degree.
00:04:11.260Do you think that there are any reasons to be optimistic at the moment about Scandinavia and Sweden in particular?
00:04:18.260I think you can be optimistic about Denmark and Finland. Finland, the Finns don't go for this being nice to people approach. And the Danes have really woken up.
00:04:32.260In Sweden, there is, it's hopeless at the moment. There is no party in parliament that can do anything about it. And there's no party that can get into parliament either.
00:04:45.260I've heard you discuss on the Lotus Eater's proportional representation. But the most right wing you get then is Sunak, I would say. Mainly you have 80% Lib Dems and Labour. That's what you get in parliament. And no one else can get into.
00:05:06.260So the question to ask there is what has to happen for people of that persuasion to, in a sense, wake up.
00:05:15.260How more tragic events must happen for people to stop being so, let's say, ridiculously charitable about this?
00:05:27.260I mean, it's, it reminds me of Trump derangement syndrome, that people are, even though all the information in the world is available today, we have the internet, you can get to all the sources, you can watch any person live or what they said in an interview or read about them. But people don't.
00:05:54.260So, you have, you're supposed to have multiculturalism in Sweden. But it's like in Britain, you have enclaves of people living, they, and they, they, they live sort of back to back to each other, they don't interact.
00:06:12.260Maybe those who work, you see them as bus drivers and nurses and so on and so forth. But people don't socialize after work. There's no reason for it. And I mean, there is this mathematical formula, I think, Schelling's law of segregation. I don't know if you've heard of that.
00:06:35.260No, I will, if you don't mind, I'll type it. You said Schelling, I think S-C-H, Schelling. But basically, it says that you get segregation, even though you don't need to have racism or hatred for each other.
00:06:55.260It's just that you have a bit of friction, sort of people don't get along. It's maybe their kids are too loud, or it doesn't smell right, they're cooking or something like that.
00:07:04.140So people, one person after another, when they move, because people move, they move to an area where they feel more comfortable.
00:07:14.220So even though there is no serious animosity, you get segregation.
00:07:20.700So you get islands in Britain, Pakistanis here, you get Somalis, and you get Sunni Arabs in one area, and so on and so forth.
00:07:35.780So the people, those in power, it's like in Britain, I would say, those in power are a bit wealthier, they live in nice neighborhoods, they are not affected.
00:09:24.020And would you say that this suggests that there is a more or less fixed human nature that the sort of narrative that destroys Europe and the West at the moment is trying to tell us does not exist?
00:09:39.520In other words, would you say, for instance, that the law of segregation that you mentioned is something that is supposed to be an inevitable outcome of human interaction?
00:09:50.720I would say, yeah, sort of formulate my thoughts.
00:09:58.140Because I think this Thomas Sowell's vision of the anointed, the anointed class, I think Deirdre McCloskey calls them the clerisy.
00:10:09.760They form a tribe of their own, which is close to the outside, and they're happy.
00:10:16.680They go to the same dinner parties, and they speak to the same people, read the same newspapers in Britain.
00:10:22.540They watch the BBC, and they're happy.
00:13:50.620So I regularly see several socialist or socialist-leaning people who upload articles about Scandinavian.
00:14:02.700They say that the Scandinavian countries are the model of social democrat countries and that they are the happiest countries to be alive.
00:14:12.980Now, generally speaking, I'm not a doomer and I don't want to advocate gloom or something.
00:14:19.180But would you say that this is far-fetched and that this is a sort of narrative that they are communicating in order to hide the sad realities that exist?
00:17:24.600But it seems to me that there is far more into the tradition.
00:17:28.480And you are actually making a very good job at describing this about in your books.
00:17:35.940And you're referring to anthropology and also to evolutionary psychology.
00:17:40.820And you also mentioned that they are very much influenced by the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment, particularly the ideas of David Hume and Adam Smith and people who follow that tradition, such as Hayek and Sowell in the 20th century.
00:17:58.700So I think the best way to start is to talk about these theories and then talk about the knowledge problem, which I think forms the, let's say, the cornerstone of the argument of your book.
00:18:13.020And then start going to more specific areas about education and educational reform and what you think the government does particularly bad when it comes to education.
00:18:26.860So what do you think are the basic insights you are drawing from anthropology and evolutionary psychology?
00:18:39.600Well, first of all, that we are a biological being.
00:19:38.120One of the strongest indicators of someone is foreign is an accent, which you can't fake.
00:19:45.240And probably fashion is also a way of distinguishing people, groups from each other.
00:19:51.860So we think that we see infinite variety, whilst at the same time we have a language that is designed to evolve away from other groups, so that we have our own lingo, and so on and so forth.
00:20:03.860And so, any study of human behavior should really, if it's possible, we should ground it in evolutionary psychology, evolutionary biology.
00:20:17.240That's, I think that's, I think that's, that should be the base, base assumption.
00:20:23.580And then, but then there are things that are different in the book.
00:20:31.860I don't know if you've read anything about what I sent you.
00:20:34.060But there is also, we live in a different world today.
00:20:39.980We live in what Abdon Smith called the great society, which is a complex adaptive system where people interact with people they don't know.
00:20:50.980And there's a quote by, I have a jar of diamonds said that with the rise of, if I remember correctly, with agricultural societies 8,500 years ago, for the first time in history, we had to meet foreign people without trying to kill them, which was the default for 2 million years of human existence.
00:21:14.060So, it's, our world is very strange, and our gut reactions to certain problems are not, not what they should be in the, in the market economy.
00:21:33.280I mean that we can accept that we can trade, buy and sell things when it comes to bicycles or cameras or computers and so on.
00:21:41.980But as soon as we come to human beings, and especially vulnerable human beings, we have an obligation, a tribal obligation to help those in need.
00:21:55.120So, on the one hand, people will want to pitch in.
00:21:58.760On the other hand, they want everyone to do something about it.
00:22:02.300So, then we get, the worst performing areas of human society are probably healthcare, care for the elderly, other vulnerable people.
00:22:14.300With regard to education, we also have a deep desire for social conformity.
00:22:21.840And that's what I'm arguing in the book, that to a large degree, education has become a tribal ritual that you have to go through.
00:22:55.920And that's a serious issue for understanding the problem of education correctly.
00:23:02.980I don't know if I make myself understood clearly, because it's a very complicated area.
00:23:09.380Yes, I think it's good if we take each of these insights into isolation, because I think that they're really rich, and I want our audience to appreciate it.
00:23:22.380So, we have so many years of evolution, so many two million years, as you mentioned.
00:23:30.660And for the most part of that, we are sort of habituated by being, by the universe, into living in hunter-gatherer societies.
00:24:22.100So, and suddenly, with, you would say, ingenuity and technology, the world has been transformed much faster than our nature has been allowed to adapt to it.
00:24:40.100I think what I see in philosophy, which I think in many ways is very much different to evolutionary psychology, we do see a kind of clash between what is called our habitual nature and our rational nature.
00:25:12.340So, he wasn't someone who would say, well, if reason tells us something should be done, it can be immediately done, and there is no bad implication that it may come out of it.
00:25:27.180So, I think that this is something that, actually, we may be a bit more habitual, as you may be implying, I think, and that we have been habituated so much into conditions, but for millions of years, that now have changed rapidly.
00:25:46.740And they also seem to change rapidly, even in the last 10,000 years.
00:25:57.220That we sort of, there's an evolutionary lag.
00:26:00.560There are certain things like the internet and social media and so on that are really, truly novel phenomena, I think you could say.
00:26:11.820But technology as such, making a stone axe or a fishing net or a cathedral, they are not that different.
00:26:23.680What is different is that we interact in the market with people we don't know.
00:26:28.880And our prosperity requires that we set aside our intuitive desires and just treat certain aspects as just like things, just like money.
00:26:46.660And that's possible when it comes to hard objects, but it's not possible when it comes to people.
00:26:52.460So, if you want good health care, government should not be involved.
00:27:00.800We should let people interact freely between themselves.
00:27:04.720But our instincts tell us that we must do something together and that it is sinful and it's really despicable to charge money from a patient, for example.
00:27:17.820Because that is your obligation is to help them.
00:27:22.900But if you try to do that, the whole market economy breaks down.
00:27:27.300It works for 20 people, but it doesn't work for 50 million.
00:28:16.560So I think one of the implications from this view is that there are several moral views that are particularly opposed to the kind of distinct layers of society that, for instance, human Smith are talking about.
00:28:40.900That may, that lead to deviations from this.
00:28:46.480And let me, let me rephrase it because I expressed this in a very abstract way.
00:28:50.840As you said, Smith said, we're living in great society.
00:28:57.360And I think that he wrote a book called The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which I think is a very important book to understand before someone reads The Wealth of Nations.
00:30:21.440And that's likely to cause feuds and cause vendettas.
00:30:26.860And there are all sorts of problems that can be solved by more impersonal institutions when we are talking about distinct neighborhoods that must coexist together under a common umbrella.
00:30:41.300Do you think that this is sort of a way of shooting?
00:30:44.600Yeah, I think this is an area where we solve the problem or we solve the problem as far as it could be solved by, if you read Homicide by Mark Wilson and Daly, for example.
00:31:01.220It's a book on abortion psychology, but it's also Stephen Pinkett's book on the better angels of our future talks about this.
00:31:12.840But there is a distinct problem in how to gather a society in that you are often faced with this problem that you need to get justice, but you have to sort it out yourself.
00:31:29.440And that can require revenge killings that go on, feuds that go on forever.
00:31:36.880And it is in Papua New Guinea, they say when the Australians came in there and finally put an end to it, they were delighted because suddenly you could go out in the morning out of the hut and go and have a pee.
00:31:57.860Without fearing having an arrow through your body as soon as you stepped out of your hut, which was the standard, what they were living in for millions of years, tens of thousands of years.
00:32:09.760So that part of it, that part of it, that the king's peace has externalized, because if there's an obligation, the whole society, the whole clan has to get together to try to kill someone else to get justice.
00:32:27.940And this is hazardous, and this is hazardous, and if you can find a third party that can be trusted to deal with this, that's fine.
00:32:38.260And with regard to policing, that part wasn't, that was also solved before.
00:32:46.800The police was a local guy, or the police was everyone who dealt with this.
00:32:52.280And they had the justice of the peace, who was an impartial third party.
00:33:01.720Where it doesn't work is when you nationalize the police.
00:33:05.880And the policemen, they are, it's in Sweden, as it is in Britain, I think that you have the Scotland Yard, you have the national police in Sweden.
00:33:16.220And they are not detached locally, and they are torn between, they have a few friends who are subject to crime, and then they have these, well, left-wing policies that you should be nice to the criminal, because really, they are the sufferers, and so and so.
00:33:35.820So the whole thing breaks down, because, you know, the policing was local before.
00:33:40.900Right, so I think we need to talk about the knowledge problem here, because I think it's something that is derived precisely from these considerations that we have mentioned right now, and is really important, not just for education, but also for the market, for basically everything.
00:34:04.920So how would you describe the knowledge problem in, say, a simple way?
00:34:14.320The issue is that we all know different things, and everyone knows different things, everyone has different wants and desires, and we don't know what others don't know, and we don't know what we know ourselves even.
00:34:32.520You can't describe to yourself even how to ride a bicycle, and there's many things that we do that we only discover we can do when we have to do them, and other people know other things.
00:34:46.440So knowledge is distributed in all of society, between millions of millions of people, and the amazing thing, what Hayek pointed out, or formalized, I think Edmund Burke essentially talks about the same thing in an essay, is that the signaling system in a market economy is money, prices.
00:35:09.160Yeah, and that's, as he says, is such an astonishing thing, that it would, if someone had invented it, it would have been sort of noble price worth it 10 times over.
00:35:20.980Everything is collapsed into a number, and that sounds cynical, but you can decide, if you have, say, 100 tons of iron, what should you do with the iron?
00:35:33.140In the Soviet Union, they had no prices, so they didn't know.
00:35:58.300I think, I can't remember the book from the top of my head now, Company of Strangers, it's called.
00:36:06.100In New York alone, there are 10 billion stock-keeping units in the city.
00:36:12.280There are things that can change price from one day to the next, from one hour to the next, and everything is coordinated that way, without anyone having to organize a society.
00:36:31.320But I read about, a professor said that this paper, The Use of Knowledge in Society, which Hayek published in 1945, he said he re-read it once a year, and he thought he discovered new things every time.
00:36:46.940Because it's 10 pages, and it's mind-blowing when you get it.
00:37:20.940Well, von Mises, he said, he said in 1920, I think, in the paper, which for some reason, he was a major in the First World War, and somehow he managed to write things anyway.
00:37:33.980He published this, and he pointed out that Marx had talked about the state going away, and everyone would share equally, and so on and so forth.
00:37:45.740And he pointed out that then you can't, you can't make economic calculations, because the only prices are decided in the market, and exactly, it's exactly this thing.
00:37:57.260And then other, a few other economists, socialist economists, they tried to work around that problem in the 1930s.
00:38:07.140And Hayek wrote three papers on it, and did the big smackdown.
00:38:12.740And he used his theory of knowledge being distributed as the basis for it, whilst von Mises used prices a bit cruder.
00:38:25.700So I think Hayek's formulation is more thorough, you could say.
00:38:32.120But essentially, what's happened, as far as I can tell, in the economics profession, is that, okay, well, moving on.
00:38:43.480Most economists work for the government in universities, or they work in big banks, and they don't consider the knowledge problem.
00:38:55.540So they make their beautiful theories anyway.
00:39:03.380Right, so let us now go and talk about education, because I started reading your book, and in the beginning, you make an observation, and I just said, wait a minute, this is basically true and brilliant.
00:39:19.480You said that a lot of people, the knee-jerk reaction, when people talk about education, is that people have an idea of how education should be, but also have an idea of why education has failed, because it deviates from their ideal about how education should be.
00:39:39.280And they want, in order to improve things, to create a board of experts, and that is going to lay down the principles of reform.
00:39:54.740But what you observe is that it's almost never the case that the best author of literature is also a professor of literature, that the best musician is also a professor of music, and that the best, let's say, trader or something is a professor of economics.
00:40:17.340So, and I think we couldn't go on forever.
00:40:23.360Elon Musk had to become a space engineer.
00:40:26.420He didn't know anything about rockets.
00:40:35.340Yeah, so I think that this is the main thing we need to tell people, and I also want to ask you about this.
00:40:45.740What is it precisely you think that is most people's idea of how education reform should come about, and why do you think it's mistaken?
00:40:55.660I think most people, building on what you said, have an idea from their own childhood.
00:41:06.060They saw what seemed to work and what didn't seem to work, and then they think a few more fixes.
00:41:12.260You should have order in the classroom, and more resources, and higher salaries for teachers, and more stringent requirements, and performance league tables, I think they're called in the UK, and so on and so forth.
00:41:29.840So you measure things, and then you've seen that picture.
00:41:35.000And then a miracle happens, and you get good education.
00:41:43.080The problem is that there are no such experts that can't do it, and education is a very complicated area where you talk to people, where you deal with people.
00:41:55.960And, I mean, you can't put a professor of musicology and write the next hit song.
00:42:07.340And we think all these, I mean, Mark Tyson said that everyone's got a plan, and then they get, until they get hit in the face, and they have to readjust.
00:42:19.400And all those beautiful things that people think up when they think they know what education is and how it should be done, when they try them out, they won't quite work.
00:42:29.200And we'll be the wrong people and the wrong teaching methods, and so on and so forth.
00:42:34.360Right, so I think it's really important to draw a distinction here, because it's a distinction that most people don't draw, is that it's one thing to teach.
00:42:48.160And quite another, the skill of teaching is one thing, and quite another to implement educational reform.
00:42:56.400And a lot of the time, the people who are advocating for really strong education reform along the lines or along status lines, they seem to me to not be aware of the difference.
00:43:12.960And they say, I think teaching has become, it's like a lot of areas in society, has become an academic subject.
00:43:25.940And whilst it is a trade, it's a craft, how to teach something, your practice makes perfect as a teacher.
00:43:35.420And it's been turned into an academic subject with professors of pedagogy and so on and so forth.
00:43:45.380And something I point out in my book is that you have an area of education which is, when it worked, was based on 2,500 years of trial and error, beginning with the Greeks, the European tradition of teaching.
00:44:00.700Other countries have other traditions, but it's based on trial and error, and now you turn it into an academic subject.
00:44:10.260And then you have to get a PhD in teaching.
00:44:26.740So you have to come up with a theory that goes away from proven practice, discover something new.
00:44:36.260So as soon as you get a PhD, you can basically be certain that anyone with a PhD in pedagogy has sort of discovered something that doesn't work or deviates from proven practice.
00:44:52.640But they haven't found something that actually works.
00:44:57.660I mean, I don't know how it is in Britain, but here in Sweden, someone made a study and said that 2 to 3% of PhDs in education were based on, used empirical data.
00:45:13.34097, 98% did not use empirical data, but they got their PhDs anyway.
00:45:17.980The idea I wanted to push forward with what I said before in the distinction is that there is the importance of gaining expertise.
00:45:30.300And I think, is it Daniel Kahneman, who got a Nobel Prize, who said that in order to be truly considered an expert in a field, you need to have devoted around 10,000 hours of dedicated practice of that skill.
00:45:50.880So, and a lot of teachers may end up getting that amount of expertise, but it's completely different when it comes to education reform, because in education reform, as you mentioned, I think in the book, there isn't so much trial and error involved.
00:46:07.900There is no, well, in practice, there's none at all, because, or virtually none at all, because I think, as Karl Marx says, it takes 20 to 20 years normally to prepare an education reform, a national education reform.
00:46:22.360And then if you want to evaluate what it brought, you have to wait another 10 to 20 years, it takes 12 years to go through school, and it takes time for the reform to settle, and then you have the old teachers that might not pay lip service to the new ideas and not teach according to them.
00:46:41.880So, say, you can make a, if you, if you want to do this properly, every 20 to 40 years, you can implement the national school reform, education reform, and that's, and most of them make education worse.
00:46:58.560So, it's basically the equivalent of having a 20 or 40 year plan.
00:47:04.940So, if you want to wait until the government gets it right, you should put your children into liquid helium, liquid nitrogen, and wait 2,000, 3,000 years, then maybe they get it right.
00:47:18.300So, it seems to me that it's remarkably analogous to the market, and especially when we are comparing the, let's say, freer economies, economies with freer markets, and really centralized systems, such as the Soviet Union.
00:47:34.240It seems to me that we see a distinction, a, yeah, a distinction, a sharp distinction between, on the one hand, having an economy where there are all sorts, there are various experiments, economic experiments, and the risk of each of them failing is minimized because if one experiment fails, 10 others may succeed.
00:47:59.12010 probably fail, but they, they have to, they have to be corrected immediately, you have to backpedal immediately, and go back to what you did before and try something different, otherwise you go out of business.
00:48:10.860But, but, and, and in the opposite case, when it comes to the five-year-old plan, you have just one giant economic experiment.
00:48:18.640And if it fails, everything, yeah, goes south.
00:48:21.120Yeah, yeah, you have thousands of people working on, on this reform, and then it's, then it's introduced, and everything goes to, yeah, down the drain.
00:48:29.040So, I think, I think, I would say one way of selling my argument might be that if, if you look back at your own schooling, and you, you think of, you had very good teachers, and you had some poor teachers, and what would happen in market society, market system, is that the good teachers would get more pupils, and teach friends to be as good as they are, and all the bad teachers would disappear.
00:48:58.020They couldn't, they couldn't, they couldn't, can't sustain themselves, they would just have to do something else.
00:49:04.840And that, that's, but that doesn't happen in a, in a national school system.
00:49:11.260Right, so, I think, I want us to approach what you're saying from another angle, because there are several questions I have, that I wouldn't say necessarily are, are rejections of what you're saying, but I want to see how they could be incorporated in,
00:49:34.260Because that, that's a very important question.
00:49:37.520When we start talking about the quality of education, and education as being an important good or value, our lives, it may be a good idea if we come up with a definition, or at least an approach towards.
00:49:49.520And maybe, maybe take it from the start, sort of, when you live as a hunter-gatherer, or as a peasant farmer, they don't do education.
00:50:02.280They, the children learn lots of things, and they're rarely taught, but they copy their parents, and they copy older friends, and they learn how to work in that environment.
00:50:12.800But then you get more advanced things in society, like reading and writing, that are, they're called biologically secondary things that you need to, your brain is not designed to do it.
00:50:30.320So, you have to repeat and practice these things.
00:50:32.740And so, the, and what you could say, education boils down to primary education.
00:50:40.740I like, I love the English term, primary education, is the, the body of knowledge that it is socially expected that everyone should possess.
00:50:51.360You could say, you could say, in, in modern society, it's reading, writing, arithmetic, a bit of, uh, uh, uh, history, and, uh, you need to understand the political society you live in, and so on.
00:51:07.720And if you're a Swede or a Greek, you need to learn English as well.
00:51:11.700And this body of knowledge, if you, if you possess that body of knowledge, you are treated like a functioning part of society.
00:51:20.340If you're not, you're treated like an idiot, essentially, because it's socially expected that you have this body.
00:51:27.100And then, so that, that is the core of education.
00:51:31.520And then there is secondary education, which is more advanced stuff, which has, unfortunately, become compulsory.
00:51:38.740So, um, where you're supposed, where you learn several foreign languages, more advanced history, more advanced chemistry, physics, mathematics, and so on, on a more advanced level, which really don't, most people don't apply in life.
00:51:58.140But it, it, it was, um, as it developed, it was something, uh, minority or not so small minority used for their trades, you could say.
00:52:11.240Right, so I, I have several questions.
00:52:13.220So, first of all, it, it seems to me that in hunter-gatherer society, there is such a process of educating, not in a, in a conventional sense where we have a classroom and we have a teacher.
00:52:24.180But for instance, in the sense of transmitting know-how.
00:52:29.620Yeah, uh, but it's usually done by copying.
00:52:32.460Wouldn't that be a kind of education, education?
00:52:35.140Yes, but it's, it's sort of, uh, it's called cultural learning is, uh, one way of, uh, Heinrich has written a book about that.
00:52:59.580Right, and when, when you are saying that education is a body of knowledge that is socially required for people to be seen as members of society, you,
00:53:10.560I'd, I'd, I'd presume you, you mean primary education, like primary education, basic arithmetic skills and stuff, because we can be educated in really niche fields that a lot of people don't know what they are.
00:53:23.820They can't be making any demands that we know of them in order to not be treated as outcome.
00:53:30.500So you're talking about the primary education.
00:53:32.220Um, yes, I, I, I, I think that's, um, the problem with the, the education debate is that as long as it was, as long as education, the compulsory education or voluntary education only concerned, uh, primary education, it was voluntarily entered into, and everyone did it.
00:53:57.260And everyone learned it, whether it was in the private school or in the later on government schools, but then government started to tack on secondary education and force it upon everyone.
00:54:10.720And that, that created the culture of large swathes of society hating education.
00:54:19.260You know, in, in, in Britain, you have, um, a white underclass that used to be the pillars of society.
00:54:27.420I don't know if you read the life at the bottom of Dalrymple talks about how the welfare status, but also education has destroyed the white working class.
00:54:39.260And, uh, because people, people don't want to be force fed these things.
00:54:44.380They are not interested in, there's a natural reaction to be, to rebel against what it is you're being told.
00:54:51.700I think what happened in Sweden when it became compulsory to continue after age 13 was that immediately you got chaos in the last, they added, added three years.
00:55:04.220And this chaos then spread during the 1970s down to, well, first year of school.
00:55:09.600And, uh, now you have the second generation, it's not soon third generation of children whose parents and soon grandparents hated school.
00:55:24.620And it, the whole, the whole thing is breaking down.
00:55:29.160So I want to ask you about the issue of regulation here, because it seems to me that we are talking about centralization and decentralization.
00:55:38.600In education, as if we're taking the two extremes of the two extreme options, but perhaps there are several arguments to be made against particular regulations or not.
00:55:51.020Of course, there's what you said in the very beginning, that the moment you start making exceptions, you have a problem.
00:55:57.360But let us, let us, let us run the argument for that sake.
00:56:02.160So for instance, when we're talking about a body of knowledge that needs to be accepted, or at least it needs to be socially accepted.
00:56:10.920So what if people in, let's say, in politics, let's say we have politicians who are, who end up in a position where they can actually influence things.
00:56:22.740And they say that I need to instill a sentiment of patriotism in children through education.
00:56:31.820And education is teaching them the exact opposite.
00:56:38.440And that could result, that could actually manifest in all sorts of ways.
00:56:44.900One way would be to have a very strictly centralized system of education that said that this is what you're going to be taught and a kind of patriotism is going to be part of it.
00:56:57.340Or you could have a sort of mixed system where you say, where the government says, well, you will have to teach A, B, and C, but you are free with respect to D, E, F, G, H, I, J, whatever.
00:57:14.320Do you think that that would be disastrous?
00:57:18.880What you mean, the point is the point to, to instill certain values in the population, essentially.
00:57:27.960That, and these values, not just because someone wakes up and says, okay, I want to do social engineering.
00:57:35.560I would say, I say, I would say that, I mean, I know it's been done.
00:57:41.200I know that small French children learned about the Gauls and the Swedish children learned about the Swedish heroes and so on and so forth.
00:57:49.860And people were, I mean, they read about Charles XII and Gustavus Adolphus and Charles X going across, crushing Denmark and so on and so forth.
00:58:04.220And, I mean, it was, Swedish history is rock and roll.
00:58:09.640It's Swedish history, the last, well, between 1500 and, well, really between 1300 and 1721 is like Greek, as much rock and roll as Greek history in the antiquity.
00:58:25.140It's a sort of heroic things and feats of arms and stuff.
00:58:45.320But I don't, I think in the modern world where we, things have gone haywire, I don't think, I don't think it's, education is the wrong tool to install.
00:59:01.220It's like in the States now you have Donald Trump who it's, it's really the revolt of the masses against, against the anointed, you could say.
00:59:30.100But the reason I'm asking is because if, for instance, we have really strong lobbies in other countries, and let's say there are other countries other than England that have a really strong lobby within England.
00:59:43.400And they, as you said, that they create enclaves and they have schools of their own and suddenly start teaching anti-English propaganda.