TRIGGERnometry - March 17, 2022


＂They Are Indoctrinating Your Children＂ - Bonnie Snyder


Episode Stats

Length

1 hour and 4 minutes

Words per Minute

173.13779

Word Count

11,215

Sentence Count

674

Misogynist Sentences

12

Hate Speech Sentences

15


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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00:00:30.980 We have six-year-olds who are being told they can choose their own gender behind their parents' backs.
00:00:36.240 One of the things that's happening this school year is it's been exposed that there are gender plans where students have a different identity at school and a different name at school than they have at home, and the schools are keeping this secret from the parents.
00:00:54.940 Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.
00:01:00.860 I'm Constantine Kissin.
00:01:02.100 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
00:01:07.940 Our brilliant guest today is from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, who is the author of Undoctrinate, How Politicized Classrooms Harm Kids and Ruin Our Schools, and What We Can Do About It.
00:01:19.580 Bonnie Snyder, welcome to Trigonometry.
00:01:22.060 Welcome. I mean, thank you for having me. This is great.
00:01:25.380 It's a pleasure to have you on the show. Listen, before we get into talking about all of this stuff, please tell everybody who are you, how are you, where you are, what has been the journey through life that brings you to be sitting here talking to us about all of this?
00:01:38.940 Yeah, I guess you could say I'm sort of a self-ejected academic.
00:01:42.900 I was planning to become a Shakespearean, an English professor teaching Shakespeare, and in that journey, I encountered early waves of postmodernism, deconstructionism, that sort of tipped me off that there was a big problem in the academy.
00:02:00.420 And I had to completely change course, and a lot of the things that I think we'll be talking about today really originated in the humanities.
00:02:08.920 So I think that I had an early view to these issues.
00:02:13.140 And then I ended up becoming a doctor of higher ed administration, specifically to confront the problems I saw in the academy.
00:02:23.540 And I did not succeed in being hired because I think that there are ideological litmus tests that are imposed in the academy.
00:02:31.480 And I always knew the right answer to the questions they were asking, but I chose the teacher honestly.
00:02:36.380 And so I ended up being an adjunct for a number of years, which actually was fine.
00:02:42.380 And I learned a lot on that journey.
00:02:44.700 But ultimately, I found my way to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, where we defend free speech and a lot of the enlightenment values that I think are under threat today.
00:02:55.180 Hmm. And one of the things for us in the UK, we are starting to see a few hints of the stuff that you talk about bleeding through into our school.
00:03:06.380 So I actually got a message from a friend saying that at my old school, they're now demanding that staff put their pronouns in their emails or announce them at the beginning of classes and all of this type of thing.
00:03:20.880 Give us the broader picture.
00:03:22.560 Like when we talk about people, you know, use words like indoctrination and postmodernism, like what is happening in American schools?
00:03:32.960 Oh, gosh, there's a lot of things going on.
00:03:35.460 I think that I would say right now, it kind of depends when you ask that question right now, I would say that we're seeing the importation of an alternate morality into our classrooms without agreement from the public.
00:03:48.540 Like we're seeing a lot of deception being used, parents being kept in the dark, which obviously now that things are coming to light and being exposed has raised a lot of legitimate anger, righteous anger.
00:04:02.060 We are seeing, you know, we're seeing the politicization of the classroom.
00:04:10.000 We are seeing, I think for a long time, we talked about diversifying the curriculum.
00:04:14.400 And I think that really that we've done a lot of work diversifying the curriculum.
00:04:18.840 We've moved on, I think, to radicalizing the curriculum.
00:04:22.180 And this school year, I think we are seeing sexualization of the curriculum, which is a really interesting twist.
00:04:30.120 You know, I've been at this a while and I've noticed that every school year the angle seems to change.
00:04:37.720 So those are just a few things that are going on.
00:04:39.780 We're seeing contempt for parents coming from school teachers.
00:04:44.180 And we're seeing, I think, teachers who are, you know, K-12 teachers in America who are presenting themselves as though they're college professors.
00:04:55.380 And they seem to think that they have academic freedom, which they don't.
00:04:59.360 The speech is considered in public schools to be hired speech, government speech.
00:05:03.600 I'm hearing teachers also talking about this is my classroom.
00:05:06.780 And in my classroom, this is how it's going to be.
00:05:09.920 But really, the classroom belongs to the taxpayer.
00:05:12.360 So there's many layers of things that are happening simultaneously.
00:05:18.900 And Bonnie, when did you first start to notice this?
00:05:22.000 When was it that you got the first inkling that something untoward was happening?
00:05:27.200 Well, as I mentioned, back in graduate school, I was exposed to deconstructionism, which I called destructionism.
00:05:37.360 And I chose to leave.
00:05:40.900 And, you know, they...
00:05:41.680 Well, Bonnie, I'm just going to interrupt you there, because what we're going to be doing throughout this interview is we're going to be using academic terms, which I think, you know, you and I and Constantine might know.
00:05:50.840 But there'll be people who are really interested in this subject who don't know.
00:05:54.580 Could you just explain to us what deconstructionism is, firstly?
00:05:59.420 No, I can't.
00:06:01.220 Because...
00:06:01.700 That's what deconstructionism is.
00:06:04.320 I mean, part of it is that it is so...
00:06:07.300 The writings are so obtuse, so hard to understand, that that's part of what drove me away from it.
00:06:13.620 You know, that it...
00:06:14.600 I would say two things.
00:06:17.200 One is that they were starting to play with language in ways where they were arguing that nothing means anything.
00:06:22.240 And there was this great leveling taking place where they were telling me that, you know, the greatest works of English literature, as agreed upon by centuries of scholars who had studied this, are no better than reading a restaurant menu.
00:06:38.600 That it's all in the reading.
00:06:40.140 It doesn't matter.
00:06:40.860 And, you know, there's the idea of intention.
00:06:42.880 It doesn't matter what the author intended to say.
00:06:47.320 All that matters is what I take from it.
00:06:49.420 And I could take as much meaning from a restaurant menu as you could take from War and Peace.
00:06:54.400 And this, to me, just seemed like utter nonsense.
00:06:57.340 I went to my advisors and I said, look, I don't even know what to say.
00:07:02.560 And the interesting thing was that the faculty, where I was, was completely dispirited.
00:07:09.620 Like, you just looked at them and the light had gone out of their eyes.
00:07:12.000 These were like soulless zombies walking around who had completely given up, who were just going through the motions.
00:07:17.680 And I looked at them and I was like, I don't want to do this anymore because literature is supposed to be uplifting.
00:07:23.200 It's supposed to speak to these transcendent issues.
00:07:26.520 So that aside, I recognize, I could say more about that.
00:07:31.720 I mean, one thing they said to me, which I think is relevant is they said, well, we're just deconstructing the canon, the literary canon.
00:07:38.360 These books that, you know, students read over and over again year after year.
00:07:42.800 And I said, well, that's interesting for you.
00:07:46.560 But can I first learn the canon before I do?
00:07:50.180 Because I think that that's an interesting activity for one generation of scholars who have already had the classical training.
00:07:56.560 And I feel like this is what's happening now in our schools is that we're kind of giving students the rubble after everything has been deconstructed and saying, isn't this fascinating?
00:08:07.100 Look at what we've done for you.
00:08:08.260 And it's just is a mess.
00:08:10.100 It's an incoherent mess.
00:08:11.800 So when I saw it again was when my younger daughter was in, I moved her to a private school, having been in public school, government school beforehand.
00:08:22.440 And she was given the Communist Manifesto to read, which I don't mind because that's a really important book.
00:08:29.940 But then she was asked to debate the merits of capitalism versus communism.
00:08:34.920 They were given nothing to read on capitalism.
00:08:38.740 And her class concluded that communism is a better system than capitalism.
00:08:44.220 Well, eight-year-olds would do that.
00:08:46.020 Yeah.
00:08:47.380 These are 10th graders, as a matter of fact.
00:08:49.860 Yeah.
00:08:50.120 And some of these kids in this class actually literally had parents who own a factory, which I find hilarious.
00:08:55.420 You know, they look at the production.
00:08:58.340 But they know what they're supposed to say to get through with it.
00:09:01.200 And what really bothered me was when I confronted them, they lied to me, which is a whole other level.
00:09:07.880 And there's a lot of lying going on, which is a very Marxist tactic.
00:09:11.440 And I often point out – I probably can find it.
00:09:15.020 I bet I can pull this out.
00:09:17.600 You know, when I was an undergrad, I went to Harvard, and I was assigned one book more than once.
00:09:22.480 There was only one book I was assigned multiple times, and that was the Communist Manifesto.
00:09:26.980 I was assigned it six times, which I find hilarious.
00:09:32.560 And all I can say is I know it when I see it, because I've been exposed to it.
00:09:38.220 And just as a curious aside, why were you assigned the Communist Manifesto six times?
00:09:43.800 Was it because they were trying to get you to understand how terrible this ideology was?
00:09:49.860 Good question.
00:09:50.560 I'm not sure why I was assigned it six times.
00:09:53.240 I did take some Russian history, so those I understand, because it was the height of the Cold War.
00:09:59.000 So in that sense, I did study with Richard Pipes, who was an advisor to Reagan, I believe.
00:10:03.520 And so I think a couple of times it was to get me to understand how pernicious this ideology can be.
00:10:09.380 But then I was an English major.
00:10:11.000 I wasn't, you know, a politics major.
00:10:13.320 I think it is considered fundamental to tearing apart literature.
00:10:21.960 That's what I think.
00:10:23.500 I don't even know.
00:10:24.480 I would look at it and I'd be like, you've got to be kidding.
00:10:26.120 There it is on my reading list again.
00:10:27.500 And it's a critical, it is a central part of critical theory, which is rampant throughout all of academia.
00:10:38.040 Now it's found its way to secondary schools, you know, pre-college.
00:10:42.580 And it's basically about taking whatever's in the center, pushing it to the margins and putting something else to the center.
00:10:50.600 So I think it's a way of reading and looking at everything.
00:10:55.120 So we've got critical theory and critical race theory.
00:10:58.960 It ties into that in particular.
00:11:01.400 Now, from my understanding of critical race theory, it started off in the 1970s.
00:11:05.900 It was posited as a theory in the 1970s in universities.
00:11:11.460 Why has it suddenly gone from a university or college setting and bled right the way through into primary schools, is what people have told me, in the U.S.?
00:11:21.900 Right.
00:11:22.940 I think I would call it downward drift.
00:11:25.440 I think that things from the academy tend, you know, it really, I think, started in law schools.
00:11:30.360 I think Derek Bell at Harvard, as a way of, you know, identifying certain laws that have a disparate impact, which seems like a legitimate line of inquiry.
00:11:42.460 But then it became extrapolated to all of these other fields and a very useful tool, I think, for dismantling anything that some people want dismantled.
00:11:52.460 We have in America what are known as ed schools, education schools, and they tend at this point to be monocultures.
00:12:02.240 I had to get certain training to become a K-12 teacher.
00:12:05.440 I was certified as an English teacher and as a guidance counselor, a counselor.
00:12:10.560 And luckily, I was, well, I didn't completely bypass the ed schools, but I didn't, as an undergrad, go to study that.
00:12:19.820 And so now it's in the ed schools and these teachers are trained in it.
00:12:23.840 And I can, why is it now in the K-12 schools?
00:12:28.760 A couple of reasons.
00:12:30.240 I think that teaching is a difficult career that a lot of times does not come with a lot of accolades.
00:12:41.200 And I feel like it's a way for teachers to feel more significant.
00:12:46.180 And to the extent that we don't make our teachers feel significant, I think that's our fault, that that's something we can correct.
00:12:54.200 You know, I tend to not think that teachers are as terribly underpaid as they like to claim.
00:12:58.760 I think that teacher salaries have risen to be, you know, and the benefits are really, really great.
00:13:03.820 But I don't think that we have a lot of respect for teachers.
00:13:07.040 You know, I sense a coming apart in our society between teachers and parents between the up.
00:13:13.360 You know, Charles Murray wrote a book called Coming Apart.
00:13:16.260 He's, of course, pretty controversial.
00:13:18.160 But just about, you know, when I was a kid, my parents would have had our teachers over for dinner.
00:13:24.140 They would have, we would have gone to church with them.
00:13:26.280 We would have been in the same social networks.
00:13:28.960 But I think that teachers are beginning to be perceived as less than.
00:13:34.860 And I think to some extent, this is a way for them to claim more significance for themselves.
00:13:41.120 That's just one, I'm just, that's one guess that I have for why it's caught on.
00:13:46.180 It's interesting, Bonnie.
00:13:47.140 Wouldn't it, I mean, a more charitable interpretation might be that some people would argue,
00:13:52.900 I don't necessarily agree with this, but some people would argue that for centuries, probably,
00:13:59.280 or for decades, at least, we were teaching kids one particular version of events, right?
00:14:04.520 You were taught a particular version of history, a particular version of various other subjects
00:14:10.680 that had a certain slant.
00:14:12.660 Let's say a pro-American slant in America or a pro-British slant in Britain or a pro-Russian slant in Russia,
00:14:19.040 where I'm from. And what these people are doing are poking or pointing at, rather,
00:14:26.080 the holes in some of those narratives that, you know, you can't teach an eight-year-old
00:14:31.140 all the complexities of history.
00:14:32.400 So you have to give them a simpler narrative, right, about certain things.
00:14:37.000 And what these people have done is rightly expose some of the gaps in those narratives
00:14:41.280 that we used to teach to our children in the past.
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00:15:13.720 Yes, that is one of the arguments that is used to justify it. And I do think that there are
00:15:20.080 teachers who are doing it for those reasons. I think that there are other teachers who are doing
00:15:25.660 it with more activist aims. I think that when it becomes problematic is when it is presented as the
00:15:35.580 only perspective with which to view historical events. And when students are asked to affirm this
00:15:43.280 this is the correct point of view. And then we get into what, you know, at FIRE, the foundation
00:15:49.160 where I work, what we would call compelled speech, where, you know, which is sort of what you were
00:15:54.060 describing when teachers are being told they must list their pronouns. Now, some people are going to
00:15:59.080 say, well, that violates my values, my religious upbringing, because, you know, in the Bible, it says
00:16:06.380 that there are two genders and whatnot. And so you're basically asking them to affirm a worldview
00:16:11.100 that they may not agree with. And in America, that is, you know, so there are lawsuits happening
00:16:17.180 right now on these very issues. And we'll see how those turn out.
00:16:21.220 Bonnie, isn't the problem as well? And look, I was a teacher. I was a teacher for 12 years.
00:16:26.960 I taught in secondary school. I also taught in primary schools. Isn't part of the problem,
00:16:32.080 the fact that most teachers are left leaning. It's very rare to get a teacher who leans right.
00:16:40.360 I mean, that's just the nature of the people that the profession attracts. So obviously,
00:16:45.860 they're going to be more tended to look at the world in this way.
00:16:50.040 Through a critical lens, using critical pedagogy.
00:16:53.500 Right. And this is a big problem. Why are other people not showing up for the teaching profession?
00:16:59.240 Uh, the ed schools really are pretty much a monoculture at this point. I think it's like
00:17:05.540 a snowball. I think that we've known for decades that it tilted left, but it's almost at the point
00:17:11.840 where it reaches such a spiral that there's only one viewpoint being, uh, you know, being presented
00:17:18.660 at all. And we are at that point now and probably, you know, and, and can we come back from it?
00:17:23.840 Because so many students now look, they might be interested and they say, I'm not going to be
00:17:28.420 welcome. It's, it's ironic because, you know, inclusivity is such an important aspect of what
00:17:34.120 they're arguing. And yet these ed schools are so non-welcoming to anyone with different points
00:17:41.480 of view. So they very much are promoting diversity, but many people will point out it's, unless it's
00:17:46.620 intellectual diversity or diversity of thought that they're not interested in.
00:17:50.940 And Bonnie, how much do you think of this? You know, we've covered the culture war stuff
00:17:55.160 a tremendous amount on, on the show. And one of the things that has become increasingly clear,
00:17:59.840 if you look at the surveys and the polling and the data on it is that, uh, particularly on this
00:18:06.340 sort of stuff, there's a sex dynamic going on and the women are far more likely to skew in this
00:18:11.680 direction. So in a profession that has always been dominated by women, uh, and will likely be
00:18:17.260 dominated by women for all eternity. I imagine that isn't, I guess what Francis is getting at,
00:18:22.820 what I'm also getting at, isn't this just an inevitable consequence of the fact that the
00:18:28.160 teaching profession attracts a particular type of person, more likely to be female and more likely
00:18:34.040 to lean left on political issues. And so schools will always have that sort of bent inevitably, I guess.
00:18:40.500 Well, and it's, it's so interesting because that's the argument that they're making in favor
00:18:44.360 of diversity, but half of the students are male and nobody's arguing in terms of improving the
00:18:50.000 representation of males in the classroom. I did pull the numbers on this in my book and, uh, the
00:18:56.240 teaching ranks are even the, when I, when I was in elementary school, I think I really benefited
00:19:02.200 maybe unfairly from the fact that a lot of incredibly intelligent women were still stuck in
00:19:08.020 teaching careers because other pathways weren't open to them. So I think I really did have, uh,
00:19:14.000 excellent teachers who may be in a different era might've become doctors or lawyers. Uh, and you
00:19:20.100 would think now that women have a lot more career paths open to them that fewer of them would be in
00:19:25.840 teaching, but believe it or not, the teaching ranks in America are even more female now than they were
00:19:31.000 when I was in elementary school. Uh, and I think that we need to do a campaign, an advertising campaign,
00:19:37.560 maybe even some sort of affirmative action, encouragement to get more males into the classroom,
00:19:43.160 uh, for every number of reason, including just positive role modeling for the male students who
00:19:49.340 in America are underperforming. Uh, and you know, the outcomes for them are much worse than for females
00:19:56.700 coming out of K-12 and going on to college as well. Males are, are in increasing numbers, rejecting college.
00:20:04.040 They've got affirmative action for men. That's going to be a great policy.
00:20:10.140 Good luck selling that body. Yeah.
00:20:12.760 Thank you.
00:20:15.760 Hey, Francis, would you like to learn another language?
00:20:18.960 No, mate. Already know foreign languages perfectly.
00:20:22.720 Oi, Gary, who is la biblioteca?
00:20:26.220 You can't go on holiday, mate, without knowing where the swimming pool is.
00:20:30.040 La biblioteca is the library, you idiot.
00:20:32.380 Exactly. You can never be too far away from knowledge and sexually frustrated librarians.
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00:22:03.900 No, I mean, Gary.
00:22:06.080 I think the problem is, Bonnie, and this comes from experience, the fact that teaching isn't a very good job anymore.
00:22:12.240 Let's just call it what it is.
00:22:14.040 You know, the behavior of students is atrocious.
00:22:16.160 You look down upon, you're demeaned on a daily basis by parents.
00:22:20.860 You're not respected.
00:22:22.700 I mean, the pay, I would push back.
00:22:25.200 The pay, I can only talk from a UK perspective, hasn't gone up in years.
00:22:29.000 It's naturally going to attract these sorts of people because you look at it from an outsider point of view.
00:22:35.600 If you're in the center or maybe in the center right and you want to make money and you want to have a successful career,
00:22:44.880 you look at teaching and you think, well, why would I get involved in it?
00:22:47.440 Quite rightly, in my opinion, as someone who's experienced it.
00:22:51.300 Right.
00:22:51.740 Well, I mean, my husband and I have been in education for pretty much our whole careers, and he is a professor.
00:23:00.280 He's likely to retire soon.
00:23:04.200 Yeah, I mean, the demands have increased to an intolerable level.
00:23:07.860 The student misbehavior has increased.
00:23:10.420 I think that there are intrinsic rewards to teaching, but I do think that some teachers are trying to enhance these intrinsic rewards
00:23:17.780 by making it sort of a political battle that they're waging via the classroom, seeing students as means to the end,
00:23:24.140 you know, the world that they want to bring into being.
00:23:29.600 But, you know, I don't like the war analogy, but I would say that, you know, if this is a culture war,
00:23:36.840 then this is one of the fronts on which it is being waged and we need soldiers.
00:23:42.980 I will say in America the benefits for teachers are quite good and there are still pensions and things that aren't available in other careers.
00:23:51.020 So I hope people will consider it.
00:23:52.820 And I hope that, you know, the families, I get discouraged when I talk to families who are very angry about what's going on in their children's schools.
00:24:00.180 And I'm starting to say to people, well, would you encourage your children to become teachers?
00:24:04.320 And they sort of scoff at me.
00:24:05.820 And I'm like, well, as long as we, you know, abandon the field, then this is what we're going to get.
00:24:11.580 So if you really care about the principles that undergird this country, and it's not just this country,
00:24:18.820 I would argue it's Western civilization, then we probably need to, I hesitate to say take up arms,
00:24:25.620 but, you know, man the stations and show up.
00:24:28.240 We have to show up and account and stand up for what we believe in.
00:24:33.240 And you're saying, and look, I'm with you 100%.
00:24:36.580 The fact that a classroom is not a place of education, but a place to spread political ideas and political doctrine,
00:24:45.720 to me is tantamount to child abuse and brainwashing.
00:24:48.900 Your job as a teacher is not there to tell kids what to think.
00:24:52.720 Your job as a teacher is to teach them how to think.
00:24:56.880 That's what you do as a teacher.
00:24:59.180 And carry on.
00:25:00.880 Yeah, your job is to deliver the curriculum that you were hired to deliver that is democratically
00:25:06.760 agreed upon within the community as administered through the school board.
00:25:11.240 As I was writing my book, I kept the subtext in my mind is this is not a free for all people.
00:25:16.860 You don't just wing it.
00:25:18.060 You're not just making it up.
00:25:19.280 You're not there to expound on your opinions.
00:25:22.520 No one cares what your opinions are.
00:25:23.860 You are there to deliver the curriculum, to teach critical thought, not critical pedagogy.
00:25:29.140 Let me push back on what Francis said, because a lot of people might say, well, yeah, you
00:25:36.800 say that, you know, education is supposed to be about teaching kids how to think.
00:25:41.080 But that's not really what happens in the school.
00:25:43.040 What happens in the school is you sit down and you get told what the right version of
00:25:47.280 this particular event is or what the right interpretation of a particular historical period
00:25:52.520 is or or, you know, why these people did this or why.
00:25:56.040 And there's plenty of other ways of looking at that same thing.
00:25:58.540 You know, I'm a huge fan of history and I read a lot about history.
00:26:03.000 A lot of the stuff that I was taught in school was complete rubbish.
00:26:06.100 Right.
00:26:06.400 And not only that, not only was it rubbish, but it also skewed in a particular direction.
00:26:12.000 So isn't that not I mean, I would argue and this is where I might agree with some of the
00:26:17.180 people on that side is.
00:26:19.500 We've always been indoctrinating kids.
00:26:21.440 We just were indoctrinating them with a particular vision.
00:26:24.180 And now we don't like the fact that people are indoctrinating with a different vision
00:26:27.640 that we don't like.
00:26:28.680 Now, I personally don't like the version that they're being indoctrinated with now either.
00:26:34.280 I'm just saying, can we honestly pretend that there was this golden age of education where
00:26:40.320 it was all neutral and there was no indoctrination going on?
00:26:42.920 And suddenly now kids are being indoctrinated.
00:26:45.480 Isn't it more a case of like, we just don't like the fact that they're being indoctrinated
00:26:49.360 with values that we would consider antithetical to our civilization.
00:26:54.280 But it's, I think, probably unfair to pretend they weren't being indoctrinated before.
00:26:58.980 Yeah.
00:26:59.160 I mean, school is always about instilling the agreed upon values of the community.
00:27:05.100 Uh, what's interesting now is that I think that they're teaching kids to tear down the
00:27:12.400 society, which is, which is why you're seeing parents showing up in on mass at school board
00:27:19.540 meetings.
00:27:19.900 And they're, some of them have gotten, you know, a little bit out of hand.
00:27:23.860 Uh, and I think that the crucial difference though, is the role of dissent and, you know,
00:27:29.840 the ability to speak back to the narrative that you are talking about, because these are not
00:27:35.040 religious schools.
00:27:36.100 And it's almost like this is being taught as though it's a state religion.
00:27:39.380 In fact, some people are starting to say that the way to, uh, reign this in is to have it
00:27:44.140 declared a state religion because this ideology does have some religious aspects to it.
00:27:50.040 And to say, well, in America, we don't have a state religion that is being taught in our
00:27:54.860 schools, which is, uh, has been the subject of many court cases.
00:27:58.120 And, you know, even the pledge of allegiance, which is a rather quaint, but somewhat strange
00:28:04.380 American tradition where we stand up and say a pledge to the flag, uh, has been pushed back
00:28:09.920 against, uh, via Jehovah's witnesses.
00:28:12.600 And there's a very eloquent court case, uh, West Virginia versus Barnett, where, you know,
00:28:18.220 they say that if there's any fixed star in our constitution, it's that no, no authority,
00:28:25.720 high or low shall prescribe what shall be orthodox.
00:28:29.360 So in America, we've traditionally left room for the eccentric dissenter to be left alone,
00:28:36.660 to have their space, to say their piece.
00:28:39.040 Uh, and I, I like to say when I was a teacher, like, for example, I had to teach some evolution
00:28:43.540 and occasionally I would have, or I thought I might have some fundamentalist students in
00:28:48.500 the class.
00:28:48.960 And I, I would just jokingly say, you know, I'm going to go over this.
00:28:52.360 It's in the curriculum.
00:28:53.260 You need, I said, you don't have to believe it, but it's going to be on the test.
00:28:56.480 You got to know it.
00:28:57.640 And that's, I think the difference here, you know, you all have your podcast where you
00:29:02.580 get to say what it is that you think, but a really big problem that we're having, and
00:29:07.420 I work at basically a free speech organization.
00:29:09.560 So I would never say that students don't have the right to bring up critical theories or
00:29:15.400 that a teacher can't tell students that, you know, here's a contrasting viewpoint on
00:29:21.000 this, uh, but to present it positively as though it is, um, you know, fundamentally the right
00:29:27.840 view to adopt is misguided.
00:29:30.760 Um, and you know, that's where it veers into inculcating a doctrine, which is exactly what
00:29:35.860 indoctrination is.
00:29:38.160 Bonnie, we've been talking back and forth and it's been fascinating, but I'm sure there's
00:29:42.940 lots of people who are listening to this who are thinking, well, just give me some examples.
00:29:47.120 What actually are you talking about when you're talking about indoctrination, for example,
00:29:51.720 because, you know, that's a very big word, you know, that's a, that has serious connotations
00:29:56.800 to it.
00:29:57.580 You know, we keep lists so that I can keep up on it.
00:30:01.240 And, you know, there are several lawsuits that are proceeding right now in the United States.
00:30:06.100 Um, I mean, some examples, I have a lot of examples of lying, you know, where lessons are
00:30:15.480 being kept secret from parents and it's been documented.
00:30:19.360 For example, in Missouri, there was a school administrator who, uh, told district teachers
00:30:26.880 to create fake lesson plans and post them online so that they wouldn't have to receive any questions
00:30:32.520 from parents about what was actually going on in the classroom.
00:30:35.520 And what was actually going on, Bonnie?
00:30:36.940 This is, I think what Francis is getting at is what are the kids actually being taught?
00:30:41.620 Okay.
00:30:42.120 So, um, yeah.
00:30:45.480 We have six-year-olds who are being told they can choose their own gender behind their parents'
00:30:50.540 backs.
00:30:50.900 One of the things that's happening this school year is it's been exposed that there are gender
00:30:55.500 plans where students have a different identity at school and a different name at school than
00:31:01.020 they have at home.
00:31:02.040 And the schools are keeping this secret from the parents.
00:31:05.800 Six-year-old?
00:31:06.920 Uh, all, well, all ages in terms of the secretive gender plans.
00:31:11.820 So, yeah.
00:31:13.540 Children in first grade being, this is the sexualized stuff that I have, I'm looking at
00:31:17.720 right now.
00:31:18.320 Children in first grade being taught about masturbation.
00:31:21.420 Um, we have, there's been a lot of uproar this year about books, which I know it sounds
00:31:26.520 like book burnings, but just age of inappropriate books that depict sex between an adult and a
00:31:32.020 minor.
00:31:32.360 Um, we had a teacher-
00:31:34.080 Ronnie, can I just interrupt you there?
00:31:36.180 So, part of when you train as a teacher in the UK, you get taught about something called
00:31:41.920 safeguarding.
00:31:43.620 And safeguarding is where you, it's about the welfare of children.
00:31:47.940 And in that, you, you, you get taught about grooming.
00:31:52.260 That is an example of grooming.
00:31:54.760 It's where you take somebody who is not sexually mature, who is a child, a very young child,
00:32:00.880 has no concepts about sex and procreation, all the rest of it, and you teach them about
00:32:05.780 masturbation.
00:32:06.700 That, to me, it's, it's, it's vile.
00:32:10.720 Yeah, and if, if you're interested in that, uh, James Lindsay had, has done three podcasts
00:32:15.080 on our groomer schools that I would recommend people take a look at.
00:32:18.620 It's very upsetting.
00:32:19.560 And it really, uh, you know, it is, according to him, and he's done a deep dive into the
00:32:24.700 readings, is intended to really divide parent from child, um, which is a very vile aspect
00:32:32.020 of it.
00:32:32.720 Uh, there are classes where they are shaming and labeling students according to their skin
00:32:38.360 color.
00:32:38.880 They are divided, there have been classes where students have been divided according to skin
00:32:44.140 color.
00:32:44.480 And, you know, this violates civil rights laws that we have in the United States.
00:32:50.300 Um, one of the weird examples that came to me in my job was a student, we, we've had a
00:32:57.520 couple of walkouts, uh, in the United States.
00:32:59.720 This one was over gun control, wanting gun control.
00:33:03.440 And, uh, it was supposed to be students walking out in favor of gun control voluntarily and then
00:33:10.020 taking the consequences.
00:33:11.000 But in this case, the administrators decided this is a great idea.
00:33:15.200 We're going to walk out too.
00:33:16.400 And everyone has to come with us.
00:33:18.200 And it was a student who said, but I don't agree with this.
00:33:20.840 I believe in the second amendment and gun rights, and I don't want to be forced to walk
00:33:26.880 around in favor of, you know, forced activism promoting something I disagree with.
00:33:32.120 And, um, so I told him to tell them that he tell them that.
00:33:36.300 And so their solution was that he could stand in the middle of the track while the entire
00:33:39.880 school would walk in a circle around him because that was what they had planned anyway.
00:33:45.100 And so I said, I told him to go to his guidance counselor and the guidance counselor put an
00:33:48.540 end to that.
00:33:49.380 Uh, but we, we do have curricula that have been designed by outside organizations.
00:33:53.960 For example, Black Lives Matter is one, um, 1619 Project is another teaching, um, Southern
00:34:03.040 Poverty Law Center is teaching for tolerance.
00:34:05.260 I think it's now called teaching for justice.
00:34:07.420 Uh, and they have lessons that have raised a number of concerns.
00:34:11.680 Uh, so many families are now asking for greater transparency about what's going on in the classroom
00:34:16.940 because the messages embedded in many of these lessons are antithetical to what families are
00:34:23.180 often teaching at home.
00:34:25.100 Um, but Bonnie, why is it that you have outside organizations dictating what is and what isn't
00:34:33.800 taught in a classroom and how it should be taught?
00:34:37.260 That, I don't understand that.
00:34:39.800 They have no place in the classroom.
00:34:42.060 Right.
00:34:42.200 Well, they're not dictating it.
00:34:44.640 These are supplemental lessons that teachers adopt voluntarily.
00:34:48.280 And then my question is, well, where's the supervision?
00:34:50.540 Where's the department head?
00:34:51.800 Where is the principal?
00:34:52.860 Where is the curriculum staff at the district level and the school board?
00:34:57.360 Uh, so this is that my classroom thing that's happening.
00:35:02.100 Uh, but yeah, I mean, I thought teachers were supposed to, for the most part, create their
00:35:05.580 own lesson plans.
00:35:07.920 Well, look, Bonnie, we've addressed the doom and gloom of how terrible everything is.
00:35:11.340 And by the way, uh, that it does sound bad.
00:35:13.940 Like the six year olds being taught about the gender options and whatever else it is
00:35:18.600 just to me, that's, that that's outrageous.
00:35:21.140 But, um, you're the, the last part of the title of your book is what we can do about it.
00:35:27.500 So what can we do about it?
00:35:29.900 Because the reason I ask is please don't take any offense to this, but it seems to me like
00:35:34.040 in America, you guys have gone pretty far off the rails.
00:35:36.620 And the problem for us in the UK is we all have always follow you like lemmings off the
00:35:41.040 very same cliff.
00:35:41.940 So we're going to have to deal with this.
00:35:44.180 What can we do about it?
00:35:45.540 Yeah, I do think that we are, are probably the most advanced case of, of, I guess, woke
00:35:50.360 infiltration into our schools.
00:35:52.980 Um, well, I think that transparency is essential.
00:35:56.580 Sunlight, they say is the best disinfectant.
00:35:58.860 And so, uh, you know, if teachers are trying to hide something from you, that's never a
00:36:03.700 good sign.
00:36:04.620 Uh, I think that there needs to be coordination and camaraderie between parents.
00:36:10.020 They should be working together.
00:36:11.440 There's this concept of in loco parentis where teachers are supposed to act in the place of
00:36:16.220 the parents.
00:36:16.940 Uh, but they have really been, uh, improvising lately.
00:36:20.240 I, my joke about that is that they put the loco in in loco parentis.
00:36:24.880 I mean, obviously I would recommend reading the book and sharing, uh, the reasons that
00:36:30.800 I detail.
00:36:31.640 And I pulled lots of research on why this is not healthy for students, why this does not
00:36:37.940 amount to a substantive, rigorous, effective education.
00:36:43.080 Uh, but I was thinking about this right before we got on.
00:36:46.700 And I think there are four ways of addressing it.
00:36:48.920 There are the legal legislative means of responding to this.
00:36:52.200 There are bureaucratic means.
00:36:53.600 Um, but ultimately this comes down to really a cultural problem.
00:36:59.400 Uh, you know, we have, and then there are academic means, you know, we need to get better
00:37:04.420 or more people in the classroom to balance what's going on so that, uh, teachers who think this
00:37:10.760 is a good idea need to hear the counter arguments.
00:37:13.680 Um, you know, in America, we have the strongest free speech protections in the world, but those
00:37:18.840 don't really mean anything if you're afraid to use them.
00:37:22.800 And what's happening is that students are shaming other students because they're learning
00:37:29.260 that there's one view that is the preferred view and other views merit derision and ostracism.
00:37:36.360 Um, and ironically, you know, when my kids were in school, they're in their twenties.
00:37:40.220 Now we had a flurry of really the biggest problem back then was this anti-bullying program, which
00:37:46.760 probably sounds good.
00:37:48.620 In theory, it should be good, but it was very poorly implemented.
00:37:52.600 And they really kind of trained students to demand that they should never, ever feel any discomfort.
00:37:58.400 And if they ever do, they should run to an authority figure and demand that somebody, uh,
00:38:03.360 redress this grievance.
00:38:04.820 And they sort of learned to exaggerate anything that happens.
00:38:08.360 Whereas we were trained in my generation more to just tough luck, stand up for yourself,
00:38:14.160 get over it, shake it off.
00:38:15.920 Um, maybe there's a middle ground between those two perspectives, but I, you know,
00:38:22.600 students are bullying other students.
00:38:24.800 Now, I think with the permission and encouragement of some of the teachers and some of what's going
00:38:29.200 on is that teachers are, you know, shaming, labeling, isolating, and I would argue in some
00:38:35.620 cases bullying students, which is really, really, uh, uncalled for and unhelpful.
00:38:41.400 And so, uh, you know, I think we can do better than that.
00:38:44.020 So there are a number of, um, lawsuits underway.
00:38:47.520 We have a flurry of legislation proposed at the state level, which itself can prove problematic.
00:38:53.760 Like maybe it's going to cause a backlash that's its own problem because they're banning
00:38:59.780 CRT in the classroom.
00:39:01.260 You know, anything, some of these are better written than others, but they, some of them
00:39:05.880 are written in a way to say that we will not teach anything that argues that one race is
00:39:11.160 superior to another race.
00:39:12.700 Uh, in this case, they're arguing that the white race is inferior and deserves to have
00:39:18.780 discrimination against it.
00:39:20.840 Well, that violates, you know, the 14th amendment in America and many other laws that we have.
00:39:26.260 So, um, bureaucratically people are filing freedom of information act requests to get their
00:39:33.220 hands on curriculum.
00:39:35.120 Um, another big problem we're having that you should watch for is these outside consultants
00:39:40.960 being hired to come into schools to deliver ideas and curriculum that is not democratically
00:39:47.860 decided on.
00:39:49.040 And that's how some of this finds its way into the classroom.
00:39:51.980 And, uh, and then when parents ask to see what is being taught to the teachers, uh, they
00:39:58.680 are told that it's copyrighted.
00:40:00.460 So we're having to, you know, legislate saying that nothing that's imported into the schools
00:40:07.380 can be shielded from the parents using copyright as an excuse.
00:40:10.880 Um, yeah.
00:40:12.420 And Bonnie, how, what role are the unions playing in all of this?
00:40:17.440 Are the unions supporting it?
00:40:19.420 Are they pushing back or are they, are they simply apolitical when it comes to this issue?
00:40:24.120 No, I don't think the unions are apolitical at all.
00:40:26.460 Um, you know, I can't speak for everything going on in the unions, but at first there was
00:40:30.140 a lot of denialism going on.
00:40:31.720 Oh, that's not happening.
00:40:32.660 You're imagining it, what people call gaslighting.
00:40:35.660 Uh, but then the unions came out and said, okay, we, it's not happening and we're going
00:40:40.300 to defend the teachers who are doing it, which is kind of hilarious.
00:40:44.260 Uh, so when people say it's not happening, I respond, well, then why did the unions say
00:40:49.520 that they're going to defend, you know, and they're arguing that teachers have first amendment
00:40:54.060 rights, but in reality, it's hired speech.
00:40:57.300 They do in their personal lives, but in the classroom, they're paid to deliver the state approved
00:41:02.300 curriculum in a public school.
00:41:04.760 Bonnie, I have a question as I'm, I'm, I'm sort of watching us have this conversation
00:41:09.660 and it's a very interesting one.
00:41:11.180 And the, the nuances are interesting, but if I'm a parent, what I'm really want to hear
00:41:17.280 here is not even how I can participate with other parents and changing the system.
00:41:21.260 What I'd be interested in is like, what the hell do I do with my kids right now to avoid
00:41:26.140 having them in a situation where they're being taught about, you know, sex at the age of
00:41:30.660 six and, and being put on some kind of gender part, whatever this craziness is like, what
00:41:36.140 would, what should parents do to, to protect their kids?
00:41:39.040 That is the primary responsibility.
00:41:41.420 Right.
00:41:41.660 A couple of things.
00:41:42.940 A lot of parents are pulling their kids out when they can and homeschooling them.
00:41:46.720 But I know that's not an option for everyone, but we have pretty wide open, uh, options to
00:41:51.800 do that in the United States.
00:41:53.180 I would argue that you can supplement your child's curriculum to balance it, to provide the balance
00:41:59.180 that isn't being provided in school.
00:42:00.880 We have a number of great curricular materials that we've also created at the fire.org, uh,
00:42:06.740 slash curriculum that you can download.
00:42:08.740 And this is mostly about first amendment rights and about, um, you know, the constitution and,
00:42:14.020 uh, the enlightenment and where Western values came from in the first place.
00:42:18.620 Um, I, I would also say that, um, parents, Oh, I, on my website, undoctrinate.org slash blog,
00:42:26.760 I have, I've put together, you know, the, that I'm like, okay, I've been outlining their
00:42:33.380 arguments because I want to give their arguments their due.
00:42:35.720 I don't want to do the straw man thing and just make a fake argument and then do it.
00:42:40.180 So, you know, that's something that I'm working on.
00:42:42.380 And then I also said, okay, they have, they're proposing certain systems that they want to
00:42:48.800 transform, uh, our culture with.
00:42:51.840 And I'm like, well, what are the systems that we have in place that they are arguing against?
00:42:55.900 So I do have eight different systems that I think are, are well worth reviewing, like
00:43:00.360 our economic system, our system of advancement, our culture, our mode of interacting with each
00:43:05.240 other, our mode of figuring out what is true and what is not true.
00:43:08.720 A lot of these are sort of invisible because it's the water we've been swimming in our whole
00:43:13.120 lives, but I credit to them for, I think, throwing all of this into stark relief because
00:43:19.520 they are advocating a completely different way of life, a completely different system by
00:43:24.320 saying that everything is terrible.
00:43:26.780 And so I, you know, I, I want people to understand and to begin talking about, you know, what it
00:43:35.340 is that we believe in and making sure that if you're going to reject it, you know what
00:43:40.560 it is that you're rejecting.
00:43:42.460 Because I don't, I think it's like deconstructing the canon.
00:43:45.720 It's, I think our kids are not being told what's great about our way of life.
00:43:51.700 And that's what I'd like to tell parents that we need to start doing.
00:43:57.340 Hey, Francis, do you like coffee?
00:43:59.520 No, mate.
00:44:00.180 I like tea because tea's British.
00:44:02.980 It's as British as kebabs and St. George.
00:44:06.560 Tea's from India and China.
00:44:08.460 Kebabs are from the Middle East and St. George was Turkish.
00:44:11.140 Doesn't matter, mate.
00:44:12.100 It became British after we smashed the crap out of that lizard.
00:44:15.760 That's what happens when you look at someone's bird during a night out.
00:44:19.700 Good to know.
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00:46:08.560 And Bonnie, do you think the solution is for people to set up their own schools, for there
00:46:14.900 to be more freedom to do that?
00:46:16.780 And as a result of that, they become more successful because they're focusing on more
00:46:22.680 traditional things when it comes to education, like reading, writing, etc.
00:46:26.680 Because I was reading about a lot of your public schools, and to me, it sounds like a large
00:46:32.340 part of them are simply not fit for purpose when you see people graduating from them unable
00:46:37.960 to read or write.
00:46:39.000 People are talking about starting new schools.
00:46:43.200 We do have something called charter schools, where you can set up a school with its own
00:46:48.240 charter where it has a specific mission.
00:46:50.620 And some of these are, you know, the mission is to transmit traditional values.
00:46:55.020 I don't think they can be religious, but they have a specific purpose, and they are freed
00:46:59.680 from some of the restrictions of traditional public schools.
00:47:02.440 It's hard, you know, you can't wave a wand and have a school appear instantly.
00:47:08.980 I hear from many, many parents who are asking that exact question right now.
00:47:13.800 Holy cow, what do I do?
00:47:15.260 Even the private schools, which, you know, we have different levels of private schools,
00:47:20.520 but even the wealthiest private schools, you can't buy your way out of this in the United
00:47:25.340 States of America right now, no matter how much money you have.
00:47:28.520 It tends to be even worse in private schools, this importation of one-sided ideology.
00:47:34.480 And it seems to be worse in affluent communities as well.
00:47:38.960 It seems to be an affliction of affluent white women, not entirely, but those characteristics
00:47:47.800 predominate.
00:47:49.100 I mean, you might consider moving to a more rural area.
00:47:52.420 And actually, a lot of people in America, if you look at our population shift, are moving
00:47:57.380 to places like Texas or Florida or places that are right now more, you know, freedom-loving,
00:48:04.500 I guess you could say.
00:48:06.740 So some people are voting with their feet.
00:48:09.880 Some people are trying to set up new schools.
00:48:11.980 Some people are deciding, I have to do it myself.
00:48:14.840 But the window that was provided via COVID through Zoom into our children's classrooms has
00:48:21.760 revealed a really unappealing reality.
00:48:25.380 And so it's been a huge wake-up call.
00:48:27.640 And I think that that didn't happen for no reason.
00:48:30.520 And so hopefully it will lead to improvements and good consequences.
00:48:35.100 I know that there are many, many well-intentioned, good teachers out there.
00:48:38.700 And I certainly don't want to impugn people who are showing up and doing, you know, yeoman's
00:48:43.360 work every day.
00:48:45.080 There's pressure on teachers, too.
00:48:46.620 We hear from teachers who are being pressured to do things that make them uncomfortable.
00:48:53.080 And we have seen a few very dramatic resignations.
00:48:56.520 I love my job, but I can't do this to kids anymore because I disagree fundamentally with
00:49:01.120 what's going on.
00:49:02.160 And this is what I was going to ask you.
00:49:04.040 I think it might sound to the neutral observer that we're kind of been beating up on teachers.
00:49:09.640 But how much of this is about the broader culture?
00:49:13.480 So, yes, I understand that a lot of these ideas were initially developed in academia
00:49:18.780 and then started to spill out into broader society.
00:49:21.680 But I almost feel like the position we are in now is it's spilling out of broader society
00:49:27.440 back into everything.
00:49:29.480 And I think education is probably just another branch into which it's now spilled out.
00:49:34.880 Because if you look at, you can look at anything.
00:49:37.060 You can look at sport, look at video games, look at almost any other issue.
00:49:40.760 These ideas are bleeding through.
00:49:43.860 So how much of this is just like education is affected by this just like everything else?
00:49:50.120 Or is it a particularly special case, do you think?
00:49:52.860 I think that education, the media and academia, which obviously is education, are probably among
00:49:59.920 the most left-leaning thing or institutions in America.
00:50:04.400 So I think it's a little bit more advanced than it is in the rest of the culture, which
00:50:09.300 is why you see the uproar at our school board meetings.
00:50:15.100 Yeah.
00:50:15.820 So but I do think, too, that a lot of these young...
00:50:18.300 We're also seeing the retirement of a wave of teachers with the baby boom.
00:50:23.240 I mean, they're aging out.
00:50:24.620 And even though I think they thought that they were very radical for their time, you have
00:50:28.880 to ask yourself who educated the baby boomers.
00:50:31.020 They were mostly educated.
00:50:32.080 And I'm technically a baby boomer.
00:50:33.540 Last three months of the baby boom.
00:50:35.420 You know, and I was educated, I realize now, mostly by people who fought in World War II,
00:50:40.280 a very patriotic generation.
00:50:42.500 And so that is definitely part of my ethos, part of how I look at the world, whereas this
00:50:49.960 generation is really educated largely by baby boomers who were radical.
00:50:56.140 So we have a wave of younger teachers coming in.
00:51:00.100 And I think part of it is the deficit in how they themselves were educated.
00:51:03.300 So I sympathize with the deficiencies I think that they received in their own education.
00:51:08.880 And I think we need to help them to be better teachers.
00:51:11.940 And Bonnie, we've spoken a lot about the education, we've spoken about teachers, we've spoken about
00:51:18.720 systems, but we haven't really discussed what has been the impact on children, because that's
00:51:24.400 the most important thing with this issue, the kids.
00:51:28.140 Right.
00:51:29.240 So apparently there is some research showing that things like ethnic studies, which is
00:51:35.940 one form that this takes, I'm hearing is good for students, which is concerning.
00:51:44.400 But it also speaks to the fact that in academia, we have very few professors, ed professors, who
00:51:53.040 are looking at questions from the other point of view.
00:51:56.020 So the need to conduct research, there's not much evidence on that, I guess is what I would
00:52:02.800 say.
00:52:03.060 It's very difficult to conduct research on children.
00:52:06.500 You have to get their parents permission.
00:52:08.080 There's all sorts of ethical guidelines that have to be followed.
00:52:12.500 So there is a dearth of evidence.
00:52:15.200 It's mostly anecdotal at this point.
00:52:17.700 I think that kids, I mean, how many kids can articulate what's wrong with their own education
00:52:23.640 in elementary school, virtually none.
00:52:26.820 We do have students who reach out to us at FIRE for help.
00:52:29.820 There is a group of students called Students Unite that I would recommend people check out
00:52:36.160 if they're looking for like-minded students who are unhappy with what's going on in their
00:52:40.780 schools, who are frustrated with it.
00:52:42.420 So, yeah, I think that the chance for harm is real and palpable, and it needs to be studied
00:52:50.280 and measured.
00:52:51.920 I completely agree with you, because that's a worrying thing.
00:52:56.060 You know, we're talking about what they're teaching.
00:52:59.180 We're talking about the way kids are being taught.
00:53:02.040 But we've got no idea what we're going to harvest with these kids.
00:53:05.860 Yeah, and how intimidating it is to know, you know, I talk about in my book, unconditional
00:53:12.760 acceptance.
00:53:13.600 And when I was trained as a counselor, that is sort of the fundamental foundation of any
00:53:18.960 helping relationship.
00:53:20.140 Counseling, teaching, those are helping professions.
00:53:22.480 And unconditional acceptance just means if you come to me and you're like, all right, I'm
00:53:26.740 an alcoholic, it's like, okay, that's where you are right now.
00:53:30.440 It's like, you don't help someone by saying, God, what kind of weak-willed idiot are you
00:53:36.260 to be an alcoholic?
00:53:37.560 You know, and if a student comes to you and they can't read, okay, you're in third grade,
00:53:41.400 you don't read, okay, that's where you are.
00:53:43.560 We're just going to start there and we're going to move forward as best we can.
00:53:46.400 You accept them.
00:53:47.520 But this is conditional acceptance.
00:53:50.900 You're only acceptable to me if you play the role that I require you to play.
00:53:56.920 So students naturally want to be, you know, appreciated and liked by their teachers.
00:54:02.620 So they're playing roles.
00:54:03.840 And this is this whole idea of inauthenticity.
00:54:06.900 So I think that we're inculcating really unhealthy behaviors.
00:54:11.300 And how many of us, here's something that a parent said to me once that really made me
00:54:15.740 worry.
00:54:16.200 She was very much on our side of the issue, very concerned, well, she's very concerned
00:54:21.540 about, I should, that was the wrong way to say this.
00:54:23.240 She's very concerned about what's going on in her child's schools.
00:54:25.380 And she wants someone to fix it.
00:54:28.640 But she finished the conversation by saying, how can I tell my child to be very careful
00:54:35.840 of what he says in school so that it doesn't, and that's how she ended it.
00:54:41.100 And I said, so that it doesn't hurt your career.
00:54:43.480 And she said, yes, my husband's career.
00:54:46.680 And I mean, this is the type of warning.
00:54:48.640 And I said to her, well, I think that our goal is to change the culture so that you don't
00:54:54.180 have to tell your son or daughter, this was a son, to be careful what he says in school.
00:54:59.820 Like, what are you afraid?
00:55:00.820 That there's the teacher's an informant?
00:55:03.160 Is this East Berlin?
00:55:05.740 Is this the Eastern Bloc?
00:55:07.380 I mean, what kind of, and this is, and I think that so many of us now are careful of what
00:55:14.400 we say because we're afraid that we're going to be, you know, dragged through the public
00:55:18.460 humiliation mill, reviled.
00:55:21.160 You know, we did actually have a professor who was a fire case, who was a very outspoken
00:55:28.540 professor and was often described as being a happy warrior.
00:55:32.020 Uh, and he fought and fought with his school.
00:55:34.900 I don't even remember the circumstances of it, but I think he was called a racist or,
00:55:39.440 you know, we're all afraid of being labeled a racist, right?
00:55:43.100 And he won his case, but then he would, they asked him to leave and they gave him a severance
00:55:46.840 and he went home and he committed suicide.
00:55:49.760 Um, so, and that was a big shock to everyone because he did not seem like he was bothered
00:55:56.340 by what was going on because he was, he was provocative and he seemed to be inviting it.
00:56:01.300 But yet he was clearly very, you know, harmed by, by what occurred.
00:56:09.380 So I think the invisible effects of what's happening are going to be lingering and are
00:56:15.360 going to really impact the life development of many young people.
00:56:19.720 And it is quite, quite extraordinary what you're talking about because I'm just finishing my
00:56:25.900 book, my first book, which is called An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West.
00:56:29.060 And the opening chapter, uh, I talk about growing up in the Soviet Union in the early 1980s.
00:56:35.520 And literally I describe my parents having that conversation with me as a young boy.
00:56:42.600 When you go to school, you must not repeat the things that we talk about at home.
00:56:47.400 That word for word, that was the conversation.
00:56:49.560 So to sit here in 2022 and to be discussing America and parents thinking about what will
00:56:59.880 happen to their careers if their child says the wrong thing in school, to me, that is an
00:57:04.940 extraordinary transformation of a country that we traditionally associate with, as you
00:57:09.400 say, the strongest free speech protections in the world.
00:57:12.340 And yet you now have children and parents afraid of wrong think and wrong speak in public.
00:57:20.240 How's this, how's this happened?
00:57:22.680 It reminds me of that metaphor.
00:57:24.420 Have you ever heard about how if you catch crabs, you don't even have to put a lid on them
00:57:28.500 because if, you know, if you catch one crab and you throw it in a bucket, he can't climb
00:57:33.220 out.
00:57:33.520 But if you catch three or four crabs, they could easily climb out.
00:57:36.960 But the problem is that the other crabs will pull him back in.
00:57:40.780 So you just keep catching them and there's no lid required.
00:57:44.660 And I think it's that same analogy.
00:57:46.680 It's a cultural problem.
00:57:48.260 And I think that it's, you know, it's invisible and yet oppressive.
00:57:54.260 And we can, and I think people are waking up and shaking it off one by one.
00:58:00.020 But I promise you that there are networks of people talking privately, saying truths that
00:58:06.760 they believe are truths that they will not say publicly, and looking for trusted, you
00:58:12.440 know, allies to use that war metaphor again, to help them in this fight.
00:58:19.800 But I do take heart because I think that what really happened last year is that, like, I've
00:58:25.640 been trying to warn about this for, when I pulled my daughter out of her school.
00:58:29.880 Over the Lying.
00:58:31.260 And that was 11 years ago.
00:58:32.800 So I've really been trying to bring attention to this for over a decade now.
00:58:37.900 And last year was the year when, you know, the sheet was pulled off and everything was
00:58:43.680 revealed.
00:58:44.140 And so my theme this year is the cat's out of the bag.
00:58:47.180 Now what do we do about it?
00:58:48.740 And anybody at this point who says it's not happening in America anyway is really behind
00:58:55.320 where the majority of people are now.
00:58:58.100 It's like, OK, it is happening.
00:58:59.920 And so now we're hearing, OK, it is happening and it's good that it's happening, which is
00:59:04.740 fine.
00:59:05.240 You know, that's what some people think.
00:59:06.660 And then other people can say, at least we're having the same conversation now about what's
00:59:12.040 going on.
00:59:13.160 And are you optimistic?
00:59:14.160 You mentioned the lawsuits.
00:59:15.620 I imagine that at the end of the day, yes, it's a cultural problem.
00:59:20.120 But partly cultural problems often get resolved through landmark legal decisions, right?
00:59:27.820 Are you expecting to see that happen over the next year or so?
00:59:31.380 I think so.
00:59:32.240 We have a couple of cases.
00:59:33.940 One is that people are watching closely is in Nevada.
00:59:36.860 This is a biracial boy.
00:59:38.760 The mother is black and the father was white.
00:59:41.380 The father is deceased.
00:59:42.620 And he was told to confess his white privilege in class.
00:59:45.920 And he refused and was threatened with failure.
00:59:49.040 So, you know, you've got harm.
00:59:51.000 And this case kind of runs the table on every law that can be invoked.
00:59:59.220 And it also has the very sympathetic appearance of, you know, because it's happening to a lot
01:00:05.540 of people who do not fit into the BIPOC category that supposedly these people are trying to protect.
01:00:14.420 His appearance is white, but he's biracial.
01:00:17.140 And so it's a very interesting case.
01:00:20.140 So, yeah, I think we're going to have some legal decisions.
01:00:23.460 And I think, you know, and actually quite a few teachers have lost their jobs over going too far.
01:00:29.320 And I don't think enough attention has been brought to that.
01:00:32.780 One example is the so-called Antifa teacher who was caught on camera bragging about, he says,
01:00:38.500 I have 180 days to turn these kids into revolutionaries.
01:00:41.980 And he was, you know, offering them extra credit to go to protests and rallies and things like that.
01:00:49.160 So when it was exposed that, you know, he was using his class to radicalize students, he was fired.
01:00:55.740 So I have multiple examples of teachers who have lost their jobs for exceeding the boundaries of what they were hired to do.
01:01:02.780 And so little by little, I think improvements are being made.
01:01:07.280 But this problem has been with us.
01:01:09.940 I know you had said, you know, critical race theory, I guess 1970, that's pretty accurate.
01:01:15.760 I think the real origins probably go back as far as the 1930s.
01:01:20.080 And specifically in America, Teachers College, Columbia, with the Frankfurt School and Antonio Gramsci, who really sort of was trying to bring about the cultural revolution.
01:01:32.740 They could never understand why the worldwide revolution hadn't happened with this.
01:01:36.900 You know, the Soviet Union.
01:01:38.020 Yeah, we're off to a great start there.
01:01:39.640 And everyone else, right.
01:01:41.240 Right. And it just didn't happen.
01:01:43.720 And they said, well, that's because the culture, the culture needs to change.
01:01:46.780 And so they have been chipping away at our culture, cultural underpinnings for, you know, that many decades now, about 90 years.
01:01:54.200 And so this isn't the ship is not going to turn around overnight.
01:01:57.460 But I don't think it's going to take 90 years to turn it around.
01:02:00.740 It is going to take a concerted effort.
01:02:02.580 We do have a number of very concerned organizations, you know, foundations, donors who are coming forward to say, you know, we see what's going on now.
01:02:13.720 We definitely want to turn this around.
01:02:15.660 And that's not to say that we want to go back to just this one happy-go-lucky 1950s positive, you know, view of everything.
01:02:23.720 But, you know, my view is we need to restore balance and we need to uphold standards.
01:02:28.900 That's another front where they're sort of saying, you know, get rid of grades.
01:02:33.500 Let's get rid of testing.
01:02:35.020 And because it's not fair to say that some kids are smarter than other kids and the great leveling again.
01:02:40.580 And so balance and upholding standards, I think, is the path forward.
01:02:45.340 Bonnie, I couldn't agree with you more.
01:02:47.320 That is music to my ears.
01:02:49.260 It's been a wonderful interview.
01:02:50.660 Our final question is always the same.
01:02:53.500 It's what's the one thing we're not talking about, but we really should be?
01:02:57.020 Um, I already alluded to this.
01:02:59.640 We need to stop talking about, I would like to, I've been talking about critical race theory for a long time.
01:03:04.360 I'm ready to stop talking about critical race theory and start talking about what is awesome about Western civilization and everything it has to recommend it.
01:03:12.300 We've critiqued it enough.
01:03:13.600 We've critiqued it so much that nobody even can articulate what it is anymore.
01:03:17.980 So I want to start and encourage others to start extolling the virtues of Western civilization.
01:03:24.980 We're not perfect, but we are, you know, as Winston Churchill said, compared to what?
01:03:30.900 It's the worst system except for everything else.
01:03:34.460 All right.
01:03:34.680 Well, I'll send you my book when it's out then because that's exactly what it's about.
01:03:38.420 Bonnie, thank you so much.
01:03:39.580 We're going to ask you a couple of questions for our locals.
01:03:42.160 But in the meantime, if people want to check out some of the resources you mentioned or follow FIRE's work, what's the best place to follow up on this conversation if people want to do that?
01:03:50.940 Yeah, please visit thefire.org slash K12 to see all of the materials we have.
01:03:57.920 We're nonpartisan, nonpartisan, non-profit.
01:04:01.240 And I have a site, undoctrinate.org, where you can check me out as well.
01:04:06.160 Fantastic.
01:04:06.800 Please do do that.
01:04:07.800 And of course, if you've enjoyed this interview, or even if you haven't, we've got more coming for you in the next few days and weeks.
01:04:14.880 The interviews always go out on a Wednesday and Sunday at 7pm, and we've got the Raw shows on Thursday, Friday and Saturday as well.
01:04:22.000 So we will see you very soon.
01:04:23.720 And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast.
01:04:28.700 Take care and see you soon, guys.
01:04:30.460 How do you think the damage done to children during the pandemic, through the wearing of masks, loss of education, loss of in-person opportunities as well, how will that damage manifest itself in later life, do you think?
01:04:45.660 Oh, wow.
01:04:46.420 Wow.