572. Navigating Education, Ideology, and Children | Answer the Call

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Speaker 12 Is it education or is it child warehousing? The answer is mostly it's child warehousing. I think that the K through 12 education system has become, is it irredeemably corrupt?

Speaker 12 Likely.

Speaker 13 How do I raise my children with strong critical thinking and moral clarity in a cultural environment where awokeness pretty much became cultural hegemony?

Speaker 12 Most of the time, people who are educating have no idea. They have no idea what literature is for.
You're not going to be able to motivate and teach people if that's how shallow your knowledge is.

Speaker 12 What you're doing as a teacher often is setting the motivational frame and dramatizing. This grips me.
This is important. It's vital.
Here's why.

Speaker 12 That's the world manifesting itself in accordance with your interest.

Speaker 1 Hey, it's Michaela, and I'm back with my dad for Answer the Call, where we take live questions from you guys. And dad mainly answers them, but I'll pipe in from time to time.

Speaker 1 Today, we're talking about a topic that should matter to everyone: how do we navigate the modern education system?

Speaker 1 So, this should be spicy.

Speaker 1 Up first, we have Joshua in Florida.

Speaker 12 Hey, Joshua.

Speaker 14 Hi, good to talk to you guys, both of you. We have been homeschooling our older son since 2020.
He's almost 10 now. I'm super happy with the results, but I'm kind of biased and very close to it.

Speaker 14 And I was wondering if you could perhaps steel man the case of

Speaker 14 sending him to a traditional style school, maybe now, maybe when he's older,

Speaker 14 just so I'm can be more honestly doing the cost-benefit analysis. It's not about me.
It's about him.

Speaker 12 Well, you are already, at least to some degree, considering him in the equation because you said that he's an avid, you implied that he was an avid and

Speaker 12 satisfied participant in what is happening. And so that's a certain amount of objective evidence.
Let's say, assuming that you have other observers who agree, and that might be your wife.

Speaker 12 What I would wonder immediately is,

Speaker 12 does he... have peers and friends and is he participating in anything that's part of the broader social contract outside the family? Like extracurricular.
Well, exactly, exactly.

Speaker 12 And like the only potential benefit to him going into the dismal school system is that he meets people his own age. He starts to socialize with his peers.

Speaker 12 And you can assess whether he can conduct himself in the broader social world.

Speaker 12 Like your role as a parent right from the beginning is to help your child, encourage your child to become maximally socially desirable. And I don't mean obsessed with popularity.

Speaker 12 I mean the sort of person that other people rely on and open doors to.

Speaker 12 And your concern, which is valid, is that because you're so close to the situation and you're his father and you enjoy what you're doing, which I think would be a good thing, is that you

Speaker 12 might be biased in your evaluation of his progress.

Speaker 12 Well, the way to test that is to see how he does in the broader world with his peers, with other adults, with social organizations that you have no part of. He could get that with sports.

Speaker 12 He could get that with clubs. He could get that with a friendship group.
Like there's lots of social organizations that aren't the school. He could get that with church.

Speaker 12 So the first question I'd have for you is: how do you think he's doing socially?

Speaker 14 He's doing well,

Speaker 14 but the only problem with that is it means that it's like a full-time job for me to make sure that he's got access to a co-op and to temple and to the chess club and different camps over the summer.

Speaker 14 But that's fine. It's my job.

Speaker 14 I do want to get out of the business of being in the middle of setting up everything and encouraging him too much because

Speaker 14 he's almost 10. At some point, you have to figure it out for yourself.
He has a phone number without internet access and he's got to be pushed out of the nest. And like, look, you call these kids.

Speaker 14 You, you go over to their house. I'll show you how to get there.
That sort of thing.

Speaker 12 Hey, I've got nothing to say about that except, yeah, do that.

Speaker 12 But, you know, you're, you're, okay, so basically what you're reporting is that he seems to be interested in and in principle, thriving in these other social communities, but that that's an additional demand on your time, an organizational demand, and you'd like to turn that over to him over the next few years.

Speaker 12 Well, that is what you should do.

Speaker 12 So that seems just fine to me. Well, there isn't anything about what you've said so far that raises red flags for me.

Speaker 12 You know, um, I don't think we're the people to argue on the other side of things either.

Speaker 1 That sounds like a way better idea than public school.

Speaker 12 Yeah, I guess the last thing I would ask you is what makes you think that he is progressing educationally at at least the rate he would in an ordinary school, which is a pretty damn low bar, let's say.

Speaker 12 But, you know, how are you informing yourself with regards to his academic progress?

Speaker 14 Because I know exactly what he's able to do with the subjects that I do have time to spend with him.

Speaker 14 And I see what a lot of things he likes to do with his own time, which is watch YouTube science videos and read biology books and that sort of thing. Right.
And that's not being prompted at all.

Speaker 14 Of course, he doesn't have internet access. So he's asking me to, can I see this video? Can I see that video?

Speaker 14 Yeah, you're, you, you hit the nail on the head. It really is just the social aspect to it.
He's the type of kid who probably needs

Speaker 14 a lot of time with kids to figure out how to deal with other people who are different. Yep.

Speaker 12 Yep. Well, that's so.
So look, it sounds to me like you're focusing on the appropriate concerns and that you're happy, your son is happy, you want to turn more responsibility over to him. Great.

Speaker 12 The amount of responsibility you want to turn over to your kids kids is all that they can handle, but no more than that.

Speaker 12 And that's the best compliment you can give them, because basically what you're saying is, look, kid, you can do this. And because you can, you should.
I'm not going to take it from you.

Speaker 12 And that'll also free you up to do the things with him that only you can do.

Speaker 12 It isn't obvious that you should be serving as his scheduling guide, you know, for the next five years when it appears that you have better things to do with your time that would be be more efficient for him too.

Speaker 12 Anyways, there wasn't anything in what you said that raises any red flags for me. The issue is, can he make the transition from the homeschooled environment to the broader world?

Speaker 12 And you seem to be facilitating that. And that's the issue to concentrate on over the next, you have years to do it.
He's only 10.

Speaker 1 Also, school doesn't necessarily help you transition to the real world either.

Speaker 12 No, it might make it a lot harder. Well, right, right, right.
Definitely. Definitely.

Speaker 1 I would have been killed for homeschooling. I can remember in grade four sitting, getting in trouble for reading at my desk

Speaker 1 because the quality of reading from that teacher was so poor that I was reading at my desk or counting the dots in the ceiling tiles to figure out how many dots there were on the ceiling.

Speaker 12 Yes, I'm fully

Speaker 12 gosh. I'm fully

Speaker 12 conversant with that degree of staggering boredom.

Speaker 1 Did you ever make a pile of eraser shavings just to see how high the pile could go?

Speaker 12 Anyway, but I got in trouble a lot for reading behind.

Speaker 12 That just used to be.

Speaker 1 You get in trouble for reading, yeah. Yeah, I know.
It's like I'm reading faster than you.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 12 Read it again.

Speaker 1 Oh my gosh. Yeah.

Speaker 12 I know.

Speaker 12 There's the voice of a teacher who hates children and learning.

Speaker 1 What about the spelling books where you have to do the exercises? We had the spelling, but you had to do the exercises.

Speaker 1 So they're like 15 pages of exercises, which was brutal for somebody who already knew how to read. But I I got really fast at it because you had to do it.

Speaker 12 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Thank goodness that's only, you think that's life when you're little.

Speaker 12 It's a long time. It's a long time.

Speaker 1 And it takes, what, two hours a day to,

Speaker 1 in theory, I doubt it even takes two hours to homeschool kids to teach them.

Speaker 1 It's mostly, if you think about school as child care, then you can wrap your head around it more, that it's childcare set up under an education facade.

Speaker 1 Then you're like, oh, okay, that makes sense. But if you're like, no, this is education, then it doesn't really make sense.

Speaker 12 Yep. Yep, definitely.

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Speaker 1 Next caller, we have Jake in Wisconsin.

Speaker 12 Hey, Jake.

Speaker 16 Hello, Dr. Peterson.
I was wondering between the homeschooling movement speaking to the system of schooling not really being the best for children.

Speaker 16 And I don't know what to do in compared to a previous statement that you've made that the institute should not be abandoned.

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Speaker 12 So

Speaker 12 that's the conservative conundrum, I suppose, is that

Speaker 12 it's a mistake to destroy all

Speaker 12 intermediary institutions, right? That's generally the radical's dream. Having said that, you're left with the issue of what you do when institutions have become corrupt.

Speaker 12 And I think that the education system, the K through 12 education system, has become,

Speaker 12 is it irredeemably corrupt

Speaker 1 likely maybe not acton

Speaker 12 right he talked about matt boudreaux yeah um i did my ted talk actually with mattreau which is funny but acton might be an option yeah well that that well there are developing institutions that are producing education systems that seem to be intelligent variants right so I guess what you hope is that, and this is something the United States is particularly good at.

Speaker 12 America is remarkable in its ability to revitalize its institutions through relatively radical conceptual and entrepreneurial transformation.

Speaker 12 And I think that is happening on the educational landscape. I mean, we're obviously trying to do that with Peterson Academy at the higher end of the education system.

Speaker 12 I think there are institutions, Acton Academy is a good example, that are models for how education could proceed.

Speaker 12 I've watched Catherine Burblesing in the UK. Her school, which is very different from the Acton schools, is an absolute bloody miracle.
The children there are thriving. It's a very

Speaker 12 authority-based, structured learning environment that makes tremendous challenging demands on the kids.

Speaker 12 And they're learning at a rate that I've just never seen anywhere, including high-level graduate seminars.

Speaker 12 So I guess my attitude towards the institutions is that as they become corrupt, increasing discernment is necessary.

Speaker 12 You know, when I went to school, I can't say that I was particularly thrilled with the course of my education K through 12, but I could at least say of my teachers that they weren't actively trying to dement me.

Speaker 12 And now we're in a situation where The incompetence, which has risen substantially over the last 30 years in the education environment, is magnified by this insane ideological corruption that's truly pathological.

Speaker 12 So, what do we need? Well, we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, do we?

Speaker 12 We want to be discerning in our analysis of institutional structure and do ever more to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Speaker 12 That's a lot to ask of parents because it's very difficult to do something like assess the quality of an entire education system. But

Speaker 12 when institutional trust

Speaker 12 has been damaged,

Speaker 12 there's no other alternative but to

Speaker 12 take the responsibility on for yourself and be more perspicacious in your assessment of your children's educational opportunities.

Speaker 12 It's also complicated, isn't it, by the fact that there are all these new technologies that we just don't know what to do with.

Speaker 12 I mean, I've been using the large language models as research tools for about, well, since they came out, and I use them a lot, and they're insanely informative.

Speaker 12 And it's the case, for example, that you can ask an LLM like ChatGPT to set you up with a training program for a foreign language, and it will communicate with you at your level.

Speaker 12 Well, we have no idea what the possibilities there are. I suspect it's not going to be long before children have a...

Speaker 12 educational tutor that's privatized, that's an AI, that knows exactly what they know and then teaches them at their, you know, at the

Speaker 12 edge of their zone of proximal development. It exists.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 There's schools opening up in Texas here.

Speaker 1 I don't know, those are the places I'm paying attention to.

Speaker 1 But they're kind of based on what Elon Musk was suggesting for children.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 1 But it's not run by Elon Musk. I can't remember the name of the school, but one just opened here.
And it's two hours of AI learning. And it's an AI teacher that teaches kids at their skill level.

Speaker 1 And then the rest of the day is more entrepreneurial and

Speaker 1 ventures and then public speaking and things, which is exactly what people should probably do.

Speaker 12 Yeah, that and some play. Well,

Speaker 12 Jorne Lomberg has pointed out that the introduction of relatively

Speaker 12 low-cost computational devices, iPads, let's say,

Speaker 12 that are...

Speaker 12 I believe his analysis was in third world countries, an hour a day, very, very inexpensive, produces a three-year improvement in learning over the course of one year. So we have no idea

Speaker 12 how challenged children are going to be to learn by teaching systems that will be optimized at their level of skill.

Speaker 1 I think practically too, if you're looking for a school because you, I don't know, don't have time to homeschool or don't want to homeschool, you can take tours of these schools and you can pick up pretty easily if they're completely overrun with ideological teachers because you take a tour and you look at the posters, look at the art the kids are doing.

Speaker 1 If there's equity anywhere, then you know that the school's a problem. You can go to their website, you can look up like, what are their policies on equity and things.

Speaker 1 If it's, it'll be plastered everywhere because they don't keep it a secret because they're proud of it.

Speaker 1 So if you find a school and you don't see it anywhere, chances are that's a more conservative school or just a not as ideological school. So you can go and tour places and it pops out really.

Speaker 1 But I think everyone's going to be learning by AI.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

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Speaker 1 Okay, on the line now is Oak Sana in California.

Speaker 12 Hi. Hi.

Speaker 13 Thank you so much for having me. So I immigrated to the Bay Area 12 years ago, and I have two sons.
They're 10 and 12, And I homeschool them.

Speaker 13 And my question is, how do I raise my children with strong critical thinking and moral clarity in a cultural environment like Bay Area, where awokeness pretty much became cultural hegemony?

Speaker 13 Because I'm worried that they will rebel against our family beliefs eventually during teenage years.

Speaker 13 And I really don't want them to do that, of course. And I want them to become like intellectually open and morally grounded as adults.

Speaker 12 How old are they?

Speaker 13 10 and 12.

Speaker 12 What sort of conversations do you have around the dinner table?

Speaker 13 Well, first of all, we always reflect back on the day and we talk a lot about the positive things that happen to us. That's our tradition.

Speaker 13 And we do go into downs of the day. And I pretty much do Socratic method of like asking them more questions and hearing hearing how they think out loud.

Speaker 13 That's one of the things we do is conversations with questions.

Speaker 12 Do you introduce, I mean, I could imagine since you've already set up that structure, do you introduce an analysis or discussion of current affairs?

Speaker 12 Like if you ask them, find something that appears to be a hot, like I don't know how much internet they access they have or access to newspapers.

Speaker 12 Pick an issue that appears relevant and

Speaker 12 tell me what you think about it and let's discuss it. I mean,

Speaker 12 you're concerned about the woke ideology and fair enough. So then you could imagine that what you need to do is to provide them with an understanding of the woke ideology.

Speaker 12 And so maybe that would be like 30 points.

Speaker 12 Obviously, a system like Grok could help with that initial analysis. And then you could use those as topics of conversation and contrast points.

Speaker 12 I mean, really, what you're trying to do is to teach them the axioms of political thought and to assess them critically.

Speaker 12 And I think your best bet with that would be to introduce them to the entire range of political thought from,

Speaker 12 you know, libertarian to Marxist. And then they like, then they know the whole landscape.
They're not going to run across anything that comes as a shock. You know, when I was

Speaker 12 relatively young, 13, I had a librarian in my hometown who was the wife of the local member of the legislature who happened to be a socialist. He was the only one in Alberta out of like 200.

Speaker 12 And people voted for him because he was actually a good man. And this woman, Sandy Notley was her name,

Speaker 12 she introduced me to a lot of classic literature, Orwell, Huxley, she really, Solzhenitsyn, she really showed me the literary world. But she also had me read Anne Rand

Speaker 12 And Atlas shrugged, which is much, obviously much more conservative than libertarian.

Speaker 12 You know, and when I asked her why she did that, she said she thought I would be intelligent enough to see through it.

Speaker 12 But the point was, she, despite her commitment to what was really a working-class socialism at the time, rather than a progressive socialism, let's say, she wanted to expose me to the whole range of political thought.

Speaker 12 Well, that's an inoculation. Well,

Speaker 12 you seem like a sophisticated person. Where are you from?

Speaker 13 I'm from Russia originally. I was born in the Soviet Union in 1987, so I didn't really catch much of the Soviet times.

Speaker 12 Right. Well, my experience with Eastern Europeans, broadly speaking, is that

Speaker 12 they or their families were bit pretty hard by the socialist worldview.

Speaker 12 have a certain amount of skepticism about it that's well warranted. You're in a good position to educate your sons.
You just start doing that.

Speaker 12 Educate them politically, make them sophisticated thinkers. And then they'll be ready when the shallow, woke nonsense comes their way.

Speaker 12 I don't see that you,

Speaker 12 you, there's, there's no way of dealing with that except to prepare them. And they're old enough, and your family seems sophisticated enough, so you could do an excellent job of that.

Speaker 12 Then they're ready, you know, and they can recognize it too.

Speaker 12 So, Mick.

Speaker 1 Yeah, what I started, so my kids are a bit younger. I have a seven-year-old and then two tiny beings.

Speaker 1 I just bought, I don't know if you've heard of the Tuttle Twins. The Tuttle Twins are so good.

Speaker 1 I love their books. They have graphic novels and then they have some shorter books for,

Speaker 1 I feel like graphic novels. You could start around like six or something, but then they have education for kids.
And it's pretty much libertarian education. I think it's hilarious.

Speaker 1 I think it's a really easy, fun way to teach kids about political perspective.

Speaker 1 Now, it's kind of biased in the way that I'm already biased, so I'm totally fine with giving it to my kid because I think it's true. But just as a practical like tool to use, Tuttle Twins is great.

Speaker 12 And what age do you think they're optimized for?

Speaker 1 Well, Scarlett, she's seven, so she's reading the graphic novels, but I think you could read them older too. And then they have actual history books and things.
And so that could be 10 and 12.

Speaker 1 I would have loved those. And they teach a lot.
They teach about American historical figures, history, political ideologies,

Speaker 1 economy.

Speaker 12 Yeah. Well, that touches on the broader issue, too.
Like a political education is a cultural education and that's a historical education.

Speaker 12 And so to really the way you fortify your children against ideology is to educate them. And you educate them by providing them with

Speaker 12 the tradition and by teaching them to think critically.

Speaker 12 And there's absolutely no reason for you not to push that hard and and make them ready fighters you know and and to do that even you you want to steel man the arguments that you're concerned about too you know i mean to the degree that the progressive ethos has anything to say it does have a grounding in compassion and hypothetically a concern for those that occupy the lower strata of the socioeconomic distribution and there are things to be said in favor of the truly oppressed and marginalized so to speak so that's worth walking through because your kids also have to understand

Speaker 12 why those arguments are put forward and how compassion can be weaponized and corrupted while masquerading as virtue. These are very hard things to

Speaker 12 manage properly, but there's no reason to assume they can't do it.

Speaker 1 One of the things you did well, because I went to an alternative middle school, an art, public art high school, and then an art university, and it was super progressive before progressivism was everywhere.

Speaker 1 And when I went to university,

Speaker 1 I think because of how I grew up, because you didn't really push things on us, I read everything that I was skeptical about. So I was like, okay, feminism.
What exactly is feminism?

Speaker 1 And I read a whole bunch of pro-feminist books and a whole bunch of anti-feminist books. And then I just decided what felt more true.
So I think as long as your kids can,

Speaker 1 well, critically think, look at all the information and then figure out what's true, they'll be prepared for hearing.

Speaker 12 Well, and part of the way that you teach people to think critically is to have them argue both sides of a

Speaker 12 position.

Speaker 1 And monitor who their friends are too. That's like probably.

Speaker 1 You got this weird family that's interceding, don't you think? Maybe then your kids shouldn't be best friends with that family's kid.

Speaker 12 Well, you have to keep an eye on your kids' friends.

Speaker 12 But I think the best thing to do is to is to fortify them, you know, because you can't be watching what your kids are doing all the time, especially as they become older teenagers.

Speaker 12 You have to prepare them to contend with the world. And if they're able to think and to think critically, then they can defend themselves.

Speaker 12 And then you don't have to worry too much about what snake pits they wander into.

Speaker 1 I had some pretty stupid friends.

Speaker 1 I wandered into a bunch of snake pits

Speaker 12 for a long time. Fair enough.
Well, I think that's a universal human experience when when you're a teenager. It's like, whoa, what was happening back then?

Speaker 1 This is what happens before your prefrontal cortex grows in. It's wild times.
Yeah.

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Speaker 1 Okay, our next caller is Amy in Connecticut.

Speaker 18 Good evening, Jordan.

Speaker 12 Hi. How are you?

Speaker 18 My question has to do with art education. I'm an art educator.
And I've noticed a lot of the students that are in the school are very disengaged, unmotivated, don't want to be in school.

Speaker 18 And in the art room, it's a different story because there's a lot more creativity.

Speaker 18 How can we transform education? There's been a lot in the past from Sir Ken Robinson and some of your own comments that art is the bedrock of culture itself.

Speaker 18 That I believe was from your Beyond Order book. How can we transform education and address this critical problem of disengagement in education?

Speaker 12 Well,

Speaker 12 my experience in school

Speaker 12 was, and this included university, was that it was often the case that the teachers who were attempting to impart information actually had no idea whatsoever why what they were teaching was good for anything.

Speaker 12 I especially remember that in mathematics because I would ask the educator why I needed to know this, and they didn't know. Well,

Speaker 12 my natural response to that was, well, if you don't know what it's good for, why should I be interested in it? Now, there's some arrogance in that, obviously.

Speaker 12 because you could say, well, you know, when you're 12 or 13, you should listen to adults because they might know something more than you do. And sometimes that's true.

Speaker 12 But it's also incumbent on educators to set the motivational frame. And so

Speaker 12 many people who teach art think about it as decoration. They have no idea what they're doing and they can't tell the students why it's important.
Well, it's the realm of the imagination.

Speaker 12 It's where creative ideas come from. It's where you develop skill and taste.
It's how you make your environment beautiful. It's how you indicate to others that you're sophisticated.

Speaker 12 It's how you learn to see beauty in the world so that it can guide you upward. Why would you want to be guided upward?

Speaker 12 Well, you want to be guided downward and suffer madly and end up in something approximating hell? Or do you want to see beauty beckon to you and learn to establish a relationship with it?

Speaker 12 And you need to,

Speaker 12 like 13-year-olds, 14-year-olds,

Speaker 12 new university students, they have a facade of cynicism, but it's pretty shallow. They don't know enough to really be cynical.

Speaker 12 It's a test in some ways. Why should I care about this? It takes effort.
Well, that's a reasonable question. Like, if it takes effort, why shouldn't I just fritter away my time?

Speaker 12 Now, if you have a serious discussion with your students, at least some of them might listen. It's like, what are the things that make life worthwhile in the midst of suffering?

Speaker 12 Well, beauty is one of those, that's for sure. You want everything to be hideous and ugly and chaotic.
How is that going to work out for you?

Speaker 12 So it's very important. Look, human beings are inclined to work toward a goal when they see value in the goal.
That's how our nervous systems are set up.

Speaker 12 And so you have to frame the educational endeavor within the confines of a story that indicate that the goal is worth the effort. And you can't just take that for granted.

Speaker 12 And that means you have to know yourself. And most of the time, people who are educating have no idea.
They have no idea what literature is for. They have no idea what poetry is for.

Speaker 12 They have no idea why it would be useful to memorize it. They don't know why you should write.
They don't know why they teach mathematical equations. And they think art is for decoration.

Speaker 12 Well, you're not going to be able to motivate and teach people if that's how shallow your knowledge is. So

Speaker 12 why is art a burning concern? Well, that's the first discussion that you need to have with the kids. And that's true for every topic.

Speaker 12 It's like, look, kid, you need to know this because if you don't know it, you're going to suffer stupidly and end up in a bad place.

Speaker 12 And if you do know it, pathways will open up to you that you can hardly imagine. And so you're going to be like a clueless, malformed,

Speaker 12 cynical, shallow lump who can't communicate and knows nothing. Or are you going to sharpen yourself the hell up and make your way through the world effectively? Right.
It's like this is a, this.

Speaker 12 If it's genuinely an educational issue, it's an intense spiritual and practical concern. And that has to be, God, you know, I went to Harvard and I did a talk in front of the students,

Speaker 12 and this was at Harvard 10 years ago probably.

Speaker 12 And I told them, you know, that thousands of people had been working for like 600 years to find them and offer them a stellar opportunity and that much was being invested in them and much was being demanded in them and that they had an ethical responsibility to be appreciative of the investment that had been made in them to sharpen themselves the hell up and to get out there in the world and do something useful.

Speaker 12 And like two dozen of them came up to me afterward and said, I wish they would have told us that when we first came to university. It's like, well, that should have been the first day.

Speaker 12 And this sort of thing happens at places like Hillsdale, because Larry Arn, who runs Hillsdale, he does tell the students that.

Speaker 12 And they have a 1% dropout rate as opposed to the 40% dropout rate that characterizes most institutions. You got to get the motivational frame right.
And to do that, you have to know why you're doing,

Speaker 12 why are you pursuing this

Speaker 12 specialization and why should people care? And if you don't know,

Speaker 12 your students aren't going to care.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I think practically speaking too, we probably have to be pickier about teachers because most teachers aren't good.

Speaker 1 So how are you going to go into a private school or a public school and get a good quality education if the teachers are no good? Yeah, well, and I don't even think that's a training problem.

Speaker 12 It's also because the, like, as we pointed out earlier, is it education or is it child warehousing? Yeah. And the answer is mostly it's child warehousing.

Speaker 12 And then you might say, well, who are the students who are most likely to become teachers? And it's not like they're picking the cream of the crop. Why?

Speaker 12 Because they actually don't care.

Speaker 1 You do. You come across some good teachers and then you remember them forever.
That's for sure.

Speaker 12 But I can remember like

Speaker 12 two.

Speaker 12 Yep. Two.

Speaker 1 Which is better than zero, I guess. None throughout my university days, which is pretty sad, but that's part of the reason we made Peterson Academy.

Speaker 12 Where they're all great.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but we went through, I mean, it's tricky to find good teachers. We went through thousands and thousands.
seriously of professors and we're like, these are the good guys.

Speaker 1 And our math teacher, because in calculus, I had this problem. I was like, why do I need to know these equations?

Speaker 1 yeah and he's like it doesn't matter memorize them yeah it's like okay so you don't even know how they came up with these if I knew how they came up with the equation and understood it to the basic level I could remember it otherwise I'm just memorizing it and I'm going to forget it after the exam the people who teach that way are people who learned what they learned by memorizing it they think that's how you learn things as soon as you remember something else you forget the last thing yeah yeah yeah which is useless yeah but our professor the math guy I'm so impressed with he explains why I was like we need someone to explain why you need trigonometry.

Speaker 1 Why do you need it?

Speaker 12 I didn't really, I couldn't really do statistics till I understood why everything was

Speaker 12 structured in the manner that it was structured.

Speaker 12 I needed to know why.

Speaker 1 And did you learn that on your own? Oh, yeah, completely. Yeah.
So for my statistics,

Speaker 1 this was year one in university. which was a health nightmare.
And I skipped everything.

Speaker 1 And on the final exam, I was cramming. And And so I learned everything myself from the textbook.
I got an A. I ended up with a D in the course.

Speaker 1 And I was like, should have done that at the beginning of the course instead of at the end of the course because I aced the final. That was my statistics experience.
But I had to Google everything.

Speaker 1 I used like Khan Academy and things to really learn.

Speaker 12 Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. There's a great book called A History of Statistical Thought that I unfortunately can't remember the name of the author, but that was extremely useful.

Speaker 12 But yeah, it's hard to find a good teacher. And a good teacher has to, well, a really great teacher.
Yeah, fair enough. A great teacher acts out a moral commitment to the topic.

Speaker 12 You know, a huge part of what you're doing as a teacher isn't imparting information. Books do that more effectively.

Speaker 12 What you're doing as a teacher often is setting the motivational frame and dramatizing the process of being engaged with the material. That's so true.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 12 Well, that's why it's a lecture theater, right? You're acting out a commitment to the enterprise and you're dramatizing that. You're saying, look, this is, this grips me.
This is important.

Speaker 12 It's vital. Here's why.

Speaker 1 This will change your life. This will change your life.

Speaker 12 Yeah, yeah. This will change your life.
Yeah. Cool.
Yeah. Protect you from the pit and orient you upward.
Yeah. And so, and you better get that right because the pit is deep, right?

Speaker 12 So, so pay attention or else, right. Well, and then people think, oh, well, maybe there's something here.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And that can be any topic if you get somebody to ask.

Speaker 12 It is. well every every

Speaker 12 phenomenon phenomenon means

Speaker 12 it's from phenistai it means to shine forth so every phenomenon is a worthy target of inquiry and some will grip you and some won't and what they're doing when they grip you is shining forth that's the world manifesting itself in accordance with your interest and so something will grip you right it'll shine forth That's what happens when you find someone attractive, for example, or something strikes you as beautiful or interesting.

Speaker 12 So that's the shining forth. So what that shining forth is, is the deep reality underneath your surface perception making itself known, glimmering.

Speaker 12 And then that's what the burning bush is in the Moses story.

Speaker 12 And then if you pay attention to that phenomenon and you investigate it deeply, you go down the rabbit hole to the bottom of all things and you see where everything's connected.

Speaker 12 That's where the animating spirit of the world resides. So that's what happens when Moses steps off the beaten path to investigate the burning bush, which is like the living phenomenon.

Speaker 12 He concentrates intensely until he gets to the bottom of something. And when he gets to the bottom of something, that transforms him into a leader.
Now he can speak truth to power.

Speaker 12 Now he can free the slaves from

Speaker 12 their what? Complacency and irresponsibility. And now he can specify the promised land.
That's what you're doing when you're gripped by a topic.

Speaker 12 And the grip is the revelation of a deeper reality beyond the surface appearance. And that's what you're trying to convey to your students.

Speaker 12 It's like most of what you see in the world is the facade of your assumption and ignorance. There's something deep there.

Speaker 12 And if you could only see it and if you made contact with it, then it would change you and everything else. That's right.
That's how the world is structured.

Speaker 1 And you can see more of that at PetersonAcademy.com.

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Speaker 1 And our final guest today is a pre-recorded message from Carl from Alberta.

Speaker 12 Ah, Alberta.

Speaker 20 To set up my question, I have four kids and spent years as a scout leader. What engages me is sharing challenging experiences and seeing growth.

Speaker 20 Following your podcast, you indicated IQ is most malleable before adulthood sets in. Going forward, what would be the best experiences I could provide for the boys in our youth program?

Speaker 20 Now what's behind this? I have a hard time thinking there isn't some path that can develop one's intelligence. After all, we humans have added substantially.

Speaker 20 And if you're on a spiritual plane, time isn't the issue. Progression or rate of progression is what I'd like to tap into.

Speaker 20 As a dad, the family and even those in the community should come along for the ride. But how could I do that best?

Speaker 12 Okay, so there's a number of questions there. There's a question about IQ, there's a question about motivation for mentorship.

Speaker 12 And then there's a question

Speaker 12 about optimal development.

Speaker 1 Is IQ

Speaker 1 most malleable before adulthood? Is that something you can even change?

Speaker 12 Well, you can certainly suppress it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, diet and et cetera, right?

Speaker 12 Well,

Speaker 12 diet and insufficient information.

Speaker 12 The problem is, to some degree, is that there's enough information in the world that's accessible to everyone so that a limit on information isn't the issue with regard to IQ development.

Speaker 12 There's more than enough information for everyone at every level of intelligence to be

Speaker 1 was that an issue before? Well, there's still the world.

Speaker 12 Yes, true. But yes, it was an issue before, I would say, because you could be

Speaker 12 in an informationally impoverished environment. I mean,

Speaker 12 it's complicated because the problem is that when you're more intelligent, say by nature,

Speaker 12 you investigate things and discover more complexity in them, right? So

Speaker 12 if you're curious enough, there's no limited environment. You rely on your own imagination.
So,

Speaker 12 and we don't really know, we don't really know how to

Speaker 12 increase

Speaker 12 IQ. We don't know.
There's been, there were all sorts of companies.

Speaker 12 10 years ago, there was a company that was advertising continually these cognitive exercises.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, I remember those.

Speaker 12 Yeah, I don't remember the name of the company, but it's vanished.

Speaker 12 And this happens repeatedly: that companies pop up and they say, we have this set of cognitive exercises that will keep your IQ intact and develop it.

Speaker 12 And then they do the research and they find that if you practice the little exercise, you get way better at it, but it doesn't generalize.

Speaker 12 And that's like, you just can't believe how solid a finding that is. People have tried for a very long time.
And it's peculiar because what you might think, there is a general,

Speaker 12 there's a general cognitive ability that's corrected for age, that's IQ. It's very easy to derive an IQ estimate.

Speaker 12 One of the things you can do, for example, you could take 100 multiple choice questions about random topics and you could administer them let's say to 100 people and you could rank order them in terms of how many questions you get right and you could correct that for age and that would be IQ.

Speaker 12 That's how easy it is.

Speaker 12 And so it's a very robust phenomenon. You might assume that because there's a general,

Speaker 12 if you're prone to get one question right, you're prone to get all of them right, right? So there's that general tendency.

Speaker 12 You might think that because there's a general tendency, you could practice a variety of different cognitive tasks, and that practice would generalize and it would increase that general ability.

Speaker 12 Nope.

Speaker 12 That isn't how it works. Now, you can decrease IQ by putting people in

Speaker 12 informationally poor environments and through malnutrition, through abuse, but

Speaker 12 there's no evidence that I know of that you can reliably increase IQ with time. I'll give you an example of this.
So

Speaker 12 there was a huge program in the United States started in the 1960s, which was supported by conservatives and liberals alike called Head Start. And I think Head Start still operates.

Speaker 12 The idea was that you could take kids in relatively deprived socioeconomic environments and you could put them in school earlier and in an enriched environment and that would give them a head start and the consequences of that cognitive head start would multiply as they progressed, right?

Speaker 12 So you get in early, sort things out cognitively,

Speaker 12 like motivate reading development. The benefits will accrue and multiply across time.
The kids will gain a Head Start. No, that isn't what happened.

Speaker 12 No, what happened was that the kids who went to Head Start did do better than their age-matched and socioeconomic-matched peers who didn't go to Head Start, but the differences disappeared by grade five or grade six.

Speaker 12 So there was no improvement in cognitive function. Now, there's a variety of reasons for that, which we won't go into.
There were some behavioral improvements.

Speaker 12 It was likely because some of the kids were taken out of extremely pathological families. Right.
Less abuse.

Speaker 12 Yeah, yeah, right. That's right.
That's right. And girls were less likely to get pregnant who had gone to Head Start in adolescence.
And the...

Speaker 12 kids in general were more likely to graduate, but there was no improvement in cognitive function. And that was really saddening, right? Because it was a good hypothesis.

Speaker 12 Like the idea that you could get a leap ahead early seems so obvious that you'd think it was incontrovertible. It just happens not to be true.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Not to get way off kilder here, but we know psychedelics improve openness to experience. Yeah.
But they haven't seen any changes in cognitive ability. Do they?

Speaker 12 No, that's also odd. Well, I think it's partly because you can make it.
Look,

Speaker 12 if you have a hierarchy, which means you're faster at processing and you can process more

Speaker 12 bits of information, so to speak, you can hold more ideas

Speaker 12 and manipulate them simultaneously. That's part of the element of general cognitive ability.
You're faster and you have a, you can juggle more. Okay.

Speaker 12 Creativity is positively associated with IQ, but it has an additional element, which is the improbability of the ideational connections you make.

Speaker 12 So the more creative you are, the bigger the leaps between ideas. Now, you can get so creative that you're manic and incoherent.
Right.

Speaker 12 But, and, and, and that would be the.

Speaker 1 You're connecting everything.

Speaker 12 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 Everything is disconnecting.

Speaker 12 Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right.

Speaker 12 Psychedelics do appear to increase that trade openness, that ability to make more distal connections and also attraction to aesthetic experience because that's part of openness but i see i've seen no evidence whatsoever that they have an in an enhancing effect on intelligence it's proved very very very difficult to increase iq very no one's done it no one's done it i bet if you got rid of brain fog associated with diet

Speaker 12 which i'm gonna say this then you'd bubble

Speaker 12 people to where they should be um breastfed babies have an iq advantage there is evidence that yeah oh my gosh that's horrifying yeah no are you serious well it's in keeping with it your brain is a very demanding metabolic organ if you optimize its function it's going to work better that seems to have accruing benefits from birth onward if you don't get enough to eat and you're stunted in your development physically you saw this with populations all around the world who never got enough to eat you know so they the men would grow up and be five foot two five foot three instead of the full six feet they might be if they had enough to eat.

Speaker 12 That's associated with intellectual stunting. The best and the best way to protect your IQ as you age isn't to do cognitive X, cognitive exercises.

Speaker 12 It's actually to optimize your nutrition and to do physical exercises. You know, the brain is a very physical organ and optimized health is the best adjunct to increased cognitive ability.
So, yeah.

Speaker 12 And so I don't think I said, as the questioner indicated, I don't believe I said that IQ was most malleable when you're young.

Speaker 12 It might be most malleable downward, but

Speaker 12 it's a very,

Speaker 12 IQ is very stable across time. Very.
And it's perverse phenomena. So here's an example.
If you take twins, identical twins separated at birth,

Speaker 12 and you test them repeatedly for IQ as they age,

Speaker 12 what you'd expect is that their IQs would get more different as their experiences diverge. That isn't what happens.

Speaker 12 What happens is that as they age, their IQs get more similar until regardless of how they were raised, by the time they're 60,

Speaker 12 if you test one twin and the other, they're so similar that it's like you test the same person twice. So identical.

Speaker 1 It's a little bit of doing anything then, just to play devil's advocate here.

Speaker 12 Well, there's lots of things about development that aren't specifically associated with processing speed. You know, so no, that's a good question.

Speaker 12 And to some degree, this questioner was asking that question, right? He focused on intellectual development, which probably wasn't appropriate. Probably, and I don't, I think he knows this.

Speaker 12 He said that he really found motivation in challenging young people to develop themselves. Yeah.
Okay.

Speaker 12 That doesn't mean, yeah, but that doesn't mean they're getting smarter in the IQ sense. It might easily mean that their character is developing and they're becoming wiser, right?

Speaker 12 And that they're developing, you know, a body of practical, specific,

Speaker 12 useful information.

Speaker 12 IQ is most correlated with how fast you learn something. You can learn something slower and still learn it.
Right. So what you're hoping for when you're educating people is more

Speaker 12 character development on the moral side. Agreed.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 12 And so, and his pleasure in challenging kids and putting them on the edge and developing them is actually a reflection, should be more accurately a reflection of concern with character rather than with intelligence per se.

Speaker 12 Right. You can have high IQ and have poor moral character.

Speaker 1 That's for sure. Yes, absolutely.
We see that all over America.

Speaker 12 We certainly do. And vice versa.
You can be a very good person who's

Speaker 12 there's no correlation between morality and intelligence, like literally none. If you think about conscientiousness and agreeableness as the moral categories, it's tricky.

Speaker 12 Conscientiousness is associated with industriousness and orderliness.

Speaker 12 Conscientious people can keep long-term contracts. They tend to abide by their word.
The correlation between conscientiousness and IQ is zero. Zero, right? Which is quite remarkable.

Speaker 12 You know, it's not what you'd expect, but it happens to be the case. There's no correlation.

Speaker 12 Like agreeableness is trickier because agreeable people are compassionate and polite and it's easy to think about that as virtuous. But disagreeable people who are competitive and

Speaker 12 critical, that's also a virtue.

Speaker 12 But there's also no correlation between agreeableness and intelligence. So

Speaker 12 character and intelligence are not the same thing. And

Speaker 12 it's more appropriate to evaluate the quality of a person. It's so tricky because intelligence is so helpful because you're faster, eh? You're faster and broader.

Speaker 12 And so, in a head-to-head competition between two people of equal character, the more intelligent person is going to move quicker. And that's a rough fact.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 12 it's like it's a brutal fact of nature. But like, also, who cares?

Speaker 1 You can't do anything about it. So move on.

Speaker 12 You, you maximize the, you maximize what you have at your disposal. You know, there are other virtues.
There are virtues. First of all, intelligence isn't a virtue.

Speaker 12 It's a responsibility. It's a gift.
And

Speaker 12 it's a gift that, if misused, brings immense cost. Like Lucifer, mythologically, is the spirit of the intellect gone wrong.

Speaker 12 Right. So like high intelligence can be a very destructive force and a curse, right? It's associated with pride, for example,

Speaker 12 in the mythological

Speaker 12 world.

Speaker 12 So

Speaker 12 lots of people who are smart are very proud of themselves for being smart. That's a very bad idea.
First of all, they didn't earn it.

Speaker 1 And they're probably not that smart. Well, you know, in the greater scheme of like God.

Speaker 12 Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, there is that to consider.

Speaker 1 Well, on that note, thank you all for watching and listening today. We'll be back with more episodes.
I quite enjoy these of Answer the Call Soon.

Speaker 1 Hit the subscribe and notify button so you don't miss an episode because sometimes YouTube is tricky with dad's channel. Talk to you guys soon.

Speaker 12 Do you have a question you'd like us to explore? Share it with us at the link in the video's description. And let's face life's challenges together.

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