Race to Nowhere: on education

I can't really remember the last time I had a chance to go in the backyard and just run around school it's just so much pressure that everyday I would wake up dreading it I'm afraid that our children are going to sue us for stealing their childhoods I would spend six hours a night on my homework you have to get into the top school you have to take tests and do interviews it's gone way to the extreme we're all caught up in it in America if you don't earn a lot of money something went wrong the pressure comes from the colleges from the parents from the government but it has to stop you have to do one out so you can get into a good college everyone expects us to be superheroes you have a fear from the parents that my kid needs to be able to get a job how do you expect it to do well when you can't even make mistakes you're dedicating your whole life to your grades you have to be smart and you have to be involved in the arts they have soccer practice every day plus the homework on top of that produce produce produce it's impossible I couldn't cope I've gone through bouts of depression just because you feel so swamped I almost like had emotional breakdown there have been six suicides in our school district our students are pressured to perform they're not necessarily pressured to learn deep and conceptually what is that going to mean when we have a whole population of dentists and doctors who've been trained from the script things that actually get our students to think are pushed aside these kids come to the table with this creativity and this love of learning let's just not take it out of them I think the United States really needs to rethink how we do schooling the economic future of the country depends on our addressing this we need to redefine success for kids it's gotta be something we do together all of us as a society almost as a movement jobs need you to be a critical thinker they need you to be a problem solver we need to really think what does it take to produce a happy motivated creative human being one of our sons we put him into a junior college and he started taking some courses and he'd never been in a classroom environment so we realized that he was totally unprepared for that experience and he had a really hard time so we thought okay we'll put him into the the high school there and award-winning high school it's got some of the best you know it's quote unquote in all the real estate advertising they always say best schools in the nation so anyway he went there and what we found out later from some of the teachers that had taught there is that the school is it's basically run like a prison it looks like a prison in fact most of the schools in California look like prisons and there's there's a reason for that it's actually the prisons that are designed like the schools and their and the reason for that is to they figure something went wrong at about 3rd 2nd or 3rd grade so California prisons are actually designed like elementary schools to get the inmates back into that mentality of doing what they're told and I think what's happening in a lot of the schools around the country is that increasingly there's just constant monitoring they're monitored for everything they had to take permission to go to the bathroom to come back and and really what's what's I think deeply troubling for me especially at the high school ages if you look at there's a book called the case against adolescents which argues that this infantile ization of children moving into adulthood and and keeping them as as children is actually one of the things that creates adolescent rebellion john taylor gatto told me of an experience they had in a school in the inner city in new and he was Teacher of the Year in a state that has over 50,000 teachers he was actually Teacher of the Year in that state it was unprecedented in New York City in the state of New York four times john taylor gatto who did a seminar here with us one of the things that he said is that his entire career was subverting the system and he would wear a three-piece suit and he would go to to school and look like a conservative but he said he was had a completely radical agenda which was to really subvert everything that was going on in that school to the point where he actually at one time stole all of the tests from the principal's office and through this school into complete chaos for two weeks and this is how radical this man was and yet his students consistently were some of the most successful students and they went on many of them to have very successful careers and several of them attributed their success to having had him as a teacher so many of us had have had great teachers but many of us have also suffered the difficulties of these school systems that we find ourselves in just to give me an example I went to one of the best Catholic high schools in the country it was elite school but we didn't we had no grades and it was a pass or fail system there were also four there were about 15 students to each class but there were four classes for each freshman sophomore junior and senior each segment had four actual different classes that ran at different paces and the idea was if that if you were having a hard time you actually were put into a class that went at a slower pace so that everybody stayed you didn't lose people and that's one of the things that we find in the school system that we have is that you have people that that young people who they they haven't had their awakening yet in mathematics or they haven't had it in reading one of the things that children are often diagnosed is being disliked dyslexic or they're having reading problems because they're trying to teach them to read at five years or six years of age and they're not ready to read yet if they just left them alone by the time they get to eight nine or ten when they're ready to read that they become quite efficient readers so this idea of of having to follow the program some people do not get algebra they will never get algebra and there are other people that don't get geometry and they won't ever get geometry it's it's you know and to punish kids for these for these what are seen as as universal ways of knowing they're not Universal ways of knowing that people have different ways of knowing I went to another high school I was for my freshman and sophomore year there I went to another high school which was also a private high school and my brother and sister went to that high school as well but again very small classes we were on honor system I don't remember cheating in in I hope I'm not this is not redacted memory but I really don't remember cheating but one of the things that the reasons why one of the reasons why our son it became unbearable for him to go to the high school there is that he since the time he was very little he's been able to do math in his head and he was very gifted in math we have another son that has a really hard time with math but he was in in the testing it became so difficult for him to keep up with the time and show the work that he just started doing these things in his head and then he would turn the tests in and and this teacher would actually mark these answers wrong that he was getting right and and when he confront him with it he said I know you're cheating and it was so humiliating for him because he had and cheated before but he said that at that school cheating was the norm it was not the exception it was the norm when I was going to school it was the exception that's no longer the case when I mentioned this to ace a medical student at the University of Stanford I said to him you know how my son was telling me that everybody cheated in high school and he said he said yeah no no I cheated my whole way through high school and I said are you doing that in medical school now and he he really kind of got a blank look on his face and it really troubled me because I'm thinking it if he cheated his way all through high school and he's gonna cheat his way all through medical school and then I have to go to him to get some operation done on me and that was a test that he happened to have cheated on so I mean we I think we have a really serious problem the other thing is we have to ask ourselves you know I have a saudi friend who's a businessman who asked one of the heads of the the business goal in in harvard do you teach ethics at harvard and he said of course we do we teach ethics he said then why are all these Harvard graduates cheating people on Wall Street you know I mean these guys are all the the smartest guys in the room the Enron guys the guys who got 4.0 that are coming out in fact derivatives most bankers could not understand this stuff it was so complicated because the people that developed these schemes were mathematical geniuses you can no longer go and get a PhD in economics like you used to back in the 50s or 60s economics was more of course in philosophy now it's higher mathematics and it's very competitive and hard to get but these guys were the brightest guys where were their business ethics they seemed to throw them out the window so there's many many issues that are going on in this in this film and and certainly we saw on the one hand all these kids are supposed to do they're all doing really well or they're all getting straight A's and 4.0 GPA and all these people here and they come into these places needing remedial work I've taught courses you know I taught a course at Las Positas College here and it's really quite shocking the level of the after 12 years of school students that have a really hard time writing a basic essay one of the things I'm teaching now at a college here in in Berkeley and one of the things that is for the students that I'm teaching is that they have to get used to the fact that I'm really not interested in measuring what they know for me that's that's for them that if they're not getting something they can tell me but they don't need this paternalistic approach to education where the teacher has to tell them whether or not they're doing well or whether or not they're there they're ok or not and then the other thing about it is I I don't I don't believe in grades and I don't really believe in testing because I think testing is also a completely insane way of measuring whether something you know something we know for a fact that most of the tests you can get advanced scores on them by taking these very costly programs where you learn how to take tests and and and you can increase they guaranteed to increase your grades by a hundred points the difference between a 600 and a 700 is the difference between getting into a good college or a god college so a lot of this and I don't think the class issue was addressed enough in this film because I think there are a lot of class issues that are going on in this film because many of these schools out there we've got teachers that are just trying to keep students from killing each other and there's a five-year burnout rate and that poor teacher who's breaking down on the film it five years into teaching most teachers now actually stop and and they can't do it anymore what's interesting is when they're asked what is the number one reason that they're finding when they're asked why they're leaving teaching because they're not allowed to teach how they want to and what they want they're being told what to teach by the state and it's all geared towards these ridiculous tests which is a massive industry that has immense lobbies these are billion-dollar industries in America the books the tapes the DVDs the CDs the videos the tutoring all of this stuff is money and yet we've got all of these young people that aren't learning basic skills the basic skill sets another aspect and this is something to think about there's something called the Flynn effect which is that they're seeing in in testing that measures IQs they're seeing that the IQs are going up for for those types of tests that measure certain aspects of quote-unquote intelligence but yet at the same time they're seeing that young people are having more and more difficult time reading facial expressions they're having a difficult time doing basic things that in fact there's a book coming out now the winter of our discontent which is about a woman who's talking about how kids don't know how to open cans or use can openers that they don't know how she mentions in the book about one of these kids came over to their house and when he wanted some ice for the for his drink she said it was in the icebox and he opened it and it was a tray and he'd never had to use an ice tray ice cube tray before because he was so used to just having the ice cubes come out of the refrigerator and he didn't know what to do and she just said to him work it out you know work it out so that's an aspect that's very frightening now one of the one of the things that to me this is indicative of an autistic personality what we're creating basically I think is a society of autistic people people that that are very good at certain things actually can be very brilliant at them but are completely disconnected from human action my wife and I have noted for a long time because we have we had five children when we would go to the grocery store with all these kids at different times and and we'd have like the two-year-old or the one-year-old the older people working in the grocery store would invariably stop and interact with the baby and and and even sometimes speak in baby language and do this and and there was some kind of interaction but we would note that the younger kids that were working this would completely ignore the child and as if it wasn't even there and there was no human interaction what kind of mothers are going to come out and fathers of people like that so I think there are a lot of issues going on in this film I'm personally against I I'm not I use a computer and I'm not a Luddite but I am very much opposed to introducing these things to young kids I think it's it's a disaster personally that's my personal opinion I also think a lot of the the things that kids need to learn in school are human things one there's a Persian proverb that says it's very easy to be a mullah it's very difficult to be a human being you can go to the madrasa and you can learn all those things and I've met many tyrannical scholars are our prophet Mohamed Salah lucidum said Yukawa job evidence anima beware of tyrannical scholars that knowledge when it becomes a source of arrogance and a source of pride it has the opposite effect the more knowledgeable a person gets the more humble they should become I'll just end and then we can open a supper talk my great-grandmother and and it's very interesting that she mentioned about Bill Gates not having a college degree many many of the most successful people in the United States of America do not have college degrees but again how are we defining success I mean that that's another because we use these words we throw them out and and often it's it's socio-economic success but this this is a book it's called Bane's rhetoric I got this from my father who got it from his mother who got it from her mother so this is my great-grandmother's high school rhetoric book from Wichita Falls it was a public high school if if you read this today I think what will surprise you is it's written at a postgraduate level somebody today even who has higher degrees I think would have a difficult time reading it but I just want to there's a section on appeal to emotions and what an interesting thing to teach high school students about how they can be manipulated by orators in that section and I also know because my great grandmother noted in the in there's a page here that has a little note from her that says Lily Cummings December 10th 1880 had a terrible toothache today so it's it's an unusual thing to know about your great-grandmother that every December 10th I'll have to try to remember that but in in this section it says thirdly the emotions and passions as fear love self esteem power anger ridicule aesthetic emotion religion the moral sentiment he says in one respect these may be viewed as pleasures or pains and as attracting or deterring us according to their felt intensity whether they be actual or anticipated such other pleasures of affection of self complacency revenge fine art and the pains of sorrow humiliation remorse in another aspect they take on the character of passions or inflammation disturbing the fair calculations of the will and inducing us to act without reverence without reference to our pleasures or our pains fear terror dred whatever pains us is an object of avoidance according to our sense of the pain this is not fear but the usual attitude of precaution against harm but on each on certain occasions pain in prospect is accompanied with a tremulous and unhinging excitement under which the powers are enfeebled and rational calculation is interfered with every other interest being sacrificed to the morbid impulse this is a high school textbook terror is a powerful agent in overcoming the consummation and self-will disposition and is made use of in government in religion and in education the passion may be excited by the mere prospect of great suffering but still more effectually by unknown dangers uncertainties and vast possibilities of evil in matters keenly felt by the here's the approach of unexperienced calamities is apt to engender panic under a play or epidemic people may be easily frightened into measures that in cool moments they would repudiate the sick and the depressed can readily be inspired with religious and moral terrors history furnishes many examples of political oratory succeeding through the excitement of Terror I mean if that's what they were teaching high school students in the 1880s you I don't think somebody like George Bush could have ever got elected right so it's it's very interesting that we're living in a time when our young people need more than ever to have the tools to be vigilant against demagoguery against propaganda advertising I would recommend all of you if you haven't read Dorothy Sayers extraordinary article that's in the little booklet there on education I would really you can you can read it online so I know I'm but it supports Ginza Academy so you can buy it too but it's it's the lost tools of learning and in that Dorothy Sayers who at one point wrote advertisement copy so she knew very well the secrets of advertising she's noted for her mystery writing but she was also a great theologian and the mind of the maker is an extraordinary book she translated Dante that the Divine Comedy wrote the best essay hands-down I've ever read on the seven deadly sins and she was largely homeschooled her father began teaching her Latin at the age of seven and she wrote in a stunning essay on why you should learn Latin early as opposed to in high school she said that to learn men some and say men say men some men say at the age when you like things like eenie meenie miney mo is very encouraging children at that age actually love to memorize they love jingles and those are the times they should be learning foreign languages and things that need rote memorization and you're all in there I think we're going to open it up for ya for questions well I think Grady's largely when you have large classrooms and I think it's an easy way for the teacher to figure out I mean it's for a large classroom so when you're working in smaller groups or one-on-one with children grading becomes unnecessary and and I also think a lot of schools a lot of the alternative schools they don't actually gray they do pass/fail so either the child learns the material and then they move on or they don't and grading is definitely not something that that needs to be done they put children that were very poor students and put them into gifted programs and told the teachers that these were gifted students and they actually ended up doing much better than they've done before so grading can become self-fulfilling prophecy the girl gets an F on a test and sudden she thinks she's she's stupid because she didn't get something that might simply be that the time that she did because we have awakenings we have intellectual spiritual emotional physical awakenings in life and these comment different stages for different people some people will have an intellectual awakening in their 30s or 40s where they they really become interested in learning at a deep level others do not and one of the things that that I think is really tragic about grading to me is the assumption somehow that this is telling you you know that this student is an excellent student because it got rids we know that that's false you know all many many of the the most brilliant people got terrible grades in school you know the famous example is Einstein and actually thought he was during his early period because he daydreamed all the time we have students that just wander off and because they're actually in and the imaginal world and creativity which is getting lost is another aspect of of what's going on out there killing the imagination a lot of the visual images students watch films instead of reading books and everything becomes visual so they actually lose that creative capacity I mean I really think grades are very detrimental and we're teaching also it's you know we're telling students that they're learning these things they become the reason why they learn it to get the grade and that's what they're interested in instead of actually learning the material what's going to be on the test as if that's the only thing that's important right what's gonna be on the test subjects should be enjoyed also and you know my father said that when he was at Columbia of all the teachers that he hadn't said he had many brilliant teachers but the one teacher that really affected him was a teacher named Mark Van Doren and Van Doren won the secrets of bandura's teaching was and giro who was one of his students said that Van Doren had a trick he made the student think that they were an intellectual appear with him and when I told my father cuz I'd read about and what my father said it wasn't a trick he genuinely believed that and he treated people with that dignity that's another aspect one of the things that I tried to do with my own kids you know is never tell them that they're lying or never tell them to expect the best you meant that to expect the best from from them when you expect when you think all these students in your classroom are cheaters they'll respond in time they will they will affirm your own suspicions and we expect from them something much higher many many young people will respond in kind it's a good point I think for people that could not hear the young lady was just saying about the immigrant community here and I think particularly probably come from a South Asian if I'm not mistaken background that that many of the immigrant parents and you find this in the Asian community in the in the in the Indian community in the Pakistani community Arab community you will find an immense pressure put on the young people to succeed get the best grades because they want them to get into the best schools this is actually in endemic in many parts of the world Cairo has tests that determine your future so high school students will actually commit suicide because of the of the impact so this is not just an American problem the difference I think in a lot of countries is the the pyramid is so small so the the people that can get into colleges are much smaller here if you don't get into the best school you can you can opt for a another school that must precede us you know I told a lot because a lot of students were Afghan students I would tell them if you are in Afghanistan this school would be the Harvard of Afghanistan you know even though it's a junior college the the type of opportunities that you have in a school here are just not afforded to people in other places so there's definitely a lot going on there I mean we have real problems in these communities where immense amount of pressure is put on young people and we're seeing it just in the statistics the you know it's a good point that that autism I mean that they don't know what causes there's people that have tried to establish the relation between vaccinations and autism and you know Joseph Kennedy Jr's going around saying it's actually the mercury that they put into the that some people react to and then there's a lot of evidence that it's not and there's a whole slew of physicians that argue the other one what for me in giving a lot of thought to autism because it is a problem in our society I think a lot of it has to do with really over stimulation and and I think some people are profoundly sensitive we don't know what ultrasound is doing to fetal development I mean there's these arguments that oh it's perfectly safe well for decades cigarette smoking was perfectly safe in fact doctors actually recommended smoking for some people so for nervousness and things like that so you know there's there's so many things we don't know and in our society that the lack of humility I think that that's in some of these professional communities in the medical community this kind of arrogance and just saying it's definitely not that or it has nothing to do with that we don't know but I think if you know about the the woman I can't remember her name right now but she you know who ended up getting or she's I think the first autistic woman to get a PhD what's it yeah Temple Grandin one of the things that really struck me about her is her relationship to animals because animals have very most animals many animals have very hyper sensitive nervous system deep dears if you look at deers or rabbits I mean they're just totally sensitive to any movement any flashing I have to have a as my sister has this also you know an exaggerated fatso Vega response as a result of Barlow syndrome which is a congenital problem so I know what hypersensitivity can be to over stimulation and we're in a society where people are over stimulated with images with lights I mean these lights have been proven just to be unhealthy lights and yet we still use them in all of our universities and and elementary schools I mean this stuff - authe studies that were done back that Walt Disney had these studies done back in the 50s on on this type of lighting but it's a cheaper binding and yet we know that effects at that time and people bleed more under these type of lights because the nervous systems is is hypersensitive so there are just so many things that you know there's just so many variables going on but but one of the things that we know definitely people are getting addicted to these these the game game game station nation which is a book about addiction to a lot of these games the the Pokemon phenomenon in Japan that poor kid who died after you know playing for three days or something or four days could not stop playing and you can say those are anomalous cases but nonetheless there's there they're there and if they're affecting you know small numbers what are they doing to the greater number of people if that's the extreme of the effect what-what is a moderate effect the young boy that had seven head shots in Virginia went to school and killed seven kids with head shots the FBI said that they didn't have marksmen that could do that because he was killing them as they were running away well it turned out he had a game at his house that his father had gotten him for his birthday where you got points for shooting people in the head and and so you can say well that's you know an isolated case but Dave Grossman wrote a book lieutenant-colonel Dave gross he taught a new science at West Point called kilala G which is the psychology of killing and yet he's written several books now I mean this is one of the foremost researchers in that field he's written several books stop teaching our children to kill because what he shows is all of these actual this technology was developed by the military to desensitize people into being able to kill other people and this stuff has trickled down into mainstream and we say well freedom of speech you know we every buddy has a right to produce what they do this is having an effect we have the problems in pornography as well the the the the number one downloading that's going on on the Internet is pornography in in the United States there's more porn being downloaded than any other thing on the Internet what type of young people is that going to do what's what's going to happen to these young people that are 15 years old and instead of like 30 years ago being exposed to a playboy or something like that they're exposed to live pornography on online and they have access to that what's that going to do in in Princeton they had a conference that I was part of on pornography and they had a neuroscientist there saying that based on their studies people that become addicted to pornography their minds get rewired the neuro plasticity of the brain actually results in complete changes so we've got people out there that literally have different brain connectivity than normal people because they've been watching very powerful visual stimulus over long periods of time so a lot of this technology we don't know the types of harm that that these technologies are causing my own teacher chef Abdullah bin Vania when he came to the West he noticed all these people walking around with headphones and he said that's a really bad sign because they're in their own world and he said we we live shared world and it's important for us to be together I mean he's from West Africa where this idea of disappearing into your own world is not a normal thing and yet we see that in Berkeley on the Berkeley campus well I'll just hums will answer this question but I would just like to say that I had a really interesting conversation with shakes Alec about this and I think they I think that I when it comes down to teaching Quran the key the key factor relates the teacher a teacher that really loves to loves the khurana loves to teach it and especially to children because I think that's a unique skill in itself and he told me a lot of people especially people outside our area they don't have access to good teachers are having their children learn Quran through multimedia and I that concern me and I asked him about that and he said learning Quran is not mandatory he absolutely disagreed with people making learning the Quran a priority over loving the Chron he just you just said that's so much more important and it's then I said to him so if you know if a child can't study you know and say until they're a teenager if they can't find a teacher until then is it better to just wait and you said yeah absolutely because the last thing you want to do is to hurt that child to love of the Quran that that is a priority well one of the most important things is identifying what children love to do and there's a great sixth century scholar from Spain called the Abu Bakr who said that one of the things that God has done is he has put natural inclinations into people because we live in a complementary world and you need people to do different things and he said if you let children explore those things that they're naturally inclined to do they will excel in those areas and this is why some people are are not good in math and and other people are not good in literature it doesn't mean that you don't want them to study math at all but it's a very difficult thing for them to do and if you make them feel as if you're a failure if you don't get geometry if you don't get out of rook then it's it's it's a really harmful thing to do to a young person and and letting them flourish you know the word that Aristotle uses in in the in the ethics for happiness is eudaimonia which in greek means flourishing that happiness is when human beings are doing things that their souls can flourish in that they feel joyful doing and we're living in a society that is increasingly becoming unhappy there's a lot of people on Prozac there's a lot of anxiety drugs that are being used and increasingly younger and younger people are using these drugs and what's going on in a society that's creating so many miserable people because I've lived in West Africa in one of the poorest countries that it's actually considered about the fourth poorest country in the world and consistently I found they were the happiest people that I've ever lived with or been I've been all over the world and they were the happiest people they were they were happy people many of them smiled normally it was normal for them to smile when they talked they actually smiled while they were talking and and they're dirt poor literally I mean dirt poor people what made them happy was I think family community the simple joys of life they really enjoyed tea you know just sitting every day they had tea maybe three times a day and it was ritualistic and they would sit down one of the things they say in that culture either how about the nephilim Matata when the food comes put away the books and and be with the food and so the idea being present you know we tend to forget we've got people look at them out there you know reading books and eating eating on the phone talking everybody's doing you know this whole idea of multitasking is a type of madness you know this idea of juggling multiple things people need to get back to just doing things well and and really with what the Arabs call it's con doing things well there's there's so many things young people into another thing and you know I I don't you know another thing I think is really key in in our culture is we have to recognize that honest work any work that's honest is honorable honesty and honorable are from the same root cognate any work that is is honest work is honorable we demean labor in this culture we demean jobs that are not seen as really important job they're very important jobs we don't have master carpenters anymore we don't we don't you know we don't have people that can make really fine things and if you teach people these skills they will always have good livelihoods you know I have a book binder because I love books like I had this book repaired I love books I think I keep this guy in in in bread and butter you know he charges me an arm and a leg for binding a book but I pay it because I love my book he's months booked in advance that was a pun but my point is this guy he's up there on it you know he's got a couple people that send your son to become a bookbinder I'll keep them in business you don't have to worry about it but you know there's there's people that can learn how to do that well you know we don't have repair people just throw things away now they used to have if you go to like the Middle East they've got a guy in every Middle Eastern corner there's a guy with a store and it's filled with toasters and all kinds of things because he sits around fixing them all day nothing's fixed anymore you just something breaks down you throw it away there's so many things that our young people can learn that are honorable and and not demeaning and they'll be happier doing a job like that then pushing a pencil and some miserable job where they really hate it and they come home every day I just my next-door neighbor literally she's a schoolteacher and supposedly one of the best districts in the world she just she gave me a rant the other day I just said how you doing and she's one of those people's because you tell me how you're doing because some people won't tell you I'm fine things you know I'm about to kill myself but I'm doing okay you know no she was like I'm so sick and tired of this country we're turning in a third-world cut I've got 37 kids in my classroom and she just I'm miserable I come home every day this is my next turn Aaron I'm not making this up I come home every day and I'm exhausted I don't even want to go back to work I'm just looking for something else to do well I mean what kind of life is that this is your life this is it I just want to add one thing to teaching to the test I I think the more that I mean I guess you're probably speaking in terms of doing homework with your children right do you help right yeah I think the more that you can take whatever it is you're teaching and apply it to their real life of the more interesting it is for them the more they begin to love the subject they see the you know the the meaning and the subject and it's just it's a very different experience the other day my daughter is with me I was editing of the book up here and I noticed one set inside a question mark and an exclamation point at the end and I had just taught about her grammar class and so I said to her hey I can't remember what happens here can you tell me and she said she had actually forgotten but she was so excited actually pull out her book and look at it and that's something she'll probably never forget do you know so I think the more you can make it real for the children the more they're going to love it the more they going to remember the you know I mean I would say first of all I you know I was in a traditional system that's been going on for centuries what I did in West Africa and with West Africans you know seven for about seven years solid in in the Middle East same people and the type of learning that that I did a lot of it is didactic poems studying didactic poems and and learning a tradition which takes a lot of rote memorization and a certain level of mastery so that you can teach those as well and pass it on but it's important to note that that is a vocation it's something certain people's love to do I love studying you know I study every day I read dictionaries every day I read dictionaries like people read novels you know I love words I love dictionaries I love finding out things and and so in fact I just you know take a take I just found out today because Dorothy Sayers said that Tate actually comes from an old Latin word which meant mug so uh you know how we say he's got a nice mug you know his face so the Romans used to say that as well so I like stuff like that you know it's like wow yeah that's exciting for me I mean the Arabic word for discovery is the same word for to become ecstatic whoa Jetta you know which done its ecstasy discovery is ecstasy little kids I the things I remember most that I loved about my little kids when they were really little and I really miss it is when they would discover something like I would have these they'd run in and say you got to come see this you know not good and I would always get excited jump up watch call me and I'd run out with them and look at that bug and it was some bugs that they had just discovered that is called Eureka you know Eureka came from our committees discovering the story goes that he was in his bathtub and he worked out displacement the problem of displacement and he solved a really major problem in in in Greek physics at the time and he just jumped up and ran outside shouting Eureka naked through the streets my own teacher chef Donovan Vega you know said once that two people live in wonder children and philosophers it's this is an amazing place and so learning is about discovery but there are many ways to learn and many things to learn and and what people have to find out are those things that give them those ecstatic moments and for some people it's going to be music for sometimes it's going to be mad for some people to be literature for some peoples can be art for some people it's going to be building really beautiful things there are different things that people can do in so limiting you know like they said the SAT score it's focusing on certain things and and you know it's one type of knowledge but language is important and my my personal belief is that everybody should have a rich language experience because we all speak and and it's speaking that makes us human and speaking which enables us to communicate and so language experience is essential to the educational experience mathematics is is far less so in my estimation but it's also a great subject so I think that in terms of getting out of the corporate school model which is what you had mentioned about I I think I think we just I think we need to really I mean we need to get out of the system as it is and I think not everybody can do that there are a lot of kids in public school which is really what this documentary is about like how are we gonna dress it the situation in public school and I think Vicki said in the documentary that she couldn't do it alone and she's basically trying to get us movement going to get people to come on board and help make some serious changes in our system but I think if if if I mean I was a community I feel like we need to get out of the system I think it's the right upon us as parents to educate our children and they're not being educated in public school and they're not being educated in a lot of these private schools that that we've created they're not really receiving a proper education it's oftentimes it's public school you know in the name of an Islamic school and so I think you know I've really looked into this question and I think we really need to try to move into more of a traditional teaching model which is one-on-one teaching and we sty with this country had the one-room schoolhouse and that was when our our literacy rates were at the highest but they were they were school houses that would have yet umbilical children maybe five ten families and children were taught one-on-one they were not created to the extent that they are today and they oftentimes skip grades because they were hearing the lessons of the older children it was a very positive environment and and and people were really by eighth grade they the children had a much better education than most of us have and we graduate from college so that's a model that we can look at as a community I've always thought that would be just a really ideal model and the other thing is homeschooling I mean obviously that's that's what's available to us now for those who can do it but that does homeschooling also does fit the traditional model of Education and it's as far as horizonte' Qing goes you know just just after that is that Joseph's peeper a brilliant Catholic philosopher wrote a little book called leisure the basis of culture and what he argued in that book is that leisure and and the time because leisure comes from a word which means license it's the permission to contemplate to think and contemplation and the idea of actually being alone one of the things now with all these things people don't get bored anymore because they just go on youtube and watch videos or they text somebody or they they don't have that downtime just to actually boredom is a very important part of human experience because out of boredom comes great creativity one of the things that Kierkegaard talks about is that we are becoming a culture of busyness everybody is busy and and he was talking about Denmark 200 years ago you know so think what's what he would think of today about our culture now the st. Thomas Aquinas said that every culture has to have certain people's that all they do is contemplate and every culture historically has had those people and those people are very important people because they are that the Socrates's of the culture they're the gadflies they are the people that challenge the whatever the politically correct views of existence are out there Confucius one of the great confusion of China said when everybody says this is good that is bad if you don't have people challenging if you don't have people questioning these things and and there's so many people that they will throw these Patt responses you can't be you're not against progress or you can't be against progress you know well if your landings and your progress is going over the cliff do you really call that progress you know if we are committing social communitarians as a people as a species what you know what's happening to us as a people and and this is not even to get into the you know what the Hindus would call the karmic effects of national behavior James Madison to to quote not from a Hindu but from a Christian founding father said the sins of nations are visited upon those nations you know so we don't even think about as a nation those things that we do to other people how that comes back to haunt us and how that affects us because now if you if you even bring that up your unamerican you know so I want to know why is it the founding fathers could criticize America and everybody else can John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson American chivalry is the most violent based thing in existence when Daniel Shays rebelled in in Massachusetts with with the farmers that were overburdened by the the complete breakdown of their currency and these are men that fought in the revolution with honor and distinction when they had their rebellion Jefferson said it's good we need a little reminder every once in a while you know so it's good I'm he saw it as a good thing when people are actually angry and upset and react this country has been so screwed in the last few years it's beyond it's been going on for a while but this thing that happened on Wall Street this bailout if this was any other generation of Americans you would have had a revolution in this country you would have had a revolution I'm not making that up you can read the history of this country the revolution the first revolution in this country that was sparked by a Virginia Stamp Act where they were charging a penny to get a license a stamp license if you went to get a marriage licenses I've got to bail that started the revolution tax of one penny you know the income tax started in 1913 folks before that Americans didn't pay income tax and now you're paying 40% of your livelihood to to a government that is so dysfunctional all we're doing is enabling a bunch of really sick people and then and then we wonder well you know what's going on in the country what's going on really but this is what's happening to this country people are you know we're sending all this money to Washington and then we've got a defense budget nine times bigger than all other countries on the planet that means some serious questioning like why do we need a defense budget that's nine-time well there's people in Afghanistan that live in caves that are threatening our existence you know I mean this is the type really and this we've got a culture of people that have been so dumb down through this educational process because they're not given any time to think they can't just sit back and think because if you start thinking thinking is dangerous thinking is a dangerous thing but as Heidegger pointed out thinking the word think is related to the word thank you know that there's there's a powerful human need to think because thinking is a way of thanking the one who gave you the gift of thought well I mean I personally don't want my kids to be assimilated into a mad insane and culture I mean that that's why we you know people that what about socialization exactly I don't want them socialized into this society I don't want them to think that this is normal and to be creative and actually be able you know people people now are so fearful I'm gonna yeah I'm worried about losing my job so make a job you know people didn't used to be employed in this country employment was seen as just one phase in life you know this this used to be a country of entrepreneurs of people that actually do things for themselves and and I think we need to get back to that you know we need to get back to independent communities that are not dependent on a global culture that's destroying our biosphere that's causing great pain and suffering both in the home and outside and there's a lot of immense panic separate look at that poor family you know who have to live with the fact that their daughter committed suicide apparently over a failing grade in a math course I'm not that that's the type of madness that we're in so I just I really feel like we have to question very profoundly the whole nature of the society that we're in and and really look for serious alternatives in in the end and the you know the Amish the Amish are there and they've been there as a testimony the people that mean I'm not advocating becoming Amish but I'm saying there's a group of people that just said you know what we're not going to participate in that madness there's a lot of people that have done that there are people that have the moral commitment to check out there are people that that have the moral commitment not to use credit cards in this society I mean people have profound conviction of greater conviction than myself on a lot of issues that I'd talk about I there was a professor at San Jose State that was at zero garbage production he wasn't producing any garbage he was an environmentalist teacher and he would take his students to his to his house to show how he got out of producing garbage so there are people that can do things but if we if we have a society that's not engendering creativity that's not teaching people to think outside of the box to think of other ways of doing things you know there's so much madness this whole system was designed by Prussians and we had that history john taylor gatto recorded the history of where this whole thing on the back in that little book yeah there was an essay by john taylor guy who talks about that but where this system came from i mean some of our most creative people in this country if you look at Henry David Thoreau you know whose books are still read to this day and Henry David Thoreau you know he completely rebelled against that but he talks about meeting a yeoman a farmer who had Homer's Iliad in his in his when he was plowing he would sit down under a tree and read Homer's Iliad in attic Greek in Massachusetts in the 1840s and and this was a simple American farmer and and one thing Thoreau says about him is that you know he didn't really read it at you know a deep level but he thought it was the greatest yarn that he ever heard I mean that that's a farmer in Massachusetts reading Homeric Greek yes that's the type of education that that a lot of early Americans had I don't think people realize how much literacy and how much leisure time this country had 150 years ago can I actually on that socialization question that's just such an enormous myth that's propagated around homeschooling community it's actually the opposite if you look at the children in this film I'm just shocked by how much time they don't have to socialize at school all day so many schools are cutting out recesses now kindergarten I think they're cutting out morning and in in lunch recesses I read in 50% in kindergartens now so they just didn't and then they're home doing homework all night they they don't have time to socialize that children that are home-schooled or outside the system in whatever form they're they have so much time and because they're also not stuck in classrooms with kids are on edge all day long which is another big problem they're interacting with everybody in society so it's actually the opposite they're actually better socialized and they're also they tend to be more I'd say just more human in the sense of a they tend out more compassion they're they're kinder in general because they don't have to deal with all the issues that come in in in schools with lots of bullying and and and also ageism yeah the idea of segregating children by age - it's just incredibly unnatural we've never done it before it's it's been ever since the institutional institutionalization of schools prior to that it didn't exist children were always with you know people of different ages so when you have children you know if you put a eight-year-old in a classroom for eight hours a day with eight-year-olds they tend to go down to the lowest to the silliest one in the classroom they don't have any they didn't have any older people to look up to and to end to want to become which is what you have in situations that don't segregate by age so that's I think that's one of the big problems that we have in our school systems this is I think this is a segregation which really is not contributing towards healthy social skills yeah and also marrying young you know we have young people that that are having children at very early ages but there's there's this total you know complete reaction to the idea of people marrying young at the early age is like teaching them actually that people do fall in love and and and young people can experience very profound love so the idea that that's completely an unacceptable expression at an early age and so they go into ways of expressing their sexuality in in other ways so you know there's just so many things that are going on you put young people in these high schools together and then people marvel at the fact that there's sexual promiscuity yeah yeah I know that's a great question yeah the question is how do mothers have been topicort begin homeschooling and I think it's a great opportunity for mothers who haven't taught before and even who haven't really had a great education which is really most of us in this country because it's incredibly easy to home-school as long as you have an ounce of patience and you really want to do it you stay one step ahead of your kids or you learn with the I'll earn my kids I get really mad at my daughter when she she's in fifth grade grammar I get really upset at her she jumps ahead with lesson cuz I'm like hey wait a minute I didn't study that so it's you learn with your kids and they've studied that can parents without education home school and it's proven ds-10 oh that's no no no no you don't have to worry about things like that the standards in our country are so low you can homeschool your child and teacher one day a week and she'll be fine I'm not advocating that but really you could do that that's totally that's totally true Yeah right yeah so by the time they yeah homeschool children are actually recruited by talking universities in our country like hey land and Yardbird and Columbia they're going to the homeschooling conferences and they're recruiting the kids because they're academically superior they're more interesting they're gonna do something in their lives so they look for people it's not it's not a kisser yeah you get I mean doing doing doing literally like an hour a day with your kid 101 they're gonna get more out of that than the seven hours in a public school or even at a private school that's not an exaggeration the most brilliant scholars hands down that I've ever studied with are the masters that came out the Mauretania tradition my clap my lessons were you see 15 to 20 minutes a day that's it and that's all they do and they do one subject at a time so that they just study like grammar for six months by the end of six months they know grammar we've got kids at studied 12 years grammar and by the end of it they think they don't know the difference between a preposition and a proposition that was she you have to tell her I was a mistake putting him in no you don't put them in you don't put them in community personhood that you know people have to make their own choices you need to study things and think for yourself that you know in in it I'm not here to tell you what to do with your kids I mean that's the paternalistic approach of this whole model that we're trying to subvert you know I mean I have somebody called me from the school district your son's not in school yeah or he actually talked about your son's not in school we're gonna have to sin where we have to contact the state done didn't and you know because it's it's it's however many thousand dollars they're not getting for that body to be in that seat you know I just I called them I said no they're he's he's being homeschooled what are you doing about transcripts we're not worrying about it thank you yeah and thank God we live in a country that still has still has but this is a threatened right to educate your own children because there are countries where you cannot do that if they want you know not every not every kid is is is interested in going to school or going to college they need good things something that they love to do you know one of a pose friend of mine is is a master you know he's a master tile layer and and he's a beautiful man he's an honorable man and that work is good work and he I would rather eat in his house because I know that food is halal food then somebody who's working for a corporation that has defense contracts you know and and so learning if somebody wants to become a you know I have another he has a furniture store he sells furniture he's an honest businessman if he reads in his spare time that's fine if he doesn't that's fine but this whole idea of having to go to school and having to get this degree and having to and this whole pseudo idea of what success is in our culture there's a man in Germany when this whole thing collapse he was worth thirty billion dollars he went down to three billion dollars he threw himself in front of a train because his self-worth was so diminished by losing that twenty seven billion dollars and only three billion left I mean you know really it's a type of madness these people you know I mean Bill Gates's they say how great he is for giving away a billion dollars he's got 60 billion dollars for God's sake he couldn't even he wouldn't he needs three or four lifetimes to be sent spending millions of day just to get rid of it all how much is enough so I mean I think we have to question these whole the other thing is we don't allow for honorable poverty in this country there are other countries where there's honorable poverty you know people can live in clean decent houses and still be poor people eat good healthy organic food and still be poor people like in southern Morocco and and their honorable good people hard-working so you know I think a lot of we have did you really look into our hearts and think about just what's important in life it's a short trip we exit very quickly and in the mean time how do we live that that's the real issue how do we do what do we do how do we how do we spend our lives what time how do we use that time that we've been given okay I just wanted to encourage people to go to the race to nowhere calm website and sign their petition she really is trying to get a movement going and I think we all need to support it and and just - thank you very much for coming I think it was a beneficial evening and thank you you

Channel: Hamza Yusuf

Views: 80,181

Rating: 4.8920541 out of 5

Keywords: education, Islam, Hamza Yusuf

Id: RF6Zskb21w8

Length: 70min 55sec (4255 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 30 2015