Thomas Sowell on the Failures in American Education. FULL UNCUT INTERVIEW

[Music] you just said that uh it was that his feelings were valued his what his thoughts were valued and that was it but now isn't that of some worth if you do have a child who for example has done nothing but learned by rote aren't you attempting to bring out the fullness of that young person and get that person to reflect and think and meditate if you think the confusion the vietnam war with the korean war is thinking and meditating of course that that that's very nice well we have another fantastic interview from the archives this one was back in 1993. everything thomas soul says in this is just as relevant today he discusses his book inside american education the decline the deception the dogmas he goes through primary education all the way through higher ed it's well worth listening to hang out at the end i'm gonna give you an educational resource that's completely free it's fantastic top quality information if you have a young person in your life or you yourself want to enhance your education this is a great place to start that will help your career and help your life sit tight and enjoy the interview we'll catch you at the end good morning and welcome back to the diane rheem show on 88.5 fm the u.s education system has many critics who see a continuing deterioration in our schools thomas sowell a senior fellow at the hoover institution is one of those as the older generation of teachers and professors leave he says new trends and counterproductive fads fashions and dogmas of american education will become the dominant influence and shape the generations to come in short he argues american schools are turning out students who are not intellectually incompetent but also morally confused emotionally alienated and socially maladjusted the problem is not merely that johnny can't read or even that johnny can't think johnny doesn't know what thinking is says dr seoul because thinking is so often confused with feeling in many public schools dr soul has written a new book it's called inside american education the decline the deception the dogmas you can join us call us between now and 12 noon 885 88 50. good morning to you sir it's good to have you here thank you very much what's going on here seems rather curious in the face of rising grades and elevated expectations about schools abilities to perform and students academic achievement yes the back in 1966 uh there were about twice as many seas as aids given out in the hot in the public schools in the united states by the late 70s there were twice as many a's as c's so you have this long period during which all sorts of test scores are going down at this very same time grades are going up is that going on at both the elementary secondary level and college at the college level uh during the entire decade of the 1980s uh the percentage of a's at yale university never fell below 40 percent so you're saying there's there's a great inflation going on and there are declining test stores yes and this is this is part of the deception because if people knew exactly what was happening i don't think the test scores could have kept going down as long as they did but everyone was told they saw the wonderful grades that kids were bringing home they were told glowing things when i was teaching back in the 1960s i kept hearing that this was the brightest and best generation that we'd had and i kept saying they don't seem to be enrolling in my courses and it was only in the end well into the 70s before the word came out that the data showed just the opposite of what the educators were saying and now it would seem that a good many educators are in agreement with you when they talk about the serious traits that our american schools are in they agree in in the sense only that these this kind of talk gets them more money uh and in fact that's used as the biggest reason why we need more money but in point of fact uh the money spent on education was rising by leaps and bounds throughout the entire period during which the test scores were going down somewhere in the early 80s there was a there was a leveling off and a few little uh rises but we have never come close to where we were in 1963. talk about the social phenomenon you call affective education and how it plays into this whole question of just how good schools are a great deal of time and energy are spent on things which are non-academic subjects which are essentially psychological kinds of subjects exercises and this is known as affective education as if you can somehow educate people's feelings rather than to educate their intellect and the problem is that uh most public school teachers have no such qualifications if anyone has such qualifications but certainly they are not psychiatrists or psychiatric psychologists uh they have no idea of the emotional turmoil they may be stirring up in the students and there's some evidence that that's that's happening in terms of medical reactions of vomiting uh signs of nerves and various ways uh but more than that what they tend to do is to try to alienate the child from the parent and i think that's the most dangerous thing how did they do that well if you read the literature it's just astonishing how parents are depicted in the literature as people who are hung up who have old-fashioned ideas uh one of the areas which they do is a sex education but it's not sex education as such because there are a whole series of kinds of education of the emotions as they would put it which do the same thing and the idea is that the child is supposed to make his own decisions and he's supposed to pick his own values on which to make those decisions so the whole history of the human race is sort of thrown out the window and johnny is supposed to start and drew upon his entire eight or nine years of experience in the world to decide uh what his values ought to be it was interesting in the book you used an example of an exchange that you had with a student and i guess your question to the student was something like um well what did you learn and the response was something like i learned that my thoughts and my feelings are valued yes uh whereas there was no effort to speak to a fact or something learned but rather the emphasis on feelings i know that was interpretation that was actually ben stein a reporter in los angeles and he asked this graduating senior who was considered the smartest kid in the class what did you what do you know about the vietnam war and he said the vietnam war was when north and south korea were fighting and they drew a line along the 38th parallel and so on and uh ben stein said would it bother you to know that that's completely wrong he said no but he said then what you just said that uh it was that his feelings were valued his what his thoughts were valued and that was it but now isn't that of some worth if you do have a child who for example has done nothing but learned by rote aren't you attempting to bring out the fullness of that young person and get that person to reflect and think and meditate [Laughter] if you think the confusion the vietnam war with the korean war is thinking and meditating why is it of course that that's very nice the tragedy is that these kids have no conception of thinking and if we're talking about adding something as an extra along the fringes fine but when you see how far behind we are behind almost every large industrial nation or even behind korea for heaven's sake uh you wonder what makes them think that we have the luxury of spending our time on these kinds of uh little experiments in the classroom well just recently i received a letter from a high school student who wanted my opinion on a wide variety of subjects and this was a classroom assignment that this questionnaire was to be sent out to people and i wrote them back that the opinions of old men like me don't matter what matters is whether young people like you learn to think get some knowledge because you're going to be making these decisions long after i'm gone and to think that people are wasting your time having you send out these questions to people you don't know is a sign of just why we're so far behind dr thomas sowell of the hoover institution his new book is called inside american education the decline the deception the dogmas talk about some of the dogmas that you feel are driving american education well one of the dogmas is the notion that you have to feel good about yourself and i think nothing so epitomized this for me as a study of mathematics given to 13 year olds around the world and uh koreans came in first americans came in last and one of the questions that we asked these kids was uh are you good at math 23 of the koreans said yes uh something like 68 of the americans said yes and so american kids felt good about themselves but they didn't know any math another study was done of 12th graders in japan to see if they liked math the 12th graders in japan disliked math more than the 12th graders in the united states and probably for good reason because he was probably hard on math uh but the japanese don't worry themselves about whether they're 12th graders like math they were feel good about it that's right they don't care the fact is when you come out of there you're going to know a certain amount of stuff and uh and if you don't do that you you know your parents are going to be on you is there a balance to be achieved that is helping students feel good about themselves and learn at the same time or is it either or dr so i do not believe that there are free lunches in education or anywhere else and it's hard work that's right and i think that's part of it too a lot of these programs are really a substitute for hard work by the teachers i mean when i think of the teachers i had they could not have cared less whether i felt good about myself they didn't ask me how did you get to school did you walk these 15 blocks from home or did you have money for the trolley they couldn't have cared less they wanted to make sure i had better have my homework when i got there and it better be right are you putting most of the responsibility here on the teachers themselves what about the parents the parents have their responsibilities as well on the whole the parents i think turn out a lot better than the education establishment the educational establishment is very good at blaming everything on parents and seizing upon this example in that example but the cool fact is that for a period of decades the parents and the public have been pushing the schools to have more academic material and the schools have been pushing in non-academic directions and by and large the schools have been winning that more and more fancy feds and gimmicks have been coming into the schools uh very often people say you know the catholic schools do so much better with so little money uh and i've come to think that really i don't want to take anything from the catholic schools but i think the fact that they have less money may be one of the reasons why they're doing so well because they cannot afford these expensive gimmicks and fads dr self what was your own background uh who was if anyone encouraging you as you were growing up why did you get turned on to education oh i i guess my family that um i know when i went into the seventh grade they make a made a big to-do about it and i didn't understand it until they told me that no one in the family had gotten to the seventh grade before and they thought it was marvelous you had uh both parents in the home uh for part of the time until my father died and then i had other other other relatives as well but no more supportive oh yes and and pushing and whatnot now of course they they could not take part in the educational process they had no way of doing that and they couldn't come to school and do all the things you know the parents must get involved it's utter nonsense whole generations of both blacks and kids had decent educations without their parents becoming involved in the school there are an awful lot of people and teachers among the first and foremost who would say that the challenges facing teachers today are far more difficult and complex than those that faced your teachers when you were growing up such as such as drugs in the schools such as weapons in the schools such as kids who really don't want to learn uh kids who come totally unprepared to do anything else but make trouble in the classroom yes yes i mean there are those those kinds of phenomena they've always they've always been tough kids and they've always been tough neighborhoods to the extent that there are today maybe maybe not but i think too that part of the degeneration of morals has been helped out by the kind of nonsense they're taught in the schools uh i think there's also this sort of modeling notion that we have to keep them all together back when i was coming along they had dumping ground classes in schools and if you didn't want to learn there were places where you could go and not learn i remember those well yes yes and i remember uh at the time when i was going through various phases they dumped me when you're ready to learn something you can come back how were you dumped oh i was assigned to chelsea vocational school in new york uh and uh it was a total waste of time in fact i told the people at chelsea vocational it was a total waste of time but since since there are truancy laws i'll be here but i'll bring my reading matter and so i won't waste the time totally uh but the fact is that there were standards and you can't have the position of what can we do for every single child you know it's a little like trying to get the drunk driver off the highway you've got to get him off that highway before he kills somebody now how he deals with his alcoholism and whatnot that's a separate and ques and secondary question but you can't have him running up and down the highway clobbering other people what about school textbooks dr so what's happening there well the phrase is dumbing down uh one of the things i did in doing research for this book was to go back and look at the old mcguffey's readers and i must say you could not use those books today because people wouldn't know what all those big words about vocabulary was really impressive oh whereas there was a history book that was being considered to be used as a textbook in the high school and they told the author to take out words like spectacle and admired because those were too difficult for the students and of course they used much more uh bigger words than that uh for in eighth grade textbooks and in generations pants and you're suggesting that the dumbing down of textbooks is part of this entire process oh absolutely of of creating a system that's not really teaching as it should and the social tragedy of it is especially hard on low income people you see if you're low income you're either going to get a good education or you're going to stay in poverty by and large with rare exceptions people of my generation in harlem uh got a good education and so no matter how poor they were they could always go on people very often try to be complimentary to me and say you know how wonderful it is that you came out of this background and went on to get your degrees and all this kind of business and i tried to tell them you know that was not that unusual that a half a block away from me there was a guy who went on to become a psychiatrist owns land's own land in napa valley and is now living in retirement overseas while i'm out here trying to work for a living uh in the same building that he lived in lived harry belafonte five blocks the other way it was james baldwin you see uh three blocks this way was where colin powell went to college at ccny and these are all people at the same place at the same time and you notice that none of that all those people although how different they are they all spoke impeccable english there was none of this junk that you hear now that's being uh lionized their so-called black english which the kids parents don't speak uh you know that you got a good education now what you did with it was your business what would be the first one or two steps you would take to put american education back on track and to reach those young people who are now as turned off as they can possibly be number one i would have parental choice whether you call it a voucher tax credit i wouldn't don't care what name it is what kind of device but some way in which parents can decide to yank their kids out of that school if it's not doing the job because as long as the school has a captive audience an iron glad tenure they're going to do what they want to do no matter what the public wants no matter what the parents want no matter what the taxpayers want and no matter what the employers want would you be in favor of the bill clinton's system of uh choice in public schools not simply for uh for parochial or well well you know it's a question of whether that's better than the present system virtually everything is better than the present system and so therefore that that's but the present system um at least in its earlier uh uh appearance was what educated you dr so oh certainly but but it wasn't the present system though but without the kind of choice that you're talking about i mean you went to a neighborhood school you did what you had to do you you did have a certain amount of choice within the public school that's very true but many things have happened now so there's no other escape hatch in other words right now you have those teachers weren't unionized the way they are today well is that the attempt then is that the goal of choice is to break the unions at the schools not no it's not to break the unions just to allow the parents to have an option the great problem with education throughout is that people are not accountable they can run those schools to indulge themselves whether whatever fair they like or for whatever way they like to teach and that goes all the way through to the colleges the professors are there to do their research and if the students don't get in the way they don't mind but those schools are not being run as places for teaching all right so in addition to school choice what else oh elimination of tenure at all levels that may not be universally popular but they've done it in england so it can be done as long as as long as people are rewarded just for being alive and sitting there for a certain number of years regardless of the quali quality of work that they do you cannot expect good quality work what about the financial factor doctor so you talked about it earlier and said that uh you know everybody keeps blaming the fact that the schools aren't doing well on lack of resources and it's not just money that's the problem is it not just money i would even argue that the the country has been generous to a fault uh you look at other countries around the world that includes japan australia uh the average american kid gets twice as much money spent on him as the average kid in new zealand kids in new zealand are doing a lot better they're getting a lot more spent on them than they were spent on the kids in my era and they're doing much worse than the kids in my era i mean i had to send my daughter to a private school to get an education almost as good as i got in the public school for nothing you know uh so it's we are falling very far behind all right we have a number of callers waiting so we'll open the phones now eight eight five eighty eight fifty uh dr thomas soul of the hoover institution is with me we're talking about his new book it's called inside american education the decline the deception the dogmas it's a pretty scathing indictment of american education as dr seoul sees it i'll be interested in your questions and comments john you're on the air hi um i go to st john's college in annapolis the great book school oh yes and i was wondering how you um you viewed the program here and whether you thought it'd fit in with the way you feel about education well you know there is no one particular way to do education at any level uh the st john's method is uh rare but if it works for st john's students then more power to them yes the the thing that i think is the best is that about about the program is the the use of reason alone to determine um how a classroom is structured i mean it could be seen as very unconventional and very um uh i'm having a hard time uh sort of experimental experimental yeah but at the same time it seems to be returned to a certain type of education that only existed a few hundred years ago yes well uh john st john's is at one end of the spectrum at the other end of the spectrum while the places that are trying to be modern where the great classics are not you know are pushed aside in favor of things that are the latest kinds of things uh just recently i went through the bookstore at stanford university and looked in the political science department to see what books they were assigning not one course had the federalist papers and this is this is this is this is if any document can be said to explain the whole american system of government what they were trying to do when they wrote the constitution this book is it yes and they do not have it but you can find all kinds of trendy uh i would consider junk being assigned all right john thanks for your call celeste you're on the air hello dr salt yes i've been a teacher for seven years and my question is about administration in the schools i find that as they talk about cutting teachers and making classrooms larger they don't talk about cutting administration and i don't see that the administration within the schools and within the the larger entity the school boards or not the school boards per se but the woods of education course of education state departments of education right those organizations they don't talk about cutting people there and i think that the education is in the classroom it's not so much in the offices oh absolutely on that yeah absolutely in fact some studies have been done in new york and milwaukee which show that of the money that's spent uh less than half of it ever reaches the classroom uh in some cases less than half of it reaches the school it maintains this enormous and growing bureaucracy and that's one of the reasons why there's very little correlation between the money and the educational performance all right celeste thanks andy you're on the air uh yeah yeah i um i too am a graduate of st john's college in annapolis and i i i wanted to say that um the problems that you that you talk about the difficulty of getting kids to think for themselves are problems that have been there since the very beginning of education and you're right that a variety of educational approaches can be proper um i want to point out though that uh you seem to think that uh the the problems with texts and educational approaches are largely due to special interest groups inside the education system and i disagree you look at history books that have been watered down because of conservative special interest groups uh and and liberal interest groups warring against each other to the point where the books have absolutely no substance at all you want to give you want to give primary source education to students you want them to read the federalist papers they have to have the money to buy those books and it goes back to the problem of the bureaucracy sucking up all the money again uh you know it's i don't think the federalist papers cost any more than some of the textbooks that i've seen which have no content well the thing is that by the time you get to the point of buying all the primary sources you need to to balance that textbook or to give that textbook some sense uh or to actually contribute that's what you're saying yeah yeah i mean you know by the time you're done buying all the stuff you need i mean you know st john's it isn't cheap because i mean all those primary books do cost a bit you have a wonderful bookshelf but it ain't cheap yes yes but i i think when you when you think of all the things that schools manage to spend their money on i suspect it would be no problem whatever to spend money on on things of higher quality even if you stuck stuck to a textbook which i don't think is the best education you could have better quality textbooks i mean i saw recently a textbook that my niece is using in the uh 10th grade and i looked through it and decided at the end that it was only toward the end of the book that they got to the kind of math that you would normally expect in the ninth grade exactly yeah yeah and so so a better book would not have cost anymore it's just this this they're selling junk well do you think one one part of the answer is for is to uh ensure that public school systems offer a variety of educational approaches so yummy so you can have choice within the public system i mean here in arlington county for instance uh it's very successful you have alternative schools and people are lining up to get in well you see if if you have uh the political muscle to do that fine but i think if you have parental choice then the schools will adjust to what the parents want very often you have backlogs of parents trying to get into traditional schools and the other schools don't change at all because they know they have a monopoly all right andy thanks for your call chad you're on the air uh yes um good morning diane good morning um i'd like to call to say that i agree with the point that you were making earlier and i think that one of the problems with the public school system while it's not without its own blame it's a lack of parental involvement you speak of school choice but when you have a parent who's concerned enough to put their child in a private school that says something about the parents involvement in the children's education but if you have parents that are completely uninvolved in what the children does expects the school to do it completely by themselves then you have a problem i know when i was coming up to school if i got in trouble i had to answer to my parents and that was serious punishment but if you have children that's not in that environment they're going to continue to be disruptive children are no longer allowed to they're very restricted how they can discipline students students are carrying weapons to school and i'm not saying that this is universal but these are serious problems and for you to just write them off and say that they're not as serious or that that's always been the case i think is a very broad misrepresentation well i think that's a little that's a little bit that's a little bit uh strong uh the fact is that suburban middle class schools and quiet neighborhoods have had their standards going down the fact is that s.a.t scores at yale have been going down so this is all over the whole society and you can't say that this is because of one kind the the parents of most of the immigrant generation for example never set foot in the school all they did was send their kids there and say do what the teacher says i'm not there's believe me there's enough blame to go around but i think that the schools try to shift their share of the blame uh by saying it's the parents because when when quality education appears the that's where the parents line up i've seen cases where the parents show up the night before and and stay overnight as if it's lining up for tickets for a rock concert or something to try to get their kids into a decent school that is teaching them something rather than the junk carlene you're on the air hello yes go right ahead good morning morning and dr sol it's this is a very simulating discussion and a very refreshing uh perspective i myself have a graduate degree and uh went i actually got it in the uk because i felt that american graduate schools are run rather like businesses and they were too expensive and most of the professors are off doing book tours and things in foreign countries and aren't in the classroom i've also gone to school in africa and in france uh so i feel while i'm not a specialist you know i've had some different perspectives my question is um has to do with a friend who recently went back to george mason university she wants to be a teacher in the public high schools and i being interested i looked at some of her class notes and a book that she's using and it has to do with the methodology of teaching in the public schools and it's something like a you know blueprint for multi-diversity cultural education or something and the book is is teaching teachers how to teach but the whole thing the book is about is how america is made up of all these different groups and how teachers have to be sensitive to all these different groups and and it had all these songs like from amish people and and uh excuse me but i started i started thinking to myself well this methodology obviously is reflecting what the chain the demographic changes in america and also reflecting the culture war in america and um and i see personally that america is starting to become a kind of social lebanon where all these different groups are trying to get sort of a piece of interaction and i thought to myself and my i said to my friend i tried to talk to her about this and her biggest worry about her next exam was if she was going to have to memorize the national holidays of 15 different countries and that she can be sensitive to her students and i'm thinking you know dr soul what does this have to do with education is the school supposed to be a agent of socialization in in america or is it i mean i just don't understand her interesting point carlene go ahead doctor so tragically this is the view of the education establishment that that is what the school is supposed to be doing what's so ironic is the school is failing so miserably in what they are paid to do that they should take on this role of being social philosophers and when you think of the pitiful academic background of the people who are taking on this kind of job you also wonder what can be going through their minds at all uh it's not true that we're becoming a multicultural nation for the first time uh this country had people who were speaking umpteen different languages probably to a greater degree 70 or 80 years ago than today because we had vast numbers of people i i know people today who are professors and whatnot who say you know we never spoke english in my home you know but they went on anyway and they became bilingual not because they were bilingual programs but because their parents spoke one thing at the home and they spoke something else at the school but you know as well as i do you can't turn the clock back i mean we seem to have moved to a different place in the society in terms of its expectations in terms of what it will tolerate and not tolerate there is a push towards recognition of all of these various groups within that make up our society so so what do you do you can well no no no i know no no i'm sorry i can't agree with any of that uh it is not society that is forcing these people to do this these people have been looking for ways of evading academic work for generations who is they when are you teachers the administrators they love anything that is non-academic uh if you have been studies done of kids in the uh schools and departments of education they love anything that's non-academic when you get into role-playing and all this kind of thing and i think it's perfectly understandable you get the dregs of the academic world becoming teachers you have education courses that repel able students from ever studying the subject and so you've cut them off at the past anyone who has any ability does not want to take these ridiculous courses in college and of the few who are hardy souls who go on and take it and suffer through them and become teachers those with high ability are the first ones to drop out and so within a very few years out of the class you have the bottom half of the class now has tenure and the top half is going somewhere else support for programming on wamu is provided by the public relations firm of barksdale ballard and company in recognition of wamu's contribution to the washington metropolitan area and its pursuit of excellence in public broadcasting good morning nancy you're on the air oh hi uh dr seoul i such a privilege to talk to you i've read your work i you have great common sense i agree with everything you say this morning i could give examples to back you up but i'd like to give two examples uh recent examples that that would contradict something of what you say as far as what's going on in the schools uh we have a situation uh in in our school where we had when my daughter was attending local high school of a lot of uh black children who were not achieving were goading and criticizing and making life miserable for their fellow black students who were achieving that that's a problem that the educational system is not really responsible for oh absolutely and and it's a national problem and it's an absolute disgrace it's pitiful i asked my neighbor who was black how she uh coped with this with her own two very bright daughters and she said she told them exactly what her mother told her in the face of discrimination by whites she said you are two individuals you will go as far as you can work to go and that's how and they are achieving now the other thing is recently in alexandria uh they both evidently they had an honors program well there was a black pressure group which uh has actually made the honors program be disbanded i believe they have been successful in that because there weren't enough blacks in the honors program and to me they're cutting off their nose to spite their face i mean absolutely they are they are uh abolishing an avenue of achievement which they could attain oh absolutely and i think the the uh much of the so-called black leadership there's a terrible responsibility for pushing these kinds of ideas on these kids that they have no chance and that everything is rigged against them and so on of all the questions i've answered after giving lectures around the country the one that really hit me the hardest was asked by a young black man at marquette university he said uh even though i'm graduating from marquette very soon what hope is there for me and i thought my god there's twice as much hope for you as for your father and ten times as much as for your grandfather but you you know you've handicapped yourself so much that you may not be able to make take advantage of the opportunities actually there nancy thanks for your call and let's go to west virginia richard sorry to keep you waiting no problem go right ahead sir two questions uh the first is that if our education and i'm more or less of your generation and if our education was so great and we're so smart how is it that we've let our schools deteriorate to the point that they have you know we're in charge now well when i don't know who we are are i think i think i'm talking about well but you see the problem is decisions are not made by generations they're made by organized groups and teachers have been a very organized group since the since the 1960s and the national education association is all in favor of these crazy things that have been criticized here this morning by me and by others uh so that uh they have in fact that's what choice is all about is it about putting the parents and the taxpayers the general public in charge and not allowing these little groups to create their own little fiefdoms where they do what they please regardless of what the rest of us think and you're saying that these people who were so well-educated are so uh narrow-minded in their uh thinking that they still are willing to jeopardize the school for their own personal gain of course professors do that at the colleges across the country well but i i still think that there is something missing in the education of someone who is um who can make a choice like that so easily but but the second point is um you know you're connecting a lot of things that have happened at the same time and you're connecting connecting them as if they're cause and effect and you know we could just as easily make the argument um that it's high budget deficits that make the uh educational system bad and say that as our budget deficits have increased our education has deteriorated and otherwise not true it's not not true that as the deficits a balloon during the 1980s there was a minor upturn in the educational things you know you can say anything but they won't necessarily accord with the facts but what i'm saying is that i'm saying that about what you're saying the fact that you have linked these things together um and that they have happened more or less at the same time and you can't say that that because something that there's a direct um link from something that's happening in society this year to the education that yeah these things have i have not said that i have not said that they are i have not said that uh hold on richard let him let him respond okay i have not said that i've traced a lot of these things over a long period of time and i've used a lot of cross-checking and one set of information with another set of information that's how i arrived for example at the conclusion that the money has very little effect i've checked spending internationally i've checked spending from state to state i expect check spending over time i've checked spending as a percentage of the gross national product no matter how you look at it the money has no effect and to call her in upper marlborough bob you're on the air yes diane uh good morning and i'm very pleased that you accepted my call i'm a great admirer of dr soule i've known about him for a long time and i hardly agree with virtually everything he ever writes or produces and i would like to relay a quick story not that he needs any but i'd like i'd like to relay one that'll back up just about everything he's saying all right and real quick my background so you'll know i was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth my grandmother was illiterate my mother who came to this country as a teenager on a cattle boat had a third grade education i'm a very proud graduate of georgetown university and earned every cent of that education on my own however the story i was in the school system of prince george's county my background is that of an investigator and after retiring i went into the school system to investigate crime now there are a lot of people who don't like to hear something like that but crime does exist in the schools everything that happens on the streets happens in the schools believe me it does all right and there was a young girl in the 12th grade at a very prominent i won't name the school i'd be happy if pressed to do so but very prominent public high school in prince george's county who literally could not read she was in the 12th grade her favorite subject get this was drivers ed she saw driver's ed as being her way to succeed in the world she didn't attend a single class all day long but never failed to attend driver's ed and i pointed out to someone someday that a terrible terrible thing had been accomplished here because no one had given any thought to the fact that this little girl was going to have to take a written driver's test and her knowledge of english was nil yes really that to show some of what's going on and this bit about money being needed that's garbage i i have done some teaching in my time on a law enforcement level you give me a group of people who want to learn something and i guarantee you i'll teach them quickly and the way to do it is with discipline all right bob thanks for your call dr seoul any comment oh well that's uh absolutely look at the case uh when i was growing up we had no guards in the public schools i was 42 years old before i saw a public school guard and yet today we have national conventions of public school guards so the deterioration is there but a lot of it too is the whole permissive notion and again the people in the education establishment are all for the permissiveness uh they're at the very least you can sort out the violent students from the other students they don't seem to want to do that are you being listened to or are you simply being dismissed as part of a conservative effort to try to change the system uh deal with they don't seem to want to do that are you being listened to or are you simply being dismissed as part of a conservative effort to try to change the system uh deal with the fact that teachers do have the kind of control they do administrators have the kind of control they do how are you being regarded well uh not nearly as well as i would like to be but i'm sure that's true of everybody uh but i think that a lot of people have to fight a lot of battles on a lot of different fronts at the same time for for victory to ever come and that's true in a war it's true in all kinds of uh things uh just think how long it took for the civil rights movement to achieve some of its goals how many people we'll never never heard of went out there and sacrificed in order they could do that on almost every other movement in the history of the country has taken that but it does make you wonder considering how far down american students have gone and how concerned people are about the education system whether somebody is not finally going to say maybe seoul has a point well it's not a question whether i have a point there are great numbers of other people out there fighting in different ways and somehow or rather the grand total of all that may have some impact this broadcast to the diane rheem show is made possible in part by the old forest bookshop offering used and out of print books for varying tastes specializing in literature history and art the old first is located a half block off wisconsin avenue at 3145 dumbarton street in georgetown and bobby you're on the air yes hello um at a time when we look for integrity in our leaders one of the things that distresses me most is a parent of three children in school who are taking a pretty challenging um course load and is the amount of cheating that goes on what do you think about it and what would you do um i'll just hang up and listen all right thanks bobby well the data indicate that the amount of teaching has also gone up tremendously over the years again another sign of the moral degeneration what has to be done about it is that you have to make it more of a more you have that the student has more to lose by cheating than to gain and again many people in education are not prepared to do that but that's part of the whole disciplinary issue isn't it that's right but there's a lot of but a lot of that is within the control of the schools for example the you know at many schools probably most schools a professor who discovers a student cheating really if he if he himself simply flunks a student that's probably the most he can do because if he brings a charge it's going to be so due processed you know that you're going to be devoting yourself to this one case for untold months with people looking for an out some way all along but there are others who might say well if you flunk that child you may put an end to at least a half-hearted attempt to stay in school well that's that's a lovely thought uh again there are no there are there are you know there are no free lunches uh and if there are people out there who suffer some bad consequences from their own actions that will not that will certainly at the very least give other people something to think about i can remember when i was in college there was a young playboy quite wealthy who lived a quite good life and didn't have enough time for his academics and one friday he came home and there was a note from the administration that said dear mr x uh uh please uh remove your belongings from the room over the weekend as we have assigned another student there monday morning yours truly and uh my roommate and i had planned to have some place in ping pong that evening but we stayed home and uh and did some studying what a signal and anthony you're on the air oh good morning good morning it's really a pleasure and i'm a little nervous so i'll have two quick questions and then i like to hang up and listen all right i recently finished a very good book by rush limbaugh called the way things ought to be and in that book he has a chapter on education and one of them was uh like a cultural demonstration at stamford attended by uh i think it was jesse jackson where the the slogan was hey hey ho ho western culture's got to go and when i read that it had me thinking about the whole issue of political correctness on campus like condom distributions and books in new york city that have heather has two mommies and things like that my question is really what do you think dr seoul about the the issue of pc on in schools especially the junior schools and the second one is if if school choice does not come through with the new democratic administration what do you think about home schooling and i'll hang up and listen all right sid thanks homeschooling is is a desperate expedient um i would have thought i would have thought it would be quite rare and yet as time goes on i have acquired more and more respect for people who homeschool their children rather than to send them into the junk that's out there in the public schools and the numbers are growing the numbers are growing uh i've run into people who homeschool their kids and i wish that i could have uh could have done that and what about his earlier point on pc in schools oh well stanford of course i mean the uh people who wanted western civilization to go are getting their wish at stanford well but what's your own reaction i think it's i think it's insanity there's no way you know we live in western civilization that's why you ought to study it now if you have time left over to study other things fine but to talk about why do we study western civilization rather than other civilizations you might as well ask why do we study the earth instead of other planets and other galaxies but don't you as an african-american believe that in some way perhaps some of your own heritage has been left out of that kind of uh study of purely western civilization i really wonder how many people here can trace back their ancestry to a particular part of africa which is itself one of the most multi-cultural areas of the world uh and and and even if i could tell where my ancestors came from uh it would probably be radically different from the way it is 300 miles away from that particular spot but definitely and so no but the point is you have a 24-hour day and so there are no free lunches and if you're and if you're going to try to spread the students even thinner than they are and pretend to study these civilizations because in order to study them you have to have scholars who've done the scholarship and the work i mean you can't conjure these things up out of thin air because jesse jackson is chanting and it's going to take you see i i've spent 10 years writing a book on race and culture which is not not it's still a manuscript and so i know that if you're going to do this seriously and responsibly you cannot do it overnight and if you're going to have not simply me but what you really need dozens of people doing this all around you're talking about something somewhere in the middle of the 21st century but if you're going to have these little uh little tidbits of nonsense carefully selected uh tendentiously selected in most cases then of course you're not talking about education you're talking about propaganda but doctor so go back to what you said earlier about the small steps that had to have been taken during the civil rights movement in order to achieve what has been achieved now can't the same be applied i am all for people taking those small steps to learn these things in the in in the in the post-graduate schools for scholars to study these things so they'll know what they're talking about and so they won't be selling kwanzaa as some kind of african uh uh uh a tradition when in fact it originated in los angeles eight eight five eighty eight fifty shan you're on the air oh yes i was driving in my car and unfortunately don't have a car phone but i took exceptions to something that was discussed regarding that being offered these touchy feely classes i am not in that 25 percent learning style that is pure academic i'm a very bright person but i do not do well in an academic setting i think that adding some of these touchy-feely and interactive classes i mean i got through a chemistry class because i had an instructor who saw that you know the book was hard for me so the lab part was the part i could excel in i think this is very important to you know not all of us are book learners well you know i i i could say i also have a high opinion of myself and i'm not i'm not very good at dancing but i really don't think that ballet schools should be adjusted to take to uh for people like me people like me shouldn't be in ballet uh and the school had and you have to realize too that uh it's not a question what you like or what you're good at there are requirements in the world that if you're going to build bridges across the river you have to know a certain amount of math if you don't want those cars to fall into the river as the belt buzz the bridge collapses under them uh and if you want doctors who can cure people you're going to have people have to have people who know chemistry whether they like it or not so we don't have the option of just doing whatever happens to feel good to us diane you're on the air hello dr saul you have a very interesting program however i found myself almost emotional because of the way you seem to approach i i my question is this what about the children um from the dysfunctional families who don't have a recourse i'm talking about the young minds who can't make decisions as to whether they have a place to study or as to whether they uh can go on uh to learn to read because they don't have the help at home can you address that issue absolutely that is a tragic situation regardless of how the education system was running but what you've said tells me absolutely nothing about why the present mess is better for that child any more than this better for any other child in more fortunate circumstances 885 88 50 and let's take a call from arlington edge you're on the air hello diane hi there dr sol i appreciate what you have to say i myself am a graduate of a jesuit high school in milwaukee a graduate of georgetown university and i teach in a local jesuit high school here in dc and i'm of the view that it's possible to focus on academics and make sure that students are learning how to learn but also outside of the classroom as in our retreat program at gonzaga which is where i teach to have the kids come in touch with themselves and their values as people we also require that students do 40 hours of community service where they also come in contact with people of different backgrounds but that isn't at the expense of de-emphasizing uh academics well uh do you have a longer than 24-hour day at that high school well the thing is we are stretched pretty thin we do uh we do really push pretty hard to uh to do all of that but we managed to do it and you know i think i'm correct in saying we're probably one of the better high schools in the area do you have some concerns about community service programs doctor yes uh because what is a service and a disservice depends on the person who's looking at it many of the things that are called community services i consider a great community disservice uh if you look at the standards on the stanford campus we have a bicycle shop that i think performs a community service and next door to it is the community service building which i think does an incredible amount of mischief in the world so the notion that some little group of elites will decide what is a service and a disservice and that they will then uh force or and cajole other people to do those kinds of things uh strikes me as an abuse of authority well we're a private school sir and the the students who attend our school do so at choice or their parents choices and they're aware of this of the service requirement when they do it they do things like tutor kids from a local housing projects or some quarter which is right next door they work in soup kitchens um and along with that since it is a jesuit catholic school we have theology classes and social justice where we'll study uh justice theories of people like john rawls and we'll go back i must i must i must tell you in all honesty i really do not see high school students studying john rawls i think the graduate students at harvard might study john rawls but i think i i just really wonder if people aren't kidding themselves uh and getting these kids to get into something like john rawls dr sull is the situation gonna get even worse before it starts getting better absolutely uh i see no sign that certainly the president administration uh if if they do introduce choice into the public schools that will be a step in the right direction and maybe some later administration can then extend it further but they are so in hockey to the national education association that nothing will be done that will disturb the people down at the nea dr tomasol of the hoover institution his new book is called inside american education the decline the deception the dogmas thanks for being here thank you very much and if you'd like a cassette copy of today's program call us for information on 885-1030 thursday on the diane rheem show first the reverend joey noble shares with us her personal experience with breast cancer we'll also hear from doctors about the latest approaches to diagnosis and treatment in our secondary film critic michael medved on how contemporary movies threaten our traditional values darcy bacon maggie redfern and carol beach produce the program leanna thompson and carolyn suleiman have been on the phones for us bruce youngblood toby schreiner our engineers i'm dianne marin 88 5 fm wamu washington it's 12 noon [Music] thank you for making it to the end once again i would love for you guys to type in the word goat greatest of all time for thomas soule i love seeing that and i'm sure he does too as i said in the intro i wanted to tell you about an educational opportunity and this 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Channel: BasicEconomics

Views: 82,393

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Id: ujga_GcWkD8

Length: 59min 33sec (3573 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 03 2021