Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and good evening.

Martin hello.

This is a live episode of the secular foxhole,

and today we have the great Andy burnstein with us.

Andy, how are you?

I'm good, blair.

Martin thanks for having me on your show.

Appreciate it.

Today we're discussing Andy's newest book, why Johnny still can't read or write or

think and what we can do about it.

Or understand math and what we can do about

it.

Andy, why can't spell.

All right.

Andy, what's yoni what's that coming from?

Well, in 1955, Rudolf flesh published a classic book titled why Johnny can't read.

Flesh was an austrian immigrant, and he was he was horrified to find I think flesh had was an

austrian jew, fled the nazis, came to America.

I think he had a law degree from university of

Vienna, and he got a PhD in library science at Columbia university.

He was horrified to find so many remedial reading cases in the United States.

And he did all his research.

He knew that there were very few in Austria or

in western Europe, and his research showed that there were very few in America prior to

right around world war i. His research showed that in the countries where they use phonics

to teach reading, systematic phonics, where you teach the kids the alphabet, the sounds of

the letters, the sounds of the combination of letters, and then you teach the kids to

identify, you have to sound out the words on the page.

In other words, to match.

By the time the kid is four or five years old

and ready to learn how to read, he or she is, generally speaking, could speak thousands of

words in the mother tongue.

And then once they know phonics, they could

sound out the words on the page.

They can match the verbal symbols that they

already know with the literary symbols on the page.

And reading becomes very easy.

The United States, flesh realized, educators

start to militate against phonics for versions of the whole word method looks say was, I

think was the initial one.

By the time of world war I created the method

doesn't work.

It created an enormous amount of reading

problems.

The textbooks had gone away from phonics in

the United States and so on.

Flesh's book in 1955, why Johnny can't read,

was a big best seller and really motivated the parents to militate for phonics.

And phonics made a comeback for several decades in the United States, roughly 30 years

or so.

Why Johnny can't read.

Rudell flesh's book, he's very famous in the United States.

So here I am, 70 or so years after flesh.

So the title of my book is why Johnny still

can't read or write or understand math or what we could do about that.

So that's the background.

Flesh's book is a classic.

It's very, very good and still timely because the schools of education still war against

lions.

One of the things that came out of this COVID shenanigans was the exposure of the

teachers unions and the frauds that they are.

At least that's my take on it.

And I think parents were alarmed at a very high rate to see just how it was astonishing

for parents to see that the teachers and teachers unions, they're our children, they're

not your children, or things like that.

Right.

These were bold statements by these people.

And so there's been a reawakening, I think, because of COVID to privatize education, which

I've been advocating since my 1980s myself.

So what do you think of that?

Do you agree with the reimbursements of that?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

You raised a number of points.

Blair definitely covered the lockdowns.

One good thing that came out of all of this

horror was, like you said, parents got to look over their kids shoulders and see what was

going on in the schools.

And they were shocked very often at the lack,

one, at the lack of academic education in American schools, and two, is the degree of

political propaganda, of leftist propaganda that's being rammed down the kids throws, how

man made global warming is going to destroy the planet.

Or there's any number of genders we could choose what gender we want to be.

And young kids, five, six, seven year olds should choose what gender they want.

Socialism is morally, spiritual, capitalism and so on and so forth, but above all, a lack

of academic training in reading, writing, math, history, science and so on.

And parents are horrified by that.

And I think it comes into context where the

test scores in the United States have been in the toilet for a long time.

They either continue to get worse or at best, they remain stagnant.

And most people know that.

We could discuss the test scores if you want,

but I think parents probably knew a lot of that.

And then when they saw what was going on in their kids schools, I think it drove home the

point, this is why.

This is why the kids don't do well on academic

test.

The schools, for the most part, don't teach

academic subjects nearly as widely or as deeply as they should, and not nearly as

widely or deeply as they do in many European and Asian countries.

Which is why in international tests, the American students tend to score much lower.

It's not a mystery.

American kids aren't any less intelligent than

kids in other countries.

They score poorly on academic tests because

the American schools don't teach academic subjects not nearly as widely or fully as they

should.

So I think parents were properly horrified.

You saw what happened in Virginia a few years ago.

They're railing against the school boards.

The Biden, Department of justice is labor them

domestic terrorists in that gubernatory election.

Terry McCall have said the Democratic candidate, friend of the Clintons said in so

many words, your parents shouldn't have much already say in what the schools teach their

children, something that was just echoed recently by some prominent Democrat in

California.

I forget the name offhand, but oh.

Swarwell was Eric Swalwell us? Congressman, just said the same thing, like a

couple of weeks ago.

So parents are properly horrified by that.

They're up in arms.

But we could discuss homeschooling is growing.

It's good.

And one, it's good and of itself.

And two, it's a step in the direction that you mentioned, Blair, towards ultimately

privatizing the school system.

Because when you pull kids out of the

government schools, you're depriving the monster of victims.

And it's a step towards privatization of the school system.

Yeah. And you can see the contradiction.

I would say almost every elected official across the country who has children, they're

in private schools and not the public schools.

We don't want that to be public.

Knowledge, but that's very often the case.

Andy and Blair, you will continue with all your great questions.

Here in Europe, home schooling is not so common.

But if you have good home schooling and good ideas like Maria Montessori and others, that's

great.

And look at the individual, the child as an

individual.

But you could also have others like religious

ideas, like teaching creationism or other things like that.

Of course it's parents.

They're right to do it.

But what's your thought about that? Could there be a trend going in the wrong

direction with home schooling, or do you think it will solve it by itself?

Well, I think first of all, as a devout atheist, I want to thank Christian

conservatives because they were the ones who spearheaded the homeschooling movement in the

United States.

And home schooling is now legal in every state

in the country.

And not entirely, but I think largely it was

Christian families who pushed for that.

To your question, the religious families are

going to teach their kids religion no matter where the kids go to school, right?

I mean, the kids go to government schools, they go to private schools or their home

school.

The religious families are going to have their

children read their Bible, as is their right.

Have the kids read the Bible, take them to

church on Sunday, taking the Sunday school.

They're going to get religious training

regardless.

But the good news is the home school is by any

metric you want to mention, any type of measurement you want to mention, the home

school is outperform.

The government school kids, they're roughly

equivalent to private school students, but they're definitely better educated in terms of

academic subjects than most of the kids that go to the government schools.

So I think it's a net gain, a huge net gain, even for these poor kids who have to be taught

creationism and everything, but also for the more secular.

Parents now have the right to homeschool their kids and get them away from the propaganda and

the very antiacademic program mentality of the government schools.

And by the way, I think government schools is the right term.

Public schools is a euphemism.

Any private school is open to the public

school.

They're government schools.

They are funded by government coercion to taxpayers dollars.

They get victims, commonly known euphemistically called students.

They get victims by truancy laws.

They force these kids to go there.

So close to 90% of American kids go to the government school, which explains why I guess

we could get into the deeper reasons why.

But that's part of the main reason why some of

these kids come out of high school.

I teach college.

I get these students.

They're good kids.

They're good American kids.

I like them a lot.

But for the most part I hate to say this about my students they're freaking ignorances, man.

I mean, these poor kids don't know anything, and it's not their fault.

They robbed the education that they should properly get.

Following that line of thought in your book, you claim or you said that there is a

war on learning.

What do you mean by that?

Oh, man, we got to go back.

That's a big question at least 100 years to

John Dewey, your philosophy professor at Columbia University, godfather of the

Progressive movement in education.

His leading disciple, William Heard Kilpatrick

was the chair of the Philosophy of Education Department at Teachers College, Columbia

University.

When Teachers College was training many

American teachers from around the country, the progressive mentality and, you know, this

sticks in my truck calling it progressives because, you know, a long time ago, confucius,

the great Chinese philosophers, said that the beginning of wisdom is to see to it that

things are called by their right names.

And these guys are socialists and statists.

And there's nothing progressive about socialism or statism.

They're regressives, but they're commonly known as progressives.

And the idea and this goes all the way back to Plato don't forget, Dewey was a brilliant

philosophy professor, but many of your audience members probably know a fair amount

about the history of philosophy.

Plato in the Republic, cultural philosopher

king, and the dictatorship of the educated elite and the wise and everything.

And this is the mentality filtered into 20th century America through Marxism, scientific

socialism.

You planned the economy, planned society, the

economist, the sociologists.

You'll plan out production and plan

everybody's lives.

The conceit is that the educated intellectual

elite know how to govern my life better than I do, know what's best for me better than I

know, know what's best for my children better than I know, and so on.

And so the idea was, this is 100 years.

I didn't get really excited on this topic, but

this is right around the time of World War One.

IQ testing had just become available.

It's very popular back then.

You can't give IQ tests today because they're racist.

But back then, you IQ test the kids.

This was the progressive mentality.

You IQ test the kids.

You find the brightest, and they get the full

academic program.

You teach them use phonics, teach them to

read, teach them writing skills, teach them mathematical calculation, science, history,

literature.

They get the full academic program because

they're going to go on to college, and they're going to be society's future leaders.

They're going to govern in the classroom and in the legislation.

The rest of us, we're a bunch of rules.

We're not that bright.

We don't need that much academic training.

A modicum of it just enough to read or write.

What we need is vocational practical skills, vocational training.

So we need drivers ed, hygiene, sex ed, and in the cities, wood shop, metal shop, so we could

be factory workers in the rural areas, agricultural training, because we're going to

be farmers.

The idea is for the overwhelming bulk of the

population.

We don't need much academic training, you

know, a moderate amount, because the goal for us is, one, to be good at our jobs, and two,

to obey the wise rules of the state.

And so that's the beginning of dumbing down

the American school system.

Let me jump in there real quick, though, Andy.

I'm sure you didn't mean it in the way I'm thinking.

I just don't want to dis those professions.

I mean, to be an electrician, to be in a

plumber, to be a farmer, to be those are some of the stuff is the backbone of how old it is.

And in the United States, the hardworking guys who are, like you said,

they're farmers or plumbers or truck drivers.

We saw the truck drivers rebell for freedom

against the Cohort restrictions.

They were, like, the only ones who did.

Yeah.

One, these are enormously productive jobs.

Two, they tend to be having gone to work rather than go to college, which I think is a

very wise choice today.

They tend to be the most freedomloving people

in the country, whereas the college graduates, as a general, tend to be socialist.

Destroy capitalism, destroy individual.

Right?

So I have enormous amount of respect for the hard for the hard working guys that we're

talking about.

But here's the thing.

You're right.

Those are let me tell you a quick story.

Sure.

I grew up in Brooklyn, New York.

People don't know that.

They hear me talk.

They think of from Louisiana.

But they're wrong.

I'm not.

You're right.

That's a joke.

But I had a good friend, let's call him Mike.

That's not his name.

He was a bus MCAP and he was a really good bus

McCabe.

We used to play basketball all the time in the

park.

And he made a lot more money as a bus

mechanic.

And all of them make teacher philosophy.

Plus being a bus mechanic.

I mean, it's enormously satisfactory because

you're fixing stuff, you're repairing things, you're taking things that are broken,

important things like school buses, you know, and you're making them work again.

So there's a lot of satisfaction that there's good money in there, so on.

But he went to Kingsburg Community College part time, like one class a semester.

Took about six years to get an associate degree.

And then he went out to Brooklyn College again, one class a semester.

Because he was working full time, it took him ten or twelve years to get a bachelor's

degree.

But he got it in liberal studies or liberal

laws, something like that.

And, you know so he's taking English classes,

philosophy classes, music appreciation, and he tells me these stories.

He goes into work carrying back then there was LPs, there weren't CDs back then.

He's carrying vinyl.

Yes, vinyl.

Vinyl.

He's carrying vinyl.

Beethoven's 9th and copies of Dust or yepskis, Crime and Punishment.

He tells me bus mechanics.

Why are you listening to this?

Or why are you reading Shakespeare? Whatever.

You're a bus mechanic.

And my friend Mike said, I'm a bus mechanic,

does? Yes, proudly so.

Doesn't mean I have to be an uneducated bus mechanic.

So that's the point.

That's the point I'm making.

Butcher, baker, candlestick maker.

We're all human beings with a human brain, and

we all deserve and need.

The rights to the best of our ability.

Yeah, absolutely.

Now, another astonishing revelation that came out of COVID was the Biden Justice

Department declared mothers domestic terrorists.

Can these people be any more unhinged themselves?

I would say no, but I'm probably wrong.

They'll probably do something more unhinged

tomorrow.

Yeah. What time is it exactly?

They put us established a division of disinformation at Homeland Security, which is

terrifying because allwell had a better name for it, right?

The Ministry of Truth.

But to answer your question, Blair reminds me.

I spoke to Terry McAuliffe just before in the 2021 gubernatorial election in Virginia, and

they voted in the Republicans and everything.

Of course, the leftists were calling them

white supremacists.

So I'm watching Fox News and they're

interviewing some mothers.

She's like, I don't know, maybe she's 30 years

old, she has young kids in the schools, and she's like a really good person, really good

heart, and she's talking very earnestly about her kids and her kids education.

And she's obviously probably shouldn't seem that philosophical.

So she's taking the leftist accusations seriously and she's like pleading into the

camera, we're not white supremacists, we're nice people.

She said, My heart broke for this poor woman.

If you take the position that parents should

have a big say and the final say in what the children are educated with that the children

should get academic education, they should not be indoctrinated with leftist propaganda.

They should not be inculcating the kids with white guilt, the idea that white people are

inherently racist, so on and so forth.

If that's what you stand for, then the left

reviles you as a white supremacist.

If that automatically qualified you as a

member of the Ku Klux Klan or the American Nazi Party or the Aryan Brotherhood or some

horrible outfit like that.

It's unhinged.

These parents who are concerned about their children's education are not domestic

terrorists and white supremacists.

It's evil.

It's so dishonest.

It's evil.

The whole idea that parents shouldn't have a say in the education of their children.

No, the truth is parents should have the final say in the education of their children because

their children belong to when they're minors, they belong to the family, to the parents, not

to the state.

And that's this dirty, shabby, shoddy little

secret here.

The school system and the leftist philosophy

that drives it.

The idea is, no, the children belong to the

state, not to the families.

And that is a National Socialist or Nazi

communist.

That is a totalitarian manifestation.

The children belong to the state, not to the family.

Is that what you meant by the impregnable fortress, the educational

establishment itself?

Well, that's another that goes back also because there have been brilliant writers and

intellectuals who've railed against the government school system for 100 years without

any effect.

And I'm getting that terminology from some of

those readings, by the way.

The newspaper columnist, the commentator, a

shall mindset who's famous for his caustic wit.

Yeah, I think he died in the 1950s.

So this quote from Mink has got to go back to

the 30s or forty s. It goes back a long ways.

When he said I don't remember the exact word,

but he said the only thing necessary to fix American education is to burn down the

teachers colleges and hang all the professors.

That's all it takes.

He said, that must have been 80 years ago.

It was true there that it's even trueer now.

So early 1950s, Arthur Bestow, who was a PhD in history, was an American professor of

history at some American universities I can't remember which, wrote a book called

Educational Wastelands.

It's very good.

This is after like 25 or 30 years of the progressive dominating the school system.

And Bestor coined the term interlocking directorate about who has the power, who has

the power in the American school system? Who's made it into the mess it already was by

the early 1950s.

And he points out the teachers colleges or

schools of education like Columbia University Teacher College two, the state departments of

education and three, whatever the forerunner was of the Federal Department of Education,

which is now that's the interlocking director.

They hold the power in the American school

systems and they are dead set on what I discussed before.

Only the brightest kids get the academic program.

The rest of us get vocational training, practical skills, because the goal what are

the post modernists like to say? Everything is politics.

Well, under this mentality, everything is politics.

You want the kids, you want the rule of the elite, the educated intellectual elite,

plato's philosopher king or Marxist social scientists planning out the economy and the

society.

And the rest of us obey the wise rules of the

state.

So that's the mentality.

So the interlocking director is committed to that.

Now we fast forward 40 years to the 1990s, and E. D. Harsh, humanities professor at the

University of Virginia, also wrote an excellent book, the Schools We Need and Why We

Don't Have Them.

And Hirsch called the school system

impregnable fortress.

That's his term.

He's absolutely right.

He talks in his book, he's speaking to groups

of professional educators principals, supervisors, district superintendents, always

professional educators in the school system, charter members of Best Doors interlocking

directory.

He's arguing in favor of factual knowledge.

So they ask him, what's your first grade of his knowledge?

What's your young children? He's saying, well, they should all the

continents, geography in the continents, in the rivers and the oceans and everything, and

they should know some astronomy, that the Earth revolves around the sun and so on and so

on.

And they disagree.

They said nobody but him in the room supported factual knowledge.

Somebody asked them, well, will this make the kids, the young child, a better person?

And when I was telling the story of my book, I interjected to say, if it were me, I would ask

these guys malignant to make the kid a better person.

But they were against factual knowledge.

And I pointed out, since I put logic for 40

years, what does logic do? My logic students will tell you after the

first week of class when I tell them what logic does.

I'll come into class every day.

The first step put my books down.

I'll sing out to the class.

This is the philosophical catechism.

What's the purpose of logic? And the kids have to sing out to show us how

to provide evidence for a conclusion.

To show us how to provide evidence for a

conclusion.

Well, how is anybody going to provide evidence

for a conclusion when the school system is opposed to factual knowledge?

If you don't know facts that you can't provide evidence to support any conclusion, which

means you can't think.

And that's exactly what the school system is

designed to do.

You obey the wise rulers of the state.

It's like bad made global warming is going to destroy the planet.

Well, actually, it isn't.

And if you know any science, and if you do

some research and get the evidence, you'll see that the modern Warm Period is simply part of

Earth's evolution from cold to warm.

Prior to the modern Warm Period was the Ice

Age, and prior to the lightsay was the Medieval Warm Period.

Prior to the Medieval Warm Period was the Dark Gates Cold Period.

You know, in the Earth cycles, the natural climate cycle.

If you know some science or you know some history, you have evidence to support your

conclusion.

But if you never taught any factual knowledge,

you have no evidence to support your conclusion, and you just obey the wise rulers

of the state and the media and the school system will tell you that man made global

warrants to destroy the planet, and you simply accept it and obey.

That's the point.

That's what the schools do, and that's what

they're designed to do.

Can you regale us with one or two of your own horror stories?

Oh, God, yes.

Some that I use in the book.

Just a couple of years ago, it was logical, as a matter of fact, before Colby shut us down.

So it would have been like, February 2020.

So almost three years ago, I had 20 students

in the class.

I remember this because it kept the arithmetic

it keeps the arithmetic very simple.

And they're all American kids born and reared

here, all went to the government school system, teaching logic.

Logic, it's a difficult subject, and philosophy in general is very abstract.

So I'm just a kid from Brooklyn, and I try to always do this inductively, give a bunch of

stories and examples and polar principles.

So I think you know, American history.

I mentioned James Madison.

Figured that was he's so famous, I figured

it'd be pretty safe.

One of my heroes.

Yeah.

Yeah, me too.

My good buddy Eric Daniels, who is an American

history professor, says that James Madison is his favorite of the founders, and we'll see

what in just a second.

But these poor kids, 20 American college

students, ten out of 20.

Never heard of them.

They looked at me like, who's that? Is he playing right field for the Yankees?

Who's that? Never heard of James Madison.

The other ten heard of them, at least, and knew he was past POTUS, president of the

United States.

But not one out of 20 American college

students knew that James Madison was the lead author of the US.

Constitution and virtually the sole author of the Bill of Rights, which is why I'm such a

big fan.

Not one out of 20.

This is not atypical.

This is fairly common.

They don't teach.

Some school districts are better than others,

and there are still a lot of good classroom teachers.

But as a general rule, they teach very little American history.

Very little history of any kind.

They don't call it history anymore.

100 years ago, they dropped the name History for this weird hybrid called social studies,

which is an undefinable term.

It means anything that any school district

wants it to mean and often means just socialist, anti capitalist, anti American

propaganda.

Speaking of which, in many of the few

instances where they do teach American history I shouldn't even say teach where they call it

American history, they'll use the textbook written by Howard Zinn.

What is it? Yeah, exactly.

A people's history of the United States.

Now, howard Zinn wasn't just a Marxist.

Your typical Marxist.

Professor.

According to the FBI, he was a member of CPUSA.

He was a member of the Communist Party.

And his book is just trash.

I mean, it is just one lie after another.

The one consistent theme that runs through

Zinn's book is that America is evil.

The United States is never right.

It's never good.

On a single instance in his book in which the

United States is good.

It's just a communist diatribe against

America.

And in many of the few instances where they

call across American history this is the most popular textbook.

And by the way, we just want to mention Mary Greybar wrote a good book on debunking.

Howard Zinn, I think, is the title.

Something like that?

Yeah, it goes through Zinn's book chapter by chapter.

It shows the errors, the lies.

Just a flat out lie.

And the fallacies and everything is very good.

But yeah, so the kids get very little actual

American history.

That's one horror story.

Some of the spelling I mentioned in the class, it's a college paper.

Some kid says people loosely do this or they loosely do that.

She used that term losh ly.

She used that term looshly a number of times

in her paper.

What word is that?

And then I finally realized from the way it was used in several contexts that she meant

usually that people usually do this, that or the other thing, which I realized is a very

loose spelling of usually.

And that's fairly typical.

These poor kids very often can't write a coherent paragraph, never mind a college level

essay.

And their spelling is like Mars.

Sometimes I try to figure out what word is that logic class, I was asking the kids.

You were talking about the parts of speech and various types of sentences, declarative

sentences and derogative sentences.

This is fourth grade grammar.

And the kids looked at me, I said, do they teach grammar in fourth grade anymore?

And one of the kids said, Well, I studied grammar in 8th grade.

And I said, well, better late than never.

They don't touch grammar, so they can't write

coherent sentences, never mind college level essays.

And now they're not even teaching cursive anymore in many of the schools.

So when I'm writing a script on the board, one kid said to me this was a good kid.

She seemed like a bright enough kid, reasonably, until she said, dr.

Bernstein, could you print it? I was, like, surprised because this was the

first I heard of it a few years ago.

I said print it.

Why? And she said, Well, I can't read cursive.

And I realized the school's decreasingly teaching.

That and consequently how do the kids sign their names?

They just print their names.

Unbelievable.

It really is.

I want to go back to our America's founding and that atmosphere, that era where

you had this wellspring of intellectual growth, if you will, in freedom.

Can you describe briefly what the education system was like back then?

I'm pretty sure they were all private.

Although I know Jefferson, which I think was a

mistake.

He wanted the public schools or government

schools because in a way, I don't blame him.

But also because that area, everything was

america was blossoming, becoming great, if you will, and yeah, why not spread that knowledge

throughout the colonies?

Yeah. Jefferson could not foresee what the government schools could be.

How could he? The government schools he dies in marx is

eight years old at that point.

Marxism doesn't become dominant almost 100

years after Jefferson's death.

So you can't foresee that the schools are

going to be what? The schools are going to become riddled with

Marxism and then later on with postmodernism.

But anyhow, about American education back

then, yeah, we have a lot of proxy data.

First of all, there's no government school

system in this country till the mid 19th century.

Prior to that, all schooling, all education is private.

Many parents do what today's known as home school.

There's a lot of evidence.

One of the pieces of evidence I cited in the

book was Philadelphia newspapers in the 18th centuries, in the 18th century, during

America's late colonial and early revolutionary period, dozens of schoolmasters

advertising in newspapers that teach foreign languages, teach mathematics, teach English

literature, teach history, science, and so on and so forth.

Let's not forget, Benjamin Franklin was one of the first to establish subscription libraries,

colonies, and yeah, reading levels.

We have a lot of proxy data showing that

reading levels in revolutionary in the early 19th century America were very high writers

commenting on it.

Some were Americans.

Some were European visitors, usually French.

That every man in the United States is better

educated than every man anywhere in the world.

It's not just the topfield in the 1830s, but

earlier French visitor.

Was it Dupont?

No, mores the pont.

Sound familiar, but I can't bring it up.

Yeah, but he was commissioned by Vice President Thomas Jefferson, so this was around

1800, and he pointed out that it was one of them, and it might have been him, might have

been to toefillo, like, roughly 30 years later, it might have been both.

Pointed out that the United States doesn't have the eminent scholars that you'll see in

many of the European countries, but every man is much better educated than anywhere in

Europe.

And we have a lot of proxy data showing

literacy levels, for example, backing that up, several examples.

Thomas Payne's common Sense, which is written in plain style but dealing with sophisticated

political principles, sold hundreds of thousands of copies to a free to a free

population that was just several million.

It would be equivalent to selling like, I

forget about millions and millions of copies today.

Even more so, the essays are the Federalists that Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and

John Dorsey wrote in support of ratifying the Constitution.

Very, very, very sophisticated.

Your political science, political philosophy,

I think many, many, many American college graduates say would struggle with The

Federalist.

Those essays were largely written as newspaper

editorials for every man to read.

The levels of literacy were very high.

Going to the early 19th century when the American population, I think, did not reach 20

million.

The novels of Sir Walter Scott and James

Fanimore Cooper, again, not easy reading.

My college kids would struggle with that.

Those books sold millions of copies, millions of copies in a very small country.

One last data point.

McGuffy's Readers is extremely religious, by

the way.

Sure.

But the intellectual level of the academic training, I mean, they're using words like

Benighted and words like that in the early grades.

I think they're excerpts from the thangel Hawthorn and the fourth grade Reader, from

Shakespeare and the fifth grade Reader.

They're at a vastly higher intellectual level

than what we do in the elementary schools today.

And Thomasol, the great scholar, America scholar THOMASAL points in his ninety s and

still rocking on, hopefully Thomas Sole and Leonard Peak, well, also, who is pushing 90s,

hopefully both of them brilliant intellectuals, hopefully keep going.

Yes. For many more years.

Yeah, absolutely.

In good health.

And Thomas sold points out, I think it's between 1836 and 1920, McGuffy's Readers sold

120,000,000 copies.

So this was not the textbook of the elite.

This was the textbook of the American people, of every man and every woman.

This is the books that children were used to learn their ABCs, and they were set up to use

either phonics or the whole word method.

But the overwhelming majority of Americans

were using phonics back then.

The kids learned to read readily.

Learning how to read is easy.

It's easy.

It's very easily done.

It's not this tortuous process that the

schools have turned it into.

A lot of proxy data showing how good American

education was for a long time.

And that's not the reason.

It's mythology that the leftists have hatched said, well, we needed government schools in

the mid 19th century because people were literally there's a technical term for that

claim in philosophy.

It's called bullshit.

I love it.

I know that's pretty technical.

But there were two reasons for the imposition

of government schooling.

One is a number of Protestant and one is more

disreputable than the next.

But one is that a number of Protestant

Americans were very concerned about the influx of Irish immigrants and they thought the

United States was become a cesspool of potpourry, of papism I see of Catholicism.

And the panacea for that was to be government schools where every compulsory school system

where one, all kids had to go, and two of them were going to use the Protestant Bible.

So they were going to turn these Catholic kids into good Protestant Americans.

That's one reason.

And the other reason perhaps even more

disreputable is that leading American so called educators like Harris Man journey to

what country? Germany.

Germany.

Germany, yeah.

And the German school system.

The government schools were designed to train the kids not to be selfish, not to be

individualist, not to place the family first, but to always serve the state first.

And those American so called educators were appalled by American individualism and

selfishness, and they were good Kantians or collectivists.

They wanted a society once the state came first and individuals served.

America shouldn't be america.

It should be like Germany.

And so the American school system was going to be the cure for that.

It's going to teach kids that their lives belong to the state, not to them, not to their

families.

Why government schools will impose this

country.

There'S an echo of that today, that America should be more like Europe, and that

kind of mess, that kind of.

Crap, should be more like Europe and teaching the kids academic subjects, but not

in a lot of other ways, not.

In anything else, I don't think.

Sorry, Mark.

It is the renaissance.

It's coming from Europe, so I have to find

that true.

Well, there was a Renaissance in Europe earlier.

Maybe there could be another one.

Yeah, the Second Renaissance.

One of the things let me just throw this in there, because I think the TV show A

Little House on the Prairie, they had the one room schoolhouse, and that wasn't a myth or a

fable or anything.

That was okay, a small child, three, four,

five to a young teenager, and the one teacher could handle all of that, and everyone learned

at their own level.

I mean, it worked.

To me.

It worked.

The school normal.

Yeah, sometimes it was men, but generally

women, because that was one profession that was open to women back then.

There's a lot more open to women today.

But in the 19th century, that was one of one

of the few.

And, yeah, it does work because the

overwhelming majority of school moms taught their children to read, using their students

to using phonics.

And once the kids can read, the whole world of

knowledge is open to them, especially today with the Internet.

I just want to say something about reading because this is the most important cognitive

skill by far.

It's very easy.

And here's what all parents got to do.

One, you'll motivate the child, show the child

that there's things in books that are really fun.

So when my daughter is 19 now, and she's a junior at college, my ex wife and I adopted

her from China, and I'd see her at least once a week.

We have a day together, sometimes more than once a week.

You know, she was little.

She's two, three years old.

We do all kinds of fun things.

We go to the park and everything.

And as part of fun things and playing, I think Borders were still in existence then, but

today you could go to Barns and Noble, go to the library and let her pick out a book.

She had to pick out the book, had to be something that she thought was fun, and so she

picked out a book.

And she usually at two or three years old,

there was some goofy story about dogs that could fly or kittens who thought the full moon

was a bowl of milk or something like that.

And she'd sit down and pat the floor next to

her and say, Read to me, Daddy.

And so I read her, and she found out that

there's cool things in books.

They're fun that way.

You motivate the child, the child knows, hey, there's stuff in books that I want to be able

to read.

I don't want to have to depend on mom or dad

or the teacher the kids motivate.

And then by the time the kid's four years old,

don't have to wait till a child six, four or five years old using systematic phonics, you

could teach the kid to read in a couple of weeks.

It's no more difficult for a healthy child to learn how to read than it is to learn how to

swim or ride a bike.

It's easy.

Reading is easy, and it's fun.

And once a child has mastered reading, a whole

world of cognition is open to that child.

That's why the school norms was successful.

They used phonics, and the kids learned how to read.

And one last thing on this, guys, what they call the return of the one room schoolhouse

today is one of the most exciting developments in education, the Socalled microschools.

Yes, because I said before, there's still a lot of good classroom teachers in the

government school system, and there are, but they have to fight against this stifling

bureaucracy, and some of them opt out.

They quit.

The great Marvin Collins did that, you know, like 40 or 50 years ago to start West Side

Prep in Chicago, and she was a consummate teacher.

But you don't have to be a supervisor.

She's like the Michael Jordan of teaching

elementary school.

You don't have to be funny.

It's the same city as Chicago.

But you don't have to be world class.

Teachers have to be a good teacher.

And there's a lot of good teachers opting out

of the government school system with disgruntled parents forming small community

schools where they're called microschools.

Today you got four or five kids or four or

five families, and one of the families has a basement.

You set up a little classroom with whiteboards and chairs and books and everything.

And this is becoming so widespread a phenomenon in America that Forbes, which is a

business magazine, ran a story on this a year or so ago, and, you know, on the microscopes.

And one way to look at this is it's the return of the oneroom schoolhouse.

And I think this is a tremendous step forward in American education, by the way, because if

you want to start your own school, if you're one of these redneck states, they probably

won't have too many hoops you have to jump through.

But if you're one of the real leftist states, you're in Massachusetts, New York, California,

Connecticut.

Yeah, there's a lot of hoops you need to jump

through.

But if you're a certified teacher starting the

school with a bunch of families, a few families to start school, then there's not

much they could do to stop you.

So any state in the country my buddy Mike

Gustafson up in Massachusetts, certified teacher, started a Montessori school with his

wife.

He has very few hoops they made him jump to.

This is Massachusetts.

So if you get disgruntled teachers who have a

teacher degree, this becomes very feasible to start a micro school or a small community

school, and then you go from there.

You teach the kids to read.

You teach the kids basic writing skills.

You teach the mathematical calculation.

It's not that hard.

You know, this is the most fundamental level

of education is in the elementary schools.

It's not that hard.

Anyway.

My final question, I guess, Andy, is what do you see the future of education?

Obviously, those people are going up against Goliath, but do you see a positive future?

It's hard to say, but I'll do my best to answer the question.

By the way, go back to the book.

Yes, please.

There's a lot in here about the microschools in the book.

Good.

And you could also go to microschoolrevolution.com if you want to find

out more about this going against Goliath.

That's correct.

The good news is the parents are realizing how bad the schools are.

There was a recent poll done over this past summer for the American Federation of

Teachers, a real leftist teachers union did, and I don't remember the exact question was

how to improve American education to the parents.

And the parents were loud and clear.

And it's very simple.

More academic education, less propaganda.

That's all it takes.

That's all it takes.

But the interlocking director at the

impregnable fortress doesn't want that.

Now, the good news is the parents are waking

up to that.

But they're rallied against the school boards.

I'd like to reach out to them.

That's one of the reasons I wrote this book.

You're wasting your time and energy.

ETH is 100% right.

This is an impregnable fortress.

It can't be overrun.

It can't be changed, it can't be altered, it can't be reformed, but it can't be

circumvented.

So you need to conduct a guerrilla war against

Goliath.

You pull the kids out of the government school

system.

You starve the monster of victims.

You teach them at home via homeschooling, or you hire tutors, which you could do online or

in person.

Or you join or form a home school co op, which

is easier in the redneck states than in the leftist states.

Or you find disgruntled teachers who start a small community school, a microschool.

But there's a number of options.

But you got to get the kids out of the

government school if you want them to be educated rather than doctrinated.

You got to understand, with few exceptions here or there, but overall, the government

school system is truly in a pregnant fortress.

Ed her said that almost 30 years ago, and he's

even more correct today than he was back then.

So homeschooling is the future.

Micro schools are the future.

If there's going to be a future in education,

home school costs.

Do you have a minute?

I want to say something about tutors.

Go for it.

Yeah, I'm a tutor, and there's plenty of others.

Here's the interesting thing, one reason of many why the school system is so bad.

Okay, tell your story.

Go for it.

So the year is 1999.

True story.

Cliff's Notes hires me to write the Cliff Notes with three iron rampit.

Now, Cliff Notes are study guides for great novels and everything to show your audience

those Iron Rand.

I mean, it's my share.

Yes, I'm sure your audience knows iron Rans is the brilliant novelist.

Right away, those guys out there, if you haven't read Iron Rand's novels, in a way, I

envy you.

You have the chance to read Iron Man for the

first time, to read about headed out with Shrunk for the first time, but so the general

editor of Cliff Snow is a really good guy, tells me.

Back when Cliff Snow started 1950s 1960s, our main demographic was high school and college

kids, which I can remember because I was in high school.

I remember the English teachers telling us, don't read the Cliffs Notes.

We're reading Charles Dickens, David Copperfield or whatever.

The English teachers were clear.

They didn't want us to read the Cliffs Notes,

not because they thought the Cliff Notes were bad.

They weren't.

They're good.

But they didn't want us to read the Cliff Notes instead of the novel, so okay, that's

fair enough.

So I went out to college.

I was an English major, and the English professor systems don't read the Cliff Notes.

We're reading Shakespeare's tragedies.

We're reading King Lear.

Okay, so main demographic back then, 1970s, high school and college student, the general

letter tells me 19 99 20 00.

Today, our main demographic is high school

English teachers because they've either never read the novels in college that they're now

assigned to teach, and or worse, they didn't understand.

Why is that? Because to teach in the American in the

government school system, you need a degree in education.

So you're taking many education courses, and so fewer content courses.

You're taking all these method courses, how to teach rather than what to teach.

Yeah, exactly.

So you had this tragic situation where in

fact, one leading example from the various sources I use, Blair, is in Connecticut, which

prides itself on its school system.

But a math major at the University of

Connecticut needed to get a math degree, I think needed 40 hours in math and then 12

hours in cognate, science, physics, chemistry, and so on, 52 hours.

But to get a teaching degree from the Connecticut school system, you needed only 30

hours of math and 9 hours of, you know, of science, 39 rather than 52.

And so the math majors are getting far more math and science than are the future math

teachers.

And it's same in literature.

You know, the literature majors, which I was in college, are getting far more literature

than the future English teachers are.

So the English teachers, same in science, same

in history, and so forth.

So the point is that teachers don't know a lot

of content.

They don't know nearly as much content as they

should because they're taking all these education courses.

So that's a real problem in the American school system.

So I was talking about tutors.

Well, say you want somebody to teach a kid

chemistry, let's say.

And so the science teachers in the high

schools have a mind in the elementary schools have had very little science in their own

college career.

But you find a tutor.

And today another good thing that came out of the pandemic is the WhiteSpeed use of zoom in

various video technologies like that.

So you don't need in person is always best.

If you can find a local graduate student who's getting a PhD masters or PhD in chemistry, who

will do it in person, even better.

But even if you can't, let's say you're in

Michigan and you're online on LinkedIn or on various websitevacitytours.com and so on or on

Facebook, there's all through word of mouth, all different ways you can find tutors.

But you find a kid at the University of Oregon, let's say, who's got a PhD in

chemistry.

Well, this kid has, first of all, majored in

chemistry.

And if he's in a PhD program in chemistry,

he's majored in chemistry.

He's got a BS in chemistry.

His degree is not in education.

His degree in chemistry already knows more

science than the high school science teachers do.

Second of all, now he's on his way to a master's or a PhD in chemistry.

So he's taking all these advanced courses in chemistry.

He knows vastly more science than any other high school teachers do.

Second of all, he's a graduate student, which means he's probably starving.

He's got very little money, so you could get him cheap.

Third of all, it's not a support, because paying for tours can add up.

You can get him inexpensively.

Third of all, it's in his self interest, too,

because this is teaching experience.

He's making money of expertise.

If he does a good job, he puts it on his resume.

He gets a strong reference from the parents.

I mean, I didn't have that opportunity when I

was in grad school.

I ran from one school to another as an

adjunct, driving, you're keeping the roads hot.

One of the chairman of the philosophy department who hired me and said, you know,

you're preparing yourself for your future career as a taxi driver.

That's what a PhD philosophy is good for.

So I had to run around from one school to

another well, now you can do a lot of this online, right, from your dorm room or your

living room.

So the tutors know vastly more of the subject

matter that they're going to teach that even the high school teachers do.

Never mind the elementary school teachers.

You can get them inexpensively for the most

part.

So there's a lot of options for parents pull

their kids out of the schools and there's a lot of options for them to get a much better

education for their children.

That's fantastic news and great for our audience to know that as well.

Again, it's in part two of my book on what we could do about it@varsitytours.com.

If you're looking there's a number of websites vivostytutors.com is a good one.

If you're looking for tutors for your kids, there's a lot of resources out there for

parents who pull their kids out of the schools.

And parents will tell me, I'm not a teacher.

And I'm thinking to myself, yeah, it's a good

thing you haven't gone through an education program.

I'm not a teacher.

And I'll say to them, seriously, how much of a

teacher do you need to be to do a better job than the government schools are doing right

now?

Yeah, that's true.

Just go back to the basics.

Show your children that books are fun and then

use systematic phonics to teach them to read.

You've already done a great thing.

Yeah. They're leapfrogging ahead already.

Yeah.

I've got one final question that I want, and it will tie into the micro schools

and the tutoring.

Why is it well, why is it important to teach

an integrated hierarchical system or subject matter to a child?

That's a complex, difficult question.

But first of all, there's some people alisa

Van Dam, who's an objectivist educator in California, she's written on this several

essays in the Objective Standard that I'm sure you could find on the objective standard

website.

I can't remember the titles offhand, although

I discussed it in the book.

But there's a book by who I call The Wise

Girls.

Jessica Wise and Susan Wise.

Bow.

Yeah.

Well trained in mind, right? I think it's the well educated mind.

But anyhow, it's a brilliant book for home schoolers.

You don't have to follow everything in it, but it shows some ways that you could approach

your homeschooling a kid and the way to integrate the curriculum so that the students

have a systematic view of the world and how things hang together.

So, for example, they recommend you're dividing your history program into four parts.

Ancient was medieval, early Modern and late modern and contemporary.

And so when you're studying, for example, when you study in ancient history, in your

literature classes, you read some of the great books by the ancients, the Iliad, The Odyssey,

Edipus, the King, you know, and so on.

The and you're integrating the literature with

the history.

Right.

Similarly, in the science curriculum, you could integrate the advances made by

ancient scientists.

Aristotle, biology, joachamedes with

engineering, some of erotosthenes and some of the early scientific advances.

Like Lisa van Dan points out, this is the way to teach science chronologically.

First of all, you perform the experiments that these scientists perform and show the kids in

action what it looks like.

And second of all, it stands to reason that

the simpler truths were identified by scientists before the more complex truths

which build upon it.

So you're doing the ancient experiments and

replicating the ancient finding, making scientific discoveries at the same time you're

studying ancient history, at the same time you're reading ancient literature.

Similarly with mathematics, you could integrate well, I guess Euclid was ancient.

I don't know that you'd want to start with Euclidean before you do arithmetic, but

mathematics may be a little bit different, but you can always when you get to geometry and

Euclidean geometry, but you already have this basis in ancient history, literature and

science that you can then integrate.

You can integrate Euclidean geometry with what

the kids learned, you know, by the ancient world earlier, but they have this integrated

approach.

It's just brilliant.

And it can be done.

It can be done.

Very good.

Andi very good.

Ladies and gentlemen, we've been talking to Andrew Bernstein, philosopher all around great

guy, and his new book is Why Johnny Still Can't Read or Write or Understand Math and

What We Can Do About It.

Andy, available from Amazon bondingglobal.com guys.

That's right.

Great to have you in the fox hole again today.

Thanks for having me on.

Martin and Blair, it's always a pleasure

talking to you guys.

So I had a great time and thanks very much.

You're welcome.

And Blair and Andy, I will end here.

Also a shout out to a fellow podcaster called Macintosh and he sent us a boost to Grant of

48 satoshis on November 22.

And he said, regarding our interview with Ken

West your interview, nice interview, guys.

So thanks again for shouting out.

I don't know if Fanny knows what a satoshi is.

Good.

We're advocates of bitcoin.

We become advocates of bitcoin.

And satoshi's is like the fraction of a Bitcoin, like a penny, if you will correct, if

you want to compare it to the fiat currency.

But we think Bitcoin is the future of a stable

currency and that is part of the value for value, I want to say ecosystem, the model for

change that's happening in the podcast world.

And that's something that you could apply in the future, like micro schools,

international that you have great examples of in very far off places.

Sure.

And to send Van Satushi's and micro payments

and Direct without any middleman to.

The tutors also right, Andy, if you're or if you were already knowledgeable about it,

we could send you whatever we received for this podcast.

We'd send you a third, we'll do a second.

Thanks guys, I appreciate it.

By the way, bitcoin is the future of money.

I think microscopes, like you said, Martin, is the future of schools.

And just to conclude, there's these tiny little schools in Africa all throughout age,

every African country.

The English education researcher James Toole

has written books on this, and it's really encouraging to see these small, private,

sometimes for profit schools in the poorest countries in the world.

If they could do it there, we could replicate here.

They don't have an entrenched teachers union and a government bureaucracy against that, but

they have a lot of other obstacles, namely starvation, for one.

We don't drink the water, I think.

Yeah, exactly.

Really good schools.

Really Good Schools, I think, is the title of Tuli's second book on these small private

schools internationally that are vastly outperforming the government schools in almost

any number of poor African and Asian countries.

Since our podcast is downloaded in 80 countries, hopefully Africa is one of more

than a few of them, then.

Yeah, I agree.

All right.

Thank you, gentlemen.

I appreciate it.

Thanks, guys.

It's been a pleasure.

Take care, Andy. Bye bye.

You too, guys.