About school life in the USA

About School Life in the USA

The Crisis of Modern American Education

I can't really remember the last time I had a chance to go in the backyard and just run around. School's just so much pressure that every day I would wake up dreading it. I'm afraid that our children are going to sue us for stealing their childhoods.

I would spend six hours a night on my homework. You have to get into the top schools. You have to take tests and do interviews. It's gone way to the extreme. We're all caught up in it in America. If you don't earn a lot of money, something went wrong.

The Sources of Academic Pressure

The pressure comes from the colleges, from the parents, from the government, but it has to stop. You have to do well now so you can get into a good college. Everyone expects us to be superheroes. You have a fear from the parents that my kid needs to be able to get a job. How do you expect us to do well when you can't even make mistakes? You're dedicating your whole life to your grades. You have to be smart and you have to be involved in the arts.

I have soccer practice every day plus the homework on top of that. Produce, produce, produce. It's impossible. I couldn't cope. I've gone through bouts of depression just because you feel so swamped. I almost like had an emotional breakdown.

The Mental Health Crisis in Schools

There have been six suicides in our school district. Our students are pressured to perform. They're not necessarily pressured to learn deeply and conceptually. What is that going to mean when we have a whole population of dentists and doctors who've been trained from the script? Things that actually get our students to think are pushed aside. These kids come to the table with this creativity and this love of learning. Let's just not take it out of them.

Rethinking American Education

I think the United States really needs to rethink how we do schooling. The economic future of the country depends on our addressing this. We need to redefine success for kids. It's got to be something we do together. All of us as a society, almost as a movement. Jobs need you to be a critical thinker. They need you to be a problem solver. We need to really think what does it take to produce a happy, motivated, creative human being.

Personal Experience with the System

One of our sons, we put him into a junior college and he started taking some courses and he'd never been in a

classroom environment. So we realized that he was totally unprepared for that experience and he had a really hard time. So we thought, okay, we'll put him into the high school there and award-winning high school. It's got some of the best, you know, it's quote unquote in all the real estate advertising. They always say best schools in the nation.

Schools as Prisons

So anyway, he went there and what we found out later from some of the teachers that had taught there is that the school is, it's basically run like a prison. It looks like a prison. In fact, most of the schools in California look like prisons and there's a reason for that. It's actually the prisons that are designed like the schools. And the reason for that is to, they figure something went wrong at about third, second or third grade. So California prisons are actually designed like elementary schools to get the inmates back into that mentality of doing what they're told.

And I think what's happening in a lot of the schools around the country is that increasingly there's just constant monitoring. They're monitored for everything. They had to take permission to go to the bathroom, to come back. And really what's, I think, deeply troubling for me, especially at the high school ages, if you look at, there's a book called The Case Against Adolescence, which argues that this infantilization of children moving into adulthood and keeping them as children is actually one of the things that creates adolescent rebellion.

John Taylor Gatto: A Revolutionary Teacher

John Taylor Gatto told me of an experience they had in a school in the inner city in New York. And he was teacher of the year in a state that has over 50,000 teachers. He was actually teacher of the year in that state. It was unprecedented in New York City and the state of New York four times. John Taylor Gatto, who did a seminar here with us, one of the things that he said is that his entire career was subverting the system. And he would wear a three-piece suit and he would go to school and look like a conservative. But he said he had a completely radical agenda, which was to really subvert everything that was going on in that school, to the point where he actually at one time stole all of the tests from the principal's office and threw this school into complete chaos for two weeks.

And this is how radical this man was. And yet his students consistently were some of the most successful students. And they went on, many of them to have very successful careers. And several of them attributed their success to having had him as a teacher.

Alternative Educational Models

So many of us have had great teachers, but many of us have also suffered the difficulties of these school systems that we find ourselves in. Just to give you an example, I went to one of the best Catholic high schools in the country. It was an elite school, but we had no grades and it was a pass or fail system. There were also four, there were about 15 students to each class, but there were four classes for each freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior. Each segment had four actual different classes that ran at different paces.

And the idea was if you were having a hard time, you actually were put into a class that went at a slower pace so that everybody stayed. You didn't lose people. And that's one of the things that we find in the school system that we have, is that you have people that, young people who, they haven't had their awakening yet in mathematics or they haven't had it in reading.

Understanding Different Learning Timelines

One of the things that children are often diagnosed as being dyslexic or they're having reading problems because they're trying to teach them to read at five years or six years of age and they're not ready to read yet. If they just left them alone by the time they get to eight, nine, or ten, when they're ready to read, they become quite efficient readers. So this idea of having to follow the program.

Some people do not get algebra. They will never get algebra. And there are other people that don't get geometry and they won't ever get geometry. It's, you know, and to punish kids for these, for these, what are seen as universal ways of knowing. They're not universal ways of knowing. People have different ways of knowing.

The Honor System Experience

I went to another high school. I was, for my freshman and sophomore year there, I went to another high school, which was also a private high school, and my brother and sister went to that high school as well. But again, very small classes. We were on honor system. I don't remember cheating in, I hope I'm not, this is not redacted memory, but I really don't remember cheating.

The Cheating Epidemic

But one of the things that the reasons why, one of the reasons why our son, it became unbearable for him to go to the high school there, is that he, since the time he was very little, he's been able to do math in his head. And he's very gifted in math. We have another son that has a really hard time with math. But he was, in the testing, it became so difficult for him to keep up with the time and show the work that he just started doing these things in his head, and then he would turn the test in, and this teacher would actually mark these answers wrong.

That he was getting right. And when he confronted him with it, he said, I know you're cheating. And it was so humiliating for him because he hadn't cheated before, but he said that at that school, cheating was the norm. It was not the exception. It was the norm. When I was going to school, it was the exception. That's no longer the case.

When I mentioned this to a medical student at the University of Stanford, I said to him, you know, how my son was telling me that everybody cheated in high school. And he said, yeah, no, no, no. I cheated my whole way through high school. And I said, are you doing that in medical school now? And he really kind of got a blank look on his face. And it really troubled me because I'm thinking if he cheated his way all through high school, and he's going to cheat his way all through medical school, and then I have to go to him to get some operation

done on me. And that was a test that he happened to have cheated on. So I mean, I think we have a really serious problem.

The Ethics Crisis

The other thing is we have to ask ourselves, you know, I have a Saudi friend who's a businessman who asked one of the heads of the business school in Harvard, do you teach ethics at Harvard? And he said, of course we do. We teach ethics. He said, then why are all these Harvard graduates cheating people on Wall Street?

You know, I mean, these guys are all the smartest guys in the room, the Enron guys, the guys who got 4.0 that are coming out. In fact, derivatives, most bankers could not understand this stuff. It was so complicated because the people that developed these schemes were mathematical geniuses. You can no longer go and get a PhD in economics like you used to back in the 50s or 60s. Economics was more a course in philosophy. Now it's higher mathematics and it's very competitive and hard to get. But these guys were the brightest guys. Where were their business ethics? They seemed to throw them out the window.

The Reality Behind High GPAS

So there's many, many issues that are going on in this film. And certainly we saw on the one hand, all these kids are supposed to, they're all doing really well or they're all getting straight A's and 4.0 GPAs and yet they come into these places needing remedial work. I've taught courses, I taught a course at Las Positas College here and it's really quite shocking the level of, after 12 years of school, students that have a really hard time writing a basic essay.

A Different Teaching Philosophy

One of the things I'm teaching now at a college here in Berkeley and one of the things that is, for the students that I'm teaching is that they have to get used to the fact that I'm really not interested in measuring what they know. For me, that's for them. If they're not getting something, they can tell me. But they don't need this paternalistic approach to education where the teacher has to tell them whether or not they're doing well or whether or not they're okay or not.

The Problem with Testing

And then the other thing about it is, I don't believe in grades and I don't really believe in testing because I think testing is also a completely insane way of measuring whether somebody knows something. We know for a fact that most of the tests, you can get advanced scores on them by taking these very costly programs where you learn how to take tests. And you can increase, they guarantee to increase your grades by 100 points. The difference between a 600 and a 700 is the difference between getting into a good college or a bad college.

Class Issues in Education

So a lot of this, and I don't think the class issue was addressed enough in this film because I think there are a lot of class issues that are going on in this film because many of these schools out there, we've got teachers that are just trying to keep students from killing each other. And there's a five year burnout rate and that poor teacher who's breaking down on the film, five years into teaching, most teachers now actually stop and they can't do it anymore.

The Standardized Testing Industry

What's interesting is when they're asked what is the number one reason that they're finding, when they're asked why they're leaving teaching because they're not allowed to teach how they want to and what they want. They're being told what to teach by the state. And it's all geared towards these ridiculous tests which is a massive industry that has immense lobbies. These are billion dollar industries in America. The books, the tapes, the DVDs, the CDs, the videos, the tutoring, all of this stuff is money. And yet we've got all of these young people that aren't learning basic skills, the basic skill sets.

The Flynn Effect and Social Skills

Another aspect, and this is something to think about, there's something called the Flynn effect which is that they're seeing in testing that measures IQs, they're seeing that the IQs are going up for those types of tests that measure certain aspects of quote unquote intelligence. But yet at the same time, they're seeing that young people are having more and more difficult time reading facial expressions. They're having a difficult time doing basic things that in fact there's a book coming out now, The Winter of Our Disconnect, which is about a woman who's talking about how kids don't know how to open cans or use can openers, that they don't know how.

She mentions in the book about one of these kids came over to their house and when he wanted some ice for his drink, she said it was in the ice box and he opened it and it was a tray and he'd never had to use an ice cube tray before because he was so used to having the ice cubes come out of the refrigerator and he didn't know what to do and she just said to him, work it out, you know, work it out. So that's an aspect that's very frightening.

Creating an Autistic Society

Now, one of the things that to me, this is indicative of an autistic personality. What we're creating basically, I think is a society of autistic people. People that are very good at certain things, actually can be very brilliant at them, but are completely disconnected from human interaction.

The Loss of Human Connection

My wife and I have noted for a long time because we had five children, when we would go to the grocery store with all these kids at different times and we'd have like the two-year-old or the one-year-old, the older people working in the grocery store would invariably stop and interact with the baby and even sometimes speak in

Technology and Young Children

So I think there are a lot of issues going on in this film. I'm personally against, I use a computer and I'm not a Luddite, but I am very much opposed to introducing these things to young kids. I think it's a disaster personally. That's my personal opinion. I also think a lot of the things that kids need to learn in school are human things.

The Wisdom of Traditional Learning

There's a Persian proverb that says, it's very easy to be a mullah. It's very difficult to be a human being. You can go to the madrasa and you can learn all those things. And I've met many tyrannical scholars.

Our Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, said: "Beware of tyrannical scholars" (إياكم وعلماء السوء - Iyyākum wa 'ulamā' al-sū'). That knowledge, when it becomes a source of arrogance and a source of pride, it has the opposite effect. The more knowledgeable a person gets, the more humble they should become.

Defining Success Differently

I'll just end and then we can open this up for a talk. My great-grandmother, and it's very interesting that she mentioned about Bill Gates not having a college degree. Many, many of the most successful people in the United States of America do not have college degrees. But again, how are we defining success? I mean, that's another, because we use these words, we throw them out, and often it's socioeconomic success.

A Historical Perspective on Education

But this is a book, it's called Bain's Rhetoric. I got this from my father who got it from his mother who got it from her mother. So this is my great-grandmother's high school rhetoric book from Wichita Falls. It was a public high school. If you read this today, I think what will surprise you is it's written at a postgraduate level. Somebody today, even who has higher degrees, I think would have a difficult time reading it.

Teaching Critical Thinking

But I just want to, there's a section on appeal to emotions. What an interesting thing to teach high school students about how they can be manipulated by orators. In that section, and I also know because my great-grandmother noted in the, there's a page here that has a little note from her. It says Lily Cummings, December 10th, 1880, had a terrible toothache today. So it's an unusual thing to know about your great-grandmother that every December 10th, I'll have to try to remember that.

Understanding Fear and Manipulation

In another aspect, they take on the character of passions or inflammation, disturbing the fair calculations of the will and inducing us to act without reverence, without reference to our pleasures or our pains. Fear, terror, or dread, whatever pains us is an object of avoidance according to our sense of the pain. This is not fear, but the usual attitude of precaution against harm.

But on each, on certain occasions, pain in prospect is accompanied with a tremulous and unhinging excitement under which the powers are enfeebled and rational calculation is interfered with, every other interest being sacrificed to the morbid impulse. This is a high school textbook. Terror is a powerful agent in overcoming the contumacious and self-willed disposition and is made use of in government, in religion, and in education.

The passion may be excited by the mere prospect of great suffering, but still more effectually by unknown dangers, uncertainties, and vast possibilities of evil in matters keenly felt by the hearers. The approach of unexperienced calamities is apt to engender panic. Under a plague or epidemic, people may be easily frightened into measures that in cool moments they would repudiate.

The sick and the depressed can readily be inspired with religious and moral terrors. History furnishes many examples of political oratory succeeding through the excitement of terror. I mean, if that's what they were teaching high school students in the 1880s, I don't think somebody like George Bush could have ever got elected, right?

The Need for Critical Tools

So, it's very interesting that we're living in a time when our young people need more than ever to have the tools to be vigilant against demagoguery, against propaganda, advertising. I would recommend all of you, if you haven't read Dorothy Sayers' extraordinary article that's in the little booklet there on education, I would really... You can read it online. So, I know I'm... But it supports Kinza Academy, so you can buy it too. But it's the lost tools of learning.

Dorothy Sayers on Education

And in that, Dorothy Sayers, who at one point wrote advertisement copy, so she knew very well the secrets of advertising. She's noted for her mystery writing, but she was also a great theologian. And the mind of the maker is an extraordinary book. She translated Dante, the divine comedy, wrote the best essay, hands down, I've ever

read on the seven deadly sins. And she was largely homeschooled. Her father began teaching her Latin at the age of seven.

Learning Latin Early

And she wrote a stunning essay on why you should learn Latin early as opposed to in high school. She said that to learn Mensa, Mensae, Mensae, Mensam, Mensa at the age when you like things like eeny, meeny, miny, moe is very encouraging. Children at that age actually love to memorize. They love jingles. And those are the times they should be learning foreign languages and things that need rote memorization. Anyway, I'll end there. I think we're gonna open it up for... Yeah, for questions.

Discussion on Grading Systems

Short comment. Well, I think grading is largely when you have large classrooms. And I think it's an easy way for the teacher to figure out. I mean, it's for a large classroom. So when you're working in smaller groups or one-on-one with children, grading becomes unnecessary. And I also think a lot of schools, a lot of the alternative schools, they don't actually grade. They do pass, fail. So either the child learns the material and then they move on or they don't. Grading is definitely not something that needs to be done. And it also kind of... Well, it's also, it's a modern phenomenon. It's not a historical thing.

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Grades

But one of the things that there's been social science studies done where they put children that were very poor students and put them into gifted programs and told the teachers that these were gifted students. And they actually ended up doing much better than they've done before. So grading can become self-fulfilling prophecy.

The girl gets an F on a test and suddenly she thinks she's stupid because she didn't get something that might simply be the time that she's in because we have awakenings. We have intellectual, spiritual, emotional, physical awakenings in life. And these come at different stages for different people.

Different Stages of Intellectual Development

Some people will have an intellectual awakening in their 30s or 40s where they really become interested in learning at a deep level. Others do not. And one of the things that I think is really tragic about grading to me is the assumption somehow that this is telling you that this student is an excellent student because they got grades. We know that that's false. Many, many of the most brilliant people got terrible grades in school. The famous example is Einstein.

The Imaginative World of Children

And they actually thought he was retarded during his early period because he daydreamed all the time. We have students that just wander off because they're actually in an imaginal world. And creativity, which is getting lost,

is another aspect of what's going on out there, killing the imagination. A lot of the visual images, students watch films instead of reading books and everything becomes visual. So they actually lose that creative capacity. I mean, I really think grades are very detrimental.

Learning for the Grade vs Learning the Material

And we're teaching also, we're telling students that they're learning these things, they become the reason why they learn it to get the grade. And that's what they're interested in instead of actually learning the material. What's gonna be on the test? As if that's the only thing that's important, right? What's gonna be on the test? Subjects should be enjoyed also.

The Mark Van Doren Approach

And my father said that when he was at Columbia, of all the teachers that he had, he said he had many brilliant teachers, but the one teacher that really affected him was a teacher named Mark Van Doren. And Van Doren, one of the secrets of Van Doren's teaching was, and Giraud, who was one of his students, said that Van Doren had a trick. He made the student think that they were an intellectual peer with him.

And when I told my father that, because I'd read about Van Doren, my father said it wasn't a trick. He genuinely believed that, and he treated people with that dignity. That's another aspect. One of the things that I've tried to do with my own kids is never tell them that they're lying or never tell them to expect the best. I mean, to expect the best from them. When you think all these students in your classroom are cheaters, they'll respond in time. They will affirm your own suspicions. And when you expect from them something much higher, many, many young people will respond in kind.

Immigrant Communities and Academic Pressure

It's a good point, I think, for people that could not hear. The young lady was just saying about the immigrant community here, and I think particularly probably come from the South Asian, if I'm not mistaken, background, that many of the immigrant parents, and you find this in the Asian community, in the Indian community, in the Pakistani community, Arab community, you will find an immense pressure put on the young people to succeed, get the best grades, because they want them to get into the best schools.

A Global Problem

This is actually endemic in many parts of the world. Cairo has tests that determine your future. So high school students will actually commit suicide because of the impact. So this is not just an American problem. The difference, I think, in a lot of countries is the pyramid is so small. So the people that can get into colleges are much smaller. Here, if you don't get into the best school, you can opt for another school.

At Las Positas, I told a lot, because a lot of students were Afghan students, I would tell them, if you were in Afghanistan, this school would be the Harvard of Afghanistan. Even though it's a junior college, the type of

opportunities that you have in a school here are just not afforded to people in other places. So there's definitely a lot going on there. I mean, we have real problems in these communities where an immense amount of pressure is put on young people. And we're seeing it just in the statistics.

Understanding Autism

It's a good point that autism, they don't know what causes it. There's people that have tried to establish the relationship between vaccinations and autism, and Joseph Kennedy Jr.'s going around saying it's actually the mercury that they put into the, that some people react to. And then there's a lot of evidence that it's not. And there's a whole slew of physicians that argue the other way.

What, for me, in giving a lot of thought to autism, because it is a problem in our society, I think a lot of it has to do with really overstimulation. And I think some people are profoundly sensitive. We don't know what ultrasound is doing to fetal development. I mean, there's these arguments that, oh, it's perfectly safe.

The Arrogance of Modern Medicine

Well, for decades, cigarette smoking was perfectly safe. In fact, doctors actually recommended smoking for some people for nervousness and things like that. So there's so many things we don't know. And our society, the lack of humility, I think, that's in some of these professional communities, in the medical community, this kind of arrogance and just saying, it's definitely not that, or it has nothing to do with that. We don't know.

Temple Grandin and Hypersensitivity

But I think if you know about the woman, I can't remember her name right now, but who ended up getting her, she's, I think, the first autistic woman to get a PhD. What's it? Temple Grant. Yeah, Temple Grant. One of the things that really struck me about her is her relationship to animals. Because animals have very, most animals, many animals, have a very hypersensitive nervous system. Deers, if you look at deers or rabbits, I mean, they're just totally sensitive to any movement, any flashing.

I happen to have, as my sister has this also, an exaggerated vasovagal response as a result of Barlow syndrome, which is a congenital problem. So I know what hypersensitivity can be to overstimulation. And we're in a society where people are overstimulated. With images, with lights.

The Effects of Artificial Lighting

I mean, these lights have been proven just to be unhealthy lights, and yet we still use them in all of our universities and elementary schools. I mean, this stuff, the studies that were done back, that Walt Disney had these studies done back in the 50s on this type of lighting, but it's a cheaper lighting. And yet we know the effects that it's having. People blink more under these type of lights because the nervous system is hypersensitive. So there are just so many things that, you know, there's just so many variables going on.

Video Game Addiction

But one of the things that we know definitely, people are getting addicted to these, the Game Station Nation, which is a book about addiction to a lot of these games. The Pokemon phenomenon in Japan, that poor kid who died after, you know, playing for three days or something, or four days, could not stop playing. Now you can say those are anomalous cases, but nonetheless, they're there. And if they're affecting, you know, small numbers, what are they doing to the greater number of people? If that's the extreme of the effect, what is a moderate effect?

Violence and Video Games

The young boy that had seven headshots in Virginia went to school and killed seven kids with headshots. The FBI said that they didn't have marksmen that could do that because he was killing them as they were running away. Well, it turned out he had a game at his house that his father had gotten him for his birthday where you got points for shooting people in the head. And so you can say, well, that's, you know, an isolated case.

Killology and Desensitization

But Dave Grossman wrote a book, Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, he taught a new science at West Point called Killology, which is the psychology of killing. And he's written several books now. I mean, this is one of the foremost researchers in that field. He's written several books, Stop Teaching Our Children to Kill, because what he shows is all of these actual, this technology was developed by the military to desensitize people into being able to kill other people. And this stuff has trickled down into mainstream. And we say, well, freedom of speech, you know, everybody has a right to produce what they do.

The Pornography Crisis

This is having an effect. We have the problems in pornography as well. The number one downloading that's going on on the internet is pornography in the United States. There's more porn being downloaded than any other thing on the internet. What type of young people is that going to do? What's going to happen to these young people that are 15 years old, and instead of like 30 years ago, being exposed to a Playboy or something like that, they're exposed to live pornography online, and they have access to that. What's that going to do?

Neuroplasticity and Pornography

In Princeton, they had a conference that I was part of on pornography, and they had a neuroscientist there saying that based on their studies, people that become addicted to pornography, their minds get rewired. The neuroplasticity of the brain actually results in complete changes. So we've got people out there that literally have different brain connectivity than normal people because they've been watching very powerful visual stimulus over long periods of time. So a lot of this technology, we don't know the types of harm that these technologies are causing.

Living in a Shared World

My own teacher, Sheikh Abdullah Bin Baya, when he came to the West, he noticed all these people walking around with headphones, and he said that's a really bad sign because they're in their own world. And he said, we live in a shared world, and it's important for us to be together. He's from West Africa where this idea of disappearing into your own world is not a normal thing, and yet we see that on the Berkeley campus.

Teaching Quran with Love

I'll just answer this question, but I would just like to say that I had a really interesting conversation with Sheikh Salik about this. And I think that when it comes down to teaching Quran, the key factor really is the teacher. A teacher that really loves the Quran and loves to teach it, and especially to children because I think that's a unique skill in itself.

And he told me a lot of people, especially people outside our area that don't have access to good teachers, are having their children learn Quran through multimedia. And that concerned me, and I asked him about that, and he said learning Quran is not mandatory. He absolutely disagreed with people making learning the Quran a priority over loving the Quran. He just said that's so much more important.

And I said to him, so if a child can't study, you know, say until they're a teenager, if they can't find a teacher until then, is it better to just wait? And he said, yeah, absolutely. Because the last thing you want to do is to hurt that child's love of the Quran. That is a priority. That's a good answer. Thank you.

Natural Inclinations and Excellence

Go ahead. Well, one of the most important things is identifying what children love to do. And there's a great sixth century scholar from Spain named Ibn Wahb al-Kātib, who said that one of the things that God has done is he has put natural inclinations into people because we live in a complementary world, and you need people to do different things.

And he said, if you let children explore those things that they're naturally inclined to do, they will excel in those areas. And this is why some people are not good in math, and other people are not good in literature. It doesn't mean that you don't want them to study math at all, but it's a very difficult thing for them to do. And if you make them feel as if you're a failure if you don't get geometry, if you don't get algebra, then it's a really harmful thing to do to a young person.

The Concept of Flourishing

And letting them flourish, you know, the word that Aristotle uses in the ethics for happiness is eudaimonia, which in Greek means flourishing, that happiness is when human beings are doing things that their souls can flourish in, that they feel joyful doing. And we're living in a society that is increasingly becoming unhappy. There's a lot of people on Prozac, there's a lot of anxiolytic drugs that are being used, and increasingly younger

and younger people are using these drugs. And what's going on in a society that's creating so many miserable people?

Happiness in Poverty

Because I've lived in West Africa, in one of the poorest countries, it's actually considered about the fourth poorest country in the world, and consistently I've found they were the happiest people that I've ever lived with or been with. I've been all over the world and they were the happiest people. They were happy people. Many of them smiled normally. It was normal for them to smile. When they talked to you, they actually smiled while they were talking. And they're dirt poor, literally. I mean, dirt poor people.

The Simple Joys of Life

What made them happy was, I think, family, community, the simple joys of life. They really enjoyed tea. You know, just sitting every day, they had tea maybe three times a day and it was ritualistic, and they would sit down. One of the things they say in that culture, when the food comes, put away the books and be with the food. And so the idea of being present, you know, we tend to forget. We've got people, look at them out there, you know, reading books and eating, eating on the phone, talking.

The Madness of Multitasking

Everybody's doing, you know, this whole idea of multitasking is a type of madness. You know, this idea of juggling multiple things. People need to get back to just doing things well, and really with what the Arabs call itqan (إتقان - perfection/excellence), doing things well.

The Honor of Honest Work

There's so many things young people can do. Another thing, and you know, another thing that I think is really key in our culture is we have to recognize that honest work, any work that's honest is honorable. Honesty and honorable are from the same root, cognate. Any work that is honest work is honorable. We demean labor in this culture. We demean jobs that are not seen as really important jobs. They're very important jobs. We don't have master carpenters anymore. We don't, you know, we don't have people that can make really fine things.

The Value of Skilled Trades

And if you teach people these skills, they will always have good livelihoods. You know, I have a book binder because I love books. Like I had this book repaired. I love books. I think I keep this guy in bread and butter. You know, he charges me an arm and a leg for binding a book, but I pay it because I love my book. He's months booked in advance. That was a pun. But my point is this guy, he's up there on it. You know, he's got a couple of people that is. Send your son to become a book binder. I'll keep him in business. You don't have to worry about it. But, you know, there's people that can learn how to do that well.

The Throwaway Culture

You know, we don't have repair. People just throw things away now. They used to have, if you go to like the Middle East, they've got a guy in every Middle Eastern corner. There's a guy with a store and it's filled with toasters and all kinds of things because he sits around fixing them all day. Nothing's fixed anymore. You just something breaks down, you throw it away. There's so many things that our young people can learn that are honorable and not demeaning.

The Misery of Unfulfilling Work

And they'll be happier doing a job like that than pushing a pencil in some miserable job where they really hate it. And they come home every day. I just, my next door neighbor, literally, she's a school teacher in supposedly one of the best districts in the world. She just, she gave me a rant the other day. I just said, how are you doing? And she's one of those people who's gonna tell me how you're doing because some people won't tell you. I'm fine, thanks. You know, I'm about to kill myself, but I'm doing okay. You know, no, she was like, I'm so sick and tired of this country. We're turning in a third world country.

I've got 37 kids in my classroom. And she just went, I'm miserable. I come home every day. This is my next door neighbor. I'm not making this up. I come home every day and I'm exhausted. I don't even want to go back to work. I'm just looking for something else to do. I mean, what kind of life is that? This is your life. This is it.

Making Learning Real

I just want to add one thing to teaching to the test. I think the more that, I mean, I guess you're probably speaking in terms of doing homework with your children, right? Do you help? I think the more that you can take whatever it is you're teaching and apply it to their real life, the more interesting it is for them, the more they begin to love the subject. They see the, you know, the meaning of the subject. And it's just, it's a very different experience.

The other day, my daughter's with me. I was editing the book up here and I noticed one sentence had a question mark and an exclamation point at the end. And I had just taught her that in her grammar class. And so I said to her, hey, I can't remember what happens here. Can you tell me? And she said, she had actually forgotten, but she was so excited. I should pull out her book and look at it. And that's something she'll probably never forget. You know, so I think the more you can make it real for the children, the more they're going to love it, the more they're going to remember.

Traditional Islamic Education

The, you know, I mean, I would say, first of all, I, you know, I was in a traditional system that's been going on for centuries. What I did in West Africa and with West Africans, you know, I was with them for about seven years solid in the Middle East, same group of people. And the type of learning that I did, a lot of it is didactic

poems, studying didactic poems, and learning a tradition, which takes a lot of rote memorization and a certain level of mastery so that you can teach those as well and pass it on. But it's important to note that that is a vocation. It's something certain people love to do.

The Love of Learning

I love studying. You know, I study every day. I read dictionaries every day. I read dictionaries like people read novels. You know, I love words. I love dictionaries. I love finding out things. And so, in fact, I just, you know, tate a tate, I just found out today because Dorothy Sayers said that tate actually comes from an old Latin word, which meant mug. So you know how we say, he's got a nice mug in his face. So the Romans used to say that as well. He's got a nice mug. So I like stuff like that. You know, it's like, wow. You know, it's exciting for me.

Discovery as Ecstasy

I mean, the Arabic word for discovery is the same word for to become ecstatic. Wajada (وجد). You know, wajdan (وجدان). It's ecstasy. Discovery is ecstasy. Little kids, the things I remember most that I loved about my little kids when they were really little and I really miss it is when they would discover something. Like, I would have these, they'd run in and say, you gotta come see this. You know, and I would always get excited, jump up, watch, homie. And I'd run out with them and look at that bug. And it was some bug that they had just discovered.

The Eureka Moment

That is called eureka. You know, eureka came from Archimedes discovering. The story goes that he was in his bathtub and he worked out displacement, the problem of displacement. And he solved a really major problem in Greek physics at the time. And he just jumped up and ran outside shouting eureka, naked, through the streets. My own teacher, Sheikh Abdullah bin Baya, you know, said once that two people live in wonder, children and philosophers.

Many Paths to Learning

This is an amazing place. And so learning is about discovery. But there are many ways to learn and many things to learn. And what people have to find out are those things that give them those ecstatic moments. And for some people, it's gonna be music. For some people, it's gonna be math. For some people, it's gonna be literature. For some people, it's gonna be art. For some people, it's gonna be building really beautiful things.

The Importance of Language

There are different things that people can do. And so limiting, you know, like they said, the SAT score, it's focusing on certain things. And, you know, it's one type of knowledge. But language is important. And my personal belief is that everybody should have a rich language experience because we all speak. And it's speaking

that makes us human and speaking which enables us to communicate. And so language experience is essential to the educational experience. Mathematics is far less so in my estimation, but it's also a great subject. So.

Getting Out of the System

I think that in terms of getting out of the corporate school model, which is what you had mentioned, I think we just, I think we need to really, I mean, we need to get out of the system as it is. And I think not everybody can do that. There are a lot of kids in public school, which is really what this documentary is about. How are we gonna address the situation in public school? And I think Vicky said in the documentary that she couldn't do it alone. And she's basically trying to get this movement going to get people to come on board and help make some serious changes in our system.

The Duty to Educate Our Children

But I think if, I mean, as a community, I feel like we need to get out of the system. I think it's a right upon us as parents to educate our children. And they're not being educated in public school. And they're not being educated in a lot of these private schools that we've created. They're not really receiving a proper education. It's oftentimes it's public school, in the name of an Islamic school. And so I think, I've really looked into this question.

The One-Room Schoolhouse Model

And I think we really need to try to move into more of a traditional teaching model, which is one-on-one teaching. And we used to have, in this country, we had the one-room schoolhouse. And that was when our literacy rates were at the highest. But they were schoolhouses that would house, you know, local children, maybe five, ten families. And children were taught one-on-one. They were not graded to the extent that they are today.

And they oftentimes skip grades because they were hearing the lessons of the older children. It was a very positive environment. And people were really, by eighth grade, the children had a much better education than most of us have when we graduate from college. So that's a model that we can look at as a community. I've always thought that would be just a really ideal model. And the other thing is homeschooling.

Homeschooling as Traditional Education

I mean, obviously, that's what's available to us now for those who can do it. But homeschooling also does fit the traditional model of education as far as our Islamic teaching goes. You know, just another, just to add to that, is that Joseph Pieper, a brilliant Catholic philosopher, wrote a little book called Leisure, the Basis of Culture.

The Importance of Leisure and Contemplation

And what he argued in that book is that leisure and the time, because leisure comes from a word which means

license. It's the permission to contemplate, to think. And contemplation and the idea of actually being alone, one of the things now with all these things, people don't get bored anymore because they just go on YouTube and watch videos or they text somebody or they don't have that downtime just to actually, boredom is a very important part of human experience because out of boredom comes great creativity.

The Culture of Busyness

One of the things that Kierkegaard talks about is that we are becoming a culture of busyness. Everybody's busy. And he was talking about Denmark 200 years ago. You know, so think what he would think of today about our culture now. St. Thomas Aquinas said that every culture has to have certain peoples that all they do is contemplate. And every culture historically has had those people.

The Gadflies of Culture

And those people are very important people because they are the Socrateses of the culture. They're the gadflies. They are the people that challenge whatever the politically correct views of existence are out there. Confucius, one of the great Confucius of China said, when everybody says this is good, that is bad. If you don't have people challenging, if you don't have people questioning these things, and there's so many people that they will throw these pat responses. You can't, you're not against progress, or you can't be against progress, you know.

Questioning Progress

Well, if you're lemmings and your progress is going over the cliff, do you really call that progress? You know, if we are committing social communitarian suicide as a people, as a society, as a species, what's happening to us as a people? And this is not even to get into the, you know, what the Hindus would call the karmic effects of national behavior. James Madison to quote, not from a Hindu, but from a Christian founding father said, the sins of nations are visited upon those nations. You know, so we don't even think about as a nation, those things that we do to other people, how that comes back to haunt us, and how that affects us, because now if you even bring that up, you're un-American, you know.

The Right to Criticize

So I want to know, why is it the founding fathers could criticize America and nobody else can? John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson, American chivalry is the most violent, base thing in existence, right? When Daniel Shays rebelled in Massachusetts with the farmers that were overburdened by the complete breakdown of their currency, and these are men that fought in the revolution with honor and distinction. When they had their rebellion, Jefferson said, it's good. We need a little reminder every once in a while.

The Need for Revolution

You know, so it's good. I mean, he saw it as a good thing when people are actually angry and upset and react. This country has been so screwed in the last few years, it's been going on for a while, but this thing that

happened on Wall Street, this bailout, if this was any other generation of Americans, you would have had a revolution in this country. You would have had a revolution. I'm not making that up. You can read the history of this country.

The Virginia Stamp Act

The revolution, the first revolution in this country, it was sparked by a Virginia Stamp Act, where they were charging a penny to get a license, a stamp license. If you went to get a marriage license, you had to pay a penny. That started the revolution, a tax of one penny. You know, the income tax started in 1913, folks. Before that, Americans didn't pay income tax, and now you're paying 40% of your livelihood to a government that is so dysfunctional. All we're doing is enabling a bunch of really sick people.

The Defense Budget Question

And then we wonder, you know, what's going on in the country? What's going on? Really, but this is what's happening in this country. People, you know, we're sending all this money to Washington, and we've got a defense budget nine times bigger than all other countries on the planet. That means some serious questioning, like why do we need a defense budget that's nine times, well, there's people in Afghanistan that live in caves that are threatening our existence.

A Dumbed Down Culture

You know, I mean, this is the type, really, we've got a culture of people that have been so dumbed down, through this educational process, because they're not given any time to think. They can't just sit back and think, because if you start thinking, thinking is dangerous. Thinking is a dangerous thing. But as Heidegger pointed out, thinking, the word think is related to the word thank. You know, that there's a powerful human need to think, because thinking is a way of thanking the one who gave you the gift of thought.

Rejecting Assimilation into Madness

Well, I mean, I personally don't want my kids to be assimilated into a mad, insane culture. I mean, that's why we, you know, people say, what about socialization? Exactly. I don't want them socialized into this society. I don't want them to think that this is normal. And to be creative and actually be able, you know, people now are so fearful. I'm going to, you know, I'm worried about losing my job. So make a job.

A Nation of Entrepreneurs

You know, people didn't used to be employed in this country. Employment was seen as just one phase in life. You know, this used to be a country of entrepreneurs, of people that actually did things for themselves. And I think we need to get back to that. You know, we need to get back to independent communities that are not dependent on a global culture that's destroying our biosphere, that's causing great pain and suffering, both in the home and outside. And there's a lot of immense pain and suffering.

The Madness of the System

Look at that poor family, you know, who have to live with the fact that their daughter committed suicide, apparently over a failing grade in a math course. I mean, that's the type of madness that we're in. So I just, I really feel like we have to question very profoundly the whole nature of the society that we're in and really look for serious alternatives.

The Amish Example

In the end of the day, I mean, and the, you know, the Amish, you know, the Amish are there and they've been there as a testimony to people living. And I'm not advocating becoming Amish, but I'm saying there's a group of people that just said, you know what? We're not gonna participate in that madness. There's a lot of people that have done that. There are people that have the moral commitment to check out. There are people that have the moral commitment not to use credit cards. In this society, I mean, people have profound conviction, have greater conviction than myself on a lot of issues that I talk about.

Living with Purpose

There was a professor at San Jose State that was at zero garbage production. He wasn't producing any garbage. He was an environmentalist teacher and he would take his students to his house to show how he got out of producing garbage. So there are people that can do things, but if we have a society that's not engendering creativity, that's not teaching people to think outside of the box, to think of other ways of doing things, there's so much madness.

The Prussian System

This whole system was designed by Prussians and we have the history. John Taylor Gatto recorded the history of where this whole thing came from. That's also in the book. It's also in the book. In that little book, yeah. There's an essay by John Taylor Gatto that talks about that, but where this system came from.

Thoreau and the Educated Farmer

I mean, some of our most creative people in this country, if you look at Henry David Thoreau, whose books are still read to this day, Henry David Thoreau, he completely rebelled against that, but he talks about meeting a yeoman, a farmer, who had Homer's Iliad. When he was plowing, he would sit down under a tree and read Homer's Iliad in Attic Greek in Massachusetts in the 1840s. And this was a simple American farmer. One of the things Thoreau says about him is that he didn't really read it at a deep level, but he thought it was the greatest yarn that he'd ever heard. I mean, that's a farmer in Massachusetts reading Homeric Greek.

Historical American Literacy

That's the type of education that a lot of early Americans had. I don't think people realize how much literacy and

how much leisure time this country had 150 years ago.

The Socialization Myth

Can I actually, on that socialization question, that's just such an enormous myth that's propagated around homeschooling community. It's actually the opposite. If you look at the children in this film, I'm just shocked by how much time they don't have to socialize at school all day. So many schools are cutting out recesses now. Kindergarten, I think they're cutting out morning and lunch recesses. I read in 50% of kindergartens now. So they just sit in their home doing homework all night.

Better Socialization Outside the System

They don't have time to socialize. Children that are homeschooled or outside the system in whatever form, they have so much time. And because they're also not stuck in classrooms with kids around age all day long, which is another big problem, they're interacting with everybody in society. So it's actually the opposite. They're actually better socialized. And they tend to be more, I'd say, just more human in the sense that they tend to have more compassion.

The Problem with Age Segregation

They're kinder in general because they don't have to deal with all the issues that come in in schools with lots of bullying. And also the ageism, the whole idea of segregating them by age. Yeah, just the idea of segregating children by age too. It's just incredibly unnatural. We've never done it before. It's been ever since the institutionalization of schools.

Prior to that, it didn't exist. Children were always with people of different ages. So when you have children, if you put an eight-year-old in a classroom for eight hours a day with eight-year-olds, they tend to go down to the lowest, to the silliest one in the classroom. They don't have any older people to look up to and to emulate and to want to become, which is what you have in situations that don't segregate by age. So I think that's one of the big problems that we have in our school systems, is this age segregation, which really is not contributing towards healthy social skills.

Marriage and Young People

Yeah, and also marrying young. We have young people that are having children at very early ages, but there's this total, complete reaction to the idea of people marrying young at early ages, like teaching them, actually, that people do fall in love. And young people can experience very profound love. So the idea that that's completely an unacceptable expression at an early age, and so they go into ways of expressing their sexuality in other ways. So there's just so many things that are going on. You put young people in these high schools together, and then people marvel at the fact that there's sexual promiscuity.

Beginning Homeschooling

Yeah, yeah, that's a great question.

Yeah, the question is, how do mothers who haven't taught before begin homeschooling? And I think it's a great opportunity for mothers who haven't taught before, and even who haven't really had a great education, which is really most of us in this country. Because it's incredibly easy to homeschool, as long as you have an ounce of patience and you really want to do it. You stay one step ahead of your kids, or you learn with, I learn with my kids.

Learning Together

I get really mad at my daughter when she's in fifth grade grammar. I get really upset with her if she jumps ahead of a lesson, because I'm like, hey, wait a minute. I didn't study that. So it's, you learn with your kids. And they've studied that. Can parents without education homeschool? And it's proven, yes, they can. Oh, that's no, no, no, no. You don't have to worry about things like that. The standards in our country are so low.

The Low Bar of American Education

You can homeschool your child and teach her one day a week, and she'll be fine. I'm not advocating that, but really, you could do that. That's totally, that's totally true. Right, yeah. So by the time they, yeah, homeschool children are actually recruited by top universities in our country, like Hale and Yarbour and Columbia. They're going to the homeschooling conferences and they're recruiting the kids because they're academically superior. They're more interesting. They're going to do something in their life. So they look for people. It's not, it's not a concern.

The Mauritanian Tradition

Yeah, you get, I mean, doing, doing, doing literally like an hour a day with your kid one-on-one, they're going to get more out of that than the seven hours in a public school or even in a private school. That's not an exaggeration. The most brilliant scholars, hands down, that I've ever studied with are the masters that came out of the Mauritanian tradition. My class, my lessons were usually 15 to 20 minutes a day. That's it. And that's all they do. And they do one subject at a time. So they just study like grammar for six months.

Focused Learning

By the end of six months, they know grammar. We've got kids that study 12 years grammar. And by the end of it, they think, they don't know the difference between a preposition and a proposition. Yeah. Oh, that was, you have to tell her it was a mistake putting him in. No, it was a mistake putting him in. Yeah, you don't put them in. You don't put them in. For me personally.

Making Your Own Decisions

You know, people have to make their own choices. You need to study things and think for yourself. That, you know, in the end, I'm not here to tell you what to do with your kids. I mean, that's the paternalistic approach of

this whole model that we're trying to subvert. You know, I mean, I had somebody call me from the school district. Your son's not in school. He actually talked to my, your son's not in school. We're going to have to send, we're going to have to contact the state. You know, because it's, it's however many thousand dollars they're not getting for that body to be in that seat.

You know, I just, I called him and said, no, he's, he's being homeschooled. What are you doing about transcripts? We're not worrying about it. Thank you. Yeah. And thank God we live in a country that still has, still has, but this is a threatened right to educate your own children because there are countries where you cannot do that.

Finding What You Love

If they want, you know, not every kid is, is interested in going to school or going to college. They need good things, something that they love to do. You know, one of a close friend of mine is a master, you know, he's a master tile layer and he's, he's a beautiful man. He's an honorable man. And that work is good work. And he, I would rather eat at his house because I know that food is halal food. Then somebody who's working for a corporation that has defense contracts, you know, and, and so learning, if somebody wants to become, you know, I have another friend, he has a furniture store.

Honest Business

He sells furniture. He's, he's an honest businessman. If he reads in his spare time, that's fine. If he doesn't, that's fine. But this whole idea of having to go to school and having to get this degree and having to, and this whole pseudo idea of what success is in our culture. There's a man in Germany when this whole thing collapsed, he was worth $30 billion. He went down to $3 billion. He threw himself in front of a train because his self-worth was so diminished by losing that $27 billion and only 3 billion left. I mean, you know, really, it's a type of madness.

Questioning Wealth

These people, you know, I mean, Bill Gates is, they say how great he is for giving away a billion dollars. He's got $60 billion, for God's sake. He couldn't even, he wouldn't, he needs three or four lifetimes to be spending millions a day just to get rid of it all. How much is enough? So, I mean, I think we have to question this whole, the other thing is, we don't allow for honorable poverty in this country.

Honorable Poverty

There are other countries where there's honorable poverty. You know, people can live in clean, decent houses and still be poor people, eat good, healthy, organic food and still be poor people like in Southern Morocco. And they're honorable, good people, hardworking. So, you know, I think a lot of, we have to just really look into our hearts and think about just what's important in life. It's a short trip. We exit very quickly. And in the meantime,

how do we live? That's the real issue. How do we live? What do we do? How do we spend our lives? What time? How do we use that time that we've been given?

Call to Action

Okay, I just wanted to encourage people to go to the racetoknowhere.com website and sign their petition. She really is trying to get a movement going and I think we all need to support it. And just to thank you very much for coming. I think it was a beneficial evening and thank you.