TRIGGERnometry - "They Are Indoctrinating Your Children" - Bonnie Snyder

Episode Date: March 17, 2022

Bonnie Snyder is director of high school outreach at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and the author of Undoctrinate: How Politicized Classrooms Harm Kids and Ruin Our Schools���And What We Can Do About It. *Recorded 21st Jan 2022* Sponsors: *Pact Coffee* Go to pactcoffee.com and use code "TRIGGER" to get a free V60 brewing kit with your order. *Babbel*  Go to babbel.com/play, and use promo code TRIGGER for an extra six months free.  Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We have six-year-olds who are being told they can choose their own gender behind their parents' backs. One of the things that's happening this school year is it's been exposed that there are gender plans where students have a different identity at school and a different name at school than they have at home, and the schools are keeping this secret from the parents. Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissam. And this is a show for you.

if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, who is the author of Undoctrinate, how politicized classrooms, harm kids and ruin our schools, and what we can do about it. Bonnie Snyder, welcome to Trigonometry. Welcome. Welcome. I mean, thank you for having it. This is great.

It's a pleasure to have you on the show. Listen for, before we get into talking about all of this stuff, please tell everybody who are you, how are you, where you are, what has been the journey through life that brings you to be sitting here talking to us about all of this? Yeah, I guess you could say I'm sort of a self-ejected academic. I was planning to become a Shakespearean, an English professor teaching Shakespeare, and in that journey, I encountered early waves of postmodernism, deconstructionism that sort of tipped me off that there was a big problem in the academy. And I had to completely change,

course and a lot of the things that I think we'll be talking about today really originated in the humanities. So I think that I had an early view to these issues. And then I ended up becoming a doctor of higher ed administration specifically to confront the problems I saw in the academy. And I did not succeed in being hired because I think that there are ideological litmus tests that are imposed in the academy. And I always knew the right answer to the questions they were asking, but I chose to honestly. And so I ended up being an adjunct for a number of years, which actually was fine. And I learned a lot on that journey. But ultimately, I found my way to the foundation for individual rights and education where we defend free speech and a lot of the

enlightenment values that I think are under threat today. And one of the things for us in the UK we are starting to see a few hints of the stuff that you talk about bleeding through into our school. So I actually got a message from a friend saying that at my old school, they're now demanding that staff put their pronouns in their emails or announce them at the beginning of classes and all of this type of thing. Give us the broader picture. When we talk about people use words like indoctrination and post-modernation, and postmodernism.

Like, what is happening in American schools? Oh, gosh. There's a lot of things going on. I think that I would say right now, it kind of depends when you ask that question. Right now I would say that we're seeing the importation of an alternate morality into our classrooms without agreement from the public.

We're seeing a lot of deception being used, parents being kept in the dark, which obviously now that things are coming to light and being exposed has raised a lot of legitimate anger, righteous anger. We are seeing, you know, we're seeing the politicization of the classroom. We are seeing, I think for a long time we talked about diversifying the curriculum. And I think that really that we've done a lot of work diversifying the curriculum. We've moved on, I think, to radicalizing the curriculum.

And this school year, I think we are seeing sexualization of the curriculum. curriculum, which is a really interesting twist. I've, you know, I've been at this a while, and I've noticed that every school year, the angle seems to change. So those are just a few things that are going on. We're seeing contempt for parents coming from school teachers. And we're seeing, I think, teachers who are, you know, K-12 teachers in America who are presenting themselves as though their college professors and they seem to think that they have academic freedom, which they don't. The speech is considered in public schools to be hired speech, government speech. I'm hearing teachers also talking about this is my classroom and in my classroom, this is how it's going to be,

but really the classroom belongs to the taxpayer. So there's many layers of things that are happening simultaneously. And Bonnie, when did you first start to notice this? When was it that you got the first sinkling that something unto Ward was happening? Well, as I mentioned, back in graduate school, I was exposed to deconstructionism, which I called destructionism. And I chose to leave. And, you know, they- Bonnie, I'm just going to interrupt you there, because what we're going to be doing

throughout this interview is we're going to be using academic terms, which I think, you know, you and I and Constantin might know, but there'll be people who are really interested in this subject who don't know. Could you just explain to us what deconstructionism is, firstly? No, I can't because what deconstructionism is. I mean, part of it is that it is so, the writings are so obtuse, so hard to understand that that's part of what drove me away from it. You know, that I would say two things. One is that they were starting to play with language in ways where they were arguing that nothing means anything. And there was this great leveling taking place

where they were telling me that, you know, the greatest works of English literature as agreed upon by centuries of scholars who had studied this are no better than reading a restaurant menu, that it's all in the reading. It doesn't matter, and, you know, there's the idea of intention.

It doesn't matter what the author intended to say. All that matters is what I take from it. And I could take as much meaning from a restaurant menu as you could take from war and peace. And this to me just seemed like utter nonsense. I went to my advisors and I said, look, I don't even know what to say. And the interesting thing was that my, the faculty where I was was completely dispirited. Like you just looked at them and the light had gone out of their eyes. These were like soullas zombies walking around who had completely given up, who were just going through the motions.

And I looked at them and I was like, I don't want to do this anymore because literature is supposed to be uplifting. It's supposed to speak to these transcendent issues. So that aside, I recognize, I could say more about that. I mean, one thing they said to me, which I think is relevant is they said, well, we're just deconstructing the canon, the literary canon, these books that, you know, students read over and over again year after year. And I said, well, that's interesting for you. but can I first learn the canon before I do? Because I think that that's an interesting activity for one generation of scholars who have already had the classical training. And I feel like this is what's happening now in our schools is that we're kind of giving students the rubble after everything has been deconstructed and saying, isn't this fascinating?

Look at what we've done for you. And it just is a mess. It's an incoherent mess. So when I saw it again was when my younger daughter was in, I moved her to a private school, having been in public school, government school beforehand. And she was given the Communist Manifesto to read, which I don't mind because that's a really important book. But then she was asked to debate the merits of capitalism versus communism. They were given nothing to read on capitalism. and her class concluded that communism is a better system than capital.

Well, eight-year-olds would do that. These are 10th graders, as a matter of fact. Yeah, and some of these kids in this class actually literally had parents who own a factory, which I find hilarious. You know, they know what they're supposed to say to get through with it. And what really bothered me was when I confronted them, they lied to me, which is a whole other level. And there's a lot of lying going on, which is a very Marxist tactic.

And I often point out, I probably can find it. I bet I can pull this out. You know, when I was an undergrad, I went to Harvard, and I was assigned one book more than once. There was only one book I was assigned multiple times, and that was the Communist Manifesto. I was assigned it six times, which I find hilarious. And all I can say is I know it when I see it because I've been exposed to it. And just as a curious aside, why were you assigned the Communist Manifesto six times? Was it because they were trying to get you to understand how terrible this ideology was?

Good question. I'm not sure why I was assigned it six times. I did take some Russian history, so those I understand, because it was the height of the Cold War. So in that sense, I did study with Richard Pipes, who was an advisor to Reagan, I believe. And so I think a couple of times it was to get me to understand how Purnish is this ideology can be. But then I was an English major. I wasn't, you know, a politics major. I think it is considered fundamental to tearing apart literature. That's what I think. I don't even know. I would look at it and I'd be like, you've got to be kidding. There it is on my reading list again.

It's a critical, it is a central part of critical theory, which is rampant throughout all of academia now. It's found its way to secondary schools, you know, pre-college. And it's basically about taking whatever's in the center, pushing it to the margins and putting something else to the center. So I think it's a way of reading and looking at everything. So we've got critical theory and critical race theory. It ties into that in particular. Now, from my understanding of critical race theory, it started off in the 1970s. It was raised as to, it was, it was, posited as a theory in the 1970s in universities, why has it suddenly gone from a university or college setting and bled right the way through into primary schools is what people have told me

in the U.S.? Right. I think I would call it downward drift. I think that things from the academy tend, you know, it really, I think, started in law schools. I think Derek Bell at Harvard as a way of you know, identifying certain laws that have a disparate impact, which seems like a legitimate line of inquiry. But then it became extrapolated to all of these other fields and a very useful tool, I think, for dismantling anything that some people want dismantled. We have in America, what are known as ed schools, education schools, and they tend at this point to be monocultures. I had to get certain training to become a K-12 teacher. I was certified as an English teacher and as a guidance counselor, a counselor. And luckily I was, well, I didn't completely bypass the ed schools,

but I didn't as an undergrad go to study that. And so now it's in the ed schools and these teachers are trained in it. And I can, why is it now in the K-12 schools? A couple of reasons. I think that teaching is a difficult career that a lot of times does not come with a lot of accolades. And I feel like it's a way for teachers to feel more significant. And to the extent that we don't make our teachers feel significant, I think that's our fault, that that's something we can correct. You know, I tend to not think that teachers are as terribly underpaid as they like to claim. I think that teacher salaries have risen to be, you know, and the benefits are really, really great.

But I don't think that we have a lot of respect for teachers. You know, I sense it coming apart in our society between teachers and parents between the up. You know, Charles Murray wrote a book called Coming Apart. He's, of course, pretty controversial. But just about, you know, when I was a kid, my parents would have had our teachers over for dinner. They would have, we would have gone to church with them. we would have been in the same social networks, but I think that teachers are beginning to be perceived as less than.

And I think to some extent this is a way for them to claim more significance for themselves. That's just one guess that I have for why it's caught on. It's interesting, Bonnie, wouldn't it, I mean, a more charitable interpretation might be that some people would argue, I don't necessarily agree with this, but some people would argue that, for centuries, probably, or for decades at least, we were teaching kids one particular version of events, right? You were taught a particular version of history, a particular version of various other subjects that had a certain slant, let's say a pro-American slant in America or a pro-British line in Britain or a pro-Russian slon in Russia, where I'm from.

And what these people are doing are poking or pointing. at rather the holes in some of those narratives that, you know, you can't teach an eight-year-old all the complexities of history, so you have to give them a simpler narrative, right, about certain things. And what these people have done is rightly exposed some of the gaps in those narratives that we used to teach to our children in the past. Yes, that is one of the arguments that is used to justify it. And I do think that there are teachers who are doing it for those reasons. I think that there are other teachers who are doing it with more activist aims. I think that when it becomes problematic is when it is presented as the only perspective with which to view

historical events and when students are asked to affirm this is the correct point of view. And then we get into what, you know, at fire, the foundation where I work, what we would call compelled speech, where, you know, which is sort of what you were describing when teachers are being told they must list their pronouns. Now, some people are going to say, well, that violates my values, my religious upbringing because, you know, in the Bible it says that there are two genders and whatnot. And so you're basically asking them to affirm a worldview that they may not agree with. And in America, that is, You know, so there are lawsuits happening right now on these very issues, and we'll see how those turn out. Bonnie, isn't the problem as well? And look, I was a teacher. I was a teacher for 12 years. I taught in secondary school.

I also taught in primary schools. Isn't part of the problem, the fact that most teachers are left leaning. It's very rare to get a teacher who leans right. I mean, that's just the nature of the people that the profession attracts. So obviously they're going to be more tended to look at the world in this way. Through a critical lens using critical pedicology. Right. And this is a big problem.

Why are other people not showing up for the teaching profession? The ed schools really are pretty much a monoculture at this point. I think it's like a snowball. I think that we've known for decades that it tilted left. But it's almost at the point where it reaches such a spiral that there's, only one viewpoint being, you know, being presented at all. And we are at that point now and probably, you know, and can we come back from it? Because so many students now, look, they might be interested and they say, I'm not going to be welcome. It's ironic because, you know, inclusivity is such an

important aspect of what they're arguing. And yet these ed schools are so non-welcome to anyone with different points of view. So they very much are promoting diversity. But many, people will point out unless it's intellectual diversity or diversity of thought that they're not interested in. And Bonnie, how much do you think of this? You know, we've covered the culture war stuff a tremendous amount on the show. And one of the things that's become increasingly clear, if you look at the surveys and the polling and the data on it, is that particularly on this sort of stuff, there's a sex dynamic

going on and the women are far more likely to skew in this direction. So in a profession that has always been dominated by women and will likely be dominated by women for all eternity, I imagine. That isn't, I guess what Francis is getting at, what I'm also getting at, isn't this just an inevitable consequence of the fact that the teaching profession attracts a particular type of person, more likely to be female and more likely to lean left on political issues? And so schools will always have that sort of bent inevitably, I guess. Well, and it's so interesting because that's the argument that they're making in favor of diversity, but half of the students are male and nobody's arguing in terms of improving the representation of males in the classroom. I did pull the numbers on this in my book, and the teaching ranks are even, when I was in elementary school, I think I really benefited maybe unfairly from the fact that a lot of incredibly intelligent woman were still stuck in teaching careers,

because other pathways weren't open to them. So I think I really did have excellent teachers who maybe in a different era might have become doctors or lawyers. And you would think now that women have a lot more career paths open to them, that fewer of them would be in teaching. But believe it or not, the teaching ranks in America are even more female now than they were when I was in elementary school.

And I think that we need to do a campaign and advertising campaign, maybe even some sort of affirmative action encouragement to get more males into the classroom for every number of reason, including just positive role modeling for the male students who in America are underperforming. And, you know, the outcomes for them are much worse than for females coming out of K-12. And going on to college as well, males are in increasing numbers rejecting college. They go affirmative action for men.

That's going to be a great poll. Good luck selling that, buddy. Yeah. Thank you. Hey, Francis. Would you like to learn another language? No, mate. Already know foreign languages perfectly.

O'I, Gary. O'e le Bibliotheca. You can't go on holiday, mate, without knowing where the swimming pool is. Le Bibliotech is the library, you idiot. Exactly. You can never be too far away from knowledge and sexually frustrated librarians.

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Absolutely perfect. mind, Gary? I think the problem is, Bonnie, and this comes from experience, the fact that teaching isn't a very good job anymore. Let's just call it what it is. You know, the behaviour of students is atrocious. You look down upon you're demeaned on a daily basis by parents. You're not respected.

I mean, the pay, I would push back. The pay, I can only talk from a UK perspective, hasn't gone up in years. It's naturally going to attract these sorts of people because you look at it from an outside a point of view if you're in the center or maybe in the center right or you and you want to make money you want and you want to have a successful career you look at teaching you think well why would I get involved in it quite rightly in my opinion as someone who's experienced it right well I mean my husband and I have been in academic in education for pretty much our whole careers and um he is a professor he's likely to retire soon uh and you

Yeah, I mean, the demands have increased to an intolerable level. The student misbehavior has increased. I think that there are intrinsic rewards to teaching, but I do think that some teachers are trying to enhance these intrinsic rewards by making it sort of a political battle that they're waging via the classroom, seeing students as means to the end, you know, the world that they want to bring into being. But, you know, I don't like the war analogy,

but I would say that, you know, if this is a culture war, then this is one of the fronts on which it is being waged and we need soldiers. I will say in America the benefits for teachers are quite good and there are still pensions and things that aren't available in other careers. So I hope people will consider it. And I hope that, you know, the families, I get discouraged when I talk to families who are very angry about what's going on in their children's schools. and I'm starting to say to people, well, would you encourage your children to become teachers? And they sort of scoff at me. And I'm like, well, as long as we, you know, abandon the field, then this is what we're going to get. So if you really care about the principles that undergird this country, and it's not just this country,

I would argue it's Western civilization, then we probably need to, I hesitate to say take up arms, but, you know, man the stations and show up. We have to show up and account and stand up for what we believe in. And you're saying, and look, I'm with you 100%. The fact that a classroom is not a place of education, but a place to spread political ideas and political doctrine, to me, is tantamount to child abuse and brainwashing. Your job as a teacher is not there to tell kids what to think.

Your job as a teacher is to teach them how to think. That's what you do as a teacher. teacher. And, and, yeah, your job is to deliver the curriculum that you were hired to deliver that is democratically agreed upon within the community as administered through the school board. It, like, as I was writing my book, I kept the subtext in my mind is this is not a free for all people.

You don't just wing it. You're not just making it up. You're not there to expound on your opinions. No one cares what your opinions are. You are there to deliver the curriculum to teach critical thought, not critical pedagogy. Let me push back on what Francis said because a lot of people might say, well, yeah, you say that, you know, education is supposed to be about teaching kids how to think, but that's not really what happens in the school. What happens in the school is you sit down and

you get told what the right version of this particular event is or what the right interpretation of a particular historical period is or, you know, why these people did this or why. And there's plenty of other ways of looking at that same thing. And I'm a huge fan of history, and I read a lot about history. A lot of the stuff that I was taught at school was complete rubbish, right? And not only that, not only was it rubbish, but it also skewed in a particular direction. So isn't it not, I mean, I would argue, and this is where I might agree with some of the people on that side, is we've always been indoctrinating kids.

We just were indoctrinating them with a particular vision, and now we don't like the fact that people are indoctrinating with a different vision that we don't like. Now, I personally don't like the version that they're being indoctuated with now either. I'm just saying, can we honestly pretend that there was this golden age of education where it was all neutral and there was no indoctrination going on? And suddenly now kids are being indoctrinated. Isn't it more a case of like we just don't like the fact that they're being indoctrinated with values that we would consider antithetical to our civilization?

but it's, I think, probably unfair to pretend they weren't being indoctrinated before. Yeah, I mean, school is always about instilling the agreed-upon values of the community. What's interesting now is that I think that they're teaching kids to tear down the society, which is why you're seeing parents showing up en masse at school board meetings, and some of them have gotten, you know, a little bit out of hand. And I think the crucial difference, though, is the role of dissent. And, you know, the ability to speak back to the narrative that you are talking about because these are not religious schools. And it's almost like this is being taught as though it's a state religion.

In fact, some people are starting to say that the way to rein this in is to have it declared a state religion because this ideology does have some religious aspects to it and to say, well, in America, we don't have a state religion that. as being taught in our schools, which has been the subject of many court cases. And, you know, even the Pledge of Allegiance, which is a rather quaint but somewhat strange American tradition where we stand up and say a pledge to the flag, has been pushed back against via Jehovah's Witnesses. And there's a very eloquent court case, West Virginia versus Barnett, where, you know, they say that if there's any fixed star in our constitution is that no no authority high or low shall prescribe what shall be orthodox so in america we've traditionally left room for the eccentric dissenter to be left alone to have their space to say their peace uh and i i like to say when i was a teacher like for example

i had to teach some evolution and occasionally i would have or i thought i might have some fundamentalist students in the class. And I would just jokingly say, you know, I'm going to go over this. It's in the curriculum. I said, you don't have to believe it, but it's going to be on the test. You got to know it. And that's, I think, the difference here. You know, you all have your podcast where you get to say what it is that you think. But a really big problem that we're having, and I work at basically a free speech organization. So I would never say that students don't have the right to bring up critical theories or that a teacher can't tell students. that, you know, here's a contrasting viewpoint on this.

But to present it positively as though it is, you know, fundamentally the right view to adopt is misguided. And, you know, that's where it veers into inculcating a doctrine, which is exactly what indoctrination is. Bonnie, we've been talking back and forth, and it's been fascinating. But I'm sure there's lots of people who are listening to this who are thinking, well, just give me some examples.

What actually are you talking about when you're talking about indoctrination, for example? Because, you know, that's a very big word. You know, that has serious connotations to it. You know, we keep lists so that I can keep up on it. And, you know, there are several lawsuits that are proceeding right now in the United States. I mean, some examples, I have a lot of examples of lying, you know, where lessons are being kept secret from parents. and it's been documented.

For example, in Missouri, there was a school administrator who told district teachers to create fake lesson plans and post them online so that they wouldn't have to receive any questions from parents about what was actually going on in the classroom. And what was actually going on, Bonnie? This is, I think, what Francis is getting that is. What are the kids actually being taught? Okay. So we have six-year-olds who are being told they can choose their own genital. behind their parents' backs. One of the things that's happening this school year is it's been exposed that there are gender

plans where students have a different identity at school and a different name at school than they have at home and the schools are keeping this secret from the parents. Six years. Well, all ages in terms of the secretive gender plans. So, yeah, children in first grade being, this is the sexualized stuff that I'm looking at right now. Children in first grade being taught about masturbation. We have, there's been a lot of uproar this year about books, which I know it sounds like book burnings, but just age of inappropriate books that depict sex between an adult and a minor.

We had a teacher. Can I just interrupt you there? So part of when you train as a teacher in the UK, you get taught about something called safeguarding. And safeguarding is where you, it's about the welfare of children. And in that, you get talked about grooming. That is an example of grooming. It's where you take somebody who is not sexually mature,

who is a child, a very young child, has no concepts about sex and procreation or the rest of it, and you teach them about masturbation. That, to me, it's vile. Yeah, and if you're interested in that, James Lindsay has done three podcasts on our groomer schools that I would recommend people take a look at. It's very upsetting.

And it really, you know, it is, according to him, and he's done a deep dive into the readings, is intended to really divide parent from child, which is a very vile aspect of it. There are classes where they are shaming and labeling students according to their skin color. There have been classes where students have been divided according to skin color. And, you know, this violates. civil rights laws that we have in the United States. One of the weird examples that came to me in my job was a student. We've had a couple of walkouts in the United States. This one was over gun control, wanting gun control. And it was supposed to be students walking out in favor of gun control

voluntarily and then taking the consequences. But in this case, the administrators decided this is a great idea, we're going to walk out too, and everyone has to come with us. And it was a student who said, but I don't agree with this. I believe in the Second Amendment and gun rights. And I don't want to be forced to walk around in favor of forced activism promoting something I disagree with. And so I told him to tell them that he, tell them that. And so their solution was that he could stand in the middle of the track while the entire school would walk in a circle around him because that was what they had planned anyway. And so I told him to go to his guidance counselor, and the guidance counselor put an end to that. But we do have curricula that have been designed by outside organizations. For example,

Black Lives Matter is one. 1619 project is another teaching Southern Poverty Law Centers, teaching for tolerance. I think it's now called Teaching for Justice. And they have lessons that have raised a number of concerns. So many families are now asking for greater transparency about what's going on in the classroom because the message is embedded in many of these lessons are antithetical to what families are often teaching at home. But Bonnie, why is it that you have outside organizations dictating what is and what isn't taught in a classroom and how it should be taught? I don't understand that. They have no place in the classroom.

Right. Well, they're not dictating it. These are supplemental lessons that teachers adopt voluntarily. And then my question is, well, where's the supervision? Where's the department head? Where is the principal? Where is the curriculum staff at the district level and the school board? So this is that my classroom thing that's happening.

But, yeah, I mean, I thought teachers were supposed to, for the most part, create their own lesson plans. Well, look, Bonnie, we've addressed the doom and gloom of how terrible everything is. And by the way, it does sound bad. Like six-year-olds being taught about the gender options and whatever else it is. To me, that's outrageous. But the last part of the title of your book is What We Can Do About It. So what can we do about it? The reason I ask is, please don't take any offense to this.

But it seems to me like in America you guys have gone pretty far off the rails. And the problem for us in the UK is we all have always follow you like Lemmings off the very same cliff. So we're going to have to deal with this. What can we do about it? Yeah, I do think that we are probably the most advanced case of, I guess, woke infiltration into our schools. Well, I think that transparency is essential. Sunlight, they say, is the best disinfectant. And so, you know, if teachers are trying to hide something from you, that's never a good sign.

I think that there needs to be coordination and camaraderie between parents. They should be working together. There's this concept of in loco parentis where teachers are supposed to act in the place of the parents, but they have really been improvising lately. My joke about that is that they put the loco in in loco parenthis. I mean, obviously I would recommend reading the book and sharing the reasons that I detail and I pulled lots of research on why this is not healthy for students, why this does not amount to a substantive, rigorous, effective education. But I was thinking about this right before we got on, and I think there are four ways of addressing it. There are the legal legislative means of responding to this.

There are bureaucratic means. But ultimately, this comes down to really a cultural problem. You know, we have, and then there are academic means. You know, we need to get back. or more people in the classroom to balance what's going on so that teachers who think this is a good idea need to hear the counter arguments. You know, in America, we have the strongest free speech protections in the world, but those don't really mean anything if you're afraid to use them. And what's happening is that students are shaming other students because they're learning that there's one view that is the preferred view and other views merit-dure.

derision and ostracism. And ironically, you know, when my kids were in school, they're in their 20s now. We had a flurry of really, the biggest problem back then was this anti-bullying program, which probably sounds good. In theory, it should be good, but it was very poorly implemented, and they really kind of trained students to demand that they should never, ever feel any discomfort. And if they ever do, they should run to an authority figure and demand that somebody redress this grievance and they sort of learn to exaggerate anything that happens, whereas we were trained in my generation more to just tough luck, stand up for yourself, get over it, shake it off. Maybe there's a middle ground between those two perspectives.

But, you know, students are bullying other students now, I think, with the permission and encouragement of some of the teachers and some of what's going on is that teachers are, you know, shaming, labeling, isolating, and I would argue, in some cases, bullying students, which is really, really uncalled for and unhelpful. And so, you know, I think we can do better than that. So there are a number of lawsuits underway. We have a flurry of legislation proposed at the state level, which itself can prove problematic. Like maybe it's going to cause a backlash that's its own problem because they're banning CRT in the classroom. You know, anything, some of these are better written than others, but some of them are written

in a way to say that we will not teach anything that argues that one race is superior to another race. In this case, they're arguing that the white race is inferior and deserves to have discrimination against it. Well, that violates, you know, the 14th Amendment in America and many other laws that we have. So bureaucratically, people are filing Freedom of Information Act requests to get their hands on curriculum. Another big problem we're having that you should watch for is these outside consultants being hired to come into schools to deliver ideas in curriculum that is not democratically decided on. And that's how some of this finds its way into the classroom.

And then when parents ask to see what is being taught to the teachers, they are told that it's copyrighted. So we're having to, you know, legislate saying that nothing that's imported into the schools can be shielded from the parents using copyright as an excuse. Yeah. And Bonnie, what role are the unions playing in all of this? Are the unions supporting it? Are they pushing back or are they simply apolitical when it comes to this issue? No, I don't think the unions are apolitical at all. You know, I can't speak for everything going on in the unions.

But at first, there was a lot of denialism going on. Oh, that's not happening. You're imagining it, what people call gaslighting. But then the unions came out and said, okay, it's not happening and we're going to defend the teachers who are doing it, which is kind of hilarious. So when people say it's not happening, I respond. well then why did the unions say that they're going to defend? You know, and they're arguing that teachers have First Amendment rights,

but in reality it's hired speech. They do in their personal lives, but in the classroom they're paid to deliver the state-approved curriculum in a public school. Bonnie, I have a question as I'm sort of watching us have this conversation, and it's a very interesting one, and the nuances are interesting. But if I'm a parent, what I'm really want to hear here is not even, even how I can participate with other parents and changing the system, what I'd be interested in is like,

what the hell do I do with my kids right now to avoid having them in a situation where they're being taught about, you know, sex at the age of six and being porn and going to gender, whatever this craziness is? Like, what would, what should parents do to protect their kids? That is their primary responsibility. Right. A couple of things. A lot of parents are pulling their kids out when they can and homeschooling them. but I know that's not an option for everyone, but we have pretty wide open options to do that in the United States.

I would argue that you can supplement your child's curriculum to balance it, to provide the balance that isn't being provided in school. We have a number of great curricular materials that we've also created at the fire.org slash curriculum that you can download. and this is mostly about First Amendment rights and about, you know, the Constitution and the Enlightenment and where Western values came from in the first place. I would also say that parents, oh, I, on my website, Undoctrinate.org slash blog, I have, I've put together, you know, I'm like, okay, I've been outlining their arguments because I want to give their arguments they're due. I don't want to do the straw man thing and just make a fake argument and then do it. So, you know, that's something that I'm working on. And then I also said, okay,

they have, they're proposing certain systems that they want to transform our culture with. And I'm like, well, what are the systems that we have in place that they are arguing against? So I do have eight different systems that I think are well worth reviewing, like our economic system, our system of advancement, our culture, our mode of interacting with each. other. Our mode of figuring out what is true and what is not true. A lot of these are sort of invisible because it's the water we've been swimming in our whole lives. But I credit to them for, I think, throwing all of this into stark relief because they are advocating a completely different way of life, a completely different system by saying that everything is terrible. And so I, you know,

I want people to understand and to begin talking about, you know, what is, you know, what is that we believe in and making sure that if you're going to reject it, you know what it is that you're rejecting. Because I don't, I think it's like deconstructing the canon. I think our kids are not being told what's great about our way of life. And that's what I'd like to tell parents that we need to start doing. Hey, Francis, do you like coffee? No, mate, I like tea because tea's British. It's British. It's as British as cababs and St. George. Tees from Indian China, kebabs are from the Middle East and St George was Turkish. Doesn't matter, Mike. It became British after we smashed the crap out of that lizard. That's what

happens when you look at someone's bird during a night out. Good to know. Well, for those of you who have a more sophisticated palette than Francis, i.e. every single one of you, if you enjoy coffee, then you have to check out packed coffee. Packed coffee or an award-winning specialist coffee delivery company. They have 100% speciality-grade coffee, freshly roasted to perfection for your order, and ground just moments before it shipped. There are over 15 different coffees on the menu at any given time to choose from, including Great Taste 2020 and 2021 winners. Packed coffee buys its coffee direct from farmers and cuts out steps in the supply chain, paying on average 65% above the fair trade base price, ensuring farmers are actually making a profit and can reinvest in their farms

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your subscription plan with packed coffee and get speciality coffee through your letterbox. Don't wait. Go to PactCoffee.com. Use a code trigger. and create your coffee subscription. The code is valid when you create a packed coffee plan. And Bonnie, do you think the solution is for people to set up their own schools, for there to be more freedom to do that? And as a result of that, they become more successful because they're focusing on more traditional things when it comes to education,

like reading, writing, etc. because I was reading about a lot of your public schools, and to me it sounds like a large part of them, are simply not fit for purpose when you see people graduating from them unable to read or write. People are talking about starting new schools. We do have something called charter schools

where you can set up a school with its own charter where it has a specific mission. And some of these are, you know, the mission is to transmit traditional values. I don't think they can be religious, but they have a specific purpose and they are freed from some of the restrictions of traditional public schools. It's hard, you know, you can't wave a wand and have a school appear instantly.

I hear from many, many parents who are asking that exact question right now. Holy cow, what do I do? Even the private schools, which, you know, we have different levels of private schools, but even the wealthiest private schools, you can't buy your way out of this in the United States of America right now, no matter how much money you have, it tends to be even worse in private schools, this importation of one-sided ideology. And it seems to be worse in affluent communities as well. It seems to be an affliction of affluent white women, not entirely, but those characteristics predominate. I mean, you might consider moving to a more rural area. And actually, a lot of people in America,

if you look at our population shift are moving to places like Texas or Florida or places that are right now more freedom-loving, I guess you could say. So some people are voting with their feet. Some people are trying to set up new schools. Some people are deciding I have to do it myself. But the window that was provided via COVID through Zoom into our children's classrooms has revealed a really unappealing reality. And so it's been a huge wake-up call. And I think that that didn't happen for no reason. And so hopefully it will lead to improvements and good consequences.

I know that there are many, many well-intentioned good teachers out there. And I certainly don't want to impugn people who are showing up and doing, you know, yeoman's work every day. There's pressure on teachers, too. We hear from teachers who are being pressured to, to do things that make them uncomfortable. And we have seen some, a few very dramatic resignations. I loved my job, but I can't do this to kids anymore

because I disagree fundamentally with what's going on. And this is what I was going to ask you. I think it might sound to the neutral observer that we've kind of been beating up on teachers. But how much of this is about the broader culture? So, yes, I understand that a lot of these ideas were initially developed in academia and then started to spill out into broader society.

But I almost feel like the position we are in now is it's spilling out of broader society back into everything. And I think education is probably just another branch into which it's now spilled out. Because if you look at, you can look at anything, you can sport, look at video games, look at almost any other issue. These ideas are bleeding through. So how much of this is just like education is affected by this? just like everything else?

Or is it a particularly special case, do you think? I think that education, the media and academia, which obviously is education, are probably among the most left-leaning thing, you know, or institutions in America. So I think it's a little bit more advanced than it is in the rest of the culture, which is why you see the uproar at our school board meetings.

Yeah, so, but I do think, too, that a lot of these young, We're also seeing the retirement of a wave of teachers with the baby boom. I mean, they're aging out. And even though I think they thought that they were very radical for their time, you have to ask yourself, who educated the baby boomers? They were mostly educated. I'm technically a baby boomer.

The last three months of the baby boom. And I was educated, I realize now mostly by people who fought in World War II, a very patriotic generation. And so that is definitely part of my ethos, as part of how I look at the world, whereas this generation is really educated largely by baby boomers who were radical. So we have a wave of younger teachers coming in, and I think part of it is the deficit in how they themselves were educated.

So I sympathize with the deficiencies. I think that they received in their own education. I think we need to help them to be better teachers. And Bonnie, we've spoken a lot about the, education, we've spoken about teachers, we've spoken about systems. But we haven't really discussed. What has been the impact on children? Because that's the most important thing with this issue, the kids. Right. So apparently there is some research showing that things like ethnic studies, which is one form that this takes, I'm hearing is good for students, which is concerning.

but it also speaks to the fact that in academia, we have very few professors, ed professors, who are looking at questions from the other point of view. So the need to conduct research, there's not much evidence on that, I guess is what I would say. It's very difficult to conduct research on children. You have to get their parents' permission. There's all sorts of ethical guidelines that have to be followed. So there is a doth of evidence. It's mostly anecdotal at this point. I think that kids, I mean, how many kids can articulate what's wrong with their own education in elementary school, virtually none? We do have students who reach out to us at fire for help. There is a group of students called Students Unite that I would recommend people check out if they're looking for like-minded students who are unhappy with what's going on in their schools, who are frustrated with it.

So, yeah, I think that the chance for harm is real and palpable and it needs to be studied and measured. I completely agree with you because that's a worrying thing. You know, we're talking about what they're teaching. We're talking about the way kids are being taught. But we've got no idea what we're going to harvest with these kids. Yeah, and how intimidating it is to know, you know, I talk about in my book Unconditional Acceptance. And when I was trained as a counselor, that is sort of the

fundamental foundation of any helping relationship, counseling, teaching, those are helping professions. And unconditional acceptance just means if you come to me and you're like, all right, I'm an alcoholic, it's like, okay, that's where you are right now. It's like you don't help someone by saying, God, what kind of weak-willed idiot are you to be an alcoholic? You know, and if a student comes to you and they can't read, okay, you're in third grade. You're in third grade. you don't read, okay, that's where you are. We're just going to start there and we're going to move forward as best we can. You accept them. But this is conditional acceptance. You're only acceptable to me if you play the role that I require you to play. So students naturally want to be

appreciated and liked by their teachers. So they're playing roles. And this is this whole idea of inauthenticity. So I think that we're inculcating really unhealthy behaviors. And And how many of us? Here's something that a parent said to me once that really made me worry. She was very much on our side of the issue. Very concerned. Well, she's very concerned about, that was the wrong way to say that. She's very concerned about what's going on in her child's schools.

And she wants someone to fix it. But she finished the conversation by saying, how can I tell my child to be very careful of what he says in school so that it doesn't. And that's how she ended it. said so that it doesn't hurt your career. And she said, yes, my husband's career. And I mean, this is the type of warning. And I said to her, well, I think that our goal is to change the culture so that you don't have to tell your son or daughter, this was a son, to be careful what he says in school. Like, what are you afraid that there's the teachers and informant? Is this East Berlin? Is this

the Eastern Bloc? I mean, what kind? And this is, and I think. that so many of us now are careful of what we say because we're afraid that we're going to be, you know, dragged through the public humiliation mill, reviled. You know, we did actually have a professor who was a fire case, who was a very outspoken professor and was often described as being a happy warrior. And he fought and fought with his school. I don't even remember the circumstances of it, but I think he was a cute called a racist or, you know, we're all afraid of being labeled. a racist, right? And he won his case, but then they asked him to leave and they gave him a severance and he went home and he committed suicide. So, and that was a big shock to everyone because he did not

seem like he was bothered by what was going on because he was, he was provocative and he seemed to be inviting it, but yet he was clearly very, you know, harmed by what occurred. So I think, the invisible effects of what's happening are going to be lingering and are going to really impact the life development of many young people. It is quite extraordinary what you're talking about because I'm just finishing my book, my first book, which is called An Immigrants Love Letter to the West. On the opening chapter, I talk about growing up in the Soviet Union in the early 1980s. And literally, I describe my parents having that conversation with me as a young boy, when you go to school, you must not repeat the things

that we talk about at home. Word for word, that was the conversation. So to sit here in 2022 and to be discussing America and parents thinking about what will happen to their careers if their child says the wrong thing in school. To me, that is an extraordinary transformation of a country that we traditionally associate with, as you say, the strongest free speech protections in the world, and yet you now have children and parents afraid of wrong think and wrong speak in public. How's this happened?

It reminds me of that metaphor. Have you ever heard about how if you catch crabs, you don't even have to put a lid on them? Because if you catch one crab and you throw it in a bucket, he can't climb out. But if you catch three or four crabs, they could easily climb out. But the problem is that the other crab, will pull him back in. So you just keep catching them and there's no lid required. And I think it's that same analogy. It's a cultural problem. And I think that it's, you know, it's invisible and yet

oppressive. And we can, and I think people are waking up and shaking it off one by one. But I promise you that there are networks of people talking privately saying truths that they believe are truths, that they will not say publicly and looking for trusted, you know, allies to use that war metaphor again to help them in this fight. But I do take heart because I think that what really happened last year is that, like, I've been trying to warn about this for when I pulled my daughter out of her school over the lying. And that was 11 years ago. So I really been trying to bring attention to this for over a decade now. And last year was the year when, you know, the sheet was pulled off and everything was revealed. And so my theme this year is the cat's out of the bag. Now what do we do about it?

And anybody at this point who says it's not happening in America anyway is really behind where the majority of people are now. It's like, okay, it is happening. And so now we're hearing, okay, it is happening and it's good that it's happening, which is fine. You know, that's what some people think, and then other people can say, at least we're having the same conversation now about what's going on. And are you optimistic? You mentioned the lawsuits. I imagine that at the end of the day, yes, it's a cultural problem, but partly cultural problems often get resolved through landmark legal decisions, right? Are you expecting to see that happen over the next year or so? I think so. We have a couple of cases. One is that people are watching close.

is in Nevada. This is a biracial boy. The mother is black and the father was white. The father's deceased and he was told to confess his white privilege in class and he refused and was threatened with failure. So, you know, you've got harm and this case kind of runs the table on every law that can be invoked. And it also has the very sympathetic appearance of, you know, because it's happening to a lot of people who do not fit into the bi-pac category that supposedly these people are trying to protect. His appearance is white, but he's biracial. And so it's a very interesting case. So, yeah, I think we're going to have some legal decisions.

And I think, you know, and actually quite a few teachers have lost their jobs over going too far. And I don't think enough attention has been brought to that. One example is the so-called Antifa teacher who was caught on camera bragging about. He says, I have 180 days to turn these kids into revolutionaries. And he was, you know, offering them extra credit to go to protests and rallies and things like that. So when it was exposed that, you know, he was using his class to radicalize students, he was fired. So I have multiple examples of teachers who have lost their jobs for exceeding the boundaries of what they were hired to do. So little by little, I think improvements are being made, but this problem has been with us.

I know you had said, you know, critical race theory, I guess 1970, that's pretty accurate. I think the real origins probably go back as far as the 1930s, specifically in America, teachers college, Columbia, with the Frankfurt School and Antonio Gramsci, who really sort of was trying to bring about the cultural revolution. They could never understand why the worldwide revolution hadn't happened with this. You know, the Soviet Union, yeah, we're off to a great start there. And everyone else did. Right. And it just didn't happen.

And they said, well, that's because the culture. The culture needs to change. And so they have been chipping away at our culture, cultural underpinnings for, you know, that many decades now, about 90 years. And so this isn't, this ship is not going to turn around overnight. But I don't think it's going to take 90 years to turn it around. It is going to take a concerted effort. We do have a number of very concerned organizations, you know, foundations, donors who are coming forward to say, you know, we see what's going on now. We definitely want to turn this around.

And that's not to say that we want to go back to just this one happy go lucky 1950s positive, you know, view of everything. But, you know, my view is we need to restore balance and we need to uphold standards. So that's another front where they're sort of saying, you know, get rid of grades. Let's get rid of testing. And because it's not fair to say that some kids are smarter than other kids and the great leveling again. And so balance and upholding standards, I think, is the path forward. Bonnie, I couldn't agree with you more.

That is music to my ears. It's been a wonderful interview. Our final question is always the same. It's what's the one thing we're not talking about, but we really should be? I already alluded to this. We need to stop talking about, I would like to, I've been talking about critical race theory for a long time. I'm ready to stop talking about critical race theory and start talking about what is awesome about Western civilization and everything it has to recommend it. We've critiqued it enough. We've critiqued it so much that nobody even can articulate what it is

anymore. So I want to start and encourage others to start extolling the virtues of Western civilization. We're not perfect, but we are, you know, as Winston Churchill said, compared to what? It's the worst system except for everything else. All right. Well, I'll send you my book when it's out then because that's exactly what it's about. Bonnie, thank you so much. We're going to ask you a couple of questions for our locals. But in the meantime, if people want to check out some of the resources you mentioned or follow Fires work,

what's the best place to follow up on this conversation if people want to do that? Yeah, please visit thefire.org slash K-12. to see all of the materials we have. We're nonpartisan, nonpartisan, non-profit. And I have a site, Undoctrinate.org, where you can check me out as well. Fantastic. Please do do that. And of course, if you've enjoyed this interview, or even if you haven't, we've got more

coming for you in the next few days and weeks. The interviews always go out on a Wednesday at Sunday and Sunday at 7 p.m. And we've got the raw shows on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday as well. So we will see you very soon. And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys. How do you think the damage done to children during the pandemic, through the wearing of masks, loss of education, loss of in-person opportunities as well?

How will that damage manifest itself in later life, do you think? Oh, wow.