The State of Canada's Education System | John Rustad

I've been speaking with Republican Governors and the Republicans I know in the US, and that's quite a few of them, as well as conservatives in Canada, about the K through 2 education system as well as the higher education system. But let's start with K through 2, so I want to run another proposition by you.

I worked in the universities for a long time, and I saw how they worked. I worked at Harvard, which was an unbelievably functional institution in the 1990s. I'd never been anywhere like it. Migel was good—I went to school as a graduate student at Migel, and I had a very good educational experience there. Migel did a lot of things right, but Harvard was really knocking it out of the park when I was there in the 90s.

The senior faculty were the smartest people I'd ever met and the most educated. The undergraduates were unbelievably high quality; like a third of them were the smartest kids you'd ever seen, and the other two-thirds, well, they were contenders, you know? The place really served excellence. You could see the edges of the politically correct movement manifesting itself around the fringes in the 1990s, but they really didn't have any real power.

The last time I was down in Boston was about a month ago. I met some of my former colleagues—great people, really—and they've all joined the Free Speech movement at Harvard. They set themselves at odds with the administration, which is an appalling thing to see, you know? And that's Harvard. Then I was at the University of Toronto for a long time, and it made a lot of noise about excellence but really had no fun, no real fundamental clue about what it meant or how to pursue it.

But I had a very good time there and I liked it a lot. I learned a lot about what was wrong with higher education, and emblematic of what's wrong with higher education is the faculties of Education. They're full of educational psychologists, and that's a corrupt discipline. Almost everything that it's produced is a lie. Whole word learning—that's a lie. The anti-phonics movement, the self-esteem movement—that's a complete bloody lie, and all it did was produce a pack of narcissists.

Multiple intelligences—that's a complete bloody lie. The educational psychologists have been a negative influence consistently for 60 years, and the faculties of Education arguably have the worst students in the university and arguably the worst faculty. Now, why is that a problem? Well, they're radical and incompetent. That's a big problem.

In the United States, they control 50% of the state budgets—50%. And the faculties of Education are why the conservatives lost the culture war. Conservatives have been too blind for four generations to see this. There's a nexus point: the faculties of Education have a hammer lock on teacher certification. I don't understand that. There's no evidence whatsoever that their training regimens produce qualified teachers—none. We also even know what makes a teacher effective: conscientiousness as the trait, high cognitive ability, and conscientiousness—you can select them.

What's your view of what's corrupted the K through 2 education system, and what do you think might be done about it? Because I think that the faculties of Education should have the right to certify teachers stripped from them. It would kill them, and they deserve it. I think the reason the classic liberals and the conservatives have lost the culture wars is because the faculties of Education have had a hammer lock on teacher certification.

So, I know that's a mouthful and it's a radical analysis and radical proposition, but I'm wondering what you think of what's going on in the K through 2 system.

Sorry, I'm smiling because what I think about the education system, the big first thing that comes to mind is our education system in British Columbia today is teaching kids what to think. It's not teaching kids how to think. It's not teaching kids how to be critical thinkers. That is, to me, the fundamental problem within the system itself.

There's material that is within our education system which is designed for more of an indoctrination as opposed to actually providing kids with the skills they need. Kids are coming out of school, and university professors, college specialists are telling me they're not prepared for anything postsecondary. They can't read, and they don't know anything; some people can't even write their own name.

So I look at the system and I think, "Okay, what is needed?" To start with, we need to do a full review of all the material that's being made available for teachers, and look at it from a perspective of being neutral. Who would review it? You know, how would go both—you've got to put a team together that's going to review it, and so it's going to be some educators; it's going to be some people that are not educators who are going to go through and look at the material from that critical lens.

For example, there's I think a book in grade four math; I think it's called "Math That Matters," and the math is correct—2 plus 2 equals 4—but the language being used is all about environmentalism. It's all social justice oriented. Exactly. It's all about, you know, anti-development and that whole side of things. So when the kids go to school—why? They've got this bent, and because this is what they've been taught; this is what they've been ado day from day one for 12 years.

Yeah, so we're going to try to change all of that, right, in terms of that material, make sure it's all neutral in terms of how the information is being provided. Quite frankly, we need to bring in something, you know, that I think is critical: fiscal management, you know, teaching kids about how money actually works, compound interest, and you know, debt and all those sort of things. Those will be some big shifts that we need to do.

Okay, so let me ask you a question about that: so why neutral, exactly? Like, why not unabashedly anti-communist, unabashedly pro-free market, unabashedly the Western tradition of freedom? You know, because I think—and I'm—it seems to me that one of the errors that conservatives and classic liberals have made consistently across time is a kind of apologetic neutrality. So I'll give you one example: at the University of Toronto in my personality course, a psychology course, seconded psychology course, I used to teach the kids about what happened in Stalinist Russia.

I did that because I used Alexander Solzhenitsyn as an example of existential psychology, because he was an existential psychologist like Viktor Frankl. Now one of the shocking things to me was that none of my students had ever heard about what had happened in Russia between 1920 and 1989, let's say—even though we fought; we just about torched the planet and we fought a cold war over it. They had no idea what the Stalinists had done.

That's a good example of something where even neutrality isn't sufficient. It's like the Communists were brutal, genocidal murderers wherever they've set up shop—it's happening again in Venezuela, it's still happening in Cuba, it threatens all of South America. China is a complete bloody catastrophe on the ideological front, and they're permeating the world; it's a catastrophe. Our education system tells students nothing about that.

Conservatives—this is particularly true in Canada, although it's starting to shift—they're so terrified of being demolished by the woke mob and also of being accused of something approximating social conservatism that they do take refuge in something like neutrality. But I'm not sure it's time for neutrality anymore.

It depends on what you mean by neutrality. So in terms of it—and by the way, regarding the cancel culture, cancel culture only works if you allow them to cancel you. Yes, you just have to stand up and say, you know, "Take a hike," and it goes away, right? Because when if they can't cancel you, then they have to find something else to do.

But regarding school, what I mean by neutrality is not that we won't teach about communism, that we won't teach about the Holocaust, because we will. We need to show that from a perspective of "This is the facts that happened; this is the evil that happened; this is the damage that was done with it"—not just from an ideological perspective, but from a facts-based stance. That's what I mean by neutral.

I don't mean neutral as in we won't talk about communism, we won't talk about, you know, fascism, we won't talk about, you know, democracy or capitalism or whatever the case may be. We will, but in terms of providing facts and information so that people—the kids can look at this and come to their own conclusions. Because you're going to have people still on the left and the right, and families are still going to have lots of influence, and I think that's okay. That’s rounded society.

I think where society runs into trouble is it gets too far on any one particular side, you know? The pendulum is swinging back and forth, and you want to try to keep that as much as you can into a place where it creates positive opportunities.

People who are informed and critical thinkers can look at information that comes forward with a critical eye, and ask the questions based on facts that they have, particularly from our history. That’s what I’m hoping our education system will become.