The Michaela School | Katharine Birbalsingh

I want to tell everybody watching and listening: the Michaela school is not a selective school, and that means anybody can go there. Usually, schools perform well if they hyper-select their students because it's easier to teach, let's say, kids that have been screened for IQ and conscientiousness. But you take everybody, and yet your students hyper-perform on their examinations. So, explain that in a little more detail because that really pulls the rug out from underneath your detractors, except the ones who don't believe in objective merit.

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because you hear "strict" and, of course, lies with lots of people. People think tyrannical and unhappiness and so on. I always say that strict is immersed in love, and when you're strict with children, it means you love them enough to keep your standards high for them. I would say that most right teachers and parents nowadays want to be friends with children, and they don't know that their duty is to have children rise up and meet them where they are and to demonstrate to them over and over again what virtuous behavior is so that they too can learn to be virtuous.

When grandma's looking a bit sad, you say to the boy, "Go and get her, bring her a cup of tea." You explain that that is what kindness is. Every little moment of kindness in particular, the child is able to do over and over again. Again, there's no point in telling children to be kind. I mean, you can tell them, but they won't understand what that means. They need to see examples and non-examples. So the cup of tea is an example, but then their brother hits them because he wants to take the toy, and that's an example of unkindness. You would say, "Well, that was unkind and this is kind," over and over and over again.

Over years, I know you're interested in evolutionary psychology; this is what we are as humans. Other animals, within a few weeks or a few months in the jungle, they get sorted and off they go. Whereas human beings take many, many years to be able to survive on their own without their parents. The role of the parents and the role of the teacher should be to show them the particular over and over again, whether that's about gratitude, duty, or kindness, and so on. Eventually, they can move that to the abstract, and they'll understand what kindness is, having seen the particular of examples and non-examples so many times.

But sadly, I think that people generally don't understand that about children. For instance, I know I’ve often said to you when you came to the school, “I said to you, you never talk about schools.” You said, “Oh, it's true, I don't really talk about schools.” I said, “Yeah, well, you should talk about schools because they’re the most important institutions in any country because children are the future.”

When all of you guys—and when I say “guys,” I mean women too, like Barry Weiss or Megan Kelly or John McWhorter or Glenn Lowry, and all these people who I have huge admiration for—nobody ever talks about schools. Nobody ever talks about the importance of our education system. What you all do is talk about what's going on in the universities, and you say, "Oh my goodness, how come these young people think as they do? How come we've got all of these marches?" You think, "How come they're not thinking about stuff in the way? Why haven't they developed critical thinking?"

This is where I sort of have a bit of a bugbear with you, and I want to say to you I want to explain why I think not just you, but all these people I have huge admiration for—Jonathan Haidt, Abigail Shrier—I read all of your stuff and I love it. But when it comes to children, I think you're all wrong. Elon Musk the other day, I saw him, you know, on some video; he was talking about how to teach children, and he's wrong. You're all wrong, and let me explain why.

The fact is, you're all wondering why it is these students at university don't think in a critical manner, and then what you all say is, "What we need to do is teach them how to think—think not what to think." But you're wrong. We need to teach them what to think. Currently, we are teaching them how to think.

What does that mean? In fact, I should ask you. When you all say things like that—teach them how to think—what do you mean?

Well, we mean with this Peterson Academy that I'm putting forward that we don't want a university—and I'm speaking specifically of universities—to be an ideological propaganda factory. It's really a dig at the radical left. I would also say that I have talked privately with any number of government officials, especially on the Republican side, about the absolute catastrophe that's unfolding in the K through 2 system. One of my dreams, and you can tell me what you think about this, is that I think the right to teacher certification should be taken away from the faculties of education.

I think they have done a job that's so abysmal that it's almost indescribable. I've talked to plenty of Republican governors about this, and it's one of my lifelong ambitions.

Yes, no, I agree. I wholeheartedly agree on that. Teacher training institutions are a disaster.

But, okay, and it's really interesting what you said. You don't want this ideology just pumped through kids, and I 100% agree—not at universities. That's not the same as K through 12. You know, I also agree with your approach from the particular upward in regard to children. That's crucial.

I know it's just that when you all talk about this business of teaching them how to think, what that looks like in a classroom in a high school is that, "Okay, so what that is, is the standard discussion between knowledge and skills." Should we teach them knowledge or should we teach them skills? "How to think" is a skill, and it can only be done within a particular domain.

I don't know how to think about cars. Okay, you tell me, you put a car in front of me and said, "Create a different kind of car. Katherine, be creative. Think outside the box." I wouldn't know what to do because I don't know anything about cars. But if you tell me to turn education on its head, I've done exactly that. I've been very radical. I've thought outside the box and done things very differently.

Why? Because I know education inside out. The only way you can think in a creative manner or think outside the box and have independent thoughts about anything is to know it really well. That means children at school level need to be taught loads of knowledge.

So when you all say things like, “We need to teach them how to think,” I disagree with you. When I say, “We need to teach them what to think,” what I mean by that is we need to give them knowledge about the world wars, about slavery, about colonialism, about all of these ideas. If they don't have historical knowledge, they're unable to make a judgment that is well-informed and that isn't just going to go down an ideological route.

You know all children are communists. They're all communists when you talk to them. They're all communists because when they hear about communism, they go, "You mean everybody's going to have equality? You mean everybody's—we're going to share, and then, you know, everybody poor and rich doesn’t happen anymore; everybody's just the same. That’s lovely." The reason why children are communists is that they're naive, they're vulnerable, and it sounds nice to them. And so that's what they go for. They don't have enough knowledge or enough wisdom to be able to make correct decisions.

That's why, for instance, we ban alcohol, we ban cigarettes, and I believe we should ban smartphones. We ban sex, we ban marriage, we ban driving—there are all kinds of things that we ban from children. The thing about the libertarian right, while I myself believe in freedom and I believe in freedom of speech and all of that, when it comes to children, I don't believe in any of it. I believe that children need their freedoms restricted so that later in life they can be truly free.

When I say their freedoms need to be restricted, that doesn't mean that they're unhappy. You saw at my school just how happy they were.

So, let me ask you a clarifying question. Do you mean that their freedoms should be restricted, or do you mean that the domain within which they have freedom should be restricted?

Well, no, I would say both because those are different, right? Because the one tilts more to, in some sense, conceptually towards control.

See, let me give you an example. You tell me what you think about this. This is a very concrete example, so it brings it down to earth.

Imagine you have a four-year-old child, and he has a closet full of clothes—like 40 outfits to wear. They're all hanging on hangers, and maybe he's a little hungry and a little tired, and you open up the closet and you say, "Which of those outfits do you want to wear?" He has a meltdown.

Okay, so imagine that instead you take three of those items of clothing off the hangers and you put them on the bed, and you say, "Which of those three pieces of clothing would you like to wear?" Then he can point to one with no problem.

There's a consumer choice literature, for example, that shows that if you have four shampoos to choose from on the shelf, and you pick one, you're happier with your purchase than you are if you have 200 on the shelf to pick from because you drown in complexity, and you've probably made the wrong choice.

So with children, my sense is that they need that play that enables them to decide. But adults are supposed to be wise enough so that the domain of choice that's presented to them is commensurate with their actual emotional and cognitive ability. So, well, I'm wondering what you think of that formulation.

Yeah, I don't think the child should be choosing at all. I think you're in a rush. You need to get him to school, get him in his clothes. Yes, there's that, and sometimes that's the case. I'm in the supermarket, and I'm watching parents say, "Darling, what would you like from the freezer to eat?" I'm looking at them thinking, "Why are you asking them? Just take what you want, put it in the basket, and go. You've got a life."

You know, like these children who are the center of the world. We need to ask them what they think about everything. We have to ask them, "What would you like to eat?" Put the spinach and broccoli in front of them and tell them to eat it, and that's what we do at Michaela. They have one choice; they don't have any choice at lunch. They all eat the same thing, and we call it family lunch.

You had lunch with the children. Why do we call it family lunch? Because it's like family dinner. What used to happen at family dinner? I have to say I don't think this happens anymore in many households because everybody's on their phone or their iPad. They take their plate of food, and they go and sit in their bedroom. But what should be happening is that you sit around a table, and you're being served—you all serve out the food, and you're all eating from one pot of food.

If you don't like it very much, well, you suck it up because that's what it is to be a child. You learn how to eat different foods because your parents don't let you get away with this idea of "I'm a free human being, and it's against my human rights, and I should be able to eat what I want." No, you shouldn't be able to eat what you want. You're a child.

Now, look, that's why people call me strict, but it's because I love them. That's why I think we should be doing this, because by doing that, we teach them how to become adults. You talk about exactly how you don't want children—you shouldn't bring up children who you're going to dislike. Well, the more choices and the more freedom you give them in that sense, the more you're going to dislike them as adults.

I mean, the fact is you cannot be friends with your children when they're children and be friends with them when they're adults. You have to choose, and you should not be friends with them when they're children because otherwise you're not going to like them when they're adults.

You are in a position of authority, and you should be molding your child and helping him with his moral formation and giving him knowledge. The school should be doing both as well—both moral formation and giving him knowledge.

Where I worry about the libertarian right is the freedoms that they enjoy amongst adults—they then impose that on children, or they don't realize that that's what they're doing. Then they think, "Oh my goodness, but why is it all these students at university are behaving the way that they do?" It's because the schools have not taught them what to think.

When I say "what to think," I'm giving them the facts about the various world wars, giving them the facts about the history of their country, making them feel as if they belong in their country and that their history belongs to them, that the geography of their country is taught to them.

On the other hand, the school is convinced that actually what they need to do is teach them how to think, and then nobody can agree on what that looks like because it's a skill, and outside of its domain of knowledge, it cannot be taught independently. It's impossible. All you can do is give children knowledge. You see what those skills are is actually bits of knowledge, and when you give them lots of bits of knowledge about, say, the Second World War, they are then able to piece together what they think of it.

Now, the problem we've got nowadays is that the schools are teaching them with a particular ideology in mind. So in Britain, for instance, I see very much that history lessons in schools will be teaching about how the British were really racist and how the Indian soldiers who were fighting for Britain were treated very badly. You know what? I'm not even saying that isn't true, but when it comes to secondary school children who might have one or two lessons a week in history and are only going to have it for a few years, shouldn't the focus be on them knowing 1914 and 1918?

Shouldn't the focus be on them knowing about Hitler in the Second World War? I mean, there are certain facts that the children have never heard of—the Battle of the Somme. They've never heard of the details of the various key battles in the First World War and the Second World War, and they've never heard of them because they're too busy being taught stories that are ideological, which will convince them that the British, for instance, are racist.

Or convince them that there were various important female characters in our historical history, and that's what matters. Of course, Elizabeth I absolutely, but there are other people brought forward as being very important when they're not so important, but because they're taught through an ideological lens, which is 2024, as opposed to teaching them the basics of their own history so that they can feel that they are British.