this is so interesting talking about like um impressing upon language what you want or like
oppressing upon kids and their thoughts what you want this is a great example
um you retweeted it james as from my think my thin formed and misinformed
i can't read milwaukee that's the everybody is always talking to me about them they're
like who's that mic guy and i'm like what they're like the one with the mke
myth informed milwaukee now it makes sense according to this
teacher educator toddlers have a unique sense of what is fair and just in this world hence
they they are ready for deep conversations about racial topics despite not knowing
what race means indoctrination of kids uh and it starts in preschool i'm going to rewind this book
what you say to uh teachers who say oh god gosh but my kids this preschool it's their toddlers
we don't need to talk about difference that'll just create differences i just wonder what you
say to those folks yeah i actually have that question quite a bit and i tell them if you spend
time with those children they let you know justice and fairness are top of mind for them i don't
know if you've ever been in a room of toddlers they will tell you what is fair and not fair i
taught two-year-olds and they don't miss a beat if you have one more than i have
i'm gonna notice that and they know when why does she get to go in that area and i'm still
over here they'll come and ask you those things so children very early on have a sense of what is
fair in the world and what is just and how do you make things right so
for folks who shy away from that conversation i say yes but if you listen to the children they're
telling you they're ready for these kinds of conversations they're telling you james and
they may not know the word race but they do know differences they do know justice they have a sense
of that um and when it comes to race if you want to be explicit in that right talk about race with
young children part of that is being prepared for that conversation i remember getting ready to be
um when i was a classroom teacher getting ready for children to ask me why my skin was darker
than theirs um so i wonder what you first of all her name is dr nicole russell she can't even spell
her own first name it's n-i-c-o-l so that for me was a my first red flag and then she says
oh well this kid is wondering why am i in the corner and this kid's not it's like yeah cause
you hit your classmate with a frying pan like kids are not yeah i was gonna say things but they don't
i was gonna ask you if it's okay if i swear on your podcast sure absolutely yeah here's the
here's the truth that the dr russell doctor doctor is overlooking is that kids are [ __ ] stupid
we don't want two-year-olds organizing society they can tell what's fair enough here let me
tell you how that works it turns out i will use the word precocious for myself as a young man
as an as a child and i had this running scam that i finally got the [ __ ] beat out of me for when
my parents figured out what i was doing and i had this running scam on my brother where i could give
him two one dollar bills and trade it for his ten dollar bill every time look how not fair it is i
have two you have one you want to trade yes every time because it turns out he didn't understand
what the numbers on the bills represented he just knew how many there were we don't want
and he was like not a toddler and he's also like a [ __ ] rocket scientist he's not stupid and so
we don't actually i know this is like news in 2021 to people with doctorates you know but we don't
actually want toddlers organizing society you know delayed gratification that's not a thing yet
understanding that what's going on you know having a functional theory of mind
none of that's happening the toddlers are literally by definition if you graded them on
the adult scale total sociopaths and also dumb as rocks like iq4 if a toddler drops an ice cream and
starts crying because it's unfair it's like well yeah that toddler doesn't understand gravity but
in their mind that's unfair like that's right my mom somebody in your comments mentioned like yeah
children also go to other kids birthday parties and are upset that they are not also getting
presents you know that's correct that's not fair they don't know it's like when i was a toddler
not that i'm going to like ha ha like how to cool smart guy i was ripping off my brother
when i was a toddler like if i fell down like my mom had to come over and like
yell at the curb that i tripped over the rock or whatever really yeah like to make me feel better
like this was a stupid little [ __ ] that was a toddler and it turns out that this is you know
we're joking around dr russell here doctor who has this completely dumb ass idea that she's using and
it turns out that this is deep deep deep deep deep in their mentality like there's a book
written in the 19 in 1970 i think called pedagogy of the oppressed when i say i think i mean plus or
minus two years on one side or the other of 1970s written by paulo ferrari a brazilian marxist who
destroyed their education system completely with his crackpot ideas he has like literally an entire
chapter it's only four chapters in the book one of the entire chapters is talking about the need
to get away from the idea of teachers and students because that's a power dynamic obviously and you
can't have power we have to get to where we mix them together and have teachers who see themselves
as students and students who see themselves as teachers and it's all this kind of one big morass
where the children are now dictating the curriculum now we have this big fight in loudoun
county who gets to pick the curriculum apparently not the parents but part of their answer is what
do the children want and you think no that's ridiculous right no it's not ridiculous that's
exactly how our universities got dragged off into diversity hell to the degree that they did
if you ask administrators why did you do all this dei crap they'll tell you almost to a man that it
was a bottom up desire from students what is gei is that diversity diversity equity and inclusion
okay yeah so it's like they said it was bottom up that means the students came in
and demanded it and our student services offices recommended it so we went with it the reason is
because they financially trapped themselves by building lots of infrastructure like
new stadiums bowling alleys movie theaters new 50 million dollar you know business
classroom building that they didn't need like crazy crazy crazy billions and billions of
dollars in mortgages on these campuses to try to track to attract students in this weird arms
race that happened after everybody could get a student loan that's federally underwritten
uh which was a clinton decision and they started competing for that infinite amount of federally
underwritten money and the student services arms race was the thing and so now you're in here
like in doc could you imagine the idea that you're going to run a business and sorry you're going to
run a school and you're going to run it so much like a business that you think oh well what the
kids want to learn is what we should i mean that's like a beastie boys music video or something like
that like an obvious parody of reality but that's what the aim is so here we have dr
russell who's like oh listen to toddlers they know all about fairness and justice because they're so
perpescasious at two [ __ ] years old they know all about it they they know the words perpiskius
too they said it and then they said freedom right afterwards yeah who knew if you keep yourself
from faul from swallowing legos then yeah you shouldn't be deciding yeah that's right i'm i'm in
total agreement with like total agreement that if you're crawling on the floor sniffing around for
parmesan cheese or crumbs or rocks or whatever it happens to be and you shouldn't be making
decisions that you don't actually understand you know a judge used to be something that you
would hold an extraordinarily high esteem in every society like ever and who are they you what's your
archetype if i said picture a judge what do you picture probably an older person yes definitely
a white man with but older more mature somebody who's been around the courtroom or whatever in law
for many decades i picture judge judy actually that would be my idea there we go yeah well that's
an ideal judge because she doesn't don't piss on me and tell me it's raining that's right yeah and
but that's the thing is we picture somebody who's like really been around and thought through some
some things and is mature in their thought it turns out you probably didn't think of a toddler
no right no yeah the toddler is like going to be hitting the dog with the the the gavel
immediately yeah it's this like it's this letting and i don't know if it's it's pressure or it's
like a generational thing of like and it's these t what these teachers are saying i feel like it
just i don't know it ties into how i think a lot i see a lot of kids being parented like
this hands off like oh like i remember when i'd hear about like montessori schools and oh we just
let them i'm picturing like free-range kids just wandering around we let them decide like
what to study and it's like what it's like why are we letting go of pr of uh of responsibility
and like per you know just parental obligations over over like uh being nice it's like
boys girls everyone does better with more structure with knowing what the expectations
are i used to work in a school it's like you nee you're you're in charge man you're the
adult you're the parent i mean look at dating even with adults it's like don't
play games right everybody just wants to know the damn rules like okay you don't want me to
call you when you're your husband's around i got you you know whatever the rules are um
people just want to know what the rules are and the same kind of thing here people actually
children especially because they're turns out they're the they're rational capacity for
abstract thought has not fully developed um need boundaries because the the likelihood that they're
in general going to be able to work out the proper boundaries for themselves
well is pretty low so you actually increase their you optimize the situation that they're in by not
letting them be free range and decide everything for themselves like if you just let kids decide
if you actually looking at the polls if you just let kids study whatever they wanted to study every
single one of them will be studying tick-tock videography because they all want to be viral
oh what they want to be when they grow up like there's a poll i read where like the number one
like job that these high school girls wanted to do when they grow up was just have only fans
like that's it so that's a little alarming and it's just it's it's scary that we can see somebody
that just because they have a dr in front of their name they're allowed to totally put what they want
onto these onto these kids which are they're basically blank slates you know and and like
she has an agenda and she is like reading what she wants into these behaviors and they're just sort
of nodding like yes this is all the uh this is the cultural wokeness that we're all subscribing to
and like yeah we need to shape the youth it's just like my sister's a teacher i think she's
one of the good ones but i i see more and more teachers who i feel like are just a little too
hungry for influence a little too hungry for control and um everyone's really kind of their
eyes are being opened to it now with this just mass participation in school board meetings
um and just parents getting upset and you had a really great episode come out recently where
you're talking about you know these language manipulations that happened and and how you
have to be really vigilant about keeping on top of what's being taught in your kid's school
and you know that's just one example it's kind of all over the culture but you know
you're responding to this like oh you know teachers will say well we're not
teaching critical race theory we're not teaching it and you're like no correction like you're
doing it you are actually doing it like you might like mince the words a little bit but
it's like it is actually going on and you were telling people what to look for like look for
words like equity look like look for phrases like white privilege um it's not about formative
it's not about what they're saying yeah it's about what concepts and ideas they're teaching
and that's that sounds like something you need to constantly stay on top of like i don't think my
parents when i was in school like even looked into what we were being taught but again like
every generation has its has its problems that are kind of i mean nine times out of ten like when i
when i took geometry we did geometry right and so nine times out of ten when our parents didn't need
to look very hard because we could actually still trust the institutions to a degree the
problem that they that they weren't catching was this emphasis on feelings you said where did this
come from it turns out that you know the answer to where did this come from is john jack rousseau
who just to kind of oversimplify you know one of the biggest philosophers of the last 500 years
one of his many kind of strange damaging beliefs his counter enlightenment beliefs was
that sincerity is a better arbiter of truth than reason logic and evidence he thought that reason
was too sterile and so you know but instinct and emotion is too raw and so that there's this thing
in between that's like sincerity and so if you sincerely express something say i don't know
it may be the fact that only nine unarmed black people were killed
by police in 2019 but it feels like to me that it's murder on the streets every day
that sincerity is like this and that's what that's what dr russell was ultimately appealing to she i
don't whether she's ever read a word of rousseau i don't know but that idea has come down to where
she's like look at the in another idea with rousseau is the noble savage which is the noble
child now in this context look at what the noble toddler already knows the toddler already know
has intrinsic instinctual understandings of fairness and justice that exceed those that
have been poisoned to poisoned in us by a racist capitalist system and so they're ready for these
conversations already look how noble you know the child is and then what's coming out of that is
they're so sincere in the way that they you know this wasn't fair she has two and i have
one that's not fair well you know maybe the kid that got two did something to earn two and
but yeah maybe you're in the corner because you hit somebody you know yeah oh well he hit
them because you know of equity and you know yeah so i mean there so it turns out there are
actually deep ugly philosophical routes for even this complete idiocy that we see
from the good doctor um doctor doctor yeah anybody can be a doctor now
you