The US School System Was Designed to Create Factory Workers | Jeff Sandefer

there is an old a very old religious insistence that pride is a cardinal sin and that humility is the virtue that counters pride and then you have to ask well what does it mean what does humility mean and it means something like admission of ignorance yeah but what's so useful about that and why it's a virtue and why it's something very useful to practice is that if you do admit to your ignorance which is to note what you don't know and to dare ask it right then you immediately Rectify I told my daughter for example

oh you know very straightforwardly um you only have to ask a stupid question once if you listen to the answer right so so she's been in many situations where you know she was in over her head like well like we all are yes very often like me today well and it is very tempting to pretend that you know and and to not ask the stupid question but first of all almost everybody around who's participating let's say in the conversation has the same stupid question and second if you don't ask it well then you remain stupid

so that's not helpful and well well you know I think this was a great lesson of like a lot I've learned about about Parenthood and about having the same approach with your children I mean you know this and I've seen you with with Julian up close of you know being genuinely interested but offering choices and listening and caring as a parent and so you know I didn't have children at this point but I have a room for 28 year olds that are bright and we can explore life together and Entrepreneurship and how you make money

and what it means if you you make money and that ended up being I spent quite a time at the University of Texas we built up the entrepreneurship program we won all sorts of awards um and then spun off our own business school why did the why why was it well received do you think and and why did the why was it also two inch two things well received by the students but obviously it was also well received by the administrations okay it was well received and you know enough about Academia the teachers so the

professors who were teachers loved us what we did though is we had a very firm very hard contract of what was required to be in the class we graded on a forced curve when everyone else gave all A's the harder we made the program the more people we attracted yeah yeah and so but but at some point uh I think our teachers who were all entrepreneurs who had been successful so all adjuncts oh yeah one the teacher of the year award 11 out of 11 years which and how big a group was that well we

for the uh there were 141 professors and our group of eight were teaching 25 percent of all the elective hours in the school as adjuncts wow as adjuncts and so being paid nothing yes so you can imagine what happens next in this story yeah right right so we're basically all fired we all quit depending on which story you want yeah yeah we go start our own school and we focus on who was this this would have been two thousand and what was I see and so that was after eight years yes eight years and what

was the rationale for the firing slash quitting um probably that I was too disagreeable which was fair um but I will say I got a call from inside the school from someone and he said look a tinkered professor and he said look I have to tell you they're going to fire half of you this summer and the other other half um at Christmas because and we were at that point attracting more than half of all the students to the school and teaching a quarter of them and they said they just you know the the tingered

political faculty just doesn't want you here so we decided we were going to teach one last class off campus across the street from the campus and um 130 people showed up for no credit they drove credit they drove from Waco from Houston to Austin from uh Dallas to Austin so they came from all over including faculty from those schools and we thought you know what maybe we should have our own MBA program right now we knew nothing about that that was impossible right no one ever told us you couldn't get a credit but we managed

to build a program we ended up winning all sorts of awards from Princeton Review uh with really Navy Seals Olympic athletes and young entrepreneurs and we built this hundred hour a week 10-month program uh that was just brutal but changed our lives and changed the lives of the students what if there was someone out there who kept a log of every single thing you did every minute of the day pretty creepy right what if I told you that's exactly what happens every time you go online your internet provider is allowed to store logs of every

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one VPN in the world stop letting strangers keep logs of what you do online visit expressvpn.com jordanyt right now and find out how you can get three months of expressvpn for free that's e-x-p-r-e-s-svpn.com Jordan YT expressvpn.com Jordan YT so that was right after you were at the University of Texas yeah yeah we we were fired and it was right the next thing we did was have this free class and the next thing after that was launch our own NBA program uh and so what was the rationale for dispensing with you guys I mean it must

have been somewhat difficult given the fact that it well it was half the students it was very popular yeah uh there was an outcry but uh as the dean put it to the students at that point you are not our customers our customers are the pursuit of scholarly knowledge and so your opinion doesn't really matter was what they were told so anyway we spun off it was successful it was a lot of fun um and really I'm I'm now you know still doing some business things mostly teaching this program is a lot of fun and

then we come to kind of one of the most important things in my life and that is um our two young boys are in Montessori School and they're just about so you had them after you left the University of Texas and started this now independent program right so this is didn't have accreditation for the independent program uh we did get accreditation we did we managed to get accreditation uh because we won all these Awards and they had to give us accreditation who who where did you accreditation uh sex we were we had sex accreditation through

a small University that my great-grandfather had been president of at the turn of the century and taxes oh the southern accrediting Association so it's one of the regional accreditors right so you got associated with a small college but it didn't matter because as long as you have accreditation right you have accreditation right right right and so accreditation was set up so that well so that in principle so that there was some what would you say consistency reliability and validity to the outside nation of a of a degree I mean that's the theory that's the theory

what it really serves as of course is a protection of the cartel right I mean it's not really that but we managed to get it wasn't an issue um and and you know we built the program by the and I've got these two children uh Charlie and Sam and um they're about to leave from Montessori to get ready to go to elementary school so I go to see the very best teacher and the very best middle school in Austin that's teaching our daughter who's older and I said when should we move the boys uh into

a regular school and I'll never forget this this gentleman was an African-American he looked like Abraham Lincoln tall stately you know very one he and he said um as soon as possible and I said well why and he said well once they've had that kind of Freedom they won't want to be chained to a desk for eight hours a day and talk to them so we get them in get them in Chains Young and I I was just kind of stunned and I said well I don't blame him I just blurted that out and he

looked down at the ground for the longest time and he looked up and he had tears in his eyes and he shook his head very quietly and he said I don't either so I went home that day and I told Laura I said I don't know if we're going to homeschool I don't know if we're going to start a school but our boys are the best teacher in this town just told me not to put them in Traditional School so we're going to do something else do you know Paul gaudy no okay Gotti I hope

I have his name right he was teacher of the year in New York state a number of years and he wrote he died unfortunately I wanted to interview him but um that never that was never possible he was no uh admirer of the current education system I'd say and he wrote a history of the education system which was extremely interesting he pointed out that the public education in the in the United States I was investigating this because I was wondering why our school systems are so bad at fostering individual Vision yes because it's such a

lack I thought why this is such a lock there's something going on here okay the prussians established the first public education system and the reason they did it was because the Prussian Emperor wanted to produce obedient soldiers you know disciplines obedient soldiers no I don't want to get cynical about that because in a society that requires a military disciplined people who can follow rules are arguably necessary now obviously that can go very badly but but we've got to give the devil is due and the oppressions actually put forward a very effective military training system now

that was adopted in the United States in the late 1800s by industrialists mostly self-proclaimed fascists so at that time of course it wasn't Mussolini Hitler like fascism it was far the early precursors of that but they were people who believed that the state and the uh the corporate world could integrate at the highest levels and there might be some utility in that which is a very dubious claim nonetheless so they noticed that they knew that all sorts of rural people were pouring into the cities to start working in factories their kids needed to be cared

for well they worked and then their kids were likely to have factory jobs and so the purpose of the public education system this is why there's rows of desks and Factory bells and this insistence on timing was to produce disciplined obedient workers certainly not to produce people who were autonomous and um that was adopted in the U.S the Japanese adopted it and militarized like mad and part of the consequence of that was the outbreak of the second world war and but but that being chained to a desk that's not a bug that was a feature

right right and you know you can also even say well let's give it some credence a rural uh worker their their time schedules much less stringent than someone who's going to work on a factory right they're on an agrarian Farm they're on a farm yeah you're much looser in your time sense and it is the case that industrialization requires clock yes and so you have to give the devil is due but in a somewhat post-industrial World which is what we're in now it's not obvious at all that obedient worker slash Soldier is the right model

for human development