Welcome back to Pods with Nick and James. Our topic this week is education. I've chosen
this topic as education affects the way we think, the choices we make as individuals
and shapes our society at large. The more research I've done into this, the more I've
realised that I've bitten off way more than we can chew, so we might have to come back
to this topic at a later point. We're lucky in this country in that we receive a free
education from the government. A lot of our thought processes are shaped by an education,
so I'll start with I guess some of our own personal experiences, keep it nice and vague
and then look at a couple of interesting facts to do with education. Comparing this country
in America's as Western education is kind of more what I'm familiar with or the modern
of Western education rather than that of individual tutors in foreign countries or other schooling
schools. Nick, I know you've got a number of views on this. I guess we'll kick off the
ball. How was your education? How did you find it?
Well obviously hi and welcome back to everybody. My education, it was very, I think I had the
aptitude to be quite an intelligent person. I had always shown quite an aptitude. I can
remember back in the early part of school my teachers quite frequently said to my parent,
my mum, that if they could get me glued to the seat then I could answer any question
that they had, do any work that they had in a very short period of time. The problem they
had was keeping me attentive enough to do the work that they were asking. However, my
personal experience of education isn't a good one. I had quite a very, very bad experience
throughout school. I think I was physically bullied in some manner every day from first
day of nursery right away through to about halfway through year nine, which affected
my ability to stay on track in school. I rebelled quite a lot. As a result, my education maybe
didn't get the full attention that I probably should have given it. I came away with reasonably
good grades, but if you think about reasonably good grades with barely any attendance in
some years at school, then what could have been my real achievement if I had applied
myself properly with the right support around me? I think the main thing that was missing
for me was the correct level of support for the issues that I was facing. But that was
my experience. It was not a good one, but I hope that it's not still going on nowadays.
It does seem to me like there is a lot more support out there for people. All right, so
listeners to this podcast, I hope you're not going to need to edit this out, Nick. Actually,
you know what? I'll speak on my behalf and I'll let you speak on your behalf. Both Nick
and myself are not neurotypical. By that, I mean I have Asperger's, which is redefined
as high function in autism along with dyslexia and a myriad of other weird quirks. And if
Nick wants to share, like you said, that you didn't have enough support other than like
obviously your high functioning because otherwise you wouldn't have had teachers saying what
they said about you when you were growing up and the fact that you could work at such
a pace and the problem was getting you to just slow down enough. How would you describe
yourself? What were your needs that weren't met? So obviously I got to 29 years old and
a psychologist I was seeing at the time identified the fact that I'm autistic, high function
in autistic. And I think that was the big gap throughout my upbringing because I was
different, but I think you'll agree the lack of understanding surrounding that aspect of
people it was lacking when I was a kid and I should imagine when you were a kid as well
being roughly the same age. Yeah, although I was lucky it was caught when I was 20 at
the end of my first year at art uni. Before then it had been misdiagnosed as mental illness,
which sounds bad, but like honestly I don't actually think it was the amount of counselling
that I had, although it wasn't the right treatment as it were, it's still, you know, like I'm
just going to say out there if you're listening to this, counselling helps, helps you at least
process your emotions and although it didn't, I don't think there necessarily is a cure
for autism like miracles of God and science aside, it helped, you know. I think I don't
know how many times I've said in my life just tell me how to and I will do, you know, and
there is no guidebook to life is there and there's so many people, so many people grow
up and I think it's one, I think my misconception for me as an autistic now was growing up I
saw everybody else just seem to be able to do it with no problem whereas for me everything
was a two-step process. I had to think about how other people would react to enable me
to know how to react in every situation that I was going through, otherwise my reactions
were quite often completely polar opposite to what most other people were expecting,
yeah, and that was where a lot of my bullying and a lot of my problems came from. People
could say one or two things and I would explode and end up marching all the way around the
school in a complete rage but that was normal for me, that was me not being able to process
my emotions but that was the problem with the education sector when I was growing up,
there was no understanding for autism or no ability to even identify that. I was surrounded
by social workers and doctors and teachers and nobody identified it in me until I was
29 years old so I think that's one major difference in the education sector now is that they are
hyper aware of those intricacies and differences in individuals.
Oh absolutely, yeah, absolutely, I know people seem to think that or something that seems
to almost be the thing is that autism is on the rise, it's not on the rise, it's just
it's always been there and it's now being more accepted.
Yeah awareness to it has grown massively hasn't it?
Like I'm certain my dad had autism but it was just never diagnosed. I don't think my
grandad did have autism just because he was a very sociable person but there was this
controlling element with my grandad so I'm thinking you know what maybe he could have
been and just have like hidden it well as a lot of people with autism do.
Oh alright well I'm sorry to hear your education was difficult, I will admit secondary school
was not easier for me, no sorry, was not as difficult as what you've described but I will
admit I didn't do particularly well in years 10 and 11, I didn't spend most of my time
away from school but I will admit I was sick about a third of the time due to general anxiety
and just like not wanting to go in and part of that was just exactly what you have mentioned
although I've always had a bit of a fear of authority and I'll go into that into another
time as well. I always did my best to hold it together but people's words would cut me
and sometimes somebody could say the wrong thing and I would just go into a spiral and
it's still that way now, still that way now if I don't keep an eye on it which is a shame
but you know what we'll talk about or bring up autism in different conditions at another
point.
I think mental health as a general topic would be a great one down the road.
Alright well I will admit I struggled, I was not, yeah it was obvious looking back like
yeah, I don't know what it was like when you were 29 got diagnosed but like when they diagnosed
me, at first I was really resistant to it because I knew somebody else who had Asperger's
and how they were like was in my mind not the same as how I am but anyway.
Alright so with education the main idea of it is or supposedly and I guess this is where
the philosophical part comes in, it's supposed to prepare you for the world. I don't know
about you, I don't feel it did. There are elements that it prepared me for, it prepared
me for criticism, it prepared me for not everyone liking me, it prepared me for working as a
team but it definitely didn't, I mean I think the most important skill anyone can have is
the willingness to try something or sorry the bravery to try something new and the resilience
to keep going when it fails or to try something different when it fails rather than giving
up. Like do you feel that your own education helped in that sense or do you feel it was
a massive waste of time?
I don't feel, I don't think for a moment that my education was a massive waste of time
but I don't think it meets the correct criteria to support our children and our young people
to develop into meaningful humans in their adulthood. I don't think it provides them
with the right foundation to go forwards in a productive manner. Quite often it purely
teaches, I mean it's been teaching the same way for so long. I mean my stepdaughter is
now coming into her GCSE year and she's learning of mice and men. Now 20, 25 years ago when
I was, well 20, well I suppose 20 years ago when I was in my GCSE year I learnt of mice
and men. That was 20 years, why hasn't education adapted and evolved in 20 years? There's been
a lot more literature, there's been a lot more learnt about the structure of education
and how it differs and psychology has changed over the last 20 years. Why hasn't the education
sector changed? Why hasn't its format changed? You know it still teaches in a very mainstream
way which doesn't meet, it didn't meet everybody's, I won't say it didn't meet anybody's but
it certainly didn't meet everybody's attention when they were growing up. It certainly didn't
appeal to everybody in their own learning style.
Well that's a fair point, like I think there is a lot of idolisation when it comes to certain
classical works and I think of mice and men is a good book but you are correct, it's the
one I learnt as well. I don't know, I think it's an interesting book in forms of history,
in forms of sociology, in forms of learning about racism, class differences, the great
depression, overcoming obstacles and stuff but you're right, other stuff has been released
and in 20 years you would, like don't get me wrong maths isn't going to change but the
way that you teach maths has changed.
Yes absolutely, but you also have to take into account the fact that everybody you have
sat in front of you, now classrooms have got bigger, the teachers are teaching larger number
of children in front of them and each one of those individual children learns in their
own way. Do you know how much of a task you're asking an adult to be able to communicate
what they're trying to teach to 35 different individuals, 35 to 40 different individuals
that all learn in a different way. It's just not possible.
I will admit that has crossed my mind, just as you have children in the education system
now my experience of the education system is different because I've worked in an art
college for a year and I also worked in a school for people with autism for five years.
I find it interesting when people, you know what there's a lot of things we'll touch
upon but I will admit completely agree, even though the class sizes at the school that
I worked at were smaller because of the needs of the pupils you sometimes would have two
and in the more difficult classes maybe even three teaching assistants. So it's kind of
weird that you've got teacher is this job where you're paid just enough to get by and
then you've got a load of teaching assistants which I'm going to be honest with you are
more than often mums with kids of their own teaching other people's kids in order to try
and translate from the broad speech that the teacher has to give to 35 people to try and
translate it to those individual children. Yeah. And sometimes it works and sometimes
it doesn't but I don't. I think there's obviously a decent message that the system is trying
to portray with the subjects that they're trying to teach that they continually bring
up as but the vision that they have in that office of that teaching model is not going
to filter down all the way to the teacher in every single school in the country as effective
as it was in their mind when they're in that office up there. You know, they're instead
of having this concretized model of this is what you will teach and this is how you will
teach it. There needs to be an element of freedom for those teachers to assess their
classroom and go, you know what, I know what the syllabus is and I'm going to teach that
but I'm going to teach it in a way that you guys are going to get it. I guess that's a
large part of the challenge of teaching is the prep. Yeah. You know, which I I will I
will tell you what that actually kind of brings us through to one of my points here. What
would you do? What would you do Nick to change the current education system? It's a difficult
one to because you've said about freedom but like it's it's a difficult one to obviously
I don't I'm not a professor of education and I don't profess to know everything about
education. I do know how I would have logically broken down the education system if I was
in a position to have done so and that and that is to teach core basic skills of language
both reading and written language, sorry spoken and written language, mathematics as a base
because maths is a universal language. It's not a language that you learn in English and
then you have to learn it all over again when you go to French. I can imagine there are
potentially aliens on the other side of the universe that still know maths in the same
way that we do just in their own format. I would I would hope they don't have base 10.
No sorry base nine that's what we're working with. But the fact is that the universe is
maths so you when you think about it in that way that is a base skill that you must have
at least as a basic going into adulthood everything is this plus that and equals this and then
you go into the basic science of methodology where you like formula and what was the model
of okay so hypothesis hypothesis yeah so this is what I expect yeah exactly planning execution
and then observation you know yeah so that that in itself not as like oh you're going
to learn this about you're going to learn about plants and and whatever else like that
if you want to specialize absolutely go and learn that but as a base format I think it
should have been more along the lines of you need to learn how to problem solve how to
identify there's a problem and then experiment with the best way to solve that problem and
how what you can learn by those experiments that you've taken and how you can develop
other other techniques from it because I think that is basic life isn't it and then another
subject which is not covered in school which needs to be covered in school is social social
economics I know people go into school when they spend time with their friends but one
thing that I never learned in school which is something that is taken for granted is
how to like how how people are supposed to be like how they're supposed to live and behave
and coexist in the society where we live that like the workings of a close knit society
and especially with the development of technology but how like why are they not teaching our
children how to how to be kind to other people and how to expect people to be kind to you
and how to react when people aren't kind to you and how to get the best out of a situation
that you go into and how to apply yourself to be the best that you could be in that situation
but the psychology how to positively resolve conflict exactly because they don't what they
do is they kind of go where you're in like how many fights happen in the playground I
can remember numerous times I witnessed fights and was in the middle of a fight etc in school
but there was no this is how we're going to talk about the problem what they do is they
just sit you in the headmaster's office afterwards and just tell you off about the fact that
that even happened if you don't teach us how to problem solve how to discuss our issues
and then and then resolve our issues then how are we going to actually do that what
you're going to do is you're going to create an aggressive nation some like so when adults
leave school and they end up in these positions of power where they go in they end up as the
colonels of our armies and and the leaders of our government instead of resolving their
problems they're going to just aggressively go forwards into into conflict because that's
how they've always dealt with their problems I think it's interesting that you bring that
up one of the reasons why I got slightly disillusioned about the education system was because I
noticed how the children were growing and how they were leaving all that I was working
at and I felt that even with the support that we were giving a number of the students we
weren't equipping them for life yeah I don't know how to positively state it like I felt
like we weren't raising your raising autistic children with additional support and then
helping them becoming a functioning adult I sometimes felt like we were institutionalizing
them to expect certain forms of help which they're not always going to receive yeah and
it's not just the autistics the autistic schools either I think the mainstream education is
victim and is victim to that same problem where the education that they are delivering
is so institutionalized that it's quite frequently for the majority of the public when they leave
school it's clipping their wings it's not allowing them to be equipped in a way that
they can flourish they end up leaving the school system not equipped going into school
not not sorry into work feeling completely undervalued completely underachieving and
they just fall into depression as a result maybe that's just a very strong opinion of
mine but it is something that's happened like something I'm going to quickly share with
you is that this is something which has come about in the American system this guy called
Rockefeller donated 1.27 billion dollars into the American education system but because
he had paid for it he got to shape it and I even just started even just starting who
started public schools in England I get video after video after video about this American
dude and what he did in order to control the school system and how it is by design made
to not make free thinkers but to make workers yeah yeah I can completely understand that
so just to obviously I want to just the name that you've dropped there is quite a quite
a significant one and I'm sure I'm sure he's going to come up time and time again but Mr.
Rockefeller is part of a big family of extremely rich people that have come to shape a lot
of what we know as the world we live in today now the education system predominantly promotes
the use of the right hand side of the brain the right hand side of the brain is what we
use for memory recall logic problem-solving it's it's the main it's the main part of the
brain that is used in day-to-day life nowadays especially because what we do is we absorb
information assimilate it logically on that side of our brain and then allow the left
hand side this is how the brain is supposed to work anyway you assimilate it logically
and interpret it logically and then you use the left hand side of your brain to creatively
develop that information that you've got into potential potential for other outcomes you
know whereas if you only exercise the right hand side of your brain you don't have the
ability to then change that piece of information that you've you've assimilated into something
which which allows for growth and potential you literally just have that is the information
I've digested and then I'm going to give that back out afterwards so it's just it's just
it's just assimilation regurgitation that's all you have you have I was told that this
is the case and therefore that is what I'm going to tell everybody else you know that's
it completely nullifies free thinking absolutely I think that also kind of comes on
that connects with media and how we process information nowadays yeah it's all kind of
done from a particular point of view another thing which I disagree with is with YouTube
and Facebook feeds where the algorithm just feeds you more of what more of what the what
you've clicked before yeah yeah or what you liked like so it gets to the point where you'll
have loads of people with varying views never seeing the same material and their realities
will be completely separate and that in itself isn't necessarily bad but it's when it's
imposed artificially you know like I'm okay with people two different people from two
different nations who never meet and never talk to the same people having different ideas
in my mind that's normal but two people living in the same society maybe even next door to
each other having polarized opposite views because their entire experiences are so alien
from one another that they couldn't even possibly relate is worrying in my mind at least like
maybe it shouldn't maybe I'm maybe I'm trying to control what people think there but like
I think there should always be just some factual not even middle ground but common ground between
human beings but I think the crux of it is I mean obviously media as a as an organization
is purely information filtering organization designed to create a centralized perspective
for the nation for the world now and its sole intent is to generate a state of fear and
consumership where you are scared to question squared scared to go out and the only means
you have to make yourself feel better is through the use of objects that you have to buy or
money that you have to spend and when when the entirety of your economic or socioeconomic
pyramid is built on financial gain which is what the system is entirely built on especially
when you come to education the whole point of education is to learn to go to work to
earn a living to provide eventually for your own family and to continue to then teach that
to your your generation your generation in order for them to go ahead and do exactly
the same thing when when you have when you have a structure that is entirely profit led
and and and has monetary value then its meaning and its its potential is completely lost you
have a system which which doesn't think of generating the best potential for individuals
it has a system which is generating the best potential for singular singular people in
singular organizations and it's it's despicable to to say the least
oh that's a fair that's a fair point like um it should always be about what is what
is best what i will it's my own experience was difficult because i saw when working for
a institution i saw good teachers i saw bad teachers and i saw good people and i saw bad
people sorry good people and bad people what surprised me is was that you had some bad
people who were genuinely good teachers and you had a lot of good people who were bad
teachers and not necessarily able to convey themselves or have the positive impact that
they were wanting to have it all came down to the ability to communicate the ability
to be authoritative yet approachable and the ability to bear information but i guess well
that's what it's all about yeah well the thing is when there's a monetary value to your life
when you have to earn money in order to be able to live within the society that we're
in then you have to go and find an occupation and then you are limited by what occupation
you can obtain not what your skills can achieve but what your what your what your resources
around you what's available to you you know and that means that quite often people that
like square pegs are trying to fit in circular holes because the system demands and that
that's very much the education system that has that has drilled that into young people
moving forward is that they must just go and find a job and then they end up working in
jobs that they they aren't happy in because they require because the society requires
that because of the monetary value that is on in demand you know there's also a social
pressure there as well but i feel is i i you can't blame everything on your parents or
on the educational system but i will admit that i feel i don't know about yourself i
feel a constant pressure to be uh climbing up the ladder to be making more to be yeah
to have an idea of where i'm going but where does that come from that's an education in
itself that's the socialistic education isn't it that's your parents teaching you what they
know and what their parents taught them you know um that's outside of the institution
of education that's society having its input you know but yeah even that in itself in the
sense to change like there's there's no need for you to seek personal development of like
if you don't like especially if you you're working in a job that you're not necessarily
happy in why should you try to advance in a job that you're not happy in you know what
you want to be doing you get some guys that leave leave university with top-notch degrees
and end up working in mcdonald's you know because that's what's available to them and
then they still have that social pressure on them to though you should be you should
be using your education in what way how am i supposed to do that it's nothing available
to me nearby that i can be using that degree all i can do is fill the spaces that are available
to me the only space that was available to me at the time is mcdonald's and i sure as
hell don't want to pass my way up the the the retail chain because i'm trained in in
physics or i'm trained in in in politics you know i will i will admit it did always surprise
me um when i was at university myself i learned that only the best and brightest even got
jobs in the catering industry so i had to travel over an hour in order to work at a
cafe because all the ones close to where i was living were filled by masters students
were filled by part-time students were filled by the cream of the crop if you wanted it's
it becomes a little bit sad when if you want to meet someone with 150 140 iq plus you've
got to go to starbucks you can talk to them for a split second by asking for a filter
coffee yeah like that it like honest honestly i remember um and you can always tell the
smart ones because uh they tend to that they're dying that like that you could tell them because
there's of the frustration but also if you're having a political or social debate if the
barista speaks up and trounces both of you like i learned pretty quickly don't talk don't
talk don't give them jip don't anything these people like the people set the person serving
you is not a force to be yeah they are quite often um i mean i've met i've met a very mixed
bag when it comes to to shop workers but they never underestimate anybody when when you
when you come into contact with them because you don't know what life they've lived and
as i said because as we've as we've covered in this you you can't you you can't think
that just because somebody's working in mcdonald's that they're stupid you know just because and
please don't think because i said oh like this person doesn't want to work in mcdonald's
that mcdonald's is a bad job it's just not suited to that person with their degree you
know there if like it's suited to people that looked to work in retail you know or it's
suited to people that have that have arguably it's so suited to people with an incredible
amount of drive and a good work ethic i mean have you worked in mcdonald's no but i've
we've both worked we've both worked with somebody who has i worked in mcdonald's and it is it
is breakneck and so fast and everybody that comes to your till has got a problem with
something and you just have to like if if there was ever a organization where the customer
is always right it's mcdonald's where you have to be happy with everybody that comes
to the till no matter what problem they're bringing you and you have to fix that problem
there and then because you've got a queue out the door of more people that are more
that are just as hungry as them if not more and the the wheel keeps turning you know so
it is draining you go in there for seven hours and you are constantly on the go for the whole
time in the middle of a hot kitchen with 45 people running around you all the time but
bumping into you and squeezing past you etc etc to try and get all this food out to everyone
that's going through the drive-through and coming to the till it's not an easy job not
by any means not at all like i will say i worked in catering for 10 years um but the
place that i worked at was not a mcdonald's and i've seen busy kitchens and i know that
although i was busy at times although there were times when i would really needed to pull
my finger out and i did my best and often did it's not the same it's not the same as
what you see when you look through the mcdonald's drive-through window and you see people rushing
about left right and center you know yeah like any any fast food place like is a is
a difficult job um and respect to those people who do it like to be fair there's a lot of
hard jobs out there but uh yeah like you know you don't you don't get a lot of shout outs
to this one goes out to all the mcdonald's workers yeah or these goes down to all the
people buck grinding away at kfc yeah like all the all the care workers that are working
14 hour days like seven days a week just because nobody wants to do the job and there they
are because they've got a heart driving their way through absolutely everything um absolutely
you know the real work workers of the world need need a lot of credit and quite often
they are far more educated for the job that they're doing what frustrates me as well is
also like the way that it's kind of the way that it's viewed but also kind of the way
things are going like a mate of mine did work in a care home then he started his uh started
doing uh building work yeah and then and then he started getting better at that starting
doing more organizing more organizing more organizing he's now at a point where he doesn't
necessarily need to be on site all that often yeah and i can understand he wants you know
he wants his energy so he can raise his kids so that he can do so that he can treat his
family right and all of that but like i feel oh you know what everything here is going
to be on tape like i also have a lot of respect for builders because they're genuinely making
shit yeah i think everybody who actually produces something there should be i don't know like
there's a level of esteem in that not that what we do as a oh yeah sorry just uh right
out there me and nick met at a workplace but we sustain things yeah yeah but i think this
is a lot of respect for people who make things yeah this comes back to the financial aspect
that i was discussing earlier if you take away money builders still exist still exist
you still need builders you know you still need people to provide housing you still need
people to provide like hospitals and and schools and and and leisure leisure facilities etc
so builders as a skill like construction workers electricians like they still exist even outside
of money you know so like you you you look at the amount of jobs that are purely there
for the consumer for the money you look at places like coffee shops you look at places
like like internet cafes you look at places like even insurance brokers and and and banks
like they don't exist outside of money but skills skills like builders electricians construction
workers tim plumbers they they still exist so i absolutely get what you're saying like
they are they are providing a a service which is necessary you know farmers are some of
the most like the most hard the hardest hardest workers on the bleeding planet they get the
worst deal of all of us it's unreal how much they have to pay just to be able to run their
farms and then they need to make a certain amount in order to get the in order to keep
sustaining that you know we have uh that that like the agricultural state of things in this
country is a bad thing and we do need to we absolutely need to work on that that's another
thing we should probably come back to um i think also like any any vocational stuff like
if there was anything that i could uh actually improve um in this country it would possibly
be the age at which you can start um doing vocational stuff yeah because it's so interesting
i've got one interesting fact about education here um by 1880s education was compulsory
in this country for children aged five to ten uh with the school leaving age uh progressively
being raised since then but like when it comes yeah i don't know it just it it surprises
me that there's a lot of academic stuff like of mice and men and although i enjoyed it
it's not for everyone bakespeare as well i enjoyed it also not for everyone you know
like it's you shouldn't force people to do that yeah i will admit that i do like how
free we are in this country um like one little fact i want to throw out out to you um did
you note that in 47 states in the us of america they are required uh the pledge to say the
pledge of allegiance um at the beginning of the day yeah like varying exemptions for students
or staff who do not wish to do it one of my absolute heroes is a man called shark fresco
i don't know if you know him but he i do but i want to hear his story he uh we will cover
his story but it's it will be at another time now um shark fresco um he refused to pledge
his allegiance to the at the start of class and he was questioned why he was being like
he was refusing to pledge his allegiance to to to america and he was like because i it's
not just america this is like we're all humans why are we pledging allegiance to america
we should be pledging our allegiance to humanity and unless it is humanity that you're pledging
allegiance to i don't want to have anything to do with it
that's fair yeah and that's fair enough there are there are numerous examples of people
like that with varying degrees of reaction from the system yeah surprising is that although
this is a commonly done thing there was a supreme court ruling in 1943 uh saying that
schools couldn't force people to do that and yet it's still so widely done um i like the
fact that if you want in this country you can sing god save the quick king god save
well it is god save the king now but you don't have to yeah if you're a member of parliament
and you don't do it yeah questions will be raised but it's but it is still your choice
like when uh corbin didn't sing it you know like he's that's fair enough like people are
entitled to their own to their own views but i know i'm i know i'm kind of generalizing
here but america is quite heavy with the for lack of a better term indoctrination isn't
um quite a lot of its well i wanted to talk to you about that because where where where
do you draw the line between education and indoctrination well like because i i don't
think it's fine cut i think there are elements of indoctrination in many institutions and
i think there are still some educative elements within institutions which do do indoctrination
well if you think um i'll tell you what you ever heard about the jones town massacre oh
you know what yeah let's um yeah let's hear about that and then if we've got a bit of
time afterwards i've got a couple of uh quotes here from famous people to do with education
i want to get your quote on we will want to we want to bring this back afterwards this
is going to be quite a heavy topic but indoctrination can have huge ramifications now jones town
massacre is one of the best examples and i use the term best in very very very very
loosely here because there is nothing good about this situation but um a man called jim
jones started something called the people's temple in indianapolis in america in 1955
now the people's temple was quite socialistic quite marxist in its scope it preached christianity
to some degree but it was very very marxist in its view views i think they called it epistotic
socialism and they like they believed in um well i'm going to be honest with you because
i uh because of my own beliefs i can actually see some of that although you get people from
all kinds of different political backgrounds um kind of preaching in a way their own political
view as if it's from the bible there are several bits which fit there like uh i think there
was one point when john the baptist was speaking to jesus and jesus literally one of the things
is uh the person who has two shirts asked to give one of them away to the person who
has none right it's just yeah there's a lot there's a lot of that sort of stuff in there
so so jim jones was very strongly viewed um very strong strongly opinionated he built
the people's temple and it wasn't just one there was numerous people's temple from 1955
all the way through to 1975 when he decided that he was going to up sticks and leave america
as a general and go and start his own socialist village in guiana in america which they named
jones town now over a thousand people from his people's temples went to guiana to jones
town and lived in his uh convent for lack of a better term together yeah attempted uh
utopian society exactly and it was an attempted utopian society but it was very driven by
jim jones now because they were in the middle of the guiana jungle jim was able to do many
things with these people he was able to tell them like filter the information that they
were receiving he was able to tell them and indoctrinate them into believing that that
was the best place that they could be they built the internet it was it was so cleverly
done they built the entire village themselves they they chopped down the local trees and
built their houses and built their pavilion where they all spent all of their time together
and they farmed their food and and you can see that the there was a thousand people that
had this view this belief that what they were working for was was a wonderful thing led
by a man who was very very twisted very he was not a very nice person at all and it he
as i said he was filtering information telling them things like the cia were were trying
to take to bring their utopia down the the american government was trying to bring their
utopia down their their family members like driving a wedge between them and their family
members by saying that their family wanted to to bring them away from their utopia and
stop their dream from from happening that in 1978 november november the week leading
up to the november 18th he started what has now come to be described as a six days six
day mental siege with the inhabitants of jones town where he was waking them up very early
in the morning with a a panic siren preaching a cry alerting them all using a a code word
they called white knight which was where everybody had to go and meet in the in the pavilion
where he would then tell them that that there was there was people on their way that they
were going to they were going to attack their village and just generally instilling this
sense of fear and dread that this this utopia that these people had lived and and brought
about brought about was going to be to be ended because of these people these evil people
that were going to come and take it all away there was a counselor in america called counselor
ryan who literally just wanted to go with a number of the relatives of people that were
in jones town to go and see jones town and see that it was okay that their their family
members were okay but because everybody was ostracized from their family members nobody
knew so they literally had to just go and see and they through negotiations eventually
counselor ryan goes to jones town and on the 18th of november he's in jones town a number
of people decide that they're going to leave jones town and i think there was about 14
15 people that decided they were going to leave jones town they didn't want to be there
anymore now you think 14 people compared to the thousand people that are there it's not
a large amount of people but jim jones didn't like this and what jim jones what jim jones
did was he told someone to go and kill these people before they got on their plane to leave
and then this person did go to the airstrip and kill or try to kill everybody he killed
the counselor killed a couple of people that were trying to get on the plane a couple of
journalists and then what that created jim jones was then able to tell his people that
if they didn't like what they were then part of was a murder they were guilty by association
at that point and that's what he told them he said are you going to stand in the way
of this are you going to you're going to rat out the person that that committed this murder
or are you are you just going to they're going to destroy everything you're going to stand
together and and accept the fate that they're going to they're going to they're going to
bring upon you because you're you're part of this murder now you're in this or are we
going to have a or are we going to take the law into our own hands choose our own fate
and then what he he instigated with them was what he called a revolutionary suicide and
on the on the morning of november 19th 918 people including children were found dead
in jones town where they were poisoned through the use of cyanide and other drugs which they
most of them willingly took but some were injected through like oral syringes and jim
jones himself was shot in the head not even by his own hand he had to get somebody else
to do it and it was the biggest mass suicide in history which was all the subject of information
and education by manipulation so indoctrination is a very very powerful tool and if if and
it's something we all need to be very very very careful of because it can lead to very
very devastating things and those people when when they decided to take that poison they
had no other choice to them you if you put yourself in their perspective in their shoes
you can in some crazy way understand why they took that poison because everything they had
lived for the past three years at a minimum but their their religion for the past 20 years
was whipped out from underneath them and then everything they'd lived was a lie and they
had no other alternative was no other there was no other option left to them and it was
all constructed by by this twisted twisted individual so i mean it's it's a crazy situation
sir is this where the meme of the like the idea of the it's also a meme that's used in
american kind of uh pop culture a lot is the idea of the cult that goes up to a hill or
goes into the woods to drink kool-aid yeah don't drink the kool-aid is where it comes
from yep yep um but yeah yeah so indoctrination is a very very powerful tool and we need to
be very very wary of indoctrination as as as a world wow well that's that's definitely
something true and that does fit in with one of my quotes that i've got here so um a a
number of famous people have got things here about education gonna gonna start looking
at those although that's a that's an incredible story and that's that's terrifying and i guess
that's something i think that's what separates in my mind a legitimate religion or a legitimate
culture subculture or group from a cult with a cult you don't get a choice with a with
a culture you can leave you know yeah that's a whole that's a whole other thing as well
for another time um sorry it's just i realized i was moving quite quickly away from that
and that is a very that's a very deep story there yeah not story that is a incredibly
dark turn of events uh honestly sorry to hear that that happened but i'm better off for
knowing that it happened and that's where those pop culture references come from um
yeah and here we are here we are what 45 nearly 50 years on from that point um still no more
um no more aware of when you're being indoctrinated and the impact in which it has they do teach
some critical thought in english classes i noticed when i was trying to help about um
five years ago like they get you to examine the text and realize is it persuasive text
is it this kind of text is it um yeah but i think self-awareness is a massive uh is
a massive thing there okay well um one thing which uh aristotle said is that it is the
mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain sorry to be able to entertain a thought without
accepting it which i think uh is incredibly true because it in order to understand someone
else's opinion you have to at least entertain the thought yeah but it doesn't necessarily
mean you accept their their way of thinking is true it just means you have to think well
if this is true from their point of view then and then you try and kind of connect some
of the dots about how they if that's not the epitome of the podcast and the whole reasoning
behind it then i'm not really sure what what is the reasoning behind it like we are trying
to listen to all the different or or discuss all the different opinions and kind of even
if we don't agree with them just by a kind of highlight the fact that they do exist and
that is a perspective that some people some people have and although it's not our own
it's definitely one worth one with value and one that has has meaning for some people if
uh if anyone's listening and you uh either disagree strongly with something we've said
um by all means don't go on a hate rampage but do bring it to our attention and we will consider
like you know giving you an answer and stuff like i'm not going to promise i'm going to answer for
every mispronunciation although i hope or every um every foot that i put wrong as i don't think
it's possible to say anything or any uh exclusive uh thought idea or statement without offending
somebody but uh if uh if you do strongly disagree send us uh a reasonable uh message and we'll do
our best best to answer it may even like pull it over into the next episode i guess okay um
another one another thing to do
all right so socrates said education is the kindling of a flame not the filling of a vessel
would you agree with that absolutely you know what since having left school i've sought education
more than i i ever did when i was in school um like even even now whilst i'm working like i'm still
i've still asked for every piece of training that i can because it interests me and i want to learn
i want to learn everything that i can and i'm 35 years old it never stops i think i think if you
can find the enjoyment of learning new things like you can really really start fulfilling your own life
absolutely man okay um another one here uh education is the most powerful weapon which
you can use to change the world any ideas on who said that um i would probably go along the lines
of either gandy or
similar love popularity um different continent no i can't i can't think no that's fair enough it
is a bit unfair i'm not trying to be unfair on purpose but uh nelson mandela with fair enough
yep yep okay um as i i'm not sure if this is necessarily uh to do with education here but
there was a number of so uh the gentle well yeah the famous playwright mark twain had a
number of things to say about education um one of them was don't let schooling interfere with
your education uh kind of pointing out the clear difference between learning things and sometimes
school-based activities uh another one was um education has its limits this is one i actually
really disagree with and i imagine you'll disagree with me with as well but um another thing he said
was everything's got its limits you cannot educate iron ore into gold which the moment you start using
any kind of parable parable uh like the moment you take away the humanity from the person and
compare them to an object you immediately go into the territory of belittling yeah but i don't know
what are your thoughts on that well i i kind of i think it's a matter of perspective that one there
um because i think there is a limit to education because i think there is a point in which
education stops and what you're doing is you're developing them you're developing past that
education you know and then that becomes the education of the future your findings then your
your your theologies become the education of the future and that's the expansion and evolution of
humanity isn't it uh point yeah okay one of my favorite um uh quotes relative to education
my sorry this isn't just one of my favorites it's absolutely my favorite fantastic i knew you'd have
one and this is absolutely my favorite quote in education terms is albert einstein albert einstein
said you couldn't judge a frog on his ability to climb a tree
that's fantastic and i think it's so important to remember that when you're in
when you're in like the education sector now when you look at the institution of education
like you're you what that's essentially what they are doing they are judging frogs on their
ability proverbial frogs by i'd um on their ability to climb trees they're looking for
for birds to be able to take down elephants you know and on their own they're unable to do that
you cannot you cannot expect that to be the case you need to equip our young people nowadays
with the ability to identify their strengths and then the the the knowledge in which to develop
those strengths into into tools that they can then use to better humanity
i mean annoyingly i partly this heat but also the fact that i'm tired i don't have a counterpoint
to that that's uh very well put interestingly the same bloke i said the following
um anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new yeah absolutely
absolutely absolutely i think he you know he definitely tried a number of new things although
i'm not sure if he's actually my favorite scientist or not i'm actually more of a fan
of marry curie myself but uh that's something else for another time okay well that's covered
most of the material that i've got here um there was one question from earlier which i don't think
we've covered what countries do you think do do education better which country yeah like like do
you think there is a better system out there like currently on the world market of education i think
there are a number of better systems i think the larger the country you go the more important it
is for the people that run that country to dumb down their education and keep their education
simple in order to make it easier for them to lead their country so if you're looking for a
better education model you normally just have to go to a smaller country and i think somewhere like
sweden probably has the better or iceland probably has some of the best education not just
education but health sector models as well um like the population smaller than the country
like the population smaller and the freedom in which that population has is is so much greater
and if you look at their their mental health levels in their countries you'll find that the
level of mental health in those countries is so much lower than it is in big countries like the
us and and the uk as a result interesting yeah yeah but weirdly enough there are a number of
different methods which are are pioneered by um kind of the scandinavian countries like sweden
norway they all do uh i'm not sure which country it is but i know one of them um their kindergarten
system is you have to be able to show that you can play with others before you're put into
mainstream education which in some ways is amazing because it shows that you need to show the social
skills and ability to cooperate before you can do it but in some ways it's boring because
not all kids are massively sociable yeah you go back to what einstein said
it um what about the climb yeah with the climbing the the tree tree frog frogs climb trees
well he wasn't aware of that was he was he was it was probably before he was why tree frogs were
widely known of but the the essence is there yeah yeah like trying yeah like there are flying fish
but you don't you can't judge a fish on its ability to fly yeah exactly yeah that's it
but okay well i realize that there are other things that we could have covered here like
the different methods of learning of uh kinsetic is it kinsetic confetic i can never remember all
of it but i'm afraid we've gotten through most of the material that i've prepared there um do you
have any closing statements on the subject of education it's kinesthetic by the way um
um no no i i don't have anything else i've actually really enjoyed this episode um okay
right um one final thing is uh did you know that uh so we're not going to go massively into it but
we are currently recording this from kent um did you know nick that one of the first schools in
this country is actually really close to where we are right now no i didn't about like 20 minutes
up the road no i didn't where was it okay st augustine's abbey in canterbury oh i thought
you were gonna say canterbury yeah yeah it was actually uh one of the first schools in this
country one of the first institutionalized schools well one of the first institutionalized schools
you are absolutely right but uh that one was uh literally five uh sorry 500 ad wow yeah wow okay
yeah yeah so that's uh i don't know like considering i've never been there i've been in the car park
opposite it i've been i've been to canterbury but i can't say that i've been to st augustine's
yeah i've been to the cafe i've been to the greasy spoon cafes around the corner from it
i walked past it a bunch of times needless to say you got what you made a punch right outside it oh
well but but i didn't realize it's kind of but it's not that that that wasn't because he received an
education inside of it or he didn't receive an education inside of it no you're right you're
right i diver but it's just kind of interesting that there can there is amazing stuff buried
all around and often it kind of uh we take it for granted in this country well there's a piece of
education which i think could be uh could be pursued a lot more than it is which is the
actual history of the country that we live in history as a topic is one of the most incredible
things that i've i've got into more since i left school i think when i was in school it was one of
the most boring subjects to to listen to but since leaving school learning history has been one of
the most enjoyable things that i've done absolutely absolutely okay great well um you've all been
listening to uh pods with nick and james um thanks a lot for listening uh do you want to decide what
we're gonna focus on next week uh whilst recording or do you want to have a quick chat afterwards
well i think i think we'll uh there's a structure that i want to go forwards with when it comes to
future topics which i'll talk to the viewer the listeners about now which is going to be
i'm going to open a reddit and for okay so they get a bit of say for people to have an input on
what they want us to discuss in future future podcasts but we'll settle on a decision later
and obviously for those people that are listening and want to have your input on that reddit
keep an eye on the uh the subject for the link and um go and have your input on reddit
great well to anyone who has been listening sorry and thank you take care guys
so