 Think Tech, I'm Jay Fidel. We're talking about history. History is here to help. And the question of the day is how can history help if we don't know history? It's an indictment of history education in America. And we have a perfect, perfect individual to help us discuss this, a history professor at UH Manoa for many, many years. Peter Hoffenberg, who knows a lot about history, including American history, also including European history. And now we're going to talk about history, education and see what happened and what it means. Hi, Peter. Okay, so I guess I'm guilty by association. So I will now take the fifth and the show of mine. It's like a 400 times fast. Right. So thanks for inviting me. And it's obviously a very big and very important question. So why don't you shoot at me some more specific things on your mind? And I'll try to address what I think you've tapped on to a very important concern that people constantly refer to the past. They think they're often referring to history. And they're often abusing it or distorting it, which is not new. But I think as we've talked about every week with social media, right, the game is out. So what used to be a reference in a printed work or reference in a classroom, now is a reference on TikTok or Facebook. So go ahead and treat me like a kindle, hump me and rip into me as the as the face, the face of the history education community. You're the guy who actually teaches it. And, you know, the problem is that, you know, the hinterland has no idea about this country. They claim to be patriots, right? They throw the American flag at you all day long. They make statements to suggest that they know more about history and American history than you do or that anyone does. And yet they know nothing. But I tell you, this for me, Peter, this sort of came to a focus when I started looking at some of the materials that have come into the public conversation over the last few weeks. P.S. I minored in American history in school. And I loved American history in school. And I love finding out what happened in the 19th century and the 20th century. And for all centuries. But I realized from some of the things that have come out of the public conversation in the last few weeks, that my history education is really seriously deficient. Even though I cared about it, I had good professors and all that. The two things that I refer to specifically are the Ken Burns video that played on PBS is still playing on YouTube. And you can see it if you want right there. And it's called the U.S. and the Holocaust. Now, you can say, well, what does that teach us about American history? Well, tons. First of all, there's a lot of footage on the Holocaust you've never seen before. And that's revelation. But it's also a lot of information on the U.S. reaction to the Holocaust that you haven't seen before or even heard before. That's revelation. Let's say I'm a history student and I'm an American history student. How come I never heard of this before about how the State Department was anti-Semitic about Franklin Delano Roosevelt being afraid to take steps to help the Jews? And these are revelationary things. I really didn't come into this time in my life thinking I was untrained in history, but I am. The second piece of information is Rachel Maddow's Ultra, which is a podcast she just started last week. And Ultra has like only three episodes so far. There'll be another one next week. She promises one a week on Mondays and you can find out on just Google Rachel Maddow and Ultra. And she talks about the 1930s and 1940s where Father Kaufflin had a tremendous effect on various communities around the country and religious anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism was racist and political groups that wanted to assassinate large numbers of members of Congress and take over the government, overthrow the government, not dissimilar from January 6th or worse, who accumulated collected, stalled munitions from Army arsenals and all kinds of war material. They were going to use this in a shooting war with Congress and with the government. And involving a lot of people who were active in the Army at the time and a lot of people in general, they were recruited. So we have this happening in Brooklyn. It's called the Brooklyn Boys. We had it happening in Boston. We had it happening in the Midwest. And we had it happening in LA. And what saved us from the accumulation of these organizations that were dedicated to wrecking the Constitution, the rule of law, and the democracy in the late 30s and hand in glove with anti-Semitism and killing all the Jews, the war intervened. The war in terms of Pearl Harbor and then the subsequent declaration of war by Germany and Italy against the United States. And then sort of changed the focus and thankfully the groups that were planning to overthrow the government were fragmented and disappeared. But the Department of Justice was not effective. The FBI was not effective. And had there not been a war, a very looming question is that they might have prevailed in one or more theaters around the country. They were strong, well-funded and well-armed. So I didn't know this. I had no idea about that. I've heard of Father Kaufland. I've heard of Charles Lindbergh. I've heard of Henry Ford. But I never knew how far they had gone and how much money and weapons they had accumulated and what their plans were. So I feel ill-educated in history. And I feel that a lot of people in this country don't even come close to my level of historical competence about American history. And if you don't know what happened, if you don't know American history, you are ill-suited to talk about patriotism, ill-suited to talk about the condition of the government, the meaning of the Constitution, the rule of law, and what we must do, have to do in order to preserve it, as Benjamin Franklin said. You have to keep the Republic and you have to take steps. You cannot be ignorant. So where have we failed, Peter? Why is the so many people in this country ill-equipped to understand American history? Several quick answers that we can talk a little bit longer. One is you've hit upon perhaps the apple in the Garden of Eden in that the way history has always been written formally, regardless of the country, is its attachment to nationalism. So what you call patriotism is extreme nationalism. And that's something that we historians are trying to unpack. But if you look at the last 200 years of people writing and teaching history, regardless of where it's being written and taught, written, China, Nigeria, Egypt, there's been this marriage that what we're talking about is the birth and rise of a nation. And when you start talking about that and picking things, you're opening up the invitation to patriotism. So one important answer for us is to try to disentangle nationalism from actually thinking and writing about history. And there are ways to do that, but the political climate is against it. So you could talk about regions, you could talk about groups, you could talk about experiences, which cross borders or are within the border but are conflicting or tense. So the first answer is really a very profound existentialist problem. And if you look at the Library of Congress, or if you look at the titles of most books, history books, they have some national title in them. And when they don't, some people get upset. So if I want to write women's history, right, there's some people are going to get upset because women are put at the center. So that's kind of the existentialist dilemma. And you put your finger right on it. And really ever since the history writing, Parkman in the US as among the first American historians in the early 19th century, Macaulay Nairu, one of the first actions Nairu used as Prime Minister of India, was write a history of India. But the purpose was right, the purpose was to cohere the nation according to a very selective view. Okay. So that's kind of the long-winded existentialist problem. Well, it sounds like there's a politicization problem. You take a particular object and you politicize it. But politicization not necessarily a partisan sense, but something that's baked into the DNA of, and you could even go back and you could say the Sinaitis and Herodotus as the first written Greek historians also put Greece and the city state first. All right. So that's kind of a, that's an important, I think existentialist question. We all have to address publishers, historians, students, parents who send their students into the classroom. We all have to address that. And I don't, when I say existentialist, I don't mean dismissive and we can't think about it. It is a large question. Now there are also some very practical questions. If you look at this country and you look at how people vote according to their sense of the past, there's a sharp division between those people who have attended or earned college degrees and those people who have not. So it's not to blame the high schools and elementary schools, which have to teach 12 subjects. But it is the argument that at some point we're not teaching enough critical thinking. And of course, when I say that people say critical race theory and they get all upset. All right. As we talked about before, that's just a dog whistle. The important part about critical race theory is the first word, not the second and third. It's critical thinking. And I think that's missing. It's kind of assumed when you teach science or math, there'll be critical thinking. Unfortunately, I think with social studies, and again, this is not to blame anybody, but there's not enough of critical thinking. Because again, the push against it is if you're criticizing or critical thinking, you're somehow a naysayer. So the challenge for historians is to understand that there are people who think in national terms, very importantly in national terms, not to dismiss them, not to dismiss people who think in patriotic terms. But I really, I go back to Baldwin and the idea of becoming America, not American 1850, but it's a process. And if you look at nationalism and patriotism as a process, then you can think of it more critically. I think the difficulty is people who have a frozen photographic image of the past. Either correctly or incorrectly, even a correct photographic image of the past doesn't mean that that's easily replicated to the present. But it's very, I don't even know, you'd have to get a neuroscientist on board. I don't know if humans are capable of truly thinking in that way. Oh, that's really important. Yeah, it is important. I don't know the science, you know, and there's the idea, you know, Rousseau said, yes, humans can handle mutually contradictory things. And it's your problem, not my problem as the author. But when he said that, I'm not sure he actually thought people could handle mutually contradictory things. And in history, the past is full of that, full of contradictions. Even the way the originalists are trying to interpret the Constitution, it's full at that moment. The original moment was filled with patriotic conflict. So I think it's part of the problem is this desire to overly simplify. And that's what I mean, neuroscience, maybe humans don't like complexity, maybe humans need individually, perhaps we can handle complexity. But maybe when individuals interact in society, I don't, I don't know, I worry about it. And I don't say it and flip it. But, you know, for example, yesterday or two days ago, Congressperson Marjorie Greene went to what she thought was a Civil War monument. And she's a Southerner who's always talking about the South. And of course, without knowing it, she actually went to a Union Civil War monument. And it was particularly poignant because it was a monument to a commander who used advanced weaponry very effectively to defeat the South. Now, on her, on her next podcast, right, you know, somebody's going to point out, and that is part of American history. That is part of the complexity of American history. And it'll be interesting to see how she and her followers can handle that. You know, maybe she'll ask for the factory in mind to be renamed after a Confederate general. So I don't think it's, I don't even think it's a matter of partisanship. I think it's a matter of complexity and not in a partisan way. I think that's part of the difficulty with President Biden right now is I do think he understands that everything comes at a cost. This is not a vote for him. It's just an example that you're dealing with one type of leadership. And I think Obama was the same way. They understood and expressed the complexity of problems. And it may be that the electorate, you know, would prefer not to know that. As Toby Ziegler said, you know, in West Wing, it's best not to know how sausage is made. And maybe people just want to eat the sausage. You know, what's the ideal though? I mean, really, I'm envisioning your first class of recent graduates, recent high school graduates who come to UH and it's history 101. And you've got a, and it includes American history, although it may include, you know, a broad swath. It's world history, right? So fresh people take, fresh persons take world history, right? Okay, say it's world history. And these principles, you know, apply to all of history. So here they are, the carte blanche, they probably don't have an appreciation of how history plays, you know, into politics and into that social psychology thing you mentioned. What do you tell them? How do you open the subject so that their brain cells are pointing in the right direction in terms not only of gathering the facts they need to know to, to have an understanding of history, but of interpreting it, you know, in a moral way and ethical way. This is a very complex, I agree with you, it's complex. And it's also perfectability, perfectability of the species. How do you point them in the right direction? You are the maven of history, that you, they're the first, you are the first history professor they have ever heard from. I mean, a dedicated. Looking at my evaluations, they're probably the last one they're going to hear. So I'm only going to speak for myself, because one of the advantages for students to go to college is, and I know that some people don't like this, is each professor is allowed to teach as they would like. And so I'm just going to tell you what I do. We have five or six folks who do world history, every community college has world history. But as you say, that might very well be their first and last history class. So it includes a lot of non history majors. So let me just give you a couple of things I try to do. One is we spend the first week reading and talking about what I call thinking and writing history. So we try to look at some of the key issues, continuity and discontinuity, complexity, what Lynn Hunt and others call presentism, trying to avoid that, right, trying to either read the past through the lens of the present, or read the past as inevitable, inevitability, excuse me, leading the present. So that's one of the first things we do. Oh, that's what Timothy Schneider talks about, too. Well, probably a lot of us, you know, it's the old polygenesis. A lot of us, in particular generation, were taught by people who believed in this. And so we just, so we inhaled it. This is probably at a much more specific level in mind, but it's a way to come into the class, don't throw a lot of facts and events at people, just lay out how we're going to approach those. Secondly, I asked them to think about, even though this scares them, I think about what we're doing as calculus. And the goal of calculus, right, is the curve never hits the line. The idea is to get an understanding of the rate towards the line, and whether how close it is to the line. So we're not asking for, as you say, that perfect match. And then thirdly, and I think all of us do this, is we try to emphasize as much as possible primary sources. So we try to emphasize as much material from the time period with certain caveats, right? It's usually translated. So it gives a translator a lot of power. And that in itself is a difficult prospect for people to try to read as if they were back in 1550. But that's a good example of calculus. It's worth trying. So, you know, people make references to, let's just say, among the uses of the past, they want to refer to the experience of a battle. They want to somehow use that. We try to go to the diaries and letters of those who experienced the battle to ask not only what was happening, but how we're using what was happening. So yesterday, and again, I don't mean to pick on Representative Reed, but that was a really good example. Okay, what did it mean to go to a union monument? Just like the discussion about General Lee's monument in Richmond, it was a very helpful discussion about what he meant back then, right? Why he meant that. And so those are what historians at least encourage our students to think about. And apropos of Ken Burns, I would ask my students to treat the same way. Think of Ken Burns as a historian. Think of that as a primary source. What is he asking? What connections does he not necessarily make effectively? I use the word bias, but not again in a partisan way. We all have a bias. So what was his bias? And then I come home, I throw up my arms, I pray to nature. And the final thing I do is I have a series of questions I ask at the beginning of the class, and I ask the same questions at the end to see if the students have been willing to rethink. You mean the one class or the whole course? Why do that with all the classes? But in the introductory one, there are questions about actually doing history. When we get to the advanced courses where students have had some history, it's more about, for example, a question they had coming into the class. How would they respond to the question afterwards? But specifically in the lower division, there is a question, what does it mean to think and write historically? They asked that at the beginning and at the end to see whether there's been, and there may not be any changes, right? But to see if there are any changes. And then when I ask the same other questions, I can get a sense of whether in practice, right? They're actually thinking historically. So one of the questions is, what do you already know about this subject? I would like to know more about it. At the end of the class, have you found out more and what has that taught you? So we, I mean, I think I speak for my colleagues counter to what the usual public discourse is. Teachers and educators actually take this seriously. They work very hard. And for example, apropos the critical race theory, nobody uses that in the classroom. Nobody even has time to use that in the classroom. And this whole thing has gotten way, way into the artisan realm, which it has in the past, as you know, knowing American history, there have been moments, right, where the classroom has been not just a laboratory but a battlefield. That's not new. Reconstruction is very much that. Again, what's new as we've discussed before is this seemingly solidified partisan split. You know, yes or no. And the ability of social media to create a national movement. So if you look at the people going into classrooms in Florida, their information, their template comes from a national organization that I'm concerned about Florida per se. And I think that's changed the ability, particularly with a lot of money, the cock brothers are behind it, and the technology, they've been able to mobilize a campaign in which, you know, the individual Florida classroom, the individual Nebraska classroom is attacked in the same way by really local Leninists. I mean, these are local Bolsheviks out to seize and take over the classroom. That's not Marx. That's Lenin. That's Mao. That's Hitler. That's Hitler. Yeah, to take over the classroom. But again, I think very importantly in all the evidence points to this and the other side does it too, right? I mean, there are national movements on the other side. So this is not to say that, you know, the ADL doesn't provide local information. Of course, it does. But when somebody stands up and says, you know, I'm particularly concerned about Florida classroom, the template and questions are often national questions that have been normalized, you know, not necessarily. So, you know, the attack on critical race theory, it really, it probably was not taught in that Florida classroom, but the same question would be asked in Nebraska, Oregon, et cetera. And it puts us, we're really okay, because we have traditionally freedom. Who's who's we are university and college professors. So people in Hawaii will remember Professor Lee. He was fired over the Vietnam War. The case went to the screen court. We're pretty well guaranteed. I mean, I know the right wingers are worried about the woke movement. But those are really very ice. Usually the people have retired and have decided that they just don't want to deal with it. But high split sub college instructors don't have those kinds of protections. Well, I want to move to that, you know, UH, I'm not too worried about where the blue state and UH is a may I call it in general a blue university. But there are places in the country where the educational track of an average person doesn't go to college unnecessarily. I'm not sure those colleges are at the level you're describing. It goes through high school. And then his or her education is formed up by social media targeting him or her to be in a certain bubble, educating him, taking over whatever education he had. But before we get to social media, I just wonder what it's like to be in a school where, for example, the school board has a book burning of all the books they don't like. That's shades of 1935 and 36, isn't it? And it has, you know, rewrites history, rewrites the fact and never gets to the critical thinking part, never ever. So when they graduate, they're different than the students who come to you and the students that you educate. What are they like? Okay, this is this is really a scary question. But what are they like that makes them so vulnerable to being brainwashed? Well, I think the causes of that, particularly for 12 and below are a couple of things. I know we don't have much time. One is this idea that there should be mandated lessons or mandated themes, etc. Now, if we lay it out as mandated themes, it's okay. But increasingly across the country, those mandated themes are linked to specific historical quote unquote truths. So proper to the problem is the denial of freedom to teach within the classroom. Because of what seemed to be, you know, reasonable expectation that kids across Massachusetts should all know the same things. But we've taken know the same things away from critical thinking to know a checklist of facts. So having said that, though, it's more than anecdotal that individual teachers, you know, wink wink at that, do the do, you know what they can, and at the same time, do introduce critical issues. So that's one response. The second response is one that your viewers all know, which is an exodus, exodus en masse. You take the pandemic, you take these new attacks, you take under salary, Hawaii is among the worst, but it's not the alone. And we have, like in nursing, a massive drain. And so as I said, in East Germany, people vote with their feet. The response of some teachers is enough, you know, Diana, this is the final straw. Thirdly, there is some pushback. And the pushback comes particularly from the teacher's union, which looks at this, you know, as a workplace issue. You've hired me to teach second grade. You've given me some guidelines. And now you're mandating the books I have to use and what I can say. And I would think that I don't know if the Supreme Court would take a case like this, right? I mean, the Supreme Court has decided whether to take a case or not. In the lead days, they took it. But I can see a very similar case coming up with under 12, particularly public school teachers. I don't think the Supreme Court is going to touch private school. But I could see that coming. And of course, people, people victimized, right, as always, are the students. They're the kids who are being used as pawns. I mean, they're just simply pawns, like the migrants in a bus. They're used as pawns. But it is true, as you say, they go home and it's quite possible. On TikTok or Facebook, they're getting the same kind of non critical thinking. Having said that, it is possible to go on social media and find critical thinking. It is possible. So I think one of my goals, and this gets back to a little bit of what you said at the beginning, is one of the things we teach the first week, is if you're going to look at a written text critically, please also look at social media critically. So we provide a sheet and go over with the students, you know, you don't want to look at who produced it, what kind of language are they using? Are they presenting alternative views in a reasonable way? You don't have to agree with the other guy, but are you presenting the argument? So it's a discussion. So I treat social media the way I would treat Luther's Theses from the 16th century, right? Look, they're facts. They're what we live with. And we ask our students to think about Luther's Theses in context and think about it critically. All right, think about TikTok in context. Think about TikTok critically. So I think, again, sorry to be long-winded, part of the difficulty is, as we talked about, social media is very seductive. Like television was, remember people complained about television in the 60s, the way they're complaining about social media? You know, the famous line at the Senate that TV was a vast wasteland, very famous testimony. You know, a lot of the same criticisms were TV, like seductive, people spent too much time on it, they don't turn the channel, similar issues. And we've seen, you know, I think we've seen TV special cable TV really expand in ways that do include critical messages. But there's a dynamic here. You know, for example, if you look at Vladimir Putin's propaganda, an internet research agency product that he was showering in this country within the 2016 election, and thereafter, and probably right now, you know, it has been, it has become much more nuanced. The lies, the manipulations, the facts, they're not necessarily black and white. It's very sophisticated stuff. They're using, you know, the most advanced techniques they can think of. It's science for them. Those are science, but science. And so when you when you teach these kids about credibility and critical thinking, evaluating the sources, you, you have to be on that dynamic too. You have to, don't you have to explain to them, it was one way five years ago. Now it's another way. And you have to use your your kepi all the more actively in order to identify the lies and manipulation. This is not easy. You're absolutely right. And you could draw a parallel, not as far as lies, but say the complexity of literature, right? I mean, reading an 18th century novel is not like reading T.S. Eliot. So I'm not drawing that great. I'm not drawing the parallel that one is truthful or not, but all forms of communication, all forms of textuality have morphed and changed. And we have to be critical to the questions we ask of T.S. Eliot may not be same ones we ask of field. Okay. The other answer is, there's a third player here, right? There's social media. They're the kids consuming social media. But then they're also supposed to be the adults at the playground. And to me, I don't refute anything you just said. To me, though, the worrisome is, is the adults who know better, helping validate those lies. So the adults in the, in on the playground who look at that, look at what is Russian or non-Russian, whatever group is manipulating. And they validate it. So we've seen, again, and I'm not making this partisan, so we've seen political figures who, you know, whether we like them or not, they have some kind of traction in their constituency. We see them retweeting, right? Or Facebook posting these original invalid. And to me, that's, that's a dynamic we can change. We can't stop the Russians from doing what they're doing. And we can have a whole discussion about if we could, how would we? And I'm also, I'm not inclined to give these large telecommunications companies censorship power. That can, that can work differently. I mean, you talk about Elon Musk. If Elon Musk controls Twitter, I promise you the AFL-CIO is not getting a tweet, right? So anybody could be censored. So part of it has the old Freudian issue. You got to have the conscience to censor yourself. And people in Congress and Senate and administrations have to be the adults. They have to say, you know, the ends of my tweeting are power and office or feeling strong. They're not worth retweeting and the cost to democracy. But we don't have, but we don't have enough adults on the playground. The old Lachke argument, you know, if you say, well, okay, kid, go to school and, you know, suck up what they give you. And they're giving you something deficient. And then the parents has abandoned the parents obligation to correct that when the kid comes home. And of course, we know that in this country that has happened, it is happening in many forms all over the- Right. I would extend the word, I would extend the word parent. So teacher, older sibling. I mean, anybody who can have a conversation to suggest that either this is not appropriate or should be critical. So parents have a lot to do, as parents already. The problem also is that if you get into some of these communities that we are referring to, where the kids don't have a flying chance of understanding American history, you find that there are biases that exist within that community, in that culture. It's not just the teachers or the school boards that burn books or tell you that you can't do critical race theory. It's not just the legislators in the legislatures of that state or the municipalities. It's more than that. It's the whole culture. And in that culture, and it's really awful to watch it happen, there are people who are down on science, down on medicine, down on religion in the sense that they, you know, down on the First Amendment separation of church and state. And they would advance one religion over another religion, down on freedom of the press, down on so many things that stand in the way of education. So if I go into a classroom or a home with my brothers and sisters and parents and all that, and I run into these biases, you know, I don't have a chance because part of it, and I like your thought about this, part of these biases about religion and First Amendment and science and medicine, all these, you know, and climate change, all these things within that, or maybe affected by that, is history itself. I think that this culture is also saying to those kids, history is dangerous. You can't just take history out of the books. You can't do critical thinking. You have to listen to us, and we will tell you that although the books may say that here's a rational thought out of the Enlightenment, you've got to follow the religion we give you, and the religion tells you something different, and it stands in the way of that critical thinking. So what they're really telling you is we'll tell you the facts, and we'll tell you how to think, and we'll overlay all of that with bias against rationality. How can you learn history in that culture, that environment? You can't learn history the way that we think of history as education is constantly changing. What you're doing is you're weaponizing the past, the way I refer to it. You're having a mythical view about the past, parts of which are true, but the problem is when you look at the past and are selective, not only do you remove the things you don't like, you don't understand that some of the things are there because of their relationship to something else. If you like taking a molecule and taking out the atoms and not understanding, then when the atoms are all put together, the molecule is something different than just the sum of its parts. I think you've touched on, again, we're running out of time, so maybe we'll talk about this later. I think you've hit on, as we used to say, a lot of third rails. You don't want to urinate on the third rail, but you've hit on a lot of third rails. One is certainly what's become an attack on experts, that somehow the association with expertise is woke or wonkism, and that has a long tradition and not just a popular tradition. At least in the 20th century, that has a long tradition on the conservative side of things, that you can't trust people who manage the economy or manage the political system. That's one thing I think we can talk about. What has happened to expertise? Secondly, and I don't want to make it so really personal, I apologize to the audience. We have a problem in trust. I mean, when you look at Adam Smith and start reading Adam Smith really carefully and closely, lots of conflicts in Adam Smith, a lot. He said, one of the ways to resolve that is you have to have trust. We don't have trust in the way that he was thinking about. We have kinship trust, perhaps. We have local community trust, perhaps. We don't have larger trusts. We're all partially to blame for that because people have taken criticism of institutions to be the same as eliminating institutions. Some people certainly do that, but many of us criticize. It's like criticizing the Constitution. It's not saying do away with the Constitution. It's to make it live out its promises. To criticize the world bank, for example, lots of problems. It's not necessarily to demolish the world bank. I've mentioned that because that's a trust issue. If you're going to have globalized capitalism, and maybe we don't want that, but if you're going to have it, you need to have some kind of umpire. The world bank is a good example of a kind of umpire. I'm not saying good or bad, but if you're going to have the system, but there's no trust in the world banking. If there's no trust in the world bank, then the whole idea of loaning and the flow of capital and targeting local projects all gone. Please, viewers, don't take this away as that Offenberg's position on the world bank. I'm just using an example. One is experts, one is trust, and the third, I think, really is the ability to have some moral imagination. This was brought home to me a while ago with the previous chief of staff who said, why would anybody in Arkansas care about Wisconsin? To me, that's a fragmentation. It's the inability to morally imagine yourself to be in somebody else's shoes, even if the labels are different. If I'm not lesbian or gay, can I have the moral imagination rather than rejecting that? If I live in Arkansas, can I have the moral imagination to see a Smith called these moral sentiments? And we have a real problem with moral sentiments, those kinds of connections. So I'd be happy to talk about those some other time. We'll get my friend Joseph Tonka who's a philosopher, because these are really, they're not, I mean, I'm interested in material parts, but they're very, they're also quite apparently philosophical. They're also not new. Yeah, I think your point about caring about what happens elsewhere is so important for the preservation of our democracy and social compact. But let me ask you one other question before we run off here. And that is, how do we fix this? I mean, assuming the country has a backbone here and can take affirmative steps to fix it. There's two levels. One is the college level, which I think some colleges in this country, do not stand up to the standards that you've identified at UH for your own classes. And how do we fix it at the free college level, grade school and high school in this country, to at least get a better handle or have these kids have a better handle? Because we're not going to save, I'll go on record, we're not going to save the country until we can save education, especially history education. If we don't do this, I think we are doomed. Even if the other things work out, that one's also got to work out. So, Querie, what do we do? Okay, a couple of quick ones that we absolutely are out of time. One is to take seriously this idea of a truly free education that is publicly supported education, because in many cases, the problem you're pointing out in which public colleges are facing censorship. It's when the state legislatures determine the amount of money that goes to that college. If the institution cannot stand on its own, cannot privately fund raise, it is beholden. So that's one example. And again, I don't want to pick on anybody, but take the state of Oklahoma where this is a major issue, what gets taught at the University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, etc., the Oklahoma legislature has a tremendous amount of power. So that's one example. Secondly, in our desire for the U.S. to keep up, particularly to keep up with China, there's been an inevitable an emphasis on STEM education. And STEM education has often come at the expense of humanities and the arts. So we have to, and this has not talked to Altenberg saying, do not fund STEM, but we have to find a way in which their gain is not our loss. In other words, we have to rethink and ensure while universities cut so many humanities positions and the arts are removed from high schools in order for engineering and math and science. Now, the engineering math and science are important. Absolutely. But we have to ask, are there not funds? So that's the second one. And the third one is you're seeing it happen. Parents in school districts are organizing against the censors. Classroom teachers are saying, look, I hear you. I don't like what you're saying. This is what we teach, and they continue to teach. So there's a real battle ground in some of these school districts. The press often covers the Maoist attacking because that makes much better press. But while this is all happening, school teachers are organizing, the National Union of Teachers is organizing, et cetera, to preserve the classroom and the integrity of the classroom. My final point, and this is, I guess, it's a friendly amendment that for many years, the classroom has been a place where everybody else has dumped their problems. Problem child, special ed, political problems, change the curriculum, kids not in good shape, PE and lunches. And when we rethink education, I think we also need to think about how much the classroom, how much the school itself can actually do. And I don't mean that in a snide or snarky way. I mean, in a very practical way. Teachers are asked to be educators, social workers, police people, parents, older siblings, religious counselors, you'll get an elementary school teacher between six in the morning when they wake up and four 30 when they have to go home to their own kids. Right. They've had to do all that. And there are lots of reasons for that. I'm happy to talk to you about how that came about. It has, as most things in history, unintended consequences of goodwill, like the idea the classroom should be to teach the whole child, which is a wonderful idea from Rousseau and John Dewey. But in teaching the whole child, right, you have to address all these other things other than addition and how to read dickens. But your interest in history, so one, one law is the law of the unexpected consequences of good intentions. All right, I'll end. Sorry, that's much too much lecturing. I apologize. Peter, wonderful to talk with you. Thank you so much for sharing. Of course. We're not finished with it. We'll we'll discuss it some more because education is a is a central theme for the preservation of the Republic. Thank you, Peter Huffinberg. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.