 So, you know, you've got a situation today where across the educational spectrum in both the United States and in the UK, you have wokeism dominating. Now, arguably, this is a bit in retreat. Again, I would mention Virginia and I would mention San Francisco, but it might be in retreat in some areas, it might be, but it's under the surface everywhere and it's suddenly to a large extent in many school districts dictating much of the curriculum and it seems to be very much alive and well here in the UK. Although, again, you know, I've been speaking at a lot of schools, at high schools over the last five, six, seven years in the UK in particular. I've talked to a lot of students and suddenly issues of race and issue of sexual orientation are ones that seem to be particularly sensitive, overly sensitive and in dangerously so as a result of all this wokeness. But they let me speak and they let me present an alternative point of view to these kids and the kids sometimes are the ones rebelling against it, but they are openly still alternative point of views and they're allowing me into the classrooms, they're allowing me in front of these students, I give them a lot of credit, I give them a lot of credit for that. Anyway, the panel today had, how many were five panelists and it was quite interesting, so the first panelist was an American, a parent, I think a parent who is probably traditionally liberal, sent a left, who discovered what was being taught and was horrified and became very active within the kind of parents movement to argue against the, argue against walkers in schools in America. So she became a real activist in the United States and she argued for kind of the, you know, parental involvement in education. The second panelist was a teacher, a really interesting guy, a teacher who clearly opposes a lot of this nonsense and who I think has a, I'd say from what he said, what I understood from what he said, quite a rational view of the role of education, the purpose of education, but his view is this is something that teachers have to handle, this is something that teachers are going to have to settle internally among themselves, that what needs to be, that woke needs to be something, the whole issue of what should be taught and the curriculum is not something parents should get involved in, it should be to a large extent something that, that, you know, teachers should engage in and that the problem, part of the problem is that there's no proper educational philosophy, that there's no clear idea of what education is for and, and that he is trying to convince people, you know, to go to basics, to return to basics in terms of what is education, what's the purpose and, and, and built from there, if you will, kind of a, a, an opposition to the entry of woke and CRT into the school districts. And I have to say, much of what he said was, was quite good. Although I think he, he, like many, I think teachers and many people in call the positions of power within the educational establishment, don't think much of parents involvement and, and, and one this left to the experts. I spoke next, I'll get to what I said in a minute, but to my left was a, was a British parent who sends her kid to a private, what they call her independent school, one of the top schools in the UK, very high on academics and she is, you know, so obviously she can afford to send their kid there and she again, I think echoed the idea that parents need to be involved, that she was shocked by what, what was being taught that she has gotten involved in the schools, that she is putting pressure and she described the many difficulties in trying to reach this, the teachers trying to reach the administrators, trying to get any changes instituted in the schools. And her point was, this is not just a public school thing. This is in all schools, including the private schools. And, and that, that this is a real problem and parents better wake up and parents better get involved. I don't think there is real homeschooling in the UK. So I don't think homeschooling is a real alternative here. And then the, the, the fifth panelist was a woman, a woman of color, I guess I can't say what color, you know, very dark skin, but from Malaysia, originally from Malaysia, but could be easily mistaken for somebody who was, who was from Africa, I mean, very dark skin. And she just railed against critical race theory, railed against preferring all, all this race based identity politics. I mean, she was really good. I mean, really excellent, you know, echoed the ideas of, I guess, ultimately Martin Luther King of, of color blindness and, and, and that all these preferential treatments ultimately are hoarding people of color. So she was excellent on the whole racial issues and, and, and why COT is fundamentally wrong and needs to be abolished. And, and what was interesting, there was nobody on the panel trying to defend woke, there was nobody on the panel trying to defend, trying to defend CRT, nobody on the panel trying to defend any kind of explicitly leftist ideas, although they, you know, they probably summon the audience. But one of the things I like about what I find interesting about the battle of ideas is that it's put on by the academy for ideas in the academy is old left. And so they are much more likely to be old line Marxists interested in class, interested in economic socialism. And much more tend to be on the side of rejecting the new left, rejecting identity politics, rejecting woke, rejecting very, very, very pro-free speech. I mean, Claire Fox, who heads up the academy and runs the battle of ideas is a huge advocate for free speech. And I've had a, I think she participated in my discussion with my, my, my aversion to remembering names is just kicked in. Again, I remember his face. The British conservative who was written about Islamic immigration Douglas Murray. No, Douglas Murray. Yes, Douglas Murray. She was on the panel with Douglas Murray and myself, one of the events that there's a video of out there. Anyway, she's very pro-free speech, but she's left on, on, on economics, but she is on culture. She was pro-Brexit. She is quite nationalist. She is pro-free speech. She is anti-woken anti-CRT. So this weird modern mixture of where I think most of the middle is forming and most of the political consensus seems to be around, which is conservative and social issues, anti-crazy left on social issues, pro-free speech and, but, but left on, on anything to do with economics. And I think that's pretty much the political consensus both in the U.S. and now in the U.K. And probably in most of Europe, most of Europe, I think that is the consensus. So what's great about the battle of ideas is you get a wide spectrum of people, but it's kind of interesting. You'd expect to have kind of the wacky left better represented, but they're really not. They're not there. So you have a wide variety of points of view, but, but the wacky left is not quite there. So it was interesting. All the comments were really interesting. And all the comments were ones that I, you know, didn't, I mean, there were points that I disagreed with, but not, not, not much of the spirit of it that I disagree with, but, but I made the point. I made the point that, you know, while much of this, much of the issue here is really a philosophical issues about the nature of education and about the role of education, what education should be about and whether it should get involved in politics and, and, and, uh, cultivating a particular morality, a particular political point of view, none of that was going to change the real and the real problem. The real problem, I believe is the, the politicization of education. And I said that it was inevitable. That is, there was no way to avoid politicizing education as long as education was basically run by the state and in particular in the UK curriculum is determined by the higher ups. Now they don't dictate CRT and they don't dictate, uh, woke, but they dictate much of the curriculum and they, and they, and they define kind of the, the, the process of education and they set exams and, and, and very much the same as the United States. And there's a constant, constant, um, war of ideas going on, uh, over education. So for example, in the United States, we have had the battle of creationism versus evolution for years in, in various conservative school districts. And, and that battle, I think is ongoing. Uh, we now have battles over CRT. We have battles over a million different cultural issues. On the other hand, pretty uniformly, um, this is another example of the fact that everybody accepts leftist economics. Um, there's basically, uh, basically an acceptance, a complete acceptance and, and, and no real opposition to the fact that the dominant history textbook that is taught in American schools, high schools, it was written by a Marxist, uh, how it's in, uh, and, and that portrays America in a, in a very kind of Marxist perspective, particularly the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, uh, in the, the entire perspective that kids learn about economics through history, which is a very, very important perspective with regard to economics. You learn economic history is a Marxist perspective. And that's in American schools. And, and again, everybody studies from the same textbook and everything standardized, at least at the school board level, but even, even then everybody is, is, is teaching to the standardized tests and everything standardized from above. And, um, and when, when you theories of how to teach math, how to teach reading, how to teach something else is taught by the colleges, everybody teaches it because everything is standardized and everything the same and, and public education dominates. And even though we have private schools in the UK and we have private schools in the US, they are not a factor and there's no real competition. The public schools dominate and the public schools at the end of the day set the agenda for what all curriculum will be because standardized tests apply to everybody, including the private schools. So my point was that to really deal with all these issues, including woke and CRT and so on, what we really need is to privatize education. What we really need is to get government out of education. And what we really need is to get parents much more involved in the educational process. I, I, you know, and I used as an example, I think I've used this on a show in the past, the example that Steve Jobs gave in an interview that he did in the 1990s where he basically said, parents spend significantly more time on choosing what shoes to wear than on choosing what school their kid will go to, choosing what kind of education their kid will get. There is lots of marketing to try to educate us with regard to shoes, automobiles, a million different different things, institutions and products and values were constantly bombarded with advertising and marketing to try to educate them, us about the, the possibilities about the, the array of products available to us. But the one area where you really don't see, where you really don't see competition and you really don't see marketing and you really don't see advertising is education. You don't see billboards saying, Hey, come to my school. We teach. I'll, you know, I'll kids go to Stanford. I'll kids go to whatever. You don't see that because there's no robust competitive educational system in America. What's interesting, what's interesting is that, what's interesting is that even though I went, I went through it, I think I was in the middle of the debate, it turned out that this point about privatizing education and the role of parents and the significance of parents getting involved and making choices and getting involved in the education of the kids and taking responsibility for the kids really to a large extent became the talking point of the whole event and many of the audience comments and audience questions were related to it. And it's interesting that when you go into a panel like this and you make some bold statement about a bold solution to a problem, even though people might disagree with you, you tend to shape the, the tenor and the content of the actual debate that goes on afterwards and people will remember what you say. I found that this happened yesterday as well on the midterms in the United States. I found it because my statements were unequivocal, they were bold, they were controversial, they were radical. People paid attention and people might have disagreed and might be upset and might be, and you could tell that, but they paid attention and they listened and they had questions and they wanted to comment and they want to engage. And isn't that what we're supposed to do? Isn't that the purpose of going on these panels? They're not going to convince anybody of anything. What you want is to engage them and make them curious and make them, make them think and make them challenge and question their beliefs. And if I say so myself, I think I did that on both panels, both yesterday and today. And I do think that probably the most important question in education today is not what is being taught, this ideology or that ideology, because as we'll see, I don't, I think the schools are not as powerful as you think they are. It's culture that matters, but what's really important about education, the real education to pay it should be about privatizing education. It's interesting that the national conservatives and many conservatives of anti school choice, they're anti, anti privatizing education. They want the state involved. They want the tool that the leftist had for so many years. They wanted in their own hands. They want the power to control what is in the minds of our kids. It is really, really interesting if you read and I think I pointed this out when we read the principles of national conservatism that they want to be able to dictate curriculum for kids. They want to be able to inculcate Christian ethics into our educational system. They want to do what CRT and woke have done. They want to do it from their side. They want the same opportunity. They want public schools because they want to be able to control the minds of kids. The only way to eliminate politics from education is to privatize it and to privatize it fully. Now, you know, as I've said, I am I am willing to consider the idea of, you know, some form of vouchers, particularly in the form of education, saving accounts where if you will, the state is paying for education. As long as the state doesn't limit what kind of education is paying for, but it's paying for education, but the parents get to choose. The parents get to decide that parents can homeschool, they can send them to religious school, they can send them to secular school, they can send them to a woke school, they can send them to a conservative national conservative school, they can send to any school they want, but that there is real competition between these schools. And I think most parents don't want to send their kids to woke schools. I don't think most parents don't want to send their kids to national conservative schools. I think most parents want to send their kids to schools that teach reading, writing, math, science, that teach the content, teach the kids how to think. I think that's the focus that most parents care about. Most parents couldn't articulate it. They couldn't talk about it. But that's partially because they have become brain dead to it because they've just outsourced the responsibility for educating their kids to the government, to the state. And there's nothing worse than giving the state that responsibility often ask parents, you wouldn't use the state to send an important letter across country. You use Fed X or UPS. I just realized I didn't use this example today in my talk, I should have. And yet you're willing to drop your kids off at the post office to have them educated by the postman every single day. Now that's not an insult to teachers. It's it's the fact that when you are a government employee, the incentives, the motivations, the structures are going to be different. And of course, if you had private education, you wouldn't have a teacher's union as powerful, as strong, as influential, as dominating as it is in the United States. So in my view, the most important issue in education today is privatizing education, getting rid of the government involvement in education. In that sense, the best thing happening in education today is the education saving account bill that was passed in Arizona. And let's hope it will survive this coming election and will stay the law in in Arizona. So I'm not so much for vouchers. I am much more in support of an education saving account. That's at least the US solution. I don't know how it applied in the UK, but I'm sure there's a way to apply it in the United Kingdom as well. That is the real issue. And I think that's the only way to get rid of of woke education today, woke education in the future, the next iteration of woke the future woke the future politicization, whether it comes again from the left or the right, get politics out of education, let parents actually choose if parents are Christians and they want to send their kids to school, it doesn't teach evolution too bad for the kids, but let them do it. If parents are woke and they want to send their kids to a woke school, let them do it. But let's have real choice and real competition, real innovation in the educational space. I think we have video of the panel. So I'm hoping I think you can see it on ARC UK. I'll also probably put it up on my channel. If the video is good enough, I'll put it up on my channel as well so you'll be able to see it in the days to come. I think it was a good good panel. What I found interesting was the extent to which woke is being taught in the schools and to where to extent to which it is impacting kids. And in how prevalent it is in the UK, I've known how prevalent it is in the US, but it's all over the UK. And again, it's both, I think the most woke school I've ever spoken at in the UK is Westminster and Westminster academically might be the best school in the UK. Again, better the school, the more woke it is. Somebody actually asked, we never actually answered this question. Somebody asked, what would you prefer? Great academics woke, not so great academics, not woke. I would go to not so great academics, not woke, because you can deal with better academics. The woke stuff becomes a part of the culture becomes a part of everything. And it's very different output as a parent. But it's a horrible choice to have to make. Anyway, I was reading something just before the show that kind of struck me as really interesting. So this is a survey of 57,000 American undergraduates at 159 top universities. And they basically asked them whether they identify as LGBT or non binary. And they documented, you know, how many of them and who identified as such. And then connected it to what their education was before. Now, you would expect that students who went to public schools, or students who went to private schools where a lot of this woke stuff and a lot of this trans stuff and LGBT stuff was being taught, would be much more likely to identify as LGBT than let's say homeschooled kids or kids who went to religious schools. But that is actually not the reality. And this is a little shocking and a little surprising. But this is the data, right? And, you know, I leave it to you to think about this. Okay, so I'm reading this is from, from the from a sub stack from David French, David French is a Christian, Christian conservative and anti Trump Christian conservative. This is not not got anything to do with Trump. This is just he's reporting. He's reporting on the study of 57,000 American undergraduates at 159 top universities, found that homeschooled and parochial schooled undergraduates as or more likely to identify as LGBT or non binary as those from public or private school backgrounds. Here's the data. Those who attended parochial schools and I'm reading from the article, or were homes schooled, were at least as likely in 2021 and more likely in 2022 to identify as LGBT. In 2022, for instance, female students from a parochial school background were 11 points more likely. And those from a homeschool background, three points more likely to identify as non heterosexual compared to those from public or private school backgrounds. Non binary and other forms of unconventional gender identity were also higher among homeschooled and parochial schooled undergraduates. And I think that's fascinating and really, really interesting. By the way, I read both Barry Weiss and David French. I read the whole spectrum out there. Even some of conservatives were big Trump supporters. I read them all, including the liberal right. So isn't that interesting that maybe what happens is if you go to public school and you get exposed to a lot of this identity stuff and you get exposed to this, it's kind of no big deal and you are what you are. And and and you know, it doesn't really have an impact on your self identification. But if you go to parochial school or your homeschooled, then when you go to college, you rebel against that. And therefore, you're more likely to self identify as one of these things, whether you are or not, because it's a form of rebellion. And it's a form of the fact that you haven't fitted in in the past, because you've been in these exclusive conservative religious environments. And now you're trying to fit in. And maybe the self identification has to do with rebellion. Or maybe it's an indication of the fact that the culture is more powerful than the schools. And that is that the culture is promoting LGBTQ, LGBTQ. I mean, I believe that some people, at least particularly young people, LGBT and certainly trans as a consequence of the culture, not as a consequence of how they really feel as a consequence of attempt to rebel as a consequence of fitting in as a lot of other things other than other than how they really feel. I mean, there is a statistics about the fact that within the trans community, it is now almost 10 to one something like that girls who want to become men versus men who want to become girls, many who want to become women. And that's the flip side of how it was historically. And a lot of that has to do with the video and sound not synchronized for you guys. Anyway, so there is a lot of social pressure. It's like an in thing. It's a click. It's cool. And look, the only way to combat all of this, the only way to deal with all of this, I think is a I do believe in competition and education. I think that would be good. But that is not going to solve the more fundamental issues of sex and gender and or the bigger issues of of kids getting to know who they really are and identifying as who they really are or and, you know, not be influenced by social pressure and just general the quality of education that ultimately there has to be in addition to competition in addition to to privatization education, there has to be a philosophical revolution. We have to change the way people think about everything. And that includes a renewed respect for reason, teaching kids how to think, teaching kids about, you know, the fact the facts of history of nature of biology of evolution, which, but more importantly, using all those facts to get kids to use their mind to think logically, rewarding logic, penalizing illogic, penalizing emotionalism, penalizing the inability to reason. What we need people to get is to think to integrate. And until we do that, I think we're going to have a we have a really, really hard time dealing with again, whatever wokeism of the moment is where it comes from the left or the right. You know, and this is primarily true in the context of morality. The whole woke critical race theory intersectionality is at the end of the day made possible made possible by altruism. This idea of guilt, this idea of so called privilege, this idea of you should feel guilty for your success, this idea of egalitarianism. All of that is a consequence and a form of and comes from altruism. This idea that that you should, you know, that you shouldn't live for yourself, that you shouldn't be proud of your achievements, that you shouldn't strive to make your life the best life that can be for you. The whole notion that the focus should be on the other and that you should be humble and that you should depicate yourself and that the standard of virtue by the way is suffering. So the standard of virtue is oppression. The more pressed a particular individual is or the more he belongs to a particular group that might have been oppressed historically or is oppressed today, the more virtuous that individual is. That's all straight altruism. So we're not going to make progress against woke. We're not going to make progress against any of that without making progress for against altruism. Now, while woke is primarily a left thing, woke is made possible by Christianity, inherently by Christianity. Christianity is the philosophy of original sin, which woke, which woke thrives on woke, you know, utilizes, capitalizes on Christianity is the idea in a sense that you're born certain for. Well, certainly if you're white, according to according to white fragility, that is true. You know, it is Christianity that builds into morality and makes morality equal altruism and makes altruism and morality the same and therefore makes suffering and and and and you know, oppression, a standard by which you should measure people's morality. That is again, intersectionality to the T without Christianity, none of this is possible. And without undoing the damage Christianity is done without challenging the beliefs of Christianity primarily on the ethics primarily on the altruism, you will never get rid of some crazy kind of left. So what needs to be addressed, what needs to be challenged is the philosophy that unites the left and the right. And that is the philosophy of altruism, the philosophy of it's called an anti reason, the philosophy of collectivism that unites left and right. I mean, I think Leonard Peacock makes this point that Marxism is to a large extent, or is to a large extent a secularization of Christianity, replacing the proletarian with God, replacing the the dictatorship for the pope or the church, the church in capital C. And, you know, communing with the spirits and applying the same kind of platonic philosophy to Christianity has been applied to the proletarian. So our battle is a huge one, because it is not just a battle against woke. If you defeat woke, something else will arise instead of it, somebody else, something else with the right to replace it. And if you defeat woke and allow the right to win and the right will replace woke with their religious teachings, with their religious indoctrination, which again, is directly in the the doctrine of national conservatism. It's not about defeating this or defeating that. It is about winning on our terms. It is about winning the philosophical battles, about winning the ideological battles by changing, changing the whole perspective on how to look at these issues. As I've said many times, I think wokeism to a large extent is peaking. It's still got a runway. It's still got a lot of energy behind it. But the American people are not behind woke and they reject woke. I think the British people are not behind woke and they reject woke. I think it's seeing its peak now. I don't think it's going to become bigger than it is today. It's already huge, but I don't think it's going to be bigger than it is today. I mean, you're seeing on every front, you're seeing ESG challenge, you're seeing at every front, you're seeing real challenges. Again, I remind you of the Virginia elections and the San Francisco recall. And there's lots of other minor examples of this all over the place. There is a real uprising against the wacky left agenda. And I don't think the wacky left agenda will survive. As I've always said in the end, wackiness will survive. Wackiness will survive because wackiness is based on the particular wackiness, altruism will survive, collectivism will survive, statesism will survive, authoritarianism will survive. Whether it comes from the left and right matters less than the fact that it will survive and it will have an impact on all of our lives. That's what we need to fight. We need to fight the whole cabuto. That's what makes it on. And that's why the best solution is to privatize the schools. If you privatize the schools, you go after woke and you go after the Christian conservatives. You go after a whole bunch of them. I find it interesting, the national conservatives, while seemingly a primarily in American movement, run by an Israeli, funnily enough, Yom Khazani, they're all over the UK. So at Durham University, a kid stood up after my talk and said, well, I'm a national conservatives. I'm a big fan of Yom Khazani and, you know, started arguing with me. And during the panel yesterday about the US election, there were a number of people who expressed clearly ideas that are based on the principles of national conservatism. This is a certainly an Anglo-Saxon world, a growing movement, and I think a powerful movement, and a very, very, very dangerous movement, as dangerous as anything the left has to propose to us and more palatable to the American and British people than what the left has to pedal. All right. Yeah, Robin says evil is impotent, only sanction of the good gives it power. And I think that's right. And in the case of education, the sanction is given by the parents. The sanction is primarily given by the parents' silence, by the parents' acquiescence, by the parents' non-challenging the evil that is being taught in the schools. Now there's some limits of the ability to do that, but most of it is just laziness and apathy and fear. And again, private education forces parents, forces, parents actually get involved to actually make a choice to actually go and choose to actually do the research to actually be there. So that is, that is interesting, but it is good to see as on this panel, we had two parents, a British one and an American one, both, both challenging their respective schools, both engaged in the battle, both very active and very passionate about this. Thank you for listening or watching The Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening, you get value from watching, show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbrookshow.com slash support, by going to Patreon, subscribe star locals and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those, any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see The Iran Book Show grow, please consider sharing our content and of course, subscribe. Press that little bell button right down there on YouTube so that you get an announcement when we go live and for those of you who already subscribers and those of you who already supporters of the show, thank you. I very much appreciate it.