 One of the things that the national assessment of educational progress does you know going back to the early 70s and tracks kind of student scores They've been pretty flat and depending on how you calculate it We're spending two to three times as much per pupil in real inflation adjusted terms Is it just that kids are dumber now? That we have to spend more and more money on them to keep them at the same or slightly lower level Than when you and i robert were you know in short pants act was not quite born yet And his sat's i guarantee you are better than mine probably yours, you know, but I know but i mean is that a brag is is it a yeah, no that's for sure Is it i mean, you know, it's it's a weird thing like are we Are we obsessing over education in a way and i'm joking about kids just being dumber but You know because education, you know going back to socrates You know educating the young is absolutely filled with existential anxiety of every society and you know So is all of this just kind of like You know, we're just we've got a lot of nervous energy and a lot of money to spend and a lot of time to argue But you know, actually the kids are doing okay Uh, I don't think the kids are doing okay, and I don't want to be alarmist about this Something we haven't even touched on is mental health, you know And if you talk to john height and greg luke you know often others they'll say it's it's the screen Stupid and I think there's a compelling case for for the deleterious effects of social media and technology and whatnot You know, it's it's almost impossible to separate schools from all the other effects in kids lives Um, do I think kids have gotten dumber? No kids have not gotten dumber kids have gotten smarter. Um, do I think we have gotten Accidentally less good at educating them probably And it probably has to do with some of the factors we talked about earlier nick about how It wasn't there didn't used to be a lot of question about what you did in school all day And the more sophisticated we've gotten in terms of trying to raise levels of you know problem solving and critical thinking We've actually made it worse not better You've got the issue of of who becomes a teacher Um, you know, uh, nobody should want women to to to to leave law and medicine and whatnot and go back into the classroom But but if you think about I'll bet like you like me nick some of your teachers In retrospect were women who today would have been doing much more renewable things than they did 40 or 50 years ago It's a gordian knot, you know, I was thinking also, you know The amount of environmental lead was so much higher, you know and lead gets a bad rap But I don't know when you know when we were chewing on lead paint and breathing in lead gasoline air fumes I don't know what seemed to be doing better as a as a society Yeah, look the one this would be my parting shot I guess the the one if I if I could make one change in American education now It would probably be and this gets to the idea of is it getting is it getting worse? I think what's changes our expectations have gotten Outsize for American education and most specifically what I mean by that is we literally expect too much not of education But of teachers we keep asking them to do more and more and the same And I look I mean, this is the the the last hill I'll die on in education I point this out all the time You've got four million American men and women in classrooms every day If you have four million of anybody doing anything by definition You're going to have a normal range of human capacity in a number that large So you've got to make that job doable by those people the cavalry isn't coming There are not enough saints and superstars to to fill all those classrooms We've got to reconceive the job of a teacher to be doable by men and women of ordinary Sentience because that's who we have and that's all we're ever going to have So if the job can't be done well by those people If you you don't have a plan you it's a prayer Hey, I'm nicolas be with reason if you liked what you saw there Please click on the link below in the show notes and watch our entire live stream with robber pundit DCO of AEI talking about school choices promises and perils Every thursday Zach Weisbiller and I do a live stream a live Unscripted conversation anything can happen anything can be said they are always interesting with policy makers book authors People who are making a difference in the world. Hope to see you next thursday