A Critique of Alexander Arguelles: Lies, Languages, Polyglottery.

i'm going to commence this discussion with a quotation from the younger brother of napoleon bonaparte this is an obscure source if you're not a personal friend of mine you've probably never heard it mentioned in a single conversation the napoleon bonaparte had a younger brother but on the other hand if you are one of my personal friends you're probably somewhat tired of hearing about your partner brother or you might even be tired you might be overly familiar with this particular quotation so i'm going to start by reading this to you somewhat modernized somewhat rephrasing it to sound like natural english in the 21st century and then i will read it to you verbatim i wanted to be fair in my criticism of him but the cheering of the crowd made me more violently excoriate and reproach him word by word for the first time i experienced how much the passions of those who listen have power over those who speak i'm quoting this at the start of this video because i think that professor arge alexander or guy is a fascinating example of a man who has been utterly corrupted by the adoration of the crowd that the listeners have corrupted the message of the speaker that the relationship of master to pupil teacher to student has been in a subtle way perverted i think it's tremendously important to understand this process is social media begins to devour formal education and as social media begins to devour politics and activism of any kind more and more of the relationships of master to pupil shall we say that they now exist here on youtube or on other platforms through other media that really are fundamentally the same as the interface so to read this exactly as it was written in english it wasn't written in french by napoleon's younger brother quote i wished to keep fair with him but the acclimations from the galleries augmented in proportion to the violence of my words and for the first time i experienced how much the passions of those who listen have power over those who speak the problem with alexander or gay is that he is telling you precisely what you want to hear i do not believe anyone is peeing him i don't think there's any mechanism of corruption other than precisely the one i just described now i'm making no claims i may there's no innuendo here about professor argy's sex life i have known many many professors with phds whose heads are turned whose heart beats faster for an attractive younger woman just to pay attention to them just to be interested in their research just to be interested in hearing them talk about their lives just to meet in their office with them and i have known some professors where it is instead the interest and sympathy of attractive young men they're gay you know it's the same dynamic playing out along a different combination of of genders i have always found it embarrassing when in the writings of some self-styled great man they boast about how many young people these days are getting turned on by their groovy philosophy now [Laughter] i was scornfully mocking my own father for this at several points in my father's life but uh the final book my father wrote and published to my eyes there's some really embarrassing moments this way i've seen it in many different fields in many different disciplines where the reality is someone spends their life toiling in obscurity not getting much recognition or appreciation that was not my father's problem by the way that was not as exciting unfortunately most people with phds they toil on labor in obscurity and then they really are delighted they really are pleased if one day an attractive young man or an attractive young woman just seems interested just seems enthusiastic just seems to get it and they may not realize the extent to which the listening of the crowd starts to shape the behavior and the message of the speaker they may not realize that without being paid without being seduced without even sleeping with any of these you know students that they start to feel a tug at their heart strikes they start to feel a kind of gravitic pull to say the things that the people in the audience want to hear now i am at the opposite end of this spectrum and it would be a long autobiographical digression for me to reflect on when exactly i had this realization but it's a powerful and important realization for all of us no matter what field even if you're a taxi driver whether you're a taxi driver or you're a creative writer or you're a political dissident or you're a language educator no matter what field you walk in what would it say about me if my political philosophy were really what all the hip young teenagers were into what would it say about me and my message if i told you yeah yeah yeah you know um when i was in cambodia phnom penh cambodia i gave lectures about history and politics and philosophy oh and all the all the kip young teenagers were into it oh yeah i had a big i had an enthusiastic audience of young people who really appreciated and were really they were really into this groovy new philosophy i was uh pronouncing as a sage on the stage i did give lectures in cambodia people found them disturbing people found them upsetting they contained hard jarring uncomfortable truths that nobody wanted to hear i got questions to the audience that are hostile they're welcome now too by the way you can follow me give the video a thumbs up and subscribe and leave a like well they'll do q and a i'm quite happy to deal with that hostility and indeed you know it's memorable for me some of the questions i receive from people in cambodia who utterly despise what i had to say those are things all positively carry with me for the rest of life like i appreciate i appreciate that criticism even if it was really criticism of someone who couldn't comprehend what the point when it was made was even if it was fundamentally stupid or irrelevant criticism i get to take that with me for the rest of my life and oh okay that's how cambodian people responded to being in front of us okay i gave lectures in london england and cambridge and oxford i gave lectures back when i was in toronto i'm sorry i have a long life of lecturing that led up to my career here on youtube all this is before started the youtube channel and i've i've been giving a lot of lectures these last five years take a look at my youtube channel or youtube channels plural you'll you'll see thousands of lectures okay what would it say about me if i told you oh yeah yeah this this lecture i gave in london england you know all the hip young kids at the university all the teenagers they were really into it they were really enthusiastic about it no no i'm not sad that the message i have to deliver is disturbing and jarring and shocking to people and in each one of those contexts each milia if you like there were extraordinary people who took me aside and told me that they thought i was an extraordinary person i have had people say to me that they thought i was a genius i have had people say to me they thought i was one of the few geniuses for this generation who's going to shape events to come and so i've had people flatter me on many different levels in many different ways sometimes to do with a specific field i was giving a lecture and sometimes much more much more generally non-specific yeah i'm not lacking for flattery some of you in the audience right now you may have had this experience people sometimes write to me and they say hey look you know that video you made so let's let's give a let's give a disturbing example they'll say something hey you know that video you made criticizing the black lives matter movement that really meant a lot to me that really you know like you know you're not an idiot you're not a right winger you're not right like here were some with a really intelligent nuanced perspective that criticized black lives matter from i could give a thousand examples for thousands what i say back to these people commonly so many of you may have had an email i just want to say ah you know you're writing and saying to me in whatever flattering terms that i'm an extraordinary person for having made this video but what i have to say to you is you're an extraordinary person because you could appreciate it do you have any idea what percentage of people watch this video and are just horrified and they just they just can't hear it they just can't listen to it when you give a lecture live in fourth grade i i i've never had someone stand up and walk out i've never had someone actually walk out of the lecture hall when i was giving a lecture not not even on buddhist philosophy of the different fields on youtube it's really easy to walk you know like you can watch someone for 30 seconds or five minutes you can get up and leave um in this way the intellectuals of our time when they're boasting they're really offering an indictment of themselves you know you give many different examples different things what i had to say about the history of the french empire in cambodia french imperialism all right i was surprised when i had this criminal i wasn't expecting this all right it was so shocking and so disturbing to the establishment of people who had phds people who were in scholarly institutes that were either in cambodia or they're flying back and forth between paris and cambodia all right that they all joined forces against me and they prevented it from being published when the editor of the journal wanted to publish it and they said no they had multiple meetings about this apparently they discussed it they discussed the article and they discussed me said no we can't let this pass we can't let this go into going to print you know and that that's stunning to me i'd have to get into a lot of deals to why that was so surprising it's much less surprising to me that you know i want to write an article talking about the history of slavery in buddhism and buddhists do not want that article to be published i want to do research on these kind of things look it's not going to hurt the buddhist religion this is research about something and buddhists true believing members of faith they don't even want to admit it exists they don't want to solve the problem they don't want to acknowledge there is a problem or was appropriate it's less that's less surprising you know overtly religious context of what you can get away with in terms of critique of religion and discussion of of history what if i were the sort of person the sort of intellectual the sort of author the sort of researcher the sort of youtuber who is here saying to you oh yeah what i had to say in cambodia it was a big hit with the french academics with phds who are still making excuses to support french imperialism to glorify the member of the french empire to this day what if i were saying you oh and that's how i got ahead i was such a darling all those people invited me to enroll in their phd programs in paris and berlin what i had to say was so popular it was so acceptable was so welcome such welcome news to people in authority to members of the establishment what if i was saying oh yeah you know i've also published newspaper articles a lot of these places the newspaper articles i published in laos were shocking and disturbing including the people in the government the newspaper articles i published in cambodia uh at least one was translated into campaign i think two were translated into the cambodian language not not by myself by professional translators uh there were individuals there were extraordinary individuals who recognized the importance of my work in laos and cambodia and all these places and a lot of them said to me hey you're extraordinary whatever particular words they used to they say wow you're this extraordinary intellectual this is an extraordinary article they're so happy to meet me but a large part of what i have to say back is you may be ignoring the extent to which you are an extraordinary person because you opened that newspaper and you were prepared to read it you were prepared to hear it you attended that lecture you were willing to listen then you had whatever it took whether it's an emotional prerequisite or an intellectual prerequisite you had what it took you know to really hear and understand and see the value in what i had to say and that is not for the vast majority of teenagers and it's not for the vast majority of middle-aged people and it's not for the vast majority of greybeards okay the vast majority of elderly people also cannot appreciate and cannot sympathize with what i have to say all right if i go and give a lecture at a polyglot conference like alexander our guy right i will not be cheered by the crowd all right what i have to say about language education what i have to say about the life of the mind being an intellectual being an author being a researcher you know what i have to say under any of these topics it's not popular it's never going to be popular and i am not in a position to apologize for that or to feel ashamed what is the lie alexander or guy is selling well he tells you that if you study for just 15 minutes per day and he lets you know that it might be too much for you to start with 15 minutes a day you maybe have to start with five minutes or even less and work your work with it if in the fullness of time you can cultivate the habit and commit to study for just 15 minutes a day you can accomplish more in one year than a university student a full-time university student enrolled in the study of these languages now i am understating the grandiosity of the promises he makes of the enticements he offers you if you will just study language using his method following his formula so let's say here um think of the pressure an 18 year old feels when studying for an exam quite from wrong people start university around age 18 these days i think that's the normal age now okay for a lot of you this is a um oh great question i'll introduce myself someone asked when uh when is no more manifesto is coming out so i'm publishing one book uh maybe even tomorrow or the next day but just in the next few days i'm publishing future of an illusion and i've i've basically taken a break from finishing home manifestos to write and publish this book veganism calling the future of an illusion and then i'm going to finalize the final manuscript for no more manifestos and it'll be on amazon soon thereafter but right now that's my only priority is finishing and publishing those those two books anyway we have confirmation it's normal to begin going to university age 18. so for a lot of you uh for professor argele himself it may be a very distant difficult memory for you to really think back on the fear and trembling you once had when studying for an exam when writing the exam maybe when receiving the test results back when they handed you the grade when you really didn't know if you were going to fail this course or at the other end you're trying to get an a plus and you don't know if you're going to get an a plus or an a minus or you know you don't know how how well you're going to do the fear the pressure of being in a university course of having your parents tell you you are the first child in this family to have the opportunity to go to university your father saved up money for 20 years since before you were born we started saving so you could have this opportunity to go to university you better not screw up or maybe you personally went into debt you took it alone maybe your parents didn't save any money but you signed up for one of those one of those ones okay now a lot of professors forget this a lot of professors forget the turmoil sitting at your own desk with your own copy of a pamphlet to memorize vocabulary for 15 minutes today with no deadline with no evaluation with no exam all right even if this were the only factor we were taking out of consideration here right it could never possibly be as powerful a language learning tool as the university course i wish i could tell you that in my experience 90 of university language courses are [ __ ] in my experience it's a hundred percent they're all bad they're all terrible i don't know of any exceptions anywhere in the world and i talked to everyone i possibly could i've talked to and visited universities in europe in asia in north america admittedly for example never mexico never latin america you know like there are parts of the world where i don't know how they teach languages but i have looked into formal classroom language education all over the world not africa you know there are there are blind spots interestingly also israel i looked into how the hebrew language is taught in israel it's remarkably bad i am not holding up the university classroom as a standard of excellence from my perspective the way languages are taught and learned and forgotten in universities is a standard of awfulness there's a tremendously important critique of university education and of how little anyone learns at such a tremendous cost all right but i am saying that the method endorsed by professor arghay is worse it's worse than the low standard said by universities now if you want to be muscular there were many things i could lie to you about to make money there are many ways i can monetize my advice or encouragement for you to start living away but i think the most fundamental is time right there are days right now i'm i'm no great paragon of beauty there are days when i spend three hours exercising you know if we include the long walks we take and i take walks with maybe 30 pounds in a backpack i don't even know if it's 30 pounds but i have a very heavy backpack backpack full of rocks in effect um we do these long walks that can be an hour and i can spend two hours at the gym i could sit here and tell you it's nothing i could sit here and tell you that that hasn't delayed the publication of my forthcoming book no more manifestos i could see their lives it hasn't delayed the publication of my forthcoming book you know future of an illusion it has days on which i spend three hours exercising the loss of productive mental time i have is much more than three hours all right i do not generally snap into say writing or editing the book and snap out of it it's not that fast it's not that easy to you know this is a really idiom in english to get into the groove to get into the flow of whatever kind of work it is you're doing i would i would really have gotten much more done the past two years if i completely neglected my physical health if i just hunched over the typewriter and worked continuously in that flow it's a sacrifice it's a real sacrifice guys i do 200 push-ups per session all right the push-ups themselves take very little time all right there are many of you in the audience and you can stop and ask yourself from your current level of fitness what if you wanted to get on my level where you can without exhausting yourself without it being such a big deal you can do 200 push-ups okay now what if i'm looking at the possibility of going from my current level of fitness to being a middle-aged instagram model like i want to really be so fit that i don't know it's going to help sell copies of my my forthcoming book all right the most important thing to be honest about is time one of the reasons for that is because time is true for everyone regardless of your psychological or emotional character now melissa is sitting here you can you can jump in but you know do you do you have an estimate for how many hours you spent studying chinese in the last year i like i'm not asking you to memorize though but like have because i know you've been tracking a lot of your a lot of your time so melissa off camera has been learning chinese i know but like let let's just say at a minimum look i think a lot of days it's four hours out of the day lately lately you know of course maybe that's not seven days a week but it's easy so i'm not gonna describe her method here but i think i think you could even if it's not for the whole last two years for the last six months i don't think it would be unreasonable talking four hours a day because some days it's more than four hours and some days less but yeah okay four hours a day all right now first note that's the same for everyone lifting weights to the gym you know what's not the same for everyone how you cope with the stress how you deal with it emotionally and intellectually all right [Laughter] um [Music] you know like at the gym 10 different people can put in the exact same amount of work they can lift the same amount of weight for the same amount of reps now what most people pay attention to is the difference in their results like the actual amount of muscle they gain or the amount of fat they lose that's not going to be the same for all 10 people okay how about the number of hours of sleep they're getting all right one of the reasons why i don't push myself beyond a certain point in exercise this happens most often with the muscles in my legs if i push myself too hard i don't sleep that night and i don't even i don't feel bad so with exercise physically i don't feel anguished i don't feel upset i just don't sleep and i can even you know i can even kind of enjoy my life that way i mean it's a lot harder if you're a parent taking care of a kid or i don't know you know it depends what you've got going on but like for me if i really lose a whole night's sleep which happens sometimes sometimes i'm i basically sleep for one hour or two hours in the night and having your muscles all pumped up and all strung out you can lose a night's sleep you know um and and trust me it's not that i'm using steroids you know it's not once you get to that we have a whole other level of questions just talking about natural exercise here okay for those 10 people if we do an experiment where they all do exactly the same exercise same reps same weight the knock-on effects psychologically emotionally and in terms of their sleep cycle are going to be different okay i know what it's like to lose sleep because you're learning a language i know what it's like to push yourself so hard that you're cracking up okay i know what it's like to push yourself against those limits i know what it's like to be sweating at your desk and have the sweat literally pour down your pencil and make the pencil impossible to use because the the tip of the pencil got wet and i know what it's like to break down weeping at your desk and it's just weeping out of stress i mean really you know what i mean like not because someone's been been mean to you okay i know what it's like to absolutely push yourself to limit where you're waking up at 5 30 in the morning to study chinese before a class that starts at nine in the morning you know so you can wake up eat and like study for an hour before you get in the bus however it works out you know i know what it's like where you're dreaming or having nightmares in that language whatever your target language is and i know what it's like to study more than one language at the same time okay i know what those upper limits are like okay and i know most of you can't cope with that i know that most human beings would cope with that far far worse than i did and i know that most human beings even when they are placed in the most encouraging circumstances whether that be in a university program or a military program or a new immigration and adjustment program like when they really have an institution helping them learn the language and rewarding them for learning language or when they're married to someone who is loving and caring and encouraging and helping them learn language it's very common you marry someone they teach you a language or learn a language with you that kind of thing all right i had none of these circumstances i was in really really tough conditions when i could now list off all the languages i've studied it's a long list and how horrible the conditions i was in it's irrelevant what i have seen again and again is that even people who have shall we say the most uh velvet-lined manacles you know they're they're in the most luxuriant of prisons in a phd program for example okay the vast majority of them could not do what i did in a [ __ ] tent with no electricity and a flashlight under a mosquito net like under really hard conditions you could tell a million different anecdotes about this but i do have a friend now who teaches german at a university in the united states of america she complains to me and someone sends me funny kind of screenshots and pictures related to how awful her job is there are a lot of different things you could say about this she has a lot of experience teaching different people of different ages if your first language is english one of the easiest languages you could possibly learn is german okay learning german compared to chinese compared to cambodian compared to lotion compared to pali you know sanskrit whatever i mean um german is one of the easiest languages you could you could possibly learn all right i think one of the most fundamental problems is that her students are poisoned by the notion that all they have to do is 15 minutes a day all right now even for german even for german you have to live the training you know you have to do written composition and listening comprehension and just repetition again and again and again until you reach a point where the rules of grammar come to you automatically you know it doesn't it doesn't occur to you to use the wrong gender it doesn't occur to you to have the wrong verb ending or adjective and you don't have to think about it in terms of rules because you have put in those hours and that's going to be far far more than the minimum number of hours required by uh by university program right i mean the level of sacrifice level of work now when you really understand how awful that is a lot of people they probably shouldn't be studying german at all probably a lot of people are signing up with the kind of encouragement of the kind of bad advice uh professor gay gives you and they think oh it'll be no big deal just learn some german it'll be fun it'll you know it'll expand my horizons and you know i mean look my problem in life really is not with tourists who have casually attempted to learn a language for a couple of years and have failed what i have seen are the people with phds themselves the people who become professors themselves that they never learned the basics i mean the basics not just they fail to achieve you know advanced levels of competence in these languages i think our university language education system it is rotten from root to branch but the people at the top they can be the most rotten of all now i have written to professor arge several times a couple of my comments were deleted and he didn't reply to you but one of them i know by the way i believe i've seen a lot of evidence for this i believe he actually does read every single comment he gets on his youtube channel he replies to many but sometimes he replies and sometimes he deletes it and decides not to reply that seems to be his style i'm not holding against him whether or not he will see this video whether he will hear this critique is quite another matter the way that professor argey has responded to this is by the simple use of weasel words you know they say well i didn't promise you that the results you would get would be just as good doing 15 minutes a day as they would be enrolling university course you know right so you can go back and look at the precise wording he used and you can decide for yourself whether or not there's any wiggle room uh whatsoever now yeah i've seen books for sale learn a language in 10 days learn a language in five days learn a language in two weeks for language and in six months you know um there are ways in which you can say this kind of fraud isn't new okay what's new is people in positions of power and privilege like you professor our guy that you have become a snake oil salesman you are supposed to represent a standard of excellence say it's about all university professors you are supposed to represent something better than the huckster on the street who stands there and sells snake oil who stands there and tells people whatever they want to hear just to make a buck in the short term right you're supposed to be better than a private for-profit language tutor or private for profit book publishing company where they think they're going to sell more books by trying to make you trying to convince people in the audience people in the market that it's going to be so easy and so rapid for them to learn this language it is your role as a professor to tell one incoming generation of students after another no if you want to do this if you want to learn a latin and you want to have your latin on this level so you can have this career in the next four years here's how much work it's going to be here's the sacrifice you're going to make and you've got to give them advice further if you get to the halfway point if you're two years into latin and you can't do this this and this at this level of confidence and solubility then you're going to have to take a gap year you're going to have to stop and you're going to have to go work your ass off 24 7 for 365 days so you can get to where you need to be before you go into the third year all right i could repeat this for german i could be this for chinese i could read this for any language that it is your job to give people to tell people what they don't want to hear to give them the advice that you know and look you know ultimately these things do come down to quantitative measurements how much competence do your students have after four years in most programs it's practically zero so i've i've posted articles about this on the internet in the past when you look at okay the average american university student who has quote unquote four years of education in chinese in a ba program the united states of america at the end of that can they even speak in simple complete sentences can they do this can they do that the actual level of language confidence produced by this is almost nothing okay so what's the road ahead lying is that how we're going to solve this problem [Laughter] by lying about it oh i've known quite a few professors who slept with their students i knew one guy and he was married they were young couple and he was very athletic which is unusual for someone with a phd and he was also he was one of these white guys who had converted to christianity so i'm guessing his family were atheist or just culturally christian but he had an epiphany he'd become uh fanatically christian after eating falling in love with and marrying his wife his wife wasn't into it spoilers he ended up cheating on his wife and he cheated on her by sleeping with one of the students he was a university professor to call it a love affair would be an exaggeration this example was memorable with me for many reasons his method of informing his wife was to send her a text message to her mobile phone um so in those days text messages had a limited number of characters limited number of words i don't know if that's changed can you now i think you can send now a paragraph you can send quite a long text message but this text message was something like you know slept with students am leaving you file for divorce it was this kind of literary masterpiece you know and the fact that this was done by text message at all you know there are a lot of ways to let your wife know you've been cheating on them it's all there are also a lot of ways to let your wife know that you've violated your own code of conduct your own standard standards of duty and professionalism that you're you know you're the did you fail to uphold the code that you swore you would live by right or wrong you took that vow um i knew another professor i don't know how he got away with this when you think about it he was married and he started sleeping with the secretary in the university department who was much younger than him and much younger than his wife she wasn't a student but she was the secretary it's also forbidden and one day mysteriously he wasn't married to his wife anymore he was married to the secretary you know so i've known a lot of combinations and and permutations um of this kind however you know as bad and bleak as that may be as dark and negative as the consequences may be you know you can say that this belongs in a very different category from the men who are their whole lives subject to a kind of persuasion from women they never seduce and you never seduce them back you know men who are forever you know being led by their nose men who are willing to watch a youtube channel and lie to themselves that the woman speaking is really very intelligent or very well informed just because she's good looking and of course we can repeat all of this with a female protagonist in relation to a male isn't it easy to tell yourself isn't it easy to interpret in the most generous way possible something stupid that somebody said make yourself think this person is more intelligent than they are because you find them attractive um university professors perhaps especially language instructors all right these people feel like losers they feel like they could never get the prettiest girl in their high school they could never get the prettiest girl in the university they feel that nobody appreciates them nobody understands their brilliance nobody understands the importance of what they do right and we're up against some hard facts of human biology here you know welcome is the fact that you whether you are a male professor or a female professor you are in your 30s you're in your 40s or 50s or your 60s it doesn't turn off you know when you're meeting people who are 18 to 25 right in contrast to the professor who actually cheats on his wife and ruins his marriage or in contrast to the professor who cheats on his wife and ruins his career like who sleeps with a student and ends up you know they're they're fired and their their reputation is ruined they have those consequences all right there's a much larger number of professors who are at all times pandering to their students where instead of the students seeking the approval of the professor it is the professor who is seeking the approval of his or her students is it sometimes due to a sincere sense of intellectual camaraderie between a professor and a student no never it's always this shallow it's always this dark it's always this bad i'm going to tell you why if these people were capable of that kind of intellectual camaraderie whether with someone younger or someone older they would not be a pawn in that professorial game they would not be on that position or it would not last long they would very soon be moving on to other kinds of endeavors working with those people with whom they had that kind of sincere intellectual camaraderie that working with their their colleagues if you're a professor security university you know let's let's just say it's english literature as an example just this is easy to visualize but we could repeat this for language learning for all kinds of things do you ever hear of a professor who met a talented student and where there's no sex involved like it's a heterosexual man heterosexual man or whatever it's a gay man and a woman but whatever where there's no say have you ever heard of a professor who met a really talented bright student and said hey you know what you and me we should become the editors of a new magazine of a new literature we should really get something started you know hey you know what you have a really great critical perspective on theater on drama we got to start publishing this it would cost them nothing for these people if you have a if you have a seat in a university if you have a permanent job do you know how little that would take for a professor to actively recruit talent actively work with talent actively start a journal show a little would take for a professor to start their own language institute independent from the university to start employing some of their former students as instructors and teachers to put together their own package and start paying their employees and paying themselves much more than they make inside the university system do you know if you have any entrepreneurial zeal if you have any capacity to appreciate intellectual talent in others and where it really is you know being their colleague being their comrade not sexually exploiting them not um affirming your own ego you know not trying to make yourself feel better about your own lost youth wasted and abandoned aspirations and so on not trying to compensate for your sense that nobody's ever appreciated your intelligence your brilliance or what you could have done because professors do exploit students in exactly that way and the schroeder students they learn how to exploit the professors back right there are students who in a very canny way they recognize okay the professor represents this obscure school of feminist radical leftist philosophy so i'm going to go up to the professor and say hey i read your paper about duluz and i really agree with you i'm going to go and i'm gonna i'm gonna pretend that this professor's particular political philosophy or particular methodology that it really appeals to me and in this way many of the schroeder students they pander to the professors and the professors uh pander back okay wouldn't it be different to live in a world where the relationship between professor and student and the relationship between leader and follower that we have here more vaguely with alexander arguelle and his status in the polyglot community polyglot internet phenomenon wouldn't it be different if these relationships were built on outcomes measurable outcomes what if it had nothing to do with who you like who you're attracted to who you feel flattered by who you get along with right what if these were actually productive working relationships of people who are trying to learn a language people who are trying to teach a language and people who are trying to do something to uh create a future for the discipline or movement that they see themselves being a part of now i'm going to give you a tiny little example and then we'll just come back to language education and my perspective that's a wrap um i asked one professor after another in buddhist studies but what are you doing for the future of the discipline now these are very different people some of these people were ethnically chinese and born and raised in china some of these people were white and born and raised in europe like some of these people were from india or sri lanka they were really different people but what they all had in common was that their approach to education their approach to philosophy their approach to politics their approach to using the position of authority and privilege they really have as university professors was 100 self-centered 100 percent self-pitying 100 percent short-term self-indulgence and they would be shocked they had never thought of it before when i said to them well yeah but if this is how you run your department of buddhist studies if this is like who you exclude and who you recruit and this is what you teach and this is what you refuse to deal with and this is the research you refuse to let happen and this is the reason like this is what's going on right like i understand that's easiest for you now like i understand you're you're eliminating problems you don't want to deal with this way but okay ten years from now what's gonna happen in the discipline like the people or your students today they will be professors just ten years from now it's not that long down the road right so if you're not recruiting talent if you're not doing something positive if you're not creating the basis for the future of the discipline right what's what's going to happen to it you know now as they say their responses were incredibly stupid but the most important thing of all was just they had never thought of this before they like i i think would be an insult to long-term thinking to say that they lack long-term thinking they were not even thinking five years ahead they were not thinking 10 years ahead now this comes back to language learning in a very direct way like you're in a department of buddhist studies and you say okay if nobody can learn pali if nobody can learn sanskrit if nobody can learn tibetan and the story like you have all these things you can't do where are we gonna be 10 years from now like i understand the easiest thing for you to do and maybe also financially the most profitable thing for you to do is just to have like yoga classes just have people come in and talk about you know your aura and breathing exercises talk about the same crap that they'd hear on a on a podcast about meditation and yoga and eastern spirituality like okay i understand like that's probably what the students are expecting the students parents are probably happy to pay for it everyone's happy to get an a minus or whatever with minimum effort like you know that the courses are not going to be that that rigorously difficult like i understand short term this may smear this okay to be blunt what about the extraordinary students like myself what about the students who are really committed to this for the next 10 years next 20 years the rest of our lives where what we need is the preparation to have a career in this field and this discipline and we can't get anything we on the contrary you've actually created a milia you've created a kind of intellectual context that's quite hostile to us that excludes us that excludes the tiny number of students who want to talk about the history of slavery who want to talk about the history of war and racism and you know students who are actually interested in reading the scientific evidence that meditation doesn't work students who are willing to talk about and do research about where an essay is about corruption scandals than buddhism sex scandals than buddhism yes yes y'all it's not just the catholic church right you know well we and i don't know any one of them myself not a whole lot of us you know we people like that right like it or not we are the future of the discipline right and there's a really weird sense in which this whole university system it just exists for us language education i've studied many different languages in many different institutions all right so once in a charming little town called saskatchewan don't try to spell it i was in saskatchewan studying cree and ojibwe nehewin yeah um i say korean ojibwe because the program covered both nihiawewen is just the indigenous word for cree all right now what's the easy way to teach those courses you have a cree language course if you think learning german is hard try studying cree all right try studying a really foreign language okay [Laughter] talk about languages you cannot learn from a mobile phone app okay well you know the easy way to do it actually has a lot in common with what i was just saying about buddhism cultural dancing music playing a drum storytelling right how about you learn some magic words from the religion how about you go out and tour some sites like you have a field trip i'm saying how about you go and see some ancient sacred paintings on a rock and then on the exam what's the word for sacred rock like you can dumb this all the way down and all the students are happy and all the students parents are happy and by the way some of the students are white they're taking they're interested in kind of cultural sensitivity course for the relationship between white people and the indigenous people they've driven to the brink of extinction now but a lot of them ethnically are cree or ojibwe they're ethnically first nations people but they have no connection to the language the culture of the history they've you know they've grown up in a colonized modern world you know they've grown up in 21st century canada right a lot of them may be totally happy with that too they don't really want to sit and memorize verb endings they don't want to drill sentence structure they don't want to learn grammar and they don't want to do written compositions that's really that's really hard work right okay so you you it's in everybody's you just keep dumbing it down what's and what's the most convenient lie of all 15 minutes a week 50 minutes all it takes you can do it you know i mean what's most convenient is to lie that at the end of this course you're going to be able to speak the language or at the end of four years of doing this okay there are all kinds of ways to make language education entertaining and fun say this about working out at the gym they're ways to make lifting weights entertaining and fun and they don't work okay weight lifting is pain exercise is suffering period okay and like no matter how careful you are they're gonna be nights where you you you only you lose a whole night's sleep you know you're up on just cause you have twitching tight muscles not even an injury you're just so pumped up or you're whatever your cortisol levels whatever the hell it is you know when you are lifting weights no matter how safe no matter careful all right there's no way to make this harmless and easy and quick and fun and entertaining it's hours it's sweat it's tears it's suffering and the problem is when you dumb down language education all right you hurt the people like me you hurt exactly the people this institution this multi-million dollar institution was created to help and you ruined the future of your own discipline okay if you have that one person in a million who really has the talent the experience and the motivation to sit down and do the hard work of learning the language what happens to them when they show up and the whole institution has been corrupted by the philosophy of alexander arghei when it's been corrupted by this process whereby the professors begin to pander to the students they just want to do whatever is hip and groovy and popular with the students they want to give lectures that the students find funny and entertaining and uplifting and you know they don't they don't want to be the mean bad professor where the professors have completely bought into this process of of of lowering the standards right okay whether the students are one in a million or one in ten thousand or whatever it is you have someone who shows up and says look i made these sacrifices i rented a new home i moved across the country in my case i moved across the world i came here to learn this language now like i don't have 20 years i don't have two million dollars i have a certain amount of money i've spent on tuition a certain amount of money i'm spending on rent and i i i am here to create the foundation for the rest of my career in this language and i need you to help me and what are you doing all right you have corrupted this whole institution precisely the resources precisely the courses precisely the teaching and training that's supposed to be here to help me right instead and if any of you live through this you've seen this instead you've created a situation that's actually hostile towards me that's actually punishing me because i'm the one person putting up their hand who actually wants to learn the grammar i'm the only person who's trying to speak in a complete sentence or resence or learn the vocabulary right i'm the only person who isn't dragging those standards down even lower and let me ask you this professor orgay you know where does the [ __ ] stop i have a friend who became a nurse i've had several friends who are nurses i think i have at least two right now who are nurses actually um but i have a friend who became a nurse during the years i knew him he took all the exams and so on and so forth uh quite a long process over over many years you know what there are a lot of really stupid really lazy people who become nurses and he's been in the classroom with him he's been in the classroom with people who are only motivated by the money they they probably told us since they were a child by their parents or grandparents oh you know be a nurse get a get a steady check every month there he's been in the classroom i mean i remember this from when i was a teenager there's a certain kind of good-looking lazy not particularly intelligent woman and you know she was looking at different career paths okay working in the nail salon esthetician uh dental assistant you know receptionist and somehow they settled on nurse you know but where they're they're just that kind of person they have no interest in the medical science or excellence they've noticed in the future of the discipline and they're in the classroom trying to do the bare minimum all right um there are also people who go into nursing as a midlife career change a lot of other kind of stereotypes to unpack in terms of who is in that classroom and why with what motivations do you think you can learn how to be a nurse in 15 minutes a day no exams no pressure it is so much easier in your own native language to learn everything you know to be a nurse than it is to become fluent in the chinese language than it is to become fluent in the japanese language in the cree language in the ojibwe language okay the sad irony is i actually think you could learn to become a nurse 15 minutes a day but even if it is possible whereas i'm saying it's impossible to learn chinese that way the last thing we need are people in positions of power like you dr arkay dumbing down the institutions lowering the standards pandering to the audience telling them what they want to hear and encouraging them to think this is going to be a very low level of sacrifice and a very low level of self-discipline for a huge and immediate reward what you need are professors who stand up and say to those nursing students when they come in look this is how much time it's going to take just to do the bare minimum this is how much time it's going to take to be adequate if you can't do this this and this at a level of excellence after six months in the program or two years of perimeter if it is you need to stop you need to drop out and enroll in a totally different nature become an x-ray technician because you can't do the job or you need to take a gap year you know keep the books with you you know go stay in a cabin in the woods and study for 365 days a year you know 12 hours a day you need to catch up this is what's required of you and if you're not good enough or if you're not putting in the time if you're not putting in the effort to reach that level of excellence you fail right this is not because i'm glorifying the fear of failure all right if you don't do that what do you produce what is the future of the nursing discipline going to be as you embrace lower and lower standards of stupider and stupider and more self-indulgent people who call themselves nurses but who do not in fact have any of the confidence that defines that field now melissa you have not had a lot of opportunities to talk do you want you want to jump in and say a few words there are some questions comments to the audience if you guys have anything to say um now's the time to say something and i'll actually uh [Laughter] cool well william mcgeehan says just don't say that you're a very stable genius that that catchphrase has already been taken by someone else yeah that's a memorable one from from donald trump um well look you know when people call you a genius how are you going to react when i was young 16 17 18 19 even 20. what i would say to them was the only reason you're telling me that i'm a genius is because you don't want to help and i need help and it did really happen in those circumstances i'd go in to talk to a professor this is a real example but it's represented many go in and talk to a professor of economics and say look i don't have the background i need to do this math and nobody's going to help me like i didn't learn this in high school i didn't learn this in primary school whatever i like you know i don't have the background of math to be doing this university level course in economics without help i remember the particular professor he was jewish i am a jewish genetically i'm not a member of the jewish religion in any sense and the first thing he said to me you know after i'd made my introductions and explained that i needed help he said oh you know you must have grown up with someone speaking yiddish in your family you can tell immediately from a voice you're so eloquent you're so well spoken is this saying not only that i must be jewish but that i must be from a you know specific subculture within judaism and this this professor he was tremendous and what he had to say to me was that i was obviously this very talented and very intelligent person i'm paying tens of thousands of dollars right and nobody's gonna help like i'm paying tens of thousands of dollars and i've got to show up and write an exam either i already know how to do it or i have a father or a brother who's going to teach me there was there was no education there to be had in economics i mean that specific department that that year at that time you know now a lot of language education projects like that too and i mean that so that was not the only situation like that but it's like okay like i see how this works and i don't think that professor was being insincere at all i mean i think i think he was really genuinely flattering me i think he was very impressed with talking to me about politics and economics i think he really felt that i was the most intelligent most interesting student he had in his office that day or that week or maybe for a couple of years oh wow here's a really bright positively motivated kid who's interested in economics and police but i can see why he'd respond to me positively compared to the people i was sitting next to in class like you know i knew what most of my classmates were like compared to people who were just coming in and saying oh i want a higher grade why can't you raise my you know there were some really there were some real challenges there were people with bad with bad motivations there right um so my point is not that these professors are being consciously and intentionally manipulative when they flatter you or nor other people generally you know but what i perceived was that you know when you say that i am talented when you say that i'm brilliant if you say that i'm a genius what you mean is you're not going to do anything now you are going to completely dismiss what i'm telling you the problem is and what i need help with and you're going to you're going to go back to your wife or whatever tonight and say you know i met a really sharp kid today that that kid's going places and i'm here saying to you no i'm not i'm here saying to you straight to your face i'm dropping out of the program and i can't do this because the program you created is bad and deeply flawed right and that you know i'm saying uh that's that's the mismatch so i had to start struggling with that early on now look some of you you've never known what it's like to have a professor tell you that you're a genius some of you like as a writer you've never given your writing to an editor or something and had them say and what doesn't matter if they use the word brilliant say that this is whether or not they use the word genius or brilliant or whatever you've never had those those kinds of reactions well i've had flattery from editors were telling me they can't publish it too look i can't publish this but this is genius this is brilliant i want you to know i don't take the time out of my day to talk to everybody so this is a manuscript this is this is amazing research this is amazing writing you know you get positive feedback that's part of a rejection you know no unfortunately politically this is so provocative we couldn't possibly publish you know you can get you can get all that uh all that feedback too you know i remember i've had very few conversations with my sister beth in my whole life um i have two sisters you know but in my whole life i've spoken to beth incredibly few times and i remember a conversation with my sister where she was she was being so cruel to me and so vicious to me my mother was there and and witnessed the whole thing and um anyway obviously i could tell this in greater detail but after the conversation was over you know my mother said to me like don't you get it the reason why she's mad at you is that none of her professors ever called her a genius and like you casually in passing were mentioning like professors you were criticized like it's true i was like complain i wasn't bragging about myself i was complaining about how awful everything was at university i and i think at least one of the professors i was mentioning um you know she studied with the same professor you know um yeah you know well guess what she went on to get a phd and i didn't i have no envy for her she has a couple youtube videos up guys if you want to know just how intellectually unimpressive my older sister is if you want to know why none of the professors were calling her jeans but i remember her viciousness and her jealousy and i've made other videos time with jealousy is very strange to me right um and i remember my mother seeing that and saying that when to me like i was totally alien because i wasn't i wasn't boasting i was i was complaining it was related to what i've just said like look these professors praise you but the reality is like you can't actually learn the language you can't do this you can't do that like the system is broken and by praising you they're writing you off they're throwing you into the dustbin of history where everyone says they're discarding you while telling you that you're a genius like this is this the kind of thing i'm complaining about but that that in itself you know my sister couldn't couldn't cope with that that excited too much josie and in many ways i mean she was intensely jealous of me her whole life i think she still is and who can blame her um this is a little bit of a digression from a depression um [Music] you know it's easy to give advice that presumes someone is on your level and it's a lot harder and it's not a lot more humiliating to really cast your mind back and remember what help and what advice you needed when you were at their level so i do this a lot i mean i'm a very self-critical person this way but like i remember how stupid i was and i like i i remember it in a way where you're really living through it again you're feeling that discomfort i remember how stupid it was i remember how ignorant i was i remember the misconceptions i had when i first started studying the korean language when i first studied studying the chinese language but this is not in order uh when i first started studying korean egypt like i can remember the hopes and dreams side with each language but i can remember you know like remember my own enthusiasm like you could say it that way but like to really inhabit that memory where you deal with and confront and feel like how vulnerable you were at that time how much you needed help and and maybe you didn't even know how to ask for the help you needed now sorry for me one language after another you know when i first started studying korean i didn't know what to ask for help i didn't know what held asphalt but sure when you're dealing with the languages later i knew exactly what helped ask for i knew exactly what i needed to do because i'd studied six other languages already or something you know i could you know obviously this and i was getting older and more mature um yeah so look i mean i think i think what i'm doing here is uniting two seemingly unrelated points okay people see you as a genius people see you as talented and people say to your face kid you're going someplace you're gonna have no problems in life like you don't need my help that's people said my whole [ __ ] life and i'm saying no like i need help i'm failing and you know i'm failing this institution is deeply flawed and [ __ ] i can't win here i'm going to lose loosener i'm like i'm looking at dropping out and joining the army that was a real thing that happened um you know it's a real example i talked to with professors and they all said good they all knew go back to university they thought it was a great idea for me to drop out and drop the army i'm touching it's great oh so yesterday you were telling me i'm a genius now you're telling me it's good dropout these are not mutually exclusive possibilities so you know i've been through some really weird situations that with authority figures right like okay you perceive me as talented you perceive me as brilliant but i perceive myself as vulnerable i know the help i need i know the help i'm asking for and i know how different it is this thing that you or the institution are are providing me so look i'd say this dude the most generous thing i can say about professor r gay maybe now as an old man who's already studied so many languages so many years maybe he can just sit alone at his desk and study a language for 15 minutes a day i doubt it i'm just being honest with you i don't so i'm also a mean old man with a lot of experiences how much progress could i make in chinese for 15 minutes a day nothing no even spanish i'm sorry even an easy language like it's not going to be 15 minutes a day it's going to be five hours a day it's it's you know you're going to break your brain and you really have to pour it on to make any progress at all it's my honest opinion here you know i i i don't i don't think it's true however you know the most charitable thing i could say is that a small part of his problem everything i said earlier in the video i think is the larger part of them maybe a small part of the problem is not having the humility and not being able to endure the very real suffering of casting your mind back to remember um what it was like for you when you were in that in that vulnerable position you know oh great question isil as a vegan do you eat canned mandarin oranges in in syrup have we done that even once in the last five years is that no i think uh canned fruit um can be important for avoiding scurvy on long ocean voyages and the exploration of the south pole but yeah that's that's about it i i can't remember last time we're not we're canned fruit i don't know it could be that could be the title of volume three of my autobiography canned fruit yep so you know a note of agreement from someone called ari ari says institutions will never sacrifice their integrity by admitting they are failing they would sooner let the student body suffer than actually admit they need to change um you know the concept of conservatism is very slippery china went through a revolution education didn't change education remained conservative right america went through a revolution now i know in new york at least they burned the uh the university down the main university of new den was destroyed in the in the american revolution i think you could go through the different major universities what was in boston at that time in philadelphia they only had a few uh in the american in the 13 colonies i should say at that at that time america had a revolution thompson did education change now with england you have to go back probably to the english civil war all right uh how about poland how about romania how about ukraine how about russia you know what do we mean by conservative like a lot of countries in the past 200 years or sorry however many hundred years morning that's 500 years let's go back they've been through dramatic profound political changes but education didn't change all right now one of my professors at the university of victoria just won he's already retired now he was on the edge of terminal he had learned chinese at a time when there were only paper dictionaries and where you had to memorize a lot of arbitrary rules concerning word order to find anything in a dictionary there were no computer-based dictionaries there were no mobile phone dictionaries there's nothing there's nothing like that um [Music] you know you can completely you can argue that the transformation offered by information technology the internet computers etc in some ways more profound or more important than the rise and fall of communism various revolutions that have come and gone that's debatable uh both are incredibly important but it's not the same they're not important in the same way okay we went from an era of paper dictionaries to instant mobile phone lookup dictionaries and it didn't change the university system didn't change now sorry i know i'm generalizing here but a huge part of the world but uh you know and if there are a couple of exceptions we can make separate youtube videos talking about them uh frankly but i think that the conservatism of educational institutions i think it's really important to recognize that that's it's more extreme actually than religious religious institutions i think it's fair to say that mainstream religious institutions they profoundly change with every single one of those examples i just mentioned but educational institutions didn't and language education is perhaps the most conservative of all and you know the easiest way to resist change is simply to deny that there's a problem simply to refuse to measure measure outcomes at what point you know do people admit there's a problem with the education of doctors and nurses i'm sorry to say it's only when there are really a lot of dead bodies piling up it's incredibly hard it's incredibly hard to get these institutions to make this world even when people's lives are aligned even when there's a body count and with something like language education you're never going to have that kind of palpable outcome to force the institution to re-examine its most fundamentalist okay so some interesting um interesting comments here from goddess nama goddess nama says melissa you might agree or disagree with this quote almost all attempts at learning a language are undertaken for vain reasons people want to be bilingual more than they want to actually speak another language quote my point being that language instruction has fallen to what is demanded by most students oh um i think that there is a really serious oh sorry you speak good good yeah yes they seem to be motivated but and at least in part in vanity so you've definitely spoken about this issue i think on your channel before yeah well that's not really the way i responded it's true i've i've talked about the uh the vanity and dishonesty of a lot of people who are making money out of giving advice on on language learning um you know what do you do if you're a gym coach if you're a trainer personal trainer or something at a gym what do you do if you're training people and you have a client you have a student who is fundamentally delusional about what they're going to be able to accomplish in the gym what they're going to be able to learn or something i think you have a serious moral responsibility as you as an educator say no that's it's not gonna happen that's not how it works you know those are not the results you are gonna get for whatever reason you know um i think that you have to provide the realism and guidance you know i think that is an implicit part of my critique of alexandre is that i'm saying he has to be in that uh in that role in that position now you know at the start of this video i talked a little bit about the life of the mind about being an author the vast majority of people i've met who wanted to be an author of any kind whether that's poetry non-fiction fiction the vast majority of people i met who wanted to be authors wanted to do it for vain reasons they wanted to do it for the wrong reasons and they liked the idea of themselves being famous and possibly rich and many of them they thought they'd be more sexually appealing to the opposite sex or the same sex that they did the higher um sexual status if they were there are a lot of people who want to write a book or many books or what have you want to be a creative writer uh for vain reasons so what's you know what's my obligation what's my moral obligation in relation to that you know or for any of us you know i mean why is it too much to ask you know no do the right things for the right reasons i mean that's that's absolutely what it's all got to be about and maybe those discussions people maybe sometimes that lead to someone recognizing that they shouldn't be writing this book at all you know maybe they abandon that project maybe they give up on the idea of being a writer at all they realize that's really the wrong path to them but more likely it's going to lead to them having a more profound engagement with and a more profound commitment to whatever it was they wanted to accomplish in the first place to really re-examine what their motivations are to start making smarter decisions uh in relation to it um you know my point being if you sat down with a stereotypical teenager who says they want to learn japanese and they want to learn japanese for the wrong reasons okay even if your purpose is to talk them out of it think it's very likely the outcome of that conversation is that they are going to be more motivated to learn japanese for the right reasons and to understand what it is they need to be motivated to do to understand the obstacles they're going to overcome and the commitments they're going to make so i was just talking to someone i'm intentionally not going to say what this is in a university program and i gave him several options and several pieces of advice but one of them was well what if you drop out of all the courses other than the language course so you put 110 times language course because these universities pretend you can do five courses simultaneously eight courses simultaneously you can be researching and writing all these essays on different topics while doing this huge amount of memorization wrote practice and so on well yeah one way to compensate for that is to is to just do the language for that year or for those couple of years and to try to really really get that down now that that may not sound deep in contrast to many and in some ways it's not but that's proceeding from this recognition of the seriousness of the task i mean as opposed to saying oh well all you need is 15 minutes a day um you know to really take that seriously so look maybe i'm being recklessly optimistic here but that okay i'm just being honest with you this is my experience in life and this is a positive experience when i talk to people who want to do vegan activism for vain reasons and i criticize the vanity of their reasons at the end of the conversation they don't want to give up being vegan they don't want to give up being political activists they want to do the right thing for the right reasons now they want to be you know they come out of the conversation feeling you know kind of refreshed with a new sense of direction and clarity like oh okay so you know i realized before i was really thinking about this the wrong way so and so forth i think that if you that that's my experience you know um but of course it requires radical honesty and um it requires a kind of honesty that i think you know professors are not trained to have professors are trained from an early age to instead be dishonest and precisely these ways if you sit down and explain to someone who wants to learn japanese just how hard it's going to be and what their reasons should be and what they should expect and how the next 10 years are going to go or the next four years ago but how lonely and what you know i totally see how for a large percentage of people that's going to result in a deepening appreciation on their part for what language learning is as a process and as a and as a product now we could repeat this even for lifting weights at the gym but sure maybe some people are just going to decide that exercising the gym is not what they want to do at all education so comment from rasmus who i've seen in the audience before welcome back erasmus education in general tends to be very biased biased the worst is possibly how psychiatry is considered a science and why use an antidepressants etc yeah um okay there is no subject on which the students and professors are more equal than the hard sciences all right you can and most professors in the sciences fear this you can stand up in class and say to the professor you're wrong i have a peer-reviewed study right here and here's the footnote here's the source and what you said in today's lecture is false physics chemistry neurochemistry life sciences right students can catch professors being wrong in the hard sciences so easily anyway sometimes even accidentally you know they don't mean to and i certainly professors have a connection on stage all the time for that reason because their their authority can challenge um language education is at the opposite extreme it's the most authoritarian the student and the professor are at the most unequal and a student is not even capable of detecting for example when the student has asked a good question and the professor is lying to the student because they don't want to deal with it you know and so it comes up again it happens accidentally oh but professor i thought that word was used this way in this context but professor last week you taught us that word should always go at the start of the sentence never at the end you know it can be totally good nature on the part of the student and it can be mean-spirited in the part of the student where the student feels they know better than the professor and the in professor's job um you know so the authority and power the professor holds and the possibility of abuse i think that language education is the most extreme there's no other field where it's harder for the student to say to the professor you don't know what you're talking about you're teaching it wrong you know um and that is exactly what we need um that's what democracy requires and entails if you are going to progress from having a fundamentally aristocratic system of education to a fundamentally democratic system of education we need to have a whole society of people at every level who are really capable of standing up to those in authority and saying you're doing it wrong you're teaching it wrong think about the consequences 10 years from now think about the consequences of these young people's lives think about the measurable outcomes or who's actually learning to speak this language in business who's learning to be a nurse and who isn't right we need to reform our institutions from the bottom up and a lot of the people that are at the top need to be torn down