Vs. Contrapoints on Cancel Culture and the Philosophy of Education
02 January 2020 [link youtube]
Youtube Automatic Transcription
this video is partly inspired by fellow
youtuber counterpoints who is currently leading the world in a discussion reflecting on what's called cancel culture in the year 2020 I wonder if anyone will still use that term just five years from now maybe this will be forgotten if people look back and watch this video in the very near future and it's also inspired by the fact that the moment I have really bad cold this is now January 3rd I've had a cold since December 17th and it has massively impaired my mental as well as physical abilities but I really resent the impairment of my mental abilities somewhat more um I think that conjure points and most of the other people discussing this have missed the most fundamental source of what we now call cancel culture and that is the organisation of Education in the Western world in the Western english-speaking world almost all education is punitive in nature and it's designed on the basis of a phony competition that's supposedly measuring your innate capabilities so the teacher's job is to put all students at the same starting line to impose the same finishing line and then to judge them to rank their abilities in order based on how they perform on the obstacle course along the way Western education system is fundamentally not about learning it's not about improvement it's not about gaining the ability to do something regardless of how long it may take you that it may take one person more time than another person to learn how to do algebra but if the point were to actually produce competence in algebra then you wouldn't design the education system so it's like hey guys guess what everyone here has two months to learn how to do algebra to this standard and then at the end of those two months we're gonna say you get an A plus you get a B you get a C you get a D and you fail and that's the point of Education oh why why did I do this because we have the illusion that what you're measuring is your innate inborn talent for algebra and you know what you may be measuring you may be measuring who had a cold during those two months just coming down with the common cold can mean that your academic performance is terrible for a crucial period of 30 days and the way our system is set up that can then impact your academic record for the rest of your life and it can also result in you thinking oh I'm I'm bad at math like I innately lack the talent to do math now of course there are a million other sources of bias and skew that creep into education like some people have parents who help them learn how to do math at home and some don't some people speak English as their first language and some don't all these advantages and disadvantages socio-economic and otherwise right but what I'm questioning here is the format of Education itself and the role of the teacher as being essentially punitive so contra points raised the interesting point that cancel' culture is inimical to the process of people learning from their mistakes like somebody says something racist or somebody says something insensitive maybe someone says something that's really offensive about history but they didn't realize how offensive it was we had a politician in Canada who said some offensive things about the Holocaust and and she claimed she didn't even like she didn't know what the Holocaust was that she was that ignorant she didn't even know what a concentration camp wasn't this kind of thing the role of the teacher in the education system again is not to help people improve and reach their goal it's to punish them for failing to reach the finish line as fast as other people who are in the same race right a contrast to this that is not to ideal or idealistic is to look at the way skills are gained in military education so I'm gonna describe what I mean here obviously this is an all education in the military but it's it's a significant part of it I once heard a man describing how in the Navy they trained people to put out a fire on the deck of a ship and it's not it's not the case they have the starting line for everyone and a finish line for everyone then they decide okay you're naturally talented at putting out fires and you're not it's not the point the point is not to grade people on how well they can put it afire the point is to train each and every one of those men to the point where they have mastery of that set of skills so that in a life-and-death situation they will put out a fire on the deck of a ship as best as they possibly can and as best as any human being can so you know what the first and most obvious difference is from education as we have it in our primary schools high schools universities in the Western world there is no fixed finish line you can keep doing the course for as long as it takes so if there's a test where you know they set up a phony fire or they have a drill obviously right and you come in and you do that drill again and again and again until you basically get a grade of a hundred percent like 80 percent isn't good enough right and if that if one person does that in three months they happen to be talented or they maybe they have some prior education that really let them figure out you can imagine you have to you have to memorize the different types of hoses and fasteners there are a certain level of book learning but a lot of its just manual skill maybe one person studies hard works hard and they completely master how to put out a fire in three months so they've finished that training module great they move on but if someone else needs six months if someone else needs nine months they're gonna keep getting that repetition they're gonna go through that learning process again and again and again until completion I grew up in downtown Toronto we had immigrants from every part of the world in the school I went to I didn't I didn't go to a rich people's school at that time we had a lot of immigrants from Chile Chilean refugees they weren't really immigrants they were refugees we had kids from Jamaica we had a lot of kids at that time from actually Greece okay a couple Koreans me do it I don't remember how to Chinese actually remember Koreans all right these kids their parents didn't speak English you know what is the point of teaching grade six English primary school level English is the point just to evaluate Oh Oh guess what big surprise the kid who arrived here as a refugee from Chile can't write a book report at the same level of skill as the kid his first language is English too both of his parents speak English fluently and maybe the parents help him with his homework Wow big surprise this kid gets an A+ and this kid gets a d-plus or a c-minus and that kid had to work ten times as hard for the same outcome know if fundamentally the point is to train all of these kids so they can get a hundred percent if the point is them to actually have the skill the ability to research and write a book report at a grade 6 level then you will help those kids you will work with those kids for as long as it takes and quite likely the kid who just arrived here from Chile the kid who just arrived here from Korea even the Greeks the guys who derive their English was not that good whatever the new immigrants who arrived in the class maybe they need to teach keep taking the course for an extra one month two months in terms maybe there needs to be flexibility to that finish line right but the role of the teacher in being punitive in saying no you pass you fail you're good you're bad you're talented and you're not it's fundamentally counterproductive and these people who are typically on the left wing we're gonna come back this they're not all left-wing these people who are stereotypically on the left wing playing the game of counterculture what the position they think they're in is the role of the schoolmaster is the role of the schoolteacher grading and evaluating others punitive ly assessing the performance of others not helping them not educating them all right now its heart the role of a teacher it's hard it's got to come from a certain sort of place of love and sympathy and concern where you actually say to a kid and the kid the kid may not have good intentions the kid may be lazy say this kid look I know you're not really motivated to write the best book report you can but I've got to work with you I got to help you you got to work with me let's take as much time as this needs let's actually develop this so you have this competence and then if you want to later you can go on to university or whatever it is you do with this confidence but where it's actually about the learning outcome okay now politically I mean when I deal with left-wing people a lot of the time they have real misconceptions about economics the most popular misconception I encounter on the left wing and I'm far to left myself are left wingers who believe that money is infinite left wingers who dogmatically believe there is no such thing as a debt problem there's no such thing as a debt crisis that it's just impossible for the government to spend too much money and go bankrupt okay now I don't I don't cancel those people I don't sit back and say okay well I'm gonna judge you like you you have some innate lack of talent for economics all right the reality is what I have to try to do is help those people and you know yes I try to use Socratic method I try to use real-world examples you know have you heard of this that and the other historical example where countries really do go bankrupt where you know life for everyone becomes miserable because the public sector the government mismanaged its debt spend too much money and then things close and it's hard it's got to come from a place of love and sympathy and you got to ask the other person to sympathize with you and and they may not recognize as you as a teacher they may not recognize you as having good intentions they may not want to recognize that you know something they don't know but I mean where does this stuff come from ultimately it may just be that they were born in circumstances with their own parents that they grew up ignorant or even with the kind of self-righteous ignorance on this topic right and ultimately it may be just as arbitrary as when you happen to have a cold when you happened to come down with the flu and you missed that month's lessons in economics class and you never caught up we all struggle with these intellectual inequalities that are arbitrary we're all burdened with it and our system of Education trains us to regard those inequalities as innate and to judge one another as if these were ethical characteristics part and parcel of who we are as human beings that we can never change all right the fact that your parents were racist doesn't mean you have to be racist the fact that you grew up racist doesn't mean you have to be racist and you know a more nuanced example may be the fact that your parents raised you with lies about American Indians Native people First Nations you know the Iroquois the achieve way the mohawk most white people grew up with lies about that not really knowing the history of where America comes from European colonization and Jensen most of us grew up with lies whether your parents grandparents or schoolteacher told you okay the fact that you have false information and Koch aid into into you and you may have a bad attitude towards that information and you may not want to learn and you may not have the curiosity of challenging yourself okay the good news is there is no finish line but death as long as you're alive you can reach out to others and can learn and others if they know what it truly means to be a teacher they can reach out and they can teach you
youtuber counterpoints who is currently leading the world in a discussion reflecting on what's called cancel culture in the year 2020 I wonder if anyone will still use that term just five years from now maybe this will be forgotten if people look back and watch this video in the very near future and it's also inspired by the fact that the moment I have really bad cold this is now January 3rd I've had a cold since December 17th and it has massively impaired my mental as well as physical abilities but I really resent the impairment of my mental abilities somewhat more um I think that conjure points and most of the other people discussing this have missed the most fundamental source of what we now call cancel culture and that is the organisation of Education in the Western world in the Western english-speaking world almost all education is punitive in nature and it's designed on the basis of a phony competition that's supposedly measuring your innate capabilities so the teacher's job is to put all students at the same starting line to impose the same finishing line and then to judge them to rank their abilities in order based on how they perform on the obstacle course along the way Western education system is fundamentally not about learning it's not about improvement it's not about gaining the ability to do something regardless of how long it may take you that it may take one person more time than another person to learn how to do algebra but if the point were to actually produce competence in algebra then you wouldn't design the education system so it's like hey guys guess what everyone here has two months to learn how to do algebra to this standard and then at the end of those two months we're gonna say you get an A plus you get a B you get a C you get a D and you fail and that's the point of Education oh why why did I do this because we have the illusion that what you're measuring is your innate inborn talent for algebra and you know what you may be measuring you may be measuring who had a cold during those two months just coming down with the common cold can mean that your academic performance is terrible for a crucial period of 30 days and the way our system is set up that can then impact your academic record for the rest of your life and it can also result in you thinking oh I'm I'm bad at math like I innately lack the talent to do math now of course there are a million other sources of bias and skew that creep into education like some people have parents who help them learn how to do math at home and some don't some people speak English as their first language and some don't all these advantages and disadvantages socio-economic and otherwise right but what I'm questioning here is the format of Education itself and the role of the teacher as being essentially punitive so contra points raised the interesting point that cancel' culture is inimical to the process of people learning from their mistakes like somebody says something racist or somebody says something insensitive maybe someone says something that's really offensive about history but they didn't realize how offensive it was we had a politician in Canada who said some offensive things about the Holocaust and and she claimed she didn't even like she didn't know what the Holocaust was that she was that ignorant she didn't even know what a concentration camp wasn't this kind of thing the role of the teacher in the education system again is not to help people improve and reach their goal it's to punish them for failing to reach the finish line as fast as other people who are in the same race right a contrast to this that is not to ideal or idealistic is to look at the way skills are gained in military education so I'm gonna describe what I mean here obviously this is an all education in the military but it's it's a significant part of it I once heard a man describing how in the Navy they trained people to put out a fire on the deck of a ship and it's not it's not the case they have the starting line for everyone and a finish line for everyone then they decide okay you're naturally talented at putting out fires and you're not it's not the point the point is not to grade people on how well they can put it afire the point is to train each and every one of those men to the point where they have mastery of that set of skills so that in a life-and-death situation they will put out a fire on the deck of a ship as best as they possibly can and as best as any human being can so you know what the first and most obvious difference is from education as we have it in our primary schools high schools universities in the Western world there is no fixed finish line you can keep doing the course for as long as it takes so if there's a test where you know they set up a phony fire or they have a drill obviously right and you come in and you do that drill again and again and again until you basically get a grade of a hundred percent like 80 percent isn't good enough right and if that if one person does that in three months they happen to be talented or they maybe they have some prior education that really let them figure out you can imagine you have to you have to memorize the different types of hoses and fasteners there are a certain level of book learning but a lot of its just manual skill maybe one person studies hard works hard and they completely master how to put out a fire in three months so they've finished that training module great they move on but if someone else needs six months if someone else needs nine months they're gonna keep getting that repetition they're gonna go through that learning process again and again and again until completion I grew up in downtown Toronto we had immigrants from every part of the world in the school I went to I didn't I didn't go to a rich people's school at that time we had a lot of immigrants from Chile Chilean refugees they weren't really immigrants they were refugees we had kids from Jamaica we had a lot of kids at that time from actually Greece okay a couple Koreans me do it I don't remember how to Chinese actually remember Koreans all right these kids their parents didn't speak English you know what is the point of teaching grade six English primary school level English is the point just to evaluate Oh Oh guess what big surprise the kid who arrived here as a refugee from Chile can't write a book report at the same level of skill as the kid his first language is English too both of his parents speak English fluently and maybe the parents help him with his homework Wow big surprise this kid gets an A+ and this kid gets a d-plus or a c-minus and that kid had to work ten times as hard for the same outcome know if fundamentally the point is to train all of these kids so they can get a hundred percent if the point is them to actually have the skill the ability to research and write a book report at a grade 6 level then you will help those kids you will work with those kids for as long as it takes and quite likely the kid who just arrived here from Chile the kid who just arrived here from Korea even the Greeks the guys who derive their English was not that good whatever the new immigrants who arrived in the class maybe they need to teach keep taking the course for an extra one month two months in terms maybe there needs to be flexibility to that finish line right but the role of the teacher in being punitive in saying no you pass you fail you're good you're bad you're talented and you're not it's fundamentally counterproductive and these people who are typically on the left wing we're gonna come back this they're not all left-wing these people who are stereotypically on the left wing playing the game of counterculture what the position they think they're in is the role of the schoolmaster is the role of the schoolteacher grading and evaluating others punitive ly assessing the performance of others not helping them not educating them all right now its heart the role of a teacher it's hard it's got to come from a certain sort of place of love and sympathy and concern where you actually say to a kid and the kid the kid may not have good intentions the kid may be lazy say this kid look I know you're not really motivated to write the best book report you can but I've got to work with you I got to help you you got to work with me let's take as much time as this needs let's actually develop this so you have this competence and then if you want to later you can go on to university or whatever it is you do with this confidence but where it's actually about the learning outcome okay now politically I mean when I deal with left-wing people a lot of the time they have real misconceptions about economics the most popular misconception I encounter on the left wing and I'm far to left myself are left wingers who believe that money is infinite left wingers who dogmatically believe there is no such thing as a debt problem there's no such thing as a debt crisis that it's just impossible for the government to spend too much money and go bankrupt okay now I don't I don't cancel those people I don't sit back and say okay well I'm gonna judge you like you you have some innate lack of talent for economics all right the reality is what I have to try to do is help those people and you know yes I try to use Socratic method I try to use real-world examples you know have you heard of this that and the other historical example where countries really do go bankrupt where you know life for everyone becomes miserable because the public sector the government mismanaged its debt spend too much money and then things close and it's hard it's got to come from a place of love and sympathy and you got to ask the other person to sympathize with you and and they may not recognize as you as a teacher they may not recognize you as having good intentions they may not want to recognize that you know something they don't know but I mean where does this stuff come from ultimately it may just be that they were born in circumstances with their own parents that they grew up ignorant or even with the kind of self-righteous ignorance on this topic right and ultimately it may be just as arbitrary as when you happen to have a cold when you happened to come down with the flu and you missed that month's lessons in economics class and you never caught up we all struggle with these intellectual inequalities that are arbitrary we're all burdened with it and our system of Education trains us to regard those inequalities as innate and to judge one another as if these were ethical characteristics part and parcel of who we are as human beings that we can never change all right the fact that your parents were racist doesn't mean you have to be racist the fact that you grew up racist doesn't mean you have to be racist and you know a more nuanced example may be the fact that your parents raised you with lies about American Indians Native people First Nations you know the Iroquois the achieve way the mohawk most white people grew up with lies about that not really knowing the history of where America comes from European colonization and Jensen most of us grew up with lies whether your parents grandparents or schoolteacher told you okay the fact that you have false information and Koch aid into into you and you may have a bad attitude towards that information and you may not want to learn and you may not have the curiosity of challenging yourself okay the good news is there is no finish line but death as long as you're alive you can reach out to others and can learn and others if they know what it truly means to be a teacher they can reach out and they can teach you