Episode 973: SOUND it OUT – the Failure of State Education
Air Date: July 15, 2026 | Host: Bob Metz
Just Right — broadcasting on WBCQ and Channel 292 shortwave
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this program are those of the participants.
Clip (Awaken With JP, December 7, 2021):
Dr. Death: I’m Dr. Death with The Center for Dominance and Control Over People. Critical thinking isn’t a pandemic we have to worry about in the future. It’s a pandemic that’s here now. The critical thinking crisis is upon us.
What are we doing to combat this disaster? Well, it’s probably not what you think. Let’s take a look at the harm that critical thinking causes.
People think it’s safe to just laugh at things like the New York Times article warning against critical thinking, but they have no idea that the catastrophic effects of critical thinking are worse than they think.
Bob Metz:
Welcome everyone. It is Wednesday, July 15, 2026. I’m Bob Metz, and this is Just Right, broadcasting around the world and online. Join us for an hour of discussion that’s not right wing. It’s Just Right.
The dumbing down of America was no accident. Likewise, the re-enlightenment of America will not simply revive without some conscious purpose behind that effort. The state of education in both America and in Canada is a term that is rather self-descriptive. The state of education is state education. And in the hands of the state, the word education is not about acquiring knowledge, but about actually being disabled in the effort to acquire knowledge. And I’m being very serious about this, as this has been both my personal observation and direct experience, and my political observation and direct experience, some of which we’ll be sharing with you during today’s broadcast. In fact, the word educate in conjunction with government or the state is a misnomer, as in the term state education. The correct term would be state schooling, which is an entirely different concept from education in any form.
We’ll have more to say about that critical distinction right after our reminder that you can write us at feedback@justrightmedia.org. Hear us on WBCQ and on Channel 292 Shortwave. Follow and like us on your favorite podcast platform, and visit us at justrightmedia.org, where you can access all of our social media links, archive broadcasts, and the support button that makes it easy for you to support the show. Because as always, your financial support is appreciated and is what makes this show possible.
Now, of all the single issues I ever got involved with during my half-century in political activity, education was always the one at the top of that list. I can think of no issue more important in any serious effort to preserve what has been called Western values or to maintain a free and prosperous society. Euphemistically called public education, the word public, of course, means government, the state, and the word education is the metaphor for schooling.
Governments are not concerned about knowledge or skills. They are concerned with process, rules, regulations, and coerced tax funds from all citizens, whether or not they’ve actually attended these schools or have children in the school system. For them, schooling is a matter of providing a service, originally made compulsory on every level—from forced attendance (remember truancy officers), forced funding through broad universal taxation at all three levels of government, and monopolistic rules that severely limit, though not entirely prohibit, competition in schooling. So schooling is about providing a service; education is about acquiring knowledge. The fact that the state-run service is not delivering objective valid knowledge is a problem that has been recognized since its inception, and it was thoroughly identified and expressed in one of the Freedom Party of Ontario’s founding issue papers published upon the official registration of the party in the Orwellian year of 1984.
And the following issue paper published at that time was entitled Public Education: Identifying the Problem, State Monopoly, and it was co-authored by Mark Emery and John Cosser.
When it comes to the books we read, the neighborhood we live in, the religion or philosophies we practice, the food we eat, the people we associate with—in fact, in most areas of our lives—we highly value our freedom of choice. Yet when it comes to one of our most precious resources, our children, parents are not permitted to exercise this necessary freedom. The closest thing to the state education system in size and scope is Canada Post, the Post Office. Like the Post Office, state schools constitute a monopoly. Competition is small because it suffers a severe state-imposed economic disadvantage. And like the Post Office, this lack of competition has allowed it to become mired in labor strife, morale problems, and inefficiency. And like the Post Office, it is often found to be impossible to correct such problems even when they’ve been identified and recognized for decades. Common complaints about the state schools argue that their political masters, the school trustees, seldom set foot in the schools to see firsthand what’s going on and seldom approach students or their families for their opinions; that the curricula are more the result of political pressure than of market feedback resulting from consumer preferences; that school funding is becoming a battleground for the religious sects, each claiming “equal benefits of the law,” meaning equal access to tax money; that heavy unionization of the teaching profession has fostered a system which rewards seniority more than ability and has made it almost impossible to turn over staff fast enough and often enough to renew the schools with fresh minds and fresh ideas; that high school graduates lack basic skills such as literacy, numerical ability, and acceptable workplace ethics and attitudes; that students have a lack of respect for schools and for their own education, since neither they nor their families must directly pay for the cost of that education; that compulsory schooling nourishes a coercive mind, which in later years may result in coercive behavior. The choice of an education may be the most important choice a person can make in his or her lifetime. Yet how many state schools even bother to advertise their points of difference from the other schools? When was the last time a state educator called you on the phone to talk about your family’s educational needs? How many choices do you have? Do you have any worth pursuing? And if you don’t know, why not? Why is more time and attention given to the purchase of a new car than to the choice of an education? Because when it comes to education, we haven’t got a choice. Since the purpose of an education is to help us make choices, isn’t it about time that the system lived up to its intended purpose? We think so. After all, freedom of choice is what we’re all about.
Now, that Freedom Party issue paper essentially described the state of education at the time of the party’s founding in 1984. And sadly, it’s still the state of education today in 2026. And since then, the consequences of state-run schooling have only gotten infinitely worse, and this is not a problem unique to the province of Ontario, Canada.
So before returning to our own turf, let’s take a quick look at the education crisis as it manifests itself elsewhere in the Anglosphere, in particular in the UK and in Australia. Referred to as the UK’s strictest headmistress, Birbalsingh, who runs the Michaela School there, gave a public delivery that was a real wake-up call for anyone wondering why the state-run schools are failing so miserably across the board. Introduced by Ali Tabrizi on his June 26th podcast and heard on this side of our upcoming bumper, Singh points her finger right at we the people as those who are responsible for having allowed such a horrific schooling system to be foisted upon our children.
And on the return side of the bumper, our attention shifts from the UK to Australia, where on June 19th, John Anderson Media featured a discussion with Professor Simon Haines and Dr. Fiona Mueller, whose credentials in education ran on too long for me to include them in our time-limited framework of discussion. But in their discussion, they begin with the basics and essentials, including the definition and nature of education itself.
But first, here comes the headmistress.
Clip (Ali Tabrizi Podcast, June 26, 2026 – Katharine Birbalsingh, Michaela Community School):
Ali Tabrizi: What you’re about to watch is a speech from the UK’s strictest headmistress. She’s a principal of a school, and she refuses to be bullied by woke ideology. She does not care one bit about political correctness. And a few years ago, there was a scandal that was national headline news because she refused to be bullied by these Islamic students who demanded that she put an Islamic prayer room in the school. Now it’s one of the best schools in the country.
She’s getting the best results from her students, and this is what she had to say about why the UK and Western civilization is falling apart.
Katharine Birbalsingh: A few weeks ago, a young man called Henry Nowak, barely out of childhood, handcuffed on the ground, begging the police for help. And what followed was the confusion of our commentators as they struggled to explain how our young police officers sworn to protect the public could behave in such a way. No one seemed to have a convincing answer. But when you spend a lifetime in schools, it’s pretty clear what’s going on. Those young police officers are not a special case. They’re collateral damage. And the pattern runs far further afield than policing.
Last September, Charlie Kirk was shot, and within hours young people were celebrating all over the internet, despite the fact that his two little children would have to grow up without their father. Many of us looked on in disbelief. What has happened to the moral core of our young people?
Something has changed profoundly in how our young people see the world. Those police officers were not evil. They were not incompetent. They were terrified—terrified of being seen as racist.
Charlie Kirk held views young people find objectionable, and so his death was cause for celebration. Henry Novak’s attacker was a brown man. So the police’s deepest instinct to protect the victim was overridden by their most powerful fear: being accused of racism. The police are not special.
They’re what some of our young people have become—so consumed by white guilt that they will do crazy, irrational, and inhumane things rather than risk being seen as racist. Unless we try to explain this change in our moral core and the moral core of our young people, and why we are witnessing this culture change across many Western countries, we cannot pretend to care about the West.
Our profound lack of interest in the moral values surrounding our children has caused our civilizational collapse. The reason the younger generation see things as they do is because they have been taught to view people in two camps—those who are oppressed and those who are oppressors. And in their eyes, Charlie Kirk was an oppressor, so his death did not warrant grief. The man who killed Henry Novak belonged to the oppressed class.
So the police’s job was to protect him, not the dying man on the ground. This is not cruelty or incompetence. This is white guilt. And we are the ones who have taught this to our children. We—the boomers, the Gen Xers, the older millennials—we are responsible for not teaching our children the difference between right and wrong.
We who immersed our children in a culture of victimhood, which is at odds with the culture of personal responsibility we all grew up in. A culture we’ve very stupidly taken for granted. As little as 40 or 50 years ago, the bedrock of traditional small-c conservative values that built the West were commonplace in our schools and in our general culture.
Once upon a time, we all knew that traditional values gave us a chance at a meaningful life. All the grandmothers knew it, all the pastors knew it, even the teachers knew it. So why don’t our young people know it now? We boomers, Gen Xers, and older millennials think school is just about teaching algebra. Do you ever wonder why Gen Z behaves so differently in the workplace? Not all of them, sure, but we all know they tend to be more performative than older generations, tend to value feelings more, and don’t really embody the small-c conservative values of duty to others, or real sacrifice instead of the performative kind. Instead, young people swim in a culture of instant gratification and “live your best life.”
You do you, be who you want to be. And if you think Gen Z is bad, just you wait till you see Gen Alpha. The culture shift comes from what children learn at school and online. Ask any young person what history they learned at school, and they’ll tell you, Hitler. Ask them what else? Slavery.
Ask them what else? American civil rights. In fact, what little they know of history will be all about black and brown people fighting for equality against the white man. Women fighting men for the vote, gay and trans people fighting for various rights. Our young people have been taught that history is simply one long story about various groups struggling under the oppressive dead white man. History is taught through an oppressor lens. The triangular slave trade—white men held the power. What about Britain ending the slave trade? More than a quick mention, if at all? No. What of the Arab slave trade that lasted three times as long as the triangular slave trade? No.
Okay, so GCSE history in Britain is often taught as migration through time. So the idea that Britain has always been a land of immigrants is embedded in our children’s heads.
Most schools would prefer to concentrate learning about the tiny number of black people who existed in Tudor England over a thorough analysis of England’s break from Rome. How can children feel that they belong to their country when they are immersed in an educational culture that teaches that their country is merely an evil oppressor? Children are the future. And yet we are teaching them to have contempt for their elders, whose oppressive world needs overthrowing by a new world of young, arrogant, anti-racists who know better than we do. We look at Mamdani, the mayor of New York, and Zach Polanski, the very popular leader of the Green Party amongst the under-thirties in the UK.
And we wonder what on earth is going on. Why are our young people voting for and cheerleading these Marxist and really quite extreme politicians? It should not come as a surprise that our young people’s moral core does not recognize complexity or nuance. They have been formed by school and the online world to make one judgment only: oppressor or oppressed, and they are desperate not to be seen as racist. Well, I’m here to tell you—that’s on us. We don’t care about childhood.
And then we wonder why our children have imbibed the wrong values. Be brave and put away your lifestyles of anything goes. Saving the West ain’t easy, you know. And then you need to narrate those traditional values openly with your children, your grandchildren, your nephews, your nieces, as if we’re going to war. We need to inoculate our children against the seductive ideas of victimhood and hold them to account so that they can see that they are morally responsible beings with agency, whatever their race, whatever their religion. We all need to be brave enough to teach children a sense of duty and service, love of country, gratitude over entitlement, hard work over laziness, forgiveness over vengeance—and our children will reject the oppressor and oppressed narrative instinctively. They will know in their hearts that dignity comes through owning one’s moral agency, through being responsible and sacrificing for the betterment of the whole. Schools matter, families matter, children matter. Save our children, and we’ll save the West. Thank you.
Clip (John Anderson Media, June 19, 2026 – Prof. Simon Haines and Dr. Fiona Mueller: What Is Education?):
John Anderson: I know that a lot of people, parents in particular, are really beginning to wonder what their kids are being taught and how they’re being taught. Let me start with something really basic. What is education? Can I throw that to each of you? What is education? Surely it’s more than just sitting in a classroom.
Fiona Mueller: It’s so much more than that, absolutely. And to answer the question, John, I would go back to the Latin verb educare, which literally means to nourish. Education is two things in my view. One is the utilitarian.
So we prepare our young people to take their place in society in the most competent, confident way—literate, numerate, understanding various subjects that we regard as important, that we’ve come to after millennia of thinking about what it is that we want to learn about the world.
And the second part is the nourishing of their moral and their spiritual and their aesthetic and their intellectual development, and making sure that they are given every opportunity to enter the world as humans with responsibilities and rights in our society. So it’s both of those things.
John Anderson: We’ve got a lot to explore there. But your take. What is education?
Simon Haines: Okay, well, thanks, John. And you started with Abraham Lincoln, so let me respond by starting with H. G. Wells, slightly different figure, writing in the 1920s, so almost exactly a hundred years ago, in the gap between World War I and World War II. And Wells said human history is a race between education and catastrophe. And he knew what he was talking about, given that he was writing then.
And I think that sense of urgency that he puts into the debate is one that we need to have now.
But just to return to what Fiona was saying about the etymology, it’s contested—either leading forth out of a young person something that’s already in them, or as you said, nurturing and kind of training the mind. And the trouble with the leading-out one is that it’s given rise to a lot of mistaken and damaging theories of child-centered education, as if everything was already in there and all the teacher has to do is bring it out. Which is a Rousseauvian theory; it is the way he thought about education in his very influential treatise called Emile, almost the originary theory of education.
Education is delivery, yes, but it’s not delivery of something that’s already wholly there within the mind. This is also, John, just to cite another authority, a Socratic mistake. The Socratic method is often referred to as maieusis. And maieusis actually means a midwife. It’s Socrates who was called the midwife’s apprentice. And the idea is that the philosopher is helping the young person give birth to an idea, and again that brings with it a sense that it’s all there inside—student-centered is fine. They’ve got the ideas, all you have to do is release them. So misleading.
And I say this partly keeping in mind what Jonathan Swift said: humanity is not rational animals. We are animals that are capable of reason. And you have to be shown how to do the reasoning. It’s not innate. It’s very important to think of it in that sense as kind of a liberation from almost the prison of your own mind—a liberation into a freedom of thought that wasn’t there before you were liberated.
Bob Metz:
Yeah, so-called child-centered learning was part and parcel of what both I and Robert Vaughan fought against as part of the whole language education front, which was an affront to intelligence. We’ll talk more about that when we later get into the issue of reading, writing, and phonics.
But I couldn’t help notice how, in her call for teaching conservative values, Singh made a point of referring to them as “small-c conservative values.” Now, why do you suppose that so many conservatives keep using the term small-c conservatives when discussing fundamental moral values? Well, like it or not, they are loudly acknowledging that the large-C conservatives are different political animals entirely. And that doesn’t even begin to address the subcategories of small-c conservative groups—fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, libertarian conservatives, progressive conservatives, etc.
And again, the searing power of labels continually rears its ugly head. BS labels continually terrify people who should feel immune to such labels, even if they accurately apply in some given situations.
But the failure of so many people to accurately define terms and words is perhaps the most profound failure of our so-called public education system. And of course, being labeled racist has become an absolutely terrifying prospect, especially since it is constantly being projected by the racists themselves. What people need to learn is the definition of racism and what it actually is. For example, racism refers strictly to the legal practice of treating individuals differently before and under the law as a consequence of their racial ethnicity. Period. Full stop.
Hatred is rarely a factor in racism. In fact, it is altruism, disguised as caring for the oppressed, promoted by people who consider themselves superior to the oppressed but who are certainly not motivated by hatred, even though their actions may suggest otherwise. As an extreme example, I could say that I feel superior to the animals, but I don’t hate animals in the least. I have a great fondness for them.
So is public education really a failure? Well, that depends on one’s objective, doesn’t it? If public schooling fails at educating the public, then from the left’s perspective, maybe that’s a success. After all, the uneducated are perfect pawns to use in Marxist political agendas.
Now here’s a quick one-minute summary of what Denzel Washington called the seven harsh truths about school.
Clip (Denzel Washington – Seven Harsh Truths About School):
Denzel Washington: Seven harsh truths about school. Nobody wants to know it, but everyone will accept it in the end.
One: School is stopping you from pursuing your dreams because they are forcing you to be good at plenty of irrelevant subjects.
Two: It has nothing to do with making a lot of money. It makes you a slave of money. And that’s it.
Three: In school, they teach you a lesson and give you a test. The real world gives you a test and then teaches you a lesson.
Four: School grades are just the outcome of your memory, not your intelligence.
Five: They don’t want a nation of thinkers; they want a nation of workers.
Six: School teaches you to follow rules, not to break them, but only the rule breakers are the ones who succeed.
Seven: School teaches you to be a good consumer, not a good producer. But in today’s world, it’s more important than ever to be able to create value.
Bob Metz:
Now I happily noticed that that commentary was distinctly called Seven Harsh Truths About School, not about education.
Now, from what we’ve heard so far, the three observations that struck a chord with me were the following:
One, that human history is a race between education and catastrophe.
Two, that humanity is not rational, but is capable of reason.
And three, that the ultimate purpose of schooling is to teach the difference between right and wrong—not to teach a culture of victimhood, but instead a culture of personal responsibility.
And now, here once again is Australia’s John Anderson in conversation with Professor Simon Haines and Dr. Fiona Mueller, this time on the subject of universities, ancient and modern.
Clip (John Anderson Media, June 19, 2026 – Prof. Simon Haines and Dr. Fiona Mueller: Universities Ancient and Modern):
John Anderson: Tell us a bit about universities, meant to be places of higher learning.
Simon Haines: These are some of the oldest institutions in the world. The first university that called itself universitas was Bologna, and that was in 1088, the year that William the Conqueror died. So this is a thousand-year-old institution.
The next important thing to know about them is that the word means one turn—universum, one turnaround—and the idea was that if you stood in the middle of a campus, you could see all the scholars all gathered together in one place. And the reason that was novel was that previously teachers had been located in one teacher’s schools or in the monasteries. So the idea that you pulled them out and put them in one place was novel.
It also created a sense that the university is autonomous. It’s its own place, it’s independent of both the state and the church.
And then the second thing to say is that the Bologna model, so this is right from the beginning, had two elements. The first one was professional training. So right from the beginning, universities taught doctors and lawyers—professional training.
The second function that the university had from the start and still has is the function of higher knowledge, which in the 11th century meant two things: it meant theological knowledge of the divine, but also higher-level knowledge of human being—so divine being and human being, truth knowledge, higher knowledge. And that’s the knowledge of unchanging forms of reality, whether divine or human.
And the next thing that happened was that a new dimension was added to that sense that there was a higher form of knowledge, with Galileo and Copernicus and then Newton later on, that science itself was part of that higher, purer, prestige form of knowledge.
So that’s the original model, and I would argue that there’s still a lot of that remaining in our own model. We still have the professional function. Our universities still produce doctors and lawyers, and we still have this kind of higher function that we look up to, which in our case now is mostly STEM—science, technology, research.
In all of that story, the prestige of the professions and the prestige of higher knowledge, there was a Cinderella at the ball. And the Cinderella, which was buried in the foundation courses that everybody had to do in these universities, was a kind of STEM-humanities hybrid called the trivium and the quadrivium. The three arts of the trivium were the three arts of language: logic, rhetoric, and grammar. The quadrivium was the four arts of number, which was arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.
Fiona Mueller: Cosmology.
Simon Haines: No, no—music.
Fiona Mueller: Music. That’s right.
Simon Haines: So that was considered as an essential foundation for whatever you went on to do next, whether you were going to be a doctor or lawyer or a high-grade knowledge person, you had to do the foundation.
The key thing in there is the bit of the trivium called rhetoric. Because what rhetoric was all about was not high knowledge, and it was not being a good engineer. It was actually about being a good person. And rhetoric was founded on study of the ancients, particularly Cicero and Socrates and Plato, but also mythical imagined ancient figures like Achilles and Odysseus. And the idea was that students would be given a kind of gallery of examples of what constituted the good life.
It was the character side of the old university—the not grasping great truths, but what kind of person should you aim to be? It was good judgment. The original meaning of the word critic, which is from the Greek word for judgment—krisis is judgment. It’s what you do when the chips are down.
John Anderson: Fiona, you’ve been on ACARA, which is the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority in Sydney. What is it about the people who run the curriculum who shape it that they don’t understand that the community is losing confidence? There’s no other way of putting it. We have doubled expenditure in real terms, or as good as, per child. Why can’t we just have some honesty here? It’s as obvious as the nose on the face that Australian parents—who after all make choices about their children’s education—want better, but we’re not getting it. That’s a loaded question, I know.
Fiona Mueller: Of course. And in the end, it comes down to accountability. We are so influenced by international movements. One of the problems is that for 60, 70 years, probably, we have adopted every fad, every trend, every unsubstantiated idea that academics in particular, and sometimes union activists and others, have adopted and said, you know, this is the way of the future, this is how we ought to do things.
John Anderson: So they’re shaping, they’re seeking to pick up Lincoln’s idea: change the philosophy in the classroom, you’ll change the society.
Fiona Mueller: Absolutely.
John Anderson: But what sort of society do they want?
Fiona Mueller: But certainly most recently, since the 90s, the most influential movement has been the globalist movement—that there are some 21st-century competencies that really override everything else that we should do. So creativity, collaboration, communication, critical thinking—these magic words that float around the place and somehow are meant to be part of everything that we do. And bizarrely, as a consequence, we are now seeing reforms that are trying to restore actual knowledge to the curriculum, because we floated off in this direction of 21st-century skills and competencies and somehow forgot that before you try to think critically about something, you actually have to know about that subject.
So, you know, it’s the old idea: if you have a vacuum, it will be filled. And we have an absolute intellectual vacuum, I believe, which lets the activists in.
John Anderson: As Karl Marx commented, people deprived of their history are easily persuaded. That’s your point. We pick up fads and drop them as quickly as that—how unfortunately not quickly enough to do a lot of damage in many cases.
How did the universities lose their commitment to the proper training of the individual’s mind so they can think critically? That’s a big charge.
Simon Haines: Yeah, and a big question.
John Anderson: But there’s a fair bit of evidence that people are not being taught to think critically.
Simon Haines: I want to offer you a quotation here, John, from a very, very distinguished Chicago social scientist, a sociologist. His name was Edward Shils. Well, this is the quote from him that really stays with me. He said—and forgive me just reading this out—“Some teachers nowadays think that the necessity and the desirability of the destruction of existing society and its institutions should be incorporated into the syllabuses which they prepare for their students. They think that as university teachers or as school teachers, I think it’s passed on, you know, they have a unique opportunity and a moral obligation. It’s a matter of personal responsibility to further the cause of revolution.”
So this has actually become, according to Shils, by the 90s, one generation after the 60s, part of the DNA of university academia.
Fiona Mueller: Separation of human society into the oppressed and the oppressor.
John Anderson: This is the forerunner to critical theory?
Fiona Mueller: Absolutely.
Simon Haines: Absolutely right.
John Anderson: Which turns out to be anything but critical, by the way.
Simon Haines: Well, quite right in the sense that I was using the word critical literally a minute ago—objectivity.
Fiona Mueller: And I can tell you for a fact, we have people now in 2026 who still adhere to that same theory in the teaching profession, in teaching faculties and universities. And absolutely, as Simon said, the idea that somehow schools and universities should be the place where children and young people learn to become activists—which is a complete misrepresentation of our national goal of creating active and informed citizens. Because the rejection at the same time is of any knowledge of thousands of years of human development and the great achievements of Western civilization in particular. Without that knowledge, of course, you just get activists.
Simon Haines: I think Fiona’s exactly right about that, but it’s just to finish Shils. He says they think such activities that I talked about just a minute ago should be carried on with all the guarantees afforded by the rule of a full academic freedom.
So people like we’re talking about here absolutely believe deep down inside that they have an obligation and an opportunity, and that they are literally autonomous and freed to do this sort of thing, and that should be their job. And that activism should be what universities do.
Look, not all academics—goodness, there’s a huge number still doing their best to do fantastic teaching and research jobs—but there’s a significant minority that do this. And because they make such a noise, that means that as far as the wider community is concerned, this is what universities have become.
Bob Metz:
You are listening to Just Right, broadcasting around the world and online.
Now, having spent quite a bit of time on university campuses, I have personally witnessed all of the activism at play, along with the woke ideology that got Robert Vaughan and myself unceremoniously kicked off of the university campus radio station at the University of Western Ontario.
From April 2007 to September 2015, Just Right was broadcast on CHRW 94.9 FM in London, which had a broadcast reach right across southwestern Ontario. On September 24, 2015, the station manager took issue with our concerns about then-opposition Liberal leader Justin Trudeau’s promise to immigrate tens of thousands of unvetted Syrian refugees. That university students and the public had to be quote-unquote protected from hearing such opinions certainly spoke to a sinister agenda that someone wanted kept hidden from public view.
But just get a load of some of the education issues Robert Vaughan and I were campaigning on back in the 90s.
Dated October 21, 1994, the following headline appeared in the pages of Freedom Flyer, Freedom Party’s official newsletter. Under the heading “Discrimination, not the Issue, says Metz.”
And I quote: FP President Robert Metz found himself in the hot seat because of his public support of London Board of Education trustee Robin Ainsley’s motion to allow parental input into any process establishing official board workshops or policies on alternate family lifestyles. As a Ward Six trustee candidate during the municipal elections, Metz was contacted by Debbie Normand, a concerned parent who also supported Ainsley’s motion. Through their efforts, the Board of Education’s public gallery was filled to capacity by people supporting the motion on the night it was debated, but the motion was nonetheless soundly defeated. In the ensuing controversy, a half-hour episode of the BBS television program Inquiry was aired across most of Ontario, featuring Metz and Norman in a debate with gay activists David Brownstorm and Louise Carish, who argued that discrimination against gays in the public education system was a critical problem. But when Metz pressed for a specific example of where such discrimination exists, they could not even produce one. Metz questioned how the issue of alternative lifestyles would even come up in a classroom dealing with science, math, language, shop, etc., and argued that sexual preferences should have no place in the classroom. End quote.
And here’s another item from the London Free Press of October 1996 under the heading “Girls in Sports Under Review.” “The London Board of Education is forming an advisory committee to promote gender equity in physical and health education in school, as concern is growing as to the number of girls dropping out of high school sports. But the committee’s role prompted a heated discussion at a board committee hearing on Tuesday. Trustee Robert Vaughan questioned the group’s work, saying it is peculiar the board would attempt to form an advisory committee to try to alter free choice and personal values. But Linda Findley, a program supervisor at the board, believes free choice is not the issue. ‘Girls don’t believe in themselves, and we have to tell them they can do it,’ said Findley. According to an unspecified study, perhaps most disturbing of all, at six years old both boys and girls believe boys are better at sports. This is not true, as girls are as strong, if not stronger than boys until puberty. Vaughan said he believes the board should not look at this as a gender issue, but supports more physical involvement for both boys and girls. ‘It’s not a gender equity issue.’” End quote.
And along the way, Robert also made some waves opposing the Rae government’s Bill 79, as reported in the May 17, 1995 Free Press under the heading “Equity Policy Racist, Sexist, Trustee Says.” Robert Vaughan assailed the board’s hiring policy objectives as a repulsive example of reverse discrimination. Quoting from the legislation, he said it stipulates that every employer’s workforce should “reflect the representation of aboriginal people, people with disabilities, members of racial minorities, and women in the community at all levels of employment.” End quote.
So you could clearly see all of the major leftist issues surfacing today all over social media were already in full swing back in the 90s and for decades before that. But of course, the really big education issue we confronted was the dysfunctional way that schools were attempting to teach literacy skills through a method that was then called Whole Language, but which has hundreds of aliases, as we’ll hear later. Little did we know that the one word that public educators feared more than any others was the word phonics.
Clip (Hooked on Phonics – classic comedy sketch):
Child: What’s going on, guys?
Mother: This isn’t easy to say.
Father: Your mother and I think you’re hooked on phonics.
Child: It’s preposterous.
Mother: I found this under your pillow.
Child: I just read that for the pictures.
Father: There are no pictures in a dictionary.
Child: That’s your opinion.
Father: Just admit it—you’re hooked on phonics.
Child: Okay, you got me. I’m hooked on phonics.
Father: There you go.
Bob Metz:
And on the very topic of phonics, coming up next on this side of our bumper are Right Angle’s Bill Whittle, Scott Ott, and Stephen Green sounding out the issue. While on the return side, Matt Walsh demonstrates the obvious superiority of phonics in the task of teaching people to read.
Clip (Right Angle, January 8, 2024 – Bill Whittle, Scott Ott, Stephen Green):
Scott Ott: It turns out that New York’s Democratic governor is hooked on something, and you’ll be really surprised to find out what it is. I’m Scott Ott with Bill Whittle and Stephen Green, and gentlemen, what Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York State, is hooked on these days is phonics. She has just proposed that the state spend 10 million dollars to—and by the way, I’m getting this from the New York Times, so this isn’t something from Fox News or something—the governor proposed spending 10 million dollars to retrain teachers on what is known as, quote, the science of reading, which involves teaching children to sound out words, decode them, and understand their meaning, as well as helping them expand their vocabulary. She’s calling for increase in teacher training programs at state universities so we can prepare teachers to teach this obscure science of reading.
And Stephen Green, the reason why she’s doing this is because last year, fewer than half of New York State’s third graders were proficient on state reading tests. Now, many teachers in New York City and the state have been trained and have been using a method known as balanced literacy, which encourages, and this is in the New York Times words, independent reading and includes practices that experts say are problematic, like teaching children to guess words using pictures. Experts and policymakers say it is now clear the balanced literacy approach did not offer children enough foundation in the fundamental skills such as phonics. Stephen Green, what do you make of this move by New York State’s governor—and the city, by the way, has done something comparable to invest millions of dollars basically to go back to the way that I was taught to read.
Stephen Green: We’re going to have to spend a lot of time and a lot of money to get back to where we were. To begin with, these uh the Department of Education needs to go. State level education departments, whatever they’re called, need to go. These unified school districts need to go. Schools need to be run as direct and locally as humanly possible. Fire them all, zero out their departments, and the next person who proposes that we do this stuff again, say, “Oh, hey, you know, we got rid of that thing, but maybe we should bring it back.” Just shoot them. Just shoot ’em.
Scott Ott: You know, Bill Whittle, certainly balanced literacy sounds more sophisticated than phonics, which seems kind of like a blunt instrument. And I don’t want to be the person who stands up and says there’s no opportunity for innovation in the way we teach or the way students learn in the school system. How do you balance that idea where you say, yes, we want to constantly be learning and growing so that we get better at doing what we’re doing, but we don’t want to throw the baby out with the proverbial bath water? Is it just that you have to do what Kathy Hochul is doing now, which is basically re-christening phonics as the science of reading and telling everybody that we now have to follow the science?
Bill Whittle: Well, first of all, that’s the entire progressive history in a nutshell. Try a policy, have disastrous results, rename it, and try it again.
Balanced literacy to me sounds like, well, we’re gonna strike a balance between a really good way to educate people and a really bad way to educate people. We’re gonna strike a balance between these two things. Right? Now, I’m one of these guys that thinks that, you know, just outside-the-box thinking, maybe literacy shouldn’t be balanced—maybe literacy should be excellent. Maybe you should stick 100 percent to the way that works and leave the way that doesn’t work out completely.
The teaching methods that they went to to replace phonics was called, I think it was called See and Say. Here’s the word giraffe, and here’s a picture of a giraffe. Memorize these hieroglyphics in this order, because that’s what a giraffe is. I’m not kidding. I’m not kidding at all. And this is a much better way to teach people, they thought.
And so if you see a picture of a snuffleupagus or something that people haven’t seen, you can’t describe it because you don’t have the picture-word connection. And the picture-word connection is very weak.
We’re the first society in the history of the world that was smart enough to destroy the entire concept of language. Because that’s what language is. Language is a series of letters that produce a certain sound so that when they’re struck together in a certain way, by making each one of the individual sounds, you come up with the word. That’s how language works. That’s old-fashioned. And the results...
Scott Ott: You know, in front of us, when my youngest son was very young, I remember after dinner going into the living room and sitting down in a chair, and he would hop up on my lap. And the way I taught him to read, I realized years later, I thought, you know, the so-called science of reading here came down to a simple thing that I said to him over and over and over again, and you know what it is: sound it out.
Because there is a simple concept that he could grasp. You don’t need a balanced literacy. You don’t need this whole superstructure of educational mumbo jumbo. You need something simple enough for a small child to understand, which is sound it out.
Clip (Matt Walsh, February 11, 2026):
Matt Walsh: When you read enough news about the declining quality of schools in this country, particularly public schools, it’s easier for your eyes to sort of glaze over after a while. All the stories sound the same. We spend nearly a trillion dollars on our public school system every year. A trillion dollars, and the results are objectively terrible. Only around one-third of 12th graders have English language proficiency, meaning they can barely speak English. And you’ll find similar stories from Maine to New York to California. They dropped the standards and shortly afterward, the performance of the students plummeted.
It seemed like a death spiral that we couldn’t possibly pull out of. But then something very strange happened in the state of Mississippi. The state’s fourth-grade reading scores went from 49th place in the country all the way to ninth place in the span of 10 years. And their fourth-grade math scores, meanwhile, went from 50th, dead last, to 16th. And when you adjust for demographics like poverty and race, as of 2024, Mississippi went to number one. Yes, from 2013 to 2024, regardless of how you measure the data, Mississippi pretty much leapfrogged like the entire country.
Now, one of Mississippi’s main innovations was that at the end of third grade, they started administering a reading fluency test. And this was a genuine test with actual consequences: if students failed it, they’d be held back and forced to repeat the grade. So Mississippi began holding back far more students than most other states. They broke with the established consensus, decided that children should actually learn to read before becoming fourth graders. Along the way, Mississippi enacted other reforms. In particular, Mississippi started teaching students to read using phonics rather than context clues.
So to give you an example of how this might work, if you teach a student using context clues, you might show them a photo of a barn and say something like, “What building is that cow in? It starts with the letter B. And what word with a letter B would make sense.” In other words, in the context method, teachers would challenge the student with a series of riddles and basically push them to guess the right word.
Teachers would also offer suggestions like these when students had trouble reading a word: quote, “Look at pictures and skip the word and reword and reread and try a word that makes sense.”
It should be obvious what the problem is here. Guessing words and skipping words and looking for clues elsewhere is not a reliable strategy. The context system is basically cheating. You might get the right result, but you’re getting it for the wrong reason.
In order to actually learn to read, you need to be able to understand the relationship between letters and sounds without relying on some hint that you’re able to dig up somewhere. And that’s what the phonics system, which Mississippi now uses, is all about. If you’re teaching a student using phonics, you tell them to go from left to right and sound out the word barn.
This is a system that is clearly superior. You have to wonder if the context system wasn’t an intentional effort to sabotage the reading abilities of young children.
And it’s pretty revealing that the moment this massive improvement emerges, the very first thing that a lot of leftists attempt to do is undermine it. They claim it’s fake, and they publish papers that misrepresent what’s actually happening. It could be more obvious that these people desperately want our education system to remain dysfunctional and useless.
You won’t find anyone who resents education more than the well-educated. They know that an illiterate country is one that’s much easier to control. And by making their state and the entire American South a much more literate place, Mississippi has struck one of the biggest blows against the leftist project in the past decade.
And like Louisiana and Alabama, it’s time for many more states to follow their lead.
Bob Metz:
In March of 1992, Freedom Party distributed a door-to-door Ontario information bulletin to Ontario homes in London, Ottawa, Toronto, and Sarnia, bearing the headline “Schools Failing Our Children.” In that bulletin were two columns contrasting whole language with phonics, in which we said just about everything we just heard in our previous audio bites.
And here was the official reaction as reported in the June 9, 1992 issue of Freedom Flyer under the heading “Whole Language Bulletin Termed Hate Literature.” Quote: Freedom Party was accused of doing damage to schools and communities which are already struggling with the many challenges of the time by its distribution of hate literature, the information bulletin’s warning against whole language. In a letter to the party, which went so far as to suggest that “truth and objectivity are obviously not the primary pursuits of the Freedom Party,” R. D. Corso, in conjunction with the staff of St. George’s Public School in London, requested, “Please do not send us further hate literature until you check out the realities.”
Despite the tone of the letter directed against Freedom Party, an invitation was extended to party executive to visit St. George’s school and observe in classrooms, as so many of our parents and volunteers do. Unfortunately, when FP Secretary Robert Vaughan called Corso to accept his invitation, it was verbally declined, purportedly on the grounds that he did not want the visit to be used for political gain. End quote.
And then there’s this one. As demonstrated in the London Free Press coverage of September 20, 1996, the hostility exhibited towards a phonics-first approach to literacy, even as an optional choice for parents, reveals a fear unwarranted by educators who claim to be incorporating it in their current reading programs. “Stifling Anger’s Trustee, Favoring Phonics” reads the headline: quote, at a stormy board meeting this week, Vaughan wanted to discuss the issue of whole language instruction, which is taught in schools, and phonics, which he advocates. However, trustee Peter Jaffe made a motion which was passed that there be no discussion. “The Board of Education likes to say everything is great with the school system, but they do not allow debate and discussion,” said Vaughan. “The hypocrisy is what gets me. You have a director, Daryl Skidmore, and a chairperson, Bill Brock, who say that we are open. Nothing is wrong with education, but when a simple motion to ask parents what they think is struck down with anger, it speaks to hypocrisy,” said Vaughan. “When I make any attempt to bring phonics to the forefront, I am shut out. People should know attempts to make this public are being stifled.” End quote.
And of course, for those wanting to delve into this issue in greater detail, perhaps two of the best books around the whole phonics versus whole language debate are Why Johnny Can’t Read by Rudolf Flesch and Why Johnny Can’t Think by Leonard Peikoff.
Now one of the earlier panelists referred to the non-phonetic way of teaching reading as the See and Say method, which was yet another term we could add to all of our aliases applied under the whole language philosophy. Over the years, variants of the whole language philosophy have been referred to, and get this, as universal instruction, visual method, look-and-say, whole word, word method, sight reading, top-down, whole-to-part, top-to-bottom, real books, Aldean method, the Scott Foresman method, whole language, psycholinguistic, and the alternative approach, among others. And the term graphophonics was being toyed around with at the time as well.
Now bear in mind that this is the same Marxist technique of changing definitions with every discovery of a truth that we have seen with everything from the defining of political labels to vaccines and gender identities.
Clip (Hooked on Phonics, January 22, 2025 – comedy sketch):
Mother: Sweetie, we love you. When your father and I saw that Hooked on Phonics was still helping millions of families and teachers help kids learn to read, we decided to try it. Thirty days later, you were reading and spelling.
Child: Dad, don’t you think mom’s being a little melodramatic?
Father: Don’t talk to your mother that way, I think.
Child: Do you know what that means?
Father: That’s not the point. The point is, when you’re hooked on phonics, yes, you can read and spell better than most kids your age, but if you’re too smart, you make people uncomfortable.
Child: Nietzsche said that sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.
Father: Give me that.
Mother: Nietzsche.
Father: It’s Nietzsche.
Mother: I always thought Nietzsche was a pasta.
Father: It is. Nishi Carbonara.
Child: Nietzsche was a German philosopher. Everybody knows that.
Mother: There has got to be some middle ground here.
Child: That’s called a compromise. And compromise leads to resentment.
Father: So does using words that your parents don’t understand.
Mother: Okay, hooked on phonics only cost us a dollar to get started. And hooked on spelling comes with our subscription. So how about this? You get to keep your hooked on phonics, but you can only use words that dad and I can understand.
Child: This is stupendous!
Father: Go put a dollar in a swear jar.
Bob Metz:
You may recall that earlier in the show I said that schooling is about providing a service. Education is an effort undertaken by the self. No one else can educate you, not even yours truly. But you can choose to educate yourself, or just entertain yourself when you join us again next week as we continue our journey in the right direction. And until then, be right, stay right, do right, act right, think right, and be right back here. We’ll see you then.
Clip (Dry Bar Comedy, March 13, 2026 – Kellen Erskine):
Kellen Erskine: I was mowing my lawn recently. I noticed every lawnmower has a throttle on it, but the speeds aren’t labeled with the words high or low. Does anybody know what it has instead? Turtle and a rabbit. Guy was ready. That was very clear. That guy’s been going to comedy shows every weekend for like 10 years. He’s like, finally they asked the lawnmower question. He just walks out. But it’s true, there’s a turtle and a rabbit, which is insane, because that means that at the lawnmower factory, they’re like, yeah, we don’t care if they can read. Just as long as they know their fables.