Leighton Smith Podcast #266 - November 20th 2024 - Dr Michael Johnston - The Leighton Smith Podcast

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Speaker 1 (00:09):
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Speaker 2 (00:16):
It's time for all the attitude, all the opinion, all
the information, all the debates.

Speaker 1 (00:21):
Off now the Layton Smith podcast powered by news Talks It.

Speaker 3 (00:27):
Be Welcome to podcasts number two hundred and sixty six
for November twenty, twenty twenty four. Now I know I
spend a lot of time on matters relating to education.
It is because of the importance of schooling, and not
just schooling, but universities and other forms of education in
the interests of the individual and the country. It's much

(00:48):
the same story over most of the world, but especially
in Anglo speaking countries, the headwinds that have battered many
lives and destroyed reputations. By that, I means schools and
universities have been difficult to counter. The interview with doctor
Michael Johnson is I think quite revealing and should be
heard by a wide range of people. Please do not

(01:10):
hesitate to send it to anyone you think come is relevant.
And by that I mean parents, grandparents, teachers, kids, And
it was hearing the intent of Donald Trump to eliminate
the Department of Education in the United States that inspired
by contacting Michael to invite him on, and he was
only too happy to He has plenty to say. At

(01:33):
the back end of two double six, we make reference
to other matters that are of interest to most of you,
that are of interest to most of you, the WHO,
the World Health Organization, the trashing of Parliament being amongst them,
an artificial intelligence, and democracy also. But next Michael Johnson.

(02:11):
Education has been a battleground for as long as I
can remember, a war zone between specifically left and right,
socialism and freedom. Michael Johnson has had a lengthy career
in education at all levels. He was when I became
aware of him, he was at Victoria University. He is now.

(02:32):
He leads the education work at the New Zealand Initiative,
which is doing good things in spite of what you
might read about it occasionally in well in the commentary
from some of some of the media. Michael Johnson, we've
had you on the podcast before, of course, you know,
stranger to people on this particular platform, and I have

(02:56):
to say it's always good to.

Speaker 2 (02:57):
Talk with you, and you it's great to be here.

Speaker 3 (03:00):
Now, would you disagree with anything I've said so far
about education being a battleground.

Speaker 4 (03:05):
I think it is a battleground. To describe it as
a battle between left and right to me kind of odd.
I mean, it non pluses me to an extent that
it is such a political battleground. And the reason I
say that is, actually we have quite a wealth of
evidence on what effective teaching looks like and how to

(03:28):
teach children to read, for example, and how to teach
them in general along the lines of understanding human information processing,
human memory, human attention, this kind of thing, and also
the necessity for children not to be stressed in order
to learn best. There's all kinds of things that we know,

(03:49):
and so why it needs to be a political battle
is a little strange. And certainly why there is a
conflict between left and right if indeed the distinction left
and right really makes sense in the modern political context.
So I think that's the only thing that I would
question about your introduction, is what we mean by left

(04:11):
and right and why things have turned out the way
they have. I guess part of it is patch protection
on the part of the unions. They tend to oppose
things like charter schools. They oppose things like structuring teachers
careers so that they get paids according to the quality
of their practice rather than how long that been teachers,

(04:34):
which is the current scenario. So there are certainly some
specific things that the unions influence labor governments over which
makes reform more difficult, But I think the fundamental ground
of the battle is deeper than that. Arguably it goes
back as far as philosophers like junjak Russo, who saw

(04:58):
children as coming into the world more or less perfectly formed,
and we messed them up when we've put them in
formal education systems versus I guess a more pragmatic view
of human beings, which is that there's there's a great
deal of knowledge and disciplinary ideas that have to be

(05:21):
inculcated in children and young people in order to make
them effective citizens. So there is that disagreement about learning itself.
But really pragmatically, I think that we actually have good
evidence on how education systems best function.

Speaker 3 (05:40):
And okay, let me let me ask you. Let me
ask you a question. Would you would you feel more
comfortable with progressives versus conservatives?

Speaker 4 (05:50):
Well, it depends what you mean in their educational context.

Speaker 3 (05:55):
Levy. Let me let me take it a step further
than you say that we know the best way to
do things.

Speaker 2 (06:03):
We have very good scientific, scientific evidence.

Speaker 3 (06:07):
So so open classrooms. Where does that fall in that scenario.

Speaker 4 (06:14):
Well, open classrooms have no evidence space for them at all,
and that turned out to be quite a catastrophe, and
many schools are now trying to reverse the situation building
walls to recreate cellular classrooms. Now, that whole thing was
bizarre because it entailed spending a huge amount of money

(06:35):
with no evidence space, against the will of many schools.

Speaker 3 (06:39):
But doesn't that forward of the category of progressivism.

Speaker 2 (06:46):
Arguably it does.

Speaker 4 (06:48):
The rationale that was used by the ministry for forcing
schools to build these environments was a progressivist agenda. I
think that's true. It was about, you know, child centered,
child led education, and the idea that if we created
these big barns and allowed children to roam around in them,

(07:09):
that they would, you know, acquire the knowledge they need.
And that is a very Roussouian sort of argument.

Speaker 3 (07:16):
That was going to be my next point. So let
me move on then to teaching literacy. Yes, well, teaching
teaching literacy the way that they adopted some time back, Yes,
in this country.

Speaker 4 (07:32):
Yes, that's a very interesting story, and I wondered for
a long time what the basis of the so called
whole language approach was and where it went wrong. So
just for listeners to be clear that the whole language
method involves exposing children to books and enabling them or

(07:53):
encouraging them to use what they call multiple cues to
get the meaning of a word. So it might be,
you know, the shape of the word itself, it might
be some illustrations on the page, it might be the
context of the sentence. And the trouble with that is
that it disperses attension across all of these different cues
instead of focusing it on the one that gives them

(08:14):
the most information, which is the spelling of the word
and the correspondence between that spelling and the sound of
the word. And it also ignores the very great cognitive
load that is imposed when a child is first learning
to read. It is a very difficult task. And so
just focusing them on the most important information is what

(08:35):
builds fluency the quickest, and there's a huge amount of
evidence for that. But to turn to the question of
why the whole language method got going in the first place,
it comes back to a confusion about the difference between
oral language or spoken language, and literacy. So oral language

(08:55):
is a human universal. All cultures have oral language, and interestingly,
it seems to be a biological function in the sense that, well,
anybody who has brought up a child themselves or been
around very young children is amazed by the fact that
a child acquires language in their second and third years

(09:16):
of life at an incredible rate without anybody explicitly teaching
them anything. And so there seems to be some sort
of attemplate in the human brain that enables us to
acquire language in that way. But literacy is not like that.
Literacy is not a cultural universal. It's about three and
a half thousand years old at most, and until about

(09:38):
two hundred years ago, very few people were literate, and
so literacy is actually better described as a technology rather
than a biological function. And it's a big cognitive task
to read and write, and so we need to take
a structured, measured approach to how we teach it, and

(09:59):
we do have very good scientific evidence now on how
to do that, which is by focusing on the correspondence
between spelling and sound.

Speaker 3 (10:07):
At first, well, let me go back to what I
was really going to start with, but as usual I didn't.
What is there about the New Zealand education system that's good.

Speaker 2 (10:18):
Jee, That's a tough one.

Speaker 4 (10:21):
At the moment, we've got quite the malaise in our
education system. Our teachers are not well trained by universities
and I liken it to some extent of committing untrained
soldiers to a war zone. And that sounds dramatic that
consider that we have something like a third of our

(10:42):
teachers dropping out of the profession within their first few
years of practice. And the roots of that is that
the university programs for training teachers don't focus on classroom
management nearly enough, and so our teachers start in the
classroom not knowing how to establish order in those classrooms. Well,

(11:06):
if you've got classrooms that are not well ordered, you've
got no chance of teaching effectively. So that's the very
foundations which are missing. Until now, we've had a curriculum
that is very loose and doesn't specify very much at
all in terms of what should be taught in our schools.

(11:27):
That's changing with Minister Stanford's reforms and as of next
year there will be new curricula for English and mathematics
in our primary schools. That will be followed by more
curriculum development over the next couple of years until we
do have a knowledge rich curriculum. So I would say

(11:48):
that's a good direction that we're going in to look
for something nice to say about our education system. But
you know, the other thing that we need to talk
about is how our schools are organized. At the moment,
they're all independent crown agencies and there isn't nearly enough
cooperation between schools, and that drives I would say, increasing

(12:13):
educational inequality over time. Because schools that are well provisioned
with I would say parental resources in communities where their
boards can bring on board lawyers and accountants and so on.
Those schools that buy and large well governed and functional
a lot better than schools that lack those resources. So

(12:35):
I think we need to find a way to bring
schools together into more functional communities of schools where those
who are operating in better off communities can really share
their resources a bit more with those who are not,
and try to really get to grips with educational inequality,

(12:58):
because not only do we have falling standards in things
like literacy and numeracy, and that's been well discussed in
the media. Also have some of the largest gaps in
the world between the young people who do the best
and those who are really being left behind, and that
gradient is socioeconomic.

Speaker 3 (13:18):
Do you think there is a difference, a racial difference
in the ability to learn and succeed. No, it's a
trick It's not a trick question.

Speaker 2 (13:29):
No.

Speaker 4 (13:29):
I think there's no evidence for that at all. And
I think that our focus on ethnicity, on you know,
especially Mari kids not doing as well as non Mari
kids and specifica kids not doing as well as others,
is a misguided way to talk about it.

Speaker 2 (13:48):
By and large.

Speaker 4 (13:50):
Actually, the problem, as I said, is socioeconomic. If off
come from a well off family, regardless of the ethnicity
of your parents, they're going to have an educational background.
Very often that enables them to support your education. They're
likely to have well they by definition they have more

(14:11):
economic resources to if necessary, higher tutors and help in
other ways like that, you just have more economic and
cultural capital backing you. And when the education system itself
is not well structured, it means that those who are
not who don't have the benefit of those kinds of

(14:33):
resources get left more and more behind if the system
itself is not doing its job well enough. So no,
I don't think that there's any evidence for it being
a racial or ethnic issue at bottom.

Speaker 2 (14:47):
The only cab out.

Speaker 4 (14:48):
On that that I would add, and I don't think
this has got anything to do with race as such.
It has more to do with culture is that our
schools do need to meet children where they are. So
I'm all in favor of schools taking account of the
communities they serve and setting themselves up to serve those

(15:09):
communities well. And if it's a community that has lots
and lots of Mary kids, then representing Mary culture in
the school is a good idea because it makes it
a more welcoming place to them.

Speaker 3 (15:22):
I'd query that, and I have for a while. Let
me go back though to the mid eighties, and I'm
not looking for any honors, but I was interviewing it.
I was interviewing a woman. She lived in Ponsonby, and
she was renowned for her work with kids and schooling,

(15:47):
and she didn't hold any positions. She was married, and
she was very concerned about the way that things were hitting.
And even though I can't remember her name. She was
one of the most impressive people I've I've met to
that point of my life. And I said to her,
I would like to anonymously establish a scholarship for a

(16:11):
married child. And she exploded, not angrily. She said, another
scholarship or something along those lines is something we don't need,
because that's not the problem. The problem was the background, etc.
But my comment to her had led into this was

(16:31):
that I don't believe that Mary or marry kids are
any less intelligent than any others. I think all races
are pretty much pretty much equal, even when it comes
to when it comes to such things. And realizing at
the same time that that I was stomping on Thomas Sole,

(16:51):
who has written a couple of very good books like
Race and Culture, and pointed out that there are differences
in the talents of various countries, like Italians who go
to South America and carry on with the specialty areas
that they're renowned in. It was just one that's one

(17:14):
that springs to mind. So they conquer that particular share
of the market and they do very and they do
very well, but it's not it's not or it wasn't
for me. An IQ thing. It was just the cultural background,
right or right?

Speaker 4 (17:28):
I agree, I think I think different cultures do have
different orientations and things that they prepare young people for.
And just to complete what I'm saying here, While I
think it is entirely appropriate for schools to respond to
the children that they have and take into account their

(17:51):
cultural backgrounds, that doesn't mean that their mission, their ultimate mission,
is any different. Their ultimate mission is to teach the
universal disciplines or subjects derived from the universal disciplines, in
order to set children up well with powerful knowledge. And
by the universal disciplines, I mean things like mathematics, science,

(18:13):
exposing them to the great literature of the world from
all different cultures. These kinds of things are what builds
the platform for young people to have successful lives, and
so wherever they're coming from and whatever their backgrounds, that
should be the aim. Now, there are different challenges associated

(18:33):
with different children. You know, some children do come to
school with particular learning needs and difficulties, and we need
to address those.

Speaker 2 (18:44):
The children don't have the same.

Speaker 4 (18:47):
Cultural capital in their home background as others do, and
that presents a particular challenge. But all of these things
point in the same direction, which is that we need
to use the methods of teaching that science tells us
are the most effective, and that's the best way to
address these differences, and to have education in being an

(19:08):
equalizing force in our society rather than just reproducing the
conditions that people start in.

Speaker 3 (19:19):
Let me approach that a different way, because I didn't
quite agree with something you said at the beginning. When
I came to this country decades ago, all the talk
was well not all the talk, but much of the
talk was with reard to marry and marry issues.

Speaker 2 (19:37):
Yep.

Speaker 3 (19:38):
In the time that I've been here forty years, it
hasn't changed. It hasn't gone away, it hasn't been resolved.
It's still the same mold, same mold as we witnessed
in Parliament to an aggressive extent just last week. Now,
if you're going to say that there are, if this
is a marry dominated school, then making it feel welcome

(20:00):
with culture, et cetera is appropriate. I can't disagree to
a limited extent, but I not in danger of and
are we not doing it locking them in to the
past and to culture and into a culture that well
prevents them from breaking free.

Speaker 4 (20:19):
Well not if we follow what I just said, which
is that while that's the you can have that as
a way to make them feel welcome and also to reflect,
you know, what they're used to perhaps in their background.
And in fact, I would say that we have an

(20:40):
obligation to enable all people, regardless of their cultural background,
to see themselves in the school system, because we can't
shy away from the fact that school can be an
intimidating institution. So that's the entry point. What we're aiming
for is to have I mean, the ideal is that

(21:02):
all young people, regardless of their background, leave school well
educated in the objects derived from universal disciplines like science, mathematics, history, etc.
Because that is what gives them the knowledge and based
on that knowledge, the ability to think through ideas in

(21:24):
a really coherent, disciplined way, and that's what sets them
up for success in life. Now, in the senior years
of school, I think we do need to think harder
about the pathways that young people follow. Frankly, I think
we send far too many young people from university to university,

(21:46):
and we don't send nearly enough into apprenticeships and trades,
and that's because we have this misguided view that a
university education is somehow inherently superior to being an electrician
or a plumber or a trades person. So I think

(22:07):
that's a cultural issue we need to face up to
and do something about. And I have some ideas about
that too. But up until the senior secondary, all young
people should be taught to read and write and do
mathematics and learn about science and history and so on,
and that should be a universal offering.

Speaker 3 (22:30):
So I've got I've got one more point to make.
If you follow in school the approach that you just nominated,
how does that then relate to the situation. The prime
example I'll utilize, and obviously so is the bonfight at
Auckland University a couple of years back, which still continues.

Speaker 4 (22:53):
I gather you're talking about the listener letter business. Well, well,
I mean that was an appalling betrayal of the academics
who wrote that piece, none of them, of course, wire racists,
despite being accused of that by many, And they were
thrown under the bus by their own vice chancellor who

(23:15):
said that their letter had caused hurt, in dismay and
all of this. What they were pointing out, of course,
is simply that there are different knowledge systems in the world.
Science is a particular one with unique characteristics, and if
we're going to teach science, then it needs to be

(23:36):
taught in terms of what it is, rather than trying
to bring in knowledge systems like muttering amati that might
have their own contribution to make, but which are not
themselves science. So that was all they were saying in
this letter.

Speaker 2 (23:55):
Now, if I'd been.

Speaker 4 (23:59):
Wanting to say those things myself, I probably wouldn't have
tried to do it in a letter to the listener.
I don't think that that affords enough scope to do
issue justice, because you really need to explain what science
is because very few people people actually understand that it's
not just any old system of finding out about the
natural world. It's been refined over literally millennia. I mean,

(24:25):
we could go back to ancient philosophers like Aristotle to
start to see the first terms of scientific thinking back
in the ancient Greek world. But it developed over many,
many centuries. It brought in knowledge from the Middle East
and India and many different cultures, and it's really not

(24:47):
until the twentieth century that it really formed into what
it is now, which is the most powerful system we
know for testing theories about the world. And the reason
it's so powerful is because it has at its core

(25:08):
the idea that, first of all, there is an objective
reality the way things are, but we always will have
imperfect access to that, and so all we can do
is build theories and try to knock them down with evidence.
And it's the trying to knock them down part what
Carl Popper called falsification that makes a scientific theory scientific,

(25:32):
and that is a unique approach to the testing of
theories with evidence, and it's built the prosperity that we
have in the world now, has given us the technologies
we have. I think it's also got a lot to
do with democracy. I don't think it's any accident that
Carl Popper, the greatest philosopher of science in history, in

(25:57):
my opinion, was also a philosopher of democracy and open society,
because there's a lot in common.

Speaker 2 (26:04):
And at the core.

Speaker 4 (26:06):
It's the ability to discuss ideas, to argue about ideas
backed by evidence in a civil way without wanting to
kill your opponent and instead seeing a disagreement is a
chance to improve everybody's ideas just.

Speaker 3 (26:23):
For the sake of everybody. When you say an open society,
and Papa believe in an open society. What sort of
open society? Can you give us a definition?

Speaker 4 (26:34):
Well, open society would liberal democracies are open societies. That
is to say, we have a quality of political rights,
We have free speech, we have the idea of free elections,
which are a way of ensuring that everybody has a
say and who governs them. In other words, we have

(26:55):
government by consent and not just some feudal overlord telling
us what to do or some tyrant but ultimately it's
underpinned by a particular culture, and that culture is one
in which we're prepared to tolerate difference of opinion and

(27:15):
to use our free speech to resolve disputes. And so
you know, a democratic legal system is another pillar of
an open society, where disputes and criminal matters are resolved
on the basis of evidence in courts, and we have
things like juries and so on. That's an open society.

(27:37):
And it contrasts with tyrannical societies, with their feudal or
fascist or communist in other words, where all of those
what all of those have in common is authority figures
just telling people what to do by dictat and threatening
them with violence if they don't.

Speaker 3 (27:56):
Indeed, there is a certain billionaire in the United States
who spends more than anybody else on election buying, So
I'm talking about George Soros. Spends megabucks and his intent
is to change America then anywhere else he can to
his so called open society, which.

Speaker 4 (28:19):
Is interestingly he was a student associated, yeah with Karl
Popfer in the past. But I agree with you that
he's deviated from Popper's ideas fairly dramatically. But look, in
the end, open societies will always be threatened in various ways.
They're precarious things and we have to bear that in mind.

(28:41):
And I guess to bring the conversation back to education.
That is why I think we need young people to
be educated in the disciplines that give them the ability
to think critically. Now much is made of critical thinking
in our current curriculum, but what has missed is the
necessity for critical thinking to be built on a base

(29:04):
of knowledge. Without quite sophisticated knowledge, which critical thinking is
just not possible. And it's not just the knowledge of
the facts of the world or the facts are important.
In addition to factual knowledge, we need knowledge of systems
of thinking that enable us to get better representations of

(29:27):
truth over time. Whether it's in history or science or mathematics,
these are all disciplines that have methods for weighing evidence
and for resolving disagreements using that evidence. We never get
to a perfect understanding of how things are, which is

(29:47):
why it's always a work in progress. And it's that
endless contestability, which is the essence of the versal disciplines
as well as democracy.

Speaker 3 (30:00):
Can I go back to the education and the schools
at least momentarily. Yes, mentioned that having the schools working
together in the same region is ideal. My thought is
usually and it is in this case. I mean, if

(30:21):
there is a local agreement because people like each other
and they get on well with the other principle or whatever,
they can help out sometimes that's fine. But isn't competition
even between schools worthy of pursuing.

Speaker 4 (30:35):
Yes, it probably is, But I don't think that competition
and cooperation are mutually exclusive things. And I think we
do need a mechanism by which we can propagate good
practice across schools rather than simply having them all set
up in just pure competition with one another. Because a

(30:59):
pure competitive model is always going to leave schools in
less advantage communities not as well off. So I think
there is a place, So let's think of it like this.
I think that the education system schools need to be

(31:21):
accountable to the country for doing a good job, and
for that they need feedback. That means we need to
measure how they're doing and for that to be known,
and that in a sense becomes a mechanism of competition
because you get to see what is functioning better than

(31:41):
what else. But I don't think that having schools cooperate
is actually a barrier to doing that, and I think
we can set things up and I'm just thinking through
this now. I'm going to write a report about it
next year. So the ideas are not yet fully formed.
But we already have communities of schools. They're called kahuiaco,

(32:03):
but they're not very well structured or resourced. And I
think we have this strange situation where we have a
kind of megalithic ministry of education that just keeps growing
and growing over time. It's got thousands and thousands of
public servants working for it. It's also got regional offices,

(32:25):
so there's a massive bureaucracy and then we've got basically
nothing between that and individual schools. So what I'm thinking
of is a way of organizing our schools into groups,
and I would set them up such that the primary
schools and secondary schools that were working together tended to

(32:48):
have children who passed through the primary schools into the
secondary schools and the same group, so you have a
more connected up view of the children as they passed through,
to have a mix of socioeconomic circumstances within them, so
that the resources were able to be shared across different

(33:10):
kinds of communities. And critically, I think that these organizations
should be owned by the schools themselves and become the
units of accountability. So if you have to some extent
a competitive element that might take place within these communities.
But also you'd have the different communities across the country

(33:35):
and we could compare how well each we're doing.

Speaker 3 (33:39):
You've you've just given me an idea. Yes, we've got
a shortage of math teachers. We do, We've got an
even bigger shortage of good math teachers. So what about
sharing math teachers. You've got a part of the idea.
So let's talk about what these communities might do. First,
and foremost, I think it is the sharing of good practice.

(34:03):
So you could have a situation where you know, it's
a really good maths teacher was the condo for a
couple of years to work for this community and to
lead professional development across a range of schools, and that
way you spread that good practice across schools instead of
having it all focused and where that teacher is working.

(34:26):
And for sure that school then loses that teacher for
a couple of years, but they're making a wider contribution
there was I was thinking, though, I was thinking more
of the same teacher teaching it. I mean, that's their
specialty maths at level three or whatever, and they've got

(34:46):
a couple of classes, classrooms, they're dealing with the school
that they're at, but they've got plenty of time up
there sleeve. I'm guessing. I'm guessing, why can't they work
out with another local school that this teacher is shared
between them and they do both schools at that level.

Speaker 4 (35:05):
So that's certainly a possibility, especially for smaller school so
that they could share teachers like that. I mean, you
would find that a maths teacher at a large secondary
school would be working full time just at that secondary
school teaching maths, so they wouldn't have a lot of
spare time. But my point, my point is that why

(35:28):
just let them be an excellent teacher in isolation. Why
not enable them to share their expertise and bring other
teachers up.

Speaker 2 (35:40):
In expertise.

Speaker 4 (35:42):
So professional development is one thing that these centers could do.
Another would be teacher education. So instead of having teachers
trained at university, have them trained in the classroom, and.

Speaker 2 (35:57):
Then you know, you have a community of.

Speaker 4 (35:59):
Schools that has a critical mass that enables a really
strong teacher education program to be put in place. Is
going to have much more practical focus. There's going to
be more of an alignment between the kind of course
work element of the program and what teachers actually need
in the classrooms because schools are nothing if not pragmatic

(36:22):
and practical. They've got huge challenges and they know what
teachers need to learn better than universities do. So there
would still be a place, a strong place for teacher educators,
but let them be employed by the schools themselves. Let
the communities of schools have their own qualification. And look,

(36:46):
there's already a model for this taking place with the
community of schools in Auckland that has got a teacher
qualification that they run and they train teachers in schools,
and I think that this is the way ahead with
teacher education. So it'll take a while to ratchet up
something like that, but I think that the remodeling of

(37:08):
the education system along the lines that I'm talking about
would really help. Other things that these communities could do
is instead of you know, if you need an educational
psychologist to assess a child for dyslexia or ADHD or
whatever it is, you don't have to wait months for
the ministry to allocate one to you. Instead, you have

(37:33):
a cadre of specialists working for your community who circulate
around the schools and do the work that needs to
be done. And that's going to result in a more
efficient allocation of resources like that as well. So I
think these communities could take on a lot and that importantly,
they would also be the center of accountability. So at

(37:54):
the moment, we have almost no feedback from schools to parents,
to government, to the state, and that's because we just
don't collect enough data and report it. Schools run assessments,
but they keep those data to themselves.

Speaker 2 (38:14):
And one of the reasons for that.

Speaker 3 (38:16):
It should be public knowledge.

Speaker 2 (38:18):
Yes, it should be public knowledge. Why is it not? Well?

Speaker 4 (38:22):
Schools fear reporting data because they fear being exposed basically,
and that's an understandable fear. It's not acceptable situation. But
what's the way around it. If we made the community
itself the locus of accountability, then the schools that belong

(38:44):
to that community would collect data and report it to
their community and let me finish. Then the community itself
would aggregate that data and report it to the center,
and that would be It would be the community as
a whole held accountable for those data.

Speaker 2 (39:05):
So then the schools.

Speaker 4 (39:07):
Within that community would have a strong incentive to help
one another improve and no one school would have to
feel so exposed. And I think that might be a
way to solve our data problem. That idea does need
a bit more thinking through, in particular what to do
when you've got a whole community that isn't functioning well,

(39:28):
But I think it would take the heat off individual
schools as well as building an incentive structure for the
schools to help one another more for schools that we're
doing well, say in literacy, to be able to help
ones within their community that we're not doing so well
because they've got a collective interest in the data that

(39:49):
they're reporting to the center.

Speaker 3 (39:52):
Of the well. The main reason that triggered this conversation
today is something that I picked up a few days
ago with regard to the American election. Let me quote you.
Donald Trump's vision for education revolves around a single goal
to rid America's schools of perceived wokeness and left wing indoctrination.

(40:17):
You can tell already that the word perceived before those
two is hinting at the angle that the article has
taken from AP News. The president elect wants to forbid
the classroom lessons on gender identity and structural racism. He
wants to abolish diversity and inclusion officers. He wants to

(40:38):
keep transgender athletes out of girls' sports. Throughout his campaign,
the Republican depicted schools as a political battleground to be
won back from the left. Now that he's won the
White House, he plans to use federal money as leverage
to advance his vision of education across the country. Now,
in so doing, he's vowed to disengage the Department of Education.

(41:06):
And you talk about the thousands of people in the
department in this country. It made me wonder if there
was a similar approach that maybe we could look at.
But it's not. It's not easy because he's going to
send it back to the States. We've got the States
to send it back too.

Speaker 4 (41:23):
Yeah, So have we have a simpler system and easy
it's sort out because it's not so huge and doesn't
have the complication of states as America and Australia do.

Speaker 2 (41:36):
So we do have it. So a couple of things
about that.

Speaker 4 (41:39):
First of all, the kind of approach that I'm talking
about with establishing these communities of schools, they would need
resources that I would say, they would need physical premises.

Speaker 2 (41:48):
Now, how do we fund that?

Speaker 4 (41:50):
Well, we take a whole lot of functions off the Ministry,
basically turn it into a smallish policy shop in Wellington,
and instead of having all these regional offices, give the
resources to the to the schools themselves to use more locally.
I think that would be a more effective approach. So

(42:11):
that's the answer to that part of the question. I
would downsize the Ministry greatly and reallocate the resources to
the communities of schools for which they would have to
be accountable that's an important part of it, making sure
there is accountability for how those resources are used. And
at the moment, the ministry isn't really held to account

(42:32):
for presiding over twenty bus years of educational decline. So
I think it is time to try something different. To
turn to what Trump is saying about education. There's a
lot in that which I agree with. I think it
is true that education systems across the world have become
captured by certain ideological ideas, and that is not good

(42:58):
educational practice because, to use a bit of a cliche,
we need to teach children how to think and not
what to think. Having said that, lightly worried that Trump
might implement ideological ideas of his own, and so that
to me would be not fixing the problem, but just

(43:21):
changing the problem.

Speaker 3 (43:23):
I don't have that for you.

Speaker 2 (43:26):
I hope you're right.

Speaker 4 (43:28):
I mean, so, if you take the question of gender
identity or whatever, I don't think there's any problem in
teaching about that. But all ideas need to be contestable.
So you put the idea on the table, is it
possible for a boy to become a girl? Well, let's

(43:51):
look at that from all different angles and bring the
evidence to bere what does biology have to say about that,
and what's the difference between sex and gender? And if
we could have open discussions about that in our classrooms
that were not dominated by ideologies, then we would be
using that issue as which is, you know, obviously of

(44:13):
contemporary social interest, because it's all over the place at
the moment. If we could have open discussions about it
in the light of evidence, then people would be taught
to draw their conclusions based on evidence instead of ideology.

Speaker 3 (44:27):
What place does the World Health Organization have in the classroom?

Speaker 2 (44:34):
Very little place as far as I can see. I
don't know why it would.

Speaker 3 (44:37):
Have the place, well, because it chooses.

Speaker 2 (44:40):
To Can you elaborate? I'm not quite sure what you mean.

Speaker 3 (44:44):
I can. I could elaborate in great details, except we
don't have enough time even in this podcast, however. Hugh
McCarthy is a retired as a head teacher after twenty
three years in that role. He also lectured in postgraduate
leadership course at the University of Ulster. And there's more

(45:04):
detail about this about this guy who has written a
twelve page missive Look who's in the classroom? Look who
who is in the classroom? Right the process to legislate
the amended Form of Relationship and Sexuality Education RS into
the school curriculum has seen the divers the diversion of

(45:26):
much needed administrative and teaching time and resources away from
education fundamentals such as reading and numeracy, the standards of
both of which have fallen alarmingly. The decline in reading
and numeracy standards caused by the impact of COVID related
policies has seen the UK achieve its worst standards since
two thousand and six and the US the worst in

(45:49):
the history. Anyway, I won't go on, but.

Speaker 2 (45:53):
Yeah, I see what you're saying. Now.

Speaker 4 (45:55):
Yeah, whether it's the WHO or other organizations in the background,
I think there are some influences in our classrooms on
things like the Healton Sexuality curriculum. There are definitely some
interests that have been influencing our schools.

Speaker 2 (46:16):
Now.

Speaker 4 (46:16):
This is actually one other very good argument for a
much stronger curriculum than we've had, because if we have
a really strong and full curriculum, then that specifies what
teachers are obligated to teach, and they're not going to
have much time to do these other things.

Speaker 3 (46:37):
Some of them, from my information, would do anything to
continue with it because there is a.

Speaker 2 (46:46):
They might do.

Speaker 4 (46:47):
But if they're held accountable for teaching a really robust
and knowledge rich curriculum, then if they choose to spend
time doing these other things, then they might fail to
deliver what's expected of them, and there needs to be
ultimately consequences for that.

Speaker 3 (47:08):
Well, we certainly agree on that. You mentioned the word
bureaucracy before when you were talking about them at headquarters.
Basically i'd use the word autocracy.

Speaker 2 (47:20):
Yeah. Well, I mean it's interesting.

Speaker 4 (47:22):
Our school system is actually incredibly devolved, and I think
that has become part of the problem that we just
have all it's highly fractured. Indeed, so in some sense
the Ministry doesn't do enough at all to preside over

(47:42):
the education system. Having said that, I wouldn't trust the
ministry to preside over it, and I think we need
a different way of structuring it, which is what I'm
thinking through now. And the ideas that I've laid out
today are actually the first public airing of them. I'm
not the only one have thought along these lines, of course,

(48:04):
but I do think we need to think very carefully
in terms of the ministry being an autocracy. Well, in
some ways it probably is, but I think in ways
that it needs to assert a bit more control. It's
actually left things way too up in the air for

(48:24):
a long time.

Speaker 3 (48:25):
Yes, but the people are the people capable of doing that,
actually holding down positions.

Speaker 4 (48:30):
There are some There are some really good people in
the ministry, for example, the crew that do the international
testing work. I think they're really good statisticians and they
provide good information.

Speaker 2 (48:42):
There are pockets of good.

Speaker 4 (48:46):
Work happening in the ministry, But as a whole, it's
a highly dysfunctional organization. It's it's faction written and it
is yeah, not using it as a resource as well.

Speaker 3 (48:59):
Shall we say, look, we we must before we terminate,
we must touch on one other thing. And this could
take as well. You can have as long as you like.
But AI now before you go. AI is something that
I'm intrigued with, but not so much. In fact, i'd

(49:21):
put AI in a parallel position to what Bitcoin was
when we first started talking about it a few years ago,
and I put my neck on the line and said
it'll collapse, it'll never go anywhere. Was totally wrong. So
the question is is AI in a similar similar category?

(49:41):
Is it a danger as much as it could be
a positive. How do you I know how you see
it because I've read I've read your articles, but take
it from where you want.

Speaker 2 (49:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (49:56):
So the way I started my reporter on AI was
to think back to the nineteen seventies and eighties, when
handheld calculators were finding their way into the pockets of
young people, and the idea was that now maybe we
don't need to teach them arithmetic anymore because they've got
these calculators to do it for them. And of course

(50:18):
the flaw in that is if they don't learn to
do arithmetic to the point of what we call cognitive automaticity,
which is to say, you know, you know your times
table's cold, and you know how to add numbers together
using an algorithm pretty straightforwardly and without much effort, You're
just not going to have the cognitive resources to take

(50:38):
further steps in mathematics. So everything that arithmetic depends on,
which is just about all of the rest of mathematics,
you're never going to be able to learn with any fluency.
So fast forward to AI. The same kind of argument
applies to learning to write. If you have an AI

(50:59):
producing writing for you, and there are some people who
have commented on the potential for AI to obviate the
need for children to learn to write themselves. Because they
can get AI to compile the facts and write a
reasonably cogent, if not exactly inspired piece, then they can

(51:19):
spend their time thinking critically about what the AI has produced.
Trouble with that is that, first of all, as I
said before, to think critically, you need a lot of knowledge,
and so just outsourcing knowledge production to AI is not
going to teach you knowledge. And secondly, writing is itself

(51:41):
a tool of thinking. So when we write, if we're
writing fluently and well, we are able to compile our ideas,
rearrange our ideas. In other words, we can get out
of our heads onto the page, as it were, our thoughts,
and then that gives us the kind of headspace freed
up to be able to think through those ideas properly,

(52:05):
to self criticize our ideas, and to rearrange them to
improve our arguments. So writing is itself a really important
tool of thinking, and we mustn't allow AI to subvert
the necessity for young people to learn to write and
to think and to acquire knowledge of their own. I

(52:26):
think there are some opportunities that are offered by AI educationally,
but it's much more in the category of feedback to children.
So you can imagine young people perhaps producing a piece
of writing of their own and then feeding it to
the AI, which doesn't just sort of rewrite it for them,

(52:46):
but says there are some problems with the way you've
structured this sentence and that sentence, and maybe even have
you thought about this counter argument to this idea. So
in other words, it's it's acting more as a coach.
It should also always be under the supervision of a
skilled teacher. We shouldn't just let AI take over in

(53:11):
the classroom.

Speaker 3 (53:12):
Is it being actively used the moment in the classroom.

Speaker 4 (53:15):
I think it's starting to be yes, And I don't
have a good handle on how it's being used at
this stage. I suspect it's very ad hoc because there
hasn't been any sort of central effort to introduce it
in a way that has any principles behind it. I

(53:35):
think a lot of teachers will intuitively understand that it's
a bad idea to let AI do writing for young people,
but I wouldn't be surprised if there's some of that happening.
Is there, apart from anything else, that's quite hard to
control what young people do with it?

Speaker 3 (53:52):
Well, we found that out yep. Is there any danger
that it could be captured and used illicitly?

Speaker 2 (53:59):
Can you explain what you mean a bit more?

Speaker 3 (54:01):
Yeah, I mean I don't know how it works. I
don't pretend to and at this point I don't really
have any great interest in the mechanics of it. But
as there is misinformation abroad in volumes, is there any
reason why AI can't be programmed to behave badly misleadingly misleader?

Speaker 4 (54:26):
There is no reason at all that it can't be
programmed to do that, And I would say that there
are probably engines that are like that already. So you
do need to understand a little bit about how AI
works to understand this. Essentially, AI doesn't know anything at all.

(54:47):
AI artificial intelligence is actually a bit of a misnomer.
I would say it's not intelligent. What it is is
a huge network which is trained using vast amounts of text. Now,
the text that you train it on will determine the
kinds of responses it gives you. So you could train

(55:10):
it on a whole bunch of documents from a particular
ideological perspective, and if you did that, the responses that
produced would be from that ideological perspective. And I think
there is already an extent to which the AI engines
are trained in something of a biased way. There's a

(55:33):
research called David Risado from Dunedin who has done some
really great work showing how various AI engines are politically biased.
And he does that by giving them questions from things
like the Political Compass test and seeing where they pitch up.
And most of the AI engines have a fairly pronounced

(55:56):
left wing bias, and one might suspect that they've been trained.

Speaker 5 (56:00):
To be like that. And well, exactly, yes, you have
very valid concern. Then well you've got to the core
of my question right perfectly. There is something else I
just want to raise with you. Welfare.

Speaker 3 (56:17):
The welfare system is I think, not just partly but
hugely responsible for a lot that's wrong with this country.
Now I could go into explanation, but if you do
agree with what I've just said, what's your thought.

Speaker 4 (56:35):
Well, I'm not an economist and welfare isn't really my
area of central expertise, but what I would say is that,
and we're at ABTZ education is that we need these
systems to left people out of bad circumstances and not
keep them there. So a welfare system that promotes into
generation or dependence is not good. There are situations in

(56:59):
which people need welfare. We should always be looking to
improve their capabilities so that they don't have to stay
on welfare and stay dependent, because that's not a recipe
for a meaningful life. Education has a really important role
to play in that for families that perhaps have been
stuck in a welfare trap for more than one generation.

(57:22):
It's pretty bad when a child has never seen an
adult who has a full time job, for example, and
we need to find a way out of that.

Speaker 3 (57:33):
I'll tell you what triggered that you write something on
New Zealand needs a clearer pathway to apprenticeships. Yep, and
I read you the first paragraph. Every year in New Zealand,
around sixty two thousand young people leave school, just six
percent of them enter apprenticeship training. Nearly double that, eleven
percent neither gain employment nor enroll in post school education.

(57:56):
That comparison points to a serious waste of human potential.
In contrast, I agree with you entirely. In contrast, under
the German dual training system, fully half of school leaders
take up apprenticeships. Now, the reason it got my attention
was because a number of years ago I met two

(58:16):
young Germans who were visiting Australia. My father was married
to a German and one of them was related to it.
So I found out the bit of detail they were
on the doll and they were traveling the world and
if memory serves me correctly, they could do that for

(58:38):
two years without repercussion.

Speaker 4 (58:42):
No, I mean, I'm not aware of that scheme, but
I do know that half of their school leaders do
go into apprenticeships, and there's a really well coordinated system
whereby they go through particular kinds of secondary schools, and
in fact they divide their kids at age ten into
different tracks, which I think is too young. But what

(59:03):
they do really well is when they leave school they
can be employed as an apprenticed by a company. They
don't have to pay for apprenticeship training because the companies
actually pulled the resources and fund a system whereby they're trained,
they work several days a week in the company, and

(59:24):
then they're studying with a tertiary provider.

Speaker 2 (59:27):
The rest of the time.

Speaker 4 (59:27):
To teach them the general skills of the trade that
they're preparing for, and when they qualify that they become
a master trades person, they can go on to be
a trainer themselves, which is a highly respected position in
German society. A lot of it comes back to culture.

(59:48):
The Germans have a very long standing respects for the trades.
In some sense, it goes back to the medieval guilds.
Be very difficult to reproduce their system in New Zealand,
but I think there are elements of it that we
could adopt. And really what I'm focusing on at the
moment is what we can do in the senior secondary
school to make the trades pathway much more visible and

(01:00:11):
much more accessible to young people so that we don't
end up with twice as many going on the doll
as we have leaving school and becoming apprentices If we
could even capture you know, that eleven percent and go
from six percent going into apprenticeships to something like fifteen percent,
that would be a really good start.

Speaker 3 (01:00:31):
Indeed, and speaking of the word start, we might call
a finish no worries. So, Michael, it's great talking with
you and very productive.

Speaker 2 (01:00:42):
I think it's very latent. Thanks have always a good
conversation with you.

Speaker 3 (01:00:46):
Thanks kindly and we'll talk again.

Speaker 2 (01:00:48):
Take care fine now, Layton Smith.

Speaker 3 (01:01:02):
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(01:01:24):
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(01:01:46):
and always read the label. Take us directed and if
symptoms persist, see your health professional. Farmer Broker Auckland. Here
we are in two double six, that is Podcast two

(01:02:08):
double six with the mailroom and missus producer. How are
you feeling after your beach walk?

Speaker 6 (01:02:12):
Lighton who couldn't feel fabulous?

Speaker 2 (01:02:14):
On?

Speaker 6 (01:02:15):
A day like this, life is good.

Speaker 3 (01:02:18):
You realize that when people hear this it may be
bucketing down.

Speaker 6 (01:02:21):
Yeah, but every day's fabulous, really, isn't it.

Speaker 3 (01:02:24):
What if you're breathing?

Speaker 6 (01:02:26):
We know that.

Speaker 3 (01:02:27):
So for two double six, lead the way I shall start.

Speaker 6 (01:02:30):
Lynn says. I am an ordinary New Zealander seventy seven
years of age. I find what happened last Thursday appalling,
of course, but I have seen a lot of political actions,
stunts and protests over my life. But this, this is
something sinister. This is not a protest. It is a
serious attempt to disable an elected government and dispense with

(01:02:51):
democracy and even the rule of law. They are blatantly
breaking the law and yet relying on the same law
to allow them to keep doing it. It is a
well established tactic of groups such as these to go
the government or establishment into taking the sort of action
that could allow them to I foul and act hurtful
and indignant. Also, schools and teachers are breaking their contracts

(01:03:15):
with the Ministry of Education. As public servants, they are
obliged to be seen as politically neutral. Yet twice last
week I saw the pupils and teachers of the two
local schools in my area marching around holding Mauri flags,
and teachers and pupils alike wearing red hats with white
feathers on them. So children as young as five are

(01:03:36):
indoctrinated into this. These children will no doubt be included
in the inflated figures reported by mainstream media. Equally upsetting,
says Lynn. Is Chris Luxen going to take any meaningful action?
I feel he should be supporting his coalition partner. I
know he has reiterated ad nauseum his feelings that he
doesn't like the bill, which I take to mean he's

(01:03:58):
wanting a quiet life. With all due respect, he should
be better than that, and I intend to make him
aware of my thoughts for all the good that that
will do. I will stop my rant later, as I
know abler pens than mine will be writing to you
on this subject, but I had to express my feelings
of fear about this. The Treaty Principle's bill is doing
no more than maintaining the principle of one man, one vote,

(01:04:22):
and lind says, I use man in the genetic sense,
as in mankind. Change it if you don't want to
risk cancelation. Another sinister aspect another sinister aspect of life
now and she says, thank you for your time. That's
from Lynn Linda.

Speaker 3 (01:04:38):
At the end of the mail room, or before the
end of the mail room, I've got a comment to
make which I think you should hear from Chris. Thank
you for the US election debrief with Patrick Masham. Totally
worth the effort and the weight. I was one of
those people who called the election for Trump. During this election,

(01:05:00):
I was most interested in the way election processes were
handled post twenty twenty A note that quite a few
states in private entities instituted measures to counteract voter fraud
prior to the last week to well, he says, to
last week's elections. Honestly, on the day, my main interest

(01:05:20):
was how the timings and results from the seven swing
states were progressing, and I was not disappointed. However, in
the wake of Trump's win, the Republicans and supporters were
quick to credit success to their campaign activating voters to
the GOP cause. This may be true, but if we
put some context around the popular vote, things look slightly different,

(01:05:45):
although still great from a GOP perspective. In twenty sixteen,
Trump received sixty three million votes and Clinton sixty point
one million votes. In twenty twenty, Trump received seventy four
point two million votes and Biden eighty one point three
million votes. Really, in twenty twenty four, Trump has seventy

(01:06:07):
three point six million votes at the time I write
this email, while Harris has sixty nine point three. This
will increase slightly without thinking too deeply. In comparison to
the twenty twenty election, Harris has lost eleven million votes,
while Trump's vote count remained roughly the same. The red
wave looks in reality to be a receding blue tide.

(01:06:31):
Has something more sinisterive been exposed by this outgoing tide
of Democrat votes? I wonder, and then it break it's
without evidence. I wonder, without evidence, if we are seeing
a relatively clean twenty twenty four election where voter fraud
has been effectively stymied, and the twenty twenty overcount is

(01:06:52):
now obvious, or at least obvious enough to need openly
explaining both for and against arguments would be welcome. Please
keep up the great work, Chris. I sent that off
to to Patrick actually with a question. I don't think
I have a reply at this point, but I'll keep
you in touch if I do.

Speaker 6 (01:07:13):
Latent John says, I've just this afternoon being speaking to
a retired and knighted justice. As you know, not all
retired judges get gonged. He must remain nameless, But he too,
is very concerned with this partnership concept and where it
might inevitably lead. A great majority of the electorate really
needs to wise up to the probable disastrous outcome. A

(01:07:36):
grab bag of kcs have come out and supported some
of this radicalism. They tend to be the newer bunch,
notable absences of endorsement from the older appointees. There are
arguably too many cass now the currency of the honor
has been devalued. When I started as a lawyer late
nineteen sixties, there were only a handful of QC's in

(01:07:57):
New Zealand. Now we're overrun with them. But I digress.
I fear we're hurtling down a slippery slope. Don't think
I'm overstating things, do you? If we have twofold systems,
how does anyone with very mixed genes determine where they stand?
Auckland's Asian population, for instance, becoming a high percentage of
the populace they and other more recent mixed heritage immigrants.

(01:08:21):
What for them? Seymour is courageous and absolutely correct. A
huge amount of discussion needed. Too many second rates in
the media who need to be given a wake.

Speaker 3 (01:08:31):
Up proud that's from John John very well put and
I thank you late and missus producer. I hope you're well,
miss a producer. Are you well?

Speaker 6 (01:08:42):
Very well? Thank you whoever's asking.

Speaker 3 (01:08:44):
The I'm a clip on short and sharp email expressing
my and views of many others I speak to. The
Seymour bill is not contentious, Just what radical illogical MARII
don't want to hear the gravy train and misrepresentation of
the treaty written in English by colonials at the time
and translated by the same into Mari doesn't suit their agenda.

(01:09:08):
I would be so bold as to suggest most New
Zealanders are sick of their bleeding and devisive, hateful retrick.
They are an embarrassment to this nation. Yes they are.

Speaker 6 (01:09:23):
Layton Mel says, love your podcasts, both yousus producer, Thank you, Mel.
It's all Layton, I'm telling you, it is all Laton.
My parents used to listen to you on talkback radio.
Years ago, and as a kid, I used to roll
my eyes and think how stupid and boring it was
to listen to talkback. I don't know how many times
I heard Layton said. Now I find myself listening to

(01:09:45):
talkback and podcasts all the time. I guess I grew
up anyway. Late in your podcast two five seven with
mister Paul Merrick mentioned a book that Amazon band and
is no longer available. He mentioned that he would send
you a PDF of the book, So I'm wondering if
I can have a copy of that pdf to read.
I'd also like any information on treating COVID short and long.

Speaker 3 (01:10:06):
And that's from mel Well. I don't believe he has,
but I've got his contact, and there was another reason
why he may not have. But I'll see what I
can do. Let you know, that's two commitments I've made
so fast.

Speaker 6 (01:10:22):
I was going to say, if you remember, you need
to write down, so you need to make the note.
Make the note.

Speaker 3 (01:10:29):
I have been disturbed by the mainstream media outright attack
and blatant misinformation on RFK the last few days. This
article explains the media's complicit behavior and total lack of
balance reporting Kennedy is and has been for decades, calling
for transparent and actual studies of childhood vaccines in particular,

(01:10:51):
then a list of four points. Number one studies of
BAX versus unbacked kids. Second, the same stringent clinical trials
as applied to all pharmaceutceutical drugs to be applied to vaccines. Three,
the removal of legal indemnity for vaccines I reckon number four,

(01:11:13):
the studies of vaccines versus an actual placebo. Then, in
Brackett's the placebo used is either a neurotoxic EG aluminium
or another vaccine on the childhood immunization schedule. It would
appear these are reasonable requests that surely any parent considering
vaccinating their child would want. Instead, all they receive is

(01:11:38):
gaslighting behavior by their gp that all childhood vaccines are
safe and effective. The media asks no questions. Worse, they
attack anyone who raises concerns. Shame on them. No wonder
people are switching off from mainstream media. One can almost
smell the death throws of a desperate, captured, paid off
media cheers Caroline, Very aggressive, Caroline, But I know there

(01:12:02):
is much sort along those lines.

Speaker 6 (01:12:04):
Layton Serlda says, just a quick note to say how
much you are appreciated. Full of stimulating interesting subject matter.
I especially liked your coverage of Trump as he cleaned
up in the election. And that's from Zelda.

Speaker 3 (01:12:16):
Zelda well said all from Roger. Roger writes from Sydney.
Harker erupts in New Zealand Parliament over controversial bill. Good
to see that New Zealand is as batty as ever
and by the look of this, Roger is an accountant.

(01:12:37):
Just say, what do you think of this? Bearing in
mind the Waitaki Council has recently been found to be
overdosing the water supplies there, don't you think an assurance
from the Director General of Health would be appropriate? But
she won't front up. Surely as a public servant she should.
This is a highly toxic chemical and I am extremely

(01:13:00):
concerned that this is going unchecked as overdosing too especially
babies and young children is toxic. Can you please investigate this?
The US is going to ban this chemical in all
their drinking water on the twentieth of January twenty twenty five.
Israel banned in twenty fourteen, saying it was dangerous. The
warnings on fluoride toothpaste as they do not swallow. So

(01:13:23):
how does the Ministry of Health know everybody is getting
the right dosage? Unless they can prove this one hundred percent,
they should immediately stop. Strangely, I can't even get a
reply from either Shane Ready or Diana Safati on this.
Perhaps you can, Linda. What's going to take place in

(01:13:44):
the US I think is yet to be refined. But
if they followed this path, then isn't Australia going to
do something as well? I think? But I either way, anyway,
this needs to be looked at. My mind has been
cast back to a period of time when we had

(01:14:05):
the Prime Minister's scientific chief were laying on the law
that this wasn't going to change because it's perfectly safe.
I've pondered that ever since. To be honest, let me
finish with this. One English writer and defender of Western civilization,
Douglas Murray, has something to say that is very pertinent

(01:14:26):
to New Zealand and the situation we are in today.
He does not hold back. Mister Murray's words give rise
to the question why is there no one in New
Zealand defending our developed culture with the same kind of
zeal The narcissist mister Whititty exercises in his drive to
return us to pre European culture. In my humble opinion,

(01:14:49):
Seymour's Treaty Principles Bill is doing something quite minor compared
to what really should be done. For just a few examples,
the defunding of all government race based departments, the closure
of the Waitangi Tribunal, and the removal of taxation concessions
for all so called murray enterprises. Mister Whiteitty is welcome
to what he perceives as his own culture if he

(01:15:11):
wants it so badly, but he should not be robbing
every other New Zealander in pursuit of that objective. Neither
should he be making a mockery of our Parliament. There
should be far greater sanctions applied for his barbaric behavior
this week. Now, that brings us to the end of
the mail room. But I have reserved a commentary for

(01:15:34):
following up immediately, well very shortly, that I wanted to
spend a little time on, So I'm not including it
in the mailroom because missus producers got things to do,
no late, and I love being here, but you still
have things to do. I got a lot of driving
to do. Yes, I do so, thank you. We shall
see you next.

Speaker 6 (01:15:54):
Week lovely, Thanks later and look forward to him.

Speaker 3 (01:16:11):
Now here's the letter that I said i'd read after
the mail room, and I think you'll note for appropriate reasons.
But before I do, I just want to make reference
to Matt Walsh, who is well it's going to be
explained in a moment, but I've seen the video. I
saw it before the before the letter arrived, and I

(01:16:32):
was going to include it, and then I thought, well,
let's do both together. So here is the letter American
political commentator Matt Walsh dedicated nearly twenty two minutes of
his recent podcast to New Zealand. When the famous star
of What Is a Woman? And Am I Racist? Dedicates
nearly one third of his entire podcast to New Zealand politics,

(01:16:54):
you can be sure that New Zealand has either done
something extraordinarily good or in this case, catastrophically bad. In
his podcast, Matt Lambastard, the Teparti Mariri, the Marry Party
inmates who turned out Parliament into a political asylum. The
caption on his YouTube video says Parliament in New Zealand

(01:17:15):
descended into tribal stone age grunting on behalf of so
called indigenous rites. This is a preview of what our
country could look like if we keep apologizing for our history.
What a shameful indictment of the state of New Zealand politics. Furthermore,
local YouTuber Fonga Ray Tim never heard of him, but

(01:17:36):
now you have had a funnier caption saying New Zealand's
low IQ special needs primitive MPs perform a Marie Harker
war dance when they don't like the vote. Close quote
that young to Party Mary MP, who violently tore Act's
Treaty Principle's Bill in Parliament and started the Harker in

(01:17:57):
defiance of the Speaker should be fired, jailed and rehabilitated,
or maybe just jailed. She is categorically unfit to be
an Why the majority so silent on these parliament terrorists?
In the recent Free Speech Union agm held in Auckland,

(01:18:17):
Professor Nigel Bigar suggested that the problem lies with a
mild risk averse majority who often wants to keep out
of trouble. As a result, they inadvertently allowed the aggressive
noise of the minority to intimidate the majority. In this case,
says the author, I believe the majority of New Zealanders,

(01:18:37):
especially white New Zealanders, have been conditioned to self censor
on all matters pertaining to Mary, for fear of being
labeled racist by actual racists like Willie Jackson. Well, for once,
I hope whatever is happening in America will happen in
New Zealand, because we too need to fight, fight, fight.

(01:19:02):
It was slightly more aggressive than I read, and to
be honest, so I self sent a little bit now
to respond to Linn's letter and be put it this way.
The detritus there was witnessed in part of it last week.
It has a source. It goes back a long way.

(01:19:22):
It's the result of a great deal of cowardice, or
if you prefer, an unwillingness on the part of governments
on both sides of the aisle to take action, to
take firm action to resolve issues, and well as the
saying goes, kick the can down the road. It falls
into a similar category as printing dollars, printing money the

(01:19:46):
future generations paid for, and the most recent labor administration
has shown us how to do that big time and
screw the country now I've made reference. Oh Now, if
you want to get the Matt Welsh piece the video,
just do a search on Matt Walsh's en Z clip

(01:20:08):
Matt Walsh's end z clip and you will find it. Now.
I've made reference recently to Robert McCulloch from Auckland University,
professor of economics, and part of the reason was because
I discovered him and he was writing for his own
blog and I really liked what he said, except did

(01:20:33):
I say it again, it's got an overrider that he's
had to go with a couple of people who who
I'm familiar with, put me in a precarious position. However,
on the seventeenth of November he wrote the following, Now
we know how New Zealand's economy became broken. The Judiciary

(01:20:53):
wrote a communist style constitution without consultation, without people knowing.
The treaty debate is great. We've just found out, courtesy
about King's Councils, what has broken the economic of this nation.
It has only just been revealed, thanks to their letter
to the PM, that the Judiciary invented their own set

(01:21:16):
of treaty principles, the main one of interests to economists
being the requirement of equitable outcomes, which are our fully
part of our constitution, so much so that the councils
call them settled constitutional law, unable to be adjusted by Parliament,
let alone upstarts like Acts Seymour and the likes of

(01:21:38):
whom they swat by referring to as being part of
the government of the day. It's sort of a throwaway
and part of the government of the day. According to
the lawyers, we the little people, just vote for day
to day administrators, whereas the profound, unalterable constitutional principles governing

(01:21:58):
us in an enduring sense are written by people with
bigger minds, our judges. Most of us have heard about
the principles before, but until the treaty debate was opened recently,
we had no idea that they were so embedded into
our constitutional arrangements. Many countries have affirmative action programs. However,

(01:22:22):
I know of no country, he writes, no country that
has a constitutional requirement of outcomes not opportunities being equalized
amongst the citizenry, other than maybe a few commoner states
that failed and no longer exist. The reasons are obvious
to economists, but not to our judiciary. Now that's only

(01:22:44):
a little that's half of it. Maybe because he doesn't
write long pieces, which makes it much easier to punch
through more of them. I suggest you have a look
at it, and you want to know how to get it. McCulloch,
Robert McCulloch m a double CUBLC and you'll come across

(01:23:06):
his lot. It's worth it's worth keeping in touch with now.
Another thing I mentioned was AI and democracy because we
discussed AI at the end of the interview that we
had with Michael Johnson. And this is an alternative approach.
Shall we say how AI threatens democracy? The explosive rise

(01:23:29):
of generative AI is already transforming journalism, finance, and medicine,
but it could also have a disruptive influence on politics.
For example, asking a chatbot how to navigate a complicated
bureaucracy or to help draft a letter to an elected
official could bolster civic engagement. However, that same technology, with

(01:23:51):
its potential to produce disinformation and misinformation at scale, threatens
to interfere with democratic representation, undermine democratic accountability, and corrode
social and political trust. Like we need more of it.
This essay analyzes the scope of the threat in each
of these spheres, and discusses potential guardrails for these misuses,

(01:24:14):
including neural networks used to identify generated content, self regulation
by generative AI platforms, and greater digital literacy on the
part of the public and elites alike. Just a month
after its introduction, a chat GPT, the generative artificial intelligence

(01:24:35):
AI chat bon hit one hundred million monthly users, making
it the fastest growing application in history. For context, it
took the video streaming service Netflix, now a household name,
three and a half years to reach one million monthly users.
But unlike Netflix, the meteoric rise of chat GPT and

(01:24:57):
its potential for good or ill spark considerable debate. Would
students be able to use or other misuse the tool
for researching or writing? Would it put journalists and coders
out of business? What it's hijacked democracy? As one New
York Times up head put it by enabling mass phony
inputs to perhaps influence democratic representation. And most fundamentally or apocalyptically,

(01:25:23):
could advances in artificial intelligence actually pose an existential threat
to humanity? And these are things I had in mind
when I will raise it with Michael. If you want
to read the entire discussion. Search how AI Threatens Democracy?
Simple How AI Threatens Democracy got two authors. Sarah Krepps

(01:25:48):
is a professor in the Department of Government, adjunct Professor
of Law, and the director of the Tech Policy Institute
at Cornell University. Doug Kriner, the second author is the
Clinton Rossiter, Professor of American Institute in American Instituts in

(01:26:09):
the Department of Government at Cornell University. So the both
at Cornell. George Freeman dot his degree at Cornell. I'm
just throwing for interest. Take now, there is one other
thing that I want to mention. I raised the subject
of the who again with Michael, and there were parts
of it that I wanted to dive into, but I

(01:26:30):
left them out until now because they're sensitive to some people.
But after all, we're all adults and we can or
should be able to cope with such things. Look Who's
in the Classroom? Written by Hugh McCarthy. Now you'll find it,
I think I might have mentioned you'll find it on
Brownstone Institute. Here's Hugh McCarthy's a bio. He retired as

(01:26:55):
a head teacher after twenty three years in that role.
He also lectured in a postgraduate leadership course at the
University of Ulster. Hugh has served as a director of
two of Northern Ireland's major educational and currently serves as
a ministerial appointment on one. He has fifty years of
experience in education. He lives just outside Belfast, married to

(01:27:17):
Lorraine and made all this but nevertheless and has three sons.
Hugh holds a master's degree in distinction in education financial
management and an honors degree in chemistry at a BA
in public administration over educated if anything now in reference
to the WHO at its interference in education in the

(01:27:42):
next section zo page four. In the next section, the
who's approach to sexuality education is discussed. It is summed
up by the statement a child is understood to be
a sexual being from the beginning. The basis for this
is explained in the section entitled Psychosexual Development of Children

(01:28:02):
and argues the need for an early start to sexuality education. Psychologies,
especially developmental psychology, they claim, purports to show that children
are born as sexual beings, whatever that means. This approach
is then transferred into education school and the classroom via

(01:28:22):
the guidelines offered to teachers. Now where it gets sensitive,
but I'm going to include it because I think it's important.
The guidance given for ages six to nine recommends a
curriculum content which includes six to nine, remember sexual intercourse,
gender orientation and sexual behavior of young people, enjoyment and

(01:28:46):
pleasure when touching one's own body, masturbation, self stimulation, orgasm.
Then from nine to twelve, the curriculum content includes how
to enjoy sexuality in an appropriate way, first sexual experience
and then covers off the pleasure, masturbation and orgasm just
for good measure now. Whilst in the International TechEd Guidance,

(01:29:09):
the learning objective for five to eight year olds state
that learners will be able to identify the critical parts
of the internal and external genitals and describe their basic function,
and from night to twelve year old learners they'll be
able to describe what sexually explicit media, pornography and sexting are,

(01:29:34):
and male and female responses to sexual stimulation. Knowledge in
brackets explain that many boys and girls begin to masturbate
during puberty or sometimes earlier, comes under the heading of knowledge. Again,
the guidance also refers to teaching the material in an
interactive way. I am at a loss, he writes, to
know how this can be done without graphic images and

(01:29:57):
the lead discussion taking place. It clearly establishes a culture
and sets out a norm for what is acceptable to
teach young children, and the guidance goes further. It also
provides detailed guidance for the teaching of RSC. So what
is RSC RS is relationship and sexuality education. Now I

(01:30:21):
shall now just refer to his conclusion. Well, actually maybe
I won't because fairly long, but the beginning of it.
It is right that schools pass on broad moral and
spiritual values. These values will include respect, tolerance, and caring
for others. It seems to me, however, that the RSSE
issue appears to be the driving culture in some schools

(01:30:43):
to the marginalization of more vital components to the roles
of schools. Children are being forced to accept this culture
which surrounds the actions of the school. Much guidance from
the authority speaks of promoting the culture. This is far
removed from providing information. And there's quite a bit more.
This is the who now. By the way, if you think,

(01:31:06):
if you're thinking, doesn't happen here, you're deluding yourself sadly,
or maybe just not in a possession of information. I
dealt with this briefly, fairly recently with a high profile
school in this country, a high school, high profile school

(01:31:27):
of the private nature, when I had communication from parents
and they were disgusted and they were basically told to
bugger off. And on that unsavory note, I will say
if you would like to write to us latent at
newstalks ab dot co dot nzid or Carolyn news Talks
of dot co dot nz. We shall return in a

(01:31:48):
few days as always with podcast number two hundred and
sixty seven. Until then, thank you for listening and we'll
talk soon.

Speaker 1 (01:32:06):
Thank you for more or from News Talk set B.
Listen live on air or online, and keep our shows
with you wherever you go with our podcasts on iHeartRadio

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Leighton Smith Podcast #266 - November 20th 2024 - Dr Michael Johnston

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Leighton Smith Podcast #266 - November 20th 2024 - Dr Michael Johnston