title: 572. Navigating Education, Ideology, and Children | Answer the Call
author: The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
contenttype: podcast
publication: The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
published: 2025-11-17T14:07:00
sourceurl: https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/pdst.fm/e/pscrb.fm/rss/p/pfx.vpixl.com/2jSe3/claritaspod.com/measure/mgln.ai/e/121/traffic.megaphone.fm/BVDWV3786003525.mp3?updated=1763150484
word_count: 9738
Well, the holidays have come and gone once again, but if you've forgotten to get that special someone in your life a gift, well, Mint Mobile is extending their holiday offer of half off unlimited wireless, so here's the idea, you get it now, you call it an early present for next year. What do you have to lose? Give it a try at minmobile.com slash switch. Limited time, 50% off regular price for new customers, up from payment required, $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 month plan. Taxes and fees extra, speeds may slow after 50 gigabytes per month when network is busy, see terms. That's 1-800-Flowers.com slash daily wire. We get to more on this in a moment. First, you know Peer Talk's favorite holiday, President's Day, because wireless service shouldn't only cost you a couple of presidents, just to Jackson and Lincoln, 25 bucks a month, from limited talk text and plenty of data. Peer Talk is an American company supporting our veterans with US-based customer service. They use the same towers as big carriers for superior 5G coverage at just 25 bucks a month. No contract, no cancellation fee. I personally use Peer Talk and can attest to the gray coverage. So what exactly are you waiting for? How do I over to PeerTalk.com slash Shapiro? You'll get 50% off your very first month again. That's PeerTalk.com slash Shapiro to make the switch on over to Peer Talk. Is it education or is it child warehousing? The answer is mostly it's child warehousing. I think that the K through 12 education system has become is an irredeemably corrupt likely. How do I raise my children with strong critical thinking and moral clarity in the cultural environment where awokeness pretty much became cultural hedge and money? Most of the time, people who are educating have no idea, have no idea what literature is for. You're going to be able to motivate and teach people if that's how shallow your knowledge is. What you're doing as a teacher often is setting the motivational frame and dramatizing. This grips me. This is important. It's vital. Here's why that's the world manifesting itself in accordance with your interest. Hey, it's Michaela and I'm back with my dad for Answer the Call where we take live questions from you guys and dad mainly answers them but I'll pipe in from time to time. Today we're talking about a topic that should matter to everyone. How do we navigate the modern education system? So this should be spicy. Up first, we have Joshua and Florida. Hey Joshua. I good to talk to you guys, both of you. We have been homeschooling our older son since 2020. He's almost 10 now. I'm super happy with the results but I'm kind of biased and very close to it and I was wondering if you could perhaps steal man the case of sending him to a traditional style school maybe now maybe when he's older just so I can be more honestly doing the cost benefit analysis. It's not about me. It's about him. Well, you are already at least to some degree considering him in the equation because you said that he's an avid, you implied that he was an avid and and satisfied participant in what is happening and so that's a certain amount of objective evidence. Let's say assuming that you have other observers who agree and that might be your wife. What I would wonder immediately is does he have peers and friends and is he participating in anything that's part of the broader social contract outside the family? Extra-curricular. Exactly. Exactly. The only potential benefit to him going into the dismal school system is that he meets people his own age. He starts to socialize with his peers and you can assess whether he can conduct himself in the broader social world. Your role as a parent right from the beginning is to help your child, encourage your child to become maximally socially desirable and I don't mean obsessed with popularity. I mean the sort of person that other people rely on and open doors to and your concern which is valid is that because you're so close to the situation and you're his father and you enjoy what you're doing which I think would be a good thing is that you might be biased in your evaluation of his progress. Well the way to test that is to see how he does in the broader world with his peers, with other adults, with with social organizations that you have no part of. He could get that with sports, he could get that with clubs, he could get that with a friendship group like there's lots of social organizations that aren't the school. He could get that with church. So the first question I'd have for you is how do you think he's doing socially? He's doing well but the only problem with that is it means that it's like a full-time job for me to make sure that he's got access to a co-op and to temple and to the chess club and different camps over the summer but that's fine. It's my job. I do want to get out of the business of being in the middle of setting up everything and encouraging him too much because he's almost 10. At some point you have to figure it out for yourself. He has a phone number without internet access and he's got to be pushed out of the nest and like look you call these kids. You go over to their house. I'll show you how to get there. That sort of thing. Hey I've got nothing to say about that except yeah do that but you know you're okay so basically what you're reporting is that he seems to be interested in and in principle thriving in these other social communities but that that's an additional demand on your time, an organizational demand and you'd like to turn that over to him over the next few years. Well that is what you should do so that that seems just fine to me. Well there isn't anything about what you've said so far that raises red flags for me you know. I don't think we're the people too. Are you on the other side of things either? That sounds like a way better idea than public school. Yeah I guess the last thing I would ask you is what makes you think that he is progressing educationally at least the rate he would in the ordinary school which is a pretty damn low bar bar let's say but you know how are you informing yourself with regards to his academic progress? Because I know exactly what he's able to do with the subjects that I do have time to spend with him and I see what a lot of things he likes to do with his own time which is watch YouTube science videos and read biology books and that sort of thing and that's not being prompted at all. Of course he doesn't have internet access so he's asking me to can I see this video can I see that video? Yeah you hit the nail on the head it really is just the social aspect to it. He's the type of kid who probably needs a lot of time with kids to figure out how to deal with other people who are different. Yeah well that's so so look it sounds to me like you're focusing on the appropriate concerns and that you're happy your son is happy you want to turn more responsibility over to him. Great the what you the amount of responsibility you want to turn over to your kids is all that they can handle but no more than that and that's the best compliment you can give them because basically what you're saying is look kid you can do this and because you can you should I'm not going to take it from you and that'll also free you up to do the things with him that only you can do you know it isn't obvious that you should be serving as his scheduling guide you know for the next five years when it appears that you have better things to do with your time that would be more efficient for him to anyways there wasn't anything in what you said that raises any red flags for me the issue is can he make the transition from the homeschooled environment to the broader world and you seem to be facilitating that and that's the issue to concentrate on over the next you have years to do it he's only 10. Also school doesn't necessarily help you transition to the real world either right definitely definitely I would have killed for homeschooling I can remember in grade four sitting getting in trouble for reading at my desk because the quality of reading from that teacher was so poor that I was reading at my desk or counting the dots in the ceiling tiles to figure out how many dots that were on the ceiling yes I fully I'm fully conversing with with that degree of staggering boredom did you ever make a pile of eraser shavings just to see how high the pile could go no but I got in trouble a lot for reading behind that just used to get in trouble for reading yeah I know it's like I'm reading faster than you yeah any read it again oh my gosh yeah I know there's a there's the voice of a teacher hates children learning what about the spelling books where you have to do the exercises we had the spelling but you had to the exercises are like 15 pages of exercises which would brutal for somebody who already knew how to read but I got really fast at it because you had to do it yeah yeah thank goodness that's only you think that's a life when you're little it's a long time it's a long time and it takes what two hours of data in theory I doubt it even takes two hours to homeschool kids to teach them it's mostly if you think about school as childcare then you can wrap your head around it more that it's childcare set up under an education facade then you're like oh okay that makes sense but if you're like no this is education then it doesn't really make sense yeah yeah definitely the problem with Facebook Google and others so-called free services is that they aren't really free at all you pay for them by letting huge tech companies record your activity and sell it to advertisers as the saying goes if the product is free you're not the customer you are the product the digital version of you is being bought and sold by Facebook's real customers and who are they you never know they can be marketers want to sell you something lobbyists who want to change your mind about gun control or even foreign governments who want to influence how you vote if you don't want to be a product that's bought and sold you need to start protecting your privacy online and the way that I do that is with Express VPN if you don't protect your online privacy your internet service provider can see every website you visit third party data brokers can collect logs from apps and websites tracking your activity through your IP address to build an incredibly detailed profile of you but when our hosts and production teams use Express VPN 100% of their online activity is reratted through secure encrypted servers that means their ISP has no record of activity and nothing to sell Express VPN also hides their IP addresses so data brokers can't track them or assemble any profiles about them just like that you're no longer a product to be sold just one click and you're connected and tech experts at CNET and the verge agree that Express VPN is the number one VPN we partnered with Express VPN because we want all our viewers to have access to this important privacy protection which is why right now you can get an extra four months free when you go to ExpressVPN.com slash Jordan that's EXP are ESS VPN.com slash Jordan to get an extra four months totally free next caller we have Jake and Wisconsin hey Jake hello Dr. Peterson I was wondering between the home schooling movement speaking to the system of schooling not really being the best for children and I don't know what to do in compared to a previous statement that you've made that the institute should not be abandoned when you want your spring break to feel like and your kids pool day to feel like and your hotel but to feel like oh and room service to feel like because at Hilton hospitality feels like your cabana is ready would you like fresh towels it matters where you stay book now at hilton.com hilton for this day so that's the conservative conundrum I suppose is that it's it's a mistake to destroy all intermediate intermediary institutions right that's generally the radicals dream having said that you're left with the issue of what you do when institutions have become corrupt and I think that the education system the K through 12 education system has become is it irredeemably corrupt likely maybe not act in right right right to draw yeah um I did my TED talk actually with Matt yeah which is funny but actin might be an option yeah well that that well there are developing institutions that are producing education systems that seem to be intelligent variants right so I guess what you hope is that and this is something the United States is particularly good at the America is remarkable in its ability to revitalize its institutions through relatively radical conceptual and entrepreneurial transformation and I think that is happening on the educational landscape I mean we're obviously trying to do that with Peterson Academy at the higher end of the education system I think there are institutions acting Academy is a good example that are models for for how education could proceed I've I've watched Catherine Burble saying in the UK her school which is very different from the acting schools is an absolute bloody miracle the children there are thriving it's a very authority-based structured learning environment that makes tremendous challenging demands on the kids and they're learning at a rate that I've just never seen anywhere including high level graduate seminars so I guess my attitude towards the institutions is that as they become corrupt increasing discernment is necessary you know when I went to school I can't say that I was particularly thrilled with the course of my education K through 12 but I could at least say of my teachers that they weren't actively trying to demand me and now we're in a situation where the incompetence which has risen substantially over the last 30 years in the education environment is magnified by this insane ideological corruption that's truly pathological so what do we need well we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater do we we want to be discerning in our analysis of institutional structure and do ever more to separate the wheat from the chaff that's a lot to ask of parents because it's very difficult to do something like assess the quality of an entire education system but when when when institutional trust has been damaged there's no other alternative but to take the responsibility on for yourself and be more perspicacious in your assessment of your children's educational opportunities it's also complicated isn't it by the fact that there are all these new technologies that we just don't know what to do with mean I've been using the large language models as research tools for about well since they came out and I use them a lot and they're insanely informative and it's it's the case for example that you can ask an LLM like Chauchy PT to set you up with a training program for a foreign language and it will communicate with you at your level well we have no idea what the possibilities there are I suspect it's not going to be long before children have a educational tutor that's privatized that's an AI that knows exactly what they know and then teaches them out there you know at the at the edge of their zone of proximal development it exists yeah there's schools opening up in Texas here I don't know that those are the places I'm paying attention to but they're kind of based on what Elon Musk was suggesting for children yeah but it's not run by Elon Musk I can't remember the name of the school but one just opened here and it's two hours of AI learning and it's an AI teacher that teaches kids at their skill level yeah and then the rest of the day is more entrepreneurial and venture ventures and then public speaking and things which is exactly what people should probably do yeah that in some play well in law yeah yeah you aren't Lamberg is pointed out that the introduction of relatively low cost computation devices iPads let's say that are I believe his analysis was in third world countries an hour a day very very inexpensive produces a three year improvement in learning over the course of one year so we have no idea how challenged children are going to be to learn by teaching systems that will be optimized at their level of skill I think practically too if you're looking for a school because you I don't know don't have time to homeschool or don't want to homeschool you can take tours of these schools and you can pick up pretty easily if they're completely overrun with ideological teachers because you take a tour and you look at the posters look at the art the kids are doing if there's equity anywhere then you know that the school's a problem you can go to their website you can look up like what are their policies on equity and things if it's it'll be plastered everywhere because they don't keep it a secret because they're proud of it so if you find a school and you don't see it anywhere chances are that's a more conservative school or just a not as ideological school so you can go and tour places and it pops out really but I think everyone's going to be learning by AI yeah let's talk life insurance you probably have some but do you know what you're actually paying and what you're covered for most people pay too much for too little plus if you get coverage through work and lose your job you could suddenly have zero protection that's where select quote comes in they make it simple for you to get the right coverage at the right price for over four decades select quote is helped more than two million Americans secure over 700 billion in life insurance coverage by doing with they do best shopping for you so you save their license agents work entirely for you comparing policies from top rated carriers in just 15 minutes to find the perfect fit for your health and budget completely free of charge whether you need same debt coverage of up to two million dollars without a medical exam or you have pre existing conditions like high blood pressure diabetes or heart disease select quote partners with providers who offer specialized policies designed for your unique situation with life insurance rates at today's historic lows visit select quote dot com and let their licensed agents help you find the right policy for your life and budget they shop you save get the right life insurance for you for less and save more than 50 percent at select quote dot com slash Peterson save more than 50 percent on term life insurance at select quote dot com slash Peterson today to get started that select quote dot com slash Peterson okay on the line now is oaxana in california thank thank you so much for having me so I immigrated to bay area 12 years ago and I have two sons there 10 and 12 and I homeschool them and my question is how do I raise my children with strong critical thinking and moral clarity in the cultural environment like bay area where wokeness pretty much became cultural hegemony because I'm worried that they will rebel against our family believes eventually during teenage years and I really don't want them to do that of course and I want them to become like intellectually open and morally grounded as adults how old are they 10 and 12 what sort of conversations do you have around the dinner table well first of all we always reflect back on the day and we talk a lot about the positive things that happen to us that's our tradition and we do go into downs of the day and I pretty much do secratic method of like asking them more questions and hearing how they think out loud that's one of the things we do is conversations with questions do you do you introduce I mean I could imagine since you've already set up that structure do you introduce an analysis or a discussion of current affairs like if you ask them find something that appears to be a hot like I don't know how much internet they access they have or access to newspapers you know pick a an issue that appears relevant and let's and tell me what you think about it let's discuss it I mean you you're concerned about the woke ideology and fair enough so then you could imagine that what you need to do is to provide them with an understanding of the woke ideology and so maybe that would be like thirty points obviously a system like Grock could help with that initial analysis and then you could use those as topics of conversation and and contrast points and really what you're trying to do is to teach them the axioms of political thought and to assess them critically and I think your best bet with that would be to introduce them to the entire range of political thought from you know libertarian to Marxist and then they like then they know the whole landscape they're not going to run across anything that comes as a shock you know when I was relatively young thirteen I had a librarian in my hometown who was the wife of the local member of the legislature who happened to be a socialist he was the only one in Alberta out of like two hundred and people voted for him because he was actually a good man and this woman Sandy Naughtley was her name she introduced me to a lot of classic literature or well Huxley she really solsionates and she really showed me the literary world but she also had me read Anne Rand and Atlas Shrugged and which is much obviously much more conservative than libertarian you know and when I asked her why she did that she said she thought I would be intelligent enough to see through it and but but the point was she despite her commitment to what was really a working class socialism at the time rather than a progressive socialism let's say she wanted to expose me to the whole range of political thought well that's an inoculation well you seem like a sophisticated person where are you from I'm from Russia originally I was born in Soviet Union 1987 so I didn't really catch much of the Soviet times right while my experience with with Eastern Europeans broadly speaking is that they've been they or their families were bit pretty hard by the socialist worldview and have a certain amount of skepticism about it that's well-wanted you're in a good position to educate your sons you just start doing that educate them politically make them sophisticated thinkers and then then they'll be ready when the shallow won't nonsense comes their way I don't see that you you there's there's no way of dealing with that except to prepare them and they're old enough and your family seems sophisticated enough so you could do an excellent job of that then they're ready you know and they can recognize it too so Mick yeah what I started so my kids are a bit younger I have a seven-year-old and then two tiny beings I just bought I don't know if you've heard of the Tuttle twins the Tuttle twins are so good I love their books they have graphic novels and then they have some shorter books for I think I feel like graphic novels you could start around like six or something but then they have education for kids and it's pretty much libertarian education I think it's hilarious I think it's a really easy fun way to teach kids about political perspective now it's kind of biased in the way that I'm already biased so I'm totally fine with giving it to my kid because I think it's true but just as a practical like tool to use Tuttle twins is great and what what age do you think they're optimized for well Scarlett she's seven so she's reading the graphic novels but I think you could read them older too and then they have actual history books and things and so that could be ten and twelve I would love those and they teach a lot they teach about American historical figures history political ideologies economy yeah well that touches on the broader issue too like a political education is a cultural education and that's a historical education and so to really the way you fortify your children against ideology is to educate them yeah and you educate them by providing them with the tradition and by teaching them to think critically and there's absolutely no reason for you not to push that hard and and make them ready fighters you know and and to do that you want to steal man the arguments that you're concerned about too you know I mean to the degree that the progressive ethos has anything to say it does have a grounding in compassion and hypothetically a concern for those that occupy the lower strata of the socio economic distribution and there are things to be said in favor of the truly oppressed and marginalized so to speak so that's worth walking through because you your kids also have to understand why those arguments are put forward and how compassion can be weaponized and corrupted while masquerading as virtue these are very hard things to to manage properly but there's no reason to assume they can't do it one of the things you did well because I went to an alternative middle school and art public art high school and then an art university and it was super progressive before progressiveism was everywhere and when I went to university I think because of how I grew up because you didn't really push things on us I read everything that I was skeptical about so I was like okay feminism what exactly is feminism and I read a whole bunch of pro feminists books and a whole bunch of anti feminist books and then I just decided what felt more true so I think as long as your kids can well critically think look at all the information and then figure out what's true they'll be prepared for here on part of the way that you teach people to think critically is to have them argue both sides of a of a position and some of their friends are too that's like probably okay some weird family that's interceding don't you think maybe then your kids shouldn't be best friends with that family's kid well you have to keep an eye on your kids' friends but I think the best thing to do is to is to fortify them you know because you can't be watching what your kids are doing all the time especially as they become older teenagers you have to prepare them to contend with the world and if they're able to think and to think critically then they can defend themselves and then you don't have to worry too much about what snake pits they wander into I know I had some pretty stupid friends I wandered into a bunch of snake pits for a long time well I think that's a universal human experience when you're a teenager it's like whoa what was happening back then this is what happens before your prefrontal cortex grows in it's the wild times yeah every day thousands of women across the country face unexpected pregnancies feeling completely alone and overwhelmed the reality is tough about one in four pregnancies currently ends in abortion which means over three thousand lives lost daily but there's real hope through pre-born network clinics they offer free ultrasounds in that moment when a mother sees her baby for the first time it changes everything over 350,000 babies have been saved through this work and it doesn't stop there mothers are being introduced to Jesus getting practical support and choosing life like Valeria who didn't think she deserved to have a child until she found a pre-born clinic now she has a beautiful daughter who's already bringing life to others this happens every day which is why monthly support is so critical just 28 dollars a month can help save a life and help restore what truly is a gift from God dial pound 250 and save the keyword baby that's pound 250 baby or go to preborn.com slash Jordan that's preborn.com slash Jordan let's rescue a generation one heartbeat at a time okay our next caller is Amy in Connecticut. Good evening Jordan how are you? My question has to do with art education I'm an art educator and I've noticed a lot of the students that are in the school are very disengaged unmotivated don't want to be in school and in the art room it's a different story because there's a lot more creativity how can we transform education there's been a lot in the past from Serkin Robinson and some of your own comments that art is the bedrock of culture itself that I believe was from your Beyond Order book how can we transform education and address this critical problem of disengagement and education? Well my experience in school was and this included university was that it was often the case that the teachers who were attempting to impart information actually had no idea whatsoever why what they were teaching was good for anything I especially remember that mathematics because I would ask the educator why I needed to know this and they didn't know well my natural response to that was well if you don't know what it's good for why should I be interested in it now there's some arrogance in that obviously because you could say well you know when you're 12 or 13 you should listen to adults because they might know something more than you do and sometimes that's true but it's also incumbent on educators to set the motivational frame and so many people who teach art think about it as decoration they have no idea what they're doing and they can't tell the students why it's important well it's the realm of the imagination it's where creative ideas come from it's where you develop skill and taste it's how you make your environment beautiful it's how you indicate to others that you're sophisticated it's how you learn to see beauty in the world so that you can guide you upward why would you want to be guided upward well you want to be guided downward and suffer madly and end up in something approximating how or do you want to see beauty back into you and learn to establish a relationship with it and you need to like 13 year olds 14 year olds new university students they have a facade of cynicism but it's pretty shallow they don't know enough to really be cynical it's it's a test in some way why should I care about this it takes effort well that's a reasonable question like if it takes effort why shouldn't I just fritter away my time now if you have a serious discussion with your students at least some of them might listen it's like what are the things that make life worthwhile in the midst of suffering well beauty is one of those that's for sure you want everything to be hideous and ugly and chaotic how is that gonna work out for you so it's very important look human beings are inclined to work toward a goal when they see value in the goal that's how our nervous systems are set up and so you have to frame the educational endeavor within the confines of a story that indicate that the goal is worth the effort and you can't just take that for granted and that means you have to know yourself and most of the time people who are educating have no idea they have no idea what literature is for they have no idea what poetry is for they have no idea why it would be useful to memorize it they don't know why you should write they don't know why they teach mathematical equations and they think art is for decoration well you're not going to be able to motivate and teach people if that's how shallow your knowledge is so why is art a burning concern well that's the first discussion that you need to have with the kids and that's true for every topic it's like look kid you need to know this because if you don't know it you're gonna suffer stupidly and end up in a bad place and if you do know it pathways will open up to you that you can hardly imagine and so you're gonna be like a clueless, melformed, cynical, shallow lump who can't communicate knows nothing or you're gonna sharpen yourself the hell up and make your way through the world effectively right it's it like this is this if it's genuinely an education issue it's a intense spiritual and practical concern and that has to be because God you know I went to Harvard and I did a talk in front of the students the and this was at Harvard 10 years ago probably and I told them you know that thousands of people had been working for like 600 years to find them and offer them a stellar opportunity and that much was being invested in them and much was being demanded in them and that they had an ethical responsibility to be appreciative of the investment that had been made in them to sharpen themselves the hell up and to get out there in the world and do something useful and like two dozen of them came up to me afterward and said I wish they would have told us that when we first came to university it's like well that should have been the first day and then this this sort of thing happens at places like Hillsdale because Larry Arn who runs Hillsdale he does tell the students that and they have a 1% dropout rate as opposed to the 40% dropout rate that characterizes most institutions you got to get the motivational frame right and to do that you have to know why you're doing why are you pursuing this specialization and why should people care and if you don't know your students aren't going to care yeah I think practically speaking too we probably have to be picky or about teachers because most teachers aren't good so how are you going to go into a private school or a public school and get a good quality education if the teachers are no good yeah well I don't even think of a training problem it's also because the like as we pointed out earlier is it education or is it child warehousing yes and the answer is mostly it's child warehousing and then you might say well who are the students who are most likely to become teachers and it's not like they're picking the cream of the crop why because they actually don't care you do you you come across some good teachers and then they you remember them yeah that's for sure but I can remember like two yep two which is better than zero I guess none throughout my university days which is pretty sad but that's part of the reason we made Peterson Academy you where they're all great yeah but we went through I mean it's tricky to find good teachers we went through thousands and thousands seriously of professors and we're like these are the good guys and a math teacher because in calculus I had this problem I was like why do I need to know these equations yeah and he's like it doesn't matter memorize them yeah it's like okay so you don't even know how they came up with these if I knew how they came up with the equation and understood it to the basic level I could remember it otherwise I'm just memorizing it and I'm going to forget it after the exam the people who teach that way are people who learned what they learned by memorizing it they think that's how you learn things as soon as you remember something else you forget the last yeah yeah it's useless yeah but our professor the math guy I'm so impressed with he explains why I was like we need someone to explain why you need trigonometry why do you need it I didn't really I couldn't really do statistics till I understood why everything was structured in the manner that it was structured yeah which I needed to know why and did you learn that on your own yeah so for my statistics this was this was year one university which was a health nightmare and I skipped everything and on the final exam I was cramming and so I learned everything myself from the textbook I got an A I ended up with a D in the course and I was like should have done that at the beginning of a course instead of at the end of the course because I ace the final that was my statistics experience but I had to google everything I used like Khan Academy and things to really learn yeah yeah there's a great book called History of Statistical Thought that I can't fortunately can't remember the name of the author but that was extremely useful but yeah it's hard to find a good teacher and a good teacher has to well a really great teacher yeah fair enough a great teacher acts out a moral commitment to the topic you know a huge part of what you're doing as a teacher isn't imparting information books do that more effectively what you're doing as a teacher often is setting the motivational frame and dramatizing the process of being engaged with the material that's so true yeah yeah yeah yeah you're well that's why it's a lecture theater right you're acting out a commitment to the enterprise and you're dramatizing now you say look this is this grips me this is important it's vital here's why this will change your life this will change your life yeah yeah this will change your life yeah cool yeah protect you from the pit and orient you upward yeah and so and you better get that right because the pit is deep right so so pay attention or else right well then people think oh maybe there's something here yeah and that can be any topic if you get somebody it is well every every phenomenon phenomenon means it's from phanus thigh it means to shine forth so every phenomenon is a worthy target of inquiry and some will grip you and some won't and what they're doing when they grip you is shining forth that's the world manifesting itself in accordance with your interest and so something will grip you right it'll shine forth that's what happens when you find someone attractive for example or something strikes you as beautiful or interesting so that's the shining forth so what that shining forth is is the deep reality underneath your surface perception making itself known glimmering and then that's what the burning bushes in the Moses story and then if you pay attention to that phenomenon and you investigated deeply you go down the rabbit hole to the bottom of all things and you see where everything's connected that's where the animating spirit of the world resides so that's what happens when Moses steps off the beaten path to investigate the burning bush which is like the living phenomenon he concentrates intensely until he gets to the bottom of something and when he gets to the bottom of something that transforms him into a leader now he can speak truth to power now he can free the slaves from there from their what complacency and irresponsibility and now he can specify the promised land that's what you're doing when you're gripped by a topic and and the grip is the revelation of a deeper reality beyond the surface appearance and that's what you're trying to convey to your students it's like most of what you see in the world is the facade of your assumption and ignorance there's something deep there and if you could only see it and if you made contact with it then it would change you and everything else that's right that's how the world is structured and you can see more of that at PetersandAcademy.com Shopify powers millions of businesses worldwide supporting everyone from established brands to entrepreneurs just starting their journey you can create your professional storefront effortlessly with Shopify's extensive library of customizable templates designed or reflect your brand unique identity boost your productivity with Shopify's AI power tools that craft compelling products descriptions engaging headlines and even enhance your products photography all with just a few clicks plus you can market your business like a pro without hiring a team easily develop and launch targeted email campaigns and social media content that reaches customers 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Alberta to set up my question I have four kids and spend years as a scout leader what engages me is sharing challenging experiences and seeing growth following your podcast you indicated IQ is most malleable before adult would sets in going forward what would be the best experiences I could provide for the boys in our youth program now once behind this I have a hard time thinking there isn't some path that can develop one's intelligence after all we humans have added substantially and if you're on a spiritual plane time isn't the issue progression or rate of progression is what I'd like to tap into as a dad the family and even those in the community should come along for the ride but how could I do that best okay so there's a number of questions there there's a question about IQ there's a question about motivation for mentorship and then there's a question for about optimal development is IQ most malleable before adulthood is that something you can even change well you can certainly suppress it yeah diet etc right well diet and insufficient information the the issue the problem is to some degree is that there's enough information in the world that's accessible to everyone so that a limit on information isn't the issue with regard to IQ development right there's more than enough information for everyone at every level of intelligence to be to have an issue before well there's still the world yes true but yes it was an issue before I would say because you could be in a in a informationally impoverished environment I mean it's it's it's complicated because the problem is is that when you're more intelligent say by nature you investigate things and discover more complexity in them right so if you're curious enough there's no limited environment you rely on your own imagination so and we don't really know we don't really know how to increase IQ we don't know there's been there were all sorts of companies 10 years ago there was a company that was advertising continually these cognitive exercises yeah I don't remember the name of the company but it's vanished and this happens repeatedly that companies pop up and they say we have this set of cognitive exercises that will keep your IQ intact and develop it and then they do the research and they find that if you practice the little exercise you get way better at it but it doesn't generalize and that's like you just can't believe how solid a finding that is people have tried for a very long time and it's peculiar because what you might think there is a general there's a general cognitive ability that's corrected for age that's IQ it's very easy to derive an IQ estimate one of the things you can do for example you could take a hundred multiple choice questions about random topics and you could administer them let's say to a hundred people and you could rank order them in terms of how many questions you get right and you could correct that for age and that would be IQ that's how easy it is yeah so and so it's very robust phenomenon you might assume that because there's a general if you if you're prone to get one question right you're prone to get all of them right right so there's that general tendency you might think that because there's a general tendency you could practice a variety of different cognitive tasks and that practice would generalize and it would increase that general ability nope that is not works now you can decrease IQ by putting people in informational informationally poor environments and through malnutrition through abuse but there's no evidence that I know of that you can reliably increase IQ with time I'll give you an example of this so there was a huge program in the United States started the 1960s which was supported by conservatives and liberals alike called head start and I think head start still operates the idea was that you could take kids in relatively deprived socioeconomic environments and you could put them in school earlier and in an enriched environment and that would give them head start and the consequences of that cognitive head start would multiply as they progressed right so you get in early sort things out cognitively like motivate reading development the benefits will accrue and multiply across time the kids will gain a head start no that isn't what happened no what happened was that the kids who went to head start did do better than their age matched and socio-economic matched peers who didn't go to head start but the differences disappeared by grade five or grade six so there was no improvement in cognitive function now there's a variety of reasons for that which we won't go into there were some behavioral improvements it was likely because some of the kids were taken out of extremely pathological families right less abuse yeah yeah right that's right that's right and girls were less likely to get pregnant who had gone to head start in in adolescence and the kids in general were more likely to graduate but there was no improvement in cognitive function and that was really saddening right because it was a good hypothesis like the idea that you could get a leap ahead early seems so obvious that you'd think it was incontrovertible it just happens it's not to be true yeah not to get way off kilter here but we know psychedelics improve openness to experience yeah but they haven't seen any changes in cognitive ability no that's also odd well I think it's partly because you can make it look if you have a hierarchy which means you're faster at processing and you can process more bits of information so to speak you can hold more ideas and manipulate them simultaneously that's part of the element of general cognitive ability you're faster and you have you can juggle more okay creativity is positively associated with IQ but it has an additional element which is the improbability of the ideational connections you make so the more creative you are the bigger the leaps between ideas now you can get so creative that you're manic and incoherent right but and and that would be the you're connecting everything yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah right um psychedelics do appear to increase that trade openness that ability to make more distal connections and also attraction to aesthetic experience because that's part of openness but I see I've seen no evidence whatsoever that they haven't an enhancing effect on intelligence it's proved very very very difficult to increase IQ very no one's done it no one's done it I bet if you got rid of brain fog associated with diet well people to where they should be breast fed babies have an IQ advantage there is evidence that yeah oh my gosh that's horrifying yeah no are you serious well it's in keeping with it your brain is a very demanding metabolic organ if you optimize its function it's going to work better that seems to have accruing benefits from birth onward if you don't get enough to eat and you're stunted in your development physically you saw this with populations all around the world who never got enough to eat you know so they the men would grow up and be five foot two five foot three instead of the full six feet they might be if they had enough to eat that's associated with intellectual stunting the best and the best way to protect your IQ as you age isn't to do cognitive ex cognitive exercises it's actually to optimize your nutrition and to do physical exercises you know the brain is a very physical organ and optimized health is the best adjunct to increased cognitive ability so yeah and so I don't think I said as the questioner indicated I don't believe I said that IQ is most malleable when you're young it might it might be most malleable downward but but it's a very IQ is very stable cross time very and it's it's perverse phenomena so here's an example if you take twins identical twins separated at birth and you test them repeatedly for IQ as the age what you'd expect is that their IQs would get more different as their experiences diverge that isn't what happens what happens is that as they age their IQs get more similar until regardless of how they were raised by the time they're 60 if you test one twin and the other they're so similar that it's like you test the same person twice so identical doing anything then just play devil's advocate here well there's lots of things about development that aren't specifically associated with processing speed you know that so no that's a good question and to some degree this questioner was asking that question right he focused on intellect intellectual development which probably wasn't appropriate probably and I don't I think he knows this he said that he really found motivation in challenging young people to develop themselves yeah okay progress yeah but that doesn't mean they're getting smarter in the IQ sense it might easily mean that their character is developing and they're becoming wiser right and that they're developing you know a body of practical specific useful information IQ is most correlated with how fast you learn something and you can learn something slower and still learn it right so what you're hoping for when you're educating people is more character development on the moral side yeah yeah and so and his pleasure in challenging kids and putting them on the edge and developing them is actually a reflection should be more accurately a reflection of concern with character rather than with intelligence per se right you can have high IQ and have poor moral character that's for sure yes absolutely we see that all we certainly do and vice versa you can be a very good person who's there's no correlation between morality and intelligence like literally none if you think about conscientiousness and agreeableness as the moral categories it's tricky conscientiousness is associated with industriousness and orderliness conscientious people can keep long term contracts they tend to abide by their word the correlation between conscientiousness and IQ is zero zero right which is quite remarkable you know it's it's not what you'd expect but it happens to be the case there's no correlation like agreeableness is trickier because agreeable people are compassionate and polite and it's easy to think about that is virtuous but disagreeable people who are competitive and and and and critical that's also a virtue so but there's also no correlation between agreeableness and intelligence so character and intelligence are not the same thing and it's more appropriate to evaluate the quality of a person so tricky because intelligence is so helpful because you're faster a you're faster and broader and so in in ahead to head competition between two people of equal character the more intelligent person is going to move quicker and that's a rough fact and it's like it's a brutal fact of nature but like also who cares you can't do anything about it some move on you you maximize the you you maximize what you have at your disposal you know there are other virtues there are virtue first of all intelligence isn't a virtue it's a responsibility it's a gift and it's a it's a gift that if misused brings immense cost like Lucifer mythologically is the spirit of the intellect gone wrong right so like high intelligence can be a very destructive force and occurs right it's associated with pride for example in myth in the mythological world so lots of people who are smart are very proud of themselves for being smart that's a very bad idea first of all they didn't earn it and they're probably not that smart well you know in the greater scheme of like God yeah yeah yeah yeah well there is that to consider well on that note thank you all for watching and listening today we'll be back with more episodes I quite enjoy these of answer the call soon hit the subscribe and notify button so you don't miss an episode because sometimes YouTube is tricky with dad's channel I'll talk to you guys soon do you have a question 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