00:00:00.000class is in session and welcome to unlearn 16 class is in session guys you just get me today
00:00:09.420just me no traveling podcasts no no what was it called a blog a blog a boog no a vlog uh we did
00:00:18.240have a good time and i had a great time doing that and i promise you we will do more but for today
00:00:25.400Guys, I think it's about time we talked about the Supreme Court.
00:00:29.040You know, I wanted to be a bit fun in the summer.
00:00:32.640And watching what the Supreme Court is doing is making my blood pressure go up to epic proportions.
00:00:40.840And so now I'm going to have to talk about it.
00:00:43.400And what I'm going to focus on today, even though there's a litany of things that I could be focusing on,
00:00:48.300I'm going to choose to speak to the unconstitutionality or the supposed unconstitutionality of higher education institutions using affirmative action to decide upon their student body and how they're being let in and who gets let in and at what point.
00:01:09.680listen do i think affirmative action is the best possible way to have diversity inclusion probably
00:01:19.620not can i think of a better way no i can't so let's assume let's not assume let's just look
00:01:27.640at history let's acknowledge go down a path for a minute let us acknowledge the priority
00:01:36.720the sense of entitlement, the privilege that groups have had in the United States
00:01:44.920for generations upon generations upon generations in order to get into higher education facilities.
00:01:51.960And that privilege comes with a whole subset of things, being able to participate in sporting
00:01:59.680events, in clubs, and all of those kinds of things, being able to donate your time,
00:02:04.240being able to get tutors being able to get the highest marks because of said tutors being able
00:02:09.180to take college prep courses blah blah blah blah all of these different things right up to and
00:02:16.000including legacy admissions when we look at all of that and we as a society presume assume
00:02:28.200stipulate that getting into college has is anywhere an objective test and measure of a0.73
00:02:39.600student's intelligence capacity work ethic um potential all of those things is ridiculous
00:02:47.920absolutely ridiculous the supreme court presupposed in that acknowledgement in that
00:02:59.680decision that they just came down with they presupposed that without affirmative action
00:03:07.860policies that getting into places like Harvard, Yale, Princeton were objective tests of all of
00:03:20.400those factors I just mentioned. Therein lies the asinine part. And again, we can sit here and0.96
00:03:28.780debate, does affirmative action as it's applied in universities? And by the way, as it's applied
00:03:35.160in universities, and as it's applied in other places, varies, okay? There's lots of different
00:03:40.460ways to have affirmative action policies. For instance, affirmative action could look like this.
00:03:47.360It could look like, as it is for the Toronto Police Force, that they won't begin to sort or
00:03:55.020hire or pull people for interviews until the pool of applicants has a diverse sort of
00:04:04.560um component to it meaning they want to make sure that a certain number of women a certain number
00:04:10.320of visible minorities all a certain number of each group have actually applied to the police force
00:04:16.960before they sit down and decide who the best applicants are doesn't that make sense so what
00:04:24.080that says is it says that the police force is required and the way that they go out and try
00:04:30.800to get applicants they are required to diversify the body from which they are going to choose
00:04:37.440applicants so they have to go find these people they have to make it available they're not forcing
00:04:43.600people to apply but they make it available that seems reasonable to me that seems reasonable
00:04:49.440in other professions it might be the tipping point right it might be the tipping point
00:04:55.600if all things being relatively equal then race or history of oppression or history of uh you know
00:05:07.840persecution actually gives them let's say a leg up let's say if it's a tipping point all things
00:05:16.000being equal we're going to give the individual a chance who has been historically consistently
00:05:23.280excluded now let's change this to education for a minute and i can come back and i can talk about
00:05:28.800affirmative action as it applies to police as it applies to firefighting and i could talk all day
00:05:33.760long about how different policies have made those particular forces better and stronger and more
00:05:42.000holistic and well-rounded but let's just stick to education okay let's just stay there my first
00:05:50.000question. So they've taken away all these quotas. They've taken away all of the ways in which race
00:05:56.000might be the tipping point. Because that's what we're doing here, right? Everybody loves to talk0.81
00:06:01.200about affirmative action and goes, oh, well, that kid over there failed biology. But since he is
00:06:06.080a minority, all of a sudden he's going to Yale for chemistry. Stop it. It's never happening.1.00
00:06:11.700Let's embrace that first, please. Please. Let's embrace the fact first that we are not choosing from candidates who are completely ill-prepared and undereducated and ill-equipped to handle the rigors of Harvard or Yale or whatever.
00:06:32.600We are choosing from a body of people who have relatively similar educational and capacity background.
00:06:46.300And then we're taking that into account.
00:06:50.640And before we go through all of this and start talking about it to a bigger degree, let's talk about the idea that as far as education goes,
00:07:01.420i have been a teacher for 20 years if somebody could please show me an objective fair
00:07:12.460credible methodology to judging somebody's intelligence capacity and potential in education
00:07:22.860where is that please i would love to know where is that in high school let's go through all the ways
00:07:29.980in which it's a ridiculous expectation to assume there's sort of a level of equity anywhere across
00:07:38.780the board okay number one what school do you go to we know this i could hand the exact same paper
00:07:47.260the exact same macbeth paper in to 10 different high schools and get 10 different marks now what
00:07:54.780who's right who's better the school that's marking me harder by the way the school that has a higher
00:08:02.780academic rigor probably is going to give a lower grade does that mean i am not better for harvard
00:08:14.700than the kid that went to another school and got an easy grade does that mean that
00:08:19.380How in the hell can we standardize that?
00:08:24.220Number two, when we're taking economic background into account, for example, if I have a student who works and works, I mean works at a job 30 hours a week, 25 hours a week, and also goes to high school and also does extracurricular and they manage to pull off an 85.
00:08:48.700And I compare that individual to the person who has tutors, who has no job, no other responsibility, who can do everything in their world to just benefit them and their capacity and their ability in the classroom.
00:09:07.820and they get a 93, 85, 93. You would think objectively, Joanna, even if the schools were
00:09:20.040exactly the same with how they mark, which is absolutely not the case, objectively, the 93
00:09:24.640is better. Bull. I've been a teacher for 20 years. I'll take the 85 seven days a week and twice on
00:09:31.180Sundays. Why? Because that student has proven what they can do while also going to school and trying
00:09:38.860to learn physics. I am not saying the 93 is not a great student. I am saying, I am simply making
00:09:46.280the point, it is not an objective measure of intelligence and capacity. It is a measure of
00:09:54.160the school they go to, the help they get or do not get, and the way they balance everything in their
00:10:00.420lives and that's what places like harvard are trying to include so when they put race on the
00:10:06.660table by the way they also put economics on the table they also put how much money you have coming
00:10:12.660from on the table but when they put race on the table what they're saying is students from
00:10:20.100particular racial backgrounds who have faced historical levels of marginalization discrimination
00:10:27.140oppression have done all of that have faced all of that
00:10:32.420and got a 90 and joined that club and worked that job or and joined that team or whatever it was
00:10:43.120they did and volunteered for that hospital now you're asking me who is a better candidate for
00:10:50.740harvard and i'm telling you who the hell knows i'm saying our admissions policies are absolutely0.97
00:10:59.300asinine and when you throw the sats on there as you do in the united states there is the most0.97
00:11:09.140perfect illusion of objectivity and an illusion of potential judgment of academic judgment on
00:11:21.140intelligence both of which are utterly false and we know they are utterly false we know that
00:11:29.940because we see places dropping the lsats left right and center we see places dropping the
00:11:34.980SAT scores because they don't see them as having a direct correlation with what you need to do in
00:11:41.940school anymore. You look over the ages and you watch genius after genius after genius drop out
00:11:49.900of school. Why? If there's such a good marker of intelligence, of brilliance, of the next generation
00:11:58.240of thinkers, if that's who we want to bet on, right? Why are they dropping out? Why are they
00:12:04.260not staying in school where they're not staying in school because they will exactly say it is a
00:12:09.940cookie cutter mentality not built for original creative amazing forward-thinking thought what
00:12:18.900and instead of looking at the education system going damn you're right that we we don't have
00:12:26.420those things we sit them down we tell them to write a three-hour exam we tell them to write0.78
00:12:31.620this kind of essay, we tell them to do this and this and this. And when they can't formulate all
00:12:36.580of these coherent thoughts in the particular order we've asked them to do so, we call them
00:12:42.540unintelligent. We say you are not worthy. We say, please form a line to the left because everybody
00:12:47.700else is going to Harvard, but not you because you couldn't write a five paragraph essay in the right
00:12:52.320amount of time talking about the poetic symbolism of Macbeth's soliloquies. Go ahead, say that 10
00:12:59.740times fast we have created illusions every single place we've gone and coincidentally
00:13:08.060not at all coincidentally those symbolic pretentious
00:13:16.140ideals of objectivity have consistently and historically benefited
00:13:24.460those in the controlling elite majority class. Why is that? Well, I'll tell you why it is.
00:13:35.900And it's the same thing that everybody's trying to deny all over the United States and a lot of
00:13:39.960part of Canada, right as we speak. When you create a game, a country, a nation, when you create a
00:13:47.220legal system, when you create a way in which we interact with each other and what you need to get
00:13:52.580ahead and how that getting ahead serves you. The people that create it, created it to benefit
00:13:58.020themselves. I'm not even saying that maliciously. I'm saying right now, if I was to create a sport,
00:14:05.060guess what? Being really tall would be a freaking disadvantage. It just would be.0.91
00:14:10.580Because I want to support it. I want a sport I can kick butt on. And being 5'6", I'm not kicking butt0.98
00:14:15.300against the 6'2 players. So cool. My sport, being tall, disadvantage. And I don't even think we do
00:14:22.040that necessarily consciously. I think a lot of what we do is subconscious. And again, standardized
00:14:30.160tests have been proven time and time and time and time again to be racially, culturally,
00:14:37.220even gendered, biased on the information you draw, on the ways in which you think,
00:14:44.820and the methodology that you use in order to pass that test. And that's not even to mention
00:14:49.940The economic part that you throw in there, when I say that anybody with a significant sum of money get SAT prep courses and tutors and books and practice tests and groups that they study and tricks for the test.
00:15:12.860And anybody who is an adult and has passed their educational requirements would also know that the individual that gets the 99 doesn't necessarily make the best employee, the best worker, the best entrepreneur.
00:15:34.440they don't necessarily um change or or adapt to the environment in which they are put in because
00:15:44.140they are used to such particular structure and that's why i argue that affirmative action in
00:15:51.940its broadest sense should have been expanded we should stop calling it affirmative action
00:15:59.600to be perfectly honest and by the way this is what harvard's gonna do because they're smarter
00:16:06.620than this theocrat sitting on the supreme court harvard's gonna do and all of those schools are
00:16:12.020gonna do what they should have done long ago stop calling it affirmative action
00:16:15.040start calling it intelligent hiring intelligent recruiting start understanding that diversity
00:16:24.820and equity isn't trying to do them a favor. It's not trying to do the individual a favor.
00:16:32.200It is trying to make the institution stronger by having more creativity, more divergent sources
00:16:41.120of intelligence and capacity all come to the table at once. That's how progress happens.
00:16:48.140That's how change happens. If you want them to drone out the same boring crap about Shakespeare0.97
00:16:55.080they've been doing for the last 300 years, cool. You guys can go to that school, but guess what?0.89
00:17:00.840That school isn't doing anything interesting. That school's not changing the world. That school
00:17:05.440doesn't have geniuses being born and bred. Schools that understand that they need a whole bunch of
00:17:13.840different ways of getting at information that's genius stop calling it affirmative action
00:17:21.040because again you are not doing them a fit you're not evening playing fields
00:17:28.160we need to start recognizing that the kid that works 30 hours a week join the volleyball team
00:17:35.960God of 88 in chemistry, takes care of their family. That kid, that kid is a bit of a superstar.
00:17:46.900And that kid does better at juggling, at being able to do many different things at one particular
00:17:56.580time. That kid can handle stress and anxiety. That kid has had so many balls in the air that
00:18:03.460they've stopped juggling just with their hands. That kid is going to be able to take each issue,
00:18:12.200each wave of change, each transition of time period and exception, and they're going to be
00:18:21.160able to do more and more genius things. That kid is going to have more transferable skills.
00:18:27.640and in a Charles Darwin-esque kind of way,
00:18:32.780that kid is going to be able to adapt.
00:18:49.400It's the individual that can adapt to change.
00:18:54.080And the individual that can adapt to change has to have a holistic sense of education, has to understand that biology is just important as music, has to understand that there will be waves of change that will hit them at any given moment.
00:19:10.800And they are going to have to shoulder that, adjust, reposition themselves and make space for the future.
00:19:17.460And that, my friends, is what affirmative action was supposed to be getting at.0.98
00:19:23.300so go ahead supreme court ban affirmative action it was a stupid moniker anyway0.98
00:19:31.220because it sold a faulty lie it it gave the pretense oh we're just helping these poor0.98
00:19:39.620oppressed minorities when in actuality it is the people under the most pressure that will do
00:19:47.540great things and what we should be doing is changing admission structures in order to more
00:19:55.060clearly see what a student has gone through what they have shouldered and the potential
00:20:02.420that they will be able to unlock because of all of that past experience while still understanding
00:20:09.060trigonometry i mean i don't understand it but i'm sure somebody does do you understand me
00:20:15.220this idea needs to be turned on its head and that's how we will have real positive change
00:20:24.620in education and by the way in every other career that we're going to be talking about here
00:20:29.780stop calling it that and maybe the same mentality will start hiring which is hysterical start0.95
00:20:39.500hiring stay-at-home moms that have stayed at home and taken care of their four kids taken 10 years0.99
00:20:45.040or 15 years out of the industry, try to come back to the industry and nobody wants to hire1.00
00:20:49.060them? Are you dumb? Are you ridiculously short-sighted and brain damaged? Because an1.00
00:20:59.200individual or a stay-at-home dad, an individual that has gotten that education, that has gone
00:21:04.520into the workforce, that has chosen to stay home, take care of those kids, and then multitask their
00:21:10.280entire lives and then wants to come back to the industry, sign them up, give them a raise,
00:21:17.120give them the corner office. I don't care what you do. They are going to be fantastic.
00:21:20.920They are going to be able to multitask their way into the next generation.
00:21:26.220And what do we do? Well, we judge them for being out of the career for 10, 15 years.
00:21:31.820You think that's going to stop them? You don't think they can catch up with the latest version
00:21:38.060a microsoft word come on now let's not assume we have any objective measure of intelligence
00:21:50.140or aptitude period stop assuming that there is no way i sit down and i've interviewed teachers
00:21:59.020i sit down and interview teachers and i can look at their grades you think if they got an 88 in
00:22:03.740chemistry or a 92 do you think that matters yeah come on to be honest being perfectly honest
00:22:12.860sitting down with a teacher who said listen that 88 was because i took chemistry again
00:22:18.620a lot of people would be like oh my god you didn't get right the first time
00:22:22.460showing that you can struggle showing that you will struggle and you will force yourself to learn
00:22:29.100and you will keep at it until you get it? As a teacher, that's a skill set you can't teach.
00:22:38.140A teacher that gets things easily, just like an athlete that gets things easily,
00:22:42.160does not make the best coach because they've never had to struggle to get the skill.
00:22:47.940Where is that on a teaching application? You know what I mean? Oh, he got 88 in chemistry. Oh,
00:22:54.160wait, but this other guy got 75. They took it again and got 85. And he constantly takes courses
00:22:59.560in order to update themselves, to understand better teaching strategies in order to get it
00:23:03.760quickly. Hire that. That individual, that individual. If we are looking for the best
00:23:12.400and the brightest to go off to university, if we are looking to pave the way, if we truly want the
00:23:18.280Ivy League to be the Ivy League, not a place to put our kids because I used to go there and now
00:23:23.920I want my legacies to attend there as well. And I've donated a library in order to ensure that
00:23:29.700happens. If we don't want that, and we want actual progress and intelligence and brilliance
00:23:37.480in our educational halls, then we need to all admit right away, there's no such thing as
00:23:44.420objectivity, number one. Number two, we need to open the path and doorways and sections of many
00:23:52.720different ways to attempt, and I use that word attempt because it won't be perfect, to attempt
00:23:59.500to judge somebody's drive, determination, capacity, potential, and intelligence. All of those things
00:24:07.880formulated into one to take the best bet on the best student to do amazing things. And then education
00:24:15.780becomes what it's supposed to be. A place where people want to be challenged. They want to sit
00:24:22.780in rooms with brilliance. They want to argue and debate theory and idea. They don't just want to
00:24:29.300sit down and memorize so they can get into the next school, the next business school, the next
00:24:34.280law school, the next medical school in order to get their degree, in order to sign off and get
00:24:41.020in their career so they can make boatloads of money. We need a new system. So, good, Supreme
00:24:50.940Court. Ban it, because it was doing us a disservice anyways. Harvard will come out with an entirely0.95
00:25:01.680new way of judging, of garnering how a holistic student is going to, and I keep using Harvard,
00:25:12.220but the whole Ivy League is in play here, is going to pick and choose students for who's
00:25:18.120going to go to their school. Good. I'm glad. It's going to make way for what should have been
00:25:25.040happening years ago when we were fumbling around trying to figure out how to fix this nightmare of0.82
00:25:33.860a system that historically has only ever propagated the majority culture, the majority view, the
00:25:41.420majority ideas, making way, by the way, for a new emergent culture in which we say everything's on
00:25:49.720the table. Bring it all on the table. In order to do that, we need to let go of those old ideas.
00:25:56.560So let go of affirmative action. I think it's about time, just like everything the Supreme0.94
00:26:02.760Court has struck down recently in their very ridiculously right-wing, for the most part,
00:26:12.340theocratic ideology, let them do it this way. And let us understand that we are more intelligent,
00:26:24.400more capable, more genius than they will ever be. And let's start creating new institutions
00:26:32.780and new ways of doing things and challenge the Supreme Court in new and exciting ways
00:26:39.480So they can't use outdated logic and outdated ideals and outdated ways that we try to use when we are fumbling in the dark of the 90s to fix a broken system.
00:26:52.420We can be more articulate. We can be more powerful. We can understand the Constitution better. So let's start now.
00:27:00.620This is a new generation. And to every new generation, well, let's be honest, a slayer is born. But so are great academics.