(0:00 - 2:44) Jim McMurtry was dismissed from his position as a high school teacher in British Columbia in 2001 for telling his students the truth about the residential mass graves narrative. Jim and I met recently in Kamloops, where we were joined by BC MLA Dallas Brody who was similarly kicked out of John Rustad's Conservative Party, also for questioning the narrative, and where all three of us were working with Professor Frances Widdowson, who was dismissed from Calgary's Mount Royal University, also for insisting upon truth. Professor Widdowson was in Kamloops, along with her very talented producer Simon Hergott working on their second documentary, exposing the false claims of murdered children at her residential schools. Earlier this year Jim published the excellent book, The Scarlet Lesson, where he details his own case of persecution by a school system that no longer has any interest in teaching truth, and will go to extreme measures to silence any teacher who dares to insist upon facts. What Jim also reveals in his book is that his dismissal over questioning mass graves was not the first instance where he was persecuted by a school system that no longer provides education to our children, but rather indoctrination. In the course of the book, Jim paints a disturbingly clear picture of everything that has gone wrong with our schools. Jim, welcome to the show. It's wonderful to see you again, Will. And we had the pleasure of working with each other for a couple of days recently in Kamloops, where you and I along with Dallas Brody were involved in Frances Widdowson's latest documentary exposing the hoax of the residential mass graves. And in the course of our discussion we agreed on a number of things about our educational system, how it's falling apart. Now you, of course, have written this excellent book, The Scarlet Lesson, where you detail everything that's happened to you as a result of questioning that mass grave narrative. But you've been an educated educator for decades, Jim. And you've observed our educational system gradually falling apart. And in this book, you've made a number of very perceptive comments. And I think that's really what I'd like to focus on today. Folks, if you want to know the details, if you're not familiar with details of Jim's case, I strongly recommend the book. It doesn't take very long to read, and it's very, very revealing about what's going on in our country. So what I'd like to do, Jim, is, as I said, you've got these very perceptive comments, and there's cases here where I would just like to read, quote, what you've written, and invite your comment on it. (2:45 - 4:50) There's a major one towards the front, but we're going to get back to that one, because it is the most concise summary I have ever read of everything that is wrong with our system. But we'll come to that one later. We're going to save that one. So we want to move on. And these aren't necessarily in any particular order. But I thought this was very revealing. We talked about this, where you had made a joke about UNBC, the University of Northern British Columbia, and calling it the university of no better choice, which of course was just a tongue-in-cheek joke. And I personally, if I'd been your student, I would have thought it was very funny. But a complaint was levelled against you by a parent because her sister was a graduate. I'm not sure where to start with that, Jim. To you and I, we're both about the same age. We went through a school system at the same time. It seems to us unimaginable that any administration would give any credence to that complaint whatsoever. It was a completely innocuous, harmless joke, and they treat it like it's some sort of major offence. What do you think is going on there? That this sort of very minor thing gets blown way to proportion. That joke was the beginning of the end for me. I didn't give a child the right mark. I only gave her a 29 out of 30, and her friend Julie had a mark of 30 out of 30. So the mother came screaming into the school. She was so out of control that the administration asked her to return the next day. And the next day she was highly accused of pointing her finger, and that was one of the things. She didn't like my puns. The students didn't complain about them, but I guess she drilled her daughters to what I said wrong. My book is called The Scarlet Lesson because there was a scarlet letter that an adulterous woman back in times when adultery was greatly punished, she had to wear an A forever. And I'm saying because of one lesson, which we'll get to at one point, or people already know, that I'm wearing this forever. For me, saying a simple pun. My son went to UNBC and had a nice time. (4:51 - 7:05) And I'm carrying it with me forever because I can't teach again. So thank you so much for talking about something that nobody else has talked to me about. But that's just so important. They're after humour. They're after any story, any history that is some way going to get kids to think outside the one lens they've been provided. They can only look at history negatively. They can only look at and there's nothing about the fact that I made a joke that might have a connotation that is saying something bad about university or saying something violent or saying something that might have a sexual innuendo in it. It's to think that all that's okay if it's part of the woke programme. You can talk about any point being strangled to death. You can talk about the holocaust. You can talk about a police officer shooting Michael Brown, this poor black criminal. You can talk about anything. You can talk about sex if it involves the infidelities of Donald Trump. There's nothing you can't talk about as long as it impugns Western Christian capitalist white European British society. Very well said, Jim, and you were talking about that student and the mother who came in complaining because she got 29 out of 30 and her friend got 30 out of 30. And that's just another, and by the way for the viewers, a lot of viewers know this, you know this, my wife's been a teacher for 30 years so she's been watching all the same stuff that you have. And we reached a point where it was no longer acceptable to fail a student. It doesn't matter if they didn't do anything. You can't give them an F. It's not allowed. And so we've reached this point where marks are completely disconnected from performance. And so I really am curious from your perspective what was going through this mother's head when she came in screaming about a 29 out of 30 as though that were somehow a horrible thing because it clearly had nothing to do with performance. (7:08 - 8:00) Well, you know, excellent question. I think parents realise that they can manipulate the system. I think, you know, if someone going to a restaurant and not being happy with the service or not even, maybe perhaps not even liking the waiter waitress and going, I want to speak to the manager. So this is the system now. The parents realise that the only people that principals are accountable to are them. So the principals will have to completely abandon students. Abandon, unless it's a student who's going to go right to mom or dad. Abandon teachers and caretakers, secretaries, anybody in the system. Complete abandonment. So marks are really, what marks were meant to be is to reflect student performance and to communicate to parents. But now marks are something else. Marks are a way of managing to stay in the profession. (8:00 - 11:48) So many of my colleagues give all their students A's. Many of my colleagues don't give any essays. They don't give any tests. There's exams. Provincial exams went a long way. There's two still there, but they're a joke. I mean, anybody, they can do in the grade 10, 11, or 12. There's no challenge to them. So marks are no longer disassociated with job survival. Marks now are something that you can really get in big trouble for. So at my school in Abbotsford, the principal would take teachers aside whose marks were too low, class averages too low, and particularly if marks were being given to minority kids that weren't good enough. And then, of course, the whole school system in B.C., they started saying, we don't want any more Indigenous kids doing communications 11 or 12, which was sort of an easier watered down English class, because we don't want them not to do as well. So we're going to put them all into English, where it was an academic class where there was challenge. And then eventually throw everybody in to get rid of communication altogether and have everybody doing high level English. And of course, everybody gets A's because, and so there's just no challenge anymore. And now they're moving away from English in class, because who needs English when you can offer instead Indigenous class courses, where you can talk about how to make a fishhook out of bones. Some things that are really going to be helpful to students into the future. So what to me is it's a disgusting dereliction of duty, and that you're not doing what you're supposed to do. Education itself is a word that comes from the Greek educare and educare. And it means to lead out and develop, to prepare people for the future. And they're not doing that right now. The focus is more on again, two things at play. One, indoctrinating into woke ideology and the other is get ahead. The school system is about how people at the top can get ever more money and ever more influence. I mean, it's not about kids. It really isn't about kids. You don't ever sit down and go, well, what would be a better way of teaching this? Or what would be a better way of handling children who are homeless and living on the street? What would do? We have a problem with kids dying from fentanyl. We don't talk about those things in staff meetings. We talk about things like, well, how bad were residential schools 100 years ago? Because the more we talk about how bad residential schools are, if we do land acknowledgements, sometimes several times a day, it's supposed to be once a day, but there's assembly or there's something else or a basketball game after school, you can have three land acknowledgements in one day. So we do things that are of no value to any kid or teacher in the school. But you do them because what the principle is showing to the whole world is, I'm woke. I believe in this ideology which puts down every single person who looks like you and me, including kids, and boosts up these small groups of students in the school system when it's not Punjabi kids or kids from India generally. It's not kids from Korea or Japan or China. It's not the kids that do well. We're just focussing on the kids who work less hard. But we need to have them because we want to prove the thesis that we live in a racist society. And the more kids that we can get that say yes, Canada is racist, the more kids we can get are trans, the more kids that we can get who consider a gay lifestyle, the more kids we can get who think that their whole lives are going to be determined by their skin colour. That's what it's all about. Two things again. I'm going to repeat them if I may. And that is, it's about making the school system work for the people who get the most money. Some superintendents make up to half a million a year. (11:48 - 11:59) And they do very little work. And we're starting teachers who are 50,000, 60,000 tops. And that's hard in this day and age, particularly in cities and housing costs and so forth. (12:00 - 12:39) And the second thing it's doing is academic time is no longer for academic time. Even my three-year-old grandson at daycare is being told about residential schools and worried that his hair is going to be cut off and he's going to be taken away from his family. So what I'm seeing, Jim, from what you're telling me, from my own observations of watching my wife over the years and what's been happening in the educational system here, is we have this cascade of issues. The first being starting, I believe, with the parents. And I'm going to make my own sort of personal comment on this. I've been kind of looking at scans for years at the parents who give their kids these weird names. (12:40 - 13:00) I'm not going to list any, but you know what I mean. And I've said to my wife a number of times, these parents don't really want a child. They want an accessory. And they must show their accessory off to their friends. And their accessory must be getting straight A's. So anytime their child does not get a straight A, they go to the school and they complain. (13:00 - 13:49) And as you say, we've got principals in our educational system in Canada who are absolute dictators in their own little fiefdoms. And my wife has certainly experienced that a number of times. Who, all they care about is, will the board, the higher up administration, look at their school and say, oh well their marks are at least average, or possibly above average. So they have to answer to those people, and those people in turn have to answer to other people. And all anybody cares about is what is seen on paper. And so what's being done here is instead of demanding more of the children, demanding that they actually work and to learn something, we just keep lowering the education standards. Until we reach a point where quite literally, and I don't even mean this as a joke, a monkey could graduate from high school with straight A's.