Will Dove  00:00 Our educational system is broken. Leftist controlled school boards and teachers associations have infected our schools with woke ideology. SOGI, or Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, Critical Race Theory and DEI, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion are all part of a plan to rob our children of their ability to think, while robbing parents of the right to be informed and to make decisions for our children.   Will Dove  00:32 How did we get here? What is the long-term goal of these leftist ideologues and how do we push back against them?   Will Dove  00:41 John Hilton O’Brien is the founder of ParentChoice.ca, an organization established over a decade ago to equip parents, not our government or educational system, to be the decision makers for our children. John is also extremely well educated in history and politics and understands the steps and the strategies the leftists took to get to a point where in many provinces, parents don’t even have a right to be informed of their children’s decisions.   Will Dove  01:15 We are in a war. A war for the minds of our children. The enemy has been infiltrating our society for decades and are now firmly entrenched. But that does not mean they can’t be beaten. The key to defeating any enemy is to first understand their strategy and tactics. In this interview, John educates us all on how the leftists came to control our schools, what they want to achieve with that control, and the grim future for all of us if they succeed.   Will Dove  01:51 He also gives us the knowledge we need to take back our schools through one simple principle. Know thy enemy.   Will Dove  02:08 John, thank you so much for coming in today.   John O'Brien  02:10 Well, thank you, Will. It's a pleasure to be here.   Will Dove  02:14 I've been wanting to do this interview with you quite some time. And I must have to apologize, it has taken me so long, because we actually met at an event last summer, and I talked to you then about it. But you know, things just get so busy, and that got put off. So finally, you're here. Good. So, because there are so many parents right now in Canada, who are deeply concerned about their rights as parents, their right to be informed, their right to make choices for their children. And they're being attacked by the proponents of SOGI and the trans agenda. And it's being done largely through the teacher’s associations.   John O'Brien  02:45 It's kind of crazy, isn't it? So, a couple of years ago, there were some elections over in Ontario, and I was tracking some of them. And I found that there were 85 teachers, well, not teachers, but 85 candidates who were endorsed by the Ontario Secondary Schools Teachers Federation, the OSSTF. And out of those, they elected 58, which is an awfully good percentage for a political party.   Will Dove  03:16 And of course, they had money to throw behind these candidates.   John O'Brien  03:20 Oh yes, they'd spent, I think $650,000 as a third-party advertiser, the maximum the law would allow. In fact, they'd also spent $650,000 in the provincial elections that spring and they'd shoot the government to be allowed to spend more, and the government got out of it by invoking the notwithstanding clause.   John O'Brien  03:43 But anyhow, if a political party had gotten those numbers, we would have heard that the champagne corks popping in Vancouver. Because the most successful political party in Canada is the teacher's union. They now control billions upon billions of dollars of educational budgets, which don't necessarily have quite the same oversight as, say, the federal or provincial governments. And this gives them a lot of discretion.   John O'Brien  04:13 Now, I'd love to say that Alberta doesn't have the same problem because the Alberta Teachers Association is set up in law. And it really isn't allowed to endorse a political party or candidate says the theory. But with amounts to a two-party system, it can sure as heck oppose one.   Will Dove  04:37 Yes, if you live in Alberta, and you were here for the last election, you hear an awful lot of ads from the teacher’s association. They didn't name anyone in specific. Oh, but it was very clear what they were saying.   John O'Brien  04:49 I believe they did name the premier of the time quite frequently. Now ostensibly, those ads back in 2021 were ads about the curriculum, and they were there to tell us how bad it was. It, of course had nothing to do with the fact that the NDP government that had been in previously had promised the leadership of the ATA that they'd be allowed to develop the curriculum before us. And that this premier had canceled that saying it was a conflict of interest. No, nothing to do with that.   Will Dove  05:22 Of course not.   John O'Brien  05:23 But they spent over a million dollars, $1.1 million, as a third-party advertiser, as a provincial advertiser. So, nobody noticed that they were spending this money during the school board elections specifically. So, it was really quiet a tour de force. And they're poised to do it again. They've told us as much, right? Their magazine hosted an op-ed from an outfit called SOGI 1 2 3, a lot of British Columbia. An interesting outfit that we should probably talk about a little later.   Will Dove  06:05 Well, we will, yes, we will.   John O'Brien  06:07 And they announced that they're going to do what sounds like a very expensive ad campaign covering all the bases from online to giant billboards in cities, let alone radio and television advertising. It's even coming to a theater near you, it'll be in the movie ads, or the pre-movie ads. But that's not the most interesting part. The most interesting part is that they tell me, they're going to fund what they call community organizations. And the reason they're doing that is they want to go after Daniel Smith's parental rights and trans policies.   Will Dove  06:55 And we should, for the viewers who are not in Alberta, we should fill you in on what that is. We probably should start with Scott Moe in Saskatchewan, who passed a very similar law last year, that definitely protected parent's rights to be informed, to build on making decisions for their children, and even put restrictions on when kids can be put on hormone blockers and things like that. Daniel Smith has proposed doing the same thing in Alberta this year, this fall.   John O'Brien  07:18 She's being a little bit more comprehensive about it.   Will Dove  07:21 Yes.   John O'Brien  07:22 Now, I should mention, we're not sure what will actually come out of it, because she hasn't produced any legislation out of that. So, so far, it's really elected to promise. But in the meantime, the ATA has announced that part of their opposition is going to be funding community groups, which is of course, in not very good code as a code for activist organizations. So, I've seen them at work already. And it's been beautiful.   John O'Brien  07:54 You see, back on March 19, The United Conservative Party Constituency Association, that's Smith's party, a local organization, hosted what it called the "Let Kids Be Kids Town Hall". And I was one of the invited speakers, so I got to see it close-up. And they were hosting that a little movie theater in Calgary. It was really, formerly a fairly large theater that's now run independently. And they got something like 600 nasty calls and emails from little activist groups that nobody had ever heard of before. And they carried messages on Facebook and things say, this is how to call Eventbrite to cancel their ticketing. And here's how you contact the theater.   John O'Brien  08:51 So, the theater got 600 nasty calls and emails, by the weekend before the event. Interestingly, one of those calls was actually from the Alberta Teachers Association. And they called up to say, "We're canceling the event we have planned next month, because you're hosting a hate group." And there's a very confused cinema employee who said, "I'm sorry? Hate group? Wait, are you talking about the United Conservative Party?" "Yes, that hate group!" Okay.   John O'Brien  09:32 In the event, though, not a single protester showed up. There was this lonely looking Global TV crew out waiting for the protest to start. And there was this trans person who had been a speaker at the event, kind of chasing them down the block trying to get them to interview her so she could talk about it. But the reason there was no protesters, there wasn't any grassroots movement opposing it. This was pure astroturf paid for by the ATA.   Will Dove  10:06 Yes, John, we both made reference to SOGI, Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity. A lot of parents know that, some don't. But what most people don't know is where did that come from? What are they trying to do with it?   John O'Brien  10:19 Well, SOGI stands for Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity. Now, in Western Canada, this was largely brought in by a little astroturf organization called SOGI 1 2 3. SOGI 1 2 3 is a product of something called the ARC Foundation or ARC Foundation out of British Columbia. And SOGI 1 2 3 is their product. And they went through Alberta, in particular and through BC and they got things like memoranda of understanding what school boards or, in some cases claimed they had, they even if they didn't, that's just rumor, of course.   John O'Brien  11:06 And they got to the government and said, hey, we have all this public support, how about mandatory gay straight alliances in all your schools. That's just Alberta as an example, every province has a different set of things in Ontario. It's this fantastically elaborate set of little sub legal documents, fascinating policy documents about it. But when you follow the money back to ARC Foundation, ARC Foundation is a charity, and that means you can go look the map at revenue of Canada, they bring in a million dollars a year. Half of that is apparently from government grants. A quarter of that money comes from receipt of donations from Canadians, and the other quarter is from foreign entities and under revenue Canada's rules, they're not obliged to reveal where that money comes from. We don't know who's really funding that last quarter, which may well have been their seat money.   Will Dove  12:16 I think we're going to make a pretty good guess. The very same people who are members of the WEF.   Will Dove  12:25 Would be my guess.   John O'Brien  12:27 Maybe. Look, I'm going to go out on a limb here. And I'm going to add your stock of conspiracy theories, because I have a new one for you. All right. Have you ever heard of the Gerasimov?   Will Dove  12:46 I have not.   John O'Brien  12:47 Valery Gerasimov, the Chief of Staff for the Russian Armed Forces, wrote a paper a couple of years after the Arab Spring. And he asserted that what the Americans had done was stayed-formed NGOs and things, and started local political movements in all of these Arab countries. And they done it to create local resistance to the government to slow things down in their civil society, just create general problems in society.   John O'Brien  13:24 And then they could build on that by later inserting some teams to take a more active role, including armed force. And that is how they've done the Arab Spring. That was actually an act of intelligence intervention. And, of course, nobody was fooled by Gerasimov writing about this, because it was apparent to almost every observer, that what was happening was that Gerasimov was then promoted, was saying that this is how Russia should act. And now we have all of these websites and bot farms coming out of Russia intervening in North American and European politics.   John O'Brien  14:12 Well, more than one person can play that game. Anybody who gets ahead, by slowing Canada down, would be motivated to do something about it. Not just the WEF, their motives, at least appear to be sort of to help someone, not just entirely themselves. But there are lots of actors in the United States, for instance, who benefit from say Alberta not being able to get oil or natural gas to market. I wonder who's funding some of these environmental protests, right?   John O'Brien  14:54 Similarly, somebody who's trying to prevent Canada from taking more leading role on something would be motivated commence with education. And so, it doesn't just have to be the WEF. This opens a range of a huge number of potential acts.   Will Dove  15:12 Well, I use that term very broadly. Keeping in mind, well, what is the WEF? It was just a bunch of wealthy industrialists, who own just about everything, and have their own agenda. So, when I say the WEF, I am not saying it was directly the organization. Well probably, as I said, the same people who are probably members of that are likely behind this, because what do they want, they want control, they want power. They want everything for themselves and nothing for anybody else. And SOGI is yet another way of getting that.   John O'Brien  15:43 Absolutely. If we're talking about the WEF as a collection of industrial powers, that would mean that.   Will Dove  15:49 That was essentially what I meant in that context. Yes.   John O'Brien  15:53 So that's the sort of thing that we're looking at, but also don't discount possible actions from actual governments either.   Will Dove  16:01 Right. But then, of course, we have to take into account that many of those governments are controlled.   John O'Brien  16:06 Yes, that is true.   Will Dove  16:09 And it's all part of, yes, let's use your term, conspiracy to take the power away from the common people, and put it into the hands of the elites.   John O'Brien  16:23 And we don't really need to talk about some vast conspiracy or shadowy organization. This is a conspiracy that's really explained by ordinary human greed and ambition. And what particular wealthy individuals or corporations or governments are motivated to do whatever is in their best interests, but certainly not in ours.   John O'Brien  16:48 So now, John, I got to ask you, because it's not just Alberta, it's not just Ontario, its teachers associations, unions, across the country, that have been just taken over by this SOGI, trans, leftist ideology. And I come to the conclusion that it was done on purpose, as you just pointed out, with Ontario, where they funded all these people to run for. So, it's being done on purpose. Why? What are they after?   John O'Brien  17:17 Well, look Will, we have sent too many people to university, there is a lot of competition for a lead to jobs, because everybody who's been to university believes in their own great dignity and worth and wants a job that's commensurate with what they see as their real value. But there are just aren't enough jobs to go around. And so, people compete hard for it. And what you're seeing is mostly just elite competition. So why would somebody twist, say, critical race theory around, right?   John O'Brien  17:56 Critical race theory works like this, I've got power in a relationship, and I'm not going to exercise it in a way that duplicate some structure of oppression that my client has experienced, fine. What I'm not going to do is turn to my client and say, you must check your privilege and give up your power to me, who's the person who has all the power in the relationship. Right? That's twisted.   John O'Brien  18:25 That's what's going on in our classrooms. That's what's going on in our school boards, right? We've seen that with tragic effect in Ontario, right? Where we had a popular school principal, who was literally bullied to death by a DEI department. That's what it's about. That DEI department - sorry, it was really an external organization that collects millions of dollars in government grants, and then gets a contract from the school board to offer DEI training.   John O'Brien  19:06 These are people with enormous amounts of power, and Bilkszto, coming into that as a participant under the interest of the school board, he works for the school board, these people have the right to talk to him. And they're sucking power away from their participants, when what they're supposed to be doing is giving power to their participants. This is the opposite of any ideals that they may think that they hold.   Will Dove  19:37 So, if I'm understanding correctly, and I think what you're saying makes a great deal of sense. Through my own kids, I have met and known some of these leftists woke kids. And they all want to insist that they're sick, that they're victims that they've got, you know, post-traumatic stress disorder, whatever. And I look at them and I think, you're not sick, you're weak. And you've been made weak. And I think that's exactly what you're saying is that they're doing this, DEI, the SOGI, all of this, it's intentional, to make them into permanent victims, people who are weak, so they can't compete in the real world. So, it will be useless.   John O'Brien  20:16 Well, it's more like a sort of corporate Munchausen by Proxy, the sort of thing where the parents make the child sick, so that they get sympathy from other people. And so, they have more power in the relationship. It's the same sort of dynamic.   Will Dove  20:34 So, maybe one of my advice, maybe I was misunderstanding a little bit, because of what you just said. So, what they're doing is they've created this culture of these people who as you've said they have all the power in the relationship, but they're completely useless. And they're driving off the people who could actually do the job.   John O'Brien  20:47 That's right, because they're competing for power. So, when the woke teacher stands up in front of the classroom, and says to her students, you must check your privilege. She's taking power away from them. And more importantly, she's taking power away from the parents. One of the ways this comes out is in the argument that people sometimes make, but children have a right to privacy. And you get this from human rights advocates. You get this from old child welfare advocates and so on.   John O'Brien  21:23 But let's just dissect that argument. What's really being said, is that the child has a right to privacy, well, who exercises that right? The child's a minor. The person making the argument that the child has a right to privacy is someone who works for the state who embodies the power of the state, the terrible coercive power of the state. And they're saying that, I, acting for the state should be able to exercise the rights of children against the parents. That's not how human rights works.   Will Dove  22:04 No. And it's completely illogical too. And I pointed this out that they make this argument, then we had an NDP MP, Randall Garrison, just a couple of months ago, stood up in the House of Commons and said, children don't have rights, or children have rights, parents don't have rights. And this argument makes no sense whatsoever, because what they're saying is, okay, so this minor child has a right to make their own decisions, except they're not making their own decisions. The school board and the teachers and the government are making their decisions.   John O'Brien  22:37 That's right. That's exactly what they're saying. Let me give you an example of a real human right. You know, you go to our UN treaties, and somewhere sit there and the Universal Declaration, you'll find this line that says, the parents have the right to decide the form of education given to their children. But it doesn't stop there. The UN also came up with something called the - that was a document on discrimination in education. And what they said is that parents have the right to have schools, which are not run by the public authority, and religious minorities, like Catholic, for instance, do have a right to run their own schools, and you can't deny funding to them.   John O'Brien  23:31 And a big part of the history of this country has been an attempt to do just that, to deny religious minorities like Catholics in English Canada, Protestants in French Canada, the right to their own schools. And we've seen that played out even in living memory, even in our lifetimes. And a big part of it is also an attempt to eliminate the right to have different sorts of non-public education, defund them at the least, take them over if you can.   Will Dove  24:07 And I think that's exactly what they're doing. I was telling you before the interview, I've been married to a Catholic school teacher for 28 years. And you'd like to think that the Catholic system was better than the public system in terms of teaching kids the right lessons, moral lessons. No, they're not. They're no better at all. And I've seen this firsthand, and it's been going on for years. So sure, they tried to defund it. They couldn't do that. So now they're going to attack it from within.   John O'Brien  24:31 Well, this isn't new. Frederick Haultain, the premier for the Northwest Territories going into making the western provinces. He refused to let Catholics start their own normal school, which is how you did teacher education back in the day, and he boasted that he had administered the separate out of the separate school boards. He was deliberately trying to take them over and was largely successful.   John O'Brien  24:58 When it comes to Catholic education, teaching authority in the Catholic Church flows through the bishops. But when you look at a place like Alberta, teaching authority actually comes from the public authorities, which dictate curriculum and elect the school boards under their auspices, and funded completely separately, the bishops have nothing to do with it. So, it's really hard for those schools to be Catholic in those cases. So, that's simply the result of the system we've got. And that's part of the long-standing tradition of Canada.   Will Dove  25:38 Now, I don't think we can talk about all of this without at least touching on what's happening on most of our universities right now, with all of these Pro-Palestinian demonstrations, it was all part of the DEI mentality. What's your take on that, John?   John O'Brien  25:51 Well, you're absolutely right to connect that to the whole DEI thing. What we've got is this weird version of critical theory that's been dumbed down, so you can put it into an education faculty. I'm sorry, teachers everywhere. But teachers don't generally get taught the whole version of any fancy philosophical idea. So, this CRT we're seeing is dead simple. There's oppressors and victims. And they're always going to be separate. And you have to go with the victims. And all you have to do to be allowed to oppress someone is to portray yourself as a victim.   Will Dove  26:39 That's a very, very good summation of the twist of logic at all.   John O'Brien  26:44 But it isn't the end. Remember, we're in a place where there's lots of elites competing for very few jobs. And so, we're playing the game, and the universities have more progressive than thou. So, everybody is trying to compete to be more Pro-Palestinian. That's how you get ahead in academic settings. And then we wonder why we've got universities allowing Palestinian camps and allowing literal discrimination, and even violence against Jewish people on university campuses, and even in our K to 12 schools.   John O'Brien  27:22 If you were to go onto the Parents for Choice in Education website, you'd find an article we published last week, that involved a case of a Jewish student being pretty seriously bullied in a public school.   Will Dove  27:35 I read that. Very sad.   John O'Brien  27:39 So, that's what this leads to. And we don't even need to turn to some sinister outside organization necessarily. This is the ordinary, everyday corruption that comes from people who are trying to compete for elite positions. And if they've got a fool themselves to do that, so be it.   Will Dove  28:02 Now, I tend to be a bit more upbeat in my projections, I think that the globalist and all their plans are not going to win. They're going to do a lot of damage in the meantime. But I think that ultimately, they're going to lose. But just to play devil's advocate for a minute. Now, with all the stuff we've discussed, this is the attack upon our kids, in our schools, in universities, and to produce these, yes, these powerful victims, in order to, as far as I guess it, just destabilize the entire system.   Will Dove  28:29 And we're already seeing the effects of this in the schools and universities and the fact that these kids can't think straight, they're completely brainwashed. What happens when these people form a substantial portion of the working class? They're out there in these jobs, these elite jobs that are totally unqualified, they can't do the job. What happens to our society, then?   John O'Brien  28:48 Well, what's the saying, "Those who cannot do, teach; those who cannot, teach either", is that DEI departments? Well, what's going to happen is, we're going to run out of other people's money, and we're going to stop paying for things that are important. And if we don't get back to doing things like manufacturing, you can't run an entire economy on a fancy service in industry, especially one that's overpaid as much of our university.   John O'Brien  29:26 Education in universities is largely overdone. We've told many, many people, that they'll get a better job if they go to university. And we've said that because the average income for people who went to university is higher. But that includes people who were very rich to start with. That includes a lot of inherited money. You don't get rich by going to university, you get into debt. And it's of course, the debt that really drives a lot of the competition, you have to compete, you've got a debt. And that's part of the reason, it's so cutthroat. When people start going to trade schools and picking up a trade, because they've realized they're not going to get anywhere except into the poor house, by going to university, things will start to fix themselves.   Will Dove  30:21 I'm glad to hear you say that, my own daughter is about to graduate from state.   John O'Brien  30:27 I spent a lot of time as a vocational counselor, as the sort of person that say, workmen's compensation would send you too if you needed a new line of work. And the trades really are the bomb.   Will Dove  30:45 96 percentage job placement rates in her chosen career.   John O'Brien  30:50 We've never gotten enough trades.   Will Dove  30:52 No, we don't. So now, we have to talk about how do we fix this, and you've actually got a page on your website about running for a board and how to do this. Obviously, we have to replace these broken people who are making the decisions with people who will make better decisions. How do we go about doing that?   John O'Brien  31:07 Well, in 2021, there was a school board election in Alberta. So, I went out and ran a few training courses. You see, I have won and lost quite a few elections as a campaign manager. I was one of the people who started Alberta's Wildrose party back in 2007, there were 50 of us. I wound up on the original board, we discovered, none of us actually knew how to run a competitive election. So, I went out and studied and ran everyone I could.   John O'Brien  31:39 So, I had some knowledge. And I didn't start until too late. I started running courses when I started in my current position in April of that year, and the election was in October. But still out of the people I trained, 12 of them ran for office, 4 won their seats, which is pretty good for a first out of the gate for a bunch of political types. If it was a political party, we call it an unqualified success. I'm trying to train a whole lot more.   John O'Brien  32:12 So, just in Alberta, and Saskatchewan, a little part of Saskatchewan. So far, I've trained 178 people. The aim, though, isn't to produce political candidates. It's to produce people who know how to campaign, know how to run a campaign, because to most people in Canada, that is an arcane art, that's limited to the smoky back rooms of political conventions that aren't allowed to smoke anymore, either. So, nobody really knows where they're happening. So, the more people I can train, the better. So, right now it's just Alberta, I would have gone to Saskatchewan if I could, but I couldn't really find any hosts. We even produced a textbook for it to reduce the amount of what...   Will Dove  33:03 I'm hoping I can get, that can give us some hope on that because something my freedom organization Strong and Free Canada has been working on it's going to be launched within the next couple of weeks. There's a new site called freedomcoms. And what we're doing with freedomcoms is we're building in person freedom communities across the country, in such a way that people's identity is protected when they join. And once we got enough of these people, the first thought that I had was, let's get people running for the school boards.   Will Dove  33:28 So, now I know who to contact once we've got those people, I'll stick you on them. And we'll organize these people to take - we have to take back our school boards, because the globalist knew this, go after the kids. And of course, this is what tyrants have done throughout history. Go after the youth. We'll take back our youths.   John O'Brien  33:48 I love the idea. Now, there's something else that's kind of funny that I do that I don't advertise much. You see, I'm actually a social worker by trade. And I was trained in community organizing by one of Saul Alinsky disciples. If anybody happens to know who that.   Will Dove  34:07 I'm afraid I even I don't. So, maybe you should explain that.   John O'Brien  34:09 Saul Alinsky was 60s organizer that all the leftist looks up to, he's their patron saint. They don't realize that he actually despised them quite cordiale. In fact, he'd worked as a union buster for part of his career. But he wrote the book on organizing methods, all the sneaky backdoor stuff that the leftists do. I'm fairly well-versed. So, one of the things I do when I get a group that is interested in trying to run a slate for a school board or something, and they're trying to figure out how to organize. I'll come in and I'll help them figure out what they're doing. I'll do a workshop or something or a brainstorming session and help them get where they need to go. It's not something that we do a huge amount, but it's something that's available.   Will Dove  35:05 Hopefully once this freedomcoms is grown enough, maybe we can even do a video series.   John O'Brien  35:10 Yeah, that's not something that you may want that you necessarily want to call public consumption, of course.   Will Dove  35:16 No, but there's ways of making it available on the torn members.   John O'Brien  35:19 Precisely.   Will Dove  35:21 Alright, so we've covered I think, all of that ground. But certainly, there's other things on education that we should be talking about. And as a father myself, having raised two kids, watching them go through the educational system, listening to my wife come home and talk about the things she's had to teach. One of the things that concerns me is the horrible curriculum, it is almost useless. The crap that we're teaching them, and not teaching them things they need to know, how do we change that?   John O'Brien  35:47 It's been like that for years. And in a lot of places, you're going to have 12 years in social studies of - can we talk about residential schools, again? We're going to get deeper into it. Look, if you want to talk about residential schools by say, great sex, you'd better understand the mileage, from which they wrote, right, which is early Canadian policy to do with First Nations? Well, you can't talk about Canada in that context without talking about the British Empire and colonialism in general.   John O'Brien  36:28 And then you're going to ask yourself, why on earth would Britain think an empire is okay, so you'd better talk about empires. Usually, we skipped from the ancient Romans to World War I. Right? Which doesn't really help but it kind of helps if you talk about, say, Charlemagne, father of modern Europe, created an empire that staved off the Muslims. He's the reason we are speaking Arabic today. Yeah, first Holy Roman Emperor back in the days when it was Holy Roman an empire. Now, Kenny put that in his curriculum, it was in Grade Two. And the complaints I heard about it from the ATA were funny. The first one was, why the children can't spell Charlemagne? It's just a fancy word for Charles the great.   Will Dove  37:22 And isn't the purpose of education to teach them how to do things like that?   John O'Brien  37:26 And then it's developmentally inappropriate. Charlemagne is King Arthur and his knights, except they really existed. And there's a ton of things that mentioned them without even saying who they are, like just, Lord of the Rings, Boromir blowing his horn is a call out to a Charlemagne story.   Will Dove  37:49 I didn't know that.   John O'Brien  37:51 Not many people do. Because we haven't taught about any of this stuff. The root waters of our civilization for decades in education. I'm not worried about developmental inappropriateness. I'm worried about the fact that that's knights and shining armor. And I'm going to have kids smacking each other with sticks in the playground for the rest of the year after I teach about it.   Will Dove  38:17 So? We did it when I was a kid. We're all fine. You got a bruise here and there.   John O'Brien  38:24 It's a little distracting if they do it in class though.   Will Dove  38:26 Well, yes, of course. But I don't know. It's to myself, my own personal reaction is refusing to teach children something because they might go and get hurt. I'm sorry. That's the purpose of being a child. For example, let's talk about this for just a second. Okay, it might cause a playground fight. But there's a reason why we get especially young boys to work out their aggressions when they're young. As somebody who studied martial arts, I can tell you, that a seven-year-old does not have the capacity to do serious damage to someone else. They're simply not big enough, not strong enough. So that's the time to let them do that.   John O'Brien  39:05 There's a formidable amount of literature about Charlemagne and his 12 knights that we call the paladins. Hey, there's a Dungeons and Dragons reference for you right there.   Will Dove  39:16 I should probably not reveal my geek, that my family and I played D&D regularly.   John O'Brien  39:20 My wife and I actually run a game store in Strathmore. We have a Wednesday night drop in D&D. Alright, it gets a lot of people.   Will Dove  39:31 We're fellow D&D geeks then.   John O'Brien  39:32 Yes. But that's where the term paladin comes from. Charlemagne's 12 peers. Anyhow, getting past that. One of the things about teaching Charlemagne is you can also cover him in literature, because the stories they spawned are tremendous. And you know what all those stories are really about? They're really about how to be a man. How to handle conflict, how bad it is when you don't deal with it appropriately, how to be loyal, how to be tidy, especially to people that you've been at odds with that's the whole point to chivalry, taking that whole Christian ideal of love your enemy, and applying it in real life so that you don't hold grudges even after a war.   Will Dove  40:26 That's the popularity of Jordan Peterson, because young men today, especially young men, but young women, to what extent as well, and desperate to be told, how do I be a functional adult. And the system we have right now, as we've already discussed, are completely robbing of that. So, we have somebody like Peterson come along, or Charlemagne and teach them those lessons. And they go, “Oh, that's how I do it.” And as you said, do it without being weak.   Will Dove  40:52 So, one of the things that I wish I could get across to people in this country is there's a difference between being nice and being good. Stop being nice and be good. Because sometimes being good means being a bit of a dick.   John O'Brien  41:06 Sometimes.   Will Dove  41:06 Sometimes, usually not. Usually can do it or being polite. But sometimes, you got to push things a little bit. You got to say to somebody, you're wrong, and here's why you're wrong.   John O'Brien  41:20 So, one of the things I worry about with faculties of education, is that they're a little tied into their own little ecosystem, right? If you think about it, you've got your teachers union, got your Faculty of Education, you've got usually two levels of bureaucracy, and then you've got a fifth arm, which is the activist groups, they only talk to each other, because they're the experts. Why would they talk to parents?   Will Dove  41:55 Most especially when they're trying to take the parents power away.   John O'Brien  41:59 That's why we have an echo chamber. And some of the weird things we see are explainable about this. So, I'm going to tell you something terribly complicated. I don't know if it's going to be suitable for a podcast or not. But here it goes. There are two kinds of curriculum out there. Now, the first comes from a fellow called John Dewey. And anybody who went to elementary school in Canada, got taught the Dewey Decimal System. But they probably didn't get told that John Dewey did almost all of his work in the 1890s. And his idea is the foundation of modern educational theory.   John O'Brien  42:45 And what happened was, he misread, an ancient philosopher called Plato. There's this dialogue in which Socrates, who's a character in a play basically, written by Plato, is talking to somebody and he gets a slave boy who was clearly uneducated to learn some rudimentary geometry. And the conclusion that the pair take out of that is, well, the boy must have already known geometry. And we were just reminding him of somehow.   John O'Brien  43:23 So, Dewey tells us that children already know everything. All that's needed, is for us to help the child explore her environment. And so, we'll draw this knowledge out of her. And that's why you start locally and try to get out more globally as you go along. You have to be a guide on the side rather than a sage on the stage. And that's what's resulted in curriculum that is absolutely boring. Because it has no content. It's there just to facilitate this exploration and bringing out what educational theory assumes, is they're natural genius.   John O'Brien  44:11 So, we can contrast this to another form of curriculum. And that curriculum is mostly shown up by a fellow called E.D. Hirsch. He wrote a book that's quite accessible and available right now called “How to Educate a Citizen”. Hirsch is the sort of educator who when he wants to know what's working, will wire your brain so that he can get readouts and see what's happening. And one of the things that he looked at was, you know, our scores on these standardized exams, going down and down and down, and I think it's probably curriculum or something. But what could it be, really? And then he noticed that rich kids, their scores weren't declining as fast.   John O'Brien  45:07 So, he came up to a hypothesis, the rich kids are getting the content anyhow. They're just getting it at the dinner table because they have better conversations, their parents know more. Well, I can test that. So, he said, I'm going to make a series of schools with a content rich curriculum, a completely different approach, we're going to make one idea build on the other from grade to grade. And we are going to pack this thing in. And lo and behold, the poor kids did as well as the rich kids used to and the rich kids did still better.   John O'Brien  45:48 And the conclusion is that if you want your cat to sharpen its claws, get it a scratching post. If you want kids to learn how to learn, get them some content. And there is no question about the efficacy of this versus the efficacy of the social studies that's going to - curriculum that's going to come out in Alberta now, for instance. Hands down, the content rich curriculum gets results in a big way. And the kids coming out of it are happier and more well-adjusted than the usual nonsense.   John O'Brien  46:33 So, that is the curriculum that Mr. Kenney tried to bring in. So, why did the educational establishment in Alberta hate it so much? Well, remember our conversation about this being about elites competing? If content were king, well, then the Faculty of Arts would be important. The Department of English, Department of History, Department of Mathematics, those would be key, you'd get a degree in those and then you'd get what amounts to a tradesman is training in how to teach, carefully mentored lots of practical experience. But then we wouldn't have a Faculty of Education. And a Faculty of Education gets to have a dean, it gets to have its own department chairs, it gets to have its own DEI department, bureaucratic jobs, prestige, money, public regard, flow from Dewey's mistake.   Will Dove  47:47 Yet more unnecessary administration and a broken system.   John O'Brien  47:51 Precisely. And again, those who can't do, teach; and those who can't teach, run DEI departments.   Will Dove  47:58 So, the answer to my question of how do we fix the curriculum is the same as the answer to what do we do about the SOGI and the trans agenda? We have to replace the decision makers?   John O'Brien  48:08 Exactly. So you need to go at this on a fairly broad spectrum. More provinces than more premiers need to do what Kenny was trying to do. Now, it's possible that Kenny's choice to pursue a content rich curriculum wasn't executed terribly well. But he had the right idea. Absolutely. And we need to go and take back our school boards.   Will Dove  48:35 Yes, we do.   John O'Brien  48:36 And there's something else that goes back goes into this training of people to run of school board races, when they've gotten some experience running school board races, they can go run other races and get more experience. And that will develop an entire ecosystem of people who really understand democracy, and are willing to take part in it. And that's something that's sorely lacking in Canada today.   Will Dove  49:05 Indeed, it is. So, John, I think that brings us to funding. And this is a bit of a loaded question, I suppose, in a way because I've already read your blog post on it. And you're saying exactly what I've been thinking for a long time. You've proposed two different alternative funding methods for education, one of which is one that I've been advocating for some time, and that is - stop funding the system and start funding the student which will give parents choice. Your ideas on that?   John O'Brien  49:40 Well, one of the mistakes we make is that we assume that private schools are private. They aren't. Even here in Alberta, which is you know, the mecca of educational choice, we found that the government can reach into a private school and say, this is the curriculum you're going to teach. It can also reach into private schools quite hilariously and say, well, you have to have gay straight alliances or whatever other popular idea of the day.   John O'Brien  50:15 These are not private schools, they're only private on name. These are independent schools, they're independently administered. They're not being run by a public-school board, but don't get to thinking they're private in any sense. And rich people in Alberta don't send their kids to Alberta's private schools for the most part, 85% of our schools are working class with their average income, the low, the mean for Alberta. Okay, that's important to note, I don't have those figures for Ontario or other provinces, I'm afraid I've only done the deep dive on that in Alberta, but there's no reason to think it's significantly different anywhere else.   John O'Brien  51:04 So, start funding them properly, have that money, just follow the child, maybe even have a separate department in the education ministry that assigns funding by the child. The child has a disability, then there's this pool of funding they can draw from automatically if that child is going to a school, and the school is doing that program, then they can draw on the funding. Of course, this isn't the most radical possible way of doing it. Did you find out what?   Will Dove  51:39 I did, but I want you to talk about it.   John O'Brien  51:41 The most radical way of doing this is to notice that our teachers all have at least a four year degree at the base. And usually, it's four year degree plus a two year after degree, and often a master's degree on top of that. That's kind of like doctors and lawyers, and maybe we should treat them with the same respect we do with doctors and lawyers. Wouldn't that be crazy?   John O'Brien  52:14 And just like a doctor or a lawyer can hang their shingle out, maybe we should allow a teacher or a group of teachers to hang their shingle out? And if parents will bring their children to their schools? Why don't do well? And the reason that I'm moved to suggest this as a possibility, although I know very well how radical it is, is that when I look at an education budget, I see a disconnect.   John O'Brien  52:47 In Alberta, where we spend amongst the lowest and certainly the most efficient education program in Canada, we're better at getting money to the frontline than anybody. But we're spending $12,500 per student. Okay, even allowing for the fact that one student is in home education, private schools or charters. Fine. That's $12,500 per student, because we've got a $10 million education budget and 800,000 students. Fine.   John O'Brien  53:28 Well, our average classroom size is 27 or so. Something like $350,000 we're spending per classroom. The average teacher in Alberta is paid $84,000. I think it's $104,000 in Ontario, but they're spending far more per classroom. If that was a profit-making corporation with shares sold on the open market, you and I would be leaving here right now driving down and say, please take our money, because no private business puts that little money into frontline services. This is mad. We would get such good education if we let teachers have the same rights as doctors and the lawyers.   Will Dove  54:22 And actually, let them teach what they know. My wife, of course she has her Bachelor's in Education, but she also has a Bachelor's in British Legal History. And she taught social studies for a long time. And watching her stand in front of a junior high classroom, and they start asking questions, and she can go for hours off the top of her head, engage with the kids and the kids get excited about it. Now some of the teacher there who understands the subject, not just what happened. But what happened as a result of what happened.   Will Dove  54:52 We were at a little event not long ago where there was this leftist woman talking about once again slamming colonialism and after listening to this group in an hour, my wife got up and said, well, I'm sorry, but you've missed some points, and proceeded to completely destroy her argument. So, I love what you're saying, because yes, we do. We have highly trained teachers with education coming out of their ears. But the curriculum doesn't let them use it.   John O'Brien  55:16 And part of the reason is that the educational establishment doesn't want to help them.   Will Dove  55:24 They don't want the kids educated, as we've already discussed. They want them programmed, but not educated.   John O'Brien  55:31 No, that's not true, Will, they want them babysat. There's a difference. It's not that they deliberately don't want them educated. It's just that they want to collect money, and the most efficient way possible, which involves doing as little as possible, and making sure that the maximum amount of money makes it to administration where they are. Because they're in the position of the stakeholders of a private corporation, and they're getting the money.   Will Dove  56:00 There's the president of the ATA here in Alberta recently got replaced. So, I'm not going to say the man's name who was there before him. And I don't know the name of the one right now. But my understanding is that the annual salary is around about $400,000 a year.   John O'Brien  56:15 Well, just looking at Alberta Teacher Association, they have taken a powerful game about inclusion. But when you go down the list and look at the pictures, they are pretty white. Very well fed white, I might add. So, I wouldn't trust anything they had to say about diversity, their idea of diversity is the longer you work here, diverse it gets.   Will Dove  56:48 Yes.   John O'Brien  56:52 But underlying it, this is all about elite competition, we've trained too many people in university for too few jobs. But if we let teachers put up their own shingle, which mean advancing in that profession a little better. When you're designing a system, you have to think about it in the same way the designer of a board game does. And you have to ask, “How are they going to bend and mutilate the rules for their own advantage?” Because that's what people do when they play board games, they read the rules and go, "How can I get an advantage?"   John O'Brien  57:30 And you have to make human greed and ambition work for you rather than against you. It's just part of human nature. So, you need to make a system where instead of human greed taking away from education, from efficiency, in make it works for you. If you make it easy for teachers to start their own little schools, and to pioneer advanced methods, you're going to get a better education system because you're taking that ambition and greed and putting it to use for everyone. And that's why I proposed the radical version of school reform.   Will Dove  58:15 So, John, as a final question, we've discussed an awful lot of what's wrong with the system, how it's broken, and ultimately how it needs to be fixed. And of course, that's not going to happen overnight. I do believe in time; we are going to fix it. I think there's going to be a lash back from what's been happening that we're going to return to some common sense. But in the meantime, we have an awful lot of parents out there very concerned about what their kids are being exposed to, about their kids not getting a proper education, what is your advice to them?   John O'Brien  58:43 Well, first, you need to start doing it at home. Up until 10th grade, I never learned anything at school that I did not first cover at home, from Shakespeare all the way up. The first thing I learned in school that I hadn't learned at home was the periodic table. And that's because I've been too lazy to learn it when my older brothers did. So, you can do an awful lot at home.   John O'Brien  59:14 Another thing you need to do is have a closer look at your school board. Often your public-school board will have 30 or 40 unique programs, right? From Special Education things all the way up to say elite programs like the International Baccalaureate program. And so, if you look at those and go, "How can I get my child in there so she'll succeed?" And the way that's interesting, you can probably find a program that's huge. But the final thing that you need to do is you need to learn how to advocate effectively.   John O'Brien  59:55 And when I say advocate effectively, Will, I mean there's a proccess to it. It starts with building a relationship with the teacher of that school and the principal of that school. If the first time you show up, it's there to complain, and you're going -- that's not going anywhere. First, find a reason to like that person, however wonky they may seem to you at first and very different from you often, that's fine, find a reason to like them. Because you can't counterfeit that sort of unconditional positive regard.   John O'Brien  1:00:35 Then see if you can be helpful in some way. See if you can reinforce what they're trying to get across at home. Let them know what your priorities are and keep them reasonable. So, they're not going to be surprised by you. And finally, when it does come time to say, I need you to do something differently. You can come and say, "I need you to do something differently and here's what I want you to do." And that way, yes, you're in a position where they're not going to do what you want. You say, "Look, if you can't do that, for me, I'm going to have to take it to the next level." So, you escalate. There's always a pattern to this. And you need to learn how to follow that pattern. But it starts with respect and a positive relationship.   Will Dove  1:01:28 And I also want to add to that, because I think that's excellent advice, John, listen to just talking specifically about the provinces where there are rules in place that say you cannot inform the parents, if your child has decided they want to be going by a different pronoun or a different name. People will break rules for their friends. So, if you go and you make friends with the administration, with the teacher, don't be surprised if your child, your son, decides now he wants to be a she/her, you get a phone call from your friend, a very quiet one, probably made from home, not from the school, saying, "Hey, you probably want to know about this."   John O'Brien  1:02:02 Doubly so in small towns, of course. Now, the final thing, of course, is get involved in politics. I don't mean go out to vote. You're not participating in the political system if you vote once every four years, I mean, go and find the candidates and talk to them. When you find a good candidate or recruit a good candidate, go door-knocking with them, donate a little money.   John O'Brien  1:02:33 School board elections in particular are run on a very low budget. And if you give them 50 bucks, they will remember you forever. They will really remember you if they go door knocking with you. And a person who door knocks with a candidate has a kind of implied right to talk to them about policy. And I assure you, if you have not taken part, by going door knocking with a candidate, they will never listen to you on policy, because everybody wants to mouth off about policy without actually doing the work. You know, everybody wants to change the world. Nobody wants to change the toilet paper. And so, people in politics learn to simply discount folks who haven't done the work.   Will Dove  1:03:22 And once again, I'm going to take what you've just said a step further. For those who are truly ambitious, start an organization. It doesn't even have to be very big. But if you can sit down with a politician and say, well, I represent X organization, and X number of people, now you have their attention.   John O'Brien  1:03:39 It is no accident that Smith's proposed policies on transgenderism and parental rights bear a striking resemblance to things that I've written over the last couple of years.   Will Dove  1:03:53 At parentchoice.ca. Yes, absolutely. John, thank you so much for your time. And for your very clear thinking, I really think that you have given people a great deal to think about, and I'm hoping a lot of people are going to take action on it. Because that's really what we have to do. It's not going to change sitting around listening to an interview, as you say, voting every four years, that's not going to change anything.   Will Dove  1:04:13 People have to get into their chairs, and they have to go get involved. And we have to take back our school boards. And as you say, from there, now you've got the education on how to run a campaign, how to win. We just keep moving up the ladder and eventually we take back our country.   John O'Brien  1:04:27 Absolutely. I think that's a good note to end on.