This is Busted Pencils, fully-ledded education talk.
Here are your hosts, Dr. Tim Slecker and Dr. Johnny Lupinacci,
educated educators talking education.
Yeah, that's what we love to do here.
It's Busted Pencils fully-ledded education talk,
educated educators talking education,
one full hour Busted Pencils across all civic media,
everybody out there you're listening.
We appreciate you, Dr. Johnny Lupinacci,
producer Jess, my two friends, Johnny, how you doing?
We had doing great, you know,
it's break from teaching over these holidays.
And so, hey, listeners, teachers out there,
hope you're getting lots of rest and reset in
because, you know, pretty soon we're coming up on that,
that get back to the classroom vibe.
So, you know, I'm soaking up all that rest in
lots of ideas spinning around in my head
for teaching next semester.
So, you know, it's always exciting to be here
with the listeners on Saturday and Tim,
our guest today, we've been reading, you know,
we've been reading and this is right up both of our alleys.
Tim, he'll introduce our guests in a minute,
but he sent me a book a couple of weeks ago.
He said, Johnny, you've got to read this.
This is the stuff we're always teaching and talking about.
And Tim, you couldn't be more right.
So I'm excited for our conversation today.
Yeah, absolutely.
And Jess, what about you?
What's going on in your world?
Well, you know, we're in that sort of weird period
where it's the last week of the year.
There's a lot of reflection going on,
a lot of looking back at this year of 2024
and going, man, some things went really, really well.
And some things slow, you know,
maybe in the next year we can do things
a little bit differently.
So I've been stewing in this reflective period
and something that I know that has been
just absolute top marks is busting pencils
with you two fine doctors.
Wow.
My goodness.
Thank you, Jess.
That felt so good to hear that.
Yeah, I, Johnny, though, talking about our guests.
I came across, you know, Jess and Johnny know
and the listeners know Tim stocks social media for guests.
And when I find them,
then I hound them until they either block me
or I eventually get them to agree to come on this show.
And I just saw our guest out there
posting some interesting replies to some people
and then got him on LinkedIn and then solve the book.
And then, man, we have this conversation.
Let's get him in here, though.
He is an educational provocateur
learning environment specialist
and advocate for equity and progressive education.
He's a non his non linear journey spans
from struggling as a dyslexic student
to becoming a studio art major NYPD
to NYPD detective and eventually an expert
in K 12 education transformation.
He is the author of the new book designed to fail
welcome to busted pencils.
Ira David Sokol.
Hi, Ira, how you doing?
I'm good, Tim.
And Johnny, thank you for having me.
It I know that my personal journey is interesting.
But I think that puts gives me a lot of commonality
with a whole lot of the students who are on the schools today.
Whether their lives have been really interesting
up to this point or will be in the future.
Well, I think about that, you know, one of the things
Johnny and I always try to bring to the show
is this idea of connection to the students.
You know, we we refer to ourselves
as the blue collar scholars.
Johnny growing up in Detroit, me growing up in Pittsburgh,
you know, doing that, that kind of, you know,
really recognizing that they're, guess what?
There's a whole lot of kids out there
that typically sometimes might find school challenging
and there's a whole lot of reasons why.
And in fact, though, Ira, this is what we're going
to be digging deep into your new book,
Design to Fail, a history of education in the United States.
But you know, you said, yeah, you have an interesting pathway
to this position.
And, you know, we talked before to get ready for the show.
And I was wondering though, if you can talk a little bit
about your experience as a learner
and that kind of moment when we were, you know,
reflect, or you were talking about this,
that it was when, and I'll let you tell the story,
when something happened and you ended up
in a different educational environment
where things started to click.
If you can kind of just walk us through your experiences
of learner.
Well, I think, I think I'm a, I'm a good learner
and I think I'm really bad
in traditional formal education.
You know, I think I learn things pretty quickly.
I think I have a really strong memory.
I think I have really good visual skills.
What I can't do is sit still in a room
and listen to somebody drone on.
And the other thing I can't do is turn my interests
on and off based on a bell schedule.
But, but, you know, I, I began school
with two basic things that just aren't acceptable
in schools, the inability to read to decode
alphabetical text and, and a real inability
to sort of sit still and, you know, be completely compliant.
It's just not in me.
And, and that creates an amazing challenge
to, to any sort of traditional teacher
and any traditional school.
And because of my age, I was also growing up in a time
when people had very few strategies for kids
with dyslexia, the term ADHD didn't even exist yet.
It's actually referred to as minimal brain damage.
And, you know, I did have and I tried to express
this to people, there were educators who tried to do things.
But there was nothing that was going to smooth out
the system that just didn't work for me.
And, when things weren't really bad in, in middle school
and they went really, really bad.
And, I, I was told that I was going
to an alternative high school, which, you know,
usually carries a certain connotation.
But I, I have this lucky, this moment of luck in my life,
which didn't always, hadn't always happened up to that point.
The alternative high school that just been taken over
by a couple of teachers who, working with Neil Postman
had redesigned a lockdown school
into a school without walls, which is remarkable transformation.
And, what, what that school did was it shifted
all the responsibility for learning onto us as students.
To quote one of the teachers, it was to eliminate
all the excuses we had.
You hate this teacher.
You, you think it's the wrong time of day.
You don't want to sit in this classroom.
Whatever it is that's blocking you, you, you figure it out.
We're just telling you, you have to get these New York's
Day credits and to graduate and you tell us how to do it.
And, if something doesn't work, stop doing it
and do something else.
And so, what that enabled me to do was actually find a path
to, to do things.
And it's not like I ever read a book in high school.
I didn't, I, I couldn't have if I wanted to,
but it was the kind of place where you could be around people
who were there for all sorts of different reasons.
But some of them were great readers.
And I listened to people talk about books
and I listened to people talk about music
and talk about math and things.
And in the way that humans learn, I started to figure things out
because, you know, that I learned a, I learned a term
from Irish educators, you know, about aspirational peers.
We learned best from other kids.
And, and that's what worked for me in a big way.
And that, although I had never really considered the idea
of going to college before, it's what allowed me to think
about that and do that, get out of my hometown and, and move
forward.
Well, you think about, so that the description there too
is is without this alternative high school, as you said,
I were to, and anybody listening busted pencils too,
they, they, they know what we're talking about, you know,
in fact, if you want to let us know, it's 608-557-8577,
and that's the busted pencils mail bag.
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The number you can text us anything, all those questions.
And we want to hear from you, we appreciate it.
We have our guest, the author of Design to Fail,
Iro so-called kind of remnant, well,
remembering what it was in that experience as a learner
and schools, and finally getting into an alternative high
school and the reality, you know, school without walls,
putting the responsibility of saying, you know, here's
what it takes to get out of here.
You figure out how to do it.
Iroh, think about that though, how many students,
though, in a way, right?
You were being shipped off because, quote,
there was no other place for you in these pathways.
How many students does this happen to?
Yeah, Johnny pushed out, right?
You know, I'm just, I hear this school.
It just, it isn't set up and I, you know,
I see, man, we were going along on our first segment.
So before I put out a, you know, kind of a twisted
question that leaves so many out there to go,
it just reminds me, though, too.
And I remember when I was the dean of the School of
Education at Edgewood College,
there in Madison, Wisconsin,
one of my most powerful moments was when the Madison
Metropolitan School District principal,
for, quote, the alternative high school invited me
to bring future student teachers for the possibility
that they might do their student teaching in that school.
And it was, again, that experience.
It was that alternative.
You had students there, their role,
their responsibilities were to hear the credits,
hear the requirements and the teachers in the principal,
they're just really allowed that type of freedom
that those students thrived in.
And I remember having those conversations,
particularly with the students and then my future teachers
who absolutely decided that why doesn't school look
like this all the time.
I think that's the issue that we're going to be talking
about the book is designed to fail.
The question though, Ira,
where schools really designed to fail?
Really?
It's the history of American education.
Spusted pencils fully let it.
We'll be right back.
So, since the sea is through,
our days are precious and so few.
We know, we probably are the two.
But until this sky, no longer blue,
we bring the dawn on our own,
until we drown,
and we drown,
and we drown,
but how do we know?
Hey, y'all, come back.
Spusted pencils fully let it at the age of clock.
Dr. Donnie Lupinati here,
Dr. Tim Slecker, producer, chairman of the boards,
Jess, on the boards holding it down to night.
And our guest, Ira Sokol,
here talking about,
man, his book,
which provides, I'll jump right into it,
a really good discussion,
a thorough critique.
But when I say critique,
he's not just poke and holes.
It's kind of answering questions and posing questions about,
if we, if we know things aren't going that well in schools,
why do we keep doing them?
Right?
And so there's a long history of this
in American schooling.
And so getting into it,
we started to jump into it last section,
but I wanted to come back around to it
and ask you, Ira,
to kind of,
he could just,
just break it down.
This,
this, you set up such a wonderful critique
of what you were sharing,
calling,
you called traditional education.
You know,
and I'm the show I'll often talk about schooling versus education
and that we know schooling.
And for most kids,
right,
you have to really kind of adhere to a system of compliance.
And all the things you write about in your book,
get the fallen line
or it doesn't work for you.
You're pushed out and you shared one of those stories for you.
You were pushed out to a place where some educators
were working really radically different than schooling.
And they found ways to engage you
and to have you,
you know, formally in a setting,
although it was called alternative,
be a learner and a partake in education.
So I just wonder if we get into that a little bit
for our listener we're talking about, you know,
the history of American schooling so dominantly,
what Ira shared is traditional education.
But can you give the listener a little bit about like
just the nuts and bolts?
What do we mean by this?
Doing things the way we've always done it?
Well, Johnny,
I think the first thing that, you know,
we've always done is that school has always been built
primarily around compliance.
And that's very, very intentional
because public schooling in this country began when,
you know, this country faced its first flood
of immigrants who were different,
who didn't speak English,
who were not Protestant,
who didn't have that work ethic
that people, you know,
that has been part of our myths for a very long time.
And the purpose then was to sort of integrate them
into a society.
It even goes back way before we really had public schools
and the revolution had people talking about,
you know, developing citizens who were part of a machine.
You know, it's it.
So it's always been a compliance driven thing.
It's never been about learning
and it has always flown in the face
of the way children actually learn.
You know, children learn by imitating.
They learn by their own curiosity.
They learn on their own timetables
and they learn with the way their individual brains work.
And that's never been a priority.
So schools are based on an economic,
an economic and political agenda,
which says that we need compliant citizens
and we need people who will be okay working for low pay
doing meaningless jobs.
And if you think about what kids actually learn
in a traditional classroom, that is what they learn.
I say a lot that kids really don't pay any attention
to anything we say as adults.
What they pay attention to is what we do
and how we behave.
And so what we teach kids is that it's perfectly okay
for us to interrupt them anytime we feel like,
whether it's by changing subject areas
or making announcements over a PA system,
they tell us that totally boring work
is somehow preparation for life.
We should, you know, do 50 of these same math problems.
We, you know, we tell them that their curiosity
doesn't matter because we're going to ignore them
because that curiosity interrupts our lesson plans.
And what that leaves us with is kids who either get trained
out of, trained out of their own interests
or who sort of get kicked out of the education system.
You know, that's your, that's your choice.
And the fact that that continued pretty solidly
since the 1840s, despite all sorts of people attempting
to change it speaks, you know, volumes.
And I think most closely expressed by,
you know, I have a quote in the book
from a Texas school superintendent
who's most famous for suspending a kid
for having black hair who said, you know,
to be an American is, you have to be compliant.
I mean, that's the belief system that drives it all.
Boy, with that, though, too, I mean, the indictment there,
too, is really powerful because when we start to then say,
like, why are things the way they are
and why do we keep repeating things
that, quote, don't, don't work?
I wonder, though, too, you know, what we do here
on busted pencils when we're talking about
fully-led education talk and we have great guests
like Ira Sokol and talking about his book, Design to Fail,
that we know it doesn't work, but we Ira,
they don't care about me, you, Johnny, Jess, we,
we aren't part of the system.
And in fact, as you said, all the attempts,
you know, whether it's Dewey or anybody
who's tried to change the system,
we're not part of the we.
And the system is designing is working just fine.
It's working just perfectly.
And any attempt to take down that system gets met
with an incredible, powerful status quo resistance
that absolutely has time and time and time again
said, no, schooling is about making you compliant
and go in and take your part in this economic system
that is driven to actually your job is to go out
and, you know, get a job, but to keep wealth and power
in place as it is.
Well, and just, you know, very quickly,
if you go to schools for rich kids, say,
St. Anne's in Brooklyn or think places like that,
you will see a completely different education system.
The people being educated to be the leaders
are getting a completely different kind of education.
They are getting that freedom to think and freedom to move
because the people with power and wealth know
that's what works.
And that's what they want for their kids.
They want something different for the rest of us.
It's busted pencils.
It's fully let it education talk.
Our guest, Irosoko, his book, new book brand new,
get it out there, you know, or order it designed to fail
a history of education in the United States.
We're talking about this.
In fact, I want to put this question
before we go to the break.
We want to get into this, this history
because I have to admit, you made me acquainted
with a new character.
Elwood Patterson, coverly as somebody that if we're studying
the, you know, the history of American education
and why it is the way it is, boy, what, what a person this,
this person is more when we get back, busted pencils,
fully let it.
I'm falling down with the earth.
Welcome back, busted pencils.
Only let it education talk.
Educated educators talking education.
Tim always asked you how that's Tim McEarth rise against.
We love that.
Just always bring us the best.
All the time you address Tim McEarth.
I, I have a moment where I'm like, Tim is talking in the
third person again.
He is giving himself a little pep talk.
That's great.
But let's do it all fair.
And no, no, no, no, Tim, the lead singer of rise against.
We love that.
Hey, it, in fact, if you love that music and want to tell us
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We're just thinking our guests.
I was so cold.
We're talking about his brand new book, just released, designed to
fail a history of education in the United States.
I wrote, I left you though with, and we're not going to spend a
lot of time, but this person that you introduced me to L.
Wood, Patterson, coverly, just a little bit on his impact on
designing the system that, in one way, we still have.
Well, coverly's most important role is sort of it is creating
the myth that was inevitable system and the natural way that,
that we would work.
He and what drove his power was the length of time.
He was the dean of education at Stanford for decades.
And he wrote pretty much all the textbooks that teachers
were trained with from 1920 to almost 1960.
He wrote every textbook that every teacher had when they went
through the education system.
The problem for all of us is that he was an incredible racist.
He was a eugenicist.
You know, he believed in natural superiority of certain people
and natural inferiority of everybody else.
He when we got board World War II, we turned out to be quite
the fascist on top of it.
He was a very big Mussolini fan.
So you have somebody doing this and what he did was he sort
of rewrote the history so that he eliminated all the people
who were challenging these ideas.
So you never hear about people like William Alcott who in
the 1830s and 1840s was really pushing for child centered
education and people like Ella flag young who, you know,
sort of ran the school that John Dewey studied and ended up
being the first female superintendent of the schools in Chicago
and all the other people who tried to do very different things.
He wiped them out of history.
So there was only one narrative going and one of the things
that's happened in the years since then is though in the 50s,
there was a rising tide of criticism against him.
Except for John Taylor, God, oh, everybody else riding the history
of education has forgotten him completely left him out.
And when you leave somebody like that out, you leave out the cause
of what we're doing.
And, you know, I, I pick on all the professors from Stanford
because they're in a building that coverly paid for.
When they go downstairs to have lunch, they eat in the coverly
cafe, you know, he was this dominant guy, but they never
write about him.
They never talk about him.
And it's that myth that this is the norm.
That's so dangerous because Americans, as they do in most
other things, don't compare themselves to other countries.
They don't look at what other people are doing in different
ways.
I, I always lay off when people say, well, kids can't learn to read
by sight word recognition.
And I say, gee, I wonder how everybody in China figures it out.
You know, but, you know, we don't think about any of those
things.
So we don't look at any alternative ideas because we believe
this is the natural logical evolution that's brought us here.
And that's clamped down on the other narratives that talk
about how we build a different kind of citizenry and a
different kind of economy by developing different kind of
learners who can trust their own abilities and curiosities.
Well, you talk about that though too in the book.
I mean, there are, you kind of hinted, but there has been a
push against, you say, you know, if a counter to this very
sterile kind of compliant, staying your place, type of
education, how is we're looking here now thinking about that?
I mean, is, are we do for another one?
And, and when and because, well, I know Johnny and Tim and Jess,
we, we're ready for another one.
In fact, we're trying to get it going, Johnny, right?
I mean, busted pencils, you know, let's, let's get this
pushing.
John, I could see you're like, dude, what are you talking about?
Yeah, man, I'm getting lost in the sauce, man, because I'm
vibing with this.
I love this when we're looking at why we do things the way
we do, right?
And one of the important roles that history plays and and and
I was sharing with us here, you know, that why it's important
to have the histories, have the diverse, you know, stories
that are about what happened also to have historians, right?
It's not just like, hey, I heard this happened or there's this
perspective, it's actually, you know, like a discipline,
like a craft.
There are people who are historians that provide us with this
understanding of those patterns so that we can hopefully,
I think looks where I was going to this is interrupt those
dominant patterns and say, Hey, just because right now,
the best reason we have other than the goals of keeping
people sorted and maintaining social class and power, like
you've talked about, Tim has sort of primary purpose of
schooling, you know, the only other goal here that comes up is
why we do things the way we do, but because that's how we've
always done them, right?
And so when we say, well, let's do them differently, how do we
not reproduce the patterns of the past, right?
And this is the important thing of like Iris book and having
historians and having diverse perspectives on what's worked
and what hasn't worked so that we don't so we truly interrupt
and that task is much harder to do in the talk about to
interrupt the patterns of the past is actually a lot harder.
So I really like this conversation because it's like, it's
a rich, you know, clear history of how we keep doing some
really, I'll just say him some really bad ways of having us,
our young people learn to be democratic citizens, right?
Yeah, no, very, I would jump in there.
Well, I think what's critical is that things can change.
Somebody developed a system we had and they started in the
1840s and they finished 80 years later, but they were reacting
to their times and their specific things.
I mean, if you think about the 1840s, you have all of this
technology, technological change, this communication capability
change, the world is radically different in 1850 than it was
in 1840 and you have the second industrial revolution
starting and they may, you know, even if you say these things
worked at the time, well, you know, okay, I mean, there's the
famous Woodrow Wilson quote that I use, you know, that we do
this because we want to fail 80% of kids, we want to get them
out of school before high school because we need a lot
more minors than we need clerks and but the world isn't doesn't
work that way anymore.
And so since World War II, we've had this idea that we want
to educate everybody, but we're still operating a system
designed not to do that.
And when, you know, before the pandemic, Pam ran and I and I
worked for Pam, she was a superintendent of school system
that I worked in for a decade and now she's sort of a business
partner in a, you know, educational advising firm, it, we started
asking about 2019, why would kids come to your school if they
didn't have to.
Now, education is at this existential threat moment.
Kids are saying, we're not coming.
I mean, not just in the US, in the UK and parents are saying,
you don't have to go because they don't, you know, what the,
what the pandemic showed by bringing instruction into the
home, suddenly parents will be coming aware of how worthless
this all was, you know, it was going on and and how much of it
was a waste of time and how disinterested their kids were.
So, you know, we've, we've talked to people where schools
have 30%, you know, chronic truancy rates.
Well, that's not sustainable as, as things go.
So kids are voting with their feet and even the head of the
Carnegie Foundation has said that kids are voting with their
feet, that they don't want to do this anymore.
But when you go back, you know, all the way back to William
Alcott who said, classroom should be filled with distractions
that would get kids interested that the garden outside was
more important than the classroom, that nobody should really
be asked to stay in their seat for more than five minutes
straight. There's a woman named Louisa Parsons Hopkins, who
in the 1870s and Boston is trying to do a whole sort of
maker education thing. Like I said, Ella Flag Young, who,
who said the division of subjects was like the stupidest
thing she'd ever heard of. Why would you do this?
People thought wildly against educators, teachers,
superintendents, principals fought against the whole idea
that you divide kids up by, by age. You know, there were all
these things that were being presented, but we stuck with
something because if people don't have real educational
opportunities, then the people who have the money keep having
the money. And so there are so many ways we could step in
and break that. And some of the things that the system that
Pam and I worked with me had 26 schools and about 14,000
students and every conceivable socio-economic group and
urban, suburban, rural, all sorts of things. We tried to
eliminate grades in elementary school. So you had K five
classrooms with multiple teachers and lots of kids. We tried
to eliminate bell schedules in secondary schools and let
things go. We tried to really change discipline rules. So
kids were not getting in trouble all the time. You know, and
we tried to change the technology. So kids were learning
the things they need to learn, use in their life. And it's
doable. It worked. We ended up with a 97% on time graduation
rate and ranked third in Virginia, even though we were nowhere
near the top of funding. So it's doable if we have this sort
of guts to challenge the system, take things on and take the
risk to try to give kids what they really need. Man, so much
there, so much going on. I was so called the book designed
to fail having a great conversation, giving us hope there
though too, I wrote because we can design something different.
Ira, if I want to get the book or I want to find some more
connections, you're talking about your firm with the Soquel
Moran or Moran Soquel, let us know where do we go?
So the book is available Amazon and soon it will be available
for any bookstore to order. And it's and as soon as I get around
to listening to it all and approve it, we'll have a lot of
audio book out. Soquel Moran dot com will bring you to our
website. We were excited to work with anybody who's excited to
do things differently.
Oh, thank you so much for busting pencils, Ira.
Thank you for having me. It was wonderful. Johnny Tim,
breaking it down when we get back.
Yeah.
I was really glad it education taught educated educators
talking education. What a great interview, I recycle what a
great book designed to fail. Johnny, I mean, I know what
Ira was talking about, I had to just resonate with you.
Well, absolutely, like I was saying before, I mean, it's so
important to understand the history, right, and to understand
why things are the way they are. And I really appreciate Iris
0.2, it's so important. And it's why texts like the book keys
written in a sharing and these conversations are so helpful
in this moment is because you get stuck and you say, why do we
keep doing things the way we do them? We know they don't work.
Well, here's the thing that's really important about what
Ira is sharing and like these, these stories that he's telling
in there as a historian is people have known better and done
better before we don't need to for for a lack of better words.
We don't need to invent anything. There's no new tech.
There's no new like novel idea or discovery. You know, we're
at a moment where we know so much about what good learning
looks like and can be that we need to do it. Well, that's the
really difficult difficult part is that we're talking about
how set in particular ways schools are, right? And you know,
Ira talks about them being very factory oriented and very
sorting, right, in terms of being shaped around compliance.
I mean, I'll level up that a little bit and say that they're
carceral, right? In this particular moment, they are so
much about compliance that they are carceral. They are
mimetic of our prison system, which is also a huge problem
in this country. Our response to what I'll call cultural
resistance or like like Ira talked about getting kicked out
of a school. I'll talk about it being pushed out, but a response
to the kinds of behaviors that say we know better and we know
we should be getting a better education, right? So the
resistance is a different kind of behavior. It's bad behavior
and you get kicked out. It plays into this system of, you know,
a carcerality. You have to ramp up security. You have to
ramp up compliance. In fact, when we talk policy all the time
here on bus, right? Well, you remember all the zero tolerance
laws, yeah, game both both in both Democrat and replying
administrations, right? The response to young people saying
this isn't working for us and their behavior. All behavior
is a form of communication. We can talk to teacher Halli and
teacher Joanna. Just thinking that. But all that cultural
resistance, AKA also known in traditional schools is a bad
behavior. All that cultural resistance, right? Is a is a loud
cry saying enough is enough. We need to do things differently.
And I love when we can talk to folks who say, and guess what
we don't need to invent it. He inspired in rhyme with, right?
Isn't it Mark Twain who said history doesn't repeat itself, but
it rhymes? So rhyme with some of these examples of people who
didn't do school the same way. In other words, they emancipated
learning from schooling. That's education, right? The emancipation
of learning from schooling from those factory and carceral models
of schools. So I love Irish work. I love that we're going to
keep having conversations with them. I love that we get to do
some busted pencils because, hey, interrupting the status quo,
Tim, that's our jam, huh? Jam, I mean, you know, you think about
that the interrupting part and you made this very clear and
we'll reinforce it. Why do we have this compliant based system
that, you know, isn't working for most kids and the kids that it
does work for, it kind of browbeats the curiosity out of them,
the engagement out of them, you know, we have statistics that for
every year you spend in school, you get less and less engaged so
that by the time you're graduating, your engagement level is is
gone. You say, well, how is this happening? And guess what,
this is because you have the powerful, not the Democrats, not
the Republicans, the powerful across both of those parties that
benefit from that system and do everything they can to keep that
system in place to the point that it starts to feel like we
don't know anything else. We don't know and it feels like I
think sometimes Johnny, we think we have to invent because we
don't know the stories of the past and the innovators of the
past because, you know, and even I was story there too, you
know, there's been an intentional writing them out. We don't
want to even know they existed. We don't want to even introduce
these concepts to let's just say what you and I do, you know,
future teachers so much going on there, though, Johnny Lupin
Hatch, I throw it over to you because you know what time it
is. It's now time for your moment of Zen.
The rule of law does not do away with the unequal distribution
of wealth and power, but reinforces that inequality with the
authority of the law. It allocates wealth and poverty in such
complicated and indirect ways as to leave the victims be
Thanks everybody for busting pencils with us. Again, thank
you, Ira, so called great book, love it, designed to fail,
make sure you have the opportunity to go out, get that book,
you know, it's time. Yeah, after Christmas, guess what,
people still want gifts. And if you didn't get a good one,
Hey, you know what, maybe the other thing is gotten by
yourself a gift because, you know what, those socks that
you got from your grandma, we know those are horrible. You
know what, save them for next year, give them away, re-gift
them. You know, go get that book, man, because it is going
to absolutely change everything because that is something that
we want to do that we always do. Johnny, I see you guys, I hope
I'm not going to tell our listeners to go get a book if they
didn't get it, get go get a beer, go do something fun. All right,
reading books is great to him, but there's time to also take a
break and just be around folks and, and, and we don't have to
change the world one nerd at a time. We can have some fun
together too. And so I hope folks are out there doing that. Hey,
we love our listeners. We love you being here with us on
Saturdays. Remember tune in for Home Room on Monday, and we'll
see you in 2025 for class and session and a whole new year.
Plus and pencils, keep buss and pencils.
You