Matthew Cooke

 Matthew Cooke is the writer-director of How to Make Money Selling Drugs, a documentary film which criticizes the war on drugs in the United States, and Survivors Guide to Prison, about the prison system. Cooke also often serves as his own narrator, editor, cinematographer and visual effects artist.

 

My friends. I haven’t written or spoken about our political situation in a while - mainly because I’ve been focused on making more long form content.

But I had some thoughts about education I want to share. Maybe it sparks something in you as well.

Most of the public arguments about education today are limited to manufactured outrage over curriculum - and the skyrocketing costs of student debt, which depress our entire economy much like a recession - which is affecting everyone.

It’s a really an easy issue to resolve offering K - 16 (instead of k - 12) like most other wealthy countries.

Cancelling student debt is a no brainer. Could be paid for by billionaire profits alone since the pandemic. And it would spike consumer spending power and grow businesses as a result.

But there is an even deeper issue worth considering - which is rethinking public school entirely.

Before the 19th century there was no such thing as a public school system available to all the people, regardless of income or demography.

Public schools as we know them are on the one hand a fairly recent invention and on the other haven’t seen much innovation in the last century.

Academics are separated by factory bells and students are grouped by their physical age - the least likely factor in predicting commonalities. And test scores and grades are emphasized over personal experience and discovery.

This system is supposed to compete for children’s attention at a time where the most sophisticated communications technology in the history of humankind is in their pockets 24 hours a day.

Meanwhile the arts, the category of activity that engages the entirety of the human experience, mind, heart, and body - that which strives to reflect the fundamental essence of what it means to be a human being is the first to go on the chopping block when budgets run short.

Instead, kids cram answers to questions by rote memorization that often appear completely alien and irrelevant to life in the modern world.

No wonder there are record amounts of teenagers diagnosed with attention issues, medicated into submission to conform to a system of education that was created centuries ago and now competing against fortune 500s employing weapons grade psychological tactics for marketing dominance.

Meanwhile: We don’t hear nearly enough about creative problem solving - the critical skill required for progress in a society.

Creative problem solving requires two types of thinking: Convergent and divergent.

Convergent thinking is the application of linear, logical steps to analyze a problem which has only one correct solution: what is the purpose of a coffee cup? Well it is a cup for holding coffee!

Convergent thinking is what we learn in public school. It’s about discipline. Conformity. And that is useful.

But there could be other purposes for a coffee cup, couldn’t there? That is called divergent thinking. We need that skill for advanced problem solving - for problems that haven’t been solved yet.

Little children are notoriously good at divergent thinking, and able to conceive outside the box, coming up with multiple answers to common problems at what’s considered genius levels of thinking but as we get older, children and then adults, are less and less able to think creatively - most likely because doing so soon becomes an act of rebellion - to such an extent it could get you a failing grade on your tests.

Imagine that. Creative thinking can hold you back.

This is why many world-renowned education and creativity experts advise that we should be going completely the opposite way of standardization.

That instead we should be encouraging collaboration and individualization.

We could be building flexibility in curriculum to suit different learning styles. Some learn best by listening. Some by watching. Some can only learn by doing. Some by teaching!

Some have different specialties, challenges. Some are better at collaboration - some work better in pairs or alone.

But one thing we all have in common is the need for association in learning - meaning there needs to be some connection to our lives, to our hearts at the very least for learning to have meaning and stick.

That’s why the best advice I ever heard in college was to not take classes at all. Don’t take classes - a friend suggested. Take teachers.

A great teacher can make any subject fascinating. And turn the specific minute detail of a thing into a universal life lessons. An easy example is when you’re learning a new sport - which by nature is action packed and engaging.

Snowboarding for example. A good coach might advise that where you’re looking, that’s where you’re headed. Well that applies to the slopes and to life.

A great teacher illuminates a truth you carry with you to the next life challenge and the next.

Associations create opportunities for discovery. And deep connections, between ideas, experiences, problems and solutions are the best way to learn.

Because that is how the mind works - by connecting things.

If you ever want to memorize a grocery list, imagine each item smashing into the walls and furniture in the different rooms in your house, then do an imaginary tour of your house and you’ll remember each item.

Without an association, a list of random items becomes meaningless and forgetful.

So what if we made providing context, meaning and association to our outdated school systems?

Let’s take the worst grades of all - junior high school.

When we’re 12, 13, 14 years old. Feeling super awkward and weirded out instead of sitting still learning stuff we have zero application for - we showed up to an empty field and build our own school? Like an erector set?

Set the foundation. Framed the walls. Learned plumbing. Electricity. Put together a printing press. Published a newspaper.

Put an old car back together for a teacher to drive us to get supplies.

Soldered circuit boards to assemble a computer. Ran in telephone lines. Learned math and science THAT way.

And then got introduced to the arts in the context of how those profoundly life changing technologies were invented.

Learned about the Chinese inventors of aqueducts. The Arabic inventors of numerals. The Indian inventors of the ruler, the button, and cataract surgery. The African concept of Ubunto - our shared humanity. The Ethiopian inventors of coffee before we had our first cup.

Kids could sit in classrooms they built with their own hands, giving them confidence and self reliance so by the time they were 16 they felt more like adults - like they used to 100 years ago.

Because as important aside: the teenager is a modern invention.

Nobody was even using the term until the 1940s. It was just adults and kids.

Modernization has created an unnaturally extended period of adolescence - that combined with our current public school system cleaves huge cultural divisions between generations - between children and their ancestors, creating feelings of isolation, anxiety, and the ungrounded existential crises that define post modern industrial life.

We are cut off from wisdom, continuity and communal identity.

Generational differences are getting even more defined as our communications technologies develop faster and faster.

What is the use of that?

Other than for marketing departments to have more demographic markers to target.

Education comes from a latin word which means rearing or training. But what are we training for?

According to Maslow our hierarchy of needs starts with the physical, air, water, food, shelter, sleep, and moves inward to our needs to feel safe, secure, being healthy, and deeper still, the need for community, family, friends, belonging, self esteem, feeling love and respect for ones self and others, and then finally: self actualization - realizing your potential, bringing your gifts to life!

Whether that’s your sense of peace, or humor, to some talent or outward skill.

And feeling that you’ve contributed something to your world, your family, your descendants. All of that, we are training for - all the time.

There’s a wise bit of council for people who are looking for self actualization that practice means attainment and attainment means practice -- that means we have to always be in practice. Always in training.

Always working on actualizing our selves more deeply and authentically.

As some of our first nation brothers and sisters say, always be in ceremony.

Pablo Casals - the master cellist. 81 years old was asked why he still practiced 4-5 hours a day Pablo said “Because I think I’m making progress.”

The master filmmaker Akira Kurosowa upon receiving a lifetime achievement award from George Lucas and Steven Spielberg said “I don’t feel that I understand cinema yet...

I really don’t feel I have grasped the essence of cinema. Cinema is a marvelous thing but to grasp its true essence is very, very difficult.”

If the master artists still considered themselves students at the end of their long and accomplished lives, how much for the rest of us?

If we’re all students for the duration of our time here, then perhaps there shouldn’t be any argument at all, that our educations, and our training should be the number one priority of an advanced society.

As all else we do comes from that - the actualization and demonstration of our humanity.

 

What I Learned When Trump Tried to Correct the Record

 

The former president made an unusual effort to influence how historians will view him.

By Julian E. Zelizer

About the author: Julian E. Zelizer is a history and public-affairs professor at Princeton University. He is the editor of the forthcoming book The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment.

 

As an academic historian, I never expected to find myself in a videoconference with Donald Trump. But one afternoon last summer—a day after C-SPAN released a poll of historians who ranked him just above Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson, and James Buchanan, our country’s worst chief executives—he popped up in a Zoom box and told me and some of my colleagues about the 45th presidency from his point of view. He spoke calmly. “We’ve had some great people; we’ve had some people that weren’t so great. That’s understandable,” he told us. “That’s true with, I guess, every administration. But overall, we had tremendous, tremendous success.”

 

I am the editor of a scholarly history of Trump’s term in the White House, the third book in a series about the most recent presidents. A few days after The New York Times reported on the project, Trump’s then-aide Jason Miller contacted me to say that the former president wanted to talk to my co-authors and me—something that neither George W. Bush nor Barack Obama had done. For someone who claimed indifference about how people in our world viewed him, Trump was spending an inordinate amount of time—more than any other ex-president that we know of—trying to influence the narratives being written about him. My co-authors and I weren’t the only people he reached out to. According to Axios, Trump conducted conversations with more than 22 authors, primarily journalists, who were working on books chronicling his presidency.

But if anything, our conversation with the former president underscored common criticisms: that he construed the presidency as a forum to prove his dealmaking prowess; that he sought flattery and believed too much of his own spin; that he dismissed substantive criticism as misinformed, politically motivated, ethically compromised, or otherwise cynical. He demonstrated a limited historical worldview: When praising the virtues of press releases over tweets—because the former are more elegant and lengthier—he sounded as if he himself had discovered that old form of presidential communication. He showed little interest in exploring, or even acknowledging, some of the contradictions and tensions in his record.

The former president sat at a wooden desk in his Bedminster Golf Club with an American flag beside him. Over the first 30 minutes, with a single sheet of white paper in front of him, Trump reminisced about his underappreciated negotiating talent in handling the economy, the coronavirus pandemic, and the leaders of China, North Korea, and Russia. “Nobody was tougher on Russia than me,” he maintained. With regard to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Trump recounted how he had compelled other allied nations to pay higher dues after decades when they had not paid their fair share. Many of Trump’s anecdotes came back to how he had talked—or intimidated—powerful actors into doing things that no other president would have been able to. The former president claimed that he had reached a tentative deal with the South Korean government to contribute more to its own defense. (In telling the story, he imitated the accent of South Korean President Moon Jae-In.) The historic deal, Trump alleged, was scuttled once Joe Biden became president, after the 2020 election was “rigged and lost.”

He seemed to measure American politicians primarily by how they treated him. Even many of those elected officials who criticized him in public sang a different tune, he insisted, when the television cameras were off. Trump vented about governors who continually expressed during private meetings how impressed they were with his COVID policies (“I hope you can get the tapes,” Trump said) yet proceeded to “knock the hell out of me” in public: “So unfair.”

Right as I was about to open the virtual floor for discussion, Trump took a surprising detour, spending several minutes telling a convoluted story about how price overruns and poor design plans had marred the Navy’s $13 billion supercarrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford. Calling the project the “stupidest thing that I’ve ever seen,” Trump explained how during a presidential visit, he warned that the technologically advanced vessel was a mistake. He recounted how the hardworking crew members who had been servicing ships for years (“out of central casting”) thought key features of the Navy’s design, including aspects of the catapult system that assists in launching planes, made no sense to anyone who had experience in aerial military operations. On the USS Gerald R. Ford, you would have to be an “Albert Einstein,” one crew member had complained, to fix things that once would have been extremely easy to repair.

I glanced at the puzzled faces of my colleagues in their Zoom boxes as Trump’s story unfolded. But his point soon became clear. He was taking a jab at the experts. For the historians who were writing a first draft of his presidency, Trump had a message: The best and brightest didn’t always know what they were talking about—unlike hardworking people who lived by common sense, as he did.

Our entire meeting suggested that Trump sometimes does care about expertise, despite his vitriol toward the academy. After all, he was the one who had decided to reach out to a group of professional historians so that we produced “an accurate book.” As he has done many times before, Trump proudly mentioned his uncle who was a professor at MIT. While talking to us, Trump was working to influence the narratives that were told about him—as he’d done repeatedly during his time in the Oval Office. Indeed, he had even closed out his term peddling the case that he was not a failed one-term president, like Herbert Hoover or Jimmy Carter, but someone who had victory stolen from him.

When the Yale historian Beverly Gage brought up the president’s relationship with the FBI and the intelligence community—the subject of her chapter in our book—he eventually turned to the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021. According to his memory, the expert opinion was off. The “real story,” Trump argued, “has yet to be written.” When Congress met to certify the Electoral College results, Trump told us, there had been a “peaceful rally,” more than a “million people” who were full of “tremendous love” and believed the election was “rigged” and “robbed” and “stolen.” He made a “very modest” and “very peaceful” speech, a “presidential speech.” The throng at the Capitol was a “massive” and “tremendous” group of people. The day was marred by a small group of left-wing antifa and Black Lives Matter activists who “infiltrated” them and who were not stopped, because of poor decisions by the U.S. Capitol Police when some “bad things happened.”

During our hour together, Trump didn’t have many questions for us. Even in his attempt to correct the record, Trump mostly didn’t acknowledge or engage with informed outside criticisms of his presidency. He did, however, admit to having sometimes retweeted people he shouldn’t have, and at one point he said, “when I didn’t win the election”—phrasing at odds with his false claim that the 2020 vote was stolen.

But his goal was to sell a group of historians on his side of the story. “I’m looking at the list, it’s a tremendous group of people, and I think rather than being critical I’d like to have you hear me out, which is what we’re doing now, and I appreciate it.” In preparation for the meeting, his staff had already supplied us with documents that portrayed him as a conventional president with a moderate record.

He seemed to want the approval of historians, without any understanding of how historians gather evidence or render judgments. Notwithstanding the C-SPAN polls, our goal is not to rank presidents but to analyze and interpret presidencies in longer time horizons. We want to understand the changes that take place to public policy, democratic institutions, norms of governing, and the relationship between White House officials and political movements. Though we are always eager to read oral histories by participants—and hear directly from a former president—these sorts of comments play only one small part in works that are checked and cross-examined with other contemporaneous sources. In practice, professional historians gather their evidence by reviewing essential written and oral documents stored in archives—which is why so many in my profession shuddered upon learning that boxes of material were initially carted off to the former president’s home at Mar-a-Lago rather than given directly to experts at the National Archives.

Trump could help historians evaluate his presidency by sitting for public questions from people other than Fox News hosts and Conservative Political Action Conference audiences, and preparing a thoughtful, revealing, and honest memoir—one that might offer historians insights into his personal and political evolution as well as key decisions made in his time in office.

After answering our questions for half an hour, Trump ended the conversation by thanking us: “I hope it’s going to be a No. 1 best seller!” It was certainly an upbeat way to sign off, though I wasn’t quite convinced he meant it. A few days after our meeting, Trump announced that he would stop doing interviews with authors, because they had been a “total waste of time.” He added: “These writers are often bad people who write whatever comes to their mind or fits their agenda. It has nothing to do with facts or reality.”