Edugenic Harm
Edugenic Harm (N): The harm done by educators to students. Edugenic harm is analogous to iatrogenic harm.
Source: Teach Me, Teacher - Episode 200
We had this issue with medicine, when people had a doctor came in in a white coat with a stethoscope around the neck. And a nurse, you know, with a clipboard next next to the doctor. You had the sense that you were talking to a priestly class Otherwise, why the white robe and what we didn't really understand was a concept that became known as iatrogenic x iatrogenic harm is the harm done by healers to their patients. Iatrogenic harm turned out to be an enormous, I mean, just a spell bindingly large issue, and a lot of the procedures that we now have in hospitals to make sure we don't amputate the wrong leg or give you 10 times the dosage so that we're off by an order of magnitude, the checklist, all of these things come out of the recognition that healers were doing a tremendous amount of the harm to the sick, and the needy, we do not yet have a concept of endogenic harm, the harm done by educators to students, and that channel will change everything once once we define edugenic harm. If we're confident that this is a crazy idea, then you have no danger from it, you'll simply define the term and then you'll happily find out that the term is about 0.0001. We can congratulate ourselves and move on that teachers are doing no harm. I do not know what that's like. I cannot tell you how bizarre my understanding of the classroom is. It's just I mean, if you looked at my record, I was a pretty good student in elementary school. Up until about fourth grade, I get skipped over fifth grade. I'm already young. So I'm a young fifth grader who gets instantly moved into sixth grade. I moved to the probably top rated middle and high school in Los Angeles private from a public school. I go to an Ivy League undergraduate school start at the age of 16. I have a master's degree by the age of 19. And I'm off to Harvard University with the top fellowship in my pocket to study the hardest field of mathematics at the top place. That story masks a completely different experience. I mean an experience the depths of depression and self doubt, the inability to understand what was going on, the constant feeling of drowning, of suffocation, of being hated, of being hounded, to being hunted. And I think that that, you know, people will find had Garry Kasparov on my show the great chess champion. And Gary is one of the most forceful human beings you will ever meet in your life a you know, Jewish Armenian Russian world chess champion. My personality is constructed to be able to go up against Garry Kasparov. Now you can say why what have you been through the Battle of Stalingrad now, I've been through the classroom baby in the classroom, you are so outgunned by your teacher, whatever your teacher says, right or wrong, fair or unfair, kind or cruel, underhanded or straightforward, goes. Your rights are not the rights of an adult. They're not the rights of a peer. You are effectively a captive in somebody else's self created world.