Why parental choice in education is the single-most important battle of our time (Guest： Alex Newman, New American Magazine)
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Summary
Alex Newman of the New American Magazine joins me to talk about his new book, Crimes of the Educators, and why Common Core is a disaster for America's education system. He also talks about the dangers of Common Core and the alternatives to Common Core.
Transcript
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The Alberta government has fined us at the rebel for illegal criticism of the education minister
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David Egan. But I'm not going to be censored by the government so today I'm still talking about
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how terrible the education system really is. I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed and you're watching The Gunn Show.
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By now I'm sure you've heard about the latest attack on the rebel by Alberta Premier Rachel
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Notley. We were convicted in our absence of illegal political criticism by Alberta Premier
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Rachel Notley's new hired mercenary the elections commissioner. Now the newly created elections
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commissioner decided that our billboard on the side of highway 2 criticizing Alberta's
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education minister David Egan for failing Alberta students broke elections advertising laws.
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For that we received a fine of $5,500 that we will fight with everything we have because we are never
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going to stop criticizing the government. We are a media outlet and it is our right to do so. Now you
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can see Ezra's incredible video explaining the whole situation about how this is really an existential
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threat to the survival of the rebel at StandWithTheRebel.com. It's pretty clear Notley doesn't want me
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talking about how terrible the education system really is and so I'm going to because I'm a journalist
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and a political commentator which means I'm going to comment whether she likes it or not. So joining me
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tonight is my new American friend. One who literally wrote the book on the creeping Marxism of the North
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American education system and how it is harming our children and future generations of kids to come.
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My guest tonight in an interview we recorded earlier in the week is journalist, author, and educator
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Joining me now from the New American Magazine is someone I'm rapidly becoming a fast fan of Alex
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Newman. Now I had Alex on the show a couple weeks ago. Not my show. I was filling in for the big boss
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on the big show. But I wanted to have Alex back on because we before we had a conversation about the
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green tyranny of climate change because I met Alex at the climate change conference in Poland. But Alex also has
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another what I would probably call an expertise. And that is the creeping Marxism into our education system.
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So joining me now from sunny Florida, and I'm jealous, is Alex Newman of the New American. Hey, Alex, thanks for
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joining me. Hey, thank you so much for having me, Sheila. Are you trying to make everybody hate me by
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telling all the Canadians I'm in sunny Florida? I want them to feel sorry for me. I don't care what
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that means for you. That's awesome. That is really nice. So thank you for having me, Sheila. Now, when I say
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that you've, you're a bit of an expert on the education system, you literally wrote the book on it,
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didn't you? I did. Yeah, I was really fortunate to work with Dr. Samuel Blumenfeld. He and I
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together co-authored the book Crimes of the Educators, how utopians are using government
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schools to destroy America's children. Dr. Blumenfeld literally spent 50 years of his life.
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He just passed away a couple of years ago at age 90. But he spent 50 years of his life involved in
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the education fight. He lectured in all 50 states, all over Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the United
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Kingdom. And so he was, I think, the go to expert on education. And before he died, he wanted to write
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one more book. And they contacted me to see if I would work with him on that. And so I was just
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incredibly fortunate to work with him on that. And now we just literally, as we speak, Sheila,
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we're going to press with a special report on education in the New American Magazine,
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going through all the insanity that's going on today, how we got here, where this is going,
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and what the alternatives are for parents who want to get out. And in addition to that,
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I'm a teacher. I teach at an online school called the Freedom Project Academy, K through 12
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Christian school in the United States. We have students in all 50 states and 12 different
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countries. So I didn't realize that you were a teacher at a Christian school. That's phenomenal
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to hear. As Canadians, we often hear the words common core thrown around when we're watching
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American coverage as we want to do, because it seems to me that a lot of the progressivism
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affecting America is incubating itself here. But how would you describe common core to a Canadian,
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someone who doesn't really understand what that is? Like, I think that we are inflicted with the
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same things. Maybe we just call them something different here. We have discovery math. I don't know
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if you have that in the United States, but could you give us a Coles Notes version of what common
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Sure. Well, thank you for the opportunity, Sheila. And at its simplest level, common core was the first
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open effort to nationalize education in America. Like you guys in Canada, you guys have provinces,
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and each province is supposed to be in charge of education. Well, in the United States, we have 50
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states, and each state historically has always been in charge of its own education system. And typically,
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it's been local school districts and local communities that run the education system.
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But for a period of decades, they were quietly consolidating control over this. So in the end
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of the 1970s, with Jimmy Carter, we got the Department of Education, but it was still federal
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law that the federal government couldn't intervene in terms of what was taught. Well, when we got the
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Obama administration, they rolled out this common core program, and they pretended like it was developed
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by the states. Of course, it wasn't. It was developed by special interest groups, people
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like Bill Gates. You know, he put $2 billion of his own money into it, as well as different
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federally funded organizations and establishment groups. And they put together this set of national
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standards that supposedly was going to improve education in the United States. Now, I happen to
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know the only two subject matter experts who they put on the Common Core Validation Committee. I serve on
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board with them. Dr. Sandra Stotzky from the University of Arkansas was the English expert,
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and she refused to sign off. She said, these standards are terrible. You're taking out all
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the good literacy. This is going to reduce the critical thinking abilities of children. I'm not
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signing off on it. And now she goes around the country speaking against it and testifying in state
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legislatures that they should get rid of it because it's a disaster. So the only English expert refused to
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sign off because it was a disaster. And then on the math side, we had Dr. James Milgram of Stanford
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University. And he also refused to sign off. He said, these are as non-challenging as possible.
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They're not clear. In some cases, they're literally based on incorrect math, believe it or not. And so
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you have a, from an academic standpoint, these are just absolutely disastrous. From a centralization of
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PowerPoint point of view, again, this is absolutely disastrous. You have now all control over education
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being centralized in one place. And then if you take it to the next level, and I think, you know,
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to understand Common Core, you need to understand the broader context that they came about in.
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There is a global effort led by UNESCO, the UN's education agency, to globalize education standards.
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And the Common Core is very much a part of that agenda. In fact, Bill Gates, who financed the
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Common Core, actually signed an agreement with UNESCO in 2004 on behalf of Microsoft to globalize
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education. The UNESCO has what they call a world core curriculum. And the leadership of UNESCO,
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including its actual Communist Party director general, Irina Bokovo, stepped down at the end
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of last year. She was going around telling everybody, hey, this is great. Now we're getting
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all these countries to adopt national standards, and we're implementing our global goals through
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the national standards. So what Common Core is, is not so much just the nationalization of education,
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it is the globalization of education. And they'll tell you this, right? They were running ads on television
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in the United States bragging about how under Common Core, we would have the same standards in Paris,
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in Shanghai, and in Chicago. So we could measure what everybody was doing on an even platform all over
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the world. So we now have a globalized education system. And it is actually, in fact, you can demonstrate
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this using the government's own data, dumbing down the population of the United States, and facilitating
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the further indoctrination of the American people. So it's a disaster all around, Sheila.
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You know, it is very chilling, because local school boards are really the last bastion of
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parental autonomy over the education system. It's, you know, it really is a human right for parents
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to be able to determine the education that their children need, and that is best done, like everything
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the government does at the local level. And this is really stripping away the parental involvement
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in the education system. But I was reading on the New American magazine website, that this has been
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really exposed as a failure by empirical measurements. So I believe it was a school that
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had taken Common Core reading out of the school, and they immediately saw an improvement in their test
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Yeah, that was a phenomenally interesting story. Here in Florida, we had what's called a charter
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school. And, you know, that's maybe a whole other issue. But they decided, well, in fact, I found out
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that their reading scores were at the top of the state. They were like in the top 1% of the state. And
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in some cases, their students were the top performing kids in the whole state. And I automatically knew,
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see, this gets us into a whole other issue, but I automatically knew what was happening in this
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school. Under the Common Core, they have kindergarten children memorizing what they call sight words. And in fact,
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this is mandated under Common Core. So, you know, I have to give a little bit of a refresher or
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explanation of what this means to people who don't know what it is. So we, in English, we have a phonetic
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alphabet where every one of our letters represents one or more sounds. So a P sounds like P and an A
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sounds like A, and you combine it and it sounds like P, right? In Chinese, you know, they use symbols
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that express an entire word. So you would memorize the whole symbol, and then that symbol would represent a
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word or an idea or a concept. So it's completely different ways of writing. Now, back in the 1840s,
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they did this experiment in the public schools in Boston, where they started teaching children how
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to memorize entire words instead of teaching them that, you know, each letter corresponds with one or
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more sounds, and this is how you blend the sounds together, and that's how you determine what's written
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on the page. They started getting the children to memorize, you know, this series of squiggly lines.
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When you see those squiggly lines, that means cat, rather than a C stands for K, and an A stands for
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U, and a T stands for T. They would say, this means cat. When you see these lines in this way,
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that means cat. So the results were disastrous. In fact, the guy who invented it, he had good
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intentions. It was Reverend Golodet, and he wanted to teach deaf children how to read, and deaf children
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couldn't hear sounds. So this was, you know, really a great way to teach them how to read. You couldn't do it
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any other way. And so that was a great advancement for them. But when they tried it on non-deaf children,
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what they found was a complete cataclysm. So all the leaders of the public schools in Boston got
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together, and they wrote a phenomenal essay. It's just as relevant today as it was back then,
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saying that, hey, this method of teaching reading doesn't work. We're getting rid of it. It's just
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ridiculous. This is not how you teach reading with a phonetic alphabet. So anyways, fast forward 60 years
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later, a guy called John Dewey, who's really the founding father of what passes for education today in
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America, the public school system, decided to resurrect this and create reading primers so that
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teachers and colleges of teachers all across the country would be indoctrinated in the use of this
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methodology. Since then, we have had a complete breakdown of our literacy skills. If you look at
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the government's own data, you see that Americans are now illiterate as a nation. You know, if you look
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in some places like Washington, D.C., the government's own data shows that more than two-thirds of the
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population is functionally illiterate. At a national level, just 13 percent of American adults, and this
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is according to the U.S. Department of Education, are considered proficient in reading. Even in states
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like California, which historically has been a high-performing state in education, more than half
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of the children are not even ranked proficient. They can't even read at a basic level in the state
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of California. And this is all because of this reading methodology. So when I saw these scores at this
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charter school in Florida, I immediately knew what was happening. They were teaching the kids how to
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read using phonics. So I called them and I said, hey, you have really good reading scores. Can you
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tell me about your reading program? They said, oh, yeah, we just use phonics. We don't use the common
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core. I said, oh, I already knew that. Wrote an article about it. It ended up going viral. It got picked up
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probably by hundreds of news articles and news websites and publications. But it shows you how dangerous the
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common core is. I mean, we're mass producing illiterates and we have the solution. I mean,
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the solution is right in front of us. Just teach reading how we always taught reading for thousands
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of years. But they don't want to do that. So now I think you would probably agree with me that
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education really is the forefront of the culture war. And especially here in my home province, we are
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governed by, to be honest with you, a bunch of progressive wackadoodles that recently us here at
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the Rebel have run afoul of, specifically because of our criticism of our education minister failing our
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grade nines, where many of them are not proficient in math, which is basically crippling an entire
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generation of our workforce. But there's also a pervasive anti-Christian sentiment in all of this, too.
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Here in Alberta, we had, you know, basically with the swipe of a pen, they closed down the, it was a
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massive Christian homeschooling school board that operates under the education ministry here. And
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they basically shut it down, the alleged financial impropriety. They didn't even bother to investigate.
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And overnight, nearly a third of all the homeschool students in the entire province were out of,
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but without a school to go to, really. What's been your experience with that pervasive
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anti-Christian sentiment in education in America?
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I'm so glad you asked about this, Sheila, because this is at the heart of what so-called
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education has become today. You know, I mentioned John Dewey earlier. He, you know, if you go to
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Wikipedia, they call him the, you know, the godfather, the founding father of America's public education
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system. And he really was. And fortunately, he was very honest about his agenda. One of the things
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that he did, he drafted and signed what's called the Humanist Manifesto. And in this Humanist
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Manifesto, it was an incredibly important document. The very first plank, they said, we religious
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humanists, and, you know, to their credit, they were honest. It's, you know, it's a religious
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worldview. But they said, we religious humanists regard the universe as eternally self-existing
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and not created. And you compare that with the first words of the Bible. And the Bible
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tells you that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. So you have this
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guy, John Dewey, with a lot of money from the Rockefellers, by the way, you know, big
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They're involved in everything, right? Including the global warming scam that we were exposing
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not too long ago. And you had John Dewey team up with the Rockefellers and a whole bunch
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of others to hijack our education system. They did. They were very, very effective at it.
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They actually targeted the teaching colleges. And so John Dewey was very open about his ideology.
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He was a humanist. He rejected even the idea of God. He wanted socialism. He thought, and
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if you read this Humanist Manifesto, it's very clear. They talk about getting rid of the profit
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motive and collectivizing the means of production. I mean, it could have come straight out of Fidel
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Castro's handbook, you know. And he was very, very transparent about the fact that we want to use
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the schools to fundamentally transform American children so that we can transform America.
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And he wanted a socialist America, and he said so. And so from the very beginning, and
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you know, this is really when we started getting the institutionalization of the government education
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system in America. And I'm quite sure that these same influences dominate the Canadian system.
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From the very beginning, one of the purposes of this system was to erode the Christian faith
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of the American people. It's been very, very successful. And, you know, in America, I don't
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think you guys have the same thing in Canada. But in America, our founding fathers, when they wrote the
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Declaration of Independence, they said, they actually wrote in these exact words, we consider these truths
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to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain
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unalienable rights. So our founding fathers in our country said, we have rights, and our rights come from
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God. And then they continued, and the purpose of governments, the governments are established among
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men to protect these rights. So our founders said, God gave us rights, God created us, and we
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established governments to protect the rights that God gave us. Now, John Dewey said, hey, there is no
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God. And that means there's no objective source for your rights. So our founders didn't view this as a
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religious statement. They, in fact, viewed it as a self-evident truth, as they wrote in our Declaration
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of Independence. But with this philosophy that Dewey had, this ideology, this religious worldview,
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if you will, which is how he described it, they gradually got rid of that. In fact, in the 1960s,
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in the early 1960s, it culminated in a series of Supreme Court decisions that banned the Bible
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from our schools, that banned prayer from our schools. And now they literally teach the kids,
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the same Common Core people have the next generation science centers, they teach the kids that there is
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no God, that science proves there is no God, that we came from apes that came from slime, and that there
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was no creator at all involved. It was just chance over billions of years. And so kids go
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out into the world. And this is fundamental to the worldview of a person. If a God created you
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with rights, and a God loves you, and you're created in his image, you look at the world very
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differently than if it was just all a big giant cosmic accident, your life has no more value than
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that of your goldfish. You have a totally different outlook on the world. And so in America, and I'm
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quite sure the same is true of Canada, the government schools have become probably the single largest
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engine for the propagation of anti Christian religious views and ideological views that that
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exists. Alex, I couldn't agree with you more. And another one of the crazy progressive things that
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happened in my province over the last two years is we actually had a school board tell a Christian
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school that they couldn't teach portions of the Bible and they had to remove portions of first
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Corinthians from their school handbook, because they said it ran afoul of this safe school policy,
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they said it was discriminatory, and it wasn't inclusive. And they did this at a Christian school. So they had
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to remove portions of the Christian Bible from their teachings. Now the school, to their credit, did not
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comply, but they were immediately turfed from the school district, and had to become a completely private
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school, as opposed to a more accessible school under the public umbrella. But I absolutely agree with you that
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there is just this pervasive anti Christian sentiment, and it is creeping into Christian schools, where Christian
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schools now find themselves censoring themselves preemptively sometimes. I saw at the New American, there was
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actually an article about a Christian teacher who was fired for using the correct biological pronouns, which is
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All right. Well, you know, that's the next frontier, Sheila. And actually, I've written about Alberta on a few
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occasions. I have an education blog called the Newman Report. And I've covered Alberta education policies at least
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twice now. And this is one of them, because it's crazy. But you know, this is the next frontier, you guys
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are one step beyond where we are right now in America. In every one of our 50 states, a parent has
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the option to completely opt out of the system. So a parent can pull their kids out of the school, and you
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can go to any kind of school you want to, it could be an independent Christian school, a church school, you
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could homeschool them. Most of our states are still very free when it comes to homeschooling. But the next
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frontier is now to come after these last little bastions of opposition, because for their ideology
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to be credible, they need to completely, you know, it really makes me think of that old story, I'm sure
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you've heard of it, the emperor has no clothes. You know, as long as there's one little boy out there
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to raise his hand and point out, hey, you know, emperor, you're naked, actually, you're not really
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wearing any clothes. As long as that boy is out there, there's a risk to the entire indoctrination
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system. And so the next frontier now, of the education establishment, if you will,
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is to smother and destroy all opposition. And so that's taking a number of different forms
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around the world. In Sweden, where I've spent a lot of time, and in fact, two of my kids were born
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there, I saw this happen firsthand. First, the government came in and they said, oh, you know,
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we're just going to fund all the private schools, we're just going to give tax money to all the
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Christian schools and the private schools, and then that way, we'll have real school choice.
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And so all the schools started taking government money. And then, you know, just like the mousetrap,
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boom, the trap closed shut. And now you all have to teach the government curriculum, you all have
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to teach first graders that gender is a social construct, and that homosexuality is a desirable
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lifestyle, and all these types of things, you must teach them, no deviation is allowed. They ban
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prayer, even in Christian schools. And so we're now seeing that in the United States, where they want
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to come with the money. And once you take the money, you know, they call it strings attached,
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I call it chains attached, right? They want to chain these people down. So that, you know,
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I don't care what people believe, if you want to have a, you know, a hippie left wing school, good,
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have one. I'm happy for you. If you want to teach your kids, you know, your progressive ideology,
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good, do that. But don't come and interfere with the with the educational freedom of everybody else.
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And that's where this is all going, unfortunately.
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Yeah, I mean, in Alberta, we have a pretty diverse school system, arguably the most diverse school
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system in the country. We not only fund our charter schools, our public schools, our Catholic schools,
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and we also fund private schools up to I think it's about 70% or so, which if you were a progressive,
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you would say, hey, that's a really great idea. Because what it means is there are no socioeconomic
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barriers to a parent directing the education of their child the way that the family chooses the
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way that the family sees fit that everybody has access to a school that suits their child as opposed
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to the general cookie cutter school. But the movement here in Alberta is to enforce the cookie cutter
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ideology that everything has to be brought under the thumb of the public secular system. And all these
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other schools just they they need to go to the wayside simply because they do take that public
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funding. Whereas I would argue that Christians pay school taxes, too. And they have the right to
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decide how they spend that money. That's right. And, you know, they talk about how much they love
00:23:53.580
diversity. But then when it all boils down, they hate diversity. They hate diversity of thought and of
00:23:58.400
opinion and of educational choices. And, you know, I tell people all the time, this is the battle.
00:24:05.380
You know, every dictator throughout all of history has understood if you want to control the future.
00:24:09.200
And in fact, Hitler said this directly, right, that he who owns the youth owns the future. I mean,
00:24:13.920
he quoted directly this was entered into the evidence at Nuremberg. Every dictator has understood
00:24:19.060
this. Every progressive has understood this. John Dewey understood this. This is why they were so
00:24:23.600
maniacally obsessed with getting control of the school system. So as long as we have options,
00:24:28.300
as long as parents have the option to withdraw from this and to educate their children in a way
00:24:33.040
different than what the government wants, you know, we're in good shape. But what's happening now
00:24:38.520
is that is gradually being eroded. They don't want Christian schools. They don't want independent
00:24:42.520
schools. They don't want schools that have different pedagogy or different ideas. And, you know,
00:24:47.640
if you draw the lines out, what you see is that this has enormous implications for the survival of
00:24:54.900
liberty, for the survival of our countries, for the survival of self-government, because what they're
00:24:59.400
doing now is they are indoctrinating the children into these ideologies, these ideologies of globalism
00:25:05.160
and socialism and humanism. And, you know, in America, something like 87 percent of the children go
00:25:10.180
to public schools. You know, do the math. Eventually, the older generations will die off. 87 percent,
00:25:16.480
that's more than enough to win every election in the country. So what's going to happen? Well,
00:25:20.600
eventually, we're going to lose our freedoms. We're going to lose our rights. We're going to lose
00:25:24.120
our country if we don't address this. And so that's why I say all the time, education is the
00:25:29.400
single most important battle of our time. We must focus on this, because if not all the other battles,
00:25:35.920
you know, everybody out there listening, I'm sure, has their pet political views. And, you know,
00:25:39.440
I want my gun rights safe. I want, you know, my free speech. I want the border laws and for,
00:25:43.940
you know, whatever it is, whatever your pet issue is, over the long term, you're going to lose
00:25:48.180
if you don't focus on this education issue. And so I say everybody, you know, keep focusing on your
00:25:52.580
issues, but also recognize that you have to devote some of your time and some of your energy to
00:25:57.060
education, because otherwise you're going to lose on everything else. Now, Alex, you're bringing your
00:26:01.640
message that education is truly the battleground for the future up to frigid Alberta. You're headed to
00:26:11.860
Calgary for a conference. What's that all about? That's right. Yeah. Thank you so much. I'll be
00:26:16.460
at the Freedom Talk conference. That's going to be in Calgary. And if I'm not mistaken, it's February
00:26:22.140
8th and 9th. I don't know the exact venue, but anybody who puts that into a search engine can find
00:26:28.100
it online. It's going to be a lot of fun. There's going to be some great people there. I know Craig
00:26:32.340
Rucker, who was with us in Poland, will be one of the speakers there. And I looked at the list. It looks
00:26:36.740
like some amazing Canadians. So I'm really excited to be a part of it. And I hope to meet as many of
00:26:42.160
my Canadian friends as possible when I'm up there and I'll bring a big jacket. So you better. I think
00:26:49.500
you're in for a pretty rude awakening about the weather. Now, where can people find your book
00:26:55.940
on education? In America, at least it's available at all the big bookstores, retailers in Canada. I
00:27:02.180
don't know what the situation is, but certainly you can get it through amazon.com. It's available and
00:27:06.460
you can order it online. You can also get it on Kindle if you like. And our special report in
00:27:11.380
The New American, that's being printed as we speak. And that'll be available in the coming days
00:27:17.620
through our website at thenewamerican.com. People can order copies of the print issue or they can
00:27:22.580
get a digital version of it as well. Excellent. And what was the name of your book again,
00:27:27.260
just so that people can plug that right into Amazon? Absolutely. It's Crimes of the Educators,
00:27:32.740
how utopians are using government schools to destroy America's children. And they're using
00:27:37.660
them to destroy Canada's children as well. Great. Alex, I want to thank you so much for
00:27:42.460
being extra generous with your time. Again, I promised you 20 minutes and we are past that.
00:27:47.660
But I just find you to be so fascinating. And I learn something new every time. And I look forward
00:27:53.660
to hopefully catching up with you in Calgary in a couple of weeks. Awesome. Hey, thank you so much,
00:27:58.260
Sheila. I really appreciate it. Thanks for everything you're doing. And I hope I'll see you in Calgary.
00:28:16.420
Well, there you have it. The fight for parents to retain control of the education system or in
00:28:21.640
some instances, wrestle control back from centralized government really is a fight for the future of
00:28:28.120
the culture. In Alberta, we have a lot of good people working very hard on this issue, especially
00:28:32.820
those at Parents for Choice in Education. We also have a similar group in Ontario at Parents as First
00:28:39.640
Educators who really are on the front lines battling for parents' rights every single day. And because
00:28:45.560
they are battling for parents' rights and smaller government, they are called names like homophobes and
00:28:52.260
bigots and xenophobes by people who have never met them, never looked at their work and never really
00:28:58.900
investigated what they are trying to do. In short, they're getting the standard treatment activists get
00:29:07.720
from the left. Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight. I hope Rachel Notley was watching and
00:29:14.600
hello to you, elections commissioner. You don't scare me one bit. Thanks, everybody, so much for
00:29:21.160
watching, especially you haters out there. I'll see everybody back here in the same time, in the same
00:29:26.840
place next week. And remember, don't let the government tell you that you've had too much to think.