Action4Canada - August 15, 2022


Alex Newman： Dumbed-Down Schools Are Intentional

Topics
Crimes of the Educators
Hosted by
Tanya Gaw
Mentioned
Common Core Samuel Blumenfeld Obama Alex
World Crisis, Globalist Agenda Targeting Children In The Education System & Live Q&A Success Story： Action4Canada Cross-border Travel NOL - Marian

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

167.0

Word count

724

Sentence count

56

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Alex Blumberg talks about his journey into education and how he became the author of Crimes of the Educators, a book about the failures of the American education system. He talks about how he got his start in journalism and why he decided to write a book.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I kind of came at this from a weird direction. I had actually never gone to a public school. I grew
00:00:08.080 up mostly in third world countries. I grew up in Latin America, a little time in Europe, and then
00:00:12.240 went to Africa, back to Europe. So I never really experienced the public school system. But as a
00:00:17.300 journalist, I started getting curious. It was very obvious to me, you know, I didn't even finish high
00:00:22.560 school, but it was very obvious to me coming back to America that something must be really wrong
00:00:27.480 with the educational system. I could not believe it. I took, you know, every state in the U.S. has a
00:00:32.460 high school equivalency test you can take. And so I took that and I could not believe it. I mean,
00:00:37.940 this was stuff that I was learning in third, fourth grade. I couldn't believe that this was seriously
00:00:41.740 an exam to allow you to skip high school. But it was. So I knew very early on that something was
00:00:47.500 very wrong with the system in the United States. I started writing articles about Common Core. Now,
00:00:53.500 for those who aren't familiar, Common Core is the set of national standards that the Obama
00:00:57.560 administration tried to impose on America by basically bribing our state governments to adopt
00:01:02.960 it. And, you know, right away, my radar went off. I said, OK, something's really wrong here. We're not
00:01:08.720 supposed to have national standards. As I dug into it and started talking to some of the people
00:01:12.260 involved, it became very clear that this was subversive. The values that were being taught were
00:01:18.440 contrary to Christian principles, contrary to what our nation was founded on. The academics were just 0.94
00:01:24.320 mind numbingly dumbed down. And in fact, this was coming from the people who were on the Common
00:01:28.380 Core Validation Committee. They had one math expert, one English expert. They both told me I serve on
00:01:33.320 some boards with them and they both told me that this is a disaster. I mean, I'm not going to sign off
00:01:37.680 on this. So it was clear something was wrong. A couple of years after that, I was contacted by Dr.
00:01:43.780 Samuel Blumenfeld. He and I wrote for a number of different publications and we shared some of
00:01:49.360 the bylines and some of the same publications. And he asked me, Alex, would you be willing to
00:01:54.320 work with me on a book on education? He had already done 12 books on education. And what an honor it was
00:02:00.500 for me to be asked that. He had done. Let me see if I have. Well, you see a whole bunch of them behind
00:02:05.320 me. The one that we ended up producing, Dr. Blumenfeld and I, you can see it right here. It's called
00:02:09.860 Crimes of the Educators. This was published in 2015. And so Sam had spent 60 years of his life
00:02:16.700 studying the public education system, real research, right? He would go to the universities
00:02:20.860 and pull out the archives and the correspondence from the people he was investigating. True, true
00:02:25.960 research. And so he focused on the past, how we had gotten to where we were. I focused on what was
00:02:32.620 happening at the time, which was the rollout of Common Core, the increasing federalization of our
00:02:37.340 education system, and where it was all going, right? The globalization of education around the
00:02:42.280 world and how these international standards, international testing, international values were
00:02:49.000 making their way down to the local level. So as I was working on this with Sam, I ended up reading all
00:02:55.500 the books that he ever wrote about it. And it clicked. I realized that this is the issue that transcends
00:03:02.320 all the other issues. You know, I've been writing about all kinds of things. I've been writing about
00:03:06.480 the UN, the open borders, the efforts to suppress our free speech, the efforts to silence Christians, 0.99
00:03:12.680 you know, all of these things I've been talking about, and I've been researching, and I've been
00:03:16.240 exposing. But when I realized that education was the thread that ran through them all, I said,
00:03:21.300 this is, I mean, this has to be the focus. Because if we get this one wrong, we're going to lose on
00:03:26.240 all of the other issues anyway.
00:03:36.480 Thank you.
00:03:50.140 Thank you.