Ep 645 ｜ The Shocking History of Public Education ｜ Guest： Pete Hegseth
Episode Stats
Summary
Pete Hedgeseth is a Fox News host, and he recently wrote a book about American education and the history of American education. In this episode, we talk about how we got here to public education being the mess that it is in the United States, and how we can strategically get out of it.
Transcript
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Hey, guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Tuesday. This episode is brought to you by our friends
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at Good Ranchers. Go to GoodRanchers.com slash Allie. That's GoodRanchers.com slash Allie.
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All right. Today, we are talking to Pete Hedgeseth. He is a Fox News host,
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and he recently wrote a book about American education and the history of American education.
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That we are talking about today, and it really is an awesome conversation. I mean,
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the man knows his stuff. You're going to learn some things, I think, about the American education
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system, what we are facing, what we have been facing for a very long time that you probably
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didn't know, how we got here to public education being the mess that it is in the United States.
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And then also, he is going to talk to us about how we can strategically get out of it. So I'm
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so excited for you to hear this. Pete, thank you so much for joining me. There's a million things
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I could ask you to comment on. Thank you, Allie Beth. Yes, but I specifically want to talk to you
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first and foremost about your book, Battle for the American Mind, Uprooting a Century of
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Miseducation. So according to your book, there is a 16-hour war being waged against the American
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child's mind. Is that correct? What do you mean by that? Yeah. That was the original title of the
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book, The 16,000-Hour War. That's the amount of time kids are in public education or any K-12
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education from K-12. And as parents, for so long, we've defaulted to what's easy, what's convenient,
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what's local, what we're used to. And over time, and we tell the whole story in the book,
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that war has been waged without most parents knowing the extent to which the left has completely
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captured those mechanisms. Because you and I and so many other people talk about higher education
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and the lunacy of college, and we have for quite some time. And we missed the fact that progressives
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have been focusing intentionally for over 100 years on shaping the affections of our youngest
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kids down to elementary school, because they knew changing their worldview then was far more powerful
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to social change than trying to deprogram them in college. So this 16,000-hour war is something
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we've mostly not been fighting, but the left has.
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Why do you think it took us so long to recognize that? I mean, we've been talking about the craziness,
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as you said, of what's going on in the university system. But as you mentioned in your book,
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they're typically showing up to college already at least a little bit indoctrinated, or at least
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vulnerable to the bad ideas that they are hearing from their professors, thanks to the 16-hour war.
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So why has it taken really, you know, this long for us to realize what's going on?
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I think there's a lot of nostalgia about public school. I went to public school. My dad was a public
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school teacher. Everybody wants to believe that if it was good enough for me, it's good enough for my
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kids. I'll give them the values they need over the dinner table or at church on Sunday or Wednesday
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night. And okay, there's a little bit of bias, but we can move past it. I want them to be on a sports
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team and go to prom and have all the big experiences. And there's a lot of pride in the public education
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system, at least there has been until now. And so my mom protested in the 80s and 90s at the PTA
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in the school board, in my school, in a very conservative, you know, suburban town in Minnesota,
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middle class. But it was tinkering at the margins. It wasn't quite revealing itself yet. And I think
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in the first chapter, we call the last two and a half years, the COVID-16-19 moment. That moment when
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this classroom came into our homes, we were looking over the shoulders of our kids, and we saw common
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core math. And we saw critical race theory masked as diversity, equity, inclusion. We saw gender theory
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and gender pronouns. And parents said, whoa, how do we get here? And we actually started this book
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before the COVID-16-19 moment started. So we were changing it and editing it real time as we were
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learning even more alongside parents. And what we discovered through our research is that Ernest
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Hemingway once wrote of bankruptcy, it happens gradually until it happens quickly. This was not
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something that happened because of Obama or something happened just because of the unions or the 60s.
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This was an intentional targeting. And school has always been such a cohering aspect of how we as
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Americans identify ourselves, that if we don't like the school, we move to a better zip code or a place
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that's just put in a new gym, or they've got a lot of STEM courses or AP courses, and we assume,
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OK, our kid will be just fine. And this COVID-16-19 moment, I think, has broken that paradigm. The unions
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have exposed themselves for who they are. So we have this new opportunity to look under the hood.
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The question is, what are options that are out there for the parents? We obviously have a very
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distinct point of view in the book. But first, the first step to recovery is understanding the
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depth of your problem. And I was in the same boat as everybody else five years ago with kids in public
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school thinking, hey, they'll be OK. I'm learning in real time, too.
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Yeah. Tell us the role that you believe the teachers' unions have played in this. That's something
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we've talked about on this show a lot. But tell us your perspective.
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Massive. I would argue there's not a more powerful institution in American politics,
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certainly in the American classroom, than the NEA and AFT. And when you dig into these unions,
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they actually used to be professional teachers' associations that were conservative by inclination,
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that passed out scripture and Bible verses and classical works to young kids to learn how to read
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grammar and understand different concepts. They were effectively co-opted by the unionization
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movement, the progressive movement, and then the hardcore government union movement in the early
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50s and 60s and coerced into becoming public teacher unions, at which point they married up with
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the progressives who were at the beginning of this plot. One of the names you'll meet in this book is
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John Dewey. A lot of people know him as the father of modern American progressive schools. He was also the
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founder of the AFT, and he was also the honorary lifetime president of the NEA. So from the beginning,
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it's been atheists, progressives charting the course of the NEA, married up with public unions,
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empowered by politicians, and then they codified their power. The moment they did that most significantly
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was in 1967 when they elected Jimmy Carter. The NEA sent more delegates to the Democrat National
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Convention in 1976 than any other group. There were a majority of delegates. They elected Jimmy
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Carter. And what did Jimmy Carter do? He turned around and created the Federal Department of
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Education as a gift to the NEA. The NEA bragged there would be no Department of Education without
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the NEA. That's been a symbiotic relationship ever since. And the federalization of our, what we like to
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think of local control didn't commence then, but it certainly accelerated then to the point now where
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from accreditation to certification for teachers, to standards, to curriculum, to pedagogy, to the
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pipeline of teachers, it's all controlled by unions who are now completely in bed with cultural
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Marxists. It's done with the progressives. These are full out cultural Marxists, almost all of which
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are atheists who are guiding this perspective. Right. You describe this transition from a classical and
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mostly Christian education system to a humanistic utopia, that that has kind of been the goal and
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that's still the goal. Is that, I mean, is that still why we're seeing the absolute craziness that
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we're seeing today when it comes to gender ideology and the divisive racial curriculum that we're seeing?
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Is that the humanistic utopia they think that we should be striving for? Yes. When you look, when you
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meet the characters of this progressive takeover, they're almost all, and I'm not saying this
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hyperbolically. They're almost all atheists, almost all socialists. They're certainly all humanists,
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as you talked about. Dewey wrote the Humanist Manifesto. These are all people that believed in
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social change through government intervention, and they knew they needed to remove one thing.
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Central to the story is the removal of God from the classroom. And it wasn't the Supreme Court that
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did it with rulings in the 50s and 60s. It was progressives who wrote about it openly in the New
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Republic and their publications. And that's what's so interesting about the research we did.
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This is not a conspiracy that was hidden. This is a plot that was in the open as they debated amongst
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themselves. How do we remove the immovable object of Western civilization, which is biblical truth?
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And if you have the Bible in the classroom and prayer in the classroom, you can't tinker with
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the reasoning and the fundamental virtues of kids the way they wanted to. And so they talked about
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creating pullout periods. In fact, they created their own new school in a new town in Gary,
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Indiana, called the Gary Plan, where parents would be told, well, yes, there's religion,
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but the religious instruction is off-site in the middle of the day. And then eventually,
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they transported that to New York City, where it became no religious instruction at all. And
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eventually, they pushed that as the standard. And the church gave in, by the way. The church split
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into a progressive wing, a social justice wing, and a more fundamentalist wing, which was focused on
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saving souls, which is great. But they got out of the kingdom business and the education
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business and started something called Sunday School. And thinking, and the progressives wrote,
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they said, what good is one hour of theistic training on Sunday going to do against our 40
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hours of secular training during the week? They knew they had the volume of time over time.
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They didn't know exactly where their experiment would lead. That's why I don't like to call this a
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conspiracy. But what they did know is where it wouldn't lead. And they intentionally said,
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God is out. Biblical truth is out. Classical literature eventually is out. And they tore down
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the pillars of Western civilization. So eventually, they could replace it with agenda. And that's when
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you meet the critical theorists who land at Columbia University, who push a new theory called
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critical theory. And where did they land? At the most powerful teacher's college in America,
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at Columbia. And they started proliferating that view to the point where now you have critical
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race theory called something else and critical gender theory or critical queer theory called
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something else in the classroom because they've consolidated that takeover so significantly.
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But first, it was the removal of God. And what they replaced it with, ironically, as a patriot
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myself, I know you're the same. They replaced it with a pledge. And they replaced it with a flag,
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Tell us a little bit more about that, because that is not an argument that you typically hear from
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conservatives. I mean, obviously, we honor the flag. We're thankful for our country. As you said,
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you're patriotic. I'm patriotic. But you said that they replaced prayer with a pledge of allegiance.
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Why did they do that? Because when I'm thinking of communists, when I'm thinking of Marxists,
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I'm not thinking of patriotic people who love the flag. And certainly nowadays,
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the communists don't. They don't like patriotism. So how and why did that happen?
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It's a great point. It floored me when we first came upon it as we did the research as well.
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Well, they knew that parents would be outraged if God was removed, rightfully so. Kind of like you saw
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the protests in Loudoun County and elsewhere. They knew that would happen. So they had to replace God with a
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well-placed forgery, almost like a pressure plate when you might have in a museum. So as they removed
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God, they put in place something people revered, and rightfully so, the flag of the United States
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of America, and said, that's how we're going to unite people, not around God, but around
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patriotism. Now, it isn't the type of patriotism you and I think of, of the founding principles,
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rights endowed by a creator in our declaration. This was more allegiance to the state. In fact,
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the original Pledge of Allegiance did not say under God. It was written by a socialist. His name is
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Francis Bellamy. Under God was only added by Eisenhower when we were fighting the godless
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communists in the Cold War. So God was something they were potentially trying to remove. And here's
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why they reject it today, because it was never about patriotism or America's founding principles.
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It was about a placeholder. So now they're happy to get rid of the flag. They're happy to get rid
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of the pledge. 1776 is gone. 1619 is here. It's because it was always about social control
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and social change, social justice, whatever you want. Anti-fascism was what the Marxists called it
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even then, as the Antifa calls it even today. The line from critical theory to Antifa is direct.
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So it was only a stepping stone. And what we use is a word called paideia in the book. Paideia is a
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long forgotten Greek word that our founders understood very well, that we taught in our
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classrooms 200 years ago. It's basically the enculturation of our youngest, of our most
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precious, what we've been placed on their hearts as the value of the good life. And for 200, you know,
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for 150 years in America, it was more or less unchanged. It was the Western Christian paideia.
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Progressives changed it to the American progressive paideia, consolidated around a flag. Now we're living
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in about the last 20 years in what we describe as the culturally Marxist paideia. They have gone from
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bias to indoctrination and activism. And that's why you see the kind of boldness you see today is
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because parents can protest at school boards. And I salute that. I think it's wonderful.
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But it only really reinforces the power of school boards and superintendents and state boards of ed
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that just brush them aside and say, we're going to keep hiring diversity, equity, inclusion consultants.
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We're going to keep celebrating Pride Month for the whole month. And we're going to keep doing
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whatever we want, because you don't really have any power. And we wish we were the parents anyway.
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Right. And I am concerned about, I mean, yes, I'm glad that there is a push against some of this
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craziness that we're seeing in schools. But I think people stop short of saying, well, we need to
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replace it with a Christian classical education, because they don't want to seem like they're promoting
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theocracy. They think that this means that they are opposing the separation of church and state,
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which I think is a misunderstanding of that concept. But most people are too scared to say,
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well, we need to go back to this Christian classical education. And I have my doubts as much as I would
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like that, that we would ever head in that direction, that the pendulum would ever swing back
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The pendulum inside our public system or our government schools is never going to swing back
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that far. But every movement to reclaim things that we know to be good and true has been started
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by a small percentage of people who created their own ecosystem and said, I reject the status quo of
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the system because it's not going to work for my kids or future generations. And we're going to start
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our own school. So I would argue the darkest moment of American education, K-12, was in the 1970s,
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when there were zero classical Christian K-12 schools in America. They had almost outlawed
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homeschooling. They tried to outlaw all religious instruction. They were going for full monopoly
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and full consolidation. And some brave parents in the 1980s rediscovered, based on some writings
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that had been done, the classical Christian form of education, which is neither, it's not
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Christian nationalism or a theological form of education. It's the way Western civilization was
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educated for 2000 years. It's the way our founders were educated. It's Latin, it's Greek,
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it's great books, it's steeped in human history. It's an understanding of human nature, our fallen
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nature, the flaws that are, and that we are, that are flaws that exist within us and that we are made
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in the image of God. When you seek to discover wisdom and beauty and virtue and answer big questions
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like, you know, why am I here? And what is my relationship to God? It unleashes true knowledge
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and understanding. All of that is gone from education today. All of it in the public sector.
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Thankfully, that movement has grown. So I would argue we're in the 40th year, 40, you know,
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fourth decade of a 100 year renewal where parents now have the option and the alternative to either
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homeschool with more resources than ever, or find one of over 500 classical Christian schools across
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the country, which are far more affordable than so-called elite schools. And that's why we argue for
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a radical reorientation of your lives around the education of your kids. Because the most important
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thing is, is, is developing their relation with, with their Lord and savior. And, and the second
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most important part is what you do as a family. But other than that, it's the 16,000 hour wars that
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you give to someone else to shape who they become. And I don't want to send my kids to Democrat camp.
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So I prefer not to send them to a progressive school. And the more you dig, you realize I was a kid
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in the nineties in a public school. And I, as we research this, I'm ashamed. I'm not ashamed. That's
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the wrong word. But I, I realized the massive blind spots I have in my own education that I wish I could
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go back to school and get a classical Christian education because the miracle of 1776 was not an
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accident. They read all the great thinkers. They understood all the fallacies. They knew the pitfalls
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of Republican government and they tried to avoid them. And they were flawed men, but at least they had
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access to that information. And we stripped that away from our kids today. So I think it's a very
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viable movement. We're very, uh, proactive about advocating for it at the end of the book.
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And there are more options than ever. And you saw up in Maine, Beth, you saw the, the new Supreme
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court ruling that allowed for parents to take, uh, their, their money and go to religious instruction,
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not just secular instruction. Arizona just passed a universal voucher program effectively. I think there
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will be more options. I think parents will be thirsting for it. And the, to use a word of the left,
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the goal of this book is to raise awareness is to say there is an alternative and hoping your kids
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survive public school is, is not sufficient. Yes. Um, my mom and grandmother were both public
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school teachers. My parents were educated in public school. Um, and one thing that they recognized even
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in the nineties when they were raising my brothers and me is that they knew that they wanted to give us
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a Christian education. And I'm very thankful for that. I know that not everyone has had that
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opportunity, but kindergarten through 12th grade, I did have, uh, I don't know if it was completely
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classical, but it was a Christian education. And one of the best gifts I think that I was given is
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not just understanding a biblical worldview and how everything, even mathematics fits into that.
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But also I really believe that I was given a gift in my education of reason, especially in high
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school and critical thinking and understanding literature that I don't think a lot of people my age,
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and especially younger than me have been given just understanding how to think through arguments.
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Talk about the war on reason that has been waged specifically in education and particularly in
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the last 20 or so years. You could not be more spot on. I couldn't say it better myself. I mean,
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the opening statement, the dedication, uh, quote of the book is only the educated are free.
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And of course that's what our founders understood. That's what Western civilization has been premised
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on. That's what the liberal arts is all about. It's, there's nothing to do with being left of
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center and everything to do with having a liberated mind. And the most dangerous citizens are free
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thinking, reasoning citizens and what the left wants today. And they, they dress it up as something
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practical. So Dewey did it and they've done it ever since. It's all about vocational training,
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training you for the jobs of the future economy. And Woodrow Wilson was, was, was predominant in this
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worldview. Most people don't need that highfalutin liberal arts education. Most just need the basics to
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be trained to be workers. You see the same thing in the argument for STEM education today. Basically,
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it's the same argument, train them for the jobs of the future, but that classical stuff,
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they don't need that. So there becomes an orthodoxy inside government schools about not just how you
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think, but what to think, because they don't teach you how to think. And then they tell you what to
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think. And that's how kids show up already indoctrinated, uh, at universities. And the assault
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is, is almost complete in the point where the SAT take the SAT, for example, which has only since
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its inception been about measuring reasoning. It's not how, uh, it's measuring how strong the
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engine can run, not how well you can, um, study for the test. Well, David Coleman, who took over
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common core for Obama after consolidating more federal control over how we, the standards for
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our kids moved over to the college board, which creates the SAT. And under the guise of the fact
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that the test is racist, uh, because there were not equitable distribution of outcomes by race,
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they said, we have to scrap all the reasoning portions of the SAT and effectively make it a
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test. You can study for that mirrors the common core. So now even the reasoning measures we use to
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come out of high school to determine whether you are prepared for college have been dismantled. So
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at every step of the way, they don't want free thinkers and liberated thinkers. Cause those are the
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most dangerous type. You cannot control them. And what I love about classical Christian is they don't
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call it elementary, middle school, and high school. They call it grammar, logic, and rhetoric
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because it's all meant to, meant to fit the way child's minds think. Grammar are the basics. You
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hammer in the basics. So they have it. Logic is where they start to identify fallacies and think
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critically, and they want to argue about it and figure out their place in the world. And then rhetoric
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is how you articulate and make an argument that is, uh, that stands the test of time, all based on
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an immersion in history. And it, I don't like the idea that it gets classical gets characterized as,
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you know, dusty books and old guys with old ideas that aren't relevant today. Um, which of course
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is the opposite of the truth. Wisdom is timeless. The failing failures, failures of human beings are
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timeless. Uh, and learning from them is how we, we, we get closer to God, frankly, and, and an
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understanding of, of his, his, his, uh, truth. So it's, uh, it's the answer and the left knows it.
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And that's why they targeted it because they needed, uh, people to make widgets and to vote
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a certain way based on the control they wanted in the future. Yes. You talk about, um, also this
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war on virtue and you can kind of see why people who want the state to have control over kind of
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mindless, reasonless people would wage a war against critical thinking. But why would public
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education wage a war against virtue and really subvert the Christian definition of what virtue
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actually is? What's the purpose behind that? Well, how do you define virtue when you get rid of
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any sort of a baseline whatsoever of objective truth and an understanding of where virtue comes
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from? So in many ways, it's a system incapable of answering that question. How do you have that
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discussion? Uh, and especially when the entire premise of our country is based on Judeo-Christian
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values is on reflecting on the nature of man and God and where our rights come from. You can't have
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a, a, a substantive, let alone a robust discussion about the ordering of virtues and why they chose them
00:23:19.980
when you can't even talk about the Bible, let alone read it, let alone study it. And even Jefferson,
00:23:25.880
who himself was a deist, you were tearing him down all over the place these days too. He, he didn't
00:23:30.900
believe in the new Testament, but he wrote his own version of the, of the new Testament called the
00:23:34.780
Jefferson Bible, which where he pulled out the verses he agreed with and pulled out the ones he
00:23:40.200
didn't. And you know, that's got to, we've all got a bunch of problems with that, but at least he
00:23:44.920
engaged with the ideas and understood the fundamental arguments that were underlying the system that he was
00:23:50.260
a part of. And so what they do is we replace virtues, timeless virtues with things like morals
00:23:56.400
and values. And in the books we talk about, and I fall into that trap myself all the time. How often
00:24:01.360
do I talk about values? Well, values aren't necessarily grounded in, in a permanent standard
00:24:07.100
as virtues are. And so values can shift and morals can shift. And then you can insert new value systems
00:24:13.420
like socialism, like utopianism, like a humanism that create their whole or, or climate religion at
00:24:20.940
this point, a whole different hierarchy of values. And, and then the, the, the, the, the virtue signaling
00:24:27.500
that you do to use that word again, is you signal the values you hold by the positions you hold
00:24:33.400
inside an ever shifting framework that the progressives define. And so virtue becomes this old
00:24:38.420
word. You never hear the virtue in public schools. In fact, it's a word that I rarely used until
00:24:44.460
engaging with this topic substantively, because values are easier to talk about my values, your
00:24:49.640
values, who are you to tell you whose values are right? And that's rampant in a, in a system that,
00:24:54.860
that has no permanent standard. Yeah. The opposite of virtue is vice. And C.S. Lewis says that every vice
00:25:00.700
is basically pride manifests itself in a different way, but every sin really starts with pride. And when
00:25:07.520
you're looking at some of the scary videos that we see coming out of public school classrooms of
00:25:12.700
teachers coming out to their students or telling their students, Hey, you can identify as this
00:25:17.200
gender. We won't tell your parents. It really does come down to, yes, a form of terrible depravity and
00:25:23.180
all kinds of just perverted things that we don't even want to talk about. But it also comes down to,
00:25:28.460
I think, narcissism, narcissism in these teachers, narcissism in the school administrators and the
00:25:33.500
teachers unions that are trying to create armies of children that conform to their image. As you
00:25:38.380
said, rather than teaching kids, Hey, you're made in the image of God. And therefore he is the
00:25:42.940
authority over what is and what isn't what's right. And what's wrong. They're saying we you're made in
00:25:47.020
our image and we want to make you more in our image. And we are the arbiters of what is right and
00:25:52.460
what is wrong. So that's also part of, I think, why this ideology has run rampant. You've exchanged
00:25:57.720
the God of scripture for the God of self. You've got narcissists running the show. You said it
00:26:02.740
exactly right for the God of self. My brother is over and we were watching something and a commercial
00:26:07.980
pops up and the t-shirt of a young girl says, you know, worship yourself. And it is no, really, it's
00:26:14.240
the modern manifestation of the self-esteem movement, which is effectively identity politics
00:26:20.340
on Mac. So what boxes can I check that make me different, unique, or conforming to the current
00:26:27.180
trend of the current thing of the moment that we've determined is stigmatized or criticized or
00:26:33.160
not sufficiently celebrated. And who are you as an authority figure to tell me how I should feel
00:26:38.920
about myself, which of course leads to vacuous lost kids with no sense other than loving themselves,
00:26:47.360
but they don't know why, except for superficial definitions of what that means with no connection
00:26:52.200
to God whatsoever. So then you create a cause or a movement, whether it's Black Lives Matter,
00:26:57.780
whether it's LGBTQ issues, whether it's transgender sports issues, take your pick of the current moment
00:27:03.720
and they can throw their identity and self-worth and self-love at it and say, you're attacking me
00:27:09.900
without any of the infrastructure around which we normally discuss and debate these topics on a
00:27:15.920
common framework. We are on Venus and Mars when it comes to education. And I, that's why the message
00:27:22.380
of the book is pull your kids out. They're not going to, there are salt and light. I love the
00:27:29.200
salt and light argument. There are some kids that are fortified and prepared. I get it. Most kids
00:27:33.620
aren't. I look at my kids. I love them. I'm worried they're not. And I know I want the foundation for
00:27:38.640
them that gives them a fighting chance. Yeah. I've heard a lot of people say that. And I think their
00:27:41.980
heart is in the right place, but you don't put your kindergartner on the front lines when
00:27:45.720
they're not even big enough to hold up their shield yet. And so, I mean, the world is going
00:27:50.220
to be a battlefield. They're going to have decades and decades of this kind of stuff to deal with. So
00:27:55.060
how can we, the best that we possibly can, steward the short amount of time that we have
00:27:59.720
and give them, you know, as much armor, if you will, before they are in that battlefield by themselves.
00:28:07.680
Just to kind of wrap this up, I do want to make sure because I think that this is fascinating.
00:28:22.880
You also say that there is a war in the public education system, I would say in the secular
00:28:26.900
progressive world in general, also not just against reason and virtue, but against wonder
00:28:32.680
and beauty. And that's really interesting. Will you just kind of summarize what you mean by that?
00:28:37.400
Yes. So two words that before I started this project with David Goodwin, who's the president
00:28:42.100
of the Association of Classical Christian Schools, an amazing human being that even I didn't associate
00:28:47.460
with education. I mean, when's the last time you went to school and thought, I really want my kid
00:28:51.380
to come out of school with wonder and beauty. And one of the neat parts of this project was visiting
00:28:56.320
a lot of classical Christian schools. And one moment that I recall is an art teacher at one of those
00:29:01.460
schools saying, art is a trained skill. And the reason we try to create beautiful art is that we
00:29:09.520
are creating the image of God. And by creating that beautiful art, not in a form of idolatry at all,
00:29:13.240
of course, we reject any of that. But you get closer to revealing the infinite beauty, the eternal beauty
00:29:20.140
of the creator by creating things that are beautiful, that reflect the beauty of his creation.
00:29:25.500
And when you look at the artwork of 10th graders and 11th grade, I mean, it could be hanging in
00:29:31.680
museums. And this is a rural school in North Carolina. And I started to realize, yes, our public
00:29:37.860
schools have totally abandoned any attempt, not just at the formal making of beautiful art, but at the
00:29:43.580
attempt to define what is beautiful. I mean, a great example of it recently is Sports Illustrated. I'm at
00:29:48.960
Barnes & Noble picking up a book and there are three Sports Illustrated swimsuit covers, right? There's one that
00:29:53.220
you would traditionally see. And then there's one with an obese lady and another one with an elderly
00:29:57.120
lady. And it's not to say that people can't be beautiful. I'm not saying that that, I get that
00:30:02.320
argument. But this idea that you be you, everything is beautiful, beauty is in the eye of the beholder,
00:30:10.880
diminishes the value of excellence and beauty in a lot of contexts to include the beauty of virtue.
00:30:17.160
And then wonderment is, what I love about classical Christian schools is, you know, you don't have
00:30:22.400
the flashy colors up on the walls and the cartoons up. The wonder is not in the, oh, look around at
00:30:28.760
all the colors. The wonder is in the imaginative nature of developing and forming a mind to engage
00:30:33.820
with big narratives and ideas and subjects that they can grapple younger than you think to fortify
00:30:40.700
them for the coming cultural wars that are there. So these are forms of education that are founders
00:30:46.940
that classicists have known about for years, written about. We wrote children's books that were
00:30:51.120
attuned to them in the past. We've dumbed it all down, creating a lower standard and then no
00:30:57.640
Yeah. And within this, there's a war on innocence. There's a war on creativity. I mean, there's so much.
00:31:03.400
We really could go on and on. I'm so thankful that you wrote this book. I think, as I said before we
00:31:09.940
got on, it's a really unique understanding, a unique perspective on what is going on and why.
00:31:16.520
And I'm very grateful for it. Where can people find it if they want to buy it? Where can they
00:31:23.440
Yeah. Anywhere books are sold. And we're grateful because it has spent three weeks at number one on
00:31:29.100
the New York Times bestseller list. And it's because word of mouth has spread that if you want to
00:31:34.700
understand where we are, read this book. It'll give you a depth of the understanding and a part of
00:31:39.100
the solution. But you can go to classicalchristian.org, which is David's association site. It explains what
00:31:45.880
classical Christian is better than anywhere else. And then it's also has a map, like a Google map with
00:31:50.360
pins of where all the schools are. And I've been all over that, making my own choices with my own
00:31:55.300
family. And it's an amazing resource. And it fortifies you to understand that there really isn't. We call
00:32:00.960
it an educational insurgency. And I tend into military analogies as a military guy myself. So we are
00:32:07.760
surrounded. Tactical retreat is necessary. And the preferred form of warfare of the weak against the
00:32:14.720
small or the weak against the strong or the small against the large is insurgency, is we have to gather
00:32:20.100
our networks underground at first, build this army that's connected, the type of capacity that we need
00:32:26.700
so that we can move into phase two of insurgency, which is growing to the point where an overwhelming
00:32:33.660
majority of Americans potentially have access to this form of wisdom in the classroom, which right now is, of
00:32:38.400
course, nowhere near the case. So yes, classicalchristian.org. The book is Battle for the
00:32:42.940
American Mind. Thank you. I'll tell you this. We've done a lot of interviews. Not many people understand
00:32:47.720
the subject the way that you do, Allie Beth. So thank you for how you contribute to this cause with
00:32:52.500
parents and grandparents and mothers and fathers who are grappling through this culture war and this
00:32:57.520
cultural revolution, frankly, and don't know where to turn because so many institutions they thought
00:33:01.780
they could count on they can't anymore. And that's part of what we're trying to expose in the book,
00:33:06.180
too. Well, thank you. We've got a lot of young moms that listen to this podcast. I know that they're
00:33:10.120
going to get a lot out of this interview. So thank you so much. No, Beth. Thank you very much.