Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 645 ｜ The Shocking History of Public Education ｜ Guest： Pete Hegseth

00:00:00.000 Hey, guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Tuesday. This episode is brought to you by our friends

00:00:04.180 at Good Ranchers. Go to GoodRanchers.com slash Allie. That's GoodRanchers.com slash Allie.

00:00:18.380 All right. Today, we are talking to Pete Hedgeseth. He is a Fox News host,

00:00:24.320 and he recently wrote a book about American education and the history of American education.

00:00:30.000 That we are talking about today, and it really is an awesome conversation. I mean,

00:00:35.400 the man knows his stuff. You're going to learn some things, I think, about the American education

00:00:40.460 system, what we are facing, what we have been facing for a very long time that you probably

00:00:45.260 didn't know, how we got here to public education being the mess that it is in the United States.

00:00:51.700 And then also, he is going to talk to us about how we can strategically get out of it. So I'm

00:00:57.460 so excited for you to hear this. Pete, thank you so much for joining me. There's a million things

00:01:13.180 I could ask you to comment on. Thank you, Allie Beth. Yes, but I specifically want to talk to you

00:01:17.140 first and foremost about your book, Battle for the American Mind, Uprooting a Century of

00:01:20.980 Miseducation. So according to your book, there is a 16-hour war being waged against the American

00:01:29.320 child's mind. Is that correct? What do you mean by that? Yeah. That was the original title of the

00:01:34.120 book, The 16,000-Hour War. That's the amount of time kids are in public education or any K-12

00:01:40.460 education from K-12. And as parents, for so long, we've defaulted to what's easy, what's convenient,

00:01:47.820 what's local, what we're used to. And over time, and we tell the whole story in the book,

00:01:54.780 that war has been waged without most parents knowing the extent to which the left has completely

00:02:01.800 captured those mechanisms. Because you and I and so many other people talk about higher education

00:02:07.200 and the lunacy of college, and we have for quite some time. And we missed the fact that progressives

00:02:12.640 have been focusing intentionally for over 100 years on shaping the affections of our youngest

00:02:18.480 kids down to elementary school, because they knew changing their worldview then was far more powerful

00:02:24.280 to social change than trying to deprogram them in college. So this 16,000-hour war is something

00:02:29.900 we've mostly not been fighting, but the left has.

00:02:33.600 Why do you think it took us so long to recognize that? I mean, we've been talking about the craziness,

00:02:37.280 as you said, of what's going on in the university system. But as you mentioned in your book,

00:02:43.020 they're typically showing up to college already at least a little bit indoctrinated, or at least

00:02:48.480 vulnerable to the bad ideas that they are hearing from their professors, thanks to the 16-hour war.

00:02:55.420 So why has it taken really, you know, this long for us to realize what's going on?

00:02:59.900 I think there's a lot of nostalgia about public school. I went to public school. My dad was a public

00:03:04.540 school teacher. Everybody wants to believe that if it was good enough for me, it's good enough for my

00:03:08.860 kids. I'll give them the values they need over the dinner table or at church on Sunday or Wednesday

00:03:13.580 night. And okay, there's a little bit of bias, but we can move past it. I want them to be on a sports

00:03:18.080 team and go to prom and have all the big experiences. And there's a lot of pride in the public education

00:03:24.380 system, at least there has been until now. And so my mom protested in the 80s and 90s at the PTA 1.00

00:03:31.340 in the school board, in my school, in a very conservative, you know, suburban town in Minnesota,

00:03:36.560 middle class. But it was tinkering at the margins. It wasn't quite revealing itself yet. And I think

00:03:41.740 in the first chapter, we call the last two and a half years, the COVID-16-19 moment. That moment when

00:03:47.880 this classroom came into our homes, we were looking over the shoulders of our kids, and we saw common

00:03:53.640 core math. And we saw critical race theory masked as diversity, equity, inclusion. We saw gender theory

00:04:00.020 and gender pronouns. And parents said, whoa, how do we get here? And we actually started this book

00:04:05.020 before the COVID-16-19 moment started. So we were changing it and editing it real time as we were

00:04:11.280 learning even more alongside parents. And what we discovered through our research is that Ernest

00:04:18.200 Hemingway once wrote of bankruptcy, it happens gradually until it happens quickly. This was not

00:04:23.400 something that happened because of Obama or something happened just because of the unions or the 60s.

00:04:27.460 This was an intentional targeting. And school has always been such a cohering aspect of how we as

00:04:33.260 Americans identify ourselves, that if we don't like the school, we move to a better zip code or a place

00:04:40.820 that's just put in a new gym, or they've got a lot of STEM courses or AP courses, and we assume,

00:04:45.840 OK, our kid will be just fine. And this COVID-16-19 moment, I think, has broken that paradigm. The unions

00:04:52.300 have exposed themselves for who they are. So we have this new opportunity to look under the hood.

00:04:56.580 The question is, what are options that are out there for the parents? We obviously have a very

00:05:00.680 distinct point of view in the book. But first, the first step to recovery is understanding the

00:05:04.940 depth of your problem. And I was in the same boat as everybody else five years ago with kids in public

00:05:09.980 school thinking, hey, they'll be OK. I'm learning in real time, too.

00:05:14.420 Yeah. Tell us the role that you believe the teachers' unions have played in this. That's something

00:05:19.400 we've talked about on this show a lot. But tell us your perspective.

00:05:22.500 Massive. I would argue there's not a more powerful institution in American politics,

00:05:27.860 certainly in the American classroom, than the NEA and AFT. And when you dig into these unions,

00:05:33.140 they actually used to be professional teachers' associations that were conservative by inclination,

00:05:39.860 that passed out scripture and Bible verses and classical works to young kids to learn how to read

00:05:44.640 grammar and understand different concepts. They were effectively co-opted by the unionization

00:05:50.740 movement, the progressive movement, and then the hardcore government union movement in the early

00:05:55.260 50s and 60s and coerced into becoming public teacher unions, at which point they married up with

00:06:01.940 the progressives who were at the beginning of this plot. One of the names you'll meet in this book is

00:06:07.160 John Dewey. A lot of people know him as the father of modern American progressive schools. He was also the

00:06:14.140 founder of the AFT, and he was also the honorary lifetime president of the NEA. So from the beginning,

00:06:21.440 it's been atheists, progressives charting the course of the NEA, married up with public unions,

00:06:28.740 empowered by politicians, and then they codified their power. The moment they did that most significantly

00:06:34.880 was in 1967 when they elected Jimmy Carter. The NEA sent more delegates to the Democrat National

00:06:41.420 Convention in 1976 than any other group. There were a majority of delegates. They elected Jimmy

00:06:47.020 Carter. And what did Jimmy Carter do? He turned around and created the Federal Department of

00:06:50.420 Education as a gift to the NEA. The NEA bragged there would be no Department of Education without

00:06:55.200 the NEA. That's been a symbiotic relationship ever since. And the federalization of our, what we like to

00:07:01.540 think of local control didn't commence then, but it certainly accelerated then to the point now where

00:07:07.400 from accreditation to certification for teachers, to standards, to curriculum, to pedagogy, to the

00:07:15.160 pipeline of teachers, it's all controlled by unions who are now completely in bed with cultural

00:07:19.880 Marxists. It's done with the progressives. These are full out cultural Marxists, almost all of which

00:07:25.140 are atheists who are guiding this perspective. Right. You describe this transition from a classical and

00:07:32.160 mostly Christian education system to a humanistic utopia, that that has kind of been the goal and

00:07:37.840 that's still the goal. Is that, I mean, is that still why we're seeing the absolute craziness that

00:07:42.900 we're seeing today when it comes to gender ideology and the divisive racial curriculum that we're seeing?

00:07:48.100 Is that the humanistic utopia they think that we should be striving for? Yes. When you look, when you

00:07:52.320 meet the characters of this progressive takeover, they're almost all, and I'm not saying this

00:07:56.860 hyperbolically. They're almost all atheists, almost all socialists. They're certainly all humanists,

00:08:02.760 as you talked about. Dewey wrote the Humanist Manifesto. These are all people that believed in

00:08:08.100 social change through government intervention, and they knew they needed to remove one thing.

00:08:13.500 Central to the story is the removal of God from the classroom. And it wasn't the Supreme Court that

00:08:19.020 did it with rulings in the 50s and 60s. It was progressives who wrote about it openly in the New

00:08:24.380 Republic and their publications. And that's what's so interesting about the research we did.

00:08:28.080 This is not a conspiracy that was hidden. This is a plot that was in the open as they debated amongst

00:08:32.660 themselves. How do we remove the immovable object of Western civilization, which is biblical truth? 0.96

00:08:39.020 And if you have the Bible in the classroom and prayer in the classroom, you can't tinker with 0.99

00:08:44.000 the reasoning and the fundamental virtues of kids the way they wanted to. And so they talked about

00:08:50.200 creating pullout periods. In fact, they created their own new school in a new town in Gary,

00:08:54.020 Indiana, called the Gary Plan, where parents would be told, well, yes, there's religion,

00:08:58.720 but the religious instruction is off-site in the middle of the day. And then eventually,

00:09:04.000 they transported that to New York City, where it became no religious instruction at all. And

00:09:08.580 eventually, they pushed that as the standard. And the church gave in, by the way. The church split

00:09:14.100 into a progressive wing, a social justice wing, and a more fundamentalist wing, which was focused on

00:09:19.240 saving souls, which is great. But they got out of the kingdom business and the education

00:09:22.980 business and started something called Sunday School. And thinking, and the progressives wrote,

00:09:28.120 they said, what good is one hour of theistic training on Sunday going to do against our 40

00:09:34.980 hours of secular training during the week? They knew they had the volume of time over time.

00:09:41.680 They didn't know exactly where their experiment would lead. That's why I don't like to call this a

00:09:46.080 conspiracy. But what they did know is where it wouldn't lead. And they intentionally said,

00:09:51.640 God is out. Biblical truth is out. Classical literature eventually is out. And they tore down

00:09:58.300 the pillars of Western civilization. So eventually, they could replace it with agenda. And that's when

00:10:03.440 you meet the critical theorists who land at Columbia University, who push a new theory called

00:10:08.580 critical theory. And where did they land? At the most powerful teacher's college in America,

00:10:13.620 at Columbia. And they started proliferating that view to the point where now you have critical

00:10:19.120 race theory called something else and critical gender theory or critical queer theory called

00:10:23.980 something else in the classroom because they've consolidated that takeover so significantly.

00:10:29.300 But first, it was the removal of God. And what they replaced it with, ironically, as a patriot

00:10:34.080 myself, I know you're the same. They replaced it with a pledge. And they replaced it with a flag,

00:10:38.200 with allegiance to the state.

00:10:51.060 Tell us a little bit more about that, because that is not an argument that you typically hear from

00:10:56.000 conservatives. I mean, obviously, we honor the flag. We're thankful for our country. As you said,

00:11:01.420 you're patriotic. I'm patriotic. But you said that they replaced prayer with a pledge of allegiance.

00:11:07.060 Why did they do that? Because when I'm thinking of communists, when I'm thinking of Marxists,

00:11:11.040 I'm not thinking of patriotic people who love the flag. And certainly nowadays,

00:11:15.220 the communists don't. They don't like patriotism. So how and why did that happen?

00:11:19.460 It's a great point. It floored me when we first came upon it as we did the research as well.

00:11:24.300 Well, they knew that parents would be outraged if God was removed, rightfully so. Kind of like you saw 0.99

00:11:28.620 the protests in Loudoun County and elsewhere. They knew that would happen. So they had to replace God with a 0.95

00:11:33.500 well-placed forgery, almost like a pressure plate when you might have in a museum. So as they removed

00:11:39.140 God, they put in place something people revered, and rightfully so, the flag of the United States

00:11:44.660 of America, and said, that's how we're going to unite people, not around God, but around

00:11:48.920 patriotism. Now, it isn't the type of patriotism you and I think of, of the founding principles,

00:11:54.300 rights endowed by a creator in our declaration. This was more allegiance to the state. In fact,

00:11:59.840 the original Pledge of Allegiance did not say under God. It was written by a socialist. His name is

00:12:05.320 Francis Bellamy. Under God was only added by Eisenhower when we were fighting the godless

00:12:10.060 communists in the Cold War. So God was something they were potentially trying to remove. And here's

00:12:16.600 why they reject it today, because it was never about patriotism or America's founding principles.

00:12:21.920 It was about a placeholder. So now they're happy to get rid of the flag. They're happy to get rid

00:12:26.660 of the pledge. 1776 is gone. 1619 is here. It's because it was always about social control

00:12:33.640 and social change, social justice, whatever you want. Anti-fascism was what the Marxists called it

00:12:40.940 even then, as the Antifa calls it even today. The line from critical theory to Antifa is direct.

00:12:46.600 So it was only a stepping stone. And what we use is a word called paideia in the book. Paideia is a

00:12:52.980 long forgotten Greek word that our founders understood very well, that we taught in our

00:12:56.680 classrooms 200 years ago. It's basically the enculturation of our youngest, of our most

00:13:01.860 precious, what we've been placed on their hearts as the value of the good life. And for 200, you know,

00:13:06.920 for 150 years in America, it was more or less unchanged. It was the Western Christian paideia.

00:13:12.100 Progressives changed it to the American progressive paideia, consolidated around a flag. Now we're living

00:13:17.900 in about the last 20 years in what we describe as the culturally Marxist paideia. They have gone from

00:13:23.560 bias to indoctrination and activism. And that's why you see the kind of boldness you see today is

00:13:29.140 because parents can protest at school boards. And I salute that. I think it's wonderful.

00:13:33.320 But it only really reinforces the power of school boards and superintendents and state boards of ed

00:13:39.440 that just brush them aside and say, we're going to keep hiring diversity, equity, inclusion consultants.

00:13:43.960 We're going to keep celebrating Pride Month for the whole month. And we're going to keep doing 0.96

00:13:48.740 whatever we want, because you don't really have any power. And we wish we were the parents anyway.

00:13:52.680 Right. And I am concerned about, I mean, yes, I'm glad that there is a push against some of this

00:13:58.600 craziness that we're seeing in schools. But I think people stop short of saying, well, we need to

00:14:04.940 replace it with a Christian classical education, because they don't want to seem like they're promoting

00:14:10.700 theocracy. They think that this means that they are opposing the separation of church and state,

00:14:15.860 which I think is a misunderstanding of that concept. But most people are too scared to say,

00:14:20.400 well, we need to go back to this Christian classical education. And I have my doubts as much as I would

00:14:25.200 like that, that we would ever head in that direction, that the pendulum would ever swing back

00:14:30.320 that far. So what do you think?

00:14:32.860 The pendulum inside our public system or our government schools is never going to swing back

00:14:36.540 that far. But every movement to reclaim things that we know to be good and true has been started

00:14:41.360 by a small percentage of people who created their own ecosystem and said, I reject the status quo of

00:14:46.840 the system because it's not going to work for my kids or future generations. And we're going to start

00:14:50.840 our own school. So I would argue the darkest moment of American education, K-12, was in the 1970s,

00:14:56.420 when there were zero classical Christian K-12 schools in America. They had almost outlawed

00:15:02.120 homeschooling. They tried to outlaw all religious instruction. They were going for full monopoly

00:15:06.520 and full consolidation. And some brave parents in the 1980s rediscovered, based on some writings

00:15:11.540 that had been done, the classical Christian form of education, which is neither, it's not

00:15:18.520 Christian nationalism or a theological form of education. It's the way Western civilization was 0.68

00:15:24.740 educated for 2000 years. It's the way our founders were educated. It's Latin, it's Greek,

00:15:29.380 it's great books, it's steeped in human history. It's an understanding of human nature, our fallen

00:15:35.080 nature, the flaws that are, and that we are, that are flaws that exist within us and that we are made

00:15:40.980 in the image of God. When you seek to discover wisdom and beauty and virtue and answer big questions

00:15:48.480 like, you know, why am I here? And what is my relationship to God? It unleashes true knowledge

00:15:53.680 and understanding. All of that is gone from education today. All of it in the public sector.

00:15:58.420 Thankfully, that movement has grown. So I would argue we're in the 40th year, 40, you know,

00:16:05.200 fourth decade of a 100 year renewal where parents now have the option and the alternative to either

00:16:11.980 homeschool with more resources than ever, or find one of over 500 classical Christian schools across

00:16:17.740 the country, which are far more affordable than so-called elite schools. And that's why we argue for

00:16:22.480 a radical reorientation of your lives around the education of your kids. Because the most important

00:16:27.380 thing is, is, is developing their relation with, with their Lord and savior. And, and the second

00:16:32.520 most important part is what you do as a family. But other than that, it's the 16,000 hour wars that

00:16:37.720 you give to someone else to shape who they become. And I don't want to send my kids to Democrat camp.

00:16:44.000 So I prefer not to send them to a progressive school. And the more you dig, you realize I was a kid

00:16:49.960 in the nineties in a public school. And I, as we research this, I'm ashamed. I'm not ashamed. That's

00:16:55.340 the wrong word. But I, I realized the massive blind spots I have in my own education that I wish I could

00:17:01.340 go back to school and get a classical Christian education because the miracle of 1776 was not an

00:17:06.680 accident. They read all the great thinkers. They understood all the fallacies. They knew the pitfalls

00:17:12.380 of Republican government and they tried to avoid them. And they were flawed men, but at least they had

00:17:17.300 access to that information. And we stripped that away from our kids today. So I think it's a very

00:17:22.020 viable movement. We're very, uh, proactive about advocating for it at the end of the book.

00:17:26.600 And there are more options than ever. And you saw up in Maine, Beth, you saw the, the new Supreme

00:17:31.220 court ruling that allowed for parents to take, uh, their, their money and go to religious instruction,

00:17:36.140 not just secular instruction. Arizona just passed a universal voucher program effectively. I think there

00:17:41.480 will be more options. I think parents will be thirsting for it. And the, to use a word of the left,

00:17:46.340 the goal of this book is to raise awareness is to say there is an alternative and hoping your kids

00:17:52.880 survive public school is, is not sufficient. Yes. Um, my mom and grandmother were both public

00:17:58.060 school teachers. My parents were educated in public school. Um, and one thing that they recognized even

00:18:03.320 in the nineties when they were raising my brothers and me is that they knew that they wanted to give us

00:18:08.640 a Christian education. And I'm very thankful for that. I know that not everyone has had that

00:18:13.200 opportunity, but kindergarten through 12th grade, I did have, uh, I don't know if it was completely

00:18:18.180 classical, but it was a Christian education. And one of the best gifts I think that I was given is

00:18:22.240 not just understanding a biblical worldview and how everything, even mathematics fits into that.

00:18:27.960 But also I really believe that I was given a gift in my education of reason, especially in high

00:18:34.300 school and critical thinking and understanding literature that I don't think a lot of people my age,

00:18:39.920 and especially younger than me have been given just understanding how to think through arguments.

00:18:56.060 Talk about the war on reason that has been waged specifically in education and particularly in

00:19:03.880 the last 20 or so years. You could not be more spot on. I couldn't say it better myself. I mean,

00:19:08.760 the opening statement, the dedication, uh, quote of the book is only the educated are free.

00:19:15.080 And of course that's what our founders understood. That's what Western civilization has been premised

00:19:19.300 on. That's what the liberal arts is all about. It's, there's nothing to do with being left of

00:19:23.220 center and everything to do with having a liberated mind. And the most dangerous citizens are free

00:19:28.140 thinking, reasoning citizens and what the left wants today. And they, they dress it up as something

00:19:34.220 practical. So Dewey did it and they've done it ever since. It's all about vocational training,

00:19:38.800 training you for the jobs of the future economy. And Woodrow Wilson was, was, was predominant in this

00:19:44.640 worldview. Most people don't need that highfalutin liberal arts education. Most just need the basics to

00:19:51.760 be trained to be workers. You see the same thing in the argument for STEM education today. Basically,

00:19:56.360 it's the same argument, train them for the jobs of the future, but that classical stuff,

00:20:00.520 they don't need that. So there becomes an orthodoxy inside government schools about not just how you

00:20:06.680 think, but what to think, because they don't teach you how to think. And then they tell you what to

00:20:10.240 think. And that's how kids show up already indoctrinated, uh, at universities. And the assault

00:20:15.780 is, is almost complete in the point where the SAT take the SAT, for example, which has only since

00:20:22.240 its inception been about measuring reasoning. It's not how, uh, it's measuring how strong the

00:20:28.560 engine can run, not how well you can, um, study for the test. Well, David Coleman, who took over

00:20:34.560 common core for Obama after consolidating more federal control over how we, the standards for

00:20:40.020 our kids moved over to the college board, which creates the SAT. And under the guise of the fact

00:20:44.340 that the test is racist, uh, because there were not equitable distribution of outcomes by race,

00:20:49.720 they said, we have to scrap all the reasoning portions of the SAT and effectively make it a

00:20:55.240 test. You can study for that mirrors the common core. So now even the reasoning measures we use to

00:21:00.940 come out of high school to determine whether you are prepared for college have been dismantled. So

00:21:06.000 at every step of the way, they don't want free thinkers and liberated thinkers. Cause those are the

00:21:11.360 most dangerous type. You cannot control them. And what I love about classical Christian is they don't 1.00

00:21:16.600 call it elementary, middle school, and high school. They call it grammar, logic, and rhetoric

00:21:20.880 because it's all meant to, meant to fit the way child's minds think. Grammar are the basics. You

00:21:26.360 hammer in the basics. So they have it. Logic is where they start to identify fallacies and think

00:21:31.480 critically, and they want to argue about it and figure out their place in the world. And then rhetoric

00:21:36.420 is how you articulate and make an argument that is, uh, that stands the test of time, all based on

00:21:42.700 an immersion in history. And it, I don't like the idea that it gets classical gets characterized as,

00:21:48.060 you know, dusty books and old guys with old ideas that aren't relevant today. Um, which of course

00:21:53.160 is the opposite of the truth. Wisdom is timeless. The failing failures, failures of human beings are

00:21:58.980 timeless. Uh, and learning from them is how we, we, we get closer to God, frankly, and, and an

00:22:03.840 understanding of, of his, his, his, uh, truth. So it's, uh, it's the answer and the left knows it.

00:22:10.700 And that's why they targeted it because they needed, uh, people to make widgets and to vote

00:22:15.860 a certain way based on the control they wanted in the future. Yes. You talk about, um, also this

00:22:22.080 war on virtue and you can kind of see why people who want the state to have control over kind of

00:22:30.860 mindless, reasonless people would wage a war against critical thinking. But why would public

00:22:37.900 education wage a war against virtue and really subvert the Christian definition of what virtue

00:22:45.460 actually is? What's the purpose behind that? Well, how do you define virtue when you get rid of

00:22:50.620 any sort of a baseline whatsoever of objective truth and an understanding of where virtue comes

00:22:55.200 from? So in many ways, it's a system incapable of answering that question. How do you have that

00:23:00.700 discussion? Uh, and especially when the entire premise of our country is based on Judeo-Christian

00:23:06.720 values is on reflecting on the nature of man and God and where our rights come from. You can't have

00:23:12.280 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 1.00

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 0.99

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

00:30:56.160 objective standard of beauty.

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

00:31:21.340 learn more about classical education?

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 0.86

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 0.99

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.

Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - July 19, 2022

Ep 645 ｜ The Shocking History of Public Education ｜ Guest： Pete Hegseth

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