The Charlie Kirk Show - Being Responsible for Your Children’s Education with David Goodwin

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, today in the Charlie Kirk Show, David Goodwin joins us.

00:00:02.000 We talk about Paideia, the progressive model of education, and why you should make sure your kids are educated classically, classical education.

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00:00:28.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:00:29.000 Here we go.

00:00:30.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

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00:01:11.000 Joining us now is a very interesting man who co-authored a very important book, Battle for the American Mind with Pete Hegseth, David Goodwin.

00:01:19.000 David, welcome to the program.

00:01:20.000 Hey, it's good to be with you, Charlie.

00:01:21.000 You know, we really hit it off, I guess you could say, at a thing in Tennessee that Pete was hosting all about education.

00:01:29.000 And you and I just talked and talked and talked and talked, and really glad we did.

00:01:33.000 And also, you're involved with classicalchristian.org, right?

00:01:35.000 The American education.

00:01:36.000 Correct.

00:01:36.000 Yeah, the Association of Classical Christian Schools.

00:01:39.000 So I was really moved by one of the pamphlets you gave me that contrasts government education and industrial era education with classical education.

00:01:49.000 What are the differences?

00:01:50.000 Boy, there are two very different forms of education.

00:01:54.000 I suppose the biggest difference is they have two different goals.

00:01:59.000 The goal of modern public education is really to create subservient citizens who will do what the state tells them to do.

00:02:07.000 And the goal of classical education is to create free citizens, hence it was originally called liberal arts or the liberal education.

00:02:18.000 Yeah, and some would say that the modern industrial government model came from Prussia, like very much like sit-down, shut up, you know, top-down, authoritarian.

00:02:26.000 So let's define our terms.

00:02:28.000 Then how would you best define classical education for someone that's completely uninitiated?

00:02:33.000 Well, it was invented in Greece.

00:02:36.000 It was built in the West.

00:02:37.000 It formulated and effectively built the Western mind over the course of 2,000 years.

00:02:43.000 So it, of course, by definition is difficult to put your finger on necessarily, but it consists of the seven liberal arts.

00:02:53.000 The first three, grammar, logic, and rhetoric, are the linguistic training component of it.

00:02:57.000 And then the second four, which are called the quadrivium, and I won't go into those, but those focus on the mathematic elements of thinking.

00:03:08.000 Where did things change and who changed them when we went away from a classical base of education in this country?

00:03:14.000 Because the founders were all educated classically, correct?

00:03:17.000 Abraham Lincoln was educated classically.

00:03:19.000 So the people that we look very highly in, but the late 1800s, early 1900s, something changed.

00:03:24.000 Why and who?

00:03:26.000 Well, you put your finger on one of the things, which is the German model of education, which was a very industrial thing, came in in the mid-19th century.

00:03:33.000 But the real shift occurred in about 1915.

00:03:37.000 You can almost put your finger on it because John Dewey, the father of modern American education, by that time was having a strong influence in particularly the progressive movement as it rose.

00:03:48.000 And that progressive movement had some very specific goals in their agenda.

00:03:54.000 And one of them was to replace and eliminate classical education.

00:04:00.000 Dewey says as much.

00:04:01.000 Why?

00:04:02.000 Why would John Dewey, the great person, the person that we put up as like the archbishop of American education, why would he want to get rid of classical education?

00:04:10.000 Well, publicly, he said it was worthless because it didn't create, I suppose worthless might be a strong word, it was not useful because it didn't create citizens who could do anything like make widgets in a factory.

00:04:25.000 But what he was really attempting to do and what scholars have pointed to since is cow the American public into thinking in a particular way instead of being free and open thinkers who could evaluate logically what was being said.

00:04:44.000 Let's take a step back and understand the context of what was also happening politically during this.

00:04:48.000 Woodrow Wilson was president.

00:04:49.000 Woodrow Wilson was a German historicist who did not believe in the founders' vision for the country.

00:04:55.000 He believed that we must have, for lack of a better term, a philosopher king type council of experts that should be immune from political pressures.

00:05:02.000 I think that was actually a speech he gave.

00:05:05.000 And so simultaneously in 1915, you had an educational revolution.

00:05:09.000 So Woodrow Wilson won, largely because Teddy Roosevelt primored William Howard Taft, not primary, but he did primary and then he ended up running as a third party in the Bull Moose Party.

00:05:18.000 Wilson wins like 42% of the vote, former Princeton University president and professor and then governor of New Jersey.

00:05:24.000 Woodrow Wilson wanted to almost refound the country, right?

00:05:27.000 And yet education is the least talked about of the 19 teens.

00:05:32.000 We talk about the Federal Reserve Act, the Income Tax Act, the 17th Amendment, the 18th Amendment, but we don't talk about the educational revolution.

00:05:40.000 Was Dewey's vision simultaneously alongside Wilson to create like a secret society of a council of experts that are immune to any sort of pressure from the sovereign and a bunch of worker bees that will do what they're told?

00:05:54.000 I think so.

00:05:55.000 I mean, I think the entire pragmatic vision of Woodrow Wilson was pretty typical of the entire progressive movement, which was this weird admixture of guys even like Teddy Roosevelt, right?

00:06:11.000 He played a role in the progressive movement because he had the kind of the original manifest destiny.

00:06:18.000 I mean, it had been around for a while, but he really drove that home.

00:06:21.000 But it was this idea that America itself was salvific.

00:06:24.000 It didn't lean on Jesus Christ as the basis for America.

00:06:30.000 So it was in itself looking towards sort of an American, this manifest destiny piece.

00:06:39.000 And then that blended with Woodrow Wilson or, of course, the religious arm.

00:06:45.000 Wilson has been called the most religious president that we've ever had, which is a very strange thing when you think about what he promotes.

00:06:51.000 But he was, of course, the president of Princeton before he was president of the United States.

00:06:56.000 That was sort of a social gospel component where the gospel had been undermined and turned into this social activist group in the late 19th century.

00:07:06.000 So you had those two components, the manifest destiny and the social gospel folks, and then you had the socialists.

00:07:12.000 And Dewey was an atheistic humanist, but he also brought with him a lot of the socialist ideas that came in.

00:07:21.000 And those three things melded together into this thing called progressivism, which was kind of uniquely American, but it had at its center education because they knew that this thing called Paideia would control the direction of the country, and they needed to get control of it.

00:07:39.000 But it had one kind of downside, and that was it took about one or two generations, so 40 to 80 years, to actually turn the boat.

00:07:49.000 And so they started in about 1940.

00:07:52.000 What is Paideia?

00:07:54.000 Paideea is sort of the way I've sometimes described it is, you remember back in Vietnam, we brought a lot of babies here at the fall of Vietnam.

00:08:05.000 And many of us have met those people and know those people.

00:08:09.000 They are indiscernible from Americans when you talk to them, right? 1.00

00:08:13.000 They may look South Vietnamese, but they sound American. 0.82

00:08:18.000 That's because they were raised here.

00:08:20.000 And this is what Paideia really results in: it's the raising of a child to think and love and be a certain way.

00:08:28.000 And that's very different around the world.

00:08:30.000 The Greeks identified this a long time ago, and they thought, why don't we try and intentionally create a paideia that will be able to self-govern?

00:08:40.000 And that was the beginning of the West.

00:08:43.000 If you were to summarize in their own best words, what is the Paideia of the modern education establishment?

00:08:52.000 It's cultural Marxism, very clearly.

00:08:55.000 I mean, this is why we, you know, we watched in 2020 as the world seemed to turn on a dime.

00:09:01.000 Yes.

00:09:01.000 And that really didn't happen.

00:09:03.000 It didn't turn on a dime.

00:09:04.000 It turned on a 40-year paideia that had been embedded in kids for a very long time.

00:09:10.000 These are affections and values that they love.

00:09:13.000 So if you look at something like gay marriage, well, they had been enculturated, the children of America have, to believe that the worst thing you can possibly do is discriminate against some group of people who self-define in some group.

00:09:31.000 And because that was the value that was stated above all other values, it became sort of the driving force of everything else.

00:09:40.000 It still is.

00:09:41.000 Yes.

00:09:41.000 And how do you change that is an interesting question.

00:09:46.000 So the book is The Battle for the American Mind.

00:09:49.000 I had an opportunity, so did Blake, to go through one of your schools, I think the original flagship school, right?

00:09:56.000 In Boise.

00:09:57.000 It wasn't.

00:09:58.000 It wasn't the original, but it is one of the first ones, yes.

00:10:01.000 And we saw an amazing, I mean, a truly remarkable thing where we saw classroom after classroom.

00:10:11.000 I mean, these kids are reading Aristotle and Socrates and Plato, studying Aquinas.

00:10:17.000 If you're sending your kid to government school, I don't think you quite even understand what you are setting them up for.

00:10:25.000 Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.

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00:11:27.000 So let's walk through a difference.

00:11:29.000 In a government school, a fourth, fifth, and sixth grader, what will their day look like?

00:11:35.000 A classical kid, fourth, fifth, and sixth grade.

00:11:37.000 What does a typical day look like?

00:11:40.000 Well, the progressives decided that they were going to march everybody through the school.

00:11:45.000 So in a public school, you've got fourth is the same for every kid.

00:11:50.000 Fifth is the same for every kid.

00:11:51.000 The same for every kid.

00:11:52.000 They have a certain now.

00:11:53.000 In those grades, you've got, you know, they're mostly with one teacher, but they're going through textbooks.

00:11:59.000 They're being told information to memorize.

00:12:05.000 Probably in this day and age, the problem is they're not getting a lot done because one of the problems in the public schools is that so much of the energy is put into getting everybody up to the same level that it's very hard for kids to excel.

00:12:22.000 In a classical school, you know, the difference, we'd start in the fourth grade, they'd be reading a lot of classic children's works like the Arthurian Legends or Tolkien or fifth grade is usually where Tolkien kicks in, sometimes fourth grade for The Hobbit.

00:12:41.000 And the reason we read these books is that the language that they use is high language.

00:12:47.000 It's something that challenges the kids.

00:12:48.000 It elevates.

00:12:49.000 It elevates them, yes.

00:12:51.000 I think the progressives had this idea that kids were like computers.

00:12:54.000 You just program them one step at a time and you just kind of build a ramp for them.

00:12:59.000 What children really like to do, I tell this story sometimes.

00:13:02.000 If you take a kid and you have one of those stepping stone kind of walks between your house and the garage or something, what will every fourth grade boy do?

00:13:12.000 They'll skip around.

00:13:13.000 He'll try and jump them, right?

00:13:14.000 See how far he can get.

00:13:15.000 Well, that's what they're built to do, and yet we constrain them by pretending they have to take little baby steps. 0.99

00:13:22.000 I don't know how you're going to react to this, but in my personal opinion, the modern industrial system is very feminine. 0.79

00:13:29.000 Do you agree with that?

00:13:30.000 Yes, I definitely agree.

00:13:31.000 It's very hard, I think, for boys to find the challenges to overcome that make life interesting.

00:13:39.000 That's what makes a lot for boys.

00:13:41.000 It definitely makes life interesting to have challenges and things are really hard to do to overcome.

00:13:47.000 And I think for girls, sometimes too, they like that.

00:13:50.000 But in any event, the feminization of the grammar school in particular, how many snowball fights and dodgeball games have been stopped by the establishment because these things are aggressive.

00:14:05.000 And that's, of course, what you want to do: train young people.

00:14:09.000 Well, aggression is necessary to civilization.

00:14:13.000 It's definitely necessary.

00:14:14.000 It's also necessary.

00:14:16.000 Exactly.

00:14:16.000 It's necessary to train them.

00:14:18.000 If we just don't let them be aggressive, then they'll grow up and they'll be aggressive anyway because they're boys, but they'll do it in all the wrong ways.

00:14:25.000 Yeah, they'll join gangs and do bad things.

00:14:27.000 So, just can you add more examples as to why how for the non-believer or the people that are not persuaded, how is elementary school in the government sense feminized?

00:14:38.000 Well, part of it is that they take all competition out.

00:14:42.000 They try and remove any challenges that are hard to overcome.

00:14:46.000 They punish anything that looks like it isn't conforming to a room of 25 kids sitting in straight rows looking forward.

00:14:57.000 And a lot of boys just don't react well to that.

00:15:00.000 And this is why they end up in trouble more than the girls do.

00:15:05.000 And oftentimes that results in boys not liking school.

00:15:09.000 And then by the time they're in seventh, eighth, ninth grade, they've been conditioned not to like school.

00:15:14.000 And it just goes downhill from there.

00:15:15.000 And we all know what public schools are like in the deep secondary, right?

00:15:18.000 And then like the eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh.

00:15:23.000 That's where, you know, the bullying and all of that sort of thing.

00:15:26.000 It's because we aren't asking men or boys to be men.

00:15:30.000 We're not training them up to be men.

00:15:32.000 We're training them to be hooligans, basically. 1.00

00:15:37.000 And for young ladies, they're more agreeable.

00:15:39.000 And also, just from the literature selection in the government schools, like Little House on the Prairie is that that speaks more to a young female than it does a young man.

00:15:51.000 Young man wants to read Lord of the Rings a lot more than, you know, I lost my dog or old yeller or whatever.

00:15:58.000 I'm not saying that doesn't have a place, but the literature selection doesn't seem to excite young men.

00:16:04.000 There's been a whole book written on this.

00:16:05.000 I can't remember who wrote, it was a book recently on this.

00:16:09.000 Well, we try and get, we get them both ways.

00:16:11.000 So, like, at the school I used to be at, we would teach the Iliad at length, if you know, the Greek Iliad, which is the story of the fall of Troy, which is an all-war book to seventh graders.

00:16:20.000 And then by the ninth grade, they were reading Jane Austen.

00:16:23.000 So there was a little bit on both sides for the girls and the boys because there's greatness on either side of it.

00:16:29.000 Of course, there's greatness.

00:16:30.000 They will just the idea of a novel that excites a young man in a government school.

00:16:38.000 I haven't seen it very much recently.

00:16:39.000 Well, they've been taken out of different.

00:16:41.000 Yeah, they don't conform to the paideia that they want to deliver.

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00:17:50.000 So David, some people will say, but I want a neutral education for my kid.

00:17:55.000 That's what they're getting at the local government school.

00:17:58.000 It's the idea that you have a certain paideia in mind means that you know better than the kid.

00:18:04.000 Let's let them decide.

00:18:05.000 Right.

00:18:05.000 Well, that was the idea that was planted in the early progressive movement.

00:18:11.000 They called it plasticity.

00:18:13.000 That we don't, that society doesn't want to embed ideas in kids' minds because we need to preserve the plasticity of their minds.

00:18:23.000 That was their term.

00:18:24.000 Which, of course, was a fallacy.

00:18:25.000 You can't do that.

00:18:26.000 What you have is the injection of atheist ecumenism as a replacement.

00:18:31.000 And that was Dewey.

00:18:33.000 Dewey was a signer of the atheist ecumenist manifesto.

00:18:39.000 So, in fact, he penned much of it.

00:18:42.000 So the whole educational establishment knew better.

00:18:48.000 It knew that it wasn't going to actually provide a pluralistic, neutral education.

00:18:54.000 It just wanted to get people to let go of Christianity. 0.91

00:18:57.000 And so education in Latin means to lead forth.

00:19:01.000 And so you should be leading them forth towards something.

00:19:05.000 More and more parents are concerned about that.

00:19:08.000 But traditionally, the country I grew up in, when my parents sent me to school, it was, you know, general trust of institutions and the teachers know best and they're going to just be led towards an ability to get into college and have a nice career.

00:19:23.000 But that was never actually the case, was it?

00:19:26.000 No, they knew early on that they could shape the direction of the country.

00:19:32.000 Lawrence Kremen is someone I cite in the book who's a scholar from Columbia University who wrote the definitive book on American education and the history of it.

00:19:41.000 It won a Pulitzer Prize, and that's what he says in the book, essentially.

00:19:45.000 I can't pull the quote out of my head, but he essentially says that the progressives wanted more than just an institution.

00:19:52.000 They wanted to control the nation through the paideia of the nation. 0.99

00:19:56.000 And he uses that word, paideia.

00:19:58.000 Yeah, and so then when we think of what paideia we want, we want one that develops the character and the soul of the human being.

00:20:11.000 How do we best do that?

00:20:14.000 Well, there's a lot of ways that historically that's been done.

00:20:18.000 The stories that we embrace, the stories that we immerse our kids in, reading to our young children great stories, not the stories that they're getting out of the Walmart aisle or at the local bookstore.

00:20:33.000 Go back to the original, to the great.

00:20:36.000 But I think in Ephesians 6, you know, that's where we're told by, of course, Paul in that situation.

00:20:42.000 Fathers, don't provoke your children to anger, but raise them in the...

00:20:47.000 And then there's this word in the Greek called Paideia.

00:20:50.000 Oh, it's actually in the scriptures.

00:20:52.000 It is, yeah.

00:20:53.000 Raise them in the paideia of the Lord.

00:20:54.000 Now, if it's interesting, it's interesting.

00:20:56.000 If you go to the various various translations of that, it will be words like fear, admonition, education, instruction, training.

00:21:04.000 Well, those aren't good translations.

00:21:05.000 No.

00:21:06.000 But there's seven different words that are used in different translations there because the word isn't translatable into English.

00:21:13.000 And so Paul uses it several times in scripture, but it is a command.

00:21:20.000 What does he say to it?

00:21:20.000 Raise them in the paideia of the Lord.

00:21:23.000 So what we're called to do as Christians is to bring up our children in the path, as you said, the leading out of the Lord.

00:21:33.000 It's almost like trying to translate logos into English.

00:21:37.000 You just can't do it.

00:21:37.000 Exactly.

00:21:39.000 Right?

00:21:39.000 It's such a massive word that had serious weight for the thinkers of the time or the culture of the time that we don't even have an English equivalent to it.

00:21:51.000 Well, yeah, the Greeks had this, I mean, they just thought.

00:21:54.000 I think they just sat around and thought all the time.

00:21:57.000 They did other things.

00:21:58.000 Yeah, they conquered a few continents, that kind of thing.

00:22:00.000 But they packed a lot into a small word.

00:22:05.000 And you are so right.

00:22:06.000 Logos is another key word that means so much more than the word or reason.

00:22:12.000 Exactly.

00:22:13.000 Exactly.

00:22:14.000 It has a divine construct to it.

00:22:16.000 It has a meaning that ties to the transcendent ideals.

00:22:19.000 I mean, it gets real heady really fast.

00:22:22.000 Same with Paideia.

00:22:23.000 It's a very big word.

00:22:24.000 The guy who wrote the definitive work on that is three volumes.

00:22:28.000 He wrote three volumes, thousands of pages on that single word.

00:22:32.000 Yeah, and interestingly enough, I think that the first time that the logos was introduced was in Ephesus, which is also where Paul was writing his letter of the Ephesians, right, to the people of Ephesus.

00:22:43.000 Anyway, I think it was Heraclitus or Heraclitus that came up with it.

00:22:47.000 So this is important, though, because if you have a child and it says all throughout the scriptures, raise up a child in the ways of which they will go and they will not stray.

00:22:56.000 But the secular parent has this bizarre belief that I don't know better than my kid. 0.91

00:23:03.000 And it's this very liberated progressive that we have a democratized type family.

00:23:08.000 And who am I to tell my kid how to lead their life?

00:23:11.000 Right, right.

00:23:12.000 Which you're conveying a value just by doing that.

00:23:16.000 Just by doing that, you're conveying the value that you're values.

00:23:19.000 Yes, that's right.

00:23:20.000 That there is nothing better than that.

00:23:21.000 That difference is actually a statement of some truth or some ideal.

00:23:27.000 You're embedding that deep in their soul, that idea that truth doesn't matter.

00:23:32.000 Which is a truth claim itself.

00:23:33.000 Yes.

00:23:34.000 And so, but this is a, there's really no such thing then as atheists, and there's really no such thing as people without parents.

00:23:41.000 Something will fill those voids, right?

00:23:43.000 Yes.

00:23:43.000 Something will become God of your life or become apparent in your life.

00:23:48.000 And if you wanted the state to get bigger, wouldn't you then have the government education system that we currently have?

00:23:56.000 If you wanted government to expand and people to be happy little worker bees, then classical education is a threat to that.

00:24:04.000 Yes.

00:24:04.000 Well, it's why at the center of every educational system, there has to be something.

00:24:10.000 And with the one exception of Jesus Christ, the thing at the center is an idol.

00:24:17.000 It has to be.

00:24:18.000 It always has been an idol.

00:24:20.000 So the idolatry of our current country is that America or some set of values that the atheistic humanists have fed us or the cultural Marxists, those are in the center.

00:24:33.000 There will always be a center.

00:24:35.000 Like tolerance, diversity.

00:24:37.000 Right.

00:24:38.000 They will make up the center.

00:24:40.000 And this is when I started working with Pete.

00:24:44.000 This was one of the interesting early points of resonance that we had, was that he had been near one of our schools, met a couple of our students, Pete Hegseth at Falk, and he was impressed with their sort of manners and what have you.

00:24:59.000 And he wondered about whether our schools kind of taught patriotic things.

00:25:03.000 And I said, well, that isn't the way the country was set up.

00:25:06.000 The country was set up with Christian education, classical Christian education.

00:25:11.000 And that yields all kinds of goods, but they're in the periphery.

00:25:14.000 One of those is patriotism.

00:25:16.000 But it's a periphery item.

00:25:19.000 You can't put it at the center of education.

00:25:21.000 At the center has to be Christ because nothing else can support the weight of a Christian worldview and the weight of the West. 0.70

00:25:32.000 I mean, the whole Western world, the reason it's so hated and the reason Israel is so hated is because the tradition from which Israel and Christianity come form the true system of the West. 0.84

00:25:45.000 And so that's what has to be undermined and taken apart, which is what the critical theorists did after Dewey managed to strip Christianity out of the schools.

00:25:56.000 The critical theorists stepped in and retrained everyone to think in a deconstructed setting.

00:26:04.000 Yeah, Marcuse and Derrida and Foucault and Davis and Bell and Paula Fieri.

00:26:12.000 So then let's talk about some of the other then counterfeit worldviews because some people listening might say, okay, I'm not on board for the Christian worldview, so I'll just have kind of like a patriotic worldview.

00:26:25.000 Is that possible?

00:26:26.000 I guess it's better, but is that attainable?

00:26:29.000 Well, it comes to the word logos that you mentioned a minute ago.

00:26:32.000 The logos, of course, in the Greek understanding of it is the transcendent or ideal reality.

00:26:38.000 It is the mind of God.

00:26:40.000 And so if you're going to make America that thing, it's going to be too small to fill the role.

00:26:47.000 It's just, America is a great nation, but it's not great enough to fill an eternal transcendent role.

00:26:53.000 So it'll fail.

00:26:55.000 Everything you put in that center will fail if it is not big enough to fill that hole.

00:27:00.000 Yeah, that's exactly right.

00:27:02.000 And you could try.

00:27:04.000 I mean, obviously a patriotic virtuous education is better than not.

00:27:07.000 But so talk about, you know, how do you then, from a Christian perspective, blend Aristotle and Socrates and Plato into Christianity?

00:27:17.000 Because so I was educated from a Christian perspective, but it was strictly bibliocentric, no classical elements at all whatsoever.

00:27:26.000 I was thankful for it.

00:27:26.000 It worked for me, right?

00:27:28.000 It was amazing.

00:27:29.000 But you have a different approach.

00:27:30.000 You actually think the Greeks have something to contribute to creating strong Christians.

00:27:37.000 Because some in our audience don't agree with you on that.

00:27:40.000 Right.

00:27:40.000 So I'm taking the position that Christians took for 1,800 years, which is that the kingdom is invasive.

00:27:47.000 It covers everything.

00:27:49.000 There's no aspect, as Kuyper, the Dutch prime minister, once said, there's not one square inch in all of creation that Christ doesn't say is mine.

00:28:00.000 So if you're hoping to find a way to do classical education, so the unique thing about Christian classical education, or we call it classical Christian education, is that the Greeks invented it around the logos, around the transcendent.

00:28:22.000 Christ filled that role.

00:28:23.000 And early in the church history, we're talking first century, Christians like Justin Martyr, Origen, Clement of Alexandria, they spotted this and said Socrates was a proto-Christian.

00:28:34.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:28:35.000 Because if we remember, why was he killed?

00:28:37.000 He was killed because of the youth.

00:28:40.000 What did he tell them?

00:28:41.000 The truth.

00:28:41.000 Well, he said.

00:28:42.000 He asked a lot of great questions.

00:28:44.000 One of the things he taught them, for example, was that there could not be a multitude of gods.

00:28:50.000 Like they believed that.

00:28:51.000 No, I mean, his last dialogue was a case for monotheism.

00:28:54.000 It is, yes.

00:28:55.000 The euthophro dialogue is that way.

00:28:57.000 Anyways, not to get geeky here, I'm sure you and I would love to go back and forth on this.

00:29:01.000 I love it.

00:29:01.000 I actually, I studied it in a Claremont class last year, and here I am reading this.

00:29:06.000 I'm like, wow, Socrates was kind of the first monotheist in the Greek world before Moses was obviously before him.

00:29:14.000 Well, he comes up with so much stuff that's central to Christian doctrine.

00:29:17.000 We just don't realize it.

00:29:18.000 So the church that inform our audience of that.

00:29:21.000 Well, for example, holiness.

00:29:25.000 Does God, I mean, this was one of the questions he asked.

00:29:28.000 Does God just behave himself?

00:29:31.000 Does he just do the holy things?

00:29:35.000 No.

00:29:36.000 Socrates argued, whatever good God does, whatever he actually does, is holy by definition.

00:29:43.000 He's the creator of holiness by who he is.

00:29:47.000 So that's a little Christian doctrine that was picked up and, of course, built in through Augustine, some of the people you mentioned on your show earlier, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, all the way down through.

00:29:59.000 Much of Christian doctrine is informed by the Western mind, the mind of the Greeks.

00:30:05.000 So David, help our audience understand, because some people say, well, I'm sending my kid to a Christian school and they study the Bible every day, Bible stories.

00:30:13.000 That's fine, but I actually find the people that are in Christian or classical Christian, Christian, classical, that yes, do have the bibliocentric view, but they understand in Philippians it says whatsoever is true, whatsoever is beautiful, whatsoever is good.

00:30:27.000 That is a comprehensive way to then understanding the beauty of the scriptures because then it creates a hierarchy of beauty, doesn't it?

00:30:33.000 Correct.

00:30:34.000 Because then you have something to compare it to.

00:30:36.000 Build that out because some people would say, no, no, no, I don't want my kid studying Aristotle.

00:30:40.000 He was a pagan. 0.65

00:30:41.000 I only want him to study Esther or what's his way up.

00:30:46.000 It takes a little bit to get next to, but you've got to realize that in Christian theology, God is sovereign over all things.

00:30:53.000 God is sovereign over all things.

00:30:55.000 Because we know that.

00:30:56.000 We know he created the Greeks and He created the Greek mind and he put Jesus into time. 0.90

00:31:01.000 He wasn't.

00:31:02.000 In a very Hellenistic era.

00:31:03.000 Exactly.

00:31:04.000 A very Greek Hellenistic era.

00:31:06.000 The Bible is written in Greek, at least in the New Testament.

00:31:09.000 It's Kine Greek, yeah.

00:31:10.000 Koine Greek. 1.00

00:31:11.000 And it carried with it a lot of these meanings.

00:31:13.000 You and I talked about that earlier with Paideia, with Logos, but there's a lot of words in that category.

00:31:18.000 Hello, Eutheria, Ecclesia.

00:31:20.000 Yeah, isonomia, the Greek word for freedom.

00:31:23.000 And we are naive if we don't believe that God did that intentionally.

00:31:28.000 That there was something that the Greek and Roman world had to offer as a place for Christianity to launch, exactly.

00:31:39.000 And in fact, it fits very well.

00:31:42.000 We see it, of course.

00:31:43.000 There's the evident points.

00:31:44.000 What is it, Acts 17 with the Paul visits Athens?

00:31:49.000 Yeah, sure.

00:31:49.000 I've been there.

00:31:50.000 The Temple of Mars Hill, the Mars Hill, where he says, you know, these are the fake.

00:31:54.000 So he's referencing everything going on in that place.

00:32:00.000 It's interesting.

00:32:01.000 In front of the panel.

00:32:02.000 Yeah, as he's coming in there, he meets up with, it even specifies in scripture, Stoic philosophers.

00:32:09.000 Well, there's an entire story behind just that word, stoic.

00:32:15.000 It, of course, described a school of thought that was.

00:32:18.000 Seneca, Epicetus, Epischetus, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius.

00:32:23.000 Marcus Aurelius.

00:32:23.000 It came afterwards.

00:32:24.000 Yeah, 250 or so.

00:32:25.000 Yeah.

00:32:27.000 And all, and the Stoics had a whole school of thought.

00:32:30.000 And that later was addressed by the fathers of our church as they helped to coordinate the integration of the Greek mind into truth.

00:32:43.000 So your question originally, Charlie, was, what do we say to Christians who say we just need the Bible?

00:32:48.000 I'm sure you've received that objection before.

00:32:50.000 Oh, yes.

00:32:50.000 Okay.

00:32:51.000 Oh, we get it all the time.

00:32:52.000 Because why the thing is, is we'll read these Greek philosophers.

00:32:56.000 Now, they aren't inspired like Scripture.

00:32:58.000 No.

00:32:58.000 But we have the inspired scripture to look at and say, look, what they were saying actually adds colours.

00:33:04.000 Points, right?

00:33:05.000 Like Galatians 3, the law is a school teacher to Christ. 0.59

00:33:08.000 Exactly.

00:33:09.000 And it points to it and it clarifies.

00:33:12.000 It gives us the more that we can embrace it, the more that we can engage it, the more we understand it and certainly understand the language of the time and what scripture is even saying.

00:33:21.000 You know, we talked about the Logos.

00:33:23.000 You mentioned its reference in Ephesians.

00:33:27.000 Of course, the famous reference is in John 1 in the beginning was the Logos became flesh.

00:33:33.000 Yes.

00:33:33.000 And John, of course, was Greek-minded.

00:33:36.000 He was in Antioch and most of it, much of his ministry was there.

00:33:42.000 And so he carries in the book of John the Greek gospel into the mix.

00:33:49.000 And that is, you know, it's so integrated that the only reason when I sit down with parents and try and explain this, they just, it's not a matter of disagreement.

00:34:00.000 They just never have heard the story.

00:34:02.000 No, they have no idea.

00:34:03.000 Why haven't they heard this story?

00:34:05.000 Because the progressives buried it.

00:34:07.000 They wanted it to go away.

00:34:09.000 They had to bury classical education.

00:34:11.000 Dewey says he wants to bury classical education.

00:34:15.000 Yeah, I mean, I hate to like none dare call it a conspiracy, right?

00:34:18.000 But whatever you want to call it, it was a plan.

00:34:20.000 It was a scheme.

00:34:21.000 It's interesting you should say that.

00:34:22.000 So when we wrote the book, Pete and I, of course, it was published by HarperCollins, and there's an editor there.

00:34:27.000 And he said, hey, I don't really want to engage in a big conspiracy here.

00:34:32.000 And Pete and I both said, this isn't a conspiracy.

00:34:36.000 It was in the open.

00:34:38.000 They said what they were doing in a publication called The New Republic.

00:34:41.000 Yeah, that's it.

00:34:42.000 Another one called The Progressive.

00:34:43.000 That's why one of my favorite books is, it's called None Dare Call It a Conspiracy.

00:34:46.000 It's from 50 years ago.

00:34:47.000 And it's like, hey, it's not a conspiracy because you literally, it's all out in the open, right?

00:34:51.000 Like people want certain things and they tell you, but you're not allowed to call it that because you commit the crime of noticing.

00:34:56.000 David, we have to have you on again soon.

00:34:58.000 This was super deep and profound.

00:35:00.000 Plug any websites or books for us.

00:35:02.000 ClassicalChristian.org is our main association site.

00:35:05.000 ClassicalDifference.org is where parents and outsiders often find interesting stuff and information about classical education.

00:35:13.000 And then battlefortheamericanmind.org or dot com, excuse me.

00:35:16.000 BattleforthAamericanMind.com.

00:35:18.000 David, God bless you, men.

00:35:19.000 We're behind you 100%.

00:35:21.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:35:22.000 Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:35:25.000 Thanks so much for listening, and God bless.

00:35:30.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - October 29, 2023

Being Responsible for Your Children’s Education with David Goodwin

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