00:00:00.000Hey everybody, today in the Charlie Kirk Show, David Goodwin joins us.
00:00:02.000We talk about Paideia, the progressive model of education, and why you should make sure your kids are educated classically, classical education.
00:00:12.000Email us as alwaysfreedom at charliekirk.com.
00:00:15.000Get involved with turningpointusa at tpusa.com.
00:00:19.000Check out our education movement, turningpointacademy.com.
00:00:43.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:51.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:03.000Brought to you by the Loan Experts I Trust, Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage at AndrewandTodd.com.
00:01:11.000Joining us now is a very interesting man who co-authored a very important book, Battle for the American Mind with Pete Hegseth, David Goodwin.
00:01:36.000Yeah, the Association of Classical Christian Schools.
00:01:39.000So I was really moved by one of the pamphlets you gave me that contrasts government education and industrial era education with classical education.
00:01:50.000Boy, there are two very different forms of education.
00:01:54.000I suppose the biggest difference is they have two different goals.
00:01:59.000The goal of modern public education is really to create subservient citizens who will do what the state tells them to do.
00:02:07.000And the goal of classical education is to create free citizens, hence it was originally called liberal arts or the liberal education.
00:02:18.000Yeah, 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.
00:02:37.000It formulated and effectively built the Western mind over the course of 2,000 years.
00:02:43.000So it, of course, by definition is difficult to put your finger on necessarily, but it consists of the seven liberal arts.
00:02:53.000The first three, grammar, logic, and rhetoric, are the linguistic training component of it.
00:02:57.000And 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.
00:03:08.000Where did things change and who changed them when we went away from a classical base of education in this country?
00:03:14.000Because the founders were all educated classically, correct?
00:03:17.000Abraham Lincoln was educated classically.
00:03:19.000So the people that we look very highly in, but the late 1800s, early 1900s, something changed.
00:03:26.000Well, 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.
00:03:33.000But the real shift occurred in about 1915.
00:03:37.000You 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.
00:03:48.000And that progressive movement had some very specific goals in their agenda.
00:03:54.000And one of them was to replace and eliminate classical education.
00:04:02.000Why 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?
00:04:10.000Well, 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.
00:04:25.000But 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.
00:04:44.000Let's take a step back and understand the context of what was also happening politically during this.
00:04:49.000Woodrow Wilson was a German historicist who did not believe in the founders' vision for the country.
00:04:55.000He 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.
00:05:02.000I think that was actually a speech he gave.
00:05:05.000And so simultaneously in 1915, you had an educational revolution.
00:05:09.000So 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.
00:05:18.000Wilson wins like 42% of the vote, former Princeton University president and professor and then governor of New Jersey.
00:05:24.000Woodrow Wilson wanted to almost refound the country, right?
00:05:27.000And yet education is the least talked about of the 19 teens.
00:05:32.000We 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.
00:05:40.000Was 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?
00:05:55.000I 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?
00:06:11.000He played a role in the progressive movement because he had the kind of the original manifest destiny.
00:06:18.000I mean, it had been around for a while, but he really drove that home.
00:06:21.000But it was this idea that America itself was salvific.
00:06:24.000It didn't lean on Jesus Christ as the basis for America.
00:06:30.000So it was in itself looking towards sort of an American, this manifest destiny piece.
00:06:39.000And then that blended with Woodrow Wilson or, of course, the religious arm.
00:06:45.000Wilson 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.
00:06:51.000But he was, of course, the president of Princeton before he was president of the United States.
00:06:56.000That 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.
00:07:06.000So you had those two components, the manifest destiny and the social gospel folks, and then you had the socialists.
00:07:12.000And Dewey was an atheistic humanist, but he also brought with him a lot of the socialist ideas that came in.
00:07:21.000And 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.
00:07:39.000But 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.
00:07:54.000Paideea 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.
00:08:05.000And many of us have met those people and know those people.
00:08:09.000They are indiscernible from Americans when you talk to them, right?
00:08:13.000They may look South Vietnamese, but they sound American.
00:08:20.000And this is what Paideia really results in: it's the raising of a child to think and love and be a certain way.
00:08:28.000And that's very different around the world.
00:08:30.000The 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?
00:08:40.000And that was the beginning of the West.
00:08:43.000If you were to summarize in their own best words, what is the Paideia of the modern education establishment?
00:09:04.000It turned on a 40-year paideia that had been embedded in kids for a very long time.
00:09:10.000These are affections and values that they love.
00:09:13.000So 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.
00:09:31.000And because that was the value that was stated above all other values, it became sort of the driving force of everything else.
00:10:29.000We can make a difference standing for life by giving free ultrasounds with our friends at pre-born.
00:10:34.000In a Dobbs world, states decide about abortion, and so many liberal states are taking extreme stands, even allowing abortion up to literally the second before a baby is born.
00:10:45.000And in California, the demand for abortions has increased 400% in part because the state is inviting women and girls to come to California for the sole purpose of aborting their baby.
00:11:53.000In those grades, you've got, you know, they're mostly with one teacher, but they're going through textbooks.
00:11:59.000They're being told information to memorize.
00:12:05.000Probably 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.
00:12:22.000In 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.
00:12:41.000And the reason we read these books is that the language that they use is high language.
00:12:47.000It's something that challenges the kids.
00:12:51.000I think the progressives had this idea that kids were like computers.
00:12:54.000You just program them one step at a time and you just kind of build a ramp for them.
00:12:59.000What children really like to do, I tell this story sometimes.
00:13:02.000If 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?
00:13:41.000It definitely makes life interesting to have challenges and things are really hard to do to overcome.
00:13:47.000And I think for girls, sometimes too, they like that.
00:13:50.000But 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.
00:14:05.000And that's, of course, what you want to do: train young people.
00:14:09.000Well, aggression is necessary to civilization.
00:14:18.000If 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.
00:14:25.000Yeah, they'll join gangs and do bad things.
00:14:27.000So, 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?
00:14:38.000Well, part of it is that they take all competition out.
00:14:42.000They try and remove any challenges that are hard to overcome.
00:14:46.000They punish anything that looks like it isn't conforming to a room of 25 kids sitting in straight rows looking forward.
00:14:57.000And a lot of boys just don't react well to that.
00:15:00.000And this is why they end up in trouble more than the girls do.
00:15:05.000And oftentimes that results in boys not liking school.
00:15:09.000And then by the time they're in seventh, eighth, ninth grade, they've been conditioned not to like school.
00:15:32.000We're training them to be hooligans, basically.
00:15:37.000And for young ladies, they're more agreeable.
00:15:39.000And 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.
00:15:51.000Young man wants to read Lord of the Rings a lot more than, you know, I lost my dog or old yeller or whatever.
00:15:58.000I'm not saying that doesn't have a place, but the literature selection doesn't seem to excite young men.
00:16:04.000There's been a whole book written on this.
00:16:05.000I can't remember who wrote, it was a book recently on this.
00:16:09.000Well, we try and get, we get them both ways.
00:16:11.000So, 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.
00:16:20.000And then by the ninth grade, they were reading Jane Austen.
00:16:23.000So there was a little bit on both sides for the girls and the boys because there's greatness on either side of it.
00:16:52.000All you have to do is go to members.charlikirk.com today or charliekirk.com and click on the members tab.
00:16:59.000Sign up for access to all of our exclusive content.
00:17:03.000Never before seen interviews, weekly columns written by me, all of my most recent speeches in one place, videos where I answer your questions and so much more.
00:17:12.000Plus, we're going to be inviting members to Zoom calls with me starting very soon.
00:17:17.000Help keep us uncensored by providing you with new content daily by becoming a member.
00:17:21.000Your support means the world to me and the whole team.
00:17:24.000Sign up today at members.charliekirk.com.
00:17:27.000If we have blessed you in any way, if this show has impacted your life, if you like the impact that we are making for other people and young people especially, consider becoming a member.
00:17:36.000It's affordable for people of all income levels.
00:17:38.000You guys get amazing perks and benefits and it's only beginning.
00:18:42.000So the whole educational establishment knew better.
00:18:48.000It knew that it wasn't going to actually provide a pluralistic, neutral education.
00:18:54.000It just wanted to get people to let go of Christianity.
00:18:57.000And so education in Latin means to lead forth.
00:19:01.000And so you should be leading them forth towards something.
00:19:05.000More and more parents are concerned about that.
00:19:08.000But 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.
00:19:23.000But that was never actually the case, was it?
00:19:26.000No, they knew early on that they could shape the direction of the country.
00:19:32.000Lawrence 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.
00:19:41.000It won a Pulitzer Prize, and that's what he says in the book, essentially.
00:19:45.000I can't pull the quote out of my head, but he essentially says that the progressives wanted more than just an institution.
00:19:52.000They wanted to control the nation through the paideia of the nation.
00:20:14.000Well, there's a lot of ways that historically that's been done.
00:20:18.000The 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.
00:20:33.000Go back to the original, to the great.
00:20:36.000But I think in Ephesians 6, you know, that's where we're told by, of course, Paul in that situation.
00:20:42.000Fathers, don't provoke your children to anger, but raise them in the...
00:20:47.000And then there's this word in the Greek called Paideia.
00:21:39.000It'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.
00:21:51.000Well, yeah, the Greeks had this, I mean, they just thought.
00:21:54.000I think they just sat around and thought all the time.
00:22:24.000The guy who wrote the definitive work on that is three volumes.
00:22:28.000He wrote three volumes, thousands of pages on that single word.
00:22:32.000Yeah, 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.
00:22:43.000Anyway, I think it was Heraclitus or Heraclitus that came up with it.
00:22:47.000So 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.
00:22:56.000But the secular parent has this bizarre belief that I don't know better than my kid.
00:23:03.000And it's this very liberated progressive that we have a democratized type family.
00:23:08.000And who am I to tell my kid how to lead their life?
00:24:20.000So 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.
00:24:40.000And this is when I started working with Pete.
00:24:44.000This 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.
00:24:59.000And he wondered about whether our schools kind of taught patriotic things.
00:25:03.000And I said, well, that isn't the way the country was set up.
00:25:06.000The country was set up with Christian education, classical Christian education.
00:25:11.000And that yields all kinds of goods, but they're in the periphery.
00:25:19.000You can't put it at the center of education.
00:25:21.000At the center has to be Christ because nothing else can support the weight of a Christian worldview and the weight of the West.
00:25:32.000I 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.
00:25:45.000And 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.
00:25:56.000The critical theorists stepped in and retrained everyone to think in a deconstructed setting.
00:26:04.000Yeah, Marcuse and Derrida and Foucault and Davis and Bell and Paula Fieri.
00:26:12.000So 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.
00:27:49.000There'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.
00:28:00.000So 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.
00:28:23.000And 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.
00:29:36.000Socrates argued, whatever good God does, whatever he actually does, is holy by definition.
00:29:43.000He's the creator of holiness by who he is.
00:29:47.000So 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.
00:29:59.000Much of Christian doctrine is informed by the Western mind, the mind of the Greeks.
00:30:05.000So 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.
00:30:13.000That'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.
00:30:27.000That is a comprehensive way to then understanding the beauty of the scriptures because then it creates a hierarchy of beauty, doesn't it?
00:33:12.000It 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.
00:33:33.000And John, of course, was Greek-minded.
00:33:36.000He was in Antioch and most of it, much of his ministry was there.
00:33:42.000And so he carries in the book of John the Greek gospel into the mix.
00:33:49.000And 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.