The Charlie Kirk Show - From the Archive: What Is Wisdom? Why Our Schools Stopped Teaching It

00:00:03.000 My name is Charlie Kirk.

00:00:05.000 I run the largest pro American student organization in the country fighting for the future of our republic.

00:00:11.000 My call is to fight evil and to proclaim truth.

00:00:14.000 If the most important thing for you is just feeling good, you're going to end up miserable.

00:00:19.000 But if the most important thing is doing good, you will end up purposeful.

00:00:24.000 College is a scam, everybody.

00:00:26.000 You've got to stop sending your kids to college.

00:00:27.000 You should get married as young as possible and have as many kids as possible.

00:00:31.000 Go start a Turning Point USA college chapter.

00:00:33.000 Go start a turning point USA high school chapter.

00:00:35.000 Go find out how your church can get involved.

00:00:37.000 Sign up and become an activist.

00:00:39.000 I gave my life to the Lord in fifth grade.

00:00:41.000 Most important decision I ever made in my life.

00:00:43.000 And I encourage you to do the same.

00:00:45.000 Here I am.

00:00:46.000 Lord, use me.

00:00:48.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:00:49.000 Here we go.

00:00:56.000 Noble Gold Investments is the official gold sponsor of The Charlie Kirk Show, a company that specializes in gold IRAs and physical delivery of precious metals.

00:01:06.000 Learn how you could protect your wealth with Noble Gold Investments at NobleGoldInvestments.com.

00:01:13.000 That is NobleGoldInvestments.com.

00:01:14.000 Hello, everybody.

00:01:18.000 Welcome.

00:01:19.000 Glad you're here.

00:01:19.000 It's good to be home.

00:01:21.000 And there are a few good things and not so good things that have come from Illinois.

00:01:26.000 Jury's out if I'm one of them, but Turning Point for sure.

00:01:30.000 Thank you for all of the amazing work that the Turning Point Academy team has put in to putting together this event.

00:01:37.000 Hutz and Jennifer and Francine and Scott have worked very hard on the whole Turning Point Academy team.

00:01:42.000 For those of you that follow Turning Point, we are a busy bunch.

00:01:45.000 We just had our Young Women's Leadership Summit last weekend where we had 2,500 young women leaders in Dallas, Texas.

00:01:54.000 And if you saw any of the media coverage about it, it's a completely different type of gathering than you would expect.

00:02:01.000 First of all, we said that there's no men pretending to be women allowed at our Young Women's Leadership Summit, which shouldn't be a controversial thing to say.

00:02:11.000 And of course, now we have our Educators Summit.

00:02:14.000 And then coming up in a couple weeks, our sister organization, Turning Point Action, in West Palm Beach, Florida.

00:02:20.000 We're hosting Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Dan Bongino, and any presidential candidate that wants to show up.

00:02:27.000 And so if you guys are looking for, if you're bored in July, you want to come down to West Palm Beach, Florida, that lineup is going to make some headlines for sure.

00:02:36.000 But this is one of the most important things that we're doing.

00:02:38.000 I'm thrilled with Hutz's leadership, and it's full circle.

00:02:41.000 I gave my life to the Lord.

00:02:43.000 Thanks to Mrs. Weber, I still call her Mrs. Weber.

00:02:45.000 You can't get over that, right?

00:02:48.000 In fifth grade.

00:02:49.000 And really, third, fourth, and fifth grade set me on a trajectory for my life's work.

00:02:55.000 And that's when I was at Christian Heritage Academy.

00:02:57.000 I went to government school after that.

00:02:59.000 So that's a really important note for some of you that are educators or parents.

00:03:03.000 Even if a couple years of strong education can make that foundation more than you could ever imagine.

00:03:09.000 So it was third, fourth, and fifth grade at Christian Heritage Academy.

00:03:11.000 Then I went to MacArthur Middle School.

00:03:13.000 Some of you might be familiar with that.

00:03:14.000 And then Wheeling High School.

00:03:16.000 Which some of you are familiar with.

00:03:18.000 And they've disowned me at that school.

00:03:21.000 But I am going to talk about Wheeling in a second because there's a lot of lessons to learn there.

00:03:27.000 I had a great experience there.

00:03:29.000 I really did.

00:03:29.000 I can't say that that school's in a good place anymore, which is too bad because the trends that we are seeing nationally unfortunately infected that school.

00:03:37.000 I'll talk about that.

00:03:39.000 But Hutz then took over Christian Heritage Academy after I left, so we kind of crossed paths.

00:03:43.000 And that's how we got reconnected.

00:03:46.000 Through a local friend of mine, Jack Vita, who's a great kid, and he connected us super energetic.

00:03:50.000 The Lord wanted us to work together, and we immediately hit it off.

00:03:54.000 And I mean, our whole vision, our broad vision, everything we do at Turning Point, and I forgot to mention, we just had our pastor summit where we had 1,100 pastors in Nashville, the largest pastor summit of its kind, and we have another one coming up in a few weeks.

00:04:07.000 We're doing all sorts of stuff.

00:04:09.000 Is our big picture vision, as we believe firmly that Western civilization is special and unique, rooted in biblical values and ideas, and that we are called through our own obligation to do our part to try to save Western civilization against people that want to destroy it.

00:04:27.000 And, you know, this is something that not every Christian agrees with me on.

00:04:30.000 Some people say, Charlie, Western society doesn't matter.

00:04:33.000 It doesn't matter the government that you have.

00:04:35.000 I think that's wrong.

00:04:36.000 Jeremiah 29 7, demand the welfare of the nation that you are in.

00:04:39.000 I'm not saying it's the most important thing.

00:04:41.000 The most important thing is spreading the gospel.

00:04:43.000 But the second most important thing is to make sure you can do the first thing.

00:04:46.000 And when we lived during COVID and they deemed the church non essential and strip clubs, liquor stores, marijuana dispensaries were essential and the church was not, and Easter and Pentecost was, you weren't even allowed to go to church.

00:04:57.000 You had to wear masks and be socially distanced.

00:04:59.000 I said, no, something here is really, really terribly wrong.

00:05:03.000 And we also must be very honest that, you know, in countries that are less free, totalitarianism is directly at odds with liberty, which is God's idea, not man's idea.

00:05:12.000 And so there is a place, I think, for believers to contest in this and to love the nation that you are in and also have gratitude because we do not live in a country or a civilization like any other.

00:05:22.000 I think this is a, I'll be very blunt, which is kind of my thing, right? 0.91

00:05:27.000 I think it's hyper entitled upper middle class Christian talk. 0.91

00:05:31.000 If you act as if there's nothing special about America, if you kind of just scoff and you're like, oh, this country's like everything else, you know, God doesn't really care about this.

00:05:39.000 I think that is a complete disrespect to the Bible believing courageous Christians that founded this nation, that died for this nation, that poured into the form of government, consent to the governed, checks and balances, individual liberty, independent judiciary.

00:05:54.000 These are all biblical principles.

00:05:55.000 The most cited book in the formation of the United States government was Deuteronomy, right?

00:06:01.000 Most kids can't even spell Deuteronomy, right?

00:06:03.000 And in fact, that's going to be something I'm going to talk about in a second.

00:06:05.000 On the Liberty Bell, they put Leviticus on the Liberty Bell, okay?

00:06:10.000 Not Psalms, not Proverbs, not John.

00:06:12.000 Leviticus proclaim liberty in the land of which you are in.

00:06:16.000 And so, for some people that say, oh, Charlie, there's no place for patriotic elements in Christian education, I disagree completely.

00:06:23.000 I think that we need to contest for liberty because it's something that has an eternal ring to it.

00:06:29.000 And so, a couple thoughts that I want to share with you today.

00:06:32.000 Let me talk about Wheeling High School, then I'm going to talk about something that happened yesterday on Jeopardy.

00:06:36.000 Which actually ties into why we are here, which I think is one of the most illuminating pieces.

00:06:41.000 It's a 10 second clip that is one of the most powerful things I have seen and why Turning Point Academy matters.

00:06:46.000 Meg's 10 second clip, Jeopardy!

00:06:48.000 So I'll leave you in suspense there.

00:06:49.000 But first, let me tell you about Wheeling High School.

00:06:52.000 It was a great place to go to school.

00:06:54.000 I say this to reporters all the time.

00:06:56.000 I'm sure there are some reporters that are either, they snuck their way in.

00:06:59.000 Welcome, by the way.

00:07:00.000 Hope you learned something.

00:07:01.000 Glad you're here.

00:07:01.000 And so I mean that.

00:07:03.000 We've got nothing to hide, right?

00:07:04.000 We're just trying to make sure the next generation, Loves God and loves the country, right?

00:07:08.000 Not a huge agenda here.

00:07:10.000 So these reporters sometimes challenge me because I'll say this.

00:07:14.000 I said I was a minority in the high school I went to.

00:07:16.000 They don't believe me, right?

00:07:17.000 Because there's kind of this archetype as if I went to New Trier.

00:07:19.000 I didn't.

00:07:19.000 I went to Wheeling.

00:07:20.000 You guys know the difference, right?

00:07:22.000 As if I went to some sort of Lily White high school.

00:07:24.000 Nothing wrong with New Trier, right? 0.88

00:07:25.000 But the point is that I was a minority in the high school I went to 53% Hispanic, English is second language.

00:07:31.000 If you know Wheeling, you know the area.

00:07:32.000 And it was a great place to go to school, right?

00:07:34.000 It was like the United Nations, over 80 countries represented.

00:07:37.000 And when I went to high school, no exaggeration.

00:07:39.000 Nobody cared about race.

00:07:40.000 Nobody cared about race, right?

00:07:42.000 We had black kids, we had Polish, we had Vietnamese, we had Japanese, we had South Africans.

00:07:46.000 There was not even like a whisper of racial insensitivity. 0.99

00:07:50.000 Were there like stupid jokes here or there? 0.99

00:07:52.000 Yeah, 16 year olds being 16 year olds. 0.99

00:07:54.000 But we all looked at each other as human beings on our sports teams, in our classrooms, in our competitions.

00:07:59.000 And it was a great place to go to school, right?

00:08:00.000 Won state championships on marching band and debate and all this.

00:08:03.000 It was a great place to go to school.

00:08:05.000 And now, 10 years later, that very same school is completely different.

00:08:08.000 District 214 has been taken over by social emotional learning and critical race theory.

00:08:12.000 They're emphasizing race where there was no problem to begin with, where it was a school where I was always told that race doesn't matter and character matters.

00:08:21.000 Now I see from the outside that race matters and character doesn't matter that much.

00:08:26.000 That is not progress.

00:08:27.000 That is a regression, everybody.

00:08:29.000 And it pains me.

00:08:30.000 I am saddened because I know what education can and should be.

00:08:35.000 Were there problems where I went to high school?

00:08:36.000 Yeah, there were liberal teachers.

00:08:37.000 Now, who cares, right?

00:08:38.000 The point is, you're going to get that in government education, right?

00:08:41.000 But I can tell you that there was not the retribalization of 17 or 18 year olds based on the melanin content of people's skin.

00:08:50.000 And I can say from personal experience that it worked and it was beautiful, and that's what education should be.

00:08:58.000 Now, you have these academics that see racism where it doesn't exist and create it where it doesn't exist.

00:09:04.000 They're literally creating more racism where these kids otherwise would not be acting in that way.

00:09:11.000 And it's really a tragedy.

00:09:12.000 We're seeing this happen in schools across the country.

00:09:15.000 And so, this has personally been a motivation for me to empower Hutz and the Turning Point Academy team because seeing something that once worked and then see it become somewhat largely unrecognizable.

00:09:28.000 Really pains me.

00:09:29.000 And I'm sure all of you have your own personal experiences of an institution that wants to be great, once was great, and a school that wants to be great.

00:09:35.000 And so I'm personally motivated to try to push back against it.

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00:09:46.000 There's an organization I really, really appreciate called Christian Healthcare Ministries.

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00:10:56.000 Critical race theory, I believe, is from the pit of hell.

00:10:58.000 It is one of the great evils in our society.

00:11:00.000 There is no compromising with it, it judges people based on the color of their skin.

00:11:04.000 Not their content.

00:11:05.000 They do not believe in individual agency.

00:11:08.000 They believe in societal power dynamics.

00:11:10.000 It is a false assumption, it is against exactly what we're called to do in the scriptures, which is look at people with souls.

00:11:16.000 They look at people strictly as what power dynamic group that they're in.

00:11:20.000 And anybody who even entertains it to a slightest degree, I think, either doesn't mean well or they really don't know what they're doing.

00:11:27.000 It could be one of the two.

00:11:28.000 I think there's a lot of people that don't quite understand what they're doing.

00:11:30.000 But we're seeing it happen in society, right?

00:11:32.000 I mean, at Cal Berkeley, they have black only graduation ceremonies, right?

00:11:36.000 At over 200 campuses now, they have black only dormitories.

00:11:39.000 And we're told this is progress. 0.99

00:11:41.000 Just so you know, the new racial orthodoxy is that whites should have their own areas and blacks should have their own areas.

00:11:48.000 Not exactly a unique take to be like, hey, we tried to get away from that in our country.

00:11:52.000 That is literally what is now being created.

00:11:56.000 And if you challenge it, you're a racist.

00:11:59.000 That is where we are.

00:12:00.000 Okay, second thing, I want to talk about Jeopardy.

00:12:02.000 So somebody asked me the other day, Charlie, what is the goal of Turning Point Academy?

00:12:08.000 I said, well, there are a lot of goals.

00:12:09.000 One of the most important goals is to make sure that kids are wise, not just that they know a bunch of stuff.

00:12:16.000 Big difference. 0.97

00:12:18.000 Most Christian education out there. 0.99

00:12:21.000 Will not be able to clearly tell you that.

00:12:24.000 You see, there's a massive contrast between modern John Dewey centric education and a classical Christian bibliocentric education.

00:12:32.000 There's a philosophical difference, and I'm gonna paint some of those contrasts for you.

00:12:36.000 But first, let me tell you about something I saw.

00:12:38.000 If you saw it, it went viral, and if not, it's worth thinking about.

00:12:41.000 So I'm a big fan of Jeopardy!

00:12:43.000 I grew up watching it a lot with my grandmother.

00:12:45.000 I'm okay at it, I'm not that good, right?

00:12:47.000 But I'm above average.

00:12:49.000 And so I was watching this clip.

00:12:53.000 And you have these three brainiacs, and just to even get on Jeopardy super hard, right?

00:12:57.000 You have to compete.

00:12:58.000 It's not like, hey, we randomly select you.

00:13:00.000 These are very smart, credentialed people, okay?

00:13:02.000 And this was like the introductory question, right?

00:13:04.000 It was like a $200 round, right?

00:13:06.000 And so they give you the answer, so you have to say the question.

00:13:10.000 They basically have the Lord's Prayer, right?

00:13:16.000 And all you had to do was fill in what is hallowed, right?

00:13:19.000 It was a missing thing.

00:13:21.000 You know, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come.

00:13:23.000 And you got these three brainiacs that just stare into and they don't know the most elementary question, right? 0.76

00:13:33.000 And then you watch the full episode, they're not dumb, these are smart people, high IQ, high functioning people. 0.79

00:13:40.000 And they could tell you the difference, different Greek gods, they could tell you about sub Saharan species elimination, right?

00:13:47.000 They could tell you about climate change trends, right?

00:13:50.000 They were quoting like 60s rock songs, and but they couldn't tell you the most.

00:13:57.000 It's the simple question about the Lord's Prayer, and that is a perfect example of modern education.

00:14:02.000 These people are standing up there, and yeah, they know a bunch of facts, but they have no wisdom.

00:14:10.000 And there is a total difference between that.

00:14:12.000 You send your kid to most colleges and most secular institutions, they will be able to recite a bunch of information, but they don't have wisdom.

00:14:23.000 So, what is wisdom?

00:14:25.000 Wisdom is the knowledge of the things that never change.

00:14:29.000 Wisdom is being able to tell the difference between good and evil.

00:14:34.000 Wisdom is being able to understand the difference of what is man and God, man and nature, holy and profane.

00:14:42.000 These are questions that you can't answer easily just by memorizing a bunch of stuff.

00:14:47.000 It takes work to get to wisdom.

00:14:49.000 Now, some of you might say, well, Charlie, you know, you can get wisdom through life experience.

00:14:53.000 You can, but there's no guarantee.

00:14:56.000 And usually the only way, but you're basically telling me is that.

00:15:00.000 I want my kid to experience a bunch of pain to get wisdom because that's the only way that you could get wisdom the old fashioned way it is pain.

00:15:06.000 And that's fine.

00:15:07.000 We should not want to shield our kids from pain, but there's a much easier way to get kids wisdom at a younger age, which is make them do the work.

00:15:16.000 Read the good books, spend time in the scriptures, and have meaningful dialogues in the pursuit of truth.

00:15:23.000 It does not happen in 99% of schools, and it doesn't happen in most Christian schools, by the way.

00:15:29.000 In fact, most Christian schools are having an industrial style. 0.90

00:15:32.000 Hyper feminized model of education.

00:15:35.000 Now you might say, what do you mean hyper feminized? 1.00

00:15:37.000 Having kids sit around all day long and just read books like Little House on the Prairie is a hyper feminist, failed model of educating young boys.

00:15:45.000 Boys need to move every 20 minutes and need to be involved in learning all the time. 0.59

00:15:50.000 Most Christian schools, they're like, never heard of this before.

00:15:52.000 Like, well, we just have kids sit single file, and that's a really good way to make sure kids suffering from ADD get hyper medicated at a young age, young boys especially. 0.99

00:16:00.000 It's a failed model.

00:16:02.000 And yet we keep on repeating it.

00:16:04.000 We're wondering, like, well, why is this generation the most suicidal, depressed?

00:16:08.000 Alcohol addicted, drug addicted, screen addicted, and social media generation history.

00:16:12.000 I don't understand.

00:16:13.000 Why is it that they are increasingly believing that there is no God and all this?

00:16:17.000 Well, first of all, the whole premise of how we're doing education is completely flawed.

00:16:22.000 If you look at Woodrow Wilson, who was, I think, America's worst president, and John Dewey, who was a terrible person, and he was the father of modern public education, really government education, they decided to turn the page, turn their back, I believe, all out steamroll.

00:16:39.000 What founded this country, which was classical Christian education? 0.89

00:16:43.000 Every major founding father was classically Christian educated.

00:16:46.000 Now, what does that mean?

00:16:47.000 That means they reasoned from the Bible.

00:16:49.000 They studied Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

00:16:52.000 They studied Aurelius.

00:16:53.000 They studied Epictetus.

00:16:55.000 They studied Seneca.

00:16:56.000 They studied all the classics.

00:16:58.000 And they, first and foremost, were educated in a way of you'll eventually can fill yourself with information.

00:17:04.000 Do you know right from wrong and good from evil?

00:17:06.000 And are you going to have the temperance and the prudence to make decisions for the rest of your life?

00:17:12.000 Are you going to be what Aristotle called a well-souled being?

00:17:16.000 That's not a question most education even thinks about asking now.

00:17:19.000 You know what they say is, well, I just want my kid to have a bunch of skills so that he could go get a job.

00:17:25.000 Instead, it should be, I want my kid to be a good person.

00:17:30.000 It's a much different approach.

00:17:32.000 And I could say this right now: when you don't emphasize wisdom, when you don't emphasize diving deep into these ideas, then yeah, there's a lack of morality, and that's pretty obvious.

00:17:45.000 Creates an unhappy people.

00:17:47.000 It also creates mass societal moral subjectivity.

00:17:52.000 And you get bad politics because of that. 0.87

00:17:54.000 You get real, you get, I mean, you get this pride garbage that we're seeing in our country right now. 0.97

00:17:59.000 Men can give birth, all that. 0.93

00:18:01.000 It starts from a flawed educational premise.

00:18:06.000 And so in modern education, they believe that kids need to be endlessly entertained, right?

00:18:14.000 Videos, movies.

00:18:17.000 Classical education believes learning is an end in itself.

00:18:22.000 That it's not a means, but learning is an end.

00:18:24.000 That it's one of the greatest things a human being can do.

00:18:28.000 Totally different.

00:18:29.000 Where modern education is like learning is an inconvenience to get you to a skill set so you can make money.

00:18:34.000 Whereas classical education believes that you become a joyful person when you learn.

00:18:39.000 And I know that to be true, and you do too.

00:18:41.000 That the deeper you understand, the first line of Aristotle's metaphysics is all men desire to know, yearn to know.

00:18:49.000 In modern education, they say, How many times have you heard that we must equip young people for an ever changing global economy?

00:18:56.000 How many times have you read that in a silly pamphlet, right? 1.00

00:19:00.000 That nauseating garbage. 1.00

00:19:02.000 How about this? 0.99

00:19:03.000 We must have young people to be able to have the courage and the wisdom to act against evil.

00:19:10.000 That's a big difference, right?

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00:20:45.000 So, what we're getting at is that it's not even a matter that we have liberal education and conservative education.

00:20:51.000 The form and the process of actually how we're educating kids ourselves needs to be reconsidered.

00:20:58.000 And that's what Turning Point Academy is trying to do.

00:21:00.000 And we're not the only ones.

00:21:01.000 Hillsdale's done a great job of this, right?

00:21:03.000 There's so many great groups that are doing this.

00:21:05.000 But honestly, I think we're barely even touching the surface.

00:21:08.000 Because when I sit down with Christian parents, they say, Oh, yeah, you know, I send my kid to a great Christian school.

00:21:15.000 And I say, Okay, well, you know, answer a couple questions like, What is the premise of the school?

00:21:20.000 What do they consider to be the end?

00:21:22.000 And it kind of gets a little bit fuzzy at times.

00:21:24.000 And there's some great Christian schools, obviously.

00:21:27.000 However, the amount of Christian schools that try to fit into that modern form is alarming. 0.78

00:21:36.000 And I'll give you another example.

00:21:38.000 You know, parents should have to ask the question of, And having a daughter now, you start asking these questions, right?

00:21:46.000 Is when I'm going to choose education, what exactly is the process that I want them to go along?

00:21:55.000 So the word education in Latin literally means to lead forth, right?

00:21:58.000 And actually comes from the allegory of the cave to lead forth from darkness into light.

00:22:02.000 Modern education believes all viewpoints are equal.

00:22:08.000 Okay?

00:22:09.000 And so do some Christian schools, by the way.

00:22:11.000 If you dive in, it's like, well, we don't want to offend people, and there's a lot of good ideas out there.

00:22:16.000 Properly rooted Western Christian education believes that there is a truth and you should love the child enough to lead them on the path and the journey to get to that truth.

00:22:28.000 That's completely different than believing that everybody has, you know, similar type, equal footing ideas, egalitarianism of ideas.

00:22:38.000 That's really bad.

00:22:39.000 And that's where you get this new modern educational model where a first grade teacher will sit around and ask, okay, I want to hear what all of you think about what's going on in the news.

00:22:48.000 Who cares what the kids have to say?

00:22:51.000 Teach them something.

00:22:54.000 Modern education believes old is bad.

00:22:57.000 This is a built, this is one of the great cancers of our society.

00:23:03.000 I fight it every day on these campuses, right?

00:23:05.000 That old is bad. 1.00

00:23:06.000 It's like, oh, they didn't have airplanes when Socrates wrote, so they must have been really dumb. 0.96

00:23:12.000 Or that Bible is so old.

00:23:14.000 I like flipping things, I think flipping is actually one of the coolest things we have.

00:23:18.000 To be able to do with our reason, which is a gift from the Lord.

00:23:21.000 So they say old is bad.

00:23:23.000 They say, oh, it's so old, it's outdated.

00:23:25.000 You could flip it into the opposite, which is true.

00:23:27.000 Hey, maybe if something old is still as popular as it is, it's probably true.

00:23:32.000 It's like the exact opposite, right?

00:23:34.000 Maybe the thing that is thousands of years old is still the most quoted, most sourced, most foundational text.

00:23:41.000 There's probably some staying power to this document.

00:23:44.000 You should have humility before you dismiss it because we have Twitter and Advil, and Paul the Apostle didn't, right?

00:23:53.000 Like, oh, wow, he wasn't very advanced, which gets down to an even more fundamental thing.

00:23:57.000 And I'm happy to say that at most turning point training events, I think 90% of our kids get this question right, but we're not at 100%.

00:24:05.000 We just had a Texas training, and most kids got the question right, some didn't.

00:24:08.000 And the kids that didn't were Christian educated, right?

00:24:11.000 And it was a very simple question which is, are human beings naturally good or are they naturally bad, right? 0.94

00:24:16.000 And the Christian kids thought they were naturally good, which goes to show that whoever school they go to should be shut down and burned to the ground, right? 1.00

00:24:24.000 Not a hard question to answer, right? 0.99

00:24:27.000 And they meant well, they said, Their reasoning was like, well, God is good and God made us.

00:24:33.000 Not good theology, right?

00:24:35.000 At all.

00:24:36.000 Missing a big part of the story, including everything after the fall, which is basically a flaming tragedy till Christ comes, right?

00:24:44.000 Lying, rebellion, cheating, stealing, arson, war, lying, rebellion, cheating, stealing, arson, war, Christ, right?

00:24:50.000 It's just after the other.

00:24:52.000 So, are human beings naturally good or naturally bad?

00:24:57.000 This is an incredibly important question. 0.94

00:24:58.000 Classical education believes human beings are rotten.

00:25:02.000 Modern education believes human beings are great.

00:25:05.000 Why does that matter?

00:25:07.000 Because if you believe human beings are great, then what do you have to teach them?

00:25:12.000 Just some skills, but you also then have to motivate them to be activists against what is bad, which is the system.

00:25:18.000 Because then they have to explain evil.

00:25:19.000 And the way that modern educators explain evil is racism, sexism, homophobia, colonialism, climate change.

00:25:25.000 External, external, external, not you.

00:25:28.000 External, not you.

00:25:29.000 Classical education believes that.

00:25:31.000 No, you're the problem.

00:25:33.000 And you got a lot of work to do.

00:25:35.000 You got to learn self control.

00:25:36.000 You got to learn gratitude.

00:25:38.000 You got to learn humility.

00:25:39.000 You got to learn temperance.

00:25:41.000 And you got to do it over and over and over and over and over again.

00:25:44.000 The way education should operate is education used to be where we used to tell young people, you're the problem and America is great.

00:25:54.000 Now, in modern education, we say that you're great and America's the problem. 0.93

00:26:00.000 The self esteem thing is a pile of anti biblical garbage that has come into our schools. 0.98

00:26:05.000 And most Christians don't have the courage to say it because they want to be nice. 1.00

00:26:08.000 I don't care about being nice.

00:26:09.000 I care about being true or telling the truth.

00:26:12.000 And I think self esteem actually increases suicide.

00:26:14.000 I think self esteem actually creates really bad behavior.

00:26:17.000 And I'll prove it to you.

00:26:19.000 There's this poster at Wheeling High School, and this was one of my big debates I had.

00:26:22.000 You're perfect the way you are.

00:26:24.000 And I remember going up to a teacher, I said, If I'm perfect the way I am, why are we in school?

00:26:27.000 Why are we doing homework?

00:26:30.000 Instead, the proper message should be, You're not all yet, you could be.

00:26:34.000 Completely different.

00:26:36.000 One is about a journey.

00:26:38.000 Of eventually reaching a destination through hard work, sacrifice, and discipline.

00:26:43.000 The other one is this affirmation as if you've completed your path in the ninth grade.

00:26:49.000 That's not even fair to the kid, right?

00:26:51.000 It puts all this pressure on them.

00:26:54.000 And so the question of is a human being naturally good or naturally bad is one of the most important questions an educator can ask.

00:27:02.000 Because then, as a society, you must explain why there is all this crumminess happening.

00:27:07.000 I think the answer is pretty simple because you believe the raw material we're dealing with.

00:27:12.000 Post the fall is pretty awful.

00:27:17.000 So, you must teach goodness.

00:27:18.000 You must teach right and wrong.

00:27:21.000 And you must do it repeatedly.

00:27:23.000 And when challenged, the postmodernists who control the education system, you could tell that most of them don't have kids.

00:27:33.000 Because when you have kids, you realize that they're very sweet, but they do things you did not teach them, that they got from somewhere, such as, it's about me.

00:27:46.000 And I asked this to parents, we haven't had this phenomenon yet, but I can't wait.

00:27:49.000 It's going to be great.

00:27:51.000 Of a kid turning one parent against the other, manipulation.

00:27:55.000 Was there like a manipulation seminar where you sat that kid down?

00:27:59.000 Here's how you do it you game them here, and you do it here, or is it kind of just like instinctive?

00:28:05.000 Is it automatic for a two year old absent education to say thank you?

00:28:11.000 No.

00:28:13.000 Gratitude has to be repeatedly reminded.

00:28:16.000 Incentivized and then demanded because you're not naturally grateful people.

00:28:25.000 I talk about jobs and industries on this show all the time, but I didn't expect to find an entire skills trade community on TikTok plumbers, electrician, builders, and contractors sharing the work they do every day.

00:28:37.000 And it went way beyond tips and tricks.

00:28:39.000 People were sharing their craft, connecting with local contractors, and talking about how they were building their businesses and growing their teams.

00:28:46.000 It opened my eyes. To how people in the trades are using TikTok to share their skills, make connections, and find new opportunities.

00:28:52.000 I remember thinking, this is exactly what we need more of people sharing what they know and creating opportunities for others.

00:28:58.000 And I never expected to find a community like this.

00:29:01.000 That's the thing about TikTok.

00:29:03.000 You start with something you know, and suddenly you're finding a whole new side of it that surprises you and leaves you wanting to know more.

00:29:08.000 Your next discovery is waiting for you on TikTok.

00:29:11.000 Learn more at TikTok.comslash discover more.

00:29:17.000 And I'll prove it to you further.

00:29:19.000 Again, they reject the scriptures, the modernists.

00:29:22.000 But I love the book of Exodus, one of my favorite books of the Bible.

00:29:26.000 Incredibly wise for a variety of reasons.

00:29:29.000 And I think there's so much to learn from Sinai and from human nature and tyranny, which I think a lot of what we're living through right now actually Exodus speaks to.

00:29:37.000 So God delivers his chosen people after incredible intervention, right?

00:29:40.000 Ten plagues, a little thing.

00:29:42.000 They're in the desert for like a couple days, mind you.

00:29:44.000 This is not even like years, okay?

00:29:48.000 Blows quail off course, manna from heaven, the whole deal, right?

00:29:51.000 They wanted for nothings what the scriptures were.

00:29:52.000 They weren't hungry, they weren't all this.

00:29:54.000 And then they start yammering. 0.99

00:29:57.000 Send me back to Egypt. 1.00

00:29:58.000 We want to go. 0.99

00:29:59.000 Who is this Moses guy?

00:30:01.000 Who does he think he is? 0.81

00:30:02.000 We want to go back to Egypt where we were slaves because at least we had meat. 0.88

00:30:13.000 Ungrateful.

00:30:15.000 Another favorite line in the book of Exodus, which is everything we are living through.

00:30:18.000 It's the turning point of the whole get it?

00:30:21.000 Turning point of the whole book of Exodus, which is great because everything is going in kind of this post Genesis, Genesis 12, you know, history starts. 0.98

00:30:27.000 Abram, you're a bum. 0.96

00:30:28.000 Get up, leave your dad's house, right? 1.00

00:30:30.000 Boom, all of a sudden history starts, right?

00:30:32.000 And we get all the way to Joseph, and then Genesis ends, Exodus begins, and there's this incredible line where everything changes.

00:30:44.000 And then there was a king, it says king, but Pharaoh's, fine, who rose to power who did not know Joseph.

00:30:51.000 And that was, all of a sudden everything changed.

00:30:53.000 So what did he mean?

00:30:54.000 Joseph saved Egypt from annihilation.

00:30:57.000 Well, God did, but he interpreted the dreams.

00:30:59.000 And that's very important.

00:31:00.000 Joseph never took credit for it.

00:31:00.000 He said, it's God who's giving him the power.

00:31:03.000 Pharaoh was like, Yeah, I have no memory of that. 0.91

00:31:06.000 And he became a tyrannical maniac. 0.76

00:31:09.000 I could replace it by saying, and then came a generation who did not know George Washington.

00:31:15.000 And then came a generation who did not know Abraham Lincoln.

00:31:19.000 That's what you're living through. 0.63

00:31:21.000 The whole book of Exodus, the tyranny, God's, all started with a Pharaoh, a king, being like, meh, who cares if we are, I don't know, who is the Joseph guy? 0.95

00:31:31.000 Why do we have all these people here again? 0.99

00:31:33.000 Like, who are these Hebrews? 1.00

00:31:34.000 Like, why do they take Saturdays off? 1.00

00:31:35.000 Like, it's really weird.

00:31:38.000 Turn them into slaves.

00:31:40.000 Just like that.

00:31:41.000 If you do not have a memory of what came before, tyranny is going to come.

00:31:47.000 And then you get into Exodus 20, right?

00:31:50.000 God's covenant with his people continues.

00:31:53.000 Ten Commandments, which everybody just follows the Ten Commandments.

00:31:55.000 It's actually more than Ten Commandments, that's a separate issue.

00:31:58.000 Because it really is.

00:32:00.000 There's a lot.

00:32:01.000 For example, you need to work six days, not just.

00:32:03.000 There's a lot there.

00:32:04.000 It could be anywhere between 12 to 14, depending on how you read it.

00:32:07.000 But the first is the first sentence is super important, right?

00:32:13.000 For I am the Lord your God who delivered you from Egypt. 0.99

00:32:15.000 In case you morons forgot. 0.98

00:32:19.000 You know, when I parted the sea and the coil off course and the manna thing and all this, I'm the God that delivered you from slavery. 0.99

00:32:28.000 And of course, they do forget and they do the golden calf because that's human nature, which is rebellion and ingratitude.

00:32:33.000 And that's who we are.

00:32:35.000 But the one that I do want to make sure I emphasize of the Ten Commandments is the only one that involves our nation and involves a promise.

00:32:42.000 The only one.

00:32:43.000 Honor your mother and father so that you may live long in the land of which you are in.

00:32:48.000 And everything that modern secular education aims to do, intentionally or unintentionally, is to break the bond between a parent and a child.

00:32:58.000 Everything.

00:32:59.000 It is directly against that commandment.

00:33:02.000 Totalitarians need to make families strangers, they need to make moms and kids foreign to one another.

00:33:12.000 Strong families are the greatest threat to totalitarianism.

00:33:18.000 When Stalin took power in Russia, he taught everyone that your true mother is Mother Russia, the Russian government.

00:33:24.000 In Mao's China, the first thing he did was enlist the Little Red Guard and pay kids and reward kids with candy to turn in parents to the gulag.

00:33:34.000 And that same generation is now running the Chinese Communist Party in China.

00:33:39.000 What do parents also do?

00:33:40.000 Parents have a memory of things before.

00:33:42.000 That's why it says honor your mother and father so that you may live long in the land of which you are in.

00:33:50.000 And that word honor literally means heavy, to treat your parents heavily, to treat that relationship not lightly.

00:33:57.000 So, the word in Hebrew, heavily and honor, are the same word, and light and curse is the same word.

00:34:02.000 So, if you were to treat them lightly, you were to curse them.

00:34:04.000 It's the same root in biblical Hebrew.

00:34:08.000 And if you send your kid to Deerfield High School, no offense, there will be an overt or subversive campaign to ruin that bond.

00:34:20.000 So that's why we're here.

00:34:22.000 We're here because you're educators, because you guys have roles that have influence.

00:34:26.000 Some of you are in government schools.

00:34:27.000 Some of you are in private schools.

00:34:29.000 Some of you guys are in home schools.

00:34:31.000 We need to just continue this education revolution.

00:34:33.000 We're here to partner with.

00:34:33.000 There are so many organizations doing great work.

00:34:37.000 We need more.

00:34:37.000 More is more is more.

00:34:40.000 And I could tell you that we need to go on a rescue mission right now for the kids of this country that are currently being held hostage by this godless, secular, Situation that we find ourselves in.

00:34:52.000 We need to rescue those kids because there are so many great kids out there and parents that might mean well that have them in these just terrible institutions.

00:35:01.000 And we see the result, right?

00:35:03.000 The result is just terrible.

00:35:05.000 But there's a better, deeper way to educate the next generation.

00:35:10.000 We know it works.

00:35:11.000 When you do it right, you get leaders that you make statues to.

00:35:15.000 When you do it wrong, you get people that want to take statues down.

00:35:22.000 In the founding generation, there were about what we called 15 to 20 game changers, right?

00:35:27.000 John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Gouverneur Morris.

00:35:31.000 You can go through the whole list, right?

00:35:32.000 George Mason.

00:35:34.000 All classically Christian educated, every single one of them.

00:35:37.000 The question is, where are the game changers right now in America?

00:35:41.000 You have to be sowing into that. 0.74

00:35:43.000 And I know some of you as Christians, you say, sorry, it seems so overwhelming.

00:35:47.000 You know, the odds are stacked against us.

00:35:50.000 You cannot engage.

00:35:51.000 You have to do your duty to the divine as an obligation, as a form of worship, regardless of how the odds are stacked against you.

00:36:02.000 And so I'm incredibly hopeful.

00:36:03.000 I'm hopeful because homeschooling has multiplied in recent years.

00:36:07.000 Look at this attendance here.

00:36:08.000 This is beyond anything we could have imagined.

00:36:10.000 It's really beautiful.

00:36:11.000 And we're going to keep on doing this.

00:36:14.000 I'm hopeful because I really think people are finally starting to wake up in a very serious way.

00:36:18.000 I think Christians are really starting to see the spiritual dimension of what's going on.

00:36:22.000 I certainly pray that's the case.

00:36:25.000 And we're seeing a hunger, an appetite, a desire to educate kids in the proper way, in the way that is proven and biblical, not in this secular, industrialized model.

00:36:37.000 That does not enrich the soul of the student.

00:36:42.000 So that's what we're here to do.

00:36:48.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to charliekirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - October 04, 2026

From the Archive: What Is Wisdom? Why Our Schools Stopped Teaching It

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