00:00:01.000What a week it has been with Virginia and New Jersey all across the country.
00:00:07.000And this Saturday we want to bring you a partnership.
00:00:10.000Actually, it's a perfect word to use because the word college actually comes from the word partnership with our college that we love here on the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:00:19.000Hillsdale College, the beacon of the North, the place where real learning gets done.
00:00:27.000We have the president of Hillsdale College, Dr. Larry Arn, the last college you could call Hillsdale College, where they talk about Christianity, faith, theology, liberty, truth, America.
00:00:39.000I have learned so much from Dr. Larry Arn over the last year and a half and especially, or last year and a half, especially.
00:00:48.000And before we get into that conversation, I want to tell you more about our partnership with Hillsdale College.
00:00:52.000I have completed eight online courses.
00:00:55.000It is my goal to finish every single online course that they offer.
00:00:59.000It takes work and things in life that are meaningful.
00:01:07.000I asked Dr. Arne about this in our conversation, and I could definitely agree with this in my own personal life, which is we want to point upwards.
00:01:16.000We want to go towards things that matter.
00:01:19.000I know in my own personal life, when I push myself to keep climbing to eternal things, to beautiful things and good things, I find that fulfilling.
00:01:28.000And I wouldn't have told you that five or six years ago.
00:01:31.000Not that I wouldn't have thought it mattered, but as you start to realize the more you learn, the less you know when you thought you knew it all.
00:01:40.000So we've partnered with Hillsdale College, charlie4hillsdale.com, for you to be able to take the very same courses that I think will actually help you make sense of some of the things we talk about here on this program.
00:01:51.000We are going a million miles a minute sometimes and dropping names like John Locke and Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, Socrates, Plato.
00:02:20.000I never knew there was so much depth to the history of civil rights in America.
00:02:25.000And as I told many of you, I have finished the Western Heritage course all about Rome, ancient Greece, the medieval period, all the way up to the glorious revolution.
00:02:50.000That's what we're doing at Hillsdale College.
00:02:52.000Their mission is to try and supply the nation with the information, the knowledge, and the wisdom, which is the knowledge of things that do not change, to anyone who wishes to learn.
00:03:05.000I believe right now when we have chaos and uncertainty around us, it's the perfect time to learn.
00:03:13.000It's the perfect time to open up books and pursue big ideas.
00:03:16.000And that's exactly why I've been so enthused and so excited to tell you about this partnership and work through it.
00:03:23.000We have a fair amount of people that are already taking these courses, and I know that it will enrich your life.
00:03:28.000And if you have children, or if you are a college student or high school student, these classes will help give you another side of the story if your teacher is teaching all this left-wing, Marxist, post-modernist, deconstructionist, socially relativistic, atheistic garbage.
00:03:44.000I think the Hillsdale Online Course can help you at charlie4hillsdale.com.
00:03:48.000Or if you're homeschooled and you're just looking for a little bit of an addition to what you're already teaching your children, I think that it can be very beneficial to you.
00:03:58.000I asked Dr. Arn about what does education mean?
00:04:02.000And Dr. Arne goes through in great detail why we need to dismiss this phrase.
00:04:08.000Oh, we just want to teach young people how to think, not what to think.
00:04:46.000I'm really excited to see all of you in Phoenix, Arizona at AmericaFest, tpusa.com slash A-M-F-E-S-T, December 18, December 19, December 2021.
00:04:57.000We have Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump Jr., Candace Owens, Jesse Waters, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and so many other amazing speakers, including my wife, will be there as well.
00:05:40.000We talk about education, we talk about the founding fathers and he is so wise, so get your pens out, start taking notes and I hope this course actually I hope this conversation motivates you to enroll in one of their free online courses, charlie4hillsdale.com.
00:06:22.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:07:16.000I see a lot of people kind of fumbling that recently, even people on the center right that would call themselves conservatives, people that say, Well, we got to teach people how to think, not what to think, or we got to listen to kids and give them what they want.
00:07:30.000And that's not the how to how to think, not what to think.
00:07:34.000If you just think about it for a minute, it's silly, right?
00:07:37.000Do we want to raise them up to think that the moon is made out of green cheese?
00:07:42.000Uh, so the point is, if you step back from our mechanistic engineering society, which touches across the political spectrum, by the way, education is not like making anything, it's like helping something to grow.
00:08:00.000But the growth is in the thing, right?
00:08:04.000You can plant an acorn all day long and you'll never get a pine tree out of it, right?
00:08:16.000Now, you know, the Latin word education means to lead forth, educare, and that raises the question: which way is forth?
00:08:27.000And that means, you know, the Bible says, train up a child in the way he should go, which is not the same thing as the way he wants to go in all cases.
00:08:37.000But of course, people do want to grow to be fully what they are.
00:08:42.000So, education is just helping them learn.
00:08:45.000And you have to step back again in another way, too, because human beings love to know.
00:08:52.000The first line of Aristotle's metaphysics: the human being stretches himself out to know.
00:11:44.000The curriculum, K through 12, almost everything that's taught are things that anybody can know if they have common sense and take trouble to gather knowledge and think about it, right?
00:12:03.000And that means that expertise is not the thing in school.
00:12:07.000In fact, at almost any level, you know, you don't have to be a rocket scientist unless you're teaching rocket science.
00:12:17.000And so schools can be, must be, should be transparent.
00:12:24.000And that means parents can understand too.
00:12:53.000Here's a great episode from the life of Winston Churchill.
00:13:00.000When the socialists beat him after the cataclysm of the war, they put a guy named Mr. Douglas Jay, he's famous, for this statement, in charge of education.
00:13:14.000And there weren't any ministry of education back then, but he was the guy working on it.
00:13:20.000And he said this, and he made the terrible mistake of making it in the hearing of Winston Churchill.
00:13:25.000He said, mothers don't often know what's best for their children.
00:13:33.000The gentlemen in Whitehall know better.
00:13:35.000Whitehall is the governing center of England.
00:13:38.000The gentlemen in Whitehall know better, right?
00:13:42.000That's just exactly like that idiot Terry McAuliffe in Virginia.
00:13:49.000In other words, because we're scientifically trained in some way, by the way, and almost none of these bureaucrats are actually scientifically trained because you can't be scientifically trained in this kind of thing.
00:14:04.000So, yeah, it just, and just remember, these arguments that lie behind the administrative state will deprive us of the ability to operate as effective human beings because everything will have to be done for us.
00:14:20.000And we are then mere subjects in every sense, like subjects of a tyrant, but also like subjects of all of their work upon us.
00:15:03.000And no matter what success you have in your life, and I expect you're going to have a lot more, if you get yourself some kids, which I encourage, then what you will know because they live is that there will be that many people who think something is extremely important has happened the day you die.
00:15:24.000You'll have this relationship with them, and it's sacred and it's tight and it can't go away.
00:15:31.000If it's destroyed, the resentment will last forever.
00:15:36.000And so that's the first thing: the primary human experience.
00:15:53.000And then the last thing is your contact with the divine, which is written in every reflection you have about right and wrong, every perception you have about what things are and how they fit and in what order.
00:16:07.000You're always thinking about God when you're thinking that way.
00:16:10.000That's something you said you liked about this course in Ethiopia.
00:16:13.000We taught on the ethics, which is Aristotle just explains that sublimely.
00:16:19.000And that means that those three things, right?
00:16:22.000Your family and your work and your contact with the divine as a moral, intellectual, responsible agent, those are the three fundamental elements of human life.
00:16:36.000And Lord, they're messing with them all.
00:16:39.000And that means there'll be nothing left for us to do.
00:16:41.000And I think what happened in Virginia is people are coming to see that now.
00:16:48.000And so I want to kind of zero in on one thing you mentioned, which is debated, which is if education means to lead forth, and I learned this in a Hillsdale online course.
00:16:59.000So for everyone listening, go to charlieforhillsdale.com and check it out.
00:17:03.000It's a phenomenal course on Western philosophy and just intro to philosophy.
00:17:08.000The lead forth, I believe, Dr. Arne, you could correct me, is from the allegory of the cave, is where that imagery came from, where it's a lead forth from darkness into light, which is, so then what is the proper way to lead children?
00:17:23.000That is the debate in some ways, because there is three types of camps right now in the education debate that I'm able to perceive.
00:17:31.000One that wants to lead children forth towards critical race theory, an emphasis on diversity, equity, inclusion, the 1619 project.
00:17:39.000Another camp that says, we're not going to make any truth claims.
00:17:42.000We're just going to show the kids everything that's out there and they can kind of go through the buffet line and choose as they see fit.
00:17:48.000But then there's another way, I would call it the Hillsdale way or the classical education way that says we're going to lead them forth towards truth, towards people of strong character, or I learned from you, which means that which is etched in like tattoo.
00:18:00.000So, Dr. Arn, can you help explain that a little bit?
00:18:03.000Because some parents get nervous when you say you're going to lead them forth to something and say some things are better than others.
00:18:09.000Well, remember the caveat, they're going to make the trip, right?
00:18:16.000You don't grow for the plant, you just nourish it.
00:18:19.000And if you nourish it right, it will grow better.
00:18:22.000But yeah, so the first thing, you know, in this day and age, it's kind of extreme.
00:18:30.000And so this thing that I think is always true in education is especially important today.
00:18:36.000And that is all you do is show them, help them figure out what things are.
00:18:55.000But just think, now compare Aristotle's account of the human being, which, you know, anybody can understand, by the way.
00:19:04.000I mean, it takes some work to divine it directly from Aristotle, but Aristotle says, how do you see the cup on the table and know what it is?
00:19:36.000It has something to hold it together as what it is.
00:19:40.000And the reason we can see its essence is because we have a receptive soul.
00:19:49.000Whatever is holding this cup together, I've got one in my hand, whatever is holding that together is also working on my intellect to build it in there.
00:20:03.000And he says the intellect is nothing before it thinks.
00:20:11.000And that means it's more perfectly receptive than anything except God.
00:20:17.000Now, an immaterial thing cannot have a color, right?
00:20:27.000And so when they teach that your race is a structural feature of your being, they are telling the students it is impossible for you to have objective knowledge of anything.
00:20:38.000It destroys the enterprise at the first step.
00:20:42.000And, you know, that's all materialism, communism, socialism, Nazism, all of those things.
00:20:49.000What they do is they reduce the human being to matter.
00:20:53.000And so education, and you're not going to get all that in kindergarten.
00:20:59.000Education has to be built on the assumption from the first day that you are a free being able to think and comprehend and speak.
00:21:10.000And reason and speech are synonyms in Greek.
00:21:52.000And that chapter, book three, chapter four, is about four pages long.
00:21:58.000Now, they're difficult pages, but they're very worth understanding.
00:22:02.000And things like that should be put out as a goal to students early.
00:22:07.000Like, you know, you think you're going to, like there's a proscription in literature today that you do not privilege the text over the reader.
00:22:22.000What that means is don't tell them that this is good or bad.
00:22:25.000Let them make up their own mind, right?
00:22:28.000And, you know, when they're young, you're establishing a point already, and that is whatever claims about excellence are made are questionable, right?
00:23:33.000And I said, because, first of all, he thinks it's valuable.
00:23:37.000Telling you that's neutral, that's a position too.
00:23:41.000Telling him it's bad, that's a position, right?
00:23:44.000But by taking you to church, he could be certain that in the end, you would have to make up your own mind, as you have just demonstrated.
00:23:56.000And he said, how did I demonstrate that?
00:23:58.000I said, by asking me that question about your dad.
00:24:02.000In other words, you're not, you have to get them on a road to build their essential skills, which are reading, writing, and arithmetic, and their knowledge.
00:24:14.000And as they learn to evaluate, they will be able to question whatever they need to question.
00:24:19.000Whereas if you start them off with the final answer, which is nothing is true except what we think is true, then that crushes all questing for knowledge.
00:24:39.000It needs to be presented to the students as good, as good for them, as good to know, as beautiful thing to know.
00:24:47.000And, you know, by the time they get to college, it's a, you know, the way we proceed around here is, first of all, we, you know, everything is open to question.
00:24:59.000But that doesn't mean the teachers and the college are not very influential with the kids because we have a structure here.
00:25:05.000And, you know, you can't get into this college unless you commit to the structure.
00:25:11.000That means you have to be a volunteer.
00:25:14.000And we even explain at the moment that they volunteer that they can't right now understand everything they're getting themselves into.
00:25:21.000They will be able to think it through while they go.
00:25:24.000And that means they're free and their freedom is cultivated in them by the discipline of learning.
00:25:34.000So, Dr. Arn, you say this in some of your interviews where some freshmen or sophomore students will say, well, Dr. Arne, I feel or I think a certain way.
00:25:44.000And you'll say, well, I don't really care about how you think.
00:25:46.000Because that's an interesting way to put it.
00:25:49.000Maybe I'm miscategorizing it, but it's a different way than most colleges would do it, which is to say, well, the students know best.
00:25:57.000We got to listen to them first and foremost.
00:25:59.000Well, so, you know, I'll illustrate with a story.
00:26:04.000Many years ago now, 15 years ago or something, I had a young man stand up and it's a crowd, a big, big crowd of people, four or five or six hundred of them.
00:26:14.000And he said, if I come to Hillsdale, will you respect my opinion?
00:26:20.000And I said, yeah, we don't give a crap about that.
00:28:21.000How do you know which ones to conserve?
00:28:25.000You know, there's a lot that need destroying.
00:28:28.000And so, you know, eventually you'll reach the definition that, first of all, all such definitions depend upon a claim that the thing is good.
00:28:38.000And, you know, because only good things.
00:28:40.000And then, and then that raises the question: what makes a thing good?
00:28:46.000Which are the prime subject in the Socratic dialogues, for goodness sake, right?
00:28:51.000Some of the most important and beautiful things ever written, exploring all the time what is it for a thing to be good.
00:29:01.000And so you've got to get kids on that quest, and then their souls will elevate and they'll become good at figuring out things that are good and not good.
00:29:13.000And that's, you know, that's what education is.
00:29:17.000Well, I can say that taking the online courses and reading your work, Dr. Arne, I've been on that journey and it's been so fulfilling.
00:29:25.000And I might have got a later start than I would have liked, but it's been nourishing to my soul.
00:29:31.000So I want to ask you about one of your books, The Founder's Key, and kind of a series of arguments you make in that book and the lectures that you do around this topic.
00:29:41.000I think it ties into some of the national news items today around our history and also education.
00:29:50.000In the book, you make the argument that the Declaration and Constitution fit almost perfectly within one another.
00:29:57.000This argument is rejected by a lot of academics.
00:30:01.000They think they're actually two separate types of documents, and the Constitution was fixing the errors of the Declaration of Independence.
00:30:08.000You argue that the Declaration is kind of our birthday, our birth certificate.
00:30:14.000And that's a big deal where the French or the Chinese or other nations, you could kind of approximate within a couple hundred years where they started, but not a specific date and a moment.
00:30:23.000Please explain that to our audience and just also about the exceptionalism of our founding and a little bit of what you talk about, the connection, the divine connection between the Declaration of the Constitution.
00:30:35.000Well, you know, first of all, remember, it's conservative scholars when they differ with the Declaration of Independence who say that the Constitution fixed its errors.
00:30:44.000The liberals think that the Constitution blemished the Declaration of Independence.
00:30:51.000And my argument, I claim it's the true argument, is that they're hand in glove.
00:30:57.000And that's easy to demonstrate on just these simple grounds.
00:31:01.000First of all, there's a wide overlap between the people who wrote them.
00:31:06.000Second, they didn't understand the Declaration as a departure.
00:31:11.000I mean, there's a historical record about that.
00:31:14.000The third thing is just read the documents, right?
00:31:18.000The Constitution gives its chief task is to give a structure of government.
00:31:25.000And the structure is a beautiful thing.
00:31:27.000It's worth thinking about for years about that thing, because remember, the first three articles of the Constitution are each about a branch of government.
00:32:23.000And he appears as the supreme judge of the world, the judicial branch.
00:32:29.000And those are the four times he occurs.
00:32:31.000And the lesson, even in the Declaration of Independence, is you put all those powers in one set of hands if they were God's hands.
00:32:40.000Then inside the Declaration of Independence, because you know, the Declaration of Independence is in three parts, a beautiful beginning that's a kind of universal statement of the authority under which they are proceeding.
00:32:53.000And they needed that, by the way, because they're getting ready to throw off the English law, and they need something outside and above that to start.
00:33:04.000And they start with the laws of nature and nature's God.
00:33:07.000The last part is the legislative act, very grand.
00:33:11.000Appealing to the supreme judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, we hereby declare these free and independent states.
00:33:29.000That case is introduced at the end of the first part when they say, prudence indeed will dictate that governments long established will not be changed for light and transient causes.
00:33:41.000In other words, you need an argument why it's right to do this crazy thing.
00:34:30.000And so if you just think about it, what would it, if you just read all of those charges and think, what kind of procedure would it take to remedy all these evils he's done?
00:34:43.000And the answer you get is the Constitution of the United States.
00:36:37.000But a big event happens in the government.
00:36:40.000The TV cameras will be outside the White House because the executive branch has acted, or outside the Capitol, because the legislative branch has acted, or outside the Supreme Court because the judicial branch has acted, right?
00:36:56.000And that's what America looks like when it's acting as a whole.
00:37:01.000Now you have to have the principle or the final cause, and you have to have the form or formal cause in order to have an entity, a being.
00:37:12.000And they each are necessary and related.
00:37:17.000Now, it's interesting about the Constitution that they made a form, the Articles of Confederation, during the Revolution, and they regarded it quickly as faulty.
00:38:06.000The government does not authorize and make us.
00:38:09.000And the trouble was the Article of Confederation were passed in the ordinary legislature.
00:38:15.000And that meant that it couldn't be an authority above them.
00:38:20.000And that's what Madison says in a very important document called The Vices of the Political System of the United States.
00:38:26.000One of the documents that led to the Constitutional Convention, he says that's a fatal flaw, right?
00:38:34.000We, the Constitution of the United States, is the only law that the people as a whole have ever passed.
00:38:43.000And then, by the way, the method by which they passed it, which was constitutional conventions appointed by the people, especially for this purpose, singularly for this purpose, and then that whole method disappears, right?
00:38:58.000So we make a law, and it can be the supreme law because it's the only one we ever made.
00:39:03.000And the only partial making of it after that are the amendments to the Constitution.
00:39:10.000And that means those are all recurrences to extraordinary method so that the ultimate authority of the people can remain above the government.
00:39:21.000Now, I said that the I just described the United States as a in form as a relatively simple thing, three branches of government.
00:39:31.000But of course, there are now 150 or so, it's actually controversial how many there are, law-making bodies in America.
00:39:40.000It's very difficult to name them all, right?
00:39:42.000But they make laws through procedures that are quite outside the Constitution, and they make the great majority of our laws now.
00:39:51.000That's the reason there can be so many laws.
00:39:55.000And that's a change in the form that is, in my opinion, extremely threatening to our liberty.
00:40:03.000And we have to subject those agencies again to the legislature.
00:40:10.000There are plans for that that have been partially, one of them is passed the House of Representatives.
00:40:15.000That is to say, if a regulatory act is not ratified by the legislature within a certain period of time, it becomes null.
00:40:30.000And then you'd have to have some checks so they don't just automatically ratify them all without thinking about it.
00:40:36.000And this is a fundamental change in American government.
00:40:41.000If you look at each of the three articles, the first three, there's seven in the original Constitution.
00:40:49.000They all begin: this power shall be invested in, right?
00:40:54.000So legislative, judicial, and executive.
00:40:58.000Only in the first one, only in the legislative power, does it say all the legislative power shall be invested in.
00:41:07.000And that's very important because the doctrine, there's a chapter in John Locke's second treatise on government about this on the delegation of the legislative power, he says.
00:41:18.000And that's a great evil, dangerous, right?
00:41:22.000And so the greatest single overturning of the Constitution is the creation of this administrative state.
00:41:29.000And my opinion is we got to bring it back under control.
00:41:34.000And for people that want to learn more about it, they can go to charlieforhillsdale.com.
00:41:39.000And Dr. Arn, I want to next time talk to you about Churchill and Lincoln.
00:41:43.000But unfortunately, we're out of time for this conversation.
00:41:46.000And I just want to reiterate our gratitude to Hillsdale College for what they're doing for our nation.
00:41:51.000Just in primus alone, I think makes America a more free place, not to mention their online courses, which, as I mentioned, have really blessed me.
00:42:01.000And we have lots of people taking the online courses, Dr. Arnon, and they're finding great fulfillment in them.