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

Episode Date: July 19, 2022

Today we're talking to Fox contributor Pete Hegseth, who has recently written a new book called "Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation," which details the history of the leftist infiltration and takeover of public education. He calls it the "16,000-hour war" because that's how much time a typical child will spend in public school — absorbing progressive propaganda. Pete goes over the historical role teachers' unions have played in removing God from schools and replacing him with a kind of fake leftist patriotism meant to separate kids from family and religion in order to raise them to be devoted to the state instead. However, Pete explains that there is a movement in support of classical Christian education that has been growing bigger since the 80s and how this kind of advocacy and education is what's needed to make sure our kids have the education that they actually need to be successful in life — rather become than good little activists like the Left wants. --- Today's Sponsors: EdenPURE freshens your home so that you're never having to breathe dirty air again. Go to EdenPureDeals.com and use discount code "ALLIE" to save $200! Carly Jean Los Angeles simplifies getting dressed and makes it easy to feel confident and put-together. Go to carlyjeanlosangeles.com and use code "ALLIEBASIC" to save 20% off your first order. Good Ranchers delivers meat that is born, raised, and harvested right here in the United States. Go to goodranchers.com/allie to get $30 off your order plus free express shipping. My Patriot Supply keeps you prepared for any crisis. Go to preparewithallie.com and save $150 on a 30 months emergency food kit. --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise- use promo code 'ALLIE10' for a discount: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort.

We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Hey, guys. Welcome to Relatable. Happy Tuesday. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to Good Ranchers.com slash All right. Today we are talking to Pete Hedgeseth. He is a Fox News host. And he recently wrote a book about American education. history of American education that we are talking about today. And it really is an awesome conversation. I mean, the man knows his stuff. You're going to learn some things. I think about the American education system, what we are facing and what we have been facing for a very long time that you probably didn't know how we got here to public education being the mess that it is in the United States.

And then also he is going to talk to us about how we can strategically get out of it. So I'm so excited for you to hear this. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles,

faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Thank you so much for joining me.

There's a million things I could ask you to comment on. Yes, but I specifically want to talk to you first and foremost about your book, Battle for the American Mind, uprooting a century of miseducation. So according to your book, there is a 16-hour war being waged against. the American child's mind. Is that correct? What do you mean by that? Yeah. That was the original title of the book, The 16,000-hour war. That's the amount of time kids are in public education or any, you know, K-12 education from from K-12. And as parents for so long, we've defaulted to what's easy, what's convenient, what's local, what we're used to. And over time, and we tell the whole story in the book, that war has been waged without most parents knowing the extent to which the left has completely

captured those mechanisms. Because you and I and so many other people talk about higher education and the lunacy of college and we have for quite some time. And we missed the fact that progressives have been focusing intentionally for over 100 years on shaping the affections of our youngest kids down to elementary school because they knew changing their worldview then was far more powerful. to social change than trying to deprogram them in college. So this 16,000-hour war is something we've mostly not been fighting, but the left has.

Why do you think it took us so long to recognize that? I mean, we've been talking about the craziness, as you said, of what's going on in the university system. But as you mentioned in your book, they're typically showing up to college already at least a little bit indoctrinated or at least vulnerable to the bad ideas that they are hearing from their professors, thanks to the 16. hour war. So why is it taken really, you know, this long for us to realize what's going on? I think there's a lot of nostalgia about public school. I went to public school. My dad was a public

school teacher. Everybody wants to believe that if it was good enough for me, it's good enough for my kids. I'll give them the values they need over the dinner table or at church on Sunday or Wednesday night. And, okay, there's a little bit of bias, but we can move past it. I want them to be on a sports team and go to prom and have all the big experiences. And there's a lot of pride in the public education system, at least there has been until now. And so my mom protested in the 80s and 90s at the PTA and the school board in my school in a very conservative, you know, suburban town in Minnesota, middle class. But it was tinkering at the margins. It wasn't quite revealing itself yet. And I think in the first chapter, we call the last two and a half years the COVID-16-19 moment. That moment when this

classroom came into our homes, we were looking over the shoulders of our kids, and we saw common core math. And we saw critical race theory masked as diversity, equity, inclusion. We saw gender theory and gender pronouns. And parents said, whoa, how do we get here? And we actually started this book before the COVID-16-19 moment started. So we were changing it and editing it in real time as we were learning even more alongside parents. And what we discovered through our research is that Ernest Hemingway once wrote of bankruptcy. It happens gradually until it happens quickly. Right. Is this was not something that happened because of Obama or something happened just because of the unions or the 60s.

This was an intentional targeting. And school has always been such a coherent aspect of how we as Americans identify ourselves that if we don't like the school, we move to a better zip code or a place that's just put in a new gym or they've got a lot of STEM courses or AP courses. And we assume, okay, our kid will be just fine. And this COVID-16-19 moment, I think, has broken that paradigm. unions have exposed themselves or who they are. So we have this new opportunity to look under the hood. The question is, what are options are out there for the parents? We obviously have a very distinct point of view in the book. But first, the first step to recovery is understanding the depth of your problem. And I was in the same boat as everybody else five years ago with kids in public

school thinking, hey, they'll be okay. Yeah. I'm learning in real time too. Yeah. Tell us the role that you believe the teachers unions have played in this. That's something we've talked about on this show a lot. But tell us your perspective. Massive. I would argue there's not a more powerful institution in American politics, certainly in the American classroom than the NEA and the AFT. And when you when you dig into these unions, they actually used to be professional teachers associations that were conservative by inclination that passed out scripture and Bible verses and classical works to young kids to learn how to read grammar and understand different concepts.

They were effectively co-opted by the unionization movement. movement, the progressive movement, and then the hardcore government union movement in the early 50s and 60s and coerced into becoming public teacher unions, at which point they married up with the progressives who were at the beginning of this plot. One of the names you'll meet in this book is John Dewey. A lot of people know him as the father of a modern American progressive schools. He was also the founder of the AFT, and he was also the honorary lifetime president of the NEA. So from the beginning, it's been atheists, progressives, charting the course of the NEA, married up with public unions empowered by politicians, and then they codified their power. The moment they did that most significantly was in 1967 when they elected Jimmy Carter. The NEA sent more delegates to the Democrat National Convention in 1976 than any other group. There were a majority of delegates.

They elected Jimmy Carter, and what did Jimmy Carter do? he turned around and created the federal Department of Education as a gift to the NEA. The NIA bragged there would be no Department of Education without the NIA. That's been a symbiotic relationship ever since. And the federalization of our, what we like to think of local control, didn't commence then, but it's certainly accelerated then to the point now where from accreditation to certification for teachers to standards, to curriculum, to pedagogy, to the pipeline of teachers, it's all controlled by unions who are now,

completely in bed with cultural Marxists. It's done with the progressives. These are full-out cultural Marxists, almost all of which are atheists who are guiding this perspective. Right. You describe this transition from a classical and mostly Christian education system to a humanistic utopia, that that has kind of been the goal and that's still the goal. Is that, I mean, is that still why we're seeing the absolute craziness that we're seeing

today when it comes to gender ideology and the divisive racial curriculum that we're seen? humanistic utopia they think that we should be striving for? When you meet the characters of this progressive takeover, they're almost all, and I'm not saying this hyperbolicly, they're almost all atheists, almost all socialists. They're certainly all humanists, as you talked about, Dewey wrote the humanist manifesto. These are all people that believed in social change through government intervention. And they knew they needed to remove one thing. Central to the story is the removal of God from the classroom. And it wasn't the Supreme. And it wasn't

the Supreme Court that did it with rulings in the 50s and 60s. It was progressives who wrote about it openly in the New Republic and their publications. And that's what's so interesting about the research we did. This is not a conspiracy that was hidden. This is a plot that was in the open as they debated amongst themselves. How do we remove the immovable object of Western civilization, which is biblical truth? And if you have the Bible in the classroom and prayer in the classroom, you can't tinker with the reasoning and the fundamental virtues of kids the way they wanted to. And so they talked about creating pull-out periods. In fact, they created their own new school in a new town in Gary, Indiana, called the Gary Plan, where parents would be told, well, yes, there's religion, but the

religious instruction is off-site in the middle of the day. And then eventually they transported that to New York City, where it became no religious instruction at all. And eventually, they pushed that as the standard. And the church gave in, by the way, the church split into a progressive wing, a social justice wing, and a more fundamentalist wing, which was focused on saving souls, which is great. But they got out of the kingdom business and the education business and started something called Sunday school. And thinking, and the progressives wrote, they said, what good is one hour of theistic training on Sunday going to do against our 40 hours of secular training during the week? They knew they had the volume of time over time. They didn't

know exactly where their experiment would lead. That's why. I don't like to call this a conspiracy, but what they did know is where it wouldn't lead. And they intentionally said, God is out. Biblical truth is out. Classical literature eventually is out. And they tore down the pillars of Western civilization. So eventually they could replace it with agenda. And that's when you meet the critical theorists who land at Columbia University, who push a new theory called critical theory. And where did they land at the most powerful teachers college in America at Columbia, and they started proliferating that view to the point where now you have critical race theory called something else and critical gender theory or

critical queer theory called something else in the classroom because they've consolidated that takeover so significantly. But first it was the removal of God and what they replaced it with, ironically, as a patriot myself, I know you're the same. They replaced it with a pledge. And they replaced it with a flag with allegiance to the state. Tell us a little bit more about that. because that is not an argument that you typically hear from conservatives. I mean, obviously, we honor the flag. We're thankful for our country. As you said, you're a patriotic.

I'm patriotic. But you said that they replaced prayer with the Pledge of Allegiance. Why did they do that? Because when I'm thinking of communists, when I'm thinking of Marxists, I'm not thinking of patriotic people who love the flag. And certainly nowadays, the communists don't. They don't like patriotism. So how and why did that happen?

It's a great point. It floored me when we first came upon. as we did the research as well. Well, they knew that parents would be outraged if God was removed, rightfully so. Kind of like you saw the protests in Loudoun County and elsewhere. They knew that would happen.

So they had to replace God with a well-placed forgery, almost like a pressure plate when, you know, you might have in a museum. So as they removed God, they put in place if it's something people revered and rightfully so, the flag of the United States of America

and said, that's how we're going to unite people not around God, but around patriotism. Now, it wasn't, it isn't the type of patriotism, you and I think of of the founding principles, rights endowed by a creator in our declaration. This was more allegiance to the state. In fact, the original Pledge of Allegiance did not say under God.

It was written by a socialist. His name is Francis Bellamy. Under God was only added by Eisenhower when we were fighting the godless communists in the Cold War. So God was something they were intentionally trying to remove. And here's why they rejected today,

because it was never about patriotism or America's founding principles. It was about a placeholder. So now they're happy to get rid of the flag. They're happy to get rid of the pledge. 1776 is gone. 1619 is here. It's because it was always about social control and social change, social justice, whatever you want.

Anti-fascism was what the Marxists called it even then, as the Antifa calls it even today. The line from critical theory to Antifa is direct. So it was only a stepping stone. And what we use is a word called Pieda. in the book. Pidea is a long-forgotten Greek word that our founders understood very well, that we taught in our classrooms 200 years ago. It's basically the enculturation of our youngest, of our most precious. What we've been placed on their hearts as the value of the good life. And for 200, you know, for 150 years in America, it was more or less unchanged. It was the

Western Christian Pidea. Progressives changed it to the American progressive Pidea, consolidated around a flag. Now we're living in about the last 20 years in what we describe as the culturally Marxist Pidea. They have gone from bias to indoctrination and activism. And that's why you see the kind of boldness you see today is because parents can protest at school boards. And I salute that I think it's wonderful. But it only really reinforces the power of school boards and superintendents and state boards of ed that just brush them aside and say, we're going to keep hiring diversity, equity, inclusion consultants. We're going to keep celebrating Pride Month for the whole month. and we're going to keep doing whatever we want because you don't really have any power,

and we wish we were the parents anyway. Right. And I am concerned about, I mean, yes, I'm glad that there is a push against some of this craziness that we're seeing in schools. But I think people stop short of saying, well, we need to replace it with a Christian classical education because they don't want to seem like they're promoting theocracy. They think that this means that they are opposing the separation of church and state, which I think is a misunderstanding.

of that concept. But most people are too scared to say, well, we need to go back to this Christian classical education. And I have my doubts as much as I would like that, that we would ever head in that direction, that the pendulum would ever swing back that far. So what do you think? The pendulum inside our public system or our government schools is never going to swing back that far. Yeah. But every movement to reclaim things that we know to be good and true has been started by a small percentage of people who created their own ecosystem and said, I reject the status quo of the system because it's not going to work for my kids or future generations, and we're going to start our own schools. So I would argue the darkest moment of American education,

K through 12, was in the 1970s, when there were zero classical Christian K through 12 schools in America. They had almost outlawed homeschooling. They tried to outlaw all religious instruction. They were going for full monopoly and full consolidation. And some brave parents in the 1980s rediscovered based on some writings that had been done, the classical Christian form of education, which is nice, either it's not Christian nationalism or a theological form of education. It's the way Western civilization was educated for 2,000 years. It's the way our founders were educated. It's Latin.

It's Greek. It's great books. It's steeped in human history. It's an understanding of human nature, our fallen nature, the flaws that are and that we are flaws that exist within us and that we are made in the image of God. When you seek to discover wisdom and beauty and, virtue and answer big questions like, you know, why am I here and what is my relationship to God? It unleashes true knowledge and understanding. All of that is gone from education today. All of it

in the public sector. Thankfully, that movement has grown. So I would argue we're in the 40th year, 40th, you know, fourth decade of a 100 year renewal, where parents now have the option and the alternative to either homeschool with more resources than ever or find one of over 500. classical Christian schools across the country, which are far more affordable than so-called elite schools. And that's why we argue for a radical reorientation of your lives around the education of your kids, because the most important thing is developing their relation with their Lord and Savior. And the second most important part is what you do as a family. But other than that, it's the 16,000-hour wars that you give to someone else to shape who they become. And I don't

want to send my kids to Democrat camp. So I'd prefer not to send them to. a progressive school. And the more you dig, you realize I was a kid of the 90s in a public school. And I, as we research this, I'm ashamed. I'm not a shame. That's the wrong word. But I realize the massive blind spots I have in my own education that I wish I could go back to school and get a classical Christian education because the miracle of 1776

was not an accident. They read all the great thinkers. They understood all the fallacies. They knew the pitfalls of Republican government. And they tried to avoid them. and they were flawed men. But at least they had access to that information. And we stripped that away from our kids today.

So I think it's a very viable movement. We're very proactive about advocating for it at the end of the book. And there are more options than ever. And you saw up in Maine, Beth, you saw the new Supreme Court ruling that allowed for parents to take their money and go to religious instruction, not just secular instruction. Arizona just passed a universal voucher program effectively. I think there will be more options. I think parents will be thirsting for it.

to use a word of the left, the goal of this book is to raise awareness, is to say there is an alternative, and hoping your kids survive public school is not sufficient. Yes. My mom and grandmother were both public school teachers. My parents were educated in public school. And one thing that they recognized, even in the 90s when they were raising my brothers and me, is that they knew that they wanted to give us a Christian education.

And I'm very thankful for that. I know that not everyone has had that opportunity, but kindergarten through 12th grade, I did have, I don't know if it was completely classical, but it was a Christian education. And one of the best gifts I think that I was given is not just understanding a biblical worldview and how everything, even mathematics, fits into that. But also I really believe that I was given a gift in my education of reason, especially in high school and critical thinking and understanding literature that I don't think a lot of people my age and especially younger than me have been given, just understanding,

how to think through arguments. Talk about the war on reason that has been waged specifically in education and particularly in the last 20 or so years. Your could not be more spot on. I couldn't say it better myself. I mean, the opening statement, the dedication quote of the book is only the educated are free. And of course, that's what our founders understood. That's what Western civilization has been premised on. That's what the liberal arts is all about. It's, there's nothing to do with being left of center and everything to do with having a liberated mind. And the most dangerous citizens are free-thinking reasoning citizens. And what the left wants today. And they dress it up as something practical.

So Dewey did it and they've done it ever since. It's all about vocational training, training you for the jobs of the future economy. And Woodrow Wilson was predominant in this worldview. Most people don't need that highfalutin liberal arts education. Most just need the basics to be trained to be workers. You see the same thing in the argument for STEM education today, basically. It's the same argument. Train them for the jobs of the future, but that classical stuff, they don't need that. So there becomes an orthodoxy inside government schools about not just how you think, but what to think, because they don't teach you how to think, and then they tell you what to think, and that's how kids show up already indoctrinated at universities. And the assault

is almost complete in the point where the SAT, take the SAT, for example, which has only since its inception, been about measuring reasoning. It's not how, it's measuring how strong the engine can run, not how well you can study for the test. Well, David Coleman, who took over Common Core for Obama, after consolidating more federal control over how we, the standards for our kids moved over to the college board, which creates the SAT,

and under the guise of the fact that the test is racist, because there were not equitable distribution of outcomes by race, they said we have to scrap all, the reasoning portions of the SAT and effectively make it a test you can study for that mirrors the common core. So now even the reasoning measures we use to come out of high school to determine whether you are prepared for college have been dismantled. So at every step of the way, they don't want free thinkers and liberated thinkers because those are the most dangerous type. You cannot control them. And what I love about classical Christian is they don't call it elementary middle school and

high school. They call it grammar, logic, and rhetoric, because it's all more. meant to fit the way child's minds think. Grammar are the basics. You hammer in the basics so they have it. Logic is where they start to identify fallacies and think critically and they want to argue about it and figure out their place in the world. And then rhetoric is how you articulate

and make an argument that stands the test of time, all based on an immersion in history. And I don't like the idea that it gets, classical gets characterized as, you know, dusty books and old guys with old ideas that aren't relevant today. which of course is the opposite of the truth. Wisdom is timeless. The failures of human beings are timeless.

And learning from them is how we get closer to God, frankly, and an understanding of his truth. So it's the answer and the left knows it. And that's why they targeted it because they needed people to make widgets and to vote a certain way based on the control they wanted in the future. Yes. You talk about also this war on virtue.

And you can kind of see why people who want the state to have control over a kind of mindless, reasonless people would wage a war against critical thinking. But why would public education wage a war against virtue and really subvert the Christian definition of what virtue actually is? What's the purpose behind that? Well, how do you define virtue when you get rid of any sort of a baseline whatsoever of objective truth and an understanding of where virtue comes from? So in many ways, it's a system incapable of answering that question. How do you have that discussion? Especially when the entire premise of our country is based on Judeo-Christian values is on reflecting on the nature of man and God and where our rights come from, you can't have a substantive, let alone a robust discussion about the order of, of virtues and why they chose them when you can't even talk about the Bible, let alone read it,

let alone study it. And even Jefferson, who himself was a deist, and we're tearing him down all over the place these days too. He didn't believe in the New Testament, but he wrote his own version of the New Testament called the Jefferson Bible, which where he pulled out the verses he agreed with and pulled out the ones he didn't. And we've all got a bunch of problems with that. But at least he engaged with the ideas and understood the fundamental argument. that were underlying the system that he was a part of. And so what they do is we replace virtues, timeless virtues, with things like morals and values.

And in the books we talk about, and I fall into that trap myself all the time. How often do I talk about values? Well, values aren't necessarily grounded in a permanent standard as virtues are. And so values can shift and morals can shift. And then you can insert new value systems like socialism, like utopianism, like humanism. that create their whole or climate religion at this point,

a whole different hierarchy of values. And then the virtue signaling that you do to use that word again is you signal the values you hold by the positions you hold inside an ever-shifting framework that the progressives define. And so virtue becomes this old word. You never hear the virtue in public schools. In fact, it's a word that I rarely used until engaging with this topic substantively. because values are easier to talk about my values, your values, who are you to tell you whose values are right?

And that's rampant in a system that has no permanent standard. Yeah. The opposite of virtue is vice. And C.S. Lewis says that every vice is basically pride manifested itself in a different way. But every sin really starts with pride. And when you're looking at some of the scary videos that we see coming out of public school classrooms, of teachers coming out to their students or telling their students, hey, you can identify as this gender we won't tell your parents. It really does come down to, yes, a form of terrible depravity and all kinds of just perverted

things that we don't even want to talk about. But it also comes down to, I think, narcissism, narcissism in these teachers, narcissism in the school administrators and the teachers' unions that are trying to create armies of children that conform to their image. As you said, rather than teaching kids, hey, you're made in the image of God. And therefore, he is the authority over what is and what isn't, what's right and what's wrong. they're saying, you're made in our image and we want to make you more in our image and we are the arbiters of what is right and what is wrong. So that's also part of, I think, why this ideology has

run rampant. You've exchanged the God of Scripture for the God of Self. You've got narcissists running the show. You said it exactly right for the God of Self. My brother is over and we were watching something and a commercial pops up and the t-shirt of a young girl says, you know, worship yourself. And it is, no, really, it's the, it's the, it's the, it's the, Modern manifestation of the self-esteem movement, which is effectively identity politics on max. So what boxes can I check that make me different, unique, or conforming to the current trend of the current thing of the moment that we've determined is stigmatized or criticized or not sufficiently celebrated? And who are you as an authority figure to tell me how I should feel about myself? which of course leads to vacuous, lost kids with no sense other than loving themselves,

but they don't know why except for superficial definitions of what that means with no connection to God whatsoever. So then you create a cause or a movement, whether it's Black Lives Matter, whether it's LGBTQ issues, whether it's transgender sports issues. Take your pick of the current moment and they can throw their identity and self-worth and self-love at it and say, you're attacking me without any of the infrastructure around which we normally discuss and debate these topics on a common framework. We are on Venus and Mars when it comes to education.

That's why the message of the book is pull your kids out. They're not going to, there are salt and light. I love the salt and light argument. There are some kids that are fortified and prepared. I get it. Most kids aren't. I look at my kids. I love them.

I'm worried they're not. And I know I want the foundation. for them that gives them a fighting chance. Yeah, I've heard a lot of people say that, and I think their heart is in the right place, but you don't put your kindergartner on the front lines when they're not even, you know, big enough to hold up their shield yet. And so, I mean, the world is going to be a battlefield. They're going to have decades and decades of this kind of stuff to deal with.

So how can we, the best that we possibly can, steward the short amount of time that we have and give them, you know, as much armor, if you will, before they are in that battlefield by themselves. Just to kind of wrap this up, I do want to make sure because I think that this is fascinating. You also say that there is a war in the public education system, I would say in the secular, progressive world in general, also not just against reason and virtue, but against wonder and beauty. And that's really interesting. Will you just kind of summarize what you mean by that? Yes. So two words that before I started this project with David Goodwin, who's the president of the Association of Classical Christian Schools, an amazing human being, that even I didn't associate

with education. When's the last time you went to school and thought, I really want my kid to come out of school with wonder and beauty. And one of the neat parts of this project was visiting a lot of classical Christian schools. And one moment that I recall is an art teacher at one of those schools saying,

art is a trained skill. And the reason we try to create beautiful art is that we are creating the image of God. And by creating that beautiful art, not in a form of idolatry at all. Of course, we reject any of that. But you get closer to revealing the infinite beauty, the eternal beauty of the creator by creating things that are beautiful,

that reflect the beauty of his creation. And when you look at the artwork of 10th graders and 11th grade, I mean, it could be hanging in museums, and this is a rural school in North Carolina. And I started to realize, yes, our public schools have totally abandoned any attempt, not just at the formal making of beautiful art, but at the attempt to define what is beautiful. I mean, a great example of it recently is Sports Illustrated. I'm at Barnes & Noble picking up a book, and there are three Sports Illustrated swimsuit covers, right? There's one that you would traditionally see, and then there's one with an obese lady and another one with an elderly lady. And it's not to say that people can't be beautiful.

I'm not saying that that, I get that argument, but this idea that you be you, everything is beautiful. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder diminishes the value of excellence and beauty in a lot of context to include the beauty of virtue. And then wonderment is what I love about classical Christian schools is, you know, you don't have the flashing colors up on the walls and the cartoons up. The wonder is not in the, oh, look around at all the colors. The wonder is in the imaginative nature of developing and forming a mind to engage with big narratives and ideas and subjects that they can grapple younger than you think to fortify them for the coming cultural wars that are there. So these are four, of education that are founders that classicists have known about for years written about.

We wrote children's books that were attuned to them in the past. We've dumbed it all down, creating a lower standard and then no objective standard of beauty. Yeah. And within this, there's a war on innocence. There's a war on creativity. I mean, there's so much. We really could go on and on. I'm so thankful that you wrote this book.

I think, as I said, before we got on, it's a really unique understanding, a unique perspective on what is going on and why. And I'm very grateful for it. Where can people find it if they want to buy it? Where can they learn more about classical education? Yeah, anywhere where books are sold and we're grateful because it has spent three weeks at number one in the New York Times bestseller list. And it's because word of mouth has spread that if you want to understand where we are, read this book, it'll give you a depth of the understanding and a part of the solution. But you can go to classical Christian.org, which is David's Association site. It explains. explains what classical Christian is better than anywhere else.

And then it also has a map, like a Google map with pins of where all the schools are. And I've been all over that making my own choices with my own family. And it's an amazing resource. And it fortifies you to understand that there really isn't. We call it an educational insurgency. And I tend into military analogies as a military guy myself. So we are surrounded. Tactical retreat is necessary.

And the preferred form of warfare of the weak against the small, or the weak against the strong or the small against the large is insurgency, is we have to gather our networks underground at first, build this army that's connected, the type of capacity that we need, so that we can move into phase two of insurgency, which is growing to the point where an overwhelming majority of Americans potentially have access to this form of wisdom in the classroom,

which right now is, of course, nowhere near the case. So, yes, classical Christian.org, the book is Battle for the American Mind. And thank you for, I'll tell you this, we've done a lot of interviews. Not many people understand the subject the way that you do, Allie Beth. So thank you for how you contribute to this cause with parents and grandparents and mothers and fathers who are grappling through this culture war and this cultural revolution, frankly, and don't know where to turn. Because so many institutions they thought they could count on, they can't anymore. And that's part of what we're trying to expose in the book, too.

Well, thank you. We've got a lot of young moms that listen to this podcast. And I know that they're going to get a lot out of this interview. So thank you so much. No, Beth. Thank you very much. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Alley, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself.

On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us.