The David Knight Show - INTERVIEW Alternatives to Public School and Why It's Time to Exit

Episode Date: May 2, 2023

It's not just concealment of gender transitioning from parents, it's official policy to also hide CRT. So what's the alternative? From micro-schools, private schools, homeschool —there's never been more excellent choices for education outside of the failed institutions we call public schools.Tony Kinnett, Investigative Columnist at DailySignal.com, Twitter @TheTonus.Find out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.comIf you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here:SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-showOr you can send a donation through Mail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @[e-mail] App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Money is only what YOU hold: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silverBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

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All right, joining us now is Tony Kennett. He is an investigative columnist at The Daily Signal. He is also host of The Tony Kennett Show on WIBC in Indianapolis. He's a former award-winning biology teacher and STEM director specializing in debunking critical race theory, pseudo scientific gender theory, adolescent psychology, and climate science.

It sounds like we've got a lot that we agree on. He lives in rural Indiana with his wife and daughter away from the muck and the chaos of inner cities. Good to have you on, Tony. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me on, David. Let's talk a little bit about, and you sent me this article after we set up the interview because I wanted to talk to you about a number of things. But this just happened at the end of last week.

A school there in Indiana. And tell people what happened there to a special needs student. Absolutely unbelievable. It really is horrendous. There is a western Indianapolis suburb called Brownsburg. And at one of its elementary schools, five teachers and aides were complicit. They've been charged by the police in abusing a special education student. And not just any special education student, but a life skill student.

So a student who is there just to learn things like washing his hands, how to be respectful in conversation, how to address properly those kinds of basic life skills. And these teachers forced the student to eat his own vomit and just an absolutely horrible situation. And this is a school that tells everyone it's the number one school in the state, according to academic stuff. So, yeah, pretty horrendous stuff. And he was seven years old, I see from the story here. That is correct. And he is so severely handicapped. I guess that's not politically correct anymore.

Anyway, he's got such severe problems that they're just teaching him how to do basic things in his life. They're not going to try to teach him academics or anything like that. And they make him make his own vomit. I had several life skills students when I taught in Knightstown. If you've ever seen the movie Hoosiers, that's a, that's school. Um, and I grew up kind of, or started my teaching career there. And I had a couple of life school students and the thought of anyone doing anything remotely like that to either of those kids just makes my blood boil. It would infuriate me. It is amazing. It is amazing. And you know, I I've told the story before to my audience and maybe, uh, some people haven't heard it,

but I'll tell it to you as well. My wife has a master's degree in teaching and you know 40 50 years ago uh she left because the teacher next door to her and they had open classrooms so she could hear what was going on was just constantly intimidating this one child and bullying him in front of everybody else stand in a trash can you're nothing but trash and. And his father came in, and his father was, she instinctively realized that his father was like that as well. And she was bullying his father in a parent-teacher's conference day. She went to the principal and said, can we get rid of this teacher? This is crazy.

The principal said, no, the teacher's got tenure. Is that something that's still happening in schools? More so in colleges and universities rather than tenure being a thing in K-12 schools. There are a few legacy teachers that have been around for a long time that still do have tenure, but it's very rare these days. More often, the trouble in schools today comes from principals, those that have no talent in education and are very invested in a lot of nonsense, very power hungry, and went and got a couple of master's degrees and make the lives of the teachers and parents at that school rather difficult. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, you taught for a while and tell us a little bit about CRT because that's

something that you focused on. Tell the audience exactly how you define it because that's one of the things they like to do. Say, well, that's not what we're talking about. How do you define CRT and how long has this been happening where you were involved in it? Absolutely. So as someone who's studied it for eight years, I actually sat in the classroom of Gloria Ladson Billings from the University of Wisconsin. She's the lady who said, hey, let's put CRT into K-12 education back in the 1990s. Critical race theory is just a lens. It's a lens with which you look through society, as many theories that are social theories are. And it simply says this, every single action, facet, foundation, or function in American society is built upon white supremacy racism.

Therefore, every single aspect of life is affected by that. That's all critical race theory is. It's this weird claim that everything is a secret conspiracy of white supremacy. Well, you know, when you say it's a lens that you look at the world through, that's what we would call, as Christians, we call that a worldview. And it's essentially like a fundamental you know moral construct a foundational morality to to view the world with and so what they're doing is they're coming up with a very you know marxist foundational worldview isn't it that is really kind of focused on racism it is highly racist in its um and its fundamental

premise it is it's very deweyian in its ethic. And of course, the famous Dewey of American education is the one who wrote the Humanist Manifesto. And again, that's why as Christians, it's so dangerous to try to flirt with these kinds of things to appease the world because you end up sacrificing core aspects of a biblical worldview in order to satisfy the world. Well, you're not supposed to be of the world. You're not supposed to try to convince the world you're wonderful, lovable, and fun. You're supposed to stand for Christ, and that's why this is such an anathema. That's right. People are concerned, rightfully so, about the drag queens in the library, but of course, Thomas Dewey got there

first. That's the truth. Other things like that. It's already been infiltrated by Marxists a long, long time ago, Horace Mann and all the rest of these people that were out there as well. So let me just ask you, in the Indiana schools, what kind of literacy rates and numeracy rates are you seeing? Because in the Chicago schools, there was only 30 schools or so where the people were grade level in math. The kids were grade level in math, the kids were at grade level

in math. And it was only about, I'm sorry, there's 30 schools where nobody was at grade level in math. And there was 50 plus schools where nobody was there for, it's actually the other way, the math is harder. So it's 50 schools where nobody was at grade level, 30 schools where nobody was at reading level. What kind of stuff are we seeing in the Indiana schools? Well, it would depend certainly on the area that you're in in the state. There are a lot of rural schools that have distanced themselves from a lot of nonsense and still stick to some traditional methods of education, although that's fast eroding, which have literacy rates of close to 70 to 80%, whereas suburban schools and inner city schools are

anywhere from 20% literacy to 50% literacy. It really just depends. The further you get into, as my bio says, the muck and chaos of the inner cities, where they've tried the same kind of nonsensical policies over and over that really just harm students under the guise of socialist utopia, you see drastically lower reading scores. You see students who are unable to perform even basic calculation or memorization levels, and they can barely even write their name, much less type it into a computer. Yeah, it is amazing. Of course, it'll all be solved once we get artificial intelligence replacing the teachers,

right? That's what Bill Gates wants. I mean, he's actually pushing this stuff. He says it's going to revolutionize education. You know, just like after we put personal computers and iPads and stuff, we gave those to the kids. They're all so much smarter now, right? It's really amazing. As a former science and STEM teacher, robotics and kind of computer education was always a deep fascination of mine. And I started noticing in the mid 20 teens that a lot of the stuff that was being sold to schools were basically just shiny toys, uh, that there really was very little

educational value to them. It was just distractions and entertainment. And that's, you know, what we're paying for as the taxpayer right now. It's, it's incredible. That's right. Yeah. When, uh, my wife, Karen was teaching in school, uh, she was able to get this, uh, computer. It was called CompuColor because it had eight colors at the time. That was something of a novelty. This was early, early days. But she didn't start out by having the kids play games or drawing pictures in color. She started out by, it also had BASIC. And so she wanted to teach them how to program.

So they're doing flow charts and things like that. But that's not what they're using the computers for. They're using them as a kind of fid you know, a fidget toy or something. Sure. Yeah. And a drill and practice so that you don't have to actually do that with them. How long has this CRT thing been happening in Indiana? And how long were you suffering under it?

You said you went back into the, your experience with Gloria Ladson Billings goes back quite a ways. Did you say back into the 90s? Was that when it started? That's when she started advocating for the theory. So I can outline the critical race theory into both nationally into the public schools pretty succinctly. Gloria Ladson Billings in the 90s made quite a startling discovery, which is that the sexual revolution left a lot of families fatherless. And that creates intergenerational poverty real fast. Well, fatherlessness was very prevalent in America, in inner city communities,

as well as in the Deep South and in Appalachia. So she looked at that and said, well, we can't run around telling people that fatherlessness is the issue, so therefore we're going to assume that it's racism. Of course, she ignored that twice as many white families from Appalachia and the Deep South were suffering from fatherlessness intergenerational poverty, racism. Of course, she ignored that twice as many white families from Appalachian, the deep south, were suffering from fatherlessness, intergenerational poverty, but she ignored that. And she kind of clung to that Malcolm X style, it's all racism, and it always has been. And so she suggested in two essays in the 1990s, 1994 and 1996, that we needed to start teaching students that there were these massive barriers to overcome for every black student and that it was all the problem of this mythical white supremacy that governs every part

of our lives like some kind of secret conspiracy and therefore she started bringing this into the inner city schools and so even in indiana we started seeing in the late 90s early 2000s the very early portions of critical race theory and this type of diversity, equity, and inclusion take hold in the inner city academics. And by the way, this is when schools in the inner city stopped improving. This is when you actually saw reading and mathematics scores start to plummet. Because even in the 80s and 90s, inner city schools were still a place where you could get an education, not the best one, but you could get an education. And so this started to seep out into the suburbs in the late aughts as a lot of rich, suburban, upper middle class individuals got bored, no longer going to church, no longer active in the

community. Well, they need something to do. Well, they can advocate for racial equity because that's the new hot thing. And so they started to advocate for that as President Obama ran for the second term in office. That's when he took up that banner. And since then, it's been seeping into schools further out from inner cities. Now, it's become such a popular social trend because Republicans don't really or hadn't cared about education for 10 years, completely abandoned it. And Indiana just gave the democrats basically whatever they demanded in education since that policy is taken hold it's pretty much infiltrated every aspect of the soft sciences so talking about english and social studies in most of the k-12 schools in indiana now you know that you're talking about this going back into the 90s mid-90s and things like that and gradually you know it's not going to immediately hit with everybody it has to build a little bit but still this thing's been going on

for like you know 20 some odd years and it's only been in the last few years that people have really caught on to this do you think um uh why is that did they just catch on to it because of the school lockdowns as parents were seeing what was happening on the in the kids classroom is that really where this began or was there starting to become an awareness of cr2 before that looking for reliable it solutions for your business at innovate we are the it solutions people for businesses across ireland from network security to cloud productivity we handle it all installing managing supporting and reporting on your entire it and telecoms environment so you can focus on what really matters growing your business whether it's communications or security innovate has you covered visit innovate today innovate the it

solutions people well i was writing about it in 2015 and 2016 because it was startling me how horribly it was affecting kids. But the reason that parents did not as a whole, and I'm not talking about there are a lot of great parents who are already starting to think about these things. But a lot of parents in the United States have been apathetic for the last couple of generations. David, let me ask you a question. When's the last time that you opened up the hood of your car and checked the oil? Yeah, yeah. Well, I do keep a schedule on it, but I typically don't do it myself because I don't have anywhere to jack the car up in my car. So I can't get it right. But yeah, right. So you turn it over to experts to do that. And that's what we've done with our kids. Right. Well, we always trusted the engine light, right? So back in the day, you know, my grandfather would come home every Friday and he would

check the oil in the car before the weekend because he knew that he needed to keep an eye on it. And then after the automated systems came out, and again, like you said, the experts started to kind of take a look at this. We kind of just said, no, they've got it. If the engine light comes on, I'll check it, but I don't really need to. Well, all of a sudden COVID happens and the lockdown happens and parents are forced to hear what's going on in classrooms because a lot of parents in the country didn't care. The kid came home, it didn't get in trouble. I'm sure he's learning whatever he

learned. I'm sure that it's just as good as what I learned back when I was in school. And parents really chose not to be involved. And I'm not saying that's any specific cultural group's fault. That was just a trend of lethargy in American society. And we opened up the hood, even though the engine light wasn't on. And what do we see? We see smoke pouring out of the engine block. And now parents are very concerned, as they should be. Yeah, you know, I was thinking as we're talking about that, I did have a British sports car once.

And I had to check the oil every time I went anywhere. Because it was untrustworthy that's right and that's what we need to like we need to treat the school system as if it were a British sports car of the 1970s and we need to know how that vehicle works because what I see a lot of people making the mistake now is just going after teachers in general and there are a lot of decent teachers who don't buy into this garbage that are ordered to do this kind of junk by administrators and i i do think that the administrators and a lot of newer counselors is where a lot of this is coming from uh and so you know use your kind of inside teachers

to let you know what's going on inside the school there are those that exist let's talk a little bit about this along that it's a good analogy that you have about, you know, knowing what it looks like under your hood. You know, you might even have, if you've had it set for a while, you might have some squirrels that have set up inside the engine. You know, I don't know what's going on with it. I've had that happen to me with cars that I've had set for a while too. So, you know, let's take a look at that. And, you know, when we, and knowing what's going on under the hood doesn't just mean what the federal curriculum is or what a state curriculum is or even what your school board or your school curriculum is it's what's actually happening in the classroom and how do

and and that's the thing that that concerns me because i've seen as parents have pushed back as they push back against a group sometimes they'll go in and they'll throw out the existing school board. They'll put somebody else in there. And I've seen it over and over again, both in Florida and in Texas, the teachers come out and say, well, they can tell me anything they want,

but I'm going to teach this stuff to my kids in my classroom. What do you say that we should do about that? You know, if you've got an activist teacher that is the teacher of your children, how do you know that? How, and what do you do about that uh you know if you've got an activist teacher uh that is the teacher of your children how do you know that how and what do you do about that well the very first thing that you should be doing is talking to your teachers and talking to your students or your children you need to know what's going on in the classroom and that takes more than letting someone else handle it unfortunately i think that the the whole electing a better school board thing

while very well intentioned becomes well i just want to elect someone that i trust to just take care of it for me yep and that's not how this country is set up you're supposed to be an active citizen of this republic you're supposed to be involved this country has survived as long as it has because citizens aren't supposed to take breaks and let someone else handle it for them and this is something that we need to remember in schools as well your kids will let you know what's going on if you set up a pattern of talking to them more than once a week and letting them get away with saying you know i don't know when you ask you know what they learned in

school also talking to your teachers you'll be surprised how much your teachers tell you what it is that they believe and what they know and what it is that their goals are. If you do have an activist teacher, they're really, you just need a school board who's willing to say, look, we told them to teach in this specific way. They said, no, they're gone. They have to fire them. In Indiana, you can fire a teacher for whatever reason. There is no precedent for any kind of rationale that you need to fire a teacher. If you know, that's actually what Indianapolis ended up using is the excuse to get rid of me.

And that was their legal, right? We don't like you. We're going to fire you. And so they terminated my contract. I think that schools across the country really should be doing that. If you don't think a teacher is good, get rid of them.

And what were the, the accusations against you and the basis of you being fired? What was it? They didn't like the fact that you're pushing back on CRT or what was it? I recorded a viral video in November of 2021, basically exposing my school who had sent an email to all administrators of which I was one, telling us that if a parent or teacher asked if we were teaching critical race theory and then they gave us a script, we were to respond, no, we actually believe in, and then this entire list of things. Of course, as I said earlier,

I studied critical race theory at that point for about seven years, and I was disgusted that I was supposed to lie to my teachers and parents and refuse to do it. And then we had, lo and behold, Gloria Ladson Billings over for a large staff meeting. And we basically cackled as a staff that we were teaching critical race theory and our stupid parents just couldn't be burdened with such knowledge. So I went to Twitter about it and I recorded a video that went viral and went on Tucker Carlson twice and was immediately banned from the building and was told that I had given severe psychological trauma to the other administrators, which was amazing. And they started a huge investigation in which they didn't want to let me bring a lawyer in with me. And it was amazing. They accused me of like missing a meeting that I was supposed to go to like six months ago.

They had to find things to fire me for because I received good evaluations. So it was just kind of a weird situation of schools trying desperately to cover up a narrative that they had been exposed for. And you see this a lot around the country now. That article that I sent you, all of these schools around Indiana, hidden cameras are revealing that administrators know they're lying to you and that parents you know, parents are justified in looking, which is verbatim. What I told parents to do in November of 21 in that video. And it's a very subversive thing.

You know, they know that parents don't want CRT. They know that parents don't want this LGBT transgender grooming and all the rest of the stuff. And so there's an active deception that's there. They talk about it. They brag about it. They have policies about it that you will use. As I was talking about earlier in the UK. You will encourage the kids in their

gender transitioning, and yet when you talk to the parents, you will use their biological pronouns when you do that to conceal all this. And it is a very radical mindset that the children don't belong to you. That is something the Democrats have been telling us for quite some time. And American parents just can't seem to understand the implications of that, can they? So this is something that's become a serious concern of mine. I was actually thrown out of a school board meeting recently locally in Indiana for asking from the press area, again, there was a journalist, where the district had obtained a policy they were using to fire a counselor for not going along with the keeping a kid's transition decision from their

parents. And it's incredible how many of these administrators think that because they have a couple of master's degrees, they know better than the parent. I have two education master's degrees, both are worthless. And although it was a very good school, and it was a very big waste of money, it does not make you better than the parent. Just because you're around hundreds of children a day instead of one or two children a day does not mean that you have a magical, biblical-level insight into the inner workings of a child. The arrogance of that is truly destroying the trust that parents had for a long time in our public education system. And of course, their experience is very shallow and distributed over a lot of different people

instead of really deep about that particular child. i remember that's well said uh one one woman who came out and said who do they think they are i have a master's degree and it's like yeah but you're not our master that doesn't make you a master of anybody or anything even i remember her saying that and it infuriates me i my master i two fancy master's degrees very nice they look gorgeous on my wall and they don't mean a thing. I still learn things every single day when I do research on educational theory. We're preparing to homeschool our daughter right now. And so I'm learning things every day about English and literacy education from traditional methods that work far better than anything I observed when I

was in the public education system. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, you had an encounter with the 1619 Project, as you put it, liar. I would agree with that. But she called you a liar. But actually, I think Nicole Hannah-Jones is the liar. Tell us about your encounter with her in the New York Times. So that earlier video that I had published, I accused the administration of, again, of lying to parents.

And I cited my sources and I quoted several pieces of literature directly from the authors, Richard Delgado, Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi, Gloria Ladson Billings. And I cited my sources like the science academic that I was and published them for the world to see. She got very upset about that and said, well, this guy isn't an administrator, despite on the Indianapolis Public School website, I was listed as the director of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics for the district and the 30,000 students that it held. She was just very, very upset. But I didn't really take it seriously. Of course, this is the woman who told everyone that the union didn't join the Civil War until 1865. So as a dear old theologist that I knew liked to say, she had a screen door in her submarine. So you just kind of take those things with a grain of salt.

Well, that's her truth, right? Her truth is whatever she wants. Her truth about history is this or that, right? She just comes up with it. It has worked for her, though, hasn't it? I mean, she's become very famous and rich doing this type of thing. Let me ask you, you know, we look at institutions, they have a life of their own. They're rotting from the head down. So many of our institutions everywhere are rotting from the head down. What do we need to do about education? Is it fixable or should we just abandon ship and start something

completely different by fixing education do you mean the current public education system in the u.s yeah is the government school system is it fixable that would be my question so there's an there's a an old paradox uh the the grecian ship. If you keep replacing every part, is it the same ship after you've replaced every single part on the ship? I think that realistically, that's the paradox that we need to come to terms with the American public education system. If you replace every single facet and part and policy and organization in the education system with something better, the public education system could be saved. The Northwest Treaty Ordinance did specify that organizing the town around the church

and around the education of children was a very sure way to build a community foundation. And I agree with that to a degree. I do not think that the totalitarian or excuse me, the total view that libertarians hold that all education should be completely ignored by the state, I don't necessarily think that that's a good end game. I think that can be a useful model in dismantling things through, for example, with the school choice initiatives that we've been seeing. More so than anything, to fix the American public education system, I think that every parent needs to be involved daily in what their kids are learning. I think that probably a better solution than the public education system

and just reforming it financially and institutionally, which would take decades, which could be done, but it would take decades. I don't think that we really have that time to spare. I think that micro schools are the future. We see a lot of good public school teachers and private school teachers leaving the schools. They're hired by eight to 10 parents to teach their group of children. The parents pitch in to pay that teacher's salary as you would pay tutoring for the year, sometimes through education savings accounts that states pass. And the kids receive basically a one-room schoolhouse education that's far better in a small classroom setting than they were getting in the public schools. We're seeing huge success with those micro schools popping up all over the country. And I think that our resources would be

better spent there, but I could be wrong. Yeah, that is an interesting alternative because again, that, that harkens back to, you know, you said the one room schoolhouse thing, way things were in the early 20th century and others. And, you know, in a situation like that, you're going to have a wide variety of ages. They're not going to be enough kids that you're going to rigidly segregate them by age and that type of thing. But let me ask you as a teacher and somebody who's followed this closely,

you know, what is the purpose of education? You know, what, what is it that the schools are trying to develop? Are we trying to, are we trying to create kids who are going to, you know, be, uh, good citizens? Uh, and what does that look like? Are we trying to create uh kids that are going to be good employees you know what what is the purpose of education or is it something well the true the true classical purpose of education that i believe has been set forth uh

since uh adam and eve were first given the charge of their children uh is that education should inculcate three things. That would be knowledge of the world around them and the creator which governs them. Number two, virtue and how one is to act in concordance with that creation. And then number three, the wisdom to use the two of those together to be a valuable member of society. I do not think that the modern education system in this country values those three things because I do not believe that the people in that public education system or the citizens that support it for that matter value those three things. Right now, it seems that you have two groups vying for power within the public education system. On one side, you see those who believe that education's

purpose is to create activists for progressive change, to kind of fight these bogeymen of white supremacy and gender inequality and insert down here inequities and all of that. And the other group of education, these would be the establishment Republicans, believe that we should be creating individuals ready to participate in the economy of the state. That's what a lot of Republicans will get in front of their state houses and say, both groups are missing the mark. It's like individuals walking around with their hands over their eyes trying to tell you what they see. It's not very useful.

They're getting a part of the picture, but they, again, have abandoned the three classical values, which we've learned throughout all of history, especially looking at the works of St. Thomas Aquinas, that education is built for, which is wisdom, knowledge, and virtue. I agree. Absolutely. And, you know, I go back and I look at comments from R.L. Dabney. He said he was absolutely opposed to government being involved in any way in education because he said fundamentally it is about religion it's about virtue and and wisdom and things like that not just knowledge he said you can convey knowledge in a technical uh school you know as an apprentice or something like that but he said education is something different it's fundamentally you know what you

know is spiritual it's foundational it's moral as you pointed out and um that is something that he said we're always going to be at odds if we're going to have the government doing it because then it's going to be whose worldview is going to be taught you know just as you were saying earlier uh crt has a worldview and and the lgbt stuff is really a worldview that they're pushing on the kids as well and then you know the republicans have had their own worldviews in the past. And so what he was looking at, he was, that's why he opposed it. It wasn't the sort of thing he couldn't even imagine, you know, where we would be today with CRT or LGBT, uh, with that.

But, uh, you know, he was looking at it from standpoint. Um, are you going to teach secularism? Are you teach Protestantism? You're going to teach Judaism, Catholicism. What is going to be taught? Because fundamentally that is the foundation of the person that you're talking about, and that should be the object of education and what he was talking about. So I think when we start to decentralize this and, and rethink education, I think it really is essential for us to get away from this factory system that

was initially set up to feed people into the factory economy and a one-size-fits-all and then the conservatives you pointed out it kind of lost interest and the progressive took that over and turned the ship around sinking and i think i think that there there was an interesting approach when we left the one-room schoolhouse to kind of model after the grammar schools that we had seen and also some of the boarding schools that had popped up. And I don't fault them for the way that they did so at the time. If you have an individual whose expertise is history, then you should want that individual teaching history in the school. And you have another individual whose expertise is mathematics, then they should be teaching mathematics. The problem is, again, and I think that the core issue with, again, the criticism that you just

recited on and expounded upon on the government running the system is that it involves people becoming apathetic and turning over full and total control via means of trust to that institution. And again, they're your children. There should not be any institution, there should not be any kind of facet that does not involve you being a Berean, to pull from the scriptural example, double-checking your work. And this is why, by the way, that you should know about medicine. This is why you should know about industry. This is why you should know how the education system works, because you should be double checking these things for your kids. There is no situation in which you're a good parent for turning over complete and total

control or trust of your child to someone or something else. That's not wise. And every scriptural example of someone turning over the trust of their children to someone else ends in complete and abysmal failure. There's a reason for that. And it was common sense up until about 15 minutes ago, which is that the more you are involved in your child's upbringing, the better they will be trained, as the proverb says,

to go in the direction they should go. Yeah, you're absolutely right. Absolutely agree with what you're saying. So you're talking about, as a former teacher, somebody who's seen the current system from the inside. You're looking for your kids at homeschooling talk a little bit about what is out there on horizon for people and homeschooling we did that with our children but it's been a while now uh so talk to people about uh you know we got

the micro uh school advantage kind of one room schoolhouse where the parents are in close uh you know contact with the teacher and are overseeing that. And of course, we've seen things like that in the past with homeschool cooperatives and things like that in a more open way. Talk about some of the things that are on the horizon with homeschoolers, the good and bad, and maybe some pitfalls that we might want to watch out for. Absolutely. So I would say right now, there's never been a better time to try out something like this.

So many states have taken on school choice opportunities, which allow you to pay for these alternative education options. And again, try some of these things out. The myth that, you know, if your child tries something out in education and it doesn't work, they're going to be damaged forever is one of the stupid and silliest myths that have ever been told. If you've ever had a kid try a sport and it not work out you understand that's goofy it doesn't ruin your child that's right so try something out you know try out uh if you can afford it with the time try out a little bit of homeschooling try out

a micro schooling option try a private school a christian school there are many different opportunities and options that you can take a look at and there are many resources that kind of aggregate and accumulate outlines on these different options I would recommend looking up the classical learning test with Jeremy Wayne Tate he talks about a lot of classical learning education opportunities also you can reach out to me directly tony.kennett at heritage.org or on Twitter over at the tonus t-h-e-t-o-n-u-s i'd be happy to point you in any number of directions if you're interested i'm more than happy to take time to to help a parent find their path the second thing i should mention and i think this is the most important is that there is more curriculum and resources out there for you to use

in some kind of an alternative education opportunity than there ever has been before in every subject. It's all out there. A lot of it is free of really high quality materials. And honestly, I'm really excited for that reason alone. Yeah, that's one of the things people talk to me about. I said, everything has changed so much. There's just an explosion in stuff that is out there.

And I don't know what a lot of the new stuff is. And that's the key thing. But I, you know, when I encourage people, I say, look at the government schools, you couldn't possibly do worse. And so take that fear of failure away from, uh, take it off the table and don't be afraid to do something. And if it doesn't work, try something different. As you pointed out, your child's not going to be irreparably damaged by anything that you try with this stuff. It can easily be changed if it doesn't work for them. And we found that ourselves when we were going through things. We would try different curricula for math or different curricula for English, and some

would be liked by one child and not by another child. So you experiment and you do it on an individual basis. Talk a little bit about the classical curriculum, because that was something that I thought was always interesting, but it was really beyond the amount of time that we could devote to it. Has that gotten any, there's other resources out there, maybe that's gotten a little bit easier for people to do. It's pretty hard to do unless there's some actual school often affiliated with a church or something that

is running the classical curriculum through the trivium that that used to be kind of the case that it was kind of restricted by your access physically and location to that kind of a thing however there are a lot of online options now that do provide classical resources that can help teach you how to make your education experience for your kid a little more classical. This just includes a higher level of expectation in teaching English and teaching history. It's a very narrative focused education and teaching your child very early on some of the higher principles in history and ethics and philosophy. And actually trusting that your kid can understand difficult concepts like aristotle and shakespeare earlier than being a senior in high school that's right

and those things do shape what it is that they do there's also uh classical education that focuses very heavy on etymology so the origin of words and syntax so focusing on greek focusing on latin and actually taking some of those aspects to making your education a more valuable experience i have yet to find an individual that utilized latin in their education that is not excellent at reading at language synthesis at historical analysis because it really does teach you a whole lot and that's coming from someone who never learned how to speak latin i've never studied latin beyond a little bit during my time learning Koine when I was in college. So I would encourage parents really to look at resources, again, via the classical learning test.

They have a kind of a small repository of places that you can go. But you don't have to be close to a school that teaches classically anymore to get involved. Some of the best classically trained individuals that I know were homeschooled and by parents that learned on the fly to say. That's right. Yeah. Even if you don't know Latin yourself, you can still teach on that. What we wound up doing was we found some books that had keywords from Latin and from Greek, because I thought that was one of the best aspects of that was to see the etymologies you're talking about you know of our language and once you start to learn a lot of those you can you know pretty much look at so many english words and you immediately can kind of piece together what is really there it was something that we enjoyed even though we had

not done that in our education uh that's that's another nice thing about homeschooling your kids you get to go back and fill in some of the missing pieces in your education that way that's one of the things absolutely yeah and you get to experiment i mean like the science of reading right now and the instruction of phonics is becoming such more or such a an easier a more easily understood subject yes uh than than when i was even in school it's amazing to see the strides that we are making in some of these educational practices because again education is starting to become decentralized which means that individuals are going to find out things it's like a new age of industry that

is starting to take hold in education things we're discovering that we're inventing that we're trying out and I I'm excited to see 20 years from now, the effects and the refinements of some of these studies. It's again, it is, there's never been more fun to be in the education field. Uh, and I, I do miss being in the classroom primarily for that reason. Well, you're going to have some kids to really focus on it. I'm sure you're going to do a great job of teaching them. One of the things I like to, I'll say this about the classical curriculum, even though we didn't do it, uh, finding out about, you know, in terms of the perspective I like to, I'll say this about the classical curriculum, even though we didn't do it, uh, finding out about, you know,

in terms of the perspective, the general perspective, uh, teaching kids to think on their own. That's what a liberal education used to mean. And so part of that would be to give, uh, kids at a very early age,

there'd be a lot of memorization, a lot of, uh, facts that you would be giving them. And then you transition into putting those together in a critical thinking type of way. And so, you know, you can also teach critical thinking without doing a full classical curriculum. So there's always opportunities like that that exist. And as you find out about different approaches, you can pick and choose this from that, whatever works for you and your kids. You know, it's kind of like a smorgasbord out there. And

it's even more so that way now with all the resources that are out there. I think that I agree with you. I think that is the future. There's a tremendous amount of information that is online and it's just, you know, there's so much information in so little time. That's really the issue, I think, isn't it? Prioritizing this stuff. I think so. And that's one of the reasons I'm so optimistic because we've been talking about you know the curriculum but we haven't even talked about the pedagogy which is how something is taught and right now the number of ways to teach all of the different things that you know we used to sit in classrooms and drone through are limitless realistically i mean the

field trips that parents are taking their kids on to museums and to parks and going into the woods and all kinds of wonderful things just to experience the creation. Getting back to that apprentice model that again, with the apprentice, the fellow craft and the master, it's amazing to see kids younger and younger kind of hang out with their parents while they're doing their work and really getting to experience applying some of the things that they've learned and finding out that, wow, these kids really enjoy labor and accomplishment and industry and that agency that comes from those things. It's something that the Montessori crew got right back in the late 90s and early 2000s.

And then they got distracted because, you know, wooden blocks are so much fun to play with. They forgot to stick to the classical roots. But seriously, these things in education, it's truly a wonderful time to be able to participate, especially when the competition is tripping over themselves in agony. Yeah, exactly. I remember when John Taylor Gatto was an outspoken advocate of homeschooling and stuff. But he was a former teacher of the year in New York a couple of times, I think.

And, and he would do that. He would do a lot of field trips and things like that with the students. And I think that's a very important thing. You know, when we talk about the importance of a moral foundation, that goes back to Deuteronomy six. You know, you take your kids with you as you're walking, as you're doing these activities on a day to day basis with your with your kids there, you give them moral instruction as what is happening. Or you talk to them about politics, or you talk to them about history, or you talk to them about math and other things like that.

But it's being there with them. That gives you an opportunity to speak into their life and to give them a moral foundation. If you're not there, you can't do that. And that's the key thing. I think that is very important. If you're not there, you can't do that. And that's the key thing. I think that is very important as you're talking about the different methods that people have, you know, we're talking about phonics or see and say that they tried that doesn't really work that well, the different approaches as to how you teach something, the pedagogy as you've talked about math is the same way.

I remember when I was in school, they had this, uh, you know, new math and it really didn't click. Oh, new math. Yeah, new math was awful. I hated the new math. But I wanted to go into engineering, and I had to get over this. And I had just avoided as many math classes as I could. I don't know how in the world I graduated with a few math classes I had.

So I had to catch up on my own. And the thing that saved me was I found a math book that had been used as a textbook for the Naval Academy. That got me through trig. It was all practical and I loved it. It was great. Got me up to spherical trig even. And so, you know, there's difference in the way that the information is presented and how you're looking at it. And again, you laugh at new math because that's where you're coming from in that area, science math right oh no i was i was laughing because there's an old tom leher song uh it was a pianist and a comedian new math new math and it i it gets stuck in my head i love that one yeah i remember uh tom leher i love his stuff uh but uh yeah it is it was uh that was the time that i was around there learning

it's a little bit older than i am and that was the kind of stuff that they threw at us so it's how it's presented and now you got a massive uh you know smorgasbord of different ways that you want to teach these same subjects which subjects are you going to teach it is really an exploding thing there so that's the positive aspect of it you know people are have been given an opportunity the curtain has been pulled back we've seen seen what CRT looks like. We've seen what is happening with the LGBT stuff. We know they want to take your kids away from you and hide what they're actually doing. We know what their agenda is. And then on the other side, there's this vast open area of opportunity for you to explore with your children. I think that's the key thing, isn't it? And I really would point this out that in an era where parents are

desperate to connect with their own kids and they think you know oh i got these teenagers who don't want to be around me and don't want anything to do with me and i don't know how to connect with them if you are taking your kids out and you are you know involving them in you know your work and your labor and getting them to experience more parts of quote unquote adult life that we kind of sheltered away from in the 60s through the 80s. And you actually get kids to experience that kind of work alongside you as your assistant, as whatever it is that you have them doing, completing tasks, you unlock passions in their life. And they are, those are experiences they share with you that, you know, of course, you know, to put it in the hallmark way, are lifetime experiences and wonderful.

But in a more serious fashion, that gives you things to talk about. That builds that core of trust that lasts forever. And you don't have to wait until your kids are in your 20s to be, quote unquote, the adults laboring in the field together. You can get that in an earlier age by trusting that your kids will be interested in things that you're doing, because that's where education is applied. And that's how it's always been meant to be ever since the earliest days of instruction that we learned of in the time of the Israelites. Yes, I agree. That is absolutely true. It is an interesting time, and I think it is interesting, and I've looked at it from

a Christian perspective. I remember looking at how everything was closing down, and of course, our freedoms were being closed down even more rapidly in so many more areas now. And yet, at the same time, we have this window of opportunity for education with our kids, which is such a strange thing. And I always saw that as a God thing, you know, that God was keeping that window of opportunity open for us as, you know, every one of our freedoms are being infringed upon in rapidly increasing ways.

We still have that freedom to educate our kids. And that is a wonderful thing. We need to take advantage of that in any way that we can in terms of making the choices and being involved in what our kids are doing. We have that opportunity. And it'd be a shame to lose that, isn't it? Well, thank you so much for joining us, Tony. And what is the best way for people to find your work?

You're there at The Daily Signal as a host. You have a radio show on WIBC. Tell people, do you have a website that you want to direct people to? Just dailysignal.com. You can find a lot of my work, but the easiest way to get in touch with me, and I know that this, given the dumpster fire nature of the site,

some people may not find it as fun, but you can find me over on Twitter at thetonus, T-H-E-T-O-N-U-S. My messages are open. I love getting to chat with people. Other than that, you can, of course, find my email and things over at The Daily Signal, and I'm happy to talk to you there as well.

That's great. Great talking to you. It's good to see somebody who's been there, who understands it, has recent experience in it, and understands the big picture. Thank you so much, Tony. It's great having you on. Thanks for having me on, David.

Thank you. We'll be right back, folks. Stay with us the common man they created common core to dumb down our children they created common past to track and control us. Their commons project, to make sure the commoners own nothing and the communist future. They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary.

But each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God. That is what we have in common. That is what they want to take away. Their most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation. They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us. It's time to turn that around and expose what they want to hide. Please share the information and links you'll

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