The David Knight Show - INTERVIEW Taking Back Your Children & The Future

Episode Date: March 27, 2023

We know the problems with schools. But here's some practical solutions from Dr. Duke Pesta, FPEUSA.org, for real education — whether it is a single problem area, an area for enrichment/advancement, or an entire educational program.Find out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.com If 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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No, we bet more power to you. T's and C's apply 18 plus bet responsibly gambling care. Dot E. Joining us now is Dr. Duke Pesta. As I said, he is the executive director of the freedom project Academy. I went to get him on because I have people all the time saying,

yeah, and I understand how bad the schools are, but how do I do this? You know, and we have to recover, uh, the understanding of how to do it. It's just like a lot of people are looking at this stuff and saying, uh, you know, in terms of food supply and supply chain issues. Well, I, I know I need to start growing some of my own food, but I don't know how to do it. It's all been lost. I haven't had anybody in my family that's farmed for generations.

And so we have to recover some of these things. Fortunately, this has been growing gradually for a while. And you've got some people like Dr. Pesta who have been working on solutions for quite some time. And they've got some very mature solutions. And so we're going to talk a little bit about how that looks. But thank you for joining us, Dr. Pesta. Thanks. Nice to be with you. Thank you. We were talking during the break there, and I asked him if there's anything he'd

like to talk about. He said, well, we could start with what you just ended up with. Why do bad things happen to good people? What is your understanding, Dr. Pesta? Well, my primary gig is I'm a university professor. I'm a professor of English, and I teach the Western classics, often teach books like the Bible. And so I usually talk to my kids about this. And one of the points I make to them, because I hear that from sophomores all the time, if God is just and we should love him, how come he doesn't save puppies from being run over and this kind of stuff? And my argument is pretty basic. It's, look, think about what you're asking God, that unless you give God, unless God gives you everything you want, you know, you don't want to die in a hurricane, a tornado,

I get it. But at what point do you stop that? I mean, let's say that God says, oh, I agree with you. We're going to take away all natural disasters. Then you're going to say, well, but gee, God, it certainly isn't good that people die of cancer, right? And so God says, you know what? We're going to take away cancer.

Pretty soon you're going to be asking him to make you taller and less bald and no acne. And this is the point, right? Is that the world we live in has its nature as God made it has its own consequences, including death, which is the wages of sin. And so what we're basically asking God when we say that, I'm only going to worship a God who basically makes me God too. In other words, I shouldn't have to die. I shouldn't have to suffer. I shouldn't have to be inconvenienced. And isn't that literally what caused Lucifer to become Satan, right? He wanted to become God, not worship God, serve God.

And I think when you get to the bottom of those arguments, right, that natural disasters prove that God doesn't exist, well, that's one more example of how man seeks to become God ourselves. Yes. And you go back to the Garden of Eden and you see the same impulses that we see in the technocracy. You will live forever and you'll become like God. That was the explicit promise.

And as part of that, you know, they ate the forbidden fruit. Nobody died, you know, they didn't do any harm to their fellow man type of thing. And so we typically dismiss that and say, well, what's the big deal? Well, it was rebellion to God. You know, God said in that day that you eat of it, you'll die. He cursed the world, and that's the world that we live in. I think it's interesting, Dr. Pesta, you know, people, when they see something bad happening, they would call it an act of God.

But they don't say that when something good happens. It kind of shows our fallen nature right there, doesn't it? Well, I think about Nietzsche for a second, the great, the end of the 19th century, who said, God is dead. We philosophers have murdered him with our knives. He said that, do you not smell the stench of the death of God? He did say also, Nietzsche, that in order for man to be worthy of the murdering of God philosophically, man would have to become God, right? If you get rid of God, then man will have to step up. And you could not have had a Hitler or a Stalin or a Mao without that philosophy, right? If there is no God, then the strong man becomes God. And we could sum everything we're talking about, we could sum it up with the first

commandment. I am the Lord, your God, you cannot have strange gods before me. If you put anything before God, you are becoming a god in a way. And so it is amazing how basic when you look at the theology of God as Judeo-Christianity has handed it to us. I mean, you really don't need much more than that first commandment. If you follow the first commandment going back 3,500 years, and you keep God in place, and you recognize his supremacy over everything, then you're never going to wander astray. It's amazing how in the modern world, the first thing that happens is that we start by making science God, and now the God of science is turning on us, right?

Telling us that biology doesn't matter anymore if somebody wants to be trans. That's right. Yeah, oh yeah, it does. And of course, lockdowns and all the rest of this stuff. We have a guy who appeared to speak for the God of science for a couple of years, and he was telling everybody exactly

what they could and could not do. Kind of a dictatorship. And that's what always happens when people see themselves as god but um yeah it is it is truly amazing when we look at it i've i've had um some people will say well you know when we look at these natural disasters and say where was god in this massive uh death and destruction and he says well if you understand what your relationship is to God, it's kind of what Jesus said when he had some people say, but what about these people in Galilee that Pilate murdered? You know, while they're in the middle of a religious ceremony, massacred them. And what about this tower that fell on all these people and they died? You know, Jesus reminds him, he said, look, you know, you need to think about the fact that you're going to die someday, essentially is what he's saying.

And if you don't get your life, turn your life towards God, repent, follow him and that type of thing, you're in much greater peril. We're all going to die. And we need to understand our need of Christ. And so that is the key thing. Instead of trying to put ourselves in positions you're talking about with Nishi, elevating ourselves to the level of God and putting him in the box as a defendant, we need to take a different perspective and start taking a look at ourselves as well, I think. But let's talk. Yeah, go ahead.

I was going to say that sounds really good. I think that's a good summation. Oh, well, thank you. Let's talk a little bit about, you've been an opponent of Common Core for a long time. And of course, that's where a lot of this stuff began and the Department of Education, I've interviewed Charlotte Iserby many times before she passed away,

talking about the deliberate dumbing down of America and the fact that they wanted to control curriculum from a central position, attach dollars to it. And so it's given us things like Common Core. It's given us things like critical race theory. Talk a little bit about those things and the trajectory that you've seen over the last several decades in terms of education.

This moves so quickly that Common Core is almost passe now. What was a big deal 12 years ago, now it's completely been swallowed up by the next thing, which is critical race theory and the radical sexuality that you see going on in your classrooms, the LGBTQ stuff. And I think Charlotte was wonderful, rest her soul. She was one of the first people in the Reagan administration. Even when you had a president like Ronald Reagan, the Department of Education was doing nasty things. And so she exposed a lot of that and put it on the map. Once you created the Department of Education, you gave the federal government their nose under the tent. Constitution is clear.

There is no mention of public education anywhere in the founding documents for a reason. Our founding fathers knew that if you put a federal entity in charge of education, it would not be long before that federal entity was educating children for their benefit, not for moms and dads and local communities. And so it's amazing how fast things changed. 1979 rolls along, here we are 50 years later. And now the education, what happens in our kids' classrooms is dominated by what the Department of Education says. The Department of Education has been given taxpayer money under lies. When Biden took over, you remember how he asked for trillions more in COVID relief.

We ponied up again, as we always do. And then billions of those dollars, billions and billions were handed to the Department of Education to hand out grants to public schools to put critical race theory. And this is how this is why we should have no federal messing with education. But Common Core, I'll say this about it. It was the final step. I think you suggested this. It was the final step that actually opened the pipeline between the federal government

and your backyard school, your little local school district. That set up the pipeline once and for all. And now it's working the way it's supposed to work, according to the left, where autocrats, people who've never been elected to anything like Cardona, our secretary of education, are taking taxpayer money, which they shouldn't have, and bribing local school districts and threatening them to start having trans bathrooms and letting boys in showers. Because if you don't do any of those things now, you're not going to get your federal money. And almost every single state, however conservative, has a liberal Department of Education. So on the state level and the federal level, you either conform or you go without your money.

Yeah, if they fund it, they're going to control it. And the way they control it is going to be through these curriculum and through testing and all these different things. And that's been on there for a long time. I said for the longest time, if we don't have freedom of education, there will be no freedom of speech and there'll be no freedom of religion. And we see that those are the things that are really under attack in the colleges. And it seems like all of our institutions have been taken over by this kind of philosophy, people who are steeped in it. And I think it's just because they've been recycling people through generation after

generation. These institutions, you know, they go all the way from kindergarten through graduate school or whatever, get their degree, and then they go right back into the school and teach what they just learned. And that next generation, every generation, it becomes more concentrated, doesn't it? Go on, go on. At this year's Cheltenham, glory rests in the lap of the gods. Oh, curses.

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No, we bet. More power to you. T's and C's apply. 18 plus bet responsibly. Gamblingcare.ie. Yeah, I think we've got, pretty much for people under 35, the vast majority of them

have been educated this way. And what was the demographic that killed the red wave? What we were supposed to? In this horrible economy, everybody was geared up. We were going to see this. What killed it was single young women under the age of 35. They voted in record numbers. And the college kids, 18 to 29s, they voted in record numbers. And they were the ones who completely transformed this and handed government back largely i mean a small gain in the the congress but the senate in particular stayed left because those young people who have been miseducated for three generations now they're becoming the future

of this country that's right yeah if you take over the schools you take over education you've taken over uh all of it and as i was talking about before you came on, that is one of the reasons why you have communist dictators or dictators of any political philosophy, like President Xi, who is having kids sign a kindergarten. To get into kindergarten, your parents have to sign a statement saying they will stay away from all religious instruction and all the rest of this stuff, because they must be the ones who are going to set the worldview and the foundation for people. So you've got the Freedom Project Academy, and let's talk a little bit about how this works because I think one of the silver lining, certainly a big silver lining of this lockdown through the pandemic was that parents got a chance to see what was actually going on in their child's classroom. And I've had this discussion with people for many, many decades have said, because I've been pushing back against this even before we homeschooled our kids.

And I said, look, look at what's happening in Washington. Look at what's happening at the state level. Look at what is happening in your school district. Look even at what is happening in your own school. And they'd always say, no, but it's different in my kids' classroom. We got a great teacher. Well, they got a chance to see what was actually going on in the classroom. And it scared them to death. So tell us a little bit what your classroom looks like. Well, you know, you asked at the very top of this segment, you asked, you know, a lot of moms and dads know something has to be done, but they don't know what to do.

One of the great blessings of being in this country, and you mentioned this, is we're not yet China. And so homeschooling is a viable option or decent private schools. So there are a lot of ways to do this. And most moms and dads say, I want to pull my kids out of public school, but I don't know what to do with them. And I don't know any idea how to homeschool them. We freedom project for that purpose it's a online christian school from kindergarten all the way through high school uh it's classical education so you're not getting any of this lgtbq garbage uh and we do it live we have live teachers on the internet who will your kid can log in and they hate they've got a classroom of 25 other kids all across the world. Actually, we got kids

in 14 foreign states, 48 states and 14 foreign countries, and they'll have classmates. Kids can talk to each other. They can talk to the teacher and they can bring, because of technology, they can have music and timelines and pictures and film clips to help with education. So we create a virtual classroom that is every bit the equal, I think, of the typical model, but it's in some ways better because there's more privacy. This is happening in your home. No one at Freedom Project, none of our kids have had to miss a day of COVID. They never had a school shooting. They've never been bullied by sex. They've never been forced into the wrong bathroom because they get this education in your living room. And so it is one answer, I think. And we are accredited. Our kids are graduating, going to colleges. We do all the transcripts and

grades for you. But meanwhile, you can watch if you wish to because we record the live classes. As soon as the live classes are over, we record them. You, mom, mom and dad, you have access to every single second of your kid's education. All you got to do is get on that site and go back and you can find everything that was said, everything that was done. You control and see everything. And so we believe education, one of the reasons education's lost its way is because educrats and teachers unions and miseducated teachers have taken all the parental rights and they've adopted them while ignoring your kid's education. In a school like Freedom Project, we're giving you a school structure and we're allowing you at home to be in charge of it.

That's really interesting. And, you know, there's so many different ways for people to approach it. You know, just like we have, you know, you can have home schools or you can have private schools or charter schools or this or that or a regular public school. There's a lot of different ways that this can be done. And as you're pointing out, this is a classroom situation, like a Zoom class, and parents can see everything that is being done in the classroom. So they have an opportunity to monitor it, which is something that you wouldn't get out of a charter school or something like that. You would still have this kind of, well, what is really being taught there? And the key part of it, I think, is the fact that you have that oversight ability because there's always this uncertainty when it's out of sight.

What is going on? Even if you could have one teacher and they may be totally out of sync with the rest of the faculty or the principal or the mission of the school, but they could go do their own thing. And you don't know that in a school environment or in a charter school environment, because that class is hidden from you. And so I think that's a real key thing. Yeah. It is. And I think even with the charters and some of the private schools, people have to realize that many of the private and many of our Christian, so-called Christian schools, have been infected with all of this. In fact, some of the most intolerant CRT and LGTBQ programs are in our Christian schools, believe it or not. And as with the charters, as with the private schools, as you said a moment ago, they're still taking money from the state or the feds, which changes how they're able to do things. Once you start

taking money from the feds, this is like all the state legislatures too. Once you take money from the feds, you get addicted to that money. You decide that you can't live without that money. And so you're willing to change anything. Even in Christian schools, you're jettisoning the Bible and replacing it with social justice issues. And so, yeah, you've got to be very careful about that. But the key is exactly that. Moms and dads are the stakeholders. They should be in charge ultimately. That's right.

And people will say, you know, what's the matter with the schools? They're totally failing. And I've said for years, they're not failing. They're doing exactly what they were designed to do. As you pointed out, you know, there was actually a Babylon Bee satire, and they said, miracle, this student graduates from seminary class and still believes in god you know i mean it's in all of the institutions any of them can be subverted that's why it's very important to be able to see that and in your particular approach you have a situation where the parents don't have to do the schooling but they still have the

visibility and and the the educational resources are still there for the parents to have full, I should say, I guess the resources are accountable to the parents, which you don't have in these other formats. And yet it offloads a lot of the work from parents, and it looks more like a traditional school. But I think a lot of people are concerned about the different approaches to homeschool. They don't know exactly what they're going to do in terms of, you know, how do I teach this class or that class?

And there's different approaches that have come. But, you know, this is one that people would instantly recognize because it's so much in structure like a class, but the focus is on the academics and keeping that focus rather than some kind of a social agenda. Yeah. And the nice thing about this is that if you are comfortable homeschooling your kids, and let's say that you're doing a great job up until they're juniors in high school, but you have no idea as a homeschool mom how you're going to teach them chemistry. Well, you could just take a chemistry class. Or if you have to keep your kids in the public schools,

I hope you wouldn't. But if you keep your kids in the public school, but you're very concerned that the history of America they're learning is one big lie, which is what it's going to be. And we have moms and dads who keep their kids in the public schools, but they take a history class from us. We do three years of American history in high school, and it's completely originalist history. It's not about rewriting history. It's not about social justice. It's the actual history of this country. So their kids will get bad history at the public school, but then when they come home two times a week, mom and dad will sit them down and watch an actual recorded history class from us that at least gives your kids a second way of seeing things.

We have a lot of moms too, who have kids in public schools. And so the kids don't know how to do math. And so they're, they're, they're learning all this goofy math stuff that is completely non intellectual. Well, you,

you can set that a lot, set that aside and show them some of our math, which is traditional math. And right away, the, the, the light bulb goes off kids who kids who couldn't do math in the public schools now can do it because lo and behold,

we're teaching them math, not social justice math. Yeah, that's very important. And that's a real key advantage because that is the issue when you get to the higher levels. You know, what do we do for chemistry? What do we do for these other things? And what has become commonplace is for people to have a co-op type of situation. But that doesn't mean that you've got anybody there that is really qualified to teach chemistry. You've got somebody who signs up to do it, and they'll try to stay a couple of lessons ahead of the kids doing it. But if you could take a particular class or set of classes

and kind of do the classes a la carte is what you're talking about, right? Yeah, yeah, wonderful. Something that people are looking at, you know, a particular deficiency of your ability to teach or something that you would just like to offload, you can offload that particular class if it's something that you don't like. So you don't like math. Well, you could offload math to the Freedom Project Academy, right? Yeah, and the nice thing is we, for high achieving kids, we have at the high school level advanced

economics. We have marine biology, we have astronomy, we have really good class of physics that you would be hard pressed, I certainly couldn't teach them. But we also for kids who are remedial. So if you find out that your fourth grade is really reading at a first grade level, which is likely to be the case, you can bring your kids to us and we have remediation programs to get them caught up as well. We can then take not just the high achieving kids and give them those high level courses that homeschool is hard to do. We can also take kids who are behind and try to catch them up because we have a different paradigm in public school. In the public school, as long as every kid is equally bad,

that's justice, right? That's fairness. The problem are the kids who get ahead. The high achieving kids are the ones that are being artificially held down. That's what the common, by the way, in Common Core meant. People didn't realize it. All that meant was everybody's going to get the same education, a common education. And to do that, you can't raise standards. Every time you raise a standard, kids fall off. Every time you lower a standard, more kids are included. And look, inclusivity is the only virtue the left now believes in. As long as every kid is the same kid, and that means much lower, then we have racial and social justice i remember when common core was being pushed and you had uh bush out there talking about no child left behind as

well you know the converse the converse of that is no child gets ahead you know that's right and no child left behind meant don't pay don't fail them it didn't mean educate them it means everybody gets a diploma everybody gets a diploma. Everybody gets a passing grade. Everybody gets to go to college. That was, and this was a so-called Republican president. So going back to the Department of Education in 79, whether you've had Republican, conservative, or Democrat presidents, all of them have moved education to the left. That's right. Yeah, it's all Lake Wobegon curriculum, where everybody's

above average. But the reality is, as you're talking about remedial classes, to give an example, we talked about in Chicago, for example, they had over 30 schools, I forget the exact number, but over 30 schools where there were no students reading at grade level. And they had over 50 schools where no students were able to do math at grade level. But as you point out, they're fine because everybody's equal. We've dumbed everybody down to the least common denominator, but I guess they wouldn't understand that either because they don't do math. It's even worse than that. It's not that everyone's equal.

You're superior. If you don't know math, math now and science are considered white supremacy. The idea that the empirical method and facts and truth, objectivity, these are being attacked by the socialist left as racist, sexist constructs designed to keep minority and women people down. That's the whole point. So science is hard. Math is science.

Math is hard. So our response, well, they must be white supremacists. So therefore, the fact that if minority kids in the inner city schools where there's no discipline, there's no family support, if those kids aren't getting the same grades as kids in wealthy suburban schools, well, then it's got to be racism. And the problem isn't the school. The problem is math

itself and science itself. And that type of attitude, I remember Walter Williams before he passed away, that enraged him. He said, what you're saying here is that black people can't do this or black people can't do that. And so we got to dumb it down. He says, you know, that's what he hated so much about all this stuff. But let's talk about what classical schooling is about, you know, kind of reclaiming the tools of loss, the lost tools of learning. Let's talk to people a bit about what's involved in classical schooling. Well, the first thing I would say about classical education is something nobody ever mentions. It understands human nature. Classical education starts from the premise that we're all different, that not all of us are going to be good at everything, that the purpose of education is not to make us the same. It is to make us more

individual. I, for instance, in second grade, I had a first grade reading, first grade math ability. I still have a first grade math ability, right? I was never going to get it. It was not me. And yet when I was in second grade, I had a 12th grade reading level, see? And back then, they let me read 12th grade books in second and third grade. Can you imagine with the one gift God gave me, the ability to read and to write? If I had to be chained to my second grade peers for the next 10 years before I even got to 12th grade books, that one tool that I had would have been destroyed. In the same way, they're destroying math kids. If you're forcing a two year old, a second grader who can do ninth grade math, if you're forcing that kid to keep doing

second grade math, that math talent is going to rebel. It's going to fall to pieces because it'll have been destroyed. So when we teach kids like individuals, that allows kids who are good in sub-subjects to jump ahead. That's not discrimination. That's education. We've lost that idea. And before you say anything else about classical education, it conforms to human nature. This progressive education doesn't because it literally holds everyone down strangles everybody from what they could do by get by insisting that unless they're

the same there's some kind of discrimination it reminds me of kurt vonnegut's novel harrison bergeron right where if anybody could run they put weights on their legs if they could dance they would tie them up so they couldn't dance because they can't let anybody excel. If you've got some natural talents or some developed abilities, we're not going to let you use them. And that really is what we have incorporated everywhere. You know how that story begins, right? Harrison Bergeron. Oh, it's wonderful. It says something like in the year 2097, 97 because of the 187th amendment to the u.s constitution finally all people were equal that's great yeah that's uh that's one to remember uh i start out the program every day with a quote from orwell you know as the clock strikes 13 uh this is what's happening

this is the date as the clock is striking 13. That's kind of the world that we live in. What's that? Two plus two equals five, remember? That's right. That is a key. So it allows people to pursue what, and to, as we point out earlier, you know, the a la carte nature of it. I think that is something that is super valuable, no matter what way you, what path you choose to educate your child, that is an incredibly valuable resource to try to pull in something that they're, they're struggling with to try to shore that up. Or if it's something that they're super interested in,

maybe you can go a lot deeper than you would be able to guide your child. And so that allows, as you know about every child being individual that allows every parent to tailor the education and the desires of their child for education, to tailor that specifically to them. So tell us a little bit. There is a really important thing to say, and I want to make sure we get this said. You also got to have a little faith if you're a mom and dad, especially if you're a Christian mom and dad. Look, do you really think God blessed you with kids that you yourself could not educate?

That doesn't make any sense. That if God gave you those children, the idea that you are powerless to educate them, why would that system exist, right? Why would God give you children only somebody else can educate? That doesn't make a lot of sense. So if you start with a little bit of faith, i've met thousands tens of thousands of homeschool moms across the country giving all these common core talks and i can tell you one thing i've never yet ever not one single time met a homeschool mom who regretted doing it that's right neither of my everybody's has been one of the biggest they look at it it's like this daunting task as they're looking at all this stuff, and they put pressure on themselves.

But as they get into it, and as they take each day as it comes, I have seen over and over again parents who never regret it. They love it. It's one of the biggest blessings of being a parent was to be involved personally in your child's education. That's the way that God intended it. And if you do this, you want to honor God, God will honor that, and he will make things happen. People need to step out in faith about that. So tell us a bit more about classical education, some of the classes that are available at Freedom Project Academy. Well, we believe classical education means,

on top of everything else, teaching kids how to think, not telling them what to think. It's not prescriptive. It's not ideological. Let a child wander. If he wants to read, the more he reads, the better, right? The higher he reads. If they want to experiment with science and math, you encourage that. You don't try to discourage them. And they'll find out. Kids are smart enough. They'll find out where their wheelhouse is. So just nurture them. So with classical education, then, the one thing that I would say that separates us from everything else, besides the fact that it teaches kids to think, critical thinking, is the fact that it's very dependent on history. If you don't know what

happened, then you're going to be condemned to repeat it, right? If we don't know, if we can't learn from the past, then we're animals, or we may as well be animals, right? We make the same mistakes again. This, by the way, is why the public schools hate history. They either ignore history or they rewrite it along ideological lines, right? If we told the truth about socialism, it would be the first idea canceled. We're canceling the founding fathers because a small percentage of them own slaves. Okay, if that's enough to disqualify them, then you should completely disqualify the socialism on the hundreds of millions of people it killed. But that's the ideology. Socialism is the answer to the problem,

no matter how many people had to die. And the founding fathers had to go because 250 years, they lived in a world that was not like ours. Yes, yeah, that's very true. And talk a little bit about critical thinking. As I've said many times, education is not the filling of a bucket,

but it's the lighting of a fire. Trying to find, as you pointed out, what your kids are interested in, what they're good at, what their wheelhouse is, and then supporting them in that. But also, it's very different, as you point out, the goal of our government institutions are to tell people what to think. Your goal is to try to tell them how to think and how to think critically, right? That's exactly right. And you do that by exposing them to different arguments. Look, we're a Christian school, but we have our kids read the Greek and Roman mythology, the Odyssey,

the Iliad, the Aeneid, not because we want them to choose paganism, but because too many of our homeschoolers, this is one flaw of homeschooling. Oftentimes homeschool moms and dads want, are so protective of their kids that they only have them read books from their own worldview. The problem with that is when you go to college, you're immediately going to hear arguments attacking that worldview, but you've never heard those arguments before. You don't know what other people think. And so that's why so many homeschool kids collapse when they get to college and become liberals. It's because they can't

defend what they believe because they've never read what the other people think. So classical education is about that. Think about it. Why does Washington DC look like a Roman city? You've got buildings and monuments that look like something from ancient Rome, including the White House with its pillars. That's because the founding fathers, all of them were Christians or at least deists. There's a handful of deists. Most of them were Christians. They all believed in God. They read the pagan classics. They read Plato and Aristotle. They learned about democracy and forms of government. And the first great republic in the world was the ancient Roman Republic. So for all their Christianity, so I

like to explain it this way, the ethos and the moral spine of the founding of this country was Judeo-Christianity going back through the New Testament all the way to the old. But the structure of our government isn't Christian. It's Roman in a way. It's a republic. And so if our kids aren't reading and understanding that, they're going to be easy prey for radical leftists. Like you mentioned, when I logged on here, you were talking about Chinese education, where you got to sign off on no religion and all that. By keeping your kids away from other worldviews, you are doing effectively what the Chinese are, only keeping them in a box.

And then when a better argument seems to come down the road, they have no ability to defend what they believe. That's right. And if they understand history and they understand Roman history, for example, they understand we've got to be careful about crossing that Rubicon and going from a republic to an empire. And I think we crossed that Rubicon here in many, many, many ways, and people don't understand the difference between those two. They just say, well, I've heard something somewhere about Rome,

and I think the head slays other bad. I love your Rubicon example, right? The die is cast, Caesar said. He crossed the Rubicon example, right? The die is cast, Caesar said. He crossed the Rubicon River, and forever, Rome ceased to be a republic and became a tyranny, an empire, right? An emperor, basically a king to an emperor. And not knowing that, you and I went to school when we got that kind of education. My university kids have never heard any of this stuff. Seriously, my university kids, only about, I would say about 80% of my university kids,

they know that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. Only about 30% of them actually realized that he was a president of the United States. It's that bad. Well, what's bad is that they are focusing them on sex at such an early age. I mean, it really has, life has become a combination of Orwell's 1984 and Harrison Bergeron from Vonnegut and Brave New World. You know, when you look at these schools, it's absolutely insane what has happened to them and how quickly it has happened in those schools.

And so it is very important for us to understand the alternatives. Tell us a little bit more about some of the classes that you have, because I think it's very important that people understand that they can get some of these things a la carte. To me, that is a very, very important feature. Absolutely. We have economics courses at every level because of kids. Math is important, but if kids don't understand money and how to stay afloat, there's going to be big problems, all the debt we have. Maybe I could pay for Jerome Powell to enroll. Yeah, that's exactly right. Well, one of the requirements we have for kids in middle school is that they take Latin. Not only is Latin a great language in terms of its historical knowledge and its biblical knowledge, but Latin also is a

mathematical language. You have to place things in certain ways. It's very analytic. So by teaching kids Latin as the first language they learn in sixth and seventh grade they're going to be prepared to to do spanish and french and italian a much higher level because of course all those languages are based on italian but there's something so mathematical and analytically precise about latin that it really helps them in math and science too so we have that we have the advanced economics we have uh history courses that are American and civic based to our courses in American history. Don't just teach history, but civics, something that the public schools ignore. We also have, as I mentioned before, we have literature.

Hang on a second and talk a little bit about that distinction with civics. Oh, boy, it's a big one. So teaching kids history is oftentimes fraught because as we've seen people like Howard Zinn in the 70s creating history textbooks that were so viewed through the lens of socialism, not democracy and freedom in the republic. Civics is what our rights and responsibilities are, what we are allowed to do, what we owe our country, what our country owes us through law, all of that stuff, what the responsibilities of freedom are. And those can't be made up. What's in the documents say this is what we can and can't do, what we must do, what our liberties are, how government is limited. Government works for us, not the other way.

That's the thing that our kids aren't getting. So they don't see the value of the Constitution because all they're taught in their history classes is that the white men who created the Constitution eliminated women and minorities, and then we move on to something else. But when you read the documents and you find out civically what benefits and what wonderful prescience they had, suddenly you don't look at them so negatively. So civics without history is problematic, and it's one of the reasons why we are in the trouble we are today with young kids when they vote. Yeah, and of course it's also true, you know, as you come as a Christian background, if people don't understand

human nature they're not going to understand one of the reasons why we keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again regardless of the technology they they want kids to think that because they have computers or something like that there's so much more advanced than the past and that the rules don't apply but the issue still remains human nature and that the rules don't apply, but the issue still remains human nature. And that's what doesn't change. And that's one of the key things that we learn out of history. But continue on with some of the other things that you have. Well, I would say, too, about that point, because you want to know the best definition

of classical education is that, right, that socialism is wrong on a lot of a lot of a lot of levels and it's wrong precisely because it doesn't take human under human social values into context it doesn't understand human nature human beings are not the same socialism treats people as collectives not individuals socialism wage wages war on the individual well Well, you mentioned Christianity. I think Christianity has always been the kryptonite of socialism. Why? Because there is no figure in human history, not one, who was more individually centered than Jesus Christ. When he came, he did not offer salvation collectively. That was something you had to work out with God

through your own free will. There has never been a greater voice in human history than Christ when it comes to the worth and the power and the uniqueness of every individual. We're all made in the same image of God. And so when Christianity— And that transcended ethnic groups, it transcended male and female and all the rest of these things. It's highly individual about that. You're exactly right. And it is why they have to attack that. One of the reasons is they don't want there to be any God except them.

But the other part of it is that as well, because if they reduce you, as we saw with all the public health stuff, right? Public health is this imaginary thing, but we can destroy all the health of the individuals in order to serve this construct we call public health. Yeah, and the reason we're in the mess that we are in our schools is because we are removing Christianity. The Christianity is slowly being eradicated from our culture, and with every step back, Christianity takes, socialism takes two steps forward. And so if you really want to fix this, and this is one of the reasons, by the way, homeschool works, because many, not all, but many homeschool moms and dads are Christians. And they're educating their kids to preserve the Christian way of life.

And notice what happens. Not only are those kids remain, they keep their faith. They are better students. They do better on math and science and reading and writing in college. So when Christ is there, all the education issues are taken care of. Public schools, the socialists are correct. Before you can get full socialist control of any aspect of American culture, You have got to push religion in general and Christianity in particular. You've got to push it off the cliff. They've been pushing for a long time now, and I don't see a whole lot of our Christian churches pushing back. That's right. Yeah, it's one of the reasons why all these socialist collectives have always failed throughout history, because as you point out, they don't understand human nature. It was a

problem for the pilgrims. It was a problem for all these, you know, the United experience and all the rest of these things. And they would come back and say, well, the problem is not socialism. The problem is the families. And we got to get the kids away from the parents at an earlier and earlier age. We see all of these threads. If we know history, even just recent history, we can see all of these threads, all these arguments that have gone back for hundreds of years.

Very, very similar to what we have right now. We've got to get rid of parents. We've got to get rid of Christ. We've got to get all that out of there. And we've got to get the kids at an early age so we can indoctrinate them. That's why it's so important for parents to take control of what their kids see, to be able to see what their kids are seeing. That's why I really like what you're doing there. One of my favorite quotes is, the problem with socialism is socialism. In other words, it's a bad, unhuman idea. The problem with capitalism is capitalists.

Capitalism is perfectly a fine idea. It works. However, some capitalists abuse it. The problem with socialism is the idea. The problem with capitalism is that some people might misabuse it. Nevertheless, the idea does work. That's right. Yeah, any system that you have, you know, a bad actor in a system doesn't necessarily mean that the system itself is bad.

It's an opportunity for you to purge that out and not be corrupted by it. It's an opportunity for you to purge that out and not be corrupted by it. It's an opportunity for reform to the system. But the problem with any system is going to be the individual human element, and that's the key thing. But as you point out, socialism is inherently flawed in its very structure. So tell us a little bit about your approach to things that are more basic, like math and reading, how that differs from the government's approach. Well, we do hardcore phonics. You want to teach your kids to read, read fast and read well, you got to teach them phonics.

No sight words, none of this garbage they're doing in the public schools now. Amen. That's true. I can say that. Everybody that I've known says phonics. It really is, yes. It works. And this is why you said something very early on. These schools are failing because they see failure academically as a way forward. This is not a mistake. The public schools aren't

interested in turning your kids into educated people. Educated people won't follow instructions. Educated people won't surrender their. Educated people won't surrender their freedoms to socialism. So they're literally, not figuratively, literally holding your kids back so they don't know. That's why they teach sight words. That's they're trying to get kids to look at words and memorize them. And then it's not a mistake. They can't do it. They can't read. They can't do math. Kids who't read. They can't do math. Kids who can't read and do math and look after themselves,

kids who can't become entrepreneurs and take care of their own families, they will turn to government to do it for them, which is the end game here. So we do traditional math, traditional science, and purely empirical, right?

All based on memorization of multiplication tables we don't do common core weirdness our reading is phonics based we have them reading good books that have moral and historical lessons in them from the time they start going to school uh by the our grade levels are what they were 20 50 50, 100 years ago. Good. By the time your kid starts and graduates high school, we want to make sure that kids can theoretically do calculus by the time they graduate from high school. We want to make sure they're doing algebra before they get to high school. They got to be reading serious books before they get to fifth grade or they'll never read better books. So it's not complicated.

We've been doing it. We did it for a thousand years. It's just in the last 50 to 70 years, we threw it all away and went with all of this ideological crap from the departments of education that these indoctrination sites are turning kids away from teaching truth and turning all this ideology. I agree. And of course, the solutions, everybody, one of the big problems is that most people in our society, and it doesn't matter if they're left, right, Republican, Democrat, most people

still see government as a path to a solution. If we just elect the right people, if we got the right president in place, but the solution really is for us to step up and to do it ourselves. And that was always what Alexis de Tocqueville talked about, the strength of America. They would see something that was a problem, and they would take care of it themselves. If they needed a library, if they needed a volunteer fire department,

he said the Americans will put it together. He said in France, where they were under socialism, they're waiting for the government to come to their rescue. The Americans will step up and do it. But we've lost that. And the reason we've lost that is because it's been educated out of our culture. And we need to reclaim that. That's one of the key things about taking responsibility for education. That's where it all starts. And that's where all the problems in our society are founded. And that is in the kind of education that

we have now. I really like what you're doing there at Freedom Project Academy. And the website is, I've got it here on my sheet here. Tell everybody where the website is. We start enrolling in middle April. So this is very timely. And check us out at FPEUSA.org, FPEUSA.org. All kinds of information about our school. You can see every class we teach, every book we assign in every class.

You can see that whether you come with us or not, you could take our whole curriculum. Just take it. Just get your kids educated well. We start enrolling in about three weeks. And if you have any questions, you can get a hold of anybody. Just go to F-P-E-U-S-A.org. April 11th, and it is FPEUSA.org. And I have to say, I absolutely agree with your philosophy of education.

It's one of the things that we used to do kind of ad hoc back in the days when we educate our kids. We'd go down to the bookstore and they'd have these books, what your third grader needs to know or whatever. We'd look at that and say, no, they don't need to know that. There's something they need to know that's not in there. And oh, by the way, they're going to teach the other third graders this. So we need to teach them how that is. Teach them that and teach them how, why we don't agree with that.

You know, teach the controversy there. And that's part of the critical thinking. I really do agree with what you're doing, Dr. Pesa. Thank you so much for coming on. And again, that website is fpeusa.org, a great place to find resources, and that'll get you started for sure if you're trying to get your kid out of this system that seeks to dominate them. Thank you so much, sir.

Thanks for your time today. Thank you. 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 find at thedavidknightshow.com. Thank you for listening. Thank you for sharing. If you can't support us financially, please keep us in your prayers.

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