The Right and Wrong Way to Teach: Charlie Speaks to the TPUSA Educators' Summit
Why have America's schools gone so badly off the rails? In his speech to the TPUSA Educators' Summit, Charlie explains that our problems are nothing new. They're rooted in mistakes that stretch back decades and even centuries, to men like Woodrow Wilson, John Dewey, and Jean-Jacques Rosseau. Above all, Charlie says, the crisis of America's schools is rooted in the failure of progressivism to understand what education actually is...and what a child is.Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Reclaiming Education at Turning Point00:01:51
Hey, everybody.
Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, my speech at our Turning Point Academy Educators Summit.
And then I take questions from the audience.
If you guys are interested in Turning Point Academy, it is turningpointacademy.com.
That is turningpointacademy.com to reclaim, revive, and restore.
Check it out, turningpointacademy.com.
Check it out today.
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We deeply appreciate it and thank you for your support.
Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
His spirit, his love of this country.
He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
That's why we are here.
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Welcome to our Educators Summit.
I just want to brag on Hutz.
He's real special.
I've got to know Hutz well, and we're going to keep on working together on lots of different things.
And from kind of idea of Turning Point Academy in the heat of a Phoenix summer to really now where we are, it's incredible.
And I want to welcome all of you.
I hope these couple days at both the Educator Summit and America Fest are life-changing.
Teaching Truth to the Next Generation00:15:01
That is our goal, to create immersion experiences that make you really challenge yourself to want to be bold and courageous, maybe to take a stand to homeschool your kids, maybe to start a Turning Point Academy, maybe to send them to the Dream City Christian Turning Point Academy right down the street.
Maybe to, hey, I'm going to, as a student, I'm going to stand up against the nonsense that is being taught in my local school.
Whatever it might be, we try to create that experience for you.
And Turning Point Academy is just getting started.
It's going to be incredible to see what God does through Turning Point Academy in the coming years.
And Hutz, you're doing a wonderful job, and the whole team has worked really hard.
So I'm going to talk just about one very basic thing, and then we could do some questions.
I think truly the issue with American education, and there's plenty, but the one that is most important for us to focus on is the people that have run our education system over the last 100 years, started with John Dewey, Woodrow Wilson played a big role, is they fundamentally do not understand what education is.
We have a completely different opinion of what education is and what it should be.
And so if you walk into any government school here in Phoenix or across the country, they believe that education is allowing students to choose what direction they want to go, presenting them with a bunch of options to liberate them from a very broken world, and really having young people find themselves.
That's a really bad idea.
In fact, it's an evil one.
It's immoral to say to a fourth grader, you got to start to figure out stuff for your, you know, figure out your own path.
Instead, education comes from a Latin word, which means to lead forth.
And the next question is, well, what are you leading them forth towards?
To truth.
You're leading them forth towards a fulfilling life towards beauty, towards truth, towards goodness, towards virtue.
And so therefore you must know what the end in goal is, the end goal is before you even begin the education process.
Far too often teachers will get their fourth or fifth graders kind of sitting around a room and they'll ask them their opinions on the news cycle.
A controversial thing that shouldn't be controversial to say is it's completely irrelevant what a fifth grader opinion is on the news cycle.
That's not what education is.
It's not about the votes of a fifth or a sixth grader.
You can get their perspectives and guess what?
You need to correct them when they're wrong.
That's what a teacher is supposed to do.
A teacher needs to know the path to put a student on.
That's not to say you have to get a student to agree with everything that, you know, how you see the world, but there is a right and a wrong way to educate a child.
For example, at Turning Point Academy, we proudly say there will be no critical race theory.
There will be no wokeism.
There will be no transgender or genderqueer ideology.
There will be none of this insidious mind poison that exists in our country anywhere that Turning Point Academy operates.
We are not going to tolerate it.
We're not going to allow it, period whatsoever.
And thank you.
And some people ask then and they say, well, Charlie, what about freedom of speech?
And what about allowing different opinions?
I'm all for that, obviously, from a constitutional perspective.
The classroom is not a place for all ideas to get equal footing.
This is something that most parents don't wrap their heads around.
They say, well, I want my kid to be exposed to all viewpoints.
No, you don't.
You don't want your kid to be exposed to the flat earth theory or to bloodletting as a way to try to solve diseases.
You don't want your child to be exposed to eugenics.
Maybe that they might be aware and it's a silly idea.
No, education needs to be rooted in truth.
It needs to be rooted in.
And this is one of the reasons why our education system has gone so, so incredibly wrong.
And what's interesting is that it's not that the educators that are currently running our system don't believe in that.
It's they say they don't believe in it, but then they want their version of the truth to be taught to children.
We are seeing a crisis in American education unlike anything this nation has ever experienced, where children are being taught that men and women are basically the same.
They are being taught the awful ideas that there's white privilege and that there is this racism embedded at every single corner in our country.
And more than anything else, they are being taught in gratitude.
It is an entire generation that is being taught to view the world through a lens of not being grateful.
In the scriptures, it tells us time and time again, be thankful, be thankful, be thankful.
You know why?
Because being thankful is not automatic.
The raw material of human nature makes us very ungrateful.
It's easy to take things for granted.
You must teach children to say thank you.
It's one of the first things you teach them.
And guess what?
If our nature was to say thank you, you'd have to teach them once and they would do it automatically from that point forward.
No, we are inherently programmed through our broken nature, original sin, to not want to be grateful.
Guess what?
An ungrateful people is a deeply unhappy people.
And so we teach that.
When you go to college, you get a degree in ingratitude.
Better yet, when you go to elementary school or in high school in America, they are not just ungrateful, but they become increasingly bitter towards the world.
Now, you're going to hear from Dennis Prager in a little bit, but there's a couple things that at Turning Point Academy we are going to communicate very clearly that not even most private schools communicate, that almost no public schools communicate.
I should call them government schools, not public schools, because they don't serve the public school.
They're good.
Their government schools is very, very simple.
We at Turning Point Academy believe that a child is not basically good.
We do not believe in inherent human goodness.
And by the way, if you find that belief to be controversial, then you certainly are not a Christian.
And this is something I wish every pastor would communicate, and they're not.
I'm not saying you're inherently bad.
I actually do believe we're inherently bad, but I'm just saying you're not inherently good.
That at the very least, you have an inclination towards nature that is not something that is admirable or virtuous.
Therefore, any goodness in the world must be taught.
Therefore, anything that is good means it must be taught to the child.
It's not going to happen automatically.
So there is a thinker that did a lot of damage in the 1700s.
His name was Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
He started what we know as the Romantic movement, also as a thinker in the Enlightenment.
He believed the exact opposite.
He believed that humans were good.
He believed that human nature, the child, starts perfect and is corrupted as it gets older.
That the child then gets corrupted through capitalism, through the patriarchy, through Western values, through Christianity.
He believed in the primitive over the civilized, the infant over the adult.
This is a romantic view of human nature.
And almost every single government school that we fund with our taxpayer dollars is teaching children exactly that.
They believe it.
They say anything that is wrong with the world is not because the seven-year-old has something wrong with them that they need to improve.
No, it's because of all the evil of capitalism or the evils of America.
And they teach that to the children.
You know what that does to kids?
It turns them into narcissistic activists who believe there's nothing wrong with me, but there's a lot wrong with stuff around me.
And it should be the exact opposite.
And I'll never forget, I stumbled into this accidentally, probably because of my education at Christian Heritage Academy.
When I was in high school, there was this sign that always bothered me.
And one day I was just rather upset.
And I just decided to ask my teacher about it.
And the sign says, you're perfect the way you are.
And I decided to ask my teacher, excuse me, if we're perfect the way we are, why am I going to school?
Why do I do homework?
Why do you grade me if I'm perfect the way you are?
The self-esteem movement has done more garbage.
The self-esteem movement is not biblical.
It's not moral.
It does the opposite.
It actually creates people with no self-esteem.
As Dennis Prager will tell you, and I learned this from him.
We need to be teaching children self-control, not self-esteem.
In fact, and people say, well, Charlie, people are hurting themselves and getting bullied.
I think that self-esteem only creates more self-harm because it makes people think, well, I don't feel perfect.
And maybe there's something wrong with me.
Instead, you should tell a child, hey, you got a lot of potential, but you are not there yet.
You got to put in a lot of work, a lot of sacrifice, a lot of diligence.
You got to wake up early and maybe you can get close to fulfilling that potential that God has in front of you.
That's a way to make sure depression rates go down and to make sure mental health is in a better direction.
Not telling children they're perfect.
And instead, the entire educational system is rigged in the exact opposite direction.
And it's because I believe there is a political purpose for this more than not.
And I think there's a spiritual purpose as well.
But it does create the raw material for activists.
If you talk to an average high schooler and you ask them, what are the biggest problems facing society?
They will say environmentalism, you know, the climate change, environmentalism, racism, sexism, anti-trans beliefs.
And do you know what they should say?
The biggest problem with society is me.
That's what they should say, is that I'm the biggest threat to society.
And I got to figure myself out before I try to tackle all these other isms.
We are being terrorized by a group of people that are telling us our world is awful that never make their bed.
They don't even do the, I mean, they don't shower either, but the very basic stuff.
The point is the biggest battle that we should teach.
This is biblical, by the way, is it's a battle against your own nature.
Is that it's you against you.
And through the Christian lens, we realize we're never actually going to be able to win that battle.
Only Jesus can win that battle for us.
And guess what?
Most children are never even exposed to this teaching whatsoever.
And this leads perfectly into the rise of anti-Americanism in our country.
You want to know why there's so much anti-Americanism, structural anti-Americanism in our country?
It's because we do not teach the students, young people, that there is something to be appreciative of, grateful for, thankful for, and instead, nothing but complaining for what happened before them.
What we're going to do at Turning Point Academy is we are going to teach the beauty of the American founding.
We're going to talk about the magic of 1776.
We're going to talk about how the founding fathers quoted Deuteronomy more than any other book in creating the freest best country ever to exist in the history of the world.
We're going to teach the truth about slavery, that we were the first country to actually do something about abolishing the sin of slavery that pre-existed America, and guess what, still exists in the world today.
It's a tragedy.
Human beings owning human beings has been around for a long time.
The question is who did something to actually stop it?
The first anti-slavery convention ever hosted was in Philadelphia in 1775 by Benjamin Franklin.
Vermont independently abolished slavery in 1776.
By the time the Constitution was ratified, nine out of the 13 states had already independently abolished slavery.
George Washington said, it's a matter of when, not if, we abolish slavery in the United States of America.
It's our country that wrote extensively that this is wrong and we have to get rid of this.
Show me another nation that was able to have that kind of introspection, heroism, and courage to be able to get rid of a moral sin.
Are children being taught that?
Of course not.
They're being taught the opposite.
That, oh, something bad happened, and because of that, not just something bad, something evil.
I don't want to minimize it.
It was evil, period.
And therefore, the whole country must be thrown out.
Here's a good line about America.
The negatives about American history are universal.
The positives are unique.
Every country ever to exist has struggled with the same stuff that America struggled with.
Okay, but we're the only country that did the stuff that we did.
No other country comes even close.
And we are robbing a generation of being excited about their nation that is evil.
In our soul, I believe this.
I believe it's biblical.
Jeremiah 29, 7.
You know, pray for the nation of which you are in, or badrash, it's the badrash, which is the Hebrew word.
Demand or to seek the welfare of the nation that you are in because your welfare is tied to your nation's welfare.
We are called to fast and pray for our leaders.
Said differently, I believe it's a good thing to want what's best for your country.
And we are teaching our children the exact opposite.
And honestly, I think it creates deeply unhappy people.
I think people are happier when they're able to say, I have a country that has done something pretty cool, that has done something heroic or epic.
And what we're going to try to do at Turning Point Academy is try to fix that.
But it's going to take all of you through our educators network, through our resources, through our curriculum, through our teacher trainings, through our partnerships that we're doing with so many of our schools.
It's going to be an all of the above approach.
And there's so many great educational opportunities out there that already exist.
But here's the one thing I could tell you: it's not enough.
More is more.
We are at a crisis right now in America where if we do not do something bold and dramatic, we're going to have an entire generation that suffers from historical Alzheimer's.
That's exactly where we are right now.
Our nation is suffering from Alzheimer's.
We don't know where we came from, who we are, or where we're going.
It's very sad.
I'm not trying to trivialize Alzheimer's.
If you've ever dealt with somebody in that condition, that's exactly where we are as a country.
We can't remember our history.
Turning Point Academy will restore the memory of the greatest nation ever to exist in the history of the world.
Let me finish by saying this, and then we'll do some questions in the time I have remaining.
I cannot emphasize enough the moral danger that woke is poses to our entire society.
We are not going to dance around the edges.
Our Nation Suffers from Alzheimer's00:04:25
We will not be politically correct.
We are not going to say there's two sides to the story.
We are going to say unequivocally that wokeism is from the pit of hell because it is.
Wokeism as defined as this: if it's so insane it requires a PhD to explain it, it is wokeism.
No offense, Hutz.
I know you have a PhD.
I mean, no offense, as you well know.
Meaning this: if you have to write 5,000 pages that men can become pregnant, you are woke.
If you have to write thousands of pages to say that borders do not matter or that white people need to atone for something they didn't do because they look like someone who was evil hundreds of years ago, you are woke.
If all of a sudden you have to apologize for something you did not do, you are woke.
We're not going to put up with it.
I'm so sick of people saying, Well, Charlie, we have to hear them out.
I'm not going to hear them out.
I know their ideas.
I've read their books.
I've read Intro to Critical Race Theory.
I've read Foucault.
I've read Derrida.
I've read Derek Bell.
I've read Angela Davis.
I read it so you don't have to.
And by the way, we're going to be working with some of the best anti-woke theorists, James Lindsay, many other people, to just with precision and with incredible tenacity, make sure you're informed to know how much of a danger this is.
I believe this set of ideas that we are now teaching our children, that is in our military, in corporate America, is in every corner of society.
If we do not do the most ambitious and bold counter-offensive of this, it will destroy everything that we love.
It will destroy our banking system.
It will destroy our economy.
It'll destroy our education.
And guess what?
Their number one goal is to destroy the backbone of any functioning society, the family.
Wokeism is the virus that will last a lot longer than COVID, and dare I say, do more damage.
And far too often, churches, schools, and businesses tap dance with this evil, and I will say it again: this evil set of ideas.
If you teach an 11-year-old that you could take a set of drugs that will chemically castrate you and that will liberate you, you are an evil human being, period.
Including the people that put up with it, that administer the drugs, the entire system.
If all of a sudden you go into a Francis Parker School, I'm going to excuse you the details, okay?
It is so graphic.
It is so terrible.
14, 15, and 16-year-olds are being distributed.
Let me just say this: incredibly graphic sex toys to 14, 15, and 16-year-olds in class, not extracurricular, by the dean of students at Francis Parker School in downtown Chicago.
But this is another important thing.
Not only should we need to answer the question of what is a human being made in the image of God, mind, body, soul, but it's also what is a child?
I got to give credit to my Jewish brothers and sisters.
They really get this idea of protecting child innocence.
There's a moment where you are a child no longer.
Bar and bot mitzvahs.
Think that Christians need to have some form of an equivalent, not necessarily in a religious context, just as a ceremony like, hey, you are now an adult.
Like, now you are responsible.
In fact, in Jewish culture, the prayer that the parent says is in Hebrew, thank you, God, I am no longer responsible for my child's sins.
That's pretty cool, isn't it?
I think the Bar and Bat Mitzvah tradition is one of the most awesome things in the Jewish faith.
I wish we in Christianity took coming of age as seriously.
I mean that.
Done correctly at the study of the Torah and all that.
What's the point of that?
It's that up until that moment of the crossing of the line of where the parent says, Thank God I'm no longer responsible, it's that child's innocence must be protected by adults.
The protection of the innocence of children is the mark of a moral or an immoral society.
The left doesn't believe that.
They believe that children should be sexualized.
That is not an exaggeration.
They're bringing drag queens into churches.
They're bringing drag queens into schools.
You can see the material, you see the videos, you see all of it.
And it goes back to a theorist, Rousseau, but also a thinker who is an evil person, Dr. Kinsey, who believed in the widespread sexual manipulation of children.
I truly believe one day we will be judged as to whether or not we stand up against this widespread, unspeakable immorality.
Drag Queens in Schools and Churches00:11:42
I really do.
As I said yesterday at the Jewish summit, one of my favorite verse, which is kind of my life verse, Psalm 97, 10.
Who here loves God?
Raise your hand.
Well, if you love God, you're commanded to hate evil.
So if you love God, you must hate evil.
That's Psalm 97:10.
My question is to how many pastors who talk about and sing good that you love God do you also tell your congregation you must hate evil?
That is a harsh teaching.
Guess what?
It's true.
And there's a lot of evil to hate right now.
And we don't have to look too far.
Turning Point Academy is going to be a light.
It's a movement.
I'm so excited about it.
I pray it brings a revival.
I have no idea where this is going to go except up and wide and just be able to be a blessing to many people.
And it really is, I think, the next and most exciting development that we have at Turning Point USA and all the other programming we have.
And so I'm going to take some questions, but I encourage you: if I have just piqued your curiosity at all, talk to Hutz, talk to Francine, talk to Jennifer, come to the booth, the Turning Point Academy booth, sign up for information, get our materials, and we're super thrilled and excited to work with you.
Okay, let's do some questions, everybody.
Great, thank you.
Is that okay if I do questions?
Okay.
Thank you.
Thank you so much, Charlie.
We're going to take some questions.
I have a mic on this side.
Ryan is over here.
Just raise your hand and we will come to you as quickly as we can.
Excuse me.
Yes, sir.
Is it on?
Can you hear me okay?
So, Charlie, because I believe that the Bible teaches that there is no such thing as a separation between education and religion.
The two are synonymous.
You can't divorce the two.
And I believe woke and communists and Dewey and all those people all said the same thing.
They spoke in terms of religious education.
Therefore, I believe government-controlled education is unconstitutional.
Certainly, we need to get rid of the Department of Education.
But.
Can you just ask your question?
I'm so sorry, we're tight on time.
I apologize.
What can we do now that we control Congress to push that agenda to remove the Department of Education?
Well, I wholeheartedly agree with that.
That's never going to happen, but I totally agree.
It should, and we should aim high, and maybe my lifetime that will happen.
But let me tell you what we can do, is we have to be more in the mold and the model of Ron DeSantis and do this on a state level and kick out CRT and wokeism on a state by state, county by county, school board by school board level.
That, I think, is a great use of time.
Federal government, here's what I would like to see the new Congress do.
I want to see a special committee to investigate Merrick Garland to find out why moms and dads were put on the domestic terror list for showing up at school board meetings.
That I want our new Congress to do immediately.
And people should go to jail for that.
They should.
Parents who show up to ask questions about sexually charged curriculum should not be put on terror lists on their own government.
We should never forget that, everybody.
It is so awful what happened there.
So, look, I'm a big believer.
One of my beliefs that I have right now is local, local, local.
I am less interested in the federal than I ever have been.
I'm not totally cynical about it, but there's a lot wrong.
It feels as if there's like this Praetorian guard of the administrative state that is almost untouchable.
I have some ideas on how long term to solve that, but the local, the state, the county, the municipal, just right now, there's a pastor, Tim Thompson, who's amazing, who just, his church helped take over a school board in Temecula, California.
And within their first meeting, they banned critical race theory from all of their schools.
That is a church with involvement that won with action.
That is the way.
It's very, very exciting.
So, thank you, sir.
All right.
Yes, next question.
Charlie, how are you?
I'm good.
How are you?
Thank you so much for having me speak real quick.
I just have a quick question.
This schoolhouse is on fire.
We need media access to get the children out of the schoolhouse before we can put these fires out.
That's why I'm a huge supporter of school choice.
But one of the biggest hurdles that I see in that movement is teachers.
How can we get teachers to understand and support the school choice movement?
Because it is very beneficial to them, incentivizing the private sector and giving them more opportunities to use their God-given talents.
Yeah, that's a great question.
So at least here in Arizona, there's been a fair amount of momentum to pass school choice legislation here.
Arizona has the best school choice laws in the country.
It does.
And it's a huge win.
The money follows the child in this state more than any other state.
Here's my argument, and this is why we're doing the Educators Teacher Summit right here, is that we need teachers who are willing to leave the comfort and the safety of a government job with a government pension, trust in the Lord, and trust in faith to go maybe go into a pod school or a private school to not necessarily even earn less money, but to have less certainty.
And a lot of people in the American teaching profession are too comfortable with their tenured pension job.
And I'm not that, I don't blame them.
Comfort, we as human beings are designed to go towards comfort, right?
But that comfort is not going, in my opinion, going to change or save the country, right?
And so, look, I could tell you this, that there are so many good government school teachers out there.
I know we have some in the audience right now.
I think there's more not so good than good, but that's my own personal opinion, right?
But look, I'll say this.
I had teachers that I went to a government, I went to Christian Heritage Academy, and I went to government school, and I had some fabulous government school teachers, and I had some awful government school teachers.
And you're going to hear this over and over again.
The awful government school teachers earn just as much as the fabulous ones.
The idea that we pay bad teachers, that they're still employed, I think we should fire 10% of all American teachers and then pay the top 10%, 10% more.
You don't have to overthink that, right?
Unfortunately, that's easier said than done.
That's why I'm a big fan of school choice, where you can actually do that within the public government school model.
It's so difficult.
Yes?
Hi, Drew here.
If I don't come off clear, let me know.
With the Twitter files being released and all these things going on, specifically, what do you think will change?
Like on a scale of zero being nothing, business as usual, 100 being like it would reverse everything that Twitter did, or government, Twitter, all the stuff.
What do you think?
I think it's very significant and substantial.
I'm going to answer it super quick because I do want to keep the questions focused on education.
But I have said this, and I will say it again.
Elon Musk liberating Twitter is a bigger deal than Republicans controlling the U.S. Senate.
It's that big of a deal.
So you can kind of put a number figure on that.
But I, for 18 months, was labeled by Twitter with a do not amplify tag, and I no longer have that on there.
And we are reaching tens of millions of more people a month, just my account alone.
And so I could say that's substantial, very much so.
Thank you for the question.
I didn't mean to be short, but I just want to get to as many education ones as we can.
Charlie, your people are saying you need to wrap here.
All right, we'll take two more.
Okay, two more.
Hey, Charlie, how are you doing?
Good seeing you, my friend.
You mentioned the, it's going off the question to mention about teachers.
And do you suggest we have something in California called the California Parents Union that just started, but it's smaller.
And I talked to a lot of teachers.
They feel hamstrung by the teachers' union.
Would a suggestion be also in a local level, getting individuals to organize their own kind of union to be able to go up to Sacramento or whatever your state capital is and advocate for them so that those teachers then also have a place to go and a place to actually that's a good idea.
I think that effort is better spent just leaving the government school system altogether and building an alternative.
But it could be, look, if you are a government school teacher and you're here, welcome.
We love you guys.
Thank you.
You could leave the union immediately thanks to the Supreme Court Janice decision.
Do not pay your dues anymore.
Leave the union.
They do not represent you.
They are robbing your money and you'd have more money in your own pocket, everybody, okay?
So that would just be an immediate kind of takeaway there that I would encourage.
But I am increasingly cynical, unfortunately, about the future of government schooling in America.
That's why we've got to build alternatives.
The final question.
Hi, Charlie.
My name is Tracy, and I am a middle school teacher at a Christian Academy locally here in Chandler.
Thank you.
And although we don't have woke ideology as an issue or CRT, you know, we have some other insidious things, as I'm sure many of you can identify with, as far as the social media access that a lot of our kids have, TikTok in particular.
And I know that many of my students have access to that.
And of course, I don't have direct ability to maybe speak into that with the parents.
But I've noticed that those are the most defiant children that I encounter.
They are the most disrespectful.
Super quick.
I'm sorry.
Sorry.
Yes.
What can I do to help maybe partner with Turning Point to fill in those holes?
Thank you for being here.
That's a beautiful question.
First, on TikTok, if there's only one thing you remember me saying, anyone you love should stay far away from TikTok.
There is no reason for it whatsoever.
It will destroy your child's life.
It'll make them depressed, anxious.
It is neurologically rigged to make your children hate themselves.
It is digital heroin and opium.
It was designed by a military firm in China for the exact intent to make the American population depressed, anxious, on psychiatric drugs.
If you think I'm kidding, go into the research of what is behind TikTok.
And also, it is a feeder of the most incredibly awful and just unspeakable transgender ideas and all that other stuff.
So as a teacher, I would do a special night where you bring parents together and you try to educate them on what exactly is this stuff.
I praise God that I grew up in a time without smartphones.
Look, I could go on a whole different speech of this.
Parents, please don't give your kids smartphones.
It will ruin their life.
There is no redeemable value for a smartphone until they're 18, period.
I stand by it.
I grew up in a life without them, and boy, was I lucky and blessed.
And I see children now with them, and they are anxious, and they're on benzodiazepans, and they're on Zoloft, and they're on Prozac.
And we have 6 million teenagers in the last two years, 6 million new teenagers that are now on psychiatric drugs.
And it's gone like this ever since we've decided to give everyone a smartphone.
We wonder why kids are killing themselves more than any other cause of death.
Well, it's because it's a portal into every worse impulse a human being can have.
You might say, well, Charlie, I need to communicate with my child.
Eh, not really.
You don't.
I grew up without it.
But if you do, give them a jitterbug.
It's just fine, which is the phone where all you could do is call smartphones.
No redeemable value whatsoever until you're actually running a business, in my personal opinion.
And even then, it's questionable.
Get involved with Turning Point Academy, everybody.
Smartphones Fuel Teen Mental Health Crisis00:00:22
Hutz, you're doing a great job.
Thank you.
And we so appreciate you, Charlie, and so grateful for your speaking.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email me your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thank you so much for listening, and God bless.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk. com.