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Dec. 8, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:36
Education Gone Awry Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 472
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This episode is brought to you by my friend Rebecca Walzer, a financial expert who can help you protect your wealth.
Book your free call with her team by going to friendofdinesh.com That's friendofdinesh.com Hi, everyone.
I'm Danielle D'Souza Gill, your host this week.
This is my last day hosting Dinesh's podcast.
He's actually flying back from Israel as we speak.
He had an amazing time.
He will tell you all about it, I'm sure, when he's back tomorrow.
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I'm at Danielle D'Souza Gill on all the platforms.
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And then also, of course, True Social and Getter.
But we have a lot to talk about today, starting with the Senate outcome, as well as the Georgia race.
We'll also discuss the state of education in the country.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Well, everyone, we just got the sad news that Herschel Walker has lost his race for the United States Senate.
Warnock, unfortunately, will continue to be one of Georgia's senators.
And something I want to draw attention to is that Georgia, traditionally a red state, maybe now a purple state because of Atlanta, is literally represented as though it is a blue state.
Georgia will continue to have two Democrat senators representing them in Warnock and Ossoff.
I find this really weird because Brian Kemp, the Republican candidate, cleanly and clearly won his race for governor in Georgia this fall.
So something is going on here where for some reason people are voting red for statewide offices, yet voting blue for nationwide offices.
We apparently saw very high turnout in the runoff, but it may not have been enough Republican voters turning out for Herschel.
So what does this mean for us as a nation?
This means that the Democrats will have a 51 majority, so an even greater majority than they had before.
This means they will no longer need Kamala Harris as a tiebreaker vote.
This also means that Senator Manchin and Senator Sinema will carry a little less weight than they had before in being able to block the runaway train of the radical Democrats.
So this is all very bad news.
But the good news is Republicans have taken the House.
So we have a narrow margin there.
So we will hopefully be able to get some things done, hopefully be able to prevent the nation from getting far worse too quickly.
But the House has had no say in confirming appointments.
So those will likely all go through the Democrat-controlled Senate and presidency and be confirmed.
But to be honest, I think the main silver lining when I look at the country right now is simply our Supreme Court.
Our Supreme Court is about the only thing keeping our nation from going off of a cliff by focusing on the Constitution.
If we didn't have a constitutionalist Supreme Court majority right now, we'd be living in full-blown crazy land.
Many people are questioning and wondering what should be done about the Republican Party considering our recent loss in Georgia and considering the midterms are now officially over.
People are pointing the finger in all directions, and there's certainly a lot to unpack, but I want to focus on discussing the role of the RNC.
Rona McDaniel has been absolutely horrible.
She's basically a Romney, that's her family.
I'm not sure exactly what her ideology is.
Some say it's like Romney's, some say it's like Trump's.
I say it's like neither.
Her ideology is one of whatever gets her the fanciest dinner, whatever gets her the most clout, and whatever deals she can broker within her party so she can stay in power.
That's her ideology.
When Trump was at the height of his popularity, she rode the Trump wave.
When he's down, she does nothing to help him or his candidates.
She doesn't come out against Trump like Romney would, but she's in it for herself.
Harmeet Dillon, an amazing lawyer and woman I had the pleasure of being on the advisory board of Indian Voices for Trump with, would be a much better candidate.
She actually cares about the Republican Party and actually cares about us winning.
It's reported that she will be challenging Rona McDaniel as RNC chairwoman.
So more power to you, Harmeet.
Now, you may be wondering what the purpose is of the RNC and why it's important as far as who's running it.
Well, it's important for solely one reason.
The RNC controls a lot of money.
The purse strings.
So if a candidate is helped with fundraising by the RNC, that could make all the difference for that candidate to win.
But if the RNC abandons that candidate, that could sink them.
The same could be said of Mitch McConnell's purse strings in manipulating the Senate.
Different power players control different purse strings.
Ron DeSantis has been building up his own arsenal of funds.
Of course, Trump has a massive arsenal of funds he's raised.
So the burden isn't on one entity to carry a candidate to the finish line.
Agreed. But it is the burden of all big players who want what's best for the party to do what they can to get our candidates across the finish line.
And I think we need to do this as team players.
This idea of someone only being a Trump candidate so you're going to abandon them or only being a McConnell ally is silly.
Because at the end of the day, if this person is the Republican nominee and has the Trump endorsement, everyone needs to get behind them.
We were successful in ousting the greatest rhino of all, Liz Cheney.
But the reason we were successful in that is we stuck together and we all realized that that was necessary.
She's widely despised.
She's wildly unpopular.
Sure, she had the help of Paul Ryan and Bush Republicans, but I'm not considering them part of our team.
They're has-beens and outdated.
They're gone. They're not the future or in office.
When I say the Trump wing and Republican wing need to align, I mean the current Trump wing.
And when I say the Republican wing again, I mean current.
So Rona McDaniel, Kevin McCarthy, people who are in power.
People like that who have power, have money, they're leaders of our party.
If some retired person like Paul Ryan who sells himself to corporations to put his name on the docket wants to be involved, he can do that.
But it's meaningless and we can't control him or influence him.
He's gone. His money may have some influence, but that's it.
His word means nothing.
So as we look forward, we need to develop a unified strategy for 2024 and come up with new ways of reaching voters, even if this means early voting where it's legal.
We need to reach hardcore MAGA Republicans in red districts, and we need to reach swing voters in purple and blue areas.
We proved we know how to do that with Lee Zeldin.
So we need a party that includes them, as well as Marjorie Taylor Greene and others.
We need to overwhelm the Democrats in 2024 and the election.
They have a lot of seats coming up, so it's actually our turn to win.
We have the chance to win big, but we need to get our act together.
There's no question America is in decline.
Crime and inflation are skyrocketing.
It seems daunting, but don't lose hope.
If you're a senior, you remember better than anyone how strong America can be when we work together.
That's why I urge you to join forces with AMAC, the association of mature American citizens.
Becoming a member of AMAC is easy, and it only costs $16 per year.
Go to amac.us to sign up today.
Debbie and Dinesh are proud members of AMAC. You should be too.
Go to amac.us now.
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I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast Mark Bauerlein.
Mark is Emeritus Professor of English at Emory University and an editor at First Things Magazine.
His latest book is The Dumbest Generation Grows Up, From Stupefied Youth to Dangerous Adults.
Mark, thanks for joining me.
Well, I'm happy to be here.
Glad to be here, in fact.
Oh, great. Well, I'm such a big fan of First Things.
I went to one of their conferences, one of the ones where they do a deep dive.
I saw the recent one this year was on death.
I think I went to one a couple of years ago.
But yeah, they have such great content, such great things there.
What inspired you to want to dive into the topic of the dumbest generation grows up?
Because you seem very smart.
Well, you know, I was a college teacher for a long time, an English teacher at Emory University, and I saw during the aughts, you know, the 90s in an English department, you always had these bookish kids, you know, they grew up reading Hemingway or Jane Austen, and they wanted to get more, and they really found a lot of their identity, their lives through these characters.
In fiction, they might have had a great high school English teacher, And what I saw over the aughts is actually what everyone saw, this transfer of young people from being print readers to screen watchers.
They suddenly had all these new tools flood into their lives.
And, you know, Facebook came along in 2005-06.
Twitter came along in 2008.
All the iPhone and then the Instagram, the chatting, the texting, the photo...
And what we saw was the gradual diminishment of that literary education, the literary sensibility of young people.
And I said, way back in 2008, this first Dumbest Generation book was, this is a terrible formation for young people who are going to grow up to be responsible Americans, who have some sense of history of the past,
They might know something about where revolutions usually lead, and that the American Revolution was a great exception to the norm, if we look at France and Russia and China and Cambodia and elsewhere, and that we're losing that sense of things.
And that these millennials, who were 15 years old in 2008, they're in their bedrooms, they got all the screens going, they got the music playing, the TV is on as well.
All night long, they're going back and forth with their peers.
This is going to produce an adulthood that is going to be hyper-consumer oriented, that is not going to have really much religious sense of anything.
They're not going to be devoted to their country or to their localities, their neighborhoods.
A lot of them are coming out of broken families.
And when they're 30, 35 years old, They're gonna be angry, bitter, disappointed.
They're gonna have a sour mood about the nature of their country, the nature of the world, and they're gonna mistrust their fellow citizens, and they're gonna turn to the false gods of politics.
The woke.
This is actually, for them, a replacement For all the foundations that they didn't get when they were young.
Church, country, family, honor, tradition, and they need that.
Without them, they got a big hole in their souls and they're filling it with the woke.
Because what does the woke give?
Woke is a very moral vision of the world.
It's not this loosey-goosey relativism thing.
You've got heroes and you have villains.
You've got the sacred.
George Floyd is a sacred object in their minds.
And you've got the profane, Donald Trump.
He's an abomination.
They can't even think an image of him without their faces going into this grimace.
So this is why the subtitle of this new book is From Stupefied Youth to Dangerous Adult.
And when we find that the youth vote in the midterms, 18 to 29 year olds, went 37 points in favor of the Democrats, we shouldn't be surprised.
This was bound to happen.
And the left has understood this.
Get them while they're young.
Get them through the schools, through the curriculum, and then through the entertainment that they consume when they're teenagers.
And this can produce now what is becoming really one of the most reliable voting blocs for the Democrats.
Yeah, for sure. I'm going to jump in because there's so many interesting things you said to talk about, but I want to start with technology, which you mentioned, because I do think technology, there are so many great things about it.
You can connect with people, but it's much beyond simply having a landline phone because now we have, like you said, technology.
This ability to constantly be on our cell phones, constantly be chatting on the internet, things like that.
I'm a millennial, so I guess when I was in high school, things like that, I actually said, I don't want to be on social media.
I deleted all of that.
I was like, it's too much of a distraction because...
I would say to myself, okay, I'm going to check whatever all these things are for 10 minutes.
Next thing I know, 30 minutes has passed.
And I said, I can't do this.
I can't focus on schoolwork and studying when I'm getting distracted in the ether when I see all these people at school during the day anyways.
So I'll just ask them things in the day.
So I literally did not have social media until I decided I was going to do more of these things for work.
But God forbid in personal life I would ever want social media because...
It's just I think it can be really harmful especially when you're still a young person because there's a lot of judgment and there's a lot of confusion and it can be hard to pull yourself out of it.
So that's why it's like I think it's good to cut it off if you can't not not that you can't manage it but if it's too much of a distraction and even with phones.
I mean initially I'd only had a phone because my parents were like we might need to pick you up and call you.
But I was like, I don't need a smartphone.
I literally don't need to text people.
This is back when there were flip phones and stuff.
So it wasn't like the iPhone yet.
But I just think that today, especially with Gen Z, they're so much on their phone.
They're on TikTok. Like social media is so much worse than just having a profile and having it kind of sit there.
Like sometimes people might just have one, but they don't necessarily use it all the time.
And now I think the Gen Z has gotten so wrapped into it that now the left is using that as a way to politically reach them.
So like the White House will do things with these TikTok influencers and say, oh, you know, this person believes this and they believe that.
So you should believe the same thing and you should vote this way.
So I guess I'm of two minds.
In one sense, I do think parents should say, don't be on this.
You can't have a phone at this age or whatever.
You can't be on social media at this age.
It's just not appropriate because there's also a lot of scary stuff on there.
So you have to be careful.
But then on another mind, at a certain point, they're gonna be older and we have to teach them to, I guess, have some sense of control.
And also maybe we should be putting content into those ethers because if we don't, it's gonna be only the other side's content.
So how much do we then want to reach people through social media and these things?
Because in the one sense, I do want to just be completely conservative in that conservative traditional sense, but also we have to move with the times in order to keep reaching people and winning elections like you're saying.
So what would be your advice in terms of that balance?
Well, the first thing I should say is that you should feel quite proud of yourself.
I don't usually say this to young people, but you should feel proud of yourself for having had that resistance at that tender age.
I was a strange bird.
Well, one, the peer pressure is so powerful.
I mean, what is worse for a 17-year-old than to be shunned by other 17-year-olds?
And if you're not in the loop, if you don't have the tools, you miss out.
You don't know what's going on.
You don't get the news, the gossip.
You don't know where people are meeting.
It's really an instrument of belonging and actually just knowledge.
And you know how bad it is in high school when you don't know what's going on.
You're going to get picked on and, you know, things are going to happen.
You're insecure enough as it is just being an adolescent.
So I think it took a great deal of independence on your part.
For one reason, the peer pressure factor.
But the other factor is, remember, the Silicon Valley people designed these tools to be addictive.
They intentionally did this.
They hired psychologists who were experts in persuasion and design and addiction to help them create these tools.
And we know how bad they are.
By the fact that so many of the titans in Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Chris Anderson, who was the editor of Wired Magazine, Steve Jobs famously didn't let his kids do a lot of screen time at home.
They send their own children in Silicon Valley to low-tech schools like the Waldorf schools.
So they know what these things are doing to the kids.
They know the point.
The more addiction we get, the more money we make.
And they're brilliant in the way they design.
Because I have a son, and I've seen him online and doing the games.
I mean, things like Fortnite. Brilliant Fortnite move was to make it so that four or five guys, they're usually guys, can get into a game together and they can talk to one another.
One is in Nebraska, one is in Spain, one is here in Washington, D.C., And they can all socialize while in this game.
And what you said about time is absolutely correct.
They get on these tools and one of the point of the tools is to put a mind into a condition of what is called slow time.
Slow time. Where a kid will play video games for four hours and someone will say to them, how long have you been doing that?
When he's finished, I don't know, an hour and a half.
And he really means it.
He's being honest.
He spent four hours.
It felt to him like an hour and a half.
And that's one of the symptoms of the screen addiction.
You run so much of your life and you don't even know that it's happening.
So, good girl.
And I would say that the way you speak lacks so many of the annoying tics and vocabulary Of your typical millennial.
So it shows now that you weren't immersed back then.
And I think the big lesson that I would want to say out of this book and just generally as an educator, what you do at age 15, 16 and 17 reverberates for the rest of your life.
These are formative years.
This is when, you know, hardwiring is still taking place.
And you're never going to get those years back.
When you're in college, I tell the students it goes by very quickly and you're never going to get an opportunity to do this again.
You're not going to read the Aeneid when you're 30 years old and you got your friends, you work, you watch TV. That's not going to happen.
So these precious late teen, early 20s years I think we've seen one generation largely destroyed, and Gen Z is well on its way to being destroyed as well.
And I'll say that that sour mood, I mean, I know you want me to talk about the positives of technology.
Yes, yes, yes. Of course.
No, no. Technology is horrible.
And I mean, we know the great things that has happened with science and medicine and communications, of course.
But We have to see the insidious impact, especially on the young.
And when we look now at the cancel culture in our society, millennials lead the way on it.
They're the ones most in favor of cancel culture.
They don't believe in free speech.
I mean, again, larger percentages of them than older groups.
They don't care about the First Amendment.
They know who's bad and who's good.
They've been given a moral framework that is so solid.
It's reassuring.
It's nice to know what is good and what is evil.
And so many of them had liberal parents who, you know, do your own thing and You know, that form of liberalism that really prevailed from the 60s up through the 90s.
I think a lot of the kids said, can we have some foundations, please?
Can we have some stability in life?
I'm 18. I don't know who I am.
I don't know where I'm going. The universe is giant.
And you're giving me no grounds.
I mean, even give me something to rebel against.
Oh, you want to do this? Okay, you know, find your passion, you know, whatever.
And so this is not a proper formation for an individual.
And no wonder they turn to the tools, the TikTok stuff, the, you know, the joining groups to sign petitions to go after the bad guys.
Fine, you know, hate Donald Trump.
It's the joy of belonging, right?
It gives them comfort that they have a place to stand in this chaotic, confusing culture that we have presented to them.
And if anyone doubts that, I don't have a TV, so I'll go to a hotel room and I'll just find myself at 9 o'clock at night just scrolling through and I say, after a while, I say, We really live in a culture that fluctuates from the remarkably stupid to the disgustingly vulgar.
That's what you get.
How much of it is a circus that you see when you go through the channels?
And that includes the commercials.
So this is...
Unfortunately, it's a pessimistic outlook, but I don't see a lot of reasons for optimism in our country.
But it's not too bad, since we know that this is the root of a lot of the problem.
I mean, I also do not have a TV, so I understand we're like two Martians observing the situation.
But I think that for a lot of young people, their parents, like you were mentioning, maybe didn't believe much or if they did believe something, it wasn't a very strongly held belief.
So it was difficult for them to articulate some of those beliefs to their kid and so like you were saying, the kid kind of says, OK, I do want to believe in something more because we're just living in this coexist world where everything is confusing and nothing really means anything anymore.
Just emptiness.
You know, the old movies where it was, I don't know, rebel without a cause or some old movies where there's a rebel and then they're like the really staunch parents or the staunch That doesn't relate anymore because now the elders of these people are hippies and so on.
And so I think they said, I want meaning in my life, so I'm going to become this woke activist and so on.
So how would you recommend reversing something like this?
Because I find that it's hard because they find so much meaning in these causes.
To them, their liberal belief really is like their religion.
It's replaced God, their tradition, and they even get to the point where they start to threaten their parents.
They start to threaten everyone around them, saying, if you don't agree with me, if you don't jump on this bandwagon, I... I'm going to punish you sort of thing as opposed to having any kind of sense of Well,
I think when you started with the clarity that we are Gathering over what is happening is a good thing.
And I would also say that this religion, this woke religion, there's not a lot of joy in it.
One, it's a very ungenerous, punitive outlook upon things.
People aren't granted very much room for mercy and redemption.
It has a lot of vindictiveness to it.
There's a vengeful feel to it.
And the thing is that it doesn't make people happy in the long run.
I think the woke commitment is a short-term satisfaction.
And you need to keep finding victims in order to get that rush of conquest and cancellation.
But I think that that satisfaction is going to diminish over time.
How many times can you get the sexist, the racist, whatever?
It just sort of becomes a routine.
And the thrill is gone.
Especially as you're getting older.
Are you going to be doing this when you're 50?
What you're doing now that you're 30?
You look at those Antifa mug shots.
You'll get 50 of them shown.
Those don't look like happy people.
You would think that If they are martyrs for a cause, social justice, racial justice, anti-fascism, that you would, like the early Christians, go to your fate singing and with a smile, happy to be persecuted for your honorable beliefs.
But these are damaged people, these are screwy people, and The joylessness, the humorlessness of woke could be the sign that it isn't going to last and that a more authentic religion might begin to look appealing to them.
Right. And when you were a professor of English at Emory, did you notice over time kind of the quality of student diminish?
I've heard that from some professors who had a long tenure at a school say, I used to have students who were so dedicated to the material, to reading, and then the students come later and they're not really even paying attention.
Maybe their class allows computers and they're on that the whole time.
But did you find that that was a big change?
You know, during my decades in academia, I did a lot of peer review, reading manuscripts for presses and for journals and evaluating them, hiring people, doing admissions.
I did testing work for ETS and on the GRE exams, and I most definitely found a deterioration of standards.
The quality of people going into the humanities really Really dropped.
And that included the younger professors.
And part of that is because the standards went down.
When I was in graduate school at UCLA in the 1980s, I'll just give you one example.
One of the requirements is we had to take two courses in philology, the history of the English language.
We had to do phonetic transcriptions of Shakespeare.
Now, there is no philology required in PhD programs.
Of everyone at schools anymore.
That's gone. That's gone.
We had written qualifying exams that were 16 hours long, and they would flunk out about one-third of the students taking these exams.
You're not going to see that at all.
And look what's happened recently.
We're getting rid of the tests.
The LSAT is disappearing.
The GRE literature exam in English is disappearing.
The GRE itself, the SAT, We're getting rid of the gatekeeping mechanisms, all in this ridiculous notion of egalitarianism and racial justice because there's such a test score gap between Asian and white and then black and brown.
So we're just going to get rid of that.
And the thing is that the pursuit of egalitarian, the pursuit of equity is inevitably going to lower The standards.
That's any social scientist will tell you.
You cannot equalize outcomes without changing the yardsticks for the worse.
So you're going to get students who come out, they're not as well educated, they're not as trained, they're not as skilled as they were before.
And this is simply setting political values Goals, objectives ahead of academic quality and the maintenance of standards.
And sadly, most academics, they're at peace with that.
They don't want problems.
They don't want to open their mouths.
They just want to teach their classes and go home and not have trouble.
They don't want anyone to make a complaint against them because that ruins their lives for three months.
And who needs it, right?
So, they go along, they get along, and meanwhile, fewer and fewer students major in the humanities.
They vote with their feet, they go somewhere else because they know there's something rotten.
As one person wrote in an op-ed many, many years ago in the Wall Street Journal, That the humanities, the curriculum, it's leaving Western civilization, but now they're reading Westerns.
So you might know the person who wrote that.
Yeah, I mean, I think the quality of student has definitely gone down, but also the quality of professor.
When I was in college at Dartmouth, one of my favorite professors was an older professor, and he was really known for these incredible lectures.
He was a great orator.
But he had – I don't know if he had hired her, but a younger woman had come in in the English department, and she was not great.
She didn't really give the greatest lectures.
But instead of working on that, she basically said, lectures are sexist because they're more favorable to men, I guess, because they have a booming voice.
So she felt like she couldn't do a lecture, even though I've heard many women give great speeches.
So lectures stopped and it became basically a thing of the past.
And later she was trying to get her tenure and I just randomly got chosen to write her review because I was in the class.
So of course, I don't know if she was too happy to see my review because she was woke.
And so I made that pretty clear.
She would actually make us watch her speeches on C-SPAN.
That was like a requirement.
And they were not the best because again, she just said, I don't care how I sound to the outside world.
I don't care about speeches.
I don't care about lectures.
So I think the whole class suffered as a result because they're not actually hearing from a professor who believes in excellence.
And instead is just being forced to sit through something that she doesn't even think is good.
So overall, I do think the quality of the professors has really suffered and the quality of the students has suffered.
And if you go to schools like this, you almost have to get through them as a mole because you can't actually go to be fully part of everything because almost everyone is against you.
So you have to sort of use your role in the best way you can to learn from the best people that are left, which I usually find is the oldest people, and to avoid the worst people.
And then when you can, I guess, use any influence you can to not allow those people to get tenure.
I guess I felt like that was the only thing I could really do in my role.
But moving forward, I just think our education system has so many issues and But it's been so fascinating talking with you, Mark.
This has been such a great conversation.
I'm happy to join you anytime.
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Use discount code AMERICA. Call 800-2468-751 or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast Jeremy Tate.
Jeremy is the founder and CEO of the Classic Learning Test.
Jeremy is also the host of the Anchored podcast.
Prior to founding CLT, Jeremy served as director of college counseling at Mount DeSales Academy in Catonsville, Maryland. He received his Bachelor of Science in Secondary Education from Louisiana State University and a Master's in Religious Studies from Reformed Theological Seminary. Jeremy and his wife Erin reside in Annapolis, Maryland with their six children. Thanks for joining me, Jeremy!
Thanks Danielle for having me.
Of course. Well, I wanted to have you on because I wanted to discuss with you just this idea of classical learning.
What inspired you to want to focus on this and devote your life to teaching and spreading those kinds of values?
It's a great question. You know, it's so interesting to me that education, or like what was a good education, it really didn't change for about 2,000 years.
I mean, you go from Augustine all the way to Plato's Republic, all the way forward to the American Revolution, our founding fathers, even to the beginning or the mid of the 19th century.
For 2,000 years, a good education meant classical languages, it meant logic, it meant philosophy, it meant rhetoric, it meant penmanship.
So many of the main things that define a great education are now no longer part of education at all.
And realizing this was the kind of education that in many ways gave birth to America, the kind of education that's kind of baked into our founding documents, and that a part of the crisis we're having as a nation, as a civilization, It has come about because we've gotten away from this towards a secular progressive model of education, which is really more pushing ideology than educating young people.
Yeah, for sure. When do you think that education shifted from the way it was for this 2000 years to whether that's becoming just different in different places or maybe becoming more woke?
How do you feel like that kind of change began?
That's a great question. I think if you had to put your finger in one place, I think it's actually right around the beginning of the compulsory education movement, which really starts after the Civil War up in New England.
And so part of what was going on is that when they made education, you know, mandatory in New England, there was actually some denominational inciting among various Christian groups about exactly what was getting taught.
And they kind of used that to take religion completely out of schools.
But eventually that led to not just religion, but really morality in general.
And, you know, you think about the language, just the language itself that was used for education for centuries and centuries.
They didn't even call it education.
They actually would call it formation.
You know, he's being sent off to formation or he's being sent away from formation.
It was about the formation of the whole human person, heart, character, And everybody agreed what that was, what that formation was.
It was cultivating the virtues, the disciplines of hard work, of courage, of honesty, of mastery of self, of prudence, of temperance.
This concept of education, this formation, is what's gone and what we need to get back to.
Definitely. And this is kind of a random question, but how do you kind of see the relationship between how there used to be maybe not a lot of education for a lot of people, but some people had a very good education.
Maybe they became monks and they studied a lot.
Yeah. How do you think it kind of happened where now that so many people have education but they're not really getting education?
How do you kind of see that relationship?
Because I think it's sad that as soon as classical education was sort of banned from most schools, most colleges, that's the time when the country basically said you have to go to college in order to do anything.
College is essential and yet college then kind of started becoming meaningless.
Yeah, so this is a fact that blew my mind.
Just thinking generationally about what's happened in American education, the group that does the worst in terms of the U.S. citizenship test, 81% of people under 45 cannot pass the U.S. citizenship test.
This is an NBC poll, right?
So not even right or left, you know, it's NBC and they said they did our own research and 81% of people under 45 Can't pass the U.S. citizenship test.
What was really shocking is that for people over 65, 74% of them can pass.
So we're going from a 19% pass rate to a 74% pass rate within two generations.
What's really interesting is that the group that's under 45, that demographic, has also had the most formal education.
And so they've gone into all of these years of schooling But they can't pass a basic civics test about the US Constitution.
So I think what we've seen is we've moved away from any kind of serious substance, and instead we've moved towards this vague concept of skills, critical thinking skills, higher order thinking skills.
Nobody really knows what this stuff means.
But they use this language to get away from the transmission of serious core knowledge.
Which is what education was, in addition to the character formation part, again, for generations.
Definitely. No, I mean, character formation, I feel like it's pretty much the opposite as far as education, because you almost feel like you have to be against your teachers or what you're being taught.
Obviously not against them, but against maybe the views that are being taught, because oftentimes they don't tell you what the right thing to do is.
They don't really even talk about a lot of classical education anymore.
What would be your advice to young students who want to learn classical education, but they don't want to be woke, but maybe also don't feel like trade school is right for them?
Yeah, there's an incredible renaissance happening right now.
I think CLT, my movement, my work in terms of an alternative to the SAT and ACT, I think it's a small part of a much larger movement.
I mean, look at the growth of homeschooling.
We've gone from 13,000 homeschoolers back in the early 70s to now over 5 million in a period of 50 years.
Explosive growth, and it's across demographics.
We've seen a 5x growth of black families homeschooling We've seen 3X growth of Hispanic families.
It's all Americans that are realizing.
And a lot of this was COVID. A lot of them saw the kind of nonsense that their kids were taking home during COVID. The parents were in the other room and they could hear what was being taught in this Zoom class.
And they're like, wait a minute. This is not what we signed up for.
I didn't know that we would have all of this ideology in it.
And what's really interesting to me, Danielle, about classical education is that it's really brief.
From the ideology that's being pushed.
If students are sitting around a table and they're reading and debating parts of Plato's Republic, that does not lend itself to pushing ideology where the modern approach, which only focuses on relevant modern topics, is going to push one particular way, one particular way to think about all of those topics, be it abortion or Or, you know, certain rights for certain groups.
The only thing I would add to that is, what does this education produce, right?
And the mainstream education, if we want to call it woke, we can call it woke.
But I think it produces a spirit of entitlement in a lot of ways, instead of a spirit of gratitude.
And if you're going to measure the fruits of a particular kind of education, you meet these young people, these homeschoolers, these kids from classical schools, and they are profoundly, they're grateful.
They're hardworking.
In many ways, they're different.
I don't want to bash the public schoolers out there, but I've been really amazed meeting these young people.
So where do you take first steps?
I think read for yourself.
Dig in. There is a treasure that is kind of yours by inheritance.
And so I would recommend if you're a young parent and you've got young kiddos, start reading Aesop's Fables to them.
Start reading Grimm's Fairy Tales to them.
It's amazing how little kids, who are three and four, as soon as you start reading Aesop's fables to them over the new modern stuff, they don't ever want to go back to the new modern stuff.
The new stuff cannot compete with Grimm's fairy tales.
Every three-year-old knows that.
Yeah, for sure. And I think so many people, too, who are older might want to go back and learn new things they didn't get to learn and feel like, oh, you know, I didn't get to spend the time on the great books or whatever it is.
So what would be your suggestion on why people should even learn these things?
Because some people might be conservative, but say, well, I just I don't know.
I'm focused more on Practical reading or things like that.
So what is kind of the value, would you say, of reading things like The Great Books to people of any age?
Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I'd recommend, I mean, if you want to go kind of a more formal route, great colleges like Hillsdale offer a bunch of free classes that you can take in order to be doing this with.
It can be intimidating. I mean, you pick up by yourself a copy of The Odyssey, and hopefully you can read it and enjoy it, but it can also mean falling away.
I think The Great Books, this tradition, is meant to give birth to The great community.
CLT is right down the street from St.
John's College in Annapolis. It's a great books college if you're interested in a great graduate program.
It's amazing for teachers.
But what you're doing is you're reading together the very best of what has been thought and said.
You're reading Plato. You're reading Aristotle.
You're reading Ben Franklin.
You're reading the texts that have truly stood the test of time.
And you're discussing them in groups of people who span the political spectrum Who are atheists, who are theists, who are Catholics, who are Muslims, and learning to talk about the things that really matter most with different groups of people.
So a couple quick recommendations, if I could, that are not classics, but I think to understand kind of what has happened, the book I would recommend first and foremost would be Alan's Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, which is now almost 40 years old.
It's 1986. But Alan Bloom was a professor at the University of Chicago, and during his 40 years, from the late 40s until the 80s, he witnessed this seismic change in the kind of students that were arriving to campus.
And in the course of a few hundred pages, he impacts kind of what was happening.
A new book is also out called The Battle for the American Mind.
David Goodwin, Pete Hegseth, it's a great book, and it talks about how really intentional And really kind of radical, not just Democrats, but radical fringe progressives were able to grab hold of things like accreditation,
things like teacher certification, and really have come to dominate a lot of the ed schools in the United States, which make it very hard for any teacher to get certified without first absorbing a bunch of ideology that then is passed on to students.
For sure. And I think a good reason, too, for why the great books are even important or why people should care or want to read them is because they provide a cornerstone, I think, of Western civilization and of even our founding and why we believe a lot of the things we believe about America.
Even religion. There are just so many interesting things there.
And also, I think it provides more meaning into discussion and being able to look at history and things like that.
Whereas when you're only reading kind of outcome of ideas, which would be, let's say, politics, then I think you're missing a whole layer of really interesting thought beneath that.
But Jeremy, thank you so much for joining us today.
I really appreciate it.
Daniel, thanks for having me on.
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Feel the difference. Well, that wraps up today's show.
I'm Danielle D'Souza Gill.
It's been such a pleasure joining you all this week and last week.
Make sure to stay in touch with me on social media at Danielle D'Souza Gill.
I will see you again in the future, and I look forward to you all having Dinesh back tomorrow.
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