The David Knight Show - Interview: Public Education and the War on Christianity
Aired: 2026-05-14
Duration: 44:08


=== Controlling America's Education (09:44) ===

[00:00:07]  Well, joining us today is Robert Bortens.
[00:00:10]  He's the author of Woke and Weaponized How Karl Marx Won the Battle for American Education.
[00:00:16]  He's also the CEO of Classical Conversations.
[00:00:20]  And if you are involved in homeschooling, you've probably heard of this.
[00:00:23]  As a matter of fact, many of our friends did Classical Conversations and they loved it.
[00:00:27]  So we're going to talk to him about that as well.
[00:00:29]  So we'll give you some tactics for how you can do it.
[00:00:33]  And we'll also tell you what the other guys' designs are for your children.
[00:00:37]  Which will hopefully inform you to go in a different direction, whether you take classical conversations or not.
[00:00:43]  But it is a great alternative to government schools.
[00:00:47]  Thank you for joining us, Robert.
[00:00:49]  Yeah, thanks for having me on the show today.
[00:00:51]  Excited to be here.
[00:00:52]  Well, thank you.
[00:00:53]  I was excited to see that your co author was Alex Newman.
[00:00:55]  I've talked to him many times about education.
[00:00:58]  And of course, he's written books about that as well.
[00:01:00]  I love every time I talk about education, I use the analogy that Alex Newman did.
[00:01:05]  He said, the schools are like a burning building.
[00:01:08]  So the first thing you want to do is get your kids out of there.
[00:01:12]  Second thing you want to do is put out the fire because it's going to burn down our entire neighborhood.
[00:01:16]  And, uh, and I think that's one of the best analogies I've had for what the, the issue is and the approach that we should take to it.
[00:01:22]  So we're going to talk about, uh, this, um, you know, way that people can get their kids out of this burning building and teach them themselves with classical conversations.
[00:01:32]  But we're also going to talk about, uh, the fact that this is burning down our society.
[00:01:36]  And that's really what I think your book is about, uh, woke and weaponized how Karl Marx won the battle for the, for American education.
[00:01:44]  Tell us a little bit about what Marx wanted from education and what he is getting out of our government schools.
[00:01:51]  Yeah, so the whole intent of the Marx is to remove children from their families so that children can grow up to view the state as their father, that then they would have a loyalty to the state and the state can get them to do basically whatever the state wants them to do.
[00:02:13]  And his ultimate goal was to.
[00:02:16]  End religion and end private property.
[00:02:19]  And he understood that family and child bond was the greatest threat to his worldview, and that he had to figure out a way to get adults to willingly give that up and for children never to form it in the first place.
[00:02:35]  And so ultimately, why our education system is woke and weaponized is because the followers of Marx understood that we wouldn't be able to change the United States from the outside, that we weren't going to be able to be taken over by.
[00:02:50]  Some, you know, world war that the Cold War with Russia was going to inevitably fail.
[00:02:56]  And so they targeted intentionally our school systems using the Frankfurt School and the Columbia Teachers College to get their Marxist ideologies into our textbooks, into the formation of teachers at four year universities.
[00:03:12]  So whether they personally identified as Marxists or not, that they would inevitably be teaching a Marxist worldview to the next generation.
[00:03:21]  And so each generation forgot a little bit about what the Previous generation knew.
[00:03:27]  And today we have more than 50% of Gen Z thinks Democrat socialism is a good idea, despite the fact that it's killed well over 100 million people since the early almost 110 years now.
[00:03:41]  And so it is a destructive ideology.
[00:03:45]  It's really putting the arsonists in charge of the burning building.
[00:03:49]  And that's what we've done here in the United States.
[00:03:52]  That's right.
[00:03:52]  Yeah.
[00:03:53]  Yeah.
[00:03:53]  They wouldn't know anything if they didn't know the wrong stuff.
[00:03:55]  So.
[00:03:56]  Yeah.
[00:03:57]  That's kind of where we are right now.
[00:03:58]  And you know, you talked about that and the opposition to the family and how that was in their path.
[00:04:03]  If you go back to the 1800s, these utopian societies that constantly failed, organized along communist principles, even though they didn't have Karl Marx, this is even before Karl Marx, they constantly failed.
[00:04:16]  And they said, Oh, you know, the problem is that we've got to get to the kids earlier.
[00:04:20]  This has always been the case, isn't it?
[00:04:22]  And it's so frustrating that we can't get Americans and Christians to understand how vital that is to get to children in the early years and to really shape them and to guide them and to give them the truth.
[00:04:38]  Yeah, so Horace Mann, which is credited with bringing the public school system from Prussia here into the United States, said this We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause.
[00:04:54]  In other words, that the kids have become their hostages, which, you know, if you're teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic, you know, what parent doesn't want that?
[00:05:03]  So, what was their cause?
[00:05:05]  And their cause, as Horace Mann said, was to destroy religion, to destroy private property.
[00:05:10]  And so that's what we do in the book, Wilkin Weaponized.
[00:05:13]  Is this isn't like my opinion.
[00:05:15]  We actually go back, or Alex's opinion, is we've done the research.
[00:05:19]  What did Horace Mann actually say?
[00:05:21]  You know, what did John Dewey say?
[00:05:22]  He said, change must come gradually.
[00:05:24]  To force it unduly would compromise its final success by favoring a violent reaction.
[00:05:30]  Well, why would parents act violently if John Dewey just wants to educate their kids?
[00:05:34]  That's right.
[00:05:35]  Right.
[00:05:35]  And it wasn't, right.
[00:05:36]  It wasn't because they're teaching them how to read and write.
[00:05:40]  And so when parents today, you know, we get so many people get frustrated with the school system or, We spend so much money on it and they want to reform it.
[00:05:48]  Like the book points out that the school system is working exactly as the utopian designers want it to work.
[00:05:55]  And so there's no reforming the system because it's working perfectly.
[00:06:00]  It's actually working better than expected.
[00:06:02]  The fact that only less than half of American adults now read above a sixth grade level is the fruit of the system.
[00:06:11]  But that's a high watermark because only about 36% of kids. Now, can read at grade level.
[00:06:18]  And it's not like these grade levels are high achieving grade levels.
[00:06:22]  They keep dumbing the grade levels down just to get the kids out of them.
[00:06:25]  And we can't even get but a third of them passing it.
[00:06:28]  Same thing with math.
[00:06:29]  And it's even worse for things like history.
[00:06:31]  I think it's down in the low 20 percentile, are at grade level.
[00:06:35]  And so the whole entire point was to force people to not be able to be sovereign over themselves, to be able to govern themselves, so that they would adopt this collectivist worldview, whether it was a form of a Nazism,
[00:06:51]  which is a form of collectivism, or Democrat socialism, or straight out communism, or any of these sort of collectivist ideologies, where the state gets to be governed by the powerful and they get to decide who wins and who loses.
[00:07:08]  And we are all equally under their own yoke.
[00:07:11]  And so that's ultimately the goal of the system.
[00:07:14]  And since a person who can read, like Frederick Douglass said, former slave and a great American, once you Learn how to read, you're forever free, is basically what he said.
[00:07:26]  And so liberal education used to mean it meant that it liberated you of the tools of learning, right?
[00:07:31]  Exactly.
[00:07:32]  And so that's what we've been trying to do at classical conversations for a really long time.
[00:07:35]  Yeah, it's even in 1982, right before the wall fell.
[00:07:40]  Um, President Rowan Gay, there he was, uh, the Ford Foundation's president told uh, Norman Dodd, who was part of the White House, that their goal was to successfully merge the United States with the Soviet Union.
[00:07:55]  And so, when you have someone like Mandami getting elected, uh, you know, mayor of New York City, and you know, when he's getting giving in his inauguration speech, he says, We need to throw off the chains of rugged individualism.
[00:08:08]  Individualism and embrace the warmth of collectivism.
[00:08:12]  That was the goal.
[00:08:14]  Field of fire.
[00:08:15]  Yeah.
[00:08:17]  Unfortunately, he's already ran out of people's money.
[00:08:19]  But that's been the goal from the beginning and was to take away our freedom by dumbing us down.
[00:08:25]  And that's why we say Karl Marx won the battle for American education because people keep sending themselves kids to these schools, even though under every single metric they're failing.
[00:08:37]  Yeah.
[00:08:38]  Well, it's important for people to understand the founders here in America that brought this.
[00:08:42]  Horrendous system to us.
[00:08:44]  Horace Mann, Thomas Dewey, people like that.
[00:08:46]  You know, people look at the Dewey Decimal System, how they used to organize libraries.
[00:08:50]  Does anybody even use that anymore?
[00:08:51]  They even use libraries anymore.
[00:08:53]  But, you know, he comes in with a practical tool that's there and he insinuates himself into the educational system.
[00:09:01]  And yet, the reality is, if we go back to people like R.L. Dabney after the Civil War, he said education is not fundamentally about math and other things like that.
[00:09:12]  That is kind of a vocational training.
[00:09:13]  He said it really is about values.
[00:09:16]  And so from the other side of it, you know, if we look at people who have an agenda that they want to teach values that are going to allow them to control, to dumb down and to control people, like Charlotte Isabee was talking about the deliberate dumbing down of America, you know, when your goal is to dumb people down to control them, that's one thing.
[00:09:34]  If your goal is to set up people who have a moral foundation and a moral backbone that is strong, that's a completely different thing.
[00:09:43]  And so R.L. Dabney felt that it was Completely had to have a complete separation of school and state.

=== Government Training for Corporations (15:28) ===

[00:09:51]  And yet we're not anywhere close to that.
[00:09:52]  You had a lot of people who were hopeful that Trump was going to do something about that when he said he was going to get rid of the Department of Education.
[00:09:59]  But you've spoken to that as well.
[00:10:01]  How do you see that happening here?
[00:10:03]  What, how, how are they doing in terms of shutting down the Department of Education?
[00:10:07]  Seems like it's still here.
[00:10:08]  I wonder if this is kind of, if this is another professional wrestling narrative from Linda McMahon, maybe that's why he put her in charge of education.
[00:10:18]  Yeah.
[00:10:19]  So, I mean, I think it's a, it's, It's something that people need to understand that the federal government has no constitutional authority over education.
[00:10:28]  Period.
[00:10:29]  Stop.
[00:10:30]  Now, ending the Department of Education is a step in the right direction, but it can also be a sleight of hand because what they're doing is they're just moving all of the education laws to different departments, whether it's the Department of Finance that's going to oversee student loans.
[00:10:49]  Well, student loans were all privately run basically before 2010 and Barack Obama took them over.
[00:10:55]  And there was a few hundred billion dollars in student loan debt.
[00:10:59]  Well, that has quadrupled under the federal government taking over it.
[00:11:04]  So, one of the things you've got to do is you've got to get the federal government out of subsidizing and guaranteeing student loans.
[00:11:11]  Yeah.
[00:11:12]  So, but Congress has to do that.
[00:11:14]  And so, and of course, I think that has driven up tuition.
[00:11:17]  You know, every time so many economists will say, every time you subsidize something, it gets more expensive.
[00:11:24]  And certainly we have seen tuition go through the ceiling.
[00:11:27]  I say many times, I went to a state university and my tuition was less than the cost of my books.
[00:11:33]  And now it's just gone through the ceiling with all the federal loans that are there.
[00:11:37]  Now, they had HEW, Health Education and Welfare, for a long time.
[00:11:41]  Then they started breaking these things out as they started getting bigger.
[00:11:44]  When did they start the Department of Education?
[00:11:46]  When did that break out?
[00:11:48]  Yeah, so that was in the 70s under Jimmy Carter.
[00:11:51]  So he promised this to the teachers' unions that he was going to create this entity.
[00:11:56]  And since then, I mean, it's basically been a Democrat or socialist money laundering scheme.
[00:12:04]  In order to brainwash the next generations.
[00:12:07]  And so we've spent trillions of dollars in this department, and not a single education metric has improved.
[00:12:15]  So, just by cutting the expenses to zero, actually not just shutting the one department down, but actually ending these laws that only drive up price and do nothing to improve educational outcomes, we would all be going into national debt slower or maybe paying less taxes.
[00:12:37]  As well as having better outcomes.
[00:12:39]  And so, do I think the Trump administration wants to maybe get the federal government out of education more?
[00:12:46]  I think they do.
[00:12:48]  But it's ultimately up to Congress to end these unconstitutional laws or the Supreme Court to step in and end it.
[00:12:54]  But I don't see the Supreme Court doing that anytime soon.
[00:12:58]  So, we really need to put pressure on Congress.
[00:13:00]  But it's been a disappointing sleight of hand.
[00:13:04]  In some ways, I think even more dangerous when you put like some of these education laws under the Department of Labor.
[00:13:11]  Because now you're going to be even thinking about more of this career and college readiness ideology, which is again just part of this socialist worldview that we've adopted over the last 60 or 70 years.
[00:13:24]  Like you said, education is really about forming a moral background for yourself and being able to become a more complete human being.
[00:13:35]  And some of these other things are more job related.
[00:13:38]  And the federal government has never successfully predicted what the job market was going to look like a year from now.
[00:13:45]  Much less 10 or 12 years from now.
[00:13:47]  And so the fact that they may be more incentivized along those lines with these changes disturbs me and just goes back to that point of you just got to get your kids out.
[00:13:59]  And quite honestly, if you do the exact opposite of what the government entities tell you to do, they'll probably turn out much better.
[00:14:07]  Yeah, it's kind of interesting.
[00:14:08]  You know, when you look at this, the Department of Education, Ronald Reagan was going to end it, right?
[00:14:13]  That was one of his promises.
[00:14:15]  That's what.
[00:14:16]  Charlotte Isby and Philip Slafley were writing about in their book, Deliberately Dumbing Down America.
[00:14:22]  And they were very disappointed that that didn't happen.
[00:14:25]  As a matter of fact, it got much, much bigger.
[00:14:27]  You know, it could have strangled that thing in the crib, but they let it, they nurtured it into maturity under the Reagan administration.
[00:14:34]  And that's one of the things that I think is dangerous.
[00:14:37]  We look at this and we think, well, you know, Reagan wants to make government smaller and he's going to get rid of the Department of Education.
[00:14:43]  And yet he doesn't, right?
[00:14:45]  See, the same thing with the Republicans around Trump.
[00:14:48]  At the same time.
[00:14:49]  But, you know, when you're talking about putting some of this stuff, transferring it over to the Labor Department, and how that kind of feeds this whole idea that it's the responsibility for the government to train people to work for corporations, you look at that.
[00:15:05]  And even in its most benign manifestation, the agenda is kind of wicked.
[00:15:12]  Yes.
[00:15:12]  I mean, we're not here to train our kids to be widgets in some factory, you know, drones on the assembly line.
[00:15:20]  And yet that's the way they see your children.
[00:15:22]  And it's looking more and more like there's really not any hope for people who are going to be working for big corporations.
[00:15:28]  They're looking at how they can replace everybody with AI and robotics.
[00:15:34]  Yeah.
[00:15:35]  Yeah.
[00:15:35]  It's scary.
[00:15:36]  I mean, as Pink Floyd once said, just another brick in the wall.
[00:15:39]  And that's really what our education system has become.
[00:15:43]  And under the Department of Labor, like even if you have good people running it now, like under the Trump administration who are trying to do their best job, like it still doesn't align with what our federal government is created to do.
[00:15:56]  And just as a Christian, what government has been mandated by God to do, there is no.
[00:16:02]  Job creation, no labor laws, like all of these things aren't under the jurisdiction of a civil government.
[00:16:09]  It's primarily justice, is what God designed the civil government for.
[00:16:15]  And so anytime it steps out of those bounds, we know it's going to be expensive.
[00:16:19]  It's going to produce very poor results.
[00:16:22]  And so we've got a system now in the United States where our education system, like there are in the city of Chicago, there are 40 schools that have zero students that are.
[00:16:36]  Reading or writing at grade level, zero.
[00:16:39]  And one of those schools spends over $40,000 per year per kid.
[00:16:43]  There's a school in New York City that spends about $80,000 a year per kid with zero kids that can read or do math at grade level.
[00:16:53]  So it's not money that's the problem, it's the civil government's institution at all that has the issue.
[00:17:00]  And that's what we show in the book, Woken Weaponized the public school system was woke and weaponized when it was created in the 1850s.
[00:17:09]  And imported here into the United States.
[00:17:11]  I mean, it's the school system that primed Germany or Prussia at the time to start World War I.
[00:17:19]  And so that's been imported to the United States.
[00:17:22]  And we keep thinking that somehow we can disobey God's design for the family and God's design for civil government and have good outcomes.
[00:17:32]  And so the most dangerous part about what Trump is doing is one, it could lull conservatives to sleep that the Department of Education has ended when in fact it's never.
[00:17:43]  The laws themselves have never been stronger because it's the law themselves that are the problem, not who's administrating it or what department.
[00:17:53]  So, yeah, there might be some minuscule tax savings where we have less employees in the federal government, and I'm all for that.
[00:18:00]  And so, and there's maybe some efficiency approach, isn't it?
[00:18:05]  Yeah, but it's not getting rid of something.
[00:18:07]  You can't make something more efficient that shouldn't exist.
[00:18:09]  That's right.
[00:18:10]  We're doing a completely wrong thing, but let's make it more efficient.
[00:18:12]  It's like, well, no, let's actually not.
[00:18:15]  I'd much rather.
[00:18:16]  Have somebody in there like Hillary Clinton who says it takes a village to raise a child, she has thrown down the gauntlet.
[00:18:21]  Actually, she's thrown it in your face.
[00:18:24]  And I just heard Melissa Harris Perry say about a decade ago, We've got to get over this notion that children belong to their parents, they don't, they belong to the state, right?
[00:18:33]  And so these people come out and say it out loud.
[00:18:36]  And I find that's the Republican Party has embraced that same ideology.
[00:18:41]  That's right, they just put you to sleep, you know, they assuage your concerns that that's what's really happening while they fund it.
[00:18:48]  And continue it.
[00:18:49]  And they'll do little things to make it less abrasive right now.
[00:18:52]  And so it really is a conditioning.
[00:18:55]  And that's one of the reasons why they got to keep going back and forth from one party to the other.
[00:18:58]  They have to condition you.
[00:18:59]  The Democrats push the agenda further down the road, and the Republicans say, well, I don't know, maybe not quite that fast or that far.
[00:19:06]  And let's modify this a little bit to make it a little bit less painful.
[00:19:10]  But we're still going the same place.
[00:19:11]  We're still doing the same thing, essentially.
[00:19:13]  Yeah.
[00:19:14]  And all that goes back to, again, like the design of the system.
[00:19:17]  The system has been so, uh, You know, ingrained in our culture now.
[00:19:21]  I mean, since the 1960s, there was a guy named B.F. Skinner who basically viewed children as animals to be trained.
[00:19:31]  And so, my wife has got a master's degree in education.
[00:19:33]  Let me interject this here.
[00:19:35]  And she brought that book to her apartment.
[00:19:37]  I was over there looking at her stuff.
[00:19:39]  And it's like, Beyond Freedom and Dignity.
[00:19:41]  And I said, It's about time somebody complained about the way the kids are being treated in school.
[00:19:45]  And she says, No, no, no.
[00:19:46]  That's a blueprint about what to do that you oppose.
[00:19:50]  He wants to not have any freedom or dignity for human beings.
[00:19:53]  And it's like, What?
[00:19:55]  And that was part of the educational core that they were teaching them.
[00:19:57]  They were teaching the kids B.F. Skinner.
[00:19:59]  They wanted them to use those Skinner esque approaches on kids.
[00:20:02]  Oh, yeah.
[00:20:03]  So it's part of the, I just have a friend who got her master's, and they had a whole class praising B.F. Skinner.
[00:20:09]  This guy's burning in hell unless he had a sort of deathbed confession.
[00:20:14]  But what he's done is basically destroyed the United States education system or compelled that Marxist ideology into every single classroom.
[00:20:23]  So, like, my wife was a public school teacher for 10 years.
[00:20:26]  You know, doesn't have a Marxist bone in her body, but after she got out, she realized like all of these things that were in the system.
[00:20:33]  You know, she's a straight A student trying to do what's going to be best for her kids.
[00:20:38]  And everything they're teaching her is just conditioning, you know, to condition the kids to become little socialists.
[00:20:46]  Yeah.
[00:20:46]  And to condition them to, you know, just obey and believe whatever the authorities have for them, which is why we saw during the, you know, COVID experience how many people who, Our thoughtful people just went along and believed whatever the TV screen was telling them.
[00:21:06]  Well, that's all part of the conditioning that is built into the public school system.
[00:21:11]  So you can have a great teacher that loves Jesus in front of the classroom.
[00:21:14]  She's still teaching from a Marxist textbook and a Marxist classroom play through redistribution of wealth, which is a Marxist ideology.
[00:21:23]  And so everything about it is Marxist.
[00:21:26]  And of course, you want to soothe those who are in the system itself.
[00:21:30]  But the reality is, we need more pastors.
[00:21:33]  More American leaders telling people to get out of the system altogether.
[00:21:37]  I agree.
[00:21:37]  And of course, flip the script, and you've got a teacher who's not a committed Christian and reading off of a script.
[00:21:46]  Let's say that you've got the government that comes in and says, no, no, no, we don't want you reading that stuff.
[00:21:50]  We don't want you doing the DEI stuff.
[00:21:51]  How many times have we seen teachers cut social media videos that said, well, you know, they said in Texas that we're not going to do this and this and this, but I'm the one who's in control in the classroom and I'm going to teach that.
[00:22:02]  Just try to stop me.
[00:22:04]  And that's the reality.
[00:22:05]  And, you know, I've talked to people for over 30 years.
[00:22:09]  We decided we're going to homeschool our kids when we had them.
[00:22:12]  And I would have people tell me, you know, yeah, I understand it's really bad at the national level.
[00:22:18]  It's really bad at the state level.
[00:22:20]  And I can even see it happening in our county, but it's not, and maybe even in the same school, but it's not happening in this classroom.
[00:22:27]  I know that teacher.
[00:22:28]  She's great.
[00:22:29]  And I'm not worried at all about my child being there.
[00:22:32]  But then during COVID, They're able to see what was actually happening in the school and they could see what you're talking about.
[00:22:38]  And that made a big difference with a lot of parents.
[00:22:40]  Now, a lot of them just didn't care, right?
[00:22:42]  They just go along with it.
[00:22:43]  But I think that's why we're seeing the surge of people moving out of the schools and deciding that they're going to educate their kids.
[00:22:48]  So let's talk about that.
[00:22:50]  Let's give people a positive vision of where this goes.
[00:22:54]  Tell us a little bit about how classical conversations work and what the goal is and how you accomplish that, those types of things.
[00:23:02]  Yeah, classical conversations started in my parents' basement.
[00:23:06]  1997.
[00:23:07]  So I was one of the first 11 students.
[00:23:09]  I was homeschooled through high school.
[00:23:11]  And it was really to empower parents to give their kids a classical Christian education through high school, through homeschooling.
[00:23:20]  And also, with the idea of helping students go after and seek truth, beauty, and goodness, and to help people ultimately to know God and to make Him known.
[00:23:32]  And so, a big difference than what the education system is trying to do.
[00:23:36]  And so, we meet once a week with the trained parent tutor, typically in eight to 12 students per classroom, no more than 12.
[00:23:45]  And they go through all six subjects, and then you're homeschooling them at home the rest of the week.
[00:23:50]  But they're coming together and like, Doing science dissections and debates and mock trials and science fairs and doing poetry jams and things that are more difficult to do alone.
[00:24:04]  But you're doing it in these groups and we're doing it through a biblical worldview.
[00:24:09]  So everything points back to Jesus.
[00:24:11]  We think two plus two equals four tells us something about the nature of Jesus.
[00:24:15]  You know, through a classical model where we're reading the original writings, reading things like the Constitution and Magna Carta and the Federalist Papers and comparing them.
[00:24:24]  And that's so important, the original writings.
[00:24:26]  I love that you brought that up because it's completely different than somebody's textbook summary of something, isn't it?
[00:24:32]  When you go back and you read the original.
[00:24:35]  Oh, 100%.
[00:24:36]  And you got to realize all these textbook companies have their own value system as well.
[00:24:41]  And they're not American values, they're collectivist values.
[00:24:46]  And so, yeah, they want you to read it through some woke professor's worldview.
[00:24:51]  So that's the worldview that you get it.
[00:24:53]  I mean, we stopped teaching cursive writing.
[00:24:55]  Uh, which cursive writing has a lot of we don't at classical conversations.
[00:24:59]  We encourage families to do cursive writing, um, but they stop teaching it because they don't they know if the kids don't learn cursive writing, they can't read the constitution, so that they have to believe whatever some woke professor tells about them.
[00:25:12]  Plus, there's so many benefits of it that just you know develop brain development and hand eye coordination from cursive writing.

=== Rejecting Woke Worldviews (10:23) ===

[00:25:19]  So, those things have been super you know important to us, and so we have a full K 12 program, uh, even college credits available for our students.
[00:25:28]  We have about uh 2,000 groups in the United States, about 800 international now, over 135,000 students in our programs.
[00:25:37]  And we're helping families every single year, just like yours, to homeschool successfully.
[00:25:43]  And yeah, we do that.
[00:25:44]  And we don't have any wokeness in our curriculum.
[00:25:50]  It's all going back and reinforcing the good and the bad, right?
[00:25:55]  Nobody's perfect, but looking at history through how does God view history?
[00:26:00]  And how does that help us to become human beings that will be flourishing, that can help our communities, help our churches, help our businesses, be entrepreneurs, you know, go to college, you know, go into ministry, all of those things.
[00:26:13]  And so it's been awesome.
[00:26:15]  And we're looking forward to, you know, hitting our 30th anniversary next year.
[00:26:21]  But it's totally a different paradigm.
[00:26:23]  Like we don't.
[00:26:23]  Yeah, it is.
[00:26:24]  And tell me a little bit about now.
[00:26:26]  It sounds like you got a lot more depth into certain subjects and that type of thing.
[00:26:30]  We did a homeschool cooperative with our.
[00:26:33]  Youngest child, our daughter, when we were in Texas.
[00:26:36]  And it didn't have the kind of depth that you're talking about in some of these things.
[00:26:40]  Is that what your organization, Class School Conversations, helps to provide to move the kids in a more challenging way?
[00:26:48]  What is the difference between, let's say, just a homeschool cooperative where you've got parents who volunteer to teach a particular topic to the group so they can go a little bit more in depth with that topic than they would if they were having to cover everything?
[00:27:02]  Yeah.
[00:27:02]  So we have a full K 12 curriculum.
[00:27:04]  Most of it has been written by us at this.
[00:27:06]  Point, but it's written by homeschool grad parents who've empty nested homeschooled their own kids, written for homeschool parents.
[00:27:14]  And it's written to be done inside a community once a week.
[00:27:18]  And so it's all the subjects, but it's also that help.
[00:27:21]  And so, you know, this has been battle tested now with millions of students, you know, over the 29 years.
[00:27:28]  And we're always learning from those students and learning from those families and then reincorporating it into future versions and trainings into our system.
[00:27:38]  And so it's not, you know, it's a proven roadmap.
[00:27:42]  Like if you ever played the game Oregon Trail growing up, right, you had to select a guide to help you.
[00:27:48]  Go to Oregon.
[00:27:49]  Well, we're that guide, and we've been to Oregon a million times versus like your typical co op, you know, great people, you know, but they've never been to Oregon before.
[00:27:59]  They're just trying to, you know, figure it out as they go.
[00:28:02]  And it's better than doing it on your own for sure.
[00:28:05]  But they don't necessarily have a vision for 12th grade or what a high school graduate should look like.
[00:28:10]  But we've seen, you know, tens of thousands of students graduate now.
[00:28:15]  And so we know like what are they capable of doing, you know, what works and what doesn't work.
[00:28:20]  And so Just imagine, like, you know, millions of years of coaching or millions of years of experience.
[00:28:27]  We sift through all that, pick the best stuff, and then give that to you as a parent.
[00:28:32]  So you're not trying to figure things out, you know, as you go.
[00:28:36]  Of course, you're figuring out, you know, your own kids and your own rhythms and things like that.
[00:28:40]  But, you know, we've got best practices that make it super easy for you to homeschool your kids.
[00:28:45]  So you don't have to, you know, one less thing for you to worry about.
[00:28:49]  That's great.
[00:28:49]  Yeah.
[00:28:49]  Because when you're doing it in a cooperative, it's like, okay, so we need somebody to teach X.
[00:28:53]  And it's like, Is that me?
[00:28:56]  I got to go bone up on this stuff now.
[00:28:57]  And so, with everything else that's happening in your life, you got to go try to find that in enough depth to teach not only your kids, but other kids as well.
[00:29:05]  That's, I think, a very valuable thing to have that.
[00:29:08]  Having done it the other direction, I can certainly see the value in classical conversations and having that structure that is there.
[00:29:16]  Now, you're not looking to get any grants from the federal government, are you?
[00:29:22]  No, thank you.
[00:29:23]  No, we.
[00:29:25]  The federal government needs to stay out of education, and so we don't want to get involved with them in any way.
[00:29:33]  And because why?
[00:29:34]  They would come in and they would start altering your curriculum right away, wouldn't they?
[00:29:37]  If they're going to give you the money, they're going to dictate what you teach.
[00:29:40]  That's the iron law of economics.
[00:29:43]  That's the iron law of economics.
[00:29:45]  And so you can't, the medium is the message.
[00:29:48]  And so if the medium is that the government's going to pay for something, that's a collectivist message, especially when it's something the government has no business being involved in.
[00:29:58]  And so it's, of course, Course, students who go through 12 years of collectivist conditioning end up, you know, being bent that direction.
[00:30:08]  But that's what it takes, right?
[00:30:09]  Like it takes $20,000 a year for 12 years to get half of the American generation to think collectivism is a good idea.
[00:30:19]  So it just shows you how expensive this worldview is to how contrary to human nature it is that it takes that level of effort to get the common man to embrace it.
[00:30:31]  And so We have got to stop reinforcing that system as Christians and just get our kids out.
[00:30:38]  And the more we get our own kids out and show people that you're going to live a much more flourishing life, your kids are going to be happier, your family's going to be happier.
[00:30:49]  That living on this consumerism hamster wheel of hedonism that is basically the American culture today, which leads to depression among many other symptoms of this, is just the rejection of God.
[00:31:05]  And so we need to live our lives as the Bible commands us to live.
[00:31:10]  And it says, teach your children daily my commandments so that they can live a good life.
[00:31:16]  And, you know, we need to get back to that in our country.
[00:31:19]  And we had that for almost 100 years in our country.
[00:31:22]  It wasn't until 1850 where the first public schools initiated.
[00:31:26]  And it wasn't until 1900 was there a public school in every state.
[00:31:29]  And so it's possible to have an educated populace without the government being involved at all.
[00:31:34]  And we have almost 125 years of history to prove it.
[00:31:40]  As a matter of fact, I wonder how many of the kids in these schools, since they can't even read at grade level, how many of them could read Thomas Paine's Common Sense?
[00:31:49]  Of course, pretty much everybody was reading that back in the day.
[00:31:52]  There's a very, very high literacy rate.
[00:31:54]  And there were no schools involved, except perhaps as a graduate school or something.
[00:31:59]  Somebody's going to go into a profession, law or medicine or something like that.
[00:32:03]  But it does go against the basic design of God.
[00:32:07]  And we should always expect that there's going to be problems when we do that.
[00:32:11]  God has set up the family.
[00:32:14]  And he has done that in a loving way.
[00:32:16]  And he's done that in a way that really works.
[00:32:19]  And when we decide that we don't want to do it that way, we'd rather have the government do it that way.
[00:32:23]  It's very much like what the Israelites did when they rejected Samuel and they said, We want a king, right?
[00:32:28]  And God said, Well, they haven't rejected you, Samuel.
[00:32:31]  They've rejected me.
[00:32:33]  And so that's the issue parents have rejected what they have that is really a wonderful thing.
[00:32:41]  It's a wonderful experience to be able to teach your kids.
[00:32:44]  And we had seen this and.
[00:32:47]  We met some wise people who were talking about it as we got into the beginning of this, and they talked about how, well, you know, I've seen that when you have kids that are in school, they get bonded to their teachers, they get bonded to their fellow students in school.
[00:33:02]  But when we teach in homeschool, they're bonded to their parents, they're bonded to their siblings as much as anything else.
[00:33:08]  And of course, they do get involved with people on the outside.
[00:33:11]  And I could look at that, I could see that in my own life going through a school that I did get bonded to teachers and to Classmates and stuff like that.
[00:33:20]  I didn't have any siblings that were my age, but I could see how that could be the case.
[00:33:25]  And certainly that is.
[00:33:27]  And it's much better to go with God's plan always, isn't it?
[00:33:33]  It always is.
[00:33:34]  And I think that's the part where we need pastors to step up here in this country.
[00:33:37]  I mean, you've got, I mean, the statistics are horrendous.
[00:33:41]  And so, you know, we've got, you know, Barnes says somewhere about 73% or maybe 78% of students who are in church regularly.
[00:33:52]  But go to public school, are no longer practicing Christians just two years after graduating high school.
[00:33:58]  And so, you know, Jesus told the story of the good shepherd who went after one lost sheep.
[00:34:05]  Well, what happens when you're losing 73 sheep?
[00:34:08]  You know, pastors should be fearful of what they're going to say in the BEMA seat if they have those statistics inside of their, you know, sheep that they're leading.
[00:34:20]  And the same thing with parents.
[00:34:22]  What are you going to say in the BEMA seat when God says, Hey, I gave you these kids.
[00:34:28]  This is one of the most precious gifts I gave you.
[00:34:30]  It says that in the Bible to raise them in the way they should go.
[00:34:35]  And for 12 years, you turned them over to a godless, atheist education system, contrary to what I commanded you to do.
[00:34:47]  That's right.
[00:34:48]  And so many parents have probably never heard it framed that way.
[00:34:51]  And that's because our Many pastors in America are more afraid of the teachers' unions than they are of God.
[00:34:58]  That's right.
[00:34:59]  And I'm happy for any pastor to challenge me on that and preach the evils of the public school system this upcoming Sunday.
[00:35:09]  That's right.
[00:35:09]  Yeah, so many times it's about filling the pews rather than filling the hearts with truth, isn't it?
[00:35:16]  And so, yeah, it really is something.
[00:35:18]  It's not just a responsibility of the parents, but it's something that pastors and leaders need to look at this and say, you know, what is happening to us and why is that happening?
[00:35:29]  They don't seem to want to meet people where they are and to speak to the issues that are front and center that are directly affecting them, give people some guidance, some wisdom, some discernment.
[00:35:41]  About what they're seeing in their everyday life.

=== Pastors and Parental Duty (02:01) ===

[00:35:43]  Instead, it's kind of like, um, you know, the woman at the well when, when, uh, Jesus says, uh, well, let's talk about your life here.
[00:35:51]  You, you know, you're living with this guy you're not married with and you've had, uh, half a dozen other husbands or whatever.
[00:35:57]  And she said, Oh, you're a prophet.
[00:35:58]  Let's talk about, uh, theology.
[00:36:00]  And she, she changes the topic.
[00:36:02]  And so it's really easy to talk about theology.
[00:36:04]  It can be very uncomfortable if we talk about our own personal lives, can it?
[00:36:09]  And, and how that all applies in our own lives.
[00:36:12]  It's much easier, much more comfortable to talk about theology.
[00:36:14]  Or to talk about prophecy or something like anything other than the stuff that is really killing us.
[00:36:21]  Yeah.
[00:36:22]  And the good thing is, I think more pastors are waking up to this and getting bolder from the pulpit, but that's what we absolutely need.
[00:36:29]  And then business people, like these are your future customers, these are your future employees.
[00:36:34]  Like this system is not helping you out.
[00:36:37]  It is, we are funding a system that is going to turn them against you so that you have higher taxes, more red tape, more headaches.
[00:36:46]  Maybe even bankrupt you because you're not doing the right three letter acronym that's in vogue.
[00:36:53]  And so, businesses, you need to start scholarships for your kids, employees, or donate to local private schools or help local homeschool co ops or groups.
[00:37:06]  If your employee has a new baby, give them a book about education or teaching your child how to read.
[00:37:14]  Because the nice thing is, Is there's not a complicated answer, it's just parents need to be discipling their kids, they need to be teaching them to read.
[00:37:24]  The state will not teach you to read, they've proven that time and time again.
[00:37:30]  You know, 40 years ago, a parent would have been embarrassed to send their kid to public school without them being able to read well.
[00:37:37]  Nowadays, parents will complain to the public school if their kid doesn't know how to read, but they're not going to do it.

=== Finding Joy in Hard Work (03:48) ===

[00:37:44]  You've got to do it yourself, and so it requires sacrifice.
[00:37:48]  And if you can't homeschool, Today, then start reading with your kid every single night and making sure that they're able to think well and that you're deprogramming them because they are getting programmed every single day in that public school system.
[00:38:02]  And I just want to say, too, you know, we look at parenting as a difficult job, no doubt about it.
[00:38:06]  And there are difficult things like changing diapers and stuff like that.
[00:38:09]  But it is the joy of having your child around.
[00:38:12]  And that's what people who've homeschooled miss, you know, is the joy of being able to interact with them that way.
[00:38:18]  And it really can be a joy.
[00:38:20]  So, I mean, You know, when you look at this, this is a job responsibility that's been given to you, but it is a joyful responsibility.
[00:38:27]  If you look at that, it's an opportunity to spend time with your children and to have a relationship with them when they get into their teens because you've been with them when they were younger.
[00:38:36]  And it's about maintaining that relationship.
[00:38:39]  I think that's the key thing.
[00:38:40]  You know, yeah, there's work involved in it, but it's one of the most rewarding jobs that you're ever going to have.
[00:38:48]  Yeah.
[00:38:48]  I mean, everything in life that's worth doing is worth doing well.
[00:38:51]  And absolutely, like what?
[00:38:54]  What have you ever accomplished in life?
[00:38:56]  Like, the harder it was to accomplish, the more satisfaction it was, right?
[00:39:01]  Yeah, um, and you see that over and over again.
[00:39:03]  I mean, even with lottery winners, lottery winners, they didn't accomplish anything.
[00:39:08]  They have all this money.
[00:39:10]  And what do they do?
[00:39:11]  They go bankrupt.
[00:39:12]  They get depressed.
[00:39:13]  They commit suicide at a significantly higher rate.
[00:39:16]  So they've achieved everything in life with no work and they're miserable.
[00:39:22]  Right.
[00:39:22]  And so we got to also remember that God created work before sin.
[00:39:29]  He gave Adam and Eve jobs to do before sin entered the world.
[00:39:34]  That's right.
[00:39:34]  So sin entering the world only made work.
[00:39:37]  Difficult work is actually part of our imago day, a part of our reflection of our creator.
[00:39:44]  And so, part of the reason that the collectivists hate work so much is because they know that that's a reflection of God in us, and that if they are to destroy religion, they need to do everything they can to destroy that reflection.
[00:40:00]  And so, that's why they're happy to dumb down the standards, you know, happy to have people that don't work and are on welfare, you know, 247, 365 for the rest.
[00:40:11]  Their lives because they know that all that is degrading to their humanity and makes them easier to control in the future based on whatever preferences they have.
[00:40:22]  And so, yeah, I think we're living it out.
[00:40:26]  Yeah, I've interviewed David Bonson several times and he's written books about your profession, that type of thing.
[00:40:33]  And son of Greg Bonson, if people remember the apologist.
[00:40:36]  And that's a point he made is that same thing you made.
[00:40:40]  The second person I've heard to make that point, and it's a very strong and important point work is not a curse.
[00:40:46]  Work is part of who we are, being, as you point out, in the image of God.
[00:40:51]  And it's what is the curse the work being made difficult, which was a result of our rebellion as mankind.
[00:41:00]  But work itself is a very fulfilling thing, and it's something that is in and of itself is good.
[00:41:06]  And so we should not shy away, especially from the work that God has gifted us to do.
[00:41:11]  If God has given you a child, then God will give you the ability to train that child in what they need to know.
[00:41:18]  And there's no question about that.
[00:41:20]  That's what he wants.
[00:41:22]  And there is a tremendous reward in lining yourself up with what God wants.
[00:41:27]  It always works that way, doesn't it?
[00:41:30]  So it always does.
[00:41:32]  Yeah.

=== Solutions Beyond Identifying Problems (02:35) ===

[00:41:33]  So, your website is at classicalconversations.com or something like that?
[00:41:37]  What is your website?
[00:41:37]  Yeah, classicalconversations.com.
[00:41:39]  If you go to there and put in your zip code, I will connect you with a local homeschooling parent.
[00:41:44]  Happy to answer any of your questions about classical conversations or just homeschooling in general.
[00:41:50]  So, we've got representatives.
[00:41:51]  Across all 50 states and many countries around the world as well.
[00:41:56]  And then you can find the book at robertbortons.com or at amazon.com.
[00:42:02]  You can find Wilkin Weaponized How Karl Marx Won the Battle for American Education and How We Can Win It Back.
[00:42:08]  That's great.
[00:42:08]  That's great.
[00:42:09]  Well, it's wonderful.
[00:42:10]  I didn't know that your parents started the organization, but that's great that you're continuing the work.
[00:42:15]  It's very important.
[00:42:16]  And I know a lot of people, as I said before, who did classical conversations and they absolutely loved it.
[00:42:22]  And so I would recommend it based on their experience.
[00:42:24]  We never experienced it, but if I had it to do over again, I'm sure I would go that way.
[00:42:31]  Thank you so much for joining us.
[00:42:32]  Again, our guest is Robert Bortons, and the book is Woke and Weaponized How Karl Marx Won the Battle for American Education and How We Can Win It Back.
[00:42:41]  That's the key thing.
[00:42:43]  It's not just identifying a problem, but it's coming up with a solution as well.
[00:42:47]  Thank you so much for joining us, Robert.
[00:42:49]  Thank you.
[00:42:50]  Thank you.
[00:43:01]  The common man.
[00:43:05]  They created common core to dumb down our children.
[00:43:08]  They created common past to track and control us.
[00:43:11]  Their commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing.
[00:43:16]  And the communist future.
[00:43:19]  They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary.
[00:43:24]  But each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God.
[00:43:30]  That is what we have in common.
[00:43:32]  That is what they want to take away.
[00:43:35]  Their most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation.
[00:43:40]  They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us.
[00:43:45]  It's time to turn that around and expose what they want to hide.
[00:43:50]  Please share the information and links you'll find at TheDavidNightShow.com.
[00:43:55]  Thank you for listening.
[00:43:56]  Thank you for sharing.
[00:44:03]  If you can't support us financially, please keep us in your prayers.
[00:44:07]  TheDavidNightShow.com.