Alex Newman, co-author of Crimes of the Educators, exposes how Common Core—funded by Bill Gates and tied to UNESCO’s "world core curriculum"—dumbs down students while indoctrinating them into globalism and atheism, mirroring John Dewey’s socialist, anti-Christian agenda. Sheila Gunn-Reed connects this to Alberta’s $5,500 fine for criticizing Education Minister David Egan’s math failures and a school board’s defunding of Christian schools over 1 Corinthians. With 87% of U.S. children in public schools, Newman warns centralized control erodes parental rights, local governance, and future freedoms, echoing Hitler’s Nuremberg dictum: "He who owns the youth owns the future." The fight for education choice isn’t just academic—it’s existential. [Automatically generated summary]
The Alberta government has fined us at the Rebel for illegal criticism of the education minister David Egan.
But I'm not going to be censored by the government.
So today, I'm still talking about how terrible the education system really is.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
By now, I'm sure you've heard about the latest attack on the rebel by Alberta Premier Rachel Notley.
We were convicted in our absence of illegal political criticism by Alberta Premier Rachel Notley's new hired mercenary, the Elections Commissioner.
Now, the newly created Elections Commissioner decided that our billboard on the side of Highway 2 criticizing Alberta's Education Minister David Egan for failing Alberta students broke elections advertising laws.
For that, we received a fine of $5,500 that we will fight with everything we have because we are never going to stop criticizing the government.
We are a media outlet and it is our right to do so.
Now, you can see Ezra's incredible video explaining the whole situation about how this is really an existential threat to the survival of the rebel at standwitherebel.com.
It's pretty clear Notley doesn't want me talking about how terrible the education system really is.
And so I'm going to, because I'm a journalist and a political commentator, which means I'm going to comment whether she likes it or not.
So joining me tonight is my new American friend, one who literally wrote the book on the creeping Marxism of the North American education system and how it is harming our children and future generations of kids to come.
Common Core Controversy00:16:49
My guest tonight in an interview we recorded earlier in the week is journalist, author, and educator Alex Newman of the New American Magazine.
Joining me now from the new American magazine is someone I'm rapidly becoming a fast fan of, Alex Newman.
Now, I had Alex on the show a couple weeks ago.
Not my show.
I was filling in for the big boss on the big show.
But I wanted to have Alex back on because before we had a conversation about the green tyranny of climate change, because I met Alex at the climate change conference in Poland.
But Alex also has another, what I would probably call an expertise, and that is the creeping Marxism into our education system.
So joining me now from sunny, Florida, and I'm jealous, is Alex Newman of The New American.
Hey, Alex, thanks for joining me.
Hey, thank you so much for having me, Sheila.
Are you trying to make everybody hate me by telling all the Canadians I'm in sunny Florida?
I want them to feel sorry for me.
I don't care what that means for you.
That's awesome.
That's really nice there.
So thank you for having me, Sheila.
Now, when I say that you're a bit of an expert on the education system, you literally wrote the book on it, didn't you?
I did.
Yeah, actually, I was really fortunate to work with Dr. Samuel Blumenfeld.
He and I together co-authored the book Crimes of the Educators, How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America's Children.
Dr. Blumenfeld literally spent 50 years of his life.
He just passed away a couple years ago at age 90.
But he spent 50 years of his life involved in the education fight.
He lectured in all 50 states all over Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom.
And so he was, I think, the go-to expert on education.
And before he died, he wanted to write one more book and they contacted me to see if I would work with him on that.
And so I was just incredibly fortunate to work with him on that.
And now we just literally, as we speak, Sheila, we're going to press with a special report on education in the New American magazine going through all the insanity that's going on today, how we got here, where this is going, and what the alternatives are for parents who want to get out.
And in addition to that, I'm a teacher.
I teach at an online school called the Freedom Project Academy, K through 12 Christian School in the United States.
We have students in all 50 states and 12 different countries.
I didn't realize that you were a teacher at a Christian school.
That's phenomenal to hear.
As Canadians, we often hear the words Common Core thrown around when we're watching American coverage as we want to do, because it seems to me that a lot of the progressivism affecting America is incubating itself here.
But how would you describe Common Core to a Canadian, someone who doesn't really understand what that is?
Like, I think that we are inflicted with the same things.
Maybe we just call them something different here.
We have discovery math.
I don't know if you have that in the United States, but could you give us a Kohl's notes version of what Common Core is?
Sure.
Well, thank you for the opportunity, Sheila.
And at its simplest level, Common Core was the first open effort to nationalize education in America.
Like you guys in Canada, you guys have provinces and each province is supposed to be in charge of education.
Well, in the United States, we have 50 states and each state historically has always been in charge of its own education system.
And typically it's been local school districts and local communities that run the education system.
But for a period of decades, they were quietly consolidating control over this.
So in the end of the 1970s with Jimmy Carter, we got the Department of Education, but it was still federal law that the federal government couldn't intervene in terms of what was taught.
Well, when we got the Obama administration, they rolled out this Common Core program and they pretended like it was developed by the states.
Of course, it wasn't.
It was developed by special interest groups, people like Bill Gates.
He put 2 billion of his own money into it, as well as different federally funded organizations and establishment groups.
And they put together this set of national standards that supposedly was going to improve education in the United States.
Now, I happen to know the only two subject matter experts who they put on the Common Core Validation Committee.
I serve on a board with them.
Dr. Sandra Stotsky from the University of Arkansas was the English expert, and she refused to sign off.
She said, these standards are terrible.
You're taking out all the good literacy.
This is going to reduce the critical thinking abilities of children.
I'm not signing off on it.
And now she goes around the country speaking against it and testifying in state legislatures that they should get rid of it because it's a disaster.
So the only English expert refused to sign off because it was a disaster.
And then on the math side, we had Dr. James Milgram of Stanford University, and he also refused to sign off.
He said these are as non-challenging as possible.
They're not clear.
In some cases, they're literally based on incorrect math, believe it or not.
And so you have a, from an academic standpoint, these are just absolutely disastrous.
From a centralization of PowerPoint point of view, again, this is absolutely disastrous.
You have now all control over education being centralized in one place.
And then if you take it to the next level, and I think, you know, to understand Common Core, you need to understand the broader context that they came about in.
There is a global effort led by UNESCO, the UN's education agency, to globalize education standards.
And the Common Core is very much a part of that agenda.
In fact, Bill Gates, who financed the Common Core, actually signed an agreement with UNESCO in 2004 on behalf of Microsoft to globalize education.
The UNESCO has what they call a world core curriculum.
And the leadership of UNESCO, including its actual Communist Party director general, Irina Bokova, who stepped down at the end of last year, she was going around telling everybody, hey, this is great.
Now we're getting all these countries to adopt national standards and we're implementing our global goals through the national standards.
So what Common Core is, is not so much just the nationalization of education.
It is the globalization of education.
And they'll tell you this, right?
They were running ads on television in the United States, bragging about how under Common Core, we would have the same standards in Paris, in Shanghai, and in Chicago.
So we could measure what everybody was doing on an even platform all over the world.
So we now have a globalized education system.
And it is actually, in fact, you can demonstrate this using the government's own data, dumbing down the population of the United States and facilitating the further indoctrination of the American people.
So it's a disaster all around, Sheila.
You know, it is very chilling because local school boards are really the last bastion of parental autonomy over the education system.
It's, you know, it really is a human right for parents to be able to determine the education that their children need and that is best done like everything the government does at the local level.
And this is really stripping away the parental involvement in the education system.
But I was reading on the New American magazine website that this has been really exposed as a failure by empirical measurements.
So I believe it was a school that had taken Common Core reading out of the school and they immediately saw an improvement in their test scores.
Yeah, it was a phenomenally interesting story.
Here in Florida, we had what's called a charter school and that's maybe a whole nother issue.
But they decided, in fact, I found out that their reading scores were at the top of the state.
They were like in the top 1% of the state.
In some cases, their students were the top performing kids in the whole state.
And I automatically knew, see, this gets us into a whole nother issue, but I automatically knew what was happening in this school.
Under the Common Core, they have kindergarten children memorizing what they call sight words.
And in fact, this is mandated under Common Core.
So, you know, I have to give a little bit of a refresher or explanation of what this means to people who don't know what it is.
So we, in English, we have a phonetic alphabet where every one of our letters represents one or more sounds.
So a P sounds like P and an A sounds like a, and you combine it and it sounds like pa, right?
In Chinese, you know, they use symbols that express an entire word.
So you would memorize the whole symbol and then that symbol would represent a word or an idea or a concept.
So it's completely different ways of writing.
Now, back in the 1840s, they did this experiment in the public schools in Boston where they started teaching children how to memorize entire words instead of teaching them that each letter corresponds with one or more sounds and this is how you blend the sounds together and that's how you determine what's written on the page.
They started getting the children to memorize this series of squiggly lines.
When you see those squiggly lines, that means cat.
Rather than a C stands for and an A stands for and a T stands for T, they would say, this means cat.
When you see these lines in this way, that means cat.
So the results were disastrous.
In fact, the guy who invented it, he had good intentions.
It was Reverend Golodets, and he wanted to teach deaf children how to read.
And deaf children couldn't hear sounds.
So this was really a great way to teach them how to read.
You couldn't do it any other way.
And so that was a great advancement for them.
But when they tried it on non-deaf children, what they found was a complete cataclysm.
So all the leaders of the public schools in Boston got together and they wrote a phenomenal essay.
It's just as relevant today as it was back then, saying that, hey, this method of teaching reading doesn't work.
We're getting rid of it.
It's just ridiculous.
This is not how you teach reading with a phonetic alphabet.
So, anyways, fast forward 60 years later, a guy called John Dewey, who's really the founding father of what passes for education today in America, the public school system, decided to resurrect this and create reading primers so that teachers and colleges of teachers all across the country would be indoctrinated in the use of this methodology.
Since then, we have had a complete breakdown of our literacy skills.
If you look at the government's own data, you see that Americans are now illiterate as a nation.
You know, if you look in some places like Washington, D.C., the government's own data shows that more than two-thirds of the population is functionally illiterate.
At a national level, just 13% of American adults, and this is according to the U.S. Department of Education, are considered proficient in reading.
Even in states like California, which historically has been a high-performing state in education, more than half of the children are not even ranked proficient.
They can't even read at a basic level in the state of California.
And this is all because of this reading methodology.
So when I saw these scores at this charter school in Florida, I immediately knew what was happening.
They were teaching the kids how to read using phonics.
So I called them and I said, Hey, you have really good reading scores.
Can you tell me about your reading program?
They say, Oh, yeah, we just use phonics.
We don't use the common core.
I said, Oh, I already knew that.
Wrote an article about it.
It ended up going viral.
It got picked up probably by hundreds of news articles and news websites and publications.
But it shows you how dangerous the common core is.
I mean, we're mass-producing illiterates and we have the solution.
I mean, the solution is right in front of us.
Just teach reading how we always taught reading for thousands of years, but they don't want to do that.
So now, I think you would probably agree with me that education really is the forefront of the culture war.
And especially here in my home province, we are governed by, to be honest with you, a bunch of progressive wackadoodles that recently us here at the Rebel have run afoul of, specifically because of our criticism of our education minister failing our grade nines, where many of them are not proficient in math, which is basically crippling an entire generation of our workforce.
But there's also a pervasive anti-Christian sentiment in all of this too.
Here in Alberta, we had, you know, basically with the swipe of a pen, they closed down the, it was a massive Christian homeschooling school board that operates under the education ministry here.
And they basically shut it down the alleged financial impropriety.
They didn't even bother to investigate.
And overnight, nearly a third of all the homeschool students in the entire province were out of, without a school to go to, really.
What's been your experience with that pervasive anti-Christian sentiment in education in America?
I'm so glad you asked about this, Sheila, because this is at the heart of what so-called education has become today.
You know, I mentioned John Dewey earlier.
He, you know, if you go to Wikipedia, they call him the, you know, the godfather, the founding father of America's public education system.
And he really was.
And fortunately, he was very honest about his agenda.
One of the things that he did, he drafted and signed what's called the Humanist Manifesto.
And in this humanist manifesto, it was an incredibly important document.
The very first plank, they said, we religious humanists, and to their credit, they were honest.
It's a religious worldview.
But they said, we religious humanists regard the universe as eternally self-existing and not created.
And you compare that with the first words of the Bible.
And the Bible tells you that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
So you have this guy, John Dewey, with a lot of money from the Rockefellers, by the way, big oil.
Rockefellers.
They're involved in everything, right?
Including the global warming scam that we were exposing not too long ago.
And you had John Dewey team up with the Rockefellers and a whole bunch of others to hijack our education system.
They did, they were very, very effective at it.
They actually targeted the teaching colleges.
And so John Dewey was very open about his ideology.
He was a humanist.
He rejected even the idea of God.
He wanted socialism.
He thought, and if you read this humanist manifesto, it's very clear.
They talk about getting rid of the profit motive and collectivizing the means of production.
I mean, it could have come straight out of Fidel Castro's handbook, you know.
And he was very, very transparent about the fact that we want to use the schools to fundamentally transform American children so that we can transform America.
And he wanted a socialist America, and he said so.
And so, from the very beginning, and you know, this is really when we started getting the institutionalization of the government education system in America.
And I'm quite sure that these same influences dominate the Canadian system.
From the very beginning, one of the purposes of this system was to erode the Christian faith of the American people.
It's been very, very successful.
And, you know, in America, I don't think you guys have the same thing in Canada, but in America, our founding fathers, when they wrote the Declaration of Independence, they said they actually wrote in these exact words, We consider these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.
So, our founding fathers in our country said, We have rights, and our rights come from God.
And then they continued.
And the purpose of governments, that governments are established among men to protect these rights.
So, our founders said, God gave us rights, God created us, and we established governments to protect the rights that God gave us.
Now, John Dewey said, Hey, there is no God, and that means there's no objective source for your rights.
So, our founders didn't view this as a religious statement, they in fact viewed it as a self-evident truth, as they wrote in our Declaration of Independence.
But with this philosophy that Dewey had, this ideology, this religious worldview, if you will, which is how he described it, they gradually got rid of that.
In fact, in the 1960s, in the early 1960s, it culminated in a series of Supreme Court decisions that banned the Bible from our schools, that banned prayer from our schools.
And now they literally teach the kids, the same Common Core people have the next generation science centers.
They teach the kids that there is no God, that science proves there is no God, that we came from apes that came from slime, and that there was no creator at all involved.
It was just chance over billions of years.
And so, kids go out into the world, and you know, this is fundamental to the worldview of a person.
If a God created you with rights and a God loves you and you're created in his image, you look at the world very differently than if it was just all a big giant cosmic accident.
Your life has no more value than that of your goldfish.
You know, you have a totally different outlook on the world.
And so, in America, and I'm quite sure the same is true of Canada, the government schools have become probably the single largest engine for the propagation of anti-Christian religious views and ideological views that exists.
Challenging Indoctrination00:06:20
Alex, I couldn't agree with you more.
Another one of the crazy progressive things that happened in my province over the last two years is we actually had a school board tell a Christian school that they couldn't teach portions of the Bible and they had to remove portions of 1 Corinthians from their school handbook because they said it ran afoul of this safe school policy.
They said it was discriminatory and it wasn't inclusive.
And they did this at a Christian school.
So they had to remove portions of the Christian Bible from their teachings.
Now, the school, to their credit, did not comply, but they were immediately turfed from the school district and had to become a completely private school as opposed to a more accessible school under the public umbrella.
I absolutely agree with you that there is just this pervasive anti-Christian sentiment, and it is creeping into Christian schools where Christian schools now find themselves censoring themselves preemptively sometimes.
I saw at the New American, there was actually an article about a Christian teacher who was fired for using the correct biological pronouns, which is also, you know, good grammar.
Well, you know, that's the next frontier, Sheila.
And actually, I've written about Alberta on a few occasions.
I have an education blog called the Newman Report, and I've covered Alberta education policies at least twice now, and this is one of them.
They're horrible.
It's crazy.
But, you know, this is the next frontier.
You guys are one step beyond where we are right now in America.
In every one of our 50 states, a parent has the option to completely opt out of the system.
So a parent can pull their kids out of the school, and you can go to any kind of school you want to.
It could be an independent Christian school, a church school.
You could homeschool them.
Most of our states are still very free when it comes to homeschooling.
But the next frontier is now to come after these last little bastions of opposition because for their ideology to be credible, they need to completely, you know, it really makes me think of that old story.
I'm sure you've heard of it.
The emperor has no clothes.
You know, as long as there's one little boy out there to raise his hand and point out, hey, you know, emperor, you're naked, actually.
You're not really wearing any clothes.
As long as that boy is out there, there's a risk to the entire indoctrination system.
And so the next frontier now of the education establishment, if you will, is to smother and destroy all opposition.
And so that's taking a number of different forms around the world.
In Sweden, where I've spent a lot of time, and in fact, two of my kids were born there, I saw this happen firsthand.
First, the government came in and they said, oh, you know, we're just going to fund all the private schools.
We're just going to give tax money to all the Christian schools and the private schools.
And then that way we'll have real school choice.
And so all the schools started taking government money.
And then, you know, just like the mousetrap, boom, the trap closed shut.
And now you all have to teach the government curriculum.
You all have to teach first graders that gender is a social construct and that homosexuality is a desirable lifestyle and all these types of things.
You must teach them.
No deviation is allowed.
They banned prayer, even in Christian schools.
And so we're now seeing that in the United States where they want to come with the money.
And once you take the money, you know, they call it strings attached.
I call it chains attached, right?
They want to chain these people down so that, you know, I don't care what people believed.
If you want to have a, you know, a hippie left-wing school, good, have one.
I'm happy for you.
If you want to teach your kids, you know, your progressive ideology, good, do that.
But don't come and interfere with the educational freedom of everybody else.
And that's where this is all going, unfortunately.
Yeah, I mean, in Alberta, we have a pretty diverse school system, arguably the most diverse school system in the country.
We not only fund our charter schools, our public schools, our Catholic schools, and we also fund private schools up to, I think it's about 70% or so, which if you were a progressive, you would say, hey, that's a really great idea because what it means is there are no socioeconomic barriers to a parent directing the education of their child the way that the family chooses, the way that the family sees fit,
that everybody has access to a school that suits their child as opposed to the general cookie cutter school.
But the movement here in Alberta is to enforce the cookie cutter ideology that everything has to be brought under the thumb of the public secular system.
And all these other schools, they need to go to the waveside simply because they do take that public funding.
Whereas I would argue that Christians pay school taxes too, and they have the right to decide how they spend that money.
That's right.
And, you know, they talk about how much they love diversity, but then when it all blows down, they hate diversity.
They hate diversity of thought and of opinion and of educational choices.
And, you know, I tell people all the time, this is the battle.
You know, every dictator throughout all of history has understood if you want to control the future.
And in fact, Hitler said this directly, right?
He who owns the youth owns the future.
I mean, he quoted directly, this was entered into the evidence at Nuremberg.
Every dictator has understood this.
Every progressive has understood this.
John Dewey understood this.
This is why they were so maniacally obsessed with getting control of the school system.
So as long as we have options, as long as parents have the option to withdraw from this and to educate their children in a way different than what the government wants, you know, we're in good shape.
But what's happening now is that it's gradually being eroded.
They don't want Christian schools.
They don't want independent schools.
They don't want schools that have different pedagogy or different ideas.
And, you know, if you draw the lines out, what you see is that this has enormous implications for the survival of liberty, for the survival of our countries, for the survival of self-government.
Because what they're doing now is they are indoctrinating the children into these ideologies, these ideologies of globalism and socialism and humanism.
And, you know, in America, something like 87% of the children go to public schools.
Eroding Liberty00:03:50
You know, do the math.
Eventually, the older generations will die off.
87%, that's more than enough to win every election in the country.
So what's going to happen?
Well, eventually we're going to lose our freedoms.
We're going to lose our rights.
We're going to lose our country if we don't address this.
And so that's why I say all the time: education is the single most important battle of our time.
We must focus on this because if not, all the other battles, you know, everybody out there listening, I'm sure, has their pet political views.
And, you know, I want my gun rights safe.
I want, you know, my free speech.
I want the border laws in, you know, whatever it is, whatever your pet issue is over the long term, you're going to lose if you don't focus on this education issue.
And so I say, everybody, you know, keep focusing on your issues, but also recognize that you have to devote some of your time and some of your energy to education because otherwise you're going to lose on everything else.
Now, Alex, you're bringing your message that education is truly the battleground for the future up to frigid.
Alberta, you're headed to Calgary for a conference.
What's that all about?
That's right.
Yeah.
Thank you so much, Shiloh.
I'll be at the Freedom Talk Conference.
That's going to be in Calgary.
And if I'm not mistaken, it's February 8th and 9th.
I don't know the exact venue, but anybody who puts that into a search engine can find it online.
It's going to be a lot of fun.
There's going to be some great people there.
I know Craig Rucker, who was with us in Poland, will be one of the speakers there.
And I looked at the list.
It looks like some amazing Canadians.
So I'm really excited to be a part of it.
And I hope to meet as many of my Canadian friends as possible when I'm up there.
And I'll bring a big jacket.
You better.
I think you're in for a pretty rude awakening about the weather.
Now, where can people find your book on education?
In America, at least it's available at all the big bookstores, retailers.
In Canada, I don't know what the situation is, but certainly you can get it through Amazon.com.
It's available and you can order it online.
You can also get it on Kindle if you like.
And our special report in the New American that's being printed as we speak.
And that'll be available in the coming days through our website at thenewAmerican.com.
People can order copies of the print issue or they can get a digital version of it as well.
Excellent.
And what was the name of your book again, just so that people can plug that right into Amazon?
Absolutely.
It's Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America's Children.
And they're using them to destroy Canada's children as well.
Great.
Alex, I want to thank you so much for being extra generous with your time.
Again, I promised you 20 minutes and we are past that, but I just find you to be so fascinating and I learn something new every time.
And I look forward to hopefully catching up with you in Calgary in a couple of weeks.
Awesome.
Hey, thank you so much, Sheila.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks for everything you're doing.
And hopefully, I'll see you in Calgary.
Great.
Thanks, Alex.
Thank you.
Well, there you have it.
The fight for parents to retain control of the education system, or in some instances, wrestle control back from centralized government really is a fight for the future of the culture.
In Alberta, we have a lot of good people working very hard on this issue, especially those at Parents for Choice in Education.
We also have a similar group in Ontario at Parents as First Educators, who really are on the front lines battling for parents' rights every single day.
And because they are battling for parents' rights and smaller government, they are called names like homophobes and bigots and xenophobes by people who have never met them, never looked at their work, and never really investigated what they are trying to do.
Haters Get Standard Treatment00:00:24
In short, they're getting the standard treatment activists get from the left.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
I hope Rachel Notley was watching.
And hello to you, Elections Commissioner.
You don't scare me one bit.
Thanks, everybody, so much for watching, especially you haters out there.
I'll see everybody back here in the same time, in the same place next week.