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June 10, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
59:27
3315 The Dangers of Common Core | Dr. Duke Pesta and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
We're very pleased to have the highly energetic and charismatic public speaker and educator, Dr.
Duke Pester.
He is a tenured university professor, author, and the academic director of Freedom Project Academy, which is a live online school, which offers individual classes, complete curricula for students in kindergarten through high school.
You can check out the website at fpeusa.com.
Now, with no, and I guess always with no common core, Dr.
Duke, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Thank you so much, Duke.
Great to be with you today.
Six years.
Boy, you can get a lot done in six years.
And in the six years that Common Core has first begun to creep its inky way into the lifeblood of the American educational system, I think people are beginning to wake up to some of the dangers and the damage that it can do.
So I wonder if you can help people to understand what Common Core is and how this beast came to be.
Well, you know, it's a huge six years and probably 50 years before that the federal government was working towards this.
The short answer is that Common Core represents the federalization of education in America more than at any time in our historical past and certainly in very unconstitutional ways now.
The federal government is in charge of curriculum, in charge of standards, and in charge of testing our kids.
None of this is technically legal.
The Tenth Amendment of the Constitution, of course, It prevents the federal government from meddling in state educational policy.
But this has been a slow creep.
For decades and decades, the feds have been accruing more and more power to themselves.
As you know, in the late 1970s with the creation of the Federal Department of Education, once you did that, once we had a big bureaucracy in Washington who dedicated itself to education, there's no doubt that over time they were going to take more and more responsibility to themselves.
Common Core represents the biggest step forward in the federalization of education.
And there are two main problems, number one.
Number one is this centralization, this control.
The more the federal government controls our kids' schools, the less access and opportunity parents have to impact their kids' education, the less local school districts matter.
Indeed, entire state education departments will quickly become moot.
All they're going to do is implement federal directives.
They have no originary ability to change things now in a meaningful way.
So that's number one.
And number two, as always happens with the federal government, what they do is when they have this kind of control over anything, now healthcare and now education, they use it to import ideology.
They use it to support their statist observations, their statist requirements.
They use healthcare as a tool to control people, and now they are doing the same thing with education.
So besides being an illegal, really contralegal federal takeover of education, it is also a Trojan horse Common Core to transform American education from primarily skills and knowledge-based to primarily ideological now.
Now, before Common Core, there was prior federal government programs.
No Child Left Behind sort of comes to mind.
And was Common Core built upon the success of No Child Left Behind, or is it another one of these shadowy government replacements and expansions of power for programs that already failed in the past?
It's both, actually.
No Child Left Behind, and before that, you had the Clinton administration with Goals 2000, and before that, you know, ever since 1979, when the Department of Education was put in place, A series of initiatives.
And it's interesting, in this country, standardized testing, this idea that you're going to give kids one big broad test that's going to tell anything meaningful to a working teacher in a classroom, the whole idea of standardized tests, which is a failed idea, it began with the Department of Education because the Department of Education needed a way, not necessarily to improve education, but to measure certain aspects of education so that they could manipulate it for their own control.
Through Goals 3000, through the Department of Ed, all that stuff, into No Child Left Behind, which of course was a Bush administration, a George Bush administration plan.
People forget, though, that even though George Bush, the Republican, gave us No Child Left Behind, He turned over the writing of the No Child Left Behind curriculum to Teddy Kennedy.
People forget that.
The most liberal, progressive, and morally degenerate member of the Senate was the one who completely wrote the No Child Left Behind legislation.
And so the idea that there are two political parties here, that the Republicans are somehow better than the Democrats on this is nonsense.
But you got it right.
Through No Child Left Behind, which failed.
And why did No Child Left Behind fail?
One, it was too standardized.
It was one-size-fits-all education.
It took too much control away from the states and the teachers.
It turned our children into simple test takers.
It failed.
And so what did the federal government do when it failed?
As they always do, and you suggested this, Stephan, they simply rolled out the same thing.
They just made it bigger, more standardized, more federal, and more based exclusively on one-size-fits-all.
So it fell apart with No Child Left Behind.
All Common Core does is make it harder to get rid of, more federal, and bigger.
Right.
Now, of course, the lure is the word standardized a lot of times.
I like standardized weights.
I like the fact that you drive on the same side of the road in every part of the country.
I like the fact that the train tracks don't suddenly widen or narrow when you cross from state to state.
So what is the challenge or the pushback on the idea that standardization is great?
Well, you know, Albert Einstein once said, we standardize automobiles.
We do not standardize people.
And I think he's exactly right about that.
The idea that you're going to have a standardized education, a one-size-fits-all education.
I mean, usually the federal government, when they do bad things, they give it really cutesy names.
Like health care.
The national health care law is the Affordable Care Act.
Nobody, not even the feds, believes that.
But for a lot of people who aren't paying attention, well, I'm all for affordability.
Hey, if it's affordable, I'm for it.
Same thing with standardized tests, standardized education, and Common Core.
The name Common Core, stop and think about that for a second.
In what sense does anybody in this world think their kid is a common kid?
In what sense?
Think about our own kids and grandkids.
The kids that we have, they don't even learn the same way.
The daughter doesn't learn the same way the son does.
She has different talents and abilities.
The idea that you're going to force kids to be at the same level all the time, and that's what Common Core does.
We are going to make a baseline and every kid will be at that baseline.
We will try to make sure no kids fall below it, but we will darn well guarantee that no kids will go beyond it.
And so you've got kids who are really good in English or history or writing who are now being artificially held down to the standard.
And you've got kids who are really good in math who aren't allowed to jump ahead anymore.
They're being forced down as well.
So it makes common sense even mathematically.
If you're going to get 60 million American school kids To exactly the same place all the time.
By definition, it has to be a pretty low place.
It's a common place, and that's the problem with it.
The communism in Common Core seems to be rearing its head.
This hatred or fear of inequality seems to be part of the methodology.
You've talked about in your speeches, Dr.
the degree to which socialism or sometimes outright communism in the case of the card-carrying communist John Dewey was foundational to the original idea of of government education in the 19th century.
Yeah, and you know, what you said there is really wise.
The why is it, and a lot of people still don't realize this yet, the more progressive the idea, the more progressive the individual, the more they claim diversity.
And yet it is precisely these progressive technocrats who want to level all diversity, There can be no educational diversity.
We can't let smart math kids be good at math because it's unfair to non-smart math kids.
It really is a Orwellian doublespeak that comes along with this.
But the other point that you make is important too.
The foundations of American public school, obviously the founding fathers, the Constitution, they made no provision whatsoever for public education because they understood Breaking free from the United Kingdom is the way they did, the Colonials.
They understood that when the government is in charge of educating kids, then the government will educate children for their benefit, not for the benefit of the families, the local communities, the religious traditions.
Really, the idea of American public school was put on the table by Horace Mann.
The two prime movers here are Horace Mann and John Dewey.
And you can see statues, monuments, schools named after them in every state in this country.
Horace Mann, when he looked for a model for American public schools, he went to the authoritarian Prussian model, the Otto von Bismarck Your kids belong to the state model that took kids and boarded them with the federal government and indoctrinated them into a statist, militaristic way of seeing things, very unindividualized, no critical thinking, simply obedience.
This is the model of Horace Mann.
John Dewey, who a generation later picked up the mantle from the – Dewey was born the very year that Horace Mann died.
Dewey, of course, was not a pretend communist.
He was an actual card-carrying member of the Communist Party, and he made the argument that the entire purpose of public education was not to make kids smarter, to not teach them skills, but to shape their will, to condition the will of the students to become useful tools of the state.
And ever since then, look at the history of the NEA, the National Education Association, the largest teachers' union in the country, and what they've said down through the years.
It's been a consistent – the thing that troubles me with Common Core and about American public schools in general is the architects of it and the sustainers of it for 150 years have all told you what they've wanted.
We want to use education to separate kids from parents, to subordinate them to state, to remove critical thinking and make them good conditioned little warriors for whatever status implementation we want to bring down the road.
And that's where we are now.
We're just seeing the consolidation of it all.
Yeah, I mean, it is interesting that the Prussian system produced Nazism in some ways, and the communists look to the foundations of the Nazi system in order to get their educational standards.
And there is an outright hostility to independent critical thinking.
And of course, the power of the state has always been at war with independent critical thinking.
And so the idea that giving government the power to educate children is going to raise children with the skills most necessary to sort of the 21st century economy, which is thinking on your own Yeah, it's a great point.
And most moms and dads I talk to in my talks across the country, they are neophytes at this.
They've never given a second thought to public schools.
They grew up with them.
The idea that they would drop their kids off 8-10 hours a day to let a government entity educate them That's so ingrained in their psyches now that they know—and they think it's free, too, right?
Forget these skyrocketing property taxes that moms and dads are paying.
They think it's free.
But the bigger issue is exactly that one.
And the parents aren't aware of this dichotomy here, that the public schools—they're really not public schools anymore.
We have to refer to them, I think, as government schools because that's the model that they serve.
And it has always been the case.
Whether you're talking about status on – supposed status on – I've always been puzzled by the Nazis as a right-wing ideology given that they define themselves as socialists in their very name.
But the so-called right-wing fascists, the Nazis, the left-wing fascists, the communists, the idea that they have a shared goal here and that is the power of education.
It was Vladimir Lenin who said, we'll give you the West.
You can have the parliaments.
You can have the houses of Congress, the Senate.
Give us your elementary schools, he said.
And within one generation, we're going to take your kids from you.
And, of course, that's what the Nazis did.
Von Bismarck and the Prussians did it.
We see it across – and American progressives, I would put, in the camp of statists who want to see control over every aspect of our life subordinated to a federal entity.
Well, and the power of the family to transmit values and to create self-regulating citizens is unprecedented, I think, and unreproducible in any other context.
And of course, if you have children who have values and self-regulation, they have far less need for the state and are more skeptical of state power, which I think is why these totalitarian ideologies are was fundamentally opposed to value transmissions through the family.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And I think the argument here is a spokeswoman for the NEA, the National Education Association, the largest teachers union in America, she was – a couple years ago, she was addressing the UN on education.
She said the two biggest problems – her name was Schneider, by the way – the two biggest problems facing the implementation of transformative schools, government schools, was the family and the religion.
These were the two things that had to be done away with, she argued, to turn the kids into war to the states.
Arne Duncan, Obama's secretary of education who stepped down a few months ago, on his way out the door, he called for in a final farewell speech.
What he wants to see happen moving forward is federal boarding schools, schools where the federal government just takes kids away from parents for a variety of reasons and educates them 24-7.
In states all across the country, including here in Wisconsin, certain public schools have won grants from the federal government to serve kids breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the public schools.
And not just nine months a year, but all summer long when school's out, too.
So what you say about the schools now becoming the de facto parent, loco parentis, right?
They are seeding, and with all the sexuality involved with Common Core, mainstreaming things like transgenderism, homosexuality, radical forms of sexuality, the kids as young as five now, They are using this power now they have over control of education and standards and testing.
They're using that to teach their agenda way above and beyond the mandate they have to teach our kids to read and to write and to think.
Primarily, these are now sociological experiments.
They're not really schools.
Well, and I think that's been somewhat explicit in many of the pronouncements put forward by educational mandarins or bureaucrats.
The idea that schools are there for, I think they refer to it as psychosocial therapy or something.
What did it even mean by that?
Yeah, in 1969, the NEA said, the schools must be, the path to change, to transforming American life is based on the requirement that schools will have to become Psychosocial clinics and that teachers will have to become psychosocial therapists to make this happen.
In other words, The schools are not places where ABCs and 123s are taught now.
They are places where, first and foremost, we must condition the will of the people.
We must get them – I'm sure you saw, Stephan, that school district in Portland, Oregon a couple weeks ago who voted to ban any – to remove any textbook from the school that has any – that sheds any doubt or suggests that there's a second side to the global warming debate.
We're now purging the schools of even scientific texts that suggest alternatives.
This is the kind of thing they're doing.
It's not about teaching science.
Teaching climate change in second and third grade, it's not about teaching science.
These kids are too young to understand how science works, too young to understand – to be able to read the climate science for themselves.
You're just indoctrinating these kids, and you're now removing anything that would give them an alternative view.
And when you think about that and you apply that to sex, to the evils – what they perceive to be the evils of capitalism, to – across the board, the so-called white – things like white privilege now are being taught completely uncritically.
And to my mind, I mean, this is the most illiberal thing in the world.
You are judging an entire race of people on the color of their skin and suggesting that simply by virtue of their race or patriarchy, by virtue of their gender, people are racist or sexist.
So we are re-inscriting all the things that classical liberals said they were fighting against.
We are now re-inscribing in the classrooms genuine discrimination on the basis of progressive liberal thought, which is shocking when you think about it.
Well, race baiting in particular was foundational to the communist agenda, was put forward by the Comintern as early as the 1920s, and it's a way to set people against each other who otherwise might be friends and allies, because a people more easily divided is more easily ruled, so it doesn't shock me that that particular approach is being taken.
60 million American school kids all being taught to the same level.
Weeks or months being devoted to teaching the test.
As you've pointed out, there are ads on Craigslist for people being brought in for nine bucks an hour to mark these tests like they're going past in some sort of conveyor belt, and usually a very accelerated conveyor belt, and sometimes they're even being pressured to...
Provide the test results or the test markings that the bureaucrats want.
Isn't it the case, pretty much, that when you have to teach everyone to the same level, the lowest common denominator is going to prevail, which is going to be incredibly frustrating for the kids with, you know, as they all have their own specialized abilities or higher abilities on average than the norm.
Right, that's exactly right.
That what you're doing is you're not really, you are not really helping the lowest performing kids.
All you're doing is, in the name of fairness and social justice, you're dragging the high-performing kids down.
Arne Duncan made that famous statement that the only moms who were complaining about Common Core were the suburban white mothers who had the ability to provide tutors for their kids and all sorts of advantages that other kids didn't have.
So what we're doing is we're pulling the high achievers down and we're leveling them off.
And people ask me all the time why.
People who don't understand education very well will say, well, why would a federal government?
It doesn't make any sense.
Why do they want uneducated kids?
Why do they want generations of graduating seniors who can't look after themselves?
And the answer we know is obvious, because a population that can't be entrepreneurs, that can't create their own wealth, that can't defend themselves and look after themselves, they are more than happy to surrender freedom for security.
Most of my college kids...
Stephen, 9 out of 10 of them are Bernie Sanders supporters.
And they can't tell me a single reason why other than he's going to give them stuff.
And when I ask my seniors and juniors in my university classrooms about to graduate, ask them to define communism, socialism in one word.
The word they always give me is fairness.
I mean they've been taught that for 20 years.
Exactly.
Fairness.
Exactly.
Well, as you pointed out in speeches, the kids who get school breakfast, lunches and dinners, there was stigma because it was associated with the poorer kids and therefore the schools, I think, were legally then required to provide breakfast, lunch and dinner to everyone so that the poorer kids couldn't be so easily identified.
Right, that's right.
And so the creeping growth of the idea of the school as parent, Arne Duncan also said in his speech in 2009 that we're beginning to build clinics On our middle and elementary schools.
That has to be the norm, he says.
Moving forward, we can't trust parents to give the kids healthcare.
We can't trust parents to give their 11-year-old girls the kind of birth control the federal government thinks they should have.
So we're putting actual clinics on the schools now.
So your 12-year-old daughter shows up to school with a couple of Midol once a month, and she could literally be suspended for drug trafficking.
But the schools now, under the mandate of Obamacare, Obamacare and the changes in education are working together.
Because the minute we decide, we didn't even really decide it, we didn't vote on it, the minute the federal government made itself responsible for healthcare, they now get to decide what healthcare is.
And they have all kinds of sections in the Obamacare legislation about your kids' educational health.
So education by definition now is more about healthcare than it is psychosocial, you asked that question.
More about healthcare, mental wellness, psychosocial development than it is real hardcore learning, and that gives the feds a real in to transform it that way.
And it seems like in America, as far as I understand it, the right to fire teachers became severely curtailed in the 1960s.
And I think if there were very competent, empirically based, trained in reason and evidence kinds of teachers around, there would be more of a revolt.
But I guess my concern is that if teacher quality has gone down, then teachers who are of lower quality...
to outside forces because it doesn't actually interfere with what they are capable and competent to teach children themselves.
Right.
Teachers aren't, and for a while now, for a few generations, we've minimized competency in their teaching areas, and we've maximized ideology.
Education, you know, you could make a serious argument, I think it's true, that the creation of department of education, departments of education are utterly unnecessary.
They're as unnecessary as Think about it.
Whenever at the university, your daughter wants to be a high school math teacher, they don't teach them math in the education department.
They send the child, that's the student, they send them to math professors.
When somebody wants to be an English teacher, they send them to me, the English professors.
All the education people give them is this really twisted, progressive, quasi-Marxist, leftist academic theory.
And so ever since we defaulted to the idea that the only people who were allowed to teach in this society were people who were accredited by big state departments of education, we had lost the game there.
And Common Core makes this even worse because what's happened, of course, is those teachers who were that last generation of teachers who had been taught a different way, these are the teachers close to retirement age, they all just walked away.
They weren't going to do this Common Core.
So teachers who had five and six and seven years to go before their full retirement They just said enough is enough and they walked away.
And the state schools loved it and the federal government loved it because you're getting rid of those teachers that you're paying the most money to and you're replacing them with 19, 20-year-old heads full of mush who only know the social theory.
They don't know how to teach real English.
And so it was a win-win for them.
Well, and I think for parents, when you look and you send your kid off to public school, you have memories of your own time in public school.
And I had both public and private education in England and Canada.
And...
I had some not so bad teachers.
They tended to be very old, right?
So they had come in long before.
I had a teacher when I was learning Victorian poetry.
I had a teacher, a professor in university who only had a bachelor's degree.
That's how old he was.
He could actually become a professor with only a bachelor's degree.
So when you think back on your own childhood in school, you have to go back in a sense two generations because there's you as a kid and then there's the teachers who the best and your most memorable ones were probably older.
Those teachers are gone and school is, you know, I have to remind myself and remind other people school is not the same now as it was when you were going to school.
Well, and you're exactly right.
And we remember our generation.
We remember the schools.
And I remember distinctly.
I had some really good, solid teachers, but I also had some wackos.
And it's true in the university, too.
When we remember our university careers 20 years ago, we tend to remember the college sports, we remember the dances, we remember where we met our wives under the fountain on the quad, but we don't always remember the overt and really subtle sometimes ways that the classroom was being hijacked and we were being pushed left.
And you're right, go back two generations and even three beyond that, and then the transformation is absolutely staggering.
I mean, ten years ago, ten years ago, the idea that we would be teaching elementary school kids things like transsexuality and homosexual marriage, that, ten years ago, would have been inconceivable.
The most staunchly progressive superintendent of schools would have balked at the idea, would have seen it as a kind of child abuse.
Now, not only is it accepted, you're considered retrograde and regressive if you don't agree to this right away.
I mean, how quickly, even in ten years, this has changed.
Well and of course they're trying to get things like oral sex and masturbation and so on taught to children who are Wait!
I mean, I don't think the school should ever be involved in teaching sexual matters to children.
That, to me, of course, is the responsibility of the parents because sexuality and values and civilization and marriage and family and commitment, they're all so heavily bound in together that teaching matters of sexuality without teaching the values that make it sustainable and productive for society is extremely dangerous.
They might as well give a Gun safety lessons to four-year-olds.
But that has happened, and that has become part of the core curriculum.
And I think parents just feel dragged along behind, like they're just tied to a pickup truck going down a road.
Like they're just trying to find out.
And they find out sometimes when the kids come home with questions or comments.
And it's bizarre for the parents to see the different world that their kids are in now.
The scary thing is not the questions your kids ask you.
It's what they're learning that you never know.
Because it's much worse.
And this all came about because of the abstinence education of the 80s.
Under the Reagan administration, the move was to teach abstinence, that abstinence was the primary way, the only safe way of avoiding sexually transmitted diseases in pregnancy.
The progressives, ever since that happened about 1984, they just have balked.
And so they've created this thing.
It's comprehensive sex education now, comprehensive sex ed.
And what it is is A mom and a dad in the 70s, when they were teaching simply the birds and the bees, some people didn't like that.
Moms could opt their kids out of two weeks of health class their sophomore year in high school.
The problem is now is that the kind of sexuality that's coming through in Common Core, and it was designed this way, you can't opt out of anything.
I mean, math now has to devote a certain amount of time every semester to sexual issues.
The way story problems are written to sexualize children.
English books, the classics are gone.
They're getting rid of all the classics.
And they're having pre-pubescent, pre-adolescent kids read things now that are shocking in their descriptive nature.
Violent, graphically sexual, graphically transsexual and homosexual.
So at the youngest ages, before kids have even developed the ability to think abstractly, we're forcing this on them now.
And your listeners would be really interested, I think, if they looked up a document.
It's called the National Sexuality Standards.
You can find them online.
The National Sexuality Standards, they were written in 2012, the very year that Common Core was being put into the curriculum.
And if you look at the – scroll through the first few pages of that document, it's a federal document, you will see on page six that the National Sexuality Standards, this comprehensive sex ed, it was already designing itself based on what the Common Core Standards in English and math were doing.
So the whole thing was always designed to be fed right into this seamlessly.
You can't opt your kid out of math, right?
So your kid's going to get some sex in math and English and physical education and art and social studies and on and on it goes.
Right.
The methodology by which Common Core was implemented is, I don't know, makes a mafia takeover look like going over to somebody's house for tea.
Because as you point out, 10th Amendment forbids the feds from meddling in state education.
There are at least three more statutes banning the feds from imposing standards.
So how in this sort of weasel fog way did the federal government manage to bypass clear statues, the Constitution, which is supposed to be pretty much the last resort for the law of the land?
How did they get around all of this and get this implemented?
Well, the federal government wanted to take over education the same way they wanted to take over health care.
There was really – John Roberts invented the tax idea for Obama.
There was really legally no way to do health care, but they did it.
They had much more restriction when it came to education.
You mentioned the Tenth Amendment, 1965, three different federal statutes legally prohibit the feds from creating national standards or a national curriculum.
So they had to do the next best thing.
They got together a group of five, the five people on the Common Core Committee.
And Bill Gates, a private citizen, has spent about six billion of his own dollars on this.
He funded these five people through two Washington lobbyist groups.
Two Washington lobbyist groups became the shelter organizations for these five individuals who were paid by the Bill Gates Foundation to craft the standards.
Teachers didn't write them.
The states didn't write them.
Governors didn't write them.
Five primary individuals.
The main person of which, by the way, David Coleman, is not a teacher, has no teaching experience.
So once they were written and drafted, what they did is the federal government came in, and right in 2009 when Obama took office, they created the federal Race to the Top program.
The feds gave billions of dollars, our own taxpayer dollars, away to the states under the name of the stimulus.
People don't recognize this, that when the outgoing Republican Bush and the incoming President Obama, when they both warned us unless we coughed up billions in taxpayer dollars to stimulate banks and car companies, Hundreds of millions, even well over about $1.1 billion of the stimulus package went right back to the Department of Education.
They paid themselves with our tax dollars in the name of a crisis to create the Race to the Top program.
And that was basically every state in the union was encouraged to apply to the federal government for a Race to the Top grant.
New York in 2009 was the first state to win a Race to the Top grant.
They got $700 million from the feds.
That money went right to the Department of Education.
They could spend it on whatever they wanted in New York.
The only meaningful provision of any state that took Race to the Top money, and 46 of them did, was that any state that took one dime of Race to the Top money had to accept the Common Core state standards when they were finally written.
So 46 states took it sight unseen simply because they wanted the money.
And we're on the hook for it.
They had no say in it.
They had no ability to revise or change it.
They took money and they got the standards.
Well, this is a classic, I'll take the money now and my successor will inherit the liability.
That's the whole point behind some of this massive government spending.
But Bill Gates, I mean, okay, obviously, if it had been the Koch brothers, the left would be completely mental about all of this stuff, because they're very sensitive to potential corruption from who they call rightists.
I have no particular sense of Bill Gates's political ideology.
I don't know what's going on under that shaggy dandruff scalp.
But Why on earth would he want to drop six billion on Common Core?
Why?
Why?
Well, I mean, first of all, you're exactly right.
If any other billionaire had done this, the liberals would be screaming, Koch brothers, buy public schools.
But the reason Bill Gates doesn't get that is because we have a long history of his progressive leaning causes, right?
His parents were on the board of Planned Parenthood.
He's donated all that money for quasi-eugenicist abortion techniques in Africa, which goes way beyond just birth control, what he's doing over there.
But I think you're also right.
Having said that, he is obviously a progressive.
Beyond that, I think you're right too to say that he's not terribly interested in education per se.
Bill Gates is a technocrat.
He is absolutely convinced in the power of technology to control the will of the people.
He sees technology, and Zuckerberg is the same way.
They see technology, not necessarily education, but We're good to go.
a mutual agreement pact to begin to shape culture with technology exactly the way Common Core is doing it.
So way before Common Core back in 2004, you could see Bill Gates working with the United Nations to begin to think about implementing stuff like this.
Right.
So the money that he spent then flowed to various people who came up with the Common Core curriculum and the sales package, it's not even an asterisk and a footnote.
It's sort of right up front, you know, now with bleach.
and it says that the Common Core are proven standards That are better.
You know, and that's, of course, it's one of these things easy to say, hard to prove.
But I think as you've pointed out, Dr.
Gook, there is no actual empirical evidence to support any of the Common Core curriculum's effectiveness and, I guess, in the hopes of some parents' long-term economic value add for their kids.
Well, the first thing you mentioned about the money, the money was not just to support the people who wrote the standards.
The bulk of that money Bribed the schools.
Schools who couldn't afford the new Common Core textbooks, Bill Gates gave them grants, right?
So Bill Gates used his money to open the doors of the schools, which didn't – even though the state took Common Core, the schools didn't necessarily have to go ahead and buy it.
But Gates provided all this money for the schools to throw out all their old curriculum and standards and take the new textbooks.
So that was the big bribe.
And the second thing you said is equally problematic, right?
This idea that the federal government, the schools – They put this in place.
They bought and bribed and paid for it.
And yet none of this has been tested.
What troubles me as a common core, anti-common core advocate is everything that's wrong with common core, the people who wrote it said it.
We have a great quote from Bill Gates in 2009 saying exactly that.
We won't know for 10 years.
On film in front of hundreds of people at a conference, he says, we don't even know if it's going to work for 10 years.
It's never been benchmarked.
It's never been tested.
The whole common core thing has been, the whole premise of common core is a lie.
It's new.
First of all, it's copyrighted, which means teachers don't have a lot of flexibility.
Teachers can't use multiple ways of getting to the same answer.
They're stuck using that methodology.
It has never been benchmarked.
It has never been tested.
Teachers have no flexibility.
David Coleman, the architect of Common Core with no educational experience, he's the guy who said on camera, and I know you've seen the clip, he said flat out, teachers will teach to our tests.
There is no force strong enough On this planet to prevent that.
I mean, this is a guy with no educational background who is overseeing the test.
And let's be clear for your listeners.
David Coleman started out as the chair of the Common Core Committee, but no sooner did he finish the English and math standards than he miraculously ended up at the college boards, where he's in charge of the exams your kids have to take to get into college now, right?
Particularly the SATs.
And the ACTs, excuse me.
And so what you see now is the same guy who put the standards in place is now transforming the college entrance exams to be Common Core-based, right?
You see the plot, how it all just starts to settle in and fit together.
Well, and I just want the people listening to and watching this to pause for a second, because this to me is...
So morally reprehensible.
I doubt even with Shakespearean eloquence, I could encapsulate it in mere syllables.
But when Bill Gates says, we won't even know if it works for 10 years, what he's talking about is experimenting with progressive ideology on 60 million children.
And if it doesn't work, and propaganda only works for the state, it certainly doesn't work for the free market.
But if it doesn't work, then Bill Gates is casually throwing his billions of dollars and the government is throwing its billions of dollars in a massive social experiment wherein children's entire lives and futures are at stake.
And they're saying it's not even worth it to test it ahead of time.
And what that means is they don't think it's going to work.
Because it would be easier to sell it if they tested it in a local environment and turned out to work beautifully, then they would test it.
So they don't believe it's going to work.
They're implementing it anyway, and they are experimenting with radical, anti-rational, anti-enlightenment values on children who are captured and as one...
An ancient educator in the 19th century, I think it was Horace Mann, said that they're hostages to our cause.
The children are forced to be there.
The parents are forced to pay.
It is a giant social experiment.
And he says with a shrug, well, we don't even know if it's going to work for 10 years or so.
These are children's lives, souls, minds, futures, capacity to think, capacity to relate, capacity to understand the world, capacity to be productive citizens, and they are experimenting with On these children, without the parents' permission, without any rigorous standards of knowing it's going to work, and what gives them that right to enroll 60 to 4, 60 million children into a semi-socialist experiment, which I think is going to really damage their ability to be productive and functional and happy human beings.
Sorry for the rant, I'm not even going to pretend there's a question in that, but that to me is so unbelievably immoral, I don't know how to put it.
It's very well said.
That's as good a rant as I've ever gone on myself, so I appreciate that, and It's worse than that.
I think the way I like to phrase it, this is educational eugenics.
You are literally tinkering with the educational DNA of children.
You are violating the way they naturally and biologically learn.
You are forcing things on them at the youngest grades that they are utterly unprepared to comprehend.
We used to call this brainwashing, right?
This is indoctrination.
It's worse than indoctrination.
You can indoctrinate people who are old enough to think for themselves.
When you indoctrinate children, I can't think of a stronger word for it than brainwashing.
You are forcing worldviews into kids' minds that destroy native modesty and restraint, that hedonize them and libertinize them in ways that It's so anathema to we as parents who want to raise these kids with a good moral compass, with a good sense of individuality and worth.
We're destroying three primary things.
The two main ones are faith in country and faith in self.
Those are the two main things that are getting undercut here.
The individual is being subsumed before the common collective, right?
And then the idea that free markets, individualism, liberty, all of this stuff is now just – they're all social constructs that were designed to oppress these kids.
This is a radical brainwashing and rewriting of the very educational fiber of their being.
And it's going to have devastating consequences for these kids when they get older.
And it does seem to me to create decision matrices for children that are going to lend them to be more and more dependent on state power.
The hypersexualization of children, to me, it seems inconceivable that this would not lead to things like teen pregnancy, single motherhood, and so on.
and single mothers are very dependent on the state and vote very left.
If you have children who grow up without the thinking skills, without the rigorous evidence-based reasoning skills to compete in the economy, then they're less capable of employment and therefore more dependent on the state.
Or if they're capable of employment, it's at a very low level.
Or they want to go and get government jobs because they don't know how to compete.
Because, you know, we have a global economy, which means that American kids are no longer just competing with American kids.
They're competing with better educated kids, non-indoctrinated kids all over the world.
And also then politicians who have the old ancient anti-Socratic sophist trick of making the worst argument appear the better through charisma and slow pacing of words and emphasis and teleprompting.
Those politicians are going to have a much easier time selling nonsense to people who can't think.
So this is just another example of the state sowing bad ideas like evil crops into the minds of children, and then when they grow them, they can harvest them in the form of more dependence and more state power.
And you have a long history with this, Stefan.
Explain to me the difference between what the Soviets did to their kids and what we're doing to ours.
We have substituted, although I would argue that the Soviets recognized in certain kids the need to develop them intellectually.
I'm not sure we do anymore.
Out of 60 million kids, the Soviets would harvest the best and the brightest and train them in very limited ways at what they were very, very skilled at.
We're not even doing that anymore.
I mean we have a situation now where we have decided that the primary purpose of education is sociology and ideology.
It's under the benign name – all of this is couched under the benign name social justice, right?
Social justice is either social, it's antisocial, and it's terribly unjust.
But under that benign epithet, social justice, we are completely transforming education from a knowledge-based mastery achievement system to one of simple conformity.
And being able to speak what they speak to you, to give them back the same politics and ideas that you've been handed.
It's really cruel.
It's really fascist.
It's on us now.
We are living through this and most moms and dads in this country are more or less oblivious to it still.
And there is, I think, we see, of course, this erupting in colleges across America where dissent from the leftist narrative is a thought crime and a hate crime and something to be virulently opposed and punished and protested and you can get expelled for certain reasons.
things that other people find offensive and so on.
And I think this idea that dissent from the moral narrative, it's got this very old world, almost inquisitional format that there is a revealed truth and any who disagree with it are immoral and heretics and blasphemers and so on.
And that actually is going to train children, particularly the more intelligent children, to fear dissent against the mainstream narrative.
And dear God in heaven above, Dr. D.
Duke, you can't have a civilized society where people are afraid to dissent from authority.
That is, to me, the self-censorship that means that if the government wants to take away more and more First Amendment rights, people who already have forbidden themselves from saying things that they would consider, that other people might consider offensive, won't have anything to lose if censorship reaches a legal or material form.
We have – and I've got it right here.
I'm going to just read you the title of this because this is fresh off the presses.
May 14th of 2016, we have a Harvard University professor who came out and said that we need to treat Christians and conservatives, he says.
We need to treat them the way the Nazis were treated after World War II. He says these thinkers, Christians – the professor's name is Ishterber.
He's a professor, Tushnet.
Professor Tushnet, he says.
At Harvard University, he says we have to treat – just like we treated the Nazis as the losers.
They were on the wrong side of history, the Nazis.
And so therefore we have to repress them.
We have to persecute them.
We have to punish them with every aspect of the law we can for being on the wrong side of history.
He is a tenured professor at Harvard University arguing now.
And we see what happened to a professor out in California just yesterday.
He happens to be a Latino male.
He's also bisexual and conservative.
And they've driven him off campus.
The students harassed him.
They vandalized his office.
They called him terrible names.
And the university would not intervene.
Now, you can imagine if you had a Latino professor who was progressive and the same thing happened.
They'd be having year-long seminars on tolerance.
But these primarily white kids who drove and harassed and chased this professor on campus, no consequence for this whatsoever.
And so the very thing that you just said Well, of course, there is a...
A tactic on the left, and it's not just on the left, but the tactic goes something like this.
If you can define somebody as a bad category, then all hell can be unleashed upon them in good conscience.
And that is a particularly chilling phenomenon that is occurring.
Aldous Huxley wrote this, and I think it's a really, really good quote to understand some of the sadism involved in this leftist machinations.
Of course, the author of Brave New World, he wrote, the surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone.
To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior righteous indignation, this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.
But for people who have a lot of pent-up anger, if they can define people as a negative category, Donald Trump is a fascist, his supporters are Nazis, or whatever it is, then once you've put people into that dehumanizing category, you can unleash all your venom on them and call yourself a moral hero, and everyone's going to pat you on the back.
And this is the root of incredibly destructive behavior, which, when taken to its logical conclusion, does result...
Yeah, well said.
When I explain it to my students, I say, you know, isn't it interesting that 2,500 years of Western culture and the evolution of moral thinking, the complex way we've talked about virtue, whether it's chastity, humility, generosity, charity...
All that's been displaced now.
2,000, 2,500 years of complicated moral thought, all the way through the Enlightenment, has been eradicated now in favor of one virtue and one virtue only.
The only progressive virtue that now exists is tolerance.
And ironically, the only way to demonstrate your tolerance to the progressive satisfaction is to be absolutely viciously intolerant of anything that crosses your worldview.
To me, that sums up the Huxley quote, too.
How do you prove how tolerant you are?
By being intolerant to the point of violence to people who don't share your worldview.
So, let's talk about why this Harvard professor targeted Christians.
Because that's interesting.
Didn't talk about other religions.
And one of the things that I've noticed is that is it politically correct to criticize Christians, although all other religions, some of which could be considered more aggressive, always get a bit of a free pass.
And this, to me, whoever the left attacks is generally the most reasonable person in the room, and the least offensive, and the least aggressive, and the one who's most likely to roll over.
It is almost like being attacked by the left has become a badge of honor for your civility, which is why I would argue that they go after Christians who they know are not going to fight back in the way some other groups back or are unlikely or, you know, not yet.
But the idea that Christianity in particular provides or is a bulwark against the expansion of state power is kind of a new idea for me.
I've been critical of Christianity, to put it mildly, in the past.
But as a relentless empiricist, to me it's hard to avoid the fact that Having a power in your life or in your mind that is superior to the authority, the moral authority of the state, gives you a conscience independent of state power, and I can't help but see that as one of the greatest bulwarks against the expansion of state power.
Yeah, and I happen to be a Christian, and I teach Christian subjects in the universities all the time, and for me, I share 100% your skepticism about organized religion, but if you go back to the fundamental ideas of the Gospels, The thing that gets me that I think is what you're talking about is this bulwark that has been infused through Christian civilization for 2,000 years, even if non-Christians don't even recognize it anymore.
If you go back to the Gospels as the central tenet, the ideas of Christ are primarily the ideas of the individual.
That Christ didn't heal collectively.
He didn't preach necessarily collectively.
He dealt with the people who he interacted with one on one.
His entire philosophy was one that the individual was what God was interested in primarily.
And so the individual, as Christian culture evolved and Christian nations evolved, the individual became increasingly ensconced at the center Of what was important in creation.
And that's still a holdover.
Even our founding fathers, many of whom were deists, for instance, they still imbibe that idea that the individual—and I go back to what Anne Rand said.
Anne Rand said, one of the quotes I do like from Rand is, when will we realize that the individual is the smallest minority of all and the one most worthy of protecting?
Because if you do it that way, all this common status garbage goes away, and so too goes away— Even racial problems.
I mean, even gender problems.
When we look at people as individuals, and I happen to think that of all the great philosophers in world history, Christ was the one who most focused on that individual, as the worth of the individual.
And for me, that's why today, even, Christianity is such a bulwark against the kind of status leveling of distinctions that you see in things like Common Core.
And for me, it's hard to avoid the Again, seems to me fairly obvious empirical fact that if you combine Christianity, particularly with Greek philosophy, to some degree Roman, but I would say more specifically Greek philosophy,
and the fact that Christian theologians have wrestled with Aristotle and Socrates throughout the centuries, the countries which have had the Greek-Christian combination have ended up as the most equal before the law, smallest government, most dedication to the free market and scientific principles and so on.
I can't look at that.
And looking across the world, I can't find that that's an incredible kind of accident.
And so to me, the fact that they want to get rid of old white guys in the curriculum and the fact that they want to get rid of religion in the curriculum, I think means that the combination of Christian individualism and the supremacy of the conscience, even in the face of secular power, combined with the particularly Aristotelian dedication to empiricism and rationality, these are the two things that...
Are at the moment the most potent combination to push back the expansion of state power because I really want people to understand this.
It never ends.
The power lust, the addiction for power over other human beings, it never ends.
Common core is only the next domino.
There'll be a domino after that.
There'll be a domino after that because it will never work.
They will never be satisfied.
There's never enough power to fill up a hungry soul and satiate it.
An empty soul, an alienated soul, an evil soul, can never be filled up with enough power to turn it good.
So it's never going to stop.
Common Core is also going to fail and then there's going to be Common Core 2.0 and 3.0 and more and more control is going to be placed Until the government runs out of money, which is one of the few rare opportunities for the return of freedom to certain situations, or until the people become truly informed, truly speak powerfully with a voice to push back against this kind of power, because you say, oh, well, okay, so Common Core's there, and I guess we'll learn to live with it.
Well, as you've pointed out, it's a whole series of dominoes, and every domino gets bigger, and every domino gets darker, and eventually it's just a gravestone falling on civilization.
Yeah.
Yeah, and I thought that was a wonderful description you just gave of Western culture.
You didn't call it that, but this linking up of the Judeo-Christian philosophical tradition.
And it's ethics, the morality from the Ten Commandments to the Sermons on the Mount, to the rationalist tradition of Plato and Aristotle.
And what we all have to realize, it's not just Jesus they're coming for, because there are a lot of secular thinkers who wouldn't be too bothered by seeing the diminution of religion in the country.
But they're also coming for Aristotle and Homer and Plato, too.
They're coming for all of it.
And rather than see Western culture as some great divide between Bible-thumping morons and secular enlightened people, we have to recognize this – the way that the culture is intertwined, that you need both.
You don't necessarily need more churches, but you need more of a sense of these two ways of seeing, right, to hypersensitize – hypersimplify it.
The compassionate and the rational need to be bound together in the way that Western culture uniquely did it.
And if you don't, you get what you just said.
It all unwinds.
Civilization itself begins to peel apart.
And one of two things is going to happen.
We're going to fall apart To anarchy, which is what the progressives are driving us to, or we're gonna fall apart to some kind of a theocratic fascism, which is the answer of Islam, right?
That what you get when you emphasize only the spiritual is a fascist kind of Islam.
What you get when you so anarchize thinking and thought, you destroy truth, you destroy morality, you get the kind of liberal anarchy that we're now laboring under, and both are equally dangerous.
And yet, that Western culture that we have lived with for 2500 years Precariously sometimes, but they put those two traditions together and gave us something better than either of those two really anti-civilizational alternatives.
Yeah, minor technical correction from a guy who studied it a lot.
Anarchy means without rulers and the idea that the end goal of the communists is to have, I mean, I know in the communist manifesto of stateless society, it never appears and so on, but the ever expansion of coercive power over the individual that is the foundation of Of the state is chaos, yes.
But, you know, no gods, no rulers is sort of the idea behind anarchy.
And, boy, we sure aren't running out of rulers, but we are running out of gods.
And this is one of the reasons why I view myself in very much strong alliance with Christians at the moment.
Because, yes, they're coming for the Greco-Roman tradition of critical thinking, of empirical evidence, of speaking truth to power.
They're coming for the Christian tradition of having an allegiance to ethics and to a system of belief that is outside the role of state power and often directly in.
Thou shalt not steal with regards to the income tax is not necessarily something that Christians have never spoken of.
And I think that's very, very important to understand that if you think you can stand alone, if you think you can stand without allies, well, that's probably what the people in power want you to think because you're going to be a lot easier to take out of the way.
I think it was a very necessary corrective.
What I meant was not necessarily anarchy in the sense of moral anarchy.
This idea that there's no male and female, right?
The breaking down of the civilizational cohesiveness in order to reinforce a new order that both ends up, and you're right, it both ends up in terms of control.
Now let's talk a little bit about solutions and alternatives.
I don't want to have the elephant of despair sit so crackingly on the chest of everyone that they can't get back up again afterwards.
So in my particular view, I would view American...
Government schools or federal schools at the moment as a pretty toxic environment, as a toxic environment for children.
But of course, there are alternatives, unlike some places Germany comes to mind, homeschooling or unschooling or other forms of alternative education is legal.
I mean, of course, you still got to cough up the money for government schools, even if you don't use them.
But what are the options that people have to avoid this potentially increasingly dangerous environment for the health and well-being of their children?
Well, one of the remarkable things about the American experiment, unlike many places in Europe, is that we do have a really vibrant homeschool culture here.
We have freedom unprecedented in lots of other places in the world to be able to keep our kids home, to teach them ourselves.
And even if we can't always do that financially or in terms of who's going to be home, we have all sorts of ways we can supplement the kids' education.
In the last 10 years, homeschooling went from 2 million families to 3 million.
And given how much...
There's a lot of bad information on the internet, but there's also a lot of good stuff, a good history, right?
And so, yeah, good podcasts, that sort of thing.
We can really impress upon kids a normal view of history.
We could give them balance, and that's what I would say.
Even if you can't afford to homeschool your kids, even though it really doesn't cost anything, I think homeschooling is the answer.
But if you can't do that, and you can't find a good, solid private school...
Then take some time every day.
Recognize that your kids are going to get a false view of American history.
America and Western culture will be responsible for all the world's problems.
Multiculturalism will excuse the worst aspects of other cultures and somehow find a way to blame us for it.
So you've got to give them real history.
You've got to teach them civics, which they don't learn in school, about what the rights and responsibilities of freedom are.
But, you know, unprecedented freedom to avoid things like Common Core.
And so unless moms and dads wake up and start doing it, it's going to be more difficult to do.
And you generously gave me a minute to talk about what we do.
I got involved with Freedom Project Academy.
What we are is for moms and dads who are exactly in that position, moms and dads who know they have to homeschool, they have to get the kids out, but they don't feel qualified to jump right in with both feet.
We can help them.
We are a complete online school from kindergarten through high school.
We can do individual classes for the mom who thinks she can handle English and history and math but needs help teaching chemistry.
We can do it for her." Or in some instances, families will give us their kids for 10 classes a year.
And we have, unlike a lot of schools which use recordings, we have live teachers teaching like you and I are talking to each other on the computer here.
The kids can see the teacher, they can interact with them, they have actual classmates.
So it replicates the social aspects of the school without the bullying, the sexualization.
And we are a classical school, too, in the sense that we teach critical thinking, critical values, we teach logic, we teach economics.
We want kids to be able to do the exact opposite of what the public schools want.
We want to graduate kids who are independent, entrepreneurial, critical thinkers, who are going to be suspicious of anyone and anything that seeks to restrict their freedom and their liberty.
And so we're one of many arguments, but take a look at us.
And if you want more information on Common Core, by the way, you can come to our website, Look at the school and get all that information for free.
It is FPEUSA.org.
And any questions?
Or just take advantage of all the free links to all the Common Core stuff we have up.
And I also wanted to point out that Dr.
Duke has great – I mean, as a speaker myself, it's a real pleasure to watch somebody great doing what they love.
And, of course, you've given a speech many times where they stride passionately without notes.
It's a beautiful thing to watch.
And we'll put a link to one or two of your speeches below, which are just well worth – You can download the audio if you want, but they're well worth watching.
You're a very, very compelling and passionate and powerful speaker, and I really respect that because, you know, it's one thing to have the truth.
It's another thing to be able to successfully implant it into the minds of others in a motivational way, and that is a great pleasure to watch in action.
So I just want to say thanks, of course, a lot for taking the time today.
It was a real pleasure to chat.
And thanks a lot for all of the work that you're doing and you know it's people like us who have to step up and fill in the gaps of the generally leftist mainstream media who refuse to report on these kinds of things because of course it serves their agenda of expanding the squishier sides of state power.
So I appreciate the work that you're doing.
I really appreciate your time again and you're welcome back anytime you like.
I'm really grateful.
You've been fighting this battle longer than I have and you have your own brand of eloquence and reach and so Yeah, the more we can link up forces and continue to push this, the better.
Thank you so much for having us on today, and if we could ever come back, we'd love to.
Appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
All right.
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