Educational Awareness

When we think about education, most of us picture classroom desks, textbooks, and traditional school buildings. But what if we told you that only 20% of a child's learning happens during school hours? The remaining 80% occurs outside those walls – and that's where ReSchool Colorado is making a transformative difference.

In a recent episode of the Educational Awareness Podcast, host Melissa LaShure sat down with Amy Anderson from ReSchool Colorado to explore how this innovative organization is helping families access a more expansive education system that works across all learning spaces.

The Vision: Education That Extends Beyond School Hours

Founded 13 years ago, ReSchool Colorado operates on a simple yet powerful premise: children are learning constantly, not just during the traditional school day. Amy Anderson explains their mission as supporting families to "co-design an education system in Colorado that gave all kids access to learning opportunities that occurred across all of those spaces."

This approach recognizes what many parents instinctively know – that their children's interests, talents, and learning needs often extend far beyond what traditional schools can offer. Whether it's a child passionate about music, dance, coding, or athletics, ReSchool helps families access these enriching experiences regardless of their financial circumstances.

Breaking Down Barriers to Educational Equity

One of the most significant challenges ReSchool addresses is the growing cost of enrichment activities. Anderson shared some eye-opening statistics: recreational soccer, which cost around $200-250 per season just a few years ago, now runs between $500-600. Summer camps that were once $300 for a week have jumped to $700-800 or more.

"We initially shadowed families in the early days of ReSchool," Anderson explains, "and that's where it became just a huge aha that kids were spending a lot of time in these spaces outside of school and families were sharing with us, most of the families that we work with are lower income families, that they did not have the same resources."

To address this inequity, ReSchool has raised about a million dollars over the past decade, redistributing these funds as "learning dollars" that families can use to access educational experiences their children might otherwise miss.

How ReSchool Works: A Multi-Faceted Approach

ReSchool's support system includes several key components:

Learner Advocates

These navigators and coaches work directly with families, helping them identify resources and access the types of educational opportunities their children need. They serve as trusted guides in what can often feel like an overwhelming landscape of options.

Learning Dollars

This direct funding program provides families with financial resources to pursue learning experiences and activities for their children. Families have the flexibility to use these funds in ways that best serve their children's unique interests and needs.

Resource Platforms

ReSchool has created two valuable online tools:

Denver Learning Ecosystem: A comprehensive database of Denver-area providers offering out-of-school programming

Discover Learning: A parent-focused platform where families can input their location and children's interests to find suitable learning providers

Family Choice Journal

This free tool helps families engage in meaningful conversations about their learning interests and needs, then guides them toward finding aligned experiences.

The Broader Movement: Education Savings Accounts and Micro-Grants

ReSchool's work connects to larger national trends in education funding. Anderson discussed education savings accounts (ESAs) – programs in several states that allow families to access public education funding for private schools or homeschooling resources, provided they leave the traditional public school system.

However, Anderson notes that over 80% of the families ReSchool works with choose to remain in the public system. "It's risky for some people to leave," she explains, pointing out that public schools provide transportation, food services, aftercare, and special education supports that families may not receive elsewhere.

ReSchool maintains an agnostic stance on these policy debates, focusing instead on supporting families in making the choices that work best for their unique circumstances while highlighting potential equity challenges that can arise.

Colorado's Educational Innovation

Colorado offers various innovative educational pathways, including:

Community college integration with high school programs

Innovation centers in districts offering career and entrepreneurship focus

Path Forward program, allowing early graduates access to up to $4,000 for workforce or academic pathways

These options provide students with alternatives to the traditional four-year college track, similar to programs in other states that offer pathways in fields like aviation, automotive mechanics, construction, nursing, and culinary arts.

Expanding the Model: Sharing Resources Nationally

Rather than directly expanding to other states, ReSchool focuses on sharing their expertise and resources. They offer:

Online training for organizations wanting to establish learning dollar funds

Design Lab resources with tools and processes for community co-design

Advisory and coaching services

Speaking engagements and knowledge sharing

"So much of it's local and contextual," Anderson explains. "You really need the relationships and the people there. But if we can be a resource to help you stand that up... people don't have to all start from scratch."

Getting Involved and Learning More

For families interested in exploring ReSchool's resources or organizations wanting to implement similar programs, several tools are freely available:

Family Choice Journal: Available on the ReSchool website under the tools section

Design Lab resources: Free download for communities wanting to co-design educational solutions

Research briefs: Available at investinfamilies.org, detailing lessons learned from various educational funding programs

Interested parties can reach out directly at [email protected] to learn more about their programs or explore potential collaborations.

The Future of Learning

ReSchool Colorado represents a growing recognition that education happens everywhere – in music studios, on soccer fields, in maker spaces, and through countless other experiences that ignite children's passions and develop their talents. By working to make these opportunities accessible to all families, regardless of economic circumstances, they're helping to level the educational playing field.

As Anderson puts it, every parent knows their child's strengths and interests. ReSchool's mission is ensuring that knowledge translates into access – access to the rich, diverse learning ecosystem that exists beyond traditional school walls.

The work ReSchool is doing in Colorado offers a model for communities nationwide to think differently about education, funding, and opportunity. It's a reminder that when we expand our definition of learning, we expand our children's possibilities.

For more information about ReSchool Colorado, visit reschoolcolorado.org. To learn about their national resources and research, check out investinfamilies.org.

Rediscovering Ancient Wisdom: What Classical Christian Education Offers Modern Students

This post is based on our recent Educational Awareness podcast episode featuring David Goodwin, co-author of the New York Times bestseller "Battle for the American Mind" and President of the Association of Classical Christian Schools.

In an era where American education faces mounting challenges, an ancient approach is gaining renewed attention. Classical Christian education, rooted in methods that have shaped Western civilization for centuries, offers a compelling alternative to progressive educational models. But what exactly does this approach entail, and could it hold keys to addressing our current educational crisis?

The Foundation: More Than Just Another Educational Method

Classical Christian education isn't simply a different way of organizing curriculum—it's a fundamentally different philosophy of learning. As David Goodwin explains, this approach views education as the cultivation of wisdom and virtue, where knowledge goes far deeper than mere information retention.

"Knowledge for classical educators is different," Goodwin notes. "It specifically deals more with understanding rather than just information. If you know something about a tree or a horse, we're interested in all the dimensions of that—experiential, mimetic learning through imitation, or direct instruction."

This holistic approach to knowledge creates what educators call "poetic knowledge"—understanding that engages not just the intellect but the whole person.

A Day in the Life: What Makes Classical Christian Schools Different

The Elementary Years: Building Strong Foundations

Classical Christian schools take a markedly different approach to early education. Phonics instruction is paramount—no whole word learning methods here. Students develop fine motor skills and an appreciation for beauty through extensive cursive handwriting and even calligraphy work.

Literature selection focuses heavily on classic children's works from the 19th and 20th centuries: Pinocchio, Robin Hood, Arthurian legends, and authors like C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald. Aesop's fables and various myths round out the reading curriculum, providing rich material for developing both literacy and moral imagination.

Grammar instruction follows structured programs with recitations and sentence diagramming, while Latin typically begins in third grade. Why Latin so early? It's not just about language—it's about understanding the structure of language itself, since Latin's inflected nature helps students grasp grammatical concepts that enhance their English comprehension.

The Memory Advantage

One striking feature of classical education is its emphasis on memorization. Students learn math facts through speed drills, memorize poetry, recite historical facts through songs and chants, and even employ ancient memory techniques like memory palaces used in Greece and Rome.

This focus addresses a real crisis in modern education. As Goodwin observed, "We see quite a decline in students being able to recall their basic math facts right now." Classical schools combat this through intensive memory work that gets students "off their fingers as quickly as possible" with rapid-fire math fact drills.

The Three Pillars: Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric

Classical education organizes learning around the Trivium—three paths to knowledge:

Grammar Stage (Elementary): Students absorb information and learn the fundamental rules of language and mathematics

Logic Stage (Middle School): Students learn to analyze, critique, and understand the relationships between different ideas

Rhetoric Stage (High School): Students learn to express knowledge eloquently and persuasively

This progression follows natural developmental stages, working with rather than against how children's minds naturally grow.

Beyond the Classroom: Character Formation

Classical Christian education doesn't compartmentalize academics and character development. The cultivation of virtue—moral, natural, and intellectual—is woven throughout the educational experience.

Students develop moral virtues through the study of literature that presents clear examples of good and evil. Natural virtues emerge through nature studies where students might spend time drawing leaves in intricate detail, observing carefully before learning about photosynthesis. Intellectual virtues like precision, observation, and understanding develop through rigorous academic work.

The Assessment Question: How Do You Measure Success?

Rather than relying solely on standardized tests, many classical Christian schools are moving toward descriptive assessments written by teachers each quarter. These evaluations address not just academic progress but character development and virtue cultivation.

When standardized testing is used, schools often choose assessments aligned with their educational philosophy, such as the Classic Learning Test, which uses reading passages more consistent with classical education's emphasis on great books and complex texts.

Addressing Practical Concerns

Special Education Needs

Classical Christian schools, being private institutions, often lack the extensive special education resources of public schools. However, many have developed specialized tracks within their mainstream programs. The intensive language focus, while challenging, often helps students with learning disabilities develop stronger skills than they might in less demanding environments.

The Training Challenge

For educators interested in classical methods, training opportunities exist through organizations like the Association of Classical Christian Schools, which offers conferences, online resources, and pedagogical training. Classical Academic Press provides additional resources through their Classical U program.

However, converting existing schools or teachers to classical methods proves challenging. Even established Christian schools attempting to transition to classical models often struggle, particularly when more than 20% of parents remain neutral or negative about the approach.

The Public School Question: Can This Model Transfer?

The question many ask is whether classical Christian education can work in public schools. Here, the challenges are significant. The Christian foundation isn't merely an add-on to classical education—it's integral to the entire approach. As Goodwin explains, "The pedagogical framework is based on Christianity, so it gets harder with our model."

Some charter schools attempt to adapt classical methods while navigating legal constraints around religious content. However, the fundamental difference in how classical education approaches knowledge and truth makes full implementation difficult in secular settings.

Looking Forward: School Choice as a Solution

The most promising development for classical Christian education may be the expansion of school choice programs. Eleven states currently have measures allowing parents to direct public funding toward private schools, including classical Christian institutions. This approach preserves the integrity of the classical model while making it accessible to more families.

Rather than trying to retrofit existing public schools, this path creates parallel educational structures that can serve families seeking alternatives to progressive educational models.

The Historical Context: Education's Forgotten Purpose

Understanding classical Christian education requires recognizing that separating education from Christianity is historically anomalous. Before 1900, attempting to educate without Christian foundations would have been "unimaginable," not just for moral reasons but because the entire approach to knowledge was different.

The liberal arts—the original meaning having nothing to do with modern political liberalism—were designed to liberate the mind to conform with reality, with what the Greeks called the logos. This same logos that John's Gospel identifies with Christ formed the foundation of Western education for over a millennium.

The Path Forward

For families interested in classical Christian education, resources are available at classicalchristian.org, which includes a school finder for the organization's 550 member schools serving 75,000 students nationwide. The Classical Difference magazine tells the stories of these schools and students, providing insight into this educational alternative.

As American education continues to face challenges, classical Christian education offers not just an alternative methodology, but a fundamentally different vision of what education should accomplish. Rather than merely preparing students for economic productivity, it aims to form human beings capable of wisdom, virtue, and truth—goals that have guided the best of Western education for millennia.

The question isn't whether this ancient approach can work in modern times—over half a million students in classical Christian schools worldwide demonstrate that it can. The question is whether enough parents and educators will choose this path to preserve and extend an educational tradition that has shaped the greatest achievements of Western civilization.

In an age of educational crisis, perhaps the way forward isn't innovation but restoration—recovering the timeless principles that once made education truly transformative.

https://www.literaryscape.com/educational-awareness

https://www.literaryscape.com/educational-awareness-1

Welcome to the final episode of America’s Education Past and Future. Although this wraps up the series, I will have follow-up episodes, as this has opened doors for conversations and a deeper look at how we are going to move forward with education in our nation.

                  As we look at the future of education in America, I want to point us back to the book of Nehemiah in the Old Testament. Nehemiah is the last of the Old Testament historical books. The book recounts the third return to Jerusalem after captivity, describing the rebuilding of the walls and the renewal of the people’s faith.

                  Sounds refreshing, but as you read through this account, you realize it was not easy. You also find that it reflects where we currently stand in education and what the future might hold. I will give you a very brief overview.

                  Nehemiah receives a report of the Jewish remnant who had survived the exile and were now residing in Jerusalem. Nehemiah 1:3 – They said to me, “Those who survived the exile and are back in the province are in great trouble and disgrace. The wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates have been burned with fire.”

                  This is a picture of our current education system. Progressives have torn down the pillars of our nation’s once superior educational system and left it a pile of burning rubble.

Although the exiles had been living amongst the rubble for years, they had not started to rebuild. The same can be said of us as we continue to use the progressive school model, hoping for different results.

Nehemiah wept when he heard the news before seeking God’s help, which is key to his success. When he arrived in Jerusalem, he inspected the damage and then came up with a game plan to rebuild the walls and restore Jerusalem to its former glory.

Nehemiah 2:17-18 – Then I said to them, “You see the trouble we are in: Jerusalem lies in ruins, and its gates have been burned with fire. Come, let us rebuild the wall of Jerusalem, and we will no longer be in disgrace.” I also told them about the gracious hand of my God upon me and what the king had said to me.

They replied, “Let us start rebuilding.” So they began the good work.

Opposition rose immediately. Nehemiah 2:19-20 – But when Sanballat the Horonite, Tobiah the Ammonite official and Geshem the Arab heard about it, they mocked and ridiculed us. “What is this you are doing?” they asked. “Are you rebelling against the king?”

I answered them by saying, “The God of heaven will give us success. We his servants will start rebuilding, but as for you, you have no share in Jerusalem or any claim or historic right to it.”

Remember what Dr. Witherspoon, the founder of Princeton, stated.

“Government was a reflection of its citizens; if Americans became profane and immoral, their government would also become profane and immoral; and history has demonstrated conclusively that such governments do not survive. Consequently, it was simple logic that any true friend of America would promote religion and morality.” (4 Centuries of American Education, by David Barton, page 12)

Any friend of America would promote religion and morality. As we have learned throughout this series, America was founded on Christian principles and morality. If you stand against this, then you stand against America, just as these men tried to stand against Jerusalem.

As you continue to read through Nehemiah, you see he had many successes in rebuilding Jerusalem, but there was a lot of opposition. However, he stood strong and pressed on, knowing God was with him. One of my favorite verses from Nehemiah is 4:14. This comes as they face opposition once again.

After looking things over, I stood up and said to the nobles, the officials and the rest of the people, “Don’t be afraid of them. Remember the Lord, who is great and awesome, and fight for your brothers, your sons and your daughters, your wives and your homes.”

Does that not make you want to say hoorah, let’s get this done?

In our last episode, we discussed the Classical Christian Education (CCE) model and how it served our children well for centuries, providing them with an education that was far superior to any other. Statistical and empirical data prove its superiority.

We have the opportunity to be the Nehemiah’s of this generation so that the generations to come will enjoy the freedom that comes with an education that develops their thinking and reasoning skills. If we take a stand, do the hard work, and rebuild our broken education system, our children will end up with an education that surpasses our own. And don’t we always want better for our kids?

The question is, how do we go about rebuilding our broken education system? I am no expert in this, and there could be more than one way to get this done. These are my ideas, and I am sure others have better ones. Right now, I just want to get the conversation going so that a plan can be formed and put in place.

Before we can roll out the CCE model in our classrooms, we need to equip our teachers with the knowledge and skills needed to implement these teaching strategies. These strategies will feel strange at first because most of us have never experienced them as students and it is not how we have been teaching.

This means we must create training opportunities where current and pre-service teachers can easily acquire this training. For pre-service teachers, it is a matter of changing the current college coursework to prepare these students to implement the CCE model. This can happen as we have seen colleges change their programming to train students in the latest teaching strategies, which have changed multiple times over the years.

For current teachers, we need readily accessible and flexible training to meet their current life and job demands. There are a variety of avenues for this: training centers, on demand courses, conferences, and training brought to the schools.

Parents and students will also need guidance to help navigate this change. Expectations and routines will differ from students’ and parents’ education experience.

Remember the visual Pete and David gave of the capsized ship? We have been on it so long that the capsized ship feels normal and as we turn the ship upright, we have to re-orient ourselves; which means training for all who are involved.

Once training is in place and underway, we have to turn our focus on the implementation. Do we start brand new schools under this model? Do we turn our public schools back into Classical Christian schools? Do we find a middle ground and allow local communities and school boards to vote on whether they want to stick with the current progressive education model or change to the CCE model?

These are all possibilities. Right now, you can start a Classical Christian school and with organizations like the Classical Christian Schools Association, you can get this done with the support of those who have gone before you. An open voucher system would make this even more feasible, as federal and state education dollars would follow a child wherever the parent chooses to educate them.

Can we turn our public schools back into Classical Christian schools? Yes. That is what they were before the progressives changed them. Why would we build brand new schools when we have fully staffed schools sitting in our communities right now?

Many will say this is not possible because of the Warren Court rulings in the Engel v. Vitale, the Abbington School District v. Schempp, and the Reed v. Van Hoven cases. However, evidence proves that these rulings are unconstitutional. So, I say we the people move to have these rulings overturned. It’s a daunting task, but not impossible. I mean, did anyone think Roe v. Wade would be overturned?

Is it possible to let local schools and communities decide for themselves which model of education they want to go with? I think this a place to start, but I am not confident that as a nation we can maintain two very different education systems and remain united.

Let’s look back on our own history. A clash between two very different ideas of right and wrong ignited the Civil War. The ideals and “virtues” that our current progressive education system instills in students are self-centered, vapid, and intolerant, leading to a society spiraling out of control, as evidenced by a multitude of events over the past decade. The ideals and virtues of the CCE model are vastly different, focusing on serving God and others, valuing truth, honesty, and integrity.

When it comes to the long haul, these two societies cannot co-exist in peace. Which is why we stand at a great precipice today. We either continue on as is and watch society climb deeper and deeper into the pit of despair and chaos, taking our great nation with it. Or, we stand and say not on my watch. We fight the small battles and hopefully avoid a war, in order to save our children’s future and the future of this nation.

The question is, are we ready to link arms, stand together, and fight for our children’s future, or do we stand back and do nothing?

Back in episode one, I mentioned you would go through the Josiah experience. In 2 Kings 22, King Josiah hears the word of the Lord read out loud for the first time. His first response was shock and grief at learning that their nation was so off course from God. After a time of reflection and repentance, he instituted reform across the country, bringing the people back to God.

I have no doubt you are feeling the Josiah experience right now. My hope is that this series has revealed truths we have never known and opened doors for conversations to rebuild our education system to its former glory. There will be numerous conversations to come, so stay tuned. For now, I would like to leave you with reading Nehemiah’s words to you once again.

After looking things over, I stood up and said to the nobles, the officials and the rest of the people, “Don’t be afraid of them. Remember the Lord, who is great and awesome, and fight for your brothers, your sons and your daughters, your wives and your homes.” (Nehemiah 4:14)

Resources and Links

Blog Post: https://www.literaryscape.com/educational-awareness/educational-awareness/episode-9-americas-education-past-and-future

Book- 4 Centuries of American Education by David Barton: https://shop.wallbuilders.com/index.php/four-centuries-of-american-education.html

Book – Separation of Church and State, What the Founders Meant by David Barton: https://shop.wallbuilders.com/index.php/separation-of-church-state-what-the-founders-meant-book.html

Book – Battle for the American Mind by Pete Hegseth and David Goodwin: https://battlefortheamericanmind.com/

Over the last seven episodes, we have gone through the history of education in America and found some fascinating connections and facts. Today, we are going to look at a possible future for education.

                  Throughout this mini-series, I have referenced the book Battle for the American Mind by Pete Hegseth and David Goodwin. Today I will be returning this book as they laid out a plan for America’s future educational path. One that centers around the original pedagogy for our nation, the Classical Christian Education model. Don’t let the name scare you before we dig in.

                  The Classical Christian Education model produced world class leaders such as Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, and Hamilton. I like how Pete and David put some numbers to this. During that time, there were around 3 million people in this nation, and this model produced six wise leaders. So, with a population around 245 million today, we should expect to see at least 480 leaders like these men. Yet, we struggle to find just one.

                  So, what is this Classical Christian Education model? Why did we veer away from it? How do we get back to it?

                  The previous episodes went over the why we veered away from it. The progressive agenda began to steer the education ship in another direction and, generations later, it was completely forgotten.

                  I like the description Pete and David give at the start of chapter 10. They compare our current educational dilemma to a capsized ship. When things first started moving away from the Classical Christian Education model, it felt weird and off kilter to everyone. Now that we have been living in this “capsized” state for so long, righting the ship feels unnatural. However, if we do not right the ship, it will eventually sink.

                  There are CCE (Classical Christian Education) schools around the nation. In fact, you can visit the Association of Classical Christian School’s website to find these schools and learn more about this model. Today I am going to give you a quick overview from the book Battle for the American Mind.

                  Here is their description of what you will see and hear when walking into a classical Christian school.

                  You’ll inevitably see uniforms, hear children greet you politely, and possibly see them stand when you enter the room. The rooms are orderly, and the décor reflects classical art. . .The children will be joyful and engaged, if you spend time you’ll notice that Latin seems to be sprinkled throughout. From down the hallway, recitations in unison may be about anything, from Bible verses to great men of the Middle Ages. If you stop around the second or third-grade classrooms, students with singsong voices will be reciting jingles as they diagram sentences to gain a precise understanding of grammar. (Battle for the American Mind, page 195)

                  That is a far cry from what you will see and hear when walking into any public school, and even some private schools. It amazes me that this used to be the norm in our public classrooms for centuries.

                  Within these schools, you find that history is everywhere from Ancient, Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Byzantine, early Anglo-Saxon, medieval, French, German, Asian, right down to American history. This is always taught right alongside biblical and church history. Their schedule and coursework are oriented around a historical context.

                  CCE studies the world as a single, connected system; a single story unfolding from beginning to end. Heroes and villains are both flawed and to be admired because all people are. In this environment, the timeline of history connects the parts of human knowledge into a wider system of knowledge that can be understood, as students, in an imperfect yet rewarding way, trace God’s hand through time. . .No other faith can claim integration with recorded history like Christianity. No other form of education integrates everything so naturally—history, literature, language, philosophy, theology, science, art, mathematics, and music—into a single system of understanding. And from this integrated study, classical Christian students gain perspective and wisdom as they evaluate story after story through the lens of a Christian viewpoint—not as indoctrination, but rather as they investigate the historical narrative. Could it be that the progressive schools study so little history because they cannot avoid the historicity of Christianity? (Battle for the American Mind, pages 195-196)

                  We talked in an earlier episode about the Gary project. This was where the progressive school model was put into practice. They took each subject and pulled them apart, making them silos where students gained information to spit back out. A lack of synthesizable connections to other subjects prevented a comprehensive education. Classical Christian Education integrates all subjects, avoiding the tunnel vision our current public-school model creates for students.

                  I once heard a friend of mine tell a story about her son. He was reading his social studies textbook and came across a word he didn’t know. He stopped and looked at her. She told him, you have the skills to decode that word. He replied with, we only use those skills in reading, not social studies. She was floored especially when she realized he wasn’t saying it to be snarky, he truly believed it.

                  Classical Christian schools use the Socratic approach. Here is an example from Pete and David’s book.

                  In secondary classrooms at CCE schools, teachers are widely read in the classics and great ideas. The economics of Adam Smith, Marx, or Keynes relate to the politics of Jefferson, Lenin, or Roosevelt. And these ideas descend from the ideas of Hesiod, Xenophon, and Aristotle, among others. Of course, Matthew 20, 2 Thessalonians 3, and Mark 10:23 shed the light of Truth on the economic discussion. The conversation in the classroom is about all of these people and ideas and scriptures at once, without false partitions. It’s not about information. The real objective is to train minds to think through the ideas carefully. . .A liberated mind is one that can entertain thoughts without accepting them (real tolerance). (Battle for the American Mind, Page 199)

                  CCE relies less on textbooks and more on great classics. We’ve talked about how easily curriculum is rewritten along with our history in textbooks created to push the progressive agenda. By relying on great classics, CCE schools avoid false information. These books also help teach virtue. CCE uses more storybooks and less fact books.

                  So, what is a great book? It is a book that has stood the test of time, usually by contributing an original idea to the conversations about Truth, Goodness, and Beauty that descends from at least three millennia of the Western Christian tradition. In general, these works have entered a “canon” by wide recognition. (Battle for the American Mind, page 202)

                  I have put a link in the blog post where you can view the list of Great Books of the Western World created by Mortimer Adler, the editor of the encyclopedia. Looking through the list, I want to buy them and start reading.

                  The heart of classical Christian education is the trivium and quadrivium.

                  Dorothy Sayers brought the seven liberal arts into focus with her 1948 essay, which in 1981 inspired the rebirth of classical Christian education. She prescribed a return to the trivium, which trains students in reasoning and persuasion, and the quadrivium. . . which trains students in a philosophical form of science.

                  In the first art of trivium—the grammar phase—students in grades K-6 hone their use of language and knowledge as a foundational skill, sharpened in preparation for the next art. . . Students in middle school advance their linguistic skill to the intersection of language and mathematics—“logic” phase. The study of logic takes apart, analyzes, and applies the human capacity of reason so that students can recognize good arguments. Once this is well practiced, students move on to the final phase—rhetoric—to integrate these specialized logic skills with language.

                  The last four liberal arts—the quadrivium—provide a domain of real-world study upon which the trivium can be applied. . . The quadrivium seeks to encounter God’s wisdom by looking at nature, thereby drawing closer to Wisdom Himself. The four arts of quadrivium are arithmetic (the study of numbers), geometry (the study of space), music (the study of ratios and proportions), and astronomy (the study of motion). (Battle for the American Mind, pages 206-211)

CCE schools require students to study Latin, beginning in elementary school. They may also teach ancient Greek as well. Latin has proven to improve academic success. Many of the words in our English language are Latin origin.

                  Dorothy Sayers explains that “[a] rudimentary knowledge of Latin cuts down the labor and pains of learning almost any other subject by at least fifty percent. It is the key to the vocabulary and structure of all the Teutonic languages, as well as to the technical vocabulary of all the sciences.” (Battle for the American Mind, page 212)

                  Douglas Wilson states it well: “Their Latin might revert to zero, but their English will never be the same.” (Battle for the American Mind, page 212)

                  Christianity is essential to the CCE model. This is not a classical model with Christianity added, instead Christianity is at the center of it. If you recall our earlier episodes where we looked at the history of education in America, the fact that this model was the standard for our country does not surprise you. Our founding fathers and the generations that followed knew that if our public education system became so secular that it did not instill religion, morality, and knowledge based on the principles of Christianity, the government and society would become corrupt and chaotic. I think we can all step back and agree with their assessment.

                  Please note I gave you the short and skinny on the CCE model. Pete and David’s book Battle for the American Mind will give you the entire picture, so if you have questions, start there. I also recommend a visit the Classical Christian Schools website.

                  We now stand at a precipice where the direction of our public education system will either drive us over the edge into oblivion or pull us back to not only safe ground, but fertile ground where our children and their children can build a future filled with hope and goodness.

                  As we head into our final episode, take time to reflect on all that you have heard throughout this series. Then ask yourself, what future do you want for your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and this nation?

Resources and Links

Blog Post: https://www.literaryscape.com/educational-awareness/educational-awareness/episode-8-americas-education-past-and-future

Book- 4 Centuries of American Education by David Barton: https://shop.wallbuilders.com/index.php/four-centuries-of-american-education.html

Book – Separation of Church and State, What the Founders Meant by David Barton: https://shop.wallbuilders.com/index.php/separation-of-church-state-what-the-founders-meant-book.html

Book – Battle for the American Mind by Pete Hegseth and David Goodwin: https://battlefortheamericanmind.com/

Thanks for joining me for another episode in our America’s Education Past and Future mini-series. I left off last week’s episode with the promise of looking at our pedagogy and curriculum. Before we dive into that, I want to just define a few things.

                  First, pedagogy is the how. It is the methods you use to teach content. Standards are what you teach or the content. Curriculum provides the scope and sequence for the standards to be taught and combines it with the how it is to be taught, pedagogy.

                  I want to discuss each of these components separately and then look at how they are woven together and the impact they have on the quality of our education. However, I want to remind everyone of what I said in episode one. I am in no way shape or form shaming anyone when I discuss these topics. We do what we do in education today, because that is all we have known, until now. This includes me. I have taught in the current system and lead teachers in this system. Yet, with so many people shedding light on the current state of our education system, we cannot continue to ignore it.

                  I believe Albert Einstein once said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

                  It is time to get off the pedagogy Ferris wheel of the progressive model, and stand firm on the pedagogy of our past, the classical Christian education model. More on that soon!

                  Let’s start with pedagogy. Any educator can tell you that you spend the last two years of college learning all about pedagogy and putting it into practice. This is where your professors teach you how to teach.

In today’s education system, pedagogy is constantly changing. I like to call it the pedagogy Ferris wheel. If you stay in education long enough, the strategies you were told to use to teach come back around wrapped in a shiny new package.

I cannot tell you how many times I have heard educators who have been it longer than me say, “This is what they had us doing 15 years ago, just under a different name.” Raise your hand if you have said that or heard that before. I know I am not the only one raising my hand right now.

Outside of the fact that content areas have been untwined and siloed, nothing about educational pedagogy has stayed the same. Right now, we are in the Science of Reading kick. The science of reading offers numerous effective strategies. And in case you did not know this already, the Science of Reading has been around since the 1980s. It is just back in a new shiny package.

Whatever the new pedagogy is, it drives our curriculum, which is built off our academic standards. Yes, we are going there. The highly controversial topic of Common Core standards.

In 2004, David Coleman launched the Common Core initiative. It was sold as a way to make academic standards the same across the nation. So that no matter where you were in the country, all 6th graders were learning the same set of skills. This meant moving from one state to another would not adversely affect a child’s academics. In theory, they should be able to hop right in where they left off at their previous school.

I don’t think anyone had an issue with having a set of national academic standards. This is evident by the fact that all but nine states adopted these new standards. What made common core an issue was all the things behind the scenes. Data mining, new pedagogical approaches, significant historical content revisions, and the implementation costs of these new standards.

With forty-one states adopting the common core standards, curriculum companies quickly rewrote all of their curriculum to align to these standards. All subjects took a hit, but I would say math and history took the hardest hits. With the rewriting of curriculum progressives were able to literally rewrite history to meet their agenda.

Suddenly, the heroes of our nation’s past were evil. Men and women who were once viewed as being on the side of wrong, now to be praised for their contributions to society. Think about how many of our founding fathers have been slandered by our new curriculum. That is just the tip of the iceberg. Do we even study our founding documents anymore?

In David Barton’s book, Separation of Church and State, What the Founders Meant, he mentions a conversation he had with a well-accomplished attorney. The attorney was adamant that the words separation of church and state were in our constitution. David responded by pointing out that those words are not mentioned in any of our founding documents. At the attorney’s insistence that they were, David asked him to find the phrase in the constitution. The man could not and responded with, “I can’t believe this! In law school they always taught us that’s what the First Amendment said!” (Separation of Church and State, What the Founders Meant, by David Barton page 5.)

David was floored to discover that this attorney had never read the Constitution he was to uphold, because no one required it. If the reading of founding documents is not required in law school, then it isn’t happening in our K-12 public schools either.

In case you missed the earlier episode where we discussed separation of church and state. These words are contained in a letter written by Thomas Jefferson in 1801 in response to the Danbury Baptist Association and their expression of concern over the government taking over religious freedoms. He was assuring them that because of the wall of separation, they had nothing to fear. Here is the excerpt from his letter:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, . . .I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between church and state. (Separation of Church and State, What the Founders Meant, by David Barton page 12.)

The wall of separation was erected not to limit public religious expressions but rather to provide security against governmental interference with those expressions whether private or public. (David Barton, Separation of Church and State, What the Founders Meant, page 12-13)

Now let’s look at what common core standards did to math. Parents, how many of you can longer help even your elementary-aged children with their math homework? I believe every parent listening has their hand up.

Educators, how many of you get frustrated because students do not know their basic math facts and cannot perform basic calculations like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division? Again, I am pretty sure every educator’s hand is up right now.

With Common Core came a new pedagogy for teaching math. This new pedagogy introduced radical teaching methods for arithmetic, prioritizing process over accuracy.

Hold the phone. Did you hear what I just said? It does not matter if they can get the right answer or not, because it is all about the process. So, I can praise Johnny and say he has mastered the skill of addition when he tells me that 2 plus 2 equals 5, because hey he got the process correct. When we add two numbers, we get a bigger number.

If you do not believe me on this one, then please watch the video on common core by David Barton. In this DVD he shows a video of a training given to teachers as they prepared to implement the common core standards.

Again, with forty-one states adopting the common core standards, curriculum companies rewrote their math curriculum. The straightforward, no nonsense math curriculums like Saxon math were shoved out for a more “rigorous” math curriculum that taught students five or more ways to add numbers. Leaving confused and frustrated parents, educators, and students in its wake with students bearing the brunt of this movement.

                  After researching and learning more about our nation’s educational history, I truly believe Common Core was yet another strike from progressives to sink our ships in this game of Battleship. These new standards not only rewrote our history to fit the progressive’s agenda, it created a separation between parent, child, and educator. With parents frustrated by these new math methods, they can no longer help their child learn basic math skills. Teachers pull back and keep all work at school, because students do not fully understand the math concepts and have no one at home to help. The cycle continues until there is a great divide.

I have touched on curriculum a little bit while talking about standards. Curriculum brings pedagogy and standards together in a logical scope and sequence. We have discussed math and history. As we look at curriculum, I want to touch on reading and science.

Most states, even some states who did not adopt common core standards, may have common core standards without realizing it. My state recently adopted the Next Generation Science Standards or NGSS. These are connected to Common Core just wrapped in, you guessed it, a new shiny package. Again, I highly recommend David Barton’s DVD Common Core. As he shares a little bit about the NGSS and Common Core Standards.

I have a screenshot of a 4th grade NGSS standard. For those of you listening to the audio version of this episode, you can find this image in my blog post.

There is a lot going on in this standard. The NGSS committee had to create a guide to help teachers unpack these standards. As you move up through the grades, they get more and more complex. Here is a statement from the NGSS website:

The NGSS and other Framework-based standards ask educators and students to approach teaching, learning, and monitoring student progress in new and different ways, grounded in students making sense of phenomena and solving problems using the three dimensions of science together. These resources are designed to help educators unpack the standards and understand what they mean for classroom instruction and assessment.

Again, a new pedagogy for teaching science is introduced. All curriculum companies, you guessed it, rewrite their science curriculum to align with these new science standards and the pedagogy that goes along with it.

Reading curriculum is just as bad. When you take the time to dig into it, you see teachers are told to teach multiple reading skills simultaneously without explicit instruction on any of these skills. Lessons approach a skill as if students already know how to, for example, finding the main idea and supporting details. If you don’t know what main idea and supporting details are, then you cannot successfully identify it in a text, which limits your comprehension of said text.

Reading is complex and, yes, you use multiple reading skills automatically and simultaneously while reading a text. It has been said many times reading is thinking, and that is true. However, when you are first learning to read, you need explicit instruction on these skills to develop them, so that you can employ them to think as you read, moving from learning to read to reading to learn.

The newest pedagogy wrapped in a new shiny package, for reading, is the Science of Reading. It has some great strategies for breaking down these skills into explicit step-by-step instruction. Throughout my training, they emphasized that instruction must be explicit and systematic.

When talking with a dear friend and educator about reading curriculum options, she pointed out that she had gone through two Science of Reading trainings where they stressed the need to be explicit and systematic. Her school had just adopted a new reading curriculum that has been on the rage because it is aligned to the Science of Reading. Yet she pointed out that it is neither explicit nor systematic.

Serving as a curriculum director, I have found the same. Our committee has spent an entire year digging through curriculum that our state put on a list of highly qualified curriculum, yet not one of them had explicit or systematic instruction. And a couple of them had some extremely inappropriate content. They all had stories, fables, and legends from other countries without reference to our nation’s own stories, fables, and legends.

They have slowing erased even our historical literature, all in the name of creating global citizens. I say you cannot know where you stand in a global society, when you don’t know your own heritage. But I digress.

Let’s come back to curriculum. We should scrutinize the curriculum; if it fails to meet the standard, we should toss it out. My school is looking at writing our own curriculum because no pre-made boxed curriculum meets our standards or our student’s needs.

I could go on and on about curriculum, but I will wrap this episode up with a few things for you to mull over. First, check your state standards because even though I live and work in a state that did not officially adopt the common core standards, they still went back and rewrote our standards to mirror common core but slapped our States’s name in front of it. Second, if you have been riding the pedagogy Ferris wheel for so long you are on repeat, get off! No pedagogy introduced in the last one hundred years has helped our students’ academic success. In fact, it has brought it down.

Hang in there! We have hope because our nation once had a pedagogy, standards, and curriculum that led to the quick rise and success of America. Which is why we used to have people from other countries coming to visit and learn about our education system. Wouldn’t it be nice to get back to that? To spend our days celebrating our student’s academic success rather than beating our heads against the wall because nothing is working, and our students are not learning. Oh, and to have a classroom of polite, well-behaved students so you can spend your time teaching rather than managing behavior issues.

Sounds pretty amazing to me and I have a feeling it does to others as well. Join me for the next episode as we jump off this Ferris wheel and look at a solution that has already been proven to work. We just have to have the courage to make the change and go for it.

Resources and Links

Blog Post: https://www.literaryscape.com/educational-awareness/educational-awareness/episode-6-americas-education-past-and-future

Book- 4 Centuries of American Education by David Barton: https://shop.wallbuilders.com/index.php/four-centuries-of-american-education.html

Book – Separation of Church and State, What the Founders Meant by David Barton: https://shop.wallbuilders.com/index.php/separation-of-church-state-what-the-founders-meant-book.html

Book – Battle for the American Mind by Pete Hegseth and David Goodwin: https://battlefortheamericanmind.com/

Website – NGSS: https://www.nextgenscience.org/understanding-ngss-design/understanding-ngss-design

DVD – Common Core: https://shop.wallbuilders.com/index.php/common-core-dvd.html

Welcome to another episode on America’s education past and future. Given the controversy surrounding the dismantling of the Federal DOE. I wanted to take this episode and share the history of the Federal DOE.

                  My husband is a fan of Blaze TV. He listens to their shows all day and shared a brief clip on YouTube where Glenn Beck spoke about the Federal DOE’s organizational act. I have this video linked along with the act in the show notes. Glenn notes President Jimmy Carter founded the Federal DOE; Congress solidified it in 1979. Congress must pass legislation to completely dismantle it. In Glenn's video, he shares excerpts from the DOE’s organizational act. You can click here to hear his take on it.

                  I am going to share the first part of the organization act that gives the what and the why behind it. The legislature amended this act in December 2022.

TITLE I—GENERAL PROVISIONS FINDINGS SEC. 101. ø20 U.S.C. 3401

The Congress finds that— (1) education is fundamental to the development of individual citizens and the progress of the Nation;

(2) there is a continuing need to ensure equal access for all Americans to educational opportunities of a high quality, and such educational opportunities should not be denied because of race, creed, color, national origin, or sex;

(3) parents have the primary responsibility for the education of their children, and States, localities, and private institutions have the primary responsibility for supporting that parental role;

(4) in our Federal system, the primary public responsibility for education is reserved respectively to the States and the local school systems and other instrumentalities of the States;

(5) the American people benefit from a diversity of educational settings, including public and private schools, libraries, museums and other institutions, the workplace, the community, and the home;

(6) the importance of education is increasing as new technologies and alternative approaches to traditional education are considered, as society becomes more complex, and as equal opportunities in education and employment are promoted;

(7) there is a need for improvement in the management and coordination of Federal education programs to support more effectively State, local, and private institutions, students, and parents in carrying out their educational responsibilities;

(8) the dispersion of education programs across a large number of Federal agencies has led to fragmented, duplicative, and often inconsistent Federal policies relating to education;

(9) Presidential and public consideration of issues relating to Federal education programs is hindered by the present organizational position of education programs in the executive branch of the Government; and

(10) there is no single, full-time, Federal education official directly accountable to the President, the Congress, and the people.

PURPOSES SEC. 102. ø20 U.S.C. 3402

The Congress declares that the establishment of a Department of Education is in the public interest, will promote the general welfare of the United States, will help ensure that education issues receive proper treatment at the Federal level, and will enable the Federal Government to coordinate its education activities more effectively. Therefore, the purposes of this Act are—

(1) to strengthen the Federal commitment to ensuring access to equal educational opportunity for every individual;

(2) to supplement and complement the efforts of States, the local school systems and other instrumentalities of the States, the private sector, public and private educational institutions, public and private nonprofit educational research institutions, community-based organizations, parents, and students to improve the quality of education;

(3) to encourage the increased involvement of the public, parents, and students in Federal education programs;

(4) to promote improvements in the quality and usefulness of education through federally supported research, evaluation, and sharing of information;

(5) to improve the coordination of Federal education programs;

(6) to improve the management and efficiency of Federal education activities, especially with respect to the process, procedures, and administrative structures for the dispersal of Federal funds, as well as the reduction of unnecessary and duplicative burdens and constraints, including unnecessary paperwork, on the recipients of Federal funds; and

(7) to increase the accountability of Federal education programs to the President, the Congress, and the public.

FEDERAL-STATE RELATIONSHIPS SEC. 103. ø20 U.S.C. 3403

(a) It is the intention of the Congress in the establishment of the Department to protect the rights of State and local governments and public and private educational institutions in the areas of educational policies and administration of programs and to strengthen and improve the control of such governments and institutions over their own educational programs and policies. The establishment of the Department of Education shall not increase the authority of the Federal Government over education or diminish the responsibility for education which is reserved to the States and the local school systems and other instrumentalities of the States.

(b) No provision of a program administered by the Secretary or by any other officer of the Department shall be construed to authorize the Secretary or any such officer to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution, school, or school system, over any accrediting agency or association, or over the selection or content of library resources, textbooks, or other instructional materials by any educational institution or school system, except to the extent authorized by law.

(c) The Secretary shall not, during the period within eight months after the effective date of this Act, take any action to withhold, suspend, or terminate funds under any program transferred by this Act by reason of the failure of any State to comply with any applicable law requiring the administration of such a program through a single organizational unit.

                  Now, that doesn’t sound bad. I could go along with a lot of the positives outlined for the Federal DOE, but some aspects raise serious concerns. I also question the need for the Federal DOE when education is the responsibility of the state, not the federal government. And it’s those thoughts that make me step back and ask: since when did a crew of people sitting in Washington DC, who don’t even know who we are, and most likely do not have any formal training in education, know what’s best for our students and their education?

                  Let’s look at a few of these items. First, let’s look at this statement:

(2) there is a continuing need to ensure equal access for all Americans to educational opportunities of a high quality, and such educational opportunities should not be denied because of race, creed, color, national origin, or sex;

                  This is great, but I want to point out that this was already happening since the foundation of our country without the federal government being involved. Let me take you back to David Barton’s book 4 Centuries of American Education. On page 13, he shares that founding fathers such as John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkins, Benjamin Franklin, and Benajamin Rush founded some of the first schools for women and black Americans. Something that was unheard of at that time in history. They promoted that all children, regardless of race or gender, should be educated.

                  If citizens were already taking care of this at the local level, why did we need the federal government to step in? The truth is, we didn’t. Many will argue we did because of some schools denying access to others based on gender or race. I agree something had to be done to prevent this. However, big brother stepping in and bringing all his regulations with him was not the answer.

                  The answer lies within our free market. Many educators dislike the voucher system, but I think that is because the unions have been saying for years that this system will take away our jobs. And yes, if you do not provide a quality well-rounded education, then parents will take their children somewhere else that will. If we are honest with ourselves, we as parents would do the same thing. We want what is best for our children and that includes a quality education.

The voucher system lets parents freely choose their child's school, which is as it should be. We don’t want the government or others telling us how to educate or raise our children. We should not turn around and do it to others. What the voucher system breeds is competition, which leads to better education. Schools that deny students access based on race and gender would be obsolete because no one would choose to send their child there. A voucher system ran at the state level weeds out the ineffective educators and schools, leaving the best of best for students.

                  Let’s look at another piece that made my eyebrows jump up and if you’ve been listening to this entire mini-series, I am sure yours jumped up too.

(6) the importance of education is increasing as new technologies and alternative approaches to traditional education are considered, as society becomes more complex, and as equal opportunities in education and employment are promoted;

                  We’ve been looking at the statistical and empirical data of these alternative approaches to traditional education, and it isn’t pretty. According to the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) report card, in 2024 only 29% of 4th grade students were proficient in math. Eighth-grade math proficiency is only 28%. You can view the math scores on the NAEP website here. Reading is not any better off with only 31% of 4th graders demonstrating proficiency and only 30% 8th graders reading at grade level. You can view the NAEP reading scores here.

                  70-80% of children are not proficient in either reading, math, or both. The combination of alternative teaching methods and curriculum has led to this unacceptable proficiency in reading and math.

America’s traditional education model produced students with such a high level of academic knowledge and reasoning that many could begin attending college after their eighth-grade year. In fact, many of us struggle to read and comprehend our founding documents because our education is subpar compared to that of the average American citizen in the seventeen and eighteen hundreds.

Has the Federal DOE helped with this by supporting alternative approaches to education? The data would say no.

                  Believe or not, I am trying not to be snarky, but this statement made me laugh. If you have ever completed any Title grant so that your school could receive federal funding, you will laugh too.

(6) to improve the management and efficiency of Federal education activities, especially with respect to the process, procedures, and administrative structures for the dispersal of Federal funds, as well as the reduction of unnecessary and duplicative burdens and constraints, including unnecessary paperwork, on the recipients of Federal funds;

                  Nothing about the federal grant process is efficient. Moreover, numerous stipulations prevent direct funding of student educational needs. In fact, some grants are not even worth applying for because nothing that is allowable for the grant money to be spent on is useful to our students.

                  Ever attend a Donuts with Dad or Muffins with Mom event? Title I money requires the school to host parent outreach events to have more parent involvement in their child’s education. These events don’t work, yet we throw thousands of education dollars at them. Parents come in eat a donut or muffin with their child and then walk right back out. They leave not any more involved in their child’s education than they were when they entered the building.

Two years ago, I abandoned the Title III grant application process due to its restrictive nature, forcing us to squander funds on unnecessary items. We could not in good conscience continue to waste money like that. I realize we are a small school with a small EL population, therefore we received less than $5,000 from the Title III grant. However, had it just been given to support the education of EL students with no additional requirements, we could have put the money to good use.

                  This is last one before we look at what is going on with the Federal DOE now. As I read this section really think about what it is saying.

                  (a) It is the intention of the Congress in the establishment of the Department to protect the rights of State and local governments and public and private educational institutions in the areas of educational policies and administration of programs and to strengthen and improve the control of such governments and institutions over their own educational programs and policies. The establishment of the Department of Education shall not increase the authority of the Federal Government over education or diminish the responsibility for education which is reserved to the States and the local school systems and other instrumentalities of the States.

                  Protect our rights from whom? The rights and power of public education has always resided with the states and local school boards without federal government involvement. The way I read this, they are protecting the state's education rights from themselves because they are creating the Federal DOE to and I quote:

…strengthen and improve the control of such governments and institutions over their own educational programs and policies.

That is a scary line. The states already had control, but the federal government wanted to strengthen and improve that control through legislation and assistance that gives them control at the state and local level.

We just talked about the federal funding. They don’t just give states that money out of the goodness of their hearts. It comes with strings attached that do more harm than good for our children’s education.

This last statement seals it for me.

The establishment of the Department of Education shall not increase the authority of the Federal Government over education or diminish the responsibility for education which is reserved to the States and the local school systems and other instrumentalities of the States.

One, this is not true today. As stated earlier, their funding does not come without demands and control from them. Two, stop and think, why did we need the federal DOE in the first place? If they shall not increase their authority over education or diminish the state's responsibility for education, what is their purpose?

I think we all know the answer to that question, it’s just a matter of whether or not we want to accept it.

Now that you have some background on the Federal DOE, let’s look at what is happening with it now. Here is President Trump’s executive order signed on March 20, 2025 titled: Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities. I do have a link to a video of this signing in the blog post for this episode.

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and to enable parents, teachers, and communities to best ensure student success, it is hereby ordered:

Section 1.  Purpose and Policy.  Our Nation’s bright future relies on empowered families, engaged communities, and excellent educational opportunities for every child.  Unfortunately, the experiment of controlling American education through Federal programs and dollars — and the unaccountable bureaucracy those programs and dollars support — has plainly failed our children, our teachers, and our families.

Taxpayers spent around $200 billion at the Federal level on schools during the COVID-19 pandemic, on top of the more than $60 billion they spend annually on Federal school funding.  This money is largely distributed by one of the newest Cabinet agencies, the Department of Education, which has existed for less than one fifth of our Nation’s history.  The Congress created the Department of Education in 1979 at the urging of President Jimmy Carter, who received a first-ever Presidential endorsement from the country’s largest teachers’ union shortly after pledging to the union his support for a separate Department of Education.  Since then, the Department of Education has entrenched the education bureaucracy and sought to convince America that Federal control over education is beneficial.  While the Department of Education does not educate anyone, it maintains a public relations office that includes over 80 staffers at a cost of more than $10 million per year.

Closing the Department of Education would provide children and their families the opportunity to escape a system that is failing them.  Today, American reading and math scores are near historical lows.  This year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that 70 percent of 8th graders were below proficient in reading, and 72 percent were below proficient in math.  The Federal education bureaucracy is not working.  

Closure of the Department of Education would drastically improve program implementation in higher education.  The Department of Education currently manages a student loan debt portfolio of more than $1.6 trillion.  This means the Federal student aid program is roughly the size of one of the Nation’s largest banks, Wells Fargo.  But although Wells Fargo has more than 200,000 employees, the Department of Education has fewer than 1,500 in its Office of Federal Student Aid.  The Department of Education is not a bank, and it must return bank functions to an entity equipped to serve America’s students.

Ultimately, the Department of Education’s main functions can, and should, be returned to the States. 

Sec. 2.  Closing the Department of Education and Returning Authority to the States.  (a)  The Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities while ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.

(b)  Consistent with the Department of Education’s authorities, the Secretary of Education shall ensure that the allocation of any Federal Department of Education funds is subject to rigorous compliance with Federal law and Administration policy, including the requirement that any program or activity receiving Federal assistance terminate illegal discrimination obscured under the label “diversity, equity, and inclusion” or similar terms and programs promoting gender ideology.

Sec. 3.  General Provisions.  (a)  Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:

(i)   the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or

(ii)  the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.

(b)  This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.

(c)  This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person. 

DONALD J. TRUMP

THE WHITE HOUSE,
    March 20, 2025.

                  Here is the fact sheet that was issued in conjunction with this executive order.

RETURNING EDUCATION TO PARENTS AND COMMUNITIES: Today, President Donald J. Trump signed an Executive Order returning power over education to families instead of bureaucracies.

The Executive Order directs the Secretary of Education to take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return education authority to the States, while continuing to ensure the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.

The Order also directs that programs or activities receiving any remaining Department of Education funds will not advance DEI or gender ideology.

DISMANTLING BUREAUCRACY AND EMPOWERING FAMILIES: Federal government control of education has failed students, parents, and teachers.

Since its relatively recent inception in 1979, the Department of Education, which does not directly educate students, has spent over $3 trillion without improving student achievement as measured by standardized National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores.

Federal taxpayers spent around $200 billion in additional education funding during COVID-19, which, given the substantial learning loss that resulted, typifies the ineffectiveness of the current federally driven model.

Mathematics and reading scores are down in public schools, despite per-pupil spending having increased by more than 245% since the 1970s, indicating that more spending does not mean better education.

13-year-olds’ mathematics scores are the lowest they have been in decades.

13-year-olds’ reading scores are the lowest since testing began over 30 years ago.

Low-performing students are falling further behind.

In 2023, 13 Baltimore, Maryland, high schools had zero students who tested proficient in mathematics.

The Department of Education burdens schools with regulations and paperwork.

Its “Dear Colleague” letters have forced schools to redirect resources toward complying with ideological initiatives, which diverts staff time and attention away from schools’ primary role of teaching.

Biden’s Department of Education added rules that imposed nearly $3.9 billion in costs and 4,239,530 paperwork hours.

Taxpayers will no longer be burdened with tens of billions of dollars wasted on progressive social experiments and obsolete programs.

Under the Biden Administration, the Department of Education wasted more than $1 billion in grants focused on entrenching radical ideologies in education.

Biden’s Department of Education rewrote Title IX rules to expand the definition of “sex” discrimination to include “gender identity.”

The Trump Administration recently canceled $226 million in grants under the Comprehensive Centers Program that forced radical agendas onto states and systems, including race-based discrimination and gender identity ideology.

FULFILLING PROMISES TO PARENTS AND STUDENTS: President Trump has outlined a bold vision for America’s schools and returning education back to the states.

During his campaign, President Trump said “I will close the Department of Education and move education back to the states where it belongs.” 

While speaking on parental rights in education, President Trump spoke of a dramatic rethinking of schools: “I want every parent in America to be empowered to send their child to public, private, charter, or faith-based school of their choice. The time for universal school choice has come. As we return education to the states, I will use every power I have to give parents this right.”

Since returning to office, President Trump has already signed an Executive Order to expand educational freedom and opportunity for families, recognizing our government-assigned education system has failed millions of parents, students, and teachers.

                  Aren’t we as educators and parents frustrated by the mandates handed down to us by the federal government? Mandates that come from people in Washington, DC who have never stepped foot in our communities and most likely have never served in any role as an educator. Again, I ask, who knows what our children’s educational needs are? I’m pretty sure we would all agree it’s us, not the federal government.

                  Many of us fear having the federal DOE removed, and I understand that. For most of us, it has always provided the funding for some teachers' salaries. At the same time, they have made mandates that hinder our ability to meet our students’ needs. With these changes, we will still receive necessary funding, but with fewer mandates. Putting the control of education back into the hands of the states and its citizens brings us unprecedented freedom in education. A freedom we have not seen in a hundred years.

                  These are scary but exciting times in education. Join me in the next episode as we dive into curriculum and pedagogy before looking at solutions to bring America’s education system back to excellence.

Resources and Links

Blog Post: https://www.literaryscape.com/educational-awareness/educational-awareness/episode-6-americas-education-past-and-future

Book- 4 Centuries of American Education by David Barton: https://shop.wallbuilders.com/index.php/four-centuries-of-american-education.html

Book – Separation of Church and State, What the Founders Meant by David Barton: https://shop.wallbuilders.com/index.php/separation-of-church-state-what-the-founders-meant-book.html

Book – Battle for the American Mind by Pete Hegseth and David Goodwin: https://battlefortheamericanmind.com/

Executive Order: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/improving-education-outcomes-by-empowering-parents-states-and-communities/

Fact Sheet: https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/03/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-empowers-parents-states-and-communities-to-improve-education-outcomes/

Video of Executive Order Signing:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjnoGgEJvLs

NAEP Math Scores: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/mathematics/2024/g4_8/?grade=8

NAEP Reading Scores: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/reading/2024/g4_8/?grade=8

Federal DOE’s Organizational Act: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/COMPS-726/pdf/COMPS-726.pdf

Glenn Beck’s Video on DOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yIIsFDLFoc

As we finish up with the history of American education and move to the present and then look to the future, I want to pause and address a question I am sure you are asking. How did I and others not see this? How did we not connect the dots before?

                  The WCP was a pile of rubble by 1954 and in its place was the APP (American Progressive Paideia. Today, anyone under the age of 70 is a product of the APP educational system. If you look at each generation living today, you will find the younger the generation, the more liberal and left leaning they are.

                  As I pointed out in episode four, the progressives not only took control of public schools and mandated all children attend, but they also have control over college teacher accreditation programs and textbook companies. This means they control the entire pipeline and every aspect of our education, from kindergarten to college (even if you are not in college to be a teacher). With the use of our education system, they have created a factory line of people who think, act, and vote the way they desire.

                  Let us finish tracing this progressive line in history and discover what APP really is and how it morphed into CMP (Cultural Marxist Paideia).

                  In the 1960s, we saw the product of this new progressive paideia. Our textbooks paint the Warren Court as having led the charge against racial discrimination, which was a noble pursuit. However, what most people miss because curriculum companies leave it out or twist to sound good, is that the Warren Court was the most liberal Supreme Court in American history. Pete and David give a full explanation in their book Battle for the American Mind starting on page 102. Here is a snippet:

                  This Court pioneered the extraconstitutional approach—an approach born of critical theory’s “structural criticism.” To the progressive Warren Court, founding documents were an impediment to progress. The Warren Court saw the Constitution as a guideline; it was living, not law. In many ways, the courts of the 1960s were simply finishing the work Progressives had begun at the beginning of the century. (Battle for the American Mind, page 103)

The Supreme court ruling in the Engel v. Vitale case in 1962 and the Abbington School District v. Schempp in 1963 prohibited prayer and Bible reading in schools, cutting the pillars of religion and morality out of our education system. Add to that the 1965 ruling in Reed v. Van Hoven, where courts ruled it, was unconstitutional for students to pray over their lunch.

Within a matter of four short years, nine justices fundamentally changed our educational system forever. (Battle for the American Mind, page 103)

Let us back up to 1923 and look at the Frankfurt School in Frankfurt, Germany. It resided at the Institution for Social Research, which is known today as the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Yes, you heard that correct. There was a critical theory before it morphed into the critical race theory of today.

This school was founded by a Marxist law professor. The first director was Max Horkheimer. The Frankfurt School was focused on radical social change—criticism of all things Western—using social, economic, cultural, political, and educational institutions. (Battle for the American Mind, page 110)

In 1935, after the rise of Hitler, scholars from the Frankfurt School fled to New York, where they became faculty members of Columbia University where John Dewey had just retired five years earlier. Horkheimer was offered a formal position at the university and allowed to establish his “Institute”.

Exiled Marxists were out in the open and holding court in America’s most prestigious teachers’ college. (Battle for the American Mind, page 111)

                  The Frankfurt School disguised their critical theory as social science. Science is known as objectively observing scientific laws in nature. Applying this to human behavior does not work because you cannot generalize off lived experience. To counter this flaw, they explained away certain human realities based on biases and power structures in the Western civilization.

                  They take it further by saying social scientists cannot be technical observers and problems solvers, but instead self-reflective explorers. This is where ideas like “check your privilege” and “implicit bias” come from. It is not enough to study history or civics; the student must emphasize their own current and historical contribution to the power structure that leftists deem evil at the moment. As such, in keeping with the Marxist tradition, critical theorists insist that “social science” cannot be content to describe and explain the world, but instead should emancipate students to understand their role in contributing to oppression, injustice, and discrimination. Students must become, in effect, self-loathing activists, “scientists” with raised fists. (Battle for the American Mind, page 113)

                  Whoa! Sound familiar? Let me continue with Pete and David’s explanation because they do a wonderful job of showing how this thinking is woven into our education system.

                  By turning traditional liberal arts subjects into “science,” critical theorists focus their efforts on dissecting and then tearing down the societal, cultural, political, religious, and economic layers that utopians believe prevent their egalitarian efforts from succeeding. According to them, it’s not that their systems don’t work—it’s the way we study them and understand them that is flawed. Thus the entire manner in which we study society has to change. Enter the “social sciences” Yes, our modern social sciences—like “political science”, previously known as “politics,” and “social studies,” previously known as individual disciplines like “history, economics, geography, and philosophy”—are by-products of Marxist philosophy. . . All in the service of removing God, tradition, and Western history.

                  Let that sink in for a moment. Then let me help you gain a little perspective. Our nation was founded and our educational system created on the WCP (Western Christian Paideia) which is based on the pursuit of unchanging divine order. In contrast, critical theory, which makes no claim of absolute truth, instead it rejects any notion of God, sin, or natural law, in turn completely rejecting that rights are endowed by a Creator, as stated in our Declaration of Independence.

                  Nothing they stand for is, in any way, shape, or form American. They are adept at twisting words to lure unsuspecting citizens into their way of thinking. They have the wolf in sheep’s clothing routine down pat. And who does the Bible show twisting words to lead man into sin? Genesis 3:1-5 Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”

“You will not surely die,”  the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

Who does the Bible warn us as being a wolf in sheep’s clothing? Matthew 7:15-20

“Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.”

                  Do you see why they pulled God and the Bible from our schools? Had our parents and grandparents been equipped with this knowledge, they would have been able to recognize the lies and bad fruit and put a stop to it.

Wise conservatives who knew the truth of God’s word, caught on to the progressive’s real intent, called them out on it. And what did progressives do to those who opposed them? They labeled them mad.

As John Goldberg put it in Liberal Fascism, the Frankfurt School’s “analysis also held that since Marxism was objectively superior to its alternatives, the masses, the bourgeoisie, and anyone else who disagreed with them, had to be, quite literally, mad.” (Battle for the American Mind, page 115)

They labeled their opponents mentally unstable fascists. We see how this has turned into cancel culture. Who was being canceled and why? Those who opposed the progressive agenda because they exposed their lies with the truth. The truth still eludes many Americans as the Cultural Marxist Paideia continues to be deeply ingrained in our culture.

This next connection is going to shock many of us and some of us will go into denial, but I ask that you step back and research the facts yourself.

We know that Columbia University is where members of the Frankfurt School became faculty. Did you know that at the time of their arrival, Columbia was America’s oldest and largest Graduate School of Education? They created a pipeline from Columbia University to the local K-12 classroom that pumped the Marxist critical theory into every child across the United States who attended a public school. You can still see the agenda clearly marked out on their website today.

While Marxist critical theory made its way through our college and K-12 classrooms, two other forces captured the institutional side and constitutional side in order to have an ironclad grip on our education system: teachers’ unions and the Supreme Court. We have already addressed how in the 1960s, the Warren Court ignored our founding documents and made rulings that fit their progressive agenda.

Let us turn to the teacher’s unions. The two major teachers’ unions are the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). They are the two most powerful unions today.

When the NEA was founded in 1857, it was not a union, but an association. At the time, it reflected America. It was traditional, conservative, and God fearing. In her book Standing Up to Goliath, former educator Rebecca Friedrichs discusses the association.

“During the 1960s, before the NEA was taken over by unions, teachers spoke out a lot, because the NEA was a positive association formed by teachers to support their profession and the children in their care. A sweet retired teacher reached out to my friend Larry Sand one day and said, ‘In the 60s NEA was not like it is today! I still have booklets given to us in Teacher’s Ed for memorization in the classroom. All of them are Bible verses.’”

“The booklets, Selections for Memorizing: Growth Booklets, are full of Scriptures from the Holy Bible, prayers, writings, and poems about kindness, moral character, and even the importance of the Education Triangle [students, parents, and teachers]. They were printed en masse by the NEA so that every child in schools across the country could have one every year.” (Battle for the American Mind, page 117)

Can we say that about the teacher’s unions today? Are they positive? Do they support teachers and the children in their care? From a recent personal experience, I can say that at least in my state, the state teacher’s union does not support our teachers who pay them, nor the children in our classroom. We had a bill passed that mandated 80 hours of professional development to be completed by all teachers in two years or they would lose their license. The trainings had inflexible scheduling and unreasonable attendance policies. Plus, if you did not complete it within in a year, the state would not guarantee they would pay for the training they mandated. Although this bill was crucial for our state’s teachers, the bill’s discussion and passage lacked any union representation. In fact, they endorsed it on their website.

When educators became aware of the bill passing into law, there was an outcry. The union then switched gears. They sent out a petition to be signed, which did nothing. After teachers stormed the capital, and their demands were not met, the union reposted its support of the mandated training on its website, under the guise of helping teachers meet this new mandate.

In another incident, our state legislature was pushing to pass a law that allowed any teacher to approach administration for discussion of any issue without it having to go through the local union rep. This is great because now teachers did not have to wait for the monthly formal discussion to have their concerns heard and addressed by administration. A positive thing, right? Yet the state union sent out letters telling teachers to call their senators and oppose the bill because it would silence the local association and voice of teachers.

A teacher licensing bill drew no union response, yet a bill empowering teachers ignited massive union opposition. I suspect this is true of all state teachers’ unions.

Did you know that by 1932 John Dewey, the father of progressive public schools, became the honorary life president of the NEA? He was also the cofounder of the NEA’s rival, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) in 1916. Knowing what you know now about John Dewey, does that make you question the agenda of these unions?

Both associations were absorbed into the public unionization movement during the 1960s. From there teachers unions were off to the races—guided by a growing left—wing labor movement that was grounded in left—wing organizing. (The NEA was advised by Saul Alinsky, as you well recall.) Schools and teachers who had previously been guided by parental involvement and local control were now at the whim of powerful new and overarching federal involvement. Soon after, the teachers unions were putting politicians in office and then bargaining with them on the other side—all with progressive aims in mind. (Battle for the American Mind, page 119)

Still not convinced that these unions have overstepped their bounds, causing more harm than help?

In 1972, the NEA consulted Saul Alinksy to train their staff. One of the training documents titled Alinsky for Teacher Organizers, made the case that teachers should be used to organize, not just for changes in the classroom, but for social change. (Battle for the American Mind, page 37)

The American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association outright deny that critical race theory is being taught in our classrooms all across the United States. Yet in 2021, The American Federation of Teachers invited the author of How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi to be their keynote speaker at their national conference. Here is a quote directly from his website: “Being an antiracist requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-examination.”

In essence, he is saying we are born racists and must strive daily to overcome it. This is coming from their keynote speaker. At the same time, they deny that gender and racial theories are being taught in our classrooms, yet they have multimillion dollar legal funds to defend teachers who run into trouble with state or local laws banning the teaching of critical race theory.

Educators who are part of the union, that is your money they are using for this. Step back and ask, is that where you want your money going? Other disturbing programs and ideals find support from these organizations. Investigate it for yourself and decide if your money is working for you. I recommend reading Rebecca Friedrichs’s book, Standing Up to Goliath, to learn more about our teachers’ unions. I put a link to her book and her website For Kids and Country, in the blog post of this episode.

I never joined the teachers’ union, which was not a popular decision in my house where my father and grandfather were not only part of the auto workers’ union, but were part of their local union’s negotiation team. They discussed how the local union negotiates a fair contract on my behalf. I pointed out that my union dues do not go to those in my local union who are striking a bargain on my behalf. Instead, they funnel the money to the state and federal levels. Each of which put my money towards a multitude of things I do not agree with.

I then shared that I did not want to join an organization that uses scare tactics to get people to join. Every pitch I heard about joining the union was all about how they could step in a protect me and my job should a legal issue arise, because you never know when a student will tell a lie that will destroy your career. First, I fully trust in God to protect me. Should He allow a legal action to remove me from the classroom, then He has something better in store for me. Second, should a legal issue arise from a student lying about me and my employer does not use their legal funds to help defend me, but leaves me hanging, then I do not want to work there anymore.

What I love about my dad and grandpa is that they may not have been happy with my decision, but they respected it, because they could not deny the truth behind my statements. And guess what? They still loved me even though we disagreed on this one topic.

I have thrown a lot at you in this episode, that to be honest, for some of us, is hard to swallow. A good deal of us may even be shaking our heads and denying it. I encourage you to step back and take the time to dig in and find the answers for yourself. I am sure just visiting the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association websites would reveal a lot about who they are and what they stand for. The question is, is that who you are and what you stand for?

Resources and Links

Blog Post: https://www.literaryscape.com/educational-awareness/educational-awareness/episode-5-americas-education-past-and-future

Book- 4 Centuries of American Education by David Barton: https://shop.wallbuilders.com/index.php/four-centuries-of-american-education.html

Book – Separation of Church and State, What the Founders Meant by David Barton: https://shop.wallbuilders.com/index.php/separation-of-church-state-what-the-founders-meant-book.html

Book – Battle for the American Mind by Pete Hegseth and David Goodwin: https://battlefortheamericanmind.com/

Book – Standing Up to Goliath by Rebecca Friedrichs: https://www.forkidsandcountry.org/standing-up-to-goliath/#none

Welcome back as we continue to look at the history of education in America. In this episode, we will pick up where we left off in episode three, the progressive takeover of public education. Most of what you hear in this episode will come once again from the book Battle for the American Mindby Pete Hegseth and David Goodwin.

                  Many of us were taught that the Progressive Era ended in 1929, however it continues today as a political party. I am guessing you can figure out which political party that is.

                  Dewey led the progressives and by 1915 they had their “school tool” in place, as nearly every American child attended a public school. John Dewey became the architect of education as he continued to write articles in The New Republic magazine. That name alone tells you they had an agenda to change America. If you visit their website today, their objectives are telling.

                  Progressives knew paideia was powerful, and that schools controlled it. They latched onto this and created the Gary Plan. A plan that implemented their model school in Gary, Indiana. These schools became the prototype for all public schools and the model is still used today. However, instead of seeing an increase in academic rigor, it has plummeted.

                  Here are a few key things to consider when looking at the Gary Plan that exists in all public schools. In fact, everyone listening to this podcast, unless they attended a classical Christian education school, has experienced this model. With this plan, they took subjects and broke them apart, making them silos. Instead of reading and discussing articles or works of literature that crossed across subjects like history and science, you now rotate between seven periods a day and history is no longer history, it is social studies.

                  This is also where they strategically began to extract Christianity from public schools. Instead of studying the morals and precepts of God’s words within the school, students were allowed to leave school during the day for religious training. It was no longer a part of the curriculum. They knew they could not completely take away religious education, as the WCP was still too strong in our culture. This was their way of appeasing the masses while acquiring yet another win and advance forward in erasing religious teaching in public schools.

                  I like what Pete and David share on this move. You can find this paragraph on page 87 of their book.

The defenders of this so-called-pull-out period for religious education knew they could end Christian education if they played their cards right. Defending the pull-out period in the same New Republic article, they wrote that “the [church] school [will be] less necessary for those who wish religious instruction for their children. What the Gary Plan seems to do is not to bring religion into the schools, but for the first time to take it out of the schools.” (Battle for the American Mind, page 87)

                  They needed religion removed from education in order to create a new American paideia devoid of Christ. Remember back in episode two where we discovered that religion, morality, and knowledge were the pillars on which our founding fathers-built education. Dr. Witherspoon, a signer of the Declaration, stated.

“Government was a reflection of its citizens; if Americans became profane and immoral, their government would also become profane and immoral; and history has demonstrated conclusively that such governments do not survive. Consequently, it was simple logic that any true friend of America would promote religion and morality.” (4 Centuries of American Education, by David Barton, page 12)

Even Thomas Paine, one of the least religious of the founding fathers, admonished French schools because of their secular manner. Here is what he had to say.

It has been the error of the schools to teach . . .sciences and subjects of natural philosophy as accomplishments only whereas they should be taught. . .with reference to the Being who is the author of them: for all the principles of science are of Divine origin. . .When we examine an extraordinary piece of machinery, an astonishing pile of architecture, a well executed statue or a highly finished painting. . . our ideas are naturally led to think of the extensive genius and talents of the artist. When we study the elements of geometry, we think of Euclid. When we speak of gravitation, we think of Newton. How then is it, that when we study the works of God in the creation, we stop short and do not think of God? It is from the error of the schools. . . The evil that has resulted. . . has been that of generating in the pupils a species of atheism. Instead of looking through the works of the creation to the Creator Himself, they stop short and employ the knowledge they acquire to create doubts of His existence.” (4 Centuries of American Education by David Barton, page 37)

Stop and ask yourself, did the Gary Plan work? I am going to say no by the fact that I have been told my entire life to never travel through that city because of the crime rate.

                  The progressives took their model school and implemented it in New York and wrote this in The New Republic magazine:

Twentieth-century democracy believes that the community has certain positive ends to achieve, and if they are to be achieved the community must control the education of the young. It believes that training in scientific habits of mind is fundamental to the progress of democracy. It believes that freedom and tolerance mean the development of independent powers of judgement in the young, not the freedom or older people to impose their dogmas on the young. Democracy claims no right to interfere with worship or opinion, but it does claim the right to develop in every child the capacity for testing its own convictions. It insists that the plasticity of the child shall not be artificially and prematurely hardened into a philosophy of life, but that experimental naturalistic aptitudes shall constitute the true education. (The Battle for the American Mind, page 88)

                  I have a hard time reading that out loud without throwing up. They are saying the government claims the right to develop our children’s philosophy of life, rather than we the parents. Oh no they did not, but yes they did and continue to today. They know the power of paideia and they fear losing control of it because citizens who are rooted in the word of God and can think and reason have the power to take them down by exposing their lies.

                  To do that well, you have to understand how they take words that are revered and twist them to mean something different in order to make it easier for people to swallow. Democracy is not a bad word, but they have made it one. (A side note: we are not a democracy but a republic that uses some democratic practices.) The New Republic editorial board wrote the following on July 29, 1916.

The older theories of democracy were negative, built up to protest against kings, aristocracies, and oppression. Those theories were concerned chiefly in saying what government must not do. But during the nineteenth century popular rule became increasingly a reality, and people came to feel that government is not an alien thing to be limited, but a social instrument to be used. Democracy has been evolving from a protest into a purpose. It is becoming a philosophy of life, no longer protestant but in its own way catholic. To be a democrat today is to be something more than a voter. It is to believe in a scale of human values, to have a morality and think with certain assumptions. “Modern sociologists” are simply men engaged in stating the affirmative faith of democracy.

                  They loaded the language to make democracy sound moral, which is American, but to the keen ear you can pick up on the fact that democracy is not rooted in the moral word of God but in the immoral word of man. Pete and David cover this more in their book, which I recommend you read.

                  Now let’s get back to education. I think this next quote is going to throw you for a loop. This is a quote from President Woodrow Wilson.

“We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.” (Battle for the American Mind, page 93)

                  This view comes from the Marxist concept of the proletariat or worker class. Wilson believed that most people just need to be trained for a job. They had no use for a free-man’s education.

                  Again in 1939 C.S. Lewis warned: “education is essentially for freemen and vocational training for slaves . . .If education is beaten by training, civilization dies.”

                  What do we see a big push for today? Vocational training. Schools are changing their graduation requirements to create a pipeline for vocational training. There is nothing wrong with receiving training in a vocation. The issue arises when education is stripped down to just training for vocation instead of teaching citizens to think and reason for themselves. Our current public schools churn out thousands of worker bees every year.

                  I like the way Pete and David put it: With a focus on vocation instead of wisdom, the souls of students were oriented toward servile tasks rather than the pursuit of divine Truth. So, assumptions shifted. What we now call “worldview” shifted. Virtues shifted. Thought shifted. The whole ship of society gradually reoriented to a set of new ideas-progressive ones. . .Without realizing it today’s American students absorb a deep affection for scientism(science is the only way to find truth), equity/equality (there is nothing better or worse, just different), individualism (identity/politics), neo-Marxism (the government can and should solve all inequalities), along with a host of other modern and postmodern affections that lead to servitude (it’s all about your job).  (Battle for the American Mind, page 94)

                  These have been slow changes over the past century that have led us to where we are today. Remember John Dewey, the father of progressive education? In 1929 he founded the First Humanist Society of New York. Charles Potter was the president. Here a few quotes from him.

“Be freeing religion of supernaturalism, it will release tremendous reserves of hitherto thwarted power. Man has waited too long for God to do what man ought to do himself and is fully capable of doing.”

                  “The chief end of man is to improve himself both as an individual and as a race.” ( A side note in Christianity the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him. I don’t know about you, but that sounds way better to me.)

                  One last quote from Mr. Potter: “What can theistic Sunday school, meeting for an hour once a week, do to stem the tide of a five day program of humanistic teaching?”

                  If that does not slap you across the face and make you sit up and listen, I don’t know what will. These are the words of a man who was president of a society founded by John Dewey.

                  When you keep tracing the line through history, you find that the government-based accreditation to validate school diplomas and control high school to college transitions where teachers are certified by states through colleges were designed by Dewey’s progressive disciples. Textbook authors then came from this line of trained professionals, placing public education under the complete control and influence of progressives.

                  That is a lot to digest. I am going to stop there, but in the next episode we have some fascinating history to look at in our next episode.

Resources and Links

Blog Post: https://www.literaryscape.com/educational-awareness/educational-awareness/episode-4-americas-education-past-future

Book- 4 Centuries of American Education by David Barton: https://shop.wallbuilders.com/index.php/four-centuries-of-american-education.html

Book – Separation of Church and State, What the Founders Meant by David Barton: https://shop.wallbuilders.com/index.php/separation-of-church-state-what-the-founders-meant-book.html

Book – Battle for the American Mind by Pete Hegseth and David Goodwin: https://battlefortheamericanmind.com/

Book – The New Republic Magazine: https://newrepublic.com

In episode two, I left you with a list from the book, Battle for the American Mind, that showed the difference between WCP (Western Christian Paideia) and today’s progressive Paideia. Remember, paideia is the root of our culture. Our vision of the good life begins in youth. Let us look at those comparisons again before we dive into how our paideia has been changed.

WCP: A lifelong search for greater meaning in life.

Today: Search for a job.

WCP: Seek wisdom.

Today: Seak facts.

WCP: Study history and classics.

Today: There’s nothing worth knowing that wasn’t just thought of.

WCP: Teach the application of reason.

Today: Preach the acceptance of indoctrination.

WCP: There is a divine order, revealed in Christ.

Today: There is humanist anarchy.

WCP: Strong-spirited citizens who are better together.

Today: Weak-spirited citizens who better serve the state.

I don’t know about you, but I find that WCP inspires more hope for a better future for our children and grandchildren.

                  Now that we know the history behind the foundation of our education system, we need to switch into battle mode. However, before every battle, we must study the enemy and their tactics. The more we know about them, the better prepared we are to stop their advances and outmaneuver them.

                  Think of it as an intense game of Battleship. Initially, you are firing randomly because you don’t know where your enemy is. Once you get one hit in, you become aware of where the enemy is and can quickly take them down.

                  I am so grateful to David Barton, Pete Hegseth, and David Goodwin for researching our educational history, discovering the enemy’s tactics, and then sharing it with the rest of us. If you have not already, you need to read 4 Centuries of American Education by David Barton and Battle for the American Mind by Pete Hegseth and David Goodwin. I also strongly suggest another of David Barton’s books, Separation of Church and State, What the Founders Meant.

                  Before I dive into how progressives have changed our education system over the past one hundred years, I want to remind you of what I said in episode one. Pete and David connect the dots in history to today’s dilemma in education. For many of us, it is going to be a tough pill to swallow, much like it was for Josiah in 2 Kings 22.

                  They had gone their entire life, never having heard the word of God. When it was discovered and read, Josiah tore his clothes and wept because for generations they had not been living according to the will of God. Many of you are going to feel the same as Josiah, because, like him, we have never heard the whole truth. But I want you to remember that with God, Josiah got back up, fought the battles, and brought the nation back to God.

Although this episode may shock you, persevere; hope remains.

                  Let us start with agreeing that our enemy is cunning. Progressives knew they had to take down our WCP, but they could not just wipe it out. Otherwise, they would have had a full-blown battle on their hands that they were at the time too weak to fight. This is because WCP was so engrained in our citizens. Instead, they had to replace it gradually with a fake or progressive paideia, best done through the education system. Each generation got a little more of the progressive paideia, and each generation became more and more progressive.

                  Horace Mann, the father of American education, organized school districts and implemented a common curriculum across the U.S. from 1840 to 1860. He planted ideas to gradually replace the classical Christian education with a mechanistic Prussian (German) one. We will dive into the classical Christian education model in a later episode.

                  This new form of German education was not rooted in classical Christianity but in the enlightenment and utopian philosophies of Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche. John Dewey, who is the father of progressive school in America, wrote his thesis on Kant’s philosophy.

                  Mann’s work led to Massachusetts becoming the first state to require all children to attend school in 1852. By 1918, compulsory education laws were in effect in all states. With local school boards remaining in control, the WCP deeply embedded, and the Bible still being taught in school, this move was not seen as detrimental. However, with the mandate that all students attend school, it now required all state governments to create state-controlled schools. By making the government, the schoolmaster, the church, parents, and local community influence are effectively supplanted.

                  Yes, all children now had access to an education, but this also centralized the government’s control of culture. At the time, the consequences of this move were not seen, but we see them now.

                  The divide of the Protestant church in the late 1800s provided progressives another in when it came to infiltrating the public school system and replacing the WCP with their own. Dwight L. Moody became the father of Christian fundamentalism. While Washington Gladden became the father of Social Gospel. Those following Gladden believed they should balance the wealth scales, seek women’s suffrage, advance prohibition, and many other social issues. This made it easy for them to align with the progressives. Unfortunately, Gladden’s followers left Christian tradition behind to pursue labor laws, temperance, women’s rights, and a variety of social activism.

                  Progressives in the late 1800s blended the idea of Marxist government with aspects from the Social Gospel and the belief in an American national destiny in order to make Marxism more palatable to Americans. (Battle for the American Mind, page 74)

In 1892, Bellamy penned the Bellamy Salute, a precursor to the Pledge of Allegiance, which schools nationwide adopted. The original salute mirrored the Nazi salute. (see picture in Battle for the American Mind on page 78.)

                  Here are the words to that salute.

                  I pledge allegiance to my flag and the Republic for which it stands; one nation indivisible, with Liberty and just for all.

                  Congress feared another form of Marxism and add in the words: the flag of the United States of America and under God. Here are the words to our current pledge, which is recited every morning in classrooms across the nation.

                  I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands; one Nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

                  The reciting of this pledge at school bred nationalism, which has its place. However, the intentions behind this were to place nationalism above Christ. This is what we have today, and it does not look pretty.

                  You can see the danger of imbalance from the writings of Dallas Lore Sharp, who was a Methodist minister, professor, and progressive.

                  My child is first a national child. He belongs to the Nation even before he belongs to himself. His education is first national and after that personal. We parents can hardly see this. It is a particularly difficult point of view for the highly individualized, assertive Anglo-Saxon whose political weakness is his undeveloped sense of social solidarity. (Battle for the American Mind, page 92)

                  In the 1890s, John Dewey gave lectures on the school and social progress. He argued for vocational training rather than a focus on liberal arts, saying:

                  “It is our present [Classical Christian] education which is highly specialized, one sided and narrow. It is an education dominated almost entirely by the medieval conception of learning. It is something which appeals for the most part simply to the intellectual aspect of our natures, our desire to learn, to accumulate information and to get control of the symbols of learning; not to our impulses and tendencies to make, to do, to create, to produce.” (Battle for the American Mind, page 79) (The School and Society book) (The School and Society PDF)

                  I just want to pause here, step back, and analyze what John Dewey is saying. On the surface, it may not seem bad. When you take it apart, you see the fallacies. Let us look at where he says that classical Christian education appeals simply to the intellectual aspect of our natures, our desire to learn, to accumulate information and to get control of the symbols of learning.

                  Are some of you furrowing your brow, shaking your head, and saying, “What?”

                  Isn’t learning and accumulating knowledge the whole point of any education?

                  The next part of this line says that classical Christian education does not appeal to our impulses and tendencies to make, to do, to create, to produce. John Dewey is known as a father to progressive education. He believed we learn by doing. Yes, we learn by doing. However, we cannot go and do without a solid foundation in knowledge and reasoning. Furthermore, and you may think I am stretching here, but do we want an educational system that not only appeals to our impulses but encourages them? Acting on impulse almost always ends in disaster. How about we fill our students with knowledge and teach them how to reason with religion and morality before they go and do?

                  We still see this ideal playing out in public schools today, with our STEM schools and vocational pathways. Our education system has turned into a pipeline for jobs, rather than producing productive citizens who can think, reason, and produce independently without the government telling them what is right or wrong.

                  In 1939 C.S. Lewis wrote: “education is essentially for freemen and vocational training for slaves . . .If education is beaten by training, civilization dies.”

                  Wise words from a wise man.

                  David Goodwin and Pete Hegseth sum up this part of the progressive movement by acknowledging that you realize this is a very different story than you learned about progressives from your school textbooks.

                  “You may have learned that their movement ended child labor or regulated the “robber barons.” The Progressives write the textbooks, so they tend to emphasize their popular and positive achievements. And, as the saying goes, the victors tell the stories the way they want them to be told. Their war was clandestine, so it stayed out of their textbooks.” (Battle for the American Mind, page 81)

                  We have only scratched the surface of the history behind this detrimental shift in American education. Join me for another episode as we peel back the layers. In the meantime, be sure to read your copy of Battle for the American Mind. Pete and David go into much more detail. I am hitting the highlights and bringing in my perspective as an educator.

Resources and Links

Blog Post: https://www.literaryscape.com/educational-awareness/educational-awareness/episode-3-americas-education-past-and-future

Book- 4 Centuries of American Education by David Barton: https://shop.wallbuilders.com/index.php/four-centuries-of-american-education.html

Book – Separation of Church and State, What the Founders Meant by David Barton: https://shop.wallbuilders.com/index.php/separation-of-church-state-what-the-founders-meant-book.html

Religion, morality, and knowledge were the pillars on which education in America was built. These pillars cannot be found in today’s education system. Why is that?

The battle to tear down these pillars, which destroyed our western Christian paideia, started long before our time. I will share more details soon.

Government leaders believed that if public education was secular and no longer instilled religion, morality, and knowledge in students, then the nation would be better off if states returned schools to the church.

Dr. Rush wrote several educational policy papers. He gave many reasons why the Bible should always remain a textbook in American education. At the end of one of his papers, he left his readers with this warning.

“In contemplating the political institutions of the United States, I lament that if we remove the Bible from schools, we waste so much time and money in punishing crimes and take so little pains to prevent them . . . For this Divine Book, above all others, favors that equality among mankind, that respect for just laws, and those sober and frugal virtues which constitute the soul of our government.” (4 Centuries of American Education, David Barton, page 25)

Gouverneur Morris, signer of the constitution, further emphasized Dr. Rush’s point by saying:

“Religion is the only solid basis of good morals, therefore, education should teach the precepts of religion and the duties of man towards God.” (4 Centuries of American Education, David Barton, page 25)

Crime statistics today prove these statements to be true. The Supreme Court ruling in the Engel v. Vitale case in 1962 and the Abbington School District v. Schempp case in 1963 prohibited prayer and Bible reading in schools, severing the pillars of religion and morality from our education system. The Abington v. Schempp decision reversed more than two hundred years of legal precedent, prohibiting the Bible and its instruction in schools. According to the court:

[I]f portions of the New Testament were read without explanation, they could be and. . .had been psychologically harmful to the child [student]. (Separation of Church and State, What the Founders Meant, page 15)

I love how David Barton responds to this outlandish claim.

What an amazing pronouncement: the Scriptures can cause psychological damage—that is, exposing students to Biblical teachings (such as the Golden Rule, the Beatitudes, and the Good Samaritan) can cause lasting brain damage! (Separation of Church and State, What the Founders Meant, page 15)

If that is not a lie from the pit of Hell, I don’t know what is? In fact, a laughed at the absurdity of it.

The court continued its purge of God and religious morals from schools when, in Stone v. Graham, the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional for students to voluntarily see a copy of the Ten Commandments. The court explained:

If the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey the Commandments. . .[T]his. . .is not a permissible. . .objective. (Separation of Church and State, What the Founders Meant, page 14)

Another ridiculous claim from the court. Should students voluntarily look at the Ten Commandments, they just might obey them, and that would be unconstitutional. So, we want our kids to steal, kill, and commit adultery, among other things? And don’t we have laws against stealing and killing?

How are these rulings and claims panning out for us and our children? David Barton shares some statistics in his book, Separation of Church and State, What the Founders Meant.

Following the Court’s 1962-1963 decision to exclude basic religious teachings from students, violent crimes increased 700 percent. . .In fact, crime so exploded among junior high students that the federal government began separate tracking of murders, assaults, and rapes committed by students ages 10-14. (significantly, none of these categories of statistics existed before the Court’s decisions—that is, these crimes occurred so infrequently that separate monitoring of these problems was unnecessary). (Separation of Church and State, What the Found Meant, page 15)

Also, following the 1962-1963 court-ordered removal of religious principles from students, teenage pregnancies immediately soared over 700%, with the United States recording the highest teen pregnancy rates in the industrialized world. Similarly, sexual activity among fifteen-year-olds skyrocketed, and sexually transmitted diseases among students ascended to previously unrecorded levels. In fact, virtually every moral measurement kept by federal cabinet-level agencies reflects the same statistical pattern: the removal of religious principles from the public sphere was accompanied by a corresponding decline in public morality. (Separation of Church and State, What the Founders Meant, page 17)

When I was in high school, I participated in our school’s abstinence program. As a high school student, I spoke to junior high students about abstinence and my reasons for choosing it. This program was only in place for a year or two and I never knew why it went away. David points out that opponents claimed it was religious teaching and therefore the courts shut the program down.

As a current educator, I can say that a leading cause of early teacher burnout is student behavior, coupled with a lack of parental support. In fact, today a teacher is more likely to be reamed out by parents and then reprimanded by administration for reprimanding a student for inappropriate behavior, than not. When did it become wrong to expect a child to follow directions given by an adult? I do not think it is unreasonable to ask a child to stand in a straight line and walk through the hallway without talking. Yet walk into any public school today and you will find adults battling to get students to do this one simple thing. With backlash from parents, most educators have given up and ignore the behavior.

I could tell you story after story of student behavior that will shock most people. Putting a safe hold on a student is common, as educators work to keep the child and those around them safe. A family member made the comment, “Kids behave like that?” after I told them about an incident where a kid knocked me flat on my back while I was attempting to help them calm down. It was not long after that, they signed up to volunteer at their local school. Needless to say, they are not volunteering any more.

Why are kids so out of control, and why aren’t we doing anything about it? You can thank the progressives who started tearing down our western Christian paideia by dismantling our education system over the past 100 years.

Now that you have some history about the foundation of our American education system, it’s time to look at how and why it changed. This is where that Josiah experience is going to come in. Over the next few episodes, you will learn things that will blow your mind, but before we get into that, let’s go over what western Christian paideia is.

In episode one, I shared David Goodwin and Pete Hegseth’s simplified definition of paideia. Paideia, simply defined, represents the deeply seated affections, thinking, viewpoints, and virtues embedded in children at a young age, or more simply, the rearing, molding, and education of a child. (Battle for the American Mind, by Goodwin and Hegseth, page 44)

Paideia is the foundation of all cultures and their vision of the good life. Ever wonder why other countries that we pour our military resources into cannot maintain a republic like ours when we pull out? It is because their paideia is not the same as ours. Their vision of the good life is far different from ours and it has been cultivated within them from a young age.

Let’s break the Western Christian Paideia down. I love how Pete and David do this in their book Battle for the American Mind. Much of what is coming next comes from pages 48-50 in their book.

1. Western: refers to any civilization that descends from the convergence of Greece, Rome, and Hebrew cultures dating back roughly 2,500 years. It envelops nearly all historical Christendom. (Battle for the American Mind, page 48)

2. Christian: This ties back to what I said in episode one. Today, most of us view Christianity as a personal religion, but this is not accurate. Recall when I said Christianity is not a religion but a belief in Jesus Christ and a desire to live according to God’s word. There are many who call themselves Christians and each attend churches of different denominations. Our forefathers viewed Christianity as being a certain kind of kingdom that superseded the rulers of this world, but was transacted through the church. The church and the state were intertwined in civilization because both had separate but related roles to play. Western civilizations once recognized that the state resides under the eternal King. (Battle for the American Mind, page 49)

3. Paideia: It motivates our decisions and behavior through our affections cultivated in us at a very young age. Because it influences each person in a culture, paideia forms a culture. Effecting how we vote, whether we marry, have small families, or large families, whether we are productive or start a revolution. (Battle for the American Mind, pages 49-50)

Western Christian Paideia is a particular type of paideia that was intentionally created for a self-governing people. It is unique to the west and America was founded on it. (Battle for the American Mind, page 50)

You can see in the history we have covered over the past two episodes how our founding fathers leaned on WCP (Western Christian Paideia) as they debated and worked through creating our founding documents. Documents I urge everyone to read and familiarize themselves with. Very few American citizens today are familiar with our founding documents because they have not been taught for several generations. Seems odd that our educational system does not teach from the founding documents.

This is because our WCP has been slowly replaced with a progressive paideia over the past one hundred years through our education system. David and Pete give a great comparison between the WCP and the progressive paideia on page 54 for their book Battle for the American Mind.

WCP: A lifelong search for greater meaning in life.

Today: Search for a job.

WCP: Seek wisdom.

Today: Seak facts.

WCP: Study history and classics.

Today: There’s nothing worth knowing that wasn’t just thought of.

WCP: Teach the application of reason.

Today: Preach the acceptance of indoctrination.

WCP: There is a divine order, revealed in Christ.

Today: There is humanist anarchy.

WCP: Strong-spirited citizens who are better together.

Today: Weak-spirited citizens who better serve the state.

Paideia is powerful, and the education system is the driving force behind it. So how did we lose our WCP? And how do we get it back, because it sounds a lot better than the paideia we have today? Come back for the next episode as we examine these questions.

I have given you a lot to think about. Please do the research yourself and don’t just take my word for it. I highly recommend you read David Barton’s books, 4 Centuries of American Education and Separation of Church and State, What the Founders Meant, and Pete Hegseth and David Goodwin’s book, Battle for the American Mind.

Resources and Links

Blog Post: https://literaryscape.com/educational-awareness/episode-2-americas-education-past-and-future

Book- 4 Centuries of American Education by David Barton: https://shop.wallbuilders.com/index.php/four-centuries-of-american-education.html

Book – Separation of Church and State, What the Founders Meant by David Barton: https://shop.wallbuilders.com/index.php/separation-of-church-state-what-the-founders-meant-book.html

Book – Battle for the American Mind by Pete Hegseth and David Goodwin: https://battlefortheamericanmind.com/