Well, joining us today is Robert Borton's he's the author of Woke and Weaponized, How Karl Marx Won the Battle for American Education. He's also the CEO of Classical Conversations, and if you are involved in homeschooling, you've probably heard of this. As a matter of fact, many of our friends did Classical Conversations and they loved it. So we're
going to talk to him about that as well. So we'll give you some tactics for how you can do it, and I'll also tell you what the other guys, what their designs are for your children, which will hopefully inform you to go in a different direction whether you take Classical Conversations or not. But it is a great alternative to government schools. Thank you for joining us, Robert.
Yeah, thanks for having me on the show today. Excited to be here. Well, thank you.
I was excited to see that your co author was Alex Newman. I've talked him many times about education, and of course he's written books about this as well. I love every time I talk about education, I use the analogy that Alex Newman did. He said, the schools are like a burning building. So the first thing you want to do is get your kids out of there. Second thing you want to do is put out the fire,
because it's going to burn down our entire neighborhood. And I think that's one of the best analogies I've had for what the issue is and the approach that we should take to it. So we're going to talk about this way that people can get their kids out of this burning building and teach them themselves with classical conversations, but we're also going to talk about the fact that this is burning down our society. And that's really what I think your book is about. Woken Weaponized, how Carl
Marx won the battle for American education. Tell us a little bit about what Marx wanted from education and what he is getting out of our government schools.
Yeah, So, the whole intent of the Marx is to remove children from their families so that children can grow up to view the state as their father. That then they would have a loyalty to the state, and the state can get them to do basically whatever the state wants them to do. And his ultimate goal was to
end religion and end private property. And he understood that that family and child bond was the greatest threat to his worldview, and that he had to figure out a way to get adults to willingly give that up and for children never to form it in the first place.
And so ultimately why our education system is woken weaponized is because the followers of Marx understood that we wouldn't be able to change the United States from the outside, that we weren't going to be able to be taken over by some you know, world war, that the Cold War with Russia was going to inevitably fail, and so they targeted intentionally our school systems, using the Frankfurt School and the Columbia Teachers College to get their Marxist ideologies
into our textbooks, into the formation of teachers at four year universities, so whether they personally identified as Marxists or not, that they would inevitably teaching Marxist worldview to the next generation.
And so each generation forgot a little bit about what the previous generation new, and today we have more than fifty percent of Gen Z thinks democrats socialism is a good idea, despite the fact that it's killed well over one hundred million people, you know, since the early almost you know, one hundred and ten years now, and so it is a destructive ideology. It's really putting the arsonists in charge of the burning building. And that's what we've done here in the United States.
That's right. Yeah, Yeah, they wouldn't know anything if they didn't know the wrong stuff. So yeah, that's kind of where we are right now. And you know what you talked about that and the opposition to the family and how that was in their path. And if you go back to the eighteen hundreds of these utopian societies that constantly failed, organized along communist principles, even though they didn't have Karl Marx. This is even before Karl Marx. They
constantly failed. And they said, only know, the problem is is that we've got to get to the kids earlier. This has always been the case, isn't it. And it's so frustrating that we can't get Americans and Christians to understand how vital that is to get to children in the early years and to really shape them and to tell to guide them, and to give them the truth.
Yeah.
So Horace Man, which is credited with bringing the public school system from Prussia here into the United States, said this, we who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause. In other words, that the kids have become their hostages, which you know, if you're teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic, you know what parent doesn't want that. So
so what was their cause? And their cause, as Horace Man said, was to destroy religion, to destroy private property. And so that's what we do in the book Will Can Weaponize. Is this isn't like my opinion, we actually go back or Alex's opinion is we've done the research. What did Horace Man actually say? You know what did John Dewey say? He said change must come gradually? To force it unduly, would to compromise its final success by
favoring a violent reaction. Well, why would parents act violently if John Dewey just wants to educate their kids? Right? And it wasn't right. It wasn't because they're teaching them how to read and write. And so in Parents Today, you know, we get so many people get frustrated with the school system or we spend so much money on it,
they want to reform it. Like the book points out that the school systems working exactly as the utopian designers want it to work, and so there's no reforming the system because working perfectly, it's actually working better than expected.
The fact that only.
Less than half of American adults now read above a sixth grade level, that is the fruit of the system. But that's that's a high water mark, because only about thirty six percent of kids now can.
Read at grade level.
And it's not like these grade levels are you know, high achieving grade levels. They keep dumbing the grade levels down just to get the kids out of them, and we can't even get but a third of them passing it. Same thing with math, and it's even worse for things like history. I think it's down in the low twenty
percentile are at grade level. And so the whole entire point was to force people to not be able to be sovereign over themselves, to be able to govern themselves, so that they would adopt this collectivist worldview, whether it was you know, a form of a Nazism which is a form of collectivism, or democrats socialism or straight out communism, or you know, any of these sort of collectivist ideology where the state gets to be governed by the powerful and they get to decide you know who wins and
who loses, and we are all, you know, equally under their own yoke.
And so that's ultimately the goal of the system.
And since a person who can read, like Frederick Frederick Douglas said, you know, a former slave and a great American, you know, once you're once you learn how to read, you're forever free, is basically what he said.
And education used to me and it meant that it liberated you with the tools of learning, right exactly.
And so that's what we've been trying to do at classical conversations for a really long time. And yeah, it's even in nineteen eighty two, right before the Wall fell, President Rowan Gaither, he was the Ford Foundation's president, told Norman Dodd, who was part of the White House, that their goal was to successfully merge the United States.
With the Soviet Union.
And so when you have someone like Mindami getting elected, you know of New York City, and you know when he's got giving in his inauguration speech he says, we need to throw off the chains of rugged individual individualism and embrace the warmth of collectivism. That was that was theal of fire. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Unfortunately he's already ran out of people's money. But that was that's been the goal from the beginning, and was to take away our
freedom by dumbing us down. And that's why we say Carl Marks won the battle for American education, because people keep sending themselves kids to these schools even though under every single metric they're failing.
Yeah.
Well, it's important for people to understand the founders here in America that brought this horrendous system to us, Horseman Thomas Dewey, people like that. You know, people look at the Dewey decimal system, how they used to organize library. Does anybody even use that anymore? They even use libraries anymore? But you know, he he comes in with a practical tool that's there, and he insinuates himself off into the
educational system. And yet the reality is, if we go back to people like RL Dabney after the Civil War, he said, education is not fundamentally about math and other things like that. That is kind of a vocational training, he said, it really is about values. And so from the other side of it, you know, if we look at people who have an agenda that they want to teach values that are going to allow them to control to dumb down and to control people like Charlotte Isabee
was talking about the deliberate dumbing down of America. You know, when your goal is to dumb people down to control them, that's one thing. If your goal is to set up people who have a moral foundation and a moral backbone that is strong, that's a completely different thing. And so Url Dabney felt that it was completely had to have a complete separation of school and state, and yet we're
not even where close to that. You had a lot of people who were hopeful, but Trump was going to do something about that when he said he was going to get rid of the Department of Education. You've spoken of that as well. How do you see that happening here? How are they doing in terms of shutting down the Department of Education? Seems like it's still here. I wonder if this is kind of if this is another professional
wrestling narrative from Lenda McMahon. Maybe that's why he put her in charge of education.
Yeah.
So, I mean, I think it's something that people need to understand, is that the federal government has no constitutional authority over education periods. Stop now, ending the Department of Education is a step in the right direction, but It can also be a slide of hand because what they're doing is they're just moving all of the education laws to different departments, whether it's the Department of Finance that's
going to oversee student loans. Well, student loans were all privately run basically before twenty ten and Barack Obama took them over, and there was, you know, a few hundred billion dollars in student loan debt that has quadrupled under the federal government taking over it. So one of the things you've got to do is you've got to get the federal government out of subsidizing and guaranteeing student loans. Yeah, but Congress has to do that and so and of course I.
Think this has driven up tuition. You know, every time, I know so many economists will say, every time you subsidize something, it gets more expensive. And certainly we have seen tuition go through the ceiling. I say, many times I went to a state university and my tuition was less than the cost of my books. And now it's just gone through the ceiling with all the federal loans that are there now. They had HUW Health Educational Welfare for a long time, then they started breaking these things
out as they started getting bigger. When did they start the Department of Education? Where did that break out?
Yeah, so that was in the seventies under Jimmy Carter. So he promised this to the teachers' unions that he was going to create this entity. And since then, I mean, it's basically been a you know, a a Democrat or a socialist money laundering scheme in order to brainwash the next generations. And so we've spent trillions of dollars in this department and not a single education metric has improved.
So just by cutting the expenses to zero, actually not just shutting the one department down, but actually ending these laws that only drive up price and do nothing to improve educational outcomes, we would all be going into national.
Debts slower or maybe paying.
Less taxes as well as having better outcomes. And so do I think the Trump administration wants to maybe get the Department federal government out of education more.
I think they do.
But it's ultimately up to Congress to end these unconstitutional laws or the Supreme Court to step in and end it. But I don't see the Supreme Court doing that anytime soon. So we really need to put pressure on Congress, but it's been a disappointing slide of hand in some ways.
I think even more dangerous when you put some of these educational laws under the Department of Labor, because now you're going to be even thinking about more of this career and college readiness ideology, which is again just part of this socialist worldview that we've adopted over the last sixty or seventy years. Like you said, education is really about forming a moral background for yourself and being able
to become a more complete human being. And some of these other things are more job related, and the federal government has never successfully predicted what the job market was going to look like a year from now, much less ten or twelve years from now, and so the fact that they may be more incentivized along those lines with these changes disturbs me and just goes back to that point of you just got to get your kids out.
Honestly, if you do the exact opposite of what the.
Government entities tell you to do, they'll probably turn out much better.
Yeah, it's kind of interesting, you know, when you look at this the Department of Education, Ronald Reagan was going to end it right as one of his promises. That's what Charlotte isby and Phillips Slapely we're writing about in their book, you know, deliberately dumbing down America. And they were very disappointed that didn't happen. As a matter of fact, it got much much bigger. You know, it could have strangled that thing in the crib, but they let it.
They nurtured it into maturity under the Reagan administration. And that's one of the things that I think is dangerous. We look at this and we think, well, you know, Reagan wants to make government smaller, and he's going to get rid of the Department of Education, and yet he doesn't right see the same thing with the Republicans around
Trump at the same time. But you know, when you're talking about putting some of this stuff, transferring it over to the Labor Department, and how that kind of feeds this whole idea that it's the responsible for the government to train people to work for corporations. You look at that and even in its most benign manifestation, the agenda is kind of wicked. Yes, I mean, we're not here to train our kids to be widgets in some factory, you know, drones on the assembly line, and yet that's
the way they see your children. And it's looking more like there's there's really not any hope for people who are going to be working for big corporations. They're looking at how they can replace everybody with AI and robotics.
Yeah, yeah, it's scary. I mean, as Pink Floyd once said, just another brick in the wall. And that's really what our education system has become. And under the Department of Labor, like, even if you have good people running it now, like under the Trump administration, who are trying to do their best job, like, it still doesn't align with what our federal government is created to do. And just as a Christian what government has been band aidd By got to do.
There is no job creation, you know, no labor laws, like all of these things aren't under the jurisdiction of a civil government. It's primarily justice is what God designed the civil government for. And so anytime it steps out of those bounds, we know it's going to be expensive,
it's going to produce very poor results. And so you know, we've got a system now in the United States where you know, our education system like there are in the City of Chicago, there's forty schools that have zero students that are reading or writing at grade level zero, and one of those schools spends over forty thousand dollars per year per kid. There's a school in New York City that spends about eighty thousand dollars a year per kid with zero kids that can read or do math at
grade level. So it's not money that's the problem. It's the civil government's institution at all that has the issue. And that's what we show in the book Woken Weaponize is the public school system was woken weaponized when it was created in the eighteen fifties and imported here in
the United States. I mean, it's the school system that primed Germany or pressure at the time to start World War One, and so that's been imported to the United States, and we keep thinking that somehow we can disobey God's design for the family and God's designed for civil government
and have good outcomes. And so the most dangerous part about what Trump is doing is one it could lull conservatives to sleep that the Department of Education has ended, when in fact it's never The laws themselves have never been stronger because it's the law themselves that are the problem, not who's administerrating it or what department. So, yeah, there might be some minuscule tax savings where we have less employees in the federal government for that.
And so.
Approach, isn't it you know, Yeah, but it's not getting rid of something. You can't make something more efficient that shouldn't exist.
That's right, we're doing completely wrong thing, but let's make it more efficient. It's like, well, no, let's actually not. You know, I much rather have somebody in there like Hillary Clinton who says it takes a village to raise a child. She has thrown down the gauntlet. Actually she's thrown it in your face. And I just heard Messa Harris Perry say about a decade ago, we've got to get over this notion that children belong to their parents.
They don't. They belong to the state. Right, And so these people will come out and say it out loud, and I find.
That the Republican Party is embraced that same mighty always that's right.
They just put you to sleep, you know. They they assuage your concerns that that's what's really happening, while they fund it and continue it and they'll do little things to make it less abrasive right now, And so it really is a conditioning and that's one of the reasons why they've got to keep going back and forth from one party to the other. They have to condition you.
Democrats push the agenda further down the road, and the Republicans say, oh no, maybe not quite that fast or that far, and let's modify this a little bit to make it a little bit less painful. But we're still going to the same place. We're still doing the same thing essentially.
Yeah, And all that goes back to again, like the design of the system has been so ingrained in our culture now, I mean since the eighteen nineteen sixties was a guy named BF Skinner who basically viewed children and animals to be trained.
And I've got a master's degree in education. Let me interject this here. And she brought that book to her apartment. I was over there looking at her stuff, and it's like beyond freedom and dignity. And I said, it's about time somebody complained about the way the kids are.
Being treated in school.
She has no, no, no, that's a blueprint about what to do that you oppose. He wants to not have any freedom or dignity for human beings. It's like what And that was part of the educational core they were teaching him. They were teaching the kids B. F.
Skinner.
They wanted them to use those skinnerisk approaches on kids.
Oh yeah, so it's part of the I just have a friend who got her masters and they had a whole class praising BF.
Skinner.
This guy's burning in hell unless he had a sort of deathbed confession. But what he's done is, you know, basically destroyed the United States education system or compelled that Marxist ideology into every single classroom.
So like my wife was a public school.
Teacher for ten years, you know, doesn't have a marxistponent in her body. But after she got out, she realized, like all of these things that were in the system. You know, she's straight a student trying to do what's going to be best for her kids, and everything they're teaching her is just conditioning, you know, to condition the
kids to become a little socialists. Yeah, and to condition them to you know, just obey and believe whatever the authorities have for them, which is why we saw during the you know, COVID experienced how many people who are thoughtful people just went along and believed whatever the TV screen was telling them. Well, that's all part of the
conditioning that is built into the public school system. So you can have a great teacher that loves Jesus in front of the classroom, she's still teaching from a Marxist textbook in Marxist classroom, played through redistribution of wealth, which is a Marxist ideology, and so everything about it is Marxist. And of course you want to, you know, soothe those who are in the system itself. But the reality is we need more pastors, more American leaders telling people to get out of the system.
Altogether, I agree.
And of course, flip the script and you've got a teacher who's not a committed Christian and reading off of a script. Let's say that you've got the government that comes in and says, no, no, no, we don't want you reading that stuff. We don't want you to doing the DEI stuff. How many times have we seen teachers cut social media videos that said, well, you know, they said in Texas that we're not going to do this and this this, But I'm the one who's in control
in the classroom and I'm going to teach that. Just try to stop me. And that's the reality. And you know, I've talked to people for over thirty years. We decided we're going to homeschool our kids, and we had them and the I would have people tell me, you know, yeah, I understand, it's really bad at the national level, it's really bad at the state level. And I can even see it happening in our county, but it's not and maybe even in the same school, but it's not happening
in this classroom. I know that teacher, she's great, and I'm not worried at all about my child being there. But then during COVID, they're able to see what was actually happening in the school and they could see what you're talking about, and that made a big difference with a lot of parents. Now a lot of them just didn't care, right, they just go along with it. But I think that's why we're seeing the surge of people moving out of the schools and deciding that they're going
to educate their kids. So let's talk about that. Let's get people a positive vision of where this goes. Tell us a little bit about how classical conversations works and what the goal is and how you accomplish that those types of things.
Yeah, Classical Conversations was started in my parents' basement nineteen ninety seven, so I was one of the first eleven students.
I was homeschooled through high school, and it.
Was really to empower parents to give their kids a classical Christian education through high school through homeschooling, and also with the idea of helping students go after look and seek truth, beauty and goodness and you know, to help people ultimately to know God and to make Him known.
And so a big difference then with the education system is trying to do and so we meet once a week with a tran parent tutor, typically in eight to twelve students per classroom, no more than twelve, and they go through all six subjects and then you're homeschooling them at home the rest of the rest of the week.
But they're coming together and like doing science dissections and debates and mock trials and science fairs and doing poetry jams and things that are more difficult to do alone, but you're doing it in these groups, and we're doing it through a biblical worldview.
So everything points back to Jesus.
We think two plus two equals four tells us something about the nature of Jesus, you know, through a classical model where we're reading the original writings, reading things like the Constitution and Magna Carta and the Federalist papers and comparing them.
And that's so important, the original writings. I love that you brought that up because it's completely different than somebody's textbook summary of something, isn't it when you go back and you read the original.
Oh one hundred percent?
And you got to realize all these textbook companies have their own value system as well, and they're not American values, they're collectivist values. And so yeah, they want you to read it through some woke professor's worldview. So that's the worldview that you get it. I mean, we stop teaching curse of writing, which Chris Writing has a lot of.
We don't at classical conversations. We encourage families still do cursive frighting, but they stop teaching it because they know they know if the kids don't learn curse of frighting, they can't read the Constitution, so that they have to believe whatever some woke professor tells about them. Plus there's so many benefits of it that just you know, develop brain development and hand eye coordination.
From cursive writing.
So so those things have been super you know, important to us. And so we have a full K through twelve program, even college credits available for our students. We have about two thousand groups in the United States, about eight hundred international now over one hundred and thirty five thousand students in our programs. And we're helping families every single year just like yours homeschool successfully and yeah, we do that and we don't have you know, we don't
have any woke wokeness in our curriculum. It's all you know, going back and reinforcing you know, the good and the bad, right, nobody's perfect, but looking at history through like how do how does God view history? And how does that help us to become human beings that will be flourishing, that can help our communities, help our churches, help our businesses be entrepreneurs, you know, go to college, go into ministry.
All those things.
And so it's been awesome and we're looking forward to you know, hitting our thirtieth anniversary next year.
But it's totally a different paradigm like we don't. Yeah, it is.
Tell me a little bit about now. It sounds like you've got a lot more depth into certain subjects in that type. Like we did a homeschool cooperative with our youngest child or daughter when we were in Texas and it didn't have the kind of depth that you're talking about in some of these things. Is that what your organization classical conversations helps to provide to many of the
kids in a more challenging way. What is the difference between let's say, just a homeschool cooperative where you've got parents who volunteer to teach a particular topic to the group so they can go a little bit more in depth with that topic than they would if they were having to cover everything.
Yeah, so we have a full K through twelve curriculum. Most of it has been written by us at this point, but it's written by homeschool grad parents who've empty nested homeschool in the homeschool their own kids, written for homeschool parents, and it's written to be done inside a community once a week, and so it's it's all the subjects, but
it's also that that help. And so you know, this has been battle tested now with millions of students, you know, over the twenty nine years, and we're always learning from those students and learning from those families and then reincorporating it into future virgins and trainings, into our into our system. And so it's not you know, it's a proven roadmap. Like if you ever played the game Oregon Trail growing up, right, you had to select the guide to help you go
to Oregon. Well, we're that guide, and we've been to Oregon a million times, versuly like your typical co op. You know, great people, you know, but they've never been to Oregon before. They're just trying to figure it out as they go, and it's better than doing it on your own, for sure. But they don't necessarily have a vision for twelfth twelfth grade or what a high school graduate should look like. But we've seen, you know, tens of thousands of students graduate now, and so we know,
like what are they capable of doing? You know, what works and what doesn't work, and so just imagine, like you know, millions of years of coaching or millions of years of experience, we sift through all that, pick the best stuff and then give that to you as a parent, so you're not trying to figure things out you know as you go. Of course you're figuring out you know, your own kids and your own rhythms and things like that.
But you know, we've got best practices that make it super easy for you to homeschool your kids, so you don't have to, you know, one less thing for you to worry about.
That's great. Yeah, because when you're doing in cooperative, it's like, okay, so we need somebody to teach X, and it's like, is that me?
I got to go.
Bone up on this stuff now. And so with everything else that's happening in your life, you got go try to find that and enough depth to teach not on your kids, but other kids as well. That's I think a very valuable thing to have that. Having done it the other direction, I can certainly see the value in classical conversations, uh, and having that structure that is there. Now you're not looking to get any grants from the federal government, are you?
No, thank you.
We federal government, you know, is need to stay out of education, and so we don't want to get involved with them in any way.
And because why they would come in and they would start altering your curriculum right away, wouldn't they If they're going to give you the money, they're going to dictate what you teach.
An iron law of economics, that's the iron law of economics, and so you can't.
The medium is the message.
And so if the medium is that the government's going to pay for something, that's a collectivist message, especially when it's something the government has no business being involved in. And so it's of course students who go through twelve years of collectivist conditioning end up being bent in that direction. But that's what it takes, right It takes twenty thousand dollars a year for twelve years to get half of
American generation to think collectivism is a good idea. So it just shows you how expensive this worldview is to how contrary to human nature it is, that it takes that level of effort to get the common man to embrace it. And so we have got to stop reinforcing that system as Christians and just get our kids out.
And the more we get our own kids out and show people that you're going to live a much more flourishing life, your kids are going to be happier, your family's going to be happier that living on this consumerism hamster wheel of hedonism that is basically the American culture today, which leads to depression and among many other symptoms of this is just the rejection of God. And so we need to live our lives as the Bible commands us to live, and it says, teach your children daily my
commandments so that they can live a good life. And you know, we need to get back to that in our country. And we had that for almost one hundred years in our country. It wasn't until eighteen fifty were the first public schools initiated. And it wasn't until nineteen hundred was there a public school in every state. And so it's possible to have educated populist without the government being involved at all, and we have almost one hundred and twenty five years of history to prove it.
Yeah, much better educated. As a matter of fact, I wonder how many of the kids in these schools, since they can't even read at grade level, how many of them could read Thomas Pain's Common Sense, And of course pretty much everybody was reading that back in the day. It's very very high literacy, right, And there are no schools involved except perhaps as you know, like a graduate school or something, somebody's going to go into a profession
law or medicine or something like that. But it does go against the basic design of God, and we should always expect that there's going to be problems when we do that. You know, God has set up the family and he has done that in a loving way, and he's done that in a way that really works. And when we decide that we don't want to do it that way, we'd rather have the government do it that way.
It's very much like what the Israelites did when they rejected Samuel and they said we want a king right and God said, well, they haven't rejected you, Samuel, They've rejected me. And so that's the issue is that parents have reeted what they have that is really a wonderful thing. It's a wonderful experience to be able to teach your kids.
And you know, we had seen this and we met some wise people who are talking about it as we got into the beginning of this, and they talked about how well, you know, I've seen that when you have kids that are in school, they get bonded to their teachers, they get bonded to their fellow students in school. But when we teach in homeschool, I think they're bonded to their parents. They're bonded to their siblings as much as anything else. And of course they do get involved with
people on the outside. And I could look at that. I could see that in my own life going through a school, that I did get bonded to teachers and to classmates and stuff like that. I didn't have any siblings that were my age, but I could see how that could be the case. And certainly that is and it's much better to go with God's plan.
Always it always is.
And I think that's the part where we need pastors to step up here in this country. I mean, you've got I mean, the statistics are horrendous, and so you know, we've got you know, Barnes says, somewhere about seventy three percent or maybe seventy eight percent of students who are in church regularly but go to public school are no longer practicing Christians just two years after graduating high school.
And so you know, if.
Jesus told the story of the good shepherd who went after one lost sheep, well what happens is when you're losing seventy three sheep. You know his pastors should be fearful of what they're going to say in the beam a Sikh if they have those statistics inside of their you know, inside of their you know, sheep, that they're that they're leading. And the same thing with parents, like, what are you going to say in the beam a Sikh? When God says, hey, I gave you these kids, this
is one of the most precious gifts. I gave you, says that in the Bible, to raise them in the way.
They should go. And for twelve years you turned them over to.
A godless atheist education system, contrary to what I commanded you to do. And so many parents have probably never heard it framed that way. And that's because our many pastors in America are more afraid of the teachers' unions than they are of God. And I'm happy for any pastor to challenge me on that and preach the evils of the public school system this upcoming Sunday.
That's right.
Yeah, it's so many times it's about filling the pews rather than filling the hearts with truth, isn't it. And so yeah, it really is something it's not just responsibility of the parents. But it's something that pastors and leaders need to look at this and say, you know, what
is happening to us and why is that happening. They don't seem to want to meet people where they are and to speak to the issues that are front and center, that are directly affecting them, give people some guidance, some wisdom, some discernment about what they're seeing in their everyday life. Instead, it's kind of like, you know the woman at the well when Jesus says, well, let's talk about your life here.
You know, you're living with this guy you're not married with, and you've had half a dozen other husbands or whatever, and she said, oh, you're a prophet. Let's talk about theology, and she changes the topic. And so it's really easy to talk about theology. It can be very uncomfortable if we talk about our own personal lives, can it, and
how that all applies in our own lives. It's much easier and much more comfortable to talk about theology or to talk about prophecy or something like anything other than the stuff that is really killing us.
Yeah, And the good thing is I think more pastors are waking up to this and getting bolder from the pulpit.
But that's what we absolutely need.
And then business people like these are your future customers, these are your future employees, Like this system is not helping you out. It is we are funding a system that is going to turn them against you so that you have higher taxes, more tape, more headaches, maybe even bankrupt you because you're, you know, not doing the right
three letter acronym that's in vogue. And so businesses, you need to start scholarships for your kids, you know, employees, or don't to local private schools, or help local homeschool co ops or groups.
You know.
Give if your employee has a new baby, give them a book about education or teaching your child how to read. Because the nice thing is is there's not a complicated answer. It's just parents need to be discipling their kids. They need to be teaching them to read. The state will not teach you to read. They've proven that time and time again. You know, forty years ago, a parent would have been embarrassed to send their kid to public school without them being able to read.
Well.
Nowadays, parents will complain to the public school if your kid doesn't know how to read, but they're not going to do it. You've got to do it yourself, and so it requires sacrifice, and that if you can't homeschool today, then start reading with your kid every single night and making sure that they're able to think well and that you're deprogramming them because they are getting programmed every single day in that public school system.
I just want to say too. You know, we look at parenting as a difficult job, no doubt about it, and there are difficult things like changing diapers and stuff like that, but it is the joy of having your child around. And that's what people who've homeschooled miss, you know, is the joy of being able to interact with them
that way, and it really can be a joy. So, I mean, you know, when you look at this, this is a job responsibility that's been given to you, but it is a joyful responsibility if you look at that. It's an opportunity to spend time with your children and to have a relationship with them when they get into their teens because you've been with them when they were younger, and it's about maintaining that relationship. I think that's the
key thing. You know. Yeah, there's work involved, in it, but it's one of the most rewarding jobs that you're ever going to have.
Yeah, I mean everything in life that's worth doing is worth doing well and absolutely, like what have you ever accomplished in life? Like, the harder it was to accomplish, the more satisfaction it was, right, And you see that over and over again. I mean even like lottery winners, Right, lottery winners, they didn't accomplish anything. They have all this money, and what do they do. They go bankrupt, they get depressed, they commit suicide, like at a significantly higher rate.
So they've achieved.
Everything in life with no work, and they're miserable. Right, And so we got to also remember like that God created work before sin. He gave Adam and Eve jobs to do before Sin entered the world. So Sin entering the world only made work difficult. Work is actually part of our imago day, part of our reflection of our creator.
And so part of the reason that the collective is hate work so much is because they know that that's a reflection of God in us and that if they are to destroy religion, they need to do everything they can to destroy that that ref and so that's why they're happy to dumb down the standards, you know, happy to have people that don't work in are on welfare you know, twenty four seven through sixty five for the rest of their lives because they know that all that
is degrading to their humanity and makes them easier to control in the future based on whatever preferences they have.
And so, yeah, I think I agree we're living it out.
Yeah. I've interviewed David Bonson several times and he's written books about you know, your profession, that type of thing and son of Greg Bonson if people remember the Apologist, and that's the point he made, is that the same thing you've made the second person I've heard to make that point, and it's a very strong and important point.
Work is not a curse.
Work is part of who we are being, as you point out, in the image of God, and it's the It's what is the curse is the work being made difficult, which was a result of our rebellion as mankind. But work itself is a very fulfilling thing, and it's something that is in and of itself is good. And so we should not shy away, especially from the work that God has gifted us to do.
If God has.
Given you a child, then God will give you the ability to train that child and what they need to know. And there's no question about that. That's what he wants, and there is a tremendous reward and lining yourself up with what God wants. It always works that way, doesn't it.
So it always does.
Yeah. So your website is it Classical Conversations dot com or something like that?
What is your way?
Yeah, classical Conversations dot com. If you go to there and put in your zip code, I will connect you with a local homeschooling parent happy to answer any of your questions about Classical Conversations or just homeschooling in general. So we've got representatives across all fifty states in many countries around the world as well. And then you can find the book at Robert Bortons dot com or at
Amazon dot com. You can find Woke and Weaponized How car Marks won the Battle for American Education and how we can win it back.
That's great, that's great. Well, it's wonderful. I didn't know that your parents started the organization, but that's great that you're continuing the work. It's very important and I know a lot of people, as I said before, who did classical conversations, and they absolutely loved it, and so I would recommend it based on their experience. We never experienced it, but going if I had it to do over again, I'm sure I would go that way. Thank you so
much for joining us again. Our guest is Robert Borden's and the book is woke and weaponized, how Carl Marks won the battle for American education and how we can win it back. That's the key thing. It's not just identifying a problem, but it's coming up with a solution as well.
Thank you so much for joining us, Robert, Thank you, Thank you.
The common man. They created common Core and dumb down our children. They created common past track and control us. Their Commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing and the communist future. They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated ordinary. But each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God. That is what we have in common. That is what they want to take away.
Their most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation. They desire to know everything about us, while they hide everything from us. It's time to turn that around and expose what they want to hide. Please share the information and links you'll find at the Davidnightshow dot com. Thank you for listening, Thank you for sharing. If you can't support us financially, please keep us in your prayers. The Davidnightshow dot com