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Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets and today is Monday, October 27, 2014. Today we're gonna talk about education and specifically, I'm gonna give you some valuable context and information that you may not have ever been exposed to, which I think will help you and give you a higher degree of confidence to make decisions about the cost of education to radically improve your financial plan.

Today's show is gonna be a little bit different and this is part of a series that I'm doing on education. And this series is probably going to be very unique in terms of the context of how to pay for college. That's ultimately where we're heading. But when I sat down to kind of create this series, I could have easily just sat down and said, "Let me talk to you about how a 529 plan works, and here's what the prepaid tuition program is, and here's what states have the lowest cost, you know, contribution program, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Go online and Google it. You can find it." And I'll do that. I really will. But I wanted to give you a little bit of context that I think will help you to make different decisions. But in order to do that, I really struggled with how to do it.

And the buzzword of today is context, context, context. And there's two types of context that I want you to gain from today's show. First, in the preamble to the show, I'm gonna give you a little bit of context as far as why I'm presenting this topic to you in the way that I'm presenting it to you.

And then throughout the interview that's coming, you're gonna have some context around the history of school that I think will be very valuable for you. Context for why I'm doing these shows the way that I'm doing it. For education is a major factor in lifetime success, and it's a major factor in every financial plan.

Many people think retirement is the primary question that a financial planner spends time talking about. It's actually, it is a primary thing, but it's not necessarily the most primary thing. Education, specifically with a major focus on college education, is a major, major factor in many people's financial plans. In fact, many clients will often prefer education over retirement.

Most parents would gladly defer retirement in order to provide their kids with the start in life that they need. So we're all familiar with college planning. We're all familiar with the idea of saving for college. This is commonly referred to in people's discussions. We want to save for retirement, save for their kids' education.

So this is a normal, and properly so, a normal goal that that parents have. But yet this is also one of the more expensive purchases in life. If somebody were to choose to retire at, say, 65 years old and they were to live to, say, 90, that would be one of the most expensive things to fund.

But the second biggest expense for many people is the cost of education. And by education, I include in that both the cost of college, which is usually what many people are worried about, and all of the costs associated with high school education, middle school education, elementary school education, pre-kindergarten education.

I'm incorporating all types of education. We as parents, those of us who are parents, will spend tens of thousands of dollars on these costs, whether they're direct costs or indirect costs. They may be direct costs with the cost of actually paying tuition. They may be direct costs of the cost of supporting the government school system with the cost of with our tax payments, property tax payments that supply it.

They may be indirect costs, paying for extracurricular activities, things like that. So we will pay for these costs. And the question is, is there a more intelligent way to hack the system, as it were? Is there a radical personal finance approved method? Is there a radical method that could get us dramatically better results for dramatically cheaper cost?

And I think there are some really great methods that can be employed. The trouble is, however, the mindset that we may have around it. And I have found that we need to have, in order to, effectively accomplish this discussion, we need to have an ability to understand the context and the history.

So today's show is all going to be about history of school, so that we understand a little bit. If we don't understand the history of something, let me use a simple example. If you're talking to me about college, and you're asking questions, and I'm giving you advice on how to pay for college and why you should pay for college, if you don't know anything about the history of college education, the facts that most people associate with is the higher degree of earning power from going to college, the higher degree of lifetime earnings from getting a college degree, if you don't know any of that history, then you don't have any context for why you should be considering it as part of your financial plan.

But if you have a little bit of the history, then you can more easily make decisions. You can understand why there are tax breaks for certain decisions, why there are subsidies for certain courses of action. The problem that I faced when I was doing financial planning around college, however, is that many times the decision shouldn't start in college.

If you give me somebody who's just going into college, as far as a freshman, it's too late to do financial planning. A, it's too late for the parents to do much for it, but it's too late to do much of the stuff that has the biggest difference. Why did this kid not get a free ride?

Why didn't we start planning for that in middle school and figure out how to get a free ride? Now, there's lots of ways to do that. There are a lot of things that can be done. So I'm trying in this series of shows that I'm doing to present to you some alternative ideas that I think will make a dramatic difference in paying for college.

Where I'm heading is ultimately to give you the technical show. The technical show on here's how a 529 plan works, and here's how an educational savings account works, and here's who can use them, and here's what you can put in them, and things like that. I will give you that technical show.

I'll also give you some of the funky ideas that are probably more useful than those accounts. I'll give you that show, but I wanted to start a little bit farther back. And so this show today, which is episode 89, is actually number two in this series. The first show was episode 77.

If you're interested in that one, it's radicalpersonalfinance.com/77. And in that one I said, "How to Pay for College, Teach Your Babies to Read." That was probably the most loosely connected show to this topic. And the reason is it's just something fun that I think is really interesting. I think it has dramatic potential.

If you can work with children and babies when they're six months old and six weeks old and a year old and two years old and three years old, it can make a dramatic difference as far as their personal abilities and development. But it's an area that I'm a total amateur in, so I was more just sharing as a friend of friend of things I'm interested in and I think are cool to look at and study, but I'm not an expert in that.

Next I'm going down to how to pay for primary school education. And how do we pay for high school? How would we figure out how to do this? Do we buy a house in a good school district so we can go to a good public school and save the cost on private school?

Do we need to go to a private school? Is there a certain type of private school that's going to make a difference? So that's the second kind of part of this series moving on toward college, giving a little bit of advance notice as far as advanced preparation toward the college subject.

But I realized as I was trying to develop my outline for these shows that if you don't have a little bit of the historical context of the history of school, the range of potential decisions that you'll make is very small. So I wanted to give you a little bit of the history that I have discovered surrounding the history of school.

And I think you'll find it interesting. I find it utterly fascinating. And I think you'll find it interesting. But it's not—you may—if you're the type of person that gets frustrated with not having, you know, input, decision, decision, decision, decision, just give me this fax, you may find this frustrating and you may want to skip today's show, but I would ask you to consider trying it and listening to it, because you may not be familiar with some of the information.

I know that I certainly wasn't until the last couple of years when I've really worked hard to try to enhance my knowledge around it. Today's show is an interview with a man named Brett who hosts the—he's the founder of the School Sucks Project. There's a podcast associated with that called the School Sucks Podcast.

And I didn't feel capable of bringing you the history of the school system simply because I'm an amateur on the subject. And I didn't feel capable of doing it and being able to focus on the important things. So I've reached out to Brett, and he's on the show, and we've done this interview, and it's going to be divided into two parts.

Today's interview is kind of the introduction of the history. And then tomorrow I'm going to release part two. In total, the interview is just under three hours, and part two is going to be all about the solutions. Part one is all about the history, and part two is all about some of the alternative solutions that Brett has developed as a teacher and in working with this situation.

So I hope you find it interesting. I'm going to ask you to listen today with an open mind. This subject is one that could be fairly contentious, and it may be new information to you. It is by necessity cursory. Brett does a great job of kind of walking through the information, but it's fairly cursory as far as the actual level of knowledge that is in the show.

That's not the right way to say it. The level of detail that's in the show. There's a book that you'll hear referenced, that I've referenced on the show multiple times, called "An Underground History of American Education." This book is 440 pages, and they are single-spaced. I'm holding it here in my hand.

Single-spaced, 8.5 by 11 pages. It's dense. It's a very, very dense book. So we're trying to cover in about an hour basically a very voluminous history on schooling. But I think Brett does a great job of introducing the subject to you. I would ask you, though, to listen with an open mind, and my hope is indeed to foster debate.

But I am not debating with you over what is right or what is wrong. I'm trying to simply give information, and I hope to foster a lively debate in your own head and with your friends and your circle of influence. Happy to have the debate on the blog if you're interested as well, but my main focus is not to say what somebody should do, but rather just give some information that I have often not heard talked about.

This is a very important subject to me because I'm a teacher. I've never taught in a formal school setting, but I am a teacher. I consider what I'm doing on the show to be teaching, and I actually come from a long lineage of teachers. My mother was a teacher in the government school system.

My grandmother was a teacher for many years. My sister is a teacher. My brother-in-law is currently a teacher. And I love teaching. Without knowledge and without education, what do we have? And the people that have sowed into our lives are usually the greatest teachers. So we touch in this interview on a lot on the history.

We go into just a tiny little bit of politics at the end, not in a "this is right" and "this is wrong," but just because the conversation flowed that way. We cover a little bit of Common Core, which is important in today's language. I think you'll be interested in that discussion.

And I would ask you just to give the information in today's show—give it a listen. In tomorrow's show, we come back with solutions. I will cut the interview off specifically right when we start getting into solutions. The interview is about an hour and 27 minutes today. Give it a little bit of time through about the first four minutes.

I ask Brett a little bit about his background, and I'll give you some of his background as a teacher, but give it just a little bit of time to get into the meat of the show. I hope you enjoy today's show. Sit back, relax, and enjoy learning some history that you may never have studied, and I hope you find it fascinating, as I do.

So, Brett, welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. I appreciate you being with me this morning. Thank you so much. It's great to be here. So you're probably—I would bet that this is probably your first time coming on a personal finance podcast to talk about education. Do you get a lot of calls from people to talk about finance and school at the same time?

It's my first time on a personal finance podcast ever. Well, good. Well, I think we'll see as the interview goes on. I'm hoping to pull out some themes and to just basically use you as a resource of knowledge to share with me and teach me some things and teach the audience some things as well.

So we're here today to talk about school and education, and what I'd love to do is would you start with maybe a little bit about your background and your path as a teacher and then how you wound up hosting the School Sucks podcast? Sure, absolutely. The way I usually describe it to people is I was continuously learning my way out of jobs that I had.

And, you know, I wasn't really—it wasn't like I was taking a moral stand against a kind of work that I was doing. It's just like the more I learned about, you know, the environment that I was in and what was behind it and what I was really being asked to do, what my function really was, I stopped enjoying that work and no longer wanted to do it.

So my career started, you know, I was still in college. I was pursuing a bachelor's degree in communications, and I really fell in love with history. I had a great history professor, and it had always been a subject that I didn't like very much. I actually really kind of despised in high school.

I thought it was terribly boring. But this guy had such a wonderful energy that it really ignited my interest. And he was so dynamic and passionate about the subject, it actually started to get me interested in the idea of teaching. And there were a variety of things that were happening around for me around the age of 20, 21, that had me looking for a new course in life, and I really felt that it was important to give something.

I don't know how to describe it today. I think I was very politically confused, and I felt like I owed something to society. I felt like a meaningful life was making some kind of contribution. And I still believe that to an extent, but the way my conception of it then was very different.

And the first job I had working with young people was in a boarding school for troubled kids, kids who had been labeled like oppositional defiant, kids who were struggling with a variety of psychological or academic behavioral issues. It was a place where you could move up. It was private, so you could move through the ranks pretty quickly.

I moved kind of sideways first from being like a residential person to a teacher's aide. I asked them to promote me to a difficult lead teaching position on a specialized campus. They did that. I put in a couple of years in a very challenging environment, like I said, and I asked them as basically a reward to make me the history teacher of this other school they ran.

So this was my career progression from about 2000 to 2006. In 2006, I moved to the Boston area, and I just started doing private tutoring, mostly academic tutoring at first, which was the best view I had of the operation of public schools. I had learned a lot about the state's care of children working in the private school because all the it wasn't really private.

I mean, all the money came from state departments of child services and Medicaid and stuff like that. But I got actually basically a walking tour of the public schools in Massachusetts, where the public schools are considered to be really extraordinary as far as public schools go in the greater Boston area.

Between 2006 and 2008, I did a lot of SAT tutoring at that time, and in 2009, I teamed up with a professor from King's College in New York, and we started just a little tutoring business in New Hampshire that was primarily focused on the SATs and follow up tutoring for the SATs.

And I did that until 2013 and wasn't really enjoying the work very much anymore. It was very repetitive, so it's very easy, but it was boring. And I realized running this small company how much time I was spending doing essentially unpaid work. I mean, I think as a contractor, and I think of like a dollar amount attached to every hour I spend, and a lot of the work was just basically investigation, trying to make connections, dealing with football booster clubs.

And I understand that down the road that work can produce money, but at the same time I had been doing the School Sucks podcast and running the School Sucks project since about 2009. I said, "Well, if I'm going to be doing this low-income work, I really would rather be doing it with something I'm passionate about," which was the show, Expanding and Growing the Show, which I started, like I said, in 2009 basically as a kind of therapy to talk about all of these stories and experiences that I had had working in and around the public schools, mostly in Massachusetts from 2006 to 2008.

But I also had all of this interesting experience prior to that, and I had a lot to say. And I was becoming more politically aware between like maybe 2005 and 2008. So I was listening to other podcasters who were like-minded, and I was pausing and kind of talking through some of the things they were saying, and I was really driven to say something, to do something.

And at the same time, I was missing kind of the audience that I had had as a classroom teacher, and that was why I started the podcast in 2009. I need to hear your background, and I want to talk about what you cover with the podcast, but I want to give you just a little bit of introduction, just to kind of how I came to learn a little bit more about the history of the school system.

So I come from a-and this will help, I think, to also center the conversation for the audience. I come from a background of working as a professional financial advisor. So I'm young. I'm almost 30. And for the last six years, I worked as a full-time financial planner. And when I started working as a financial planner, I was young when I started.

I was 23 when I started. And I – to me, I had just a lot of very simple answers. I thought everything was essentially straightforward. After all, I had always been interested in personal finance. The rules of how to get wealthy and stay wealthy were fairly simple and fairly straightforward.

And I figured all I needed to do was just simply teach people all the stuff that I had learned and that I had memorized, and everything would be simple. Then I actually started working as a financial advisor, and in working as a financial advisor, I started to experience that even though I might have had a technically correct answer, then technically correct answer, it didn't always work.

And what I learned is that it just felt like – and I'm compressing a lot into a short period of time here, but it felt like a majority of the people that I was working with didn't – everyone was kind of pursuing the same path, that they didn't actually understand why they wanted and why they cared.

And it wasn't really working, but everybody felt like they should be doing something that they weren't doing. And so specifically, this is most apparent around the topic of retirement planning. When you ask over a thousand people, "When do you want to retire," essentially, and a great majority of them tell you age of 65 or 60, and I'm looking at it, and then I ask, "Why?" And you find out there's really nothing behind that except that's what everyone else does.

That really bothered me because I looked at it, and I'm a pretty kind of – I think I'm a little bit of an out-of-the-box thinker, and I say, "Why would you wait until 65? Why don't we do it other ways?" So when I would start to describe other paths to people, other potential ways to achieve their financial goals more quickly, I'd often get a blank stare.

And then I was frustrated that I didn't seem like anybody wanted to learn anything. And so through a variety of circumstances, that got me interested in saying, "Why? Like what is wrong? Because – and how can I not – why can I not get people to do these things that work more quickly?

Why can't I get someone to leave a job and just go start a business?" And that sent me through a series of interesting occurrences to studying the school system and learning about some of the history that I had never known. And so that's kind of how it connected to finance, and I've bumbled into the history of schooling without any prior connection to it from a school perspective.

I've bumbled into it trying to solve the problem in financial planning. And I was a little bit – I came from – I was educated at home through seventh grade, and then I went to a private school through high school, and then college and whatnot through a more traditional path.

So I think I had some experience that made me more receptive than many people. So that's just to give you some background as far as how I stumbled into thinking and talking about schooling. Yeah, there's something you said too, though, that really – it made me think the attitudes of obedience and conformity that are just so prevalent in society.

It was one word. And I'm not faulting anyone for this. I don't want to say that people are thoughtless about this because it sounds so crass, but I just don't think people have ever really been given the opportunities in some cases to think about these things. And retirement – when I hear somebody say that word, I have so many questions.

What does retirement mean to you? I mean, I think now about how I spend 30 to 50 hours of my week, and I wouldn't want to not do that. Is it like relief from doing that thing? Do you sit on the beach? Do you join a shuffleboard league? What does it mean?

What do you do with all your time? And so even the idea of retirement kind of leads me to the question of, what are you doing in life? Do you want relief from that? Are you deferring happiness that you could have now some way? Just with this end date in mind that I guess was kind of – I don't want to say it was arbitrarily set by the government at 65, but are people just kind of like fighting their way through life to get to that point when they can do what?

Nothing? I have so many questions about that, you know? But I think it kind of lines up nicely with what you were saying, that people would give you this answer of 65 just because that's like a set retirement age and that's when it will be over. Right. And I've done a lot of history – excuse me – as much studying as I've been able to find to find out about the history of retirement as a word and as a concept.

I've got a couple of shows where I talk about the history a little bit that you might be interested in afterward with some of what I have learned on the subject. But I really feel like you hit the nail on the head as far as people often not kind of getting a clear picture.

And what I observed is – as a simple example, you make the point of, OK, you can just simply transition from – you can just – why would you want to – why not create something that you wouldn't want to quit from? And this is what I learned in doing financial planning.

I learned – once I learned all the science of it and I took away the whole idea of retirement that I've got to do this for these benefits and once I learned about benefits and learned about tax and all the mystery went away, then I said there's a simple and easy way to retire.

Pick a job that you wouldn't want to retire from and go do it. But I couldn't get – I struggle to get people to A, figure out what they want to do and I think this has a lot to do with schooling which is where I want to go to.

I feel like A, people don't – even me, I'm not that in touch with what I actually want to do because I'm not accustomed to thinking about what I want to do. I'm accustomed to simply doing what I'm told to do that I need to do. And then B, helping people to have the courage to just make the jump out of what seems to be safe and secure into what seems to be scary.

And those are the two things with financial planning that seem to be the two biggest obstacles. Number one, not knowing what we want and number two, having the fear of going after it. So I've been trying to figure out why. Like why psychologically do we face this fear? And I think part of it might have something to do with schooling.

So you reached the conclusion that school doesn't work. Why did you reach that conclusion and how? Well, first of all, it depends on – does the school work? It depends on who you ask. I mean, I would think that the average politician, if you could get them alone in a room and get them to be honest, somebody running for office on a national level, they would say, "Oh, man, school is awesome." Nobody has any critical questions.

Look at the media. Look at what people are ingesting and calling the news. I think that there's obviously – I don't want to get down on marketing or advertising. I think there are obviously important functions in a free market economy. But in my opinion, those people should have to work a little harder to win people over.

Like there is an uncritical nature of adults on certain issues, even people who are very, very smart, people who have skills that I'm just always impressed by. I remember having political arguments with a dentist, a brilliant man in some respects, but his attitudes politically, I was just like, "You're allowed to put a drill in a person's mouth?" With this kind of thinking.

So the compartmentalization of knowledge or lack thereof is very interesting. I think for pupils and for parents, we could say that the schools aren't working. But there is certain corporate interests or government interests or even academic interests that really, I would say, if you could get those people to be honest, they like what the schools are doing.

I would say the schools don't work because they teach three primary lessons, three primary hidden lessons. The first one I already mentioned was obedience. The second, conformity. And as a result of those two lessons, I think you get kind of an intellectual apathy. If you're obeying and conforming, that leads to obviously a lack of energy when it comes to thinking.

There's not a lot of thinking required in obedience and conformity. So I would say in that respect, the schools do not work. And largely, that's by design. I think sometimes if I talk about it in too shorthand a way, it sounds like an evil plan, but it really wasn't.

It was the misguided good intentions in a lot of cases that paved this road to hell. And it's a long story. I wanted to ask you how much time you wanted to spend on the history of school. Did you want a five minute version, a ten minute version? What were you thinking?

I want to give it a... It can't be as long as Underground History of American Education. Otherwise we'd be here for about 50 hours. But I don't want to give it a five minute version because this is an aspect of history that I'm fascinated with. And what's so interesting is that I was always excellent at history as far as passing the test.

I got a five on my AP US History exam and I knew how to study, but I always hated it. And then I became an adult and I started studying a little bit of history of things that I cared about. And now I'm essentially obsessed with history because if I can understand the history of something, then that allows me to understand a little bit more about...

That allows me to understand the present with a little bit more of a clearer lens on what's actually happening. So let's trace through the history of the school system. And we can take as much time as we need. How did we get to where we are today? Sure. Well, on my show, in most of my narratives about this, we're usually starting the story of public schooling in the Kingdom of Prussia, which was in Central Europe where Germany is today, usually in the 1810s, or sometimes we can start the story in the United States in the 1840s or really the 1850s where that Prussian system was spread.

Now, before I go into that in any detail, I think it's worth pointing out that the concept of education as a public good on a national scale predates both of those periods. I mean, there's legislation in government action regarding the idea of education as a public good all the way back into the 1780s.

And there's something called the Northwest Ordinance where there was basically requirements for systems of public schooling to be set up every time a new township was established. And this also includes like how do we raise money through taxes and how is land allocated for this purpose? And into the 19th century, there was more legislation regarding land grants for not just public schools, but also colleges and all the way into like the 1860s during the Civil War when they're talking about specific purposes of teaching agriculture, mechanical arts, industrial education, things like that.

Now, the interesting thing is that nowhere in the U.S. Constitution, which is allegedly, I'm told it's supposed to be like the guiding document of the United States government. Is there any mention of education as a public good on a national scale? Therefore, it should be a state's issue, according to the 10th Amendment, that all the powers that are not explained as a role of the federal government are left to the states.

For some time, that was the case, even when a lot of academics and intellectuals started to have designs for national schooling or even a national curriculum, which is a very old idea that's still being pushed today. Education was really up to the states. And of course, even today, education is funded to a large degree on a local level, even though it is controlled to a large degree on the federal level.

And I think one of the important changes in this was in the 1860s, there was the 14th Amendment, right after the Civil War. And basically what the 14th Amendment does is it guarantees rights to all citizens. And there's certainly a lot of questions in that statement. But the actual text is something like anybody who's born in the United States or becomes a naturalized citizen.

You know, no state can make any laws that deny them the privileges or immunities or protections under the United States. So in other words, and what's kind of sneaky here is that everybody is now not a citizen of their state, but a citizen of the United States. And the federal government, because of this, sees people working within the federal government or people working around the federal government, see the federal government as having all kinds of new responsibilities to its citizens.

All documentation regarding the United States prior to the Civil War was written as "the United States are." After the Civil War, it's "the United States is." So, you know, that was one very important legislative piece of the history, right? That with the 14th Amendment and everyone becoming kind of wards of the federal government, then you see that there's more of an impetus for a national plan of education as a public good or as a public service.

And, you know, there's other angles that we can pursue this from as well. It's not as simple as just shifting to the state as a form of control. There's all of these religious forces around the same time that we might not really understand today. I think maybe like when people watch the news and they hear about like sectarian violence in Iraq, and then you realize that these are just two different sects of the same religion, and the disagreement that they have that has them at odds, that has them killing each other, seems like maybe even pretty arbitrary or, you know, at least kind of small.

There's a lot of this going on in academia, and maybe more substantial as far as the religious disagreements are concerned. But there's an author named Sam Blumenfeld, B-L-U-M-E-N-F-E-L-D, who's done a lot of good work on this subject. And academia in the United States really prior to the 19th century was controlled by the Calvinists.

Calvinists had founded Harvard University in the 17th century. And essentially what they believed is, I think, an idea that is pretty common to most forms of Christianity, this idea of the Holy Trinity. I know that's definitely the case with Catholicism, and it's "Father, Son, Holy Spirit." What comes along, and this sounds so strange that this was like such a significant turning point, I think, to us in the 21st century, but around the beginning of the 1800s, universities like Harvard were basically taken over by a group called the Unitarians.

And Uni kind of gets rid of this Holy Trinity idea, that the only really holy or divine force is God, and the Son, Jesus, is not really divine. And this is like the big split, and it's seen as kind of a liberalization of dogma. And these people managed to take over in academia, and if salvation is not going to be-- I'm hearing myself say this, and it sounds so silly, but this was like a huge debate and a huge turning point a couple hundred years ago.

If salvation is not going to be delivered through the central figure in Christianity, which is Jesus, what eventually comes out of it is the belief that it's going to be delivered by earthly forces, by the guidance of the wise on earth, and it's going to be done through intellectuals, through academics, and essentially through the state.

And that, in short, is the result of the shift at places like Harvard University from Calvinism to Unitarianism, that salvation would be delivered through an enlightened population, and the responsibility for that enlightenment would be in the hands of the government. And this is really what I believe opened the door to the embrace of this Prussian system that I mentioned at the beginning of this talk.

But I'll pause there, just if you have any questions. Obviously, the implementation of the Prussian system is very important, but if you have any questions about what I've talked about so far-- Yeah, it's valuable, and two things occur to me. One is, have you read the book The Messianic Character of American Education by R.J.

Rush Dooney? I have not. So I have not either. It's on my reading list, and it's freely available online. So he comes from a Christian perspective, and he talks about basically exactly what you said, the messianic, the idea that education is the religion of the day. And what's interesting when you get into talking about religion and talking about the impact of religion on our society, I think--correct me if I'm wrong--you say that you're an atheist, right?

So you're coming from a very non-religious perspective, is that right? Yeah, I'm coming from a very non-religious perspective. Right. And so I come from a very--I don't like the word "religious" because I'm actually far out of the mainstream, but I come from a very--I'll use the word "religious." I come from a very Christian religious perspective, and so it's very important to me, and I have some pretty strong opinions on it.

What's interesting, though--and Rush Dooney as well, he comes at it from an extremely Christian perspective. So what's interesting to me is that in this conversation, lest anybody think that it's a matter of one side versus the other, all the history that you've just shared is all the history that I have found as well, and yet you're coming at it from the perspective of an atheist, and I'm coming at it from the perspective of a devout Christian.

And it's dramatic how this--this is what fascinates me, is that we can both recognize the course of facts that take over. And I don't think you can understand history without understanding even the history of religion, because it's such a dramatic factor of control in societies. And you go back and you start studying the history of religion, even today you look at Christian denominations, and you look at--as you said, I don't understand the conflicts in Islam between the different sects of Islam.

I have not studied it enough to even have a hint of understanding on it. But I look, and you trace the course of conflict between various Christian denominations, as the priests and the religious people took over, and then this denomination against that, and you can't--if you don't understand that, you can't understand the history of the United States, or frankly, the world.

So that is my--just my indicate--just I wanted to comment on that, because if anyone is concerned about--oftentimes in our society, we're so polarized with an inability to have a discussion going back and forth about history, that immediately we start to say, "Well, that can't possibly be true." No, it is true.

And the religious control over society is amazing. So keep going. Yeah, absolutely. I have this kind of running joke on my show, and it's a joke, where I call the British the idiots of history, because every time they go somewhere, basically something bad happens. And, you know, almost like they're this Mr.

Bean character. And obviously that's a gross simplification. Sure. And it's not representative of how I really think we need to look at history, which is, to some extent, we have to be willing, even though it's hard and frustrating at times, to examine people in the context of their times.

Right. And people--most people who lived will--if we look at them through the lens of the 21st century and what we know and what most of us believe, they will look completely insane. But, you know, to understand the importance, the weight that this carried in academia at the beginning of the 1800s, I think is very, very important.

And it humanizes people as well, because it's very easy to say, "Oh, these jerks, you know, they wanted to--they found this cruel schooling system in Central Europe that, you know, five generations later would be the Third Reich, and they brought it to America, and either, you know, that's just a terrible, irresponsible lack of foresight or an evil plan." And obviously it's way more nuanced than that.

You know, so to move into the Prussian connection here, one of the people most responsible for the implementation of the Prussian system in the United States in the 19th century was Horace Mann, who was a Unitarian. And it was--I think it's worth talking a little bit--for people who are totally unfamiliar, before we get into that, just inserting a brief Prussian history.

Obviously, in the late 1700s and early 1800s, Central and Western and Eastern Europe, very messy place politically. A lot of, you know, perpetually changing borders. Prussia is a very militaristic kingdom. It's been called--Gatto mentions this in the Underground History-- people refer to it as an army with a country, essentially.

Just to give you some idea of what Prussian society is like. And they're looking to expand West, and as they're doing this, unfortunately for them, they run into a guy who has a pretty good reputation for, you know, military competence named Napoleon in France, and he kind of beats them back, I think, like right in the first decade of the 1800s, it's something called the Battle of Jena.

The Prussians, who were not new to this kind of militarism or expansionism then, their intellectuals, their government officials are obviously very frustrated and confused, especially considering the resources they've made available to, you know, military conquest or expansion of the kingdom. The loss to Napoleon, the embarrassing loss to Napoleon, basically triggers something called the Prussian Reform Movement, where over the course of the next decade, intellectuals and academics and philosophers like Johann Gottlieb Fichte are essentially looking for ways to restructure society, and one of the best ways they have is the setting up of a compulsion schooling system.

And it was tiered, you know, like there was obviously a private level for a very small percentage of the population. I haven't mastered the pronunciation of this yet, but it was called Akademische Lehren, which was, you know, a very small portion, and these were children of government officials or, you know, the elite in society.

There was another level called Real-Schulen, which essentially translates to "real school." It was for basically the people who were categorized into being the future managers of society, and then at the bottom, which is where over 90% of people wound up, the Volksschulen, which was the people's place or the people's school, and obviously the curriculum in each setting was different.

And the common school, the Volksschulen, was essentially obedience, you know, the idea of nationalism, military discipline, kind of collectivism would have been taught there, the importance of the state above all, loyalty, duty. Those were the lessons, and the schools were not terribly academic. There wasn't a lot of reading.

The teacher was certainly the star of the academic experience. It wasn't very student-centered, but, you know, American educators were really just fascinated by this system, and they started going there to see it, like basically right when it started in 1818, 1819, and they started sending back these favorable reports, you know, so and then, you know, the French sent their government officials to go and look at it, and they sent favorable reports, and this went on for a couple decades until Horace Mann went there to Prussia in the 1840s, and he came back and presented to the board, the education board in Massachusetts, his seventh annual report on education, and a lot of it had to do with the Prussian system of education.

Through this and through other efforts, he was basically able to persuade other people who were looking to modernize and expand public schooling in America. Horace Mann was very involved in the Whig Party and was able to get a lot of his politician friends to legislate tax-supported elementary education, and it was pretty much established in Massachusetts by the 1850s along with something that they called "normal schools," which later became known as teacher colleges, "normal" just in the sense that they were to train teachers in social and educational norms.

Once this was set up, it spread around the rest of the country, especially the Northeast, very quickly. What's interesting is, and this is kind of like one of the wild cards of history, like how successful the adoption in Massachusetts was and how quickly it spread around the rest of the country, it was all pretty much based on Horace Mann's report, even though there were reports prior to that.

Mann went to Prussia and observed the schools when they were not in session. Really? So he didn't really see the function of the compulsion school system in Prussia. Wow. He kind of just imagined it. What Gatto says is that people were basically touring Europe, the more established countries of Europe.

The United States at the time was less than 80 years old. So obviously, what are they doing in France? What are they doing in Great Britain? What do they do in Central Europe? Maybe what do they even do in Eastern Europe? And Mann was very turned off by the British class system and really saw that when he heard about the German system, he was very hopeful about it.

And I think he had read the reports that had been written by another American who went 20 years earlier named John Griscom and a French guy who went shortly before he did named Victor Cousin. So all these reports and actually, if you go to Internet Archive, you can read these reports.

Internet Archive dot org. And if you just grab yourself a copy of the Underground History of American Education, and when you find a book in there, when Gatto, John Taylor Gatto, just for those who don't know, a very famous public schooling critic who's been who was active from the time he retired up until about two years ago when he became ill, wrote this massive textbook, college textbook sized book called the Underground History of American Education, where he basically compiles all his research and he looks at the development of the schools from a variety of different angles.

So it's a jumping off point for deeper research if people want to do it. But for most people, just reading that book would be a sufficient exploration into the history and the mission of public school in America. So, yeah, man goes, he looks at empty schools. And I mean, I guess he could have he could have interviewed people, which he probably did.

So he got kind of this top down view. Right. It's like basically if I went into a, you know, a school today, probably would walk out with different stories depending on who I talk to. Right. If I talk to the principal, that would probably be the least accurate representation of what the school environment is actually like.

Maybe if I talk to the teachers, I'd get a slightly more accurate representation. But if I really wanted the most authentic experience, you know, without actually having to be a student or a teacher in the school myself, I probably want to talk to the students. Right. Those those would probably be the people who would be most honest with me.

And you would need a big cross sampling of the students, because speaking with the class valedictorian who excels in the environment would be very different than speaking to the student who, you know, dropped out two years ago because of social reasons or because of academic reasons or the one that's just struggling just to pass and get through.

Like depending on that's I mean, that's the key is what happens is we all put our experiences of school onto the system. So I did well academically in school. Academics has always been easy for me. So although I had, you know, certainly a learning process of a learning process, you know, as far around other aspects of life and the social environment, successfully navigating social relationships with with in the same way that we all do.

Academics always came well to me. So I thrived in a structured, formal environment. And yet many didn't. So you would need to really many don't. And that affects the rest of their life. And so you need you would need a broad cross sampling of the students to even approach getting an accurate accounting of it.

Absolutely. So I totally agree with you. And Mann, on the other hand, in his tour of the Prussian schools, might have, you know, interviewed a schoolmaster during his summer vacation. Not not exactly a good barometer for a wide experience, that's for sure. Right. And he kind of for some reason and I really don't know why this was, but he had this fantasy about what he wanted the schools to be.

And obviously there was this attitude in America at the time, a growing attitude. And obviously, through the rest of the 19th century, this attitude really expanded and became more more of an urgent cry is that they're worried about immigration into the United States. And they were worried about the diluting of, you know, maybe a certain culture or a set of values.

And the this was even though this would accelerate and really spin out of control later, they really wanted to use the schools as a way to standardize society. And from what Mann knew about Prussia before he went, the information that was available at the time, you know, 1830s, 1840s, they're really good at doing that.

You know, there was really very few ways out of the Vokshalen, you know, the the common school, if that's the school to which a person was relegated. So they like that idea of standardization and control. I mean, a lot of the setup of the common schools was to teach, like I said before, obedience and military discipline.

But Mann, he in the seventh annual report, he has some some interesting statements. Right. And one of them, I actually I'm working on a video right now. So I have a screenshot of this like right here. He he writes in an effort to defend or explain the system and address some of the objections.

He says the question is sometimes asked why, with such a wide extended and energetic machinery for public education, the Prussians as a people do not rise more rapidly in the scale of civilization, why the mechanical and useful arts remain among them in such a half barbarous condition, why the people are so sluggish and unenterprising in their character, and finally, why certain national vices are not yet extirpated.

Now, that should be for people like us. That should be an easy question to answer. Right. Right. Like why if they have so much school, do they suck so bad? You know, like that kind of that's basically what he's asking. And it's a question that answers itself. And it's because school is compulsory.

Right. What are they being robbed of? You know, individuality, volition, all of those things that, you know, I think work to make people great. And obviously there's a there's a tremendous amount of regimentation in society outside of school. So then he he attempts to answer that question. Right. And this is really a harbinger of things to come in American schooling contained in basically a one sentence answer.

He says these are questions. These questions may readily be answered. First, it is a great defect in the people schools of Prussia that the children leave them at so early an age. Hmm. Right. So what he's saying is, yeah, they just need more of it. Right. And this is a theme that continues up until Barack Obama and Arne Duncan.

Right. You know, like the problem is, yeah, it's not working and it's just because it doesn't cost enough and we're not giving or forcing enough of it on the young people of today. What's startling about the statements, and I want to tie it into modern day and because and I want to keep going with the history.

But when I first started thinking about some of these things, it was a very it continues to be a very long process for me. And which is why I'm having you on to kind of discuss it, because I don't feel capable of giving the subject any kind of justice, you know, as a teacher on it, because I'm a student of it.

But what really happens is that we, I'll say I, in my experience, just being in the mainstream culture, is that I was trained by culture to think it's us versus them and we're right and they're wrong. And this was not a heavy influence in my family, but this was a heavy influence in just in our society and in politics.

And so what I observed is, so for example, I'm a recovering Republican. And so I, you know, I see, I graduated from high school in 2003. So I really liked George Bush. And I got completely, when we invaded Iraq after 9/11, I was in ninth grade in 9/11. And, you know, think about it from a ninth grade perspective.

And you look at it and you say, wow, we got to go do this. And I was, I'm ashamed to say, I was emphatically in favor of like, we got to go and get, you know, these terrorists. And then what happened is I literally, I went and campaigned, I knocked on doors when I was in college for George Bush's second election.

And so what happened, though, is that when you are connected to a person, then you associate the person with all the good things. And so when George Bush says we need to, you know, increase public school standards and we need to pass No Child Left Behind, like, yeah, we need to increase public, you know, government school standards.

And we need to pass No Child Left Behind because all these crazy teachers are doing these things without standards. And then you got the flip to Barack Obama. And so then Barack Obama, I would watch a lot of his speeches and there were many things he would say that I liked.

And then I just looked and I'm like, but this is, this guy is horrible. But then when I watched him doing all of the exact same things that George Bush did and my Republican friends disagree with me and my Democratic friends disagree with me, it's basically like my communist friends that agree with me and my libertarian friends.

So you've got, you know, I'm out in the lonely boonies when it comes to political thought. But when I noticed that basically all of the same things happened. So, you know, George Bush passes No Child Left Behind and Barack Obama, you know, Common Core. And you look at it and you say, wait a second, I thought there was supposed to be a difference here.

And yet they're both doing the same wars and continuing the same wars and both of them are continuing the same, like, focus. And so that was a big influence on me trying to figure out why is it that these political parties seem to, like, they say they're different, but you look at their actual actions and they're doing the same thing.

But when I go back to it, and that was a long kind of setup for a question, and feel free to comment and answer the question, but when I go back, the immediate thing that I want to do is I want to go back and I want to ascribe blame.

And the scariest statement to me in the world was in the preamble or the prologue or whatever it was in Gatto's book in Underground History, it was when he says, if you think this is a conspiracy, as defined by one person or multiple people of doing it, you would be wrong.

And what's worse is that that would actually be better. Because it's not so much in what he said, and I still struggle to figure out how this works, but he says, it's not so much that there is a conspiracy of this group of people, this one individual group of people, but rather there is an entrenchment of thought that is so entrenched.

And I'm paraphrasing because I don't have it in front of me, but he says there's an entrenchment of thought that's so entrenched, and that's why it's even worse than if there were a conspiracy. And so the question, and feel free to comment on the political connection, but also the question is, the people at that time, do you have any sense of their motives?

Because my guess is that they felt strongly, Horace Mann or whatever, and if I'm wrong, let me know, because I haven't been able to find this, but my guess is that they probably felt very strongly about their motives, and their motives, they perceived them to be true and in the best interest of people.

Have you gotten a sense of the motives by reading their works of that time? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I've combed through a lot of these books, and you're never going to find that gotcha moment, you know? Like, you really have to read carefully whether we're talking about, you know, this phase of development of public schooling in America, or the later, and I would say even the more important phase where the progressives took it over.

It's easy to look back knowing what I know now, and certainly see it as evil, and see it as, you know, just a terrible misestimation of what the role of government should be, and the power that government should have, and the power that academics should have, and the rights that academics think they have to decide what's good for other people.

Obviously, a lot of that is very prevalent, you know, in American political discourse today, but yeah, it seems like not so much--there are times where people do seem to be kind of hiding in the shadows, depending on who you're talking about, right? Because, like, oh, the people will be outraged by this.

And, you know, it's true, too. I forget, what was it called? The separation of school and state. Are you familiar with that? It was written by a guy named Sheldon Richman. No, I haven't read that. Is that a book? Well, they were learning pretty quickly, right? Because in 1852, Richman reports in this piece called "Separating School and State--How to Liberate American Families," the first compulsory schooling laws were put into effect in Massachusetts.

And something like four out of five people resisted the new law. And I think it was decades later that in parts of Massachusetts, the militia was actually needed to get people to send their kids to the schools, to basically surrender to the system. So, you know, that can be summed up as, like, oh, the rabble, oh, these people, they don't even know what's good for them like we do at Columbia University and Harvard.

But no one says, "I have an awesome evil plan." You know, that's never really uttered. And it's funny, too, like a minute ago we were talking about George Bush and Barack Obama and all the education legislation of the past 15 or 20 years, all the way really back to Clinton.

A lot of the people who were supporting those things, they sounded a lot like Horace Mann did in the 1850s. He was describing this great urgency to all of these initiatives and like what we really need is standardization for teachers and we really need a national curriculum and standards.

And that was all covered 150 years later by No Child Left Behind and Common Core. And then there's, you know, Head Start, Race to the Top, Goals 2000. All of those efforts that are sold to the American people as making public education better are really, I think, the same thing that people have been trying to do for more than a century.

And that is to standardize and better systematize the schools to meet the needs of the powerful in a changing world. And, you know, maybe it started because Horace Mann was, you know, he might have had his own religious motivations. There might have been some general fears about immigration and changing culture.

It very quickly shifted to industrial needs, you know, how to turn people into good workers, you know, by the 1870s, 1880s, 1890s. And, you know, everything that I've talked about so far regarding the establishment of the Prussian system really just constitutes this apparently unbreakable foundation of American public school.

Right. So, like, all reform discussions to me are so futile because no one is ever talking about striking the root, which is, I mean, I mean, there's actually multiple things that could be considered the root here. You know, a system funded by force, a system funded through taxation, a system that you can't opt out of.

That's one way to ensure a lack of quality. Right. Not giving people the option as to whether or not they want to pay for it. The real root is the the Prussian system, right. A system too efficient to be questioned. But the building on this anti-freedom, anti-individualism, really anti-education schooling system continues under the guise of reform.

Right. It's always under the guise of reform. But by the time we get to, you know, the 1900s, we have a whole new group, a whole new cast that is going to take over American public schooling. So right before the call dropped, you were just mentioning that a whole new group, a whole new cast of characters comes on the scene.

So let's go there. What happens next? So these are the the progressives. Right. And this is all happening during a time that's often referred to as the progressive era. And one of the biggest reformers is a guy named John Dewey. And so these are people who... You have the Dewey decimal system, right?

Is that John Dewey? I'll Google it. I thought it was. I was going to ask you because I've always thought it was, but I'm not sure. So somebody said that to me before and I said, I don't know, I'll Google it. You keep going and I'll Google it while you're doing it.

Now, obviously, these are people who have much different motivations than the people who are setting up the system in America or transporting the system from Germany to America 50 years earlier. And they put their faith not so much in God, but in a kind of scientific management, really in the developing field of psychology.

Now, obviously, a lot of the sciences that they're going to try and use at this time are largely experimental and widely misunderstood. So it would be like a shorthand way to describe it would be like, imagine if somebody basically announced that we're reinventing the whole school system in the United States for 2015.

And it's all going to be based around quantum physics. Right. There's the potential for some messes. For sure. But these are people who kind of see the merging of science and the state as a new kind of God, a new kind of faith. And, you know, they're also very politically, they're largely socialist, you know, and they don't have the same conceptions about evil that religious folks who had something to say about education.

You know, dating all the way back to like the 1500s and Martin Luther, who said we need state schools because we're at war with the devil. They didn't see evil as having, you know, that kind of root. They saw evil rooted in things like poverty or social injustice or ignorance.

And they thought those were all the things the state could remedy through the school system. That they wanted to build a kind of social or administrative utopia through public schooling. And, you know, that's what they set out to do. The interesting thing is that around the same time, late 18, last decade of the 1800s, first couple decades of the 1900s, industrialists, people like Andrew Carnegie and John D.

Rockefeller are also coming to understand the power of public schooling. Right. They see that this can build a standardized workforce. And they actually start funding idealists like John Dewey. And this is a largely their their power over public schooling is accomplished through tax free foundations. Right. And they have their selected academics and politicians that essentially help push and manage their expanding training system.

So this goes back to that first question, right? Does public school work? And the follow up question is for who? Right. John Dewey liked it because it created for him and people like him, like the, you know, the behaviorists, the John Watsons, the William Ones, the B.S. Skinners, a kind of laboratory for a variety of different, you know, economic, social or psychological experiments.

And people like Rockefeller, even though, you know, the Rockefeller Education Board might not have been, you know, John Rockefeller behind the wheel the whole time calling all the shots. It obviously expanded beyond the man, John Rockefeller. Sure. But, you know, this is this is the thing. Right. This is where a conspiracy gets so complicated.

Right. Because you start to sound like a conspiracy theorist. You start to sound like a tinfoil hat person. It's like, yeah, man, it's the progressives and their eugenics and they're all being funded by the Rockefellers. You sound like a nut. Right. But some of it's true. I mean, you know, John Dewey was teaching at Columbia University.

He worked at the teachers college there. And that institution was heavily endowed by Rockefeller. And it was around around 1920, early 1920s, that using Rockefeller money, he set up something called the Progressive Education Association. And this was essentially used to spread this management philosophy throughout academia. And it worked, you know, and and Columbia was a huge place for this Columbia Teachers College.

But the rest of academia certainly followed. So I'll pause again there for, you know, any questions or follow ups. So, yeah, two follow ups. Number one is, according to Wikipedia, the Dewey Decimal System was not John Dewey. It was Melville Dewey, and he published it in 1876. So I don't know if that's any relation, but it was a different person.

So it wasn't John Dewey. And he was an educator, however, and I don't see any connection here in that to John Dewey. So that's good to know, because I think I have I've always thought that that was the same Dewey, but different Dewey. I think the conspiracy thing is one of the most one of the most one of the biggest questions that I've always had is because there's so much.

Well, A, in our society, we have this incredible most of us who who try to be rational and mainstream. I, let me not speak for I have this incredible, like revulsion against being called a conspiracy theorist. This has become such a pejorative term where if you are a conspiracy theorist, you automatically, you know, people mentally we place people who, you know, into a into a box and they can never get out.

But what's remarkable is that history is shaved by conspiracy. Like all a conspiracy means is that two people or more are working together. And so people clearly work together. And, you know, every time that the United Nations meets or the globe, the G20 or the G6 or whatever, the the leaders of these organizations of these of these countries are conspiring to, you know, in their terms, make the world a better place.

So we've got to be able to use that word. But I think sometimes, at least for me, where I found is I found that in some ways it almost doesn't matter is that it doesn't the effect. The reason for the effect, I think, does matter because it can be so complicated.

If I can look at it and I can say, hey, I've got a problem and I can do something different, then I can actually make some progress and out of it. And then that and so, you know, I kind of got caught up trying to figure out, like, how does it work?

And I haven't yet figured it out. So I've just kind of set that aside for myself and say and said I can at least see the results and the results are fairly clear that and I don't think they're very good. So how can I work within that and just try a different system of some sort?

Sure. And I think a lot of these things that we might look back at and call conspiracies, maybe some of the participants at the time didn't even didn't even realize they didn't think about it like that. So, you know, instead of to reference what you said about Gatto's introduction to the book where it's worse than a conspiracy, a phrase that that we've used is a philosophic corruption.

Interesting. So so there's this container in which all thinking is taking place. Right. And it's the same thing, like I would identify pretty much as like a libertarian. Right. And people say, oh, well, that's so naive, you know. Well, yeah. In this world, a world that we've inherited from complete insanity.

Right. You know, and violence. Yeah. Libertarianism trying to inject libertarian ideas through a dropper into the raging rapids of political insanity. Yeah. It's naive. Right. It's something we should start talking about. But, you know, I think that. Before I lose my train of thought, how did I get to there?

Why did I inject that? So we're just talking about the progressives in Rockefeller and Carnegie seeing the advantages of it and then that it was a platform for for science, you know, for scientific management. And let's go from there and kind of try to wrap up. I got it, though.

I. OK, so just to say, did they ever look back? You know, I mean, Dewey died maybe in the 1950s and Rockefeller maybe 10 or 15 years before Dewey. Did they ever did they even know? I don't even know if they knew each other. But, you know, just imagine them looking back.

So did we just do a conspiracy? Right. It might not have occurred to them at the time. I believe John Dewey cared about children. Right. And I believe that people like Rockefeller looked at humanity and said, oh, the poor things, you know, somebody somebody needs to standardize and organize their lives for them.

Right. And Dewey had some things to say about how children should be treated and was critical in many ways of the very Prussian system that he started observing when he became an educational reformer, about how regimented it was. There's a lot of things, obviously, that I disagree with Dewey about, but I believe that his I don't think he was an evil person.

And I'm I'm not sure a lot of these people who participated in something like the Rockefeller Education Board were evil people as well. I think they saw themselves as a role as having a role or part of that philosophic corruption could be a sense of duty, you know, to to manage society.

Right. And whether that came from, you know, religion or or some some other place. I mean, a lot of a lot of these groups that have been more conspiratorial, like the Fabian Society, which was formed in Britain in the late eighteen hundreds. It seemed like they were searching for some kind of supernatural justification for for what they were doing.

You know, I mean, we hear lots of talk in in conspiracy theory about bloodlines, right? Like, oh, we're descended from the Merovingians or something. People look for license to act out these megalomaniacal impulses, you know. Right. And, you know, so I think there there is this surface good intention may be driven by something deeper that is unhealthy in a psychological sense.

But no one ever said in all the reading, you know, going and trying to find as many of God's official sources as possible, primary sources. I've never encountered anything that read like here's an awesome evil plan that we should implement immediately. Right. Right. And that's that's what makes it tough, because we immediately look for that.

And then if we don't find that, at least what I immediately looked for that like, wow, there's got to be some awful evil plan. But it really doesn't start that way. I mean, I don't think I think there are. I mean, my guess is that, yes, there are true conspiracies and it's beyond my knowledge and experience to discuss them intelligently.

But I'm glad to hear you say that, because actually, it's one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on. So I want to ask you the question, because I haven't been able to find it. I've just you know, I've more traced a series of almost a series of unfortunate events of people trying to do people trying to implement their version of good by controlling other people's lives.

And I see this happening still today. You know, and once you once you start to see it, it seems like you see it everywhere of us trying to control other people and control other people. And control other people's lives and tell other people how they should live and what they should do.

And that's a kind of an involved philosophical conversation, which I would enjoy having with you. We're not have time to do it today, but I'm very interested in kind of the philosophy behind it, especially in the world we live in. But yeah, let's move on. And what I'd like to do is I'd like to flip to some solutions.

And I wanted to go through that history, even if it was in length. Is there anything after before we flip to solutions and what do you do? Is there anything after the progressive era that we mentioned that you feel is important just to have as context? Well, that's I mean, that's really the runaway train, right?

You know, I mean, that's really like the point where there's no going back. You have this strong foundation of Prussian education upon which the progressives build, you know, and obviously they're emboldened. And empowered by money from tax free foundations that really has, you know, at its roots, the industrialist people like Rockefeller that I mentioned, Carnegie that I mentioned.

The expansion, it's it's just a perpetual expansion, though. I mean, there's in 1965, there's a piece of legislation called the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. So a lot of these people in academia now see this as, you know, essentially unlimited access to U.S. taxpayer money. The Department of Education follows shortly after that in the 1970s.

That's set up. And, you know, Sam, Sam Blumenfeld in one of his pieces describes this as like the fulfillment of an 100 year dream, you know. And it's so true. I mean, what's 100 years before the setup of the Department of Education, the 1860s, the 1870s? So that's the the middle, the period in between people like Mann and Dewey.

Mann wanted it in the 1850s. Dewey and the progressives wanted it in the 19-aughts and 1910s and 1920s. They wanted that kind of overarching control over education, which was going all the way back to the Constitution, supposed to be a localized function. Even even as a government function, it was never supposed to be, you know, the domain of the federal government.

But it seems like there was this impulse and it's understandable, right? When you see the power of schooling, right, we'll I mean, this is something that's been echoed by, you know, Lenin and Stalin and like, give me the children at six for three years and I will make them into, you know, I can't I can't even think of how many people have said something like that.

Right. Right. You know, there's probably I mean, I've got quotes attributed to Hitler. But anyway, you know, that idea, the power of schooling, that we will take young minds and control them and mold them like who wouldn't want a piece of that? Of course, you know, in the in this container of philosophic corruption.

So everybody tries to grab it. Where is it at today? I would say it's extended beyond the United States and this idea of global citizenship and like the UNESCO influence or sustainable development influence. And people would say there's a lot of that in common core, you know, that it's trying to make people basically, you know, cast away the idea that they're citizens of a nation, which is which is, you know, a relatively recently manufactured idea by what was it, the 14th Amendment that we already mentioned to cast that aside and say we're citizens of the world.

You know, we are the children of the UN. So now the control becomes even more centralized into fewer hands over more people. And I mean, that's the that's the nature of power. Right. So it all makes sense. And yeah, I mean, this is one of the functions of my show is just to point out this history.

But of course, also, I think to transition our next subject, what people can do about it and what what else is out there. Right. We live in in such a unique time. And I mean, you make a good point about how this is going going. I'm interested because I'm watching the common core debate happening in the mainstream.

And what's interesting to me is in my experience now, again, I'm 29, so I haven't I don't have the perspective of decades of watching it, but I've never seen such widespread. If judging if my Facebook feed is any indication, I've never seen such people paying attention to government education, government schooling in the way that they are now.

And so I wonder if Common Core and kind of the implementation of Common Core across the states and the debate that, you know, the various tiny debate that's happening about it will make more people go and kind of research it a little bit. It'll be interesting to watch. But what are your thoughts in short?

What have you gathered so far about it? About Common Core? Yeah. It just seems to be kind of the like my my observation of it is that it seems to be just the continuation of exactly the same agenda that has been around, you know, so, for example, exactly of standardization.

But because of the because of how kind of bitterly Obama is hated among the conservative Republican faction, because of this intense, like personal, I don't want to be too dramatic, but he evokes very strong, very strong opinions from people. And because he evokes very strong opinions, both positive for him and against him, then because he has been so strong with with exerting his political capital against in a very unpopular way.

I mean, I feel like just and just as a lay person observing, I feel like when he rammed through the Affordable Care Act, kind of in face of all opposition, that made a lot of people who would normally just simply say, oh, it's no big deal. We're going to move forward.

That made a lot of people stand up and say, what's going on? And it started to get people maybe got started to get people organized against them. And what and I have the problem of being so young that I haven't observed this for decades. But it seems like so many people kind of have started to like research things and study things.

And you know, you had that that I just have seen, you know, a reaction against Common Common Core. And what's interesting is that I judge by my age group. And the interesting thing about my age group, a lot of people that I have conversations with, I've never seen so many of my friends who are not as kind of wacky and out there as I am in the as far as politically, who are much more mainstream politically.

I've never seen so many people kind of paying attention and taking the solutions. And this is this is why I want to go to solutions, because we live in a time that is such a, not an oxymoron, I don't know what the right word is, not an oxymoron, but it seems so opposed of increasing control over society.

And yet it has never been easier to just simply opt out. Like schooling, it is in my study of history of schooling, at least in the last hundred years, it's never really been easier to just simply pull your kids out than it is today. And so we've got a time where people, you know, in, you know, over the course of the next couple of generations, things could radically change.

And it's easy. There's no person with a gun simply saying, in most places, there's no person with a gun in the U.S. saying, you have to keep your kids in this system. In Germany, there is, but in the U.S., there's not. And so the solutions are simple and straightforward.

So that's kind of my answer to your question. If you have insight, I'm interested, because it's such a current political debate. Well, I think there's obviously been a lot of vitriol in political debate and from opponent to opponent. I think there is an interesting trend, really, since the second term of Bill Clinton, that presidents are getting more hammered by the availability of information in ways they just didn't in the past.

I mean, the fact that Nixon went down in the early 1970s, kind of amazing if you if you think about the lack of information that was available to to journalists at the time. And I'm debating I don't want to get it. Let's cut me off at Nixon right there.

That's a story for another time. But, you know, I think that Clinton's second term, Clinton gets hammered with a bunch of charges. George Bush is embattled his entire term, both terms. And I think the Internet has a lot to do with that. It's only continued with Obama. I think it's all positive trends.

I also think even though I don't like Obama, I don't like his policies. And real quick, I want to interrupt you because I want to interrupt you because it's so important in our society. It's common that people can't really have many political discussions. So I want to since I've since I've listened to your show and I know this, I'm a recovering Republican and I'm a devout Christian.

You come from a very leftist, Democratic or leftist background, and you're an atheist, right? I came from a I fled for sure. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, I guess I would I would call myself a non believer. I would just say I'm a non believer in all respect. I don't believe in the political system.

I don't believe in the political parties. I maybe it had something to do with my religious upbringing. I don't have a lot of faith in a higher power. Don't worry. I think I think religion has destroyed more people of their belief in God than just about any other force.

So, yeah, so that's a conversation for another day. But but keep going with what you're saying. I just wanted to point that out because people think especially in listening to a show like this, because my show is not branded as libertarianism. It's not libertarian radio like, you know, I just I just pointed out that we can all look at it and observe and pull our own decisions.

So I interrupted your train of thought, but you were talking about Obama, I think. Yeah. And I like I don't like Obama. I don't like his policies. I really see Obama as the embodiment of the progressive movement in many ways. Not in every way, but in a lot of ways.

Right. The embodiment of the progressive movement from 100 years ago, as far as like, even if he hasn't really been terribly effective in implementing new things outside of the Affordable Care Act or Common Core, what progressives see their role in the management of other people to be. Obama, kind of in his defense, seems to have been this flypaper for everything old conservatives have feared in the last 50 years.

Right. Blacks, communists, Muslims, like all those labels. Like I heard somebody interview this this progressive guy, like liberal YouTuber, went out and interviewed people at like the Mitt Romney event. And she's like, Obama goes to Reverend Wright's church and he's a Muslim and he's an atheist. And the guy's like, which one is he?

He's all three. And that's exactly it. He's flypaper for like all he's the embodiment of all these fears, you know, that these people have. And they really don't. I mean, I see Obama kind of as a pawn, kind of as a dupe, kind of somebody who is, you know, guided into this position and animated by idealism.

And every time I see him, I just see somebody who's completely defeated by the realities of the presidency. So, yeah, and obviously pinning everything on Obama as far as all the problems that the country is facing today is is really spitting in the face of history in a really irresponsible way.

So I try not to do that, but at the same time, not, you know, not showing any love for Obama. So, yeah, I think that with the ever expanding role of the federal government in the the public school system, it's important for people to to look for alternatives. And I would say the you know, obviously the two real alternatives are homeschooling in private school.

Right. And I think a lot of people look at, you know, these things and they say, I can't I can't do it. I think part of that is is an attitude problem. Right. Homeschooling. Right. Is a term that I think we should really get rid of. Right. Because, well, it opens this door for people to say, oh, I'm not qualified.

I can't do school. I have no education in schooling. But if you're living, you're learning. Right. And you have if you're a parent, you know, you could do home education. Right. Right. You know, education is just the experience of being alive and interested and motivated. Right. So forget about schooling.

No one can do school. As my friend, Laura Lynn, says, the she's the unplugged mom. She that's her site. And she says only school can do school. So forget about school. Right. People use homeschooling and unschooling. But I like home education and the the guidelines for that, if there are any, I would say voluntary instruction.

Right. Kids learn about what they want to learn about, even if there's like some focus, some subtle focus on things like self-discipline. I think that self-directed learning is is the most important and the most valuable piece of education. Learning against some one's will is pretty pointless in my estimation, you know, which is based on over a decade of experience, like forcing people to try and do things from gym to algebra doesn't lead to a lot of positive results.

And you can even get the illusion of success through like short term positive results, you know, often in the form of like the school assessments. Like you've got to be on the vocabulary quiz. But then how many of those vocabulary words do you remember a month later? Right. You know, I can't tell you how many like doing SAT vocabulary, how many kids were like, oh, we had this on a quiz a month ago.

I was like, oh, great. What does it mean? And they always had the same answer. I don't remember. You know, they just jettison that information. They need to make, you know, new room for all the other seemingly meaningless stuff they have to learn. So there isn't much, even though you could get this illusion of success in the short term, there isn't much to speak of in the way of retention, motivation or enthusiasm for learning.

And I think the adult society reflects that. What are the best sellers out there? It's things like, you know, here's the easiest way to do something, you know, here's the fastest way to do something. Don't have a lot of self-discipline or, you know, time management skills? Buy this thing.

It's already done. Or boredom killers, you know. I'll draw it through from financial planning is what happens is and this was like I told you earlier, this is how I one of the big things that motivated me to go and start studying and try to find info on it is people in financial planning.

It's very frustrating to be a financial planner because people don't want background. They want the answer. And then the other thing that you observe is people simply want an expert's opinion. And they don't want to understand why an expert says something. They just simply want to say what does the expert say to do.

And so in financial planning and in personal finance and financial planning, people will often choose their guru. So it's easy to pick on, you know, hi, I'm Dave Ramsey or excuse me, I'm a Dave Ramsey guru or I'm a Suzy Orman guru or I'm a Jim Crane, not a guru, a follower.

You know, Dave's my guru. Suzy's my guru. You know, Joshua's my guru. And it's so hard to try to help people sever that and say I'm not your guru. You know, you don't want me to be your guru. I'm your teacher. My hope is that I can earn the place of being your teacher.

But I'm not your guru. And you have to exercise a little bit of – you have to work to learn something. And this has to matter to you. And it's very frustrating from the perspective of a teacher as a financial planner because what happens – and I think this is what happens so many times is it's so much harder to teach people how to learn and teach people how to think and give them the background.

They just want – many people just want the answer. Give me the answer. Just give me the answer. I can give you the answer. But only if I know everything about you and I can't give you the answer for everybody. And so this has impacted every aspect of life, the schooling.

Because we've all come through it, it's impacted every aspect of our life. And instead of having the confidence to say I know how to go and learn the answer, then we're looking for someone to give it to us. In my personal experience, before I started studying any of Gato's stuff – and at the end here I'll tell you how I found your show because it was a very circuitous route.

But I didn't go out originally seeking for it. But what I just observed is I observed that the average three- or four-year-old that I knew was precocious and interested in life and happy and loves learning. I have a one-year-old son and he loves to learn. You can see it.

Children love to learn. And then I noticed that the average 18-year-old that I knew, or even many of the average 30-year-olds that I knew, hate learning. And I said, "What is wrong here? The only thing that we've effectively done is taught people to hate learning." And how did this happen?

Because I love to learn. I feel like I'm one of the few that escaped. And maybe the reason I escaped was for the first seven years, with the exception of third grade when I went to a government school. I was educated at home so I could learn about what I wanted to learn about.

And I would sit there and read the encyclopedia because I thought it was so interesting to learn about all these things. So I had a little bit of that built up before I went into a formal school. But I'm ranting a little bit. But if you could step in and help a parent, helping someone like me.

I'm in the process of trying to understand how to design my son's educational plan, and what I'm going to hold before him and what I'm not. What would be the guiding principles? You mentioned self-direction and voluntary learning about areas of interest. What other guiding principles would you give to encourage a parent like me?

That's it for today. Come back tomorrow for the continuation of the interview. Shop break-resistant glassware at WineEnthusiast.com so you can spend more time and less time. I'll get the broom. Shop our Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals for the best prices of the season on wine storage, gifts, and more.

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