I read a book a week and review it every Sunday.
This week, I read Pete Hegseth’s last book, the “Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting A Century of Miseducation.”
For those who don’t know, Pete Hegseth is a Fox News personality. He co-hosts the show “Fox & Friends Weekend,” fills in as guest host on other Fox News shows, and is a frequent guest on the network.
Hegseth served in the U.S. Army National Guard and Army Reserve for 12 years, including tours of duty in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay. After his military service, Hegseth became involved in conservative politics and began appearing as a commentator on various television news programs, including Fox News. He has written two other books: "In the Arena: Good Citizens, a Great Republic, and How One Speech Can Reinvigorate America" and "American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free".
The thesis of the book is: if conservatives want to take back American culture, they have to first take back American education by returning back to classical Christian education. Over 100 years ago, the progressive movement---led by the “father of progressive education,” John Dewey---of the late 1800s and early 1900s transformed American education from a classical Western Christian Paideia of cultivating Judeo-Christian virtues and learning about Western civilization and freedom to a progressive system focusing on vocational training and control of nature (paideia refers to the thinking, viewpoints, affections, attitudes, and virtues cultivated in children at an early age; it determines the behavioral, economic, political, and cultural views they’ll have when they become adults). Pandeia is upstream of culture. In other words, pandeia determines what culture you live in. As Abraham Lincoln once said, “the philosophy in the schoolroom in one generation, becomes the philosophy of government in the next.” Control of education is the main source of progressive and left-wing power. And C.S. Lewis wrote in 1939: “…education is essentially for freemen and vocational training for slaves…If education is beaten by training, civilization dies.” People want to have meaning and be free---not be corporate slaves.
After taking control of public schools, progressives systematically removed God, virtue, tradition, Western history, and the Great Books from America’s schools, producing students unable to be free people and to reason. Classical education, also known as classically “liberal education,” liberated minds from the shackles of cultural dogma allowing the individual to think for themselves and be free. It consisted of virtue, reason, and cultivated a purpose above self-interest. The Greeks believed that self-interest and selfishness leads to tyranny and civilizational collapse. Progressives destroyed the four educational pillars of American republicanism: reason, virtue, wonder, and beauty. Western Christian Paideia instilled virtue and morality in children, and an ability to think for yourself. Classical Christian education cultivates wisdom and virtue in children. It integrates everything---history, literature, philosophy, theology, science, art, math, and music---into a holistic system of understanding of human nature and of the world providing these children with an ability to reason and apply fundamental universal principles to whatever situations they encounter in life. Western Christian Paideia made children thoughtful, inquisitive thinkers ready to tackle any challenge this dangerous world will offer. They read the Great Books. They understood how the economics of Adam Smith, Marx, and Keynes relate to politics of Jefferson, Lenin, and FDR. And how the American experiment is based on ideas of the Greeks and Romans. They were trained in the Socratic method. Progressive education destroyed all that. It indoctrinates students to be social justice activists spewing the latest slogans of the left.
“A liberated mind is one that can entertain thoughts without accepting them (real tolerance).”
This change, combined with the influence of the Cultural Marxists from the Frankfurt School, fundamentally altered how American children are educated and how they view their country. Progressives wanted to dilute the influence of Christianity and Western virtues in American culture. And they were clever about doing it under a guise of public schools, ‘democracy,’ ‘science,’ (sounds familiar?) and the industrial revolution. Meanwhile, conservatives and religious Americans were divided by sect, distracted by free-market economics, and didn’t understand that culture drives economics and politics. Progressives wanted to weaken the influence of traditional families, churches, communities, capitalism and industriousness, self-reliance and personal responsibility, and of virtue. Wokeism in schools and parental protests at school board meetings of the last several years are just the latest manifestations of the progressive transformation of paideia during the last century.
Using the German model, progressives created public schools, common curriculum, state-based educational bureaucracies. and then passed “compulsory education laws” that funneled children through the public school system, effectively giving them control of public education. Progressives removed Christianity from schools, and replaced God with nationalism. Later, when President John F. Kennedy signed an executive order allowing public sector employees to collectively bargain, progressives and Marxists took control of teachers, teacher-training, and wholly captured the entire educational system. Is it any wonder that students today are indoctrinated into woke ideology? Progressive education has led to indoctrination and servitude. Progressives have returned us to what the Greeks called “barbarism”---characterized by people who are easily captured, unable to reason, and cannot handle ideas they disagree with. Progressives train children to be slaves instead of being self-reliant and free.
At the end of the book, Hegseth lays out a three-step plan for retaking American education back to the Western Christian Pandeia. Cultural Marxists have seized the commanding heights of education and culture, and have become arrogant in their belief that they will maintain power forever. We must retreat from government schools and other woke (private) schools and mount an insurgency. Marxists are in control. It took progressives a hundred years to consolidate their power in education---it may take us just as long. We must build a foundation for an alternative education system, one that’s build on Western Christian Pandeia. The insurgency has already begun. The Association for Classical Christian Schools launched in 1994 (see classicalchristian.org). There are now over 60,000 American kids enrolled in classical Christian schools across the country. That’s still miniscule compared to almost 50 million kids in government schools. We need to grow the number of and enrollment in classical Christian schools. This requires fundraising. We need to educate parents on the value of classical Christian schools and raise awareness about the existence of these schools. Simultaneously, we need to continue to discredit teachers’ unions and government schools that are failing our students. The unions are the problem---not the teachers. Concerned parents need to run and take over school boards, and expose the corruption. We need to be patient. It took a century for the progressives to take over education. It may take us just as long. We need to build a network of classical Christian schools before we can go on the offensive. We need to launch a “defund the unions” movement. Public unions are unconstitutional. We need to bring legal challenges to place caps on how much money public unions can spend on political campaigns. When stripped of their obscene union cash, Democrats will change their attitudes on school choice. We need to pass more “right to work” laws. Break up large school districts. Abolish Department of Education. Place video cameras in classrooms. Implement universal educational tax credits at the state and federal levels. Tax credits would annihilate government schools and allow classical Christian schools to flourish. Then we can once again imbue students in the Western Christian Pandeia and make America great again.
I read a book a week and review it every Sunday.