Real Education vs. The Department of Education

Hey everybody, my conversation with the president of America's greatest college, Hillsdale College, Dr. Larry Arnn.
Check out charlieforhillsdale.com. That is C-H-A-R-L-I-E forhillsdale.com.
charlieforhillsdale.com. We talk about Churchill, education, the Department of Education, and more.
This is a conversation worth listening to and sending to your friends. Again, it is America's greatest college, charlieforhillsdale.com, charlieforHillsdale.com.
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Okay, everybody, we are here with one of my mentors and teachers, Dr. Larry Arnn.

Proud to be here with such a fine student.

Well, thank you, and I take learning seriously.

Hillsdale College, I say every day on this program, it is America's greatest college.

Yeah, well, it could almost be damning with faint praise. But it is very good, and it has a very powerful sense of itself.
It knows what it is for 180 years, and everybody there is committed to that. That's why it's great.
It's great for many reasons, also thanks to your leadership. But speak about the bylaws or the constitution of the college is rather short.
It's not a big administrative document. No, it's from 1844.
The people who started Hillsdale College were preachers on the frontier from New England, and they were classically educated. You had to know Latin and Greek to enter the college in 1844.
They were patriotic, learned Americans. The document begins, The nomination of Christians known as Free Will Baptist, along with other friends of education, grateful to God for the prevalence in the land of civil and religious freedom, see,

and intelligent piety,

believing sound learning is necessary to preserve these,

hereby endow it.

So we exist to provide sound learning in support of civil and religious freedom,

which is America's gift to the world, by the way,

and God's gift to America

and America's gift to the world, and intelligent piety.

Those are the purposes of Hillsdale College. What makes your college different than just the everyday college? If you were to walk around Hillsdale, which I have, I sense it, I feel it, how do you do this in practice differently? Well, first of all, it's not part of the national maw of a system today.
We don't take the money from the government, which money carries several hundred pages of rules that are impenetrable and difficult to even follow, even understand. So we don't have that.
And then what that liberates us to do is to form a college. It's a word that means partnership.
And so the reason Hillsdale gets on and proceeds is because to come to Hillsdale College in any capacity, you must make a commitment to the founding mission of the college. You must believe, you must agree that the college has a right to pursue the mission and you will help it.
Doesn't mean you can't argue with it. You can argue about anything at Hillsdale College.
But you agree that the institution is formed for these purposes, and that is not to be obstructed. And so that means that we, you know, the first line of Aristotle's politics is every community is formed for the sake of some good.

Right. Well, we have a good that we're formed for and we follow it.
And that means we can cooperate. We can be a college.
And, you know, it's it's you know, college is a certain kind of thing, a very beautiful kind of thing. And it's not for everybody, but for people who are prepared to suffer, to learn the best things, it's great.
You are such a person, by the way, I've discovered. It's the reason I get on with you.
That, you know, it takes work. You have to change your mental weather.
You have to forget about yourself to learn the best things. Now I'm going to read this book.
And the question on my mind is not, what do I think about it yet? The question on my mind is not, do I agree with it yet? The question is, what does this say? And what does it mean? And then that's first. And then after that, is it true? Is it good? So that's college, right? And you learn to do that.
You learn to do that in the humanities and in the natural sciences. And it's a wonderful activity, and it's difficult.
What is education? It comes from a Latin word that means to lead forth. And that means education is the process of our helping the young go forward in the way that they are made to go.
The Bible says, train up the child in the ways he's meant to go. And he will not forget.
That's what it means. And, you know, you learn.

We're freedom guys, you and me. And the truth of human freedom is profoundly revealed in college, in the daily operations in every class, by this fact.
You can't learn for them. You can only help them.
They have to want to. and so the first task, when we take every human achievement, like you have built Turning Point.
I've walked around it today for the first time. It's very impressive.
And it is the product of two things that are the cause of every human achievement. You are able and you are willing.
And you urgently want to do it and you can do it. And this is your thing, right? Now, everybody I've met here and some dozens are also willing and able.
Everybody's a volunteer. That's why it works.
So now that we've defined what education is, and we could talk at length about how incredible Hillsdale is, let's talk about the Department of Education. Should that even exist? No, it's a bad idea.
Why? Well, first of all, there are many reasons, but the first starts with the nature of education. Now, I'll start with the constitutional reason first because it's actually very important, but it's not the most important.
The Constitution of the United States lists 17 things, if I remember the number of paragraphs right, that the federal government may pursue in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. And education is not among them.
Well, it says general welfare. That's what they're always—sorry, go ahead.
Well, not there. It doesn't.
Well, it does, actually, at the beginning of Article I, Section 8. But if the general welfare clause meant that, then the rest of Article I, Section 8, would be redundant, right? So, yet, in the summer that they were writing the Constitution of the United States, they were passing the Northwest Ordinance, which is one of the four organic laws of the United States, and it gave one 64th of the Western lands in the Northwest Territory reserved for only one public purpose, education in each township.
Now, that meant that the federal government and the biggest asset it ever owned supported education through the states. That's the constitutional arrangement.
It's not that education is not important. It's vital.
It's just that it is not a federal authority for profound reasons. The second thing about education is it is inherently as local as a thing can possibly be because the learning is in each student and they need others around to help them.
They need to be nearby. So that that I'm just reading the constitutional.
So these are the 17 things that you're talking. Is that correct? Yeah.
And as they are enumerated here. So then how is it that the Department of Education withstood any legal challenge? Well, how did we get to a place where we accepted that the federal government should have such a role?

You know, it was actually first formed in 1867.

And it was called, at the outset, the Department of Education.

And there was enormous pushback.

And so they downgraded it to a part of the Department of the Interior called the Bureau of Education. And it was to be a clearinghouse of information among the states.
No regulatory power. Just gather up facts and make them available to.
And it's defended on that ground for decades. And then in 1979, Jimmy Carter, who I read has a deal with the teachers union, elevates it to a department.
And it actually goes into operation two months before Ronald Reagan was elected president. and every Republican since Reagan has promised to get rid of it,

I think it's very possible that we've elected the one who will do it now. And it should be done because here's the numbers, right? First of all, it's a microcosm of what afflicts the most serious affliction in America.
There are 23 million, round numbers, permanent civilian employees of the government, state, local, and federal. 11 million are in education.
Is that right? Yeah, public education. So it's almost half.
Yeah. And of the 11, 6.7 million, which is more than half, are neither teachers nor teachers assistants.
So it's top heavy. You're trying to tell me seven out of 11 million of the employees of education in America publicly funded are not teachers.
6.7, yeah.

The non-teachers outnumber the teachers in public education.

And, you know, Hildall College starts charter schools, about 100 of them now. That's just incredible.
It's like the ratio is like 8 to 1 in favor of teachers because you don't need all that, right? and a lot of that is driven by funding from the Department of Education which directs a lot of the state spending because it demands that they do certain things and spend their own money on it too and hire people to manage it. So you need to decentralize.
The whole government of the United States is radically top-heavy and expensive. And so education is a great place to start in reforming that because of the nature of education itself, which is you don't need a lot of bureaucracy to run it.
You need focus on the classroom. I'm just thinking, I messaged my team, just so you know, as I said, commit this to memory, what Dr.
Arne just said. That might be the most powerful statistic I've heard in a long time.
I've heard a lot of numbers. Yeah.
That's 7 out of 11 million of the people in education. 6.7 out of 11.
6.7. Okay.
Yeah. We'll be very precise.
Last time I looked. But what are they? What do these people do? What are their jobs? Well, they, you know, shuffle paper, tell, you know, they make rules.
See, the bureaucratic, you have to understand that the, well, you do understand, the bureaucratic state is a different kind of government from constitutional rules. This is the most important thing, one of the most important things I learned from Hillsdale.

Yeah.

And it proceeds in a different way.

I have 850 employees, it turns out.

I hate rules.

Me too.

Because what rules do is they try to, you know,

something goes wrong, pass a rule so it doesn't go wrong again. Next thing you know, you've got a thousand rules.
The right way is goals. What will we achieve together? Now, go do that.
And the only rules that work are rules your mother told you. Don't lie, you know, don't steal.

Or even the Ten Commandments.

Yeah, that's right.

You know, be nice, you know, stuff like that.

And so in a free society,

things work from the bottom up

and people are responsible for themselves

because you have to locate authority

and responsibility together.

And so if you move authority to a central place, people lose responsibility for their lives. If you return authority to them, they must accept responsibility for their lives, and then they can live as free people.
So education is exactly like that. And from my understanding of what you've taught me and Hillsdale online courses have taught me, which people should check out, charlieforhillsdale.com, there was an inflection point.
Woodrow Wilson, who was a historicist, we don't have to go too far in that direction. Yeah, yeah.
But this was all happening simultaneously with John Dewey and the change of our view of education. Can you speak to how the administrative state was born in practice during that period of time?

And we're almost now fighting the 110-year hangover war in 2025, but that simultaneously was happening as we got derailed of what education actually is as well. Those two things are tied together.
Well, first of all, the progressives who did all this were educators. And they had adopted a tendency in modern philosophy.
The purpose of learning or knowledge or reason is not to know, but to make. And so we're going to remake the society.
When he's president at Princeton, Woodrow Wilson said that his object was to make the young men, his men back then, of Princeton as little like their fathers as possible. So we're going to remake the society.
And that means that now all of a sudden higher education is an exercise not in discovery or truth but in power. And that's the key to the progressive era.
They substitute the pursuit of truth for the pursuit of truth of power. And that means the federal government becomes an engine of power.
And the administrative state looks upon us as objects to shape, not as citizens to represent. And that's why there's, I mean, these crazy things that the Doge is discovering.
That's why they're there. And they're not crazy if your purpose is to remake everything in the society.
See, I walked around your place, right? And what I saw was there's a sort of pattern. There's rooms, a lot of people in them.
They're mostly young and attractive. They smile a lot.
And and there's not somebody there's not rules all over the wall there's not people watching everything they do right that that's why they come and work here and that's why they stay fun you know that's right and so it's self-governance too yeah that's right you what's our goal? And, you know, after that, it's just an interesting discussion about how you'd go about it. But they're going to have to figure that out.
That's free people, see. Whereas just, you know, I was told when I went to work at Hillsdale College, we don't take the money from the government so we don't have to find the sign or abide by the various federal titles.
And I asked a lawyer, education lawyer, I said, why don't you send me Title IV of the Higher Education Act? I was curious, you know, what is it we escape by not taking this money? And he said, well, there's no use. He said, you won't be able to read it.
And I said, you know, I'm pretty smart. What are you, a lawyer? And he said, no, I can't read it either.
He said, only a specialist can read it. See, Madison says, if the laws be so voluminous and changing that no one can tell what they say, even if they're made by the right process, they are not laws.
See? So that's what we got now, right? We're trying to shape and control the society in detail. And that spirit is the spirit of historicism from which progressivism arises.
And it's the spirit of early progressivism. And it's the reason why now they're taking people's kids away from them and doing surgery on them and that's you know that's we have to remake the thing yeah here's i i've learned an interesting argument lately that i didn't know as much about there's this man carl popper and he wrote the book the open society and george soros has founded the Open Society Foundation.

And what is the book The Open Society, and George Soros has founded the Open Society Foundation. And what is the Open Society? The Open Society is a society where all of our natural attachments are diminished.
Family, love. We're open borders, tribes, government by consent.
We have to be open to the whole world. The other night, the Secretary of State, Mr.
Rubio, was questioned by a CNN journalist. But it was freedom of speech that led to the Nazis.
And Rubio, who turns out is a pretty smart guy, read a little history, unlike this woman. Margaret Brennan was her name.
Yeah. I do not choose to remember her name.
But she didn't know that the Nazis suppressed freedom of speech.

And, of course, they did.

It's what tyrants do.

I have an online course on that right now.

Excellent.

And see, that's straight out of Karl Popper.

See, attachment to freedom causes war and Nazism. See, and apparently that's all she knows.
She didn't read a book and find out whether that's actually true or not. And that, how did I learn that? I read some really good – I haven't read Karl Popper.
My education is incomplete or maybe it's more complete. I think it's more complete.
But I read a long article by a highly intelligent man about him the other day and I said, oh, yeah, I see. That's what – and see, Soros, that's what he's doing to our country.

He's going to undermine our attachments.

And that means the worst thing in the world

is for somebody to get elected president

on the ground that he's going to work on his country first.

See?

Because we're not supposed to have a country.

Because then we'll have wars. But the the purpose of the country by the way is to protect us a lot of the next generation is drowning in student loan debt and you guys very well might be one of them if you have private student loan debt listen carefully why refi is not a debt settlement organization or company but they work work with each borrower individually, tailoring each loan to each specific situation.

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Why are EFY.com? They're huge supporters of our campus tour, for example, of America Fest. That's why are EFY.com? Whyrefi.com? So I want to ask just briefly the unexpected development of doge empowered by president trump to go after the administrative state in your career you've been talking about the administrative state deep state shadow government we want to call it for 50 years that's right have we ever seen anything like this this doge thing it's uh I can't think of a single

movement in politics

that I have seen

that is as important or skillful.

And even

the skillful part, I mean, first of all,

to make it the

center, you know,

Donald Trump,

first of all, I met Donald

Trump for the first time in early

2015,

astonished myself

Thank you. Donald Trump, you know, first of all, I met Donald Trump for the first time in early 2015.
Astonished myself by deciding to take him seriously. And because before, you know, I thought what everybody thought about him.
Interesting guy, you know, show pony. But what was he saying? He was saying, America first, drain the swamp.
And, you know, America is for us. We the people in the United States, in order to secure the blessings of our liberty for ourselves and our posterity, right? America first.
He, and drain the swamp. That's what the doge is about.
Because we have built this administrative class and it consumes one way or another half the gross domestic product of the country. It's got us $37 trillion in debt.
And equally bad to the waist is that the things that we used to be good at, we're not very good at them anymore. We can't teach a kid to read to save our lives.
We can't get equipment back from Afghanistan, most of which equipment ought not to have been there anyway. And so, I mean, you know, it was a very good idea to go over there and kill those guys who did the 9-11.

And we did that.

And the plan I happened to know at the time, because I knew Don Rumsfeld very well and admired him very much,

was to go over there and get them, light force, use their enemies against each other, kill them and get out.

Go back somewhere safe. And, you know, I happen, I believe, I happen to know that because Roosevelt told me that.
That's what they thought they were going to go do. And what, by the way, they did do that.
They got that done. But then to stay and build a democracy there and in Iraq, I believe what information I've've learned, that they decided that after the fact, right? Which means they don't quite understand how politics works or how democracy is built, in my opinion.
Yeah, so, but, you know, that's one reason why it's good for a person, if he's going to be a citizen in a free country, to be a student and learn a bunch of stuff. Because, you know, you need to know.
Yeah, but the ignorance of that woman, Brennan, who questioned Marco Rubio, she was actually silenced. which means probably she was astonished by the point that everybody was afraid to say anything in Nazi Germany.
So Dr. Arn, you are probably the greatest living historian on Churchill.
Yeah. Is that fair to say? Well, no.
Well, I'm pretty good. I know a lot about it.
We have a picture there of Churchill on the wall. I don't know if you saw that or not.
Good one. Do you know what that is? I don't actually know.
He looks like he's doing a radio broadcast. That's the 1930s.
1930s? Yeah. Is that him on BBC or is that? Yeah.
There was only BBC. Oh, is that right? Yeah.
Yeah. So he's doing some sort of radio broadcast.
Yeah. Who knows what.
What can Churchill teach us about foreign policy? Well, you know, we've gotten a lot of things wrong about Churchill in both directions. We think that Churchill is for war, and Churchill is for winning war but avoiding it at possible and winning it at the most economical possible cost.
And now we think that some people are arguing Churchill caused the Second World War and dragged us into it. And that just turns out not to be true and not even very hard to look up.
And so that means that we've now made both mistakes.

We thought Winston Churchill, you know, I happen to know that people in power thought that Winston Churchill was their example for building democracy in Iraq. and it's just a factual point

that he was in fact in charge of Iraq

at the end of the First World War and for three years, and that his plan was to cut the cost of being there and get out of there as quick as he could. That's what he did.
And he did not want Iraq, and he did want a place, a ruler, acceptable to the people. But that's pretty broad range.
What do they want, right? But he also said that this is not a central interest of Great Britain and we're not going to stay here. And so that means that's got something wrong, right? Something, by the way, that is not difficult to look up.
And then now we get another thing wrong, the opposite thing wrong. Now we think he was a crazy warmonger, and we've got to stop being that.
What he was was closer to the truth about these things than anybody else I know. War is very dangerous.
The only way to prevent it, and there's no perfect way, is to be in a position to win it at the cheapest possible cost. And the reason for that is only a fool, no classic philosopher, thinks that the purpose of politics is to win war.
They all think, and the founders of America thought, and every sensible person thinks, that the purpose of war is to preserve freedom and peace in politics. And that means you do as little of it as you must, and you spend as little on it as you have to.
And that means you need to be efficient about it. And you may have to spend a very great deal, but if you do, you regret it and look for a way to stop.
And that whole thing that, you know, there's a national greatness movement.

Winston Churchill would not be a good leader

of such a movement because he thought

the greatness of Britain was in its protection

of its people.

And so, yeah, so I argued those things.

I wrote in a book to argue those things.

And, you know, there is a tendency, and, you know, I'm not immune to it either probably, except that I've just made a series of propositions and I think I can prove them, have labored to prove them. There's a tendency to use all kinds of information, including about things in the past, for a purpose alien to them.
And that's because, and all humans have that, of course we have that. But how do you conquer that? One way is to learn to be a student.
That is, take yourself out of it and look at the thing, which is what a student does.

You're going to look at a book, and it will change you if you listen to it.

And I think we have to get better at that in America because we're making a lot of mistakes.

When it comes to Churchill and Russia, Ukraine, how would he think about this?

Well, I've been taught not to answer questions.

What would he do?

Okay. What principles can we apply to that situation?

I have looked through the Churchill corpus, and there's almost no mention of Ukraine.

It is

a breadbasket contended

between Germany and Russia.

As an independent thing,

it hardly comes up.

I can

find a parallel kind of thing.

And remember,

this is very, you know,

so to figure out what to do about Ukraine, first of all, there's a current situation. And, you know, the current situation would have to include not just Russian aggression, which is real.
It would have to include history. It would have to include our strength or weakness.
It would have to include China and its strength or weakness. It would have to include Iran and its strength or weakness.
And how whatever we do in Ukraine affects all that. So that the net result you're after is the protection of our country.
If you happen to be elected in our country. So that's the way you think about it.
And so I can describe to you in some detail places where Churchill made judgments like that. In 1938, Churchill wanted Britain to be prepared to go to war to save Czechoslovakia from Hitler.
Czechoslovakia had a big defense industry and a big army, and he thought, now's the time. Neville Chamberlain did the opposite.
Then in 1939, a year later, Hitler has violated his word in Czechoslovakia and taken all the rest of it that he promised not to take.

And so then Neville Chamberlain gives a guarantee to Poland, which is farther away from Western Europe and weaker than Czechoslovakia.

And Churchill was not in the government on either occasion, But he thought, wow, that's a big step. So when the war broke out, the Second World War actually broke out over German and Soviet invasion of Poland.
And Britain declared war on September 3rd, 1939 because of that thing. And then they took no step, no serious step anyway, to actually defend Poland, because they couldn't even get there.
And the Soviets and the Germans and the Nazis carved up Poland, and now there's a Polish government in exile in London. It's a long story, sorry.
And Churchill becomes prime minister. And now he's dealing with the Soviet government in exile.
And Britain has gone into war over Poland. And so he has hours of conversations with him.
I turn out to be the man who edited those conversations and published them in the document volumes to the official biography. And the Polish leaders say, look, we have to confront these Russians before they get after the Battle of Stalingrad.
Everybody knows the Russians are coming and they're strong, really strong. And they say, you've got major forces with Americans in Europe.
We've got to confront the Russians, the Soviets, not let them take Poland. Churchill says it would be lunacy to think that we will fight the Soviets over Poland.
What he was for instead was you should give Russia territory in the east, and we will give you territory from the Germans in the west, and then maybe Stalin will not gobble up Poland. They never made that deal.
It's very odd how it worked out. At both Yalta and Potsdam, the two final conferences of the Second World War.

There was no deal, but Stalin gave, offered, gave guarantees of the free elections with independent international observers in Poland at both those conferences. And the Potsdam conference was in July 1945, and then the war's over, and in August of 1945, one month over later,

he arrested all the Polish leaders and closed Poland.

And Churchill was not prepared to go to war over that,

probably could not have, even with us,

because the Soviet Army was very big,

and we were busy bringing ours home.

So the point is, that's not exactly opposite.

But, you know, it's in the middle of Europe.

Churchill favored the peripheral strategy.

You know, we got a big navy.

We can reach the edges of everything.

If you look at a map of the British Empire, it rings Eurasia, some in South America, Canada, important place where nobody lives. So, yeah, what would he do? I don't know, but I am confident.
When the Ukraine war started, I was concerned.

I mean, first of all, the Russians said they guaranteed the independence of Ukraine, and then they invaded it.

That's bad.

They shouldn't do that.

Against that, Crimea has been a Russian and Soviet naval base since the 18th century. I'd be astonished if we ever got them out of there.
And, you know, so the re-invasion of Crimea, they never really left it. And then there's the fact that we are weak.
We're running out of bullets. The Chinese have a bigger navy than we, and they're building much faster than we are.
Is this the place to fight the war? I can see why there'd be big doubts about it. I've had them from the beginning.
And then the effect, you know, China looks to me like a more serious problem than Russia. Hard to make the judgment, but I think so.
And we're driving them together. And you can see that in these negotiations, I don't know how any of this is going to come off.
And remember, what would I do? I'm not in charge. I have been doubtful about us drawing a complete line in Ukraine from the beginning.
There are some who think, and I don't know the story as well as they, that we could have made a deal with Russia about Ukraine a long time ago if we gave them the Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine, and that seems to be roughly what Trump is offering. So there you go.
That's what I think. I do not think, by the way.
Oh, here's a, let's talk about Lincoln. There's a man named Kassuth.
He was a Hungarian revolutionary. There's a statue of him, a nice one, in Washington, D.C.
And he went around America giving speeches about Hungarian independence. And he got Kassuth resolutions passed in many places.
And one of the places is Springfield, Illinois. And so he gave a talk to the Republican Club, and then the committee retired, and they came back with a resolution.
And it's rather different than most of them. It says the United States has no right to intervene in any country by nature.

I'm paraphrasing. There are three.

The second one is, if a country attacks us, we can.

And the third one is, if a third country attacks another country,

we may intervene if we find it in our interest. You see, signed, A.
Lincoln. I thought that's something of a guide about how to think about it.
Is it in our interest? It's very simple. Yeah.
Well, Dr. Arn, thank you for your time as always.

Everyone should check out charlieforhillsdale.com to take the online courses and thank you for everything. Thank you, Charlie.

You're great.

Talk to you soon, guys.

Thank you.

Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

Thanks so much for listening and God bless.

For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to charliekirk.com.