What is Education? What is Truth? What is Beauty? ft. David Goodwin

Hey everybody, it's the end of the Charlie Kirk Show. A phenomenal conversation with David Goodwin from the American Association for Christian Classical Schools.
Really great conversation of what is education, what is truth, what is beauty. I think you'll really enjoy it.
You might think that you're sending your kid or grandkid to a good school. You might think that your kid's getting a good education, but listen carefully.
You might not. You might want to reconsider what school you're sending your kid or grandkid to.
It's the most important decision, one of the most important decisions you could make. Get involved with Turning Point USA at tpusa.com.
That is tpusa.com. Email me, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Buckle up, everybody. Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here. Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie. He's an incredible guy.
His spirit, his love of this country. He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country. That is noblegoldinvestments.com.
It's where I buy all of my gold. Go to noblegoldinvestments.com.
Okay, everybody, a very special conversation here with my friend, David Goodwin. David, great to see you.
It's great to be with you, Charlie. So David, I'm going to ask a simple yet deep question.
What is education? Well, there's a lot of answers to that. But in our parlance in the classical Christian world, which is the area I'm familiar with, it's the cultivation of wisdom and virtue.
Pretty simple set of qualifiers there, but it takes a bit to unpack. So you helped run or you founded the Association of Classical Christian Schools? I didn't find it, but I am the president of it, have been for the last decade or so.
So I toured one of your schools in Boise. Yes, that's the one that I started.
I was very impressed. And it was so different than traditional government-run schools and even private schools that have an industrial model, very German model.
Explain to our audience what is the philosophical difference between a classical education and a more industrial type of education. Well, in a word, it would be the enculturation of children as opposed to informing them, just giving them a lot of facts.
So if you look at the industrial education that the progressives created in the early part of the 20th century, it was geared almost exclusively towards vocation, like teach kids how to make money. And the classical education that had been there for years prior had always done a sufficient job of that, but it had been more focused on the enculturation.
And I think that's a lot of what happened to America. When we took away the American culture, it started to decay.
And over the course of about 100 years, we find ourselves where we have been the last few. Talk about how your classes are not set up necessarily in single file rows, that it's much more discussion or dialogue based.
And just so everyone understands from one perspective, the industrial model is done by most government schools and most private schools, which is that kids are something to be programmed as if you're a carpenter. But you look at your job as more like a gardener.
Correct. What does that mean? Well, we're trying to cultivate the tools of knowledge.
How do you come to know things? And that's a very different thing. What do you mean by that? Well, what I mean by that is in the old world it was understood that knowledge isn't so easy to come by.
It's easy to get information. We see that all over the place.
And then we have people calling misinformation, right? The real challenge is getting students who can discern truth from falsehood as they learn. And so our focus is more about teaching them how to discern what is true than it is just telling them what the truth is.
So that combination is some of what you saw when you were at the school in Boise, where all of our schools have some form of this, where it's conducted, at least in the high school and usually the junior high, a large table where the students are taking apart

ancient texts and trying to understand what is the truth contained in these and what is the falsehood in these and can we align these with the truth of Jesus Christ and the scriptures and that combination of exercises forms up this skill of acquiring knowledge and that's the rare skill in our our day today. So why is it that our public schools have gravitated so far away from this practice of learning? Well, they intentionally designed it that way in about 1915.
Mr. Dewey? Yes, John Dewey, our...
Arch nemesis of liberty. Exactly.
He thought that that kind of education that really taught students to discern knowledge wasn't helpful in an industrial economy. We needed to train basically servile students to be able to do jobs.
Now, in his time, it was mostly factory work, but it later became engineering or science or STEM instead of looking at the citizen and saying what makes a citizen capable of self-governance, which is what our founding fathers were involved with. That's why they were all classically educated.
They just understood and assumed this. And so John Dewey brings this in and our schools are immediately reoriented towards just basically programming kids to do.
At first it was science, that kind of thing. But, you know, you had the Maoist revolution and we learned a few things.
You know, the progressives learned a few things from that Maoist revolution. I'm talking about the cultural revolution in the 1960s, not the original one.
When Mao realized that the best way to establish a communist government was to enculturate the people to desire communism. And so he took over the educational systems and indoctrinated them in that way.
And that's exactly what the progressives did in the latter half of the 20th century. While we may have won this election, the fight to restore our great nation is only beginning.
Now is the time to take a stand and Patriot Mobile is leading the charge. As America's only Christian conservative wireless provider, Patriot Mobile offers a way to vote with your wallet without compromising on quality or convenience.
Patriot Mobile isn't just about providing exceptional cell phone service. It's a call to action to defend our rights and freedoms with Patriot Mobile.
You'll get outstanding nationwide coverage because they operate on all three major networks. If you have a cell phone service today, you can get a cell phone service with Patriot Mobile with a coverage guarantee.
But the difference is every dollar you spend supports the first and second amendments. Sanctity of life are veterans and first responders.
Switching is easy. Keep your number, keep your phone, or upgrade.
Their 100% U.S.-based customer service team will help you find the perfect plan. Go to patriotmobile.com slash charlie or call 972-PATRIOT and get a free month of service with promo code charlie.
Switch to Patriot Mobile today and defend freedom with every call and text you make. Visit patriotmobile.com slash Charlie or call 972-PATRIOT.

Some even conservative parents will marvel and say, well, my local school, they have a great

STEM program and all I want out of my school is for them to do math and arithmetic and prepare

them for a job. you reject that premise.

Well, yes, because whatever job you prepare them for, at least in this economy, I mean, at least at the pragmatic level, is going to be gone by the time they graduate anyway. So it's a pointless exercise, except one job that's always there, which is discerning truth, to understand, to know, to learn how to know.

You know, Dorothy Sayers in her essay on education that she did in the 1940s was titled The Lost Tools of Learning. And what she said in that essay was that we used to teach kids the tools of learning and now we don't at a time, and I'm paraphrasing here, at a time when it's never been so important, because radio and television and books are readily available, and all these ideas are coming at these kids, and they have no idea how to discern what is true and what's not true.
So, of course, again, our nemesis in the progressive world, their idea is, we'll just call it all fake news or fault or what's the term they use? Misinformation. Disinformation.
That's right. Disinformation.
We'll call it that. And one side calls it fake.
The other is disinformation. And in reality, the kids need to be able to listen to it all and figure out what's true.
And that's the skill that we teach. And really understand what it means to be a citizen.
Right. Well, that is a big part of the wisdom, wisdom and virtue.
When it comes to the founding fathers, this was their main focus for education, was wisdom and virtue, because they knew. And it was visible, because as soon as the revolution was over and the country was established, you have Alexis de Tocqueville come here and he observes this about the country, that it's oddly educated, that farmers actually have read Cicero or Caesar.
And he's more used to the European, of course he was French, he was used to the European model where you've got the aristocrats who are educated in the greats. And then the average farmer just does what he's told to do.
A very different picture here in America. And that's what de Tocqueville said kept us going.
That's a profound observation. So the way the country is going now is government run schools are failing terribly at even the basics.
We have private schools that don't embrace the classical model. Is it fair to say the classical model takes more work?

Well, it certainly does on behalf on the part of the student.

So it's harder as well.

It is harder for a kid to go through a classical education than go to local Bakersfield Elementary. You know, it's harder, but it's not necessarily more drudgery because kids tend to react well when you challenge them, when you ask them to think.
Strength rejoices in the challenge. Yes, and the works that we use, the great books of the West, the Bible, there's a lot of depth in those.
And so I think a lot of kids, if we think back to our public school experience, certainly I was in the public schools, you were, I think, for a time. That's right.
I see it more as tedium than anything else. And it wasn't that it was hard or easy, because some of my classes were hard.
It was that it just didn't seem to have a point. It was monotonous.
Yeah. Yeah.
So it wasn't pointing towards anything at your schools, the American Association of Christian, classical Christian schools. Are you I'm sure the answer is yes.
But talk about how you're unafraid to talk about objective truth. That is one of the things that even some conservative parents say, well, I don't want a school or a government school or anyone saying ever that there is an absolute good or truth.
Just teach the basics and move on. Well, we start with the precept that there is absolute truth, and the reason that's important is that everything else becomes pointless if you don't believe that, right? What's the point in reading old books with ideas if none of them matter? Matter.
Yeah, they don't think towards anything. So yes, you have to start there.
But when you start there, the world opens up. It's a much bigger, it's a much bigger form of education.
These kids, if the most common things I hear from graduates of our schools when they return is that they've gotten to college and they find it, again, to be tedium.

Our schools are robust enough that obviously they can do the work.

Unless they go to Hillsdale.

Well, Hillsdale is an exception for sure.

There's a handful of those exceptions. But for most kids that go to the colleges, they can't find anybody who has an interesting mind, anybody who wants to discuss anything.

Everything is superficial.

So I think that's a lot of what we try and do in our schools is just give kids a love for depth, a love for learning.

Yeah.

They're more interested in inquiring about new ideas than they are arguing about them because they're curious. That's what we try and build.
It's called wonder in our form. All men seek to know.
Philosophy starts with wonder. Both of those are two different.
Yes. But I think it's one of the first lines of aristotle's metaphysics yes yes exactly i i think i i'm i'm gonna look it up in a second here but something i know all men seek to know is the beginning of one either not the politics that's a separate one but actually the beginning of politics is also every art every inquiry every action points towards some good and you have to have a definition of what the good is.
Right. Exactly.
And you're going to live under some superseding moral code. And that's something that the progressives have done a very successful trick on us, making us believe that there could be an agnostic public square.
And I don't know if they ever believed that, but that's certainly what they want us to believe. Because cultural Marxism has a very strong set of ideals that are transcendent in their view.
In their view, for example, wealth is necessarily evil, or the equity of all, you know, leveling of all wealth, leveling of all status and stature is an ultimate good. And that's an unquestionable good in, I think, most progressive schools, and it's one that needs to be questioned.
History, economics, the great works of literature. Did you study these things in school? Probably not.
Or even if you did, maybe it's time for an enjoyable refresher. Hillsdale College is offering more than 40 free online courses, including their newest course on totalitarian novels.
In this free eight-lecture course, you'll learn from Hillsdale College president Larry Arnn as he goes in-depth on four novels, 1984, Brave New World, that hideous strength I love all four even though these novels written in the 1930s and 40s they're highly relevant today as they show what a tyrannical government does to human nature more importantly they can show us that faith family and friends are worth fighting for maybe you read these books a long time ago in school maybe you've heard heard others talk about them, and they seem a little intimidating. Let Hillsdale College, America's greatest college, help you make the most of them.
Go right now to charlieforhillsdale.com to enroll. There's no cost, and it's easy to get started.
That is charlieforhillsdale.com, C-H-A-R-L-I-E for Hillsdale.com. So there's lots of parents listening to this right now, and they might think they're going, they're sending their kid to a solid school.
I'm not asking you to criticize them, but what are very simple questions that they can ask? A checklist of whether or not their school is truly pursuing what is good, true, and beautiful. You know, that's funny.
These may sound a little bit strange, so I hope that you're going to take them.

No, please go through them. I want parents to take notes and grandparents and then compare.
Yes, so the first one I would ask is, at what age do they read a full book, cover to cover? Most schools these days have moved to just short little passages of readings they don't want to. Yeah, the books.

And then the second question, beyond what is the age at which they read their first full book with chapters in it, not small readers, but an actual book with chapters, say, Little House on the Prairie or something like that. Old Yeller, yeah, sure.
Yeah, Old Yeller, any of those. Then the next question would be, what is the greatest book that you guys read at this school? And by that, I mean something that's older than 100 years old.
Just any book that's older than 100 years old that you read. I think those two questions will often tease out answers that may surprise most parents.
I think this is what, when Pete Hegseth and I wrote Battle for the American Mind, he was fascinated and brought in some really good material on what he called the COVID-16-19 project, which was back at the time, parents watching over the shoulders of their kids and realizing that what they were learning at school was very different than what the parents thought they were learning at school. So that's why some of these questions I might suggest that people ask may seem a little bit rudimentary.
I love those too. So you're saying most schools, they don't read anything post 100 years, and they definitely won't even tell a kid, hey, here's an 11-chapter book, you must read it.
Right. What age usually is that, do you find? High school, if at all um i have been surprised that even in high schools that's not happening anymore do you think it's possible that there are kids right now that are juniors and seniors that have never read an entire book i know it's possible because i've met them oh come on now i don't you're trying to tell me there's kids that are juniors in high school in america that have never read a book yes it is it is very strange.
And I... It's a national security crisis.

If it weren't for the fact that the kids were standing in front of me telling me this, I probably wouldn't have believed it. But it's it's not just that it's, you know, the quality of what they're reading, the content of what they're studying.
You know, in this day and age, certainly one thing I would ask if I were a parent looking

at a school is when do you start teaching cursive or do you start teaching cursive? Yeah, they've gotten rid of it. Most of them have gotten rid of it.
So I was, you're not to convince me on the cursive one. I was taught cursive.
What utility is there in cursive? Well, it's interesting. What does it form? It forms an aesthetic, which is kind of a—in classical education, we talk about the three transcendentals, truth, goodness, and beauty.

Those are the three axes, if you will, kind of if you think of it like a Cartesian plane, just like height, width, and depth.

In the world of ideas, in the world of content and material, everything is measured in those three axes, truth, goodness, and beauty. And the beauty axis has been forgotten for a long time.
I totally agree. If you just want to capture a little bit of this, just look at the Declaration of Independence and look at the signatures on it.
And John Hancock's signature is the one we often think of because it's so large. But men of his day actually sought to create a distinctive cursive hand because it was viewed as part of their refinement to become a better person because they had beauty even in the hand in which they wrote.
And this is something that we teach kids, you know. So that's kind of maybe more of an ethereal answer to your question.
No, I'm tracking. But there's also the fine motor skills that you gain from that.
Our kids' fine motor skills at this point are really defined by tapping iPad screens. I think using a pen to write in a very precise way is a way to build that.
And then there's just the aspect that cursive is an efficient way to write. And there are times when you should write in a book.
And it's also just for no other reason than it's different and challenges you. It does.
And if you've got a good teacher, if it's not just somebody who wants you to accomplish it. Yeah, I felt it was, at least my memory, it was very monotonous.
I didn't like it. It was a pain or a labor.
The best teachers are the ones who have had some background in script writing, like calligraphers do calligraphy writing.

Those teachers can really bring it alive for the kids.

It's like anything else.

In classical education—

It was mandated in the schools I went to.

Not in the public schools, but in the Christian school and then the school I went to prior.

Uh-huh.

Are you a student loan borrower? If you're in debt, listen carefully. Private student loan debt is, in the U.S., totals about $300 billion.
About $45 billion of that is labeled as distressed. They provide you with a custom loan payment based on your ability to pay.
Y-Refi is not a debt settlement company, and they work with each borrower individually, tailoring each loan to each borrower's specific situation. You will not be calling a faceless call center.
Because of private student loan debt, so many Americans feel stuck and helpless, and they even lose hope. If you are one of those people with a distressed private student loan, go to yrefi.com.
That's Y-R-E-F-Y.com. A lot of you probably have distressed student loans and you've kind of ignored it or you're not really sure what to do.
Go to yrefy.com. To go to yrefy.com, you can read the testimonials.
It's a legit company, an ethical company. We love working with them.
They support our campus tour. They're phenomenal.
So because of private student loan debt, so many Americans feel stuck and helpless. Get yourself unstuck.
Go to YREFY.com. If you have a distressed, defaulted student loan, you guys can get out of debt today.
YREFI.com. That is YREFI.com.
So parents, those two questions are phenomenal. What other one? I mean, when I walked through your school, what's the name of the school in Boise again? The Ambrose School.
The Ambrose School? Okay. When I walked through the Ambrose School, I was struck by how many old paintings, old pictures of paintings, statues.
I'm talking about thousands of years old from, or hundreds of years old, Montesquieu to Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Pascal. Remember, I brought Blake with me and he was naming all the, remember that? Yes.
Boy, that was a couple years ago. Is there something to the idea of we want to have the students surrounded by the old and the lasting? Yes.
In fact, it ties back to the beauty thing. Of course.
In that... That which is perfected in being.
I think Churchill said, and I always botched this, but we make our buildings and then our buildings make us. The idea that the architecture influences...
So the building you were in was designed from the ground up to be a school. It's beautiful.
And it's designed to cultivate in kids an appreciation for old tradition and for a love of great art. And so that's why that's in there.
But I think if you look around at your typical public school, it speaks as well architecturally. Typically, it's highly utilitarian.
It's like a cabinet drawer. Yeah.
It's utilitarian. It's functional.
It doesn't play to... It does not point up.
It does not play to the humanity of the students. It plays to them as though they're computers.
They're widgets. Yes.
You could put a bunch of computers in those buildings, and they would very easily... It could be a data center.
Exactly. Exactly.
I think that's's exactly right and you look at the actual picture of the department of education it actually looks like a file cabinet yes because that's literally what bureaucrat means means desk worker so we only have a couple minutes remaining here i could talk about this all day long do you before we get into any specifics you want to plug do you think that the current trend is favorable in American education right now? I do think it is, and I think it is for several reasons. Certainly Trump has shown us that there is a way forward.
There's a way to push back against the cultural Marxism that has dominated this country over the last many years. So I think that classical Christian education, it plays a particular role.
I think that parents are finding it. I would say it's the dominant alternate form to the public schools right now.
It's coming in a variety of forms, some of them charters, some classical Christian privates, various forms of it. I feel new energy behind this.
Yes, there is. And the energy, it's a little frightening for some of us.
I've been in this 30 years, and at first no one cared what we were doing because no one knew we existed. And now people are starting to look.
We're getting criticism from quarters trying to restore that dastardly western tradition that they would rather have go away they want the west to go away they want the west so they must get rid of the tradition and get rid of the right and the thing that perpetuates the tradition is the is the enemy and so they they they definitely are starting to notice classical education, certainly what's happened in Florida with the growth. DeSantis is pushing the entire state, whether it's the collegiate level or the K-12 level, in this classical direction.
So I think it's our time. I totally agree.
And I think that people are seeing the excesses of modernity. They're seeing the lies of secularized, hyper-modernist, materialistic culture, and they want to go back towards what is lasting, what is true.
Now, Catholic education tends to be more classical. Is that fair to say that usually that because when I think of Catholic, a classical, I think of it more Catholic in nature.
But you guys are Protestant. Is that correct? ACCS is Protestant.
I would say my friends in the Catholic movement would say it's not. Really? Okay.
And it's odd. It's not.
There are Catholic classical. There are, and they're very good.
Yes. So I'm not totally on that.
No, you're not. The thing was is that in the mid-1900s, I'm sorry, mid-1800s, the Blaine Amendments were put in to try and freeze out the Catholics.
So the Catholics formed their own school systems that then rode right alongside the progressive school system. Tell me about the Blaine Amendments.
I don't know about this. Well, the Blaine Amendments, it's named after a senator who tried to pass it nationally.
And basically, it was the Protestant church so despised the Catholic church in America at the time that they were trying to freeze the Catholics out of education. They did not want any Catholic education whatsoever.
Backfired. Catholics have more schools than Protestants.
Exactly, They do, because the Blaine Amendment said you can't spend any money, any federal money or any state money on religious education. And so that pushed the Catholics out.
They formed their own system. That system paralleled and pretty much took on the progressive form in the early part of the 20th century when the progressives revolutionized education in the United States.
It was a big movement.

And so those, what are often called diocese, the diocese schools within the Catholic church

can oftentimes be very progressive in their form. But the Catholic church is very traditional.
And

so it's recovering quickly its old form, the form of education that was native to those schools

Thank you. But the Catholic Church is very traditional, and so it's recovering quickly its old form, the form of education that was native to those schools originally, and they're putting it back into place rapidly.
So I'm very optimistic about that. I'm excited about what they're contributing to the movement because they have a very deep history.
How can people support you, get involved, and learn more? Well, you can learn more at classicalchristian.org. That is our main site that directs people in any which direction you want to go, whether you want to teach in our schools, whether you want to find a school, start a school.
So I would advise that you start there. And closing thoughts for parents that might like the local football team, but they know the school's no good.
Well, just visit one of these schools. I agree.
You just walk in. You live in Boise, you got to check it out.
Yeah. Well, any one of them in any state, if you go in during operations, I think, Charlie, you were there after hours a little bit.
I can't remember. But if you go during operations, no matter what you see, you'll notice it's different.
David, you've been a great friend. And congrats to our friend Pete Hegseth, by the way, your co-author.
Yes. Big deal.
And we at Turning Point Academy are here to help in any way we possibly can. We love what you guys are doing.
And Hutz is special, isn't he? He's a wonderful guy. And the work that you guys are doing, you know, you very much recognize this space.
Well, thank you. And I want to see more classical schools pop up.
I want to see more classical Christian schools pop up in particular. And I'm really impressed.
And thank you, David, for your time. Thank you.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us, as always, freedom at thank you David for your time.
Thank you.

Thanks so much for listening everybody. Email us as always freedom at charliekirk.com.