Ep. 011: The Need to Abolish Government Schools with Professor Bradley Thompson

Professor Bradley Thompson of Clemson University pulls no punches regarding the need to abolish government (public) schools and utterly privatize the field of education. As our guest on Truth In Politics, he will explain why government schools are an irremediable failure, why they cannot be fixed, and why they must be abolished and replaced by private education in diverse forms.

Transcript

0:00

freedom of speech land welcome to truth in politics with your hosts um andrew bernstein and with bosch fosten how you doing tonight bosh excellent excellent i look forward to this yeah great because we have a special guest uh on tonight my former boss at clemson university professor professor bradley thompson from the clemson institute for the study of capitalism welcome to truth in politics brad hi guys it's great to be with you great to have you on and the topic for tonight of course is uh uh abolishing the government school so this is this is uh a topic that brad is is expert and so i don't think we can have anybody in the country better than than you brad to discuss this issue but uh before we even get started i just want to you know uh point out amongst brad's books this one america's revolutionary mind is the most recent was this like two years old brad when was this published uh november of 2019 so it's a year and a half old okay in two years this year this is a brilliant book on america's rev on america's founding period and brad thompson's an expert on is one of the leading uh john adams scholars in the you know in in the world so i strongly recommend this book to anybody who really wants to know the truth about america's america's founding uh founding pair great job with this book brad this is really really insightful thank you appreciate it yeah yeah thank you so uh i guess a good segue by should brad from this is that america's founders didn't have to go through government it's not funny left they just didn't have to go through government schools there was the private education in it wasn't the united states when they were growing up but in the american 18th century american colonies private education was widespread and it was very good wasn't it it was outstanding and in fact i mean i think it's probably true to say that almost all of america's founding fathers were homeschooled at least homeschooled up to a certain point they were almost certainly taught basic reading writing arithmetic at home and then many of them went to what was called a a dame school which is basically a school within a home it was it was the true it was the original home school where somebody would just put a shingle out on their front veranda and uh announcing that they were teaching uh you know various subjects john adams as a young boy was taught latin and ancient greek at the local home school and i think that's how virtually all of america's founding fathers uh were taught um government schooling was not introduced into this country really until the 1850s so um you had you had over 250 years of education taking place in um in the american colonies and then in the united states of america that was either homeschooling or it was private education government schooling is a recent phenomenon in american history right right i'm sure you have some questions for what would you say thompson what mostly are the worst consequences of government schools i mean you know what what are the things that make it that it has to be that they have to be abolished i mean what is it about them that they just that they uh destroy minds that they uh manipulate minds of of the youth in america i mean what we say is like the worst if anything consequences of government schools in terms of the culture in terms of individuals and children across the country so bosh to answer that question let me actually start at the other end of the telescope and let me say that in my view america's government schools uh represent the single most corrupt and immoral institution in the united states why is it immoral it's immoral because it's ultimately based on compulsion on force and government schooling in the united states of course has at its root of compulsory education children are forced to go to government schools right so virtually every state in america has uh truancy laws and if you don't go to school if you're if you decide not to go to school for weeks or months eventually the police are going to show up at your door and they will force you back in school so that's the first leg uh of of the immorality of government schooling the second is that it's based on compulsory taxation you don't have a choice whether to pay local property taxes for the local school whether you have children or not you must buy the force of the state you must pay local property taxes for local government schooling and then finally the government schools uh are based on government-created curricula which um which come from the top down which are created uh often by government agencies or their surrogates namely the so-called teacher uh teacher education schools uh which are which are a part of what i call the education establishment and the education establishment would be the teachers unions the education schools and the education bureaucracy and those three institutions they they form the curricula uh for the most part of of most government schools so at its at its founding at its root uh it is based on an immoral premise namely propulsion or force and then you move to what is actually being taught in the government schools now i mean i look i could spend the entire uh hour that we have tonight or probably three or four hours talking about what is taught in the schools right and so what you have to do next is you have to go into a school and you have to observe what is being taught and in in every subject matter uh whether it's english or reading or math or the various sciences or geography or history america's government schools are failing by every measurable test our students on national exams and on international exams they are failing right when when you have in some areas of the united states uh you know upwards of 90 percent of students in some inner-city schools who don't have basic competency in mathematics right that eventually is going to trickle down and have an effect on society but the the really the really important thing right are are the the values that are being taught in the government schools particularly in history and in social studies and now in the schools they have subjects like ethnic studies so california for instance has just i believe uh mandated uh the teaching of ethnic studies uh and the ethnic studies program is basically just critical race theory so that is to say it's it's marxism plus post-modernism now i mean look one could go through a whole variety of subjects i could talk about i could talk about reading for instance and how that's been completely corrupted right the bottom line is what is being taught in the classrooms i i believe is cogniti is causing um a kind of cognitive dissonance if not cognitive abuse uh on on america's children and and when you when you look at the staggering uh rates of of drug use among among uh young people suicide rates uh sexual nihilism i mean all of this in the world and the school invasions too right the school invasions by invasions you mean yeah these these kids come in like you know you know like dylan dylan what's his name dylan klebold and eric harris going to shoot up to school not an accident they don't go shoot up mcdonald's these kids these kids go shoot up to schools there's got to be some connection well there is right and that's an important question to ask why are america's teenage boys going into their local school and and committing mass murder right the question that nobody wants to ask is maybe it has something to do with what's going on in the school right so typically you get um you know liberals in this country want to argue that it's all about guns right it's it's guns that are causing america's 14 year old boys to go to their school and commit mass suicide on the other hand you have religious conservatives who want to argue that it's video games uh or divorce rates that are causing america's boys to commit mass murder nobody is asking why it is that these young men are targeting the schools like so you know mass you know young young men uh throughout history have committed acts of violence but those acts of violence have almost always been outside of the schools right you know when a teenage boy uh you know gets has his girlfriend stolen you know he has a specific reason you know you stole my girlfriend bang your debt you stole my varsity jacket bang your debt right but that doesn't explain why they're going in and take the you know the case of little morato right where where they where they the dylan uh klebol and eric harris i mean they committed mass murder and they wanted to kill every single person in the school that was their goal not only did they shoot and kill 13 or 14 people they had bombs set up always destroyed the entire school but nobody wants to ask maybe the school itself was the target and maybe the school was the target precisely because of what is being taught in the classroom and how it is being taught no i think that's a really good point uh harrison klebold that was 1999 right so over the last 22 years we've seen this these copycat crimes all this this trend towards shooting up the schools you know you know these kids like i said they're not out shooting at mcdonald's generally they go into the school so there's something in the schools that's enraging these kids and i think i can understand why their minds are being stunted uh in this course but we we we only have an hour like you said i wanted to get on to other things before i ask you a question brad you when you were talking before about the homeschools during america's colonial period remind me you know in our day or recent times there are good examples of the successful examples that's what pretty much what marvin collins did right the great marvel collins at west side prep in chicago for decades you know took kids in the hood you know that the government schools still were ineducable and and she motivated them to become outstanding students in in many cases so this this could still be done in our days not just something from the 18th century of course yeah and it's actually happening around the world uh so in anticipation of a question that uh i i suspect you would have asked later in the conversation let me just give you the example of what's happening in some of the poorest countries in the world uh in nigeria and in india where they all where both countries have government-run school systems but in in places like hyderabad india 80 and hyderabad india is is a is one of the poorest places uh in the world as is lagos nigeria in hyderabad india despite the fact that they have government schooling 80 percent of of children are educated privately now and seventy percent in lagos nigeria so you ask yourself the question how is it that some of the poorest people in the world right who are living on a you know a dollar a day how is it that they can afford to send their child to a private school well the fact of the matter is in the slums of hyderabad in lagos nigeria because there are no barriers to entry to create schools what happened what's happening is in in these cities thousands of people are setting up home schools right home schools that take anywhere you know from 1 to 20 students so some guy in hyderabad just puts a puts a shingle out on his on his front stoop saying uh you know ravi's uh robbie's uh elementary school and he takes in five kids and and you know gets gets uh gets a small amount of money and he teaches these kids and what's remarkable is that i mean i mean look if 80 percent of desperately poor parents in hyderabad india are are paying to send their kids to these private schools which obviously would have to be very very inexpensive that must tell you something about the government schools which are free the government schools are complete failures so these desperately poor parents are sending their kids um uh to to the these these private schools that cost very little so the question is well why couldn't that happen in the united states well part part of the issue is that the barriers to entry are higher in the united states but the fact of the matter is this is happening in the united states and it's happening as a result uh or at least it's coming out of the homeschooling movement so you know 30 years ago 40 years ago when homeschooling really sort of took off in the in the 1980s you know it it kind of met the stereotype the stereotype uh for homeschooling is that it was either left-wing hippies or evangelical christians who wanted to move off you know to to the back 40 somewhere in in the mountains of idaho and educate children with with no um with no interaction with other human beings there might have been some of that but the fact of the matter is homeschooling has grown so fast in the united states over the course of the last 40 years particularly in the last 20 years that what's happened what we're seeing in the homeschooling movement homeschooling is no longer about families educating their children k through 12 simply and solely at home what's happened is that you're getting the creation of voluntary associations of parents who are coming together and they are they are forming homeschool co-ops so i mean most and this is particularly true for high school age students uh many maybe even most high school age students now in the united states who are being homeschooled actually only do a part of their homeschooling uh or their education from home they're now going to co-ops where parents are getting together and a father who who teaches physics at the local college will teach the homeschool kids in the co-op physics and a mother who has an engineering degree may teach them chemistry and and a father who knows something about mathematics will teach mathematics and and so these homeschool co-ops are are just ex they're they're blowing up and they are everywhere and they're they're so big now that not only are they creating educational opportunities for these young people but there are home school uh athletic teams there are home school bands there are home school proms right that all work through these uh these homeschool co-ops so i think the moo i think there is a movement towards um um towards what we might call a separation of school and state in the united states where where parents uh are are assuming control of the education of their kids and the technology really facilitates that i think you know you could have these different home school parents some could be in minnesota some could be in you know georgia or whatever they could do they could do these classes via zoom and one thing i've noticed with the home school is now and i i think is is really good you know in the in the in the government schools the teachers got to get teaching degrees right so if they're gonna if they're gonna teach math they're not taking as many math courses as math majors do that because they're taking a bunch of education courses right and similarly in literature and history and everything whereas you know you can find online you know you can find grad students you could be in minnesota and find a grad student studying physics at arizona state you know getting a phd well he's got a phd he's studying physics he's not taking education courses right because he's a grad student he's probably poor and you could hire them cheap via zoom you know across the country to teach your kids physics or you know basic science courses or or or whatever and and so i think you know the technology really facilitates this kind of homeschooling uh revolution that you're talking about and i just want to point out to everybody brad's three children were homeschooled and now they've all graduated or on the cusp of graduating from clemson university and then so they've all done all done very well so um yeah my my wife sydney and i we homeschooled our kids for 18 years and i can tell you it was the single best decision other than to get married uh of my adult life and uh i mean i consider it uh um a genuine blessing to our family that that we homeschooled and it's i mean it's interesting how and why we homeschooled so when we first made the decision to do it it was purely for academic reasons uh we wanted our children to have a certain kind of education that you that simply wasn't being taught in the local government school uh nor was it being taught at a private school within you know 500 miles of where we lived so uh that was the initial impetus to homeschool was to give our kids a particular kind of education but then what we noticed and realized was that over the over the course of the next few years there was actually a second reason why we homeschooled and that interestingly enough was for the reason associated with the most common criticism of homeschooling namely the most common criticism of homeschooling the first question that every homeschooling parent gets particularly from their own parents is well what about the socialization factor and uh it turns out that one of the second primary reason we decided to homeschool our kids was precisely because we didn't want our kids being negatively socialized in the government schools which is exactly what happens uh in these schools and furthermore who says socialization is a virtue anyway uh well turns out not me and so um and one of the remarkable things about homeschooling is that the best um and most well-adjusted young people i've ever met in my entire life were mostly homeschooled and then the final reason the third reason that we decided to homeschool or to continue homeschooling is that for our family it simply became a way of life and it became a kind of beautiful way of life um you know i mean one of one of the one of the great greatest joys of my life was um being able to come out of my office um in the mornings fortunately because of the kind of work i do i was able to spend um you know at the very least the mornings at home and i could come out of my office you know at ten o'clock in the morning and there are my three cherubs sitting around the kitchen table with my wife circling like a shark and and just you know what watch this process take place so um i'm sorry about do you think because of kobe because of the closing of school this has happened in a kind of natural way where parents are doing this and starting to appreciate it more than they ever would before and maybe maybe now they're open to the argument for abolishing schools governance yeah absolutely absolutely without question so i i mean i hate to say this um but one one of the great factors uh in the explosion of homeschooling in the last year and a half has been coveted right because uh you know and it's it's because of the the extraordinary uh incompetence um and and politics of the government school system i mean you basically have the teachers unions shutting down schools so what are parents to do you know if they can't if they can't get their kid into a private school or they can't afford a private school i mean many americans were just basically forced into homeschooling and and i think what's happened and i mean the the numbers the percentage of kids who are homeschooled this year has gone from approximately three percent to i think i think just over 10 percent wow it's extraordinary yeah in one year yeah yeah yeah in in basically one year now the question will be how many of those parents will continue to homeschool clearly some percentage of them will because i think you know a goodly number of parents will realize that in fact um one they can do it right which is the greatest the greatest fear and worry that parents have about homeschooling is you know whether they can actually do it or not well guess what it turns out particularly with young kids um you can do it parents can do it if you decide that you're gonna throw up into homeschooling your kids um you know look i knew a lot of parents in the homeschooling world who did not have college degrees uh and they were fabulous homeschool parents and the resources that are now available to homeschooling families are so great that um and so much of it now is online i mean the single biggest problem confronted by new homeschooling parents is that there's too much there are too many curricula uh there's so much information out there but you can design uh you know you can design a curriculum for your kids uh that is that is going to be superior to what they would be receiving in the government schools oh yeah yeah that's special let me jump in for a second because you know my mother who was no paragon of the intellect let me let me assure you and and yet you know for my sisters and i my two sisters and i you know she had the flash cards you know so so we knew the multiplication table when we were very young we knew our abcs we knew the alphabet we knew how to sound out the letters it's the rudiments of phonics which is the method of teaching reading and you know for like like you said all you need to do is is is know how to read and you know use phonics to teach children when they're four or five years old and and they could you know they could be reading at four and five and the whole world of books is then is then open to them and it's not that hard to teach a kid to read via phonics it's not it's it's fact it's pretty easy um certainly vastly better than the tortuous look say method or any you know version of the whole word method that the the government schools generally favor but here's a question i want to ask first of all i like you you're the one who as far as i know you know popularized the term government schools rather than public schools public schools euphemism as you pointed out to euphemism these schools are run by the government they're financed by the government the students are forced into it by the you know by the government they're taxed they're forced you have to pay the taxes by the government so government schools is the right name why must they be abolished why can't they be remediated okay so let me just add one thing to what you just said they are also for the government yeah right and that's the most important part they are for the government the government schools in the united states were first created in order to promote the common good as it was understood by those who were in power by the government it was to take it was to take those dirty irish catholics and to make good americans so that they could uh be a part of the american system make them read the protestant bible in the government schools right that's right exactly right and and literally from the beginning of the creation of the government school their the explicit purpose was that these schools would be by and for the government to promote the values of of the government and the model that was used to originally create the government schools in the united states was the prussian system of education uh and and and i mean in some of the some of the things that i've written uh in the past uh i mean you can just find oodles and noodles of quotations of the founders of the government school system who clearly and explicitly state our job is to replace the parents in the teaching of values to children values that will support the government of the united states so um so i'm sorry andy so what why why does government schools have to be abolished i mean a good ques some intelligent person i said why can't they just be fixed you know what it does abolish them seems so extreme but what you know why can't why can't we we remediate them well they can't be fixed the government cannot be fixed right because the government schools are immoral at their root right for the reasons i've already suggested and they cannot be fixed um they could be made better that's i think that's true because the government schools in this country 50 60 70 100 years ago were undoubtedly better than they are today yes but it's only relative right so my position is that there are no there are no good government schools in america there's only relatively you know the worst to bet you know it's it's worse to better that's that's that's that's the difference so you know ultimately i think it comes down to this when i think about government schooling i compare it to the issue of religion i mean there's a there there's a direct parallel between religion and education and i like i i assume the two of you i am a proponent of separation of church and state and in in the 1780s james madison wrote a famous essay called the memorial indoor monstrance which was to my mind it's the single best defense ever written of the principle of separation of church and state and what what what i subsequently did i mean one of the things one of the turning points in my conversion to the doctrine of abolition was to become first a separationist which is to say i went so in madison's memorial under monstrance he lists 15 arguments against uh uniting church and state and i went through all 15 and all i did was i changed the word church and substituted the word school or i took the word religion and substituted the word education and shazam guess what the same principle applies exactly down the line so here's the point here's the here's the here's the i'll give you three points first now have a fundamental right to educate their children in their chosen values right in the same way that parents have a right to to send them to whatever church they want they have a or to teach them whatever religious values they want parents also have a right to to educate their children in in chosen values that's point one point two[Music] government should never be involved in trying to shape the minds of its citizenry right whether it's with regard to education or whether it's with regard to education government has no role no proper role in shaping forming the minds of its citizens and then finally virtually everything that it touches government screws everything else yeah right so if it you know you know if i mean if the government can't deliver the mail on time why the government can deliver education uh something as complicated uh as education to america's children government messes up almost virtually everything is toxins yeah the whole history of socialism you know and communism shows you know demonstrates that it's that government is not a productive agency at its best in a free country with the principle of individual rights and if george washington was president it could be a protective agency but it's not a productive agency he reminded me brad remember milton friedman the nobel laureate in economics his famous line that if you put government in charge of the sahara in five years there'd be a shortage of sand you know that's absolutely true yeah but bosh i know you have questions but let me uh make one one quick point as you were speaking about it you know it occurred to me one of the problems with the government schools is that it's a monolith you know so you have a federal bureau of education and they laid down the curriculum and the teaching methods and everything and then it's you know it's it's applied in in all the different schools and so the whole thing can be corrupted very easily if the if the if the monolith decides we do away with phonics and we're going to use some variation on the word method whether the whole government the whole structure is corrupted whereas with private schools you'll get an enormous amount of diversity right i mean you get little homeschools like marvin collins did and the one in chicago and the ones you talked about in india and and uh and nigeria you've got maybe big corporations out of schools there'll be religious schools there'll be secular schools there'll be schools that use phonics there'll be schools that use you know whole world there'll be a this tremendous diversity just like you know in the food industry you get a million different kinds of restaurants yeah there's fancy restaurants mcdonald's and stuff and you know i think to me correct me if i'm wrong parents generally there were some exceptions but parents generally care more about the education of their children than the government bureaucrats do and consequently they want kids to read they want the kids to write they want the kids to learn arithmetic they want the kids to learn history and everything and so the private schools will have to compete for them and and strikes me that the schools that deliver reading abilities writing abilities mathematical abilities will attract more customers than the ones that don't and and you know the marketplace then for you know economic incentives works uh since the customers value that kind of education i think you know the schools that deliver it better than the schools that don't will flourish unlike the government schools which is gigantic federal monolith which are very unresponsive to to parent demands is what do you think you think that's accurate it's 100 accurate america's government school system is the single biggest monopoly artificial monopoly in the united states and and of course not surprisingly as an artificial monopoly it has no mechanism for improvement in fact not only does it not have a mechanism for improvement it it built into the into uh its substructure is failure right the the you know the cost of government schools in america over the course of the last 50 years has been going up like this whereas the um uh the quality of education and test scores have been going down just like this right so there is a there is a direct relationship between government schooling and the amount of money spent on the government schools and the quality of education which is always going down but you know as a monopoly it has no means to improve i mean the quality of teaching in this country has gone down uh every passing decade and you know you've mentioned now andy a couple of times which we haven't talked about that much yet is uh how we train our teachers so in order to teach in a government school in almost every state in the union you have to have a teaching certificate and where do you get the teaching certificate you get it from a so-called education school where you in in many states you know you spend four years uh taking courses in bulletin board design or or you know taking courses in how to you know and how to set an exam and what happens is that these these young people uh many of whom have uh admirable laudable motives for wanting to be a teacher they don't learn the subject that they're going to be teaching all right so you have to ask yourself what are the qualities of a great teacher the single most important quality of a great teacher is you have to know the subject that you're teaching and the second most important quality is that you have to have a love and a passion for the subject that you're teaching but you can't have a love and a subject a love and a passion for the subject of teaching if you don't study the subject which is what's hap which is what happens through uh the the teaching colleges and i mean it it is absurd i mean i used to teach at a university where where uh i had a lot of students in my classes who were so-called education majors and you know at the end of their four years i would have kids these education majors in my classes uh and and let's just take the worst students i mean you know every semester i would have f students f students who once they passed my class they they they were there by qualified to go across town and get a job at the local high school whereas i with an ivy league pa phd in a real subject i was not qualified i know it's so insane i mean it it it isn't i'm sorry i want to add one one other thing yeah go ahead the issue of separation of school and state so so i want to ask this um let me ask this directly of your audience in particular if you are a christian conservative i want to ask you this question do you want the government school or do you i'm sorry do you want the government regulating sunday school right and the answer a hundred percent of the time is no well if you don't want the government regulating sunday school why would you want the government regulating school monday through friday there you go nicely done very very nice nicely done right government shouldn't be teaching religion government shouldn't be teaching values and government shouldn't be teaching cognitive subjects right government should be protecting individual rights and religion values and cognition should be left to the parents and to private individuals and private enterprise but i want to back up what to back up what you were saying brad voila this is this is a cliff notes for atlas shrugged somebody we know wrote this and um actually it was me i'm the guilty party but this was this is 1999 when i wrote i was hired by cliff notes to you know to write the for the fountainhead anthem and atlas shrugged and the general editor i won't mention his name well he's a great guy the general editor of cliffs notes told me that when we started out i don't know 1950s 1960 cliff when cliff's note started out our demographic was high school and college students by now 1999-2000 he said our most of our sales go to high school english teachers because they get their education degrees they don't read they're not taking that many literature courses anymore they haven't read the novels and so they've never read wuthering heights or they've never read ivan hall or you know they or they've never read shakespeare's plays and so they need the cliffs those so they could teach them you know to to the students so i i mean this is there's a perfect example of you know what you were saying and again the monolith the monopoly when when when the federal bureaucracy decides that they're going to take education for the teachers to take education courses rather than subject courses then it just it infects the entire system whereas we have privatization there'll be a thousand different schools and they'll have a thousand different policies and since the parents generally want academic education certainly reading writing and arithmetic the schools that provide that the best will be the ones that attract the the most students i'm fascinated to see you know what'll happen brad because you know there'll be more homeschooling and then there'll be people like you said put out a shingle start you know with five with five neighborhood kids uh you know and then there'll be this there's this proliferation of of diverse there's this great diversity in different types of different types of schools and i think you know the educational product will well you know i think i think the parents who want you know the kids to to be able to read write and you have basic academic skills i think you know the market plays a good demand that in the schools that provide it will will do the best that that to me is one major uh benefit a major advantage of privatization over the government over the government monopoly right the diversity no absolutely and i mean i've got a few things to say on on what a free market in education would look like before we talk about that though i think it's also important to talk about how we get there from here right um and you know because you know you can't wave your magic wand in shazam the government schools are abolished uh it's a process that has to take place and and i've developed um a plan um for uh abolishing america's government schools right it doesn't happen all at once it has to take place over time and um now and what that means is i mean there are a couple of factors that will be at work right on the one hand um as the government schools implode and they are imploding there's there's no question the government schools are imploding people are fleeing uh it's been exacerbated by covet and that process of implosion will continue over the course uh i i think of several decades um and and and as as the the virtues and and merits of homeschooling become more obvious and apparent uh you know that's going to be a drain on the government schools but then the question is though how do you how do you disestablish the government system of education right and so you know my plan and it's just one of potentially several plans i mean there's no one way to disestablish the government school system but the approach that i've taken is that it has to be uh probably a three-step process and i think probably begin at the top and the first thing you would want to do if politically it could be done um is you want to the first thing would be to abolish the the federal department of education and after you've abolished the federal department of education you need to repeal all federal education regulations and standards no more common core no child left behind et cetera et cetera you have to abolish all federal taxation associated with education uh all national standards for uh teacher certification have to go then the second stage second phase would be to then uh and we're sort of imploding down from the top to the bottom and you want to then go to the state level and then the second thing you want to do after you've abolished all the after you've removed the federal government from all education then you want to go to the states and eventually you want to abolish all state departments of education you want to [ __ ] you want to abolish state mandated uh curricular standards and testing you want to abolish all state compulsory attendance laws you want to abolish all laws regulating uh the establishment and operation of home and private schools all right so now we've abolished the federal government from education now we've abolished the state governments from education what's what well what you have is what you had in this country 150 years ago which is education at the local level and so the next thing you want to do is abolish all local uh government involvement in education which means eliminating local property taxes for schools it means uh probably then the next thing you want to do is implement uh uh universal tax credits uh for education uh and and and and start setting up uh scholar private um funds for children and then finally the last thing you do is guess what you auction off the government schools you watch them off to the highest bidders right that's that is the process or i should say that is one process uh by which you eliminate government education and then the next the next big question is well what do you then build up from the ashes right and in you know the first thing i want to say here on reconstruction is that i have never in my entire adult life met a parent who didn't want their their child or children to get a good education i i i i think i mean uh the one of the things that really gets me angry is to hear you know upper middle class white liberal parents pooh-pooh the idea of ordinary everyday uh lower-class working-class educated parents who they don't think care enough about their children to want their children to get a good education and of course there is a race element to this right people don't think that that like in in in uh in america's inner cities that african-american parents are going to care enough about their children to make sure they're educated that is a lie you only need to watch the movie the documentary the lottery or waiting for superman documentaries based on uh children in african-american inner city communities trying to get their kids into charter schools right i mean these are two extraordinary documentaries and it it it proves the lie that that that that parents uh particularly parents of a certain social economic status don't care about the education of their children that's a lie it's not true right so we've abolished the government schools what's going to happen what's going to replace them well what's going to replace them is look if there is a demand which there would be an extraordinary demand every parent in america it represents a demand to have their children educated and there would be an explosion of educational experimentation not only would you get homeschooling uh regular private schools would explode you would get co-ops like the homeschooling co-ops but uh you would get an explosion of co-ops you would get an explosion of uh learning centers like sylvan learning centers expanding creating their own schools every single church in america would create its own school colleges and universities would create schools for the children of their faculty administrators and staff large corporations like boeing uh apple um uh would start their own schools uh i mean because eventually parents would demand it right parents would you know particularly if they want their children educated in math and science and they're working at apple or boeing you know they they would start forming schools in in their corporations so you have to leave it you have to leave education to parents i mean one of the great one of the one of the the really i think um tragic unintent well let's say no not unintended intended consequences of government schooling is that you have removed the moral imperative that parents should have to educate their own children right and so what we're do what i'm calling for is give get give this responsibility back to parents i mean what is it that the parents today um you know with the government school system i'll tell you what they do on the day that their child turns five or six years old they they drive their five or six-year-old child to the local government school installation they drop them off and they said they say goodbye for the next 12 years and they they leave the education of their children to the government school system that's what happens right i'm calling for parents to re-assert re-assume control for the education of their own children and that in in and of itself would be a massive moral good in this country for parents to show the self-willing self-ruling characteristics of a free people concern concerning the education of own their own children um i mean it's it's i mean i could go on i could go on for half an hour talking about how a free market would respond to um to the educational needs or demands of of of parents um and uh i mean and and the other thing is right i mean you you would you would reintroduce into american education competition and competition for profit right and competition for profit is going to lead to innovation whereas we've had 200 years of educational stagnation in this country at best you would get a a a flourishing uh of new ways of teaching right andy you mentioned earlier technology right just think how education has changed uh in the last year and a half uh because of covid right i mean i mean you and i the three of us none of us know what the technologies will be for uh education years from now right you know i mean we you know one of the standard tropes is to pull out your your iphone and say you know um that's my daughter by the way uh hey isla um you know is you know none of us know what this will be like in 10 years and if you have a free market in education we don't know what the technologies will be like in and we know that technology proliferates you know in a free society in a free market vastly more than it does under any form of any form of statism i'm sorry we've been mobilizing some questions i'm listening i'm enjoying this i know brad is so eloquent on this stuff such an important issue it is it's incredible but one thing brad in terms of we know about compulsory school grade school and all that governments but how about higher ed education higher learning government getting embedded colleges calling the shots is that more of a modern thing or has that been around for as long as government schools law well that's that's an interesting question so you know uh state higher state involvement in higher education uh i don't know the exact history of it but what what little uh i i do know i i think it's it's co-terminus with um the the rise of uh k-12 government education right so in the 19th century particularly in the second half the post-civil war era you've got the creation of land-grant universities and the creation of state universities but certainly you know during the colonial era and really up until i would say up until the civil war um virtual all k-12 education was was private and so it was higher education there might have been one or two exceptions but on the whole uh it was private education and uh just so that people don't think that i'm a hypocrite yes i i support um a free market of education with regard to higher education as well and and there's a certain sense in which i'm sure it's coming because for the sa for many of the same reasons that the k through 12 government schools are imploding american higher education is imploding it's imploding now higher education is imploding for a variety of reasons there are demographic reasons the boomer generation now is is has moved through and just the numbers are declining and that means if numbers are declining that means enrollment is declining if enrollment is declining then revenue is declining and then on top of that uh covid uh has just uh is covid is in the process of of dramatically accelerating the number of colleges and universities in this country that are going to go out of business within the next decade and so the real question though is what's going to and then sorry one last thing the the the other major factor for uh the implosion of american higher education uh is that the universities have become ideological indoctrination right they don't teach they indoctrinate and i think a lot of people are disgusted with that no that's that's exactly right which is precisely why i created the lyceum scholars program at clemson university uh and and my hope is that um we're gonna be able to clone uh the lyceum scholars program at other colleges and universities around the country but i'm i i am right now talking to four or five different people who are very serious about creating creating new colleges um and and and so you know what what i would say to people um who believe in a free society that you know if if entrepreneurship is a value that we take seriously then we should also make sure to apply uh the virtue of entrepreneurship to education what we what we need are new colleges and new universities and i can promise you in the next decade there will be a lot of colleges and universities up for sale well that's that's encouraging bro because i think you know when you have new colleges and and you know there's a diversity there i'm guessing that tendency will be more to like you said about the lyceum program at clemson the the purpose will be to teach academic subjects rather than indoctrinate with leftist propaganda which is you know which is good for both reasons and i want to touch on some of the points you made all which i think are important um you see what the school choice issue and you know in the in many of the cities the you're right most black american parents support school choice they want to be able to send their kids to charter to charter schools and it's the leftists most of them are white including the teachers union you know who uh you know who oppose this and condemn so many of these young black kids to you know terrible schools uh they're not not able to get into charter schools another point i think what you're absolutely right history shows us you mentioned the churches i think you're right every probably every church in the country will start their own school and history shows us the churches have done historically have done have done a very good job you know in in in this field the quakers of the quakers are famous for it but they're not they're not the only ones the catholic schools you know before i think they become co-opted by the government curricula the catholic schools were much better than than the government schools and all the protestant nominations had their you know their churches like you know the quakers so i think i think you're right i think and they're usually inexpensive because you know they uh as good christians they care about the poor and you know they those schools are usually much cheaper than than many other private schools but also the other point is but you you mentioned abolishing the taxes the the income and property taxes that support the government schools which means parents have more disposable income you know to pay for private education right now any anybody who sends their case to private schools got to pay twice you know for for education their taxes fund the government schools and then their tuition funds the private school that their kids go to so the and the taxes the parents you know one of the questions about what will poor people do then well that's that's part of that's part of the answer you you end the taxes and they have more money to spend on a private school but you're right the churches will do it better than the government schools historically they always have and much less expensively than the government schools yeah that's absolutely right and i mean there are in new york city there are huge sort of billion dollar scholarship funds that have been created by people like ted horseman uh to allow uh primarily uh inner city poor kids to attend uh to attend a private school usually a parochial school um so and can you imagine i mean in a country as wealthy as the united states in a country as charitable as the united states are you telling me that children would go without education that people wouldn't stand up and and help support the education uh of of poor children i can tell you right now right you know uh even though i favor abolishing the government school system i would support or children in my community uh in my neighborhood i would i would support them financially to get an education and when when we were homeschooling uh in the early years my wife and i would take we would take into our home uh children in the community who who couldn't read and write because they were in the government school system and my wife taught them how to read and write right so i mean i mean it's the people on our side who want to free up education who have a benevolent view of the universe who think that that people are capable of of self-rule when it comes to education and and who who want to see children educated um so i i have zero doubt uh that in a free market system of education every child would be would not only be educated but would be educated at a much higher level than we presently have no absolutely and you know you know what there are still good classroom teachers in the government schools there are you know and they have to fight against the bureaucracy i've seen some you know as a as a kid the smuggling phonics you know because they know the kids need that they'll smuggle in american history you know and you know and and such well some of those some of those teachers once we abolished the government schools will do what marvin collins did the great margaret collins she was a government school teacher she had it with the government schools and she started her own school i remember was in her basement or her neighbor's you know house or something with a you know a handful of kids and you know she's superbly educated i mean because you could see those kind of schools that you were talking about in india and nigeria and marvel coming to chicago you can see a lot of them will proliferate where the best teachers will do this and they you know they won't charge that much money if it's if it's in a poor neighborhood you know with with poor kids you know like marvin collins didn't charge much much money and for years westside prep flourished for decades it did unfortunately eventually went out of business because you're competing with the government monolith all right exactly but uh so so yeah i mean i think your apps absolutely right i love the diversity of of the of the free market and you know by analogy like i said look at the food industry yeah you get you get all you go into the supermarket and there's these cornucopia foodstuffs and there's a million different restaurants even after covert there's still a lot of even still a lot of restaurants five-star restaurants you know family restaurants upscale diners what's that tv show dives and dumps and you know and everything explodes yeah and dives you know or whatever well you know all the way down to wendy's i had a baconated today for lunch you know all you know there's a million different kinds of ways to get food in in a in the food industry is basically unregulated essentially unregulated exactly the same in education yeah so exactly so compare a soviet grocery store with an american grocery store right so so why why would you want to do that why would you want to sovietize american education which is exactly what's happened right you you know that i mean everybody knows what a grocery store looked like the shelves were empty and you had to stand in line for eight hours to you know to get a stale loaf of bread and what we have done is to take the soviet system of food distribution and we've applied it to the minds of our children to education right what we need to do education is what we do what we have in this country with grocery stores yeah i know absolutely right one last question bro before you leave i know you gotta go just have you converted anyone colleagues or friends who thought you were critical and extremist about this in the last decade let's say i mean has there been people who who come around who say you know what brad i think you're right um yes yeah so um i'll be perfectly honest with you guys and your audience um i i mean one of the reasons why i was delighted to be able to do this conversation with you tonight is that i actually have stopped writing about k through 12 education and it's it's probably been 15 years uh since since i've done any writing on education so it's it's not something that's been at the forefront of my mind but i think maybe as you can tell uh by how animated i get when when i do talk about it that it comes back to me very quickly and very easily uh very passionate about it i have very very strong views and i'm passionate and so you know in in recent years um you know i i haven't been speaking publicly about it or writing publicly about it but i can tell you during the sort of the heyday of my writing on education issues which was for about a decade from about 1999 a little more than a decade to 2010 2011. yes absolutely i mean a lot of people came around i think you know a lot of people who formerly were proponents of uh vouchers school vouchers which i'm supposed to and and even charter schools um which i'm really opposed i'm opposed to as well i mean i am an abolitionist right i i see the problem with vouchers and charter schools is that they have as their purpose to improve the government school system yes right that's that's like that's like saying oh let's improve the institution of slavery absolutely right right my position is no which is why i always begin any conversation i have about abolishing the government schools by saying it's the single most immoral institution probably in the history of the united states and like i'm not a reformist i have no interest in reforming the government schools i have no interest in reforming them yes can they be made better of course they can be made if i would if i if i were put in charge of reforming government schools i have no doubt that i could make them better than they are but i don't want to make the government schools better than they than they are i want to abolish them i want to abolish them because they're immoral at their heart excellent yeah the moral is the practical right and the immoral is the impractical so you know i i agree with you 100 percent brad and you know before before we sign murphy i just want to say that to the audience uh a couple of things you know all of our shows are now archived on rumble uh so you can find them there and for those who want just the audio versions your podcasts we're up you can find us on spotify you can find us on amazon music soon we will be on itunes so uh we are growing i want it again uh for our guest professor bradley thompson his book on america's revolutionary mind is exceptional i strongly recommend it and since my year at my year at clemson you know led eventually to this in the fullness of time i finished the book on heroes i would recommend heroes legends champions why harry was amazed i recommend this too and thank you bradford for hiring me hiring me at clemson to to write this book and brad as always great pleasure talking to you you are so passionate and so knowledgeable about this you know i'd like to be able to do would it be great if we could clone bosh we could clone braggy like five million brad thompson's all over the country arguing for you get me going brad you really really do this is this is so it's it's so important but i forget about our times i gotta say but when when when andrew said to have you on i said please i mean it'll be excellent so you were as great as always yeah like i said you're the william lloyd garrison of the 21st century you know the the leading abolitionist or frederick douglass you know one of the leading abolitionists from from the from the 19th century so so this is great thanks for coming on brother everybody that was professor bradley thompson from the clemson institute for the study of capitalism right that was great thank you very much and guys thanks let me sorry andy interrupt you let me i want to thank you guys for having me on and getting me to talk about something i haven't talked about uh in quite a long time something i care deeply and passionately about i really enjoyed this and if i could actually just uh plug one other thing yeah good so i i have uh this is for your audience um i have recently started a sub stack which we don't know what sub stack is it's a new writer's platform um and i write under uh the nom daguerre of the redneck intellectual if and my my you can get me at c bradley thompson one word see bradley thompson dot sub stack dot com or just google the redneck intellectual sub stack and it comes up and i'd love to have you sign up for my newsletter uh and and i am going to be writing actually um i am going to be writing a lot more on on education both k through 12 and higher education uh over the course of the next year so if i've said anything even half interesting and you wanna you wanna get a little more uh come on over to my sub stack and uh i'll be pumping it out this year i gotta say substance is great the redneck intellectual is great brad takes on all kinds of enemies of individual rights and some of some of this is really a lot a lot of this is really outstanding so you know i strongly strongly recommend it and brad since you you know you love this maybe you know some point down the road you can come back on the show to re re reprise this and discuss evolutionism again in the in the future absolutely nice happy to come back anytime excellent thank you thank you professor bradley thompson next week everybody uh truth in politics everybody out there in freedom of speech land we are going to be discussing the right to bear arms uh the importance of because i think this is a literally a life and death issue and uh so we're going to be discussing gun rights versus gun control and so that's that's our topic for next week on truth and politics so everybody out there in freedom of speech land thanks for tuning in and we will see you next week bosh brad have a good night everybody terrible thank you or bonsoir