ADAMS: We're so happy to have you on The State of Education today. Glad that you come and tune in and listen to these podcasts.
Today I am particularly delighted to have a new acquaintance that I recently met. He has honored us by joining us today. His name is Paul Skousen. He's a prolific writer and author and has just a wealth of background. But I'm gonna just—let's just welcome him now.
Paul, welcome to the podcast today. Thank you for joining us and so delighted to have you
SKOUSEN: Melvin, it is my pure delight. I thank you for inviting me on.
ADAMS: Well, thank you for accepting the invitation.
Let's just jump right in with both feet in the deep end of the pool here today. But, well, maybe not. Let's start in the kitty side for just a second. Let's talk a little bit about your background for those who may not know you who are listening in today. Tell us a little bit about yourself, your background and so that they know who they're listening to today.
SKOUSEN: Happy to do that. I kind of woke up a little bit late in life to what we're going to talk about today. It seems odd because I grew up in a home with a father who was rather renowned and well known. He wrote The Naked Communist. He wrote The 5,000 Year Leap. That's all we talked about at dinner time, was all these wonderful ideas and principles.
Of course I cared, and of course I loved it…but started a lot more intense when my wife Kathy and I moved back to Washington D.C. I worked at the Reagan White House. I worked at the CIA and gained a lot of interesting insight in how our system works. That's kind of when I started my explorations.
So now, these many years later—ten kids later—I'm now busy trying to help my father who's passed away, finish up a lot of works. Several books are coming out and have come out. So, that's what I'm doing right now, is getting that done.
Then [I’m] anxious to link arms with others who are recognizing all the troubles going on and what we can do about it. Today I teach at a college and am busy on the keyboard…and that kind of brings us up to date.
ADAMS: There we go. Well, thank you for sharing that. As I was looking at your bio myself—I thought back and I see that you were the leak in the Iran contra thing. I don't know how proud you are of that—but, you know, it's all about getting the truth out, right?
At the end of the day, here's what's important: we have to communicate in truths. Because what we represent, what we communicate to others, and especially what we teach to our children…we are either setting them in a pathway of truth and reality or we are just taking them somewhere over the edge into something that has no real basis and is built on a lie. That's true on so many levels.
Many of the people who listen to these podcasts do so because they're concerned about what's going on in our country. They're concerned, particularly—we're an educational foundation—particularly concerned about what's happening in our schools, in our overall educational system and what's going on with our children and grandchildren.
What I'd like us to really kind of focus on for a little while are some of those—well, somebody recently, I heard him say, “The values of every society can be found in the great writings, particularly of their founders.” I know that you've spent quite a bit of time working on that.
In fact, I picked up one of your books, The Federalist Papers Made Easier. You also have a book entitled How to Read the Constitution and The Declaration of Independence. So let's kind of start at that big level and talk to us about why these are important. Maybe even dig into some of these documents a bit and what we can really glean from them.
Why are they important? What value do they bring to us today? As adults, we certainly need to be learning these things, but what of this do we need to pass to the next generation?
SKOUSEN: Right. What a great beginning to what I think is one of the most important subjects.
It's interesting to me that the founding fathers turned to education as the key to retaining freedom and liberty. You just held up The Federalist Papers Made Easier there. Those three authors explain in a few places why knowledge is the key to staying free.
Most people I talk to can tell me the latest thing about Hunter Biden and the latest cause du jour, but they don't know how many articles are in the constitution. They don't know that the prohibition of a religious test is somewhere else besides the Bill of Rights. Some fundamental things. Why does the Senate have to consent when the president does something—picks an ambassador or or a Supreme Court justice?
Those things we need to know and if we forget them, they get abused and we don't know it. And over time we start losing these liberties. I love what you're doing. I think that's exactly what you're trying to do is say knowledge is power. Knowledge is how we save our freedom. People have even lost that concept because of the headline scandals.
My effort, my father's effort, was to simplify some of these documents and explain them to say, “See, there are principles being violated that should help guide you on how to vote and guide you how you talk to your neighbor on these topics.” So never mind Hunter Biden. Let's look at what the Constitution says.
ADAMS: When we kind of think in terms of core documents for this country, what are some of the ones that come first to mind to you?
SKOUSEN: The Declaration of Independence is a statement of faith. Faith and belief. I don't know if many people view it that way. I've heard some people call it a war document. No, it's not. They don't declare war anywhere in there.
They say, “We declare our freedom and we're willing to die for it,” but they're not launching war. You go all the way through, and I found eleven or twelve distinct places where it says, “We believe in God.”
And Melvin, when I teach my classes, sometimes I worry that they're gonna complain, “Skousen, you’re shoving religion down us.” Suddenly the thought came to me one day. Actually, you're not—you're telling a historical fact. These people had a belief system, a moral foundation that they created from that and then they built this structure on top of that. If you don't acknowledge the beginning place, the rest of it collapses, which is exactly what's happening today.
ADAMS: Exactly.
SKOUSEN: Yeah. The Declaration, I view, as a founding document, just because that's our statement of beliefs. Then the Constitution structures a government to protect those beliefs. That's why it's there.
Nowhere does the Constitution explain itself—these obscure statements. But the founding fathers, they—these are huge statements. There's no wasted words. And so the Federalist papers explain what those statements mean. So there's one, two, and three that I think are the most critical.
ADAMS: Yeah. But then there's the bill of Rights, right? That's another one that's tied in as well. But yeah, so those—as you mentioned—those three.
Let's dig into these just a little bit more. You wrote a book about how to read The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Just wet our appetite enough that some people are gonna want to go and buy that book.
But what are those—obviously how to read them. You're saying, “Here's how we ought to be thinking, or here's some perspective when you read it so that it makes sense to you,” is what I'm assuming you're saying. Help us with that. You're a professor, teach us today!
SKOUSEN: Yeah, thank you. I have some really fat books on the Constitution and, oh, they're loaded. I'm in the middle of a bunch of them. They're tough to get through. 600 pages seems to be the standard. But anyway, a lot of people cannot get to those books or get to smaller books because they can't get past the Constitution.
They say, “It's a legal document, it's hard to read and I open it and look at it and it doesn't make any sense.” The reason people feel that way is because the constitution is providing answers to questions they haven't asked. If you don't ask the question, you won't hear the answer.
My purpose was to kind of link the beginners, which I think can be a lot of our elected politicians, all the way to the founding principal documents. How can I bridge the gap, and then these wonderful books that go beyond that. I thought: okay, let's start at the very beginning and let's do it from “I don't know a thing” and give some points…
Actually, in the book, I actually have words circled and I point an arrow to it. I say, “This is what this is saying!” I try to hold someone's hand and go from the beginning to the end. So some people who are beyond that, they complain about the book. “It's too simplistic.” Well, someone needed to fill the gap and that was my effort. I invite anybody to please do it if you could do it better. So that's it. That's what I was trying to link.
ADAMS: Yeah. So what you're saying is this is your version of The Constitution for Dummies.
SKOUSEN: It's funny you say that because the real Constitution for Dummies that's published out there—all it is, is full of Supreme court cases. That doesn't help! We need to go…we need to be more dumb! Be on my dumb level.
ADAMS: Yeah, yeah.
Well, as a nation—and there's so much controversy these days that you hear, obviously the media is…I don't know if it's the media that's dividing the nation, if it's politics, that's dividing the nation. You know, you can point in all kinds of directions. But at the end of the day, we've always been a diverse nation. I mean, that's one of the beauties of this nation.
We are a melting pot of the world and people are still risking everything to get in here because this was seen as a land of opportunity. Way back in the very beginning it was a place where people went to discover, people went to to gain wealth or resources that they were depleting in Europe or wherever. Then it was like, everybody has come for their own reasons, all of that melting.
But then I think of…in the time of the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the forming of the Constitution, contemporary with all of that was Noah Webster. Noah Webster—who this organization is named after—is widely known as the father of American education. He's the guy that wrote those first books that became the textbooks that everybody studied for 150 years. He's the one that wrote the first American English dictionary, he's the one that really started promoting the need for widely developed education and all of the new states so that people could be educated.
Because, as you said earlier, it's impossible for a country to flourish if its citizens are not informed and educated and capable of making things and developing things. With all of that in that time, and then as we have moved through, where we are today is all this—so many of the foundations are being questioned.
Now, I think it's always a good thing to question, right? I just do. Especially politicians. You've got to question a politician. If you don't you're just—it's a huge mistake. But the reality is, we have to question, also, systems. We also have to question new ideas. Because not all new ideas are good ideas, especially if they erode those things that are so foundational, so fundamental, that everything collapses. And I think we are seeing some of that happening in this country. We certainly are seeing evidence of that in our educational systems.
Talk to us about that a little bit. What can we—not just as organizations—but as people, as teachers, as school board members, as administrators, as parents. What can we do to strengthen this country? What are some of those foundational things that we can do to strengthen this country?
SKOUSEN: Well, here's something—this is how I see the differences of opinion. Okay, we got the American eagle. We love the American eagle. It has a left wing and a right wing. The left wing—politically, in our country—is the problem identifying the problem solving wing. They're always saying, “We got this issue, we got this problem and we got to go fix it and raise taxes and violate the Constitution.” That's what we get from the left wing.
The right wing's responsibility is, “Can we afford it? And is it based on correct principle?” So as long as you have those two combating or competing ideas in the country, our eagle flies beautifully and straight. When one side becomes too strong, we don't. That's disaster. For too many years we've had, “We've got to sacrifice principle and raise taxes to solve all these issues.” That's socialism.
As you can see, the more government intrusion into our lives, the worse everything becomes. That's a law of nature. And we're not gonna do it better in America—it will still bring this nation down. That's how I view competing ideas. We need both of them and so I'm grateful for that.
So, as we move along, we get a third component. What's that eagle partaking of? Is it getting into the poison sprayed on the berries that it's eaten? The eagle has to stay healthy. We need to have the foundation that we just talked about a second ago. We need that moral foundation.
What's under attack? The family. That's been destroyed—or undermined, I should say—and our value system, our moral code. When I get asked that by some of my students, “What do we do? What can we do?” The best beginning place? We can't reach into Washington D.C. and shake everybody up. But we can, in our very own homes, educate ourselves.
To me, I keep going back—and that's what you're doing and I'm so grateful—but that's what I keep going back to. Have you read these basic documents? Have you asked the questions? Have you looked—because until we do that self education process…why is going to church such a valuable asset? What does that achieve and accomplish? It's more than a social gathering. There's a spiritual component. This nation needs it if we're going to survive and it will not stand without it.
All of that is being attacked. I believe that the strongest, best place to begin for any of us is home in our hearts. Now, what can erupt from that? Some people will say, “Well, I teach. I've always wanted to get on the committees that choose the textbooks. Maybe I should run.” That's what comes of it. Those who have the ability and a position and a place and the burning desire—they stand up and they do what others are not in a position to do.
The larger group we pull into this awakening—the true awakening—then the more we're going to have people stand up. Can I mention Moms For Liberty? That's what they're doing. They have all these participants who ran for their Board of Education and the various committee positions. I believe if I heard correctly, they won about half of those and they started to get rid of this junk that our cute little kids are being exposed to.
To me, that's where we begin. Self-education. We reach out to family and friends and neighbors, we link arms and we share the education. And from those gatherings come the people up into the positions of civic offices to help us start to clean this stuff up.
That's the closest I can get. Whoever has that answer is going to win the Pulitzer Prize.