Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to another episode of the Parish Circuit, where we take the things that are happening in the Saint Legend parish, Opelousa's area, greater Acadiana area, and apply a biblical worldview to them. Mmm, I like that. Feels good. Truth, goodness, beauty.
And we are working to push it into all the corners in which we live here in the beautiful Acadiana area. Today. We're talking about what, Dave, what are we talking about?
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Let's talk about schools, because.
[00:00:28] Speaker A: How deep are we going? Because I could talk about schools for a minute. We've only got so much stuff.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: I guess we can't. We can't talk about all the schools, but.
Or all of the educational theories in general. But everybody. Everybody's talking about.
[00:00:41] Speaker A: That'll be behind the paywall. We'll put that content behind the paywall.
[00:00:44] Speaker B: There we go. There we go. No, everybody's Talking about the St. Landry Parish School Board and the budget deficit and the cutting of schools.
[00:00:56] Speaker A: Okay, so of how much do we have an official number?
[00:00:59] Speaker B: Well, according to.
I think it's KATC here, and this is a number I'd seen elsewhere as well, about $18 million budget deficit.
[00:01:09] Speaker A: That is not a little bit of money. That is a lot. $18 million.
[00:01:14] Speaker B: Saint Lanry Prairie School Board heard a cost reduction proposal as leaders try to close an $18 million budget deficit.
[00:01:22] Speaker A: So, okay, so you and I were chatting a little bit about this before we started. It seems like to me that the vote for a tax, another millage on your property tax was never actually to add anything new.
It seems like to me that that tax was to try and bridge the gap because it didn't make it again, by a lot, and it won't make it.
But now we have no money. And that translates to me that somebody was trying to fix the gap before we announced the gap.
[00:01:55] Speaker B: Right.
[00:01:56] Speaker A: Like a $20 million gap is not a small thing.
[00:01:58] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. But again, I don't know, we might look at that and just interpret it a little differently.
And here's why I say that. Okay. We had already. I'd said this to you before. I think that depending on your view of government and its role, you will support increased taxes no matter what. Like if. If St. Landry parish was in the. In the black and doing fine financially. Sure, they're there. I would not be surprised if tax increases were still on the.
[00:02:32] Speaker A: On the book.
[00:02:33] Speaker B: So. So, yeah.
[00:02:33] Speaker A: So if you don't have to pay taxes, then you'll vote for them every time, because that's how you get things.
[00:02:39] Speaker B: Sure. Yeah.
[00:02:41] Speaker A: It's a different animal.
Yeah.
[00:02:44] Speaker B: So.
[00:02:44] Speaker A: But let's talk. Let's talk about this. So what's going on with the school system right now? Like, what schools are closing?
[00:02:49] Speaker B: Do we know they have proposed closures? Well, we already know that.
We've known for a while that OJ Is closing as it is. It's being merged with ohs, so they're going to house the junior high and the high school at the same location. The reason for that, though, is different. So OJ had gotten an F rating as a school, I think, for seven years in a row.
So the state stepped in, and they're like, either we take this school over, or y' all combine with OHS and figure it out.
So they. They opted for that. The school board opted for that option.
And this was a while back. This was.
[00:03:30] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:03:30] Speaker B: Months ago, at least.
[00:03:31] Speaker A: So Appaloosa Junior High is closing, and that's a massive complex in the middle of town.
[00:03:35] Speaker B: So that's what I've been thinking for months. But I. I looked it up recently. I mean, just like a couple days ago, and apparently they're actually going to move an upper elementary there, so they're still going to use the facilities.
[00:03:46] Speaker A: Oh, that's true. Because there was a couple other schools that were already slated to close.
[00:03:50] Speaker B: So while OJ Was closed for different reasons, on paper, not for budgetary reasons, but for the failing grade as a school for seven years in a row, they're using this whole situation.
[00:04:02] Speaker A: I wonder why we can't get any taxes passes.
[00:04:04] Speaker B: The issues overlap because now that they have space available at O.J. o.J. What was O.J.
they're gonna move something else in there that's probably being axed because of the budgetary issues.
[00:04:17] Speaker A: Yeah.
Okay. I'm just gonna put this out there just for all of our listeners.
Privatize education.
Okay, just chew on that. Just chew on that for a little bit, and we'll come back to it later.
[00:04:31] Speaker B: You just offended a lot of people.
[00:04:34] Speaker A: Well, I mean, listen, man, it's.
It's obviously not working. Louisiana's last America is last.
St. Andrew, Paris Opelousis is last. We are the last of the last of the last of the last.
[00:04:49] Speaker B: For the sake of, you know, accuracy, which we are always 100% accurate. Oh, sorry. On this show, we're not technically last. I think we've, you know, I think we've climbed into the 40s or maybe like, even. Maybe even into the 30s last time I checked, which is a surprise. But. But to your point, it's like, we
[00:05:09] Speaker A: are the Bottom of the barrel.
[00:05:11] Speaker B: Right. It's being like you're. You're on a. You're on a sinking ship, but you're not quite under. You're not as far under the water yet if you're climbing up anyway.
[00:05:21] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. It's not. This is not a good push. Yeah. So then we're going to close all these schools.
I think what we're seeing start to happen in St. Landry parish, like the seeds of this are already planted, is the charter schools coming in and just taking over. I think that's what's happening.
[00:05:42] Speaker B: Yeah. It was interesting. The superintendent actually kind of in this article, at least in the presentation, he did kind of blamed the charter school system for the situation they're in. Basically, every time a charter school comes in, it draws money. It draws students away. So therefore it draws money away.
[00:06:01] Speaker A: Ah, capitalism.
It's so refreshing.
[00:06:04] Speaker B: So, yeah.
[00:06:05] Speaker A: So that consequences have actions or. Sorry, your actions have consequences. Sorry.
[00:06:09] Speaker B: Yep, yep, yep.
Yeah. So the. Well, and something else. This is not, you know, somewhat related, but we'll talk about the mayor stuff later. The next mayoral run. But Albert Guillory, who recently announced that he was running, mentioned in his little promo video that Opelousis is like half the population that it was a few decades ago, which also plays into this. I would imagine that if you've built the infrastructure for a population center of a certain amount and now there's half as many kids as there once was, you're going to run into budgetary problems.
[00:06:47] Speaker A: Yeah. So I personally detest the government school systems. I think that they teach a philosophy.
It's not a neutral education. You and I have had this conversation lots of times. There is no actual neutral. The lie of neutrality is a real thing.
Your kids, where you send them, are getting more than just reading, writing and arithmetic. They're getting a worldview and being taught and instructed how to live according to that worldview.
[00:07:17] Speaker B: Yeah. And I would go further and say reading, writing and arithmetic are.
[00:07:21] Speaker A: Ooh, go.
[00:07:22] Speaker B: They are infused with worldview no matter what.
[00:07:26] Speaker A: Yes, that's right.
[00:07:27] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:07:28] Speaker A: So two plus two equals four. Because God said it does.
[00:07:31] Speaker B: Right, Right. And it matters because God created a universe in which it makes sense and matters. You know, the beginning of the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
And even if you're in a school where it's just simply not stated, if God is simply absent, you're still teaching a whole way to think about life and all of the topics.
[00:07:57] Speaker A: There's no vacuum here, so. But I know all of that is true.
But at the same time, I am kind of rooting for the charter schools.
I don't agree with them missionally or philosophically or anything like that, but it's more like it's two football teams playing, and I hate both of them, but I hate one of them less.
You know, like. Like, that's kind of. That's kind of where my head is right now.
[00:08:27] Speaker B: I'm about to make a soccer reference, but nobody, Nobody, nobody in St. Landry,
[00:08:30] Speaker A: Paris, like if Tottenham and Arsenal. Yeah, that's right. Well, you would actually care about that game a lot, wouldn't you?
But the. The deal that I see with these charter schools coming in is exactly what the superintendent talked about.
They are, in some sense of the word, capitalist, meaning the kid goes. And with that kid goes, it's money.
And so there's some type of choice and vote that's happening here. Now it's happening again with other people's money and other people's resources, but it's still happening. And so that means that the people who are doing a better job will get rewarded. In our parish, even there are voucher systems for these kids to go and take that money with them to private schools. If they wanted to, they could go to Westminster Christian. I don't know if obviously Catholic accepts vouchers. Do you know?
[00:09:20] Speaker B: I actually don't know. I would guess, but I don't want to. I'm not sure.
[00:09:23] Speaker A: But there's options like that in the city as well or in the parish as well. So there's potency for this capitalist kind of vibe to at least apply pressure to the current educational, Incredibly broken system to try and do something of a better job. And I like pressure.
If I'm just being straight, I like the pressure because now it means that the public education system is no longer siloed and isolated, and they have to at least pretend again to listen to people whenever they have stuff to say.
And I think that matters a lot, because if my kids are gonna vote with their feet and with their dollars, which my kids are not a part of, public education system here. So I'm just trying to give an analogy.
But if they were, then that allows me to say things like, I'm not putting my kid in your school because of these LGBTQ flags that you guys keep flying.
And until you quit this nonsense, I'm not even coming close, not even getting remotely close to it. Do you see what I'm saying?
[00:10:27] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. No, I do. So, yeah, they're gonna have a. They have to Deal with the constituency that is voting with their.
[00:10:34] Speaker A: Yeah, with their feet.
[00:10:35] Speaker B: With their feet.
[00:10:35] Speaker A: That's right. Yeah. And that's worth something. That's worth something. Now it's only really, really worth something whenever you have a distinctly Christian community.
But if we had a distinctly Christian community, we'd have a different educational system. Which brings me back to my earlier point.
Education should be privatized.
[00:10:54] Speaker B: Amen.
[00:10:54] Speaker A: Okay, should we talk about that just for a moment to help people?
[00:10:58] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, why don't we just let it hang and. Yeah, either way, look, we probably don't have time to talk all the way through, but look, we can talk about this as much as we want.
[00:11:06] Speaker A: This is our show. We can do it. All right, so education should be privatized.
The reason for that is because whose responsibility is it to educate the child?
[00:11:15] Speaker B: Now?
[00:11:16] Speaker A: The secularist would say
[00:11:19] Speaker B: the state or whoever the people decide, I guess, or
[00:11:24] Speaker A: the polis, you know, or the.
Yeah, the, the gymnasium, if we're going all the way back to Aristotle and all those kind of things.
But we're going to say no, actually the way that God made the universe to work.
Kids are educated primarily by their parents.
Kids are given to their moms and dads. Kids are given to their parents. That's who should educate them. And so the next rebuttal, the next question would be. Oh, so are you saying everyone should homeschool?
No.
Although my kids homeschool. Not all my kids have always, but they do now.
I don't mean it necessarily that way, but I do mean that it is the parent's responsibility.
It's the parent's responsibility to see that their kid is educated.
And why would I pay myself? Why do I pay for an education that my kids aren't going to take part in anyway? I'm paying for it twice because I buy all my kids curriculum, I buy all their classes for them, I pay for them to go to school. And then I also pay money into this tax system that I don't use.
[00:12:30] Speaker B: Right.
[00:12:31] Speaker A: Why am I doing that?
[00:12:32] Speaker B: Yep. And that's been, that's been something people. You know, I remember, like my dad growing up bringing up that point that, you know, if, you know, if he sends his kids to a private school or homeschools us, he's still having to pay for the public education system. And that came to a head too, even recently in Louisiana, in places like Oklahoma, where they started passing laws requiring schools to hang the Ten Commandments in classrooms. You remember that one of the biggest backlashes against that was it's bringing religion into the secular space.
[00:13:07] Speaker A: Religion's already there, but that's okay.
[00:13:09] Speaker B: Right, right, right.
[00:13:10] Speaker A: There's lots of religion there, in fact.
[00:13:12] Speaker B: And that, you know, and it was even brought up that like. Well, and we have to pay for that. Right. We're having to pay for these public education systems and they're going to hang the ten Commandments on the wall. How dare they. Hold that thought.
[00:13:24] Speaker A: Hold that thought right there.
[00:13:25] Speaker B: And we're like, wait a second. Yeah, this is what we've been saying.
But yeah, so. So it'd be like, you know, are there.
Do you think there's any signs on the walls in science classrooms and public schools in Louisiana today that show the, I don't know, the evolution of man from a.
[00:13:41] Speaker A: Now, wait a second, David. Are you saying you're an evolution denier from an ape?
[00:13:47] Speaker B: If you go further back to the piece of goo, a bit of goo that.
Anyway.
[00:13:52] Speaker A: Yeah, I've got opinions.
[00:13:53] Speaker B: Yeah. So anyway, there's a lot of faith.
All we're saying is there's a lot of faith assumptions built into any belief system that any school is going to teach.
[00:14:04] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:14:04] Speaker B: And it's religious in nature, and yeah. It's going to be funded one way or the other.
[00:14:10] Speaker A: Yeah. So the, The. The general lay of the land right now in St. Andrew Parish is that the schools are going to close.
Dun, dun, dun.
[00:14:18] Speaker B: Yes. And actually, if you want to. Do you want to. Just for curiosity, do you want to know which ones?
[00:14:21] Speaker A: I do.
[00:14:22] Speaker B: Okay. So according to this, and I've heard this again in a couple articles, I think Kratz Springs.
[00:14:28] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:14:28] Speaker B: And I think that's an elementary.
Most of these are elementaries.
[00:14:31] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:14:32] Speaker B: So I think they're trying to consolidate elementaries that are out more kind of rural small places. So Crop Springs, Groli Northeast Grand Coteau and Grand Prairie elementary schools, as well as Central Middle School, Plaisance Middle. Those were all the.
The ones that are discussed here. And yeah, so there's gonna be some mergers involved, things like that. People bus.
[00:14:55] Speaker A: That is gonna be a long way of busting busing kids from Kratz Springs.
[00:15:00] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:15:00] Speaker A: So where are they gonna put those kids?
[00:15:02] Speaker B: That's way the heck Port Barry, I think, is the. Is the plan, which is still pretty far.
[00:15:08] Speaker A: That's a long bus route.
[00:15:09] Speaker B: It's like 20 minutes.
[00:15:10] Speaker A: How are they gonna. How does that save money? Those facilities must be falling apart.
[00:15:14] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, I would imagine so. I would just guess that not having to pay for facilities as well as there's probably gonna be consolidation of staff so probably not. Even though some will probably transfer. Probably not. Everybody's going to keep their job, I would guess.
[00:15:30] Speaker A: Wow. The teacher's union is probably going to have a field day with that.
[00:15:34] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:15:35] Speaker A: All right. That's the most woke organization probably around. It's teachers unions, by the way. Also, you can put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Okay, so then it doesn't really sound like there's anything to do right now. It sounds like I'm just kind of sitting off to the side and saying, ooh, what's gonna happen?
[00:15:57] Speaker B: Right, right, right. We're just kind of hearing stuff and.
[00:16:01] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:16:01] Speaker B: And.
[00:16:02] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, let's let it close. That sounds great. I think that when I look around St. Landry Parish and Opelousas, I see nothing but opportunity. I just. The secularized institutions are collapsing on themselves. The governments are collapsing on themselves. The public school system is collapsing on itself. And I'm like, huh, I wonder what the Lord's about to do. I think something great can come out of all this if families will take the responsibility for educating their children. Again, just start there. Just say, this is my job.
This is my responsibility.
[00:16:34] Speaker B: Yep. Do you want to get. We could. Do you want to help our listeners maybe with some practical steps? Because I know the.
[00:16:41] Speaker A: Let's go.
[00:16:42] Speaker B: The top rebuttals to a statement like
[00:16:45] Speaker A: that is what about the poor kids?
[00:16:46] Speaker B: The what abouts. The what about. The what about.
[00:16:48] Speaker A: Let's do it. Let's do it right now. We're only 16 minutes in. We got time. Let's take the big what abouts. All right, let's start with the most obvious. Why do you hate poor children?
[00:17:01] Speaker B: All right, Stuart. Why do you hate poor children?
[00:17:03] Speaker A: Why do you hate poor children? Yeah. So obviously we're embellishing here a little bit. Although I do know some people that will ask that question to me, to my face, straight face tattoo. And they'll say, why do you hate the poor children? I said, no, I actually love them.
I want them to have a real education, not this fake one that they get at a public institution.
I want them to know real truth, not that kind of fake truth.
So imagine the idea. Imagine. Imagine with me. Imagine with me a school that is organized and started by a church whose people have not been taxed into oblivion by the governments around them, but rather have more money to be generous with. And they utilize that to begin educational initiatives in a city that desperately needs them and deploys those initiatives in such a way that people are brought along and actually helped to be elevated farther and farther in their lives than they ever were before.
And guess what? It's happened over and over again throughout human history. This has happened.
[00:18:10] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:18:10] Speaker A: Go look up Chalmers. Go look up Thomas Chalmers in Glasgow.
Go, Go look up all the foundings of the Christian universities throughout the United States. Go, go. Find these facts. Christians and education have gone together. We're people of the word. And this is an easy piece to start with, but I would also say that goes hand in hand with what we said before, which is parents recognizing that it's primarily their responsibility to educate their children.
[00:18:37] Speaker B: Right.
[00:18:38] Speaker A: You don't just now have a new address to drop the kids off at. Like, if, if that's your mindset, you don't get to come to my school.
[00:18:45] Speaker B: Right. Okay.
[00:18:46] Speaker A: If you're not going to actually take responsibility for these kids, then. No. Then this is. You're just. You're looking to be.
What's the word? A consumer of a new product.
[00:18:58] Speaker B: Right.
[00:18:58] Speaker A: And that's not. You haven't actually learned what we need you to learn.
[00:19:00] Speaker B: Yeah. And that's a big cultural moment mindset shift to really take on that mantle again, like for parents to actually scary recognize, like, oh, I am ultimately responsible whether I entrust that education to someone else for help or do it myself or whatever, that the buck stops with me. It's my responsibility that my children get educated.
And sometimes that takes sacrifices.
[00:19:31] Speaker A: That's right. That's right.
One of the best things that I ever heard was somebody who is an advocate of starting Christian schools, and he said, no one gets to go for free.
And I thought, what does that mean? What do you mean? Nobody gets to. But what about the poor kids? You know, like, that's immediately where my head goes. But, but his point in saying that was it should cost something.
Of course it should cost something to give a good education to your children.
[00:19:58] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:19:59] Speaker A: That doesn't mean that it costs $20,000. I mean, what's the cost to educate a child right now in St. Landrew Parish? Isn't it $14,000 a kid?
[00:20:07] Speaker B: The state. I looked up the state per student number a while back. It might be as high as 14. It might be as low as like 11,000 somewhere in that range.
[00:20:15] Speaker A: What's tuition at Westminster?
[00:20:17] Speaker B: It's pushing 10, I think, these days in the high school.
[00:20:21] Speaker A: Wait, hold on, David. You mean it's cheaper to give your kids a private education than it is for the public system to handle it? Hold on, David, hold on.
[00:20:31] Speaker B: Yes. And at some places it's significantly cheaper.
[00:20:34] Speaker A: Yeah, I know of private Christian Schools where it costs more like five or four.
[00:20:37] Speaker B: And of course, there's the ones that you could spend 20 or whatever. Right.
[00:20:41] Speaker A: And that's the beauty of the system. Like, this is you now get to decide what you spend and how you do it. And some people would say, but I can't afford to do anything. And I would say homeschool and homeschool co ops are very, very much an option.
[00:20:53] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:20:54] Speaker A: And people do it.
[00:20:55] Speaker B: And the biggest rebuttal to that is kind of like the, well, what about the single parent homes and what about the ones where both parents work?
And I mean, I could probably give examples of how to kind of address that one. I think when priorities of, like, if you really seriously take on that responsibility as a parent to educate your children, sacrifices can be made.
[00:21:14] Speaker A: You'll spend the money.
[00:21:16] Speaker B: You know, we like my. My wife could in theory be working. Right now we're homeschooling our kids.
And we were even doing so when I made next. Well, I'll just say very little.
[00:21:31] Speaker A: Made nothing.
[00:21:31] Speaker B: Made very little as a private school educator and coach.
And yet we, you know, we lived in the middle of Appaloosas and found some cheap house to live in and don't go on a lot of vacations.
[00:21:43] Speaker A: And I'll say my number. I don't mind saying my number. Like, we used to make $1,200 a month.
[00:21:48] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:21:50] Speaker A: And you know what?
We figured it out.
We knew what we wanted to do with our kids, and we figured it out. And the Lord provided we don't make $1,200 a month anymore. But my oldest was homeschooled kindergarten by my wife when we did.
[00:22:09] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:22:10] Speaker A: It's not unattainable, but you probably didn't
[00:22:13] Speaker B: get your latte every morning.
[00:22:17] Speaker A: I didn't have my double mocha frappe latte. That's a coffee shop, you know. Yeah, yeah. Like. And there are sacrifices that you can make. You can do this. It depends on what you want, but it can be done. Neither David nor I are millionaires, man. Like, we're not sitting over here in our ivory towers saying, oh, yes, peasant person, yes, you must figure out, no, we've done this. We've actually walked through this. And it's very doable and attainable. We can stop relying on the government to educate our children. Actually, let me say it a different way. We can stop relying on the government to do a terrible job educating our children and instead take the responsibility ourselves. But I'll tell you, I'll tell you from personal experience, it's terrifying.
[00:23:00] Speaker B: Yeah, well, yeah, especially when you're. Again, this is something we brought up before, when you're incentivized not to. And that's in a variety of ways, not just education.
You know, you could talk about all the other systems in place for government reliance and people staying there, but, but there's something that, that happens when you try to take ownership of your, your children and your family and your provision and you, you, you start breaking free of that.
There's a lot of motivation that comes along when you realize, like, all right, I got to work hard. Yeah, I gotta, I gotta provide. And we gotta figure this out.
[00:23:32] Speaker A: And we're here to say that you can do it. Yeah, it can be done. David and I are living proof that it can actually be done. You can do this. I go to church with men who are fighting to figure out how to do this, and the Lord is blessing it. I go to church with men who are single, single household income guys who have sacrificed everything to either have their kids in private Christian education or homeschool them.
They're willing to do it.
You can do it. It's not impossible. And I can guarantee you that some of these men make less money than you do, because I know them.
It's completely doable. It's completely attainable. And the beautiful thing about being a part of a church is that you can lean on each other.
You can form little co op groups. Like, our church has this wonderful little homeschool co op where all the mamas share curriculum with each other and they talk about what they're doing with their kids. My daughters are starting book clubs with the other girls in church right now. And they're reading Jane Austen books together and they're reading practical Christianity books together. They're reading history books together. They're making little lists and they're like, yeah. And even one of them today, they were like, yeah, how fast do you want to read? You want to read a couple of chapters a week? And one of the girls was like, no, I'm doing a chapter a day.
Like, we're smoking this.
[00:24:58] Speaker B: That's awesome.
[00:24:59] Speaker A: I mean, these kids are ready to go.
And it's just a bunch of little nerdy Christian homeschool kids.
Oh, yeah, this is who we are.
[00:25:11] Speaker B: The blessings of being part of a biblical church are tremendous. Are tremendous. Yep. I mean, I can think of my boys are probably mostly being, you know, getting their clothes from hand me downs from, you know, fellow church families who are handing down their boy. They're not having boys anymore. So they're handing off their boy clothes to us.
[00:25:34] Speaker A: Amen.
[00:25:34] Speaker B: And obviously that's just one thing of the many that we're handing around and giving to them.
[00:25:39] Speaker A: And it was awesome.
[00:25:40] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:25:41] Speaker A: Yeah. So moral of the story, stop looking to the state to save your children.
It's also especially easy to do that in St. Legrand parish because the state's doing a terrible job.
[00:25:53] Speaker B: Yep. And it's easy to. And it's maybe one more. One note I want to make. It's easy to hear like what we're saying and for someone to.
For it really not to be landing. And maybe they're just hearing us and just still hearing people like just, I don't know, angry at the state and berating the public school system or something like that.
And not hearing maybe the philosophical argument we're trying to make.
We would say that the government was never meant to raise children, provide for families, or to educate their children and humans for most of human history, and Christians and Americans specifically for most of our history, even have understood this. It's a fairly new phenomena. 1920s, this very state focused.
[00:26:44] Speaker A: Go look up John Dewey and see what he did to the educational system.
[00:26:47] Speaker B: Horace Mann.
[00:26:48] Speaker A: Horace Mann, John Dewey.
[00:26:49] Speaker B: See the shit where we're listing those as not good guys, by the way?
[00:26:52] Speaker A: No, no, heck no.
[00:26:54] Speaker B: Bad guys.
[00:26:54] Speaker A: Go look up Horace Mann and John Dewey, the fathers of the modern secularist public education system in the United States, and you'll see exactly where it came from. Now, they would have some religiosity blended into it in the early phases, in the early days, put prayer back in schools. Remember that?
[00:27:12] Speaker B: Right, right, right. There's like a unit. What I think Horseman was maybe a Unitarian, something like that. But in the end, they were viewing humans in general and children specifically as kind of just the cogs in the national machine. You wanted to just create good citizens. And here are the steps in which to do that. And it was, you know.
Yeah.
Problematic. Not how we should view image bearers of God given to parents to raise and amen. Belong to churches and all those things.
[00:27:44] Speaker A: If you are a Christian and listening to this pod, you are called by God to raise your children in the fear and admonition of the Lord.
Which means you can't send them to the government schools.
You can't.
But Stuart, this is another one of those.
[00:28:04] Speaker B: What about. But what about the portrait? I just thought of another. What about. What about.
[00:28:08] Speaker A: What about.
[00:28:08] Speaker B: And this gets to maybe what I was. I was trying to get to as well. But what about the really good Public school, Stuart. What about the small town, Louisiana one where all your, you know, not maybe there, there's some that would maybe be Protestant leaning, but I know of, like, nearby small communities, heavily Catholic, where they, like, stop school for mass every week at a public school, you know, and like, it's a very strong, close knit community and the teachers love, you know, and teachers love the kids and there's some good, even faithful believers there. Like, what about that in the public school system?
[00:28:44] Speaker A: Yeah, the gangrene is still there.
Okay. So the gangrene that manifests itself outward, that grows outward from the dirt, from the filth that is in the public education system will come out eventually.
When the system is designed to create a particular product, it will create that product. Okay. I think it was Vodi Bakam who says, you should not be surprised whenever you send your kids off to Rome to be educated, that they come back as Romans.
The design of an educational system is to not just give you facts and skills, because we talked about that earlier.
It is rather to give you a philosophical framework through which to live your life.
That's what's happening. If it's just facts and skills. I mean, for those of us who homeschool our children, we recognize very early on in the game that it doesn't take nearly as long as eight hours a day, especially when your kids are little. When your kids are little, you're done in three hours, two hours, like, depending on how young the kids are, you've covered the curriculum for the day. And that can't help but make you think, what are they. What are they doing for the rest of the. What are they doing for those six hours?
They're being shaped, they're being molded. And so even, Even the, I don't know, the Catholic school in l', Autel, okay, that lets them out for Mass. I don't even know if this actually happens. I'm just making stuff up. But like, the country Catholic schools and. Or the country public schools that are functionally Catholic and all those things. My point is that the gangrene is still there.
And the same one that leads schools to have pride flags hanging from the ceiling like they do in St. Landry parish. That is a thing. Yep. And they have statements where they say, you know, we support gender equality and identity in their, like, hiring policies, which means that your kid can be taught by a man in a dress.
[00:30:46] Speaker B: Right. If push came to shove.
[00:30:47] Speaker A: If push came to shove, like those same institutions, the same seeds of all that are present. Despite how nice your teachers are, the Gangrene can still set in.
So that would be my rebuttal to that.
It's still doing something. It's definitely not doing nothing.
[00:31:10] Speaker B: Yeah, well. And I think just looking at some of the incredibly capable and educated men and women in our nation's past, I think we've gotten very comfortable with a very bad educational system in general that even like the, even the quote unquote good schools are producing just the disciplines and the knowledge and the ability to think critically and create and innovate.
We've lowered the bar so much I
[00:31:46] Speaker A: would challenge people to go back and look at what the one room schoolhouses were doing 150 years ago.
It would embarrass you the amount like they're calculating tonnage and volume in the fourth grade with a pencil and a piece of paper.
[00:32:03] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:32:04] Speaker A: Like we're not anywhere near that anymore.
We are only getting dumber.
[00:32:11] Speaker B: Yes. And that might be this topic of another one because I don't know if we have time to get into all that.
[00:32:15] Speaker A: That's true, that's true.
[00:32:16] Speaker B: But there'.
[00:32:16] Speaker A: Fair point, fair point.
[00:32:17] Speaker B: But no, I'm glad you brought it up. I'm just saying I was tempted to just launch into another
[00:32:23] Speaker A: David Riley tirade.
[00:32:24] Speaker B: It was tirade of tests and results and standardized expectations and how that has had its effect over the decades.
[00:32:34] Speaker A: Yes. So education system in Saint Legra parish is collapsing.
Yep.
I, I would just about call that a grace.
Let's go back to the way things ought to be and see what happens.
I think that people would be incredibly blessed to see one what they are capable of and what their kids are really capable of.
[00:33:01] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:33:01] Speaker A: I think they really would be.
[00:33:04] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:33:05] Speaker A: All right, well, that's it. Thanks guys for listening. Catch you next time.
