Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: What's up, guys? The Parish circuit is back.
Not that it was ever really gone. It was just the 4th, July 4th. And things got crazy. But now here we are. To talk more about things going on in St. Landry Parish, I'm Stuart Ammonon. With me, as always, is David Riley. Hi, David.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Hello.
[00:00:15] Speaker A: Hello.
[00:00:15] Speaker B: Happy, happy 250th America. And happy birthday, Stuart.
[00:00:20] Speaker A: Oh, gosh, yes. Thank you. If you would like to buy me a present, I enjoy whiskey and cigars.
[00:00:28] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:00:30] Speaker A: Not that we're drinking whiskey right now while we're recording.
[00:00:34] Speaker B: Never.
[00:00:35] Speaker A: Actually. We totally are. We totally are. Okay. But let's get back on tack on task at hand. You ready? The whiskey's already talking. I haven't even taken a sip yet.
That's amazing. Okay, so first things first, let's talk about schools. Dave, what's going on in the schools? They're closing, right? Yeah. Last number I saw was like seven.
[00:00:56] Speaker B: Yeah. So I think it's. It's like three or three. Three or four closures and four consolidations, mergers or whatever. Okay, okay, okay. But, yeah, the total number is decreasing for sure.
And the gold number. Look, the last number. We talked about this a while back. We had an episode on schools, right? Number was like 18 million or 18.1 million deficit. Now the estimate, I don't know why, the latest article I've seen is now between 19 and 20 million dollars in deficit. So that number has increased.
[00:01:28] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:01:29] Speaker B: Don't know why.
[00:01:30] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:01:30] Speaker B: But, yeah, I watched Some of the St. Andrew Prairish School board meeting that they officially kind of voted on these closures. Seems like everything's going through.
Only question mark is Cross Springs elementary, where there's still a fight being put up, which is my understanding.
Tomorrow on the 10th of July, there's supposed to be a hearing where a judge will kind of decide whether Kraut Springs elementary is allowed to go forward with its, you know, plea, I guess, or its injunction against the St Landry Parish School Board.
[00:02:03] Speaker A: So Kratte Springs is in the air.
[00:02:04] Speaker B: It's in the air. I mean, I don't know how that would work, though. I think it's. If I had to guess, I think it's probably going to close.
[00:02:11] Speaker A: Okay. Okay. Well, then what? I mean, so what does this mean for us?
I know the Krant Springs people are saying it's an extraordinary inconvenience because now they're gonna have to travel very far.
Isn't that the gist of their.
[00:02:23] Speaker B: So I'm sure that. So, not that I've seen Honestly.
[00:02:27] Speaker A: Oh, really?
[00:02:28] Speaker B: I'm sure that is a complaint. But the more, I guess, emotional plea that's being put forward is the, like, this is the center of our community. This is the pillar of our community.
[00:02:38] Speaker A: The school is.
[00:02:39] Speaker B: Yes. This elementary school, Cross Spring Elementary. And they've c. You know, the fact that they've. I guess the community came together to install the playgrounds and keep up parts of the facilities and mow the grass when the mower, like, so the community has a lot of involvement there. And they're saying the reason they don't want it to close, at least the speakers at this meeting. Yeah, we're saying kind of like, no,
[00:03:00] Speaker A: this is, man, small town Americana right there.
[00:03:04] Speaker B: Yeah, you can feel it.
[00:03:05] Speaker A: Like their neighborhood school.
[00:03:06] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:03:07] Speaker A: Wow. Yeah. Okay. I mean, I get it. I get it. Well, it sounds like the public schools that were public schools whenever I was a child where, I mean, I remember in first grade, the teacher prayed with us before lunch. All the teachers were Christians. Everybody was heavily invested.
I mean, it was a neighborhood school, and it was a very small school. I went to a class B school. So super small. We barely had a basketball team.
But it was like that. It was small town Americana. And people.
People who still live there. I went to Weston High School in North Louisiana. It's like 20 minutes east of Jonesboro, Louisiana. But people who still live there, like, the old high school rivalry still plays there. Oh, I go to Weston. Oh, I got to quit. You know, like, that's. That's fun stuff. I like that. I love that. Honestly, like, I wish that we could have more of that, but I don't think we will.
[00:03:59] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I'm just thinking about this. We talked about this on our first episode. Kind of like there is kind of like the ideal of a public school that seems to be working and doing what it's supposed to do.
But we did talk about how there's still kind of some errors in thinking even in that system, even in ideal.
[00:04:17] Speaker A: Well, that's my point in saying I don't think we will, like, fundamentally, the system has been infiltrated.
The Marxist and Progressivism ideologies have infiltrated our public education system.
At its very core.
It is, I would say, unrecoverable at this point. Although all the public schools in our nation at one point were all Christian schools, they were all Protestants. This is why Roman Catholics started Catholic schools in the United States historically, because the public education system was so distinctly Protestant. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know.
[00:04:52] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think what you just said will rub some people the wrong way, because they probably don't feel.
They might not feel like that is true. That kind of the secular or Marxist way of thinking has infiltrated our school systems that much. And especially if you're somewhere like in Crop Springs or, I don't know, Erath or something like that, you might be
[00:05:11] Speaker A: like, wait, mine's fine.
[00:05:13] Speaker B: Marxism or whatever. Yeah, right.
[00:05:15] Speaker A: It's not here. But, man, I know Ms. Pate teaches my first grade class. I know her. Ms. Thibodeau teaches second grade. We grew up together. I know these people, man.
[00:05:23] Speaker B: But, yeah, I gotta say, there's a.
As Americans, we have to take an honest look at our thinking and how we've just kind of grown up thinking about the world, about education, who's responsible for it, you know, wealth disparities, what do we do with that?
[00:05:39] Speaker A: Right?
[00:05:39] Speaker B: And we've all been catechized. We've all been taught to think a certain way, even Christians, conservatives.
We've all been kind of trained in what is ultimately kind of a Marxist framework.
[00:05:53] Speaker A: Yeah. We are the frog in the pot. And the water has been turned up over time.
We haven't left. We don't notice. We don't notice that it's different than what it ought to be.
But there is no such thing as a secular education.
We've talked about that before, but we can frame it out real fast for everybody. Again, there is no such thing as a secular education.
Education teaches a worldview. It teaches an ideology. It teaches a set of moral values. And it always will and it always has. The polis and the paideia. The purpose of the paideia is to shape the polis.
You can Google those words if you want to. But in other words, the purpose of education is to form communities. We've known that since ancient Greek times, you know, like. And so we're going to use the educational system and Horace Mann and John Dewey did this to shape the way our culture and society looks. It's intentionally. And so the first lie, or one of the first lies, maybe I should say that slips in, is that there is no.
Or that you can just have a secular education, a neutral education. It's just facts, reasons, logic. Well, maybe not logic.
Historical facts. Two plus two is four.
And all those things will remain true no matter what. Education can be secular. Right.
And then somebody shows up and they say, also, boys can turn into girls.
And everybody says, wait a second.
[00:07:22] Speaker B: Well, not everybody, but most people should say, wait, yeah, how did we get here? Wait. Yeah. So two plus two doesn't equal four,
[00:07:30] Speaker A: you know, well, and there are people who say that it doesn't.
[00:07:32] Speaker B: Right, right.
[00:07:33] Speaker A: There are math proofs and theorems that are, of course, promoted by leftists that deal in fake numbers, you know, artificial numbers in which they say, well, two plus two doesn't equal four if you operate in a different base.
Sure. And it's that weird multiverse evolutionary mindset that pushes its way into education and works differently. We have facts in a universe that we study and research because God created it and it can be understood.
If you remove God, you remove facts, and it just happens.
We think, or our culture says that boys can turn into girls today because fundamentally we tried to separate education from God. It doesn't work.
Yep.
[00:08:24] Speaker B: I think this could be helpful for listeners who might be struggling with this a little bit, too.
I'm going to say something that might sound controversial at first, but I think if you think about it, we all know this is true. All evidence is interpreted.
All evidence is interpreted.
When you think about a secular education, you might be thinking, oh, yeah, no, we're just teaching the facts, the things that we can know for sure.
[00:08:44] Speaker A: Right.
[00:08:45] Speaker B: There's no religion here.
[00:08:46] Speaker A: Right, Right.
[00:08:47] Speaker B: But anytime that you look at anything that we can relate to with our senses, you are not just taking in some brute, undebatable fact. Everyone interprets it with a worldview.
Everyone does.
[00:09:04] Speaker A: Biblical studies would call that a hermeneutic.
[00:09:06] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:09:07] Speaker A: You're viewing the world through a lens. You're reading the world through a hermeneutic.
[00:09:11] Speaker B: Yep. And when we look at.
Exactly.
But when we look at rocks, you interpret it with a worldview. If you look at the, you know, the canyons and cuts formed with the eruption of Mount St. Helens, an evolutionist and a creationist are going to look at those exact same things and come to very different conclusions about the why and the how and then how that appears in other parts.
[00:09:39] Speaker A: And that was Ken Ham's point whenever he debated Bill Nye, I think, like seven or eight years ago, which you can go watch that debate on YouTube.
The Bill Nye versus Ken Ham debate.
[00:09:48] Speaker B: What's funny?
[00:09:49] Speaker A: What?
[00:09:50] Speaker B: We're getting so old, Stuart. I'm pretty sure that was like 15 years ago.
[00:09:54] Speaker A: Oh, wow. Maybe I am that old. It might be. I might be that old.
[00:09:58] Speaker B: I think it might be about 15 years old.
[00:09:59] Speaker A: Well, anyway, you should go look up the debate because that was Ken Ham's point. It was a great moment. I still remember that to this day.
It was a great moment because Ken Ham basically frames the whole debate from the jump. He says, bill and I are looking at the same evidence and drawing different conclusions. And that's the way a worldview works. And it was very, very well done, in my opinion. So I would encourage you, if you're listening to us right now and you're like, these people are crazy. They're cracked out. We don't know what they're thinking. This is a conversation that's been happening in the west for quite some time. It came to a head in 2020 with all the COVID stuff. And a lot of people woke up and got shook out of their seats a bit whenever they realized just how far to the left America as a whole had drifted. And there's been a right winging response to that on a national level that we've seen through presidential elections, that we've seen in Louisiana state governor elections, House Senate seats, the swing of the Supreme Court. A lot of people woke up on the other side of that and said, oh, wait a second, we've lost our minds. We need to go back.
[00:11:04] Speaker B: And let's be real. When people think of like indoctrination or dogmas that people will hold on to and kind of attack if you go against them. People have always thought that was a religious or quote unquote, a religious thing. You know, Christians and Muslims have their dogmas and whatever, but I think what our recent history has shown is that the secular kind of evolutionist world that has dominated the sciences in our culture and things like that are actually incredibly dogmatic.
[00:11:36] Speaker A: It's a religion.
[00:11:37] Speaker B: If you question the narrative, and we would argue that a lot of their narrative has no consistent evidence, you will sound crazy because it's very dogmatic, it's very unquestionable.
[00:11:52] Speaker A: Right. Well, I had a friend of mine, he says it this way. He says every religion has blasphemy laws.
In other words, every religion has things that you can't say.
You're not allowed to say that. And so what we like to do on the parish circuit in our recorded episodes and in our articles sometimes too, is break the secularist blasphemy laws and say things like public education is doomed because there is no neutral.
Say things like that so that we are able to help people develop new categories, think through things well, and hopefully continue the shift of our country on a local level in Opelousa's Saint Legisl Parish, Acadiana, more and more towards what we would call a biblical worldview. A fully orbed biblical worldview.
[00:12:45] Speaker B: Yeah, let's give your blasphemy law assertion a test. Ooh, shall we if we were in Canada or the UK right now and we said we, let's see, let's say we blasphemed the God of the Bible, would we get in trouble?
[00:13:01] Speaker A: No, absolutely not.
[00:13:03] Speaker B: And we wouldn't have for the last hundred years.
[00:13:04] Speaker A: No, absolutely not. But.
[00:13:06] Speaker B: But if we said something publicly on a loudspeaker or in a pulpit like homosexuality is wrong or a boy can't be a girl. Girl can't be a boy. You. You can get arrested.
[00:13:17] Speaker A: You actually can get arrested.
[00:13:18] Speaker B: People are getting arrested.
[00:13:20] Speaker A: It's happening.
[00:13:21] Speaker B: So if you're like, no, the secular world's evolutionists aren't dogmatic, go look, just, just. Yeah, just like wake up a little bit.
[00:13:29] Speaker A: Look around.
Yes.
[00:13:31] Speaker B: Find out.
[00:13:32] Speaker A: And the fundamental point of all this is, what we're saying is that there is no neutral in education.
And so what's happening right now is the public education system in St. Landry Parish is crumbling with the save of a few, like maybe folks who are out at Crot Springs elementary and they're like, no, our school's great. And, and we have all these good conservative Christian teachers. And maybe, maybe that's what.
[00:13:55] Speaker B: And they aren't even framing it that
[00:13:56] Speaker A: way, but they're just saying it's a pillar of the community.
We'll call it classic Americana. Yeah, right. Small town Americana. And they're like, no, our school's different. It's not like those hyper progressive schools. You know, we're different. We're a community around it. Maybe they're saying all those things. Sure.
But my point is that give it time, give it time, and it's going to move and it's going to continue to move.
The same thing with the charter schools. People are saying, oh, well, just more charter schools are going to move in and that'll be the new direction of St. Landry parish. We'll all just go to charter schools. Okay. Give it time.
It's going to do exactly the same thing. It's going to shift exactly the same way over time.
[00:14:38] Speaker B: Yep. And I think even if you. Even if some of those new directions maybe solve like a. A behavioral or test score problem, we would still argue that they are simply schools of a particular religion. Like, don't. We can't get around the fact that they are. They are coming in to teach a secular religion. Yeah.
[00:14:59] Speaker A: And their presuppositions, their foundation is off.
Yeah. Build on a crooked foundation and the house is gonna fall down eventually. Maybe you got to go up four stories before you can notice that it's cattywampus but it's gonna happen, right?
You like how it just worked in Cattywampus into this podcast episode?
[00:15:18] Speaker B: I like that.
And there's a lot more we could talk about here. Should we bring it back? Yeah. Into St. Landry Parish?
[00:15:25] Speaker A: Yeah. Let's say, what steps? What should people do?
What would.
What would our advice be to people? All right, Stuart and David, you guys are being jerks. You're telling us that we can't put our kids in the public school anymore.
What are we supposed to do?
I would just start by saying, take responsibility for your kids education.
Just start right there.
Just start right there.
So for each person, that's going to look very different.
But it is the parent's responsibility.
The Bible makes that plain. It says, your job is to raise your children in the fear and admonition of the Lord. In other words, to educate your children.
It's the responsibility of mom and dad. And that happens naturally, no matter what. Like, kids learn from their parents and through their parents.
Far more.
Far more. They're little sponges.
[00:16:17] Speaker B: Yep. There's no question about whether a child will be educated. It's simply by whom.
[00:16:22] Speaker A: By whom. That's exactly right. So take responsibility for that and just say, these kids are my responsibility. I'm not shipping them somewhere else and just saying, you guys figure it out. That's the equivalent of the parent who ships their kids to summer camp and youth group and doesn't do anything else with them spiritually all week and expects them to pop out Christians, that's not gonna do it.
The responsibility is yours, mom and dad. If you're just shipping your kids to summer camp, if you're just shipping them to youth group, if you just go to some Sundays and you hope that things are going to work out okay for the kids, but you're not leading them in devotions. You're not catechizing your kids. You're not taking that responsibility. Don't be surprised whenever it doesn't take. Whenever they're not Christians.
Don't be shocked by that.
So take responsibility. That's what I would say. Step one. Step one. Just take responsibility. Know that it's your job and look around and say, now what?
[00:17:19] Speaker B: Right. And that doesn't exclude the option of partnering with other Christians, a Christian school, something like that, to help educate your children.
But I think where people are probably intimidated is like, especially maybe if they're thinking about homeschooling or something like that.
[00:17:37] Speaker A: Sure is.
[00:17:38] Speaker B: Like, you know, the time. I don't have time. Maybe Two parents are working maybe. Yeah, whatever. You know, it could take some sacrifice. It might.
[00:17:47] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:17:48] Speaker B: Very difficult choices and sacrifices.
Maybe as an encouragement though, kids will be educated no matter what.
And I think sometimes we, because we've grown up in this very secularized educational system, we think about test scores and we think about are they gonna be at all the right levels in math and reading and whatever.
[00:18:09] Speaker A: That's a whole episode.
[00:18:10] Speaker B: I know it's a whole episode. But like as maybe an encouragement, man, if your kids know how to work hard and they can think and they can read, like there's so much you can do, there's so much they can do, they will do.
We often overcomplicate it and often the education that our kids really are getting, even if they're out of school, is through the TV they watch, the social media that they're on for hours a day.
So anyway, that's just my little. Yeah.
[00:18:35] Speaker A: And education also doesn't mean vocation. You know, we'll talk about that more later.
But I would say I agree 100%. Take responsibility. And after you've done that officially, repent of not taking responsibility for the raising of your children, for the discipline of your children, for the education of your children, repent of that. And when you have repented and are taking responsibility, then look around and say, what should I do now? And for some families it's going to look like I got to figure out homeschool curriculum. For some families it's going to look like I need to be a part of a co op. I need to find other people who are trying to do this, who are taking responsibility for their kids education. For some people it's going to be like, I got to put these kids in a Christian school. Where can I find one? Where do I go? And there are options around here for that. And for some families it's going to be online school, which there's tons of great online options for parents. But step one is stop abdicating. Repent of your abdication of the God given responsibility that God has given you to educate your children and do it, do it. Jump in and the Lord will bless. Like man, the Lord will bless. It is so wonderful.
As a father of kids that are coming to age now, my oldest is 16, my second oldest is 14.
It is so wonderful to see these godly young women growing into who God has made them to be.
Walking out their faith and being Christian. Ladies. Like, it is a wonderful thing to experience as a parent. It really is. And it was hard.
It was hard to get here, but it's wonderful to experience on the other side. It is doable. It's very doable. It's not daunting.
Take responsibility.
Repent, and the Lord will bless. There you go.
[00:20:25] Speaker B: Amen.
[00:20:26] Speaker A: Amen. Thank you guys so much for listening. We'll see you next time.
