Listen on Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify | Watch the Video

Did you know that public education in America is rooted in a movement to undermine Christianity? In this eye-opening episode, we talk with journalist and CEO of Liberty Sentinel Media, Alex Newman, about the history and current state of education in the United States.

Discover how government-run schools originated, the problems with modern public education, and why Alex believes classical Christian education is the gold standard for raising the next generation. Alex shares insights from his book Indoctrinating Our Children to Death and discusses the potential risks and benefits of state-run school choice initiatives.

To learn more about Alex and his writings, visit https://libertysentinel.org/

Episode Transcription

Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode for better readability.

Marlin Detweiler:
Hello again and welcome to another episode of Veritas Vox the Voice in classical Christian education. Today we have with us Alex Newman, well known in conservative circles for his insights and writings and communications. Alex, welcome. We are really pleased to have you here.

Alex Newman:
It's an honor to be here. Thank you for having me.

Marlin Detweiler:
Thank you. Tell us a little bit about your family and your education and your background your career as we get into things that we want to talk about.

Alex Newman:
Sure. Happy to do it. We just welcomed our sixth child literally a week ago. So praise the Lord for that. Thank you. Yeah, we are just thrilled and very thankful to God for his blessings. We got a little daughter and couldn't be more pleased. As the Bible tells us that children are a blessing regardless of what the world thinks, and you know forget climate change, We love babies!

I've got a weird interesting background. I grew up outside of the United States. Dad was a corporate executive so they moved us all over the world. Left the US when I was four. Moved to Latin America then Europe then Africa then back to Europe. And so being back in the United States is new for me.

I didn't come to know the Lord until I was in college. Grew up as what my dad used to jokingly call a CEO Catholic. We would go on Christmas and Easter only.

Marlin Detweiler:
I've never heard that. That's funny!

Alex Newman:
Yeah. So we would go occasionally and you know hear a couple of Bible verses here and there but never really paid much attention to it. But then in college it was just radically transformed coming to know that the Bible was. I went to very elite international schools in Mexico I went to the French school there. In Brazil I went to a very elite international school. And same thing in Switzerland.

Strange story I got expelled. I was not a good kid. Moved to South Africa– blew a bunch of money just you know again until I came to know the Lord I was really on the wrong track. And ended up in journalism just by accident. Well what seemed like an accident at least. Of course it was divine providence in retrospect but I just wasn't especially interested in math. I wasn't especially good at anything except writing. And so I ended up getting a degree in journalism and the Lord just opened doors. And I found publications where the truth could be published. And that opened doors to really digging into the subject of education. And so that's really been my major passion for over a decade now.

Marlin Detweiler:
Very good. Well let's move into that. Tell us how education fits into your concerns and initiatives. Why is that a focal area for you?

Alex Newman:
I don't exaggerate at all when I say that I believe education is the most important issue right now facing our families, facing the church, and facing our nation. And people say, “Oh well how could you say that? What about the Great Commission?” Well, I believe the Great Commission is inextricably intertwined with education.

If parents aren't discipling their own children how in the world do they think they're going to disciple the nations? It's simply preposterous. So I believe the reason we're in this mess as families, right? They say 50% of families now in America are falling apart ending in divorce. We've got our cities are crumbling. They're on fire half the time now it seems like we've got the political class that is totally out of control. I do feel like our nation is on the verge of destruction.

And I believe the single most important reason we're in this mess is because we have failed when it comes to understanding God's design for education and for discipleship. And you can say which came first the chicken or the egg? You know why did the pastors preach about this? And I get it. But I think the reason we got into this mess even when it comes to the church is because we allowed our children to be educated and really discipled by the world by a system that is hostile to Christ.

And I think the only way to fix it – There is no short-term solution. Everybody wants the silver bullet that's going to save us, you know, in the next election. I don't think that's possible. It took generations to get into this mess. The only way to fix it is for parents and pastors to go to the word of God, find out what God says about education, and then implement that to the best of their ability by providing Christian education and proper discipleship to the young.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, that was life-changing for me as I had children and became aware of the idea of classical Christian education through a book called Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning. It was just eye-opening to me to see what had been once and what could be again. And that's what intrigued me about that whole pedagogical model of classical Christian education.

And it just changed it. The ramifications and how it matriculated into all areas of life are hard to overestimate. How do you with what you do where do you find your greatest opportunities for impact? Is it in your writing? Is it in your speaking? Is it in some of the things on which you serve as a board member? How would you describe what's most impactful for you?

Alex Newman:
Well what's been really interesting is how God has been opening doors to all different segments of society. And so I'm able to write in a variety of different publications including some secular publications. I just had a piece published by Newsweek about a month or two ago on education. And I didn't think in a million years they would publish it but they had reached out and agreed to publish a call for parents to pull their children from government schools and get them a legitimate education.

So I've been able thanks to the grace of God to reach people across all different strata in society at all different levels in all different places. And that sometimes takes the form of preaching in an evangelical church on a Sunday morning. Sometimes it takes the form of writing an op-ed in a newspaper.

Sometimes it takes the form of being invited to speak at a Republican Party event. And you know I tailor the message to whoever I'm speaking to. Of course, I'm not going to go and preach a sermon to a Republican Party club, and I'm not going to bring a political message necessarily to a church on a Sunday morning.

But everywhere where God is opening doors I'm doing what I can to plant the seeds here of understanding that we have gone catastrophically wrong when it comes to the education of our young people. And so you know where is the biggest bang for the buck? I wouldn't be able to tell you, but you know God has opened a lot of doors for me to be able to reach people who otherwise you know they're not going to be maybe sitting in a pew on a Sunday morning. They're not going to be at a Republican Party function. They're not going to be reading Newsweek. And so I'm grateful that the information is getting out there.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. That's wonderful! Well, you lead me to a question. Lots of people in the wake of Covid have said in their public school education, “I never knew and never saw what was going on. And now I did and I'm concerned.” And there was a lot of movement. There's a lot of conversation about the problems that they were now able to observe.

But I want to take a look behind the curtain. Where did the public or government schools go wrong? What do you think?

Alex Newman:
It's an interesting question, and I would say we all went wrong by trusting the government to educate our children in the first place. So at the very beginning is where it went wrong. And that's actually one of the things I do in my latest book, Indoctrinating our Children To Death. I start in chapter one by going to the guy who first seriously proposed in the contemporary context that the government ought to be educating our children.

This was a man who rejected the Bible. This is a man who rejected the truth.

Marlin Detweiler:
And so you're referring to Horace Mann.

Alex Newman:
Even before Horace Mann. I'm going back to Robert Owen.

Marlin Detweiler:
Oh yeah!

Alex Newman:
Very wealthy Welsh utopian married into a wealthy textile family. And I mean this guy was a committed communist long before Karl Marx came along and kind of formally articulated it. He was so convinced that he was right that he bought a piece of property and set up a commune in Indiana called New Harmony. And, of course, it failed very quickly because you know when you get rid of private property and try to undermine the family things don't work very well. God's design is pretty good. And he concluded that what had gone wrong is that these people in his commune had been brought up in a Christian society saturated with biblical ideas and that the best way to break that hold was to have the government step in and take over education. So there's a fascinating history there of these ideas that he publicly articulated.

He wrote a series of essays on this ended up being taken over to Prussia by the Prussian ambassador at Yale. Robert Owen actually writes about this in his autobiography. He says the Prussian dictator so much approved of these ideas that he ordered his interior minister to start setting up a national system of education. And of course that's what Horace Mann later imported into Massachusetts since that spread like a cancer across the United States.

Marlin Detweiler:
I need to read up on Robert Owen. And I have not considered the idea of where Horace Mann got his thinking but what you're doing is something that I really would agree with. And that is you're establishing an understanding and or a consideration of the fact that you didn't have some golden age of public education in America.

The 40s weren't what we should look back to, and the 60s are what we should look back to. We had a problem from the core. A friend of mine says if you start a movie and you get 15 minutes into it and it's really bad it's a stinker. You don't rewind it and start it over. The hopes that it will get better.

Alex Newman:
Right, that's brilliant! And let me add one more thing about this whole process because we know quite a bit about how this happened because there was a whistleblower. His name was Orestes Brownson. He was a very close associate of Robert Owen's and he eventually converted and became a Catholic and repented of his involvement with this.

And he kind of blew the whistle on what these guys were up to. He said they had created what he described as a secret society modeled on the Carbonari and that their objectives were to change public opinion. So that Americans would give up their attachment to homeschooling and church education and then get men elected to the legislatures who would support this idea and at least get the camel's nose under the tent by having a foothold for the government.

But what Brownson says is that the ultimate objective these are his words was to get rid of Christianity. And so they had this vision right from the very beginning when they were first proposing that the government ought to educate our kids that this would be a battering ram against the truths of Scripture. And, of course, it has been.

Marlin Detweiler:
Well you know it's really funny to think of the arrogance of people who think they're going to war against God. And, of course, there are people who don't believe this God exists. But when you consider the extraordinary awesomeness and holiness of the God that does exist that we know it is just silly and laughable to think all I have to do is go up in an airplane at 30,000ft and look around and realize how small I am in the context of something and realize how big must a God be to be outside and beyond all of this? And of course, that's a whole different topic, and we probably should get started. We have too much to cover. So, Indoctrinating Our Children to Death. What problem were you solving in writing that?

Alex Newman:
Well, I was trying to solve the incredible ignorance that surrounds the whole topic of education, starting with the history. People don't realize where the system came from. As you just pointed out, there's this ridiculous myth out there that there was a golden age of government schools, and people generally think it was the generation before theirs. So you know, my parents generation thought the golden age of public schools was the generation before theirs.

And what's happened is every generation realizes that, wait a minute, this isn't good. What's happening here? This isn't like when I went to school because it's getting progressively worse. We're getting dumbed down. We are being indoctrinated and each generation realizes that it's happening but they don't realize that the origins go back to the very beginning. And so my goal with writing this was first of all to set the record straight.

There was never a golden era of government schools. What we had before the advent of government schools was amazing. And so I actually have a huge afterword in there where I just say you know what an education look like before the government took it over? And we look at the homeschooling we look at the role of the church in education and –

Marlin Detweiler:
What time frame are we looking at, just to put it in context? 1800?

Alex Newman:
I go for America. I go back to the very beginning, you know, you go back to the early 1600s when the pilgrims were arriving and they set up Harvard, and they passed the old deluder Satan act and that everybody needs to read so they can read their Bible so that Satan can't deceive them. And you know some people make the mistake of saying well that was the genesis of public schools.

No, the Massachusetts Bay colony was a Bible colony. Church and state were basically one. You had the leaders. The church and civil government ensured that everybody could read. But there was no system where you had to hand your children over to government to be educated. That really didn't happen until Horace Mann imported the Prussian system into Massachusetts.

So I go through all of that. I go through some of what's happening today. The system is so bad now. People don't even believe it when you tell them what the government's own data show. Less than one third of the victims of public schools are proficient in any core subject. People don't believe that until they go to the U.S. Department of Education's website and see it. And another big thing I tried to do –

Marlin Detweiler:
It’s a good thing our unions have only made it that bad.

Alex Newman:
Right now, and I tell you, just think about this in any other industry. Just imagine a fast food chain where less than one third of the customers got what they were paying for. The Swat team would kick in the door by morning. It's ridiculous. And then the unions have the gall to ask us for more money and more time with our children.

But one more thing that I really tried to do with the book, I did touch a little bit on why half of American adults are basically functionally illiterate, according to the federal government's data. I wrote an earlier book with the late great doctor Sam Blumenfeld that really delved into that problem. That was Crimes of the Educators.

But I show where this is all going to because Jesus Christ twice in the Gospels is quoted as saying that you're either with me or against me. And when you just dig right beneath the surface, you see that that is more true than you can even begin to imagine. So you have a U.N. agency now, Unesco, the UN Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization that is deliberately methodically and very rapidly working to standardize education around the world.

They're injecting the occult, the New Age, all of this, and this is in classrooms in Kansas, right? This is now ubiquitous. And if we don't deal with it, they're going to indoctrinate an entire generation of human beings, not just Americans, but human beings, to believe that globalism, feminism, socialism, and New Ageism is the route to salvation and we must prevent that at all costs. Or at least we must protect the remnant of God's people from this diabolical indoctrination.

Marlin Detweiler:
Now, what you're describing very clearly is a run from– let's get away from that. And I understand the importance of that. We cannot allow our children to be educated in a way that is so absurd in so many ways. But I also know that we respond best and things last longest when we have something to run to. What do you advocate?

Alex Newman:
Classical Christian education in my opinion is –

Marlin Detweiler:
I’m so glad to hear you say that!

Alex Newman:
But it's true. I do believe that's the gold standard. And I tell people, you know, first, before people realize that they have a need for classical Christian education, you have to show them that they have a problem. When you go into the doctor's office, if the doctor says, hey, you're all healthy, you know, see you later. Oh, okay. Great. I don't need to change anything. But if the doctor says, hey, you have cancer, it's going to kill you and your family. If you don't deal with this, they say, oh, well, what do I need to fix this? And so my goal here is first of all, it's showing people you've got a major problem. It's going to kill you. You got to do something different. And as far as the solution, you know, the Bible is so filled with wisdom. I just recently finished a book by Kevin Swanson where he just went back and quoted the church, what the early church fathers said about education. And you know, they debated it. How much Plato and Socrates do the kids need to learn?

And you know, they had arguments about that, but they were all united on what the Word of God clearly teaches. All education at its foundation is based on the fear of the Lord. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. The fear the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. All the treasures of knowledge and wisdom are hidden in Christ Jesus.

So we need to understand that's the basis. And you know, as Christians, we know God has given us a lot of liberty in terms of how we live, how we raise our children, what we do for work. But he has not given you the liberty to hand your children over to a godless government that murders babies with tax money and pretend like they're going to receive some sort of education there. It's ludicrous. So the gold standard again, classical Christian education, Bible-based reasoning from the scriptures. Obviously, they need to learn how to read, as they said in the 1640s, if they can't read, they can't read the Bible, and then Satan will deceive them. But we know how to do good education and we just have to look at what our forefathers did to create great Christian civilization, to create highly literate, highly educated, moral, decent people.

And we can replicate that. And it doesn't mean we have to go back to the 1600s, but we can learn from our forefathers, put it into the modern context, and amazing things happen. I've seen it happen.

Marlin Detweiler:
I tell you, we have as part of our online school, which has over 10,000 students taking classes. We have a celebration in Lancaster County where our office is that we call the EOYG end of year gathering. We had 1,100 people come here. I didn't do the data analysis on it yet, but we probably had 35 or 40 states represented, maybe a dozen countries just coming here to celebrate the end of the school year, graduation, and that sort of thing.

And one of my favorite things to do is to get one of my golf buddies and say, “This hotel is where that celebration is centered. I don't just go to the hotel in the lobby and talk to kids. You'll see kids all over the place. Just talk to them,” and they are astounded when they do that. At the caliper and the quality of the interactions that they can have with high school age kids. And it's remarkable what we've seen happen and what a blessing to realize that we've got this going on, and it's burgeoning in many places and has the opportunity to really have an impact.

Alex Newman:
Yeah, it is so exciting. And I've seen the same thing. I know anybody who's been involved in Christian education, home education has seen these things. I went into – we were part of a classical Christian homeschool co-op. And I remember going in there when it's for the graduation, when my kids were still small and the eighth graders were doing like a mock trial.

And I mean, these kids were doing better than the real lawyers in a real courtroom. And I was just blown away. I said, whatever they're doing, that's what I want for my children. And you see it so clearly. Now you go back to the 1830s. You read what Alexis de Tocqueville said about the education level in America. He was astounded, and he pointed out that all education of course was in the hands of parents and the Protestant clergy and he says, you know, it was a phenomenon to find somebody who was ignorant of the history of their country, the leading features of the Constitution. The evidence is in the doctrines of their religion. Today it's exactly backwards. When you find somebody who is even familiar with those things, you just assume they've been homeschooled or they went to a high-quality Christian school. So that's the radical transformation we've had in this country. And I also encourage maybe just go talk to some homeschoolers. You will be blown away.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, it's really true. What are your thoughts on the States and the whole process of seeing scholarship funds coming? ESA funds, as they're called, that states are making possible for people like you and me to send our kids to private schools or to homeschool. You live in Florida. Florida is obviously one of the big states. Arizona, there are a dozen, maybe 15 or so at this point with varying laws.

What are your thoughts on how that might impact availability? Because when I get involved in classical education, back in 1992, the thing that I saw was the difficulty it was to pay for education twice through tax dollars and then through tuition. And this now helps that. What are your thoughts on it that you see problems? Do you see opportunities? How do you see it?

Alex Newman:
Well, it's a great question. And I think it's something that we all ought to be talking about. And you know, I don't want to step on any toes here. I don't come from a place of judgment, but I do want to sound the alarm that I think there's a great danger, there's a great risk that once we get the government involved with funding and things like that, the control will follow shortly thereafter.

And growing up, my dad would constantly say it might have been the phrase he used more often than any other. With federal aid comes federal control. And what he meant was, hey, I'm paying your bills. You're going to come home when I tell you, etc. But the principle applies here as well. And I say I'm a school refugee from the People's Republic of Sweden.

My wife is Swedish. That's how we ended up there. But I watched this process. Okay, so the parliament had had used these arguments about we got to fund students, not systems. We've got to break the monopoly of the public education system. And all that sounded really appealing. So they passed all that. They got all the private schools, all the Christian schools hooked on public money. And then the trap closed. The government passed a law saying that everybody who was taking public money was going to have to stop having the Bible in the schools. They were going to have to stop praying. They were going to have to teach the government curriculum, which by the way makes California look sane by comparison. And so under the guise of school choice, they completely eliminated school choice.

Now, I will say this: I'm really excited that this is the conversation we're having now that, in legislatures across the country, we're talking about what's the best way to evacuate children from the dumpster fire that is public schools. That's a really important step forward, that the debate has shifted to this point.

And you know, I am encouraged by some of what I'm saying, and that this has facilitated in some cases the ability of families to remove their children from the public school system. But I do want to put that word of caution out there. I've seen the documents. I've got a 2022 global Education monitoring report from Unesco where they're talking about how are we going to bring these what they call non-state education providers under the control of the state for the purpose of imposing equity goals and national testing systems?

And their formula is very simple. We're going to give them tax money. We're going to get them dependent, and then we're going to tell them you have to do the tests, you have to follow the curricula. So in Florida we haven't gotten there yet. We do have the public money is now available for families that want to.

It's not homeschooling anymore. We took the homeschool language out and I talked to the governor about this. I urged him to get some of the bad stuff out of this statute, and thankfully they did do that. But you know, we Arizona, I think there's a real good warning for this. So Arizona was supposed to be the model.

Now they've got a Democrat governor, and the Democrat governor has come out publicly and has said, we want every institution, every family that's receiving this money to follow the same education standards that everybody else has to follow to follow the same non-discrimination policies. And so you know, good news and also a clear warning, we've got to be very careful that we don't compromise the biblical nature of our education by getting intertwined with government.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. Very good, very good. And well said. Let me change the topic for our last few minutes here, because it's something that I'm curious to hear your thoughts on. Oh, several years ago, one of my sons said to me, “Dad, have you ever considered running for Congress?” And I said, “What?!” He said, I got a friend and I knew who it was is really involved in the Republican Party in Pennsylvania.

I was still a resident Pennsylvania at the time, and they're not real thrilled with the congressman. And I'm curious if you'd be interested as well. First of all, I'm not interested. But secondly, it got me thinking, and I got to thinking, if I were to do that, how might I have impact? And so I actually wrote up a little thing I posted on Facebook to see what people would say about it.

It was basically this: to go in there, refuse a salary, refuse to be party loyal at the expense of the constituents that I represented, and be there as somebody who's there to serve and not to get rich or to rule. And it really seemed like a model worth considering. What do you think? How what would you say our problem is in government and maybe to really particularized. What are the biggest mistakes being made by conservatives? We are quick. I'm quick to point out what my liberal friends do that's silly. The gender confusion, the wokeness that that is a dead end that's closer than my nose. I get that, but what about conservatives where are the mistakes we're making?

Alex Newman:
Well I think one of the big problems is that conservatives nowadays only seem interested in conserving the liberal policies of the last decade. So now we’re just conserving the giant advances that the liberals have made.

I would say that fundamentally, the real problem is exactly what it is when it comes to education is that we have forgotten what God's Word teaches. Now, I would start with the premise that God is the one who ordained said, well, government. And he told us why he ordained civil government. Its purpose is to punish evil, to be a terror unto evil. God, clearly. And in the words of the Apostle Paul in Romans chapter 13, describes the civil government as ministers of God.

Government officials are ministers of God. Jesus tells us, hey you, we're not going to be like the pagans, right? For you guys, if you're in authority, that means you're going to serve other people. You're not there to lord it over everyone. You're there to serve. And we have forgotten all of that. That's how we ended up in the mess.

I was really disheartened to see the Republican National Convention. We had this prayer to the genderless pagan god Wahi Guru who was described as the one true God. I don't think we're going to be able to restore our country or its greatness by saying prayers to the false deity of Waheguru.

I don't think we're going to be able to restore the greatness of our nation by continuing to allow the slaughter of the unborn. So I think we've got to get back to biblical principles. The purpose of government is to punish evil. God is the one who gets to define evil. He has defined murder as evil. He has defined theft as evil.

And so these are areas where human courts and human legislatures have no authority to rule. Right? You can't redefine evil in a way that is contrary to the scriptures. You can't redefine marriage in a way that is contrary to the commands of the creator of the heavens and the earth without expecting judgment without expecting catastrophe. And so I think if we're gonna fix the problems that we face in government, we need Christians to go into the civil government.

We also need Christians to read their Bibles. The Bible teaches more about government than it does about heaven, and very few pastors are willing to talk about this. So I've been blessed over the last few years. God has continually opened doors for me to preach on this subject in churches. Maybe the pastor doesn't want to address it, but he'll let me come in and preach on this.

But I believe it's critical that Christians go back to the Scripture, understand the purpose of government, and that's how we can start making real progress. We argue from the scriptures. We don't argue from pragmatism. We don't argue from a position of what we feel. We argue from the immutable eternal truths of the scriptures, which is exactly by the way what our founders did.

If people knew our history when the founders talked about the laws of nature and nature's God, I mean that's got a real specific meaning. It's not whatever your seventh-grade civics teacher thinks. You got to go back to what they were quoting, go back and read Sir William Blackstone and commentaries on the Laws of England. These things have meaning.

And if we're going to conserve what was great about our country, what was great about our civilization, we've got to go back to the source. And the source, of course, is the word of God.

Marlin Detweiler:
Wonderful.
So you're a young man. You are sharp. You are quick. Pick five years, ten years, 20 years. You've progressed to that point. You look back on your work and your life. What do you hope it will look like from that vantage point?

Alex Newman:
Well, I would say one of my biggest priorities in life right now is to get children out of the public schools and into the safe sanctuary of Christian education, homeschools, Christian schools, things like that. So every time I hear from a mom or from a dad that we heard your lecture and we decided to pull our child out of the public schools, there's like a party going on in my head you know that?

Marlin Detweiler:
One more notch in the gun belt!

Alex Newman:
Right! Exactly. And it's such a good feeling to know that now this child is going to have a good education instead of being indoctrinated to hate God, hate the family, hate the country, they're going to have a decent or at least the potential for a decent God honoring legitimate education. And that's something that's going to have an impact for potentially hundreds of years because that's going to impact their children and their children and their children.

So you know that's not something that's glorious. You're not going to get a lot of accolades, and people won’t pat you on the back. But that's okay. I'm not in this to get pats on the back or anything like that. I hope that we get millions of children out of the government schools.

I hope God gets all the credit and all the glory. And I hope through this remnant that is emerging, we've got what 5 million children now being homeschooled? Another 5 million, maybe 10 million in Christian schools. I hope that God is preserving a remnant for himself to either fix the mess that we're in or rebuild from the ashes.

And whichever way that goes, you know I don't know what the future is. I don't get into big debates on eschatology. You know a lot of people think it's all over anyway. I'm just here to do what God has commanded us to do in his word and we'll just trust him with the results.

Marlin Detweiler:
Amen. What a great place to end, Alex. Thank you so much. I knew this would be drinking from a fire hose and I'm glad to take a breath now. Thanks.

Alex Newman:
Thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity. Come on.

Marlin Detweiler:
Folks, thanks again for joining us for this another episode of Veritas Vox the Voice in classical Christian education. We hope to see you next time. Bye bye.