James Lindsay holds a Ph.D. in mathematics but has turned his attention to cultural issues in a series of books, including Cynical Theories, that his critics claim are far right and nationalistic. He has, however, been praised by both Stephen Pinker, a Harvard University psychologist, and and Al Mohler, a conservative Southern Baptist, who are anything but bedfellows. He does meticulous research, documents his findings, and certainly provides perspectives worth considering. In The Marxification of Education: Paulo Freire’s Critical Marxism and the Theft of Education (New Discourses, c. 2022, Kindle Edition) he argues that much of the modern educational establishment has been deeply influenced by a self-identifying Brazilian Marxist. He begins with an anecdote. Following the tragic killings in a Uvalde, Texas, school, a legislator in Providence, Rhode Island—who calls herself a “queer educator” and “abortion funder”—urged students to walk out of their classes and take to the streets to protest gun violence, which they did. Neither she nor the educational establishment seems overly concerned by the fact that 94% of Providence students aren’t proficient in math and 86% can’t read or write on grade level. But they’re quite adept at staging a protest at the state capitol. The reason for this, Lindsay thinks, is that “education has been stolen right out from under us and from our children. This theft of education has a purpose; it enables a counterfeit to replace it. The mechanism and description of this gigantic educational ripoff can be summarized in a single sentence: Our kids go to Paulo Freire’s schools” (p. 7).
Many years ago I read Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and took it as an example of the impact Marxism was having in Latin and South America, especially in the “liberation theology” widely espoused within Christian (mainly Catholic) circles. In fact, Freire may be rightly understood as one of the liberation theologians of his era. Little did I imagine that Pedagogy of the Oppressed would become widely praised and utilized in the United States. But by 1995 it had become part of the curricula in schools of education and and “the intervening quarter century has seen enough turnover of the teachers to have fundamentally remade our schools and thus education itself. Kids still go to school, but school isn’t school anymore. The teachers have been replaced with activists, and education has been turned into ‘conscientization,’ the process of seeing the world from the so-called standpoint of the oppressed” (p. 16). Still more: Freire is also widely cited in educational journals—generally called “Critical Pedagogy” or “Critical Education Theory.” In fact: Freire is “the third most-cited scholarly author in all of the humanities and social sciences by authoritative metrics” (p. 15).
Rooted in the revolutionary thought of Rousseau and Marx, Freire wanted to transform his world. He especially sought to overcome the damage done by colonialism, so he generally romanticized precolonial, primitive societies wherein “noble savages” thrived. Thus the call to “decolonize the curriculum!” Get rid of dead, white males! “Decolonizing the curriculum means replacing articles of ‘formal education’ or ‘literacy’” with a more Woke Course of studies. “The English literature curriculum has to be ‘decolonized’ by removing Shakespeare” and introducing more “relevant” texts celebrating diversity, equity, and inclusion. Even mathematics must “be replaced with ‘ethnomathematics’ (and even the wildly nonsensical ‘mathematx’) for the same ‘decolonization’ purpose” (p. 138). Consequently: “Education, for Freire, is going to be a process of learning to ‘transform reality,’ which is the essential Marxist project” (p. 47). This begins by constantly criticizing the world as it is—finding fault with institutions, historical heroes, classical art and music. Embracing Marx’s call for a “ruthless criticism of all that exists,” Freirian educators should plow up the soil and plant new seeds rather than water what is already growing. Pointing out the “contradictions” in the status quo enables teachers to point to how things should be if the revolution transforms them. Traditional education, with its emphasis on mastering certain subjects, such as reading and mathematics, oppresses students by readying them to cooperate with an unjust society. Most of us want youngsters to simply become literate, butFreire calls for “political literacy”—learning to use words and launch movements to advance a leftist agenda. Learning to read books is less important than learning to agitate in the streets. This follows Karl Marx’s goal of getting power in order to transform the world. By looking at things from the side of the world’s “oppressed,” students are encouraged to “die and be resurrected” and enlist in the “permanent struggle” for liberation.
Freirian teachers are not purveyors of knowledge intent in imparting what’s known to their students. They are, rather, “facilitators” determined to work alongside school kids critiquing the status quo and drafting utopian plans for a better world. They are to become “change agents” protesting global warming or supporting Hamas massacring Jews. Large numbers of public schools embrace a program called “Transformative Social-Emotional Learning” (SEL) designed to do precisely such things. It’s a form of “emotional manipulation” whereby an alleged teacher becomes an “unlicensed social worker” or “unqualified psychologist” doing anything but providing instruction in grammar and geography. “Our kids currently go to Paulo Freire’s schools,” Lindsay says in his concluding section. “These schools are unambiguously Marxist (unless we split hairs and call them neo-Marxist or Woke Marxist) in their architecture, pedagogy, methods, and goals. They have abandoned the idea of educating American children to grow toward becoming successful and prosperous adults in American society because they want to undermine, destroy, and replace American society. Rather than teaching literacy, numeracy, or other educational basics, Freirean schools use subject matter like reading, writing, mathematics, history, social studies, and science lessons to teach Marxist consciousness of one or more forms at a time. As a result of more than a decade of this practice, American schoolchildren are almost universally failing in basic competency in virtually every subject at virtually every grade level.” Lindsay insists “correcting the problem of Freirean education is a high-priority item,” for it’s indoctrination rather than education. Indeed it is a form of progressive religion that should be removed from public schools.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Pete Hegseth, who cohosts FOX & Friends Weekend, wrote Battle for the American Mind (New York: HarperCollins, c. 2022; Kindle Edition) with assistance from David Goodwin (a businessman who helped found The Ambrose School in Boise, Idaho) to emphasize classical Christian education. Hegseth declares: “It is my brokenness that brings me to this book. Our brokenness. Nothing but the grace of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ affords these two authors—Pete Hegseth (me) and David Goodwin—the sufficiency to undertake such an audacious task: writing a book that motivates others to reorient their lives around the education of their most precious gift—their children and grandchildren.” (p. xv). The authors want something better than the progressive pedagogy they received and most of our their children are receiving. Goodwin has done the research and Hegseth uses his rhetorical skill to make the case for taking a different (if ancient) approach to educating the nation’s youth.
Hegseth earlier published two “books on the fight for the future of America,” but he thinks this one more important. Abraham Lincoln rightly said that “the philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation becomes the philosophy of government in the next,” and Hegseth, along with many parents, suddenly discovered what was happening in the schoolrooms when they shut down during the COVID panic. “Seemingly out of nowhere—and accelerated after the Black Lives Matter riots in the summer of 2020—concepts like white privilege and systemic racism and even a new founding date for America, the year 1619, were splashed across computer screens all over America. Critical race theory had fully arrived (often masked as ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’), along with a full-on attempt to redefine gender, infuse climate fatalism, and turn our children into activists. These types of revelations were powerful because they were not the result of media exposure, but instead a bottom-up, and often apolitical, recognition by parents that the very foundation of American education had taken a radical turn. It was the ‘woke’ versus the newly awake. You might call it the COVID-(16)19 effect” (p. 5). This is appalling apparent when, for example, you learn that the National Archives warns on-line viewers interested in copies of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, only to be “met with a warning—right at the top of each document—that says ‘Harmful Language Alert’” (p. 14). Tellingly, when Joe Biden entered the White House he “abolished the ‘1776 Commission’—a last-ditch effort created by President Donald Trump to reject the 1619 narrative and reinstall traditional American history” (p. 36).
The battle taking place in America results Marxist-inspired movements determined to transform her. Today’s Marxists want to control the culture and naturally target the nation’s schools. They “control every strong point, every choke point, and every inch of high ground in the realm of American education, and by extension, American culture” (p. 27). Powerful teachers’ unions—the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA)—promote the Marxist agenda by imposing Critical Race Theory and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI). Amazingly, in 1972 the NEA hired Saul Alinsky to train its staff and issued a document—Alinsky for Teacher Organizers declaring “that teachers should be used to organize, not just for changes in the classroom, but for social change” (p. 37). In addition to concerns for race, class, and gender, union bureaucrats want to “deconstruct” the nation’s history and constitutional principles. For them, “our Western Judeo-Christian roots are the problem—they must be dismantled, one theory, one word, one classroom, and one mind at a time” (p. 32). Thus, as former New York governor Andrew Cuomo said: “We’re not going to make America great again, it was never that great.” Cuomo’s view was evident in the “Common Core” curriculum prescribed for the nation’s schools a decade ago, pushing the historical positions of Howard Zinn’s A Popular History of the United States. “It is not hyperbole to state,” Hegseth says, “that no other book has had a greater impact on the minds of American youth for the past forty years. When not assigned in classrooms, it has been fully incorporated into the mass-produced textbooks in our classrooms. Zinn’s view of history is enmeshed in American classrooms. The unions love it, endorse it, and teach it” (p. 40). Zinn openly espoused socialism and was patently anti-American. To Hegseth, Zinn’s book was “written from the perspective of the Soviet Union” and designed to “make America look like an evil country.” Tellingly, “ the NEA—the nation’s largest labor union—openly works hand in hand with the ‘Zinn Education Project’” (p. 40).
Recognizing how the public schools have been radically transformed, Hegseth thinks classical Christian schools, implementing Western Christian Paideia (WCP), are much needed. “Paideia, simply defined, represents the deeply seated affections, thinking, viewpoints, and virtues embedded in children at a young age, or, more simply, the rearing, molding, and education of a child. Classical Christian education creates a paideia unique in all of human history—one that enables freedom” (p. 44). Western Civilization, over the centuries, blended the best of Athens and Jerusalem, establishing a priceless heritage that must be recovered and celebrated. Throughout the 20th century American Progressives rejected the Western Christian Paideia in order to establish a fully humanistic agenda, believing (in accord with Woodrow Wilson) “that most people just needed a vocational education—they had no use for a free-man’s (classical) education” (p. 93). Trained to get jobs rather than wisdom, students learned little of “divine Truth.” C.S. Lewis saw this clearly a century ago, noting that, rightly defined, “education is essentially for freemen and vocational training for slaves. . . . If education is beaten by training, civilization dies.”
Hegseth confesses that he knew little about any kind of classical education. “I am a graduate of two of the most ‘prestigious’ universities in America—Princeton and Harvard—yet I’ve never read most of the classics. Homer or Virgil, Plato or Aristotle? I’ve read next to nothing of them in school. I don’t know a word of Latin or Greek, let alone really understanding the histories of Rome and Greece. I never studied Shakespeare, and don’t think I ever experienced the Socratic method (except from my one conservative professor in college). I never had my faith infused into my education; it was always just an accessory. I can’t properly diagram a single sentence, and couldn’t tell you the difference between a verb and an adverb. I write like I speak. It just is what it is. We were all failed by our government schools, and we didn’t even know it” (p. 246). He now believes the nation needs Classical Christian schools which stress reason and virtue, wonder and beauty, believing that, as Aristotle said, “To enjoy the things we ought and to hate the things we ought, has the greatest bearing on virtue.” This means students should memorize great poetry, study history and the Bible, and become open to the “stamp of beauty, timelessness, and culture on their soul” (p. 207). This is best done by following the time-tested trivium (grammar, logic; rhetoric) and quadrivium (arithmetic; geometry; music; astronomy), and obtaining a working knowledge of Latin. Above all, the Lord Jesus Christ must be honored and heeded.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Pete Hegseth recently published The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free (New York: HarperCollins, c. 2024; Kindle Edition), a treatise that is “closely tied” to his “Battle for the American Mind—because if we don’t stay free, then we’re just another country with a flag. I won’t fight for just any flag, and I hope my kids would not either” (p. xix). This book is a very personal manifesto designed to alert readers to worrisome changes taking place in America’s armed forces. What he says is quite worth considering but not to be taken as the final word. Though Hegseth interviewed scores of veterans and active duty warriors, his book is more a jeremiad than an objective study (though he does cite documents including a 2024 report that declared: “‘as currently postured, the U.S. military is at significant risk of not being able to defend America’s vital national interests.’ For the second year in a row, our military is rated as ‘weak’ relative to the force needed to defend national interests)” (p. xiv). Rather than training warriors to fight, Hegseth thinks, “We’ve become a ‘You Be You’ military” (p. xvi). The book’s epigram sets the tone: “Proclaim this among the nations: Consecrate for war; stir up the mighty men. Let all the men of war draw near; let them come up. Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears; let the weak say, “I am a warrior” (Joel 3: 9–10; ESV).
After graduating from Princeton University and getting a cushy job in a Wall Street financial firm, Bear Stearns, Hegseth joined the Army in 2001, responding to the Islamic jihadists’ attacks on 9/11. He became an officer and “led men in combat in Iraq in 2005. I pulled bodies out of burning vehicles in Afghanistan in 2012. I held a riot shield outside the White House in 2020.” (p. xi). “ Despite his years of service—and because of his conservative views expressed on Fox News—he fell afoul the Army brass and would be branded, in 2021, an “extremist!” The fact that a few veterans were part of the January 6 occupation of the Capitol led the Biden administration to investigate “extremism” in the military, finding “only 100 cases of extremist activity among 2.1 million active and reserve forces, ‘a case rate of .005 percent’” (p. 23). In fact, the U.S. military is the least racist, least sexist, most equitable institution in America! The armed forces have become “woke” in part because they have followed Barack Obama’s injunction to “fundamentally transform America.” Under Obama for eight years (plus four more under Biden), “the pipelines of future military leaders have been primed with social justice, politically correct parrots. Parrots who love “firsts” instead of fighters. Parrots who will spout ‘our diversity is our strength’ when they know damn well that it’s the opposite in the military: our unity is our strength. They are dangerous idiots, and they are in charge” (p. 29). In Hegseth’s view: “You don’t ‘fundamentally transform’ something or someone you love; you transform something you disdain” (p. xvi).
Because the military has lost its way there’s a recruiting crisis in America. Though three-fourths of American youth can’t qualify for military service—largely because they’re not physically fit—the recruitment problem is largely a morale issue. Good soldiers, fed up with identity politics, are leaving and their replacements cannot be found. Leftists have infiltrated and now control the upper echelons of the armed services, turning them into social justice bureaucracies providing employment opportunities for various minority groups. Presiding over the system are the general officers who covet promotions rather than leading disciplined bands of warriors. Such officers know how to cultivate powerful politicians but fail to to endear themselves to enlisted men. “Hunting for racism, today’s generals create racial strife. Pushing for gender equality, today’s generals weaken unit readiness. Rooting out ‘extremism,’ today’s generals push rank-and-file patriots out of their formations (I’m one of them)” (p. 10). An “unholy alliance of political ideologues and Pentagon pussies has left our warriors without real defenders in Washington” (p. 11). By focusing on internal DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) issues our military forces have compromised their fighting ability. A Special Forces officer—one of the “dozens and dozens” he interviewed—told Hegseth: “‘The current state of the military is careerism. It no longer centers on our core task: to win wars. Indeed, the ethos is: Where’s my next command? How am I going to advance myself?’” (p. 37). While Joe Biden was Commander in Chief, careerist ‘generals “have ceded ground—or outright defeat—on every contested battlespace with a foreign adversary.” (p. 36).
Much that’s wrong with today’s armed forces can be traced to their “(Deadly) Obsession with Women Warriors.” Hegseth makes a “politically incorrect but . . . perfectly commonsensical observation: Dads push us to take risks. Moms put the training wheels on our bikes. We need moms. But not in the military, especially in combat units” (p. 66). Though individual women may be amazing “warriors” they are definitely exceptions. There’s a simple explanation for this—an “average man’s upper-body strength is greater than that of 99 percent of women” (p. 73). Facing this reality, the military has either lowered its standards to make sure women could qualify or established different standards for the two sexes. For example: “the minimum standard of push-ups for a female in the Army, age twenty-two to twenty-six, is eleven” (p. 84). Women get preferential treatment in order to place them in combat units—including the Army Ranger and Marine infantry units. So the Army’s Airborne School no longer requires a daily five-miles run and now busses students to jump sites since too many women were getting injured. Basically, “physical standards have gone completely out the window” because “women really struggle on the most basic tasks.” Our “warriors” are getting “fatter and slower” (p. 87).
Hegseth’s also worried about the state of our military academies. Over the years, and for various reasons, they changed as an increasing number of “civilian professors” were hired—“for reasons of ‘diversity’”—and “with them came the predictable, radical, left-wing educational philosophies” (p. 210). Thus “LTG Darryl Williams, then the superintendent at West Point, released a five-year plan that focused on ‘inclusivity’ as equal in importance as marksmanship under fire” (p. 215). We now have rules of engagement written for warriors by lawyers, special treatment for homosexuals and transexuals, and a Supreme Court justice (Elena Sagan) renowned for her anti-military views.
“America today is in a cold civil war. Our soul is under attack by a confederacy of radicals” who “wish to erode our institutions by making us question our purpose. They seek to make us believe that everything we have is somehow taken from other people’s efforts, other people’s possessions. Stolen land! Patriarchy! Racism! . . . . That America is not that great; was never great. And, for the purposes of this book, that the US military is a tool for conquest, imperialism, and oppression” (p. 205). To awaken us to this threat—and to enlist us in resisting it—makes The War on Warriors worth heeding.
# # #