The education cartel and the long march through our institutions | Hour 2

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to the Pete calendar show.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support. All right. So along the education theme, Jonathan Turley had a write-up. This appeared over at The Hill, I believe, is where this was published? Yeah, at thehill.com. And republished at his own website, jonathanturley.org. He is a law professor, New York Times bestselling author of Rage and the Republic, The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution. And He writes about the education cartel and the blue state school scam. Again, this is a guy at, I think he's at Georgetown. So one of these prestigious colleges. Okay. And so he's been seeing the product of the K-12 government schools coming into his college for quite some time. And like, We are all well aware of the failings of the K-12 system. And it's now approaching, I believe, a critical mass. The results are undeniable. And now you've got a lot of legacy outlets that are starting to sort of make the connection between the cartel and poor performance. He calls it the education cartel, the K-12 education cartel. And I think that's a fair name for it at this point. He says it's destroying the K-12 system. New polling shows K-12 education has now reached a record low in the number of people who are even somewhat satisfied with the state of education. What's most troubling, he says, is that the near total contempt for our school system does not make a bit of difference. Families and students have become largely irrelevant to the education cartel, which is a self-sustaining, self-perpetuating political alliance of unions and politicians. I know what the what the cartel is. Activists and advocates and allies will say, but Pete, we don't have collective bargaining in North Carolina. And that's true. That does not mean that we don't have a teacher's union here. We do. And they funnel a ton of money to the Democrats, which is why in the cities where Democrats rule the roost, right, you have the kinds of poor performance that we see. According to Gallup, only 32% of American adults say that they are, quote, completely or somewhat satisfied with the quality of K-12 education. So only one out of three say they are completely or somewhat satisfied. So that means two-thirds are not, not satisfied with the K-12 system. That is the lowest fallacy. figure in Gallup's 27 years of asking the question. Public satisfaction with the school system has dropped almost 20 points since 2024. 20 points in two years. So you can't even say it's COVID. Not at this point. Now, I guess maybe you could say it's, you know, pandemic related in that all of the learning loss that we saw, although our own teachers union chief here in North Carolina said learning loss isn't really a thing. That's a myth. Okay. So maybe you could make the argument that, you know, parents were awakened to the problems in their schools when they were, you know, locked in their homes and they saw what their kids were not learning. And this is sort of a remnant of that, the learning loss that the kids had. And now, excuse me, they're not able. To make up the work or they've fallen behind to. A large extent. So maybe there is some residual effect from COVID, but to drop 20 points in two years indicates to me that It's more of a waking up to the current state rather than a direct result of the pandemic. That's my assessment. College students are entering higher education without even basic math or other skills. We've covered this as well over the years where you've got all of these colleges and universities, some of them very prestigious, that have to do remedial courses to because the kids coming from high school into the quote unquote best colleges and universities don't know how to do math that they should have learned to do in order to graduate high school. Turley goes on to say for generations, the public school system has failed students in major cities. Despite massive budget increases, actual test scores continue to fall or remain at subpar levels. In a prior column, I was particularly moved by the frustration of a mother in Baltimore who complained that her son was in the top half of his class, despite the fact that he failed every one of his classes except three. And he's in the top half of his class. Her story is led to my changing my view of school vouchers. Despite my long support for public schools, I believe vouchers may be the only way to wrest control away from the education cartel by introducing real competition based on academic performance. When you've lost Jonathan Turley to the pro-voucher side, like, that's a you problem. Cartel members. That's a you problem. Okay. I've long said, my preference is a blowing up of the K-12 model. I believe it is an antiquated model. It was put in place not to create, as the founder of the model said, not to create, quote unquote, men of letters, right? We're not trying to create scholars. We're just trying to give them basic reading and math skills so they can get off the farms and into the factories. That's why it's a factory model. It's the Prussian model. We literally took it from Prussia and brought it here. This is all well documented. Okay. So the model doesn't work anymore. If it ever did in the first place, maybe it served a purpose, right? Maybe it worked very well at some point. But what I can tell you is that as one who went through the factory model, it does not serve all the students well. So vouchers are my compromise position because I would prefer a dismantling of the K-12 factory model. But I know that a lot of people won't go along with that. So me being all about solutions as I am, um, I offer the vouchers as a midpoint, as a compromise. So you want to keep your K-12 schools? You can keep your K-12 schools, much like Obama promised with healthcare, right? I will make you that same offer. You get to keep your K-12 schools. But you're going to have to compete with other schools that are going to be able to serve different student populations, preferably better. And here's the thing. If they don't, they go out of business. If they can't serve those populations, then they won't have any students enrolled and they won't make any money and they will close up shop. That's how the market penalizes poor performance, right? If you're sending your kid to a school, a private school, and they're not learning anything, then eventually word gets out that, oh, that's a diploma mill. Don't take any of those kids to your colleges because they don't know anything. So now it's not even a credentialing service. which is what a lot of like higher ed has become. He goes on to say, faced with low proficiency scores, teachers unions and school administrators have continued to lower proficiency requirements, right? If you don't have enough kids at or above grade level, then just reduce the standards. So now they're at grade level. So us not teaching you anything, that's now the standard. Your ignorance is our standard. He says they are simply pushing students out the door without basic skills, robbing these kids of any chance to break out of cycles of poverty and unemployment. When confronted with their poor performance, school board members have declared meritocracy to be a form of white supremacy. Gifted and talented programs are being eliminated in the name of so-called equity, right? So dumb everybody down, reduce all of the standards, and we keep our jobs... We get more money for our jobs. Your kid doesn't learn anything, but that's okay because, look, they have a diploma. This is not a model that works, folks. The holidays will be here before you know it, and so now is the time to create precious and priceless family heirlooms that will last for generations. Take your old photos, slides, films, and tapes to create a video in Mint Hill. There, they'll turn those memories into the story of your lives, memories from past family events captured forever to pass down to future generations. Create-A-Video's skilled team will professionally transfer your family's stories onto easy-to-use USB drives or DVDs, that won't deteriorate over time like the old photos and tapes are doing right now. They will create a keepsake video that you can share and copy and keep forever. 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We can't possibly figure out a way to measure standards. And I thought that was really weird because that's kind of your job as a teacher and an administrator, right? Like that's the whole point. That's why parents send their kids to you is for you to teach them stuff and then measure their performance, measure their growth, right? So you're telling me you can't do that for yourselves? I always say this when I talk about teaching and the profession of teaching, which is, I want to pay great teachers lots of money. They deserve it. It's an art form for really good teachers. When you have a really good teacher, you know it's a really good teacher. Parents know. Teachers know. Everybody knows who the great teachers are, and they know who the terrible ones are. I refuse to pay the terrible ones the same amount of money as the great ones. And until you guys in the industry can figure out a way to reward the best without also rewarding the worst, then this is where we are. And everybody's going to get paid based on length of service. To me, that's stupid. It doesn't make any sense. Congratulations, you did not get fired from a job that you basically can't get fired from. I've never liked. The pay scale structure, but when it comes to this kind of education cartel run by the government, it's all just basically years of service. That's the only way they can do it. And you can't do it based on merit, based on test scores, performance, whatever, growth, whatever. You can't do it. So, okay. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. but I'm not sorry. Like I'm not going to pay every single teacher, you know, six figures because that means the terrible ones are also getting six figures and they don't deserve that. And they're actually harming children, not teaching them. Right. Um, so that's a problem with the merit based pay. It's entirely of the, uh, the cartel zone doing Mitch says, I too believe we need drastic change in our schools. My wife has been teaching for 40 years and, But what do market solutions do with autistic kids or kids with learning disabilities or kids who just won't behave? My wife has all of those kids in her class. Well, yeah, if you have a market-based system, then you would have schools that cater to those kids because the market would identify a gap in what's being offered, right? They would say, oh, hey, we have kids that are special needs, and so we are– and the market isn't serving them, so let's start a school to serve those kids. That's how the market works. You could also have– like I said, the vouchers is my compromise. You have the vouchers. You could then also set up– government schools as the safety net to provide for the gaps that the market isn't serving. You could do that too. There are all sorts of solutions. Simply saying, well, what about this? That's not a solution. The solution is that there would be entrance into the marketplace. People would would hear these questions asked. What about this particular population and what about this particular kind of student or whatever? And then the market would say, well, you know what? There are there are a lot of students here that could benefit from this kind of a model. Why don't we do that model? Right. 704 number says maybe the education model has shifted from creating factory workers to producing people who can't think at all and will vote for anyone who promises utopia. That is correct. That is correct. I will get into this in a bit. This is part of the long march through the institutions, right? When you don't understand the outcomes, reassess the assumption. If your assumption was that we're supposed to be, you know, creating men of letters from the K-12 system, and it's like, why aren't we creating men of letters? Well, because your assumption was incorrect. That was never the intention. That's why we're not seeing it. Now it makes sense, right? All right, real quick. Every government number gets revised, right? Every projection gets walked back Gold does not file corrections like GovCo. Revelation Gold Group helps families hold physical gold and silver, including in a tax-advantaged gold IRA. It's real, it's in your name, and 10 minutes tells you if your retirement account qualifies. If you want to learn more, go to calendarmetals.com. That's calendarmetals.com. There is a link in the podcast description. Or if you want to talk to somebody, you can call 888-465-3049. Ian says, let's remember that education majors created only after Carter created the Department of Education have the lowest SAT scores of all majors. Is that true? Okay, first off, there were teaching colleges long before Jimmy Carter. I mean, I went to Winthrop University, and that college was always a teaching college. It was an all-female teaching college. And then it went co-ed in like the 80s and then I showed up like 10 or 15 years later still a very you know female dominant student body and the education college and I did take a couple classes over there and that's when I was like yeah no this isn't for me so now alright so do they have the lowest let's see here let me ask my local data center. Do education majors have the lowest SAT scores? Yes. Really? Data consistently shows that education majors have the lowest average SAT scores. Of any major. I did not know that. I did not know that. I'm not going to comment any further on that. I'm not going to say anything else about that. I did. I was not aware of that. Hashtag not all teachers. Jeff with a G says, while the factory model churns out little skulls full of mush, it leaves them dumb and unable to provide for themselves, making them ripe pickings for the demo communist indoctrination chamber. Okay. Let me get to this because this is along those lines. There's a fellow by the name of Breville Lepram. He is the co-founder and technical lead of Argile, an artificial intelligence video generation platform based in Paris, France. Okay. So he posted up onto X, in 50 years, history books will say that Elon Musk won a war that no one even knew we were losing. A war that began 100 years ago in an Italian prison cell. In 1926, Benito Mussolini had a 35-year-old Sardinian intellectual arrested. At the trial, the prosecutor reportedly said, quote, we must stop this brain from working for 20 years. The man with that brain, who was incarcerated, was Antonio Gramsci. I have mentioned him before. So they stuck him in prison, but his brain never stopped working. In fact, while in prison, he filled thousands of pages with that became one of the most influential political texts of the 20th century. I think we are living through the moment when his theory is now collapsing. Let me explain. Gramsci asked a simple question. Why did the communist revolution succeed in Russia but fail everywhere in the West? His answer was that in the West, power is not held just by the state, the police, and the army. It's held by the culture, by what people find normal, obvious, common sense. He called it cultural hegemony or hegemony, right? A unified culture, common sense, right? This is the joke. Common sense ain't that common, right? But that it used to be, it probably still is to a large extent, right? So if you're trying to seize power for the revolution, because Gramsci was a Marxist, he was a communist. So to seize power, you don't first take the palace like they did in Russia with the Bolshevik revolution. You have to first take the minds, people's brains. You got to win the culture. How do you do that? Schools, universities, the newspapers, the theater, publishing. The courts. That's what he called the war of position, a slow conquest, institution by institution by institution. When the culture gets flipped, the politics follows on its own. This is why I've said this for many years, right? Politics is downstream of culture, right? Whatever the cultural norms are, That affects the politics. Why do you see the rise of the DSA? Why do you see the rise of, you know, critical race theory, queer theory, right? All of this stuff that we have been witnessing over the last 20 years, but really came to a boiling point about seven years ago or so. Woke 1.0, as AOC might call it. 40 years after Gramsci, another guy comes along, a German activist. His name is Rudi Dutschka. And he's the guy talking about Gramsci's philosophy and the Gramscian approach. And he's the guy who dubbed it the long march through the institutions. See, and this is why when people on the right say that all is lost, right, the doomerism stuff, and it's like, oh, you know, what is this produced except all of this Marxism and everything? What's worth conserving about that? There's a reason why they call it the long march. Through the institutions. It's because it has taken decades to get to where we are now. That is not reversed in one election cycle or two or three. It is a long generational project. For decades, Le Pogon says, we have lived with a puzzle that no one could really explain. Why are almost all artists on the left? Actors. Singers, teachers, journalists, a good chunk of the judiciary. Why could a country vote right election after election, but still see its culture speaking with one voice from the left, right? We were told, well, that's because educated people are all on the left. I encountered this argument from a lefty 25 years ago that I worked with. That, oh, you know, the creative types, the smartest people, they're all on the left. But the answer is simpler. Gramsci had written the recipe and it was applied. See, when you control who gets the grant money or the job or the good review or the prize or the invitation onto the set, you control what becomes the culture. So people conform to that norm in order to get those jobs. It's not that they are smarter. It's that they have been rewarded because of their ideology and their willingness to follow that code, that philosophy. And these are the results. One last point that Breveil Lepram, the co-founder and technical lead of Argile, an artificial intelligence video generation platform based in Paris, France. He started off by saying. 50 years down the road, he predicts, history books will say, Elon Musk won a war that no one even knew we were losing. And so he lays out the Gramsci-Duchka approach here, the long march through the institutions. We've talked about this. You know, the revolution is, or sorry, the issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution. And this is why So many of the cultural institutions have been captured. It's intentional. People who don't adhere to that philosophy then don't get access to the cultural platforms, right? And it's the teaching colleges, it's universities, it's the arts, it's the legal profession. And so you start essentially blacklisting people who don't subscribe to the Marxist worldview, right? So that's one component of it. The other component of it, he says, is at a global scale. Why did so many developing countries, especially in Latin America, for example, keep voting again and again and again for socialists and radical left governments? Well, as I mentioned yesterday on the program, a whole ecosystem of non-government organizations, the NGOs, quote-unquote, independent media, quote, civil society programs that were largely funded by Western money. Musk comes along. With Doge, opens up USAID's books, and this agency that's been virtually untouchable since the 60s and has been pumping tens of billions of dollars a year into these various entities all around the globe And what have they been inducing? And so when the USAID spigot gets turned off for these types of operations, all of a sudden you start seeing all of these Central and South American nations ditching the commies. He says there's one last real stronghold left. Europe. Brussels funds its own networks of NGOs. With an opacity or opacity, basically, you know, it's masked, it's covered, you can't see it, that even the European Court of Auditors has pointed out. Lack of transparency. The big foundations, like George Soros' Open Society, the supranational entities that produce norms without ever facing a voter, it's the last fortress of cultural hegemony, and it's starting to crack. He says, I'm convinced all of this is going to collapse and faster than we think. Gramsci was right on one essential point. Culture precedes politics, but he forgot that it works both ways. When an artificial culture loses its IV drip, what's real underneath rises to the surface. What comes next, I believe, is a renaissance, a culture that starts loving beauty, Ambition, science, the civilization that gave it birth. It starts loving all of these things again. Look, I've talked about this. One might say that I have railed against the crap that people call art that is littered in front of so many government and corporate buildings. It's gross. It's gross. It's not art. I call it art by explanation. You have no idea what you're looking at until you read the placard that describes the artist was trying to represent this thing or whatever. And it's like, okay, so I can't discern what this thing is because it just looks like a bunch of scrap metal that somebody dumped in front of a building until I read the placard. that says it's supposed to represent this thing that doesn't look anything like what I'm looking at. That's part of the demoralization operation. It was one of the things literally that the communists in the Soviet Union listed in their Their massive list of ways to undermine and demoralize the United States during the Cold War. The corruption of art. To rob us of things that are beautiful. Because by robbing us of those things, right, it detaches us from God. Because beauty is the thing that inspires us in building and creating things. That's what God does, is God creates things. And so when you cannot see any beautiful creations around you, it demoralizes you and it detaches you. It breaks you away from that bond. And that's what the communist project is all about. It's a detachment from God. That's why communism destroys, doesn't create anything except misery. He goes on to say, in the history books, we'll remember that it all started when one man decided to look at the accounts. It took someone rich enough not to depend on anybody, crazy enough to take it on, and free enough to weather the hate that would follow. Thank you, Elon. I tend to agree. I tend to agree. Again, it was a long march through these institutions. It's going to be a long march back. There's always the cascade effect. Slowly at first, and then very quickly. So the tide can turn very quickly. But if you think woke one is dead, you are mistaken. It will come back. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them, too, and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to the Pete Kaliner show dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening and don't break anything while I'm gone.