“From Trotsky, to Lenin, to Mao, to Castro—to socialist Bernie Sanders and Comrade Ocasio-Cortez—a common tool for manipulating paideia is to use words that people associate with positive virtues, but to change their meaning.”
Television host, former soldier, and recent Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth’s The Battle for the American Mind, co-authored by ACCS President David Goodwin, is a brash and unpolished polemic against the progressive subversion of American education and its devastating cultural consequences. The book is far from a scholarly work—clumsy in execution, rife with inaccuracies, prone to scare tactics, scattershot in its accusations, largely unsourced, lacking a cohesive argument, three times as long as it needs to be, written in the author’s loose conversational tone—and could rightly be called propaganda, but it nonetheless offers an urgent and compelling diagnosis for parents who look at a culture bent on despising all that is true, good, and beautiful; who, in a moment of honest despair, might wonder: Is it even responsible to bring children into this world? Am I equipped to raise them?
The book is at its most effective when tracing the history of progressivism’s slow, deliberate takeover of American education starting all the way back with John Dewey (1859–1952)—a movement that now grants the state control over children for 16k formative hours, during which they are taught to disdain their faith, their country, their families, and even their bodies. They’re also taught to read and write and that 2+2 sometimes equals 5 or whatever. We’ve all become aware of the radical ideologies swamping college campuses (I only caught the beginning of it as a student), but Hegseth and Goodwin posit that the seeds are planted much earlier, and parents saw evidence of this during virtual class meetings throughout the COVID-19 lockdowns.
They astutely highlight the subtle shifts in pedagogy that allow even ostensibly neutral curricula to be weaponized against the soul of the child. Instead of a reverent passing down of tradition and the building up of strong morals by looking toward what is higher and greater, a fundamental shift in the way reading, writing, and arithmetic are taught can turn the student inward so that his education reflects his own fallen nature and the vague social issues of his own time. He becomes disconnected from his lineage and adrift on a sea of incoherence. And the proof is in the pudding: kids are far less capable and polished than they were in the recent past. But before conservatives rush to romanticize the “good old days” of the 1950s or demand the reinstatement of “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, the authors remind us that the problem goes far deeper: modern Christians have no living memory of what a truly virtuous educational model looks like. By the time Christians awakened to progressivism’s agenda, the battlefield had been completely reshaped, the terrain remapped, leaving them scrambling for solutions that are merely evil in another guise. Instead, let’s fetishize the ancient world.
The authors argue that American education was once grounded in the “Western Christian Paideia” (what they abbreviate as WCP, and boy do they need an acronym for how often they use the phrase)—a murky brew of Judeo-Christian values, Greek thought, the medieval liberal arts tradition, and the philosophies of the Founding Fathers through which the child is educated and inculturated. This classical approach to education aimed not at mere vocational training but at forming virtuous, thoughtful, and spiritually grounded individuals capable of leadership and lifelong learning. In contrast, today’s schools, steeped in a neo-Marxist ideology that Hegseth regularly conflates with progressivism at large, prioritize utilitarianism and social engineering over the cultivation of wisdom and character. The result, they argue, is an unscrupulous and exploitative system that undermines both individual and societal flourishing. To explain why this is not good I will borrow a lyric from the pen of Jon Foreman, “I wanna thrive, not just survive.”
Hegseth invokes the WCP like a mantra, presenting it as the ultimate antidote to the cultural decay he describes. However, it quickly becomes an overstuffed turkey that reduces the argument considerably, a monolith to set against the monolith of the public school system. The book essentially ignores that some earnest Christians are also progressive or that even conservative Christians might be public school teachers, and that before public schooling many people never learned to read or write at all. Early American education wasn’t the fulfillment of both Greek thought and the Christian religion. Greeks weren’t proto-Christians (though their philosophical framework was crucial in helping our ancestors describe the tenets of their faith). And the public school system need not be aligned with a distinctly Christian worldview to stoke within the student a love of the true, the good, and the beautiful. While the book’s broad strokes ring true, these habits of conflation, imprecision, and generalization risk undermining its credibility. Much of what it says might be true, but the book itself isn’t able to confirm it.
As a former homeschooler (4.5 years of elementary school) and public schooler, I found myself reflecting on my own education while reading this book. As a homeschooler, I was shielded from the influences my peers faced, but I wasn’t classically or biblically educated, and when I went to public school I wasn’t challenged academically at all. I learned engineering in college, and thankfully only had to sit through one or two diversity seminars, and have been mostly self-taught in everything else. I knew that I wanted to be more intentional with my own kids than simply excising the bad bits of the public school model but otherwise replicating it, and this book is nothing if not a call to action. I don’t know if its answer is the one-size-fits-all solution to the problem, nor if the model it proposes is historically accurate (it doesn’t necessarily need to be), but, for all its flaws, the book has spurred me to think more deeply about how I can provide my children with the rich, spiritually nourishing education I often craved without knowing where to find it.
Of course, the messenger matters, and Hegseth’s personal shortcomings—admissions of infidelity and a succession of wives more staggering than President Trump’s own—cast a shadow over his role as a standard-bearer for Christian virtue. Yet his candid reflections on the moral relativism he encountered in his own education lend a measure of authenticity to his critique. He writes as someone who has experienced firsthand the emptiness of a life untethered from transcendent truths and is now seeking to chart a better path for future generations.
Inspired by the book’s call to action, the other night I impulse bought a vintage 1947 set of Olive Beaupré Miller’s My Book House, a curated progression through nursery rhymes, world myths, folktales, history, and biography. The Battle for the American Mind won’t be counted among the Great Books it urges us to teach from, but it has reminded me that shaping my precious children’s souls is not just a duty but a joy—and, perhaps, an opportunity to rediscover the wonder of learning for myself!