Why Should Students Love America? | Dr. Larry Arnn

- [Audio] We believe and have always believed in this coun­try, that man was cre­at­ed in the image of God. He was giv­en tal­ents and respon­si­bil­i­ty and was instruct­ed to use them to make this world a bet­ter place in which to live. And you see, this is the real­ly great thing of America.

- It’s time to dis­cov­er what binds us togeth­er and find­ing it has the pow­er to trans­form our world. That’s what I believe. How about you? Hi every­one. I’m Doug DeVos and wel­come to ​“Believe!” Glad to have you with us again. And today we have a won­der­ful oppor­tu­ni­ty to talk to Lar­ry Arnn, the pres­i­dent of Hills­dale Col­lege. And for those of you who are famil­iar with Hills­dale, you know the strength of the school and the rep­u­ta­tion that it’s built and the top­ic today that we want to talk about, is in high­er edu­ca­tion or in edu­ca­tion in gen­er­al today, what should kids be learn­ing about Amer­i­ca? What should we love about Amer­i­ca or learn about Amer­i­ca and you know, Hills­dale Col­lege and Dr. Lar­ry Arnn have been incred­i­ble advo­cates of under­stand­ing our his­to­ry in a way that I think is help­ful and that helps us grasp what we should believe or what we should con­sid­er believ­ing our­selves as we go for­ward. You know, because your fam­i­ly, you may have dif­fer­ent beliefs one way or the oth­er, a lot of kids love Amer­i­ca. And a lot of kids maybe don’t right now. So this is a great oppor­tu­ni­ty to get togeth­er with an expert, with a great friend like Dr. Lar­ry Arnn. So Lar­ry wel­come, and thank you for join­ing us. And we’ll just dive right in, help us under­stand a lit­tle bit about how we talk about Amer­i­ca in an edu­ca­tion­al envi­ron­ment. How should we? Should we be teach­ing kids to love America?

- Well, the first thing is teach ​‘em to under­stand it, know it, right? We’ve exten­sive­ly lost the love of Amer­i­ca. And so now we have to have a dis­cus­sion about whether it’s wor­thy of love. And before you even get to that, you have to start with the fact that it’s a doc­trine of the clas­sics. It’s an obvi­ous thing. Peo­ple were made to live togeth­er in polit­i­cal com­mu­ni­ties. Aris­to­tle traces that to our abil­i­ty to talk, which is unique to us. And so either you’re gonna live under laws or you’re going to be mis­er­able, and there’s almost no his­to­ry of nations, of groups of peo­ple sur­viv­ing long with­out law. So study­ing law, the phe­nom­e­non of law, the phe­nom­e­non of pol­i­tics is nec­es­sary. And you should start with your own because your own is very con­se­quen­tial in your life. We would prob­a­bly val­ue Amer­i­ca bet­ter if we lived in Rus­sia today.

- Right.

- And much, much bet­ter if we lived in Chi­na today. So you need to know it to call your­self an edu­cat­ed per­son. And then what should you know about Amer­i­ca? First of all, Amer­i­can his­to­ry is amaz­ing­ly coher­ent. It starts, you know, the coun­try was born on a day. It has a birth­day. You can ask your­self, when did Eng­land start? When did Chi­na start? And the answer is a long time ago, and exact­ly what date is con­tro­ver­sial. We have the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence. We can read it and see what it says. Also the found­ing that pro­duced the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence and its part­ner, the Con­sti­tu­tion, that too is not so long ago. And it’s very much in the time of record­ed his­to­ry. So you can not only read those doc­u­ments, you could read why they were writ­ten and who wrote them and what they thought about them. So you can know. And it’s a great thing to know. So you should start with that. You just to fig­ure out what it is. And, you know, the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence is a beau­ti­ful doc­u­ment and an inspir­ing doc­u­ment, and also a chal­leng­ing doc­u­ment. Because the first thing that you have to try to do is under­stand it. The first para­graph of the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence men­tions the laws of nature and of nature’s God.

- Right.

- It’d be a good idea to find out what those are. What do they mean by that? Because it’s a very inter­est­ing sit­u­a­tion. The Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence begins uni­ver­sal­ly. It begins when, in the course of human events, that means any old time, it becomes nec­es­sary for one peo­ple. And that means any peo­ple to assume the pow­ers of the earth, to which they’re enti­tled under the laws of nature and nature’s God. Well, that expres­sion, that way of begin­ning, is the solu­tion to a prob­lem they have. They’re about to throw off a sys­tem of law, the British monar­chy and con­sti­tu­tion, which is by the way, a long way from the worst sys­tem of law.

- [Doug] Right, right.

- But not good in some impor­tant ways. And they need some author­i­ty for doing that. And they don’t say just ​’cause we want to, they say there’s some stan­dard above even us that makes this right. And indeed, any­thing, any time that vio­lates that stan­dard is not in the right. I mean, you know, in Chi­na right now, they con­trol peo­ple’s speech and liveli­hood, not under the rule of law, but accord­ing to the will of cer­tain pow­er­ful peo­ple, is that right? Is that right for Chi­na? It might be the best they can do, but if you lived under it, you would­n’t like it because it’s not the right way to treat a human being. So first of all, already you see, there’s a remark­able series of things to know about the coun­try. And so one should, you know, stu­dents, they should dwell on those. They should think what those mean, right? The work of a stu­dent is not to just believe what they’re told. They’re to think and fig­ure out what’s true. And the Amer­i­can found­ing unusu­al­ly to a unique extent, I believe, invites one to do that. So you should go into that effort. And then you know, there’s a lot of things you need to know to under­stand pol­i­tics, you know? And I don’t mean just Amer­i­can pol­i­tics, pol­i­tics, a human phenomenon.

- Now let me inter­rupt right there. And just you’ve giv­en us so much to start think­ing about. And the first thing that I’m gonna read back is one of the last things you said. We’re not just telling stu­dents some­thing to believe. We’re try­ing to get them to think so that they get to their own belief sys­tem. And it feels some­times that that isn’t hap­pen­ing in many edu­ca­tion sit­u­a­tions where many times, you know, stu­dents, are to a cer­tain extent trained. I got­ta get a good grade on this test. I got­ta become friends with this pro­fes­sor or have a rela­tion­ship. And so I’d bet­ter give ​‘em what they want. And you know, there’s enough spec­u­la­tion and there’s enough sto­ries out there where some­body may have giv­en a good paper, but it was­n’t what the pro­fes­sor want­ed. And there­fore they weren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly taught to think, they were taught to fol­low in the foot­steps if you will, of some­one of some­one who was in pow­er. Which kind of gets to the oth­er things you were say­ing about peo­ple impos­ing pow­er on the oth­er, but let’s leave those thoughts for just a sec­ond. Tell us a lit­tle more about you and how you came, your upbring­ing, what you were think­ing, how you got to a point of believ­ing the things you believe today. So tell us a lit­tle bit more about you.

- Well, you know, my sto­ry is not ter­ri­bly remark­able. I grew up in a very priv­i­leged cir­cum­stance. I had a poor father and moth­er who worked very hard, so I got to see that and they liked to read books and put those two things togeth­er. You’re on your way. And so I was curi­ous and, you know, every­body is nat­u­ral­ly curi­ous and I was good at school. And it emerged over time that I saw that there were con­tra­dic­tions every­where you look and con­tra­dic­tions invite you to try to fig­ure them out. And so I embarked on that. A big turn­ing point in my life, the rea­son I’m not a lawyer, I like to say, I’m not a lawyer. I’m an edu­cat­ed man.

- I’m sure our lawyers are gonna love that.

- Excuse me, lawyers. I was made to do it in under­grad­u­ate school. I was made to read Pla­to’s Repub­lic. I tried to resist it. And the theme of Pla­to’s Repub­lic is what is jus­tice? What is the right treat­ment of oth­er peo­ple? And ear­ly on, there’s a fight between Socrates and some and a sophist. That’s some­body who many of the Socrat­ic dia­logues involve sophists. And that’s some­body who teach­es young peo­ple, ambi­tious young peo­ple, how to argue in order to win and get pow­er, which is some­thing dif­fer­ent than the truth. And Socrates destroys that man. And those two young men become his stu­dents. Their names are Glau­con and Adeiman­tus and they hap­pen to be Pla­to’s broth­ers. And so Pla­to’s broth­ers are in a con­test for their souls. And Pla­to’s teacher is lead­ing them as he led Pla­to. And so that’s a great dra­ma. And I began to under­stand the sig­nif­i­cance of that. And I learned from that to ask, not just what my opin­ion is and not just what any­body’s opin­ion is, and not just what the pow­er­ful opin­ion is, what is the truth of the mat­ter? ​‘Cause that’s what we real­ly want to know. We wan­na know what’s right. We all wan­na know that. And so that’s, you know, I became a stu­dent and was more seri­ous. I’d always been, I used to be real­ly good at mak­ing A’s. Then I became a stu­dent. I want­ed to find out. I went to grad­u­ate school. I stud­ied the clas­sics and the Amer­i­can rev­o­lu­tion and Abe Lin­coln and Win­ston Churchill. Those are my main fields. And I stud­ied them because they taught those things there. But also the par­tic­u­lar mix of them with me was dri­ven by what I loved, by what sung to me. Your col­league, Steven Ford, for exam­ple, I know his loves ​’cause I watched him grow up and he’s bet­ter at the things that he loves in par­tic­u­lar than he is at every­thing. So I fol­lowed that track and I did come very much to love the sto­ry and mean­ing of Amer­i­ca. I think it’s one of the great­est things that ever hap­pened, but that’s a con­clu­sion that you breach, you know, you don’t start by say­ing, at Hills­dale Col­lege for exam­ple, we don’t start our class­es by say­ing, ​“You’re gonna find out the truth and here’s what it is.” We start rather in anoth­er way, this is a beau­ti­ful thing to under­stand. Let’s see if we can under­stand it. And that’s how you read Shake­speare. And that’s how you read Pla­to. And that’s how you read the Amer­i­can rev­o­lu­tion and that’s how you study physics or chem­istry or biol­o­gy. You give your­self to it. So I learned to do that. And then I dis­cov­ered, you know, a huge change in my life when I moved to Michi­gan and I moved to Michi­gan because I dis­cov­ered, I did­n’t know it, not many peo­ple knew it back then. Hills­dale Col­lege was actu­al­ly found­ed by peo­ple who became friends of Abra­ham Lincoln.

- Wow. What an incred­i­ble his­to­ry, what an incred­i­ble legacy.

- Awe­some to me. Right?

- Yeah.

- And the plat­form that Lin­coln was elect­ed pres­i­dent in 1860, the first ver­sion of it was writ­ten in a build­ing that stands on this cam­pus today.

- Oh my goodness.

- Lin­col­n’s friend, Fred­er­ick Dou­glass, spoke on this cam­pus twice.

- Wow.

- And the col­lege was­n’t mak­ing a lot of those things, but I’ve dis­cov­ered them not because they told me and I went, ​“Wow, that’s a beau­ti­ful thing.”

- That is a wow.

- And I just thought maybe it would be pos­si­ble to what it always seemed to me impos­si­ble, which was to turn a col­lege into a com­mu­ni­ty. And so I think we’ve done that and that’s why, it’s not because of me, it’s because those things are beau­ti­ful and we study those things.

- Wow. Wow. Wow. That thank you for that his­to­ry. It always helps so much to put your per­spec­tive, your beliefs, your lead­er­ship, in per­spec­tive by the expe­ri­ences that you’ve had and the curios­i­ty that you express by gain­ing a lev­el of under­stand­ing, of seek­ing out, of being curi­ous about jus­tice or truth. Let me ask a lit­tle bit and I have to get to Fred­er­ick Dou­glass being on cam­pus. I just, again, a huge fan, the Con­sti­tu­tion, the Dec­la­ra­tion. I’m involved with the Nation­al Con­sti­tu­tion Cen­ter in Philadel­phia. And so I’ve tried to learn so much. I’ve just real­ly enjoyed it, but our nation, while it has a won­der­ful rich his­to­ry, does not have a per­fect his­to­ry. And Fred­er­ick Dou­glass rec­og­nized that. But he also talked about his appre­ci­a­tion and that our best path for­ward was to build on the found­ing prin­ci­ples in the Dec­la­ra­tion. Can you help us under­stand that a lit­tle bit more in that rela­tion­ship and how our nation can learn from things, how it can redi­rect, how it can improve itself in the struc­ture that we have? How we can find things we believe and then seek as a nation to pur­sue those things.

- Good ques­tion. Amer­i­ca is very dif­fer­ent than most coun­tries because it begins with an expla­na­tion and you’re invit­ed to believe it, which means you’re also invit­ed to dis­agree with it. And many peo­ple did. There was a war fought over it and one can read them, you know, the Con­sti­tu­tion, I regard as a great doc­u­ment, the peo­ple who opposed it did­n’t. And to under­stand the peo­ple who sup­port­ed it, you have to also read the peo­ple who opposed it and it has to make a case for itself. And so what’s unusu­al about our coun­try is not that it’s imper­fect. They all are. It’s that it holds up a stan­dard of per­fec­tion and invites one to com­pare. And no seri­ous Amer­i­can has ever made the argu­ment that this is a per­fect coun­try. The most seri­ous Amer­i­cans to my mind, Fred­er­ick Dou­glass is one of them. Abra­ham Lin­coln is one of them. George Wash­ing­ton is one of them. They called upon the nation to attempt to live up to its prin­ci­ples. Lin­coln said this thing that just con­tains a world of mean­ing in a short state­ment, he says, ​“The elec­tric cord that binds Amer­i­can is the state­ment of equal­i­ty in the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence.” And then he says, ​“Always to be striv­en for, always to be sought after, nev­er to be whol­ly attained.” You see? In oth­er words, there’s no sur­prise in the fact that the coun­try is not per­fect. It’s a coun­try! The remark­able thing about it is the per­fec­tion for which it aims.

- Right? What a great way to think about that. And so how do we as a nation and the divi­sion that we have, and the strug­gles that we have, how do we find our way for­ward? Because as you say, there’s peo­ple on both sides, there were peo­ple that were, you know, liked the Dec­la­ra­tion, who knows who did­n’t like it. Those are peo­ple who liked the Con­sti­tu­tion, those who did­n’t like it. There’s peo­ple who like Amer­i­ca and those who don’t like Amer­i­ca. What’s the right way, or maybe not the right or wrong. Let me not say it that way. What’s a pro­duc­tive way to not like Amer­i­ca? Because I tend to observe a lot of peo­ple who say they don’t like Amer­i­ca. But I don’t see them being pro­duc­tive to move it for­ward or to offer rec­om­men­da­tions or sug­ges­tions, or to go shoul­der to shoul­der to work togeth­er with peo­ple who like it to make it bet­ter. Help us under­stand the con­se­quences of not lik­ing Amer­i­ca, but, you know, and then tak­ing that too far.

- Well, you know, that’s very good. I said before it, you know, it’s too late to sim­ply, as things are today to sim­ply say, you ought to like Amer­i­ca. The ques­tion is, what is it? Let’s find out about it, right? Because it’s not what its sil­li­est par­ti­sans or sil­li­est ene­mies say, it’s a set of claims and they can be eval­u­at­ed. And that’s what stu­dents do, right? You don’t edu­cate, first of all, you don’t edu­cate a child by doing any­thing to them. It’s not like man­u­fac­tur­ing, it’s like help­ing some­thing to grow. And so the ques­tion is always, let’s find out about this. And let’s find about out about this in com­par­i­son to oth­er things, both what does it claim it is and what is in fact it is. And also what do oth­er things claim and what are they in fact. And that’s why the first line in Aris­to­tle Meta­physics, a very great book, is, ​“The human being stretch­es him­self out to know.” Not wants to know, stretch­es him­self out to know. We love to know. If you walk in a class­room full of 20 lit­tle kids or big kids, it does­n’t mat­ter where they are. And it does­n’t mat­ter who they are. You can take it for grant­ed. They wan­na know. And the first thing is just to find out and the sub­ject is not, what do I think about this? You can’t answer that until you know what it is. And, you know, I argue and believe that Amer­i­ca is the most beau­ti­ful of the mod­ern coun­tries. Imper­fect though it is, of course. It is a human thing, right? They’re all imper­fect. To make that argu­ment, first you have to become acquaint­ed with what it is. And so you start now at the high school, at the K through 12, there’s two dif­fer­ent kinds of things we do here. In the col­lege lev­el, the way you find out what a thing is, is look at it direct­ly. Read the doc­u­ments, read what­ev­er record there is. Read what­ev­er sci­ence there is about what­ev­er sub­ject you’re study­ing and fig­ure it out. Ear­li­er, kids start study­ing some civics in the fourth grade by law, prac­tice and tra­di­tion. And we think that’s right, and they should get acquaint­ed with the words of the basic doc­u­ments of Amer­i­ca, but they can’t quite read them and under­stand them yet. And so they need a fair text­book and a fair teacher. And you don’t have to wor­ry too much about prej­u­dic­ing them because they’re gonna fig­ure it out for them­selves any­way, espe­cial­ly if the edu­ca­tion goes on and by the time they get to 11^th grade, and then by the time they get to col­lege, they’re actu­al­ly read­ing all the stuff for them­selves. And so, you know, I believe that the founders of Hills­dale Col­lege were right that slav­ery was an evil, but that was­n’t a unan­i­mous opin­ion. John Cal­houn, Steven Dou­glas, Jef­fer­son Davis, they argued that it was a good thing and peo­ple took to killing on each oth­er over that. And so what you do is read those argu­ments, right? What seems true? And it’s only when you’ve done that, that you can intel­li­gent­ly think about what you think. And here’s a rule. It’s an over­rid­ing rule. Edu­ca­tion is not about you. It’s about the thing you’re study­ing. And if you study it tru­ly, that will have an effect on you. So one of the first jobs you’ve got to do with kids is get them to still them­selves and open them­selves to see this thing, right? We have a con­sti­tu­tion read­er here that we think is the best micro­cosm of the sto­ry of Amer­i­ca. And it’s all in orig­i­nal source doc­u­ments. Well, on one page, you can read John C. Cal­houn writ­ing, argu­ing that slav­ery is good for the slaves. And on the next page, you can read the Alaba­ma slave code. And, you know, that’s the rules that gov­ern slaves and slave own­ers and free peo­ple too in Alaba­ma. Every free white male in Alaba­ma had to ride posse one night a month as a vol­un­teer, whether were slave own­ers or not, look­ing for run­aways. And the intel­li­gent stu­dent will say, ​“Wow, I won­der why they were try­ing to get away.” You know? So, you know, in oth­er words, you have to sus­pend what you think and open your­self. And that’s what, you know, the pos­ses­sion of the moral and intel­lec­tu­al virtues are very close­ly relat­ed. And one thing the moral virtues teach you to do is to look at oth­er things and see them as they actu­al­ly are not tem­pered, not altered by your wants or your fears. You know? You have to learn to sit down and look at it and pos­sess your soul when you do it. And we don’t do that in school so much any­more because we’re actu­al­ly pre­sent­ing them an arbi­trary world. You know, the New York Times has done that fright­ful 1619 Project. And they claim that the move­ment of the found­ing of Amer­i­ca from the colonies for­ward was in the direc­tion of per­pet­u­at­ing slav­ery. Now, the lead­ing Amer­i­can his­to­ri­an today is a man named Gor­don Wood, a stu­dent of the for­mer lead­ing his­to­ri­an, a guy named Bernard Bai­lyn. And Gor­don Wood has writ­ten in response to that, no colonist wrote such a thing ever. In oth­er words, there’s not a shred of evi­dence for it. And they did­n’t retract the New York Times. They just altered their expla­na­tion on the web­site with­out call­ing any atten­tion to it. What they had said was, ​“This is the true sto­ry.” Now they say, ​“This is the new nar­ra­tive.” But see the nar­ra­tive is some­thing dif­fer­ent than the sto­ry. And that means that’s some­thing they’re propos­ing to the stu­dents, and it should be iden­ti­fied like that to them. And hon­est peo­ple would invite the stu­dents to com­pare what they say to what was said at the time. And, you know, we have hind­sight, that’s one of the things you have to take out of it because you don’t get to use it, in mak­ing your own choic­es. But we should cer­tain­ly look at what peo­ple say today, but we should com­pare it to the record that exists, which in this case, it’s very rich.

- I’m sor­ry. Again, Lar­ry, when you talk about edu­ca­tion, stu­dents, teach­ing, learn­ing, you have a rev­er­ence about you that this is, not only for you, but for the stu­dent and for the teacher, that this is a call­ing. And for those of us lis­ten­ing to you, you know, I’m hear­ing your encour­age­ment say, you’re not gonna tell us what to believe. You could tell us what you believe, but you’re gonna encour­age us to be curi­ous enough and work enough to go to the doc­u­ments, to sign up for a class or do some­thing so that we can form our own beliefs. And you seem so pow­er­ful­ly com­mit­ted to that idea. Am I see­ing that right? Hear­ing that right?

- We all make choic­es in our lives and Hills­dale Col­lege has been suc­cess­ful since I’ve been here. And that means I could go and do a lot of oth­er things. I don’t want to.

- Right.

- You know?

- Right.

- The sub­limest human activ­i­ty out­side church is con­tem­plat­ing the best things with friends and that’s what col­lege is sup­posed to be.

- Wow. Wow.

- And you know, I mean, col­leges are scenes of strife and hos­til­i­ty today. Ours is not. And the rea­son is, by the way, every­one here, every trans­ac­tion at Hills­dale Col­lege is done by peo­ple who want to do it, you know, they’re vol­un­teers. And so, you know, I just had a bunch of kids in here for lunch and we just sat and talked about noth­ing in par­tic­u­lar, sup­posed to be 50 min­utes. And it last­ed until this con­ver­sa­tion start­ed, almost two hours, because they wan­na fig­ure out the world.

- Right.

- And so I know about the world quite a lot, I’m old­er than they are, and they know a lot about it. And so we just talked about that and it was sub­lime. It was awe­some. I actu­al­ly believe the key to recov­er­ing Amer­i­ca, which I think is being lost, maybe fatal­ly, is to learn about it ​’cause it’s a great thing to know. And you know, I mean, you know, we got all these char­ter schools, right. And they’re just besieg­ing us with so many peo­ple who wan­na start ​‘em.

- Right, right.

- And why par­ents want their kids to know, you know? No par­ent gets up in the morn­ing and says, ​“As a final end, I want my kids to love America.”

- Right.

- What they all want is they want their kids to be hap­py, which requires them to be good. And that means they’re gonna have to know a lot of things and all of the fun­da­men­tal things. Right? So, you know, in school, schools fight with the par­ents all the time. We don’t.

- Right.

- Right? You know, first of all, you don’t have to be there. It’s a choice. But sec­ond let’s say my daugh­ter found­ed a school. It’s a very great school. I’m par­tial of course to her,

- Right, right.

- When she start­ed it, she’d been a col­lege pro­fes­sor. She’s an attrac­tive woman, PhD, great teacher, the world’s her oys­ter. And she wants to have a fam­i­ly and she wants her hus­band to get a big job, aca­d­e­m­ic job. And she wants flex­i­bil­i­ty. And I said, ​“Well, you should start a school.” And she said, ​“I could nev­er do that.” And I said, ​“All right.” A few min­utes lat­er, she said, ​“Why did you say that?” And I said, ​“Well, who’s the world lead­ing expert about two things? You and run­ning a school. You’ll be good at it in three months.” Now I’ll tell you the first week, you know, girls and dads are a remark­able thing, right? Boys and dads are remark­able too, just in a dif­fer­ent way.

- I have three girls myself. So I know what you’re talk­ing about.

- I bet they’re good look­ing too. I know your wife. And she said, she called me, you know, three, four times a week. And she said, ​“Dad, they treat me like a ser­vant.” And I said, ​“Okay.? She said, ​“They give me list of things, move the bicy­cle rack, stuff like that.” And I said, ​“Well, that’ll stop.” And she said, ​“How will I stop it?” And I said, ​“You will stand in front of them. Do I remem­ber you wrote your doc­tor­al the­sis on Aris­to­tle?” She said, ​“Yes, I did.” And I said, ​“Maybe, you know what to tell ​‘em? Tell them what’s going to become of their chil­dren. They will become good peo­ple, which means coura­geous and mod­er­ate and just, and wise, right? A bless­ing to all who know them, tell them that.” She said, ​“How will I get them to come?” And I said, ​“Sil­ly goose. You have their chil­dren. They will come.” And you know, two weeks lat­er she called and said, ​“Boy, that works.” See? Because it’s nature, right? It’s how things work. And so we want our chil­dren, you know, we don’t actu­al­ly want our chil­dren to have a par­tic­u­lar dis­po­si­tion in any­thing polit­i­cal. We want them to be just, we want them to be free. We want them to be fair. Right? And so they have to learn what those things are. And there need­n’t be any con­tro­ver­sy about the good of those things. Every­body rec­og­nizes the good of those things.

- Right. Right.

- And so then you have to study, how do you get that good? And it turns out that’s very hard and there are major wars and gen­er­a­tion long con­tro­ver­sies about that. But you can study those things and then maybe you can get a bet­ter opin­ion. And be a bet­ter ben­e­fit to every­body you meet.

- Yeah. Well, you artic­u­late this idea of learn­ing and teach­ing in a real­ly beau­ti­ful and impor­tant way for all of us to learn and to think about things dif­fer­ent­ly. I’m sure that peo­ple would, when they think of Hills­dale, they would have this as a brand and they teach this and they might break it down to this type of phi­los­o­phy or this type of think­ing. But what we’re hear­ing from you is your pas­sion for hav­ing peo­ple to be curi­ous to search out for them­selves. You teach them how to learn or help them.

- And we can define the word teach. And it does­n’t mean when we use the word, it does­n’t mean telling them what we think. It means help­ing them understand.

- [Doug] Right.

- You know, I knew, you know, I’m very scan­dalous per­son. So I knew Rush Lim­baugh for many years. Liked him a lot too. And don’t apol­o­gize for it today. Well, he said to me one time, ​“How do you make them con­ser­v­a­tive?” And I said, ​“I don’t.” He said, ​“You don’t?” I said, ​“No, you can’t do that.” I mean, if there’re any good, you know, because I say so it does­n’t work.

- [Doug] Right, right.

- And he said, ​“Huh?” He said, ​“Are they con­ser­v­a­tive?” And I said, ​“Yeah, most­ly.” And he said, ​“How does that hap­pen?” I said, ​“If you teach them to find the val­ue in an old book, you have under­cut the cen­tral premis­es of mod­ern lib­er­al­ism.” You know, if Shake­speare was as good or bet­ter a writer than any­body we have today, that means it’s not just all a progress. And it means that the stan­dards of the past could reflect some­thing eternal.

- [Doug] Wow.

- And so you got­ta get, you know, anoth­er thing about edu­ca­tion is it has to take you out of your­self. Right?

- Right.

- I mean, I swear, I look at what they do in the pub­lic schools now. And it’s like they want ​‘em to just learn every­thing about civics from read­ing the news­pa­per today.

- Right.

- And that’ll turn ​‘em into slaves. Right? Peo­ple often tell me it’s a cri­sis, you know, kids don’t pay any atten­tion to the news. And I say, ​“Why is that a cri­sis?” It depends on what they’re doing with their time. But the news you’ll nev­er under­stand the news until you under­stand some his­to­ry and some polit­i­cal thought and some lit­er­a­ture. And so that’s what kids should be doing. Get­ting good at that.

- It’s hard today, with any­thing com­ing at them, whether it’s the news or social media, it always feels to me like you have to put it in con­text, you know who you are, you know, where you are, you have a place and there­fore what­ev­er’s com­ing at you does­n’t feel over­whelm­ing. Is that, as you are artic­u­lat­ed, that’s a flaw or a chal­lenge in a lot of the edu­ca­tion that’s done today that, sub­jects or infor­ma­tion is just kind of pushed at some­body. And it’s about get­ting it into their heads so they could pass a test. Am I observ­ing that cor­rect­ly ver­sus real­ly try­ing just to unleash their curios­i­ty? Am I hear­ing that cor­rect­ly? And does that then dri­ve the anx­i­ety that a lot of par­ents feel when things like the 1619 Project are taught or like you artic­u­lat­ed or crit­i­cal race the­o­ry is taught, or your involve­ment with the 1776 Project, is that the gist of the angst that maybe many par­ents are feeling?

- Yeah. And see you don’t, you think Amer­i­ca’s ter­ri­ble. And I think it’s great and you’re wrong. Right? You’ll nev­er get any­where of that. The ques­tion is, what is it? Let’s find out what it is. And as I say, remem­ber, it makes claims for itself that are amaz­ing­ly coher­ent and delib­er­ate. It’s not lost in the midst of time. And that’s, you know, you want your kid to nav­i­gate through the world today. First of all, they need to become intel­lec­tu­al­ly and moral­ly vir­tu­ous. ​‘Cause they’ll nev­er be any good if they don’t. And you know, that takes work and it takes and see here’s a won­der­ful thing in Aris­to­tle. ​‘Cause see, I’ll back­track a sec­ond because sci­ence is an old word that means ​“to know.” Tech­nol­o­gy is from an old word that means ​“to make.” Those are not the same thing. And so now we live in an age when we think we, by our own efforts can rev­o­lu­tion­ize the world and we’re impa­tient with any­thing that does­n’t make change. Change, hope, and change. So that leads us to do some­thing in edu­ca­tion. And we do it both Repub­li­can and Demo­c­rat, by the way.

- Sure.

- We think we’re going to make chil­dren into some­thing. We think it’s like man­u­fac­tur­ing. It isn’t. It’s like help­ing some­thing grow.

- Right, right.

- And to be a teacher is a real­ly great thing because what you see in the class­room is it does­n’t mat­ter what you think. I mean, what you know at least. What mat­ters is what they learn. And their learn­ing is to them a seri­ous effort. In fact, it’s hard. It makes them tired. If they’re not strain­ing at it, they’re not learn­ing. And so the growth is in them, you see? They wan­na know. They’ll nev­er know if they’re asleep.

- Right.

- And we think we’re going to do some­thing to them. And that is very much not the way. And it’s good for a per­son to teach a bunch of kids. I mean, we’re very priv­i­leged here at Hills­dale. Every­body wants to be here. Every­body’s smart.

- That’s great.

- You know, and every­body under­stands they got­ta behave them­selves and most­ly they do, but it’s also true that they strive and you get to help them.

- Right, right. Help them grow.

- And if they don’t strive, they don’t grow. You know, the only con­ver­sa­tion you can have with some­body who gets, you know, it hap­pens, young peo­ple live under pres­sures today. And there is more depres­sion than there used to be. I don’t think as much here as most places, but there’s more than there used to be.

- Right.

- And, and you know, when they’re in that con­di­tion, the only con­ver­sa­tion you’re hav­ing with them is what’s wrong here.

- Right.

- How can we help you? Above all, how can you help you?

- Right, right.

- Because we are made in a dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tion. We’re just like a dog or a cat and need­ing to eat and strive and aging and get­ting sick and all that. And yet we have these free souls. And that rais­es the ques­tion, what are we gonna do with ourselves?

- What are we gonna do? Yeah. What a great ques­tion to con­tem­plate. And you know, as we kind of wrap our time up here, you’ve worked very hard. The his­to­ry of Hills­dale has worked very hard to avoid any undue restraint from the gov­ern­ment to not take gov­ern­ment fund­ing, to avoid those sorts of things. Cer­tain­ly you apply stan­dards to your cur­ricu­lum and things of that nature. Help us under­stand why is that so impor­tant for you to have that lev­el of inde­pen­dence and abil­i­ty to con­tin­ue to do what you do? And what are you see­ing from oth­er insti­tu­tions that you look at and you observe and you learn and you see their claims and you go, okay, don’t want to go that direc­tion. We wan­na go our direc­tion. I’m try­ing to take on your learn­ing here as best I can.

- Well they’re all going broke, right? So, first of all, you have to under­stand the gov­ern­ment has changed. There are two Amer­i­can his­to­ries and the orig­i­nal one was a thing. It had lots of trou­ble in it. And the new one is a new kind of con­test. The old one, it was deeply aware of the things that I’m say­ing. That the virtue of the human being is in the human being. Oth­ers can only help. Edu­ca­tion hap­pens in the stu­dent. Gov­ern­ment pro­grams. Amer­i­ca was a very remark­able place. Toc­queville writes that when he comes here in the 1830s, he says, there’s more gov­ern­ment in Amer­i­ca than in France, which is the first cen­tral­ized nation state. But the way of the gov­ern­ment is dif­fer­ent. In Amer­i­ca, it’s local and vol­un­tary. That means we get to do it. And that’s inef­fi­cient in some ways he says, but it gives every­body prac­tice in liv­ing a life as a free per­son. And the whole goal of Amer­i­ca, the beau­ty of it is every­body gets to live a ful­ly human life. And that means make your liv­ing, raise your fam­i­ly, learn what you can, all that. Right? And it does­n’t mat­ter who your mom or your dad is. And that’s the claim of Amer­i­ca. That’s the beau­ty of it. That’s what the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence means.

- [Doug] Right, right.

- And so today and schools were always very decen­tral­ized things and you know they were sub­si­dized by the way. In the North­west ordi­nance, the biggest sub­sidy for edu­ca­tion in Amer­i­can his­to­ry was giv­en. It was giv­en ¹⁄₃₂ of the West­ern lands here in Michi­gan, where we live, but then the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment did­n’t have any­thing to do with it after that. It was for edu­ca­tion in each town­ship. And it was giv­en as an endow­ment to the states to man­age. And that meant the 16^th sec­tion of Hills­dale Town­ship is about 400 yards behind me. And the poli­cies that were made, what to do with that mon­ey were made here. And that’s Amer­i­ca at its great­est. Now every­thing is done sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly and bureau­crat­i­cal­ly. Sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly means experts fig­ure it out. And bureau­crat­i­cal­ly means there are detailed rules, gov­ern­ing behav­ior, and that’s what’s wrong with every­thing in the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment today. And that’s why schools don’t work very well. ​‘Cause the rules are made by peo­ple who don’t actu­al­ly come into con­tact much with the students.

- [Doug] Right.

- And you know, the Repub­li­cans are as guilty of that as the Democ­rats are, ​’cause they believe that cen­tral­ized test­ing is the key. You know, there’s a cer­tain recent sec­re­tary of edu­ca­tion who’s the best I ever saw.

- Right. I’m kind of par­tial to that one too.

- You know, I think you may know the woman and she’s is very stub­born about that. She she would­n’t do that stuff. Right? And it’s hard to do any­thing else ​’cause there’s this huge bureau­cra­cy. But she held the line on that stuff. And so yeah, we, and you know, we start­ed refus­ing the fed­er­al mon­ey in about 1960 and it was­n’t very much mon­ey back then. We did­n’t like the prin­ci­ple of the thing because we’re gonna train the lead­ers of the coun­try, the gov­ern­ment should­n’t be fund­ing that. How will they have any crit­i­cal dis­tance from the pow­er­ful peo­ple who run the gov­ern­ment? Well, that’s just got worse and worse and now it’s a lot of mon­ey. You know, I think it’s, I think I can show you, our audi­tors are very good. They don’t catch me at the stuff I do. And they do sur­veys of how the rest of the world works ​’cause we don’t real­ly know. The aver­age pri­vate col­lege is col­lect­ing $16,500 a year. But of that 9,000 comes from fed­er­al stu­dent loans and 5,000 comes from fed­er­al stu­dent grants. That means, what is that? That’s five, 5,000. That’s 85% is paid by the gov­ern­ment. And then there’s the state gov­ern­ment after that. And so they call the tune now and they do it. You know like your fam­i­ly com­pa­ny is a mar­vel to me. I’ve always admired it. And why? It’s not built on rules. It’s built on peo­ple work­ing and ben­e­fit­ing and you know, and doing a good job, which means serv­ing the cus­tomers well. And you know, the only rule that you can actu­al­ly enforce. And every­body will remem­ber is like a stu­dent rule here. We have very few stu­dent rules, but the over­ar­ch­ing one is just be good. Be good.

- Yeah. The gold­en rule. If we stick with the gold­en rule will be pret­ty good.

- Yeah. And make that operative.

- Yeah.

- And that means every­body’s got­ta agree that that’s the goal.

- Yeah.

- And then when they mess up, here’s a dis­ci­pline con­ver­sa­tion around here. What did you do? And I don’t have as many as three or four of those. I have one or two, if that, a year. Right? And they’ll do some­thing kind of bad and I’ll end up talk­ing to ​‘em and I’ll say, ​“What’d you do?” And they’ll tell me, and I’ll say, ​“Was that a good thing to do?” And they say, ​“No.” And I say, ​“Don’t do that any­more.” There, I told them. If they do it again, then maybe that’s more seri­ous, but they don’t very much, so yeah. In oth­er words, we are made to gov­ern our­selves and we need pow­er­ful exter­nal gov­ern­ment of course. But its pur­pose is to pre­serve our own self gov­ern­ment. And we for­get that these days and we think, you know, the schools, I mean, you know, I’ll men­tion it. I did­n’t get along with the Bush admin­is­tra­tion, either of them very much, because I care about the inde­pen­dence of our col­lege. And I think they should all be more inde­pen­dent and then see if they are more inde­pen­dent. Then the effect of that is there’s some­body who works on the cam­pus, who can be held respon­si­ble for the well­be­ing of the col­lege and the well­be­ing of the stu­dents. And also you can invite the par­ents in to help. And so I did­n’t like all these cen­tral­ized test­ing things and I did­n’t like them giv­ing the depart­ment of edu­ca­tion, more author­i­ty over accred­i­ta­tion. And why? The accred­i­ta­tion sys­tem start­ed in 1900. The first one was in Chica­go where char­ter mem­bers of that one.

- [Doug] Right, right.

- Edu­ca­tion Depart­ment start­ed in the late sev­en­ties. Now it has exten­sive con­trol over all that and what it was before it was found­ed to be, col­leges would join up and every 10 years they’d go audit each oth­er and report whether they seemed to be doing what they were say­ing they were doing. And that’s a healthy out­side check. Right?

- Yeah. Kind of a peer review sort of thing.

- That’s right. That’s all it was. And you know, I have the report of our 1900 accred­i­ta­tion and what it basi­cal­ly says is yeah, they seem to be doing what they say they do. And that’s all you need because if it’s a com­pet­i­tive world and it ought to be, except remem­ber I just told you 80, 90% of the mon­ey of all the col­leges comes from a sin­gle source now, but the truth is, if it weren’t like that, then you could say, ​“Here’s my col­lege. This is what we do. Wan­na try it?”

- Right.

- And that would be good, you know? And we’re try­ing to abol­ish that these days.

- Yeah. Yeah. Well the whole com­pet­i­tive spir­it is vital, cer­tain­ly in busi­ness. And when you’re com­pet­ing for an oppor­tu­ni­ty to help a stu­dent grow, you want the best peo­ple doing it. Absolute­ly. And so Dr. Lar­ry Arnn from Hills­dale Col­lege, thank you for your time and, and help­ing us under­stand the per­spec­tive that you bring and Hills­dale Col­lege brings to learn­ing, help­ing us under­stand the impor­tance of our own curios­i­ty in that process to seek out what it is. And so that we under­stand what it is before we fig­ure out what to believe about it. And pick a side if you will. So we’re grate­ful for your wis­dom. We’re grate­ful for your time. Thanks for shar­ing with us and just appre­ci­ate all that you do and the fine folks and your friends at Hills­dale Col­lege. It’s a great adven­ture. So thanks for spend­ing time with us.

- You and your fam­i­ly are a bless­ing to our state, and I appre­ci­ate you too.

- Well. You’re very kind. You’re very kind. And so Dr. Lar­ry Arnn, Lar­ry thank you for join­ing us. This is we’ll wrap up this episode of ​“Believe!” and we’ll look for­ward to see­ing y’all again very soon. Thanks everybody.