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This is Anne Baker together with my cohost, Brian Fitzherbert. On talking with Anne and Fitzherbert Friday. And I know Luke’s there too because I I heard just a tiny little bit of babbling, which he’s probably actually talking right now. What do you think you’re gonna have to face as your beautiful son gets older and the education system is there?
What are your hopes that a Republican governor might change the focus of education and actually begin getting rid of the indoctrination, the sexualization of our children? Do you think there would be a time that you would suddenly see that the education system is worth putting your child into a school system? I mean, we’ve got excellent teachers in both public and private schools, but the mandates that come down from the school board in Trenton, New Jersey, that dictates what all of the other school boards do in all the other areas. Do you ever think there the time will come if, let’s say, a Jack Ciattarelli gets into the governor’s office and begins to push school choice and, children are suddenly allowed to be children again and taught the basics, and also if they’ve got to focus on things having to do with their hands in high school, whether it has to do with being able to to become a superior car engineer or a carpenter or an electrician or a plumber. Do you think that will happen?
And if it does, where might you see your own little boy, in the future?
Yeah. Good question. Lots to unpack there. So first and foremost, as a parent, I look at myself as protector, provider, and guardian, for my family and for my children. And if there is something that does not jive, that is not, in line with my morals and values, I’m gonna find a way, to protect as much as possible from that exposure, as my child is a minor.
And as you pointed out, there are good teachers in both the private and the public schools. However, in the public schools, they’re forced, like you said, to follow a curriculum and to institute and talk about, all this woke nonsense and indoctrination crap that I don’t want my my children being exposed to. Not much less a minor, but just from a moral and a and a value standpoint. And should we get a Republican governor, whether that be Jack Ciattarelli, Bill Spadie, Adir, or or John Bramnick, those are the 4 that are running. Again, remember that the New Jersey constitution has more executive authority than any of the other governors, and we’ve seen what happens in Virginia with Youngkin and what he’s been able to do from a voter registration standpoint, what he’s done with schools, obviously.
And my personal perspective, if if I were governor for 4 years, regardless if I had, majorities in the legislature or could find some kind of bipartisan, piece of legislation that could get passed, again, you still have constitutional authority from an executive standpoint. Number one thing is to eliminate the 550 plus school districts in the state of New Jersey and shrink it down to 21 for 21 counties, just like Virginia. Virginia has county school districts. What does that do? That limits the amount of cost from the overlapping from an administrative standpoint.
What does that do? That frees up a lot of money to do things more specifically. We’ve now shown time and time again, Atlantic City is a perfect example, that it doesn’t matter how much money per student you you you fund. It doesn’t change that performance, And you have to change the mechanics that aren’t tied to a birth year. There are plenty of kids, and this is why I despise George w Bush and his No Child Left Behind Act from 2,006, because it did nothing but, further screw things up from an educational standpoint.
And what I mean by that is if you’re in 2nd grade, but you are reading at a 3rd or 4th grade level, or you’re doing math at a 3rd or 4th grade level, that you should be able to accelerate in that particular category, even if it’s just that subject regardless of your birth year. And those in education and teachers will say, well, what about the social aspect? Yeah. Again, you have to it’s gotta be an above approach where all these things are taking into account, but there are plenty of kids out there that are not, quote, unquote, college material, and there’s nothing wrong with that. And yet our friends on the left consistently try to humiliate anyone who doesn’t have a college degree or that doesn’t study at x, y, and z, all this nonsense.
Right? Everyone is different. Everyone has different skill sets, and people can do very well regardless of whether it’s high school education, college education, apprenticeship, trades. It doesn’t matter. But, unfortunately, Democrats don’t see it that way.
We on the right, obviously, it’s about the individual, not the collective, and to accelerate that individual capability. And if there are 4th graders, 5th graders, 6th graders that can accelerate in all these subjects, that has to change. And, again, go back to the basics. What do you need to be able to, have from a skill set in your everyday life, knowing how a car operates, you know, simple things like changing your brakes or doing oil changes or changing your tires. Normal people should have that capability because those are very, limited and and low knowledge capabilities, but but yet we go and we pay people to do that for us.
Us. Same thing with typical things of your household repairs, plumbing, all that kind of stuff, as well as your normal subjects, right, your math, your science, your reading, your comprehension, etcetera, etcetera, and stop infecting political garbage on choices that people can make when they’re an adult, when they’re 18. There’s no reason to expose them to all this stuff. So what I’m saying in a roundabout way is you take the pieces in Arizona where the school’s choice has been maximized not by your ZIP code, but by wherever you wanna send your child. And as a result, the best schools will continue to grow, and the crappy schools will die.
And the crappy teachers will find other professions, and the good teachers will be rewarded. You take peace out of Virginia. You take all this DEI and woke nonsense out of the curriculum. You take the the school district aspect. Right?
Virginia, they don’t they’re based on county school district And even further, accelerate based on not, just in one size fits all that everyone’s gotta go to college to be successful. If you’re very good in the trades, if you’re very good in fill in the blank that we don’t even know yet, it could be software engineering with artificial intelligence. It could be line coding. It could be all kinds of stuff. You revamp that.
You have to do all these things to change it. Otherwise, we’re gonna continue to get the same crappy, pathetic results, which is an indictment on the American education system because people don’t even know that there are 9 justices, much less the names of them, who are speaker of the house is, who the who the vice president is that also happens to be the president of senate, who’s the senate majority. Simple civic type things to have be an informed voter to operate in this country. And, again, it goes back to there should be more ample opportunity than your child to wherever you wanna send them to regardless of your ZIP code and have the money follow you. Right?
We pay property taxes, school taxes that are intended to follow, the student or that’s what they claim and do it from that standpoint. And all of what I’m saying is a direct threat to New Jersey Education Association and any other teachers union because they don’t care. It has nothing to do about kids and learning. It cares about minimal work as we saw during COVID and minimal, repercussions and accountability for for teachers. We talked about this a week ago.
You know, the left consistently tries to push that law enforcement officers wear body cams so that we can see what’s going on. Why can’t teachers wear the same? It’s the same thing, and it’s even more detrimental because parents are putting their minor children in the hands of teachers, school districts, and schools for 7 hours a day or more, and they should know at any point in time what is going on in the classroom and to veto anything that they deem inappropriate, just discussing everything in between. But all those things, those are those are political third world things, Anne. You can’t do those things, and not one elected official will have the balls, or anything else to actually push or introduce a bill that talks about any of those things in When we know what even in our our local, inner city school system, our public school system, that I think it’s under 35% of kids graduate knowing how to read and comprehend, and many fewer know how to do simple math according to grade level. And that’s just in Atlantic City. Should we be holding the administration accountable for the kinds of test scores that show us these children don’t have a future? Because they yeah.
Yeah. I know where you’re going. I and I apologize for interrupting, but I I I agree, but it’s gotta be more than test scores because otherwise teachers will teach the test, and we don’t want that. It needs to be a roundabout metric of performance and capability, that can determine that. And, yes, there needs to be accountability.
There absolutely needs to be accountability because guess what? There are plenty of people that become teachers that are woefully, not the right people, and at the same time, it’s not even well rounded. You’ve heard me say this too. I think the idea of a 180 days of school and having, the amount of time off that we do in the summer is just nonsense. Granted, you can stick a week here for the holidays, a week there, but we should be in school more, throughout the year.
We should be in school longer during the day with more and more breaks in education, because you’re not just competing with the kids in your classroom, the kids in your town, the kids in your state, or anywhere else. It’s across the globe, and we have to raise that capability. Just like in anything, corporate training, in corporate America, private sector, whatever, they wanna have the best of the best and tie it through performance. And if you’re not performing, there’s accountability. You’re either put on a performance improvement plan or you’re fired, and the same thing needs to be said.
And that’s the problem with the teachers union because they will do anything and everything to protect the job of the teacher rather than try to exemplify the student’s performance and capability to turn out a well informed and well educated critical thinking individual at the age of 18 when they graduate high school.
Yeah. The big problem is if you’ve got a bad administration, that is, political, that that it’s only interested actually in maintaining a power base because they get lots and lots of tax dollars from the people, in our state, then you run into huge, huge problems where no one is held accountable ever. And the fact that Democrats hand down the mandates as to what to teach our children the indoctrination that they have to undergo, the fact that there are fabulous teachers out there that are teaching according to what the mandates handed down by legislators in Trenton, for god’s sakes, these some of them are the most ignorant of people, that you could possibly find. We really do have to begin paying attention. Do you think the majority of parents care about the education system that their children are in?
My my heart tells me the answer has to be yes, that the majority do. However, as I’ve unfortunately seen and my wife has shared with me is there are plenty of parents out there that don’t think it’s their responsibility, to teach their kids. They really think it’s the job of the teachers and the administration to do that. And again, that that can be a cultural thing. That could be a mentality thing, all kinds of things.
But I like to believe that that’s the case because the like, we’ve talked about the silver lining of COVID was that parents got to see exactly what their kids are being exposed to in real time because they were home. They saw it. And, again, this this notion, because we’ve shifted from from a standpoint from the fifties sixties to now in 70 years where both parents are more than likely, assuming they’re married, are working. And the kids are coming home to empty houses or they’re they’ve got aftercare or daycare or fill that in, and there isn’t as much of, that parent child situation of, you know, what’s going on. I, again, I I feel I feel like an anomaly because I came home, and I told my my mother about my day.
And then 4 hours later when my father came home from work, I would tell him about my day at school at the dinner table while we ate to dinner ate dinner as a family. And that notion, I think, is becoming a more and more foreign concept, but you have to imagine that parents would want to make sure that their kids were getting exposure. I’m not talking about helicopter parents where they watch and and track every every single thing you do, but there has to be a significant interest in what your child is learning and being exposed to. And, you know, you’ve heard me say this privately and publicly. You know, my parents joke that the real measurement of of success of parents is whether or not they were politically aligned with you, and that they were raised with the same values and that they they agree.
It’s not indoctrination. It’s that they oh, yes. I agree with that because I believe that they, oh, yes. I agree with that because I believe that, not because of anything else, and that you have all these things. You know?
Woodrow Wilson was famous before he became president when he was a leader of Princeton that I wanna make you as unlike your parents and your father in well, his father, unlike your father as humanly possible by the time you get it out of Princeton. Again, conservative liberal ideology, dichotomy. So all these things that are going on tie back to your initial point. Should parents be concerned and involved in their in their kids’ education? Absolutely.
And the fact that we even have to have a discussion or a debate to question that is also an indictment because we know it’s not going on, because we see these things tie back to these anti Semitic anti Semitic protests on Ivy the poison Ivy League campuses. Why didn’t every single one of those students be identified, expelled, and have their name plastered everywhere so that no one will ever wanna hire them. There’s no accountability, and that’s the fundamental thing that has to come back that I wish our elected officials would do on on more more and more time. You need accountability. It happens everywhere else, but for whatever reason, government, people are worried about their next election or their next fundraiser or who’s gonna attend and who their support is gonna be that this continues to to delineate.
And, again, you know, going back to my earlier comment, how many elected officials in New Jersey that would do this? I I said 0. I’m even thinking about maybe 3 out of a 120 members in New Jersey legislature that I know, maybe 3 I know across the state might introduce a bill to address some of these things.
Yeah. Well, we need it desperately. We need it more than ever. We need to begin to train our children to be critical thinkers and ask questions, be allowed to ask questions about what they’re being taught, particularly when it comes to anything historical in nature. And, you know, we should all go back to having civics classes and maybe bringing in constitutional lawyers to talk to kids about what our constitution provides to us in the form of liberties, the very liberties that we see this weaponized Biden Harris administration trying to rip away from us through censorship.
We need to indoctrinate our children in critical thinking skills and that’s the last thing in the world the Democrats want. They simply want to have children in classrooms who are told what to do, how to do it, or else are aimless, irresponsible, partly criminal because this is all they know in order to gain access to things that they want are criminal acts, and yet this is what we’re allowing to go on particularly in our Democrat run cities and states. This is appalling.
Speaker 1: It’s it’s beyond appalling, and you would think again, and Trump says this on the campaign trail. What do you have to lose by voting for him? Jack Kerley said that in 2021. Other other candidates say it as well. What do you have to lose to give the Republicans a shot?
Because if not, just throw them out in 2 or 4 years. And, again, we’ve seen all the like you said, these Democrat controlled cities for decades, literally twice my lifetime of control, single party control, and their toilets. They’re absolute disgusting places that don’t do anything positive for their citizens and just continue to decay. I mean, it’s it’s like it’s it’s so disturbing that this continues to happen. But, again, where’s the accountability?
The voters should be holding these elected officials accountable and not continuously voting them in. And, unfortunately, politics plays a huge aspect to this.
I know. People get used to being poor, I think. They get used to being, to living in poverty. I mean
Or dependent.
Yes. Dependent on government. And government actually you know, I I can remember during Obama’s time where he would send out social workers to Hispanic communities telling them that, hey, Go on SNAP. Go get food stamps. And, of course, the Hispanic community is composed of the some of the most hardworking people that I have ever known, talked to, seen around, and they said absolutely no way.
But Obama sent these social workers into these pockets of his Hispanic communities to sign them up to get on welfare, to get on food stamps, and I’m thinking to myself what a cretinous Marxist individual you and your entire administration is. You are a disgrace to the constitution. So
Speaker 1: Oh, 100%. And the the reverse is what we as conservatives would do. I would do this in my normal job. Right? You rebaseline.
Right? You take you basically say, starting over, everyone who’s on it, we’re gonna end it immediately. You need to come in, and that creates the audit to prove that these people aren’t continually getting direct deposits through people who have made maybe have died or anything else. And you you make them come to you instead of you sending government to them, Because if they want their, for lack of right terms, their welfare, their free crap, they’re gonna come in, and then you audit those individuals. You find out who they are.
And, again, citizen anyone outside of American citizens, should not be getting it. And same thing, deal with the anchor baby situation. Just because you’re an illegal alien and you give birth to someone here and they get automatic citizenship, again, that hasn’t been challenged in court yet from an anchor baby standpoint, and and that still needs to be done.
Speaker 0: Oh, boy. We we we have we have, issues aplenty, that people are looking at, worried about, arguing for or against, and, Brian Fitzherbert, you are brilliant. I wanna thank you for being here as you do come on Fridays with us and give so much of the important, aspect of someone who’s younger, but who understands, has the has the wisdom of a much, much older person. And I wanna thank you for being here with us. You’re great.
Thanks.
Hey. Have a wonderful, wonderful weekend, and yay, liberty and prosperity. Anybody who’s around tomorrow morning at 9:30, show up at Sal’s, and you will be hearing from, a lot of very educated people who understand politics. Brian, have a good one.
