The Death of Recess (2025) Movie Script

The moment my daughter was born,
everything stopped.
In an instant, all my priorities shifted.
The world feels new again.
I'm seeing it through her eyes.
As if for the very first time.
I grew up Christian.
And now, as a father, I'm trying to pass
on the same moral compass I was given.
Not to force a path, but to give my
daughter a foundation of faith
in a world that feels more divided
and confused than ever.
I got my first camera when I was eight,
and I've been telling stories ever since.
Today, I use that same passion
to shine a light in war zones
and the aftermath of disasters.
It took me decades
to find my true calling.
But now, my camera is pointed at new life.
My daughter.
And it's brought up deeper questions.
What kind of world do I want to leave
behind for her?
How do I want her to grow up?
How can I help my daughter discover her
purpose and reach her full potential?
But one question rises above them all.
How will I educate her?
This question made me look back
on my time in school.
I grew up in Plainwell, Michigan.
A small town with the quintessential
public school experience.
But in sixth grade,
my school eliminated recess.
And that's when the problems began.
That's when I first felt it.
A quiet rebellion against
authority and conformity.
Test after test, school became a battle
just to hold onto the passion for learning
I once had.
Creativity and individuality
were pushed aside.
Replaced with standardized testing
and rote memorization.
For years, I couldn't shake the question.
Why is public school the way it is?
That question led me on a decade-long
journey to make this film.
To uncover how the education
system was built.
And to search for alternative
ways of learning for my daughter
and future generations.
It was overwhelming.
I didn't even know where to start.
Then I came across a TED Talk that
completely shifted my paradigm.
Our education system is predicated
on the idea of academic ability.
And the consequence is that
many highly talented, brilliant,
creative people think they're not.
Because the thing
they were good at school
wasn't valued
or was actually stigmatized.
And I think we can't afford
to go on that way.
I needed to go deeper.
So I reached out to someone
I considered as the oracle of education.
To my surprise, he said yes.
And what he shared changed everything
I thought I knew about school.
There are always education systems
of various sorts.
But mass systems of education,
which is really what we're talking about,
mass systems of public education that are
compulsory, those systems are quite new.
And they were pretty much modeled
on the principles of mass production.
They were based on conformity
and standardization,
moving lots of people
through the system simultaneously.
And the earliest ones
really date back to the
late 18th and early and
mid 19th century.
In 1902, the education system
was hijacked.
John D. Rockefeller was a key role
player in the Industrial Revolution.
His monopoly on the oil industry
allowed him to drive up the demand
for low wage factory workers.
In 1902,
Rockefeller appointed
Frederick Taylor Gates
to run the General Education Board,
which aimed to create an industrial
workforce through public education.
You see this idea of average mattering
and it starts getting seeped into society
by a guy named Frederick Taylor.
Most no one's heard of him,
but we're all living in his world.
Then he said, look, this idea that
we just let like craftsmen do their job,
or like workers have a say
or whatever, is just a waste.
And we could be so much better
if we just standardized everything.
The board changed the course of history by
promoting a standardized education system,
emphasizing uniformity and efficiency,
modeling schools after factories.
By funding schools, teacher training
programs, and curriculum development,
Rockefeller and the General Education
Board's president, Frederick Taylor,
created a monopoly influence
on American education,
leaving no room for alternative
education philosophies
that emphasize creativity, imagination,
and individual growth.
The General Education Board even
published their philosophy in 1913.
In our dreams, people yield themselves
with perfect docility to our molding hand.
We shall not try to make these people or
any of their children into philosophers
or men of learning or science.
The task we set before
ourselves is very simple,
to train these people as we find them
to a perfectly ideal life,
just where they are.
The organizational structure
of education
do look remarkably like
factory production,
and not at all like
the kind of organic ways
that people actually grow and develop.
It's why kids spend so much time in
schools doing academic work,
and the reason why we've come
to confuse academic ability
with intelligence in general.
Although the American education system
was captured by industrial tycoons,
it paved a way for American prosperity
and rapid technological achievement.
About a hundred years ago,
when we built this system,
it was not a question of whether we would
personalize education for every kid.
It was whether
wealthy kids would get
really great education
and poor kids would get nothing.
The only way we were going to educate
everyone was to standardize that system.
In the span of 22 years,
we built a high school a day.
Mass educated more people than had ever
been educated in the history of the world.
That was with standardization.
The United States was
a truly revolutionary place
in terms of high school education.
Most high schools were restricted
to a very small elite in most countries,
and they were not free
in most of those countries.
In the United States, by the 1920s,
high school education
was made available
to the large majority
of American students,
and it was freely available to them.
So that was a real innovation
on the part of American education.
Good schools, good teachers,
the best of teaching for our children.
By 1968, 96% of American children were
enrolled in primary and secondary school,
the highest number in recorded history.
It made the United States
the wealthiest,
most privileged country in the world
in the 20th century
and heavily because it had
educated their students
to much higher degree
than in a lot of other places.
The U.S. accounted for the largest
share of global GDP in the early 1970s,
making up nearly one-third
of the world's economy.
The assumption is give up your youth,
you know, work hard at high school,
pass all the tests, cope with the stress,
then you go to college
and get a white collar job,
settle back, you know,
until you get your pension,
and your life will all be sorted.
It was true in the 60s and 70s
when my generation, you know,
if you've got a college degree
you pretty much guarantee the job,
you're not mad.
So I think we're selling people,
you know, a kind of a false promise here.
The U.S. education system
once fueled America's prosperity,
growing the middle class from 20 percent
in 1860 to a peak of 61 percent by 1970.
But since 1980, that progress unraveled.
Test scores have hit 30-year lows
and student debt is soaring.
To stem this decline, the Department
of Education was created in 1980.
Since then, per-student spending
skyrocketed from $2,272 per student
to $17,277 in 2025,
making the U.S. the world's
second-highest spender on education.
Yet, results keep plummeting.
Teachers and families are abandoning
public schools in record numbers.
I had to know, how did the world's
greatest education system collapse?
And what's being done to fix it?
Those are two stats you don't want.
The most money spent per pupil
and you're at the bottom of the list.
And that's where we are, like it or not.
And we've been there for a long time.
Across the country, anxiety is growing
as President Trump pushes to shut down
the Department of Education.
I will sign an executive order
to begin eliminating the federal
Department of Education once and for all.
Days ago, nearly half of
all DOE employees were fired.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon said
the layoffs reflect the Department's
commitment to efficiency.
We have a little bit of breaking
news here from the courts.
A federal judge has blocked
the Trump administration
from attempting to dismantle
the Department of Education.
Let's be clear, all students will be
impacted by these cuts.
Today, 70% of eighth graders
are not proficient in reading or math.
And 40% of fourth graders
lack even basic reading skills.
More alarming, the CDC reports that over
40% of high school students experience
persistent feelings of sadness
or hopelessness.
And more than one in five kids
have seriously considered suicide
in the past year.
These numbers reveal a crisis unlike
anything we've seen in American history.
The department,
we're going to shut it down
and shut it down as quickly as
possible.
When you have a government,
Trump and Musk are
stealing from our schools.
In 2025, sweeping education
reforms are underway.
And not without controversy.
I needed to see for myself
what's really happening.
So I went straight to the Department of
Education to try and get some answers.
After weeks of back and forth,
no one accepted an interview with me.
But that's when I heard
from a presidential advisor
directly from the White House.
Education in America is
like the prison system in America.
Like many institutions
in America is corrupt.
So it's less about learning
and more about assuring
that the institutions that are making
money continue to make money.
Who are these institutions
he was talking about?
I had to dig deeper.
Where is all this money
for education going?
Who is really pulling all of the strings?
Our colleagues are depending on us
to win all the things.
Keep going, NEA.
To preserve our democracy,
we must win all the things.
We are the NEA.
And that's what we do.
The NEA started off with 43 educators
at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia,
who gathered to create the foundation
to standardize education across America.
In 1892, the NEA formed
the Committee of 10.
The committee was clear in their
foundational statement.
Every subject which is taught at all
in a secondary school
should be taught in the same way
and to the same extent to every pupil,
so long as he pursues it,
no matter what the probable
destination of the pupil may be
or at what point
his education is to cease.
Aligning with the Rockefeller agenda,
the NEA helped to solidify
standardized education in America.
In 1980,
the NEA endorsed Jimmy Carter
and lobbied hard
for a centralized federal agency
to control education policy
and funding.
They got what they wanted.
Today, the NEA is the most powerful
force in American education,
with over 2.8 million members and a
staggering $432 million annual budget.
But as I dug deeper,
something didn't add up.
With all that power, all that money,
why are our schools still failing?
Where is all the money going?
The Department of Education
has done one thing really well.
They spent over $3 trillion
since the inception.
The NEA is in town
and people should pay attention.
The Department of Education was
created in 1979 as a political payoff
and so it was born
as a political animal.
It never was about education.
After several failed attempts
to get in contact with the NEA,
I decided to take matters into my
own hands by going undercover
to their national leadership
summit in Detroit, Michigan.
I just got to the convention center here
where the NEA conference is being held
and I'm about to go undercover.
I actually don't even know
if they're going to let me in,
so we're about to find out.
Okay.
I was able to get in.
I mean, this event is closed off,
but somehow I was able to get a ticket.
Where are the funds going?
Where's all this money going to education?
My pronouns are she, her, first.
It is an absolute honor
to introduce our leader,
Becky Pringle,
president of the largest labor unit.
We are indeed in
for a season of suffering.
I went in hoping to see bold ideas
to fix our failing public schools.
But what I found stunned me.
Instead of innovation,
the NEA's programming was stacked
with political activism,
transgender ideology,
and critical race theory.
So I stepped into those
breakout sessions myself
to understand why
these issues are prioritized
over actual student outcomes.
I was torn.
My faith teaches me to love everyone,
but it also commands me
to defend children.
Jesus himself warned
about this very thing.
In Matthew 18 6, Jesus says,
whoever causes one of these little ones
who believe in me to sin,
it would be better for him to have
a great millstone fastened around his neck
and to be drowned
in the depth of the sea.
Under the Biden administration,
an aggressive campaign began
targeting voices that questioned
certain progressive agendas,
especially around gender and identity.
One group caught in the crosshairs,
Gays Against Groomers,
labeled a violent extremist group
by the Biden administration.
We're fighting back
from inside the community.
Join Gays Against Groomers in the
battle against radical gender ideology
that is destroying our youth.
I wanted to hear the other side,
so I took the risk.
I sat down with these so-called
violent extremists myself.
I finally moved to Denver.
I lived like close
to all these gay bars.
You can walk to the bars, have some
drinks, meet some guys, do gay stuff
and destroy the night.
After COVID, I was like,
why are there so many damn children?
The connection between groups
that have formed around this,
like the Satanic Temple,
the Sisters for Perpetual Indulgence,
they call themselves churches,
are literally hosting drag shows
where children are performing
in these drag shows.
These churches are grooming
and sexualizing children.
What they're doing is satanic.
You're selling these children a lie
and then pushing them
down this lifelong harm.
That is satanic in itself.
It's evil.
Everything points back
to the school systems.
That's where they're there the most.
That's where they're getting
their influence.
Why was the NEA
prioritizing this agenda?
With the education system in crisis,
I needed to understand more.
They say these programs benefit students.
But that's when I sat down with a family
who had a very different story to tell.
I was the first parent to file
a lawsuit in the state of Colorado
for a secret gender transition of my child.
May of 2021,
we send our daughter off to sixth grade.
She's just turned 12.
One day her art teacher asked her
to stay after school for an art club
in the art room.
And when she got there,
it was actually GSA
or Gender and Sexuality Awareness Club.
Concepts that I wouldn't have
consented to as a parent.
That harmed her.
That harmed her trust in her parents.
I mean, they heavily emphasize,
you don't have to tell your parents.
Your parents might not support you.
If they don't affirm you,
they don't love you,
but we love you.
The teacher had brought in these outside
presenters, an organization called Splash
for kids 12 and up, and Skittles for kids
2 to 11 to talk about gender and sex.
On their website has 40 different names
that you could potentially call it.
Friends of Dorothy is one of them.
Like all these really inconspicuous names.
That can be easily concealed to parents.
And I actually found slide presentations
from what they do in these GSAs.
And the number one rule is
what you hear and hear keep in here.
So right off the bat,
they tell these kids,
don't tell anyone
what happens in this room.
About six months after the club meeting,
she left us a suicide note
because she did not know how to live
in the body that God gave her.
In the past five years, Colorado has seen
upwards of 50,000 transgender surgeries.
It's a staggering number.
One that raised urgent questions for me
about how these decisions are being made,
especially when it comes to minors.
Recently, the Department of Health and
Human Services released a 409-page report
commissioned under an executive order by
President Donald Trump examining the use
of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones,
and surgical interventions in children and
adolescents diagnosed
with gender dysphoria.
This morning, I signed a declaration,
sex rejecting procedures are neither safe
nor effective treatment
for children with gender dysphoria.
I needed to understand the full picture.
And why had this ideology become a
priority for our leaders within education?
Okay, guys, chill.
Yeah, go lay down.
Are you good?
Did you get it out?
Are you all good?
Prior to my daughter being indoctrinated,
I had just voted for Jared Polis,
our Democrat gay governor.
I just voted for Joe Biden.
I was like your typical left-leaning,
virtue signaling millennial white woman
who just wanted to be kind and
compassionate and
be perceived as LGBTQ friendly.
And then this happened
and I woke up and
I saw behind the curtain.
Here's the groomer that groomed my child.
She calls herself a queer mom 2000s.
This was her two days
after the art club.
Hey kids, hop online.
Let's talk about polyamory.
I'll admit I had to Google
what that was.
She's asking 12-year-olds
to hop online to talk about
multiple sexual partners at once.
It gets worse.
And this is her co-president of Splash.
She's a self-proclaimed vampire.
This is Krista Gunna.
This is the local drag queen
that our school board hires
to perform for children.
It gets worse.
Through public record,
one of the people that was invited
into my daughter's classroom
is a self-proclaimed gender
queer shape-shifting blood witch.
Openly do blood witchcraft on their
social media for people to see.
This was the person they invited in
to indoctrinate my daughter
in a secret gender and sex club.
And then I learned that she does
teacher trainings in the district.
So one of them is called ABCs of LGBTQ.
In fact, the principal that transitioned,
the eight-year-old, said she learned that
she had to keep it a secret
in the ABCs of LGBTQ training.
This is my daughter's groomer proclaiming
that half the kids in the county are LGBTQ
at a city council meeting.
The Healthy Kids Colorado survey tells us
that nearly half of the students
attending schools in Larimer County
identify themselves
as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender,
non-binary, and queer.
Half.
And that's my school board president
who claims to have a trans-identified child
waving her trans flag,
supporting my child's groomer.
That's how she got into the classroom and
that's why she continues to be protected.
And I now live in fear every single day
that they're going to show up
and take my kids away because
they're passing laws like this
that allow them to.
That if I'm not willing to go along
with it, I can lose my kids.
It's scary to continue to live in a state
where I know I've put a target on my back
as someone who will not do what the
state wants me to do with my children.
Amid a boiling mental health crisis,
states across America are
struggling to find a way forward.
Colorado argues that bills prioritizing
LGBTQ plus curriculum benefits students.
To gain another perspective,
I spoke with a transgender individual
about their experience.
I could empathize because I've been trans
and I've been on the other side
and I used to fight for these things.
I used to be like,
just let the kids be kids.
It's just nonsense.
And now that I look back, I'm ashamed
I even supported such a thing.
Now that I truly understand the damage
that it makes, especially for young ones.
When he went in the first time,
he perfed the bowel with
one of the devices he was using.
It was just excrement that was bleeding
out into my abdominal cavity and
eventually I had an abscess
on my vaginal cuff.
Some of this stuff,
when you talk about mental health
already being at a crisis stage,
I started getting severe depression.
I was wanting to kill myself.
I think trauma started all of it.
In my situation,
I came from a very abusive family.
And my father controlled
very much what I did.
One time I asked my mom
to cut my hair and he beat me.
Like, beat me for days.
Every time he saw it, it made him mad
and then he beat me.
They found that 84.9% of trans
identifying people had experienced
physical or sexual trauma.
If you even think that you're trans,
ask why and work backwards.
And it's going to be with trauma.
It's going to be with disconnection.
We're sterilizing children.
We're mutilating children now
and then making laws.
No, we're gonna mutilate your child.
We're gonna sterilize your child.
And more so, we're already
doing this behind your back.
This is a sickness.
Became a parasite onto the LGB community.
The sickness found a home.
In Colorado right now, we have been seeing
several bills over the last several years
aimed at stripping parents
of their rights.
So the most egregious bill of all time in
any state ever, House Bill 251312,
is going to force parents to transition
their kids or lose custody to the state.
It's so much worse.
They also passed a Trans Sanctuary Law,
Senate Bill 129.
That's already been passed this session.
Any doctor practicing
this transgender affirming care,
you cannot investigate them.
It makes it illegal
to even respond to a subpoena.
So we have now become the most
fortified trans sanctuary state.
And there are parents flocking here from
all 50 states to mutilate their children.
We're facing House Bill 1312,
which will make it
a felony hate crime in Colorado
to misgender or detonate a person
and will make it a form of child abuse
if the parent doesn't affirm their
child's gender identity and expression.
And four years ago, if House Bill 1312
had been the law in Colorado,
I would have lost my child.
I've lived here my whole life.
And so just seeing kind of
the decline of the state,
it's sickening is what it is.
It's absolutely disgusting.
This bill passing would create an
environment where parents, pastors,
teachers are not able
to teach their children truth.
Just because there's a minority that wants
to push a twisted worldview on the rest of
the state, on the rest of the country,
that doesn't change what the truth is.
I don't think people are fully aware
of all that this bill entails
and how it will completely
destroy families.
All of these laws
that they've passed since 2019
have built the stage
for this complete obliteration of
parental rights and capture of our kids.
So they lowered the age of
healthcare consent to 12.
Licensed counselors must affirm
all gender confused youth.
They passed law in 2019
that requires gender ideology
be taught to fifth graders.
In 2023, mandated mental health
screening for all sixth or 12th graders.
Parents cannot opt out.
That's 11 to 18 year olds.
They are secretly screened.
They don't tell you
when the screens are happening.
And if the child's deemed high risk,
they send them to the state's
mental health program
without parent knowledge or consent.
Again, because they passed a law that
12 year olds can make that decision.
If they're old enough to get pregnant,
they're old enough make their own decisions
about what happens with their bodies.
Okay.
And parents do not have the right
to change that or make a different
decision or be notified in advance.
And they're going after children
because children don't know any better.
I didn't know nothing at 21.
It took me two decades
to realize this was a mistake.
And you're giving
this burden to a child.
The reason why I wanted to speak with you
is because this is what's waiting
for your kids.
That's why I want to be like,
I'm the warning.
I don't want anyone to go through this.
Like there's so many times, Spencer,
that I just hope I don't wake up.
And it's not because I haven't
dealt with my pain or my trauma.
I've been in a very accepting
place with all of that.
That's how I got here to wholeness.
But I paid a really heavy price for it.
And I have no idea.
And I can't even believe that
they're doing this to children.
And that's what scares me.
It's innocent.
They're innocent.
But yeah, I don't mind at all.
I'll show you how horrible it looks.
So this is what they
and it's all like just warned.
And this is what they want to give kids.
You know, it's like,
this is their future.
I'm mutilated.
Like, I had breasts.
I had a beautiful body before.
And I'm trying to accept
the one I have now.
Colorado's at the forefront of this.
We're seeing this legislation start here
and just spread everywhere else.
And we saw some more bills
last year that got passed here.
California immediately
pushed them through.
The thing that we have to
understand for parents
is you have two options
at this point in time.
Fight to protect at the Capitol
on the school board
or fight to get back in court
because the state is coming
to take away your children.
And when you get your child back,
your little daughter, Suzy,
may not come back as Suzy.
There's so many parents whose kids
have been secretly transitioned or
who've fallen into this
gender cult online.
It's just such a pervasive issue
that I stumbled upon.
And now I can't unsee
behind the curtain.
Moms for Liberty is leading a national
movement to reclaim parental rights
in education, pushing back against the
NEA's stronghold on school curriculum.
With over 130,000 members
across the country,
I traveled to Sarasota to meet
with co-founder Bridget Ziegler.
Why do you think that the NEA
and the teachers unions are
so threatened by Moms for Liberty?
Because their power is at risk.
This is a multi-billion dollar industry.
I mean, you've got to
look at it that way.
It's not, not only that, it's a lot of
political power too, particularly the NEA.
They're, you know, in DC,
they're a special interest group.
So you have a captive audience,
young, impressionable minds,
the incredible power influence
that is and how sacred it is.
There's nothing that's going to drive
someone more than protecting their kids.
It is a dangerous direction
we're going on.
The teachers unions hate parents.
They detest parents.
They don't see it as an institution
to educate people.
They see it as an institution
to indoctrinate kids into their worldview.
They fight against parental rights
every step of the way.
We had the Department of Justice
under the Biden administration
call parents going to school board
meetings, domestic terrorists.
There's been this mantra,
which is very alarming and sounds
really good on a surface level.
We want school to be a safe place,
but the undertone is because home is not,
but at what sacrifice?
And that was a very much
an intentional divide
to separate parents from their children.
The moms are always going to win.
You never want to fight
with a mom and bear.
Monster Liberty is also racking up wins.
School choice is racking up wins.
Why?
It's because the teachers unions
stepped on a rake during COVID.
They showed families what was
happening in the classroom.
Parents were like, what?
I thought you were teaching math,
reading, and writing.
Why are you going through
all this other stuff?
Instead of having someone else
behind closed doors,
talks about sexual priorities
with your children.
Maybe you don't want them
to talk about it.
Maybe you would like to raise your own
children and have those conversations
at a later time, maybe not in
kindergarten through third grade.
We're not in the classroom
and that's by design.
They know that we're not paying attention
to their reading assignments.
We don't know that our kids are being
asked their pronouns on a daily basis.
We don't see that there's trans flags
hanging in every classroom.
And so I just think parents
don't understand how subtly
kids are being indoctrinated with these
ideologies right under their noses.
So it's now a state standard.
And here, I've got
the standards themselves
on the slide that says you must teach
lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender,
and queer to six-year-olds.
That it's a state standard and that
parents don't have to be notified.
And then they put out a lesson on the
importance of sex work for first graders
on the State Department
of Education website.
And we wonder why.
We wonder why our test scores
are plummeting.
And I've had parents who when they
wake up to this, they go, what do I,
how do I tell other people
what's happening?
Like people are going to think
I need a tinfoil hat.
They're going to think I'm crazy.
They're going to shut it down.
And I usually advise parents
just start with academics.
Start the conversation by saying,
hey, can you believe that
70% of kids in this state cannot read
or do math at grade level?
Like that's a reasonable place
to start the conversation.
And here's why.
Because we're spending all of our
money and time on educating them
on the importance of sex work
instead of teaching them how to read.
It's no surprise because again, you go
back to who's running the show
and a lot of these things
and it does trickle back up to
National Education Association or AFT.
They will not relinquish their control
because it had control over it
for a century.
You know, it's a power struggle
and it's really, it's an institution
versus the people.
And I'll be with the people all day long.
As I waited for the outcome
of House Bill 251312,
my attention turned to a deeper question.
What's really behind America's
plummeting test scores?
Could this academic decline and the rise
in mental health struggles be traced back
further than we think?
The US has been trying
to improve test scores for years,
launching sweeping education reforms,
most notably in the early 2000s
during the Bush administration.
For those of you who've studied the
history of our government, you know,
most bills are signed at the White House.
But I decided to sign this bill
in one of the most important places
in America, a public school.
In 2002, George Bush unveiled
the No Child Left Behind Act
in an attempt to move the US
back up the global leaderboard.
But after implementing the NCLB bill,
which mandated standardized
tests in all 50 states,
the US experienced a severe
test exhaustion problem.
The country sank from 18th in the world
in math rankings in 2000 to 40th in 2015.
From 14th to 25th in science,
and 15th to 20th in reading.
Something had to give.
We have a fixed number of hours
in the school day.
Unfortunately, in order to make sure
that everyone was meeting
those academic standards,
so many districts across the country
reduced their recess time.
The entire Board of Education in Atlanta
decided to completely eliminate recess.
And by 2006, the CDC reported that
one third of elementary schools did not
offer daily recess for any grades.
By 2011, more than 40% of schools
either eliminated or reduced recess.
The average recess time in America
has dropped from two hours per day in 1950
to just 25 minutes today.
While youth suicide rates
have doubled in the same time.
Today, students are 30% less proficient
in reading and math scores
since the Department of Education
was created.
Could this all be connected?
I understand, you know,
assessments and the need to assess,
but you do it to make yourself better,
to grow, not to rank people.
To measure with one measure
is truly foolish.
Much of our educational system
has inculcated this idea
that intelligence is just fixed.
We're going to teach you things,
but then we're going to test you,
test you, test you to see
who's smart and who's not.
And this testing has not only put
more students in this framework
of believing in fixed intelligence,
but it's taken the joy out of learning.
We put so much emphasis on state testing.
Instead of really looking at
how are kids learning?
Are they excited?
Are they engaged?
And that's where I feel is
there's been a massive disconnect.
But how can we let students
use their imagination
when teachers are so stressed out that
they've got a state assessment test
at this time of the year?
The best teachers with the best intentions
would fall victim to teaching to the test,
because if you're going to link that
to their performance,
that they could eventually be
out of a job because of that.
So then how do you then tell a teacher,
hey, we're going to do new things here.
We're going to be creative.
And no, they're thinking about
feeding their families.
I was stunned to see these trends.
So I reached out to more experts to see
what they thought about this issue.
Let's just say, theoretically speaking,
I was to take away recess
so you couldn't play outside anymore
for the rest of your
For real?
For real, no recess.
Oh my gosh,
Absolutely.
One, two, I guess what I'm learning is
that they want kids to take more tests
and they want to take away recess.
Do you think that's a good idea or
No, you have to have a break on school
because like if you don't,
you're going to just going to be so focused
on recess instead of everything else.
Look, a squirrel!
Six, seven, seven seconds.
Do you get to play outside too at school?
Yes, of course, every school does that.
Right, well not every school does recess.
There's actually a lot of schools
taking away recess.
What do you think about that?
It's not fun and it'll be boring just
to stay in the classroom and learn.
Yeah, every school must have recess
so we should put back their recess.
I think that's a good idea.
Education is all about brain development
and if you wanted to design
a learning environment
that was directly opposed to what
the brain is naturally good at doing,
you design a freaking classroom.
One of the strongest predictors
of academic performance
is executive function.
If you've got strong executive function,
you can be interrupted and come
right back to what you're doing.
You have a lot of the things
that will allow you to focus at will.
How can you boost executive function?
In every population
that has ever been tested,
we already know the answer to that.
Give them an aerobic workout.
And that's something you can show with 30
year olds, 50 year olds, and 80 year olds.
The further I explored,
I began to understand
just how vital outdoor time is.
Not just for mental and physical health,
but academic performance as well.
So I set off on a journey to find schools
that are doing things differently.
Schools that are bringing recess
back in a big way.
We have 15 minutes in the morning,
a 20 minute lunch,
and then in the afternoon,
there's a 45 minute block where they
could choose to be outdoors as well
at the last part of the day.
We really wanted to teach the students
about sustainability and what it means
to give back to our communities.
And it's just this really great cycle
that the students get to learn about.
We try to make sure that kids are
outdoors as much as possible.
Why can't you be outside?
You can be outside learning,
you can be outside playing,
and hopefully that is the same thing
like learning and playing, right?
Research is now showing that
recess is essential for maintaining
a healthy nervous system
and brain function.
It also boosts social interaction,
emotional health, and supports
motor development.
A study in Denmark of over 900,000 people
found that children aged 0-10 years
living in areas with abundant green spaces
had a 55% lower risk of developing
multiple psychiatric disorders,
including depression and anxiety
compared to those with limited
access to such environments.
Studies show that children
who spent more time outdoors
showed up to a 20% improvement
in problem-solving abilities
and 20% improvement
in memory and learning outcomes
compared to traditional classroom settings.
We know about the evolutionary
performance envelope of the human brain.
It's not just going outdoors
and having an aerobic workout.
The environment where you do that
aerobic workout turns out to be
extraordinarily important.
The more forest you can have in that
workout, the more running water,
no kidding, waterfalls and whatnot,
the human brain appears to have been
designed to solve problems
related to surviving in an outdoor setting
in unstable meteorological conditions
and to do so in their constant motion.
That's what it's good at.
Those are the conditions under which
it processes the information the best.
So if I had my druthers
in an ideal school,
one of the things is that I would
parachute a school right in the
middle of a forest with a river
and have the trails and the aerobic
where it said that the kids could
go out there all day long.
This is Sammy.
It's the Science and Math Institute.
It's here at Point Defiance Park.
Sits on 702 acres of old growth forest.
And then we're also
joined with a zoo.
Being outside, it can help you.
Everybody always says, oh, you're angry,
you're sad, take a breath of fresh air.
Breath of fresh air is going outside.
It's really helpful for my learning.
I feel like I learn better
after going on a walk
or after being outside,
having the space to think.
The University of Colorado Boulder
found that kids who spent at least
one hour per day outdoors
scored 10% higher across standardized
tests compared to children
who spent most of their time indoors.
The benefits of recess were irrefutable,
but I wanted to know if these
types of schools were scalable.
That's when I found some of the
most influential people in the world
were even starting
some of their own schools.
I created a little school.
It's called Ad Astra,
which means to the stars.
That's maybe a bit different
from most other schools,
is that there aren't any grades.
There's no like grade one, grade two,
grade three type of thing.
I mean, the kids really love
going to school.
I think that's a good sign.
You see a lot of emotion from the kids
toward the front of the class
instead of from the front of the class
toward the kids, right?
The other thing that I think
is a really subtle point
is that the kids have a lot more
freedom of motion
than they do
in a lot of classrooms.
Thinking is a process that
for a lot of people is partially kinetic.
And the fact that these kids have the
freedom to get up and give their brain
that space physically,
I think actually helps a lot.
According to Edgar Dale's
Cone of Learning,
students who learn through
movement and hands-on experience
can retain information up to 90% more
than through passive traditional methods.
Schools that integrate kinesthetic learning
report test score gains of around 30%
and students with ADHD often see
improvements of up to 25%.
The evidence was overwhelming.
Movement doesn't just
change the classroom,
it changes the child.
So I set out to see whether
these innovative methods
could thrive
beyond isolated programs.
My hope was growing,
but one question remained.
Could true innovation happen
inside the public school system itself?
You can't just rely on, well I just
drilled these worksheets and so
hopefully that ingrained it in there.
If we get them hooked on what they want,
then maybe the rest falls into place.
It's hard for me to focus
on like classroom stuff.
That's the main reason I came to this
school, hands-on learning.
If like he's teaching me something
through a project,
then I'm more likely to learn it
than just reading it from a book.
99% of the world has experienced learning
in a certain way up until this point.
And it hasn't really been
until the last 10 or 15 years
where people begin
to question that way.
Our board of directors is
at least two-thirds students,
so they have all of the power
to make this what they want.
Basically what we're trying to do
is we're trying to emulate
these special gill sensors and sharks
that can detect electric current and
water to kind of see proximity
of other beings or
sizes of other beings as well.
The teenage brain has to feel like
whatever it's doing, it's doing it
for something bigger than itself, right?
And chasing a grade or points
or getting credits is not
something bigger than yourself.
So this is your third edition?
This is our third, yeah.
This one's all about consumer behavior
and environmental aspects of fast fashion.
So instead of doubling down
our old systems,
why don't we just admit that most
high school can be done in two hours
for a good chunk of the kids?
And how about we do something
to fill that other five hours
with something useful for them?
That's what we're trying to do here.
Iowa Big Kids get to work on a real-world
project, which is what we should be doing,
have kids in the real world
doing real things.
A study by the Buck Institute for Education
found that students participating
in project-based learning
scored an average of up to 30 percent
higher on standardized assessments,
30 percent lower levels of academic stress,
40 percent improvement
in social-emotional skills, and
15 percent higher levels
of emotional well-being.
Despite all this, as of 2020,
only 10 to 15 percent of U.S. schools
are reported to integrate
some form of PBL.
Why isn't our education system
adopting PBL at scale?
John Dewey became
our most famous educator.
One of the things that
Dewey made very clear is that
students learn
when they can also play,
and that the idea of a kind of
force-feeding of education
without giving students the ability
to absorb and to be playful
with their schooling
is not how you learn.
Memory is what teaching is all about.
But memory is not about
recording the past.
Memory is about the future.
All day long,
you've had these experiences,
but somehow your brain decides
which ones are important.
And it'll do that
while you're asleep tonight.
We know a lot about
how that happens in the brain.
If you repeat your times tables
over and over and over
eventually, it ends up
into long-term memory.
But we now know that
how you repeat is very important.
The critical thing is that
you interrupt your lessons.
Any musician knows this.
You can practice over and over.
If you don't put it aside
and then come back to it,
it doesn't get any better.
A headmaster in England,
he had his students learn a lesson,
then they stopped and
played basketball for 10 minutes.
And they went back
and had the same lesson.
His students were two years
ahead of all the other students
that had traditional teaching.
So recess is not just a break.
My kids really did find that it was hard
to sit through class periods
without the getting up,
going outside, running around,
and really letting off some steam.
And they'd come home
and I'd see it.
They really had
a lot of pent-up energy.
Lucy David, a representative
of the Connecticut government,
recently unveiled a bill
to mandate 50 minutes of recess time.
Study after study says
how important this is.
I had hundreds of emails
over this topic,
all in support,
and I was shocked.
According to the CDC,
over 7 million children
from the ages of 3 to 17
have been diagnosed with ADHD.
And since 2007,
there has been a 62% increase
in suicide rates
amongst 10 to 24 year olds.
Unfortunately, Lucy Dathan's bill
did not pass the Connecticut legislature.
To this day, recess continues to be
eliminated all across America.
I was beginning to understand how
this standardized model was outdated.
But I still needed to connect the dots
why our education system continues
to prioritize these outdated methods.
Oh, thank you so much, everybody.
Please have a seat.
Have a seat.
The goals of No Child Left Behind,
the predecessor of this law,
were the right ones.
But in practice, it often fell short.
In 2016, the Every Student Succeed Act
intensified America's
obsession with testing,
tying federal money
to how well teachers performed
based on their students' exam results.
The outcome?
American students will now take
an average of 112 standardized tests
by the time they graduate high school.
Yet despite doubling down on testing,
our scores still dropped.
That's when I looked outward to China,
ranked number one in the world.
I wanted to see firsthand
what was driving their success.
So I traveled there to investigate.
Described as the
toughest test in the world,
the Gaokao lasts a marathon two days.
9 million competing
for a university place this year.
In China, education is a much more
homogeneous experience.
The basic principle of education
is for elimination, right?
Because you don't have
enough university spots to go to.
I have so many students.
So all the assessment, the tool is used
so that I can figure out who to eliminate.
So it's a very sophisticated,
massive national test-taking system.
Although they scored high
in the global rankings,
this homogenized, test-focused education
didn't seem like the solution to me.
But to my surprise, like the US,
there were pockets of schools
around China
taking a more alternative
approach to education.
What makes
Montessori special and different?
The big difference is that
it's the teacher's job
to figure out what the key
to motivation is for the child.
So it's not the child's job
to listen to the teacher and then
make sure that you got your homework
written down and all of that.
That's what's really different
about Montessori.
You don't really have to
master all the knowledge
before you get into the real world.
What matters the most is
how to get the knowledge
and how to use that knowledge.
Actually, Moon Child here is not
really a teacher-student relationship.
We really learn from each other.
We have meetings together.
We play sports together.
We do courses together.
And we produce and make
so many fascinating things.
You guys are doing projects
much more than you're doing tests.
Yes, we very rarely do tests.
We're trying to combat child labor.
So we're just trying to see alternative
ways to completely get rid of it.
Everyone's talking about different topics.
How can you assess it
just by one specific thing?
I think it's much easier for us to learn
and also a faster way to learn.
The first thing education needs
to challenge to think about is to say,
can you really prescribe something
that works in all settings
for all children in all jobs?
We need to rethink about
what education can be.
What if we took away recess forever?
Because then what we could do is
we could focus more on testing.
If recess gets taken away for a test,
then how's your brain going to work?
How are you going to get ready
for the real life?
China may be known for its rigid
test-centered education system,
but the alternative schools I found
told a different story.
They proved that testing
isn't the only way forward.
And beneath that shift
was an unexpected catalyst.
The ideas of Steve Jobs and
his VP of Education, John Couch,
helped influence Chinese officials
to experiment with more creative models.
So I returned to the U.S.
to interview John Couch
and learn how this movement began.
See, what happens is
we get trained to pass the test.
So we get used to this
process of memorization,
of focusing on grades on the test score,
you know, rather than our own
intrinsic motivation.
And so what happens is our own curiosity
slowly just gets wrapped around
with a bunch of layers of concrete.
In the early 1900s,
we adopted pretty profoundly
authoritarian measures of control,
and it should scare the hell
out of everybody
that the same exact education system
that we hold up here
can plug and play in China.
So if we continue down a path
where the aim is literally just efficiency,
then we are in decline.
Because the truth is that
authoritarian regimes can literally
frog march every person
into doing whatever they want.
They can beat you
at the game of efficiency.
But fulfillment and contribution
require trusting people.
Require empowering them,
right, unleashing that potential.
That's what free society could do
better than anybody else.
We will never be able to be a society
like Hong Kong and Singapore.
We're not a homogeneous society,
and we're not centrally organized.
So I don't think that necessarily
we can follow their patterns.
If it deals with human individuality
related to performance and
development and aspiration,
any time you try to make it
one size fits all,
you destroy human potential,
you destroy human flourishing.
A kid spends most of their time doing
sedentary study, doing theoretical work,
learning what philosophers call
propositional knowledge,
and that something is the case
in a factual knowledge of that sort.
And not dancing, and not painting,
and not doing music,
and not doing practical projects.
They're still seen in some systems
as eccentric and a kind of deviation
from the norm.
And we're still having to explain
why that's a good thing,
as opposed to having people sit down
in ranks year after year taking tests.
I began to see that
standardized test rankings
weren't necessarily a great benchmark
for innovation and
overall student happiness.
I wanted to know if there were other
countries that were more innovative.
And that's when I found Finland,
who decided to move beyond
traditional education.
And their results
were impressive.
Finland, a country the size of
the state of Minnesota,
beats the US in math,
reading, and science.
Finnish public school.
Years has been
among the world's best.
Ranked number one.
World leading standards
in reading, math, and science.
How does the
educational miracle work?
For the past eight consecutive years,
Finland ranked as the
happiest country on earth,
based on quality of life, social support,
and personal liberty.
With one of the best
education systems on the planet,
could overall happiness and
well-being be a better benchmark
to focus on as a society?
I needed to learn what Finland was doing
that made them so special.
I think it's really important
to take into consideration
how long you really can concentrate
and how long you can take in something.
Because you need breaks in Finland.
School days might be for small children
from 8 to 12 or 9 to 2.
We gain the same level of results
with the least number of hours in school.
There are no standardized testings.
There are no
multiple choice evaluations.
Pupils are not burned out with tests.
The essence of it is that they treat
children like children,
allow them to be children,
allow them to play and to learn.
There's no homework for elementary.
There's no parent pressure to be following
your grades and monitoring your progress
and all these sorts of things.
They don't even teach to the test.
They don't even mention the test.
The test scores are a byproduct
of engaging deeply and effectively
in a learning process.
Finnish students spend
the most amount of time outdoors
and the least amount of time in school
than any other developed nation
in the world.
Yet Finland, year after year,
performs at the top of global rankings.
The irony is,
Finland used American research
on learning and education
to create this super school system.
I have this saying,
if you want to live the American dream,
move to Finland.
Why is America so obsessed
with standardized testing?
While Finland just gives
one test from K through 12,
the average American student
will take 112.
Yet our results continue to decline.
So why are we still clinging
to this outdated model?
Something wasn't adding up.
I returned to the US to try to uncover
the truth behind why we keep pushing
practices that no longer work.
There was always an assumption
that the smart people went to college.
But suddenly,
the gates were thrown open.
So everyone was encouraged
to go to college.
And not just any college,
the best colleges, the right colleges.
And all that was fueled
by the testing industry.
The College Board is responsible
not only for administering the SAT,
but also all AP exams
within high schools.
In 2024,
nearly 5.5 million AP exams were
administered, each costing $98.
This helps generate the College Board
over $1 billion in revenue.
The College Board now
has over $1.77 billion
in cash and investment assets.
The College Board has also
found a way to make money
using backdoor methods
that have been previously
undisclosed to the public.
That's when I heard directly
from a College Board whistleblower
who had more to share.
Buried in the fine print of the ACand SAT privacy policies,
is permission for these companies
to sell student data to third parties.
That data helped create
the illusion of skyrocketing competition
in college admissions,
giving universities
the leverage they needed
to raise tuition nationwide.
So the government mandates testing,
which forces parents to pay
for the SAT, ACT or AP exams,
which drive up profits
for these nonprofit companies.
These profits are then used
to lobby for more testing,
as well as lining the pockets of
executives and board members.
For example, David Coleman,
the CEO of the College Board,
was compensated
over $2.56 million in 2020,
which is 14 times higher than the $186,000
average nonprofit CEO salary in America.
Learning this eye-opening information
inspired me to go on a tour
across the country
to see how this corrupt
college admissions process
was affecting the country.
You got student loans,
come find the bus.
I've been in academia as a student,
as a resident, as a faculty person,
in administration,
and back as a student again.
It's a hot mess.
There's a lot of 18-year-olds making
decisions with $50,000, $100,000, $200,000
that they don't have yet.
How am I going to buy a house?
How am I going to buy a car?
How am I going to make investments
for my family by financing something?
If my credit is suffering
under my student debt,
that's not going to happen.
We can't afford a home.
We can't live in a house.
We have so much debt.
Like we haven't even touched them.
Right.
And he's been out of school
for almost three years.
There's a really clear divide
here on Colorado State.
I want to attack an issue
that I believe unifies both sides,
which is education,
because it affects us all.
I'm interested and I'm excited to ask
a question to this group of people,
but I kind of got to finesse
my way to the front.
So let's see what I can do.
So since 1987,
the value of a college degree
has only risen three percent.
Well, the cost of that same degree
has risen 213 percent.
Do you believe education has become
a business in this country?
We asked our best school seniors,
where are you going to school?
Not why are you going to school?
We have far too many people going
to four-year college in this country
because we've set a false expectation
that's mostly pushed forth by the
propaganda machine of the far left,
where they think there's a subtext
that you don't go to college
or Western College.
That's not true.
Carpenters, HVAC, military members,
veterans, police officers, firefighters,
in fact, S.A.
The pressure to go to college has pushed
over 39 percent of 18 to 24-year-olds
to pursue a college degree.
Student loans are now the largest asset
on the federal government's balance sheet,
marking a whopping 38 percent
of total government assets.
This cultural obsession with college
has created multiple generations
that will be shackled by a 1.7 trillion
dollar debt which continues to climb.
This debt is over four times
the net worth of Elon Musk in 2025,
the richest man on earth,
and one million times what the average
American will make in their lifetime.
While the average college graduate
will earn roughly 2.8 million dollars
in their lifetime,
the average American today
is spending over 3.4 million
as a result of inflation.
The American dream is failing,
with over 50 consecutive years
of middle-class decline.
There's no need
even to have a college degree.
If somebody graduated
from a great university,
that may be an indication that
they will be capable of great things,
but it's not necessarily the case.
Today, over 52 percent of
all available job postings
don't even require a college degree.
Is the tide shifting in America?
And high school students
are kind of getting victimized
because they're spending their high school
years worrying about getting into college,
not spending four very important
healthy years, 14 to 18,
becoming a healthier and a smarter
and a more secure person.
This rising debt
is a critical concern.
I began to wake up to what is controlling
our obsession with standardized testing,
and the system was showing
signs of breaking.
But I still needed to understand
what can be done
to innovate our K-12 system.
This motivated me to find
scalable solutions that could change
the course of our education system.
President Trump signed an executive order
aimed at advancing artificial intelligence
in K-12 schools.
This next executive order relates to
artificial intelligence education, sir.
That's a big deal because AI is
where it seems to be at.
We have literally trillions of dollars
being invested in AI
as U.S. education reaches
a critical tipping point,
the Trump administration has set
its sights on artificial intelligence
as a potential path forward.
So I set off on a mission
to find AI-driven curriculums
that could revolutionize
American education.
What we have been working on over
the past decade is using technology
in order to do what it does great at,
which is provide the perfect
level and pace of education
to match each and every student
where they're at.
It's like having the best
personal tutor you could imagine
sitting right next to you all the time,
understanding what does a student know,
what don't they know, and what pace
can we move forward on.
Alpha School is a K-12 model that
leverages an AI tutor to help students
learn over twice as much in just
two hours of academics per day.
It lets me go at my own pace
and it doesn't hold me back,
which I found really helpful.
It doesn't make me feel like
I have to work at the class's pace
and I can go as far ahead as I want
or I can stay back if I need to.
This real-time feedback
and individualization
flips the traditional
education system upside down.
Instead of teaching
to the average student,
an AI tutor allows a classroom
of students to learn
and advance at their own
optimized pace.
The majority of our success comes
because we have motivated students
helping kids find that intersection
of their passions and their talents
and then developing those skills.
Literally just by cutting
our schoolwork time by half,
I've reduced what took not only
the eight-hour school day
but also four to five hours after school
into the first two to three hours
of the morning.
It's given me the chance
to pursue my mission.
I'm able to spend my afternoons
working on something
truly important to me,
something that improves my life
and the lives of the people around me.
At Alpha, we're taught
how do you use your high school
to propel your future
not just to get into college,
not just to get good grades,
a good GPA,
but how can you set yourself up
for the rest of your life?
As of last year, I mean, our students got
into Stanford, Vanderbilt, Northeastern,
a UT Business School, Oxford,
I mean, top, top colleges.
With a fraction of the time
spent on academics,
Alpha students are scoring far higher
than their peers in traditional schooling.
Alpha students rank in the top 99
percentile for K-12 map testing,
and graduates scored
an average of 1474 on their SAT,
compared to the national
1,028 average.
We are proving that
what we're doing here works,
and I think that all it takes
is a bunch of kids like us
who have big goals
and big dreams
and are willing to take the risk
and take the leap to prove that
something needs to change and
that has to start with somebody.
Today in America,
50% of our graduating seniors know
as much math as the best third graders,
and 44% of our public school
students in the U.S.
were behind grade level this year.
So why isn't our traditional school system
opening the doors to change?
With the number of teachers that are
leaving the traditional field in droves,
education in the traditional environment
is only going to get worse
in the next several years,
and the budgets that
so many public schools
are operating off of
are unbelievably insane.
I want families to understand that they
have a choice in their kids' education,
and they can look at
each of their children and say,
what is the right thing
for this child?
I wake up every day thinking,
how can we make this
more accessible
to as many children as possible
to really help them flourish?
My visit to Alpha left me
feeling extremely optimistic
about the future of education
in America.
But the question remained,
can AI be leveraged to help lower
income communities as well?
That's when I discovered Notion,
a K-12 digital curriculum
based in Morelia, Mexico.
With over 70,000 students enrolled,
Notion is disrupting education
on an entirely new scale.
I flew to their headquarters
in Morelia, Mexico
to learn more about how this
cutting-edge AI solution
could reshape schooling
for students everywhere.
We named our company Notion
because it's knowledge in action.
It's only when you put your knowledge
into action when it becomes powerful.
To really get schools
out of that status quo,
that road that they've been following
for 200 years, it's difficult.
It's not that easy.
All the lessons for a curriculum
are created here.
And they all work together
in order to see
how we're going to approach
every challenge
because our whole curriculum for
the school year is divided into talent.
Challenge-based learning
is an engaging,
multi-disciplinary approach
to teaching and learning
that encourages students to leverage
the technology they use in their lives
to solve real-world problems.
Technology and personalization,
specifically in education,
is helping so that the student
can be the main character again.
We want them to use the device,
for example, in our case,
the iPad, as a tool.
And the beauty of it is it transforms
into any instrument that they need.
But if they don't use it in school
and they don't see its potential
to enhance their learning process,
they're going to end up, like most
of the adults in this generation,
just being consumers
rather than creators.
To really change the world,
we have to put this in the hands
of every single kid in the world,
not only the ones that are privileged
enough to go to a private school.
So we're also really pushing
the idea of putting our solution
in the hands of public schools.
Notion has even found a way to use
technology from the HeartMath Institute
to measure mindful
experiences like meditation
to help students balance
their mental health during school.
I think one of the things that really
separates us from the high primates
is that we're tool builders.
And what a computer is to me
is it's the most remarkable tool
that we've ever come up with.
And it's the equivalent of
a bicycle for our minds.
I believe there was
a paradigm in education
where we all thought that
if you were playing,
you were not learning.
Something that neuroscience recently
found is that when you are having fun,
when you are enjoying
what you're doing,
when it's engaging and
when it's challenging for you,
then automatically learning happens.
The budget is there.
The money is there worldwide.
It's not a matter of money.
It's a matter of will,
wanting to do things.
And we're only spending
$300 a year for each student.
Despite Mexico's low ranking
in global test scores,
Notion students were scoring in the
top seven countries in the world.
By focusing on challenge-based learning
and personalized curriculum,
Notion proved that individualized learning
could be done effectively at scale.
Unlike the high costs of
many private schools,
the Notion curriculum was allowing
even the poorest communities
to receive a high quality education.
It's a community that is six hour drive
on a dirt road from the city of Oaxaca.
It's an indigenous community
that live in extreme poverty.
They don't have electricity.
They don't have internet.
We launched this pilot five years ago.
The transformation has been incredible.
It wasn't just the AI and iPads being
used that changed this community.
I saw firsthand the empowerment these
young people received by being encouraged
to solve problems that were
relevant in their local community,
and to pursue their passions.
Education no longer had to be
about memorizing information.
It could be a tool to improve
communities all across the world.
If innovation like this could take place
in Mexico and South America,
could it also work in the U.S.?
That money is there.
That budget is there.
The thing is that
in undeveloped countries,
it's going through
a corrupt traditional system,
and unfortunately, it's not ending
at the hands of the students.
I think if you look at the growth
of the administrative unit
in public education
over the last 10 and 15 years,
it will blow you away.
The amount of school district
administrators in the U.S.
has grown by over 95% since 2000.
Teachers, 10%.
While student growth has only risen 5%.
The money to improve education is there,
it's just not making it
into the classroom.
More than 98%
of the political contributions
from the National Education Association,
almost all the campaign contributions
go to the Democrat Party.
The NEA allocates an estimated 35 to 47%
of its budget to political lobbying and
activism.
The NEA also invests millions of dollars
in influencing school board elections
to expand its nationwide impact.
The Parental Rights Movement,
or just the regular old people
who live in a community,
it's very hard to find people
willing to run for school board.
It's intense, especially if you're
fighting against the grain,
which a lot of us in the
Parental Rights Movement are.
Returning to Colorado,
I was shocked to learn
that HB 25-1312 had passed.
Despite record numbers of parents
that came to testify against the bill,
with all this opposition,
how could this bill still pass?
And what does this mean
for the future of parental rights?
I mean, there are certainly larger players
that are pushing these agendas.
I mean, for example,
my local school board here,
it's a 30,000 student district.
When I looked into the funding
in our 2021 school board election,
it was the NEA, the AFT,
the Obama Foundation, the Rockefellers.
They have total control.
They have a monopoly
on the school district.
And so big interest groups are funneling
their agendas through local school boards,
who then build big,
huge administrative cabinets.
You know, we have
the educators associations
who are getting a lot of money
to push all of this.
Instead of prioritizing innovation,
the NEA is spending
hundreds of millions of dollars
opposing alternative education.
These funds could revolutionize
our education system,
but they're being used
to lobby for political ideologies
that are actively harming our children.
Over the past decade, the NEA has
spent an estimated $700 million
lobbying against school of choice
and alternative education models.
It's very important to understand
that the unions are there
to protect the old way of doing things.
It's clearly being funded very well.
And why, right?
Oh, 100 percent.
But this isn't just
right here in America.
This is a global agenda that seeks to
destroy Western culture and civilization.
The queer agenda is Marxist,
and it is civilization ending.
In 2019,
the UN launched a global initiative
to introduce gender ideology
in Western countries,
backed by substantial
funding on a massive scale.
They're open about the fact
that gender ideology,
the state controlling children,
controlling families,
these are globalist talking points.
Openly, the World Economic Forum,
Klaus Schwab, has been pretty open
that this is the agenda.
It's very systemic.
And this agenda is really,
it's pushed by the UN.
It's part of UN Agenda 2030.
It's part of WHO.
It's part of these global elites
trying to push this,
and they're funneling
a lot of money into it.
They're doing it very secretively.
And so I think that's ultimately
where it stems from,
but there's a lot of players
in the meantime.
There's a profit motive
from the pharmaceutical,
from the medical industry.
These kids, when you get them
on the path of transgenderism,
they're multi-million dollar clients.
I mean, you will make
millions of dollars off of each kid.
You have the people
like in the United States,
the Pritzkers, for example.
The Pritzkers are in the medical industry,
and they're making a lot of money.
You've got people
like Pat Stryker in Fort Collins
who makes money
off the medical industry,
but they're putting their money
into the universities and these NGOs
who are pushing gender ideology
and queer theory.
Before attending the Pride Parade,
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot
joined Governor Pritzker
for a major step towards
protecting transgender students.
The governor signed an executive order
to ensure schools across the state
have the tools to support transgender,
non-binary, and gender
non-conforming students.
The US market for sex
reassignment hormone therapy
is valued at 1.69 billion in 2023,
projected to reach
2.23 billion by 2030.
The sex reassignment surgery market,
it's set to hit 5 billion by 2030,
growing at over 11% a year.
And leading the charge,
two major pharma giants,
AbbVie and Pfizer.
Pfizer is a major player
in hormone replacement therapy,
including testosterone
for transgender individuals.
As Gen Z now makes up nearly
30% of the LGBTQ plus population,
a massive shift in demographics
is unfolding.
But is this increase
driven purely by acceptance,
or is there something deeper at play?
AbbVie pours $700,000 annually into
LGBTQ initiatives, while Viv Healthcare,
part owned by Pfizer, pledged $7.8
million to global LGBTQ plus support.
Millions of dollars are
flowing into this cause.
Corporations profiting
from a rapidly growing market.
But what's the cost of
pushing this narrative
into our schools and society?
Something far darker
than I could have imagined
is unfolding.
Give them the tools and the
skill sets to identify this way,
that social transition that happens
eventually becomes
that medical transition,
and they get their return
on investment at that point.
My trust in the education system
was breaking.
Uncovering these nefarious
agendas has me thinking,
how on earth can I put my daughter
through the same system I went through,
with this being the reality we face?
What's unfortunate is that they're spending
all their money on administration,
on things that are not
conducive to teaching kids,
reading and math and science and the things
that they should be learning.
And when charter schools come in,
the money follows the child.
And they lose, you know, in Colorado,
somewhere between seven and
ten thousand dollars per student
that's now going to that charter school
and not to the public school for them
to squander on things like administrative
costs, administrative cabinets.
I believe in school choice because
we believed we were
owed those students.
And no, we have to earn them
by providing a quality instructional
environment or learning environment.
You know, you realize there's no
charter schools that I'm aware of
that are by promote woke ideology
and we're going to keep information
away from parents about gender ideology.
No one would go to them
if they sold it that way.
The fight for parental rights has
escalated all the way to the top,
the Supreme Court of the United States.
In a landmark 6-3 ruling,
Mahmoud versus Taylor made it clear,
schools can teach
a wide range of topics,
but they cannot compel students
to participate in lessons
that contradict their
family's religious beliefs.
Now parents must be offered
an opt-out for LGBTQ themed material.
This decision marks a turning point.
Parental rights exist, but they're only
powerful when parents know them.
Parents have had their eyes
opened once and for all.
They're never going to unsee
what they saw happening in the classroom.
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
Moms and dads are more
powerful than any politician.
Don't let up.
The unions want you to stop,
but these are your kids, not theirs.
I visited charter, public, private schools,
micro schools, and home schools.
And one thing
has become undeniable.
Our education system needs options.
Real options.
For students, for parents,
and for teachers.
The time for alternative education
isn't in the future.
It's now.
I never speak in criticism of teachers.
There are good ones, great ones,
tremendous ones, terrible ones.
Most people in my experience
are working very hard to make it better.
And they do it because
they love to do it.
They're not doing it for the money.
I believe in a hundred years
we will look back on education
as its practice in America,
and it will send chills
up people's spine.
And I'll give you a little secret lie
that every president has told.
That is, they all speak glowingly about
public education and American education,
and they all send their own children
to private schools.
I followed the money,
and what I found was clear.
Our students are in
desperate need of support,
yet much of the funding
meant for education
never actually reaches them.
Over the past decade,
that realization led me down
a difficult but eye-opening path.
I had to confront some
hard truths about our system.
But along the way,
I also found something else.
Hope.
This whole factory system
is siphoning off
hundreds of millions of
dollars of resources
that to me is just being
flushed down into the sewer
with this failed obsolete system.
I'm in favor of evaluating
students' learning.
They have to know where they are.
We have to have rigorous standards.
But to teach to the test,
to homogenize the children,
to make them dread school
and hate learning?
No.
Parents are responding
to the highly competitive
environment that we're living in,
the globalized economy
that we're living in,
and there's a lot of panic
among parents today.
U.S. high school students falling
further in the global rankings.
What your kids can read in school libraries
has become a statewide controversy.
This is a holy campus.
The devil's tricks don't work here.
It is my job to teach
my kids about sex.
It's y'all's job to help teach about
reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Who cares more
about a child's education?
The teacher's union
or the child's parents?
You don't respect us.
If you did, you wouldn't make our jobs
literally impossible to do.
An elementary school teacher
was hospitalized last week
after a parent attacked him during
a verbal argument over face masks.
You are a disgusting piece of sh.
After a decade-long journey,
I finally feel empowered,
not just to confront the deep flaws
in our education system,
but to take meaningful action
to change it.
Imagination is the power to bring
into mind things that aren't present,
and creativity is putting that to work.
It's like you're making this movie.
You could be lying in bed
all day thinking about a movie,
but here you're actually making it.
And this involves all kinds of choices,
decisions, technologies, ideas,
foresight, planning, judgments.
That's the creative process
of trying to bring about something
that wasn't there before
into practical existence.
Facing these harsh realities is the key
to unlocking new possibilities.
By addressing what truly
controls our education system,
we can move beyond outdated
educational models once and for all.
It isn't that the system can't change,
and it isn't that
you have to change all of it.
So I always say to people if they're
interested in changing education,
start with the bit you're in.
Do that bit.
There are all kinds of ways
in which people can act individually.
Or in their local context
to make this different.
And a lot of room to do it.
Or at least more room
than people think.
Education is bigger than schooling.
Education is teaching your children
how they can be
resourceful and resilient
and successful in the society
in all kinds of ways.
It's not just literacy
and it's not just schooling.
To me, the future is not Harvard.
It's not Yale.
It's these places that are
genuinely changing the model
where it's really about how many
people can you educate
to the highest level
at the lowest price point.
The family unit is the most
important for a society to thrive.
And it has been under attack
for a very long time.
It's gotten to a point
where there's way too many adults
being quiet while children
are being harmed.
Parents need to get
involved in their schools.
They need to go and
support their teachers.
They need to let administration know
that they need to see changes.
Be involved in your kids' lives.
There is nothing
more important than that.
Parents have a responsibility to show up
and to fight back against the powers
that control our families.
It seems to me
the purpose of education now
should be to spark the curiosity
and the interest and the desire
for learning among young people.
The greatest gift they can possibly have
is to be deeply passionate about something
to the point where they just
want to be doing that
or thinking about that
or working on that.
That's something
that can actually make them
one of the best people in the world
at whatever it is that they care about.
This experience of education
and parenthood and everything
is all about building this child's
brain for maximal success
in a future that we do not know.
So since we don't know,
you have to just allow your child
to experience as many things as you can
and when they find something
that they're very good at, they enjoy,
that you support them with that.
These are the kids that are going to have
to solve some of the major problems
that we have in this world
and we are going to need
a whole generation of thinkers
and people who are
able to work together
no matter what their backgrounds are.
After more than a decade walking
through classrooms across America,
I've learned one undeniable truth.
If you want to change
the education system,
you start with yourself
and with your kids.
Pull them out of environments
that shut down creativity
and seek out alternatives.
If those alternatives don't exist,
build them.
An environment that creates that belief,
that provides that kind of meaningful
learning that they can tie to their lives
and see how later on they can
make a difference with it.
That's what we're aiming for.
Dang it, I'm 67.
I should be cynical.
I am more wildly
enthusiastic than ever.
Learning is everything.
Don't forget it.
The word education comes
from the Latin word educo,
which means to draw out
or to develop from within.
That's the mission.
Helping kids uncover their passions and
cultivate the gifts God placed in them
from the moment they were born.
I think God put a recess so people can
learn about nature and see plants
and have fun and
have extra time to play.
So you think God created recess?
Yeah, we don't want
to destroy his creation.
And sometimes I sit back and
I think about the playground.
Smiling brighter than the sun
when we would play around.
Somehow those smiles fade
when we grow and older.
We must remember to take
weight off of our shoulders.
Remember to live your life.
Remember to spread your light.
Look up at the stars at night.
Let your spirit take flight.
Remember how to feel and feel,
feel, feel, feels.
Breaking out the seals, seals,
seals, seals.
Let your inner child pour out.
Set your heart on fire.
Real vibes, we need those.
Been lost like Nemo.
I found the cheat code.
Set your heart on fire.
I shot my Fritos and found my amigos.
Then we found the cheat codes.
Set your heart on fire.
Real vibes, we need those.
I've been lost like Nemo.
I found the cheat code.
Set your heart on fire.
I shot my Fritos and found my amigos.
Then we found the cheat codes.
Set your heart on fire.
Set your heart on fire.
Set your heart on fire.