The 250th Anniversary of America is a beautiful time to reconnect with our American ancestors. Every day is the perfect time to connect to our spiritual ancestors.
Welcome to Politics by Faith. Thank you for being here. Last couple of days on SiriusXM, we've done a couple of segments related to education. We touch on it from time to time. We did a segment last week about how kids can't read. Well, half of Americans can't read at a sixth grade level. That's a problem. It's 46%. 46% can't read at a sixth grade level. That's a problem. It's 46%. 46% can't read at a sixth grade level. That's USA Today, so can't read a newspaper.
New York Times is at an 11th grade level, so they're not even close. Half of Americans can't read a menu, can't read a job application. Big, big problem. But then we did a segment on college kids who can't read. And they don't have the will,
but many don't even have the skill. Today we did a segment on AI. It's graduation time across the country. Many kids are graduating high school and college who are illiterate. And they've outsourced more and more of their brain
to artificial intelligence. And I think this is unwise. And I think it will be bad for our country. There's a video a 10th grade teacher made, she's quitting, a 10th grade teacher, she says, kids can't do anything at all.
She says, she'll ask them to write a five sentence paragraph by hand, and they throw tantrums. They refuse, they throw a tantrum, they can't do it. And you have to write it by hand to avoid AI. And the kids just can't understand
why they would ever need to write anything ever or think on their own in any way. There's no will. And after a while of not having a will to learn, then they'll lose the skill. And then what are we?
What is this country? She said her students don't care about anything. There's a professor at NYU who's been trying to AI proof his assignments, again mostly by writing by hand, and he said the students just complain that the work's too hard.
This is NYU. One student said, why are you not letting me use AI? You're interfering with my learning style. One student asked for an extension because chatGTP was down the day the assignment was due. The day the assignment was due.
One said, you're asking me to go from point A to point B, why wouldn't I use a car to get there? This is one professor at NYU. New Yorker wrote an article, everyone is cheating their way through college. ChatGTP has unraveled the entire academic project.
And it's all about students who literally don't do a single thing at all. They just type in the prompt AI and whatever it spits out, they just hand it in. Like one student wrote an essay or handed it, excuse me, didn't write an essay, handed in an essay.
And the opening sentence was, as an AI, I have been programmed to. Didn't even read the first sentence. Like think about that. Didn't even read the first sentence and think maybe I should take that sentence out.
Just handed that in and that's it. It's like, what's the point of this? College, I mean, what is the point of college? One professor said, well, everyone's cheating AI all the time. Let me ask people to write a paragraph
or a paper about themselves. Surely people won't use AI to do that.
They did.
Students used AI to write an essay about themselves. One student said, I spend so much time on TikTok, hours and hours until my eyes start hurting, which makes it hard to plan and do my schoolwork. With ChatGTP, I can write an essay in two hours that normally takes 12.
I love that. That's so good. People think, so a lot of people, most people in America think that you're born good. And this is a very Nancy Pelosi idea that if we just give people more time, then they'll
use it to write the great American novel and they'll become an artist and they'll just use it to help people and achieve their dream. No, they won't. They'll use it on TikTok. This student used a TikTok until her eyes hurt. ChatGTP makes that more possible where in the past you would have spent 12 hours to
write a paper, well now she can do it in two. So what does she do with the other 10?
Tick tock.
Cal State Chico ethics professor says, massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees and into the workforce who are essentially illiterate, both in the literal sense and in the sense of being, like you cannot read, and in the sense of being historically illiterate
and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else's. So here's my idea, and then we'll bring in the Bible. College needs to just go away, all of it and all of them. And we need to just have two separate things. I'm being serious here, I'm like half joking,
but not really at all actually. We need to have two separate things. We camp, just call it camp. Where I grew up in Syracuse, New York nearby, there was a college called Hobart and we called it Camp Ho-Ho. So have camp and camp is everything you want.
It's got the sports teams, you can watch basketball and football games, and you can play in the sports, you can get in murals, whatever, and there's parties, you can get drunk, black out every night, and I don't know, that's pretty much all colleges.
So it's just a hangout. It's a four year hangout, maybe you can go five or six years hangout. But there's no classes, like stop, like knock it off with even pretending. There's no pretending anymore. There's no point to it. Stop with the pretense of school.
Why are we even pretending this? It's a thing. Just call it camp and just do it. And then we'll have other places, and I don't know if we want to call it college or come up with a new name,
and those are for kids who want to read. I heard someone say, why would a monk cheat at meditation? Well, they wouldn't because they want to do it. An artist doesn't cheat at painting. They want to paint. If you're going on a hike, you're not going to take the shortcut because you want to hike. you want to be there. So we just need college to be only with kids who want to learn.
So you have another place called college and the kids who are there want to read Aristotle and they're with other kids who want to read Aristotle. And then the professor says, hey everyone, write a paper about Aristotle and all the kids say, that's great.
I can't wait to do that. I'll write a paper about Aristotle and all the kids say that's great. I can't wait to do that. I'll write a paper about Aristotle that'll help me understand what I read better and deeper and then we'll compare papers and I'll read your paper and you can read mine and we can discuss it. Like that's what college maybe used to be
and it's not at all for anyone anymore. So we just gotta stop with the whole thing and if you wanna go to med school, then you need to go to a med school school and you can take the classes that you want to take so that you could be a better doctor. But this arms race of AI writing papers and then professors have AI that determines
if a paper is written by AI and then we have better AI that can get around the AI, like enough with that arms race, it's never gonna work. It's foolish, just be done with it. College needs to go away, you just have four year camp, graduate 12th grade, you go to camp for four years,
unless you wanna go to actual college, and no one would cheat there, because they actually wanna learn, not just party. When I was in college, we had to read a ton. And, so I was in the very beginning of this AI stuff. I wasn't AI, but it was Google Books
came out when I was in college. So that made researching papers way easier and it messed with my brain because the goal wasn't to read a book and learn it. I could pick out enough things about a book to just kind of throw an essay together and get through.
No one ever fails out of an Ivy League school. It's impossible. You could just hand in whatever slop you want and you'll get a passing grade. No one cares either. It's so cynical. It's all like, hey, prof, listen, I got in,
I'm paying you, you're teaching at Yale, I'm here, I just want the degree, you wanna get paid, just give me a grade and let's just get out of here. That's all it is. But it retrained my brain in some really bad ways. It took me like a decade before I learned to love to read. I would maybe pick up a book from time to time
and I'd skim it, because that's what you do in college. You skim the book, get enough of it to write an essay. So I couldn't get past that. I was reading books all the time and it took me a long time, literally a decade to realize, oh, I can just like take my time on this. I don't have to write an essay at the end if I can just read it because I want to read it. This is a major problem in our country
and we're not gonna see the effects of it for a while and then it'll be too late in a lot of ways. Slater, what does this have to do with the Bible? as an intro to this project that the White House has in coordination and conjunction and partnership with Hillsdale College called the Story of America.
250 years ago, all these awesome things happened in American history. And this is the time to connect to them. This is the time to learn about it, relearn about them, be reacquainted with them, tell them to your kids. This is it.
And so it's weird in American culture. I don't know if this is true with other cultures. We love round numbers like this. So it's now or never, like no one's gonna wanna learn these things on the 264th anniversary of the shot heard around the world, it's gotta be 250 or 300. So I don't wanna wait 50 years to relearn these things.
We gotta do it now, this is it, 250 years. So 250 years ago was Lexington and Concord. So I just wanna take a minute and tell part of the story and then we'll bring it to the Bible and just pause on this moment for a second. You're here because you want to be here.
There's no grade at the end. There's no getting a degree at the end of this. I'm not going to quiz you just because you want to know. And I want to know. I'm so excited that we have that little bit of an extra excuse to learn about these wonderful moments in our history. 250 years ago, Lexington and Concord.
There was an order from the king to the general in Massachusetts to stop the growing rebellion that is taking place in the colonies. So I want you to march 750 troops to Concord to seize a weapons depot that the patriots created. The fact that we had a weapons depot seems we're pretty far along. And we were ready when they came. We talked about Paul Revere a couple weeks ago, but we knew that
they had to fire the first shot. We were not going to be the ones to fire the first shot. Samuel Adams, he says, put your enemy in the wrong and keep him so is a wise maxim in politics, as well as in war. So the Brits tried to take this depot and there were 70 Minutemen in Lexington to meet these British soldiers. The Minutemen, I love that name, what a great name, whoever came up with that is awesome. Minutemen because they had to be ready at a minute's notice. No one knows who fired that first shot. That
shot heard around the world. But then the British yelled fire and a battle broke out. Eight colonists were killed and the news spread fast. The massacre at Lexington. Many colonists from all over ran to Concord. People pouring in from all over the countryside. There was a proper battle against the British there.
The British lost 14 men and they retreated. And in their retreat they were attacked at every turn by the scrappy colonists. Now a couple weeks ago we read, I think we did it here, I know we did it on the radio, we read Paul Revere's Ride, which kids used to memorize. Kids used to memorize it in their brains, not just pump it into AI. They used to know it in their brains,
they used to know it in their heart. They used to know it deep into their bones. It's a long poem, it's a lot to memorize. Maybe that'll be the summer project for the kids. And that poem ends with, this is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Paul Revere's ride. It ends with, through all our history to the last, in the hour of darkness and peril and
need, the people will waken and listen to hear the hurting hoofbeats of that steed and the midnight message of Paul Revere. And the point here is if there's ever, when there is a moment where we need to summon something deeper into us, we need to look back at our colonists. We need to look back at Paul Revere. We need to listen to the hoof beats of his steed and summon inside of us that same courage and spirit when we most need it.
Because it's been done before. You just read the story of Paul Revere and this is why it matters and this is why we made our kids memorize it. But I want to read another poem today. Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1836, the Concord Hymn. This is, this was written for and read at the dedication of the 1836 battle monument.
This is a monument that we put up right next to the most beautiful bridge in America. The Old North Bridge. Give it a search. Search for the Old North Bridge. It's the most beautiful bridge in the entire country. And the Golden Gate Bridge is a beautiful bridge.
The Golden Gate Bridge is worth the hype. And the Brooklyn Bridge. I can't wait to show the kids the Brooklyn Bridge. We're going to New York City next weekend. And I can't wait to show the kids the Brooklyn Bridge. I can't wait to show the kids the Brooklyn Bridge. We're going to New York City next weekend and I can't wait to show the kids the Brooklyn Bridge. It's one of the first things we're gonna see the morning after we get there.
We're going right to the Brooklyn Bridge. So we got some great bridges in this country. No, there's nothing like the old North Bridge. And there's a humble monument there and it says here on the 19th of April 1775, 250 years ago, was made the first forcible resistance to British aggression. On the opposite bank stood the American militia. Here stood the invading army.
And on this spot, the first of the enemy fell in that war of that revolution, which gave independence to these United States. In gratitude to God and in love of freedom, this monument was erected, A.D. 1836. That's the inscription. Here's the poem that was read when that monument was dedicated. By the rude bridge, rude, what do you mean rude? Rude means simple, unadorned.
By the rude bridge that arched the flood, their flag to April's breeze unfurled. Here once the embattled farmers stood and fired the shot heard round the world.
The foe long since in silence slept, like the conqueror silence sleeps. Everyone's dead now. In time, the ruined bridge has swept down the dark stream, which seaward creeps. This all happened a long time ago, even though back then it was only six years ago.
On this green bank, by this soft stream, we set today a votive stone. Votive means something offered or consecrated, like the fulfillment of a vow. So we give this stone, this monument here. We set today a votive stone
that memory may their deed redeem when like our sires, our sons are gone. So just like the people who came before us, they're gone. One day our sons will be gone, but we need something here. We need the stone here so that we can redeem their deeds. That memory, we can never forget what they did.
Here's the last part. Spirit that made those heroes dare to die and leave their children free. Bid time and nature gently spare. Bid means we request. We request time and nature. So, spirit that made those heroes dare to die and leave their children free bid time and nature gently spare
the shaft we raise to them in thee Monuments matter I'll never forget Every summer for like three years. Maybe I was like 10 or so around that age. I would go, we lived in Pennsylvania and then we moved to New York.
And for like three summers, I would go back to Pennsylvania and I would stay with some family friends for the summer to swim on the swim team. And it was just great, great memories. And Joe was the dad, tough guy, he's a lineman in Philadelphia.
And not for the Eagles, but like power alignment. And we were, he's a veteran, and we were driving somewhere and there was a tiny little monument. And I said something disrespectful about it. Like, oh, like it's a little, you know, like who cares about that? It was something, I forget what it was,
but you know, something snarky that a 10 year old would say who doesn't understand what's happening. And he was on it. And I don't remember what he said, but I remember his attitude. It was something like the size doesn't matter.
It's what it means. It's what it represents. It's the people that it's dedicated to are what really matter. And actually that's really interesting memory I have because I don't, I remember visualizing it, but I can't remember what they said, but I got it.
Interesting, I got the message. We need to know our history and we need to know it in our heads. We need to know it in our hearts. We need to know it in our bones. We can't AI it.
Now let's turn to the Bible. Just reading this yesterday with the kiddos, Joshua four, this Israelites 40 years wandering in the desert, old generation, all gone. Now it's just the kids. Except for Caleb and Joshua. Moses is dead. Everyone's gone.
Here's Joshua 4.
And it came to pass that when all the people had completely crossed over the Jordan so it's the second departing of a river or sea that the Lord spoke to Joshua saying take for yourselves twelve men from the people
one man from every tribe and command them saying take for yourself twelve stones from here out of the midst of the Jordan from the place where the priest's feet stood firm. You shall carry them over with you and leave them in the lodging place where you lodge tonight." So Joshua told him what God said and Joshua said that this may be a sign among you when your children ask in time to come saying, what do those stones mean to you? Then you shall answer them that the waters of the Jordan were
cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord. When it crossed over the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off and these stones shall be for a memorial to the children of Israel forever. This happened a couple times, six or so times that we know of in the Old Testament, setting up stones as a memorial. And I love this one here,
because it's explicit that the intent is to provoke questions from kids. We're setting up this thing so that kids say, what's that? What's that about? What does that mean? Why is that there? Who did that? I said we're going to New York next week. We're
taking a boat ride from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Statue of Liberty and then back. What's that thing? What is this big statue thing? Why is that there? Where did this come from? Who built it? Why? We cannot let the deeds of our ancestors be forgotten. And so much of it will naturally, right? Just because, you know, it's, I can't remember everything, but we need to
remember as much as we can. We need to do this in America, our history, our nation, the American story, it's a beautiful thing. But more importantly, much, much more importantly, the story of the Bible, oh, the New Testament, our ancestors, our ancestors.
I feel a deep connection with George Washington. We need to feel a way deeper connection with Abraham. Galatians 3, 7, know then that it is those of faith that you and me, you made it this far. We're at minute 21 of this podcast.
You made it 21 minutes. What are you doing here still? Why are you listening this long? Oh, because you're a person of faith. Know then that it is of those of faith who are the sons of Abraham. Wow, you are in a spiritual bloodline. Galatians 3 29, if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed and heirs according to the promise. Wow. All the fathers of the Old Testament are our fathers too. We are
grafted to that olive tree, Romans 11. Parents and grandparents listening right now, make it a mission to teach your kids about George Washington. Make it a mission to teach your kids about the signing of the Declaration of Independence and those who met at the Second Continental Congress and all the stories of America.
Make sure they know all the stories of our country and all the great Americans who built this place. And infinitely fold. Make sure your kids and grandkids know our ancestors. Going all the way back to Abraham, going all the way back to Adam. What a beautiful thing to study
American history and also our spiritual roots to feel a connection to the great heroes of America, but even more to our ancestors in the Bible and to Jesus Christ. Mike Slater.locals.com.
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