Death of Recess, The (2025)

[bunniefuu]

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 w*r 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 g*y bars.

You can walk to the bars, have some

drinks, meet some guys, do g*y 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 g*y 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 q*eer 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

q*eer 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 l*sbian, g*y, bisexual, transgender,

non-binary, and q*eer.

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 k*ll myself.

I think trauma started all of it.

In my situation,

I came from a very a*usive 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 ill*gal

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 c*ptive 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 t*rrorists.

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

l*sbian, g*y, bisexual, transgender,

and q*eer 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

h*m* 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 h*m*, 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 h*m* 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 q*eer 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 q*eer 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 h*m* 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.