570: Teaching Freedom - To Restore American Liberty, We Need Colleges that Actually Teach the Liberal Arts

Brian Nichols  0:04  
focusing on winning arguments. We're teaching the basic fundamentals of sales and marketing and how we can use them to win in the world of politics teaching you how to meet people where they're at on the issues they care about. Welcome to The Brian Nichols Show. Well, Brian Nichols, Bryan show in Fort number Huntsville episode is always your host. And today, we're gonna be talking about the importance of teaching freedom. I know that sounds so cliche, but I promise stick around, you're going to hear how it impacts not just young kids, but also those kids who maybe are going to be bigger kids going off to college and beyond. And before we go ahead and go there, I want to go ahead and give a shout out to today's sponsor, and then as the expat money show, head over to the Brian Nichols show.com forward slash expat we're going to join our good buddy Mattel Thorpe who's going to help you protect the money you worked so hard to earn from ambulance chasing lawyers, nefarious creditors, and of course, those greedy unjust governments. He helps people just like you invest internationally secure second residencies and passports, eliminate your tax bill and take advantage of offshore structures so you can travel the world freely and never have to worry about money again. Now I mentioned it on our episode. I think it was yesterday or so. Where Yeah, McHale is gonna be joining us here on The Brian Nichols Show late September because he's going to be promoting the amazing expat money summit taking place November 7 through November 11. Five days 30 expert speakers, and I promise you, it's going to be worth all that and more because number one, it's a free Summit. So number one, that's just it's free. Come on, guys. But number two, one of the main keynotes, the one and only Congressman Ron Paul, so make sure you hit the Brian Nichols show.com forward slash expat grab your free tickets today. Brian Nichols show.com, forward slash expat. All right, so we're gonna talk about teaching freedom today. And I thought who better to help me do that? Then the one and only Marsha and right Marcia, welcome The Brian Nichols Show.

Marsha Enright  2:08  
Thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm delighted to be here. Looking forward

Brian Nichols  2:11  
to having you on this conversation today. Because of really, it's a conversation that's getting everyone right now we are recording today on August 25, where you just saw this past week, Joe Biden, by the way, 2022 for all time, posterity is when we're recording. And Joe Biden just went ahead. And he did this huge forgiveness $10,000 in student loan forgiveness for anyone making $125,000 or less. And it's amazing, because right now, you're seeing a lot of folks saying, Wait, why are we doing this? Is this worth it? And you're bringing a solution to the table that's really challenging the traditional college structure. But before we get there, let's go ahead and give you a chance to introduce yourself to The Brian Nichols Show audience. Marcia, who are you? And what's your approach here to this old teaching freedom thing?

Marsha Enright  3:01  
Hi, hi. Yes, well, I've been very interested in education since I was a kid, when I know I really liked school, believe it or not, but other students were very disruptive. And they annoyed me until I realized that they were so unhappy. So I decided I have to find the right kind of education for my future children, so they would really love learning. And when I got to be about 20, I read some articles about the Montessori method in iron Rand's Journal, the objectivist. And I said, Oh, this sounds really good. And then I educated myself about all of it eventually sent my kids to a Montessori Preschool, loved it. And then when it came to elementary school, there wasn't something that I thought was good around. So I and a few other moms started a Montessori elementary school in 1990. It's still going, someone else is running it. I ran it for 27 years. And we had fantastic results from it. We were rated one of the top private schools in Chicago. One of the best stories I think, out of it is I got many letters from parents who told me my child loves school so much, that when he's sick, he lies to me, so that he won't miss school. And that's because the Montessori method is so designed to give children exactly the kind of environment that physical and the psychological environment and the social environment they need to really flourish. Yeah. And after my own personal interest in teaching was in the upper levels, you know, 16 and above. And I started a program I could see the problems that we're seeing today with college, you know, the wokeness, the takeover by the left the edging out of any ideas about the freedom movement out, you know, they're rarely rarely taught in any colleges. I could see all that coming. And I and I thought years ago, you know, our side of the spectrum It needs to have its own college. So I started working on that in early two into about 2006. And then the recession came and all the capital dried up, plus people weren't as aware of the, what was going on at colleges, you know, so many people who are in the freedom movement, they love the college they went to, they still give money to it. And they don't realize that they're supporting the very things destroying the kind of society that they want to live in. So anyway, so I, I pivoted, and I started a summer program called the great connections, in which I took everything in my application of the Montessori method to the college level, and an integration with ideas from the freedom movement, teaching PM, but really focus on how the students were taught. Because when your classroom was like a micro society, and you can either treat them like they're autonomous beings who have their own minds who can, who can think and you can help them learn how to think for themselves, or you can be lecturing them, you can be telling them what the answers are, you know, there's, there's different the different methods, you know, actions speak louder than words. So the methods actually teach students a lot, as well as the content.

Brian Nichols  6:16  
Well, really quick, I just want to focus on that, because I think it's important to make this real for folks because this this is an entirely different way of education. And it's really turning the public schooling system, on its head, the government indoctrination system. And that is something that I think it's so important to focus on and really make sure we drive home because I didn't, I never really focused much on the Montessori method. And I didn't really know too much until you'd reached out and I started doing some research. And I was like, This is amazing. This is not only does it make sense, but it seems that it's yielding the most positive results. So it's, it's not just a good idea. It's an idea that works. And that's something I think we really need to drive home is that this isn't something that is pie in the sky is working right now.

Marsha Enright  7:07  
Yes, yes. And it was developed 100 years ago. And she was Maria Montessori herself was such a brilliant scientist, she did many, many, what we'd call clinical experiments, with the students seeing what work in the classroom best for them. And she got such phenomenal results. Right away. This is a 1907 that she became world famous almost instantly, she had all these she started out with a body of young children from very, very poor, very ignorant factory workers. And they became enraptured with materials, she, she developed all these materials, which are like games that teach you the concepts you need to know in language and math, history, art, everything like that botany, biology, they became enraptured with them so much so that even though wealthy people had given the children all kinds of toys, they didn't play with the toys at all, they just wanted to work with the materials, because the materials gave them the knowledge that they wanted to, to know, to understand the world. And the unfortunately, people don't realize, you know, a two year old, you know, a two year old, they, you can hardly stop them from learning that you really have to I'm sorry, beat a two year old to stop them from learning. But, but by the time they're eight, and they're in a regular school, a lot of times they're they're not interested in what's what they're learning at school. And it's because of the way that it's delivered. It's very authoritarian, it's frustrating to their needs. And it turns them off, you know, and socially, it's usually not a good social situation either. So, yeah, so Montessori is just ingeniously worked out to to give children the kind of learning environment that in which they really flourish.

Brian Nichols  8:48  
Well, and let's talk about what we're seeing today with the importance of bringing an alternative not just to the the traditional government, public schooling system, but also to the traditional, quasi private, secondary schools, colleges, universities that are out there, who they'll happily take the government loans, and then they'll raise their prices, you know, 1020 $30,000 And it seems that a lot of folks are now waking up to maybe this isn't the way we should be doing education as it pertains to taking 18 year old kids and then chucking them off to these four year degree schools that they're taught really nothing of source unless they're really focusing on one specific you know, usually it's hard science or something. Engineering. Yeah, exactly. Right. But other than that, I mean, it's four years ago party, it's four years to go find yourself and really kids are not looking right now. I think the spend 50,000 $60,000 For per year on going and finding themselves they're looking to find maybe different ways of doing that. So talk to us about Reliance college. I know this is down the road, so it might not be for those kids who are graduates. Right now, but for the college students of the future, this is something that's gonna be really coming down the road for them. Talk to us about that.

Marsha Enright  10:08  
Well, we're aiming to open in 2024 in September of 2024. And we're going to be running our summer programs, which are kind of a condensed version of the college program in the next summer, so that people can have a taste of what the college might be like, the summer programs that they've run for the last 14 years, I put everything I knew about optimal education, how to develop people's independence, so that they could understand anything for themselves, so that they had self confidence. So they had good relationships with the other people in their group. So they knew how to talk to each other how to collaborate on learning on finding the truth. But I was even surprised at the results because I had student after student tell me, after one week, I feel that my life has been transformed. I know that I can understand anything myself. Now, I've been I've had that experience. And I keep in touch with many of the students that I have. I've kept in touch with them for years. So it wasn't a fleeting thing. They, they it really impacted them, and the college. So reliance, college is going to be somewhere where we're going to help young people become independent and be able to rely on themselves to be the entrepreneurs of their own life. And it's a the program is a combination of helping them learn how to think really well how to judge things for themselves, how to getting some very, very important knowledge from the best thinkers, including thinkers from the freedom movement, but of course, the other thinkers too, because you can't really be educated if you don't know, the opposition, and help them learn how to think for themselves. And then combine that with real world experience in an area of their own professional interest. And we're going to, we're going to pair them up with mentors, who, so for example, if they want to go into engineering, we'll find somebody to help them there. If they want to go into graphic design, they'll be doing a project in graphic graphic design, they can do different projects each year, so that they can if they're, you know, a lot of students, they say, oh, I want to be a graphic designer, they major in that then they get out in the real world. And they they have a job and they hate it. And so then they become a barista because they don't know what to do. You know, we're gonna give them experience before that so they can rely on themselves.

Brian Nichols  12:24  
And that's so important. The real life like, I think, just talking to I mean, folks, my age folks younger than me, I hear all the time. They're like, why did why weren't we taught financial literacy in high school, why weren't we taught the real life things that they do matter? In high school, or even in college for that matter? I mean, I was made to take an essential math class, because I wasn't too good at the numbers. But I, you know, goodness, I had to figure out how to do I think it was like, trig, like proofs and stuff, like Gagne. But you know, that that was the main focus, that was the priority. It's not the things that really matter. And I think that right there is where we're at as a society, too, is that we're tired of focusing on the things that really don't matter, we're tired of wasting our time, or energy or money on on things that yield really nothing of value used to mean that the college degree signified something. The degree on the wall meant that that signified you know, you went to school, you learn something that you you put yourself in a position to challenge yourself now, I mean, I led a sales team for a number of years. And whenever I would hire somebody, I never looked at their their degrees, it didn't really tell me anything. Tell me if they're going to be a good worker, it doesn't tell me what they learn. And degree doesn't really mean anything to me anymore. I want to learn more about who they are, what drives them, what motivates them? What are they going to do when they're faced with a challenging experience or situation? And how are they going to overcome that that's what I care about versus, you know, Oh, what did you learn? What clubs were you in? That's all the make believe fluff that we're told matters? When you're doing the tours on campus? No, what what actually matters is how well rounded Are you going to be as a real functioning adult going into real life, to not just make yourself, you know, put yourself in a better position, but to put other people in a better position to bring value to the world, not just BS, you know, somebody who's sucking value. I used to work with a guy at a Gold's Gym. And he had a great saying, because you know, Brian, one thing I always learned was, you never want to be a money taker, you want to be a money maker. Tell that tell it to your boss. He's like, anytime you're going into for new interviews, I want to be a money maker, not a money taker. And we need to have that mentality as a society, like you should not be a drain on on society, you should be bringing value. And frankly, it seems that just a lot of colleges, they they build kids to become just little robots that go in and bring a lot of these leftist, dare I say Marxist ideas out of the institutions of higher education and into real life despite not being real life and having some really profound implications and not in the good sense.

Marsha Enright  15:05  
Yeah, well, most of them, unfortunately, are really ignorant about the history of Marxism. And then how devastating and dangerous it's been. I mean, one of the best things that's come out of the event pandemic, I mean, which is was terrible, was that parents got to see what their kids were learning at school. And they said, Wait a minute, I don't want that. So and I think the that people are waking up to what's going on in college too. Since the last two years, we've they've shown their real colors with all the protests in the woke agenda and the in the willingness to cancel everybody. That's a total opposite of the kind of free society that we want. And you know, you were talking about preparing students for real life. I totally agree. I mean, having learning personal finance, learning, financial, literacy, economics, all these things is really important to working on a real life project, you can develop your portfolio that you can show to an employer, look, I was able to do this learning the kind of learning that we do in the classroom, we use a very special methodology. In our classrooms, it's called a Socratic seminar. It's a specialized version of it, in which the students are there to figure out what the author is saying for themselves. The teacher is there to help them do that not to tell them what the author is saying. And what happens is they really develop their reasoning powers by doing this, and their sense of independence. The there was another point I wanted to mention, oh, I forgotten it now. Oh, yes, that people don't realize it. But very important, on top of all the practical things that people that young kids need to learn, they also need to learn what's been the classic liberal arts. Now liberal arts has gotten such a terrible reputation nowadays, because the collectivist the progressives took over the humanities, and they've been shoving indoctrinating ideas down their throats for years now. But liberal arts comes from the idea that you need an education if you are going to be a free man, the word or woman, the word liberal is from the same root as liberty. And that consists of a of learning about the greatest thinkers that have ever lived, and learn and understanding them and the ideas that they put into the world that are still affecting us today. The ideas of Marx and Rousseau, and Hobbes, and Aristotle, and John Locke and all these people, it's really important to know these things, and to learn how to think about them, and to learn how to make your own decisions about how you should live. So if you're exposed to all these great thinkers, you can decide for yourself, oh, I want to live this way. I want to follow this kind of ethic and not that kind of ethic. I want to be in this kind of society, not that kind of society, I can see that a society where individual rights are respected, and people are allowed left alone and they're allowed to deal with each other as producers, not as looters. Then that's the society in which people flourish the most.

Brian Nichols  18:06  
All right, Marcia, I'm a 16 year old sophomore in high school. I'm listening to the show, or at least mom and dad listen to the show. And I'm excited this this gets me all pumped up. I don't want to go to the you know, leftist indoctrination center that is higher education nowadays. So I'm interested in why go to Reliance College in 2024. How do I do it? What What's the steps that I would have to take? And is there an actual physical campus was actually look like?

Marsha Enright  18:32  
Yes, well, we don't have the campus yet. We're going to be in the Chicago area. But there's lots of places available. And the if you go to our website, realize we're Alliance college.org, you can sign up for information about it will contact you will tell you more about the curriculum it gives you it gives an outline of the kind of curriculum, the kinds of things that you'd be doing. And we'll we'll give you a lot more detail once you contact us. Is that Is that what you want to know? Oh, yeah, well,

Brian Nichols  19:03  
let's say like, because this is going to be a question. I know. We talk about sales and stuff here. And we always talk about objections that you're going to hear. We'd like to we like to block objections versus having to overcome objections. So one objection if we can help our young 16 year olds listening to the show here who want to go to to Reliance college, that they're going to hear from their parents is going to be okay, well, how is going to help you get a real life job? What's what's what what can they prepare their parents for an entirely blocked that objection? What can Reliance college do to help them prepare for real life officially?

Marsha Enright  19:33  
Sure. Let me give you two, two practical effects beforehand, and then I'll answer that. One is we're going to be totally privately funded. So that we will try to by doing that we'll have the least regulation possible in our college so that we can be free to give students the kind of education that we think is the best for them. Number two, we're going to have a much lower tuition then around 22,000 than your typical college and we're going to have Scott fellowships available. Now how is how are they going to get a job, we're going to have them working on real life problems in an area of professional interest every year with a mentor. So they're going to get a lot of experience, they're going to have to develop a solution to that, they might be able to implement the solution, we're going to encourage that, or they will have to at least give a presentation to peers to other to adults to other mentors, and develop a portfolio so that when they go, they have a reputation now, oh, this mentor says, I've worked with this student, and he's really terrific. He knows how to collaborate. He knows how to solve problems. He knows how to think really well how to do research, and figure out how to solve a problem. So that will be the kind of intro that they'll they'll have to go for employment.

Brian Nichols  20:46  
Perfect. Well, all right, this this is getting me excited. I know everybody else listening has already started. So let's let's go ahead folks and support Reliance college. And let's make this more of an attractive option for young folk, we don't have to go the traditional route. And I'm excited to see options like this. So Marsha, unfortunately, we are already hard pressed for time here, which means thank you, we're getting close to final thoughts here. So Marsha, what would be your final thoughts you want to leave the audience with today?

Marsha Enright  21:14  
That whatever kind of education they're looking for, look for one in which the students are allowed to learn to think for themselves, where they're really encouraged to, to develop their reasoning powers, because that's what's going to enable them to be a free person, and to be able to make their own choices. We want young people who will be the active minority that will change us back to a much freer society than we have right now.

Brian Nichols  21:38  
Reliance college.org is the website, Marsha, where can folks go ahead and find you if they want to continue the conversation?

Marsha Enright  21:45  
Sure, sure. Write to me at Marcia at Reliance college.org. And I'm on Facebook, I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on Twitter or many different places, and I'd be happy to talk to anybody.

Brian Nichols  21:56  
Perfect. Well, folks, if you enjoy today's episode, I'm gonna ask you to do me a favor. Number one, please go ahead and give today's episode a share when you do. Yeah, go ahead and give Marsha Hello as well and make sure you tell her that you heard her here on The Brian Nichols Show number one, number two, please go ahead. If you if you're a big fan of the show, and you get value from the show, well, you can go ahead and support the show by going ahead and either a getting us a a one time donation or be becoming a $5 supporter over on patreon link in the shownotes. If you're interested, please go ahead every little bit helps it goes right back into the show. So we can have amazing guests like Marcia here on five days a week. And folks. Yeah, by the way, if you're interested in checking out all 570 Plus episodes of The Brian Nichols Show, yeah, four and a half years worth of content there for you folks, head over to the Brian Nichols show.com where you can check out all those episodes. Plus, you can find all of our YouTube links associated with each episode plus the entire transcript of all episodes, and all social media links. And by the way, when you head over to YouTube, be careful because you're going to find some episodes have been taken down because YouTube is added again. So make sure you head over to Odyssey as well and subscribe to The Brian Nichols Show over there just because the YouTube overlords they don't like us talking about you know the truth a lot. So let's go ahead and make sure you're just checking your bases and subscribe over on Odyssey if you have not had the chance yet and folks, but that being said, thank you for joining us on today's episode. With that being said, it's Brian co signing off. You're on The Brian Nichols Show for Marcia and right we'll see you tomorrow for listening to The Brian Nichols Show. Find more episodes at the Brian Nichols show.com

Transcribed by https://otter.ai