We all understand the terrible state of our leftist-run education systems, whose main goal is to turn normal young people into progressive activists.
The good news is that many parents have had enough. Homeschooling is on the rise. Charter schools are booming.
I want the parents of our students to know that this man won’t just teach my son science or literature; he’ll be a role model for my son.
In some cases, brave, intrepid souls are even attempting to build entirely new kinds of schools, from the ground up.
I recently met with one of those brave souls, Warren Steury of Nashville, Tennessee. At age 29, Steury is the founder of Meriwether Academy, a school where “young men have the opportunity to experience a rich and rigorous classical and outdoor education.”
While the school itself is still in the planning stages, Steury has already established himself as a central figure in conservative intellectual circles in Nashville, through his Classic Book Study groups and adult workshops.
Recently, he was part of a four-man team that brought Peter Thiel to Nashville to present his Antichrist lecture series.
I was able to talk to Steury recently about his views on education, his current projects, and the future of Meriwether Academy.
Blake Nelson: What was your own education like?
Warren Steury: I grew up in North Carolina. I was a public school degenerate. I was doing what most boys do, which was rebelling against all forms of order and discipline.
I was sent to a program in the mountains, against my will, at 16 years old, where I lived out of a backpack for three months. I was making fire with rocks and sticks.
Then I was transferred to a disciplinary boarding school that was also in the mountains of North Carolina, on an old Scout camp. It was a boys’ school. It was the mountain of misfits.
BN: Was that an effective way of dealing with a kid like you?
WS: It was certainly better than me sitting in some fluorescently lit institutional room. My whole reason for building these schools was thinking about what periods of my childhood had the most impact on my character.
I saw that year in the woods, hiking, camping, living in the forest as having an instrumental effect on who I was. All the other years in public school were essentially a blur.
BN: What’s the thought process of creating a new kind of school?
WS: One question I work on answering is: Does this school need to exist, or is there another school that’s offering the same thing that you’re thinking of?
Like what is truly going to distinguish this school from others? My answer is that we have a pretty unique program with the classically inclined education, the heavy outdoor model, and then the martial arts.
BN: Are there other schools that have inspired you?
WS: One of my personal favorites is St. Dunstan Academy in Virginia, which is a very cool new Anglican boys’ school.
They got their hands on 200 acres in the mountains. They’re building the campus from scratch. They just put up their Great Hall, which is a 33.5-foot-tall, massive timber-frame structure.
The students are learning how to build. The students are literally building the campus.
BN: What will you look for in your teachers?
WS: Life experience. So much of academia is essentially this pipeline where you go to college, you study something, and then you immediately become a professor in that subject. And then you’re speaking from this vacuum, this fake world that you’ve been in.
A good teacher should be a role model, a mentor, a guide, in ways that expand beyond teaching calculus. I want the parents of our students to know that this man won’t just teach my son science or literature; he’ll be a role model for my son, and even if my son forgets the math, this man will make an impression on my son’s life that will influence him for the better.
BN: I enjoyed attending your Classic Book Study Group (Plutarch’s "Lives"). When did you start doing book study groups?
WS: I was 18, when I started my first book club with some friends. It was the "Celestine Prophecy." It was like five of us in Boone, North Carolina, when we were in college.
I always enjoyed book clubs and hosting dinners for my friends. And sometimes making it more formal and paying a speaker to come in.
BN: I noticed the Plutarch study group is men only.
WS: We want to do events for guys. It’s a different conversation. It’s nothing against women. You need male spaces, and you need female spaces, and then you need spaces that are shared. A healthy society needs all of those. I think that there is a coordinated attack on male spaces in America for the purpose of weakening or discouraging the culture.
BN: I liked a recent article you had on the Meriwether website, about the role of a father in a boy’s life.
WS: It’s so important to have that masculine guiding force in a young child’s life. We know with the Spartans, the boy was with his mother for the first nine years, and then the man came and took the boy and threw him into training, and that’s where he was made a man. So we shouldn’t expect mothers to be able to raise men on their own.
Fatherlessness is a massive societal issue, and is completely detrimental to the health of the child, but also to the nation as a whole. Whereas the mother provides emotional sustenance, the father has to toughen him up. He has to bring an energy that’s very different from the mother. Aristotle talks about this, how the family should be. It’s important to have both of those.
BN: Meriwether Academy co-hosted the recent Peter Thiel lecture series. What was that like?
WS: We threw it together in two weeks. I think people need to have more faith in themselves and their friends. A group of like three or four guys who are aligned can pull off some really cool stuff.
I feel like we’re quick to assume these things are more complicated than they are, when in reality, four guys who had this idea can go to work on it.
BN: You can just do things!
WS: You can just do things. There aren’t that many laws. The laws of physics. The laws of God. Other than that, it’s all made up.
"Operation Ghostbusters" is nabbing scammers stealing tens of millions of taxpayer cash — and sending it back to Kenya.
Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald explained the details of "Operation Ghostbusters" in a media briefing Thursday to reporters.
'If you steal American identities, if you steal taxpayer dollars, if you exploit programs meant to help students build their future, we are resolved to find you and prosecute you.'
The operation targeted scammers in the Kenyan community who allegedly stole Americans' identities in order to create "ghost" students and then fraudulently file for financial aid from the federal government.
To express the scale of the fraud involved, McDonald said that one-third of the applications to community colleges were tagged as possible fraud in the state of California.
"These are not isolated errors. This is organized fraud at scale," said McDonald.
Heith Janke, assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Division, said they have identified $32 million in losses but the total could top many tens of millions of dollars.
"This stops now," said Janke. "The FBI, working hand-in-hand with our partners at the Department of Education and Department of Justice, will follow all evidence, track every dollar, and pursue each criminal who seeks to exploit our nation’s systems."
There are over 40 open cases related to the investigation that includes 26 FBI field offices and more than 20 U.S. attorney’s offices.
The operation has led to indictments against five people in New Jersey, Nebraska, and other states. The feds also seized more than $750,000 worth of cryptocurrency with ties to networks in Kenya.
The scammers are using artificial intelligence in order to apply for the financial aid as well as complete school coursework to keep the aid flowing. Some scammers are even creating the "appearance" of fake students in online classrooms so that schools believe a real person is present.
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The investigation linked more than 830,000 student financial aid accounts that were potentially a part of the fraud scam.
McDonald said the charges were "just the beginning" and others are expected.
"If you steal American identities, if you steal taxpayer dollars, if you exploit programs meant to help students build their future, we are resolved to find you and prosecute you," he added.
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October baseball brings every pitch into sharper focus. A ball that catches the corner of the plate can decide a season. For Brian Gaffney and his three sons, however, baseball’s most unpredictable pitch became the occasion for a different lesson: How much should a father push, and when should he let his boys find their own way?
Gaffney recounts the experience in “School of Hard Knucks: My Three Sons and Baseball’s Wildest Pitch.” He sets out to help Joe, Emmett, and Ben master the knuckleball, a pitch that demands almost no spin and can flutter in any direction. Even seasoned professionals struggle to control it. In a backyard with three eager boys, the possibilities for frustration are considerable.
A boy struggling with the knuckleball may learn persistence. His father may learn to listen. They may both discover that a failed experiment can lead to a worthwhile afternoon.
What begins as a family experiment becomes an education in baseball and parenting. The boys practice, adjust their grips, and keep trying to command a ball determined to do as it pleases. Gaffney has to confront something equally stubborn: his own desire to see his sons succeed.
Parents know that temptation. We want to spare our children disappointment, help them clear every obstacle, and give them opportunities we never had. Good intentions can make a game feel like a job. The child who once begged to play may begin worrying more about satisfying a parent than enjoying the sport.
Gaffney recognizes that risk in himself. His pursuit of the knuckleball is ambitious, and his sons’ progress becomes something he cares about intensely. But a father cannot take every pitch for his child. He has to decide when instruction helps, when encouragement is enough, and when to get out of the way.
Baseball offers plenty of chances to practice those distinctions. Even the best hitters make outs far more often than they reach base. A bad inning does not prevent a player from contributing in the next one. A young athlete learns to recover, to trust teammates, and to return to the field after falling short. Parents get lessons of their own from the bleachers.
Along the way, Gaffney draws on the experience of knuckleball specialists, including Phil Niekro, Charlie Hough, and R.A. Dickey. Their unusual craft gives the book its baseball appeal. A pitch that survives on patience and feel, rather than sheer velocity, rewards players willing to keep experimenting after a conventional approach fails.
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The greater reward, though, is the time Gaffney spends with his sons. Families can fill a calendar with practices, games, and travel while overlooking the pleasure of simply being together. A catch in the back yard or a ride home after a loss may outlast the memory of the final score. Children grow older, and the seasons that seemed endless eventually stop coming.
For Christian parents, the story also raises a question of stewardship. Children are entrusted to us with gifts, limitations, and ambitions of their own. Our responsibility includes teaching discipline and right conduct, but it also requires humility. A son’s worth cannot rise and fall with his batting average, and a parent’s pride should never become the price of affection.
A boy struggling with the knuckleball may learn persistence. His father may learn to listen. They may both discover that a failed experiment can lead to a worthwhile afternoon. Neither needs a trophy to show for it.
As the major league postseason unfolds, young fans are already imagining the spring when they will take the field again. Their parents will buy gloves, drive to practice, and cheer from the stands. If “School of Hard Knucks” reminds those parents of anything, it is that the most important thing they can give their children is not a perfect swing or a winning season. It is their time, their encouragement, and the assurance that their love does not depend on the scoreboard.
When October’s last out arrives, the championships will belong to a few teams. The hours spent playing catch will belong to the families who made time for them. Those are victories no scoreboard can record.
Thomas Sowell has a suggestion for young people heading off to college: Get an education while you’re there.
He’s even put together a reading list.
Sowell's introductory statement makes clear that he expects readers to question what they find, including his own arguments.
The economist and author, now 96, launched Facts Against Rhetoric last year to help people find arguments they might otherwise go through their entire schooling without encountering. It’s an extensive collection of books, essays, interviews, lectures, and online courses, organized by subject and available to anyone with the curiosity to start clicking.
Introducing the project in an April 2025 interview with Peter Robinson, Sowell described his purpose as “enabling students to get an education despite being in college.”
Parents paying the tuition may find something useful here too.
The site is a meticulously curated collection of educational resources on subjects ranging from “Intellectuals and Ideologies” and “Italians Around the World” to economics, education, and race. Alongside direct links to interviews, lectures, articles, and courses, Sowell provides extensive bibliographies pointing readers to books, specific chapters, and articles, often noting where and in what formats they’re available. You can click through to watch Sowell challenge claims about the “wage gap” for blacks and women on William F. Buckley Jr.’s “Firing Line” in 1981 or listen to Edward R. Murrow's 1943 account of a brush with death on an RAF bombing run over Berlin.
Although 96, Sowell is hardly taking a victory lap here. He is on a mission, the urgency of which he explains in his introductory statement. A college graduate has decades of life ahead of him, during which he will encounter questions his professors never anticipated. Even if everything they taught him were correct, memorizing their answers would leave him poorly prepared to think through those new problems.
He will need some practice disagreeing with people. Preferably before his livelihood depends on it.
In his long life, Sowell has had to revise a few convictions of his own.
Born in North Carolina in 1930 and raised partly in Harlem, he dropped out of Stuyvesant High School, worked a succession of jobs, and served in the Marine Corps. Eventually he earned degrees from Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Chicago. He went on to teach at Cornell, Amherst, and UCLA, among other institutions.
Along the way, he was a Marxist. Studying under legendary free-market economist Milton Friedman did not immediately cure him. In Sowell’s telling, a summer working at the Department of Labor in 1960 proved more effective. Investigating unemployment in Puerto Rico’s sugar industry, he wanted to test whether minimum-wage requirements were contributing to the problem. His colleagues’ lack of enthusiasm for an inquiry that might undermine their own department’s policy helped change his understanding of government.
Decades later, Facts Against Rhetoric gives readers plenty of opportunities to examine the conclusions he reached. His own books appear throughout, alongside work by economists, historians, journalists, and other scholars.
The selections plainly reflect his sympathies. Under socialism, for example, you’ll find Friedman's 1993 talk "The Rise of Socialism Is Absurd" as well as a reading list, including Joshua Muravchik’s “Heaven on Earth: The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of Socialism" and Paul Hollander's "From Benito Mussolini to Hugo Chavez: Intellectuals and a Century of Political Hero Worship."Anyone hoping for encouragement to join the revolution will have to look elsewhere.
But there is considerably more here than a collection of arguments to deploy against your liberal brother-in-law.
For a first visit, try the capitalism section, which links to Friedman’s 1979 appearance on “The Phil Donahue Show” and his lecture “Is Capitalism Humane?” Both offer a manageable introduction before you commit to the books listed below them, including Friedman’s “Capitalism and Freedom.”
Readers who prefer a more structured approach can follow the economics page to Hillsdale College’s online “Economics 101: Principles of Free Market Economics.” The same page points to Sowell’s “Basic Economics” and Walter E. Williams’ “Race and Economics,” along with shorter selections on subjects including affordability and unions.
Parents may want to begin with education. Here Sowell assembles material on schools, colleges, admissions, and academic performance. There’s an interview about his “Charter Schools and Their Enemies,” a discussion with Robert Pondiscio about Success Academy, and a link to Stanford’s 2023 National Charter School Study for readers who want to examine the research.
The college section also includes psychologist Steven Pinker’s interview with Reason’s Nick Gillespie, “What Went Wrong at Harvard.” Pinker discusses academic freedom, the policing of acceptable opinion, and why universities get into trouble when they pronounce on controversies their students and faculty should be free to debate.
For a longer excursion, the biographies page points to videos and articles on figures including Calvin Coolidge, Albert Einstein, and Frederick Douglass. Among a list of recommended books on John D. Rockefeller sits Ron Chernow’s “Titan"; readers considering Stephen Kotkin’s multivolume biography of Stalin — recommended here — can sample his work in the lecture “Stalin at War.”
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One of the site’s biographical recommendations is an extended interview with Sowell himself, “Thomas Sowell: A Free Man.”
In it, he recalls arriving in Harlem as a child and being taken to a public library by another boy. Sowell had never seen so many books. He also couldn’t afford to buy one, which made the purpose of the visit somewhat mysterious.
His young guide persuaded him to get a library card. Sowell borrowed two books and began acquiring the reading habit that would occupy much of the rest of his life.
Now he has some suggestions for the rest of us. His introductory statement makes clear that he expects readers to question what they find, including his own arguments: “Whether you end up agreeing with me or with them is beside the point.”
Pick a subject, follow a link, track down a book. You can disagree with Professor Sowell — or not — after you’ve done the reading.
The new trailer for Greta Gerwig’s “Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew” promises a dazzling sight: a world coming into being. Fans of C.S. Lewis will be watching Aslan and the White Witch. I’ll be watching Uncle Andrew. He may be the book’s most disturbing character because he teaches himself to deny what he knows.
Andrew’s talent for explaining away unwelcome truth raises an uncomfortable question about Gerwig’s adaptation. Will she allow Lewis to tell his Christian story, or will she explain its Christian meaning away?
God speaks through his Word, and Uncle Andrew shows how a person can become so skilled at self-defense that he loses the ability to listen.
As a philosophy professor and Christian pastor, I recognize the temptation. Education can help us discover truth. It can also equip us with elaborate excuses for resisting it. An impressive vocabulary does not guarantee an honest mind.
Lewis introduces Uncle Andrew as a man convinced that intellectual distinction exempts him from ordinary duties. Keeping promises is for lesser people. Andrew knows the secrets of the occult, so he imagines he can send children into dangers he refuses to face himself. He calls his cowardice greatness.
The vice is familiar: Exceptional ability supposedly confers exceptional moral privileges. A radical professor who believes his political vision justifies tearing down inherited institutions uses Andrew’s logic. So does the politician who excuses the dangers of communism or socialism because a glorious future allegedly demands sacrifices now. The superior mind claims authority to break rules it imposes on everyone else.
Then Uncle Andrew meets Aslan.
At first, Andrew hears the Lion’s song as music. It stirs thoughts and feelings he does not want to entertain. He then tells himself that no lion could possibly sing. He must have heard roaring. The longer Aslan sings, the harder Andrew works to believe his own explanation. Eventually he hears only animal noises, even when Aslan speaks.
Lewis gives us the verdict: “Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.”
Notice the order. Andrew recognizes something, resists it, and finally loses the ability to recognize it. His ignorance is learned. What looks like an intellectual limitation begins as a moral refusal.
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That’s why I worry about the film. A director can admire Lewis’s portals, creatures, and cosmic song while rejecting the Creator who gives them meaning. She can retain the scenery and rewrite the moral order. The result may look like Narnia without being Lewis’ Narnia.
A story has more than recognizable characters and scenes. It tells us what is good, what has gone wrong, and what would make things right. For Lewis, creation has a good and authoritative Creator. Sin requires repentance. Redemption answers a need human beings cannot overcome by declaring themselves enlightened.
Could a filmmaker present that vision faithfully without sharing Lewis’ faith? Certainly. But she must first let the author challenge her own assumptions. If Gerwig turns his Christian account of creation into a comfortable endorsement of modern cultural priorities, she will have made Uncle Andrew’s mistake: hearing the song and insisting it is merely roaring.
The trailer cannot settle that question, and I will judge the finished film when it arrives. My concern is what Hollywood so often does to stories whose moral claims it finds inconvenient. An adaptation should not become an exercise in correcting the author.
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Christians, however, should not congratulate themselves too quickly. Uncle Andrew is more than a stand-in for a leftist professor, a politician, or a Hollywood director. Lewis’ warning reaches the church as well.
In Romans 1, Paul writes of people who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. God reveals himself through creation, but human beings refuse to honor him or give thanks. Their reasoning becomes futile, and their hearts grow dark. They claim wisdom as they become fools.
Paul does not describe every unbeliever as someone who merely lacks information. Our desires shape what we are willing to admit. We can demand more evidence while insulating ourselves from the implications of evidence already before us.
Christians can do this, too. We acknowledge God’s revelation in creation, then find reasons to disregard it. We know a biblical command, then use our intelligence to argue that our circumstances make us the exception. We defend Christian books without accepting their correction. Praising Lewis’ theology is easier than submitting to the God he confessed.
That is why Uncle Andrew belongs in a Christian reflection rather than merely a debate over a Netflix film. We should ask whether our explanations clarify the truth or protect us from it. Can we admit that our clever argument was an excuse? Will we confess when God’s Word confronts something we want to keep?
Christ offers forgiveness to sinners who have spent years defending their sins. His grace frees us to abandon our excuses instead of perfecting them.
I hope Gerwig gives Lewis a faithful hearing. The finished film will show us whether she has. Meanwhile, our own hearing deserves examination. God speaks through his Word, and Uncle Andrew shows how a person can become so skilled at defending himself that he loses the ability to listen.
'Given the progress that the United States has made toward remediating illegal discrimination in K–12 education, it may prove difficult for a voluntary desegregation plan today to establish the factual predicates needed to survive strict scrutiny,' the opinion states.
While not an exhaustive list, here's a breakdown how the biggest measures fared on Tuesday night.
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