This is a preview of this week’s episode of “The Signal Sitdown.” Don’t miss politics editor Bradley Devlin’s interview with Dr. Matthew Spalding by turning on YouTube notifications for the premiere at 6:30 a.m. EST on Aug. 14, 2025.
Should I even send my kids back to school at all? Parents at every level are asking this question, whether they’re concerned about the exploding cost of higher education or the liberal takeover of the preschool classroom, because there is a disease running rampant through our education system.
Though Dr. Matthew Spalding, a Ph.D., is not a medical doctor, he has diagnosed this disease that has led to more parents questioning America’s educational institutions. As the dean of the Van Andel Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale College’s Washington, D.C., campus and a Gov. Ron DeSantis appointee to the New College of Florida Board of Trustees, Spalding continues to work on a cure. He joins “The Signal Sitdown” this week to discuss.
If you run in conservative circles in Washington, D.C., and beyond, you’re well aware that Hillsdale and its graduates have performed a not-so-hostile takeover of the conservative movement.
“What we’re interested in is shaping minds and teaching people to think,” Spalding said when asked about Hillsdale’s recent momentum. That momentum, Spalding explained, is twofold.
“On the one hand, this city is a vacuum that we can fill,” he noted. “But, on the other hand, more and more people are attracted to that because right now… I think more and more people are realizing an emptiness in our politics but also a certain lack of depth. And so they’re looking for something more.”
The modern education system, from top to bottom, has turned its back on the Western tradition’s notion of education.
“Education should be about forming a human being, liberating them, training their mind, and you do that by perfecting and getting better at the things that human beings do by nature,” Spalding told The Daily Signal. “If you think through American history about how the normal person becomes a good citizen, a good human being, a good member of their community, it’s by learning those basic things.”
For Spalding, this view of education is rooted in Christianity.
“It’s no coincidence at all that higher education at large periods of our history is really carried over and protected by religion and Christian schools,” Spalding said. “There was something about Christian institutions and Christian thinking and theology that could see the Greek and Roman roots of reasoning in the nature of things, and there was something about that philosophical understanding of the nature of things that could see a certain coincidence with an idea of Christianity that held that all are equal before God and equal in their being. And I think that melding is a very important component of educational systems in the West.”
“What is the thing they attack most precisely? That link. You’ve got to sever reason from revelation,” Spalding claimed.
“Modern society has placed those things under attack to a large extent because it denies that man by nature can do these things,” he added. “You need science, you need mathematical expertise, and you need academic experts to tell you these things. Essentially what the modern project does, whether you think of it from the point of view of reason in classical reason or revelation in biblical or Christian thinking and theology, if you destroy the notion that the human mind can know things… it’s all relativism and subjectivism, it’s whatever it’s subject to, whatever you think, whatever your will is.”
“Think about it in its more radical, skeptical sense,” Spalding suggested. “I don’t actually know you’re a human being. I don’t know that this is a table. I have no evidence of any of these things. I can’t prove any of this reality. I mean, it just becomes a nihilistic breakdown at a certain point.”