Unlock the transformative power of education as we journey with Melvin Adams, the visionary behind the Noah Webster Educational Foundation. Together, we tackle the urgent need to intertwine conservative values with learning, discussing the ways informed leadership and grassroots movements can revolutionize school boards and the educational experiences of our children. We delve into the essence of diversity in educational approaches and celebrate the profound influences that parents, grandparents, and community members hold in crafting thriving environments for our young scholars.
Feel the rhythm of change with a discussion on music literacy, where we connect our passion for music with the educational philosophy that shapes our future leaders. We muse over the parallels between music and language literacy, underscoring the universal language of emotions conveyed through melodies. The conversation crescendos as we address the erosion of historical education in America, advocating for a pivot towards a curriculum rich in historical and economic knowledge, guided by the Noah Webster Educational Foundation's five core areas of focus.
The final note of our symposium echoes with an earnest call to empower parents, teachers, and school boards. We confront the current crisis in mental health among youth, exacerbated by recent global events and the digital age's grasp on our children. Together, we strategize on fortifying the mental well-being of our students, ensuring the next generation's education is not just a matter of intellect but also heart and health, fostering safer and nurturing learning spaces. Tune in to be part of the education revolution that's reclaiming the future—one classroom at a time.
TCC is THE podcast for conservative teachers, parents, and patriots who believe in free speech, traditional values, and education without indoctrination.
The views and opinions expressed by me are solely my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any employer, school, or school district I have worked with in the past or present.
Thanks for listening to The Conservative Classroom. Teaching the truth. Preserving our values.
Unlock the transformative power of education as we journey with Melvin Adams, the visionary behind the Noah Webster Educational Foundation. Together, we tackle the urgent need to intertwine conservative values with learning, discussing the ways informed leadership and grassroots movements can revolutionize school boards and the educational experiences of our children. We delve into the essence of diversity in educational approaches and celebrate the profound influences that parents, grandparents, and community members hold in crafting thriving environments for our young scholars.
Feel the rhythm of change with a discussion on music literacy, where we connect our passion for music with the educational philosophy that shapes our future leaders. We muse over the parallels between music and language literacy, underscoring the universal language of emotions conveyed through melodies. The conversation crescendos as we address the erosion of historical education in America, advocating for a pivot towards a curriculum rich in historical and economic knowledge, guided by the Noah Webster Educational Foundation's five core areas of focus.
The final note of our symposium echoes with an earnest call to empower parents, teachers, and school boards. We confront the current crisis in mental health among youth, exacerbated by recent global events and the digital age's grasp on our children. Together, we strategize on fortifying the mental well-being of our students, ensuring the next generation's education is not just a matter of intellect but also heart and health, fostering safer and nurturing learning spaces. Tune in to be part of the education revolution that's reclaiming the future—one classroom at a time.
TCC is THE podcast for conservative teachers, parents, and patriots who believe in free speech, traditional values, and education without indoctrination.
The views and opinions expressed by me are solely my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any employer, school, or school district I have worked with in the past or present.
Thanks for listening to The Conservative Classroom. Teaching the truth. Preserving our values.
Have you ever wondered how the quality of education impacts our culture and society? What changes would you like to see in the current educational system to better prepare our children for the future, and how can we reclaim education and culture? Welcome to The Conservative Classroom, where we're teaching the truth and preserving our values. I'm your host, Mr. Webb, and I'm glad you're here. This podcast is a haven for conservative educators, parents and patriots like you, who believe in the importance of free speech, traditional values and education without indoctrination. By the way, if you like what you hear today, please share this podcast with a like-minded educator, parent or patriot. Together, we can teach the truth and preserve our values.
Mr. Webb:
In today's episode, the founder and president of Noah Webster Educational Foundation is here to discuss bringing common sense and foundational principles back to education. Now let's get started. Today, I'm excited to welcome a special guest to the conservative classroom, mr Melvin Adams. Sr. Melvin is the founder and president of Noah Webster Educational Foundation, or NWEF. He's here to tell us about his organization and the solutions it provides in education. Melvin, thank you for joining us.
Melvin Adams:
Well, Joey, thank you for this opportunity, and I want to thank all the folk who listen to your podcast, because we're all about education, just like you are, and our children are the most valuable thing we have, and what we do with them matters a great deal, so I look forward to talking to you. You can pick my brain and see what I know and what I don't know. How's that?
Mr. Webb:
That sounds good and I can't wait to dig into this a little bit because, like I told you before we started recording, I actually had two separate people suggest I have you on the podcast, so I thought you know what I've got to have him on the podcast. Well, I'm honored.
Melvin Adams:
Thank you.
Mr. Webb:
Melvin, tell us a bit about yourself and your background. What led you to founding Noah Webster Educational Foundation?
Melvin Adams:
Okay, well, I should be giving you a real short answer, but if you will indulge me, I'll give you a little bit longer version. I was born and raised in East Africa. My parents were Christian missionaries. I wanted to be a veterinary doctor. I came to the States to go to college, but that was way before internet and I had no idea where in the world to go to school for that. So I ended up going to a Christian college in the Cincinnati area, and while I was there, trying to figure out where I was going to go forward with my life, I just began to understand that I'm going to just put it this way I felt like God was calling me to work with people, and so when I figured out that you know what, it's always a good thing to follow God and follow your faith and do the right thing. And so when I started that, I had no idea where it would take me, but fundamentally it took me into education. So I taught for a number of years here in the US Because of my experience in East Africa, growing up under a communist military dictatorship that had taken over in that country when the Soviet Union started falling apart, mission organizations contacted me and asked me if I would spearhead an effort into the former Soviet Union, where they wanted to start a Christian college.
Melvin Adams:
And so my wife and I accepted that and we went there with our five young children and the six was born in the first year Came back in. That was in 92, in 2000, I'm sorry, in 2000,. We came back to the US and what I saw was alarming to me because you know seeing how communism works and in the streets, and then followed by military crackdown, and then it was a military communist dictatorship Then moving. We ended up in Ukraine where we lived for eight years and we saw that country desperately trying to come out of 75 years of communism and saw the challenges that came along with that. But when we gave back to the States it was like wait a second, we are following some of the same things that we had seen on the other side of the world. We're taking root here. We knew that some of that was there, but it just seemed like it was growing so significantly and, mind you, that was in the 90s.
Melvin Adams:
And so we decided that we needed to get really focused on education and really trying to do something significant, worked with several different organizations, nonprofit groups continued some teaching and then in 2019, the very end of 2019, we decided to start Noah Webster Educational Foundation. The whole focus of that was to try to help reclaim America's education and culture. And you know everybody said, well, it can't be done. There are way too many, you know, unions and all kinds of powers. It's just impossible to do. But I felt, like you know, I think it is doable. I think if we do the right kind of things, if we work collaboratively together with others, you know you don't have to change things from the top down. In fact, most of the time those things don't work out so well, but when you can work from the bottom up and really start growing at grassroots. So really, noah Webster Foundation started.
Melvin Adams:
We have two programs. We kind of look at ourselves as those programs, as the bookends on each side of the kids to protect those kids. On the one side is a program to help inform parents and grandparents and really just community members of what's going on in education, some of the needs, some of the challenges. We are not just a particular silo of education. We look at all forms of education, particularly in the K-12 space, and because we don't believe that one size fits all. We feel like all avenues have some value, all can have some improvement, but we try to help empower them so that they can find and have the best opportunity for their children in their communities. A vacuum of really good substantive content that could really help community leaders step forward to be local school board members so that they really knew how to give good leadership and good oversight of their schools, get the politics out and get back to actually having school that raises up a next generation of flourishing young people.
Mr. Webb:
Keep politics out of the classroom. I love that you had a school board summit I think it was called, or something to that effect in Nashville not too long ago and Nashville is about an hour hour and a half from where I live and I wanted to go so bad, but that Saturday that it was on I already had something planned and there was a conflict that I couldn't change, so I hated that. I missed that. Tell us about that, how that went and what kind of speakers you had and that sort of thing.
Melvin Adams:
So that actually, that particular summit was primarily hosted by the Leadership Institute. We've been partnering with them since 2020 and are planning to do increasing partnerships with them, but we really that was a two-day event Very well, quite well attended. We had close to 200 school board members and leaders there focused on all kind of things, you know, including hearing from a number of superintendents, particularly state superintendents, from Oklahoma, from Tennessee, from a superintendent in Florida, folk like that who were speaking about trends and things that were going on in those states positive things as well as challenges. We had a lot of different presenters spoke about, you know, the messaging aspects talked about. You know, running campaigns for those who were candidates for school boards.
Melvin Adams:
But you know, at the end of the day, what our real focus was the importance of literacy. You know, look, we are in a difficult place in our country today because way too many of our children are not learning how to properly read, write and more. The reality is, you know, when we think of literacy, we think of, you know, reading, writing, and that certainly is one of the venues of literacy. But really, literacy is the ability to develop those tools and those habits that can create learning, and there are, you know, you've got your, you know foundation blocks like an alphabet and so forth, and then you form, you know the phonetic sounds and you, you know which.
Melvin Adams:
We advocate for going back to that instead of this guessing game of what word is this that's become popular recently. But then you know how that builds. But then you know we I don't want to get into this too much here, I'm sorry, I'm kind of running on here but you know there's there's language literacy, there is math literacy and there is music literacy, or you know. So I mean those are at least three primary areas of literacy, all of which, properly learned and developed, especially in early childhood, give a person a significant foot up in their ability to learn and comprehend and retain and actually communicate ideas.
Mr. Webb:
I think you're the first person on the podcast that's mentioned music literacy. So I'm an amateur musician and I was in band from sixth grade to twelfth grade, so I'm a music lover, good, and you're the first person that's mentioned that, so can you, can you talk about that a little bit more? What is music literacy and why is that important?
Melvin Adams:
well, uh, I'll have to just declare myself I was actually a music major. I had a double major in trumpet and in vocal, ended up doing choral and orchestral band. You know, directing that kind of thing for at least 10 years. Thoroughly enjoyed that because, you know, first of all my family was very musical, so I grew up with that in the home.
Melvin Adams:
But I also understand that you know music is really a language. I mean you can communicate through music in ways you know you just can't do in language. You know spoken language or so forth, and when you know, when you can develop the ability to understand music, to create music. Well, so you know, when you talk about, you know the building blocks of that. I mean, look, we can get in the weeds real quickly here.
Melvin Adams:
But I mean you start out with just basic notation, just like you would have the alphabet. You have a musical notation which are notes and rests and all of them have a certain mathematical value because it's all built around time and patterns and pitches and tones and so all of these things which you know, people who understand what I'm saying will appreciate it. For those that aren't musically literate may not, but the reality is all of those things blend together to create an immense ability to communicate emotions and ideas and stuff through music that you know you can. You can move people through music in ways that you just can't in many other. You know some of the other skills, so that's not really my main gig, but I understand it and I and I believe that, like reading and writing of books in languages, musical literacy is a very valuable tool to help a child learn, as is mathematics literacy.
Mr. Webb:
That's just so interesting, man. I'm glad you brought that up. Thank you, backing up to something you said earlier that I wanted to make sure and hold on to that and not forget to ask you about it. But you've had a lot of experience in other countries and you mentioned the effects of communism on education. What are some of the things that alarmed you in education in America? What are some of those specific things that you saw that was being mirrored from some of the communist places you came from?
Melvin Adams:
Well, wow, that could be two or three episodes right here, but let me just kind of see if I can go right down to kind of a key. The key here it really comes down to a philosophy of humanity around, governing in humanity. When we look at our founding fathers in this country and it's appalling that how many people do not know their American history.
Mr. Webb:
And.
Melvin Adams:
I don't know it like I should. Honestly, I never studied American history until I was well into college, because I grew up studying, you know, european history and other kinds of things. I went to a British school in high school and so we were studying other parts of the world. But when you look at our founding fathers and a quick study not even an in-depth study, but a quick study of the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, will give a person a pretty good understanding what our founding fathers were trying to separate from when it comes to government philosophy and what they wanted to embrace to create opportunity and prosperity and a future for their own children and descendants and communities. And if you look at those and you study those, they are markedly different.
Melvin Adams:
In our Declaration of Independence, our founding fathers really laid out the grievances they had with King George and with the British Empire and it's, you know, it was about really dictatorship. It was about no representation of the governed. It was about, you know, taking things by force and just that kind of dominant type of government which was common in Europe at the time and really around the world. So when they separated, this experiment was a brand new idea and they separated and started this constitution or the constitution that was developed, that was really founded as a republic based on the people and their ability to be really in charge. Obviously it took a network of them, but they had a voice and you know that was quite foreign in those days.
Melvin Adams:
And what happened? When you look at the contrast, that to say, the Bolshevik Revolution, which is where communism really came forward. Obviously that came out of German philosophers earlier in the century and by 1912, vladimir Lenin had taken those philosophies and were adapting them to what was going on in Russia. Did they need a revolution in Russia? Absolutely. The czars were total dictatorship. The people were in desperate situations. They needed change. The problem was because of the structure of that change. It really just shifted from one set of dictator to another set of dictator and that is what is so commonly done in countries around the world. And really Marxism, while it talks about equity it will use that word since it's so popular these days where everybody shares and everybody has everything what they really do it's a Robin Hood mentality, where we're going to rob from the rich and everybody.
Melvin Adams:
All the poor are going to be rich, but they don't understand basic structure and basic economy. There have to be people who have some resources, some people who have the ability to develop business and to create opportunities for others, and when everybody is equal, it always turns out that everybody has nothing. You can see that historically over and over and over again, and that's the kind of thing that we're actually being seen seeing just on steroids these days in our universities and so many of our young people. They're not taught anything about our history. They're taught a lot of idealism and it's all you know. So we've just really lost our way as a society when it comes to educating our young people.
Mr. Webb:
I notice on your website it talks about the five core focus areas. So, shifting over to the NWEF, your organization, tell us about the five core focus areas.
Melvin Adams:
Yeah. So these five core focus areas as we tried to assess um and the major influences maybe the big stones in the jar, if you know that analogy these are kind of the things we see. Every issue in education comes through these five points. The first one is instruction, and so that has to do with everything. I mean pedagogy, it has to do with the actual instruction, it has to do with curriculum, it has to do with, you know, even down to issues like discipline and or, you know, management and all of the things that come along with instructing the next generation, and we do a lot of podcasts and blogs and stuff that focus on those. People certainly could get that stuff on our website. We believe that's critical and I think every American believes that's critical. In fact, I think many people are unsatisfied with what they're seeing our children and some of us grandchildren are getting and it's like, wait a second, you know we can do way better than what we're getting and they're not wrong. Instruction and there's so many best practices around instruction that properly followed, you always get amazing results. And when you don't, experimentation can be good. But you have to be careful and if it didn't work and you go back to best practices right.
Melvin Adams:
The second one is parental engagement. So we feel like and believe with all of our heart that parents have to be a part of this conversation. Ultimately, parents are the people most responsible and should be for their children for every aspect of their lives. Any of us who have been teachers will tell, with hands down, the kids whose parents are actively involved in positive, supportive ways, those kids flourish, and when a parent is AWOL, most of the time that kid's going to struggle. So it's both a focus on parental responsibility and parental rights here. Okay, the third point is government. Look, government's involved in everything, whether we like it to be or not. We think less is sometimes more, but it's important for people to know how government is involved because a lot of times the government itself is the thing that can their community, down to the local school board and how to work within that context. People who don't understand that are going to find it very difficult to bring about any substantive change.
Melvin Adams:
The fourth of these five points we have is faith and morality. You know bottom line is this you know faith is something that pretty much everybody has some kind of faith, even if it's a faith in just themselves or a belief system that there is no God or whatever they want to believe. But that creates a worldview, it creates a faith system and, you know, that kind of faith system ultimately always brings about what we call morality, which is a faith system lived out, the practices that we embrace because of what we believe. And, you know, as a society, how do we teach kids that it's wrong to steal or cheat or kill or do some of these other things that we just take for granted, if there's no system upon which it's built? Because, in reality, all of our laws in this country, in one way or another, are built around some kind of a faith system that the community has embraced and saying, okay, these are good values that we believe and therefore it's going to shape our behavior and so understanding that.
Melvin Adams:
So we're not promoting necessarily evangelism in all of our schools. There are some schools where that's appropriate, some schools that is not appropriate. However, it is important that schools don't just shy away from this, because when they do, it really opens the door to a lot of other faith systems and belief systems that we're seeing creep into our schools right now, quite frankly. And so what we promote here is that schools should embrace the overall, the overall values of their local community. They should not be promoting values that they know the majority of their community doesn't support.
Melvin Adams:
Certainly their parents of their students do not support. They should. School should not be in conflict with the community around faith and morality, because that just creates confusion for the kids and it's really important that these kids grow up to understand why we have certain values in our community. It's OK to push back on those things and to have intelligent conversation around those things, but at the end of the day you don't pull things out by the roots because it can be devastating to kids. The last one is appropriations, which really follow the money, and you follow the money in education and you can tell what the leader's priorities are.
Mr. Webb:
I feel like the morality. I feel like there's a great struggle today in schools, and I'm going to use the transgender thing as an example. A lot of things are, you know, politics. The left wants this, the right wants this, or funding issues. I think this money would be spent better here or this would be. No, I think it would be spent better here. But now I feel like there's this battle going on where you've actually got a battle between two different moral systems. How do we navigate that? And back to the. I said I'd use the transgender thing as an example, gender thing as an example. A lot of Christian teachers, myself included, I wouldn't feel comfortable calling a student that was a boy, that decided they were a girl. I wouldn't feel comfortable using she pronouns because I feel like I would be violating that trust. I feel like I'd be lying to the child. So what about that moral? Where does that fall into all this?
Melvin Adams:
Well, that's a great example. That's very much what we're seeing and because for some time schools have tried to expunge faith and morality out of our education system. And, let's be clear, it's activists that have been promoting this for some time and then infusing other ideologies into students. And then those students grow up and go to teachers' colleges and now some of those people are actually promoting those values, actively promoting them as missionaries, I may say, in our schools. And it is, it's a worldview conflict, it is a basic difference. So you know, I guess the challenge here is it matters what you believe.
Melvin Adams:
So let's talk about the transgender thing. So for as long as we've understood human anatomy and life in general, we have focused not around gender but around sex. And there are male and there are female and they're created that way. They have particular chromosome formations and that's not going to change. It doesn't matter if you have surgeries, if you have all kind of transition stuff. Your basic chromosome structure does not change.
Melvin Adams:
And you know, and that's where those who come from a traditional and certainly Christian, but I'm going to say all the major world religions, are going to embrace those concepts, because they are based on what we believe to be true, based on evidence, based on reality. And it seems like you know some of the new fads. You're talking about transgenderism. You know it's. I don't really care what the facts are. I want something, and so I want to feel a particular way, and so I'm going to just create it in my mind and I want everybody to embrace what I am creating in my mind.
Melvin Adams:
But it's not realistic and so ultimately, those concepts will fail. They always do, because reality is a great leveler and sooner or later things come back to reality, and sooner or later things come back to reality. But it is a challenge because, again, politics has gotten involved in a lot of this stuff and some of the activists have been promoted and allowed. And so now you know, look at Title're going to set these policies so that our young girls have opportunities like our boys have in sports and in other things. They're going to be protected from certain kind of discriminations and given opportunity, and you know.
Melvin Adams:
But what happens is is then those things get, which are ultimately good ideas, get hijacked by bad ideas, and it's like, OK, I'm a girl too, because I think I'm a girl, or I want to be a girl, and I declare that I am a girl and so I'm going to compete as a girl, and if you don't let me do that, then you're something wrong with you and you know that's the dilemma we're in in our society right now. But I don't think it's sustainable, quite honestly. I just think we have to keep pushing back on it and let reality and let truth stand. People ultimately want the truth.
Mr. Webb:
I think Title IX that was a good example of something that started out to help women and now it's being used to take opportunities away, and that's just a perfect example. I'm glad you brought that up, switching gears a little bit. Why Noah Webster when? Excuse me, I think most people know Noah Webster from Webster's Dictionary. So how does Noah Webster tie into your foundation? Why did you choose him?
Melvin Adams:
Well, you know, there are things that were important to me and my wife as we were forming this foundation and those things are all kind of seated in those five focus areas. But you know, when you're trying to figure, okay, so what are we going to call this thing, we felt like, okay, when you study Noah Webster, you find out, okay, he was a contemporary of our founding fathers. He was widely known in that era as the founding father of America's education and learning. He was one of the first to really promote, you know, broad learning in all of the colonies you know and all of the new states. He felt like, you know, common language, common learning, would help create a stronger republic, it would help with business, it would help with communication. What he saw happening in the country was what had happened in Europe, where you have these conclaves of German speakers and French speakers and English speakers and Portuguese speakers and whatever, and they were creating all their kind of little subcultures. And he said, look, if we can unite the people through education and through a common language, we can. We can become a great nation. And so, you know, he actually the blueback Speller is the common street language for the book.
Melvin Adams:
It was what he first put together as a model to teach students and most of our founding fathers and their families, and for the first hundred plus years of this country everybody studied that as their basic primer for learning. And you know it was filled with well, you can still buy it okay. In fact that book was the most sold book of any book in the nation outside of the Bible for the first like 150 years and then some other textbooks kind of came in and start taking their place. But I encourage people to get that book and take a look at it. It's full of just basic values, basic wisdom and teaching students not only how to read, how to write, but what words meant, what values were, and just kind of incorporated all of those things through that primer. And so we thought, wait, he had a huge influence on the formation of this country and if we could get back to some of those influences in our education again, I think we'd be better off for it.
Mr. Webb:
Very interesting. I'm glad I asked you that question. You have lots of information on your website. What's the target market? Is it parents? Is it teachers? Is it school board members? We've kind of talked a little about that, but let's drill down into that a little bit.
Melvin Adams:
Well, let's just be honest. It takes all of those people thinking together, working together to bring positive changes and the things that we want and need for our children and for our communities. So often, you know, we have parents who are unsatisfied, community people who are, you know, you hear a lot of complaining, you hear a lot of accusations. The question is what's true and what's not true? What opportunities are there and how can we get more opportunities? There's so many things that can be done. There are already so many opportunities can be done. There are already so many opportunities, so many choices in education, both within the public system and outside of the public system, that families can tap into and so just becoming aware. But we find so many parents they're just not even aware, they don't even know, they have no idea where to start. And so I think, you know, encouraging them, giving them good information, always trying to inspire hope and, you know, get people to really think about things and dig in to get what they can do and how they can get involved for their kids. So that's the one side, and that includes the teachers and everything, a lot of teachers, you know. If I could just digress here for a little bit about teachers. We desperately need our teachers Now. There are a few bad apples out there, but there are a lot of wonderful people, wonderful teachers, who they're sick with what's going on in too many of our schools. They just want to help these kids. They care about their subject, they care about these kids and they want to instill. Look at yourself. That's why you went into education. You just want to make a difference. You want to do something good for your community and invest in the next generation.
Melvin Adams:
Look, we have so many of these people, but the reality is they are leaving our schools in droves. Why is it? It's all of these complex problems. It's issues in discipline. It's issues where they're being forced to teach things that they don't even believe in and you know, and promote values that they fundamentally feel are wrong and they just don't see any way out. So, helping them understand. Look, all of these things are there, but that doesn't mean that you just have to bow to everything. You have a voice. You can speak up. You might lose your job if you do, but trust me, there are other schools that are looking for teachers like you. Okay, there's lots of opportunity for people who are principled.
Melvin Adams:
And so the switch side of that then are the school boards, because a lot of the school boards want to see that happen too. But there again, so many of them don't understand even what their state constitution gives them as their powers and duties. Let's start there and by sharing that with school board members, which most of these school board associations don't even go there, you know, because it's all about control and just kind of drive their agenda. But if we can empower these citizen school board members with what the state actually gives them as their powers, their duties, their rights, their responsibilities. And the local school board in most states has tremendous power curriculum hiring, firing budgets, on and on and on.
Melvin Adams:
But these also create complex issues and complex problems that not every you know. You just can't be an expert in all of these things. So that's where we try to connect with a lot of different specialists and educators, people that are attorneys, people that understand the policy side of things, and we try to help bring real, substantive guidance to school board members so that they can figure out how to make their schools healthy, safe places. Let me just give you a quick example. So there's a huge problem in our schools today. Here's the common term youth mental health crisis. Okay, uh, yeah, there are a lot of problems and there are lots of issues, lots of reasons for these problems that our kids are having, and so, you know, we try to look at that. So, the school board member they're trying to grapple with all this stuff and all these different things that are being pushed down. We got to have more of this thing to make these certain people feel appreciated and value, and what you're doing is we're actually separating people. We're creating more and more conflict over these issues.
Melvin Adams:
It's kind of like the bullying campaign from a decade or more ago. What did it do? It ultimately seemed like it promoted more bullying, and sometimes these systems that are formed, and sometimes these systems that are formed they start out maybe with good intentions but they get derailed. But so we try to create training. So, like we just released a training on this topic, we brought three experts in as panelists to give instruction to school boards and it's available online for people that may be interested.
Melvin Adams:
So the first one is an expert on he's a statistician, but he's also a licensed clinical counselor and so forth, and he really talked about some of the challenges that came from COVID and from isolation that everybody experienced, and particularly the children, and you know the separation. And then you know all the social, emotional and all that kind of stuff, that policies that start getting in and to where? You know kids, they're afraid to talk to each other because it's like what if I say something wrong and if I'm labeled as a bully or a racist or something, and so they just kind of shrivel up in a shell and they just kind of isolate themselves to themselves and it's just a very unhealthy thing. So he addressed that whole thing and of course, we're looking for solutions. So the second one talked about particularly social media, but digital technology. So he's an expert in that field. He actually is part of teams from the University of South Africa and New Zealand where they actually are doing extensive long term studies around addictions, including digital addictions, and what that causes, the causes that it brings onto the brain and to learning, development and all of that kind of stuff. But they're also studying. So, okay, how is it possible to reverse those trends and bring people out of that which they found?
Melvin Adams:
The third one was focused on trauma.
Melvin Adams:
So you know, as she puts it, oh my God, I think I'm going to die.
Melvin Adams:
Well, a lot of people have those kind of moments.
Melvin Adams:
It might be something in their family, it might be some tragic accident or some you know death or something that's just very traumatic in their lives.
Melvin Adams:
And you know, you bring all of these kids together and they're all involved in some form of this, involved in some form of this. How do you help them have a safe space where they actually detox from some of this stuff while they're at school, and how school can actually become a place that is not creating more of that but actually helps them recover from those things? And so that's kind of the focus here, and I feel like that was just an excellent session and that's available on our website. But that's just an example. But we feel like those kind of things are valuable not only to parents to understand these issues, but to teachers and to, especially, school board members, because they're going to be building policies that lead and govern the whole community called the school system, and so they need to understand these issues in ways that are a little bit more than just surface, so that they can really think through the issues, engage with other professionals and come to decisions that actually help create a healthy environment.
Mr. Webb:
We have touched on a lot of topics today, a lot of interesting information. So if you had to choose one thing, what's the one thing you want the listener to remember, if they don't remember anything else about this episode?
Melvin Adams:
Here's what I want them to remember they can make all the difference in the world when it comes to our kids. They, every individual if they will choose to get involved, if they will choose to educate themselves. And there are tons of great resources. We are just one of many great resources. Get involved, prepare yourself and whether it's your kids, your grandkids, your neighbors, your community, the students in your classroom, whatever it may be, listen. We have to fight for this next generation, and I use that word not in a hostile way, but we have to stand, we have to be intentional, and everybody who listens to this podcast can make a huge difference in this effort to bring a better future for the next generations.
Mr. Webb:
I love that. Educate yourself and get involved. As we wrap things up, melvin, can you share with our listeners? We've already mentioned the website and I'll make sure and post a link in the show notes to that. Is there anything else you want to mention? Any projects, other websites? You mentioned a podcast earlier. Social media this is your time to plug or promote anything you want to.
Melvin Adams:
Well, I appreciate it. I think we're on all the social media things you know. There's Twitter, there's X, there's Facebook, there's Instagram. I don't know. I don't even our team does all that stuff, but there's a lot and we use those things. So just look for Noah Webster Educational Foundation in any of those platforms and you'll find it. We're on YouTube, we're on, you know, any of the podcast platforms you can find. We're on any of the podcast platforms you can find. We have our primary one is the State of Education with Melvin Adams, and then we also have NWEF Blogcast. So we take a number of our blogs and we turn those into audios because a lot of people, while they're driving or going to you know whatever working around the house or whatever, and they want to hear it and they can listen to it that way. And so, yeah, tap into those resources and we hope they'll be useful. Our goal is to help people, help themselves and help their communities so that our kids have a better, brighter future for tomorrow.
Mr. Webb:
Ooh, I love that. That's a good note to end on, I think. Thank you so much for joining us today, melvin. It's been a pleasure having you on The Conservative Classroom podcast and I know our listeners will appreciate your insights on all these things we've talked about today and they appreciate you informing us and educating us on Noah Webster Educational Foundation. Thank you so much. Thank you, Joe, it's been an honor. That's it for today's episode of the Conservative Classroom. Thank you for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed it and learned something. If you liked what you heard. Please don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Most importantly, share this podcast with a like-minded educator, parent or patriot. You can also connect with us on social media and share your thoughts on today's topic, give feedback on the podcast or suggest a topic by sending me an email at TheConservativeClassroom@ gmail. com. We'd love to hear from you.
Mr. Webb:
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