What is Classical Christian Education? Series with Dr. Michael Adkins

What is classical Christian education?

It sounds like a simple question, but the answer is often more complex than people expect.

In this ongoing Base Camp Live series, we're sitting down with key leaders in the movement

to help them frame up the best answers and why it matters so much today.

In this episode, Dr. Michael Adkins joins us to offer a fresh perspective on how this

time-tested approach to education helps cultivate order and wisdom and clarity in a very fragmented

world-shaping the next generation in both our schools and our homes.

All this and more on this episode of Base Camp Live.

Mountains, we all face them as we seek to influence the next generation.

Get equipped to conquer the challenges, some at the peak, and shape exceptionally thoughtful

compassionate and flourishing human beings.

We call it ancient future education for raising the next generation.

Welcome to Base Camp Live.

Now your host, Davies Owens.

Welcome to another episode, Davies Owens, your host here on the journey of raising the

next generation.

I was looking recently at the calendar thinking, oh my goodness, it's actually going to be

10-year anniversary of the Base Camp Live podcast.

Later this fall, we'll have to do some special programming.

It's hard to believe we've been on this journey for 10 years, and we couldn't do it without

you guys listening and being a part of this each week, you know, podcasting.

When I started, I still find it somewhat humorous because 10 years ago, podcasting was still

very new, and I remember people curious about, well, what is this thing, even one particular

question I received, which was, this must be a gardening term because you're casting pods

out there of something.

That was early on.

You know when people ask you that, it was early on, but I'm so thankful for each of you

taking time to listen each week.

I don't take it for granted.

It is a very one-way conversation, though, because I seem to do more of the talking over

here, but I love to hear from all of you.

Info at Base Camp Live, drop me an email, let me know what is on your mind.

Big shout-out in this episode to a couple of folks that are in the Base Camp Live and

Zipcast community, Victoria Harris, head of school at Providence School of Tifton in Tifton,

Georgia, as well as Alyssa Maldon, head of school at the Providence Academy in Rockwall,

Texas.

Thank you for being a part of our listening community each week and for being on the

journey of raising up the next generation at your classical Christian schools.

Also want to just mention one of the things that we do, of course, is part of the extended

work of Base Camp Live and really my full-time job is running Zipcast.

We now have over 100 schools, about 10,000 listeners on a typical week.

It's a very highly valued resource from school leaders and parents through this really fairly

simple process, fairly simple process of having a weekly short form audio message from

your school leaders to parents, along with access to our growing content library on topics

ranging from parenting to Christian education.

I want to encourage you, if you're not an Zipcast school, to consider signing up this

spring and getting familiar with this simple process, it's also very affordable.

And on top of all that, we're launching this summer a Zipcast for teachers so that schools

have a way to connect internally each week with even more efficiency to their teaching

staff and team.

Email me directly with any questions or check out our new website at zipcast.media.

We so thank you for your partnership, as we're all part of this growing work of raising

up the next generation and connecting together each week at Basecamp Live, where we have that

image of sitting around the fire warming up and encouraging one another and with Zipcast,

giving you the microphone to speak into your own community and bring encouragement.

In this conversation this week, I sit down with Dr. Michael Adkins. He's a director of academics

and faculty member at St. Agnes School in St. Paul, Minnesota. He has taught English and history

and theology and Latin in elementary, middle and high school for over two decades, and he

currently works on curriculum and professional development and institutional advancement. He

is an educational consultant, a public speaker and a retreat leader. He has also worked extensively

in curriculum development, school improvement, pedagogy and classical liberal arts education.

In other words, he is more than qualified to answer the question, what is classical

Christian education? You know, both serve as well on the Board of Academic Advisors for the

Classical Learning Test. He is married to Cynthia, with whom he leads the online book club community

for Word on the Fire Institute, and together they have nine children. Before we jump into the

conversation, a special thank you to several folks who have sponsored this episode.

Our friends at The Wise Phone, a great alternative to a smart phone. Dr. Robert Little John and

Chuck Evans, and their wonderful book and resource wisdom and eloquence, as well as the team at

Wilson Hill Academy and the Herzog Foundation and Life Architects Coaching. All of these partners,

you can learn more in our partner page, great resources, but without further ado, here's my

conversation with Dr. Michael Adkins. Michael, welcome to Base Camp Live. Thank you so much for

having me, Dave. He's a really appreciate it's an honor to be here. Well, I appreciate you being

here. We've had the chance to get to know each other a little bit, but I'd love for the listeners to

hear a little bit of your journey into education, classical education. Share with folks kind of how

all this came about for you. Yeah, I'll try to be brief here, but I was a public school kid,

and I was really excited about what we called in public school social studies, because in my high

school, a really special teacher created a double period class. It was a mix of social studies in

English, and he created this interdisciplinary course in which we intermingled the study of

history and literature and art and all kinds of things, and that really got me really excited

about the possibility of teaching. I mentioned to you this before when we first met, but another

huge influence on me as a kid was, honestly, Indiana Jones, and watching Indiana Jones movies.

Dr. Jones, he was pretty cool, and I remember one of his students in the class scenes is

winking at him, this attractive young girl, and then he's going off and hunting treasure and

archaeology and all that, and so I was really attracted to study because I wanted to be like my

teacher in school, and I also wanted the opportunity to go on on archaeological digs and do things

around the world. So that was the beginning of it, and then I had a major conversion or reversion,

I should say, to my Catholic faith after my mom passed away, and I was on the way with the classics

and really interested in getting a PhD in classical studies. I was looking at the University of

Minnesota, and after my mom died, I kind of re-aligned my priorities in life and really got into

classical Christian education, basically, and so I ended up teaching at an ecumenical

classical Christian school for seven years, and in the process of my reversion, I then entered

a master's program in Catholic studies at the University of St. Thomas, and I was teaching Latin,

I was teaching English, and so when I had my reversion to the faith, all of a sudden I realized

two things that I really loved could come together, and that's a love of history, a love of art,

and then combined with my sort of re-found faith after my mom's passing, and so for me,

the Catholic world and Catholic studies was this foray into integrating the wonderful,

fascinating things of the ancient world, and I was a classics major in college, and intermingling

those two and bringing them together, so I was really excited about forming young disciples,

and then drawing them into this life of the mind, and getting them to be engaged young people,

and really getting an education, a really solid education in the classics that I never got in

public school, while also coupling that with formation in their faith. I love the fact that

Indiana Jones plays such a significant role. It's easy to laugh at that, but you can see where

so often we probably don't market ourselves as well as we could as classical folks that come

join us and you can spend your adult years living in a library or something, and I was opposed to

this life of adventure and discovery that's such a part of it. We're doing this series on just

trying to explain what is classical Christians. I wanted to ask you, if somebody came up to you on

the sidewalk and said, hey, you're Mr. Classical guy, what is classical Christian education? Do you

have just sort of a go-to answer to that? Yeah, my quick pithy elevator is, you know, we talk about

in your progressive standard model of education, we talk about college and career readiness,

right? But classical education is not about, that's about doing, right? Credentials and doing.

College and career is very much, I accomplish certain tasks, I do certain things, skills.

Whereas I really believe that classical education, especially classical Christian or Catholic

education, is about being. And so in my quick differences, it's about being rather than doing,

it's about the type of person that you're cultivating and forming and educating, rather than

simply credentialing them to progress through the world of work. And we're going to obviously get

into that in a moment here in our topic, but you know, typical American education, Americans are

very much pull themselves up by their bootstraps, very much. We think of that the self-made man,

we accomplish these tasks and we earn these credentials and we move on to the next level. And the

point of it all, at least when I was in public school, whenever I asked, why are we doing this?

It was always something like, so you can pass to get to the next grade or you can get to the next

level so that you can then go to college, so that you can then get a job, so that you can make money,

and then you can buy stuff. And really, classical education is more about cultivating a type of

person. And so it's about being, not about doing. And what ends up happening is when you cultivate

a person who loves, loves things worth loving, loves things that are true, good and beautiful,

and they read the rich, you know, rich texts from our culture, they have cultural literacy,

they know things, they're engaged, they end up being the most useful person for society.

And the most unuseful person is just somebody who's a self-made man who's really interested in

credentials and doesn't value anything beyond what's useful. And so we don't want a society full

of utilitarians, we want a society full of people who care about what is actually true, good and

beautiful, and they themselves challenge themselves each day to be the best version of themselves.

That's what we want. Well, and again, I'm glad you put the point in there that it's,

it is true, good and beautiful, but those underlying principles of education, then ultimately form,

if you're going to play, you know, if you want to go head to head in the utilitarian battle,

we're still going to win in that game as well. And that's, I mean, that's, I'm kind of the punchline

of the whole story here. And I think that's, you know, a lot of parents listening by into this

classical thing, probably for grammar school and, you know, it's good character development,

it's publicly and sound and all of that, but then it becomes this, the pragmatism utilitarian

poll starts coming along and the fear is, I'm handicapping my child in somebody because they're

not going to be able to get into the stem thing that we want them in or whatever that may be.

Absolutely not. It's so funny. We, we had our freshman registration night for all our new

freshmen coming in, students coming from our eighth grade and new students coming in. And I tell

them a little bit about what we do as a, as a classical liberal arts school. And one of the,

I always find funny is, is, is so many schools that, again, they're high schools. They're,

they're, they're talking about what they do with, with teenagers. And we have this common expression

of critical thinking. And I always get the audience and stitches when I go, the people who came

up with us, have they ever met a teenager before. Ninjas are just about the most critical human

beings on earth, like everything's dumb, everything's stupid, nothing is good enough, everything's

flooring. And I said, we don't want more critical thinking. What we want is logical thinking,

thinking that is grounded in the traditions, thinking that gives them a foundation to build off

from. But if, but really critical thinking is, is not just, well, that's just a fancy expression

for, for being able to analyze things well. Well, kind of. The, the critical thinking also has

an implication of skepticism and picking things apart. I mean, critical theory is, most, most

high school English students learn to read literature through some sort of lens, which is critical

theory. So at any rate, we need logical thinkers in our team among our teams, not more critical

thinking cultivate. It is such, yeah, I often when I talk with student groups, I'll actually,

kind of, it's a little silly maybe a bit, we've already talked about Indian agents, but I'll just

talk about how, you know, so the, I think a fascination in our culture with a lot of superheroes

and marvel or whatever else it's because we want to think there is some, would that be amazing

if you had this ability that no one else had? And I, and I like to say, well, in fact, that is

what you are getting. You are getting a superpower where you will be able to walk into the marketplace

and be able to discern wisely and to think critically and to not just be at the mercy of sort of

group think like the rest of the world around you. So talk. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's a,

it's definitely a different way to see the world. Well, but I want to, you know, again, just

trying to, for a lot of folks listening, they arrived at the classical Christian school because

the uniforms were cute and it was a little bit better character development in this school,

school down the street. And we don't often realize the, the, the flow of history that we're

walking into where there were a part of, especially as it relates to the formation of civil society.

And I think this is again like to take it up if you not just not just what's in it for my kid

and getting him to a better college, but literally the hope of our, of our nations, I believe,

rest largely in this important project of forming the next generation. I mean, I, I'll often begin

talks when I speak at schools by making the audacious claim, which I'd love your thoughts on,

I'm saying basically classical education, classical Christian education is the last best hope

for our civilization. Is that an unreasonable statement? Is that a, how do you react when you hear

that? Yeah, I, I think you're absolutely right. And I'm not just saying that because you're the host

of the show, but it's really, I agree with me too, but yeah, that's exactly it. There's a saying,

I don't know if this is Marshall McLuhan, but the nature of a thing is what it does. And you look

at public education, it's extremely successful. It's extremely successful. We've, we've got,

you know, a couple generations of kids who don't really believe that our country is anything special.

They don't believe in free speech. They don't understand what the Second Amendment is all about.

They want to get rid of the electoral college. You know, they want to stack this Supreme Court.

There's, there is, you know, the nature of a thing is what it does. And our public schools have

succeeded. And, you know, we could say that in a, in a sort of critical sense from looking at what's

happening on the ground is obviously problematic. Schools that are, that are, you know,

basically forming students and ideologies about the human person and human sexuality. And then

not telling their parents about it. I mean, that's all that's just crazy, but the reality is,

and I've studied this, is that the, the architects of, of American modern progressive education back

in the 1920s and 30s, folks like John Dewey, this is absolutely, I'm absolutely convinced that this is

what they wanted. Now, they understood they were smart enough to understand that this had to be a

boil of a frog sort of situation. But if you look at Dewey's philosophy, where we are at is

absolutely the product of what his belief system entailed. You know, this is the logical conclusion.

It's not as though, gosh, if we would have just passed some laws in 1983 or 84 after the,

after Reagan's, you know, Secretary of Education, who is it at the time, Bill Bennett, when he,

you know, a nation at risk, if we would have just passed some laws, then it would have really fixed

this. It would have just slowed down the rot, I think. And I hate to say that because there's a

lot of great folks out there doing work in public schools and they're, they're trying their best,

but I really do believe that the progressive philosophy by the pragmatists and John Dewey,

this is what they intended. And it, it's a very, it's a very important point of understanding that,

I think a lot of us that grew up, I was like you grew up in public school and then private school

later, but no idea of the larger story that we were kind of in this flow of history with. And so,

if you had to, let me just ask this, I mean, if you had to go back and say another, another

statement I like to make as a classical Christian education was the way basically everyone was

educated into the, in the West until 100 or so years ago or 150 when, you know, John Dewey and

others started to come along, the progressives, is that a reasonable statement to make that, that

this is not the new, some new thing that we've come up with, this is lower the way people were

educated. Absolutely, absolutely. Now, the sort of scales at which, you know, your average child

was educated is very different now. We have compulsory education, every single child must

K through 12 to 10 school. But really, that's absolutely true. And when you look at, we could do

a whole podcast on American education. Yeah. And people would be absolutely astonished at how

Biblically based, the first two centuries or more actually, gosh, probably three plus

centuries of American education were Biblically based, almost exclusively Biblically based

and then based in the classics and learning Latin, which is absolutely astonishing.

It's astonishing and it's, you know, it's a story you don't ever hear and that's why, and then,

you know, you catch one of some classical Christian school down the street and you're like, well,

is this some, you know, some new trendy thing or it's a bunch of people who'd rather be Amish,

but there were no Amish rounds, they started this classical, like, hold on a minute, you guys,

you're literally walking into a story that's so big and so important. So let's take a break. I

want to come back and explore this a little bit more and then kind of walk us from those, you know,

that transition point of what happened in early American history and then up to current day,

understanding what is classical Christian because knowing its history is a very key part of knowing

what is it, you know, how to answer that. So we'll be right back after the break.

Today's episode of Base Camp Live is brought to you by my friend Chris Casper, who you heard on

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By their classical Christian parents, students and teachers, this is Robert Little John,

co-author with Charles Evans of Wisdom and Elequence, a Christian paradigm for classical learning,

published by Crossway Books. We want you to know about our new book with well-known family

counselor Keith McCurdy published by classical academic press. The book is titled Wisdom and Elequence

for Parents. How classical Christian education can transform your children, your family, and the

world. We have written this shorter parent-focused book specifically as it admissions and parent

education resource for schools and families. We are excited to be proud sponsors of SIPCAST

and Base Camp Live and we hope you are enjoying these two great resources for classical learning

as much as we are and we would invite you to visit our website WisdomandElequence.org to explore

the various services offered by the authors of Wisdom and Elequence for Parents and to let us know

how we can best serve you. We look forward to hearing from you soon. Like before the break,

we were talking, we can introduce this idea of just this flow of history that most of us are not

familiar with. So you mentioned before John Dewey, the progressive. So the point is for

centuries education was effectively biblical. It was classical by many definitions and then

something happened. So kind of pick up where the train came off the track and kind of help us

again understand where we are now. Yeah, it's probably different in every country, but in the

United States in particular, what started happening originally was higher ed as where I began to

erode first. And there's a great book James Tonson-Bertchell, his book called The Dying of the Light.

And there's a short summary of this in first things. And he talks about how religious colleges and

universities started to water down their identities in the mid to late 19th century. So the 1800s.

And so you saw constitutions that in the industrial revolution, a lot of these things were a lot of

things in society were challenging these colleges and universities to prepare people

for the world of work. And they ended up taking their very classical curriculum and sort of

industrializing it. And in doing so at the same time, they watered down their mission commitments

and their commitments to their founding churches. And you know, for example, an obvious one you

can look at Harvard and the seal of Harvard. And you know, it's something like looks at Veritas,

light and truth or something and religious symbolism. And all of that is completely washed away

now. And so it began with the erosion of higher ed in the United States. And then that slowly

trickled down to our public school system, but it took a lot of time. It really started exploding

in our grade schools and secondary schools, our primary and secondary schools at the

advent of progressive education with John Dewey and those folks in the early 20th century when

they actually started developing now that these colleges and universities had eroded their

religious commitments and and began offering more sort of quote unquote practical majors.

They developed education schools and education schools that were very purposely

to undermine what we now call the classical model, a sort of classic approach to learning,

you know, learning Latin and Greek was out reading the great books, studying philosophy. That was

replaced by the study of psychology and the science, the hard sciences. And so and a very

purposeful effort by John Dewey to remove God from the equation. And so, you know, by the mid 20th

century, American education was almost night and day difference from 50, 60 years prior.

And there's a lot of laws in our country, too. You'd be surprised. The Supreme Court actually

plays an important and not so great role. I took a school law course and I learned how the

Supreme Court, even though they decide a case a certain way, the various opinions supporting it,

the majority opinion, what they write in there will actually stack the deck for precedence,

for changes to be made in the field of education. And I know that sounds really weird and strange,

but it's true. And so, you know, one particular example is the pinker case where a couple of

kids were protesting the Vietnam War and their administrators came in and targeted them and

wrote up a ad hoc policy to target them. They were actually Christian kids protesting the Vietnam

War. The administration of the school wrote up an ad hoc policy to directly target them saying,

if you wore wear a black arm band, imagine this is a protest in a public school now. All they were

doing is wearing black arm bands. So what happened is the Supreme Court supported the pinker kids

enrolled against their administration, which was correct, but in the opinion, the ruling opinion

stated that children under the age of 18 in public schools have free speech rights.

And that, you know, that previously was in-local parenthesis and educators are,

they have charge in-local parenthesis in the charge of parents, like they have a sort of total

authority over these kids. But the court said, no, no, they have free speech rights.

Right. Now they can come to school with t-shirts, with all kind of garbage all over them.

You know, crazy hair. You can't enforce against their right of free expression in speech.

So, Emile, that's just an example of how you wrote them.

Yeah, it's a great example of the erosion, but one thing I hear you saying that I want to make

sure it's clear to folks is that they took out traditional, you know, Judeo-Christian

theology and anchor points. They took out the authority of the family, but they didn't just leave

it in a neutral frame. I mean, part of what makes education such a critical element in the

ability to even have a free and ordered society is that you are forming something deep, the

paidea is being formed in a child. So, in a sense, I always say, every school teaches religion.

You just changed religions. Is that fair to say? Absolutely. Absolutely. Yep.

And so, we've now got this progressive agenda, which is about the individual. It's about

my rights to do whatever I want. I mean, look fast forward from the black armband

decision to where we are today. Hence, again, sort of this very audacious claim, but, you know,

I think the last best hope for a civilization is classical Christian education, because if we can

reinstate that sense of, I am humbling myself before the authority of God and I'm falling under

the world of, you know, the rule and jurisdiction of the church and my family now the sudden

society becomes rightly ordered. So, I'm saying this because it seems like, again, we so often just

relegate school to this reading, writing, arithmetic thing over here in the corner. It's like,

this is a powerhouse. And we, if we can regain our foothold, we take back over this kind of

nuclear weapon for forming a civilization. So, it's a big deal. No, you mentioned the word

paide. It's all about worldview formation, right? Yeah. And public school forms young people in a

worldview that they are a master unto themselves or really that they are a master unto themselves.

Really, what it is is you're just part of the of the machine to purchase products in a capital

society. And therefore, you need a job to do that. And you need to be a productive member of

society. Whereas before it was, it was a loftier vision of, we have certain ideals in our society

that are rooted in transcendental realities, being God, of course. And that even the founding of

our own country rests in the reality that there is a, there is a divinity that endows upon us all

the rights that we have. Whereas in progressive schooling, it's no, we the system and the government

give you those rights. Right. And it's a completely different worldview of utilitarianism

and the total control of the state versus one in which you're, our education is here to liberate

you to think for yourself, to think logically, to think within the tradition. And these are the

most important values that we hold. And that these important things come from something higher

than us. And it's worth keeping the flame alive. That's a completely different vision. Totally

different. Yeah, it's a completely different. Yeah. And that's, this is the, I think helpful for

parents to realize that because it's easy, especially when you get into the high school years and

school down the street has the bigger stadium lights and the bigger offerings. And you know,

let's go down there. There's more, you know, big and kind of consumer mindset, more offerings,

more opportunities, missing the entire DNA of school and into the point you're making.

I've heard you quote debos before on the idea of, yeah, share a little bit of that because I think

it really hits on this point. Yeah. Yeah. One of the things we're riffing on here is utilitarianism

and credentialing for the world of work. And so WDB DuVois, he has a very famous quote and he had

he was in a actually, and just as a sidebar, African Americans actually have a lot to do with

classical education and other peoples of diverse backgrounds that is really also a sort of suppressed

and lost story. But on this point of utilitarianism, WBB DuVois had a debate with Booker T. Washington

about the direction of American schooling. Booker T. Washington wanted to go into the pragmatic

direction like John Dewey and he believed that African Americans would benefit most from an

education that gave them practical work and skills so that they could first begin to get a

foothold in American society and have jobs. You know, we just got to start with jobs. You know,

they have to have an economic value. And DuVois said absolutely not. It's really about liberating

them and liberating the life of the mind or else there'll be a different kind of

survival state. So DuVois famously wrote and said quote, I insist that the object of all true

education is not to make men carpenters, but to make carpenters men. And that's about forming

a virtuous person, forming, taking a young boy and adolescent and making them into a man

is a lot of formation is happening there. It's not just, hey, young immature boy who is obsessed

with youth culture and you know, whatever music you're listening to in your movie obsessions and

your gaming. Let's just take that person and you just stay the same wonderful person you are today.

But now we're going to get you a job. Yeah, you know, that's absolutely not what we're about. But

public school education has no problem with that. And where are we today in the world? And I

talked to business owners all the time that that gaming adolescent now with a degree in his hand

tries to go get a job and the work ethic and the sense of entitlement. All of these things that

have been formed in the pie day of that child now impacts our country and impacts our world.

I mean, there's so much that's, I mean, I look at these statistics all the time on just the

number of young men that in women in particular, they don't even want to get married or have children

like that is so out of step with the modern narrative. And these things are integral. I mean,

just our birth rates alone are going to be kind of a cosmic to our civilization and to even try

housing enrollment and looking schools in 20 years when no one's had kids. I mean, so these are

things that are really affecting our civilization. And they're, you know, they're downstream of the

type of educational environment that they're in. So yeah, I think we underestimate the cultural

capital that is now burned out. And what I mean by that is that that the cultural capital of

Christianity and the American polis of a traditional American polis has been burned out a while now.

And what that meant is that is that parents were very purposeful and how they parented their

children. Schools really saw more than what they were doing as credentialing. It was about

education and formation. And even when even in the 1950s and 60s, you know, after the progressive

school movement, there was, again, a lot of that cultural capital was still there, but it's gone now

in a way that I think is really quite alarming such that, you know, basic, basic sort of response,

sense of duties and responsibilities, basic etiquette about how you operate, opening a door for

somebody to writing a thank you note after getting in a job interview to I've had situations where

there are students who are in graduate school. And I call them up to offer them a teaching job.

And the response is, hey, so hey, can you come in for an interview this week? You know, let's say it's

this really happened. It's a true story. I called up a young candidate, a phenomenal young person.

And it was Tuesday and I was offering them to come in and Wednesday, Thursday, Friday for an

interview, or maybe it was Wednesday. And the person on the phone said, yeah, actually, I was

planning to leave with my friends for a concert up north in Duluth tomorrow. And could we wait

until Monday to do the interview? And I just thought, you're a kid. I'm offering you your first

job. This is like the last thing that you should say to me. And in fact, I don't know that I,

but this is just kind of, you know, I don't want to rag on the young people too much, but it's,

it's a thing. But they're young people who they are because of the education system and the general

culture system that said, you do you. And you're, you know, and everybody's there to wait on you

or it's child centered and all. So again, these are, these are seismic level investments in a Christian

classical school that are downstream of everything. I want to take a final break and we come back. I

want to just get as specific as we can because how you live this out in the classroom and in our

homes is, is really the challenge. I mean, we, I think the agreement is, yes, this is what we want

to be doing. But what does it look like, especially when you've not had a classical upbringing yourself,

which is still the norm for the vast number of parents and educators that are leading this movement.

We've not really experienced it, although there is a second generation starting to come through,

but we'll be right back after the break.

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Michael earlier, you were sharing with us that great quote from Du Bois on really raising up men,

not just the carpenters and so talk a bit more about that because I think that really helps us set

the stage for what is classical Christian education and how is it lived out today in this modern

and demanding world. Yeah, absolutely. So to to restate his quote, he says quote, I insist the

object of all true education is not to make men carpenters, but to make carpenters men and so

he's implying that there are there are different visions of education out there and some are valid

and some are our counterfeit visions of education. And so he says the expression true education,

he implies that there's an alternative to what's being pushed. And so for Du Bois, the counterfeit

notion of education does no such thing to force, it doesn't allow students to be liberated,

right? It allows them to stay in this world of youth culture with their blinders on and it

doesn't give them the hooks to understand really important things in our society that older generations

take for granted like freedom of speech, the second amendment, the bill of rights and they can

take for granted the importance of these things. And so really for Du Bois, if education is all

about the practical and getting young people to enter the world of work and be a productive member

of society to purchase things, what it means is we're sacrificing an education that gives them

the knowledge of our history so that they can really understand what is most important

and most valued that they should pass on to their own children. Yeah, I think about the title

of Leonard Sox's book, Boys of Drift, you know, it's just that there's very much a culture of

young people that are drifted, depression rates, anxiety, I mean so much of it is they don't

know who they are, they don't know where they fit in, they're not choosing things like marriage we

talked about before. So this is again, I think a word that is very encouraging to parents that they

this weird education that they've, you know, subscribed to is not so weird. It's actually what's

built the society around you and it's it's very very much worth leaning into. So other it just

in a few minutes we have left, just other words of encouragement to to school leaders to parents.

Yeah, yeah, and I'll just try and a couple different things here. I was point of

utilitarianism. There's another a Catholic thinker named Joseph Peaper and he argues that the

modern world is marked by total labor and that the original meaning behind leisure and liberal arts

has really been lost. And what we're doing is when we give kids a progressive education oftentimes

in our public schools, they're subjugated by what we would call the survival arts. And so,

you know, what ends up happening is is people's lives are dominated by this vision where really

being a worker is their entire identity, a worker and a consumer. And that's not we want for our

young people. And it also doesn't help preserve American society. There's a great line that I'll

quote here from Michael Rose in his new book, The Subversive Art of Classical Education. And I

think this really hits home at our point. So again, contrast this with a with a vision of education

that's purely utilitarian and practical and job training. Michael Rose says quote, when a 15-year-old

learns the progression from Greek philosophy to Roman law, from medieval synthesis to Renaissance

humanism, from Reformation theology to Enlightenment political theory, he gains more than cultural

literacy. He gains a map. And with that map, he can navigate claims about rights, justice,

equality, authority and freedom. And quote, I think that's really powerful. And it helps show how

young people need to understand where all of these concepts in our society and government come

from, the things that we value. And a lot of that capital has been lost because of progressive

education. Yeah, I just find it ironic all these folks throughout protesting. Do you not realize you

have the right to protest because of the system that is that you're, well, I'm, I'm, you know,

tearing down. Yeah. Yeah. I'm in the soda. And I don't want to necessarily wait into the political

debate out of it. But what is so, what's so lost on these folks is again, what Michael Rose was

just talking about. For example, this, this I find hilarious. It's, it's the theory of non-contradiction,

right? I mean, it's, it's sort of like you have no logic. We have a group of people in Minneapolis

currently protesting enforcement of borders. But what they do is they harass fellow citizens by

putting up artificial borders that they've built themselves in stopping people's cars in the

middle of the road and asking them to show ID ID. I'd have seen a video on this. It's the craziest

thing in the world. And so again, we don't need more critical thinking. We need more logical thinking

and classical Christian education is the way to do this. Yeah. Well, and I, yeah, we could go on

and we need to point our time down. But it's, there's a term of seen recently called meta-modernism,

which is this idea that it's, it's beyond postmodernism. Now we're allowing absolute and

complete contradictory realities into our life. It's 2 plus 2 is 5. And that's perfectly fine.

We're not going to even bother to try to sort all those, you know, oppressive, you know, absolute

things out. And it's just, that's the scary point at which the civilization falls apart. So, you

know, I think the bigger thesis here is what is classical Christian? And in fact, what it is is

not just getting a job. It's not just forming who you're going to become. It's literally saving

our civilization. It's a pretty audacious statement that you've helped us see, I think, very well

and very convincingly. So any final thoughts to our listeners? I just encourage everyone to,

to really consider what options they have around them. There's, there's homeschooling. There's

hybrid schools. There's brick and mortar classical schools. There's charter. There's a religious

affiliated classical. It's really transforming lives. I did my, I did my doctoral dissertation on

a study of classical education and what it is. And I am so astonished at the results that I see,

the fruit that is born for, for all kinds of communities, socioeconomically and, and ethnically

diverse communities coming together as a community united around a, a mode of education. And having

a lofty vision for what a human person is capable of, like, like, W.E.B. Du Bois had. And that when

you, when you hold vast that vision, it transforms people's lives, you know, and, and, in the Catholic

world, St. Elizabeth Anne Seaton and, and others who, who brought education to the masses and,

and particularly to underserved communities, minorities, the poor, they did not give them a

different education than what the elite received. So St. Elizabeth Anne Seaton, she's, she's,

she's part of the founders generation. And, um, and that, uh, she brought them the best education

possible from her school, such that wealthy Americans were sending their children to her school.

It's amazing. For anyone. And so, um, it's amazing what this model of education, which is,

as Jeremy Tate famously says, classical education just used to be called education.

That's really the, that's a great ending point. And we're, this is not about some new trendy thing.

This is literally, I think Lewis talks about that when you get lost, maybe the best path,

home is just a turnaround to go back from the way from which you came. And so we're really

re-intrinching. And, and that, which is formed most of the world around us that we love and appreciate.

So, Michael, thanks for giving us that walk through our history, through the story, love

here in your story. Um, thank you for helping us continue to gain such an understanding and love

for classical education. Thanks so much for having me. Appreciate it.

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