David Goodwin, President of the American Association for Christian Classical Christian Schools, joins me to talk about the difference between a classical and an industrial education, and why you should choose a Christian school for your kid or grandkid.
00:00:49.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA. We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
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00:01:43.000Well, there's a lot of answers to that.
00:01:45.000But, you know, in our parlance in the classical Christian world, which is the area I'm familiar with, it's the cultivation of wisdom and virtue.
00:01:54.000Pretty simple set of qualifiers there, but it takes a bit to unpack.
00:01:59.000So you helped run, or you founded the Association of Classical Christian Schools?
00:02:04.000I didn't find it, but I am the president of it, have been for the last decade or so.
00:02:10.000So I toured one of your schools in Boise.
00:02:28.000What is the philosophical difference between a classical education and a more industrial type of education?
00:02:37.000Well, in a word, it would be the enculturation of children as opposed to informing them, just giving them a lot of facts.
00:02:47.000So if you look at the industrial education that the progressives created in the early part of the 20th century, it was geared almost exclusively towards vocation, like teach kids how to make money.
00:02:58.000And the classical education that had been there for years prior had always done a sufficient job of that, but it had been more focused on the enculturation.
00:03:11.000And I think that's a lot of what happened to America.
00:03:13.000When we took away the American culture, it started to decay.
00:03:17.000And over the course of about 100 years, we find ourselves where we have been the last few.
00:03:23.000Talk about how your classes are not set up necessarily in single file roles that it's much more discussion or dialogue based.
00:03:31.000And just so everyone understands from one perspective, the industrial model is done by most government schools, most private schools, which is that kids are something to be programmed.
00:04:14.000The real challenge is getting students who can discern truth from falsehood as they learn.
00:04:20.000And so our focus is more about teaching them how to discern what is true than it is just telling them what the truth is.
00:04:31.000The combination is some of what you saw when you were at the school in Boise where all of our schools have some form of this where it's conducted, at least in the high school and usually the junior high, around a large table where the students are taking apart ancient texts and trying to understand what is the truth contained in these and what is the falsehood in these and can we...
00:04:52.000Align these with the truth of Jesus Christ and the scriptures, and that combination of exercises forms up this skill of acquiring knowledge, and that's the rare skill in our day today.
00:05:05.000So why is it that our public schools have gravitated so far away from this practice of learning?
00:05:13.000Well, they intentionally designed it that way.
00:05:25.000He thought that that kind of education that really taught students to discern knowledge wasn't helpful in an industrial economy.
00:05:35.000We needed to train basically servile students to be able to do jobs.
00:05:41.000Now, in his time, it was mostly factory work, but it later became engineering or science or STEM.
00:05:47.000Instead of looking at the citizen and saying what makes a citizen capable of self-governance, which is what our founding fathers were involved with.
00:05:57.000That's why they were all classically educated.
00:06:00.000They just understood and assumed this.
00:06:02.000And so John Dewey brings this in and our schools are immediately reoriented towards just basically programming kids to do.
00:06:11.000At first, it was science, that kind of thing.
00:06:13.000But, you know, you had the Maoist revolution and we learned a few things.
00:06:17.000You know, the progressives learned a few things from that Maoist revolution.
00:06:21.000I'm talking about the cultural revolution in the 1960s, not the original one.
00:06:26.000When Mao realized that the best way to establish a communist government was to enculturate the people.
00:06:37.000And so he took over the educational systems and indoctrinated them in that way.
00:06:41.000And that's exactly what the progressives did in the latter half of the 20th century.
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00:07:51.000even conservative parents will marvel and say, well, my local school, they have a great STEM program, and all I want out of my school is for them to do math and arithmetic and prepare them for a job.
00:08:05.000Well, yes, because whatever job you prepare them for, at least in this economy, I mean, at least at the pragmatic level, is going to be gone by the time they graduate anyway.
00:08:15.000So it's a pointless exercise, except one job.
00:08:20.000That's always there, which is discerning truth, to understand, to know, to learn how to know.
00:08:26.000You know, Dorothy Sayers in her essay on education that she did in the 1940s was titled The Lost Tools of Learning.
00:08:35.000And what she said in that essay was that we used to teach kids the tools of learning and now we don't at a time, and I'm paraphrasing here, at a time when it's never been so important because radio and television and books are readily available and all these ideas are coming at these kids and they have no idea how to...
00:08:56.000Discern what is true and what's not true.
00:08:59.000So, of course, again, our nemesis in the progressive world, their idea is we'll just call it all fake news or what's the term they use?
00:09:27.000Well, that is a big part of the wisdom, wisdom and virtue.
00:09:33.000When it comes to the Founding Fathers, this was their main focus for education, was wisdom and virtue, because they knew.
00:09:40.000And it was visible, because as soon as the revolution was over and the country was established, You have Alexis de Tocqueville come here and he observes this about the country, that it's oddly educated, that farmers actually have read Cicero or Caesar.
00:09:59.000And he's more used to the European, of course he was French, he was used to the European model where you've got the aristocrats who are educated in the greats and then the average farmer just does what he's told to do.
00:10:14.000A very different picture here in America, and that's what de Tocqueville said kept us going.
00:11:01.000And the works that we use, the great books of the West, the Bible, there's a lot of depth in those.
00:11:08.000And so I think a lot of kids, if we think back to our public school experience, certainly I was in the public schools, you were, I think, for a time.
00:11:30.000So it wasn't pointing towards anything.
00:11:32.000At your schools, the American Association of Classical Christian Schools, I'm sure the answer is yes, but talk about how you're unafraid to talk about objective truth.
00:11:43.000That is one of the things that even some conservative parents say, well, I don't want a school or a government school or anyone.
00:11:50.000Saying ever that there is an absolute good or truth.
00:12:22.000These kids, the most common things I hear from graduates of our schools when they return is that they've gotten to college and they find it, again, to be tedium.
00:12:38.000Well, Hillsdale's an exception for sure.
00:12:42.000There's a handful of those exceptions, but for most kids that go to the colleges, they can't find anybody who has an interesting mind, anybody who wants to discuss anything.
00:13:46.000You're going to live under some superseding moral code.
00:13:49.000And that's something that the progressives have done a very successful trick on us, making us believe that there could be an agnostic public square.
00:13:58.000And I don't know if they ever believed that, but that's certainly what they want us to believe.
00:14:05.000a very strong set of ideals that are transcendent in their view.
00:14:10.000In their view, for example, wealth is necessarily evil or the equity of all, you know, leveling of all wealth, leveling of all status and stature is an ultimate good. leveling of all status and stature is an ultimate good.
00:14:29.000And that's an unquestionable good in, I think, most progressive schools.
00:14:36.000And it's one that needs to be questioned.
00:14:38.000Music History, economics, the great works of literature.
00:15:08.000Even though these novels were written in the 1930s and 40s, they're highly relevant today as they show what a tyrannical government does to human nature.
00:15:16.000More importantly, they can show us that faith, family, and friends are worth fighting for.
00:15:21.000Maybe you read these books a long time ago in school.
00:15:23.000Maybe you've heard others talk about them, and they seem a little intimidating.
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00:15:43.000So there's lots of parents listening to this right now, and they might think they're sending their kid to a solid school.
00:15:49.000I'm not asking you to criticize them, but what are very simple questions that they can ask, a checklist of whether or not their school is truly pursuing what is good, true, and beautiful?
00:16:24.000And then the second question, beyond what is the age at which they read their first full book with chapters in it, not small readers, but an actual book with chapters, say, Little House on the Prairie or something like that.
00:16:41.000Then the next question would be, what is the greatest book that you guys read at this school?
00:16:48.000And by that, I mean something that's older than 100 years old.
00:16:53.000Just any book that's older than 100 years old that you read.
00:16:56.000I think those two questions will often tease out answers that may surprise most parents.
00:17:01.000I think this is what, when Pete Hegseth and I wrote Battle for the American Mind, he was fascinated and brought in some really good material on what he called the COVID-16-19 Project, which was back at the time, parents watching over the shoulders of their kids and realizing that what they were learning at school was very different than what the parents thought they were learning.
00:17:31.000So you're saying most schools, they don't read anything post-100 years, and they definitely won't even tell a kid, hey, here's an 11-chapter book, you must read it.
00:19:10.000If you just want to capture a little bit of this, just look at the Declaration of Independence and look at the signatures on it.
00:19:18.000And John Hancock's signature is the one we often think of because it's so large.
00:19:24.000But men of his day actually sought to create a distinctive cursive hand because it was viewed as part of their refinement to become a better person because they had beauty even in the hand in which they wrote.
00:19:42.000And And this is something that we teach kids, you know.
00:19:49.000So that's kind of maybe more of an ethereal answer to your question.
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00:26:04.000I totally agree, and I think that people are seeing the excesses of modernity.
00:26:09.000They're seeing the lies of secularized, hyper-modernist, materialistic culture, and they want to go back towards what is lasting, what is true.
00:26:21.000Now, Catholic education tends to be more classical.
00:27:03.000Well, the Blaine Amendment, it's named after a senator who tried to pass it nationally.
00:27:07.000And basically, it was the Protestant Church so despised the Catholic Church in America at the time that they were trying to freeze the Catholics out of...
00:27:18.000They did not want any Catholic education whatsoever.
00:27:39.000That system paralleled and pretty much took on the progressive form in the early part of the 20th century when the progressives revolutionized education in the United States.
00:27:49.000And so those, what are often called the diocese schools within the Catholic Church, can oftentimes be very progressive in their form.
00:28:01.000The Catholic Church is very traditional, and so it's recovering quickly its old form, the form of education that was native to those schools originally, and they're putting it back into place rapidly.
00:28:15.000I'm excited about what they're contributing to the movement because they have a very deep history.
00:28:22.000How can people support you, get involved, and learn more?
00:28:26.000Well, you can learn more at classicalchristian.org.
00:28:31.000That is our main site that directs people in any which direction you want to go, whether you want to teach in our schools, whether you want to find a school, start a school.
00:28:41.000So I would advise that you start there.
00:28:44.000And closing thoughts for parents that might like the local football team, but they know the school's no good.