00:00:23.040Pre-order it today at newchristendompress.com slash longhouse.
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00:00:35.660Wherever Christianity has gone, learning and education has followed.
00:00:40.720Wherever Christianity has gone, schools have sprung up in town squares and rural villages.
00:00:46.060From grammar schools to universities, rigorous education is a Christian virtue.
00:00:51.640You see it in the 4th century with Augustine.
00:00:54.020Just read his De Doctrina Christiana on Christian Teaching, a book about education.
00:00:59.600Or in schools like the Vivarium of Italy, established by Cassiodorus in the 6th century,
00:01:05.860a haven for learning, writing, Christian training, and the preservation of learning from the ancients.
00:01:12.340Or schools like the cathedral schools of the early Middle Ages in Europe,
00:01:16.840the epicenters of advanced education in the Western world.
00:01:20.300Or schools like the Puritan schools of the early American colonies, who published the first textbook in the Americas, the New England Primer.
00:01:28.840In fact, Puritans are one of the big movers behind the expansion of education in America to include more than nobility and professional clergymen.
00:01:37.720For the Reformed and Protestant Christian, universal education of children was an outworking of the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, as it applied to normal human discipleship.
00:01:48.880If we're all priests, boys and girls, men and women, clergy and laity, nobility and laborer,
00:01:54.600then ought we not all be able to access the scriptures ourselves, to read and write and reason clearly?
00:02:01.540Prior to this time, the vast majority of education had been an undertaking only for the clergy or the nobility.0.51
00:02:08.380And so to that end, Protestants in 17th century America even passed laws requiring communities
00:02:15.260to create and support basic education in their communities.
00:02:19.100The oldest of these laws is found in the Old Deluder Satan Act of 1647 in Massachusetts,
00:08:23.460So what we're going to talk about in today's episode is Christian education as we continue mining this theme of covenant succession and the importance of this ordinary covenant succession between generations in building and seeing the new Christendom established.
00:08:39.060And so there are three big principles that will order this episode,
00:08:43.520and I'll give them to you here up front.
00:12:21.280Clearly, we have commandments in Scripture, Deuteronomy 6, Ephesians 6, other places that are very, very clear about the responsibility of fathers to rear their children with a Christian education and formation.
00:12:32.740But pragmatically, you can simply look at this and say, Christians are getting annihilated in the culture war because of this central issue.
00:12:41.240I heard somebody say it the other day.
00:12:43.320Christians reproduce in the bedroom.0.99
00:12:45.680Pagans reproduce in the classroom.0.99
00:15:13.720Yeah, and I would also say, like, look, the Frankfurt School critical theory, Herbert Marcuse post-World War II, they come to America, this whole new left that's infiltrated college campuses and then public education.
00:15:28.020Look, if you do nothing else, read the enemy's playbook, look at what they did, look at how they won the culture over generations.
00:15:35.260It was the long, slow march through the institutions, and they captured education, and now they're very easily capturing the hearts and minds of children.
00:15:42.300And that's shaping the entire culture, the entire political discourse, all that stuff.
00:15:48.500So I think if nothing else, you look at that and you say, okay, that was the play.
00:16:40.340But because of their partnership with us and because all of you chose to support them,
00:16:43.840they've grown enough to make it their full-time livelihood.
00:16:45.920This is what happens when Christians support Christians.
00:16:48.380Our communities are strengthened and faithful businesses thrive.
00:16:51.220So if you're a Christian business owner who wants to reach thousands of like-minded people
00:16:54.920and grow your company, we'd love to partner with you.
00:16:57.640Email us at advertising at newchristendompress.com.
00:17:05.480Yeah, you have to start as a Christian with these programmatic principles that inform all of our decision making. Things like when you're trying to figure out what your marriage should look like as a Christian, you don't start by saying, how would we get along better? How would I get my wife to have sex with me more? If you start there, you're like three quarters of the way through the conversation.
00:17:27.220it's like starting reading a book on chapter 19. You need to ask first, what is marriage?
00:17:31.620And how do I know what marriage is? What does success look like with this thing?
00:17:35.140Well, what are our children? What are our children? They're blessings.
00:17:39.560They're blessings from God. Children are a heritage from the Lord, the Psalms say.
00:17:43.500So you look at that and you say, what are blessings? Well, blessings come with job
00:17:47.180descriptions in the scriptures. We say this a lot at Refuge. Blessings come with job descriptions.
00:17:51.740When God gives you strength, which is a blessing, it comes with the job description,
00:17:56.740use your strength to serve God, love your neighbor, basically fulfill the law. When God
00:18:02.800gives you a wife, that's a blessing. He who finds a wife finds a good thing. And it comes with a job1.00
00:18:08.080description. Love your wife, lay your life down for her. So when he gives you children, it comes
00:18:13.060with a job description. What is that? Well, fathers, raise your children in the paideia and
00:18:19.040neuthesia of the Lord, Jesus Christ. What does that mean? Well, it means disciple them. Like Dan,
00:18:25.360you were saying. The job description that come with our children is discipleship. And what you
00:18:29.420have to realize when you ask the question of education, you have to say, what is education?
00:18:33.280It's actually a subset of discipleship. Discipleship is the big umbrella, and it includes more than
00:18:38.660just education. But one of the big headings underneath that umbrella is education. And then
00:18:45.580you realize that you are not free as a parent. This is why we use the word ought. You ought not
00:18:50.760send your kids to the government schools. You are not free, if you understand the scriptural
00:18:55.040commandments, to send your children to learn the nature of reality on most subjects under the sun
00:19:04.200from pagans. You're not free to do that. Yeah, in a way that they're teaching
00:19:08.660opposite to the biblical worldview. Yeah, and here's the thing. I love what Doug Wilson says
00:19:13.920in his case for classical Christian education. He said, the ground for the necessity of Christian
00:19:18.740schools lies in this very thing, that no fact can be known unless it be known in its relationship to
00:19:25.480God. And once this point is clearly seen, the doubt as to the value of teaching arithmetic in
00:19:31.460Christian schools falls out of the picture. Of course, arithmetic must be taught in a Christian
00:19:35.820school. It cannot be taught anywhere else. And what he's getting at, and that's end quote,0.98
00:19:40.420what he's getting at is this, why does two plus two equal four? Why does light travel at 299,792,
00:19:48.7403,458 meters per second in a vacuum? And the Christians are the only ones who can answer1.00
00:19:54.260those questions. And the answer is because Jesus is Lord. The answer is because he has created all
00:19:59.340things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities. He's before
00:20:03.320all things and in him all things hold together. And until you can relate any point of fact to
00:20:08.640that central fact around which everything ought to orbit, you don't know anything. The fear of
00:20:14.160The Lord is the beginning of knowing things, the Proverbs says, of knowledge and of wisdom, of knowing what to do about those things.
00:20:20.700It might sound silly a little bit to say, like, well, the reason that math works is because Jesus is Lord.
00:20:25.880But just one of the principles of God is that he doesn't change.
00:24:20.380It's like this is what they think about your kids, and you want to willingly turn your kids over to them, and then they're going to become like that.
00:24:27.500The lips of the wise spread knowledge, not so the hearts of fools, Proverbs 15, 7.0.74
00:24:33.000When you understand the way that Proverbs defined a fool and a wise person in that passage, definitionally, if you are sending your children to be instructed by somebody, you are sending them to have foolishness sewn into their heart.0.97
00:24:48.440And what happens when you let, when idiots, this is like simpletons in the Proverbs, well, Proverbs 14, 18, the simple inherit folly, but the prudent are crowned with knowledge.0.96
00:24:58.360Again, the Bible's not this, like, there's religious stuff and virtue stuff over here, and then there's knowledge over here, and they're totally hermetically sealed off.0.99
00:27:00.660Just repent of your critical race theory. That's all I'm asking.
00:27:04.000Part of it is exceptions make bad law.
00:27:08.000Exceptions make bad law or difficult cases make bad law is another way to put it.
00:27:13.060It's like, yeah, sure, I'm a Christian, but I grew up with an enormous number of Christians in public schooling and youth group environment.1.00
00:27:23.180And the vast majority of them are absolutely the furthest thing.0.99
00:27:26.580They're feminists, liberals, and apostates, but I repeat myself.
00:27:32.900For the project of this season to be successful, the project of seeing a new Christendom built,
00:27:38.280there will need to be thousands and thousands of Christian men and women who are equipped to stand
00:27:42.400for the truth of scripture against the errors of both the liberal church and the pagan culture.
00:27:48.480This is one reason we're so glad to be partnering with our sponsor for this season,
00:29:19.520My sixth grade health teacher was a lesbian who had her partner in to help with the classes, like a class helper frequently, as she taught us about sex and things like that.0.81
00:29:29.660Not about, you know, homosexual sex, but that wasn't allowed at that time.
00:29:55.420As another kid gets mowed down behind you.
00:29:58.040To Brian's point, even in our generation, I would say 95% at least of the people that I went to school with, outright pagans, a lot of them claim to be Christians, but not following the Lord anymore.
00:30:11.240Yeah, I mean, my school did let out early on Wednesdays
00:30:13.800because of the Catholic, whatever, confirmation
00:30:17.240and because of youth group and things like that.
00:30:19.920I thought you were going to say because of Packers practice.
00:31:06.360Was, it seems like if the scriptures were making such, I mean, inconvenient demands on us Christianly educating our children, how come there's not more scriptural direct commands about that?
00:32:03.380And many commentators, and I agree with them, posit that the book of Proverbs is Solomon's attempt to obey that command as it relates to the formation of his sons, particularly to prepare them for the vocation that God has given their lives, which is ruling well.
00:32:20.400So when you just understand that and you start going through the Proverbs, which is one of the most concentrated books of instruction on children and young people, it is full.
00:32:31.300Again, it tells you over and over and over and over again, not just that certain spiritual duties are related to things you should believe and be taught, but that you should actually know everything.
00:32:42.520Every point of knowledge should be related to the fear of the Lord or you don't know it at all.0.99
00:32:47.560So to me, there's a slam dunk biblical case that the way we think about education today is stupid.
00:32:55.080The second thing, though, the second objection I would bring is that the concept of universal education is very new historically, and it's largely the outworking in history of the Protestant doctrine of the priesthood of all believers to education.0.89
00:33:11.820So prior to about the 1500s, education was nearly exclusively reserved for nobility and clergy, and it wasn't expected that most children, boys, especially when you factor in girls, would learn how to read, would learn all these different skills, right?
00:33:29.400Now, when the Protestant Reformation happened, you start to see Christian educators rise up out of the church, particularly theological educators, begin to posit ideas about universal education as an outworking of this concept, that all of our children are priests in the kingdom of God.
00:33:47.820All of our boys, all of our girls are priests to God, priesthood of all believers.
00:33:52.100So the first textbook was a Protestant.
00:33:56.900You could go on and then we'll talk about this later in our schools section, but everywhere Protestant Christians went, they brought schools.
00:34:06.000And they brought schools with this radical idea that most people should know how to at least get through grammar education.0.61
00:34:13.180It was a radical idea, and it was the outworking of a theological concept.
00:34:15.540So that they could read the scriptures.
00:34:17.480And you know that if you listen to the cold open about the old Deluder Satan Act of 1647, which was a Massachusetts law, as you've already heard.0.53
00:34:25.940Massachusetts law from the Puritans that they basically, what we call public education in0.83
00:34:31.660America, it's actually kind of sad the way it's been hijacked and ruined really was the outworking
00:34:36.440of their law that they knew that Satan loved to deceive people. And so Christians needed to be1.00
00:34:40.860able to handle and know the word of God personally. So they needed to be able to read. And so they
00:34:45.300required by law, when you had 50 households, you had to hire a teacher to handle reading and
00:34:51.740and writing. And then when you had a hundred households in a town, you had to start a grammar
00:34:56.440school or you'd be fined like five pounds per year to the next town because they were assuming the
00:35:03.420next town was going to have to deal with your burden. So of your children being educated. So
00:35:08.300again, I would say Protestant history is against that idea. Protestants understood the need for0.85
00:35:12.980universal Christian education. And I would say that the old and new testaments have an obvious,
00:35:19.700obvious call to christian education as a subset of christian discipleship for our children
00:35:25.660so then would you say that our salvation is tied then to the way that we educate our children
00:35:33.160because i've heard that as a charge and i do have an answer i don't mean to put you on the spot
00:35:37.600well we're not saved by grace and through faith we're actually saved through christian education
00:35:41.860oh man that's just actually wait a minute i'm screwed i'm just kidding yeah just no that's
00:35:47.940No, we're saved by grace and through faith.
00:35:49.480It would be like asking, so you're saying, pastor, that unrepentant adulterers don't inherit the kingdom of God, that sinning through adultery is bad.
00:35:59.380Are you saying we're saved by not sleeping with people we're not married to?
00:36:43.060But like Christians ought to respond a certain way, particularly in this cultural moment, when they see that need and that call to Christianly educate their children.
00:37:00.540We'll head into the second principle here.
00:37:01.680I would say to sum up that we're commanded to disciple our children, and clearly, even just from a directly biblical standpoint, education is a subset of discipleship.
00:37:12.420Therefore, it is imperative that Christian parents Christianly educate their children, which entails teaching them how every point of knowledge relates to the Lordship of Christ,
00:37:22.660because our theology tells us that you cannot know anything properly
00:37:26.320about reality, knowledge, and ethics, about truth, goodness, and beauty,
00:37:30.060about metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology,
00:43:41.940um, on a daily basis or, you know, we couldn't or whatever the issue is. I think it's a way to
00:43:47.300create a division of labor that serves the whole community. Yeah. That's sort of the pragmatic
00:43:52.280level. Um, and I also think some of it too is just, um, we've talked about like with St.
00:43:58.160Brennan's, the way that it brings the community even closer together in this joint work of
00:44:03.720education. Yeah. Um, that all the kids that go to the school along with my boys, you know, we're,
00:44:08.800we're really rowing in the same direction we're united through the things that are going on with
00:44:13.200the school so i think it becomes a point of contact where one of the things we noticed with
00:44:17.740homeschooling um which we did for you know 10 years or 12 years i guess it was um was that you
00:44:23.480kind of get these individual ships just all rowing in the opposite not necessarily opposite but just
00:44:27.360different directions yeah and it really created this thing where nobody could get together and
00:44:32.020work together quite well yeah because everybody's like each family chooses their own curriculum
00:44:37.180well then you get in the church community and they're kind of doing the same thing
00:44:40.880whereas it's much nicer actually now where we can just say there's one direction yeah we're all
00:44:46.860rowing and and we're going there together um and we can and we can do it in a way where division
00:44:52.300of labor really helps us yeah do our own thing well too in our vocations that's one of the
00:44:57.840benefits of having the body of christ is that not like you said not every member does the same thing
00:45:02.880Right. Not all is a mouth, not all is a hand, whatever is essentially what you're saying. So God has equipped certain people to teach really well. And you can see that from, from our teachers and we've all experienced like, well, that person's a really gifted teacher. Even if they're a pagan, they've been gifted with teaching. They're really good at it.
00:45:19.800I want my boys to learn from good teachers. I want them to have, especially men, which I'll talk about in just a moment, that are just godly men that can really do the job of discipleship and of education well in ways that I can't.
00:45:39.600So one of the reasons I would go with schools and not homeschooling, and you can correct this, and so just to make you aware of it, so I just preface this to soften the blow a little bit, is that homeschooling tends to be very matriarchal, and because you have a female-led, the wife is usually the one doing most of the education, like the active education while the man's working.
00:46:05.020I know there are exceptions, but that's what ends up happening.
00:46:07.860One of the dangers of that is that women are more easily deceived and so captured by new techniques, by convincing ideas and things like that.1.00
00:47:10.820But I think even people like Votie Bauckham have said, hey, you know, from the pro homeschool camp, at the age of 12, every father must fully take over the education of his children.
00:47:20.900Well, for a lot of us, that simply does not work.
00:50:17.880And so this is an anomaly in human history.
00:50:20.200And it's just, I mean, if you want to talk about natural law, I mean, that's about as natural as it gets.
00:50:27.480Yeah. And so that's one of the reasons that I would say that homeschooling has an inherent pitfall in feminizing boys. And if not feminizing boys and making disenchanted boys that tend to retreat, that don't respect their mother. You said your boys, there was a lot of tension with mom and it's because of the authority structure.0.97
00:50:52.460And it was immediately alleviated when, look, now they go to school and they got two former Air Force guys teaching that.
00:51:07.080When you look at, I think you could kind of back up and summarize some of these benefits of schooling,
00:51:14.820is that one of the ways we explain to the church is like, and we love, we have many homeschool families, to be totally clear.
00:51:19.700And one of our main goals is to head off any kind of like homeschooling versus school culture in the church because just when you start a school and a lot of people are already educating their children Christianly, they're deep into it.
00:51:43.680And we're explaining why did we start a school instead of just saying, let's keep doing all the homeschooling families and give them resources.
00:51:50.220Well, we think that you see in communities, Christian communities, where there's a strong school somewhere around the middle, that you see the culture over time, especially over one, two, three generations, grow more like a tree than like a scattered field of lots of different things.
00:52:09.340You see the school and the church and the home function as this growing, cohesive body.
00:52:14.840And so they grow in theological unity.
00:52:17.400The school and the church and the home are working together to enculturate a common theological
00:52:30.280They grow over time then in unified legacy, the school and the church and the home working
00:52:35.820together in all these things over generation, passing the torch and growing in specialization.
00:52:40.920And so you end up with this great redwood tree where you then have multiple generations all
00:52:45.720working together and pouring into the school. And the school is continually improving. It's not like
00:52:50.380you homeschool for one shot until your kids are grown and then you're done. The school is
00:52:55.600continually training and growing in its skill and growing in its majesty, growing in its potency,
00:53:01.620putting down deeper roots, getting harder to knock over. And then one of the benefits is that
00:53:07.000that provides shade for a lot of scenarios where homeschooling is not possible, usually because of
00:53:13.660sin or sin that's happened again. You know, think of a mother, a widower, a widow, I'm sorry, who has
00:53:19.680multiple kids. She can't easily homeschool. Well, school can really help with that. Sometimes you0.98
00:53:26.520You have situations where sin early in life really jacks things up.
00:53:30.880And you have families that they come as you are.
00:53:33.040You're not a third-generation Christian family.
00:53:35.140You've got a lot of issues you have to work through.
00:53:37.120And a school can really come alongside and help and provide mature Christian theological input that they wouldn't necessarily know where to start.
00:53:46.260There's so many benefits as the school grows up in a community.
00:53:50.180It gives the potency of an institution.
00:53:54.520and institutions can be powerful things.
00:55:41.780Well, it's the same way that we, you know, when we manage the elder team,
00:55:45.100We want our men to be eating from the same trough is what we say.
00:55:49.040We want them to be reading similar things to grow in like-mindedness, to continue to grow, but to continue to unite.
00:55:58.860And it's the same thing with our people.
00:56:00.320We want our students to be brought up in this rigorous, godly Christian culture in education led by godly men and women, you know, towards a specific direction.
00:56:16.300And so it's to unite the people in a lot of ways as well, because now all of our students have shared worldviews.
00:56:55.200They're all learning about the same periods of time from the same sources, and they're eating the same food, and they're being strengthened by that same material.
00:57:03.660They're hearing the same message in chapel every morning.
00:57:06.060They're learning to sing the same songs.
00:57:18.680They're learning how to actually go out of the home and succeed in an environment that's not just the comfortable nest of home.
00:57:26.820These are all skills that are – they're also interacting with peers that are going to become the people that they marry and the people that they're lifelong friends with, the people that they start businesses with.
00:57:37.800My son and Eric's son, one of his sons, are the two students right now in Form 2 because we have a small school at this point.0.57
00:57:45.720So every day, Walter and Ari are just fast friends, like their butts.
00:57:51.760And I wouldn't be surprised if these few years where they might be part of a very small cohort, they'll probably end up doing something together, being friends for life.
00:58:02.820And these benefits, you can simulate them.
00:58:05.640You can get them in different ways with homeschooling.
00:58:07.100And I'm not saying if you don't have a school to spare.
01:00:31.500If next month you say to all the parents,
01:00:33.240Hey, I'm sorry. In order to continue not hiring gays, you have to now pay $800 a month of tuition that you weren't paying.0.95
01:00:40.380In Utah, there's a charter school model that's fairly popular to get funding.0.97
01:00:46.960And so there have been some that have started that there's claims like, well, it's a Christian school, but they can't say Jesus Christ is Lord.
01:00:53.660That's why this all works. You would get your funding pulled right now.
01:01:41.820Yeah, and the other side of being unbought, I would say that's equally important and sometimes forgotten because the government funding is so big, is that you also have to be unbought in how you fund the school tuition.
01:01:52.200if you, for example, if you have, let's say, some non-Christian families that like the rigor and the
01:02:00.420classical nature of your education, and they're like, yeah, we'll pay $1,400 a month per student,0.98
01:02:05.380let us in, we're not Christians, da-da-da-da-da. Well, no, you have to be able to say, no, this is0.72
01:02:10.160a Christian school. If you're not a member in good standing in your church or its equivalent,
01:02:15.860like we interview, we turn families down at our school with regularity. Even families who are
01:02:20.760saying, no, we'll pay tuition. And we say, no, thank you. Because the culture of our school,
01:02:25.580it can be easily swayed by 10, 20% non-Christian population that comes in, kids looking at porn0.89
01:02:31.640on smartphones. They don't bend the knee to Christ. They're the cool kids now. They're0.66
01:02:37.260attracted to the other students who are like, oh, look at those rebels over there. They're
01:02:41.380telling us that our parents are dumb and that Christ is stupid. No, we just say no. You have1.00
01:02:47.720to be unbought, and this is why it's so difficult to start schools, but you have to start with this
01:02:52.960foundational, we will not take money that comes with compromise, no matter what the source is.
01:02:59.920Yes. Two, unapologetically Christian. The school must be unapologetically Christian.
01:03:07.440I mean, what are we doing here? Yeah. What's the point of this podcast if this is not true?1.00
01:03:12.540Right. Like at every point. But like we've been a part of homeschool co-ops in the past,
01:03:17.560where it's like, I remember we had a part of one
01:03:20.060and they decided to let these Mormon family come in
01:03:43.000This is the theological side of the bar has to be set really high.
01:03:47.020Yeah. One of the things stupidly we've done in the Christian circle for decades is say it's the lowest common denominator. Right. Let's just set the bar so low. Yeah. That almost anyone could make it in. Well, I've been a part of those things and they're usually garbage pretty quick. Yep. One of the things that we say about St. Brandon's is that St. Brandon's is education for the saints.0.96
01:04:08.120and meaning we don't want to make pagans who know Latin.
01:04:12.500We want to make students who know the Lord.
01:04:15.200If education is a subset of Christian discipleship,
01:04:18.680we have no interest in attempting to disciple pagans.
01:04:21.860That also means we look at the fruit of the children
01:04:25.220and how they're being disciplined and raised at home as well
01:04:29.160because if they start causing some sort of distractions
01:04:32.240that are not in line with Christian living,
01:06:01.940And this is why we're classical. We're not devoting a large portion of this to saying classical Christian education, but we are a classical school, and we mean that really basically that we're devoted to teaching the canon of the Western classical model, meaning it's books, history, theology, all of those things that are just our inheritance of faith from Christ's conquest through history in the West.
01:06:25.660So does that mean we've not decolonized our bookshelves?
01:06:29.140We have not. We've actually re-colonized our bookshelf.
01:06:31.920That's part of the goal is re-colonization.
01:06:34.100We're trying to colonize and create colonizers.
01:11:33.840It's just between themselves, they're like, dad doesn't even know Latin.
01:11:36.180I mean, wouldn't you say, though, like when you look at Christendom 1.0 and their canon, I mean, like, how are we going to build 2.0 if we haven't even mastered 1.0?
01:11:47.200Yeah, you've got to know the playbook.
01:11:48.560And like to your point, Eric, about rigor and teaching our kids multidisciplinary rigor, it's a muscle.
01:11:56.820When you learn how to do a really hard thing, and I'm even talking like calculus.
01:12:00.500When you learn how to do really hard math, the discipline that it takes to focus on doing a math problem that takes four pages to work through.
01:12:08.520I was talking to Deacon and Chad King, Ben Garrett, about some of his homework.
01:12:13.400He had a test in engineering school where it was open book, open note, open anything.
01:12:18.420You just couldn't copy after you're another student.
01:12:30.500And he aced it. I mean, Ben was really good at math. He's a very skilled engineer, actually. And I was just thinking about the discipline. And now I see Ben, and I look at the discipline that he has in other areas of his life. And it's not that the math created that necessarily. It's expressed in all of it. But it's a muscle that gets bigger as you exercise it.
01:13:51.500These were the constituent parts and subjects of being able to handle words well and logic well.
01:13:58.420So they could read a book, understand it, dissect the ideas logically that are being presented, reject some, receive some, modify and integrate others into their whole body of knowledge they have, and then communicate that well.
01:14:11.360And all of that done by a man or a woman who is living a virtuous life before God.
01:14:16.080what the ancient Romans, like Quintilian or Cicero, would call a good man speaking well.
01:14:23.240That's what they were actually, these were God, I mean, they didn't know the Lord.
01:14:26.220They were aiming in their schools of rhetoric, some of the roots of our classical Christian
01:14:30.240schooling comes from this, they were aiming to make good men who could speak well. Not just men
01:14:35.560who were competent, but virtuous men who could handle words and clear, subtle thinking well.
01:14:41.720And that's what we're trying to do in our schools. We're trying to make men and women,
01:14:44.880by the time they graduate who handle words well because words are everything. Words are life.
01:14:50.660Words are life and death. To think well, speak well, and to be godly men and women as they do so.
01:14:56.560Yeah, the value of words cannot be overstated because it's built into everything. God spoke
01:15:02.980everything into existence. The word became flesh and dwelt among us. I mean, words are everything.
01:15:10.100Yeah. I mean, so vastly important. Who are the people that last? Those who have written.
01:15:15.560Yep. I mean, words are very important. Where does the attack come? The dictionary. Yeah.
01:15:21.380What is a man? Oh, we're going to tell you. It's words. It's thinking. Yeah. Even somebody like
01:15:26.980Alfred the Great, he was wise enough to know, and because of the Christian tradition, to write0.92
01:15:33.120everything down. Yeah. And so that's what marks that period. Actually, the boys in the oldest form
01:15:37.560are reading that right now, so I've been reading that