Kaylin Ford is the founder of Calgary Classical Academy, Canada's first tuition-free charter school, a Classical Charter School, and we'll come to why that's a significant difference in a moment. But first, let's talk about charter schools.
00:06:28.400as well as schools serving students with special needs.
00:06:32.260A lot of them tend to be private schools for student athletes.
00:06:36.240So they're not necessarily what we think of as the sort of $15,000, $20,000 a year tuition schools.
00:06:42.180And I think certainly there's great demand for those options as well.
00:06:45.360Well, if Mr. Hilton O'Brien is correct, there are something like 200,000 children out of 800,000 school-age K-12 students in Alberta.
00:06:56.460like 25 percent are either out of the system or anxiously looking for an opportunity to get out
00:07:03.540of the system and that does that does take us back to what we were saying before now you could
00:07:11.560say it's just population growth but i think it's more than that and would you like to expand a
00:07:16.400little bit on you said that you wish that people were were or were coming because they want to be
00:07:22.620their 10-year-old to be able to translate Virgil on the fly, you know, that would be great, wouldn't it?
00:07:29.280But is it just the moral thing, or is there really a demand for improved, an improvement in the three R's?
00:07:39.120Yes. So I think that a lot of parents can sense that there is something lacking in the education their children are receiving.
00:07:46.740They might not necessarily be able to diagnose it, partly because for most of those parents,
00:07:51.760they didn't receive what we would call a classical or traditional education themselves. They don't
00:07:56.560necessarily know what they were missing, and they can't quite put their finger on what their
00:08:00.960children are missing. You should just define classical education, just for a moment,
00:08:05.680sidetrack here. Well, there's a few ways to answer that. I would say that classical education starts
00:08:13.040with a set of metaphysical and anthropological assumptions that sets it apart from modern or
00:08:19.440progressive education and what i mean by that is that we have uh you know we say in our in our
00:08:25.680documents we believe that truth exists um it is a real thing so that's racist well well precise so
00:08:34.480i think one of the problems one of the things where modern education has really gone wrong
00:08:38.320and i think this is a sort of powerful civilizational solvent is the triumph of a kind of moral
00:08:44.880relativism and we are moral realists we say truth exists reality exists it's good it contains a moral
00:08:51.680dimension to it so there is actually such a thing as something being beautiful or just or unjust
00:08:58.880or good and bad and human beings are vested with powers of reason and intuition and we actually
00:09:06.400have the ability to sort of apprehend these at least to some extent and i think we need to be
00:09:13.120humble in that endeavor we'll never possess perfect knowledge but we can orient ourselves
00:09:18.880toward the pursuit of truth of beauty of justice of goodness and that is actually the proper end
00:09:25.440of education and you can't do that and i would say you can't engage in any serious epistemological
00:09:31.120undertaking if you don't accept that there is a truth that you are oriented toward so i think
00:09:36.400this sort of moral relativism has been extremely corrosive and it leads to a lot of confusion
00:09:41.280about what education is for. Now I don't want to be a spokesman for the for the mainstream system
00:09:50.560but they would probably bridle the suggestion that they're not teaching the truth. What exactly
00:10:00.080what exactly are they teaching then if if not the truth? Doxa mere opinion I would say. I think that
00:10:07.440one of our teachers put it well he said that in the system from which he had come which actually
00:10:13.600was religious but i think had sort of started to maybe lose some of its moorings he said that
00:10:19.200holding the correct opinions has been mistaken for being an educated person and so it's not
00:10:25.680anchored in a sort of objective or let's say transcendent idea of what truth is it's not
00:10:33.280something that stands above time or human opinion and can be used to judge ourselves or others.
00:10:39.680It is rather, it's totally fungible. It's subject to kind of changes in social preferences.
00:10:46.400And so, and I think that there's something to that. I think it's absolutely true that a lot
00:10:50.960of teachers are telling people what opinions they should hold and are equating that with
00:10:55.200being an educated person. Now, as a teacher, if somebody comes along and tells you to think this
00:11:01.760when you actually know otherwise and you go along and that's very difficult when you have
00:11:08.240a mortgage to pay and the kids need braces. Are we talking about a system that has become
00:11:15.680authoritarian? Well I think we could we could talk at some length about the authoritarian
00:11:22.480tendencies that are in schools and you know it's always been the case that society has certain
00:11:27.280there's parameters of what kinds of views and ideas and facts are acceptable to observe and
00:11:33.420to teach. That's always been the case. But I think that we've, I think that there's a risk that we
00:11:39.540are becoming authoritarian in other ways or that we are setting ourselves up rather for authoritarian
00:11:45.640conditions in a few, in a few respects. So my background prior to all of this was
00:11:53.500comparative politics, and I spent many years, over a decade, studying totalitarian regimes
00:12:01.140and trying to understand circumstances that give rise to this kind of philosophical and
00:12:06.500political corruption and evil. One of the things that is an insight from Hannah Arendt is that the
00:12:12.240perfect conditions for totalitarianism are a mass of atomized people. So it's sort of, it's
00:12:18.740hyper individualism it's sort of people who are not rooted in community in a tradition
00:12:25.140they're sort of severed from their patrimony and the kind of mediating institutions in society
00:12:31.300are weakened so they're very alone and thereby easily controlled and i think that we're very
00:12:35.940much at that point we're a sort of hyper individual very atomized society and modern
00:12:41.380education in many ways i think is exacerbating that by failing to connect people with the
00:12:45.620tradition so they're not teaching them classic kind of enduring texts and works of philosophy
00:12:50.980they're not putting them in conversation with the generations instead they seem to be trying
00:12:55.380to sever that connection and repudiate the past and so that's one of the circumstances that makes
00:13:01.540me very worried and one of the reasons why i decided to get involved in education and then a
00:13:07.380second is is the sort of the relativism the loss of objective standards by which to judge things
00:13:13.460When you use the phrase conversation with the generations, are you referring to the intentional removal of good books that were written more than 20 years ago from the school libraries and from the classroom curriculum?
00:13:34.460Well, look at the way that Canadian history is taught, for example.
00:13:38.460for example. We're not taught anymore, or many children are not taught anymore, that there's
00:13:43.820anything to recommend our country or our civilization. I don't think it's really imparted
00:13:48.940to children that civilization is an extremely hard-won, very fragile, very precious thing,
00:13:55.740that the default state of mankind is sort of a kind of chaos, and that history is very much a
00:14:01.900story of people trying to wrest order out of chaos and create things that are harmonious and beautiful.
00:14:06.620I don't think that children are taught to approach our history with that kind of gratitude or
00:14:12.140reverence or respect. It's very much a kind of iconoclastic. History is dark, it was oppressive,
00:14:18.700it was bigoted, our ancestors were less intelligent, less good than us, and we at last have achieved
00:14:23.900wisdom and we know exactly how to order things now. So I think there's several ways in which that
00:14:29.740disconnection has occurred. The loss of teaching of classical languages is another. So we have
00:14:34.460mandatory latin starting in grade five part of the reason there's several reasons but part of
00:14:39.180the reason is to make sure that students can continue to participate in these conversations
00:14:43.900that transpired and carried on for centuries that's a laudable goal you are a well-traveled
00:14:51.100person i you worked once for the government of canada in global affairs i believe as they now
00:14:56.540call it yes defeat as i think it may have been when you yes department of foreign affairs and
00:15:01.820international trade seemed a very functional and useful description you've been around you've met
00:15:08.700people in lots of countries whatever religion or culture they came from there were certain things
00:15:15.660that everybody seemed to agree on that theft was wrong murder was wrong you know there's a there's
00:15:21.020a list and it seems to be almost programmed into us as human beings whether we come from india or
00:15:28.060China or Great Britain or Canada, everybody kind of knows this naturally.
00:15:36.940Why is it so hard for us to accept that into our public education system?
00:15:43.660So I think you said earlier that you think that some teachers might be a little bit offended at
00:15:51.420the idea that they're not teaching truth. I'm not sure that's... certainly there are some teachers
00:15:56.380who endeavor to teach their children intellectual discernment and orient them with respect to the
00:16:02.060truth but i think they're kind of the exception i think most teachers would say well who's truth
00:16:07.820there's my truth there's your truth well there could only be one there's no such thing as sort
00:16:12.060of objective beauty beauty is in the eye of the beholder right it's all subjective um and i i
00:16:17.420think nothing will uh get make a lot of modern teachers more uncomfortable than the idea of
00:16:23.100virtue really oh absolutely um we've absolutely can you can you like can you speak to that a
00:16:29.180little i mean i i can almost feel that that is to the editor coming in now this isn't going to
00:16:34.140broadcast for me it's absolutely true so um you know we uh we do book clubs with our teachers
00:16:40.060last year all of our faculty studied aristotle's nicomachean ethics together this year they read
00:16:45.260plato's republic together and they discuss it weekly as part of their professional development
00:16:50.060and at a conference of teachers I recall that one of our teachers was sharing that they were
00:16:55.820studying together ethics and virtue and how our school seeks to impart virtues to students and
00:17:01.580help them cultivate virtues and the other teachers at this conference looked at him and sort of said
00:17:07.980well that sounds very religious or something very like very contemptuously saying that the idea of
00:17:13.660virtue smacked of religiosity and was therefore suspect and i think that is absolutely the
00:17:19.660culture in the vast majority of public schools so to bring this back to where we started
00:17:27.260the public schools are losing the devotion of parents and the presence of their children to a
00:17:34.700degree that should be alarming them when we talk about by the way that perhaps as many as a quarter
00:17:41.340of the children either are out or want to be out. That doesn't include those who have opted for the
00:17:49.900Catholic system, again, which is a rejection of the state system. I don't know how Catholic the
00:17:57.920Catholic schools are. I hope they're more Catholic than the public schools are, at least. But at any
00:18:03.440rate, there's an awful lot of people. All right, so here we have it that everybody, half of the
00:18:10.180people want out. And what it is they're rejecting is the lack of respect for truth that they perceive
00:18:20.120in the public education system. Now, if you, are we together at this point? Yes, although they might
00:18:28.420not be able to articulate it, but I think that that's part of the underlying problem. Yeah,
00:18:32.320it's that uncomfortable, yeah, uncomfortable feeling that not, things are not right. Now,
00:18:36.240It would be a terrible thing if we just said, well, let them go on with it, because we have to live with the product of these state schools later.
00:18:49.540So if you were asked to advise the government of Alberta on what to do with their public schools to correct the course, what would you say?
00:19:04.880Well, I think the government of Alberta has taken better steps than a lot of provinces in Canada in, for one, opening up the system to have more pluralism.
00:19:14.360So charter schools are a way to do that.
00:19:17.340And this government and the previous UCP government have taken steps to make it easier for charter schools to get started.
00:19:24.900They've removed caps on enrollment and so on.
00:19:27.340So those are all positive steps is allowing people more choice and they can then vote with their feet, hopefully.
00:19:33.260and that would send i think a strong signal to to the public school boards that something is
00:19:38.060amiss and they need to correct course so introducing sort of meaningful opportunities
00:19:42.940or choice in the system i think could have that corrective effect we're still far from
00:19:47.500there right access to a wait list is not exactly access to choice i think that some of the
00:19:53.900curriculum reforms that have been undertaken have gone in the right direction in areas of literacy
00:19:59.260in mathematics but i think that the teachers colleges are also a major area that we need to
00:20:06.060focus so a lot of the philosophical problems i think come from the fact that teachers are trained
00:20:14.140in teacher colleges on what is without exaggeration very much a marxist pedagogy so one of the most
00:20:21.420influential books that exists is paulo freer's pedagogy of the oppressed it's i think the third
00:20:27.260most frequently cited work of social science in history.
00:20:29.760There's about a fourth person who's recommended that to me.
00:20:54.260Yeah. So it's, as I said, it's the third most cited work of social science and history, and it's virtually unknown outside of teachers' colleges.
00:21:00.420So that tells you what its influence is there. And even if people are not directly studying it, they're studying works that are commenting on, inspired by it.
00:21:08.520So the language of free air is pervasive in education faculties and in professional development.
00:21:14.260And what it is, is basically, it's a kind of radical revolt against reality.
00:21:20.120So, you know, Marx had the phrase that hitherto the philosophers have endeavored to
00:21:23.480describe reality, although the goal should be to change it. I'm paraphrasing. So that idea is
00:21:29.320infused throughout their education. So they're not intending to apprehend reality with a sort
00:21:35.080of loving spirit as a philosopher might. They're not trying to attune their souls to reality.
00:21:40.360They are rather trying to overthrow it through sort of power, through command of language, etc.
00:21:46.440so if teachers are being taught this way and they're not necessarily aware of how it's impacting
00:21:52.680them but these assumptions are embedded in their education i think that's something that should be
00:21:57.160of grave concern to a provincial government and you know one thing that you could do is to create
00:22:02.680more choice in the training and certification of teachers but i think it's also totally feasible
00:22:07.800for the provincial government to actually say to education faculties this is not helpful this is
00:22:13.080not we're not going to fund this we're concerned about how we're forming the souls of the next
00:22:17.320generation and this is corrosive to the foundations of our civilization and so cut it out and i think
00:22:22.840there are some american jurisdictions that have attempted to do that that would be a remarkable
00:22:27.800thing and i can imagine how the ndp would feel it because of course the it would be a conservative
00:22:34.280government that was was doing it and therefore it would be a case of manning the battlements
00:22:39.880perhaps the conservative government would have the have the courage to do it anyway but certainly
00:22:47.800you're going to have to clean out the people who write the curriculums and curricula and classical
00:22:54.040and you would have to clean out a lot of people who if they were under the gun like that would
00:23:01.080just sort of go into the hole and wait it out and re-emerge with when there is a change of government
00:23:08.360is more suitable to the way they think and then of course it would be done twice as hard
00:23:14.440to make up for lost time i'm speculating here and i don't want to put words i think they're
00:23:19.480reasonable speculations okay i want to ask you a little bit about the actual practice of classical
00:23:26.360education now we were talking the other day about i call it the triad you call it the trivium but
00:23:32.040but basically it is the teaching of grammar, rhetoric, and logic.
00:23:37.040And the idea being that before you try to build a chair,
00:23:40.680you find out how a hammer works and how a saw works and what you do with a plane.
00:23:46.220Is this the essence of your classical education?
00:24:13.540In the sort of the neoclassical movement,
00:24:16.040I think it was Dorothy Sayers who noticed
00:24:17.980that the trivium actually tracks quite well
00:24:20.440with the stages of cognitive development.
00:24:22.840And so she proposed that kind of neoclassical education movement
00:24:27.380could focus on the idea of grammar in the early years.
00:24:31.240This is a time when students are, they're able to absorb large amounts of information, they're sort of building their mental schema, they can memorize things very easily.
00:24:40.440So that's the age at which the idea is you sort of target the acquisition of an understanding of the rules of grammar, as well as sort of a broad base of historical knowledge and facts, you know, understanding of natural sciences, arithmetic, etc.
00:24:55.460When students are in the kind of middle school years, when they're naturally more argumentative,
00:25:00.020teach them logic, teach them how to argue, what comprises a good and a bad argument,
00:25:04.580engage in sort of dialectical and training. And then when they're sort of maturing in high school,
00:25:09.460she proposes this is the rhetoric stage where they can focus on continuing to build on these
00:25:14.820other areas, but really learning how to express themselves beautifully and persuasively. So that's
00:25:21.460kind of that is something that we do of course each of these is present at every stage of
00:25:25.860education so even our very young students will sometimes engage in a socratic discussion
00:25:32.660they'll practice their rhetorical skills do they know it's socratic when they're having it
00:25:36.020they uh well the students but in grade two they learn about uh socrates plato aristotle alexander
00:25:42.260the great so they start to acquire some understanding of what that looks like even at that
00:25:46.900age. So that's certainly part of classical education. I can talk more about other dimensions.
00:25:53.860Well I think one question that has to be asked is that for the cynic, for the person who
00:26:00.340said well you know it may have been helpful 2,600 years ago and Aristotle was talking about his
00:26:08.820rhetoric, but where's the biology lesson? Where's the physics? You know we need people who can
00:26:14.340handle ai and what are you why are you wasting time teaching them to translate virgil it's a
00:26:20.660great question uh i think another way that education has gone off course is it views
00:26:26.740people in very utilitarian terms it's sort of forgotten the transcendent aims of education
00:26:32.500and says no the job the you know the purpose of education is to make people ready for jobs
00:26:37.460to do practical things and the practical skills are great and they're necessary and we want people
00:26:42.180to grow up to be useful people. But there's a distinction between what we'd call the servile
00:26:48.660arts and the liberal arts. The servile arts are the things that you learn so that you can do other
00:26:52.420things. They're a means to an end. And the liberal arts are emancipatory in their nature. They're
00:26:58.100studied for their own sake, for the love of wisdom. And we approach the sciences and maths as liberal
00:27:03.780arts, not as servile arts. Our goal is not to try to achieve mastery and command over nature so that
00:27:10.660we can bend it to our will or achieve some objective our goal is to say look the study
00:27:15.540of maths and sciences allows you to apprehend the ordering and the harmony of the cosmos
00:27:21.700and it allows you to understand something of your own nature and of how these things fit together
00:27:26.100and they can be approached with a sense of awe and reverence and love so maths and sciences are a
00:27:32.020critical part of classical education plato lays this out in the republic because these are actually
00:27:36.740the things that are sort of should be studied by the guardians of the polis but we're not doing
00:27:42.660them just so that you can get a job that's a it's a happy side effect but that's not our goal
00:27:48.260so the relentless cynic would probably then say all right i understand what you've just said
00:27:54.180and you do study maths and sciences but surely the comfort in which we live
00:27:59.860the lights go on the lights go off the car starts you fill with gas you go further
00:28:07.180everything about the highly technological society that we live in and that we enjoy
00:28:14.500and wouldn't want to be without depends upon the relentless pursuit of these scientific endeavors
00:28:21.500and yet you're saying well maths and sciences are good if it helps you to understand yourself
00:28:27.720and your place in the universe, and then you stop.
00:28:36.620and the intelligent scientists of the future come from?
00:28:41.140Well, maybe we don't need those things.
00:28:43.220Well, I think it's valuable to have those things.
00:28:46.560You know, man is, you know, we are, I think, in a sense,
00:28:50.040delegate creators, and we have these creative capacities,
00:28:52.980and I think that we're not fully sort of human
00:28:57.040if we're not finding a way to use them so i we don't reject the idea that that's a part of
00:29:03.440what we can do in applying this knowledge but i would also suggest that your cynic
00:29:10.640is focused exclusively on the imminent world and that throughout history in every world tradition
00:29:18.800education has also had, has had both sort of worldly and, let's say, ultimate ends in mind.
00:29:28.580This, you know, Plato talked about this relentlessly in numerous dialogues. What is the
00:29:32.480actual purpose of philosophy of all of these studies? It's to prepare for death and for what
00:29:37.300follows it. Aristotle takes a sort of slightly different tack, but he too says that we have in
00:29:42.320us a divine element, and we should endeavor to put on immortality as far as is possible.
00:29:46.880If you go to, you know, look at the traditions of India, of, you know, golden age of Islam, all of these traditions and education were focused on the idea, not just of preparing us how to live well in this world, but also preparing the soul for something that comes after.
00:30:04.220and we can do this in a way that is not specific to a particular religious tradition but just with
00:30:09.180an idea that actually we are not only made for this world we're not only made to be sort of
00:30:15.020narrowly useful in this place there is something else that our souls are called to some other
00:30:20.540purpose that enables us to be fully human and so in classical education we're concerned with
00:30:26.380that dimension of humanity but i suspect the state system of education in the province of alberta
00:30:35.260is not so concerned and therein lies the difference yes okay kaylin this has been a
00:30:42.620fascinating discussion and we do try to keep things within time but i could take this on so
00:30:48.140much further perhaps we can have you back again after the term has started and things are rolling
00:30:54.460along to talk about a few other deeper questions but for now i really want to thank you for coming
00:31:00.140on the show well thank you for indulging me it was no indulgence for the western standard i'm nigel