More and more parents abandon Alberta's woke schools.
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Summary
Kaylin Ford is the founder of 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. The Calgary Classical Academy was founded two years ago, and it's roaring along now with something like 1,200 students and 3,000 on the waiting list.
Transcript
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Good evening, Western Standard viewers, and welcome to Hanna Ford, the weekly opinion
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show. I'm very privileged to have with me today as a guest, Kaylin Ford. Kaylin is the
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founder of Canada's first tuition-free charter school, a classical charter school, and we'll
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come to why that's a significant difference in a moment. But the Calgary Classical Academy,
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founded, what, two years ago? That's right. And roaring along now with something like
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1,200 students and 3,000 on the waiting list. How do you do tuition-free, by the way? So many
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people with their kids in private schools, and I know that you make a distinction between private
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and charter, but so many people are paying a lot of money, you're giving it away for free. What's
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going on there? That's right. So we're a public charter school, and Alberta is the only province
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in the country that allows charter schools. A number of other jurisdictions internationally also
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have this model, but they're fully funded. So we received the same funding from the provincial
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government on a per-pupil basis, as you would in the regular district boards. The difference, though,
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is that we are run by our own autonomous boards of directors, so we're not beholden to the large
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bureaucracies of the metro boards, and we have distinct philosophical or pedagogical approaches.
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But because we're fully funded on a per-pupil basis, we are absolutely tuition-free, as are all
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charter schools. I think I may have just shot your waiting list up from 3,000 to 5,000, but at any rate,
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and what is a charter school? What's the charter about? So when we apply to have a charter that lays
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out the philosophical approach or the unique student population or pedagogical approach that we intend to
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provide, a condition of the approval of the charter is that the major public boards are not offering
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redundant programs. So we're only offering programs that the big metro boards are not delivering in that
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geographic area. And the idea is that charter schools can innovate, they can sort of spur
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change within the broader public system, they can demonstrate how different models might work,
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and sometimes they can serve distinct student populations as well.
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Kaelin, later in the program, I want to come back and ask you about how you had the idea of starting a
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charter school in the first place. But before we even get to that, I think you would probably agree with
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me that once upon a time, and maybe it was only 20 years ago, Alberta had a reputation as having the
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best schools in Canada. And I think to be fair to the sort of the hard-working people within the
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classrooms, it probably still is, but somehow it's perceived to be not meeting expectations. And of
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course that just, in your own phrase, the baseline has been lowered across the country. So what is it?
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Why are people pulling their children out of the public schools?
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That's a very good question. You know, you mentioned we have about 3,000 students who applied
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for our program this year in both Calgary and Edmonton. Yes.
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I really wish that it were the case that there are thousands of parents specifically clamouring
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for a classical education, parents who want their children growing up translating Virgil or something.
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I think that's not the majority though. For most parents, the initial impetus for applying to our
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program is that they are fleeing something in their district schools. And what we hear most often is
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it's lower academic standards. So there are a lot of parents who think their children are doing just
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fine. They're receiving good report cards, only to learn as they hit their upper elementary years,
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that they're actually several years behind where they should be in reading literacy and mathematics
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and so on. There's also, I think, cultural problems in a lot of schools. So sort of poor behavioral
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standards. So drug use, bullying, and the associated problems that make it really difficult to focus on
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learning. We also though hear, and I think there's a sometimes exaggerated but certainly not unfounded
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perception, that a lot of schools are often unwittingly pursuing an ideological program that
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is hostile to the values of a lot of families. And so a lot of families are, I think, fleeing from
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that. They sense that they can't necessarily trust the teachers that they may get or the school board
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that is delivering education to their children. And they want a little bit more control, particularly
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over, I think, the moral and ethical education that their children receive. And this tends to be met
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through the alternative system. I hate to throw numbers around, but let's just quickly let the viewers know
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how big this phenomenon is. Twenty years ago, there were approximately 30,000 children in the
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alternative system, the charter schools, the private schools, and homeschooling. Homeschooling, 20 years ago,
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there were 6,650 students. Today, it's a massive 21,131. That's triple the number 20 years ago,
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with the charter schools, it's more than double, and with the private schools, it's more than double.
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I think you're very familiar with these numbers. One thing that our friend in the Parents for Choice,
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John Hilton O'Brien, tells us, and he's written this in the Western Standard, is that although we know
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the waiting list for charter schools, we don't know the waiting list for private schools. And would you
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expect the waiting list in private schools to be proportionate to your own charter school, where you're
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giving it away for free, but in private schools, they have to pay? Do you think there could be that many people out there who
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want to get their kids out of the system into a private school and pay big money to do it?
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Pay big money to do it. And I should say, not all private schools are what we would call elite private
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schools. They're not necessarily paying big money to get there. So most families who are enrolling
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their kids in private schools are actually pretty middle income. So this would be like a Christian
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schools, perhaps? Parochial schools, yep, as well as schools serving students with special needs.
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A lot of them tend to be private schools for student athletes. So they're not necessarily what we would,
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what we think of as the sort of $15,000, $20,000 a year tuition schools. And I think certainly
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there's great demand for those options as well. Well, if Mr. Hilton O'Brien is correct, there are
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something like 200,000 children out of 800,000 school age K to 12 students in Alberta, like 25% are either
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out of the system, or anxiously looking for an opportunity to get out of the system. And that does
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take us back to what we were saying before. Now, you could say it's just population growth,
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but I think it's more than that. And would you like to expand a little bit on, you said that you
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wished that people were coming because they want to be their 10-year-old to be able to
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translate Virgil on the fly. You know, that would be great, wouldn't it? But
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is it just the moral thing? Or is there really a demand for an improvement in the three Rs?
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Yes. So I think that a lot of parents can sense that there is something lacking in the education
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their children are receiving. They might not necessarily be able to diagnose it, partly because
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for most of those parents, they didn't receive what we would call a classical or traditional education
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themselves. They don't necessarily know what they were missing. And they can't quite put their finger
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on what their children are missing. You should just define classical education,
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just for a moment, sidetrack here. Well, there's a few ways to answer that.
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I would say that classical education starts with a set of metaphysical and anthropological assumptions
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that sets it apart from modern or progressive education. And what I mean by that is that we have,
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you know, we say in our documents, we believe that truth exists. It is a real thing.
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Well, so I think one of the problems, one of the things where modern education has really gone wrong,
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and I think this is a sort of powerful civilizational solvent, is the triumph of a kind of moral relativism.
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And we are moral realists. We say truth exists, reality exists, it's good, it contains a moral
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dimension to it. So there is actually such a thing as something being beautiful, or just, or unjust,
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or good and bad. And human beings are vested with powers of reason and intuition. And we actually have
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the ability to sort of apprehend these, at least to some extent. And I think we need to be humble in
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that endeavour, we'll never possess perfect knowledge. But we can orient ourselves toward the pursuit of truth,
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of beauty, of justice, of goodness. And that is actually the proper end of education. And you can't do that,
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and I would say you can't engage in any serious epistemological undertaking, if you don't accept that there is a
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truth that you are oriented toward. So I think this sort of moral relativism has been extremely corrosive,
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and it leads to a lot of confusion about what education is for.
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Now, I don't want to be a spokesman for the mainstream system, but they would probably bridle
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as a suggestion that they're not teaching the truth. What exactly are they teaching then, if not
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the truth? Doxa, mere opinion, I would say. I think that one of our teachers put it well. He said that
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in the system from which he had come, which actually was religious, but I think had sort of
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started to maybe lose some of its moorings. He said that holding the correct opinions has been
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mistaken for being an educated person. And so it's not anchored in a sort of objective or, let's say,
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transcendent idea of what truth is. It's not something that stands above time or human opinion
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and can be used to judge ourselves or others. It is, rather, it's totally fungible. It's subject to
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changes in social preferences. And I think that there's something to that. I think it's absolutely
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true that a lot of teachers are telling people what opinions they should hold and are equating that
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with being an educated person. Now, as a teacher, if somebody comes along and tells you to think this
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when you actually know otherwise and you go along and that's very difficult when you have a mortgage to
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pay and the kids need braces. Are we talking about a system that has become authoritarian?
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Well, I think we could we could talk at some length about the authoritarian tendencies that are in
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schools. And, you know, it's always been the case that society has certain there's parameters of what
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kinds of views and ideas and facts are acceptable to observe and to teach. That's always been the case.
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But I think that we've I think that there's a risk that we are becoming authoritarian in other ways or
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that we are setting ourselves up rather for authoritarian conditions in a few in a few respects. So
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my background prior to all of this was sort of comparative politics. And I spent many years over a decade
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studying totalitarian regimes and trying to understand circumstances that give rise to this kind of
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philosophical and political corruption and evil. One of the things that is an insight from Hannah Arendt
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is that the perfect conditions for totalitarianism are a mass of atomized people. So it's sort of it's
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hyper individualism. It's sort of people who are not rooted in community in a tradition. They're sort of
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severed from their patrimony and the kind of mediating institutions in society are weakened.
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So they're very alone and thereby easily controlled. And I think that we're very much at that point.
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We're a sort of hyper individual, very atomized society. And modern education in many ways, I think,
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is exacerbating that by failing to connect people with the tradition. So they're not teaching them
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classic kind of enduring texts and works of philosophy. They're not putting them in conversation with the
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generations. Instead, they seem to be trying to sever that connection and repudiate the past.
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And so that's one of the circumstances that makes me very worried and one of the reasons
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why I decided to get involved in education. And then a second is the sort of the relativism,
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the loss of objective standards by which to judge things.
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When you use the phrase conversation with the generations, are you referring to the intentional
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removal of good books that were written more than 20 years ago from their school libraries
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and from the classroom curriculum? Oh, that's absolutely a part of it.
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So I think you'll... Is there more of it? What else?
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Well, look at the way that Canadian history is taught, for example. We're not taught anymore. Many
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children are not taught anymore that there's anything to recommend our country or our civilization.
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I don't think it's really imparted to children that civilization is an extremely hard-won, very
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fragile, very precious thing, that the default state of mankind is sort of a kind of chaos,
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and that history is very much a story of people trying to wrest order out of chaos and create things
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that are harmonious and beautiful. I don't think that children are taught to approach our history with
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that kind of gratitude or reverence or respect. It's very much a kind of iconoclastic history is dark,
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it was oppressive, it was bigoted, our ancestors were less intelligent, less good than us,
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and we at last have achieved wisdom and we know exactly how to order things now. So
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I think there's several ways in which that disconnection has occurred. The loss of teaching
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of classical languages is another. So we have mandatory Latin starting in grade five.
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Part of the reason, there's several reasons, but part of the reason is to make sure that students
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can continue to participate in these conversations that transpired and carried on for centuries.
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That's a laudable goal. You are a well-traveled person. You worked once for the Government of
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Canada in Global Affairs, I believe, as they now call it. Yes.
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Defeat, as I think it may have been when you were in the Department of Foreign Affairs and International
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Trade. It seemed a very functional and useful description. You've been around, you've met
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people in lots of countries. Whatever religion or culture they came from, there were certain things
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that everybody seemed to agree on, that theft was wrong, murder was wrong, you know, there's a list.
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And it seems to be almost programmed into us as human beings, whether we come from India or
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China or Great Britain or Canada. Everybody knows this naturally. Why is it so hard for us to accept
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that into our public education system? That's it. So I think you said earlier that you think that some
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teachers might be a little bit offended at the idea that they're not teaching truth.
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Yes. I'm not sure that's, certainly there are some teachers who endeavor to teach their children
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intellectual discernment and orient them with respect to the truth. But I think they're kind
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of the exception. I think most teachers would say, well, who's truth? There's my truth, there's your
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truth. Well, there could only be one truth. There's no such thing as sort of objective beauty,
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beauty is in the eye of the beholder, right? It's all subjective. And I think nothing will
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get, make a lot of modern teachers more uncomfortable than the idea of virtue.
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Really? Oh, absolutely. We've, absolutely. Can you speak to that a little? I mean,
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I can almost feel that that is the editor coming in now. This isn't going to broadcast for a week.
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No, it's absolutely true. So, you know, we do book clubs with our teachers. Last year,
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all of our faculty studied Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics together. This year, they read Plato's
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Republic together and they discuss it weekly as part of their professional development.
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And at a conference of teachers, I recall that one of our teachers was sharing that they were studying
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together ethics and virtue and how our school seeks to impart virtues to students and help them cultivate
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virtues. And the other teachers at this conference looked at him and sort of said, well, that sounds
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very religious or something very good, like very contemptuously saying that the idea of virtue smacked
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of religiosity and was therefore suspect. And I think that is absolutely the culture in the vast
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majority of public schools. So to bring this back to where we started, the public schools are losing
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the devotion of parents and the presence of their children to a degree that should be alarming them.
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When we talk about, by the way, that perhaps as many as a quarter of the children either are
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out or want to be out, that doesn't include those who have opted for the Catholic system,
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again, which is a rejection of the state system. I don't know how Catholic the Catholic schools are.
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I hope they're more Catholic than the public schools are, at least. But at any rate, there's an awful lot
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of people. All right. So here we have it that everybody, half of the people want out.
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And what it is they're rejecting is the lack of respect for truth that they perceive in the public
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education system. Now, if you are, are we together at this point? Yes. Although they might not be able to
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articulate it. But I think that that's part of the underlying problem. It's that uncomfortable feeling
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that things are not right. Now, it would be a terrible thing if we just said, well,
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let them go on with it, because we have to live with the product of these state schools later.
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Yes. So if you were asked to advise the government of Alberta on what to do with their public schools
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to correct the course, what would you say? Well, I think the government of Alberta has taken better
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steps than a lot of provinces in Canada in, for one, opening up the system to have more pluralism. So
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charter schools are a way to do that. And this government and the previous UCP government have
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taken steps to make it easier for charter schools to get started. They've removed caps on enrollment
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and so on. So those are all positive steps is allowing people more choice, and they can then
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vote with their feet, hopefully. And that would send, I think, a strong signal to the public school
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boards that something is amiss, and they need to correct course. So introducing sort of meaningful
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opportunities for choice in the system, I think, could have that corrective effect. We're still
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far from there, right? Access to a waitlist is not exactly access to choice. I think that some of the
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curriculum reforms that have been undertaken have gone in the right direction in areas of literacy and
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mathematics. But I think that the teachers' colleges are also a major area that we need to focus.
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So a lot of the philosophical problems, I think, come from the fact that teachers are trained in
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teacher colleges on what is, without exaggeration, very much a Marxist pedagogy. So one of the most
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influential books that exists is Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It's, I think, the third most
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You're about the fourth person who's recommended that to me.
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I'm not recommending it. It's, by the way, when you...
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Well, they referred to it and said, this is, here it is, you know.
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So it's, it's, he's unapologetically a Marxist, and the footnotes are full of approving references
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to Marx and Che Guevara and various Marxist theorists. And what you have in books like this...
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Absolutely. Yeah. So it's, as I said, it's the third most cited work of social science and history.
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And it's virtually unknown outside of teachers' colleges. So that tells you what its influence
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is there. And even if people are not directly studying it, they're studying works that are
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commenting on, inspired by it. So the language of Freire is pervasive in education faculties and in
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professional development. And what it is, is basically, it's a, it's a kind of a radical revolt
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against reality. So, you know, Marx had the phrase that, hitherto the philosophers have endeavored to
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describe reality, although the goal should be to change it. I'm paraphrasing.
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So that idea is infused throughout their education. So they're not intending to apprehend reality
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with a sort of loving spirit as a philosopher might. They're not trying to attune their souls
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to reality. They are rather trying to overthrow it through sort of power, through command of language,
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etc. So if teachers are being taught this way, and they're not necessarily aware of how it's
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impacting them, but these assumptions are embedded in their education, I think that's something that
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should be of grave concern to a provincial government. And, you know, one thing that you
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could do is to create more choice in the training and certification of teachers. But I think it's also
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totally feasible for the provincial government to actually say to education faculties,
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this is not helpful. This is not, we're not going to fund this. We're concerned about how we're
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forming the souls of the next generation. And this is corrosive to the foundations of our civilization.
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And so cut it out. And I think there are some American jurisdictions that have attempted to do that.
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That would be a remarkable thing. And I can imagine how the NDP would feel. Because, of course,
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it would be a conservative government that was doing it. And therefore, it would be a case of
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manning the battlements. Perhaps the conservative government would have the courage to do it anyway.
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But certainly, you're going to have to clean out the people who write the curriculums and curricula
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and classical. And you would have to clean out a lot of people who, if they were under the gun like
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that, would just sort of go into the hole and wait it out and reemerge with, when there is a change of
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government, that's more suitable to the way they think. And then, of course, it would be done twice
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as hard to make up for lost time. I'm speculating here. And I don't want to put words.
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I think they're reasonable speculations. Okay. I want to ask you a little bit about
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the actual practice of classical education. Now, we were talking the other day about,
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I call it the triad. You call it the trivium. But basically, it is the teaching of grammar, rhetoric,
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and logic. And the idea being that before you try to build a chair, you find out how a hammer works
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and how a soul works and what you do with a plane. Is this the essence of your classical education?
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So that is part of it. So the trivium forms part of the seven traditional liberal arts. So it's
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grammar, logic, rhetoric, as well as arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. And this sort of
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came out of Athens and then was codified in the medieval era as what comprises a classical education
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in the Western tradition. In the sort of the neoclassical movement, I think it was Dorothy Sayers
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who noticed that the trivium actually tracks quite well with the stages of cognitive development.
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And so she proposed that kind of neoclassical education movement could focus on the idea of
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grammar in the early years. This is a time when students are, they're able to absorb large amounts
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of information. They're sort of building their mental schema. They can memorize things very easily.
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So that's the age at which the idea is you sort of target the acquisition of an understanding of
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the rules of grammar, as well as sort of a broad base of historical knowledge and facts,
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you know, understanding of natural sciences, arithmetic, etc. When students are in the kind
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of middle school years, when they're naturally more argumentative, teach them logic, teach them how
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to argue what comprises a good and a bad argument, engage in sort of dialectical and training.
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And then when they're sort of maturing in high school, she proposes this is the rhetoric stage,
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where they can focus on continuing to build on these other areas, but really learning how to express
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themselves beautifully and persuasively. So that's kind of that is something that we do. Of course,
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each of these is present at every stage of education. So even our very young students
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will sometimes engage in a sort of Socratic discussion. They'll practice their rhetorical skills.
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Do they know it's Socratic when they're having it?
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Well, the students in grade two, they learn about Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Alexander the Great.
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So they start to acquire some understanding of what that looks like, even at that age.
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So that's certainly part of classical education. I can talk more about other dimensions.
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Well, I think one question that has to be asked is that for the cynic, for the person who
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said, well, you know, it may have been helpful 2,600 years ago, and Aristotle was talking about his
00:26:08.880
rhetoric. But where's the biology lesson? Where's the physics? You know, we need people who can handle
00:26:14.640
AI. And what are you? Why are you wasting time teaching them to translate Virgil?
00:26:20.640
Great question. I think another way that education has gone off course is it views people in very
00:26:27.360
utilitarian terms. It's sort of forgotten the transcendent aims of education and says, no,
00:26:33.280
the job that you know, the purpose of education is to make people ready for jobs, to do practical things.
00:26:39.040
And the practical skills are great, and they're necessary. And we want people to grow up to be
00:26:43.680
useful people. But there's a distinction between what we'd call the servile arts and the liberal
00:26:49.600
arts. The servile arts are the things that you learn so that you can do other things. They're
00:26:53.040
a means to an end. And the liberal arts are emancipatory in their nature. They're studied for
00:26:58.560
their own sake, for the love of wisdom. And we approach the sciences and maths as liberal arts,
00:27:04.080
not as servile arts. Our goal is not to try to achieve mastery and command over nature so that we can
00:27:11.040
bend it to our will or achieve some objective. Our goal is to say, look, the study of maths and
00:27:16.240
sciences allows you to apprehend the ordering and the harmony of the cosmos. And it allows you to
00:27:22.640
understand something of your own nature and of how these things fit together. And they can be approached
00:27:27.040
with a sense of awe and reverence and love. So maths and sciences are a critical part of classical
00:27:33.520
education. Plato lays this out in the Republic, as these are actually the things that are sort of should be
00:27:38.400
studied by the guardians of the polis. But we're not doing them just so that you can get a job.
00:27:44.640
That's a happy side effect. But that's not our goal. So the relentless cynic would probably then say,
00:27:51.920
all right, I understand what you've just said. And you do study maths and sciences. But surely the
00:27:58.560
comfort in which we live, the lights go on, the lights go off, the car starts, you fill with gas,
00:28:06.320
you go further. Everything about the highly technological society that we live in and that
00:28:13.760
we enjoy and wouldn't want to be without depends upon the relentless pursuit of these scientific
00:28:20.960
endeavors. And yet you're saying, well, maths and sciences are good if it helps you to understand
00:28:27.200
yourself and your place in the universe. And you stop. So where do the nuclear scientists and the
00:28:38.080
intelligent scientists of the future come from? Well, maybe we don't need those things.
00:28:43.040
Well, I think it's valuable to have those things. You know, man is, you know, we are,
00:28:48.960
I think, in a sense, delegate creators. And we have these creative capacities. And I think that we're,
00:28:54.080
we're not fully sort of human if we're not finding a way to use them. So we don't reject the idea that
00:29:02.240
that that's a part of what we can do in applying this knowledge. But I would also suggest that your
00:29:09.280
cynic is focused exclusively on the imminent world. And that throughout history, in every world tradition,
00:29:18.880
education has also had, has had both sort of worldly and, let's say, ultimate ends in mind.
00:29:29.040
Plato talked about this relentlessly in numerous dialogues. What is the actual purpose of philosophy
00:29:33.760
of all of these studies? It's to prepare for death and for what follows it. Aristotle takes a sort of
00:29:39.920
slightly different tack, but he too says that we have in us a divine element, and we should endeavor to
00:29:44.800
put on immortality as far as possible. If you go to, you know, look at the traditions of India,
00:29:51.200
of, you know, golden age of Islam, all of these traditions and education were focused on the idea,
00:29:58.160
not just of preparing us how to live well in this world, but also preparing the soul for something
00:30:02.560
that comes after. And we can do this in a way that is not specific to a particular religious tradition,
00:30:08.640
but just with an idea that actually, we are not only made for this world, we're not only made to be
00:30:14.400
sort of narrowly useful in this place, there is something else that our souls are called to some
00:30:20.320
other purpose that enables us to be fully human. And so in classical education, we're concerned with
00:30:26.400
that dimension of humanity. But I suspect the state system of education in the province of Alberta
00:30:34.080
is not so concerned. And therein lies the difference. Yes. Okay. Kaylin, this has been a fascinating
00:30:43.360
discussion, and we do try to keep things within time, but I could take this on so much further.
00:30:49.360
Perhaps we can have you back again after the term has started and things are rolling along to talk
00:30:55.680
about a few other deeper questions. But for now, I really want to thank you for coming on the show.
00:31:02.800
Well, it was no indulgence. For the Western Standard, I'm Nigel Hanford.