Western Standard - More and more parents abandon Alberta's woke schools.

00:00:00.000 Good evening, Western Standard viewers, and welcome to Hanna Ford, the weekly opinion

00:00:21.280 show. I'm very privileged to have with me today as a guest, Kaylin Ford. Kaylin is the

00:00:28.560 founder of Canada's first tuition-free charter school, a classical charter school, and we'll

00:00:35.600 come to why that's a significant difference in a moment. But the Calgary Classical Academy,

00:00:41.840 founded, what, two years ago? That's right. And roaring along now with something like

00:00:47.920 1,200 students and 3,000 on the waiting list. How do you do tuition-free, by the way? So many

00:00:55.360 people with their kids in private schools, and I know that you make a distinction between private

00:01:01.120 and charter, but so many people are paying a lot of money, you're giving it away for free. What's

00:01:05.120 going on there? That's right. So we're a public charter school, and Alberta is the only province

00:01:09.600 in the country that allows charter schools. A number of other jurisdictions internationally also

00:01:13.520 have this model, but they're fully funded. So we received the same funding from the provincial

00:01:18.320 government on a per-pupil basis, as you would in the regular district boards. The difference, though,

00:01:24.880 is that we are run by our own autonomous boards of directors, so we're not beholden to the large

00:01:30.320 bureaucracies of the metro boards, and we have distinct philosophical or pedagogical approaches.

00:01:35.840 But because we're fully funded on a per-pupil basis, we are absolutely tuition-free, as are all

00:01:40.640 charter schools. I think I may have just shot your waiting list up from 3,000 to 5,000, but at any rate,

00:01:46.160 and what is a charter school? What's the charter about? So when we apply to have a charter that lays

00:01:52.480 out the philosophical approach or the unique student population or pedagogical approach that we intend to

00:01:58.000 provide, a condition of the approval of the charter is that the major public boards are not offering

00:02:04.960 redundant programs. So we're only offering programs that the big metro boards are not delivering in that

00:02:10.400 geographic area. And the idea is that charter schools can innovate, they can sort of spur

00:02:18.800 change within the broader public system, they can demonstrate how different models might work,

00:02:23.200 and sometimes they can serve distinct student populations as well.

00:02:26.400 Kaelin, later in the program, I want to come back and ask you about how you had the idea of starting a

00:02:32.560 charter school in the first place. But before we even get to that, I think you would probably agree with

00:02:39.680 me that once upon a time, and maybe it was only 20 years ago, Alberta had a reputation as having the

00:02:45.760 best schools in Canada. And I think to be fair to the sort of the hard-working people within the

00:02:52.080 classrooms, it probably still is, but somehow it's perceived to be not meeting expectations. And of

00:03:00.320 course that just, in your own phrase, the baseline has been lowered across the country. So what is it?

00:03:11.600 Why are people pulling their children out of the public schools?

00:03:16.720 That's a very good question. You know, you mentioned we have about 3,000 students who applied

00:03:22.400 for our program this year in both Calgary and Edmonton. Yes.

00:03:25.840 I really wish that it were the case that there are thousands of parents specifically clamouring

00:03:29.920 for a classical education, parents who want their children growing up translating Virgil or something.

00:03:35.120 I think that's not the majority though. For most parents, the initial impetus for applying to our

00:03:40.240 program is that they are fleeing something in their district schools. And what we hear most often is

00:03:46.720 it's lower academic standards. So there are a lot of parents who think their children are doing just

00:03:51.840 fine. They're receiving good report cards, only to learn as they hit their upper elementary years,

00:03:56.560 that they're actually several years behind where they should be in reading literacy and mathematics

00:04:01.680 and so on. There's also, I think, cultural problems in a lot of schools. So sort of poor behavioral

00:04:10.000 standards. So drug use, bullying, and the associated problems that make it really difficult to focus on

00:04:15.760 learning. We also though hear, and I think there's a sometimes exaggerated but certainly not unfounded

00:04:23.760 perception, that a lot of schools are often unwittingly pursuing an ideological program that

00:04:29.680 is hostile to the values of a lot of families. And so a lot of families are, I think, fleeing from

00:04:36.080 that. They sense that they can't necessarily trust the teachers that they may get or the school board

00:04:41.680 that is delivering education to their children. And they want a little bit more control, particularly

00:04:46.000 over, I think, the moral and ethical education that their children receive. And this tends to be met

00:04:52.560 through the alternative system. I hate to throw numbers around, but let's just quickly let the viewers know

00:05:00.560 how big this phenomenon is. Twenty years ago, there were approximately 30,000 children in the

00:05:12.240 alternative system, the charter schools, the private schools, and homeschooling. Homeschooling, 20 years ago,

00:05:17.680 there were 6,650 students. Today, it's a massive 21,131. That's triple the number 20 years ago,

00:05:29.760 with the charter schools, it's more than double, and with the private schools, it's more than double.

00:05:34.160 I think you're very familiar with these numbers. One thing that our friend in the Parents for Choice,

00:05:39.520 John Hilton O'Brien, tells us, and he's written this in the Western Standard, is that although we know

00:05:46.560 the waiting list for charter schools, we don't know the waiting list for private schools. And would you

00:05:54.160 expect the waiting list in private schools to be proportionate to your own charter school, where you're

00:06:02.560 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

00:06:08.160 want to get their kids out of the system into a private school and pay big money to do it? 0.99

00:06:12.560 Pay big money to do it. And I should say, not all private schools are what we would call elite private

00:06:18.000 schools. They're not necessarily paying big money to get there. So most families who are enrolling

00:06:22.240 their kids in private schools are actually pretty middle income. So this would be like a Christian 1.00

00:06:25.600 schools, perhaps? Parochial schools, yep, as well as schools serving students with special needs.

00:06:32.560 A lot of them tend to be private schools for student athletes. So they're not necessarily what we would,

00:06:38.240 what we think of as the sort of $15,000, $20,000 a year tuition schools. And I think certainly

00:06:42.960 there's great demand for those options as well. Well, if Mr. Hilton O'Brien is correct, there are

00:06:48.640 something like 200,000 children out of 800,000 school age K to 12 students in Alberta, like 25% are either

00:06:59.200 out of the system, or anxiously looking for an opportunity to get out of the system. And that does

00:07:05.520 take us back to what we were saying before. Now, you could say it's just population growth,

00:07:13.120 but I think it's more than that. And would you like to expand a little bit on, you said that you

00:07:18.560 wished that people were coming because they want to be their 10-year-old to be able to

00:07:25.360 translate Virgil on the fly. You know, that would be great, wouldn't it? But

00:07:29.280 is it just the moral thing? Or is there really a demand for an improvement in the three Rs?

00:07:39.280 Yes. So I think that a lot of parents can sense that there is something lacking in the education

00:07:45.360 their children are receiving. They might not necessarily be able to diagnose it, partly because

00:07:49.760 for most of those parents, they didn't receive what we would call a classical or traditional education

00:07:55.760 themselves. They don't necessarily know what they were missing. And they can't quite put their finger

00:08:00.240 on what their children are missing. You should just define classical education,

00:08:04.160 just for a moment, sidetrack here. Well, there's a few ways to answer that.

00:08:10.800 I would say that classical education starts with a set of metaphysical and anthropological assumptions

00:08:17.520 that sets it apart from modern or progressive education. And what I mean by that is that we have,

00:08:23.120 you know, we say in our documents, we believe that truth exists. It is a real thing.

00:08:29.760 Well, that's racist.

00:08:31.520 Well, so I think one of the problems, one of the things where modern education has really gone wrong,

00:08:38.400 and I think this is a sort of powerful civilizational solvent, is the triumph of a kind of moral relativism.

00:08:46.080 And we are moral realists. We say truth exists, reality exists, it's good, it contains a moral

00:08:51.760 dimension to it. So there is actually such a thing as something being beautiful, or just, or unjust,

00:08:58.960 or good and bad. And human beings are vested with powers of reason and intuition. And we actually have

00:09:06.560 the ability to sort of apprehend these, at least to some extent. And I think we need to be humble in

00:09:13.600 that endeavour, we'll never possess perfect knowledge. But we can orient ourselves toward the pursuit of truth,

00:09:20.800 of beauty, of justice, of goodness. And that is actually the proper end of education. And you can't do that,

00:09:27.600 and I would say you can't engage in any serious epistemological undertaking, if you don't accept that there is a

00:09:33.760 truth that you are oriented toward. So I think this sort of moral relativism has been extremely corrosive,

00:09:39.920 and it leads to a lot of confusion about what education is for.

00:09:43.680 Now, I don't want to be a spokesman for the mainstream system, but they would probably bridle

00:09:53.120 as a suggestion that they're not teaching the truth. What exactly are they teaching then, if not

00:10:03.040 the truth? Doxa, mere opinion, I would say. I think that one of our teachers put it well. He said that

00:10:10.400 in the system from which he had come, which actually was religious, but I think had sort of

00:10:15.520 started to maybe lose some of its moorings. He said that holding the correct opinions has been

00:10:21.840 mistaken for being an educated person. And so it's not anchored in a sort of objective or, let's say,

00:10:29.360 transcendent idea of what truth is. It's not something that stands above time or human opinion

00:10:36.160 and can be used to judge ourselves or others. It is, rather, it's totally fungible. It's subject to

00:10:43.520 changes in social preferences. And I think that there's something to that. I think it's absolutely

00:10:50.320 true that a lot of teachers are telling people what opinions they should hold and are equating that

00:10:55.120 with being an educated person. Now, as a teacher, if somebody comes along and tells you to think this

00:11:01.840 when you actually know otherwise and you go along and that's very difficult when you have a mortgage to

00:11:09.040 pay and the kids need braces. Are we talking about a system that has become authoritarian?

00:11:18.320 Well, I think we could we could talk at some length about the authoritarian tendencies that are in

00:11:23.520 schools. And, you know, it's always been the case that society has certain there's parameters of what

00:11:29.840 kinds of views and ideas and facts are acceptable to observe and to teach. That's always been the case.

00:11:34.880 But I think that we've I think that there's a risk that we are becoming authoritarian in other ways or

00:11:41.520 that we are setting ourselves up rather for authoritarian conditions in a few in a few respects. So

00:11:50.080 my background prior to all of this was sort of comparative politics. And I spent many years over a decade

00:11:59.360 studying totalitarian regimes and trying to understand circumstances that give rise to this kind of

00:12:05.520 philosophical and political corruption and evil. One of the things that is an insight from Hannah Arendt

00:12:11.760 is that the perfect conditions for totalitarianism are a mass of atomized people. So it's sort of it's

00:12:18.800 hyper individualism. It's sort of people who are not rooted in community in a tradition. They're sort of

00:12:25.680 severed from their patrimony and the kind of mediating institutions in society are weakened.

00:12:31.920 So they're very alone and thereby easily controlled. And I think that we're very much at that point.

00:12:36.800 We're a sort of hyper individual, very atomized society. And modern education in many ways, I think,

00:12:42.640 is exacerbating that by failing to connect people with the tradition. So they're not teaching them

00:12:47.760 classic kind of enduring texts and works of philosophy. They're not putting them in conversation with the

00:12:52.800 generations. Instead, they seem to be trying to sever that connection and repudiate the past.

00:12:59.200 And so that's one of the circumstances that makes me very worried and one of the reasons

00:13:03.360 why I decided to get involved in education. And then a second is the sort of the relativism,

00:13:10.400 the loss of objective standards by which to judge things.

00:13:13.520 When you use the phrase conversation with the generations, are you referring to the intentional

00:13:22.320 removal of good books that were written more than 20 years ago from their school libraries

00:13:29.360 and from the classroom curriculum? Oh, that's absolutely a part of it.

00:13:33.360 So I think you'll... Is there more of it? What else?

00:13:35.120 Well, look at the way that Canadian history is taught, for example. We're not taught anymore. Many

00:13:42.240 children are not taught anymore that there's anything to recommend our country or our civilization.

00:13:47.680 I don't think it's really imparted to children that civilization is an extremely hard-won, very

00:13:53.680 fragile, very precious thing, that the default state of mankind is sort of a kind of chaos,

00:14:00.480 and that history is very much a story of people trying to wrest order out of chaos and create things

00:14:04.720 that are harmonious and beautiful. I don't think that children are taught to approach our history with

00:14:10.000 that kind of gratitude or reverence or respect. It's very much a kind of iconoclastic history is dark,

00:14:17.920 it was oppressive, it was bigoted, our ancestors were less intelligent, less good than us,

00:14:22.560 and we at last have achieved wisdom and we know exactly how to order things now. So

00:14:27.600 I think there's several ways in which that disconnection has occurred. The loss of teaching

00:14:32.160 of classical languages is another. So we have mandatory Latin starting in grade five.

00:14:36.480 Part of the reason, there's several reasons, but part of the reason is to make sure that students

00:14:40.960 can continue to participate in these conversations that transpired and carried on for centuries.

00:14:48.160 That's a laudable goal. You are a well-traveled person. You worked once for the Government of

00:14:53.920 Canada in Global Affairs, I believe, as they now call it. Yes.

00:14:57.360 Defeat, as I think it may have been when you were in the Department of Foreign Affairs and International

00:15:02.400 Trade. It seemed a very functional and useful description. You've been around, you've met

00:15:08.720 people in lots of countries. Whatever religion or culture they came from, there were certain things

00:15:15.760 that everybody seemed to agree on, that theft was wrong, murder was wrong, you know, there's a list.

00:15:22.160 And it seems to be almost programmed into us as human beings, whether we come from India or

00:15:28.080 China or Great Britain or Canada. Everybody knows this naturally. Why is it so hard for us to accept

00:15:40.720 that into our public education system? That's it. So I think you said earlier that you think that some

00:15:48.880 teachers might be a little bit offended at the idea that they're not teaching truth.

00:15:52.960 Yes. I'm not sure that's, certainly there are some teachers who endeavor to teach their children

00:15:59.040 intellectual discernment and orient them with respect to the truth. But I think they're kind

00:16:03.760 of the exception. I think most teachers would say, well, who's truth? There's my truth, there's your

00:16:09.280 truth. Well, there could only be one truth. There's no such thing as sort of objective beauty,

00:16:13.200 beauty is in the eye of the beholder, right? It's all subjective. And I think nothing will

00:16:19.360 get, make a lot of modern teachers more uncomfortable than the idea of virtue.

00:16:23.920 Really? Oh, absolutely. We've, absolutely. Can you speak to that a little? I mean,

00:16:30.800 I can almost feel that that is the editor coming in now. This isn't going to broadcast for a week.

00:16:34.880 No, it's absolutely true. So, you know, we do book clubs with our teachers. Last year,

00:16:40.720 all of our faculty studied Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics together. This year, they read Plato's

00:16:45.760 Republic together and they discuss it weekly as part of their professional development.

00:16:50.080 And at a conference of teachers, I recall that one of our teachers was sharing that they were studying

00:16:56.560 together ethics and virtue and how our school seeks to impart virtues to students and help them cultivate

00:17:02.960 virtues. And the other teachers at this conference looked at him and sort of said, well, that sounds

00:17:08.720 very religious or something very good, like very contemptuously saying that the idea of virtue smacked

00:17:14.800 of religiosity and was therefore suspect. And I think that is absolutely the culture in the vast

00:17:20.560 majority of public schools. So to bring this back to where we started, the public schools are losing

00:17:29.520 the devotion of parents and the presence of their children to a degree that should be alarming them.

00:17:37.760 When we talk about, by the way, that perhaps as many as a quarter of the children either are

00:17:44.400 out or want to be out, that doesn't include those who have opted for the Catholic system,

00:17:51.440 again, which is a rejection of the state system. I don't know how Catholic the Catholic schools are.

00:17:59.120 I hope they're more Catholic than the public schools are, at least. But at any rate, there's an awful lot 1.00

00:18:04.640 of people. All right. So here we have it that everybody, half of the people want out.

00:18:12.800 And what it is they're rejecting is the lack of respect for truth that they perceive in the public

00:18:21.760 education system. Now, if you are, are we together at this point? Yes. Although they might not be able to

00:18:28.880 articulate it. But I think that that's part of the underlying problem. It's that uncomfortable feeling

00:18:34.480 that things are not right. Now, it would be a terrible thing if we just said, well,

00:18:42.080 let them go on with it, because we have to live with the product of these state schools later.

00:18:49.200 Yes. So if you were asked to advise the government of Alberta on what to do with their public schools

00:19:01.360 to correct the course, what would you say? Well, I think the government of Alberta has taken better

00:19:08.080 steps than a lot of provinces in Canada in, for one, opening up the system to have more pluralism. So

00:19:14.480 charter schools are a way to do that. And this government and the previous UCP government have

00:19:21.280 taken steps to make it easier for charter schools to get started. They've removed caps on enrollment

00:19:26.800 and so on. So those are all positive steps is allowing people more choice, and they can then

00:19:31.040 vote with their feet, hopefully. And that would send, I think, a strong signal to the public school

00:19:36.720 boards that something is amiss, and they need to correct course. So introducing sort of meaningful

00:19:42.000 opportunities for choice in the system, I think, could have that corrective effect. We're still

00:19:47.120 far from there, right? Access to a waitlist is not exactly access to choice. I think that some of the

00:19:53.920 curriculum reforms that have been undertaken have gone in the right direction in areas of literacy and

00:19:59.360 mathematics. But I think that the teachers' colleges are also a major area that we need to focus.

00:20:06.400 So a lot of the philosophical problems, I think, come from the fact that teachers are trained in

00:20:14.320 teacher colleges on what is, without exaggeration, very much a Marxist pedagogy. So one of the most

00:20:21.440 influential books that exists is Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It's, I think, the third most

00:20:27.680 frequently cited work of social science.

00:20:29.680 You're about the fourth person who's recommended that to me.

00:20:32.000 I'm not recommending it. It's, by the way, when you...

00:20:35.200 Well, they referred to it and said, this is, here it is, you know.

00:20:38.080 So it's, it's, he's unapologetically a Marxist, and the footnotes are full of approving references

00:20:44.080 to Marx and Che Guevara and various Marxist theorists. And what you have in books like this...

00:20:51.680 Are they teaching this in teachers' colleges?

00:20:53.280 Absolutely. Yeah. So it's, as I said, it's the third most cited work of social science and history.

00:20:58.000 And it's virtually unknown outside of teachers' colleges. So that tells you what its influence

00:21:02.320 is there. And even if people are not directly studying it, they're studying works that are

00:21:06.560 commenting on, inspired by it. So the language of Freire is pervasive in education faculties and in

00:21:12.640 professional development. And what it is, is basically, it's a, it's a kind of a radical revolt

00:21:18.480 against reality. So, you know, Marx had the phrase that, hitherto the philosophers have endeavored to

00:21:23.520 describe reality, although the goal should be to change it. I'm paraphrasing.

00:21:28.320 So that idea is infused throughout their education. So they're not intending to apprehend reality

00:21:34.640 with a sort of loving spirit as a philosopher might. They're not trying to attune their souls

00:21:39.280 to reality. They are rather trying to overthrow it through sort of power, through command of language,

00:21:45.840 etc. So if teachers are being taught this way, and they're not necessarily aware of how it's

00:21:52.160 impacting them, but these assumptions are embedded in their education, I think that's something that

00:21:56.960 should be of grave concern to a provincial government. And, you know, one thing that you

00:22:01.440 could do is to create more choice in the training and certification of teachers. But I think it's also

00:22:06.960 totally feasible for the provincial government to actually say to education faculties,

00:22:11.680 this is not helpful. This is not, we're not going to fund this. We're concerned about how we're

00:22:16.160 forming the souls of the next generation. And this is corrosive to the foundations of our civilization. 0.94

00:22:21.360 And so cut it out. And I think there are some American jurisdictions that have attempted to do that.

00:22:26.240 That would be a remarkable thing. And I can imagine how the NDP would feel. Because, of course,

00:22:32.960 it would be a conservative government that was doing it. And therefore, it would be a case of

00:22:38.240 manning the battlements. Perhaps the conservative government would have the courage to do it anyway.

00:22:47.120 But certainly, you're going to have to clean out the people who write the curriculums and curricula

00:22:52.720 and classical. And you would have to clean out a lot of people who, if they were under the gun like

00:23:00.720 that, would just sort of go into the hole and wait it out and reemerge with, when there is a change of

00:23:07.920 government, that's more suitable to the way they think. And then, of course, it would be done twice

00:23:12.240 as hard to make up for lost time. I'm speculating here. And I don't want to put words.

00:23:19.120 I think they're reasonable speculations. Okay. I want to ask you a little bit about

00:23:24.000 the actual practice of classical education. Now, we were talking the other day about,

00:23:29.760 I call it the triad. You call it the trivium. But basically, it is the teaching of grammar, rhetoric,

00:23:36.160 and logic. And the idea being that before you try to build a chair, you find out how a hammer works

00:23:42.560 and how a soul works and what you do with a plane. Is this the essence of your classical education?

00:23:50.800 So that is part of it. So the trivium forms part of the seven traditional liberal arts. So it's

00:23:56.800 grammar, logic, rhetoric, as well as arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. And this sort of

00:24:02.800 came out of Athens and then was codified in the medieval era as what comprises a classical education

00:24:10.880 in the Western tradition. In the sort of the neoclassical movement, I think it was Dorothy Sayers

00:24:17.280 who noticed that the trivium actually tracks quite well with the stages of cognitive development.

00:24:22.880 And so she proposed that kind of neoclassical education movement could focus on the idea of

00:24:29.120 grammar in the early years. This is a time when students are, they're able to absorb large amounts

00:24:35.440 of information. They're sort of building their mental schema. They can memorize things very easily.

00:24:40.480 So that's the age at which the idea is you sort of target the acquisition of an understanding of

00:24:46.160 the rules of grammar, as well as sort of a broad base of historical knowledge and facts,

00:24:50.800 you know, understanding of natural sciences, arithmetic, etc. When students are in the kind

00:24:56.720 of middle school years, when they're naturally more argumentative, teach them logic, teach them how

00:25:01.600 to argue what comprises a good and a bad argument, engage in sort of dialectical and training.

00:25:07.280 And then when they're sort of maturing in high school, she proposes this is the rhetoric stage,

00:25:11.520 where they can focus on continuing to build on these other areas, but really learning how to express

00:25:17.280 themselves beautifully and persuasively. So that's kind of that is something that we do. Of course,

00:25:24.000 each of these is present at every stage of education. So even our very young students

00:25:28.240 will sometimes engage in a sort of Socratic discussion. They'll practice their rhetorical skills.

00:25:33.680 Do they know it's Socratic when they're having it? 0.69

00:25:36.560 Well, the students in grade two, they learn about Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Alexander the Great.

00:25:43.520 So they start to acquire some understanding of what that looks like, even at that age.

00:25:47.120 Really? Wow.

00:25:48.160 So that's certainly part of classical education. I can talk more about other dimensions.

00:25:53.440 Well, I think one question that has to be asked is that for the cynic, for the person who

00:26:00.560 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.

00:31:00.720 Well, thank you for indulging me, Nigel.

00:31:02.800 Well, it was no indulgence. For the Western Standard, I'm Nigel Hanford.

Western Standard - August 06, 2024

More and more parents abandon Alberta's woke schools.

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