What is Education? What is Truth? What is Beauty? ft. David Goodwin

29m

What are the philosophical differences between classical views of education and the industrial education model that prevails in the United States and around the world? David Goodwin, headmaster of The Ambrose School in Boise, explains his blast-from-the-past education strategy that is exploding in popularity all around the country.

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Runtime: 29m

Transcript

Speaker 1 Hey everybody, Tan Charlie Kirk Show. A phenomenal conversation with David Goodwin from the American Association for Christian Classical Schools.

Speaker 1 Really great conversation of what is education, what is truth, what is beauty. I think you'll really enjoy it.
You might think that you're sending your kid or grandkid to a good school.

Speaker 1 You might think that your kid's getting a good education, but listen carefully.

Speaker 2 You might not.

Speaker 1 You might want to reconsider what school you're sending your kid or grandkid to. It's the most important decision, one of the most important decisions you could make.

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Speaker 1 Okay, everybody, a very special conversation here with my friend David Goodwin. David, great to see you.

Speaker 2 It's great to be with you, Charlie.

Speaker 1 So, David, I'm going to ask a simple yet deep question. What is education?

Speaker 2 Well, there's a lot of answers to that. But

Speaker 2 in our parlance, in the classical Christian world, which is the area I'm familiar with, it's the cultivation of wisdom and virtue. Pretty simple set of qualifiers there, but it takes a bit to unpack.

Speaker 1 So you you help run or you founded the Association of Classical Christian Schools. Is that found?

Speaker 2 I didn't find it, but I am the president of it, have been for the last decade or so.

Speaker 1 So, I toured one of your schools in Boise.

Speaker 2 Yes, that's the one that I started.

Speaker 1 I was very impressed, and it was so different than traditional government-run schools and even private schools that have a industrial model, very German model.

Speaker 1 Explain to our audience what is the philosophical difference between a classical education and a more industrial type of education.

Speaker 2 Well, in a word, it would be

Speaker 2 the enculturation of children as opposed to

Speaker 2 informing them, just giving them a lot of facts.

Speaker 2 So, if you look at the industrial education that the progressives created in the early part of the 20th century, it was geared almost exclusively towards vocation, like teach kids how to make money.

Speaker 2 And the classical classical education that had been there for years prior

Speaker 2 had always done a sufficient job of that, but it had been more focused on the enculturation. And I think that's a lot of what happened to America.

Speaker 2 When we took away the American culture, it started to decay. And over the course of about a hundred years, we find ourselves where we have been the last few.

Speaker 1 Talk about how your classes are not set up necessarily in single-file rows, that it's much more more discussion or dialogue-based.

Speaker 1 And just so everyone understands from one perspective, the industrial model is done by most government schools, most private schools, which is that kids are something to be programmed

Speaker 1 as if you're a carpenter, but you look at your job as more like a gardener.

Speaker 2 Control. Correct.

Speaker 2 What does that mean? Well,

Speaker 2 we're trying to cultivate the tools of knowledge. How do you come to know things?

Speaker 2 And that's a very different thing. What do you mean by that? Well, what I mean by that is

Speaker 2 in the old world, it was understood that knowledge isn't so easy to come by. It's easy to get information.

Speaker 2 We see that all over the place. And then we have people calling misinformation, right?

Speaker 2 The real challenge is getting students who can discern truth from falsehood as they learn.

Speaker 2 And so our focus is more about teaching them how to discern what is true than it is just telling them what the truth is.

Speaker 2 So, that combination is some of what you saw when you were at the school in Boise, where all of our schools have some form of this, where it's conducted, at least in the high school and usually the junior high, around a large table where the students are taking apart ancient texts and trying to understand what is the truth contained in these and what is the falsehood in these, and can we align these with the truth of Jesus Christ and the scriptures?

Speaker 2 And that combination of exercises forms up this skill of acquiring knowledge, and that's the rare skill in our day today.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 why is it that our public schools have gravitated so far away from this practice of learning?

Speaker 2 Well, they intentionally designed it that way. In

Speaker 2 about 1915.

Speaker 1 Mr. Dewey?

Speaker 2 Yes, John Dewey, our

Speaker 2 arch nemesis of liberty. Exactly.

Speaker 2 He thought that that kind of education that that really taught students to discern knowledge wasn't helpful in an industrial economy. We needed to train basically servile

Speaker 2 students to be able to do jobs. Now, in his time, it was mostly factory work, but it later became engineering or science or STEM.

Speaker 2 Instead of looking at the citizen and saying, what makes a citizen capable of self-governance, which is what our founding fathers were involved with. That's why they were all classically educated.

Speaker 2 They just understood and assumed this.

Speaker 2 And so John Dewey brings this in, and our schools are immediately reoriented towards just basically programming kids to do, at first it was science and that kind of thing.

Speaker 2 But, you know, you had the Maoist Revolution and We learned a few things, you know, the progressives learned a few things from that Maoist Revolution.

Speaker 2 I'm talking about the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, not the original one.

Speaker 2 When Mao realized that the best way to establish a communist government was to enculturate the people to desire communism.

Speaker 2 And so he took over the educational systems and indoctrinated them in that way. And that's exactly what the progressives did in the latter half of the 20th century.

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Speaker 1 Some even conservative parents will marvel and say, Well, my local school, they have a great STEM program, and all I want out of my school is for them to do math and arithmetic and prepare them for a job.

Speaker 1 You reject that premise.

Speaker 2 Well, yes, because

Speaker 2 whatever job you prepare them for, at least in this economy, I mean, at least at the pragmatic level, is going to be gone by the time they graduate anyway.

Speaker 2 So it's a pointless exercise, except one job. that's always there, which is discerning truth, to understand, to know, to learn how to know.

Speaker 2 You know, Dorothy Sayers in

Speaker 2 her essay on education that she did in the 1940s was titled The Lost Tools of Learning.

Speaker 2 And what she said in that essay was that we used to teach kids the tools of learning and now we don't at a time, and I'm paraphrasing her, at a time when it's never been so important because radio and television and books are readily available and all these ideas are coming at these kids and they have no idea.

Speaker 2 idea

Speaker 2 how to discern what is true and what's not true. So of course,

Speaker 2 again, our nemesis in the progressive world, their idea is we'll just call it all fake news or fault or

Speaker 2 what's the term they say? Misinformation. That's right, disinformation.
We'll call it that. And one side calls it fake, the other is disinformation.

Speaker 2 And in reality, the kids need to be able to listen to it all and figure out what's true. And that's the skill that we teach.

Speaker 1 And really understand what it means to be a citizen.

Speaker 2 Right. Well, that is a big part of the wisdom, wisdom and virtue.

Speaker 2 When it comes to the Founding Fathers, this was their main focus for education, was wisdom and virtue, because they knew, knew, and it was visible because

Speaker 2 as soon as the revolution was over and the country was established,

Speaker 2 you have Alexis de Tocqueville come here and he observes this about the country, that it's oddly educated, that farmers actually have read Cicero or Caesar. And he's

Speaker 2 more used to the European, of course, he was French.

Speaker 2 He was used to the European model where you've got the aristocrats who are educated in the greats, and then the average farmer just does what he's told to do.

Speaker 2 That very different picture here in America. And that's what de Tocqueville said kept us going.

Speaker 1 That's a profound observation. So the way the country is going now is government-run schools are failing terribly at even the basics.
We have private schools that don't embrace the classical model.

Speaker 1 Is it fair to say the classical model takes more work?

Speaker 2 Well, it certainly does on the part of the student.

Speaker 2 The teachers as well.

Speaker 1 It is harder for a kid to go through a classical education than go to local Bakersfield Elementary.

Speaker 2 You know, it's harder, but it's not necessarily more drudgery because kids tend to react well when you

Speaker 2 when you challenge them, when you ask them to think.

Speaker 2 Strength rejoices in the challenge yes and and the works that we use the great books of the west uh the bible there's a lot of depth in those and so i think a lot of kids if we think back to our our public school experience certainly i was in the public schools you were i think for a time that's right um i i see it more as tedium than uh

Speaker 2 than anything else and it wasn't that it was hard or easy because some of my classes were hard it was that it just didn't seem to have a point it was monotonous yeah

Speaker 1 So it wasn't pointing towards anything.

Speaker 1 At your schools, the American Association of Christian, Classical Christian Schools, are you, I'm sure the answer is yes, but talk about how you're unafraid to talk about objective truth.

Speaker 1 That is one of the things that even some conservative parents say, well, I don't want a school or a government school or anyone saying ever that there is an absolute good or truth.

Speaker 1 Just teach the basics and move on.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 we start with the precept that there is absolute truth. truth.
And the reason that's important is that everything else becomes pointless if you don't believe that, right?

Speaker 2 What's the point in reading old books with ideas if none of them

Speaker 2 matter

Speaker 2 towards anything?

Speaker 2 So, yes, you have to start there. But when you start there, the world opens up.

Speaker 2 It's a much bigger form of education. These kids,

Speaker 2 if the most common things I hear from graduates of our schools when they return is that they've gotten to college and they find it, again, to be tedium.

Speaker 2 Our schools are robust enough that obviously they can do the work.

Speaker 1 Unless they go to Hillsdale.

Speaker 2 Well, Hillsdale's an exception for sure.

Speaker 2 There's a handful of those exceptions. But for most kids that go to the colleges, they can't find anybody who has an interesting mind, anybody who wants to discuss anything.
Everything is superficial.

Speaker 2 So I think that's a lot of what we try and do in our schools is just give kids a love for depth, a love for for learning.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 they're more interested in inquiring about

Speaker 2 new ideas than they are arguing about them because they're curious. That's what we try and build.
It's called wonder in our form

Speaker 2 in our form.

Speaker 1 All men seek to know. Or is that the philosophy starts with wonder?

Speaker 2 Yeah, both of those are two different.

Speaker 1 Yes. But I think it's one of the first lines of Aristotle's metaphysics.
Yes.

Speaker 2 Yes, exactly.

Speaker 2 I think.

Speaker 1 I'm going to look it up in a second here, but something. I know all men seek to know is the beginning of one either, not the politics, that's a separate one.

Speaker 1 But actually, the beginning of politics is also every art, every inquiry, every action points towards some good. And you have to have a definition of what the good is.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 1 And you're going to live under some superseding moral code. And that's something that the progressives have.

Speaker 1 done a very successful trick on us, making us believe that there could be an agnostic public square.

Speaker 2 And I don't know if they ever believed that, but that's certainly what they want us to believe.

Speaker 2 Because cultural Marxism has a very strong set of ideals that are transcendent in their view. In their view, for example, wealth is necessarily evil or

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 equity of all,

Speaker 2 you know, leveling of all wealth, leveling of all

Speaker 2 status and stature is an ultimate good.

Speaker 2 And that's an unquestionable good in, I think, most progressive schools, and it's one that needs to be questioned.

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Speaker 1 So there's lots of parents listening to this right now, and they might think they're going, they're sending their kid to a solid school.

Speaker 1 I'm not asking you to criticize them, but what are very simple questions that they can ask? A checklist of whether or not their school is truly pursuing what is good, true, and

Speaker 2 You know, that's funny.

Speaker 2 These may sound a little bit strange, so I hope that. No, please go through them.

Speaker 1 I want parents to take notes and grandparents and then compare.

Speaker 2 Yes, so the first one I would ask is at what age do they read a full book, cover to cover? Most schools these days have moved to just short little passages of readings. They don't want to.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the books.

Speaker 2 And then the second question

Speaker 2 beyond what is the age at which they read their first full book with chapters in it, not small readers, but an actual book with chapters, say

Speaker 2 A Little House on the Prairie or something like that. Old L or Sure.
Yeah, Old L or any of those. Then the next question would be, what is the greatest book that you guys read at this school?

Speaker 2 And by that, I mean something that's older than 100 years old. Just any book that's older than 100 years old that you read.

Speaker 2 I think those two questions will often tease out answers that may may surprise most parents.

Speaker 2 I think this is what when Pete Hegseth and I wrote Battle for the American Mind, he was fascinated and brought in some really good material on what he called the COVID-16-19 project, which was back at the time parents watching over the shoulders of their kids and realizing that what they were learning at school was very different than what the parents thought they were learning at school.

Speaker 2 So that's why some of these questions I might suggest that people ask may seem a little bit rudimentary, but

Speaker 1 I love those two. It's very simple.
So you're saying most schools

Speaker 1 they don't read anything post-100 years, and they definitely won't even tell a kid, hey, here's an 11-chapter book, you must read it. Right.

Speaker 2 Where they have to read the screen.

Speaker 1 What usually is that, do you find?

Speaker 2 High school, if at all?

Speaker 2 I have been surprised that even in high schools, that's not happening anymore.

Speaker 1 Do you think it's possible that there are kids right now that are juniors and seniors that have never read an entire book?

Speaker 2 I know it's possible because I've met them. Oh, come on.
Now, I don't.

Speaker 1 You're trying to tell me there's kids that are juniors in high school in America that have never read a book.

Speaker 2 Yes,

Speaker 2 it is very strange.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 1 I think it's a national security crisis.

Speaker 2 If it weren't for the fact that the kids were standing in front of me telling me this, I probably wouldn't have believed it.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 it's not just that. It's, you know, the quality of what they're reading, the content of what they're studying.

Speaker 2 You know, in this day and age, certainly one thing I would ask, if I were a parent looking at a school is, when do you start teaching cursive? Or do you start teaching cursive?

Speaker 2 yeah they've gotten rid of it most of them have gotten rid of it so i i was you're gonna have to convince me on the cursive one i was taught cursive what what utility is there in cursive well it's interesting what what does it form it form it forms an aesthetic which is kind of a in classical education we talk about the three transcendentals truth goodness and beauty those are the three axes if you will kind of if you think of it like a cartesian plane yes just like height width and depth in the in the world of of ideas, in the world of content and material, everything is measured in those three axes: truth, goodness, and beauty.

Speaker 2 And the beauty axis has been forgotten for a long time.

Speaker 2 I totally agree.

Speaker 2 If you just want to capture a little bit of this, just look at the Declaration of Independence and look at the signatures on it.

Speaker 2 And John Hancock's signature is the one we often think of because it's so large. But

Speaker 2 men of his day actually sought to create a distinctive cursive hand because it was viewed as part of their refinement to become a better

Speaker 2 person because they had beauty even in the hand in which they wrote. And

Speaker 2 this is something that we teach kids, you know,

Speaker 2 so that that's kind of maybe more of an ethereal answer to that. No,

Speaker 1 I'm tracking.

Speaker 2 But there's also the fine motor skills that you gain from that. Our kids, fine motor skills at this point are really defined by tapping iPad

Speaker 2 screens.

Speaker 2 I think using a pen to write in a very precise way is a way to build that. And then there's just the aspect that cursive is an efficient way to write.

Speaker 2 And there are times when you should write in a book.

Speaker 1 Well, and it's also just for no other reason than it's different and challenges you.

Speaker 2 It does.

Speaker 2 And if you've got a good teacher if it's not just somebody who wants you to yeah I felt it was at least my memory it was very monotonous I didn't like it it was yeah it was a pain or a labor the best teachers are the ones who have had some background in

Speaker 2 you know script writing like calligraphers do calligraphy writing those teachers can really bring it alive for the kids it's it's like anything else in classical education

Speaker 1 it was mandated in the schools I went to not in the public schools but in the in in the Christian school and then the

Speaker 1 school I went to prior.

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Speaker 1 So, parents, those two questions are phenomenal. What other one, I mean,

Speaker 1 when I walked through your school, what's the name of the school in Boise again?

Speaker 2 The Ambrose School.

Speaker 1 The Ambrose School. Okay.
When I walked through the Ambrose School, I was struck by how many old paintings, old pictures of paintings, statues.

Speaker 1 I'm talking about thousands of years old, from or hundreds of years old, Montesquieu to Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Pascal. Remember, I brought Blake with me and he was naming all the.

Speaker 2 Yes. Remember that? Yes.

Speaker 1 Boy,

Speaker 1 that was a couple years ago.

Speaker 1 Is there something to the idea of we want to have

Speaker 1 the students surrounded by the old and the lasting?

Speaker 2 Yes. In fact, it ties back to the beauty thing.
Of course. In that

Speaker 2 case,

Speaker 2 I think Churchill said, and I always watch this, but we make our buildings and then our buildings make us.

Speaker 2 The idea that

Speaker 2 the architecture influences. So the building you were in was designed from the ground up to be a school.
It's beautiful.

Speaker 2 And it's designed to cultivate in kids an appreciation for old tradition and for a love of great art. And so that's why that's in there.

Speaker 2 But I think if you look around at your typical public school, it speaks as well architecturally. Typically, it's highly utilitarian.

Speaker 1 It's like a cabinet drawer.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's utilitarian. It's functional.

Speaker 2 It doesn't

Speaker 2 play to, it does not point up. It does not play to the humanity of the students.
It plays to them as though they're computers. They're like widgets.
Yes.

Speaker 2 You could put a bunch of computers in those buildings and they would very easily

Speaker 2 exactly.

Speaker 1 I think that's exactly right. And you look at the actual picture of the Department of Education,

Speaker 1 it actually looks like a file cabinet.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 1 Because that's literally what bureaucrat means, means desk worker.

Speaker 1 So we only have a couple minutes remaining here. I could talk about this all day long.

Speaker 1 Do you, before we get into any specifics, you want to plug, do you think that the current trend is favorable in American education right now?

Speaker 2 I do think it is, and I think it is for several reasons. Certainly, Trump has shown us that

Speaker 2 there is a way forward. There's a way to push back against the cultural Marxism that has dominated this country over the last many years.

Speaker 2 So I think that classical Christian education, it plays a particular role. I think that parents are finding it,

Speaker 2 I would say it's the dominant alternate form to the public schools right now.

Speaker 2 It's coming in a a variety of forms, some of them

Speaker 2 charters, some

Speaker 2 classical Christian private, you know, various forms of it.

Speaker 1 I feel new energy behind this.

Speaker 2 Yes, there is. And the energy, it's a little frightening for some of us.
I've been in this 30 years, and at first, no one cared what we were doing because no one knew we existed.

Speaker 2 And now people are starting to look. We're getting criticism from quarters

Speaker 2 trying to restore that dastardly Western tradition that they would rather have go away.

Speaker 2 So they want the West to go away. They want the West to go away.

Speaker 1 So they must get rid of the tradition and get rid of the West.

Speaker 2 And the thing that perpetuates the tradition is the enemy. And so

Speaker 2 they definitely are starting to notice classical education. Certainly what's happened in Florida with the growth.

Speaker 2 You know, DeSantis is pushing the entire state, whether it's the collegiate level or at the K-12 level

Speaker 2 in this classical direction. So I think

Speaker 2 it's our time.

Speaker 1 I totally agree, and I think that people are seeing the excesses of modernity.

Speaker 1 They're seeing the lies of secularized, hyper-modernist, materialistic culture, and they want to go back towards what is lasting, what is true.

Speaker 1 Now,

Speaker 1 Catholic education tends to be more classical. Is that fair to say that usually that, because when I think of Catholic, classical, I think of it more Catholic in nature, but you guys are Protestant?

Speaker 1 Is that correct?

Speaker 2 ACCS is Protestant. I would say my friends in the Catholic movement would say it's not.
Really? Okay. And it's odd.
It's not.

Speaker 1 There are Catholic classical schools.

Speaker 2 There are, and they're very good.

Speaker 1 And they tend to. So, look, I'm not totally.

Speaker 2 No, you're not.

Speaker 2 The thing was, is that in the mid-1900s, I'm sorry, mid-1800s, the Blaine Amendments were put in to try and freeze out the Catholics.

Speaker 2 So the Catholics formed their own school systems that then rode right alongside the Progressive.

Speaker 1 Tell me about the Blaine Amendments. I don't know about this.

Speaker 2 Well, the Blaine Amendments, it was named after a senator who tried to pass it nationally. And basically,

Speaker 2 the Protestant church so despised the Catholic Church in America at the time that they were trying to freeze the Catholics out of education. They did not want any Catholic education whatsoever.

Speaker 2 Cager-fired.

Speaker 1 So Catholics have more schools than Protestants.

Speaker 2 They do, because the Blaine Amendment said you can't spend any money, any federal money, or or any state money on

Speaker 2 religious education. And so that pushed the Catholics out.
They formed their own system.

Speaker 2 That system paralleled and pretty much took on the progressive form in the early part of the 20th century when the progressives revolutionized education in the United States. It was a big movement.

Speaker 2 And so those, what are often called

Speaker 2 the diocese schools within the Catholic Church, can oftentimes be very progressive in their form.

Speaker 2 But the Catholic Church is very traditional, and so it's recovering quickly its old form, the form of education that was native to those schools originally, and they're putting it back into place rapidly.

Speaker 2 So I'm very optimistic about that. I'm excited about what they're contributing to the movement because they have a very deep

Speaker 2 history.

Speaker 1 How can people support you, get involved, and learn more?

Speaker 2 Well, you can learn more at classicalchristian.org. Classicalchristian.org.

Speaker 2 That is our main site that directs people in any which direction you want to go, whether you want to teach in our schools, whether you want to find a school, start a school.

Speaker 2 So I would advise that you start there.

Speaker 1 And closing thoughts for parents that might like the local football team, but they know the school's no good?

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 just visit one of these schools.

Speaker 2 I agree. You just walk.

Speaker 1 You live in Boise. You got to check it out.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, any one of them in any state, if you go in during operations, I think, Charlie, you were there after hours a little bit.
I can't remember.

Speaker 2 But if you go during operations, no matter what you see, you'll notice it's different.

Speaker 1 David, you've been a great friend, and congrats to our friend Pete Hagseth, by the way, your co-author.

Speaker 2 Good deal.

Speaker 1 And we at Turning Point Academy are here to help in any way we possibly can.

Speaker 2 We love what you guys are doing.

Speaker 1 And Hutz is special, isn't he? He's a wonderful guy.

Speaker 2 And the work that you guys are doing, you know, you very much recognize this space.

Speaker 1 Well, thank you. And I want to see more classical schools pop up.
I want to see more classical Christian schools pop up in particular. And I'm really impressed.
And thank you, David, for your time.

Speaker 2 Thank you.

Speaker 1 Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thanks so much for listening and God bless.

Speaker 1 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to charliekirk.com.