Episode 4: On Classical Education

[MUSIC PLAYING] You're listening to Community Crafted Education, where we explore alternatives to conventional K-12 education and their potential impacts on society and culture. I'm Eric Wairn, director of the National Hybrid Schools Project. On this episode, we're joined by Josh Haring from Thales College. We'll talk about classical education, how it's defined, how it's grown over the years, and what the impacts of a new and larger set of classical schools might be on society. Well, welcome. We have with us today Josh Haring from Thales College. Welcome Josh. Thanks, Eric. It's great to be here with you. Yeah, so just to start off, could you tell us just in general first about your background in your work at Thales and what Thales is? Sure. So I've been with Thales as an organization since 2013. I took a job teaching to pay the bills while I was going through seminary and fell in love with teaching. I discovered I have a bit of a knack for reading books with kids and then getting them to talk about the ideas in those books. I spent eight years teaching in the 612 world, and then I spent three years in administration. Along the way, I finished Master's Divinity and a PhD in Humanities from Falcon University. And just as I was finishing the PhD, they were looking for a classical education professor at the newest part of the Thales organization. I cut my teeth on Thales Academy, but I now teach over at Thales College. So we're a new young startup college that is trying to prove that you can marry a robust business education with a great liberal arts program as well. So I came on board to handle the education side of things. And I do a lot of education courses and then teach in the Humanities Department over here. OK, great. And so Thales Academy is a K-12 entity, and then you've got Thales College next to it, right? That's right. This always back to our founder, a guy named Bob Lutty. He is an entrepreneur, a very successful businessman. And he really believes that the best way to fix American culture is through educational innovation. And so he started one of the first charter schools in the state of North Carolina, Franklin Academy. He launched a Catholic Classical School, St. Thomas Moore Academy. Thales Academy was sort of the experiment back in 2007. And his question was, could we make a scalable classical model? And so far, the answer is sort of. We have 17 campuses in three states. And we just seem to keep growing. And the latest question on Bob's mind is, well, we figured out how to do K-12. Could we do college? And could we bring the same model of high quality, affordable cost, education to the higher ed space? And we're currently trying to figure out the answer to that question. OK, perfect. Yeah, great. So here is kind of an entry question for you. I spend a lot of time around different variants of classical schools. You spend all your time in that world. But I still encounter a lot of people who say, so what is classical education again? So how would you define this concept of classical education? It's a great question. And it's one that really, if you get 10 different teachers in the room, you're probably going to wind up with five or six different answers. So just know that I'm going to answer your question. But I think there are a lot of people who would nuance or disagree with my answer. I think classical education is a broad term for trying to recover a content rich education that is all about forming the souls of students. 100 years ago, it was not controversial at all for teachers to say they actually had something to do with moral formation of students. And that the books they read, the languages they studied, the ideas they discussed, all had a lot to do with helping the students kind of grow into the fullness of what it meant to be human. Unfortunately, over roughly the last 100 years, American education has really gotten away from all of that, such that many of the problems with contemporary public education really go back to hollowing out the curriculum and hollowing out our teacher preparation, such that teachers no longer are called to form the souls of students. As a classical education really grows out of a historically, at least, grows out of a dissatisfaction of a bunch of parents in the 1980s. They're trying to figure out some better options for their students. And they're sort of floundering in a lot of ways. They're reaching for any and every kind of model they can find that seems like it will be better than what they see around them. And a lot of these parents latched on to Dorothy Sayers essay, "The Lost Tools of Learning." And they saw her description of the trivia as the grammar stage, the logic stage, and the rhetoric stage. And they said, "Ah, that's it." And we're going to call it classical education. Well, Sayers did some great work in that essay, but she wasn't really trying to found a movement. She was writing a paper for a vacation course in education. And she shared some thoughts she had about the medieval trivia and these parents latched on to it. Well, if you go today, if we jump forward from the '80s to the 2020s, we're looking at a movement nationwide that has somewhere between six and 10,000 schools. And God alone knows how many homeschooling families and organizations that are-- all of them use this term classical. And what they all have in common is a very high view of human nature, a very strong respect for the general tradition of Western knowledge, and a conviction that education really does matter. And that it really does matter that we give the next generation the tools and the knowledge and the ideas and the principles that multiple generations of people have drawn on. And we call that very broadly classical. Now from there, you can get into homeschool classical, your charter classical, your Christian classical, your secular classical, and whatever adjective you want. There's probably a strand in the movement that it fits. But I think that broadly speaking is what all of us are trying to do in this movement. No, that's super helpful. Thank you. It's interesting. So my work and this podcast are really about hybrid schools and micro schools and all these community crafted schools. And that movement has followed a really interestingly parallel trajectory, I think, to the classical education movement, the modern classical education movement. So you've got some real pioneers in the late '80s and then into the '90s. And in the '90s, you've got these support organizations kind of springing up and things get more popular. And then in the 2000s, you get more online groups and more people are getting into it. And then COVID just made everything happen at an accelerated rate. And so this movement really took off in the last five years. And I think that's true of hybrid schools and micro schools and it's true of classical education. I don't think these two things are necessarily tied to each other. But I do find that an interesting parallel. But I've taught in conventional public schools, in hybrid schools, and in college. The middle ground, the hybrid schools where the kids are at school part of the week and homeschooled part of the week, it's not exactly like either of those. It's not exactly like five day public schools. It's not exactly like teaching in college. But I do find that the kids-- it was helpful to get some of their content. And the kids had more time, for example, to just read books, which I think is a big part of classical education. So I mean, do you think that that kind of structure could enhance the classical focus on things like secreting discussion and reading? Like our hybrid and micro schools are uniquely good vehicle for classical education? I think this certainly can be. Like so many things, I would argue it really depends on the level of parental involvement and the level of parental expectation and understanding and support of what the school structure in the hybrid model is trying to set up. I'm thinking of a few different. I've visited a couple of hybrid schools in the Raleigh area. I won't name them. But some of them do a phenomenal job of laying out really strong academic expectations. And those kinds of settings, I think, where parents are on board with that, it works incredibly well. Because your most frustrating parts of the teaching experience are in a good school, it's not the content, and it's not working with students actually teaching. It's everything else. It's making sure the students do the work. It's dealing with the behavioral concerns. And honestly, it's dealing with parents who think that, yes, my kid does have to be in school, but really, we're on the travel sports team. And the travel sports teams, what you should accommodate in your teaching. And in some hybrid school models, I think that just kind of all gets clearly delineated as this is the parents responsibility. And when you come into the school setting, we're going to do the school things that are really what the teacher is there to do. I think in as much as that happens, it can be a phenomenal model. And the classical approach is really a disposition that I think belongs to most great teachers, whether they would use that terminology or not. And it's a curricular approach that is just really tried and true. The places where I'm a little hesitant is where I do know of at least one hybrid school I've been to where they just very intentionally do not do grades. And they do not set up an accountability structure. And I just I think that that seems pretty, that seems pretty risky. I think you do need, you've got to have a right understanding of human nature. Students in general, there are some exceptions, but in general, students are going to do the least amount of work they can get away with. And so if there are no incentives that recognize academic success and no disincentives that at least penalize, if not punish, students who are dodging the kind of work they're responsible to do, I'm skeptical that much learning is happening. So I think it really depends on the nature of the structure, but if there's a good structure there, the classical model could map onto that, I think very effectively. Yeah, I think there are some other interesting kind of other overlaps between, or potential overlaps between this kind of thing and some of these self directed schools, but what you're really getting at is culture and leadership and management and things like that. And just being clear about how your school works, you know, the big question with a lot of these schools is, are we a school or are we a collection of homeschoolers or are we, or what's the mix, right? And so I think your part of it is just the leadership saying this is what we are now parents take it or leave it in a way, right? Yeah, it's the, I mean, it's a line from the Old Testament that where there is no vision, the people perish and that that ability of leadership to cast a vision, I think it's true for really any school community, you've got to have somebody who casts that vision. I think with the hybrid movement seems to me as very much an outsider who's not inside that hasn't studied the time. So at the time if I'm woefully incorrect about this. But it seems to me that a lot of folks would bring to the hybrid school the same kinds of questions that they often they used to bring to homeschooling and they still sometimes bring to a classical school. Oh, the standard model is the public school model and anything new has to prove itself. And so I think the clear articulation of that vision and being able to show we are a community of learning here is how we are learning here is what we are learning. The more clear those things are the easier it is to sort of defang people who are already attacking kind of a new player in the educational space. Yeah, perfect. So these things are growing hybrid schools are growing, micro schools are growing, classical schools of all kinds are growing. Are you seeing challenges in this kind of scaling up? That happens within these smaller models, but I don't think this is really different for classical schools of all kind. For example, a big problem finding teachers who are trained in classical methods because until five minutes ago, hardly anybody had received a classical education growing up right a hundred years ago they did and then we took a big break. And then five minutes ago we maybe have a couple of people now who are ready. So I've talked to school leaders who will say look, I need to either start from scratch with a young person who's willing to be a teacher or I can take somebody who's got some pedagogical skills, but I've got to undo a lot of things right and then rebuild them to fit in a classical school. Do you see that as a big challenge or are there other challenges that this the growth in classical education is seeing. Well, I think the teacher pipeline is the way Mark Bauer line talks about it. I mean, it's a it is a huge endemic problem for classical and I want to come back to that in just a second because we actually at Thales College, we've got a program that I'm always excited to tell people about where we're trying to help equip existing teachers and that want to get in that want to be more classically oriented in their teaching. How do they retool a little bit I would come back to that in a second, because I think the actual the biggest problem that I've seen folks like Josh Gibbs at the classical learning Institute talks about this a lot. The Cersei blog has post about this about once a week, but the growth of the movement and this I would expect with parallel the hybrid and the micro school movements as well. The movement is is very exciting. It's really especially in a school choice moment is how I think cordi angeles describes it, but we just keep having more states past school choice bills and Texas is on the horizon, all those good things. Well, that means there are all these new folks who are looking around thinking where are the workable models. What could I start that can get me that funding and what works and they look at them think, oh, classical works. I'm going to start xyz classical high school and these these folks may or may not have they typically have no idea what that is. And they're just looking for a model that works and then they're like, okay, so somebody tell me how does this work. And I think that is that that's honestly a huge. It's a blessing and it's a dilemma for this movement because if we become so broad that if we are so big tent, we could easily bring in some of the same problems that have played public education over the last 50 years. And particularly of the D E I sort of the rabid feminism issues, the quick inclusion of a bunch of ideas that are actually antithetical to the very principles of the core of a traditional education without careful evaluation or nuance or any of that just kind of bringing it in in the empathic circle we want everybody to be classical. And we've lost any real meaning to the words, so I do think that's a real that's a real issue that a lot of the leaders in the movement right now are actively thinking about there's groups like the society for classical learning, the association of classical Christian schools. And a couple of smaller organizations that are pretty actively trying to define this movement more closely such that we can bring more people in without losing the essence. And I think that's a really interesting thing to see you pipeline though. I think there's really two ways that schools do do this and at at Thales we've done both. The initial approach is to identify some colleges that seem to graduate students that we would want to hire for us that we love students from Hillsdale College. And we would like to see more of those places like Grove City College, Franciscan University of Stubanville, Christendom College, Thomas Aquinas College, Gutenberg College, the kinds of places that are still great books oriented that have a robust liberal arts program. And we will send people to their job fairs and try to recruit their graduates can teach for us. We're going into two problems. The first is when I was shocked by when I got into Admin, but you're not going to be surprised by this Eric. Very few people are actually willing to move to a location that is far away from where they grew up that they have no family near. So it's surprising how I was shocked and how many people would interview with us. They, oh, I'm actually from Kansas. I'm moving back to Kansas or I'm going somewhere they're like, they don't want to come to North Carolina where most of our schools are if they don't have ties here. So really that was that was we could never get enough of those folks to come to meet our needs as a school network because we're we're pretty big at this point. We need a lot of teachers to deal with our staffing needs. Right. So our other approach that I think is is more successful is to look at the people that we already have as teachers because with a school system our size we have somewhere between 400 and 500 teachers in the Thales Academy network. We have a lot of folks who are bringing 5, 10, 15 years of experience at local public schools for whatever reason they're dissatisfied there they interview and we love them. The public school teachers know how to do discipline. They know how to fill out all the forms. They think we are surprisingly bureaucracy light as our and our true private classical folks like, man, we have so many meetings that our public school teachers are like, what are you all talking about? There's only like two a month and they eventually work out great. But the question is, how do we help those folks kind of bone up and that's that's where Thales College's program comes in. We call this the certificate in classical education philosophy. It's built around the idea that the way adults learn is primarily not really through lecture at this stage in life when you're a professional and you're out of the academic setting. The idea of sitting down and just taking notes on our lecture very few people are willing to do that. So we built this around the idea that people change based on the books they read the conversations they have and the people they meet. And also an online evening program that is essentially a structured reading program in eight courses where each course is a series of guided seminars around key books in the classical education tradition. And I keep I keep meeting people in this program who tell me this is their initial exposure to the tradition of liberal arts. And I'm not acquiring so much profound wisdom not through what things that I say as I'm setting up a class but through insights that their peers bring and just simply through the ideas that they counter through these texts. And we've I've got about 70 people in that program now and it's becoming an enormous way of helping to take people who want to be in classical education and help them see what that in fact means without having to approve their lives and go start a grad program somewhere. I mean, it doesn't really help you but this is kind of the value of these little schools is is someone who graduates from from Gutenberg or Belmont Abbey or someplace like that and wants to move home starting up start up costs are much lower for high school so so it does that's you know no use to you really but maybe for somebody listening. And that's something that I wanted to bring up you anticipated another one of my questions and you know we're not going to do a whole lot of talking about policy stuff on this podcast but there is this question about this overlap between these new school choice programs and classical education especially right a lot of new classical schools are charter schools which are public. of past these education savings account bills, which means there's potentially more public money available for private school spaces. But I've heard skepticism over both of these ways of creating classical schools. So just to steal man it a little bit, right? You can see a couple examples of this, right? Maybe you're, say I'm a classical charter school principal and we're doing this great curriculum that we developed and we got approved through our state. And our city, and then we take our state mandated tests and they don't turn out well because our curriculum in no way overlaps or aligns with the state tests. So then I've got this problem because the results in part determine whether I get to stay open. So maybe I make some adjustments and maybe those are in less classical ways. So that's one problem that is a real problem, right? Or a potential problem. And another one would be something like an ESA bill passes in my state, which allows me to open a micro school or a hybrid school that's classical and it brings new people into the classical education world. So our constituency has grown, which is positive. But these new people we're bringing in have not been involved in classical education. They're excited to come to my new fancy, or probably not fancy my new small school. But 99% of the conversations I have with parents as this imaginary school founder are about things like, when are we gonna have more electives in AP classes? And when are we starting a football team, right? So these are legitimate questions that I ask about whether, maybe it's a net benefit to the classical education world to do this anyway. Like you give some ground, but you get a bigger group of people. So this is my question. How would you address skeptics who have those kinds of questions? - Well, those are great questions. I would start with the, let's, you've got two scenarios in place. Let's start with your head of school who's looking at, they're gonna pull our funding if we repeat tests. If we have three years to improve our test scores, let's say. - Right. - And so you've got enough time to identify the areas and identify the tweaks, whether that's personnel or whether that's content. - So I would start with really, I guess I don't, two responses there. First, I would say the, your primary impetus as a charter school there, you do have to stay open. I am not such a pure answer that I would say, you should just close rather than like find a solution. There are some who are, but I'm not in that camp. So I think it's worth just recognizing, if you already, if your tell us is to be a public charter school, you are bringing a service to that community and that service will die if your school closes. And so you do have to meet those, you have to meet those standards. That's just part of your nature as a school. The second thing though is I would say, this is where having a pretty broad understanding of classical education comes in. There is, I would say there is not one and only one way to do classical. So it may mean that, so if part of that may require doing some digging into those state tests and figure out what exactly are they assessing? Is it, is it the fact that, is it just reading comprehension of any book? Or are there some books that we need to have read before our subscribers take the end of your exam? And in that case, maybe if there's some specific books that don't violate some good principles and some morals and so on, maybe you make some reading list changes and figure out, okay, even if they're less than ideal, we're kind of on John seniors, 1000 good books instead of like the great books in this scenario. Well, there's still gonna be some great ideas and some principles and some moral formation that can happen. And maybe we just need to kind of shift that conversation to a different book list for time. I don't think there's anything wrong with doing that. I think it's something that every school kind of has to navigate. So again, this is not a one size fits all. When I teach the classical pedagogy course in my certificate program, kind of the concluding night after we've looked at four different models of classical education, is to at least try and draw the conclusion that classical pedagogy is not a series of specific tricks that you just pull out in a certain moment. It's instead a certain orientation that you have as a teacher towards your students, towards your content, towards the tradition, and seeing the good that can be done in relationship as a teacher. And so there's a lot of flexibility in there. At Thales, we hit this, we used the Iowa test for several years for our middle school. And the only history questions that ever showed up on the Iowa State Standards for sixth and seventh grade were the American history questions. And we don't teach American history until eighth grade. Students hit that in fifth grade when they're when we're not looking at their fifth grade numbers on the Iowa's really in the middle school. And then so by the time our seventh grade is taken, we always saw a dip in their social studies score just because it was unfamiliar content. And we as a school just said, you know what? That was a private school, we didn't have the funding pressure. But we could recognize that like, yeah, this is not an indictment on our program. This just means the test is not really measuring what we're teaching, and we're okay with that. To your second scenario about the parents who are really asking about the football team and the electives and the APs, I think every school faces that pressure. And it's whether it's a Christian school with parents who are there wanting to know, what are you gonna do to get my kid into Harvard? Or whether it's a public school that's just like, there's a new flashy thing. We need to do the new flashy thing. And in the classical school's case, we have really strong curricular commitments typically. And we went through this at Thales Academy several years ago where we had gotten into a habit of encouraging our students to take advantage of the virtual North Carolina public school AP courses as part of their electives. And we realized we were disincentivizing our brightest students. We were pushing them to stuff that was outside of our particular control and program. And it really was a messaging struggle. For about a year, maybe two years really. We just had to, everybody on any sort of leadership had to always be ready to explain to parents what we are doing is very intentional and is very particular. And it's actually part of why you're here with us. So even if you want that, that thing that you want is not why you're here. And we had to be committed enough to our own identity as a school to articulate that to our parents. And I think really every school has to do that eventually. There's gonna be some issue people want schools to do everything under the sun. - They're used to that, right? But when you're talking about alternative education, usually, especially if you're talking about smaller schools, and I assume this is true on the micro school level, even more so, you've got very particular funding that has to go into the essentials. And there's just not money for a football team. And usually everybody's got options. If you want the football team like down the road, there is a great school with a phenomenal football program. That's just not us. - Yeah, I mean, everyone faces constraints of some kind. Everyone has to make decisions and trade-offs. But yeah, you mentioned messaging, but it goes back to something else you talk about, which is leadership and kind of knowing who you are and what your school is before you can even communicate that kind of thing. So I have a couple more questions for you Josh. One of them is, so say this all works out, right? And we've got loads of new classical schools of all kinds, like conventional five day schools, creative charter, hybrid and micro schools and all these things. How would you expect society to change if we had, if the market share of classical education got a lot bigger than it is now? - Well, I'm still enough of a history major to hear some professors in the back of my head yelling at me about history and no way gives you the ability to predict the future. So I hope so, maybe. - Yeah. - I put no stock in my predictions, my hopes would be that I would love for really two things to come in say 25 years from now. I think it's taken us about 50 years, maybe 40 years, to forget how to tell good stories. I don't know if you've noticed this, but my wife and I have been struck recently about, it's really hard to find a good TV show or movie that's been made in the last five years. We find that we keep going back to things that are older than that. And even 10, 20, 30 years ago, there were just a plethora of great storytelling options. I think we have now so hollowed out our own ability to tell good stories that, and the left has conquered the storytelling industry in an obvious overt way. The Anora Winning the Academy Awards is just indicative of our societal illness. So I would hope that we have an awful lot of students to graduate from these thousand different flowers blooming, but I'll have some various commitment to the traditional text of Western civilization. We should have a lot of students who actually have recovered the arts of storytelling and could tell great stories that are grounded in reality and grounded in human nature. A second thing I would hope is a return to the world of the world. what I'm just going to politely call Civic Sanity. Without turning your podcast into a partisan platform, I hope it's an agreeable thing to say, we have not had in the last, we're recording in 2025, so I would say for at least the last five years, we have not had a truly neutral Civic Discourse space. Instead, particularly I think the left has completely overplayed their hand to the extent that they have turned every political encounter into an absolute battle. And the right has at times done that, but I think a lot less frequently than the left. So I would hope that if we actually have so many schools that are intentionally grounding students in a right understanding of justice, a right understanding of politics as the art of living together in peace and harmony, a revived focus on American civics and the goodness of a political structure that at this point has lasted somewhat continuously for over 250 years, but that's not something to throw away lightly. Now again, please notice and hope with your listeners, I am not, I'm trying my best to not be partisan in this. Like I just think this is sincerely a political crisis for a representational democratic republic or whatever we are these days. When we have spent a lot of civilizational energy teaching the rise in generation to hate our own political order. So I would love to replace that with a generation that is not trying to paint some kind of polyannic perfectionism under our political order, but at least values, right economics, right governance and right pursuit of justice. I think all of that's possible without sliding into some sort of partisanship. So those at least are two things I would say, I hope to see in the next 25 years. Yeah, I mean, I went to high school and college in the 90s. And so maybe that colors things a little bit, but it does, I do have memories of people being a little bit more able to just kind of be cool with each other back then, right? But I think of these, you know, all these new school models are kind of a way to get back to that kind of thing where you can just sort of plant your flag and do your thing and not need to tell other people what to do. And I think that's a salutary development in that way. However, if you were going to start a classical school of any kind, you know, a micro school, a hybrid school or any other kind, Josh, do you have one key element like a particular text or method or practice or something like that that you'd urge them to prioritize? Oh, well, I think not the lost tools of learning, I take it. Probably not, probably not. I just had an article come out in, it's a journal called an unexpected journal where I try to, they asked me to write an essay about Dorothy Sayers as a moral apologist and I spent about 2,000 words just kind of trying to explain my wrestling tension with Dorothy Sayers. I don't dislike her in any way. I just initially was handed Dorothy Sayers as the answer when I became a teacher. And I quickly discovered that actually, I always needed grammar, logic and rhetoric no matter what the age level of my students were. So her model is incomplete. I think on a very practical note, the first thing, and this maybe is just a virtue of having cut my teeth at daily's, the first thing I would be looking for is just a true believer financial backer who would see my venture through to viability. At one point, I had a friend who was very grumpy with some decisions that he and I have been handed. And he came into the break room one day, I was like, we should just start our own school. And I started thinking about it and it still to this day seems like an irreducibly complex puzzle. Like you need, for the kind of school that I would want to be interested in starting, you need a building, you need a faculty, you need a curriculum, and you really need to have all that running before parents actually take you seriously. So if you've got, and I've since met people who completely ignore all of that as a methodology and they're sort of like starting a micro school in their basement and they get some friends. And then they just, well, many such cases as they say, yep. But as far as a pedagogy, I would probably have, I can't imagine starting a classical school without a strong attention to pay to the, I would want the curriculum figured out in a philosophically coherent way and as early as possible. And it's not to say you have to have K-12 mapped out before the first kindergartener enrolls, but the longer you wait to ask those questions of what exactly are we going to do in these courses, the harder it is to actually deal with those questions when the time comes. The other thing I would, as far as an act, that's curriculum, an actual pedagogy. I do think that the secratic method of question and answer is pretty central to the heart of classical education. That's, it's not just a, let me tell you what the right answers are. And if you can repeat my answers to the world, you will be educated. That's really not what classical education is. Classical education does have to be taught by teachers who understand the arc of the arguments being made. And they have to make those arguments, but they don't make those arguments to indoctrinate students. They make those arguments in order to invite the students to wrestle with those questions. And to really, it's not the case that there are no wrong answers, but there are a variety of right answers that we want students to get to. And they don't get to those right answers just by me telling them the right answers. They have to get there through their own wrestling with truth. And that's really what lies at the heart of secratic method, I think. - Perfect, this is good advice. I have one more question for you, our closing question, which is this, what is the most interesting thing happening related to classical education right now that people involved in these new school models like microscopes and hybrid schools would be interested in hearing about? - Well, like everything with classical education, there are exciting, innovative things that really are just recovering old things that we used to know. I think the most interesting innovation is actually happening in the realm of math and science. For about 40 years, classical educators have been deeply concerned with how do we do history and literature and philosophy classically. And this too, I think the new question is a function of growth. As we're seeing all this growth happening, there's a whole new question of like, okay, so, sex and math, is it classical? A lot of us use it, a lot of students benefit from it, but they hate it. And so Singapore math is on the horizon, but I've heard from a couple of angles that Ravi Jane apparently has a classical algebra, geometry, textbook of some sorts in the works. There's now Roman Rhodes Press has a calculus for everyone that is attempting to kind of take the same methodology of classical education, but look at it from the angle of math and science. Novare has a line of classical science textbooks. I think that's the next real field that we need an awful lot of conference talks and seminar papers and debates about. Really figure out, okay, everybody has to teach chemistry, but do we teach chemistry in the same way as people who deny the existence of the soul? Where does earth science fit into a classical sequence of study? How does John senior's insistence that let them be born in wonder, how does that fit as kind of an overarching view of what we're trying to do in science? I think that's the exciting place that is where we're headed to and there's a lot of folks currently working on that, but that's what I see happening in the space today. - Oh, that's great. And we'll need a lot of teachers for that, for all of that too. Well, Josh Herring from Thales College, thank you so much for joining us on the Community Crafted Education Podcast. - So glad to be here. - Thank you for listening to Community Crafted Education, a podcast hosted by the National Hybrid Schools Project and Kenna Saw State University's Michael J. Cole's College of Business. If you have any questions about the topics we discussed on today's show or want to learn more about what we do, please look up the National Hybrid Schools Project or reach out to us directly at coalscollege.com/hybrid. (upbeat music)