The Crisis in Modern Education

This podcast is brought to you by Ascension. To discover even more free Catholic podcasts, videos, and resources to help you live your faith every day, visit AscensionPress.com. In plenty of places, public education is not so bad, but in other places and in huge chunks of places, it is horrific. So we want to understand some of this stuff of how education can go bad, where education excels and why does that matter within a Catholic framework. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen to every news shop, my weekly Catholic podcast and evangelization and discipleship. My name is Mike Gomer Gormley and I am joined as always by my illustrious co-host, Dave Tweet the knee, Van Vickell, how you doing, Dave? I'm okay. I'm oh good. As I mentioned before, I slept in a little bit and my brain isn't firing on all cylinders right now, but no, I am good. It's like beautiful weather here. This is the kind of, this is the only time of year that I don't miss the south, right? Because you just don't get this in the south, like there's no such thing as this time of year where it's just nice. It's just beautiful, temperate climate. No. We have December. Yeah. Right. Yeah. That's what we have. December is our life. Ooh. Someone's going to put us what you're done. Yeah. Yeah. And to be honest with you, like I'm not saying it makes it worth it here, like it's not, it's, there's no sun here. We regularly now compete with cities in Russia for the least amount of sun in the world. That's, it's true. It's awful. And that for me is like a fate worse than death. I don't, I don't like it at all. I like, I want to be every, yeah, every morning, I want to be in the sun. I'm, I'm literally cultivating my property to be totally like I'm, I'm planting trees so that no one can ever see me. So I can just immediately get in my short shorts and the sun and just have my freedom there. That's it. Hahaha. Dude. That's so funny. Go over. Can I tell you I'm probably more excited about this season than I've ever been of any season. Yeah. I think so. What about the season when you did spiritual warfare? No, I'm way more excited about this. This is, this is okay. No, you don't realize this is probably before economics, this might have been my first love. Really? Yeah. Yeah. I'll tell you a weird story. Once you introduce the season. Hey, we're doing a season on education. Go on. Hahaha. No, we're going to do a season on the Catholic tradition and understanding of education as well as evangelization, discipleship within a properly Catholic education. Okay. So you know that I grew up in a covenant community, like a charismatic community. Oh, no, I didn't know that. You didn't? Yeah, you knew that. Yeah. Yeah, super weird. But no, not weird. It was, mine was wonderful. But a lot of people have weird experiences with them. But it's a strange thing for most Catholics to even hear about, right? Like, well, my community was like an Israeli kibbutz. But Catholic. It was nothing like it was like a commune, which is weird. No, we didn't live together. We just prayed together. Oh, okay. Anyways. Okay. So I guess that's cool. Yeah. So the guy who led our community, he was like, he was very well known for like evangelization. He would go to other countries and stuff like that and like on behalf of the Vatican. So he would do these like huge missions and one of those things that happened is when the pope consecrated Russia to the baccalaureate Mary, well, you know, Pope John Paul did like the whole world. And it was fresh. You know, that whole thing. The fatima stuff. Yeah. Our community was in charge of, so they told people to send the catacetical materials to our community. And then we would send them onto Russia, like that's how it works, okay? Wow. Okay. Yeah. But that eventually ended and they had people kept sending, so they had warehouses full of stuff. And one summer, my job was to take whatever I wanted and then get rid of the rest. And so that's like where my library pretty much started, but so much of it was Catholic education stuff. It was like, and I mean the old school Catholic education, like like Benedictine education, Ignatian education. What is it? Classical education. Dorothy Day and Dorothy Sayres and, you know, Bloom and all of those guys and, uh, yeah, I mean, I devoured all of it. So that was just imagine you're 15 years old reading Bloom's taxonomy followed by Dorothy Sayres, the lost tools of learning. Right. Right. And Mortimer Adler. I had the entire set of Mortimer Adler. Are you kidding me? And that's how I started. No. Yeah. Even before that, my mom, I had always like, when I was like even like eight, I remember the thing like, what is wrong with the world? What is wrong with me? And how do we fix it? And my mom would just like feed me all of the Western canon. Like I don't, she wasn't or super educated personally, so I don't know why she knew to do this. But by the time I was 12, I'd read most of the Western canon. You know, like just what do you mean? What do you mean by the Western canon? I don't think that's a familiar term for people who are very happy with the listener. Yeah. Like the Western canon, we would call like the list that most people we consider the greatest books of Western civilization. So starting with Greece, you know, working their way up to even like Shakespeare and even some American literature, you know, stuff like that. But it's, you know, it's about, I'm trying to think about how long Mortimer Adler's list is. I think it's like 500 to 600 books. But it's, you know, the greatest books that you can read basically. Yeah. And it became under the, in the University of Chicago, where I believe Mortimer Adler was at. Yeah, he was. It became known as the Great Books Program. But by the way, yeah, just, just this is for you more than the audience because you feel so nerd out on this, you know, Mortimer Adler was there at the same time as Milton Friedman. Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, I mean, wouldn't you die to be in a room with those two, you know, Mortimer Adler, did you know, do you have any of his like bio stuff that you could share with the audience? Cause he's like a gem that unless you're in the nerdy educational world, you don't know. So Mortimer Adler was an Aristotelian and he would be invited to, I don't know, except for his thoughts on women. I remember. No, what? Anytime he would talk about Aristotle, he would be like, but when it comes to my thoughts on women, I'm clearly platonic. He would always say that, which is a funny phrase, but also good because Aristotle had a very low, right? Right. Women. Right. And Brio did not. Mortimer Adler is, so he was an Aristotelian. He wrote Aristotle for everybody, which is a wonderful, but like tough solid, I'll say solid introduction to Aristotleian thought for the average person, the plain person. But he wrote a lot of books. He was on PBS or some nerdy intellectual show and like the 70s and 80s, I believe that he was a star of, or one of the co-hosts star, one of the co-hosts of, but he's one of these intellectuals that was very popular, so he had pop culture sway, but his big thing was like, kind of like living out the motto, GK Chesterton, and it's the oldest things that ought to be taught to the youngest people. And so the great books program, the very idea of a Western canon, you know, to ask the question of like, what are the books that have had the biggest impact and are still a part of our culture today, even if you've never read them? And then you go through these and the great books themselves are in education. Like Dave one time said to me, because we're building a classical school here, he said I was exploring the differences of liberal arts with classical education with great books. And he's like, oh, are you aware of all the arguments? And I was like, what are you talking about? He's like, well, the great books people tell you, just have them read the books, you don't have to do the other stuff. And I was like, you know, it's funny that you say that because now I see that thread like online discussions or stuff, it's like, the books are the ones that are the teacher, you're the tutor. Don't try to get in the way of the book. And you're like, oh, okay, so that makes a lot of sense. But Mortimer Adela was awesome. Unfortunately for him, he had been married and divorced several times. And he wanted to become Catholic for years. He went to Piscopalian, Diet Catholic, just went calorie. And then his wife died and he became Catholic and then shortly thereafter, he died. But he was super interesting. So the closest touch he has to most Americans is before computers, he was an editor of Encyclopedia Britannica. Like that's how. Oh, that's woo. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My parents owned Encyclopedia Britannica. I love. Oh, yeah. That was a piece to read at all the time. I met a guy who told me one time he made his fortune selling door to door encyclopedia Britannica. That's amazing. Yeah. I mean, that's what you did before computers, you know, you looked it up. At that time. Yep. Yeah. I mean, he was, he's widely still probably widely known as like a the first disruptor in education. Right? Like, well, Aristotle, I guess would be. But like, the first modern disruptor, yeah, yeah, a modern education where he said, like, look, you know, this is, we're not teaching for a test, we're teaching for good humans, right? Like, that's what we want. And his influences are still around today and actually coming back wildly, I think. Yeah. It wouldn't be with people. So I'm really thankful for him in my life. Yeah. And if you're thinking about, okay, this, the stuff that they're talking about, maybe interesting, maybe not, like, here's a couple of things that I want to kind of outline for you all. Number one, the choice to educate. is a parent's right, like parents are the primary educators of children. How we educate, I was going to say that, that's the first step of my head. Yeah. So if you're a new parent and you're seeing people, homeschooling, you're seeing people go to public school, you're seeing people go to Catholic school, go to charter schools, do hybrid schools, you hear about all these different modes, unschooling, right? There's like a million different things out there. We, we're not here to talk about like a school choice or something like that. What we want is, we're going to do what I always call the funnel, which is where you start with this big, wide like, what even is education and why is this an important conversation? And how, where does evangelization discipleship have their place in it? And then the funnel becomes like drilling down into specific things. But we also, just to do this, we have to talk about things like, what is the purpose of education? Like what is it even for from the Catholic vision? Because we have, like, I guarantee you, you listening, you have different ideas and very strongly held opinions of what education is for that may be partially shared with the Catholic understanding, partially not. You might be saying, why does the Catholic, what does it have to do with faith and morals? Like, why can't I just go to a trade school or go to a, you know, whatever and be a private equity guy, like, why do I have to worry about a Catholic view of education? And then kind of from there, we all, we all have these things, but it's like, this is our children, number one, that we got to be clued in on. And it could be the most important decision. I think parents have a lot of anxiety about that. So I want to kind of pull back some of the fears, but also to, like, truly call on and call out those dangers within educational systems that don't share the Catholic vision. Because when you have that problem, like when parents are actively excluded from education and they become nothing more than, like, homework taskmasters, right. There's errors, there's dangers. And what we saw during COVID when parents were eavesdropping on what their teachers were teaching and having right nothing to do with the subject matter and had everything to do with like hard leftist ideology and all of a sudden they started, I mean, like the homeschool movement got a massive jump during COVID because they're like, this is destroying my kids. What the heck have you been doing? And also just eat, not just destroying, but just totally ineffective in the sense of like, hold on a second, we're doing a whole day of school in three hours. Why can't we do that all year? Right? Absolutely, absolutely. So that's the thing is, I think this is going to be a broad, the first few episodes, we need to keep it broad. I also think we need to do like a John Gotti, uh, Gotti Gatto, John Gotto. John Gotti, I think there's a mafia boss. John Gotti is the guy that nobody knows who he is. Sorry, uh, this is the guy I'm referencing is the one who was a public school educator for like 30 years or something, retired and started writing all these books on how did public education get so bad and get where it is in, in plenty of places, public education is not so bad, but in other places and in huge chunks of places, it is horrific. That makes sense. Yeah, yeah. And I think like, I think what you were trying to get at that you didn't finally lay on the plane on was thanks, but no, I'm just saying like the parent, whether you've chosen like homeschooling, Catholic schooling, unschooling, the parents are still the primary educator. Like, that's the point like we have to make is that we're not, we're not telling you which, I mean, you know what's best for your child, but no matter what, you're still the primary educator and I, and I would also say, like, I just recently was at a party and people were talking about the anxiety they have about their kids education because they have young kids that are getting ready to be schooled and my personal opinion and I'm going to be try, try to be as unhyperbolic as possible because it's just not in my nature to not be hyperbolic, um, um, we teach in extremes. That's why we're broadcasters. Right. Right. But if you're worried, the two easiest and best hacks that you can do is spend, I don't $250 on books and let your kid be bored, right? I mean, right, right there, I can tell you that's 50% of what my kids, of my kids education, like, you know, like what, what took care of it because they just read all the time, all the time. Or they do read all the time, you know. Yeah. I tell my kids and I've told them this every year and I have a couple of kids that this applies to, but being a good reader is table stakes to society and life and, you know, all the stuff, right? You need to be a good reader. Loving to read is a superpower and you need to develop that superpower because sustained reading, right? The process of looking at words on a page, I'm a big audio book guy. It is different than reading a regular book. Totally. When you sit there with the discipline of reading a regular book, it literally changes your brain, the shape of your brain. It changes civilization when you go, when you shift from being a visual or audio person, so like telling great stories, like ancient cultures, right, to then having a written culture, to then whatever this new thing we are with multimedia, so it's audio and it's video, and it's all the stuff, but it's also impermanent, which is scary. So when you have these things, it changes your brain. So the discipline of reading is a discipline that has like deep and profound impacts on your life and learning to love that because everyone, the average American reads less than one book a year, and it's because the process of reading is difficult when you like, because I tell people all the time, if you want to get good at reading, you have to cut out YouTube and TikTok and Instagram, like short form content will destroy your capacity to read. And by the way, we're not making, right now we're not making judgments about like educational systems, both go where I have advanced learning, and I think both of us would say that it's personal reading that the majority of our knowledge comes from and the majority of our education comes from, you know, even after all those years of school and wonderful schools that we want to, you know, like, you know, that's a really great point. So this is, if I could encourage anyone out there listening, where do I start if like, let's say, okay, maybe I didn't have the best education, or maybe I had a good one, but I didn't take it seriously. That's what I love about all these adults who have conversion experiences as adults. They then become readers. My favorite of this guy was like, right man, I never read a book, it would probably take me a whole year to read a book. He goes, and then I decided to become Catholic and I have a stack of books on my night stand that's 12 deep that I'm working through. And I was like, dude, I love it. That's the Pilgrim's Progress guy, John Bunyan, he was like illiterate, he became a, took his Christian faith seriously and then he's writing all these like, it's amazing how this effect happens because you long to know the truth and you don't want to be conned anymore. That's one of the powers of education and not just reading, but education. So if you feel like you don't like to read, you don't want to read, you're not a good reader. You're gonna tell you to get a book and that book is Mortimer Adler's How To Read A Book. It is, I have found it invaluable. And you don't, again, you don't have to read a book from cover to cover, but take this book, go browse the table of contents, read the front of the back and then start going through the parts that interest you or whatever and read this book because the skill that I find is parishing is how to critically read, not just read the paragraph and kind of get the general sense of what the guy's saying, that's kind of what audiobooks do for me. Like I can go for a walk and listen to an audiobook and I'll retain like the storyline, but it's like, tell me that character's name and I'm like, I've been following him for 20 hours and I can't remember his name, you know, but sitting there and reading, especially if you're reading nonfiction, you're interacting with the author's mind. So you want to be able to like understand it and be like, oh, this is his hidden presupposition. This is a really good point. This I got a question about, you know, whatever. So yeah, I'm excited about this and here's a danger of being excited about it. I might go in a million different directions. So landing the plane for you is going to be really important. We're going to have awesome guests. So we're going to get a bunch of experts in the field on and stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. I think this is going to be an awesome season for sure. Yeah. So I don't know, like for me, I have a couple of things that I want to like put out there that I think is super important, which is this educate. I had to write this one down because I wanted to make sure I didn't miss this education cannot be separated apart from what it means to be human. Okay. So again, we're going to bring out that $200 word teleology tell us in Greek means end or point goal purpose, right? So what is the human person's ultimate end in the Catholic church? We call it the sumimbonum. What is the ultimate good, the highest good towards which the human person is aimed at? And we have an answer for that. Yeah. And if we, if go where and I have a crit, any critique of how far education has come, it's that it's so far from the tail loss is that the goal of modern education is so far from what it should be. It's always I'm thinkable to see how far we can get back to where it shouldn't yeah, you know, yeah So you asked the question what is education like what's the right way to educate? Okay? There's all these disputes. There's all these modes methods models right right you can go anywhere from like a strict You know rigid educational system all the way to unschooling and you can have brilliant people in a lot of them You can have all this stuff, but what is it for so before we get to the what model is best? What about my kids learning style? What do you do with kids with learning disabilities and I need an IEP for all this and or what are IED whatever it's called all those things We're losing the forest for the sake of the trees. We back it out. What is education for we back that out? What is a human person for that? I'll answer this question every educational system embodies Whether they know it or not whether they say it or not embodies and anthropology What does it mean to be human and a teleology? What is the point of what we're doing? What is the point? So here's the deal that can be explicit or implicit so the Catholic tradition says we have an explicit anthropology and Teleology right we know What the human person is answered for us. We don't want to answer that and where we're going And right and this is why we say there's a teleology in health care we can answer that There's a teleology and education we can answer that these huge things that we have so many disputes on the Catholic Church Has the answers and it's not just like oh, that's good for you and your private little group over there This is why the great books in the Western Canon why this matters because those books Whether they're from pagan Greece or from ancient Israel or from you know Rome or whatever those books have informed and been taken up by the Catholic tradition Baptized as it were by people like Augustin and Aquinas and Christosdom and so you can find the elements of Stoicism Which is where a lot of the natural law thinking came from with the church fathers You can find things on the virtues, you know pulling from Aristotle and all that stuff You can find all this the great like synthesis that was the medieval world and then what you find is a running away from Coherence in the modern world this this kind of coherent worldview So we start with if I need to know what education is right for my kid I need to say what is education for and they see what the human person is for in the Catholic tradition says We need that human person the whole person to be educated towards truth Wisdom virtue their vocation and communion with God right all of those things is what education is for Does that make sense? Yeah, well, I mean could like what if what if someone's not even Catholic listening to this Like we could just we could even go down and to quote more rather to know and to love right to know and to love Like just in general terms like that doesn't have to just be Catholics, you know, that's every human, right? Yeah, and so education is not the acquisition of information Right education is not the training for even for us skill or a task or even a career Education is an answer to the question. What does it mean to be human? Like yeah, that is the way we have to keep framing it because the tendency is all we are a public education system Is built for like the industrial ear and factories and there's a bell ringing and move the herd from room to room and do these different things Yeah, right. That's a common critique of modern education right but probably valid. Yeah, but there's a critique even deeper than that which is like But even if you change it, you're still not answering the question. What does it mean to live a good human life? Right right because education embodies that answer like it's the way we teach our children how to live a good human life And so the Catholic vision the reason why we emphasize the Catholic vision is because when we talk about truth It's with a capital T and it references a person and that person is the one that we want to be in union with And so this changes how we evaluate schools and curricula and teachers and homeschooling and universities and even technology What wouldn't you say there's a majority of education today is geared toward one of two things first is this Do really well on this one test so that you can get into a great school so that you can get a great job So you can make a lot of money and buy yourself things and then you'll be happy Okay, so there's that and then the other one is Do really well in school so that you could find your passion like it's you centered entirely So that passion will make you happy basically. Yeah, and both of those are just I mean their recipes for Total complete unhappiness, right? Yeah, because like I don't know if you've ever met a kid but what they want to do for their life changes with the seasons Like it absolutely changes for the seasons and when you have someone that you tell them follow your bliss Or do whatever you're passionate about right that can be I mean to a certain extent obviously There's a surface level of our should advise course. Yeah, right obviously if you have no love for anything Just doing it for the sheerness of making money or the esteem of others is gonna burn out pretty quickly But the idea is it has to transcend more than just the subjective And it also has to be something that That is good for humanity, right? So even if you're not Catholic the question of education has to pull you out of yourself and your own Like immediate needs which means it also has to pull you away from doing those making those decisions For your kids like I am shaping a human person Not I'm doing career planning for this child. Absolutely, right? So what are we talking about when we educate? We're not talking about just the intellect We're also talking about the will so the intellect is ordered towards truth and the will to love right? So this is us ordering love. Well, how do you order love? Well, you've got to get to someone's desires, right? It's so fascinating in today's education Because in democracy what we basically do is we've democratized Desire right people's desires for this and that we've democratized it, which means we've flattened everything and said they're all equal So The hardest the hardest part of the season is gonna be Keeping gover from being like So move to a farm. Don't Always call your children and let go man. Yeah, you know, I would have said if you if this if we were having this conversation five years ago That might be exactly where I think this But now I have learned and because I'm trying to build a classical school It's like yeah, oh the teacher the tutor model of Oxford and Cambridge like it has very in my own pastor Even when he was rebuking me for taking one of my kids out of the school I still think there was a lot of wisdom that he has about community in the formation, right? Sure So but like educating our desires when we this is something that you see in society everywhere Especially with like the trans debate in our culture right like I'm scared right there, but like every desire Even without that every desire is flattened and equalized So you're desired to get married and to have kids and to raise them according to, you know Timeless principles and the truth and the faith and all that stuff is the same thing as someone who you know wants to shack up and Fornicate and never have kids and abort their children because all desires are like well, that's your desire It's what you want. It's who you are. We've turned happy to say the desire right yeah And so by flattening them we've equalized and we said they're all desires are equally valid And even though we know as a society that's not true that my desire to murder people in traffic Not valid So the education of desires this is where the modern education system ultimately fails Because it doesn't ask what is a human person for it cannot give a definitive answer which desires should be amplified or suppressed Which desires should be cultivated and which desires should be weeded out of the garden of the human heart And so what ends up happening is Because we want to be agnostic towards the tell us well, I could have a Muslim student and atheist student a Catholic student You know, whatever like all these different students. I can't tell them what the point of their life is therefore By keeping that question out We also now have no ground to educate their intellect their loves their desires their habits their imagination and their actions And so it becomes just trivia It becomes like hey, do you know when Columbus sale the ocean blue This is the thing. This is why the big questions matter because education is so important Yeah, and so you know one of the biggest issues that comes about from that kind of education like he said It becomes just trivia and the problem is we should learn How to be humans from great books that's I don't know if anyone read this article but There was somebody calling for doctors to have a strong Background in literature because they were having such problems with bedside manner Because they could not have they did not have empathy for the person This is where you learn empathy is in engaging The great questions and the great, you know characters of literature And the problem is those great characters have great ideas and most of the great ideas would be rejected by modern Like he said democratized education you know because the great ideas would be truth And you can't agree on what's true and what's not Yeah, so the other side of it and if you go back through the medical episodes or the health care episodes you see this thread everywhere which is what is not just the point of it right the point of health care right but it affects the way you treat your patients or the way patients treat medical personnel if we have an adopted model of what health cares for you are here to get me better give me a pill give me a pill give me a pill fix it get it but what if there is no fix what if there is no cure and you're not seeking health or healing right like you just want the pain to go away so we only treat symptoms we do all of these things that don't actually inform the human person down to their core so the question we need to be asking is not what can you do right that that's the thing okay now that you've been educated what can you do with it the question is first what do you know truth okay what do you love right what kind of person are you becoming what do you understand as good what do you believe it's true like what are you what kind of life are you preparing to live what's your destiny and does that stuff that you've learned to lead you toward or away from your destiny your destination and so it's not just about how can I smuggle religion into class because you can learn a lot through the Iliad and the Odyssey which are pagan right you can learn a lot through the Iliad or you know all these different like great works of pagan Greece and Rome there's so much truth there right but when we're not exposed to these great books when we're not exposed to like even children right when they're not exposed to these great stories with people who can like work with them and try to try to understand it that's the importance of tutors and teachers what ends up happening is that if you're not exposed to those great questions you don't ask them it's not that you don't have answers you don't ask them so you can never have answers by the way right I don't I don't think you or definitely not I'm not saying this that we're necessarily talking about schools right right like we're talking about education like don't don't confuse any of the judgments for but we'll tell you if it's a judgment on a school or a school of thought but we're talking about education in general like it this this applies to everyone it doesn't mean we're saying pull your kid out of your school what we're saying is there are certain things that need to be part of an education and and that can take place in school or it could take place in the home right so yeah and to that point the church's tradition on education and like like the magisterial kind of conversations about it is parents have the absolute and inalienable right to educate their children right it is it inalienable what what that means is they cannot parents cannot simply renounce or transfer the duty entirely to others whether it's a Catholic school a classical school a public school a charter school you cannot transfer that right so education is about the formation of the whole person right as a parent I am engaging in education all the time right and I ought to do it and expose them to the greatest ideas and the most important questions and some of the most important answers that are out there about what does it mean to be human yeah I'm completely with you on all this I think when I pitched to you the the season on health care what I was hoping is it would be like a disruptor and I feel the same way for this season you know like how do I get into this this industry and do it differently and I hope that this season is going to be the same way I hope like everybody who joins us as a guest is going to have we're going to take different pieces from them and realize like okay this is what needs to happen for a full education of a human person you know yeah so Dave let me ask you a question is Catholic education simply catechesis plus algebra? no certainly not certainly not certainly not like I mean how many catechetical resources are out there where we talk about catechesis as the formation of the person like you're forming them in the faith right right but that's education that's what we're doing in the broader project of educating a human person yeah so they're taking for granted the idea of like how do you think how do you read how do you read critically how do you write critically you know how do you formulate an idea and put those things down you know it's funny you know I kind of wonder if like the new obsession with this is from you know that what's who's that that doctor that's so popular now he had the video that went viral where he was at Harvard talking to his old students you know the famous yeah you know come on we talk oh Jordan Peterson you know like like like he's saying a lot of this stuff now and again once again he started a school that's supposed to be like a disruption education about like look you have to learn how to think and all these things and how to express yourself and how yeah to know if a thought is valid and truthful and sound and all those things you know so yeah there's a famous episode that I love on the Jordan Peterson podcast where he interviews this controversial woman who's the headmaster of a British school okay and see you you will find these stories throughout Western education where someone decides to have the courage and the tenacity to buck the trend yeah and to reground their educational institution and by doing that they actually make the students and the environment a thousand times better for education and that draws all of the haters and they become marginalized often they lose their jobs even though the children and the parents are like more of them there yeah so like the famous movie oh gosh they know me when Morgan Freeman okay and that depot was like we're Morgan Freeman is the school principal and he has to chain the doors which is a fire violation he changed the doors he keeps the drug dealers out he's you know pushing kids out he's doing all this stuff he changed that school what people don't realize is he was fired like a few years after turning the whole thing around like there are antibodies to great education right there are antibodies that happen in this and so when Catholic schools say I'm not going to do this anymore I'm not going to imitate the public school approach with just a religion class all of a sudden parents teachers the local Catholic community the superintendent of schools like diocese all of a sudden there's like hostility that gets poured out and you're like but I'm doing the Catholic thing and they're like you haven't no one wants that you're like but this is actually what the church is the app at no one wants that you're like ah but this is because there's no such thing as neutral education and people have bought into a world view and you're challenging yeah no no I've witnessed this many times with with schools and I've seen this and the problem is this you know if you if you think about the people you know in your life most people are miserable they are and the biggest influence in someone's life is their education that the most influence besides media that a person is going to have is in education you're gone for eight hours a day for how many years for someone else to influence you so there's got to be something going on there you know there's got to be some problem that's at stake here yeah and the thing that you will hear so many people repeat and Jordan Peterson repeated this to the the headmaster in that episode where she's called like the most strict teacher in or headmaster in Britain or something like that she said I have a bone to pick with you that's all the whole episode started I have a bone to pick with you and he said what and she said you keep repeating the lie that every educator repeats he said what's that and she said we teach our kids how to think not just tell them what to think and she goes do you understand how stupid that is he goes what are you talking about like absolutely you got to teach him how to think she goes of course you do and you do that by teaching them what to think because there are bad ideas yeah she's like isn't your hard guess about challenging bad ideas I have a bad ideas and there are good ideas and then there are foundational ideas if you don't communicate foundational ideas and make sure they understand them you have robbed your kids of how to think and what to think and he was like huh he's like so we are unabashedly to her school the kind of controversial part is they don't have any prayer rooms for the Muslim students we need to pray five times a day so in British schools this every school okay oh yeah okay it's pretty much every school has prayer rooms they have to stop everything for the five times a day prayer and all of that stuff and she goes no I'm sure in like you know Michigan areas where there's huge pockets of okay you know a certain like immigration you know African Muslim immigration but the pretty sure Detroit public schools a lot of them have that but that whole idea of like she goes no because not everyone is religious we do the religious if we're doing this thing we do it together if we're doing that thing we do it together so her school is aggressively I guess you would say secular in its conscious absences but she has them read the great you know the books that are not full liberal arts thing but she's like so this is what I'm saying every way we think about education and school choice and the individual teachers they have an implicit anthropology and teleology they might not even know it but they're assuming it as they're teaching okay that's the thing that's the thing that we want us that you will see sust out through every one of these episodes it's like yeah they are presupposing that man is nothing more than educating a worker for a factory job, but it's like, okay, but if I'm doing that, I'm creating slave labor, a slave mentality, not liberal arts, not a free mentality. And so they all embody this kind of approach. So we want to get away from that and we want to ask the bigger questions. Okay. We're going to take a break right now, email us, eksp.centrepress.com, email us since this is the first episode, we're knee jerk reaction to what we just said. I want to get like one or two cents if you all being like, oh, this is weird, this is good, this is bad, this is awesome, you know, you just get on public schools, whatever it is. So I want you to do that, we'll be right back. Someone shows up in your parish because they're being drawn towards the Catholic church. Maybe they can't quite explain why, but something is pulling them. O CIA could be the moment that changes everything for them. There a quiet curiosity becomes a real encounter with Jesus Christ. But the gap between how O CIA is and how it could be is real. And the Catechists leading it need more than a schedule. They need vision, tools, and a program that actually forms disciples. Invited, your journey into the Catholic church is ascension's new O CIA program, 28 lessons that walk participants through the Catholic faith with theological depth, personal warmth, and a focus on conversion, not just completion. Invited includes a participant guide that meets the seekers exactly where they are. A leader guide with Catechist formation built right in. A trade book with questions and answers many newcomers might be afraid to ask. And a mass companion book to help them participate in the mass actively, both interiorly and exterior. Our hope at ascension is that invited will help make O CIA in your parish what it was always meant to be. A true journey into life with Christ. To learn more, visit ascensionpress.com/invited. And we're back so excited to see you, Dave. In my experience, I bet we'll get an email now, they probably won't, but I bet we would have gotten an email saying, you talked about the great books of Western education, but the greatest novel of all time is the Brothers Cardamons off. To which I would reply, the author was gifted a wonderful education of the Western Language, so that is still I'm going to claim that even though it's Eastern, I don't consider Russia Eastern. I'm sorry. I know, but it is. I don't, but it is. No, no. The URL mountains is where Europe ends and it's right through the middle of Russia. This is so funny. This is a thing. This is Boris Yeltsin famously said, am I European? Am I Asian? The Boris Yeltsin said that, and if he's saying it, I'm going to say, gosh, that is the greatest quote on all of you. They are distinct, they are Eastern in the sense of Eastern Christianity, Eastern Europe, or not even Eastern Europe, but like Asia and all that stuff. But I mean, come on, they were ruled by monarchs who were cousins to the Brits, literal, the Brits, the Poles, the Germans, like, come on, that's where we're one. They were all related. They were raised in the same house. Oh, well, why can't we just do this podcast all day long? Oh, that's the great. So funny. But they never had an enlightenment. That's the thing that the Russian authors would all say, we didn't have an enlightenment. We didn't have your godless even as a take over all of education. So it's like, all right, all right, baby, I get you. Brothers Karamatsav is one of the greatest books. So I have five questions. You ready for my five questions? What's for me? No, no, no, no. No, for all of you. It's a rhetorical. Okay. It's like an examination of conscience. Oh, I love it. Okay. What kind of human being, question number one, does this educational environment assume my child is? Okay. Love it. What does it consider a successful human life? Oh, we want our kids to be successful and happy and well adjusted. Okay. What does that mean? Okay. Question number three, what does it teach a child to love? So I, here I said, a child, not my child because some of our audiences have kids. Okay. Or your post kids post in the home. Number four, what kinds of habits and virtues is it cultivating? I think that's a big one because it's about behavior, right? Number five, toward what ultimate end is my child being formed, right? And all of this is the sixth question. What is education actually for? What does it for? Right? So those five questions, what kind of human being, just pre-supposed, what does it consider a successful human life, what does it teach my child to love, what habits and virtues is it cultivating toward what ultimate end? The tell us is my child being formed. These are the questions that hopefully as we go through and explore the greater breadth and what, wow, I can't greater depth and width of Catholic education. I think you can come to some pretty cool answers. Can I give you a seventh question? Oh, go for it. Do you disagree with the fact that my soon to be 18-year-old is going to college next year and I'm trying to convince him to just be a poor poet instead of a godless heath and tradesmen. No, I'm just kidding. That's right. I'm in. Yeah. Will you son be a troubadour for the Lord going from town to town as a Mary Bard singing of the joys of the gospel? No, he wants to go to the trader out, which I'm so happy about. I love that. But he was reading Moby Dick when he was eight years old like that there's no, I'm not going to let him get away from the love of great literature. So if he were a poor poet, he could live in my basement. It'd be okay. I'd be okay. There's so many. I've heard them from so many parents who are like, I'm raising my kids. They're going to be out when they're 18. They're all this and then the kids are like 15, 16, 17. They're like, I want them to live with me forever. They will stay in there. I will buy the house next door. It's so funny. It's so funny. But also the funny thing was my wife sent me a text message telling me I got to take the car around to the shop. And she said, because I need to get started. I need to start getting ready shortly. And you had just said he was reading Moby Dick when he was eight. I started to write in. Ha, ha, ha. Responding to you and now response to the right. Yeah. Oh, man. My brain just. It's beautiful. All right, y'all. This has been every news show about the beginning of a new series on education. What's it for? This is what we're going to explore. Buckle up baby birds because mom is going to feed you. There's Borersale since then. Come on. No, no. OK. Audio. Ha, ha, ha, ha. [MUSIC PLAYING]