Pints With Aquinas - BONUS |Modern Education: Not Fit For Humans, With Steven Rummelsburg | The Matt Fradd Show Ep. 5

Episode Date: February 22, 2019

Here's a bonus episode, The Matt Fradd Show, Ep. 5. Subscribe on Youtube to watch here. Subscribe to The Matt Fradd Show Podcast here.

What's up everybody? This is a bonus episode of the Matt Fradd Show that I am putting on Pints with Aquinas for now, but they're not always going to be there. The Matt Fradd Show is a long form discussion that I have on YouTube with really interesting people. So you should subscribe to my YouTube channel like yesterday. Okay. But I'm not going to be putting these Matt Fradd Show episodes up on Pints with Aquinas for much longer. I'm only doing that now because I'm afraid you haven't subscribed to the Matt Fradd Show and that maybe you'll end up missing out on this two-hour and 20-minute conversation that I just had on education. Fascinating chat, really. But do me a favor, subscribe to the Matt Fradd Show on iTunes and leave me a review on iTunes if you like the Matt

Fradd Show. That would be super sweet because Because as I say, these aren't going to be posted here as bonus episodes forever. So be sure to do that. Also, if you haven't subscribed to our YouTube channel, just type in Matt Fradd, subscribe to my YouTube channel there. And that way, you can watch the Matt Fradd Show, the whole episode and also clips from it. Alrighty, here it is. Have a good day. G'day, welcome to the Matt Fradd Show. I am Matt Fradd, and I am really excited about what you are going to be hearing or watching today. I interview Steven Rummelsberg about education, about where we've gone wrong, why he thinks modern education has really gone off the rails, and why we need to revitalize an authentic Catholic classical

education and why that's the more human approach, the more beautiful approach. Fascinating discussion, really and truly. You're going to get a lot out of this discussion. Before we jump into that conversation, though, I want to say thanks to two of our sponsors who have helped make this show possible. The first is Exodus90.com. Lent is coming up and there's a lot of men out there right now who are thinking to themselves, how can I make this Lent the best Lent ever? I would strongly recommend checking out Exodus90.com. That's Exodus90.com. Exodus90 is like a boot camp for men, a spiritual boot camp where you give up things you don't want to give up. You take on things you don't want to take on, like cold showers, right? You give up snacking. You give up alcohol. You impose these sort of ascetical practices upon

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Go get yourself a beautiful rosary from Ruggedrosaries.com. All right, let's get into today's discussion. Steven Rummelsberg. Matt Fradd. You have a name that sounds like a wrestler. Rommelsberg. I don't think there's a wrestler in the universe named that, but there could be. Maybe.

Anyway, thank you so much for being on the show. Well, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. I want to back up here and say, what's education? What do we mean by education? Well, that should be our first definition. Yeah. I actually wrote an article about what education is. And I went and I asked hundreds of teachers. And I ended up going to our county superintendent of schools office. And I asked them what education was. And they took about four days to answer me.

And they gave me... Four days because they were thinking about it? I think they were contemplating for four. Well, they were probably running through committees and trying to figure out what education was. And they came back with answers. The first one was, you will get as many definitions of education as people you ask. Yeah.

And the fourth one was, if you ask us this next month, it'll be a different answer. Really? Yes. And the other two in the middle were just as bad. So I think there's a crisis today of really answering the

question, what does it mean to be an educated person and what is an education? It's so funny because when I asked you that question, it felt a little stupid to ask it, but this is the kind of Socratic method. We have to define things. And as you say, if we don't know what education is, or if we're continually deciding what education is, then our children just end up as guinea pigs who keep getting the latest fads on what we think they ought to be learning and stuff. Absolutely. John Dewey, the grandfather of American education, ran what were called laboratory schools in Columbia, I think in the early 20th century. And it's not much different today. These are laboratory schools.

And our students, our children are guinea pigs, and they're constantly trying on new programs and new methods. You can watch it revolving door, Common Core, Pre-Common Core, Post-Common Core. It's a never-ending slew of programs. And you ought to ask, what is this, and what is education? And I've asked so many people, and I don't think I've ever gotten an adequate answer from a living soul. So I want to get back to what education means and stuff. But tell us a bit about your story and how you ended up here.

Because you told me you were a secular humanist or raised a secular humanist. I was raised in a secular humanist family. Pretty typical, pretty normal for today. My mom and dad, good people, raised with good morality. And I liken it to living off the moral capital of our forefathers. But we were raised exclusively materialist, where everything boiled down to the material realities of things. And things like philosophy and theology were really unthought of or undiscussed or really unknown to us.

Did you talk about God and the afterlife and what happens after death with your parents? We did not, but we went to a church. My mom and dad took us to a church so that we, when we were older, we could choose whether or not we wanted to be religious. Ah, that's interesting. Yeah. But they had bought into materialism. Yes.

And yet were open to you one day becoming a Christian. They wanted us to have the choice okay so it was sort of a laissez-faire uh environment which is actually very common today you you just leave the child to do what he wants he's very russoian yeah they just naturally you're going to gravitate toward the thing that you want to do assuming you don't have a fallen nature which is right which is the assumption. And so, yeah, we were raised that way. And all of my siblings and I, none of us ended up being religious until I started teaching in about 1990. I entered the classroom. In the public schools. In the public schools. I

went from UCSB, got a BA in history, straight to substitute teaching and straight to becoming a teacher. And I noticed immediately sort of a comatose effect on my students. And so I knew immediately something was wrong, but I didn't know what was wrong. So I spent the next 15 years doing my own experiments. That comes up to today, you mean? No, I've been teaching almost 28 years. I'm in my 28th year. When you say they're in a comatose state, kind of explain what that means. Because I think that was me throughout high school. There's an interesting thing I coined,

an educational coma. Yeah, what does that mean? I think students are able to come to school and ease into a coma and have sort of automatic responses to things because the entirety of public schools deals with everything below the line of intellect and will. Everything perceptual, sensual, material. That's about the extent of the public schools. And just as you can train an animal to do tricks, you can do the same with humans. And basically,

what I discovered is that teaching in the public schools was like having children do tricks, and then people come and observe that, and they learn the tricks, they memorize the tricks, they take the test on the tricks, they go home for the summer, and then they forget everything, which is appropriate, and they come back, and you start this whole thing again. So the coma would just be automatic responses to things, sort of very shallow thinking, perceptual thinking, rather than either discursive or deep speculative thinking, which is non-existent in the public schools. Yeah.

Why don't we get to the answer now, maybe? Yes. Before we get too far here. I want to ask you, what is education? What is an education? I'm still trying to figure out what it is. Yeah. But Chesterton said,

education is the transmission of culture. Hmm. What is culture? What is culture? Culture, that's a difficult one. What do you think about this definition? Life shared in common. Yeah.

Sure. We don't have that in America, do we? We have a life shared in a common ideology, sure. Which is what? Ideological culture, I suppose. Yeah. It's a very bankrupt culture. It seems like we have the Super Bowl.

We have that in common. We have the Super Bowl. The commercials were very didactic this year. Yes. Very didactic. We have some terrible songs. Terrible music. That we forget about every week and a new crappy thing comes out.

That's part of our terrible culture. Culture, okay. Sure it is. So education is the transmission of culture. Yeah. Assuming when we say culture, we're also inferring a civilization. Civilization. I think that's what Chesterton must have meant.

Here's another question then. What is knowledge? What do we mean by... Because clearly we educate in order to help people be knowledgeable. What is knowledge? The modern term knowledge in the public schools would be something more like information. Okay. And that's not really what knowledge is at all.

We would hopefully associate knowledge with something that Thomas or Aristotle might say, when the knower becomes the known. Yeah. But that might take a little more time. Parsing? We have time right now. Parsing? No.

Well, sure. Identifying what a thing is, defining a thing and its formal and final causality would be very important to say, when you come to know a thing, when you come to truly know a thing, what's secondary to that is truth. Okay. You encounter truth. The first act of the mind is to apprehend what a thing really is. All right. We don't come close to even that first act of the mind in the public schools. So this is kind of where you're gravitating towards right now when it comes to what is education, what is knowledge. Now go back a bit. You were teaching in public schools. Yes. If you had have heard yourself say those things, would they have made sense to you?

Zero sense. All right. So we should back up a little bit more. Let's do that. Yes. So if education can be understood sort of as a method or a way of transmitting culture of what fathers pass down to sons or something like that, then we can go a little bit further and we can say educare, education, means to lead forward.

And we're assuming that it means to take someone from the darkness of error and lead them forward into the light of truth. And truth, as we know, John Paul II said, it was the convergence of the mind and reality. And what precedes truth is knowledge. Aquinas said something to the effect of the equation of thought and thing. Yes. Yeah. Yes. This might be a good time. I threw this up on the screen because I wanted you to talk about it, and that is the most popular allegory in all of philosophy,

that is Plato's cave. So for those who aren't aware of this, would you explain it to us? I can try. Yeah. It's very beautiful. It is beautiful. This is in Book 7 of the Republic, Beautiful. This is in book seven of the Republic. And it begins with Socrates giving this allegory to explain how we can confuse definitions or how we can be so unclear about things. So

Socrates said, imagine, if you will, a deep underground cave, right? And this picture is very helpful because you can see the cave here. Deep down in the cave, imagine that in the front of the, the back of the, the very back of the cave, you have a row,

you have rows of prisoners chained up. And you have them chained up so much so that their necks are chained, their hands are chained, and they're so chained up. They can't see themselves or the others.

They can't see themselves, can't see side to side, can't see anything. All they can see is the back of the cave wall. And behind these chained up prisoners is a raised kind of a bridge. And on that bridge are what he calls guards. And there's also a man-made fire. You see a fire back here. Artificial light. So there's this artificial light. You have guardians on the bridge that are holding up objects. And the light from the fire is casting a shadow on the cave wall of the thing. And the prisoners sit at the bottom of the cave. They look at the back of the cave wall and they discuss the shadows as if the shadows are the real things themselves.

Right. So the conclusion is that people in the bottom of the cave are only discussing the appearances of things, not real things themselves. Before we talk about what Plato gets into further, where he talks about what it must be like to have a man dragged up to the top and brought back down. Right. How does this now apply, do you think, to modern education? Well, this applies beautifully to modern culture,

and really to all modern cultures and civilizations. We're born into certain patterns of thinking and thought, and the things that bind us at the bottom are certain ideologies that prevent us from making further inquiries into what things really are. Okay. Sort of just things we take for granted. Give me an example. Well, we take for granted that, well, for example, school,

what we call a school is where someone goes to be educated. Yeah. That's a shadow on the wall. Huh. Why? Because there is the appearance of education. You have a teacher and students coming together and what looks like teaching goes on. But teaching

is going on, isn't it? Teaching is going on. Right. And teaching is going on down here too. Are they going to put the darkness of error into the light of truth to some degree? No. No? No. My job is to push back on you. Yes, I'm glad you did. They're being taught details about the shadows

in the bottom of the cave. And they're being taught the air itself, that those shadows are all that matter. All right. Now you got to flesh that out for us. Like give us some concrete things. Okay. Like what are some things that teachers teach their students, which are good? You know, things about temperature and measurements and history and geography. Okay. That's a good example. So if we teach all the material sciences, we teach geography, we teach how to take temperatures and things, all those are good in and of themselves

as material sciences. And the problem is, by appearances, the modern school suggests that that's the highest and best way to measure and know things. And those are merely external, accidental attributes of things in reality. So if we leave the public schools and believe that the highest way of knowing is by the material sciences, that's just a false conclusion. What's the right conclusion?

Well, the right conclusion, as we know from Revelation, is that God exists, God made all of reality, God revealed the truth through Christ, and theology is the matrix of all reality and truth. So we know philosophy, which is a smaller science, is the handmaiden of theology. And we also know that the material sciences ought to be the hand servants of philosophy. In a proper education, philosophy is the lens through which we should see and order all the other sciences. That's a quote from Newman in Idea of the University. So the public schools are devoid of philosophy and theology. Therefore, they deal pretty much primarily only in shadows

and don't go beyond the appearance of things. Okay, that's what you mean. And so the public school is a perfect illustration of the allegory of the cave. Now, what about Catholic schools? Because I speak at a lot of Catholic schools and many Catholic schools just seem like public schools that have a religion lesson.

That is to say, they don't seem terribly different. Yes. So are you also saying the same thing about many Catholic schools? I would say any Catholic school that uses the methodology and pedagogy of the public schools is doing exactly what the public schools do, and yes, making the same errors. Okay. You're going to have to flesh this out for us more, because I know that there's people listening, and they're watching, and they're like, that seemed like a big jump to make. You know, you send your kid to school. You want them to learn about the world.

You want to learn how to read, to do basic math, to learn about history. These are all good things. How could you be disparaging the public schools for this? Now, of course, there's some wacky, crazy crap that public schools are teaching right now about gender theory, about perhaps not wanting children to study the Bible even as a work of literature and things like that.

Sure. But like basically, when kids are six and seven years old, you're saying even then it's not good. It's devastating. So you've got to explain this to me. Help convince me. Let's back up for just a minute and make one vital distinction. We asked the question, well, how do you judge an organization?

How do you judge an entity? And we have to make the distinction between theoretical and practical considerations, right? So if we're going to look at the public schools or Catholic schools and judge them, the questions we have to ask are theoretical. So we ask, what are the means and ends of the school? What are the goals? What are the methods? What are they doing theoretically? Meaning, what are they doing ideologically, right? As opposed to practically, when we say, well, you have real teachers, which usually are well-intentioned, good-hearted, intelligent people trying to help children. You have families sending their children to public schools. They're generally good people. And so the practical reality is that people are there,

and there's a lot of good that comes from that, but theoretically, that's the thing we have to judge. So what are the aims? What are the methods? How do they carry out what they want to carry out? And if those things are not good, then theoretically, the schools are not good. Whereas practically, we can see a really bad theoretical situation like a Nazi death camp,

and you might have saints and martyrs and maybe the occasional sympathetic Nazi guard. Yes. And there's some good that may come out of that particular thing because of the practical reality

that real humans are there. Okay. But there's no good coming out of the ideology of the Nazi death camp. All right. I want to get back to this so that we can sum it up

at some point. Do you want to keep talking about this and how this applies to kind of modern education? Yes. And then out and back again. Yeah, it applies beautifully because it really is the setup.

Because you have the guardians in this allegory, which if the ideology is bad, are teachers who would convince students that appearances are real things when they're not? Appearances are real things. Yes. Again, I'm lost. I'm sorry. No, it's not you. It's me. Appearance as if the shadows themselves are I'm lost. I'm sorry. No, it's not you, it's me. Appearance, as if the shadows themselves

are the whole thing. I shouldn't have said real things because shadows are real things too. Shadows, it's just the appearance of the thing. Yeah. So there's Matt Fradd, and I see your body and I see your face. Yep.

And your physicality is your shadow. Right. Whereas Matt Fradd, your soul, your substantial form. Right. You are the image and likeness of God. If they were to hold Matt Fradd in front of the screen in public school, they wouldn't say much more about you than, here's Matt Fradd and here's what he does and here's what he does. They wouldn't mention that you are the image and likeness of truth. I think this is kind of borne out when you ask most people,

what's the point of sending your kids to school? And they might say, what are you talking about? You go, well, you know, they're in grade 10 and they're thinking about leaving and maybe just kind of getting some work. Why shouldn't they drop out? And they say, so they need a job. Right. And I think that is what exposes, you know,

perhaps the modern understanding of education versus how we should be looking at education. That is to say, the whole point of sending your kids to school is so they can get a job. Why are they getting a job? Well, so they can make money, so they can have a life. What is that life? They get married. Yes.

And it's like we are, it's so Pascalian. We're walking into the void and we're not looking at it. That's right. It's like, what's the point of all this though? That's right. Don't worry. Like, here's some football and have a drink

and you'll be great. And that's what I think I understand about the shadows. Yes. It's like we're not talking about reality of it. Right. Yeah. Right.

So that's a great example. The real end, the goal of a public school, and this is so public and acknowledged, is college and career readiness. That's the end. Right. So the point of school is to get you ready for college. Yeah. And the point of college is to get you ready for a job.

Yes. And the point of school is to get you ready for both. Yeah. Okay. And if you're talking about an education, those aren't even ends. Yeah. Those are not ends. Those are fruits. Those are fruits. Those are goods, but they are not the proper ends of an education because they're

purely practical. Okay. I was going to say for our listeners, I was trying to think of an analogy, like the point of eating is nutrition, not pleasure. Pleasure is a fruit or a consequence or even a motivation. That's right. But it's not why we have desire. Right. That's a great analogy. So college and career

is really not why someone does an education. An education is for the health of the soul. There you go. Health of the mind and the soul. And the college and career is purely material for benefiting society in a material way and for making money in a material way. Because in some ways, isn't it true that,

at least in the United States, we've never been so educated before? That's what they're saying. I don't think that's true at all. In the sense that we've at least got the certificates and worn the hats. We've never had so many awards for so many people. That's where we're at.

All right, let's do this. All right, so then Plato's point is suppose one of these prisoners is unshackled, dragged against his will to the outside world. Actually, I think he gets up there on his own because he's seeking truth. Okay. And then he does arrive by great labors at the top. And when he first sees the sunlight for the first time compared to the artificial man-made light, it's so dazzling it knocks him out.

Just knocks him out. And then he has a choice to make. And he sees reality for the first time. He sees beyond shadows and discovers final and formal causality, the purpose and the real essence of things. And he's absolutely blown away by the beauty of the nature of creation, right? He discovers for the first time that those shadows aren't everything. And so naturally, when we encounter truth,

we want to go back down and help others. And so that's what he does. He goes back down, tries to tell his chained up brethren, and they revolt. The other thing that I find interesting about this is you'll remember Plato talks about they award prizes and trophies to each other. Being so able to guess what that shadow was. Everyone's a winner, right? Yeah. Everyone's getting participation trophies yes and so he comes back he explains it to them and plato's point is you're nuts what are you talking about right and this is what i

this is the bit i think in which plato says he supposed he were to drag someone therefore against his will to the top kicking and screaming yeah it wouldn't okay this is interesting so this is helping me i'm learning as we're talking that That's why I love these long-form discussions. Because as we're talking, I'm figuring out what you're saying. I don't know it ahead of time. I'm not asking you questions to tell my listeners stuff I already know. I'm actually learning with you. So this is great.

So I really like this. Because I just remember there was a banality to school. There was a shallowness to it. Oh, boy. Why am I doing this? Yes. Why am I trying to learn advanced algebra? And maybe there is a reason, but I just...

There may be a reason. There may be a reason, but when they tried to convince me it would be a practical one, I couldn't believe them. Right. Or a transcendent one. Or a transcendent one, I couldn't believe them. Yeah. Yeah, all right.

Can we go back to the definition of education? Do it, yeah. We started to say something. So a true education, if you're going to be led from the darkness into the light, that involves the highest things that make man, man. And that would be the intellect and the will. Okay. These spiritual powers that are unique to man alone.

The modern public school doesn't deal with those. Well, yes, they do. They say they do. Well, they're obviously appealing to the intellect. In what sense? In having you learn things. I don't think so. To learn anything, isn't that a matter of intellect?

Well, it's a matter, all that is in the intellect is first in the senses, right? So you know your four internal senses. We have a memory and imagination. We have an memory and imagination. We have an ability to apprehend and take things in. Yep. I suppose it couldn't help but being intellectual in some sense.

Yeah. Like I can't learn my times tables without intellect. So how can you say the public schools aren't engaging the intellect? Well, they're not engaging it in a philosophical way is what I really mean to say. And then I was going to say, with will, they seem to be doing that as well in that they're telling us what words to say, what words are inappropriate to say, what we can do, what we shouldn't do.

Yes. So there's a sense in which they're appealing to the will there. For the first time in a long time, I'm admitting, absolutely. So they're dealing with the intellect and the will but in a very, very corrupt way. All right, how? How is it corrupt? Well, it's corrupt. If they're teaching us the intellect and the will, but in a very, very corrupt way. All right. How? How is it corrupt?

Well, it's corrupt. If they're teaching us ideology in the classroom, which they are, and if that ideology is false, then they're ill-informing us and ill-forming our wills. Perverting the intellect. And perverting the will. Okay. So a proper education, as you would guess, would be the proper cultivation of the intellect and the right formation of the will. There you go. That's beautiful how you put that. The proper formation

of the intellect. Cultivation. It's an inner landscape, as Augustine and Christ himself would say. The right ordering of the will. The right ordering of the will, as Augustine would say. The order of loving. So when you were in the public schools, what sort of ideological positions were you and your other teachers trying to foist upon the students which you now repent of? We did it all. We did it all. We promoted the tolerance, equality, all those things from the very beginning. And my first year, I knew something was—

We have to explain those things because both tolerance and equality can sound like really good things. They sound like really good things. So in what way weren't they? Well, they're false and contrived if, well, it depends on the object. What are we talking about tolerating and what are we talking about being equal? There you go. Making things unequal equal is a grave injustice. Yeah, it's an awful thing.

And tolerating things that are evil is a grave injustice. Yes. It's contrary to nature. That's right. So I can't begin to describe the depth of the things we taught that weren't true. It's safe to say I can't think of something we were asked to teach that actually was good. You say memorize your math facts. That's good. Well, I'm sure people were. I'm sure teachers teach their children not to physically harm others. I'm sure they teach them not to sexually prey on others.

Isn't that something that's being taught? I hope so. So those are good things, aren't they? Yes, those are good things. Yeah. Yes, those are good things. So I'm happy to bash the public school system. I just don't want to be so hyperbolic.

No, let's be fair. I don't want to be hyperbolic and then people just dismiss me. Absolutely not. Because I'm with you. Sure. I travel the country. I speak to parents and teens on the issue of pornography a great deal. And when I speak to the parents, a lot of the time I think,

why don't you just take your child out of this school? Because every child now has a tablet. And so they all have access to pornography because tablets are essentially portable X-rated movie theatres. Right. And when I was a kid, the equivalent of a tablet was a calculator. The first thing I learned to do with a calculator is type boobies. 8-0-0-8-1-3-5.

Turn it upside down. Snicker. All right, because I was awesome. You remember that. I can't believe you remember that. You know. So, like, if that's what we were doing as eight-year-olds back then, turn it upside down snicker. All right, because I was awesome. You remember that. I can't believe you remember that. So if that's what we were doing as eight-year-olds back then, of course there's something across this stuff now,

and I just think, why are we still putting up with it? Why are we sending our children to a school where they have such easy access to this stuff? So I'm with you in wanting to critique them. I'm trying to put this in a way that makes sense. If you have a glass of water and the water's good and you add an ounce of gasoline to it, even though the water's still good in there, it's not drinkable anymore. I think modern public education has subjects that are necessary. Grammar, for example, or reading is a good thing. Math is a good thing. All these things are good things. But when you reduce them to sheer questions of

quantity and ignore quality, then I think it's easy to destroy their value and worth. So take literacy, for example. Literacy is a great example of a shadow on the wall today because we end up with students who can read things, but in a deep sense, they don't know what they're reading. We aren't really forming formally literate students. We're making materially literate students. Can I give you a good example? Yeah. C.S. Lewis has a little essay called The Parthenon and the Optative. And he uses those two words to describe the two different kinds of education. One is classical and one is modern. The classical, he said, starts with hard things, dates, facts, names. It's very difficult, maybe even off-putting. And at the end,

it ends in appreciation. And that's equally hard and he says what's great about it is that the student may not like it and may reject it but when he rejects it he knows that he's rejecting knowledge at the end of the day he knows he doesn't have it when it comes to the optative education, it's just the opposite. They begin with appreciation, and he says the ending gush. And he says, the more it succeeds, the more disastrous it is. Because you end up with a person who thinks they're educated and is not. It's actually a dunce. That's a quote.

And I see today that our education is great at building self-esteem, but terrible at inculcating knowledge, terrible at cultivating the intellect, and even worse at forming the will. And there are a million examples why. Yeah, my children go to a classical school called Regina Chaley. It's a terrific school. They go twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays.

Right. In many ways, I'm very envious of the education they're getting and wish I had got. Again, my teachers were very well-intentioned. My parents are very good people, so I'm not saying anything against them. I just see my children, just like you were saying there, they're memorizing dates. My children know all the capitals to all the states,

the United States of America. They're beginning to memorize the constitution or part of it. They are memorizing poetry in Greek and Latin. And people will look at that and say, well, that's rather dry. You shouldn't be doing that. This is kind of what you mean. Because right now their minds are sponges and they are actually able to memorize a tremendous amount. Sure.

The amount of poetry that they can recite. I'm like, I'm envious of it, you know. When you talk about this leads to appreciation, what does that mean in that context? Does it mean you're learning all these things that just feel like facts, but eventually you should get to the point where you therefore like deeply appreciate

what it is you've learned? You come to know what the thing is. You come to know what the odyssey truly is. To appreciate it in the way it's intended to be appreciated, not to like it and not to think it's cool in that other sense. There's a very gushy way you can appreciate things. So whereas you're saying in modern education it's backwards. Yes.

So what does that mean? So are they learning dates and facts and things towards the end of their education in high school? No, no. They're learning names and dates and facts and things towards the end of their education in high school? No, no. They're learning names and dates and facts and forgetting them. But the consideration is this. Are they having fun? Do they feel good about what they're doing?

Does this appeal to them? Those are the wrong questions. And those are the questions that begin with an education that says, how are we going to make them appreciate what they're doing? Right? And you can look at what they're reading in the public schools. It's gross. The modern books are so vapid and shallow. Yes. It is gross. They're awful. I was just at a Catholic school when they were having a book fair. Right. But there were all these modern books. Yes. And they're terrible. There was nothing beautiful.

Right. Nothing good. Yeah. And so to appreciate those books is very base and very low. Yes. Whereas an authentic classical Catholic education, at the end of the day, you're going to appreciate the great works. So what you're after and what you're encouraging and promoting is not just a Catholic education, I'm not sure what that means, we can define that, but a classical Catholic education. What's the difference? Can you have a Catholic education that isn't a classical Catholic? You can't have an authentic Catholic education that isn't classical. So being Catholic, being universal, really should embody the best that man has said and done and the best that we

know and the highest the human soul can achieve. What does classical education mean? I think classical education is a nod to the past. Yeah. Saying, looking at the classic works, as they're called. And that's suffering today because of trying to marry classical and modern, we're beginning to call modern books certain kinds of classics. Yeah. Right? A Diet of a Wimpy Kid is going to be a classic soon. Yeah. Maybe. Maybe not. Yeah. And I hope not. Fifty Shades of classics. Yeah. Right? Diver, Wimpy Kid's going to be a classic soon. Yeah. Maybe. Maybe not. And I hope not. Fifty Shades of Stupid.

Yeah, Fifty Shades of Stupid might be a classic. And that would be terribly disturbing, but I'm seeing books that are not very good being called classics now. So we're in danger there. So when we say classics, we're talking about the Western canon, the Bible, the great Greek tragedians, the epic poets, those guys. And I believe that's meant to be, we're going to study Latin, Greek, Hebrew, the ancients, all the way up to the present. Yeah.

So there might be some people who are listening to us and they think, well, that sounds all really sophisticated and quite frankly a little snooty. Why is it that I need to be bloody learning Latin or Greek or any of this stuff? Tell me when I'm ever going to be bloody learning latin or greek or any of this stuff tell me when i'm ever going to be actually using this uh in in real life it doesn't seem practical why why bother with latin and greek and these sorts of things it's a fair question if you look at what joseph peeper said about education he said an education to be academic in the true sense of the word academic it has to be philosophical and it has to be theoretical. Philosophical meaning that it has to be speculative and theoretical meaning its end has to be truth. For these things to be true, he says, you can't have a single practical

consideration because you learn truth for its own sake. The liberal arts are things that help the human flourish, and they're for their own sakes. For their own sakes. And a language like Latin that is so inflected, it helps cultivate a sense of logic. It's an ancient language that was very concise about making laws, helping to make laws. And there's a really beautiful relationship

between reading and law. Okay, tell me what it is. If you look at the Latin word for law, it's lex. Yeah. If you look at the Spanish word for law, it's ley. If you look at the Spanish word for reading, it's leer. Leyenda is a legend. Legend, law, they's ley. If you look at the Spanish word for reading, it's leer. Leyenda is a legend. Legend, law, they're very closely related. And in fact, Plato, he said, he talked about, I think it

was the Cratulis, he talked about the fact that language in general, words are natural signs. There was a debate about whether words were natural signs or whether or not they're just contrived and made up by man. This is a very important debate in education. And he suggested they were natural signs and that not everybody was in a position to name things because of certain capacities. And he ended up saying that the poets, he called them lawmakers. He called them lawmakers because when they defined a word essentially rather than nominally, they were making the law about what things really mean.

Not the lawgiver. The lawgiver is the one creator. The lawmakers are the ones who help express it. So I think that was beautiful. And there is a deep connection between if you look at a map, it says legend. The legend helps you read the map. If you don't know the legend, you can't read the map. So that legend can be likened a little bit to the liberal art of grammar.

You need to know the rules of the map before you can read it. Yeah, my kids are being able to just look at words and see the Latin roots now. It's like, oh, so that must mean this because it comes from the same thing, which is kind of cool. There's endless benefits. I'll just say one more thing about it. Goethe said, you can't know your first language until you know your second.

There's something very beautiful about acquiring your second language and then seeing, oh, this is why grammar's important. I barely know English as an Australian. Right, right, right. We're working on it. Yeah, one day at a time. Knowledge for its own sake,

that reminds me of the first line of the metaphysics of Aristotle. All men by nature desire to know. And then I'm also, I think it's a line from The Republic where I think Socrates says of education, when it comes to things like sport, if you impose physical exercise upon somebody, it doesn't do them much harm. But if you impose education on a young mind, it can do great damage. And so he says something like, therefore, let their education be like play to some effect. Do you know where I'm getting at or where I'm referencing? Yes, I do.

How does this apply to all this, do you think? Well, it's been... Desiring to know for its own sake and so on. Yes, I think it's self-evident that all humans desire to know, and we delight in knowledge. We delight in encountering a truth. We delight in that. All humans do.

And I think that that idea of play has been taken and really reduced today because we do have this ideology in the public schools that children should just play. And the truth is we should play. But when we say play, we could be talking about video games, or we can be talking about out in the woods. And out in the woods is a lot better play than with video games. And there's a drastic difference between the two, right? Do you think a lot of our education in modern education isn't just knowledge for the sake of knowledge? Does that make sense?

Yeah, I don't think so. Again, back to that first line from the metaphysics, desire by nature to know knowledge for its own sake. Right. I don't think that's the public schools. Yeah. But I think that is education. Yeah. To come to encounter the truth.

Right. schools. But I think that that is education, to come to encounter the truth. So when did your mind flip when you were teaching education at a public school? Because we haven't got to there yet. Right. My mind flipped almost the first year in my classroom seeing this educational coma. And I later came to understand that if you go to a public school in an affluent area, things aren't very perceptible as they are in a very poor area. So I worked in a very poor area for about 20 years. And I think that the poverty of the families and the students really highlighted the defects in the theory of the education. Really? How so? Well, it was just, it's obvious in the affluent schools,

I went to nice schools when I was, we were middle class and went to nice public schools. And it just doesn't appear as if much damage is being done. But at the end of the day, in the schools I worked at, it was apparent that apathy and boredom and this coma, they were just almost automatic. And you have kids in public schools kind of active in things. Parents have them in after school things that are with the home and with the family,

whereas some of the poor areas where both parents work and they're already at a poverty level, the TV's the babysitter, the kids are listless. It's really a drastic difference between the two. And I always thought for me that highlighted the theoretical poverty of the ideas in the public schools, where you wouldn't see that in an affluent area. Because sometimes you say people get educated in spite of going through a bad program. And then we see where we work that they end up terribly uneducated. Terribly. It's an insult to the human person where I worked. So at what point did you start to realize that and want to move away from it?

Well, I started right away, and I started moving away from it right away when I discovered the fairy tales and the Greek myths. I taught sixth grade, and I watched those little stories turn them on and wake them up. You were a secular humanist at the time. Yeah, I'm still a secular humanist.

And what led you to start looking into the fairy tales and teaching them to your students? Fortunately, fairy tales and myths were a part of the curriculum in sixth grade. And when they put them into textbooks, they twist them around and make them hideous. But I got my hands on a couple copies that weren't twisted around, and I watched it bring my students to life. Really? I saw that.

And every year, I did more and more and more of that. What kind of fairy tales are we talking about? Like Father Grimm's? We're talking about Grimm's fairy tales, yes. And Hans Christian Andersen. The good fairy tales. The modern fairy tales are twisted around and really have very little value. Would you be someone to recommend Grimm's fairy tales?

My kids love it. I read them still to this day. Yes, I'd recommend them. And I remember when I first encountered them, they were very off-putting. They're so bizarre. They're so bizarre and off-putting. It's like someone's on LSD and is like, I'm going to write a story. Oh, it's just a bunch of mean people doing mean things.

And according to the secular humanist, very off-putting. And I still remark back how off-putting it was to me. And then as I kept reading, then you begin to see the appeal and the truth behind it. And these are stories written by a people, not by a person. And in them are deep, there's deep wisdom and character building things. And now I'm able to take a class and get them into the fairy tales very quickly. Wow, that's wonderful. And they just love them. It brings them to life. So how did you go from the fairy tales, Greek mythology to becoming a Catholic?

Right. Well, those things led me to the Greek poets, right? Homer, Iliad and the Odyssey, and then the Greek philosophers, to Plato and Aristotle. And then I ran into a mentor. I started becoming interested in learning, so I went to the teaching company. And I think it's somewhat of a secular venture. They take the best professors in America and have them teach you a subject. And I ran across this guy, Louis Marcos. And he taught this course on literary criticism from Plato to the present age. And I just, this guy, Louis Marcos. Okay. And he taught this course on literary criticism from Plato to the present age.

And I just, I loved it. And he also did a little class on C.S. Lewis. And the way he is so expressive, he's a faithful Baptist Christian. The way he expressed himself was just so beautiful, except for his Christianity. That really bugged me. It was just, yeah, really, really bugged me.

I love what he was saying. I learned so much about the ancients up to the present from him. And C.S. Lewis, he made me fall in love with C.S. Lewis. How can you not? Yeah, but his Christianity really bugged me. So I actually emailed him. I said, hey, I love your enthusiasm.

You're a great speaker. But what's with the Christianity? Don't you know? And I told him, didn't you realize that's medieval? And he was so kind. He got back to me. He wrote to me. We became friends. We started to meet up. He took me under his wing, this Baptist. He introduced me to Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI, and he introduced me to Thomas Aquinas, to St. Augustine, to all the great medievals. He had me

read these things. He basically took me to the Tiber River. Did all but shove me in. And he's a Baptist. And he's a Baptist. And I couldn't figure this out, but I finally, the last place I wanted to go was the Catholic Church. I was pretty much rabidly anti-Catholic. Were you?

I was. I met a lady who taught the RCA at a church, and we were looking for a church for our kids the way my parents had a church for us, so they can have a choice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And ran this beautiful lady who's running the RCA, and she says, oh, you're looking for a church?

You should come to St. Philip's. And I said, is that a Catholic church? She said, yes, it is. I said, it'll be a cold day in hell when I set foot in a Catholic church. That's what you said, yeah. I said that. And sadly, sadly, I meant it. And then there must have been some kind of cold front or something.

In hell, and you ended up there. A year later, I went to a mass, and I was just horrified that I really loved it. Now, was it a beautifully celebrated mass, or was it one of these ugly ones? It was not beautiful at all. And yet you were moved. It was beautiful to me. Yes, oh, I was moved. Preceding that, though, we had our oldest daughter, Kenya.

She was in the public schools, and my wife wanted to put her in the Catholic schools as a kindergartner. But I was so anti-Catholic, I said, no, we can't do that. We can't expose her to those medieval people. So we took her and put her in public schools. And in seventh grade, she was going to go into seventh grade. And we went to the orientation. And we know the public schools. And I had been shifting away from them for the last decade.

You're still teaching at this point. I'm still teaching, yes. And our kids are not at our school. They're at a nicer school. But we went to the seventh grade orientation, and it was just so horrendous. We just said, okay, we're moving them to Catholic schools. And we moved them to Catholic schools, and I was okay with them being Catholic. Yeah.

But when I went to that mass a year later, I was taken in. Wow. And at that point, it was another two years of RCIA. And by the time I was welcoming to the church, I was hook, line, and sinker, heart on fire for Christ. Wow, amazing. It's a miracle of grace. And then how did you get out of public schools and start teaching Catholic? Well, I stayed in the public schools.

And there became a bigger, bigger divide. I started to get in a little bit of trouble because we were reading the fairy tales and novels and great things. And they caught on to it and actually banned the novel said i couldn't read it so we would have our myths which novel were you reading they got banned oh we were reading c.s lewis novels you know we were you know what i i introduced him to the odyssey and the ility and yeah things like that narnia oh yeah the narnia they banned you from teaching novels in general because they knew i was up to something oh yeah you were banned i was teaching novels? Novels in general. Because they knew I was up to something. Oh, yeah.

You were banned from teaching novels. They said, no more novels for you, right? And so we took to, the class took to putting a mythology book, the textbook under the mythology book. If someone came in, we'd switch books. No. Yes, I probably shouldn't have said that in public. That's awesome.

You should totally have said that. That's what we did. And we did that for years. And it became increasingly clear that I wasn't teaching the Catholic faith, but I was teaching truth. And that became more and more problematic. And my last year in the public schools, I had attracted some attention from some students in another class and asked me questions. I gave them a philosophical answer and I got in pretty big trouble for it. What were the questions, can I ask?

There were questions about marriage. And I didn't give them the Catholic answer. I gave them the ethos, logos, pathos answer. Just consider it from these three types of arguments. Ethos, logos, and pathos. These are the three kinds of arguments you can make. You can make an appeal to the emotions, which is pathos. You can make an appeal to reason, which is logos. Or you can make an appeal to ethics, which is ethos.

And if you consider the question about marriage from those three angles, at least you will have considered it fully. And that's as far as I went. It turns out the little girl had relatives that were deeply offended, and I got in a little bit of trouble for that. And I wrote up the trouble I had, and it just turns out my mentor knew another guy who's kind of a hero of mine, Dr. Anthony Esselin. Yep, hero of mine too. Yeah, hero. And I sent the essay because my mentor, who knows him, introduced me to him, sent him my essay, and he said, you should send that in and have it published.

And I sent it to Crisis Magazine, and it got published under a pseudonym. Yeah. And then from there, that's why I started writing. So this was five years ago I did this. And then Dr. Esselstyn said, well, that was published. Now you should start writing more about education. So I did. And so far I've written maybe 150 articles on education in the last four years

criticizing the public schools. So that's how I got into place. So is your main criticism with public education that it doesn't go all the way? Because it sounded like before when we were talking about shadows, you were saying, well, shadows are something. Like children need to know facts and they need to know, you know, different things about history and measurements. But it just doesn't go far enough.

Like is that all you're saying? No, that's not what I'm saying at all. So help us. I don't think it goes far at all to have the idea that materially you learn a bunch of facts and you are educated after that. I don't even know what the facts are. There's a lot of studies about forgetfulness. I don't know what they are exactly, but I heard something like after three months of your college graduation, you jettisoned 80% of everything you learned. I don't know how they can measure that.

Now, wouldn't that be true in a Catholic education context also? It appears to be so, yes. Not to be in a Catholic school, also? It appears to be so. Yeah. Yes. It ought not to be in a Catholic school. Yeah. Because there's a difference between memorizing and short-term memory information and then coming to know a thing. Okay. Once you come and know a thing.

As opposed to memorizing something to spit it out at the appropriate time. Right. For no other reason than to get a decent grade. That's right. Okay. Right. And so that's another end of the schools

is to get good test scores. Yeah. It's a terrible end. Right. It's a fine fruit if that's where you're going. But it get good test scores. It's a terrible end. It's a fine fruit if that's where you're going. But it's very small and they treat it as if it's very big. So what you have is an inversion of the hierarchy of goods.

Take something very small like a test score and act like that's the end. That's the big picture. So to go anywhere at all with that seems to me to be a huge mistake. It treats a person as a means, not as an ends. How so? And that's vile. If you say, I have a class of students and my goal is to get great test scores, so you're using them to get good test scores. Yeah. To me, that seems to be an evil. It's an evil. Yeah. And the fundamental, one of the basic fundamental issues between an authentic education and the public schools is the anthropology.

Ask the question, who's sitting in front of you? What is a student? Yeah, what is a child? If your answer is, it's a test taker, then I can't see how you can do anything to help that person. If your answer is, that's the image and likeness of truth. That is destined for the beatific vision. Yes, that is destined, made for heaven, made to be face-to-face with God. Your approach is going to change.

That's exactly right. Yes. Yeah, this is getting me right now. Yeah. This is really helpful. It's a fundamental flaw. Yeah, if you don't know what the human person is, then the way you educate that thing

is going to be vastly different. And I would say it can do nothing but harm. When you treat someone as a means, is there a benefit to that? Well, I could see a teacher saying, it's not that I'm treating them as a means to an end. Yes, I do want the class to have an overall good test score, but that is in part because I want each of these

individual children to succeed individually. So in that sense, I'm not treating them as a means to an end. Wait, but to what end? I want them to exceed so that they can get a good job. Do this with me. Let's do this. Let's do a Socratic dialogue. I'll be the teacher of what.

So I want my child to get a good grade because I want them to know about the world and I want them to get a good education. Does getting a good grade equate knowing about the world? It can since I'm to know about the world, and I want them to get a good education. Does getting a good grade equate knowing about the world? It can, since I'm teaching them about the world, and getting a good grade is a sign that they've understood what I've taught them. Okay. And then when you know about the world, you can get a good job. Yeah, so that they can have a bright future ahead of them.

Materially or spiritually? What do you mean by spiritually? So, spiritually, it would be morally. Oh, well, yeah, I want them to be moral people. You want them to be moral people. I'm still the teacher, by the way. Yes, you're doing a great job, and I'm being a terrible student. Yeah, no.

No, I want them to be good, moral people who care about their white privilege and global warming is clearly the greatest threat against us right now. And I want them to be for women's health care. Yes. And I won't mention that. And women's empowerment. Yeah. Of course.

Yeah. So in essence, what you're describing, teacher, is that you want them to be good parts of society. Cogs in a machine in a society that is just. Or a society that is fair. See, when you say cogs in a machine, I get my defenses up. And as the teacher, I would be like, well, no, well, I see what you're trying to do there. I don't want them to be a cog in a machine. I want them to be, I want them to be the best version of themselves. Right. To what end? So they can live a happy life. They can live a happy life.

Well, and happy life is a good goal depending on what you mean by happy. Yeah. If by happy you mean to do well in society or to make a lot of money or to have a good job, those are not bad things, but they're not proper ends. No, that's right. You know, and this gets us to what is happiness. I remember in my senior year of high school, the question was asked, if you could hook yourself up to a pleasure machine, we didn't realize that there would one day be iPhones and porn. That's essentially what it was, I guess. And you could feel completely fulfilled and happy. Would you do it? And it was interesting that all of us sort of reacted against that. Like, no, that doesn't seem like a good life, right? Like the Matrix.

Yeah. This is why I have the red cup and you have the blue cup. I'm being red pilled by you today. Yes. And I'm staying right where my little comfy zone. Yeah. Yeah. But this is fascinating stuff. Like what is the good life? What is happiness? What's the point of all this bloody stuff? I feel like this is what normal children ask themselves if they're given the freedom to go to bed in a quiet room instead of being blared at by bloody music to help them go to sleep or even endless awful audio books to shut them up and keep their interior life from being stifled. It's all right, dude. I laid in bed. I'm like, what the heck's the point of it all? Why am I here? Where am I going?

I think they ask the same questions. Everybody asks the same questions. The public schools say, I want them to have a good life. I want them to be happy. But as kids, we asked questions expecting there to be an answer. Now it's just sort of intellectual masturbation where we ask questions for the sake of asking questions that don't actually go anywhere, nor do we expect them to or even want them to. There is no end. There is no answer. It's just the journey. This is kind of where we're at. Yeah, and I think that's more perceptual masturbation because you're asking the question, what pleases me? What do I like? What do I want to do? These are not intellectual questions as much as they're physical questions or material questions, aren't they? Yeah, maybe. I'm not sure. I'm confusing the intellectual and perceptual sometimes, but

what I've seen in the public schools is that they deal primarily in the perceptual, even though you can't avoid using the intellectual. We're human. In the perceptual, what do you mean they deal in the perceptual? Perceptual, meaning your five senses are where everything begins, and then your four inner senses

is one way we process things, right? With the memory, imagination, our common sense, our estimate sense. These things come to bear. But the higher intellect and will, those are different matters. Those are different distinct powers from the perceptual. That's conceptual. It's highly possible that I'm just not smart enough to understand what you're saying to me right now. I haven't made it clear. No, I don't think that's true. It's just that I'm really

trying to give public schools the benefit of the doubt. Right. So for example, why don't we do this then? Why don't we do this then? Why don't we talk about what's the thing being pushed on all schools right now that we mentioned? The common core. Let's talk about common core. What is it?

Why are you against it? Okay. The common core is in the matrix of a thing called outcomes-based education. And that is where schools identify a skill that they want students to learn, and they plan backwards and teach such that that skill can be quantified and measured. That's outcomes-based education. And Common Core is basically the same thing they've had since Dewey developed his laboratory schools. Oh, really since the 60s and 70s, I should say.

Dewey led up to that. But they solidified state standards. It's just standards-based learning. The Common Core is just the latest incarnation. I think they're moving on to something else. But it's really all the same. Is it sort of like, here's the least your students should know? No. No. They ask the question, how do we make kids college and career ready? They say, well, they need this skill, this skill, this skill, and this skill. And if they want them to know this skill, what do we do?

And then they do experiments to discover the best practices to have students demonstrably meet that skill. And then they give you a script, and then you read the script, or they give you a dog clicker, and then you click the dog clicker, they answer, you talk, they answer.

And then they demonstrate the skill, they take the test dog clicker and then you click the dog clicker they answer you talk they answer and then they demonstrate the skill they take the test and then at the end of the common core they're supposed to be career and college ready okay and is this how a proponent of common core would explain common core or is this how you would explain i'm trying to make it concise in a nutshell yeah because i want you to give a proponent of common core someone who's all for it i have a very good friend who's a proponent of common core no so i ask you, what is it? This is just the thing that's going to get

our students into the 21st century and make them successful. Oh, cool. What do you mean by successful and what do you mean into the 21st century?

They will be college and career ready. They will do great in college and have great careers. That's great. Yes. That sounds awesome. It is.

Well, so we need the Common Core. Okay, great. And make it a national program. So what's the problem with that? Because Well, so we need the Common Core. Okay, great. And make it a national program. So what's the problem with that? Because there's going to be people listening who are like, that sounds exactly why I'm sending my kids to school.

Right, right. So where college and career are vitally important, they're fruits of the tree. And it's counterintuitive, but if you were to give somebody a classical Catholic education, they would, without any effort at all, be very well prepared to be excellent citizens and probably know their vocation in a way that the Common Core couldn't prepare that at all. So it reminds me of a principle that C.S. Lewis draws out,

first and second things. Have you heard of this? Yeah. So C.S. Lewis says, if you put first things first and second things second, you'll get first and you'll get second things thrown into boot. If you put second things first and first things second, not only will you not get first things, but you'll lose the second as well. So the common core is a perfect example of all these skills being second things. Its ends itself are second things. They're not first things. They're second things. Career and college skills being second things. Its ends itself are second things. They're not

first things. They're second things. Career and college readiness are second things. So it's interesting. We've spent all this time and money educating our kids for college and career, and what you see is a burgeoning, a blowing up of remedial programs. Kids really not ready for college or career, I think. And I think it's borne out. Talk to the graduates. There's all kinds of videos on graduates who know nothing about history or graduates know nothing about really anything. And I'm not sure these guys are making great careerists either. Because I could hear, imagine somebody who is explained common core by somebody who's a proponent of it. And they hear your criticism, which is,

but this isn't preparing them necessarily to be good citizens and to know their vocation. Yeah. And I could think of the parents saying, well, that's not necessarily the school's job, is it? I mean, can't we do that in the home? Can't we teach them about what God has created them for, why they ought to be a moral person,

whether God is calling them to marriage or the religious life? Mm religious life. And so can't they then complement each other? They ought to complement each other. Well, parents are the first teachers. Okay. That's not just church teachers. So why not have common core plus good parents who educate their children about morals and their vocation? That's what I'm saying. That's what someone might ask. That's the right question. The fact is they mutually contradict each other. How do they mutually contradict? So basically, the first thing is if you ask the question, why does the universe exist? The universe?

The universe. Why is it here? There's a creator God. God created this. You ask the common core, there's no answer. Or it's evolution, right? Or, no, it's the Big Bang. Yeah.

And that's it. It's the end of the story. That alone, we can reconcile them in the Catholic faith. Yep. But the Common Core and its proponents are not advocating seeing the Big Bang as a part of the big plan. They're saying the Big Bang is the whole bang, whole shebang, the whole thing, right? For starters.

So cosmogony, where's the world come from? Parents, they're Catholic, know that and teach their kids that. The school does not. They teach the contrary. They say everything's here on accident. It's just one big accident, which eliminates final causality right there. So that makes those two views on cosmogony mutually exclusive. Then take the definition of the

human person. You don't have to teach a parent that their child is worthy of love, but the school doesn't speak to that. In fact, the school doesn't think this is the image and likeness of truth. They think this is a student to be educated for the purposes of society. That already contradicts what the parent wants for their child. Sure, they want their child to be an integral the purposes of society. That already contradicts what the parent wants for their child. Sure, they want their child to be an integral part of society, but as a small part of their lives, where the big part is happiness and salvation, right? The question of salvation doesn't come up in the Common Core.

Salvation is material. It's a derivative of the Marxist issue. Could you see harmonizing common core with Catholic teaching? So let's say there was a Catholic school that took upon everything that common core is and also interjected into all of those things the truths that the Catholic Church teaches?

No. It's utterly impossible. How is it utterly impossible? Because you just said they contradict each other. Yeah, their first principles are diametrically opposed. Okay. And that goes back to what you just said they contradict each other yeah their first principles are diametrically opposed okay and that that goes back to what you just said there yes it's a student that's to be educated to be a cog in society as opposed to as opposed to the image this is primarily why you're against common core uh it's primarily why the two are irreconcilable

so every name every issue that's fundamental to human existence. Evolution explains what? How we got here. God created us explains how we got here, right? And in fact, this brings up what St. John Paul II said. He said that evolution as a biological theory is very interesting and compelling. As an explanation for the origins of the universe, the fundamental problem is that it suggests that spirit comes from matter, whereas we know that matter comes from spirit. God created the universe. That's right, yeah.

And so on language, which is another fundamental mutually exclusive issue, Darwinians or evolutionists say that when men got together, it created the need for language and man-made language, where we say God spoke creation into existence. That's irreconcilable. You can't marry the two. So if Catholic education has a theory of language, the origin, purpose, and nature of language, it's fundamentally diametrically opposed to whatever the public schools say language is and its purpose.

A parent is sending their kid to public school right now. They're watching you. Are you looking at them and saying, take them out immediately? Be honest now. It may be effective daycare. Well, and to be fair to you, let me just backpedal that question a little bit.

It's difficult to offer specific answers when you don't know a particular circumstance. Right, absolutely. It sounds like you're saying that, by and large, the public education system, and even many Catholic schools, or some Catholic schools, to play it safe, are toxic environments. Yes.

And you ought to remove your child from those environments. No? I would say yes. Okay. I would say yes, but you have to substantiate that. Then let's do that. That's huge. I don't know if but you have to substantiate that. Then let's do that. That's huge. I don't know if I can.

It's an enormous question. Or if not substantiated, let's maybe talk about some of the fears, some of the worries, because I'm sure a lot of parents are having concerns about this, and they are thinking like, why don't we do this? I was talking to a friend of mine who teaches at Benedictine in Kansas. And I'm just going off what he said. And he said, if you take, he's like, it's night and day. The difference between the students who are homeschooled versus the students that went to, say, public school, it's night and day. Night and day. me if all you did was read good books to your kids on the couch like the entire like 15 years

of their education they would be in a much better place than if you sent them to school yes now um he may have been just speaking a little freely or whatever but it sounds like you would agree with that i couldn't agree more all right good good. Well, then I want you to help. People are watching with mouths agape right now. So tell them why that isn't just hyperbole. If what we're saying is true about the fundamental premises of being mutually exclusive between a Catholic education and a public school education, then Catholic parents are wise to take their children out of the public schools because it's a training in the opposite of what the church teaches. It is toxic.

What they're teaching in terms of ideology is toxic. The gender equality issues, the tolerance issues, the equality, these protected classes, and even now they're delving into sexuality from kindergarten up. The new sex ed program is devastating. How to safely insert your thing into an anus, right? All of this stuff is taught to kindergartners and all that.

Kindergarteners, unbelievable. You are insane. It's not like you've missed it a bit. It's like, no, you're not even worth talking to. You're off the reservation. Oh, it's just, it's diabolical. And we've been in, like the frog in the pot of boiling water. We're inoculated to it. We're used to it. And we're so used to thinking that education is kind of like a sacred cow. How could it be anything but good? And education is a good, but it's not an unqualified good. So I honestly would encourage Catholic parents to not allow their children to be exposed to this terrible training. But I know it's difficult. I want to get to some specific question from some of our patrons in a minute.

But I want to just expose some myths about homeschooling. Yes. So we kind of homeschool in the sense that they go two days a week. It's a hybrid homeschool. It's a hybrid homeschool. And even the teachers aren't called teachers. They're called tutors. Because parents are the primary educators. It's a hybrid homeschool. It's a hybrid homeschool. And even the teachers aren't called teachers. They're called tutors, you know,

because parents are the primary educators. Before we get to homeschooling myths, tell us why that's important. Why are parents the primary educators of their children, especially if they don't have a degree in education? How could they possibly be? It's the most natural thing in the world. And the true ground of an education is love. The order of love, the right order of things.

Within the matrix of love is the only place you can get an authentic education anywhere. The love of truth, the love of goodness, the love of beauty. And parents naturally have that for their children. And a teacher does not naturally have that for 30 students that are not his own, right? So that alone means that I would recommend parents, if they stayed home and did nothing with their kids, is better than exposing them to falsehoods and ideology and untruths.

Because at the end of the day, those things need to be undone. And maybe they are being undone at home, but that's a chore. That's a chore. That's a chore. So the family is the natural, it's the imperfect society where, and it's the building block of civilization. One of the things we love about homeschooling is that we're around each other all the time. Right. Now that makes me want to kill my children sometimes. Sure. I'm being, I'm joking, but it does. It's really frustrating. Like the house is messy. Right. And it's loud. Yes. And it's, I would like a bit more time. Like we would like to be able to pay the bills and we don't really seem to have a is messy right and it's loud yes and it's i would like a bit more time like we would like to be able to pay the bills and we don't really seem to have a lot of

time it's exhausting yes you know so i'm not in any way trying to paint this as a sort of idyllic situation but at the end of the day i kind of like that we're all really close and your kids are all wrestling on the trampoline beating the snot out of each other my two boys you know and the girls are upstairs and they're just chatting and right it's almost like yeah it's beautiful it's a terrible inconvenience it's a terribly beautiful so worth it so beautiful just you can't buy it and you guaranteed won't regret it okay guaranteed you won't let's talk about some of these myths about homeschooling and we can go back and forth here i think one of the first myths that people have is that how on earth could parents educate their children if they're not educated to do so?

Right. How could that possibly be a successful endeavor? Well, like I said, a parent who loves their child is already leagues ahead of anything else. And it is a responsibility of a parent to do their best to bring to their child, to lead them forth from the darkness of error into the light of truth. So there are things that can be done. And in very simple, short steps, you can outstrip the public schools in a week or two.

It's really a, I understand that fear because we live in a culture where we think educational experts. Experts. But the truth is the experts in the public schools are really swindling us. How so? Well, in the sense that they're bringing forward all these programs, like the new sex ed program. That's a swindle. That's a scandal. It's a crime against children. And they're peddling as if it's education. For a parent to stay home and do nothing is

far beyond better than that. So the worry about education is legitimate, but I don't think it's a real worry. I think an analogy that Anthony Esselin gave was if your child is being fed arsenic in his food, you just remove the poison and then you worry about how you're going to feed them. Yes. But you at least remove them from the toxic environment. That's 10 times better than I would have said right now. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So I think another myth is environment. That's 10 times better than I would have said right now. Yeah.

Yeah. All right, so I think another myth is that kids who are homeschooled end up weird and awkward. They're not socialized. Right, they say that. Yeah. What's your response to that?

I think by appearances as a shadow on the wall, they appear to not be socialized. But as you know, they're more social. They're more communicative. They're better at interpersonal relationships

than the masses of kids in the public schools who oftentimes are zoned out. The people who ask, the people who offer this objection, I'm like, have you met one of those like 13-year-old boys with the huge backpack and like walking to school? I've heard the objection.

One of the things that I notice about homeschool kids that I know is they're able to have dialogues with people of all different age ranges because they're not segregated into particular classrooms and only allowed to play and interact with those people. That's right. I find them much more able to look an adult like myself

in the eye and have a good conversation. Me too. I've noticed it countless times. Countless times. And that's the nature of the scientization of schools too is we compartmentalize everything, put them together, group them. We're really organizing this.

I think it's probably fair to say it's not like people who are homeschooled end up weird. I think it's very often people who have weird parents might end up weird. Certainly. Whether you're homeschooled or not. Right. It's a misattribution.

Right. And also weird might not be a bad thing. Very much not. So if you're saying they appear to be different than the automatons of the independent-minded herd, it's a true thing. Automatons, you're wonderful. It's such a great sentence. They appear to be. They appear different.

And that strikes people as weird. And I'm saying by appearances. It's a shadow. If that's weird, it's a beautiful thing. As you know, I've encountered many homeschooling children, and they'll shake your hand. They'll look you in the eye. They'll have a deep, profound conversation. At the end of it, you leave feeling like you know them, which is very different from a public school student.

Although I must interject that I work at a public school now that is a classical American public school. We call our students scholars, and they are incredible. You work at a public school right now? I work at a public school. And we call our students scholars. And they are incredible. You work in a public school right now? I work in a public school. Yes. And you're a Catholic, obviously, and they're okay with that. They're okay with that. And my ground is Aristotle, Plato, and the classics.

And they insist on primary sources. This year they told me, slow down, go deep, get into the stories. We just got done reading book nine of the Odyssey in sixth grade. And it's such a beautiful experience. And so my school's very unique. It's called John Adams Academy. And I'm very, very impressed with it. It's my first year there

because I just moved from Georgia back to California. What are some other myths you think people believe about homeschooling? You have them listed there, don't you? Well, you think I would have, but then I misplaced them somewhere. But there's like three. Yeah. Well, I think there's quite a few because I think there's a vested interest in the problem. Well, here's another one. If you homeschool your kids, they won't be ready for college. And even though college isn't the be all and end all, it's something. People say that. What's your response? Well, it depends on what you do and it depends on what college you're going to. If not ready for college, you mean they're

not ready to answer all the ideological questions. That may be true, but I would prefer that. But if you want to send them to Thomas Aquinas or Benedictine or Wyoming Catholic, then you can easily prepare your children for that, to be edified for that. You know, when I grew up, I was telling you this over text, I think by the age of 17, and this is not an exaggeration, I read two books. One was some awful fiction book that was written in the 90s. Right. I don't know what the other one was.

Yeah. That's it, man. That's it. I played video games. I looked at porn a bunch. I got drunk. I had a lot of strongly held opinions for which I had no arguments. Right.

I had conclusions in search of premises. Yes. Yeah. I mean, that was it. It's a fairly common story. There's a lot of people out there that are really angry in the good sense that they were deprived of these. I'm the same as you. Yeah.

Graduating college, I can say the same thing. So there's probably people who have questions now. They're like, okay, look, I'm in my 20s. I'm in my 30s. I never got this. I'm embarrassed that I never got this. Where do I begin? Where do I begin?

That's a good question. That's a long conversation. Good. That's why we have this long-form conversation. I like to analogize this to food. When I was raised, we didn't have a lot of good fruit in the crisper. We called it in Australia, that little pull-out drawer in the fridge. We called it a crisper. I don't know if you call it that. I think they call it something like that here. But we did have a lot of corn chips and Coca-Cola and M&Ms. We had all that. So that's what I ate.

And then if someone offered me water or an apple, I'd be like, I'm good. I'll take that Coke. Coke's way better. Don't you know? And I think it's something similar when it comes to the good, true, and beautiful. You can habituate yourself to prefer what's ugly and banal. Without a doubt. It's almost like the beautiful is more difficult to appreciate at first or something.

Right. It's like a beautiful meal. And education really should be likened to a communication of substance. If the knower becomes the known, that is a communication of substance. Right? They call man the microcosm because not only are we made of every constituent part of the universe, but we alone can take in, apprehend all things created. And that's a beautiful, beautiful thing to understand. The public schools don't teach that.

But that's important. So I'd liken it to food also. The good, the true, and the beautiful are revolting when you've been trained to eat junk food. The banal. The banal. Let's talk a little bit about, because I do want to get to that, because maybe we'll do that towards the end of this chat, about practical things we can now begin doing if we've been raised on junk. Let's talk a little bit about how technology is kind of making us all stupid and dumb.

Oh, for sure. Maybe stupid and dumb are synonyms. I don't know. But yeah, it's exhausting. i don't know but yeah it's uh it's exhausting i yeah i don't know what to do yeah like i don't know what to do it's almost like i feel like we've never been so stressed out before yes as as humans right because we are constantly being talked at and beeped at and are being expected to respond to. Yes.

Constantly. Constantly. So like 10.30, 9 p.m. Right. When I was a kid, it was like, you don't call someone at 7. It's dinner time or 6. You don't call them after that. Or 8 because people are going to bed.

Yeah. Right. Now it's constant. So we're all in this state of stress. Yes. And now what you're seeing, this is my hypothesis, adult coloring books, adult bedtime stories. you familiar with this no and i'm not even disparaging it right like i'm not even making fun of it i almost feel like it's it's it's

it's kind of become necessary if we're going to live in this perpetual state of stress and anxiety we're going to need something you know so there's this app called calm c-a-l-m and it has adult beds time stories they snuggle up and we'll read you is that right yeah okay and they're great i love listening to them sometimes and going to bed right i get the whole coloring in thing to de-stress but it's like we've lost the ability to subtract yes from our lives so if we're stressed there's an app for that right and we never think well what if i just get rid of the stuff that's making me this anxious? So the thing that's the cause of my anxiety is also, in some sense, the solution to it. So if I feel anxious, what does anyone do?

They pick up their phone and they start scrolling. And there's a sense in which that it regulates them emotionally, yeah? So it's like this awful… It's hugely problematic. What do we do? Like, I want to take this bloody thing and smash it, but I don't know if I should do that. And that misses the point.

No, that misses the point because it's an internal problem. It's an internal addiction. It's an internal addiction, yeah. Sure. Sometimes the best way or the most effective way to deal with an internal addiction is to remove yourself from that thing. It's a very good idea. You know, like, I mean, if someone's an alcoholic, you don't say the problem is internal, so you don't need to remove the Jack Daniels.

Oh, well, it's both. It is internal and you remove the Jack Daniels. What are we going to do? Because I tell you what, my phone, I tell you, I don't have email. You'll notice there's no email. I can't check my email. I don't have a browser. I can't check internet. Good. I don't have any social media apps because I pay someone to run all my social media apps. He changed the password. I don't even have an app store because I blocked it.

Do you know you can do this? You know this. Yes. I had my wife block the app store, block everything. This is essentially a dumb phone that plays audio books and gives me directions. And I did that because i'm just right i'm worse than anyone else right and i don't want to be it so but you made an internal correction to do that yeah you subordinate your appetites to the right use of reason yep and that's

part of the nature of an education but if you're being raised on these bloody things it's terrible and they're in the schools that are rampant in the school just a classical catholic education should have no screens. You get caught with a screen at Regina Chaley, it's taken away for one year. Right. You sign a contract. Right.

It's great. Right. You can't even discuss media at school. You can't talk about Spider-Man, the latest movies. No, now's not the time for any of that, all of that stuff. Right. We're just going to focus on education. As it should be.

As it should be. What does this do to a kid? They're saying that it rewires the brain a kid? They're saying that it rewires the brain. They're saying that it rewires the way you deal with reality. I think it ruins kids. Now, I think there's coming back from it if we were to remediate or do something

about it or help cultivate healthier habits, but I think they're devastating. It's awful. It's less like a news feed and more like a poker machine. So I don't know if we're capable of using this. It may be too late. Right.

Yeah. Responsibly. I don't know if we are. That's the thing. The technology uses us. We don't use it. It's created to be addictive. Yeah.

It's very addictive. And so when I travel and I speak at schools, I meet so many parents who, I just think, why, what have you done? Why would you give your child a phone? And it's got to the point where I'm like, and you probably think this too, I'm like, either I am insane

or y'all are under some mass delusion. Because I think if you give your child a smartphone, it's almost abusive. Well, if you don't, you'll be abused. What does that mean? That means that the magnetism, if you don't give your children this technology, you'll hear about it. From other parents, you mean? From all of society. Yeah. And this is why I don't let my kids play at friends' houses who would have phones. Would never happen. That's right. But we have several families and they're all so normal and healthy and beautiful. run around and they giggle and they scream they push each other too

high on the swing set and they beat each other up on the trampoline they climb trees right can't buy that it's lovely it's beautiful that's that's the way it was and that's the thing it's like people say well how do i hold off the phone i'm like my kids they you know my eldest is 11 he hangs out with other families who don't have screens. And so they're not asking for it. And if they did, they'd be like, are you joking? It's not going to happen. Yeah. We tried to hold off until 15 or 16.

Yeah. And it was difficult. We did our best, but it was very difficult. Yeah. The world pulls, and everyone has phones. It's awful. I want a slower life. Yeah.

Everyone yearns for it, right? We're yearning for it. Yeah? We're yearning for it. Yeah, we're yearning for it. But we hate ourselves. Yeah. And so we can't be alone with ourselves. That's right. It's true, isn't it?

That's right. Oh, yeah. And I think the ideology teaches us to hate ourselves. How so? It's a rejection of, it's an attack on nature. By its false first principles, it's an attack on the nature of the human person. And it orients us towards false ends. And that's hateful. Whereas the classical Catholic school or the homeschooler, when you direct your efforts toward the cultivation of the intellect and the formation of the will,

you're cultivating, you're cooperating with grace to perfect nature that's already fallen. And people that do that tend to have a better sense of themselves or higher self-esteem, if you will. Self-esteem is a huge issue in the schools. There's nothing wrong with good self-esteem. Should we be esteeming ourselves? Well, that's the question. So the public schools say self-esteem begins on the front end so that they have the false notion that if you feel good, you'll do good. That's just simply not true.

Whereas authentic self-esteem says when people do good, they naturally feel good about it. And that's a healthy self-esteem. It's not healthy to feel great about yourself if you haven't. For no reason. Yeah, for no reason. I heard a story of some first graders and the teacher had created this box and she said, okay, children, one by one, we're going to look into the box. The most important person in the whole world is going to be in that box. And so all the children were a little curious,

and they all walked up, and there was a mirror in the bottom of the box, so everybody saw themselves as the most important person. Isn't that just a beautiful reflection of the subjectivism of the public schools as well? That's another one of the fundamental issues. We say we ought to admit that we have our subjective perspective within the context of an objective reality

and that those two are like body and soul. They're composite. To eliminate, by skepticism, objective reality, which the schools are very skeptical, then you eliminate your access to reality, right? And so a classical Catholic education must necessarily be grounded in objective truth. All right, let's take some questions from some of our amazing patrons. Big thanks to everybody who supports me on Patreon, who makes these shows possible. And we're just going to go through

these randomly. I haven't even kind of read through them. What are your thoughts on gender segregated Catholic schools? Do they add or subtract from one's education experience? Oh, I'm in favor of gender separation. Of course. I call it sex separation. Let's deal with that. Sex and gender.

Yeah, gender. I always thought gender was related to grammar and words. And that sex is about human persons. Right. I know that's not the theory today. I've learned the new theories, too. Okay, sure. They don't seem to square with reality. So, separating the boys and the girls is an excellent idea. Boys are different around girls, and girls are different around boys. I know. And it should be self-evident. Yeah. It should be, but we're idiots.

We've educated ourselves into idiocy, and we will not go back. No, no, no. And it's offensive to the modern world to hear someone say that boys and girls are not equal. No, yes, they're not equal. They're not equal. They're equal in dignity.

Yeah, equal in the eyes of the Lord, and maybe in the eyes of the law, but in reality? No, men are not women women and women are not men. That's correct. And women are capable of things that men are not and men are capable of things that women are not. Exactly right. And for that reason alone, that principle alone makes it beneficial to have gender segregated schools.

So much more gets done that's appropriate. Assuming it's a real Catholic school. Yeah. As opposed to a public school with a Catholic religion class or something, as you mentioned. And is that the distinction you'd make? If I said to you, what's the difference between a Catholic school and a real Catholic school, would you say, well, a Catholic school is sort of like a public school that has a religion class thrown in?

Yes. I would say that's the distinction, where a real Catholic school would say, the theology informs the whole school, right? Yeah, that's right. Right, as opposed to a religion class is in the school. It's tacked on. Yeah, as an add-on. That's the materialist.

Robert Camito says, My wife is not a Catholic. What case can I make to her about sending our children to Catholic schools? Well, I think we've made it. Yeah, yeah. Send them to an authentic Catholic school because Catholic or not, the public schools teach against the human person. Speaking of authentic Catholic schools, Simon Rilera asks, what do you think of Regina

Chaley schools? Do you know much about? This is the school I send my kids to. I do. I really love what they're doing at the Regina Chaley schools. They're interested in primary sources, the two days a week, the teachers work in support of families, not the other way around. So there's a lot of good to be said about Virginia Taylor. And you know what's beautiful too is like we really do talk down to our children. We try to entertain them instead of exposing them to what's actually beautiful. Right. And we condescend to them and they feel condescended in a negative sense. They know it intuitively. Yeah. Right. So, like, when I was in school, we had very banal liturgies for our Holy Mass.

Right. And we would play tapes. Click. Mm-hmm. We are companions on the journey. You know that song? Yes, I do. Breaking bed and kill me.

Whereas at Regina Chaley, you have the priests celebrating mass at Orientums. They're singing in Latin. Right. And it's actually beautiful. Very beautiful, yes. So now at, you know, my kids, we sing the Regina Chaley. Right. Like after we, and they know it.

They're not, it's something, it's worth respecting. Yes. It's not crap. If you're talking about taking your kids out of public school and going to Regina Chaley, do it. Do it immediately. Immediately. Yeah. Immediately. Does the concept of unschooling fit with a classical Catholic

education? And if so, how? Catholic schools in our day seem to me just as bad as public schools. And students come away from their education just as secular as the average public school kid. Thoughts? I agree with Ryan, except for unschooling doesn't fit with Catholic education because we're fallen. We have a fallen nature and we do have to

be led by teachers. I don't know if I fully comprehend unschooling. Here's how I understand it. It's essentially that you allow your child to gravitate towards whatever he gravitates toward. And then you use that, whether it be Legos or plants or something, to then teach them. Because they will naturally want to know about that which they naturally love or are naturally interested in. So they say. Yeah. But I agree with you. I mean, if we're fallen, there needs to be some guidance there. We don't just open up the pantry and say, I'm going to, you know, un-nutrition you. It's a very bad idea.

It's a very bad idea. For that simple way of a darkened intellect, a weakened will, and disordered appetites, we gravitate towards things that aren't necessarily fulfilling or good for us. And unschooling, that's a danger. Yeah. I mean, I can appreciate where people are coming from, though, especially when you think of, like, kids who are, as you say, like in this coma of education.

They don't want to be taught these things. They're not interested in them. I can see, like, removing a child from that environment and allowing them just to be. And then to come alongside them. And so maybe I'm being unfair to what unschooling actually means. I honestly don't know enough about it to speak to it. I'm sure we'll get some angry comments.

If what you said about unschooling is what it is, then I would think it would be a bad idea, but not as bad as sending your kids to the public schools. Right. All right. Mark, doob. Is that doob or doobay? Doobay would be cooler.

Yes. If I was Mark Doob, I'd be like, it's doobay. It just might be. What type of environment typically enhances a child's ability to learn? Well, depending on what you mean by learning, Joseph Pieper says leisure time, time off, time that's downtime. You know, something like a beautiful library, a beautiful room, a comfortable room with books, great books and beautiful art maybe, or just a room with not much I think is an ideal setting if there's a tutor and a great book or if the book's the tutor. To me, that seems to be an ideal setting. That's beautiful. Yeah. Pope Mark

Dias says, Pope Francis has said that what has been done in the past does not work and we are seeing in our local community that kids are falling away from the church rapidly. Groups like Ascension Press and Dynamic Catholic have produced well-researched and engaging materials to be used to catechize our kids. How do we get the church hierarchy to embrace new teaching methods? You may disagree with that. Well, I think if we're going to do anything about teaching methods, we ought to encourage the church to go back to traditional teaching methods. Yeah, I agree. Traditional catechesis. Yeah. Traditional modes of learning. Memorization of the Baltimore Catechism would be a good thing,

I think. Well, it couldn't be a bad thing, right? But what we do think in terms of research and the new and the innovative, and this is very problematic, and this is the very problem with the public schools. Are we not falling into a sort of romanticism here, though, in suspecting that everything that happened back in the 20s or the 14th century may have been the way to do it? Well, no, no, and I hope not, because what was done then, what is essentially true, should be adapted for the age, for sure. Not in an innovative way, but in an organic way.

So in the sense that Confucius says, don't do to others what you don't want them to do to you. Christ perfected with do unto others. That's an organic growth because we all agree with the original principle. St. Louis explained that. And so, sure, if we take the liberal arts as they were and adapt them to today without innovating, then we can do something great with it. Michael O'Donnell says, does he see a classical Catholic education

flourishing more in a homeschooling or parochial school environment? This is an interesting question for you who teaches at a five-day-a-week public school. Yes, yes. I haven't seen parochial schools that do a classical Catholic or Catholic education. I haven't seen them. It doesn that do a classical Catholic or Catholic education. I haven't seen them.

It doesn't mean there aren't many out there. I know that over 100 dioceses have adopted the Common Core. That sets them far outside the possibility of being classical. And they may say they're classical because they take the Common Core and use excerpts from classical works, but that is far from classical. If I lived in your area, I don't think I'd send my kids to your school. I don't know much about it, but for would, for me, I would think I would rather homeschool my kids, and I think it would be optimal to homeschool my kids than to send them to your

school. I'm trying to be a bit prickly there. No, please do. Please do. You know, yes, I think in your circumstances, you should keep your kids and homeschool them, but I haven't seen a better public school. Than yours. Than mine. That's beautiful. And I'm very pleased what I'm doing with my scholars. Yeah. And the respect I have for their families. My principle is if your family teaches you anything that's contrary to what you're learning from, you go with your family. Yeah. It's the principle of truth.

So it's a good point. That's a good point. I also see some of these five-day-a-week schools can start off with the best of intentions and the best teachers. Yes. But then I've seen them morph into things that stopped looking like they originally were intended to be. Well, and that's the thing is we have core principles and values that are good. And what may go wrong sometimes is that if teachers don't understand the classical model, they can come in and not fulfill the mission. Whereas the other public schools are the opposite. The mission's bad. And sometimes you get

a teacher who comes in and does good because they bring the good with them yeah does that make sense yeah it does so it's it probably is always a better idea to to homeschool um yeah because of the practical and theoretical considerations would you ever but yeah i i presume you would say there's parents out there and they're like well this is all bloody well and good for you but i'm a single parent parent who's got to make a living, and I send my kids to this public school, and I kind of feel a little crapped on by you, Steve and Matt. Right. Because it sounds like you're saying I'm essentially abusing my kid while I'm working my butt off out of love for them. Right. How do you address that situation?

Because I think that's a fair reaction. Well, yeah, and it's a huge tragedy that there's so many broken families, or whatever reason that there's the difficulty of raising, single parents raising families. It's a true difficulty and one that we ought to be sympathetic and empathetic towards. Yeah, for sure. And to be fair, there are like single parents who are valiantly. Yes, absolutely. I mean, I often joke with my wife. I'm like, I'm not for polygamy, clearly, but if we could have several other people living here to do all the work that needs to be done.

My wife's like, you mean like a maid? I'm like, oh yeah, maybe we need a maid. It's exhausting doing it with two parents. And so, I mean, a lot of credit goes to those single parents who are doing this. And do the best you can. Get them to the best school you can. You can only do what you can do.

That's what makes it practically difficult. It's one thing to know the theory. It's another thing to carry it out. Yeah, yeah. I am sympathetic to the single parent. Joshua says, if the goal is a truly authentic classical education, but few know what that looks like

due to the slow degradation over the years, what hope is there in this being recovered, especially in the near term? For instance, I see personally that the school system, school systems don't do a good job teaching and forming kids. I myself am a byproduct of the system. However, it seems I am stuck with it because I don't know different and don't have options for schools that are any different. Can I just say that's an excellent question? Yes, I agree. An incredibly honest and

humble, beautiful question. Beautiful question. And Regina Celli is the seed for an answer to something like that. How many Regina Cellis are there all over the nation? I know they're popping up everywhere. They're popping up. There's Great Heart Schools popping up everywhere. Great Heart Schools? Great Heart Schools. Have you heard of those?

No. In Arizona, there's a group of schools called Great Heart Schools, and they're trying to inculcate the classical model, and schools are popping up all over the place. And in California, there'sate the classical model and schools are popping up all over the place. And in California, there's a few classical charter schools that are popping up. They're starting to come up. There may be a movement and that's a good thing if it is. Yeah. Elizabeth Moorhead says, should homeschooling parents need teaching experience? I'm not knocking homeschooling. I'm just concerned that that might be my only choice in the future, but I'm not

qualified to teach. And we've addressed this. Yeah, that's the perception because you're not an expert. Yeah. Yeah. We've addressed this somewhat, but yes. Yeah. Did you want to say anything more on that? I think the profession of teaching, it's a tricky, it's a tricky word. What do we mean when we say teach? Do we mean the art of controlling 30 kids at the same time? Or are you talking about truly imparting knowledge? Are you leading kids to truth? It depends on what you're talking about when you say qualified to teach.

I mean, you and I can look back and say, how many qualified teachers did I have? I can name my mentor, but that's almost it. Wouldn't you agree that many homeschooling parents are probably doing a valiant job and yet feel like they're failing miserably constantly? I would be sure. You can never do good enough. You can never do a good enough job for your children. Right. It's always difficult. Yeah. And do you think that's, I suspect

that many people get into homeschooling, they're nervous already about it because their parents are like, are you crazy? Why would you ever do that to your kids? So they already feel like, oh, I got to put the best face forward. I got to show how much my kids are learning. There's sickness and there's a messy house. Maybe speak to the parent out there that feels like this right now. You know what I would do? I think one of the huge, huge boulders of pressure on parents is that they don't just have to teach their kids as they intuitively know they have to. They also have to meet standards and show on a standardized test. If you could just abandon everything the state wants you to do, then that would take a ton of pressure off you.

And then you could, with peace and beauty, do what you're supposed to do. I think that's, I've seen it. I've seen parents haggard. And then when their kids don't score well, they're panicked when they haven't trained the kid to take the test in the first place, which probably isn't a very good test anyway. Right. Well, that's interesting you say that.

Because I'm sure there are a lot of parents who are like, I'm homeschooling my kids, but I'm doing that, but I expect that they should at least be able to pass these tests that you don't think that's necessary. Oh, no way. Most of the tests are just about material literacy anyway. And in fact, I mean, I suppose if you did a classical job that they would be able to take the test, but I would hope that it wouldn't compute. I would hope that it wouldn't fit.

Yeah. When I teach, my scholars this year had inordinately high test scores, and I didn't even know what the test was, nor did I think about it or teach to it because I don't know what it was. But teaching the principles that I'm teaching prepared them for that second thing of the test without having to think about it.

I think homeschooling parents shouldn't worry about the tests and the measurements because they're just not worthy. They're not fit for human consumption. And I go back to what Professor Swofford said earlier. If you just read good books to your kids on a couch, they'll be head and shoulders above. And if you did that and forgot about everything else,

not only would you be at peace, you would definitely prepare them infinitely better for life in the world than the public schools can. Marie Morrison says, we are in a post-Christian time. I think that's fair to say. Yes. As allusions to the Bible and Shakespeare's work

drop from everyday language and understanding, we lose the connection between classical literature and today's learners. For example, few will understand the David and Goliath reference or a Shakespearean quote such as, Methinks he doth protest too much. Great works of literature will not be accessible and their insights lost. Will this be averted in time?

First of all, my patrons are the greatest. Yes. How tuned in and awesome are they? They're so intelligent. That's beautiful. That's beautiful. I think it's a little late for that. Yeah, we're done. We're done. So what you're saying is there is no baby with the bathwater that can be saved when it comes to modern education. I would say that. I would say that. And especially if you think of screw

tape letters. I can't remember exactly where screw tape says this, but he says, only the learned read the great books and we've so dealt with them. I can't remember this quote, but that they can't read them either. What they ask about them is, who wrote that? What did his peers think about it? They ask the ridiculous questions. And so Satan has isolated us from the other ages.

Even when we read the great Shakespeare's, we're judging Shakespeare. We're not allowing the great Shakespeare's, we're judging Shakespeare. We're not allowing Shakespeare to judge us. We're judging Homer. We don't let Homer judge us. Yes. So we can recover that in our homes. We can recover that by having respect for the great works

and denying what the public schools are doing, which is they're taking chunks of these great works. They're saying it's, we're looking at classical literature, but they're doing modern historical criticism on them that ruins the work and defames the author in the process. That's what I've seen. That's spot on. Yeah. So it's a tragedy. So it's a lot worse than just not knowing what those references mean. It's that we no longer read great books. And even if we did, we wouldn't know what to do with them.

And even though we've been talking about this for the last couple of hours, just succinctly tell me why it's a problem that we don't read great books. And even if we did, we wouldn't know what to do with them. And even though we've been talking about this for the last couple of hours, just succinctly tell me why it's a problem that we don't read great books. Because there's great wisdom in the great Western tradition. There's our, what's the word? Our intellectual inheritance. Yeah, our inheritance that we're denying.

We've denied it. So there may have been a point in which we were standing on the shoulders of giants and we're explicating the works of the giants. Yeah. Now we've killed giants and we're trying to recreate it on our own. We're literally trying to stand on our own shoulders. Yeah. Is the problem. That's what we're doing.

That's a wonderful way to, what an analogy. I'm trying to imagine a person trying to stand on their own shoulders. That's what we're doing. Tucked up in a fetal position, rocking back and forward in a safe space. Contouring themselves into a coma. Yeah, but that's what we want to do. Stand on your shoulders. Look into the mirror.

Be completely subjective. And then criticize the great giants that turn out today to insult us rather than teach us. So the truth is it comes down to one word, docility. Docility is a bad word. Docility means to be teachable. And the modern world says to be docile is to be a slave. And the docere comes from to teach, the church doctors, to be teachable. Can you imagine having a school? Doctors. It all comes toceri. If you say, I want you to go to school, but I don't want you to be teachable. Right.

Yeah. To me, that's an insanity of the age. Docile is such a bad word. Do you think, I speak to a lot of teachers who say that if there's a troubled child and they try and tell the parents about it, they're very wary of it because very often the parents will blame the teacher instead of correct the student.

I don't know if this is a character of what's going on. No. It's not. No. So this sounds like what you're saying. Go to school, but don't you be teachable. You're in charge. You know what's best.

You're... And kids go home and inform on the teacher. And then it's a battle between the administration, who's trying to please the parent, who's mad at the teacher, who's trying between the administration, who's trying to please the parent, who's mad at the teacher, who's trying to defend themselves, who's in trouble with the administrator, but really kind of not in trouble.

It's a big cat and mouse game. I've seen this for a long time. Craig Ferguson, up there. Craig Ferguson says, by the way, in America, you say Craig. Yeah. In Australia, we say Craig. Okay.

Craig, here you go, mate America, you say Craig. Yeah. In Australia, we say Craig. Okay. Craig, how you going, mate? Craig. Yeah, it's funny. Because I'm like, hey, I'm Craig. I'm like, Craig. And I'm imagining he's spelling it C-R-E-G. Oh, you mean Craig. Oh, guy, Craig.

I get it now. Craig says, I am from Nova Scotia, Canada, and currently involved in the infancy stages of spearheading a Catholic school. Go for you, Craig. He says, prayer is at the forefront. However, can you provide three practical tips, very specific, that would help our team with the

preliminary stages of getting this school on its feet? I think you could do that. I would say get your cosmogony right. What do you mean by that? Get the origins of the universe right. Get your anthropology right, the Christian anthropology or the philosophical anthropology right. And I would also say get your human learning right. What is the nature of human learning?

The origin of language. If you really want the three best tips, the end is to master three orders. The order of reality, the order of thought, and the order of language. If you figure out what those things mean by grammar, logic, and rhetoric, then you'll be off on a good foot. Could you talk about the importance of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and how it applies to us as a microcosm? Yes. Because we're not really being taught that. No, not at all. We're being told we're being taught grammar, but what the modern world calls grammar and what grammar actually is supposed to be are two very different things. And we'd be wise to recover the essential definition of grammar and an

understanding of the nature of a liberal art as it applies to grammar. So grammar, people think it's nouns, verbs, and punctuation, and spelling, and stuff like that. And that is a small part of it. So I remember there was an ancient grammarian called Dionysius Thrax, about 100 AD, I think. And he has this hierarchy of grammar. At the very bottom, the smallest thing in grammar is prosody. And that means kind of to read fluently with the right inflection and tone. And that indicates that you get punctuation and all those things, right? So there's prosody, and then there's phraseology, then there's etymology,

then there's simile and metaphor and literary devices. And at the very top of grammar is exegesis, which means to demand from that work what it really means. Okay, this is the structure of grammar to an ancient grammarian. Now, we've taken grammar, we've taken prosody and recognized that to read fluently, we need to have proper punctuation, capitalization, decoding, and fluency. And that material breakdown of the lowest level of grammar has become our new grammar. And we take that to be our whole grammar when it's not.

I see. But grammar is more than that still. To acquire grammar properly means to exegese, to demand from it really what it really means, means to see the relationship between a word as the incarnation of an idea that is a real thing that was created by the creator. So essential categories of grammar are nouns and verbs, and they correspond to time and space, or space and time. Right? Grammar is pointing to reality, not just to constructs on a written page. So grammar needs to be really fleshed out, as does logic and as does rhetoric.

You know, this reminds me of the marriage debate we were having several years ago here in this country. Like marriage is a term that refers to an actual concept that cannot be other than what it is. Right, a natural and divine institution. Yeah. Something similar could be said of grammar. Yeah.

Yes, these are real things we're talking about, not arbitrary, not meant for us to just do whatever we want with or to give false values to. So we overvalue nouns and verbs not seeing their relationship to space and time. That's complicated. We get so many of these good questions. Yes. space and time. That's complicated. We get so many of these good questions.

John DeRosa says, what are his thoughts of just privatizing all education and doing away with the public school model entirely? Obviously, that's not going to happen anytime soon, but would you push for this in a smaller country or a particular state on the US if it were feasible?

Anything would be better than our public schools. Yeah. Right? Anything. I'd advocate even more than that. I mean, not just privatized, but we really need to come together under the principle of subsidiarity

in our communities. Yeah. And rediscover how it is we're going to transmit culture of civilization before it's too late. If you read Abolition of Man, we need to read that first and then discover. Isn't it too late already, though? Patrick Coffin, my mate, used to work with me at Catholic Answers, joked about writing a book that was entitled, Where Are We Going and Why Are We in This Handb Yeah. Yeah, that's cute. How do you remain optimistic or realistic?

You know, hopefully your optimism is realistic. I spend time with, I think I'm realistic. I spend time with 60 scholars and their families. And every day is a joy. For the last 28 years, I've had nothing but joy every day. Even when I'm playing cat and mouse with my bosses. I'm just loving working with these families. And for the most part, the families appreciate it in a big way. And the popping up of these schools, like Regina Chaley and your school and these other schools,

is a response to the revulsion we're all experiencing due to a dumbed down education that treats us as means, not as ends. That's right. Yeah, I'm hopeful and I probably shouldn't be. No, I think you should be. I am hopeful. Christopher West uses that analogy of, like, you can only eat from a dumpster so long until you start getting sick. Yeah. The point being sexual immorality and then looking at the true purpose of man.

That's right. Something similar here, I think, with education, too. Oh, no doubt. No doubt. People are getting sick. Yeah. The society's sick. It's insane.

It's insane. Yeah, it's very sick. With these bloody Democrats now pushing for fourth-stage abortions, like actual infanticide, just killing children. Well, it's logically sound, right? It's logically sound. On the premise that murder of innocents is okay. We're actually talking... I mean, this is demonic.

It's evil. It's sheer evil. And I'd say something similar is happening in the school, but it's a lot more veiled because it appears by the shadow on the wall to be benevolent. And education itself is a benevolent thing, but carried out in this way, I think we just can't see it.

All right. Lilia Rosales says, I know this is late, but where the heck do I start? I want to homeschool, but I'm the kind of person that needs an outline of what to do. Does he have any suggestions for a homeschool program?

Well, we talked about the Angelicum Academy. I think they have an outline for a homeschooling program that's solid. Yeah. And I would say just start. Start today. Yeah. If you typed in Catholic homeschool curriculum or materials, you'd find stuff. Would you?

I haven't looked. Yeah, I don't know enough about it. There are programs seat and program yeah there you go divine grace yes mother of divine grace that's what i would say a little yeah check out mother of divine grace that's excellent yeah father anthony says how can parents without an education themselves especially without a classical education give their own children an education i think father's onto something you can't give what you don't have but the beautiful thing is that you yourself can become classically educated. Yeah. Learn to read.

Yeah. And again, with these programs that we can put in place to begin to teach our children, you'll discover just how much you didn't learn as a kid. Right, right. Even the fact that my kids can recite all the states and capitals freaks people out. Yeah, and it's beautiful. It is pretty impressive. Yeah, and I thought of something C.S. Lewis said here.

You know, I think we're so confused about putting kids in grades and segregating them and giving them age-appropriate stuff. C.S. Lewis says this, and I think it's profoundly true. He says, what you read with a 10-year-old ought to be something you love to read when you're 50. Oh, man. And can I give you another example? Yes. Tom and Jerry, the cartoons, the old cartoons from like the 70s. When were they?

I don't even remember. Yes. Well, you know those old cartoons like the Roadrunner? Oh, yeah. These were beautiful cartoons. Were they? That were violent and hilarious. 50-year-olds enjoy watching them with their kids.

Now we've made them all appropriate and psychotic and they're stupid and politically correct and so uninteresting that an adult wouldn't want to watch the kinds of cartoons children are being exposed to today. I know there's a big difference between literature and... I was thinking classics, but yeah, sure. You were thinking classics. This just goes to show where I am as opposed to where you are.

But no, I think there is something to be said there. Oh, definitely. I love showing the sorts of cartoons that apparently are inappropriate to show kids today. Right. Just like I love reading books to kids. Yeah, just like you're saying, like Narnia. Read the Grimm's Fairy Tales, Narnia.

Yeah, parents love that. Yes, and the modern critics hate them. Good. Read what modern critics hate. Yeah, read what the modern critics hate. They didn't like Lord of the Rings. Yeah. But the fairy tales, Aesop's Fables are delightful.

Aesop's Fables. Read Aesop's, read Hans Christian Andersen, read the Italian folk tales. Speaking of Christian Andersen, what's his name? Hans Christian Andersen. Maybe talk about the emperor who has no clothes. The emperor's new clothes is a wonderful metaphor for modern education. The emperor's new clothes is the very vainglorious emperor who just obsesses about having a different outfit to wear every day. He's so vainglorious emperor who just obsesses about having a different outfit to wear every day. He's so vainglorious. He's imprudent. He's blinded by his vainglory. And some people in the countryside hear of this emperor and decide to come up with a swindle. They come to him and tell

him for the right amount of gold and silk, they can make him the most precious and beautiful cloth ever. And it's so special and magical that those who can't see it aren't fit for their stations. And so what they do is they set up these looms and they pretend to weave this cloth. It's invisible. And they make this invisible outfit for the emperor. And the emperor sends his emissaries to see it. And the emissaries go to see it. And they're horrified that they can't see it. So they lie and say, if I tell the king I can't see it, I'm going to get fired. So it goes, oh, it's beautiful. So everyone says how beautiful it is. It tells the emperor. And then the emperor sees it, doesn't see it, but says, if I don't see it, then I'm not fit to be emperor. And puts it on,

of course, and walks around the town in a parade without his clothes on. And it takes a little kid to look at the emperor and say, the emperor is naked. And everyone's scandalized. But the reason the kid said the emperor's naked is not because he was smart, but because he was innocent. And so I liken that to the public schools in the sense that educational experts bring these programs that are essentially invisible cloth. And the empress, mother education, is constantly putting on new programs and throwing them off. And you watch, the new thing to replace the common core insults the common core as it sheds it off and puts the new invisible garment on. And it's just as bad as the last one, if not worse.

And you've got to play along with the game. You've got to agree. Because if you criticize, in fact, we were told in our public schools, you're an onboard terrorist. You're a what? You're an onboard terrorist. I would criticize a program. They'd say, well, you're an onboard terrorist. You're ruining our school. Or they'd have metaphors like, get on the bus or leave the school. This type of pressure to see and acknowledge that it's good, or you're really out. There's no diversity of opinion there. I'm seeing that in the kind of left-leaning political people in this society. Sure. Like you have to call the dismembering of an innocent child women's health care and choice. Right.

And if you go, oh, but we're actually like killing little people and maybe that's not cool, you're out. You're out. You're not fit. You're not woke enough. You're hateful to women. Yeah. Or you're a racist or something.

Yeah. You're Hitler. Yeah, you're Hitler. You're obviously Hitler. Right. That's going to be frustrating for you as somebody who's lost relatives're Hitler. Yeah, you're Hitler. You're obviously Hitler. Right. That's going to be frustrating for you as somebody who's lost relatives in the concentration camps, you were telling me earlier. Yes. If someone disagrees with you now.

I'm a Nazi. You're a Nazi. And that hurts. Yeah, it's hurtful. It's a hurtful thing. Yeah, it's crazy. What do you say to people who are actually Nazis? You know what I actually say?

Nothing. I just smile. I go, it just dumbfounds me. And I pity that. I pity that. I think it's really sad. And I think if someone is actually a Nazi, it's perfectly okay to call them a Nazi.

Right. But if they're not, like Donald Trump is not a Nazi. He's not in fact a Nazi. You can say he's gross. You can say that he's immoral. You can say a lot of these things that could be accurate. But calling him a Nazi isn't actually true.

And fascism is really more a thing of the left anyway. Similar to communism. You're not allowed to disagree. You're not allowed to have civil debate about a thing. You're not allowed to just simply be autonomous or have your own free will. It's a denial of free will. Was there a time, I don't know because I'm not from America, so I'm claiming ignorance here.

Was there a time where there was more freedom of thought in the more left-leaning people than in the right? Because as someone who hopes to be, none of us are objective observers. All of us are biased. I know I'm biased. But hopefully my bias lines up with the truth. When I look at the people on the so-called far left, there doesn't seem to be any diversity of thought at all. And if you question secular dogma, you're absolutely ostracized, excommunicated, with no hope of repentance and reconciliation.

Whereas I see on the right, I actually see people who do criticize Donald Trump or totally disagree with some of the things that he's done. And there seems to be more freedom of thought there. Was there a time in the United States that you can remember where it was the other way around? I don't know. I don't know American history as well as I'd like to. But you can look at the federalist papers, the founding papers, and you can see a diversity of thought and a spirit of debate. And, of course, I think this country was built on civic discourse, civil discourse and disagreement and debate.

Where's all this tribalism coming from then? Because that's what it feels like. We're in different warring tribes and you cannot concede any ground to your opponent or if you're a traitor. That's right. I think the matrix is probably beginning with nominalism, philosophical, nominalism through the

Enlightenment, and then you watch it manifest politically in the formation of the schools, and the schools teach people to be like this. But I think the ground is philosophical. I think part of it seems like a breakdown in religion. Well, religion was the thing to be denied by nominalism. If you deny universals, then that's the inroad to skepticism,

denying the creator, denying the possibility of knowing the creator. That's the attack on theology. And then so then we can't know truth. Right. And so all we can hope for is power over each other maybe? Well, starting with the Enlightenment, that was the attack on the, well, it was exclusively reason, right? The age of reason they called it. Yeah.

But reason cut off from objective reality led to power, where Francis Bacon said knowledge is power, right? And that's a huge mistake. Which leads to Marxism. Sure, which leads to the material dialectic, right? And then communism and Marxism and the other fascist eugenics and all these other ideologies that people aren't able to think through fully because we've already denied theology.

We've done away with, which is the beauty of Catholicism. Yes. I think it was Luther who referred to reason as the devil's whore. Yes. That's an example of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Sure it is.

Whereas you have found as a convert the reconciliation of faith and reason. Faith and reason, yes. And it was actually never anything to reconcile to begin with. Right, it's an integral whole. Right, it's a single thing, faith and reason. And it was actually never anything to reconcile to begin with. Right, it's an integral whole. Right, it's a single thing, faith and reason. And that's our epistemology.

It's very beautiful. Let's talk about some practical ways we can educate ourselves. I said we'd get to this. I want to get to it. Yes. So many of us are feeling really overwhelmed. We barely have time to, gosh, who knows what. Well, you know what?

Maybe we do have time. I'm sick and tired, actually, of saying I don't have time. You have time for the Holy Mass. You have time for daily prayer. If I have time for Netflix, if I have time to check different accounts on social media. Netflix goes first, right. Yeah. If I've got time for that, how dare I say I don't have time.

It's not that I don't have time. It's that I don't have love. Right. You know? I love the way you put that. Yeah. How do we begin to love what we ought to love? How do we begin to educate ourselves in these works?

I think the principle, the foundational principle, and this is really where we should begin, is that we are in the age of doing, right? And we have abandoned considerations of being. So we believe that what we do is what we become. And in some modes, that holds. But the truth is what we become. And in some modes that holds, but the truth is what we are, our nature is the field of what we can do. So we need to stop focusing so much on what we ought to do and focus on how we ought to be. I think we begin there. If you don't focus on

how we ought to be and the fact that virtue answers the questions about how we ought to be cultivated, how we have to have our wills formed and our intellects cultivated. And if we don't adopt these habits of virtue, habits to have to be this way, then what we do won't really matter. The way the public schools read Shakespeare is a perfect example of doing, doing, doing and doing it wrong because we don't have the habits of being, of literacy, of apprehending, doing, doing, doing, doing it wrong because we don't have the habits of being, of literacy, of apprehending, of judging and reasoning properly to even enjoy a great book. So we need to go back and recognize we need to put the soul back in order. And that requires an understanding of head, heart, and belly, of the intellect, the will, and our appetites, and get the order of

love as Augustine would tell us, and give things their right value. See, that's very beautiful what you just said. Make it more practical for us. Someone's listening and they're like, I really want to begin doing what this guy's talking about. Okay, stop trying to do what I'm talking about, and we have to talk about how we can become, how we can be, not become, but be. How do we be? We ask the question, what are you? We have to answer that question first. If the school's conditioned us to believe that we are an animal, a trousered ape, or if we're just a lab rat, then we're trying to find things from the environment to make us better. And that's a huge mistake. Can't do that. So habits of being are formed with things like the Holy Mass, with things like prayer,

with things like communal time, with things like the Holy Mass, with things like prayer, with things like communal time, with things like practicing charity, those kinds of things form the being. Or practicing virtue as well. That wasn't terribly helpful. I'm trying to think of a practical way. I'd like more time to think about that. Well, let me throw some ideas at you, right? Because here's what I'm trying to do.

Because we used the analogy of food earlier. And I'm somebody who used to eat a lot of junk food, who's finally getting to a point where I not only am eating healthy, for the most part, didn't this morning, but I'm beginning to enjoy eating healthy. I didn't think that was possible. Right. Like I thought it would be something where I'd have to continually, you know,

pull and push and prod my will and convince it and bribe it. It's actually the point where I'm like, actually, the idea of soda is gross to me. Great. The idea of eating some fatty McDonald's hamburger. Oh, why would you? It's not even food, is it? I'm not sure.

And I figure if I can do that with my appetite, I can do that with my intellect and my... It's a beautiful analogy. Yeah. That works. Right. And so one thing I've begun doing is seriously limiting my ability to the things that are fragmenting my interior disposition or things that are suffocating my interior life.

By interior life, I think I mean that internal dialogue that goes on within me when I'm alone. You have a conscience and you have an intellect. Yeah, and just the conversations that go on in my head when I'm alone. It's interesting to me that we don't think that that's that necessary. We don't think it's necessary. Sure it is. Because we plug our headphones in and listen to podcasts like this one all day

because we hate ourselves and don't want to be alone with ourselves and can't bear to think about the mess that our life is. And so we're distracting ourselves with the Matt Fradd show right now. Stop it. Turn me off. Turn it off. Yeah. But it's like you have to think that that's all going on for a reason.

But if I'm continually plugged in and scrolling and distracting, I'm never actually something. You're never having that dialogue. So I think the first thing to do is to begin to shut down and shut off these many and varied distractions that we are using to anesthetize ourselves from that pain. And then there's going to be some space where we can dedicate to something that's true and good and beautiful. And for me, that was, I'm going to begin to read books that are good, partly because I want to be thought of as a smart person. That's a bad motive. But don't be afraid of your bad motives.

I think it's important that we're honest with ourselves. I would like to be the sort of person that people think is smart. Like, yeah, you're an idiot. That's okay. But soon enough, the good authors will beat that we're honest with ourselves. I would like to be the sort of person that people think is smart. Like, yeah, you're an idiot. That's okay. But soon enough, the good authors will beat that out of you. Better to start there. Don't be afraid of your mixed motives. And I would say to the people listening,

start with some short stories like H.G. Wells, I Love the Time Traveler, for example, or something else. Flannery O'Connor's short stories or something. Begin there because I think for many of us who were raised in this public education system or Catholic education system, we don't feel competent enough to read those things or that we could possibly enjoy them.

If you can set yourself a small goal, read this short book, you might discover that you actually love it a lot more than you thought you would. That happened to me. And now I'm just, that's what I want to do. I don't actually want to binge on Netflix. That's right. That's what I'm saying. That happened to me. Right. And now I'm just, that's what I want to do. Right. I don't actually want to binge on Netflix. That's right. That's what I'm saying. That's right.

But all this was preceded by the internal disposition of the desire to want to with cooperating with grace to be better. Yeah. To remediate. Yeah. Can I make one comment on your inner dialogue? Please. The schools talk about this a lot. They say that they have a word called

metacognition. And they say this is thinking about your thinking. And they call that the dialogue. The schools talk about this a lot. They say that they have a word called metacognition. And they say, this is thinking about your thinking. And they call that the dialogue. And that's also a term in psychology, which means to think about how you're feeling and thinking. But the classical term for that, and something very different would be reflection. The reflective nature of our intellects means we're not just thinking about our own thinking. We're thinking about our own thinking in relation to reality, not in relation to ourselves. It's too easy to become solipsistic in that dialogue, right? So we should be more reflective, meaning look to the creator. Look to the nature of things.

Start to do that. Get that disposition to recover. I want to know truth. Joseph Pieper has a great line. He says, the loss of leisure is a spiritual malaise. We have lost, when you can't spend leisure time with good books, it's because we've damaged our spiritual capacity. So a sign of that, he says, is boredom. This is the sin of sloth. The sin of sloth. Acedia. Yes, it is. So we're busy active. That's acedia. Right. Sloth. Yeah. It's a huge

problem. So I encourage people to think about reflection rather than metacognition, which is the modern expert word. This is excellent. I want you to keep talking about this so I understand it more fully. Okay. So, because, yeah, I know exactly what you mean.

You get caught into this loop that isn't actually in connection with God. Right, right. And you could make it be all about you and how you're feeling and how you... It's almost like this is the difference between philosophy and modern psychology. Exactly.

Exactly right. And it is the difference. And one is, if you think of modern psychology, it's brain science now. Yeah. And so the modern schools think you think with the brain, whereas we know in the classical schools you think through the brain.

It's instrumental. And we're talking about the mind, which is immaterial, as opposed to a brain that does this and add this and add this. The whole model's different. So how do you break out of that loop to become reflective as opposed to, what was the other term you used?

As opposed to metacognitive. Metacognition. I love your idea of having that internal disposition to say, I'm going to have a certain kind of belief in myself that I can take this small work and get through it. And I'm going to get from somebody who knows better than I do what a good work is. Trust some teachers.

Find some good teachers. We're actually good at that. We're not great at teaching ourselves. But we are pretty good at knowing the difference between a Thomas Aquinas and a sophist. Sophist isn't such a bad word today. Right. Somebody who sounds cleverist isn't such a bad word today. Right. Somebody who sounds clever but isn't saying anything.

Yeah, I can't think of any horrendous teachers or John Dewey. The difference between Thomas Aquinas and John Dewey, we can actually tell that if we're thoughtful. And so trust Thomas Aquinas and say, I would take his advice on a little short book to read and say, I'm going to read this little short work. You're not going to get it. Put it away and come back to it.

May not get it. Put it away and come back to it. And this helps us to be more reflective. Helps you be more reflective and reflect on it. Not personally. Don't ask the questions. Do I like it? How does it appeal to me?

Ask the question, is that good? Does that really correspond to a virtue? What are the virtues? I mean, those are good places to start. What is it that satisfies man's heart? What is it that makes you truly happy to be face-to-face with God with your powers fully realized

and perfect peace? That's the end. That's true happiness as opposed to even the acquisition of virtue, which makes us happy, and that's a real good as opposed to material happiness, which is very temporary, very short.

Again, I think one of the prerequisites to this reflectiveness is to cease allowing ourselves to be so fragmented internally. We fragment our concentration with a million different things and then feeling capable of concentrating on something of substance. And so what I did this past August is I gave up the internet for the whole month. No email, no nothing. I didn't touch a keyboard. Really?

It actually got to about the, I shouldn't lie to you, it got to about the 24th of the month and I gave in because my website was hacked, the church scandals broke and I gave in unfortunately. But still 24 days. That's pretty good. And I was able to read the Brothers Karamazov in 20 days without it feeling burdensome in the slightest. And then when I got back online, I realized how difficult it was to keep up my habit of reading.

So we just got to. I've got to think. I'm not that unusual. I think this advice which applies to me has got to apply to others as well. You have got to thoroughly limit your technological use. I like to talk about this. When know, when I was a child, I'm sure you as well, if you wanted to get in touch with my mum or dad or me or my brother or sister, you had three options and only three options.

Number one, you could call the phone that was bolted to the wall in my kitchen and made for awkward conversations where I'd be chatting with girls while mum was cooking the dinner. Like, mom, it's two in the afternoon. Do you really even need to get up? Secondly,

you could write me a letter, right? Post it to my address. Thirdly, you could come and physically look for me. If I wasn't home, you could go down to the shops and say, oi. And I'd be like, yeah, that was it. That was it. That's right. Now, were people less fragmented and distracted then? Maybe, maybe not. I mean, I think we could fragment. Oh, I think we were not.

I think that's true, but I'm saying it's not that people weren't capable of it. I mean, we plunged ourselves into crossword puzzles and drink and TV and radio. We can always find ways to distract ourselves. It's just become a crap load easier now to do it than it was back then. No doubt. Because now there's 700

ways by which people can get in touch with me even if I don't want them to. Thankfully, I don't run my own social media. I don't even have the passwords. I had the guy who runs it now change it all. But I'll have people like, why aren't you answering me? And they'll say this on the public wall. I wrote you a private message. I'm like, well, I can't even if i wanted to didn't see it but like who do

you who do you think would you think i just waiting to answer random people's questions thousands what right do you have to have me you know yeah but this is the world in which we live with a new norm right it's normalized right right the more friend facebook you cannot live the intellectual life and live in that world you You cannot. So what do you do personally to remain unconnected and more concentrated? Well, luckily, I'm a little older, so I'm not as—we weren't brought up with this. Less than you, I was brought up without all the computers and phones and stuff. And so I think it's a lot easier for me than it is for our children. I have the pleasure of reading every day because with my scholars, I'm reading with them things that I love to read. So every day is an intellectual adventure,

and I'm challenging them every day with first principles, principles of truth. So it's an easy one. For the last 30 years, I've been doing this. No, I shouldn't say that. I should say the last 20 years, I've been digging into great books because it's my job. And now that I write on education, I have to look and see what Thomas says because I'm not a philosopher, even though I taught philosophy over at school over here. But I'm very lucky to be a teacher. I see what you're saying, that you weren't raised with this.

Right. And I often do think, though, sometimes parents will look at younger kids and say, gosh, look how distracted they are while the parents are on their phone. I mean, I know some people in their 50s and 60s who are seriously addicted to their phone and can't stop looking at it. So I don't necessarily think, I think it has required some probably decision on your part not to get sucked into that. Oh, and I have my own issues

with it, of course, but it's not too bad. The work on my computer is always writing on education. So even though it's a screen, at least I'm doing intellectual work because I've always got a book next to my computer where I'm marrying. So I'm using the technology. It's not using me. Yeah. I spend a lot of time on my computer, but not. And I do waste time, too. Don't get me wrong.

Yeah. It's a distraction. But I do have to make efforts to say, no, I'm not going to look at Facebook. I'm not going to look at these other things, and I'm going to concentrate on my work. I've built up a habit of doing that. I've even taken it in the morning, getting up at 4 or 5, and no computer, just reading a book. You're a good man.

Do that in the morning. What time do you go to bed? Do you get up at 4 or 5? I don't know. You must know what time you go to bed. Anywhere from 8 to midnight. You wake up like five hours later, six hours later, and you just become accustomed to that? Yes, it's just like the food thing. I'm not a

morning person. I am now. Hated it, but now I love it. I just can't get enough of it. So I'm reading old books on the liberal arts like Cassiodorus and all the church fathers and the doctors, and it's such a joy. These great teachers from across the ages use noble language, and they nourish me, And it's so beautiful. 30 years ago, I would have been revolted. Yeah, I've made the decision to get up at six every morning now, which is not yet to five, but I'd like to get to that. I need to get up before the kids wake up.

Yeah. Oh, it's the best time of the day. Make coffee. Yeah. Sit alone in the house. So this is how I pray in the morning. It's not terribly interesting. I'm not really in like a real kind of like,

I just want to have the heart to heart with our Lord. I don't know why I have an American accent when I do that. That was good. I wake up. I stumble to my icon corner. I light candles and I do the morning chants. Perfect. And I don't feel terrific.

I think one of the things that prevents us from praying regularly is that we have a preconceived idea of how we ought to feel when we're praying. Yes. And when we don't feel that way, we think it's not appropriate, insufficient. That's right. We're not doing it right, and so we give it up. And that's a trick of the devil. That's one of the reasons I like sort of regimented or, what do you say,

sacramental prayer or... La Rosary. Yeah, liturgical kind of prayer. Right. Yeah, because you don't have to worry about how you feel. You just do it. You do it as a commitment, and you know every word coming out of your mouth.

It's beautiful. Yeah. I do that same thing in the morning. Rosary every morning. Do you? Won't miss it. Can't miss it for many years now. I attribute everything joyful in my life to that.

Is that right? Oh, absolutely. You wake up, you just start praying the rosary? Pray rosary every day. I can everything joyful in my life to that. Is that right? Oh, absolutely. Do you wake up? Do you just start praying the rosary? Pray rosary every day. I can't miss it. Well, that's another example of what I was saying. You have this, I should feel a certain way.

Yeah. And I really do think that gets in the way sometimes. I haven't had that problem because I learned early on that right now feelings are huge and they subordinate intellect, which makes it rationalizing rather than thinking, and then your heart's something else. But you've got to reverse the order. Your intellect has to subordinate intellect, which makes it rationalizing rather than thinking, and then your heart's something else. But you've got to reverse the order. Your intellect has to subordinate your feelings. Your intellect has to subordinate, yeah.

So by right use of reason, you subordinate your appetites to their appropriate level. They'll carry you away. And how you feel about it doesn't matter. To do the right thing is to do the right thing. Especially prayer, the one thing necessary. In the Byzantine church, we often say, glory to Jesus Christ, and the response is glory forever.

I'm sharing this not to brag. I'm a hopeless Christian who wants to be a saint. But this is just, you know, I know that there are people who are looking for real tangible, concrete things to do. And one of the things I'll do is when I wake up in the morning, the first moment I'm conscious or I am aware of myself being conscious, I'll say glory to Jesus Christ. And if my wife hears me, she says glory forever.

Nice. Isn't that nice? It's just something simple. And I would recommend our listeners, you know, like here's an example. If you're bitching and moaning about how difficult it is to pray in the morning, let me slap you about a bit and say you can at least do this.

Yes. Fall out of your bed onto your knees. Yes. And say God be merciful to me, a sinner. Yes. Fall out of your bed onto your knees. Yes. And say, God be merciful to me, a sinner. Yes. Say that three times. Trace the cross of Christ over yourself, and then that's it. Sure.

Three hair on marriage. I actually like what Jordan Peterson, you a fan of Jordan Peterson or not? I've read his books. Some of the things he says are good. One of the things he says is, ask yourself, what could I do? Yes. And what would I do to push my life in the right direction? I really like that.

It's not just what could I do, because there are things I could do, but let's be honest, I'm not going to do them. So it's like, well, what could you do that you would do that would make your life better? Yes. One of the things all of us could do, and we probably would do,

is fall onto our knees and do something very simple like that. Agreed. And I also like what he says, and this is just common sense, and I don't think Jordan Peterson in common sense, and he's not, I don't think Jordan Peterson in that book, 12 Rules for Life, is pretending to be profound. He recognizes that

in an insane culture, simple advice. There's very simple common sense. Yeah, common sense advice is pretty wise, but don't expect so much of yourself because you're a schmuck. You're actually pretty awful,

and you might want to begin living a heroic holy life but you can't right because have you seen you you're a mess so don't worry i love that start small it's just true too start small we're fallen and the world lies and says you are beautiful just the way you are and you're perfect the way you are don't let anyone tell you otherwise and. It's a very destructive message. Very destructive. But that's what the schools teach as well as we descend further and further into the morass. How have you seen that in our schools? Oh my goodness.

I remember a few years back, maybe it was many years back, I don't remember how many, but we have rules. So we write in their CUME folders. They say, we're supposed to write how the student's doing. And we have a rule that says

you can't write anything negative. Right? This is the folder that the teachers the next year read. You can't write anything negative about a student? You're not supposed to. Because if someone read it, it would hurt their feelings. So we're concerned with how people feel. And I even used to say, don't tell them no. They say, can I go early Temes to recess? I said, yes, you can, in two years. And then... You're being told in public schools, not to say no to students.

I remember this was a phase. Oh, it's repulsive. Well, you say, well, if you reject them, they feel bad. So you say something like, yes, that would be great if you did that, but let's wait till we get, let's do this next week or, you know, and hope they forget or so. I don't know. It's awful.

It really is. My friend, my friend, know, and hope they forget. I don't know. It's awful. It really is. My friend Peter Kloponis, he's a psychologist. He told me that at his child's university, they've ceased using red pen because the students find it too triggering. That's right. You can't make this crap up. You can, but it all starts, yeah.

I don't know where it starts. Yeah. I think with Satan. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, look, this has just been a bloody pleasure. For me.

Yeah, i've thoroughly enjoyed it thank you so much thank you so much matt how can people learn more about you i i know you sent me over several articles you've written which i intend to read yes um i'm writing a book as well i'm writing a book called the crisis of faith and reason in the catholic school and to understand it i'm writing a lot about what's wrong with the public schools and that should be out in a while. It's taking me longer than I'd hoped. But I think that would be helpful.

I'm going to try to make it common sense and accessible so that people can understand what's truly wrong with the public schools. And then hopefully make some better decisions, maybe homeschooling or hybrid homeschooling or at least themselves trying to acquire new habits of being. So until that book comes out, what would be like one to three books you would recommend that our viewers should check out? I thought about this question and books do us no good if we truly don't know how to read them or we don't demand from them what they're truly saying. So if we've been trained and taught to read it and judge the book, we ought to try to undo that habit and get a good book off of a good recommendation from a good teacher and let that book instruct us. So if that's going to be the case, I really think C.S. Lewis is the man who arbiters and translates the great Western

tradition into what it's supposed to be for today. So I think starting with something like The Abolition of Man, it's actually a little bit difficult. I'm reading it again and again and again. I keep getting something new out of it. And whatever books you choose to read, read them again and again, or they're probably not good books. But The Abolition of Man is one that's really helped me to highlight what's so subtly wrong with the undergirding philosophies that are invisible to what they're propagating in the schools. And he said this in 1946, and it's multitudes worse today. It's even more subtle because it doesn't look that bad, but it is. So C.S. Lewis for sure, and he wrote a bunch of essays on education too,

which I found very helpful. Are you talking about education specifically? Yeah, education specifically, but also people who want to begin living the intellectual life and are tired of plunging themselves into diversion. I think we're going to have to make a resource site. Yeah, let's do it. And I think we can, with these questions in mind, maybe have it be a place where parents that want to know what to do can come to and get some ideas to get started. I think it's a good idea. And I have tons of ideas, but it's got to be laid out. But your articles can be read online too? Yes, yes.

I've written under Stephen Jonathan Rummelsberg. I have over 150 articles on education, culture. I have one on law, on language, on all these topics I bring up. Everything I've said today I've written out in better articulation than I have here. Well, here's what I'll do for our viewers. I'll throw a link beneath the video that will show a list of your articles

for people to check out. Okay, great. This has been great. Thank you so much. Yes, it's been great. Thank you so much, Matt.