A Resurgence in Classical Education Across the Pond | Jamie Burns and Hin-Tai Ting

On this episode of Anchored, Soren is joined by Jamie Burns and Hin-Tai Ting, co-founders of the Fellowship for Classical Learning and educators setting up classical schools across the UK. They discuss the current state of education in the UK and the troublesome separation of value-conversations from classroom-conversations. They dive into their own journeys to believing in the importance of a classical Christian education from both an intellectual and personal perspective. They conclude by talking about some of the roadblocks to classical education in the UK and why they are motivated to overcome them. 

St. Anselm’s, School co-founded by Jamie Burns: https://www.stanselmscardiff.co.uk/ 

The Fountain Christian School, of which Hin Tai Ting is the founding headmaster: https://www.thefountainschool.london/ 

Transcript

Soren Schwab - CLT (00:01.112)
Welcome back to the Anchored Podcast, the official podcast of the Classic Learning Test. My name is Soren Schwab, VP of Partnerships here at CLT, and today we're joined by Jamie Burns and Hintai Ting. Jamie is a husband and father who has been in education for the last 10 years. He completed the Teach First Leadership Development Program in Cardiff, Wales, and then worked in various roles in multi-academy trusts. He has now begun establishing a family of classical Christian schools across the UK. Hintai Ting has spent most of his teaching career

Hin-Tai Ting (00:08.365)
Okay.

Hin-Tai Ting (00:29.048)
Thank

Soren Schwab - CLT (00:30.882)
working under the visionary headmistress, Catherine Burblesing at Michaela Community School in London, England's number one most successful school by academic progress. He is now in the process of setting up the Fountain Christian School, a new classical Christian school in London, and together they are the co-founders of the Fellowship for Classical Learning. And we're so excited to have them on the podcast. Gentlemen, welcome.

Hin-Tai Ting (00:36.676)
you

Thank

Jamie Burns (00:54.086)
Soren, thank you. It's great to be with you.

Hin-Tai Ting (00:57.051)
Thank you, Zoran. It's lovely to be here.

Soren Schwab - CLT (00:58.734)
Absolutely, it's great to speak with fellow Europeans. We had a little pre-conversation and Jamie and Hentai said, know, there might be some things we're saying that the American audience might not understand. So I'm going to try to be either the translator or the clarifier. So I'm super excited about this conversation. As we always do, we start the Anchor podcast by talking about our guests own educational background. I'm going to start with you, Jamie, talk to us a little about your own

kind of upbringing in your school experience.

Jamie Burns (01:30.938)
Yeah, we are very, very average school experience, sorry. That as you'll begin to discover a bit more as we go throughout this conversation, the English school system has been on a steady decline, as is true of many school systems in the West. And I got what we know in England and New Wales and Scotland as a comprehensive school education, which is a standard state school, broad range of abilities, just a classic public school in the US.

Hin-Tai Ting (01:56.141)
it.

Jamie Burns (02:01.061)
and very, very much, you know, did reasonably well. But the teachers, the teaching were fairly average. My peers and I didn't get pushed as hard as we could have done. But, and this I think is pertinent to this conversation in particular, my father didn't. My father got a classical education. He is 74 years old. He then

Hin-Tai Ting (02:06.006)
Thank

Jamie Burns (02:30.308)
went to an English public school, he then went to Oxford and read greats. And what that meant was that my home life was full of accidental classical education. He would say he unintentionally gave us a classical education, I think. And so I had this contrast of being at school and receiving a relatively average, reasonable, not awful, but not great education and a home.

Hin-Tai Ting (02:32.483)
Okay.

Jamie Burns (02:57.87)
living with a father who would regularly get his Greek lexicon out at the dinner table to explain the etymology of words and talk to us about some Greek myth that seemed irrelevant to our lives at the time. But in hindsight, it's a wonderful gift.

Hin-Tai Ting (03:00.662)
Okay.

Soren Schwab - CLT (03:13.656)
Awesome. Hintai, what about you?

Hin-Tai Ting (03:15.266)
Great, so yeah, I was born in Hong Kong and my family moved over to England when I was one year old. One of the reasons for that was for the sake of my and my siblings education. But it's very interesting because I ended up going to, again, I was in the state school system, or what you might call the public school system, and I ended up going

in years seven to 13, which I think is our equivalent of grade six to 12. Is that right, Jamie? Yeah, so about that sort of age. And this is going to really confuse listeners now. From year seven to 13, I went to a grammar school, which was completely upside down. But that's where we have grammar schools. And grammar schools are, they used to be very prominent across all of England, but they're a very rare type of school nowadays. Where essentially, in order to enter this

Soren Schwab - CLT (04:01.483)
Yes.

Hin-Tai Ting (04:12.808)
and state school, have to first sit an academic exam at the age of 11. And if you get high enough marks, then you can be considered for a place at the school. So I got into one of these schools and was there for my sort of secondary school experience. But like Jamie said, I also found it very unstimulating. And it was quite ironic, actually, because, you know, my father, having moved us over from Hong Kong to come to England.

I remember he'd always go on about, have you learned matrices yet in maths? Have you learned matrices? I said, no, I haven't learned matrices. And he'd always shake his head and his side. When I was in Hong Kong, I was learning matrices at the age of 13. Have you not learned matrices yet? And it's very interesting because Hong Kong's educational system was set up by the British and it was modeled entirely on the UK educational system, especially at the age that my father was going to school.

That tells itself some of the story of the dumbing down of standards whereby my dad received a far more rigorous and stretching academic curriculum. And obviously there's a way in which I can go too far, especially in a Hong Kong and Chinese context. And that was part of the reason for him wanting to move us over to England. But I found that it was actually the opposite. And one reason for that, I think, just the assessments in

United Kingdom, while in England particularly, are standardized. This might be a slide that we go into more detail later and I'm sure it's interesting to you as part of the CLT as well. But there's a nationally standardized curriculum with a standardized assessment that at the ages of 16 and 18 that all students take. But basically it's not really that highly differentiated between the needs of or the academic background of the student. And what we found at

our grammar school was that the test was just far too easy. So many of my friends did very little work and ended up getting just the top marks on these exams. And that bred a culture in the school where the teachers didn't really have to work that hard. They didn't really have to go over things in much detail because the accountability measure just wasn't really stretching them enough. And I'm sure this is music to your ears as well, sorry, and just thinking about the impact of assessment and accountability on

Hin-Tai Ting (06:42.752)
and how that works its way backwards through an educational system. So I would say the vast majority of my education at school was really by the internet in those golden days of web 1.0 where Wikipedia was a place where, you know, I wrote a few Wikipedia articles because that was a cool thing to do. Online forums, blogs, Google reader, those heady days. Yeah, that's where I think a lot of my education came.

Soren Schwab - CLT (06:55.235)
Thank

Hin-Tai Ting (07:11.201)
But as you can see, it's very far from a classical education. Only now, a decade into my career as an educator, am I thinking and realizing the gaps in my own education as a result.

Soren Schwab - CLT (07:23.362)
Mm-hmm.

It's interesting because a lot of the conversation I have with folks, at some point in their lives, they're realizing, wait, I got robbed. I was never exposed to this rich treasure that was passed down to Jamie, sounds like your dad, who then passed it on to you, but you never received that at school. So I see a lot of similarities and we have a lot of conversation with folks. And yes, certainly assessment is part of that. just.

Jamie Burns (07:34.426)
Yeah.

Jamie Burns (07:43.969)
Bye.

Soren Schwab - CLT (07:52.61)
recently had a conversation about kind of the dumbing down of the SAT and how if you make the assessments easier, well, that's going to have an impact on education. the schools are graded, so to speak, by their success on these standardized assessments. But I think our audience would love to kind of get a general, I it's a broad question, but what's kind of the state of education in the UK? And then we can kind of get a little bit more into why you decided to start classical schools. Maybe Jamie, we can start with you again.

Jamie Burns (07:56.41)
Yeah.

Jamie Burns (08:21.318)
Yeah, of course. It's a really, it's actually a really interesting question for a number of reasons. And one of which is that over the last 14 years, now not so much, there has been a significant shift in England in particular, there's been a, some would say there's been a real life experiment taking place in the British Isles about what is a good education, not necessarily what's a great one, but definitely what's a good one in in

Hin-Tai Ting (08:27.008)
Okay.

Jamie Burns (08:50.106)
The education that Hind Sy and I have described was fairly prevalent until 2010. And in 2010, the Conservative government took over, the coalition government took over, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democratic Party. And they had two politicians in particular who had listened to, read a lot of, and in essence fallen for a lot of the work of E.D. Hirsch.

and his core knowledge curriculum. so Michael Gove and Nick Gibb are these two gentlemen. they, Michael Gove was put in charge of the Department for Education and Nick Gibb was his school's minister. And between the two of them, they embarked on a project to revitalize the national curriculum. And in essence, they just brought in E.D. Hershey's core knowledge curriculum as our national curriculum. And

Hin-Tai Ting (09:25.832)
Okay.

Jamie Burns (09:42.362)
That has led, as you can probably imagine, to a number of things taking place. The first is standards were required to go up because the stuff that children were learning was more appropriate to their age level. That obviously got some pushback from teachers and Michael Gove was not a popular man for a fair while amongst teachers in schools. But nevertheless, he continued to do so and it has been arguably the best success of

Hin-Tai Ting (09:56.32)
Okay.

Jamie Burns (10:11.558)
any political party in Britain for the last 14 years, maybe even the last 24 depending on where you land on a couple of things. But some of the knock-on effects of that have been our standing in the PISA tests has skyrocketed in reading and mathematics. We are the best readers in the West on pearls. And that is all because of this revolution that took place in England. Now at the same time,

Hin-Tai Ting (10:37.819)
Okay.

Jamie Burns (10:40.526)
in Scotland and in Wales, the opposite was taking place. Scotland was looking at Portland's public school curriculum and saying, that's what we should implement. And so they brought something equivalent to that in, they called it the curriculum for excellence. And Wales then in turn looked at the Scottish curriculum and said, that looks great. We want some of that. And they called that the curriculum for Wales. And the

Hin-Tai Ting (10:43.679)
Okay.

Jamie Burns (11:06.778)
The contrast between what is known in English and British circles in education as knowledge rich versus skills based, that is the dichotomy that gets often spoken about. The contrast between knowledge rich and skills based has been played out in real time. And we know what the answer is. We know that a knowledge rich education has a better impact on children because what has happened to Scotland and Wales? Well, Wales now refuse to be tested on girls because they

Hin-Tai Ting (11:09.575)
Okay.

Jamie Burns (11:36.826)
They don't want that. I assume they don't want the scores being released. And that's been happening. Like I said, it's been playing out over the last 14 years. That then that was sort of content, you know, that that's this big shift in English curriculum content. But what that allowed to happen was a pedagogical revolution to a certain extent. People started getting bothered about how is it that people learn? Teachers in England, schools in England were given the freedom to press into

teaching and learning techniques and particularly thinking about things like Doug Lamob's Teach Like a Champion or Barak Rosenstein's Principles and Instruction and bringing those into the classroom and making them real. You have organizations like the Education Endowment Foundation or Research Ed that were driving this pedagogical reclamation maybe is a better way of putting it in English education. Again, meanwhile, not so much in Scotland and Wales. And then the third thing that

this government in 2010 did is they allowed schools the freedom to choose their own curriculum and create atmospheres like you might see at a Michaela Community School, for example. And that has given a backdrop for us whereby we now, I think, have a model for what a good education looks like. We know what good teaching looks like. We know what a good content looks like. And I think then

the next stage is what makes a great education and maybe that gives a little hint as to why it is that Hinta and I are about stepping into something of a classical Christian education.

Hin-Tai Ting (13:13.758)
Yeah, and just to chip in on that, think Jamie's highlighted, one of the key drivers of that change was firstly, the centralized power of the state in education in England is very different and probably the opposite to what you might have in America, centralized curriculum, centralized assessments, centralized examinations at the same time, assessing the same things across the whole country.

And that is a real strength because it means those changes can roll out. think Jamie, you were mentioning phonics is one example of that, where, you know, there's just no debate in the UK about the importance, well, in England, about the importance of phonics anymore. Some people still dislike it, but because of that strong centralized power, they just have to teach it because they'll be tested on it. And the kids are about five or six years old. And that is, I think that's one of the big drivers for the improvements in.

Jamie Burns (13:55.919)
in England.

Hin-Tai Ting (14:13.382)
reading that we've seen in international assessments. And another part of that is because every school essentially does pretty much the same exams, that gives objective criteria by which schools can compare themselves. And so you can go onto any school's website and look at the same statistics. What proportion of their pupils were getting very strong grades? What proportion of their pupils were passing their examinations at certain ages?

what proportion of the people who are getting at least five strong passes. All of these are things which teachers can just easily go to school, look at a number and get a sense of how well that school is doing because of that strong centralisation. And I think that's driven a lot of the pedagogical improvements because people can see if things are having an effect. Every year you get those results back, they're marked anonymously and independently from the school. There's no teacher assessment anymore.

And you can see what the changes we've made, are they improving our grades? Are we actually seeing an impact? And that's been a huge focus and motivator for pedagogical improvement. I think where the downside is, is because we've had that ability to, as Jamie said, run this real life experiment to see if this is actually working, to see what the results are doing, to see how things are changing. There's that saying about how when you make something a target,

that sees this to be useful as a measure. I think that's driven a lot of obsession with technique. So how can we, in some cases, the most extreme cases, how can we slightly game the system to try and boost our scores as high as possible? Because everyone's comparing them, and there are certain qualifications that a school can enter their pupils into, which are objectively far easier than other qualifications. Like a certificate in

the theory of driving might be one. I'm not sure that's true, but it's long that sort of level compared to a qualification in history, in modern history. And that's been a problem. But another problem, which is less obvious than that is I think teachers have spent a lot of time, and this is a good thing, but it's been taken in isolation. They've spent a lot of time just obsessing over pedagogy and the theory of, okay, I've got this really complicated concept.

Hin-Tai Ting (16:39.91)
For example, differentiation. How can I best break that down so that my students can understand it, can replicate it, can perform well in an examination? Or I've got this, like let's take another subject, I've got this character in a Shakespeare play. How can I best itemize the knowledge of how this character is presented throughout the play in such a way that the student is well prepared for the examination?

All of stuff is really useful and it's very helpful for students. But because so much energy is invested in that and in nuances of pedagogy, I think there hasn't really been a huge discussion about values in education. There hasn't been a huge discussion as to what are we doing this for? A lot of the assumption has been the importance of social mobility, which I think is very valid. had a very strong...

counterpart to the Teach for America movement here in the UK called Teach First, which both Jamie and I were part of. But there it was, social mobility comes from getting our pupils to get as good grades as possible so they can go to the best universities and get the best jobs. And again, the focus becomes the values basically collapse into academic exam attainment. Exactly. And I was very privileged to work at the Mikayla Community School where we spent a lot of time

Soren Schwab - CLT (17:55.63)
Very utilitarian.

Jamie Burns (17:57.339)
Yeah.

Hin-Tai Ting (18:04.252)
assessing over pedagogy, the values were central to the school, particularly the values of personal responsibility, of kindness, of patriotism, of duty. that's a interesting case study because our headmistress, Catherine Verbal Singh, who I believe has been on this podcast, when she stands up for these values, she gets an unbelievable amount of vitriol and abuse over what

Jamie Burns (18:07.141)
Yeah.

Hin-Tai Ting (18:34.115)
I imagine would seem to be quite common, tentacle values for many people. She says, no, our school sounds for these things. And the amount of people calling her all sorts of horrendous names is just crazy. And that's another angle where you can see why in the education sphere, lots of people have avoided this values debate. It's not just as a positive reason to focus on just teaching for the assessment or utilitarian pedagogy, but it's also a desire. Well, we don't want to stray into controversy and move towards values. And I think that also reflects something

Jamie Burns (18:50.726)
Hmm.

Hin-Tai Ting (19:04.215)
about English culture more generally. Just one key feature of English culture is the very strong emphasis on privacy. We're an island nation surrounded by the sea. We haven't been invaded for coming into a millennia. We like our privacy. But that means, as any Englishman knows, we don't talk about faith. We don't talk about politics.

We don't talk about religion or values or anything that might encroach upon someone else's privacy. that's another factor which is sort of trying to suffocate any discussion of really quite a central question. What is education for? What are we doing this for? What's the purpose of all those tens of thousands of hours we spend with the children in our care?

Jamie Burns (19:40.678)
Bye.

Jamie Burns (19:47.333)
and

Jamie Burns (19:54.318)
And sorry, just to close that loop, look what happens when you do focus on values. You get a score that outperforms every single other one by a long stretch.

Soren Schwab - CLT (20:02.869)
Right. Yeah, yeah. It's perfect segue and I'm so curious because this first phase was like we have to raise the standards and the curriculum has something to say, right? And we have to improve our curriculum, we have to improve those standards, but then as you mentioned in Tai, what is it only about that? And I think in America the classical education movement, the classical Christian movement, focuses so much on

the telos, right? Like, why are we doing this for? Is it is it really just to get a job? Well, of course, we want our kids to be successful. That's really not the the end goal. It's the formation of the human person, right? The shaping of their hearts, minds and souls. And so, you know, and you hinted to that a little bit already. But but talk to us how you got involved with or now getting involved with classical Christian education. and and and if there is a problem, maybe you hinted at that problem. What is it that you're trying to solve with these classical Christian schools?

Jamie Burns (21:05.062)
Hint I joined, I to go first on this one.

Hin-Tai Ting (21:06.041)
Yeah, absolutely. So for me, it's quite a personal story in several ways. The first is just my own children. So I have three children. They're all very young. One is still in the womb. And the thought of, what am I going to do about education is one that strikes every parent at this stage.

that has led to a lot of thinking and a lot of researching and a lot of just seeing what's out there, seeing what's happening in America with the classical education, the classical Christian educational model. So that's been a huge drive for me. But probably the bigger, more personal story is just as you said at the start, just my gradual awakening and realization of even the existence of the classical

Christian tradition. And difference that's made in my life. And I became a Christian when I was 18. And shortly after I to Oxford University, where I studied philosophy, politics and economics. And, you know, was there at Oxford, just really keen to defend my newfound faith, really keen to share the gospel and to share

Jamie Burns (22:07.492)
Thank

Hin-Tai Ting (22:34.894)
what had happened to transform my life so much. And I think for a variety of reasons that led to me developing quite a sort of hard edge to my Christian faith. I think you have that phrase in America, the cage stage aspect of Christian journey. And I got very heavily into presuppositionalism. I just thought, you know, this

This is the most powerful argument that would just destroy everything. Just the idea that, you know, without assuming God, everything just collapses and doesn't make any sense and you can't even acknowledge existence as one single thing. And that was my intellectual journey for many, many years. But for a variety of reasons in the last few years, through a combination of just extreme personal difficulty and...

many very difficult circumstances happening in my life. I reached a stage of deconstruction, of just thinking, you know, this faith which was very much outward focused and very aggressive in sort of taking down opposing arguments, it just felt suddenly quite flimsy at even just propping up my own day-to-day existence, you know, just helping me get through life.

you know, that wartime mentality wasn't actually very useful for just sustaining me through very difficult trials. And it was about this time, you know, it was a lot of the suffering was connected to experiences within the church. And out of necessity, I kind of took a bit of a step back and started engaging with psychology and with more secular sources on questions of suffering. And I actually found them extremely helpful. And there was a depth and

a truth and a goodness and a beauty that challenged me because I felt, well, this is stuff that I've not really encountered in my narrow corner of the Christian world. And it's not some of it's not even explicitly Christian. And I'm just trying to work out how to reconcile these things. But slowly over time, as I kept grappling with these central questions, the classical Christian tradition

Hin-Tai Ting (25:00.546)
kept popping up. So I've done a few courses with the Davenin Institute where they're very much about resourcement and just retrieving some of the riches of the Christian past. And with surprise and clarity, greats from hundreds and even thousands of years ago would speak penetratingly into some of the issues that I face today. Not just in a sort of superficial way of like quoting certain scriptures and certain logical arguments that would just like solve everything.

but with a richness, with a depth, and with a generosity, and just an intellectual openness that was very different to my caged age self. And even recently, just the other day, this happened again, where one particular question I was thinking about was, what was the place of self-love in the Christian life? Because many sermons I've heard about it see it as a very sort of bad thing. It's just taken as a, well, obviously that's not what Christians do.

And that's been a struggle because that's been part of my just personal journey working through some of these deconstruction issues and a very harsh and overly critical view of myself. And I was just browsing the internet quite casually when I came across no other than Thomas Aquinas wrote about self-love. And actually he said, it's actually our, love of God, it's our first duty due to just a philosophical argument that was very clear, very succinct.

And I just thought, wow. And I sent a screenshot of this to my, to my wife saying the classical Christian tradition does it again. And many, many times I've come back to thinking, it feels like my faith was built on this foundation, but this foundation didn't seem to fit the purpose. And I'm just searching for other things. And then I suddenly find old names like Aquinas and, and Augustine just offering penetrating Christian.

but also classical insights to my own condition that have really made me just stop and think, wow, this is not the Christianity that I grew up in. This is not the Christianity I'm familiar with. This classical tradition has a lot to commend, not just as an interesting intellectual adventure, but really for me, just as a matter of spiritual life and death, but just in a very profoundly personal way. And I think...

Hin-Tai Ting (27:25.704)
With that, just the final closing thought too on that is just compared to the cage stage mentality where I had the truth and I was going out there to sort of demonstrate the truth to everyone else. I've been reading Dante's Inferno recently as part of my sort of late education and it's just astonishing to me that in it he holds Virgil in the highest reverence while it's also acknowledging

This man fundamentally is not in paradise or targetry, but he esteems him so greatly and that generosity of spirit towards the past. was just 180 degrees from the cave stage mentality that I had where Dante was no compromiser. The line is very clear from the first page of Virgil is not where he should be, but yet he was just so open to all the truth, all the beauty and all the goodness that is to be found in this world.

And that switching mentality has been just personally transformative and has just thoroughly convinced me of the need for a classical Christian tradition and its power to not just save me, but save many others, I would hope.

Soren Schwab - CLT (28:38.082)
Yeah, yeah, that's amazing. Well, Jamie, practically speaking, right, I mean, the US, some would argue we're kind of in the third generation of classical Christian schools. Well, you're in starting generation one, essentially, right, in class of Christian schooling. Talk us through a little bit of practically what this will look like, what you're trying to accomplish, where you're trying to open these classical Christian schools. Are you naming them classical Christian schools? Because maybe there's not a

Jamie Burns (28:50.79)
Good.

Soren Schwab - CLT (29:05.478)
market for that. I'm really curious kind of the when you did your kind of market analysis to talk in business terms, where did you land and what are kind of the first steps in this process?

Jamie Burns (29:12.678)
Hmm.

Jamie Burns (29:16.814)
Yeah, it's probably worth saying a little bit of tiny bit of my end story before I do this in that I became acquainted with the thing known as classical Christian education through listening to Spotify and Spotify throwing me an Andrew Kern podcast apropos of absolutely nothing. I was happily away listening to

Hin-Tai Ting (29:41.097)
You

Jamie Burns (29:45.648)
probably the rest is history, frankly, and all of a sudden, Andrew Kearns, in my ears, describing the things that I had been witnessing in my own teaching career that I didn't like but couldn't articulate. I knew I didn't like them, but I didn't know quite what they were. And I hear the dulcet tones of Andrew Kearns explaining precisely what they were and articulating them brilliantly. And that was my first introduction to classical Christian education, know, trademark.

And that meant that I went on a big old Googling spree and discovered Tom and Hayley Bowen, who had, were about to start the King Alfred School in Dudley. And they hosted the conference and there were 50, 60 people at that conference, how to start a Christian school, because I think they've just done it at this point, And it was a real point of, hey, this is possible.

Hin-Tai Ting (30:20.914)
Okay.

Okay.

Jamie Burns (30:44.548)
what Tom and Haley have done can be replicated. And so St Anselms in Cardiff was born. And then so you then asked, we're starting, why were we doing it?

The first thing to say is from St Anselm's perspective, the school that I'm hoping to found.

Wales is in a real dire need of great education. There are, I can think of one, I don't know all the headmasters of course, and a blanket rule is that there's no blanket rules. So important to caveat everything I'm about to say, but I can think of one person I know who was pursuing for his, the pupils in his school, an education that you or I would consider good. And the rest are blindly following at least

Hin-Tai Ting (31:06.133)
Thank

Hin-Tai Ting (31:17.935)
Okay.

Jamie Burns (31:34.758)
to my knowledge, the curriculum for Wales. And there is no better way to show the contrast of a classical Christian education than putting it somewhere that is dark and bleak. And so we thought we will take this school and we will put ours in Cardiff because A, Christian parents are crying out for what the experience hints I had for their own children. It is wrong that we're robbing them of this millennia, two millennia long Christian tradition.

Hin-Tai Ting (31:42.462)
Okay.

Jamie Burns (32:04.496)
that they, we were rubbed off, I was rubbed off and Hintai was rubbed off. And it's also wrong that they're being completely utterly let down by their schools, just in a basic academic sense. And so we thought that that is the right place for us to start. Hintai, you want to speak to why London?

Hin-Tai Ting (32:24.599)
Yeah, on a very simplistic level, it's I want a school that I want to send my children to and we live in London. But obviously on a bigger level, we would love this to to be part of a movement. And what better place than London to

show what classical Christian education is. Because as you said, Sorum, there's not much brand awareness yet, really, of what this means. And we'd love to just show more people, actually, this is a thing. And this is a great thing. This is a beautiful thing. This is something different. Because no one, as we alluded to earlier, no one in this country is really having that deeper conversation. What is education for?

and to do that somewhere like London would be an amazing privilege.

Soren Schwab - CLT (33:16.896)
I'm just curious. I'll go ahead, Jamie.

Jamie Burns (33:17.136)
There's this one, I'm sorry, Well, just to say that the thing that is filling me with hope and delight is that there is this beautiful English tradition of education being removed by the church. Whether it's Augustine of Canterbury or Alcuin, King Alfred to Wycliffe, Charlotte Mason, C.S. Lewis, whoever you want to name, there's loads. There's this beautiful English Christian tradition of renewing education through the church.

And that is the thing that we want to stand on the shoulders of and maybe have a tiny proportion of the impact that some of those greats had.

Soren Schwab - CLT (33:53.249)
you're using the language that will inspire people. everything you explained earlier on the status quo, it's so lukewarm. I mean, for lack of a better word, it's just lame. And you have Christian families that I know them in Germany and they're just sending our kids to the ball at that school is just the closest to us and we're not questioning that, but there's nothing inspiring about it. So I'm wondering this cultural moment, right? There seems to be an

as you mentioned, there's such an appetite for this and starting with one school or two schools and then showing just the transformation that these families will have. What do you see as, because you want this to be a movement, you mentioned that a couple of times, movement and you have a fellowship of classical learning. What do you see as some of the biggest opportunities? And maybe we touched on those a little bit, but what also, what could be some of the roadblocks that you're seeing from?

Hin-Tai Ting (34:40.786)
.

Soren Schwab - CLT (34:49.698)
from two schools turning to 200.

Jamie Burns (34:52.986)
Yeah, why don't I start with some of the potential roadblocks.

a big one right now, pertinent to this particular cultural moment is that we have had a change of government. And this change of government has decided that taxing independent private education is the right course of action. We are going to be the only nation in the West who tax education. That is a roadblock to starting independent schools without a shadow of a doubt. There is some sort of ideology going on.

Hin-Tai Ting (34:59.186)
Okay.

Jamie Burns (35:29.232)
there that I don't know Bridget Phillipson's mind, but there's something going on. There's all of the standard things that I think your American audience would appreciate an Englishman saying, which is regulation. There are building regulation, there's financial regulation, there's safeguarding regulation, there are a number of things, number of hoops that we need to jump through that do not make starting a school easy.

Hin-Tai Ting (35:43.179)
Yeah.

Jamie Burns (35:58.458)
they are deliberately tricky. It's not accidentally tricky. So that's a definite roadblock. And then as you were just rightly saying, Sorin, I think the biggest roadblock is that sending a child to an independent school is a really foreign concept for an English parent. think it's 7 % of English kids, British kids, forgive me, 7 % of British children go to private school.

Hin-Tai Ting (36:22.002)
Okay.

Jamie Burns (36:26.054)
It's not a thing that's done commonly. And I think in some sense, there's this idea that that's the privilege of the elite, that sending your child to a school that you pay for is not something we can do. It's not something that we can afford to do. And so we've got to change that narrative. And we are deliberately positioning ourselves as what we're calling affordable independent schools, because we do want to say, actually, no, it's not the privilege of the elite.

you should have the choice as parents to send your child to an independent school, not just feel obliged to send them to the state schools. And then, as has been said a fair few times, the tell-us of school itself, we're not going to be saying, come to our school and your kid, come to our school because your kid will get good grades if he comes or she comes. We're going to be saying, come to our school because we want to help your child flourish. And they will also get good grades, by the way.

Hin-Tai Ting (37:06.097)
Okay.

Soren Schwab - CLT (37:23.502)
That's right, that's right.

Jamie Burns (37:25.498)
But that's not the first, the be all and end all. And I think there is a real sense, because why wouldn't they? It's what they experienced of British parents saying, yeah, but you're gonna teach my child coding. You're gonna teach them engineering because those are the skills they're gonna need to go into the workforce and earn a living. And, you know, fair enough, it's what they've grown up with. That's all they know. So there's a piece around changing the conversation there. What is the Telos of school? What is school's purpose? And how can we...

Hin-Tai Ting (37:35.057)
Yeah, and just picking up on the roadblocks, that point that Jamie just mentioned leads really nicely into the opportunities.

Jamie Burns (37:54.094)
move that roadblock out the way.

Hin-Tai Ting (38:05.552)
because I think in fairness to parents, it's hard to envisage an alternative when there is none. So I look at what we're trying to do with these classical Christian schools, and I just see it as really tackling the root problems of the modern world. If I can say it as boldly as that, where we live in the most prosperous, wealthiest time of human history, and yet

Somehow everyone feels just morally bankrupt, exhausted, empty. And that is because we have taken utility and we've made utility the overriding goal. We have made, what can this do for me? What can we extract out of this education? The overriding thing. And if we have that extractive self-centered mindset, then

We just become voraciously hungry constantly because that will never fill our appetites. But people don't really know what else there is because this is just how we think. This is just the air we breathe. This is just to use that David Foster Wallace phrase. This is water. This is the modern world. And we are extremely prosperous, but everyone's laughing. Is this it? Is this it? And so to just loudly proclaim that no, we are

humans made in the image of God, made to encounter and pursue truth, beauty and goodness. And that is why our souls are not satisfied with utility. That is why material comforts are completely insufficient. And what if we were entrusted with your children and we raised them with that habit of soul?

What if we just said no to this culture of life hacks and productivity, matching and all of these other just very machine like phrases and we just returned to this humanity and we treated our children in such a way where our capacity for the transcendent, for God himself, was honoured and fed into from the earliest ages throughout the most formative years of a child's life.

Hin-Tai Ting (40:29.956)
Because we are the way we are, we feel the sense of having lost something. Because when we were from five to eighteen, we were just fed utility. We were just fed, get good grades, get ahead. And we're only just starting to open our eyes to the fact that the world is charged with the glory of God. And that's actually our greatest privilege, is to pursue that and to encounter that and to experience that. So it's a massive opportunity.

Jamie Burns (40:52.198)
No.

Soren Schwab - CLT (40:52.462)
Absolutely. I'm getting goosebumps as you're talking. is life-changing work that you're engaging in. And we're going to cheer you on from America. And I actually didn't prep you for this question. So I'm just very curious. You just visited several classical Christian schools in America. You just came back to the UK. In maybe a sentence or so, or in a word, if you can, what stood out to you when you visited these schools? Was there something that you can

Jamie Burns (41:10.202)
Yeah.

Soren Schwab - CLT (41:21.058)
that you can just point to and say, wow, that's the thing. I know that's probably a tough one, but anyone want to take a stab?

Jamie Burns (41:28.998)
I'm happy to go ahead and start that one. Family. There was this palpable sense of familial relationships that I have. I've worked in schools for 10 years. I've worked in quite a few schools I've never seen and it was glorious to see and we can talk about the academic rigor if we want. We can talk about the way that children can engage in Socratic conversation if we want. But frankly,

if we're talking about human flourishing, the thing that humans need is relationships. Relationships with the Almighty and relationships with their brothers and sisters. And that was obvious in the schools that we visited and that was beautiful to see.

Hin-Tai Ting (42:11.506)
Yeah, mine would be very similar as well. I was going to go for one word, which be love. And I honestly was moved to tears talking with some of the students, talking with some of the parents, because love is the most precious thing.

but it's also so hard and so lacking. we almost just, I think, I think we just sort of factor it out of thinking about a school. But just the atmosphere of love that I felt, particularly Christian love as well, the way, the way that was just infused throughout school community was just, yeah, moving, literally moving to tears.

Soren Schwab - CLT (42:52.632)
That is absolutely amazing. Good reminder for us, right? Because sometimes in the US too, we get discouraged, right? And there's roadblocks here, of course, as well. And so thank you for that reminder that what these schools are doing is just absolutely beautiful. I have one more question. And you're both educators. I got to stay disciplined. You got to pick one book or one text that you can point to that has had the greatest impact on your life. What would that be?

Hin-Tai Ting (43:13.958)
Heh.

Soren Schwab - CLT (43:21.996)
and why Jamie wanted to go first.

Jamie Burns (43:25.464)
you when I read this question when you sent it over, sorry, and you have me completely flawed because it's such a hard question to answer. And so I'm going to do the job you asked and I'm not going to try and exercise in loopholes, but it does not suffice as an answer. And I feel very constrained by your assessment parameters. I need that to be said before I answer. I would say me Christianity.

Hin-Tai Ting (43:37.198)
.

Soren Schwab - CLT (43:48.078)
Hahaha!

Jamie Burns (43:53.774)
because it allowed me to think that my faith could be an intellectual thing as much as it was a feelings thing because the tradition that I grew up in was very heavy on feelings and not particularly heavy on intellectualism. so reading Lewis convinced me that what I thought I had felt could also be true in a rational sense, which for me at the time was really important.

journey I've gone on since. Maybe rationalism slightly less important, but at the time very, very important to my journey with God and so I'm going to say more Christianity.

Hin-Tai Ting (44:33.306)
Yeah, I gave this a lot of thought. And then the answer popped into my head. And it's quite a left field answer. My other two thoughts were very, I'm sure many people on this podcast have said them, but I was quite happy with this one. I don't just like it because it's contrarian and unique, but I think it's actually true, especially in the last few years. The book that's had the greatest impact on my life is

Soren Schwab - CLT (44:34.03)
Beautiful Hintai, what about you?

Hin-Tai Ting (45:02.551)
just my personal journal. Now, before that sounds narcissistic and, you know, before I announce the release of my memoirs coming out soon, all I mean by that is, well, from a education perspective, if one of the highest goals of life is contemplation, that state of simply being receptive and open and enjoying and allowing the good and the

Jamie Burns (45:10.522)
Hahaha!

Hin-Tai Ting (45:31.437)
and beautiful to affect us, then that's where I do it. And that's what I've learned to do in my own personal journey as I have reflected. And it's a very personal question to me because I think early on in my intellectual life and my reading life, I did read from a very modernistic perspective. I read extractively.

I was trying to sort of mine these books for things that would be useful for my intellectual architecture. Mine sent arguments like, that's a really good argument. I need to memorize that one. And there wasn't any sense of contemplation there or any sense of things. And obviously sometimes great passages would move me and I find them beautiful, but I read very much from the perspective of utility. And over the past few years, that's changed. think in writing,

in a journal regularly and know Charlotte Mason talks about the commonplace journal doesn't she and just just being able to enjoy those things and contemplate them I think has been a big part of my journey is growing into classical education so I'll say that.

Soren Schwab - CLT (46:42.54)
I appreciate that. is is mere Christianity is not a first, but the memoirs of Hing Tai Ting are first and we can't can't publish them. No, no, no, no. You're good. It's because it is absolutely amazing. This was delightful, gentlemen. Truly, truly an honor to have you on. Again, we're here with Jamie Burns and Hing Tai Ting.

Jamie Burns (46:46.667)
And

Jamie Burns (46:51.664)
I feel so cliche now.

Hin-Tai Ting (46:52.064)
Ha ha ha.

Jamie Burns (46:57.776)
Yeah. Right.

Soren Schwab - CLT (47:09.102)
co-founders of the New Fellowship for Classical Learning, doing amazing work in classical education, classical Christian education in the UK. We're gonna continue to follow your work and rooting you on from the US. You guys are awesome and really appreciate your joining the Anchor podcast today.

Jamie Burns (47:30.992)
Thanks so much for having us, Arun. Really appreciate it.

Hin-Tai Ting (47:33.597)
Thank you, it's been great so far.

Jamie Burns (47:35.248)
Yeah.