Do kids really benefit from a “classical” education? Are homeschoolers antisocial? How can parents have real conversations with their kids? Katy Gallegos answers these questions and many more on the show today. Katy is a homeschool mom and has been influential in her local homeschool community through a curriculum called Classical Conversations. Listen in as she and Melvin discuss the ins and outs of homeschooling, as well as the way Classical Conversations is helping kids get well-rounded educations.
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Do kids really benefit from a “classical” education? Are homeschoolers antisocial? How can parents have real conversations with their kids? Katy Gallegos answers these questions and many more on the show today. Katy is a homeschool mom and has been influential in her local homeschool community through a curriculum called Classical Conversations. Listen in as she and Melvin discuss the ins and outs of homeschooling, as well as the way Classical Conversations is helping kids get well-rounded educations.
Resources Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
GET CONNECTED WITH NWEF
Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nwef.org/
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/NWEF_org
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nwef_org/
Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtdHayyOqPftVoiGEqxYdsg
To hear more from NWEF, subscribe to our other podcast: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1898310
– WHAT IS THE NOAH WEBSTER EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATION? –
Noah Webster Educational Foundation collaborates with individuals and organizations to tell the story of America’s education and culture; discover foundational principles that improve it; and advance practice and policy to change it.
Website: https://www.nwef.org
Reach out: info@nwef.org
ADAMS: We’re delighted to have all of you joining us today on this podcast. I am particularly delighted to have our guest with us today. Katy Gallegos is joining us—you heard a little bit about her in the intro and so we’re going to jump right in.
Katy, welcome to our podcast today.
GALLEGOS: Thank you so much. I am honored that I was asked to speak today.
ADAMS: Well, we’re delighted. Today we’re going to talk addressing a growing phenomena in education, and that’s the element of homeschooling. More and more families are looking at homeschooling. It’s the fastest growing element as far as growth and change in education. It’s the homeschooling space.
That’s where you are and we’re also going to talk about some particular curriculum. But let’s just jump in. Tell us a little more about your background, about you personally so that our audience knows who’s talking to them.
GALLEGOS: Great! I grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska—actually, technically North Pole, Alaska, a little town outside Fairbanks, Alaska. I loved public school. I was an only child, I still am an only child, I lived far out in the woods.
Public school, to me, was my only social interaction besides church, that I would get. I had pretty good teachers, I had a good experience in school, and so I had no reason to have anything negative to think about public school.
I did, however, have some negative experience with homeschoolers up there. All the ones that I had encountered were super weird. That was never on my radar, that I would ever do anything like that. Fast forward, my family and I moved to Arkansas and we had our first daughter. A friend of mine who I really respected back in Alaska had pulled her kid out of a Christian academy and began to homeschool her.
I was like, Why would you do that? That’s the best case scenario. I was looking for what I would do with my daughter once she became school aged and we didn’t have many options around here. I just thought, Why would you leave a Christian academy to bring her home?
And she explained to me the relationship you have with your children that you have with homeschooling. How sending them off to any school—public or private or whatever—just takes away that discipline you get to do with your child in their formative years. The number of hours you’re spending with them are not the prime hours of the kid’s day—getting them shuffled up in the morning, out the door and then home at dinner time, bath time, bedtime—those aren't the best hours of their day. The best hours are in the middle of the day. You lose out on that.
Having my toddler at the time, I was like, I don’t want to miss out on the best hours of the day with her! That made so much sense to me. Other things she said, as well, really resonated with me. It kind of got my wheels turning, but I still thought, Ugh, homeschooling. That’s just not something I would ever want to do!
Then God kept putting different conversations and people and situations in my path where I could tell He was leaning me in that direction. I didn’t like that still, so I thought, I’ll ask my husband because he won’t be on board with this. Then it will be his fault and that’s fine. I brought it up to my husband one day, finally, and he was like, “Absolutely! That’s what we definitely need to do with our children.”
I was like, “Shoot!” So I started looking into—sorry, there was a fly buzzing around me—I started looking into options for homeschooling in our area. I knew I would need help because it was so far off my radar that I would not be able to just jump in and feel successful. I didn’t want to let my kid down or be inadequate at this.
I found a Classical Conversations community in Harrison. I had a lady there give an informational meeting to a group of people in my little town. Several of them decided to join the program, but my kid was still too young to actually. So several of my friends joined Classical Conversations and really loved it. They brought that program to our area and we joined as soon as my daughter was old enough.
So that’s how we got involved with that!
ADAMS: That’s very interesting. Before we jump deeper into that, you’ve raised several things I’ve heard before. “Homeschool families are weird.” I’ve heard that and some people maybe see that because they tend to be very tight families, very connected. Some maybe haven’t developed great social skills. But that was probably more in the earlier years of homeschooling because there are so many more options available today that what used to be.
We may want to jump into that a little bit. But more importantly, you made a statement about the parent giving up the very best time of the child’s life and the child’s day to be engaged with them. I think you used the word “disciple” which is typically thought of as a religious term and certainly every parent communicates their values—should be communicating their values—to their child.
But it goes down to the whole—discipleship on a deeper level is about raising up adults. It’s about pouring into someone else what you know and have experienced. You are investing your life into them. What more important thing could a parent do with their child than to do that?
Let’s talk a little bit more about that because most parents listening here probably have—especially if they’re not already in this space—maybe they’re thinking about it, maybe they’re concerned about what’s going on in their community and their school. They want the best for their child but they’re not sure what that is. Maybe it’s homeschooling, maybe it’s not, but every parent should be exploring.
The whole idea of pouring your abilities, your knowledge, your love, your parenting into that child…talk a little more about that. How important is that?
GALLEGOS: Absolutely. I think that’s of the utmost importance. That friend that was in Alaska who told me she was pulling her child out of the Christian academy to homeschool her, she said something I thought was really important. At four and five years old, your kids are not ready to go out into the world and handle value-based decisions at those ages.
I had never thought of that before. She said, “How are they supposed to be equipped for that?” You know, I was a good kid through public school but I didn’t have the foundation that I could have had. I wasn’t prepared for the conversations and things I was exposed to. But also, the conversations and experiences I was exposed to were pretty different twenty-five years ago than they are now.
I think even more so now, kids need to be shored up before they’re sent out to be lights or to be decision-makers or to know how to have conversations with others. We don’t shield our children from the world—in fact, we’ve been to all fifty states, we’ve taken them with us to all kinds of places. They’re all teaching moments and we have lots of those.
I believe that we’re supposed to be a part of the world but with the right training and, like I said, discipling, to not be conformed by the world. Or be affected by these things—I don’t want them to grow up to have a lot of the struggles that people are having nowadays. It’s not fair to those kids. I don’t think that needs to be my kids’ story.
ADAMS: What I think I’m hearing you say is you want to make sure your child has a solid foundation and has a strong support structure, knows that they have a strong support structure, first and foremost, in you. And has an understanding in who they are and perhaps that spiritual foundation, as well, before they launch out into a world that is full—and increasingly full—of very confusing ideas that the child is going to have to grapple with.
They’re going to be challenged in unfathomable ways and they need to have some kind of foundation before they’re just plunge into that. Is that what I’m hearing you say?
GALLEGOS: Definitely. I notice that even more with my now-teenage daughter. Some of the big conversations and the big worldview issues. The name “Classical Conversations” —which is the curriculum we chose to use—I thought, What a strange name. But as she gets older I realize that it is all about conversations and wrestling with ideas that are out there.
Whether you homeschool or public school or whatever you choose to do, your kids are getting a message and a certain direction that they’re being taught. I think it’s what the parents want their kids to learn, so it needs to come from those conversations with their parents, regardless of where they are educated.
I love that she can come to me with the hard questions and I get to give her my opinion first. The first thing that she hears is Mom and Dad’s thoughts on these topics. We’re very open to hard conversations. We have four older, adopted kids who we had to have some really hard conversations with because they were already in a different place in life. That’s been the culture in our family for many years.
It’s really great to know they have a safe place to come and get that first opinion. Whatever they hear later on they can base off of that first conversation that they had about it. It’s okay for them to grapple and wrestle with ideas and to debate me and my husband. I think that’s even better. They learn how to debate in a respectful and intellectual manner, not just in an emotional way which we see all around us in this world. That’s priceless. It’s very useful, it’s real life, and it can be life-changing for them.
ADAMS: You’re making some really significant statements for parents. The importance of just having conversations with your children. It’s amazing how many families never had that. I think a lot of times it’s because parents are doing the best they can but didn’t have the best model of parenting themselves. They never had deep, meaningful conversations with their parents. They just grew up without those real, significant conversations, and as a result, they picked up information from wherever. They’ve not learned how to even have those conversations, many times.
It’s so important—my wife and I, we always tried to have good conversations with our children. My wife was far better than I was at that, but the important thing was always that those conversations were a safe place where you could talk about anything and it was okay. It wasn't a matter of accusation, it wasn’t a matter of, “Oh, how can you go there?” No, it’s, “Okay, let’s talk about that,” and then having deep, meaningful, thoughtful conversations that really help give a child perspective, give a child a sense of confidence that they cna think through these issues, they can talk through these issues with people they know love them and care about them. I think that’s so significant, what you just said there.
Let’s go a little deeper into the Classical Conversations. You alluded to that as an educational system, but explain more about the foundational concepts for those who may not know.
GALLEGOS: Okay. One thing I wanted to go backwards for just a second is in reference to those conversations with our kids…I just want to encourage parents that it doesn't always have to sound good. You don’t have to know what to say, you don’t have to to have the answers. It’s maybe even better when you don’t sometimes and you tell your kids, “Hm, I don’t know. Let’s wrestle through that together, let’s see if we can find truth here and get to the bottom of what would be the truth in this situation. Let’s figure this out together.”
Especially with our older kids, there were some awkward conversations I wasn’t ready for. But you’re here for it anyways and you just say, “Phew! Okay, let’s do this. Let’s buckle up and have this conversation.” I think being awkward and uncomfortable is okay. Just feel through it. It’s awkward for them too, probably. It’s better for them to have that with you than a kid on the school bus or anywhere. I just want to set that encouragement out there.
As far as Classical Conversations goes, the model is “classical, Christian, and community.” The classical aspect is they use the classical method of education. It works best with the children’s natural learning abilities. The younger kids do—it’s called the “grammar of learning.” They learn lots of memory work.
Kids' minds are sponges and they’re so ready to absorb anything and everything. They don’t always know how to put that into practice or how to grapple with the bigger ideas, but they can memorize terms and words and facts and things like that, like at no other period of their life.
The second phase of learning is called the “dialectic phase,” which we all know is that middle school, argumentative—they call it the dialectic phase where they’re just wanting to grapple with things, wrestle with them and figure out what they believe and what they know and don’t know. In a classical model you work with that behavior of that age group, instead of saying, “Well, just take my word for it. Here’s what I’m teaching you. Just learn it, darn it.” It’s like, no, let’s wrestle with it, let’s figure out why, let’s let you ask questions.
Sometimes that’s a little irritating as a parent because you just want to say, “Let’s just get through it.” But no. That’s the whole point in this dialectic stage is to wrestle through it and let the education be their own.
The final stage is called the “rhetorical phase” where, once they have the facts, they’ve wrestled with them, they can kind of become experts on them. The older kids love to sound intellectual and smart and they like to talk about their ideas. They have all these big ideas and they can really put it into practice and speak to what they’ve learned.
So that’s the classical model kind of in a nutshell, maybe over simplified. But it is a beautiful model of education that worked for a very long time for some of the best thinkers in history. It works well today, as well.
ADAMS: I was going to say, I think you summed that up really well. Really tying it around the different phases, natural phases of learning, for a child. Really letting that process happen naturally, within the phases of their natural, intellectual, and physical development.
GALLEGOS: Yeah.
The next aspect of Classical Conversations is that it’s Christian. It’s going with a Biblical worldview. Every educational system has a worldview and we choose the Biblical one. Also, so much of our history is based on religion and a lot of that’s left out in a more traditional educational model. There’s gaps in why things happened or the motives behind different things.
When you use a Christian worldview, those gaps are filled in because it’s not left out. That’s the second part of CC. The third part is community. To me, that is absolutely priceless because, especially for somebody who never anticipated homeschooling, obviously, lunch time is my favorite.
We meet together weekly and the kids preview the next week’s work, they review the last several weeks’ work, they do a science and art project together, and they also do a public speaking thing of some sort. For little kids it might be like, “This is my dolly and my grandma gave her to me and I love her. Thank you for listening.” Something very simple.
As the kids get older, they have more meat on their presentations. The beauty in that is that our kids are being taught to speak in front of their peers and in front of others at four years old and on up. Instead of, for me…I was taught to do public speaking in speech class in highschool when I had zits all over my face and I was an awkward teenager, just mortified to be in front of people. But our kids are taught since they’re very little, so it becomes natural to them in a much easier way than it was for me.
But with community, the kids get that aspect. They get to have friendships, they get to have a lot of memories together and do a lot of fun things together in our community. But like I was saying, for lunchtime, all us moms pick each other’s brains. “What’s working for you in math class? What’s working for you at home for your read-alouds? What are you reading that’s tying into our history stuff with Classical Conversations? My kid is a terrible speller, how can I improve their spelling?”
Or whatever! We just bump ideas off one another. What works for some kids—we have a lot of dyslexic kids on our campus and so, “What are you using for that?” Things of that nature. Together we’re so much better than being individual, in our own homes, being isolated and not having that community support. But also some accountability from week to week, that we are working on the things that we’re doing with our curriculum.
The community aspect is probably my favorite because it has made me feel so supported and it has enabled me to really thrive in this journey.
ADAMS: Katy, I think what you have just expressed to us really sums up the progression, some of the adaptation that’s happened over the years in much of homeschooling.
In the early years, it was just, okay, we’re going to keep our kids at home, we're going to teach them ourselves and basically we pour into them everything we think is important, we think is going to help them. Or, we’re going to keep them isolated from bad influences outside of our home. That’s what seemed to drive a lot of the conversation, a lot of the decision-making.
Where today, as you expressed, there is that home involvement, there’s that parental involvement, there’s what happens with the child and the parent at home, and then there’s that community. It’s kind of like, once a week you get together in kind of a co-op, group learning. And you have both the small kids together and then the older kids.
Many times—and it varies from place to place how they do this—but the small kids are grouped together and they engage and experience with each other, but sometimes where the small kids observe the older kids and the older kids observe and mentor the younger kids. It’s almost this one-room school house approach that we had in our early educational history.
We’re seeing that kind of thing that helps to build community, as you used that expression. I think that’s a very important element.
Let me go back, just a little bit, into that second “C.” The “C” there is “Christian.” I think a lot of parents don’t realize…in the public space, what’s been told is it’s a separation of the state and religion. There are elements of our society that have really hammered that point home for their own purposes. But in reality, that was never the intent of our forefathers, or the founding of the nation.
It was that the state could not control and use religion as a tool or a weapon to control, to manage, to regulate, individuals. The state could not do that. But nowhere in our early history do we actually see documentation where religion or faith or Christianity was strongly discouraged. It was an encouragement that people explore truth. Try to discover truth, to learn, to grow.
Many times, the religious element had to do with not only purpose or meaning, but also had very much to do—and this is true with all religions, but particularly so in the Christian religion—is around how do we manage and regulate relationships? Because you can’t have a healthy society without some common values.
All around us in our society, there are basic common values that are more or less taken for granted. Sometimes they’re being challenged today, and it’s okay for values to be challenged, but they need to be challenged—like you said—in a way that digs down to what is true and what is best for individuals and community.
I think having the values that faith, Christianity, brings into the guidance and the understanding, the meaning of life…it answers so many why questions. Why is it wrong to take something from somebody else? Our law says you’re not allowed to cheat or steal. Some states are changing that; you know, “you can steal as long as it’s not $2,000,” or whatever.
Those are breakdowns of our society. Those are not things that build up our society. I think most parents value an understanding and a help to their children to understand why these things are so important and where they get their basis so that life makes sense. Would you like to speak more on that?
GALLEGOS: Yeah, I think that’s a huge pull. We’ve seen more families joining our Classical Conversation community who maybe aren’t practicing Chrsitans or who wouldn’t claim to be a Christian. They may believe in God but they’re not sold out on the organized religion aspect of it.
But they want their kids to be in a place where values are in place. Where they’re not going to be bombarded with ideas that are pretty crazy. I think that, more than ever, people are seeking truth. There’s that dichotomy where there’s some who are not but there are more now who are being pushed into seeking truth because they’re seeing that, like you said, the law of stealing less than $2,000 isn’t stealing is just crazy!
That pushes people more toward this… “Let’s find truth and where there’s right and wrong, where we have our kids in our environment where they’re surrounded by people who agree that there are rights and wrongs and truths to be found.
ADAMS: You know, that’s interesting because pretty much all religious teachings have some of these common values. Many commonalities in many of the world religions. I think parents from all kinds of backgrounds want their children to get this.
Many parents don’t want this, particularly, to be taught in their schools, but here’s the advantage when you’re teaching at home: you get to oversee this and you have curriculum that helps you explore these things yourself as an adult and as a parent and then help communicate those to your children in a meaningful and natural way that is comprehensive, but also comprehendible.
Then, as that gets lived out in community, all of a sudden, as we’re raising our children, we’re raising them in a world that begins to make sense to them and gives them these foundations that they can build their life around. Rather than just chaos, which is what so much of our school system today is bringing to the children. And frankly, bringing home and bringing to our community.
GALLEGOS: Absolutely. Absolutely, I think that families, as I said, that have been drawn to the homeschooling sector, they’re seeking that. They’re seeking less chaos, less confusion, and a more simple, kind of back-to-basics life.
Something that this year I’ve learned with my kids, is that in homeschooling you have—I’ve always done this, but didn’t realize what a blessing it was until recently. I saw some examples of not being able to do this with kids and thought, I’m so thankful I get to just take my kids along normal life with me. Teach them how to make appointments on the phone, looking things up and gardening and growing your own food, things that might seem, I don’t know—disposable, or that they’re not that important.
I think they’re incredibly important and what better place to teach science and math and all kinds of things in the garden, in particular. We’ve been doing a lot of that this year and I’m like, They get to see it in practice and in life! Also taking them on things like grocery shopping, how to meal plan and do the price per ounce, and all those things.
That’s all very practical stuff that if my day was so chopped where I didn’t get to have plenty of time with them to do those things, it would always be in a rush. I get to slow down and use these mundane things as teaching opportunities because that’s what they are. I’m not an unschooler where everything’s just an experience. I think there’s a [unintelligible 32:17] of people who do that and I think it probably be done well, but not by me. I don’t have the brain for that.
We do our book work and our curriculum work, but we also have a lot of real life experiences together, as well. I think that’s a really big blessing.
ADAMS: Well, share some resources. If parents or people want to learn more about Classical Conversations, particularly if they want to get more information, how can they do that?
GALLEGOS: Classical Conversations has a really great website. It’s just ClassicalConversations.com. They have videos on there that will help explain the CC program and the why and the nuts and bolts.
It’s a world-wide program, so there are programs in lots of countries, but tons in the U.S. Chances are, there’s one close to you and you can go visit for a day and get a feel for what it’s like. It’s hard to watch a video or hear someone speak about it and really understand what the classical model is. It’s so much easier to jump in and watch it in action.
I really suggest visiting a campus that’s near you. Most of them are really open to having visitors. Your kids can jump right into a class and experience it firsthand.
ADAMS: My experience—just throwing in here—is that knowledge is always around building blocks. Whenever you launch into a curriculum, particularly Classical Conversations that starts with a lot of earlier conversations and certain language acquisition because that’s the foundation for words and thoughts and ideas…it’s that building block structure.
If a family, if they get involved when their children are younger, it’s much easier because they’re in that flow. It’s maybe difficult to plug somebody in that’s a sophomore in highschool into that program because if they don’t have the foundations that come to that level, that could be a little bit difficult. Would you agree with that? Or do you have a different opinion?
GALLEGOS: I would agree that it’s easier if they start from little and the program is used the way that it was designed. From these younger ones, all the preparation work that gets them ready for those older classes and those older levels.
But I've seen several kids come in at an older age and actually really thrive. A lot of them are seeking education. And that sounds silly, but they’re not seeking filling in the blanks or just rote memorization with no meaning to it. They’re seeking to put all the pieces together and seeing that all the subjects are not all these isolated little boxes of subjects that are not related at all. They’re really full-circle, holistic subjects that are all related.
The kids who come in with those mindsets really, really thrive because they’re finally able to satisfy that hunger, like, This is why I learn stuff! I think those kids maybe even appreciate this homeschooling model and curriculum more than the ones who grew up in it. The ones who are growing up in it take it for granted. “This is what we’ve always done.” They don’t realize how charmed their little lives are.
The ones who come into seem to be like, “Thank you!” It’s refreshing to their little educational souls.
ADAMS: Well, Katy, this has been an interesting conversation. Thank you so much for sharing this time with us. To all of you who have been listening in, thank you for joining us. I hope you picked up something that’s useful to you. If you want to learn more about Classical Conversations, go to ClassicalConversations.com.
As was suggested, you can always visit a local community that is involved with that. Find out what works best for you and your child. So thank you for being involved, thank you for making a difference for our children and our country. Again, Katy, thank you so much for spending time with us today.
GALLEGOS: Thank you, and thank you for the work that you do for our educational system. And for inviting people like me, from different systems, to join your show. I really appreciate that.
ADAMS: You’re most welcome.