Ep. 77 "Unlocking the Power of Classical Education" - Guest Daniel Buck (Part 1 of 2)

Progressive education isn’t working. Kids are graduating school without basic knowledge of math, reading, and history. Daniel Buck, our guest today, says it’s time for a change. Join us on this episode as we explore the weaknesses of modern instruction, how teachers can restore order to their classrooms, and how classical ideas—while old-fashioned—may be just the thing we need to save our kids and our schools. 

Resources Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

• Learn more about Daniel’s new book, What Is Wrong With Our Schools?

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Transcript

ADAMS: Daniel, welcome and thank you for joining us today on The State of Education. So good to have you with us.

BUCK: Thanks for having me on. Glad to be here.

ADAMS: Awesome. Well, I'll tell you what, let's just jump right in here with both feet and the deep end, okay? But really, maybe not the deep end. Let's start with the kiddie pool and really kind of focus a little bit…tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, your upbringing, and your education. 

Just some things that help our audience to connect with you and understand more about you.

BUCK: I am from the Milwaukee area, Wisconsin. I'm a public school kid that's kind of become a bit of a private school convert. Went to undergrad at University of Wisconsin-Madison thinking I was going to be a doctor and then realized that's not at all what I wanted to do and I wanted to be an English teacher. Big jump, big switch there. 

Went to grad school there in curriculum and instruction and then I've spent the last seven years of my life teaching. I did a few years in public school doing English as a second language and mainstream English literature. When the pandemic hit, I saw that online learning was going to be a disaster and switched to a private school that was going to be open in the fall. Taught in English there, moved back to Milwaukee when I had a kid to be closer to my family. 

Now, this upcoming year, I'll be with the Fordham Institute, which is an education think tank based out of DC. So one of the people that lives in middle America but works remotely for the DC types. 

ADAMS: I got you. Okay. Well, welcome to that world. But you know, it's good to have you here and it's good to have your voice in this conversation. There are so many good things that are going on in the world of education and there are some really terrible things. A lot of people are very concerned. 

What I'd really like to do today is just to dig in, to tap into your experience and to your study and really focus on resourcing teachers and parents who are grappling with realities in education today, especially in the K -12 space. I mean, the university level…that's a whole different thing. A critical one, one that we do talk about some, but if we don't get the foundations right for our kids, there's an awful lot of loss.

That's kind of where we'd like to kind of focus our conversation today. You recently wrote a book and the title is What's Wrong With Our Schools? Question mark. 

So I did a little bit of digging in on that and this is what one of the blurbs says on—I think it was on Amazon. “What's wrong with our schools is the question everyone seems to be asking, or more like screaming, nowadays. Standard answers point to everything from school funding to unions to bureaucracies and more. In this book, Daniel Buck provides a different answer. Flawed ideas, ideas about instruction, curriculum, and even human nature itself are the root cause of American schooling's dysfunction.

Okay. Let's talk about your book a little bit. What started you and what got you writing this book and what was your purpose for that?

BUCK: I started writing it because the publisher reached out and asked me to. That's the honest answer. 

But as I started thinking about it, started asking myself, “Do I really want to write this book? What do I want it to be?” I think I was directing my book at the…let me restart this sentence, not restart the answer: the question I get asked most probably, on social media, in person is, “Well, what else should I be reading?” From teachers—new teachers, first year teachers, second year teachers. “You say, John Dewey and Paulo Freire, these people that we read in our book, our schools of education are wrong. What's the alternative?” 

Early in my career, I kind of bought into a lot of the progressive education models that you often learn about in your teacher prep program: let students pick what they want to read, let kids design their own discipline expectations in the classroom. Just let the kids do it all. Read contemporary fiction—all this kind of stuff.

I did all of that and it wasn't working. I started doing some digging and came across authors like E.D. Hirsch, kind of discovered the classical education movement. I thought this was this tiny little niche counter movement full of a little bit crazy people. The more I dug into it, the more I realized there's this whole canon of traditionalist education, of classical education that reaches back to Aristotle. 

I'm a bit of a crazy person who spends my Saturdays reading education research, reading education books. Most teachers—they're not looking to do that. They go in on a Monday, they work, they do great work Monday through Friday, but they go home and they want to spend time with their family on Saturday and Sunday. They're not going to pick through a hundred different meta studies, trying to figure out what works and what doesn't.

This book was me trying to distill down what is essential to know about what kind of traditional approaches to the classroom. Direct instruction, classical literature, structured practice, clear discipline structures and fair consequences, these kinds of things. It's an introductory book into this world, covering a little bit of everything from the theory to the studies to what it looks like in practice. 

It's probably a little too much philosophy for some people, not enough research for other people. And a few wish—maybe parents or school board members that are reading this don't care much about, okay, what does it look like when it comes to lesson planning? I'm not a teacher.

But I wanted to cover everything. It's an introductory book. Then, if people are more interested, they can go grab—I'm looking at my bookshelf next to me—The Well-Trained Mind or The Great Tradition or Reading Reconsidered, these other books to dig in a little bit deeper on specific topics.

ADAMS: Okay, yeah, it's interesting. The whole philosophy of education—I started teaching in ‘82 and there were a lot of changes going on in education at that time, but certainly the world of education has completely turned upside down from that time until now. As you kind of started out here, the whole focus being kind of self-guided stuff with kids and so forth. 

A certain amount of that is healthy as you are discovering what their natural interests, gifts, abilities—and all of that—are, but the bigger part of the keyword “teach”...what does that really mean?  The whole idea is, there are certain things you should know, that you should be able to transfer and communicate to the next generation. 

Sometimes that's completely lost in the modern educational philosophy. It's more like you’re the babysitter. They're just kind of watching the playground and making sure that natural selection takes place. Maybe that's an exaggeration, but would you agree that that's kind of somewhat of the philosophy of the modern day classroom? 

BUCK: Yeah, I think it mixes up what cognitive theory would call “primary versus secondary learning.” Primary learning are the things that we are primed to learn, almost naturally, through play. 

My daughter's a little over two. I don't have to sit down and run her through lessons. To start speaking, for gross motor movements, for these kinds of things, basic physics: I throw the ball up, the ball falls down. We learn that naturally. A lot of modern education theorists think that approach to learning can extend past those basic primary learnings, but that's just not how it works. 

All this stuff of culture, of advanced societies…you can't just discover your way into calculus. At the frontiers of human knowledge, that's kind of what scientists are still doing, but when it comes to teaching fourteen-year-olds the stuff that we already know, they need to be taught it. They need to be explicitly explained to them. 

They need to practice some drill and kill. They need to memorize their math facts, these kinds of old traditional approaches, that we used to all know work, are suddenly denigrated as old-fashioned, as ineffective, as oppressive even. I just think that the teaching profession has called them more than that. 

Like you said, we're not just babysitters letting them discover whatever they want in the classroom. We’re there to hand along the best that has been thought and said, we're there to ready them to enter society as young adults. We're not just there to babysit them in a classroom space for eight hours a day. 

ADAMS: Yeah, for sure. That kind of…we're talking a little bit here about instruction. In your study and in your experience, you've kind of shifted your philosophy, I guess, around this term of instruction. So would you dig into that just a little bit? 

And I know that's a huge topic. I mean, we could talk about that for a week, and that goes into multiple disciplines. But in a general sense, for the teacher, for the parent, in reality—because we're believers that parents are the first teachers. 

So, instruction. Let's talk about that just a little bit more. What are some of the specifics and the things…those principles, those things that are always going to work and those are the foundational blocks to guidance? Talk about that a little bit more. 

BUCK: Yeah, I think honestly, telling the story of how I discovered it might be most effective. Like you said, that's a big question—and we can't get into all of the research and all of the theory—but in my own personal teaching, when I first started, I ran what's called a “workshop model,” where I would let kids pick their own books.

We spent most of class reading silently. They had little questions that they're supposed to watch out for they're supposed to run their own little discussion circles, design their own little projects at the end of the unit. And the classroom felt ineffective. It felt chaotic. 

But there was one time, a few times a week, where one time in the class period it would always be controlled and kids would be 100% engaged and everyone would be listening and discussing together. So a few times a week I'd sit down, I'd spin a desk around in front, I'd sit on the desk, and we'd do a read aloud together. 

When we were doing that reading aloud together, kids were silent. I didn't have to set the expectation for them to be silent. I didn't have to threaten them with lunch detention or anything like that. They just were engaged in the book that we were all reading together. Sometimes our best discussions came from this moment. 

One kid, I can picture him now, this little guy who was like the shortest person in the class, a sixth grader, and he'd raise his hand. And he just—I can't remember any of them off the top of my head right now—he'd ask the most insightful questions off the top of his head and then look at the rest of the class and I'm like, “What do you guys think about that?” And then we discuss it all together. 

That led me towards more, honestly, teacher driven whole-class approaches to the classroom. Rather than students siloed off, cloistered, atomized, lonely in a corner reading by themselves, saying to the class, “Hey, we're all going to be silent together right now. We're all going to read this book together right now. You might want to talk to the person next to you, but I'm going to ask you for 20 minutes, not two, for the sake of everyone else around you, right? This isn't just about you.” 

You know, there's some community aspects to this too. I find that progressive education can be very self -centered and selfish almost, saying, “Hey, I'm going to ask you to do something you don't want to do for 20 minutes. Stay silent, read independently so the person next to you can focus and then we're going to come together and we're going to talk about it all together and we're going to practice things together. We're going to learn grammar. I'm going to explain it to you and you're going to practice it and it might be a little bit boring, but I'll do what I can to make it entertaining. I'll use some goofy examples, but this is going to serve you in the long run. 

Little by little, I started finding that all of these things that teacher education told me didn't work were actually what my students enjoyed the most and what was most effective and what created the most community in the classroom. 

ADAMS: Yeah. Well, that's great. That’s a great answer because it's practical and everybody's going to understand that, just like your kids did in that classroom setting. I think that, really—in the little blurb about your book, the term “human nature”…let's talk a little bit about that in this context. I think it applies right now.

Human nature…it can be very selfish, but humanity flourishes in community. We love it. We are focused on each other when we are engaged, when we’re focused, when we’re coming around a common purpose and cause and seeking things together. There are certain basic humanity elements there. 

Talk a little bit more about that and some of the discoveries you had.

BUCK: Yeah…I'll begin with discipline and then maybe move on to instruction second. I'm a practicing, believing, born-again Christian, was baptized in the lake at eighteen. 

I would say that humans are sinful and we have inherent worth in our image-bearing nature of God. We are broken and yet also redeemed. We are imperfect and yet created to be far more than we are right now. We don't have to use religious language though. 

I don't want just Christian converts to be the ones who understand this. And I don't think we have to rely on Christian theory necessarily. We could say “evolution has left some imperfections behind.” We could go from a political theory standpoint and say, “well, we're all a bit self-interested—not necessarily a bad thing—but we think about ourselves most. At some point, my self-interest is going to run into yours.”

There's just going to be natural conflict there. My daughter wants to swing her arms around in a circle, but unfortunately there's another kid in the Sunday school room that she hits in the face, right? Her self-interest runs smack into the self-interest of another kid, hitting him in the face. There's some amount of conflict. There's some amount of brokenness there. 

How that applies to discipline—the more contemporary, perhaps we could call a progressive education approach to discipline—is that human nature is perfect, but society corrupts us. So we need to fix the institutions, we need to make our classroom more engaging. If Johnny is misbehaving, maybe it's because of his family situation, maybe he's hungry, maybe there's a cultural conflict going on at school.

All of that might be true. That might make Johnny more likely to lash out in anger. That might make him more likely to push Timmy. But when push comes to shove, at some point, kids misbehave simply because they're kids. 

We could put Johnny in this perfect utopian system, and he still might shoot a spitball. He still might talk out of turn. He still might see what the rule is and then push his toe right up against the line to see, well, where is that line? Because kids are a little bit rebellious. They're pushing against the strictures and the structure and the boundaries that society puts on them.

A progressive approach would want to sort of lean towards getting rid of consequences and just [start saying], “How can we support this child?” But human nature says at some point, “Kids are always going to need consequences. We're going to need detention. They're going to have to miss out on recess time. We're going to need even suspensions and, in some cases, expulsions. We cannot get rid of those.”

The trendy approach in education right now is restorative justice, PBIS. We're going to focus on supporting the kids. We're going to focus on conflict resolution. We're going to focus on the positive incentives. None of those are a bad thing, but you need the consequences. 

You need the negative disincentives. I always just mix up what's the negative incentive, disincentive, whatever it is. You know what I'm saying.

ADAMS: Sure.

BUCK: We can't get rid of those. 

ADAMS: Reinforcement. 

BUCK: Yes! Reinforcement, accountability.

For instruction, he progressive approach, the contemporary approach is, “Well, we're going to let kids just discover what they want to learn, follow their own interests, and construct their own knowledge,” which is not really how humans learn. You can't construct knowledge about Napoleon or the Holocaust or the Civil War in your mind. That knowledge has to come from outside of you somewhere.

I could drop a textbook in front of a kid and say, “Discover on your own.” Or I could go up front and give an entertaining lecture for 20 minutes, hook their interest, maybe in something they weren't interested in ahead of time, right? Sometimes intrinsic motivation comes extrinsically. The kid doesn't want to go to summer camp until you force them to go there and they realize it's amazing.

Kids say, “I don't want to read Romeo and Juliet. I don't want to learn about the Civil War.” Then you start teaching about it and they're like, “Oh my gosh, this is amazing. This is really interesting.” Then their interest is hooked, and you can give them a lesson. 

You can give them some activities to go and learn more, but it begins with a teacher up front lecturing, explaining a concept, right? Lecturing is such a denigrated and dirty word nowadays, but it's just an adult, an expert, explaining something that kids don't know. I don't understand why that's a bad thing or consider it a bad thing. It isn't a bad thing. 

ADAMS: So let's dig into a few things a little bit more, maybe in your book, maybe not in your book. 

One of the things that Noah Webster Educational Foundation does, because we believe that school boards are central to the reclaiming of education in this country. They are the ones who are given by state mandate, by state legislative authority—not only the privilege, but the responsibilities and the powers—to regulate and guide our schools, everything from hiring, firing budgets and everything else.

Let's talk about some things that we hear all the time…and school boards grapple with some things…Often it's like, okay, wait a second, this is what the teachers have to deal with, this is what the superintendent's job is, to manage these things and so forth. And this is all true, but at the end of the day, it's the school boards who establish the policy and set the standards and the expectations. 

Let's talk a little bit about some of the culture wars that are going on in our schools.

BUCK: Even before I get to the curriculum, I just want to acknowledge and say that I appreciate the fact that you see the conundrum that a lot of teachers are in. I think teachers, especially in the right-of-center media—and I am a conservative myself, so I'm not saying that derogatorily—but teachers are portrayed as just this monolith of blue-haired indoctrinators...and that's not the case. 

Those people are out there, don't get me wrong, especially in, you know, very blue cities on the coasts. But where I've taught, starting in Green Bay, Wisconsin, most teachers are, or were, my friends—I'll use past tense, were—that I knew up there. On the left, they voted Democrat unabashedly, but they weren't bought into all of the far left pushes that we're seeing in education, and they were frustrated by it too.

They got into teaching because they loved math, and they wanted to teach kids math, and they were fascinated by it from when they were a kid, and they studied it when they were in college. They wanted kids to see the beauty in math and the way it plays itself out in the world and in the sky and the stars and falling objects and all of these things. 

Or this teacher, when they were in high school, got hooked on the French Revolution, when they  were sixteen or seventeen years old, and they had their parents buy them a bookshelf full of—sorry, hit my mic, I speak with my hands even on a podcast! They bought a bookshelf full of history books on the French Revolution when they were a kid, because they're just amazed by it, and they want to share that passion with kids.

Then they're being asked to be deputized therapists for SEL and restorative justice, or they're being asked to work progressive politics about pride or race into a math lesson. And they might even agree with a lot of these ideas. But they're like, “I don't want to do this during math class, or this isn't my role as a teacher. I have these private beliefs, but it's not my job to talk with 12 year olds about this.”

My job is to teach pre-algebra.

ADAMS: Yeah.

BUCK: Three plus x equals four, what is x? That's what I'm teaching, so they can do calculus when they're in high school, and then do mental math when they're an adult, and they're trying to sign a check with their friends for dinner. 

So I just appreciated the fact that you didn't throw all teachers under the bus there. The question about curriculum that you actually asked—I'm glad you focused on curriculum, because it's both over discussed and under discussed. We talk about what shouldn't be on there, but so rarely we talk about what should be on there, and I think we need much more of what's called a knowledge-rich approach to curriculum. 

An example of what that isn't: Common Core is a great example. I've looked at my own states, Wisconsin's history standards, and you'll see this list of skills that kids are supposed to master. “Analyze a text compared to historical events,” “interpret this quote,” these kinds of things. There are skills that kids are supposed to learn, but when it comes to what facts should they know, what errors should they learn about, what wars or key historical figures should they learn about, that gets nary a mention. 

My state's curriculum is like sixty pages and there's one page that lists recommended content to cover and it's basic things like “the modern age.” And that's just—again, it's a flawed approach to learning. 

If I asked a student to analyze the text from World War II, but they don't have the basic facts, they don't know who Winston Churchill was or Adolf Hitler was, they don't know what the Holocaust was, they don't know the years that had happened. If they don't have this basic factual knowledge, how in the world can they interpret this text?

In reading instruction…I fancy myself a decent reader. I read Rousseau, regretfully, for my book. I read a lot of Aristotle and classical philosophy and I understood it for the most part. But if you give me a reading on cricket, the British sport—I brought up an article a couple months ago just for funsies about cricket and I didn't understand a thing because I didn't know what—there are things like a tricky wicket and I didn't know the rules of the sport and I didn't know the teams and I didn't even know what a field looks like. 

You have to have content knowledge to be able to do these skills that are on the curriculum. So we need a more robust sequence of the content that kids are supposed to learn. I think that's going to crowd out some of the politics. Right now, our curriculum and standards are kind of a vacuum and so it's filled in, often, with progressive politics because you have to learn about something. 

You have to practice these skills on something, and if we give them more explicit content to cover, I think kids are going to have a much richer education and we're going to see less of these politics filling in that empty space, those gaps. 

ADAMS: Yeah, yeah. Couldn't agree with you more. 

You know, I often—from an educational standpoint, when you start out, it's kind of like that ripple in the pond, right? When you toss a pebble in the pond when it first hits the water, it makes that initial splash. It's about the size of the pebble.Then as that impacts across the water, then you see that circle and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. 

In a sense, when we teach, you always introduce concepts very directly, very simply: “Here is a fact. Here is some truth.” Then, through coming back to that and through conversation, as you revisit and revisit and revisit over time, as they build on their knowledge, as you were talking about— say, World War Two. 

As they learn certain facts about certain players, as the story unfolds, it keeps circling around those players. And all of a sudden, the whole thing starts to make sense until you cover the whole pond, so to speak, with the ripple. But it all makes sense because it all ties together because it all started with that critical point. Curriculum has to be built that way. Otherwise, it doesn't make sense. 

It has to start with foundational concepts, truths, and principles that are proven over time. I'm all about creativity and and trying new things, but way too often the new things are promoted—really, it's follow the money, because somebody came up with this new idea and they're introducing this new curriculum because they're going to sell these textbooks because it's new and everybody's got to have them. They're going to make a lot of money. 

But is it really something you can build a life around? Too often, it's not. When you get the foundations right, it just makes sense for everybody. And it works in the real world, regardless of the subject matter.

BUCK: Yeah, I'm going to—even before you ask a question, I'm going to jump in and give an analogy that I think helps explain even more what you're saying. 

Always looking for the shiny new thing in education, the newest educational model instructional practice curricular approach, whatever it is. Project based learning, discovery-based instruction, inquiry-based instruction, blah, blah, blah.

I don’t care what’s newest. We’re not talking about space technology, here, we’re talking about rearing children. And human nature hasn’t changed for 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 years. That’s one thing I really appreciate about being a practicing Christian: every single day that—at its newest—is 2,000 years old. Christian Scripture. 

You realize that humans have not changed. At all. Technology changes, aspects of society change, dominant political structures change. But people are petty, people go to war, there’s anger, there’s infidelity, all of these things. There’s also great triumphs, families coming together, reconciliation, all these kinds of things.

Finally getting to the analogy: I want to know what works. We can look at other very old traditions: family dinners, for example. Just because the family dinner is an old tradition doesn’t mean we should throw it out, get rid of it. “Aw, well, we’ve been having family dinners for a hundred years! Let’s try something new.”

If anything, in the contemporary age, when everyone’s addicted to their cell phones, staring at screens, walking down the sidewalk, not looking up at nature but looking down at Twitter or whatever it is…I think family dinners are even more important. 

Or even something related to technology, medical technology. Washing hands. Sure, we have amazing vaccines and MRIs and all this amazing technology and little miracles drugs that can cure illnesses that would have killed our children 200 years ago. At the same time, washing our hands—basic exercise—are some of the best prophylactics that are out there. Except for extreme cases where you’re really, really ill, that’s the best thing you can be doing for your health.

Just because it’s old, doesn’t mean we should get rid of it. Some of these older approaches to the classroom: reading classic literature together, explaining things to students in a short little lecture with some call and response, with some questions, giving them structured practice, a little bit of drill-and-kill…these things—we shouldn’t get rid of them just because they’re old. 

If something’s old and it doesn’t work, great. Get rid of it. I’m not hanging onto it just because it’s old. At the same time, I’m not getting rid of it just because it’s old.