ADAMS: Well, we are delighted to have all of you with us today on The State of Education podcast and especially delighted to have our guest today, Jonathan Brush. Jonathan, welcome to the podcast.
BRUSH: Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here. Looking forward to it.
ADAMS: Well, we are as well.
A lot of times we start off with just asking you to share about yourself and kind of help our audience to know who they're listening to and some perspective on where you're coming from.
Tell us about your background and then maybe you can just kind of weave that into the genesis of, and your leadership with, Unbound.
BRUSH: Sure. Be delighted to do so.
Well, this is an education podcast, so I'll do a little bit of an education background here. I was homeschooled and graduated as a homeschooled student. I went to kindergarten in first grade and I was homeschooled back in the day when that was a really unusual thing to do.
The older I get, the more surprised I am that my mother did that. My parents together, but obviously Mom was the driving force there. Had a really great experience doing that, but through the whole thing, it was like everything was new.
My mom actually helped write the admissions policies for the college that I attended. I attended a private selective liberal arts college. I had a really great experience there. I was the first homeschooled student they admitted. The second one that they admitted graduated with a 4.0 and was also tremendously beautiful. So I did the only logical thing and I married her as soon as I graduated.
As far as I was concerned, college was a smashing success. That meant that I was in really great shape. I graduated with honors from a college. I had a wedding date scheduled. But I was lacking a few important things like a job and a place to live.
And so the college said, “Hey, would you like to be an admissions counselor? And I said, “I don't have any idea what an admissions counselor is, but does it have a salary attached to it?” And they said, “Yes.” And I said, “I'd be delighted to be an admissions counselor. That sounds like a lot of fun.” I had worked giving tours for the admissions office when I worked there, so I had some connections to them.
I did that for a year. The next year they said, “Would you like to be the assistant director of admissions?” I thought, “Well, that sounds pretty spiffy.” The third year I got called into the president's office and he said, “I'd like to be the youngest admissions director of admissions in the state of Virginia.” I thought, “That sounds both terrifying and also the kind of thing that if you turn down, you don't get more opportunities.” I had a really phenomenal experience both as a student at the college and then working for the college.
But through that process—I loved my college and I loved the people that I was working with and my team and everything like that. But I started to have really big concerns and questions about higher education at large.
At some point I came home—at that point, I had four children—and my oldest opened the door and I looked at her and I thought, “I really don't want her to go to the college where I'm working.” And I thought, “Well, that's an ethical crisis because it's not that you have to go to the college where your dad works, but if I wouldn't put my own kid there, then I obviously cannot get paid to ask other people to send their children there.”
That sent me on a bit of a journey. I went to work for a non-traditional higher education company called College Plus. Through the years, that morphed into what became Unbound. Then, July of 2020, I actually had the opportunity to acquire Unbound. There was a business transfer and another company bought a good chunk of the company and the consumer part of the company was available.
So we re-formed a new board and new company and relaunched something that had been a continuation, so in some sense, it's weird. We're a bit of a startup that's been around for a while. Now we do non-traditional higher education. I went from non-traditional elementary and secondary education, traditional higher education, worked in traditional higher education, now moved into non-traditional higher education.
I have six children, two foster children. They've been homeschooled. Three of them have now graduated. It has been a fun thing to watch some of my work life intersect with my personal life as some of my children work for me and with the company.
Many of them have—well, so far, all of them have participated in the program itself. I've seen it from both a father's perspective as well as the administrator's perspective. It has been the most fun thing I've ever done. Working with the students at Unbound to do what we do has absolutely been educational and challenging and all those kinds of things, but mostly a delight and just something that I wake up every morning, pinch myself and go, “Wow, thank you, Lord, for bringing me here.”
So that's the uninteresting, but kind of maybe relevant, background—if we're talking about education.
ADAMS: Well, I think that was interesting. Thank you for sharing that.
You start out with kind of the traditional model of, outside of the homeschool—which was certainly not traditional when you were a kid. Much more popular, it's the fastest growing genre of education today in America.
But now, with all of your background and shifting from a traditional collegiate experience and promotion to the non-traditional, what is your philosophy of education? Let's kind of start there.
BRUSH: Yeah, so first of all, I think a philosophy has to be about what you're for. I'm going to start with a bit of a contrast of what I'm against, but that's in preparation for the positive side of things. I'm not too excited about people that are only against things. I think that if you're going to have some energy, you have to be for something.
But I'll tell you what kind of made me pause and go, “Wait a second, I have to think about this.” And that was—the cost initially just got my attention, right? In traditional higher education, I started to think, “I'm not so sure that this ROI pays out,” right? The amount of debt you're taking for the results that you're getting doesn't make sense. That was the initial kind of like, “Wait a second, what's going on here?”
The second was that I watched only—and this was a I know this is going back in ancient history, maybe, for some of your listeners—but in the 2000 presidential election, I watched my own campus go from almost non political or apolitical across the board. I mean, it was just… people that were really into politics were just very unusual, both the students and faculty. To becoming highly partisan overnight, and really, with just one perspective.
From just an educational perspective, I started to think, well, there's a real strange difference between: the majority of people teaching think one thing, the majority of people coming in think another thing. There's a clash there that's not being managed very well. It was, but it's not anymore because now there's all these extra emotions playing into it.
That led me to the final piece, which was: something is odd here. Colleges were designed to be ideal places. They were designed to be these—you know, Jefferson called them the academic village where people came together and exchanged ideas. I was really bought into that. But colleges weren't that. Colleges were actually vocation preparation centers.
People were going to college for a period of extended adolescence. “I worked really hard in high school. This is my chance to party before I have to go into the real world and sit in a cubicle for the rest of my life.” Or they became these kind of, “I'm going here to get the magic ‘get a job card.’”
My observation was that neither of those things made a lot of sense. It was a very expensive party as well as…I didn't think it was very good developmentally. Also, they were really ill equipped to be vocational training centers. Colleges were really good at doing the academic stuff. But I started to look more and more around and go, “I don't think this idea that everybody has to have a college degree in order to be an effective person makes sense. I think education should be more about preparing for life. Then, specific kinds of education should prepare one deeply academically.”
Now, I'm a huge fan of academics and I'm a huge fan of people who need academic training. I'm a fan of—I think colleges, traditional colleges, do an extraordinary job of teaching that. What was frustrating me was I watched the college that I worked for not be able to do what they were really good at because they were swamped with people who were there for the party or there for the job.
All those things started to come together. Out of it came this philosophy that what we do in education ought to be towards the design and preparing one to live a better life. Of course, that begs the question, “What does a better life look like?” From my Christian worldview, I would say, well, a better life is one that helps you follow the One who made you, that is based on relationships and is designed to help you serve better.
That can take place in a lot of different ways. But it's interesting to think about if that was the thing that you were saying was the highest ideal— then perhaps the second, for Unbound—now, I'll make a distinction here for Unbound—the second would be to prepare you practically for a job. Then all of a sudden it changes the kind of educational process that you're going through.
Now, that second one is important because that is in contrast to academic training. It is not to belittle academic training; it’s instead to elevate it. To say that preparing specifically for a certain set of jobs looks very different than preparing really academically in-depth. The colleges are actually quite good at training people to be academically in-depth and people who need that ought to go to colleges.
But there’s a large swath of people who don’t actually need that. They need general academics—enough knowledge to be able to run the republic—but they don’t need that really deep academic training that they are good at, but they can’t now because they’re deluded with people who aren’t there for those reasons.
Bit of a long answer, I apologize. But that frames up where I came from, and how I got to where I am now.
ADAMS: What I’m hearing you say is, your philosophy of education boils down to…you’re for strong academic focus, but at the end of the day, the customer—the student—should be prepared for life and their future, not just holding credentials or meeting certain community standards that are classified as “education.”
It’s more important that they actually gain workable skills. Is that what I’m hearing you say?
BRUSH: Yeah, maybe some slight nuance on that. I was influenced greatly by the president that I worked for, a man by the name of Phil Stone. He would say at the start of every open house, for years as director of admissions I heard him say this. He would say, “The Germans were the most educated and credentialed people on the face of the planet in the 1930’s.” He would pause and let that implication sink in. Then he would say, “It has to be more than just education. It has to be more than just a credential.”
What was equally interesting to me was that the college was highly opposed to that idea. In other words, the president was saying, “We ought to be doing something more.” And the college would say—the professors and the faculty—would say, “That’s not why I’m here.”
I would say, yes. All education, academic and, perhaps, more practical, should be preparing students for life. But then I make a little bit of a fork in the road. I think there are some students that are academically gifted who are the kinds of people who are going to be our next judges and attorneys and all those kinds of things. I want them to have the richest, deepest, most intense academic training possible. I think that that probably happens best at really good college campuses.
But there’s a large swath of people—the majority, I would argue, who need to go into…and I don’t say “practical” to demean the others. I just say more practical, almost hands-on types of things. There’s this illusion in here that, in a “knowledge economy,” that must mean they have more academic credentials. I actually think there’s something different going on here. I think they need more practical skills, most of which is posited around asking questions and being able to problem solve. Versus, just having a lot of academic knowledge, which is more of an answers-based paradigm.
This is a bit of a “choose the path that makes the most sense for you.” It's not that I think colleges are bad or a poor choice, I just think that they should be a more limited choice for people who can best benefit from them and that there's different options that maybe work better for others.
Just being able to ask that question can often free up students to say, “Oh, this makes a little more sense,” and then to follow the place that leads them to the best outcome.
ADAMS: Okay! You kind of started into this a little bit, but I'd like to dig a little deeper. As an organization, Unbound—my understanding is—it's a private, for-profit business.
BRUSH: Correct.
ADAMS: You are also unashamedly and distinctly Christian.
BRUSH: That's also correct.
ADAMS: Why is that important?
BRUSH: Well, there's a lot of answers to that, but I'll start with this. I have worked for several organizations who said they were Christian, but didn't actually follow through with that, and then were happy to sell that away in service to the culture.
When I had an opportunity to acquire Unbound, I actually told the board as we formed it, I said, “I want kill switches in this thing. I would rather that we go out of business than we lose our Christian connection.” And when I say connection, that doesn't do it justice. We state—and you can go to our website and find this in writing—that we have three priorities.
The first priority is to build the kingdom of God. The second is actually to serve the people who work for us. And the third is to serve our students. Now, the kind of trick question is that we cannot serve the people who work for us unless we serve our students, but both of those have to be subservient to building the kingdom of God. There's a statement of faith and belief in there that spells it out.
Now, because of the nature of Unbound, I do not require all of our students to subscribe to that statement. You do not have to believe certain things to be a student of Unbound. What you must do is acknowledge that we believe certain things. I tell people, “You can come in and argue vehemently with us. You can have different perspectives. We will welcome that conversation. I just don't have any patience if you come in offended that we believe the things that we do. You can try to change your mind if you'd like.”
Now, that's different for the folks who work for us. If you work for us, we expect you to understand that we teach and we do everything from a biblical worldview perspective. If you can't get on board with that, you won't be effective in being able to help us achieve our goals.
So that part is clear. Now, that's the kind of personal background, but I think there's a practical background here too, as well. I simply do not believe that one can run an educational institution without clearly understanding what you believe and subscribing to that. Now, I would make an argument, you maybe can't do that in all of life, but you certainly can't do it in education. Education is never worldview-neutral.
I feel like it's important to be honest with our students and with the people that come into the program and say, “You're all welcome here, but I am teaching this from a particular perspective because I think it is the perspective that best reflects reality. You can argue with me about that. You can have a different opinion. That's fine. But you have to understand that we will unapologetically be biased in that direction.”
I don't think you can be unbiased in education. You have some bias and we're attempting to be extra honest by admitting ours upfront.
ADAMS: You know, some people would argue with you on that and say, “Well, that's not a proper approach to classic classical education or liberal education or et cetera, et cetera.”
But I guess I would commend you for having a position there. Because the reality is—you basically stated this—the reality is, there is no worldview-neutral education because at its foundation, education is a communication of values, a communication of philosophy. And it's all about transferring ideas and communicating those things.
A lot of times, you know, of course, the liberal university and you get all the different diversity and all those kinds of things. There can be some merit in hearing different ideas. But fundamentally, the customer…it's kind of like if you're going to go buy a car. You want to know the name brand and what that name brand represents and their values and what you can count on with that particular model or that particular brand.
It's known for certain things, certain values, certain characteristics. I think when you go in understanding that now you are choosing and you're purchasing with understanding and having an informed decision on, “Okay, I'm going to acquire that on purpose because I think that's going to serve me well.”
Where in many times you go—we send kids off to college or the university and we have no idea what they're going to hit there. So often, parents, especially, end up very disappointed. Oftentimes kids come out of there completely confused and really kind of sometimes lose their way in the world.
It's just like there is no truth anymore. But fundamentally, the basis of seeking education is to discover reality, to discover truth. That's the end game, is to build those foundational blocks, get those things under me that can help me. I'm confident in these things rather than just pulling the rug out from underneath me.
So, our audience can judge for themselves what they think. But as an educator myself, I think it's important for us to be intellectually honest about what we believe, what we follow, what we're promoting. I think that's the right way to approach our customer.
BRUSH: I would add, “honest, but also unafraid.” I think those two things have to go together.
I think sometimes there are those who are honest, but afraid and that leads to a very different educational outcome. First of all, I think the way humans are designed—and designed obviously that word comes from my Christian worldview—that they are designed to look up to something. If you are not clear about what that is, you are inviting inevitable ideological chaos.
I see no examples where this has not been the case. Any institution that proclaims that they don't have a particular ideology invites ideological chaos that inevitably leads to a certain ideology.
ADAMS: True.
BRUSH: Therefore, I don't think there's a neutral ground to be in. But I do think there's a significant difference between being honest about that and also being unafraid.
In Unbound, we call this a questions-based paradigm. Now, there's actually a couple of reasons we do this, and some of it is very practical. But on the ideological scale, here's the approach that we take: I am unafraid of questions. I'm unafraid of people who have differing opinions. I think that being afraid of those things is a recipe for complete disaster. We do not have the luxury of living in a world where our students will not be exposed to every crazy ideological point of the spectrum.
There will be compelling arguments for them because the Internet allows that. To pretend otherwise is just to ignore reality. We're going to have all these ideas running around. I tell our students, “Look, here's the way I look at this. I follow an infinite God who says His ways are beyond my ways. Consequently, it appears to me that for all eternity, I'm not going to be able to fully figure out the God I follow. But physicists tell me they don't fully understand gravity either.
It behooves them in order to further science to continue to ask questions about what gravity is and how it works, but it doesn't prevent them from designing rockets that take into account gravity as a major factor.” So I tell my students, “Here are truths that have been laid out before us. They're as solid as gravity in the sense that you can live your life by them. But they're also open to continuing questioning that will lead to a deeper truth.”
People say, “Well, that sounds relativistic or postmodern.” It does in some sense, but the difference is the direction you're going and the goal you're seeking. The postmodernist relativist asks questions with the prior assumption that they are going to lead to nihilism, that is going to lead to nothing. They're asking questions deliberately to get themselves to justify this idea that there's no such thing as absolute truth.
I encourage our students, and I think, Christians are called to—and this is certainly not an idea that's any what original to me. I think this is a very Christian idea, right? This is just a way of stating it. That we ask questions as well, but we ask questions in an attempt to learn the truth.
ADAMS: Right.
BRUSH: As we learn more and more of the truth, we will find ourselves standing in a place to ask a better question that will lead us to more of the truth.
Now, that means that, like gravity, there are things we can build our lives on and say, “These things are true and we can actually structure our lives around them.” But we also, if we stop and fully understand it, that’s cult territory. That’s where things get weird. That’s where religions get internal and pharisaical and all those kinds of things.
Instead, I think that there’s this idea that, yeah, we’re unafraid to say, “I don’t fully understand that. That’s something we should continue to ask questions about.” That doesn’t mean we don’t have some things that are solid enough to live by. But it also means that we’re humble. We’re continually in this attitude of leaning forward and asking questions.
And I kind of think that persists for eternity. That’s going to be a continual process post this life.