Good Neighbor Podcast: Auburn and Opelika

Ep.#49: Cultivating Future Thinkers: Micah Moore with Auburn Classical Academy

• Susannah Hodges at Village Centre Press

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Learn about classical education in this interview with Micah Moore, the Head of School at Auburn Classical Academy.  You'll be intrigued to learn about the academy's dynamic partnership with parents, inviting them into an active role within the educational framework and a refreshing four-day school week. Micah imparts his wisdom on the classical method's capacity to produce independent thinkers, equipped with knowledge spanning Latin, logic, and traditional sciences, all meticulously curated to develop well-rounded, future-ready scholars.


Speaker 1:

Good Neighbor podcast. The place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, susanna Hodges.

Speaker 2:

Welcome to the Good Neighbor podcast. With me I have Micah Moore. He's the head of school at the Auburn Classical Academy. Welcome, micah. It's a pleasure having you with me today.

Speaker 3:

Susanna, it is a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely Well, tell us about your school. What is Auburn Classical Academy?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, well, that's a great question and this is probably, from my perspective, one of the more unique questions because our school has so many distinctives. So I'm going to give you a bit of a long answer, but first I'll tell you we are a K-8 classical Christian private school. Now, the best way to think about what makes our school unique is our mission statement. It has a lot packed into a little sentence, so I'm going to read that and just kind of unpack it. It says guided by the gospel, we aspire to provide a traditional classical education in partnership with parents. So you know, and that first thing, what we'd like to let people know is that we are a Christian school, we're guided by the gospel, but maybe, as opposed to many other schools, we are not denominationally affiliated. We use a Greek term that's transliterated and called ecumenical. That means we have students who are Baptists, students who are Presbyterians, students who are Catholic, who are Orthodox, the whole range of Christian denominations, and we all go to school here together and so we aren't specifically denominationally affiliated. We follow the Apostles' Creed as our statement of faith and we focus on biblical literacy in our Christian studies program.

Speaker 3:

Now, part of that mission statement is that we believe that we work in partnership with parents. We don't see schools as daycares. We see them as places where children come to learn, but that parents are still ultimately the primary authority of their children. And so we don't want parents to come and not expect to be involved in what their children are doing or to be plugged into knowing what their children are learning. We really want parents to be invested and to have a real stake in the education.

Speaker 3:

So one way that that plays out at our school is that we actually have a four-day school week. We're Monday through Thursday, 8 to 2.30. And that Friday day is a work from home day, so their homework will go home on that day, especially starting in grades three and up, and we want parents to be able to see what their children are learning and take part in that learning process with them and have a vested claim and stake in that. And so we truly believe it's a partnership. We believe parents are going to be the primary teachers of their children. You know kids spend a lot of time with us, but they learn the most from mom and dad. Everybody knows it. They pick up on everything from mom and dad, and so we really want mom and dad to be involved, and we think that's the way it should be, and so we try to make that a reality at our school.

Speaker 2:

Now, I'm sorry, didn't mean to interrupt you. Well, I was going to ask you about classical. I know you've been. What does that mean? What does that classical term in your title mean?

Speaker 3:

That is a great question and that's probably the one we could spend the most time on. I'll try to make it as simple as possible. You know, I've worked in classical ed for a while and what you'll find is, if you ask 10 different people what that term means, you might get 10 different answers but they all have kind of a unique thread to them that ties them together. I think the heart of what we're trying to do is pass down the values, the shared values of the Christian Western tradition, and so that means we're not. We don't see education as something that's utilitarian, that's simply meant to pass down skills or the formation of job training or something like that. We see it as the formation of the whole human via the classical liberal arts. Now, I say the classical liberal arts on purpose, because I think when we speak of them classically maybe not the way we talk about them today the liberal arts were the arts meant to make someone free. Now that that means that you want to make someone capable of deep thinking, critical thinking, so that they're free to do everything that they do well and they're not constrained by one specific thing. Put it in negation rather than positive is to say we're not like a college or career prep school, in that we're not training for a particular set of skills for a job, or training to make someone do well.

Speaker 3:

On the ACT, we believe in giving the foundational skills that make someone successful, no matter where they go in life. So we believe in training the intellect, the soul, the body. You know, we're going to teach Latin, we're going to teach traditional logic, we're going to teach a rigorous approach to arithmetic and mathematics, aristotelian science, all of those things that were classically understood to make someone capable of taking on any task and doing it well. And so we don't want to just train for one particular thing, we want to train the whole person. So if they go on here to be plumbers or electricians, if they go on here to be scholars, if they go to the desert and dig up Latin artifacts and translate them, they'll be good at it. And so that's our goal is to shape the human Well, that sounds really, really awesome.

Speaker 2:

So tell me a little bit about you, Micah. How did you get into classical education?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that is.

Speaker 3:

That's a good question.

Speaker 3:

You know it's a bit of a niche educational area and there's a really long answer to that.

Speaker 3:

I'll give you the short one, which is when I was in college I took a class with a professor who had an interest in classical ed and he had me read this book called the Constellation of Philosophy, and it was written by a man named Boethius in the 6th century and that might sound very obscure to most people, but it changed my life as an 18-year-old new to college.

Speaker 3:

It showed me that there's a store of ancient wisdom that I had no interaction with, that I had no knowledge of and really changed the whole course of my life. And so after that I taught for several years after college in Alabama and then I was blessed to move to Louisville, kentucky, to work with a great classical school called Highlands Latin School, and during my time there I ended up working for a classical publishing company called Memoria Press and then for a accrediting agency for classical accreditation called the Classical Latin School Association. And kind of during my time at those institutions I ended up getting plugged in with Auburn Classical Academy and had the joy to come and be a head of school here and lead this classical school on the ground.

Speaker 2:

Well, it sounds like you've been in the classical kind of category of education for a while here, so I'm sure you've run across some misconceptions that people have about it. What are some of those misconceptions?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, there's two that I'd like to bring up, and one I touched on earlier, which is, I think, when people hear us say things like we're going to learn Latin and we're going to learn logic and we're going to read Shakespeare, that we're our whole goal with that is to create people who go out and leave here and then go into the desert and dig up these artifacts and translate them and do things that are not really, you know, prudent, normal things that people do in their everyday life. That's really not our goal at all. Our goal is to teach people how to think, and how to think properly. You know, the most important employment skill there is is proper thinking.

Speaker 3:

The skills that employers say are the hardest to find today are basic thinking skills, and that's what a liberal arts education teaches in the classical sense, and so that's what we're concerned with. If you go on from our school and you go into a trade, we're so happy with that. We just want you to be able to do that trade well. If you go on from here and you go into a liberal arts education in college, we're happy with that. We just want you to be able to do it well, and so that's really our concern, and everything in our curriculum is tailored to training students how to think precisely and clearly.

Speaker 2:

Well, what's one thing you wish people knew about Auburn Classical Academy that maybe they don't realize?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, you know, I think I wish people knew how seriously how serious we take education. You know, I think when you asked me earlier why, what my background is, why I'm in education, something I failed to mention is really, I think that there's a crisis in education today. I think everyone's aware of this. You know, reading comprehension is going down. Mathematics skills are going down. People's ability to hold down jobs after education is going down. Performance on standardized testing is going down. Everywhere we look we see a crisis, that something is not getting through to children.

Speaker 3:

The way that we're doing things is problematic. It's not producing good results, and I think that's a problem. And I don't think that's a little problem. I think it's a big, very foundational issue for society, and so that motivated me to try to figure out, okay, what is the answer to that, and I think what I wish people knew about classical ed, and specifically about Auburn Classical Academy, is this style of education is the answer to that.

Speaker 3:

It is the formation of foundational skills to a level of mastery and excellence in children that will make them capable to go through the rest of life and be successful, to be able to evaluate things critically, to draw on moral virtues and to have a foundation that will make them successful. I mean, I just I don't think there's any other way of putting it we're trying to pursue a level of excellence in education and we take that seriously and we think it matters, and that's what I wish people knew, because I do think that there is a crisis in education and that's becoming more apparent over over the coming decades. It will become more apparent, and so I wish people knew how seriously we take that.

Speaker 2:

Well, if one was interested in learning more about your school, how would they get in touch with you?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, well, first thing I would say is give us a call. Our phone number is 334-821-7081. Now you can also go to our website, auburnclassicalacademycom, and there you'll find a lot of information. You'll also find some contact us and prospective parent forms. You also find our email address, which is info I-N-F-O at auburnclassicalacademycom. We would love for you to call us and have a conversation. We'd love to meet you. We'd love to give you a tour. If you want to come observe a class, we'd love to arrange that. If you want to see a kindergarten class, a sixth grade class, fourth grade class, we'd love for you to see what our students are doing, because we really believe that what we have here is so special and I don't think there's anything else like it in Lee County. I really do believe that this is the only school following this specific type of program, with this specific type of mission, and so I would love for parents to come by and get to know us.

Speaker 2:

Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Micah. It's been a real pleasure learning about you and learning about Auburn Classical Academy.

Speaker 3:

Absolutely. Thank you for having me, susanna, it's been a pleasure.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for listening to the Good Neighbor Podcast, auburn. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to gnpauburncom. That's gnpauburncom, or call 334-429-7404.