Andrew Ellison on What Classical Teaching Actually Requires (Part 1) | The Furrows

Andrew Ellison grew up in the suburbs of Indianapolis with a public school teacher mother who read the Chronicles of Narnia at bedtime and ran summer learning programs at home—and had no idea any of it was "classical." In Part 1 of this two-part conversation, host Alex Julian traces Andrew's path from that curiosity-rich childhood through a soul-killing public junior high, into Trinity School at Greenlawn in South Bend, Indiana, and through his early teaching years at Tempe Prep Academy in Phoenix. Andrew now serves as Vice President of Enrollment Management at the University of Dallas.

What's in This Episode:

• How Andrew's mother—a certified public school teacher—cultivated an educationally rich home that planted the seeds of classical formation long before anyone called it that
• The founding story of Trinity School at Greenlawn and why Andrew's parents sent him there without knowing anything about classical education
• Why Andrew's transition into classical schooling felt like continuity rather than rupture and what that reveals about the difference between a school that panders and one that leads
• Two pages in Wheelock's Latin on the Indo-European language family that "blew his mind" and opened the vertical dimension of knowledge for the first time
• How the classical education movement grew from living room conversations in Tempe, Arizona to the President's cabinet and the internal "30 years war" Andrew fears it must avoid

Chapters:

• 00:00: Introduction
• 01:49: Andrew's Mother as First Teacher
• 16:14: Middle School and the Pandering Culture
• 20:55: Trinity School at Greenlawn
• 23:45: Latin Tutoring with Bill Walker
• 35:42: Lead and They Will Follow
• 49:06: Wheelock's Latin and the Language Revelation
• 57:48: The Path to Teaching and Great Hearts
• 01:04:38: Good Books and Cultural Inputs
• 01:09:09: The Classical Ed Movement: Past and Future

Resources Mentioned:

• University of Dallas
• Great Hearts America
• The Paideia Proposal by Mortimer J. Adler
• Arcadia Education
• Classical Learning Test

Hosted by Ryan Klopak (Arcadia Education) and Alex Julian (CLT). The Furrows podcast features leaders in classical education who have been transformed by classical education. 

Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios.

Transcript

0:07

Welcome to another episode of the Furos Podcast, where we talk with classical educators who have been transformed by classical education and are going on to transform others. Today with us, we have Andrew Ellison, who is Vice President of Enrollment Management at the University of Dallas. And Andrew's done a lot of things. I'm not going to give his full bio right now because that's part of the podcast is uh digging into educators' experience in classical education. Thank you so much for being on with us today, Andrew. Hey, thanks so much for having me, Alex. It's fun. Yeah. So um just I guess a little thing for the listeners. I first met Andrew. You know, we don't have to tell this story right now, but uh back at the end of 2010, when uh he was desperate to hire a teacher mid-year and uh gave me the job despite all of his instincts. And uh You said something, Alex, about just how desperate I was at the time. And you and I know that. Indeed. Uh and so clearly an act of providence, because um, if it wasn't for Andrew, I wouldn't be in classical ed and could do a whole other episode on uh what it meant to to have him as a headmaster. Hopefully we'll dig into a little bit of that today. But that's uh that's how we at the Furos know Andrew. And um So let's get started. I'd love to start with the question that most people dislike, uh, which is who was young Andrew Ellison as a student in school? And did you always go to a classical school or did you start with a different sort of schooling? Yeah, um this is this is fine. When you ask about young Andrew Ellison, there's there's not as much that I'm embarrassed about as you uh if you were to ask about slightly older Andrew Ellison. But so um I'll start with this. My mother was uh was was my first teacher. Uh and I want to I want to give her credit, right? She 27 years as a certified licensed public school teacher. You know, she majored in education at Central Michigan University back in the uh early 70s that did student teaching before she started a family, got a uh a master's degree in education, um, specifically in gifted and talented education while she was a stay-at-home mom, uh, and uh finished up that degree while she was pregnant with my youngest brother, right? And uh, you know, and and be, you know, there's a long period in there when she was not working. Um, she had worked before starting a family, uh, then went and had a family in more than 10 years of not being in the classroom and just wanted to concentrate on her kids. Uh, and of course, what that meant was every summer break was pretty heavily programmed with learning activities. Uh uh and uh and others, and and summer, you know, if the local district schools were running a little summer camp on computers or typing or you know, cutting-edge skills like uh how to use an Apple IIe computer in the summer of 1985, right? Um it was an educationally rich household. Um, and my mother never heard of classical education in the 70s. None of us had really heard of classical education. Uh, but I have to, you know, what is what is good everywhere is to some extent classical. And in my household, what that meant was good books, good stories, uh being read to very, very frequently, being read the complete chronicles of Narnia at bedtime by my father over a period of a couple formative years. Nice. Um, regular trigul to the libraries. And I I say that plural because you know, every community has a hierarchy of libraries, right? There's the closed one that kind of stinks. Uh, and then there's always a central branch, right? And I I have wonderful memories growing up in the suburbs of Indianapolis on those rare occasions where we would take a trip downtown to the main branch in Indy. And that was, oh my gosh, you know, for a kid to have so many wonderful resources at one's fingertips. Um all that was really, you know, my mother was responsible for awakening a great many curiosities in me. A love of words, a love of language, a love of music. She played piano, um, uh, and then a love of science and nature. Um, you know, kids just kind of get turned turned on to things, and you know, it was dinosaurs, and everyone goes through a dinosaur phase, and you know, mom fed it with the right kinds of books, and always books that were way above my head, right? You know, I have very vivid memories at age four looking at these really complicated dinosaur books with you know um uh classificatory names, you know, uh Dino Nicus and all this. It's way above my head, but um uh my mother never hesitated to take me into the adult section of the library and get dinosaur books, books about marine life, books about space exploration. Um, and and so, you know, you can just see right there, there's a couple classical principles at work there, even though it can, you know, my mother, small town Michigan public school, uh pretty small public college or university educationist training, uh, but there was still enough, you know, residual common sense in the culture back then to know that uh you should feed wonder, you should read good stuff to your kids, uh, you should make sure television is educational and limit it and be very, very intentional about it, uh, and give kids things that are over their heads because that stretches them, that that helps them to get upwards. So, in in many respects, Alex, that little boy, you know, uh, summers at the uh with with mom running educational programs at home. I I thought every kid grew up that way. I thought every kid had study time and assignments and worksheets during the summer. Um, it wasn't until a few years later that I figured figured out that wasn't necessarily the case. And many years later that I figured out how blessed I and my brothers, brothers were. Um, but you know, really up through about age 12 or 13 um is is a continuous story in my very, very young life. Um you know, the interests kind of always stayed there. You just grew, you you kind of grow out of your dinosaur phase, but you never forget about your dinosaurs. That's right. And then you grow into marine life and the sharks and whales and and deep sea exploration, and Jacques Cousteau was really my hero at that age, right? Um uh he and my dad was actually an ex-scuba diver, Alex. So the fact that Cousteau invented the scuba was just, oh man, I felt like he was a grandfather figure. Oh, nice. Um and then, you know, you never forget about your sharks and your whales, and then you move into space exploration and the history of the U.S. space program. I remember my mom pulling me out of public school so that I could watch the maiden voyage, the maiden launch of Space Shuttle Columbia uh in 1981 on television. So just and then the only thing I would add to that is when I got a little bit older, you know, into into you know, 10, age 10, age 11, then history really took over for me. And I don't know where that came from. Um, but all I know is that uh if if it was historical and involved guns and tanks and planes, like that was that was the thing for me. And I went you know so deep on uh 20th century European world wars um in sort of my late preteen period, um, all while just attending a public school. City of Mishawaka public schools, Mary Phillips Elementary, Twin Branch School in Far Eastern Mishawaka. These are public schools. Um and the schools weren't necessarily feeding my love of learning always at all times, but there was nothing going on there to stifle it. You know, I had teachers that encouraged me, you know, I had a gym teacher who would say, all right, tell me a new fact about World War II today, Andy. Uh all that kind of stuff was there. And and I do have to mention, um, uh my mother uh did go back into the classroom and went back into teaching uh and got a job in the public schools uh and just finagled that job just right so that she could teach me and my two brothers when we came up through the district at our appropriate years later on. Uh, you know, so that just continued, I think, this seamlessness of learning home and life. Um, and and I have to count that as my first blessing, right? Um, and that lasted for a very, very, very long time and really planted the seeds uh of who I am and who I became. And all this is pre-classical ed. Um, you know, I I have to add something else in there, which you can see, I think maybe you can you'll you'll see is kind of preparing me, plowing me, plowing my soul, taking furrows in my soul, Alex, for aspects of classical ed. Uh, and that was because of my interest uh in 20th century history, as a nine-year-old, 10-year-old, um, I developed a huge curiosity about European languages. Right. And German and Russian were the first two. They just seemed so foreign, so strange. Uh, and the fact that you know, German was associated with our great World War II adversary and World War I adversary. And oh, Andy, you know, you had you had a great grandfather who fought against the Germans in 1918 and was gassed, right? Um, so feeling that sort of personal connection to the history, and then being a child of the Cold War, you know, you I can't remember the first time, it probably was on the news. You see a, you know, decrepit Soviet premier Brezhnev, you know, waving, you know, he's waving the wrong direction at a parade, and then they turn him around so he waves the right. And there's some you know, party slogan behind him, and it was in this weird alphabet. And I'm going, wait a minute, what is that? You know, it some of the letters look familiar. There's a backwards R. How do they pronounce a backwards R? You know, what does that mean? So um all these sort of pre-classical interests and appetites were getting planted in me, um, part through, you know, just through, you know, uh circumstance, and then also through my mother's very intentional cultivation uh of a culture of learning in the home. But there was nothing particularly classical about it. It just was kind of a you know, rich science and literature and history and stuff kind of an education. Um that's really interesting. I I um I wonder, you know, because you said that the school you were in wasn't um wasn't putting barriers to that in front of you. And and maybe it's impossible to separate the two things you were just talking about, uh the education of the home with the education of the school. But if you didn't have that at home, would the school have been able to focus you in those ways? You know, um I I don't I don't know to what extent it would have. I really, really don't know. Um because it's too far in the distant past for me to remember for you. I I mean, I I'm pretty sure my interest in in in history and military history in the 20th century, I'm pretty sure that that was sort of adventitious, that that came to me through some chance, something or other outside of the school. Yeah. And then, you know, you get into school and you know, you do your your unit on the war in fifth grade or sixth grade or something like that. And it's not all that vivid or not all that exciting. But I do remember, you know, you could still go to the public, um, the public school, the school had a library, every school had a library, and um uh, you know, there was a history section, and you could get, you know, check out a book from the school public library about British warplanes of World War II, you know, and uh learn your Spitfires and your Hawker Hurricanes and your Spitfire Mark Vs and your Mark VIses and your, you know, uh uh all those kinds of things. And and and those resources were there. They were there in the public schools to tap into. But it it was very much I had to discover it myself. Um those things were there to be found. They were there for the taking. Um, and uh, but you know, I was sort of impelled to it from a variety of other of other external influences, I think. Aaron Powell So when you were in school, yeah, you know, and we've we've done this now with enough guests, it's it's interesting to start to hear the commonalities and divergences, especially in elementary school. Some guests were saying, you know, school to me at that age was really about the people I went to school with. Some guests said it was really about the teacher. Everyone knew you were gonna get uh potentially this teacher next year, and or or you could get this other teacher, and that's what that's what kids worried about. Um, some who went to uh a classical school said there were books that kids talked about in each grade, and you looked forward to reading those. You know, was there a focus for you in school like that? Well, uh if you're gonna talk about my schooling, right, there really are three distinct phases. And the first one I've been describing for you so far is really the naive phase, right? Uh where yeah, you know, I'm kind of interested in friends and hanging out and you know, but uh uh the love of learning, I I just I was a geek, I geeked out, right? And my friends didn't necessarily share those interests, right? We we talked about you know Rocky Four and Michael Jackson and Miami Vice and uh you know uh pop music and and sports and things like that. You know, it was uh it was just pretty, you know, it was an ordinary friend group, and you know, they they were dumb kids, right? But when I think about my friend group, I probably was the only one who was like really a geek in some of those subject areas. And uh that didn't necessarily make for a good basis for friendships, right? Uh Legos did, Transformers did. Um, you know, your your your buddy who has cable television and you don't telling you uh about uh how hilarious Eddie Murphy's HBO special was, you know, uh uh on the playground, right? And and trying to understand jokes that were way over the head. And it sounds funny, and there's lots of dirty words in it, so it must be great, right? That was my peer group, you know. That was my public school peer group, Alex. And I'm not saying it was worse than any particular group, but you know, we were we were kids, and um that group, we were not at all united by by love of learning. I think just ordinary, you know, 10-year-old, 11-year-old, 12-year-old friendships. Um, in in the history of my life, uh, or my educational life, I mentioned three three periods of of schooling, and there really is there's a turning point in there, and it was one year in public junior high, public middle school. And um, you know, I've heard it said many times since then, and I've lived it as a school administrator and school teacher and district administrator. Uh, but middle school is is where the American mind goes to die, an agonizing, appalling death. Yeah. Uh uh through, you know, adolescence is is chemical and social. It always has been, right? But um, you know, uh when I look back at it now, I see many ways in which that school, that junior, that public junior high school, uh had had really, before the kids even walked through the door, given up on the expectations for leading kids on to adulthood. Um, what I remember is a school that, aside from a few, you know, like really tough, legendarily mean teachers uh that would roam the hallways yelling at you, or a PE teacher who whose way of uh greeting you when you came to his office was, what do you want? You know, and sort of caricatured uh uh you know junior high school teaching figures. The school as a whole just pandered to 13 and 14-year-olds. Just pandered to us. Um, teachers apologized for having to make us do homework. Uh teachers, you know, strove to outdo each other in hip coolness and uh talking about how much of our pop culture they understood and and knew about and appreciated, and um just making, oh gosh, making the popular culture of the day the point of connection and reference between teacher and student, right? And it would be just you know to kind of loosen us up and pull us in and then, yeah, make you do some worksheets for a while. And now we can talk about dirty dancing and Patrick Swayze, you know, and uh uh and the you know, the social studies teacher was the school DJ, and he had this whole getup that he put on and a fedora hat who would spin the tunes at the school dancing, right? And um, you know, the the school had dedicated itself to pandering to the kids, yeah. Pandering to us and making us like school. And and look, there there were great teachers, there were good teachers who were exceptions to that. Um, who you know, you could tell kind of went against the grain. And were a little annoyed with Mr. You know, McGillicutty for all of his pop culture antics and his DJing at the school uh dances and and all that. But um, you know, they were they were the you could tell that they didn't have the upper hand in the school. Yeah. Um and my parents, being wise, as parents always are, um, recognized that I was not going in a good direction personally. Now, again, uh there were others who were in much, much worse places than I was socially and legally and personally. And, you know, I I, you know, knew plenty of actual delinquents, uh, either by reputation or by by name in in middle school. Right. Um, but my parents got hipped to uh the Trinity School at Greenlawn in South Bend, Indiana, back in the late 1980s. And um, it's interesting, Trinity Trinity School's gone through some some interesting transitions and changes right now, and and there's there's a different school operating where the original Trinity School was, but many of the same people and a lot of a lot of the same spirit uh there. But for for listeners who don't know already, um the Trinity School in South Bend, Indiana was founded in 1981 uh by a group of um sort of Notre Dame affiliated uh academics and uh members of a um a lay religious community who had had some pretty direct contact with the uh higher education great books, capital G, capital B world back in the 60s and 70s. And these men and women started a essentially a Paidea, a non-denominational Christian Paidea school in northern Indiana in 1981, with just direct lineage to the the the Mortimer Adler Great Books Paidea movement. In fact, I I even have a recollection of an elderly Mortimer Adler, elderly, meaning he had 25 years remaining in his unbelievably long life, a very elderly Mortimer Adler giving a talk to the parents about reading uh on the campus at one point in the in the early 1990s. Right. Uh so I guess then it was only about you know 10 years or so before before his death. But um so direct lineage to that that movement. And um my parents weren't necessarily seeking a Paidea education, they didn't know anything about it, right? And as I mentioned, my mother uh long time died in the wall public school teacher. Um they saw that my love of learning was kind of being replaced by a love of fitting in and being popular, and uh, you know, some nasty attitude was developing, and you know, again, pretty mild stuff for junior high. Um but our family at that time was attending a uh a church, um, and I was raised in a variety of different Protestant Christian denominations. I'm a Roman Catholic uh today. But uh at that time, it was a Protestant church in South Bend, Indiana that was known as the place where the Protestant Notre Dame faculty and administration went on Sundays. And also graduate students, right? So there was George Marsden, the great historian, uh, Nathan Hatch, a historian of American religion, um, uh Jim Van Dr. James Vandercam, uh Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, uh Al Plantiga and uh Mick Detlifsen, an analytic Christian philosophy. Um, those were the characters who were hanging around that church and their kids. Uh and many of them were, you know, around my John Van Engen, uh director of the Medieval Studies Institute. I don't know what that says, that a Catholic university hired a Protestant to be its director of Medieval Studies. Um, you could read into that what you will, but John Van Engen was a brilliant, brilliant scholar, for sure. Um my parents found out about this Trinity school from some of their friends at that church. Oh, you should having trouble with Andrew in school. Oh, you should look at the Trinity School. Oh, it's great, it's great. Uh, and long story short, uh, my parents built better than they knew. Uh, they ended up sending me to the Trinity School. Not because they wanted a liberal education for their son, not because Dostoevsky and Plato and Aristotle uh were on the syllabus for high school, not because Latin was required up through grade 10, but because good Christian people whom they knew and trusted were sending their sons there. Interesting. Um, yeah, so that really begins the third key phase uh in the story. And before I pause to let you keep the conversation on track, uh, such as you do, right? Let me just say that um I came in in the middle of junior high at Trinity, and that meant I was not there for seventh grade because I was over being pandered to in the public school. Uh for my mother, my mother to send one of her kids to a private school, Alex. You know, she was public school teacher, certified, whole career. Yeah. Um her whole building like made her persona non-grata, right? And and and the people who were respectful would whisper to her, you know, they really hate you around here now because you're sending your son to a private school. Well, a lot of acrimony that that that she had to put up with. And she got through that, and you know, and and and and you know, uh it was just it was purely temporary, right? But having missed seventh grade, I had to get summer tutoring in Latin, Alex, to get up to speed, to be able to take Latin too uh in eighth grade. And I'm gonna mention a really important name here. He was the headmaster of Trinity Schools at Greenlawn. Later went on to be the headmaster of the second Trinity School in um at River Ridge in uh at Bloomington, Minnesota. And then for a number of years was the president of Trinity Schools, Inc. His name was Bill Wack Bill Walker, and he tutored me in Latin in the summer of 1988, one-on-one, uh, in the basement of a non-air-conditioned school in Indiana in a very, very hot summer. Oh man. And um it was just you. Just me. It was just, hey, well, you know, Mr. and Mrs. Ellison, we're happy to have your son here. Um, but he's got it, he needs Latin tutoring. Uh, otherwise, he's, you know, that's that's a that's a precondition for him entering. Nice. Uh, you gotta get him tutored in Latin. Uh and and that experience was really my introduction to classical with a capital C subject matter. Um and retrospectively, the fact that my Trinity School education began with that intensive experience, Latin only, uh, two hours a day, five days a week for two months, um made a pretty big impact. Pretty big impact. Yeah, I'd love to talk more about that in particular. So you're you're being sent to this school. You know, I don't want to call it a reform school because it's not, but but that's sort of you were you you were the trajectory you were on was not the one you were on before. It was started to become negative. And now you're being sent to another school, uh, right, with a better environment. And um my assumption would be that you you didn't necessarily want to go. Was was that the case? Well, yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, there was kicking and screaming for a short time in the summer. Yeah. Kicking for for a very short time, right? When you're young, your emotions are intense and they're done very quickly. Yeah. Um, so you know, the decision week was a was a rough week. Uh, but by the time Latin tutoring started, it was okay, it's my new school. Okay. You know, some of the guys at church go there. Uh now they know I'm going there next year. And, you know, they're telling me funny stories about, oh, you got to watch out for Mr. Malone. He's ridiculous, and you know, funny stories, yeah, just stories about characters around the school. Every school ought to have characters and lore associated with it. Uh, and that includes uh notorious uh uh you know, uh delinquent students and quirky faculty members, and you just you gotta have all those things. But by the time it started, you know, there was no opposition anymore. It was, okay, this is my new thing, and this is what I gotta do, and uh I wear a uniform now to school, and um, you know, but it's just and I know some of the kids who are here and things about it are different, but uh, it's school and I gotta do it. Did what that makes sense. Was there a time during that summer where you felt your orientation to learning shift, maybe even shift back? I can't imagine that day one of Latin tutoring, you were really excited about it, even if you were okay with it. Um but at some point you clearly that something must have shifted for you. So interesting. Um I'm gonna say absolutely not. That in retrospect, what I perceived, what I perceived, is sort of the phenomenon, you know, my perception of what was happening uh really was an experience of continuity and not of rupture. Uh that um, you know, I wasn't at really conscious at all of being redirected. It just was sort of, yeah, you know, here's this new school that I have to go to. Okay, back to learning. I wasn't conscious of changing direction. Uh, but what I found, right? So what did I say before, you know, talk about elementary school? What was I interested in, Alex? It was interested in history, uh, foreign language, uh, reading. Uh, and I'd had a great teacher, my mom. Uh and, you know, and also science and nature and space and geography. And um starting a liberal education, uh, which was classical before anyone called it that, um, you know, okay, the language thing. Here's Latin. All right, this is cool. Did I have a perception that it was something fundamentally different from Russian or German? No. Yeah. No, it just was here's another cool foreign language. And this one happens to be ancient. And did you have any idea that there were languages spoken in the past that aren't spoken anymore? Wow, you know, and it just was continuation of curiosity and wonder and learning. Um, medieval history, right? Uh, you know, not like I'd learned a whole lot about medieval history in public elementary school, but I was aware that it existed. And okay, here's here's a whole history course on uh the medieval world. Um, and it just it felt like it was continuity rather than rupture. Um, and I can say the same thing about you know English literature and composition, that it was, we're reading and writing. I was not really conscious that I was reading better books. Really? Yeah, I wasn't. You know, it was uh, you know, reading Newberry Award medals and Encyclopedia Brown Boy Detective and uh, you know, Hardy Boys or Madeline Langle in public school, and then uh Tequila Mockingbird and uh Edgar Allan Poe and uh Bartleby the Scrivener in you know Trinity School. I wasn't conscious of any sort of qualitative difference. It just was well, here's some new books we got to read. Yeah. At the time, it felt just like what was different was the place and that I wore a uniform and then we said the Lord's Prayer at the beginning of class. That those were the things that felt different. What about teachers? I mean, you said, you know, there had to be a difference in the way that the teachers were carrying themselves and interacting with you. Did you notice that at the time? At the time? Not really, no. Yeah. No, at the time, you it you can be more or less socially aware at age 12 and 13. Yeah. Uh I was sort of more of a whatever the environment is, that's what I'm gonna fit in with, right? And the environment in the public junior high was one of pandering and and party time. And so I went with that flow. And then Trinity School is one of, you know, not of sternness, but of seriousness, uh, as well as, you know, some good humor. I still have funny memories of uh, you know, an ex-marine, New Testament teacher, Mike Hammond. I'll give him a shout out. I think he's still in South Bend, Indiana. He was an ex-marine who was teaching us New Testament, and um there had been a fly buzzing around the classroom earlier in the day, you know, because windows would just be wide open, no screens, and we're trying to ventilate in there. And and our eighth-grade English teacher, who I'll also mention by name, um, a doctor, the late Dr. Rollin Lassiter from Tennessee. Uh, and he eventually ended up teaching at the University of Dallas for a period of time. Uh, his children, very prolific, went everywhere. Uh, daughter Helen, uh uh Helen Lasseter marrying John Free. Uh, and I don't think they're up at Wyoming Catholic anymore, but I know they were there, the two of them together, the freeze for a while. But Rollin Lasseter, very gentle, mild-mannered southerner, the flies buzzing around the room, and you know, someone's like trying to swat her and leave the poor insect alone. She's just looking for a place to lay her eggs, and she's not going to find it in here. Next hour, different teacher comes in, Mike Hammond, the ex-Marine, signed up for the Marines after the uh terrorists blew up the Marine Corps bunker in Beirut in 1983. Right. Gung ho. Gung-ho. Comes into the classroom. You know, he was and he still looked like a Marine, and he he was built like he was young and snappy, right? So he really appealed to the boys because it was like you want to be this guy. Yeah. And um he's starting class, and we've just said the Lord's Prayer, and he's getting, you know, talking about some stuff, and then you know, the fly buzzes around his his face a little bit. And it's coming in, and it's like gonna land really slowly on his table, and he just goes, throws out his hand and he grabs it. And uh and then manages to transfer it to his finger and thumb. And then without saying a word, he looks at us with a smirk on his face, and then rubs his finger and thumb together and squishes it. And then walks over to the wastebasket and throws it in and goes, All right, now let's return to the book of Maccabees. Um, you know, so he was a character, and Rollin Lasseter was a character. And um Tom, the late Tom Ditz, he passed away. He was there for a long time. He taught Latin and German and humane letters and medieval history and drama at Trinity School for the longest time. And he he he died of cancer back in the summer of 23, as I recall. Um, just what a wonderful group of men that I remember there. And did I perceive that they were ontologically different from public school teachers? I didn't perceive that. They just were, right? It's only in retrospect, I think you realize uh how much better they were as role models, as examples, as wielders of the rod of correction. Um and I don't ever remember being told, we don't talk about pop culture here at the school. You can just keep your top gun references to yourself, right? I don't ever remember being told that. It just wasn't talked about in the classroom. Yeah. You know, it makes such a big difference when your history teacher doesn't start class by talking about Tom Cruise, right? He would start it by talking about uh, you know, the Aryan heresy uh or the uh you know the Mongol invasions, and off we would go. Um that for a malleable young person like me, who was much more of a follower than a leader at that age, um, I was ready to follow wherever my teachers took me. And maybe that that's a really important point for educators of all stripes to think about and for parents to think about too. And I'm not saying that all kids were like me. Like there's some who are much more stubborn and hard-nosed and hard-headed. Um, so many kids are followers. They will chase whatever shiny object you you dangle in front of them. Yep. They will fetch whatever stick you throw in whatever direction you throw it. And if what you are throwing is a party time fedora, let's dance to Salt and Peppa's song push it, that's what a lot of kids are gonna chase. They will chase that. And they will they will fulfill those adult expectations if those are the expectations that you are giving them. If the expectations that you lay out for them are uh we're gonna read Edgar Allan Poe seriously, and we're gonna recite T.S. Elliot or Wordsworth or um gosh, who wrote that poem? How they brought the good news from X to Ghent. I don't know if that's 10, is that long? Oh gosh, I should know who that is. But um, if that's where you lead kids, if you give them Latin, if you give them uh uh geology and geography and history and seriousness and prayer, and you do nothing to alienate them through just unpleasant pathological mean behavior, right? Yeah, they will follow. So many kids will follow. And I just I followed because that's what was there. That those were the parameters. That was the path that was there available to me at Trinity School. So I I went down that path. That's really important. Um I think that's right, too. Just in my own experience as a teacher, you spend a lot of energy with the kids kind of on the boundaries, you know, the the boundary of, I'm not really interested in this, or the boundary of I'm kind of bored because you're not pushing me hard enough. You know, you you you kind of spend your energy trying to bring those kids into the lesson, but the majority of the rest of them are just following kind of wherever you lead them. They will go where you lead them. And what's the lesson from that, Alex? From a from a strictly utilitarian standpoint, if you've got your fringe of kids over here who want to go deeper and farther, and you've got your fringe of kids over here who are just kicking against the goads and they're not, they don't want to come anywhere with you. And you've got a broad middle who are just waiting for direction. Right. Where should you as a teacher invest your spiritual and personal energy? Yeah. You invest in those top kids because then the broad middle follows them. That's right. Whereas if you invest in the kids with the bad attitude, uh, you will lose so many of those who are in the middle, uh, and you will definitely lose those who are in the top. So if you just want to calculate it as doing the most good for the greatest number of people, um, that's where you gotta go. Yeah. Right? Lead and they will follow you. Teach to the best, which doesn't mean teach over everybody else's heads. No. Teach to everyone as if you want them to become the best. Yeah. And you know, you don't give them all equal portions of the same tough stuff, but you give them all the same stuff, right? The Mortimer Adler, you know, image is is heavy creamed, right? And uh everybody has different containers, different abilities to achieve different capacities for learning. But that doesn't mean that the smaller containers should be filled with lukewarm, dirty dish water. Right. Right. They should be filled with the good stuff too. Um, you know, if if there's the top end of the kids can handle, you know, rare filet mignon, don't give the middle kids uh a tough you know, chucks steak. Give them a smaller portion of filet mignon, right? Um yeah, but yeah, the important just the lesson for educators listening, for parents listening, is lead and so many of them will follow you. They're waiting for your direction. And if you make it high-minded and inviting, they will come, they will follow you. They really do. Uh yeah, they really do. And and half of the battle for new teachers is staying focused on that. So you're not constantly interrupting your momentum, your focus. Uh, and a lot of the kids who don't want to be there for whatever reason, actually you end up winning over anyway. We win over some of them. Right. You'll win over some of them by precisely by not fighting them. Yeah. By letting them expend their energy in futile displays of resistance. Yeah. Uh, you know, uh, they will eventually tire out. And the ones who are really rebelling against you, they will eventually get kicked out of the school, or they'll be making their parents so miserable that their parents pull them out of the school, and everyone's thankful that that that that happened. But yeah, you know, the words of wisdom for new teachers are um don't make it about the bottom 10% in terms of behavior and personality. Don't fight the hardest for those kids because you'll, you know, someone needs to be fighting for them in their lives, right? But um this in this sense, Alex, I recognize it's very countercultural for me to be saying this here, and and people are gonna maybe think it sounds uncharitable or or mean-spirited, but um it's it's a crime and a sin to starve the kids who are hungry for the best and the most stuff. It's a crime. Uh it's it's a moral offense uh against human potential and human goodness uh to starve them uh or deny them the opportunity to go farther and get more out of their education. I'll give a uh a real concrete, not particularly classical example of what happens when this is the case. I I wouldn't I when I was a headmaster, we're jumping way ahead here, um, I had a math teacher who worked for me who just heart of gold, absolute heart of gold, and so much patience for the kids. And um he definitely had, to use a uh Catholic social teaching phrase, a preferential option for the slow of study. And he invested so much time and love and resources and class time in the kids who were barely, barely making it. Right. And um he was kind of a hero around campus, and parents loved him, and the the parents of the lowest of the low kids like, oh, he's failed math his whole life, and now with Mr. So-and-so, he's got a D for the first time, and he's feeling so great, and and all this, and yeah, okay, there's all that. And then the state standardized test results came out. And his kids, his students had almost nobody exceeding the standard. Yeah, right, yeah, it was everybody met, nobody exceeded the standard. Um, and in the world of state standardized test scores, that ain't all that impressive. No, you know, and because what it takes to achieve the standard, everybody knows pretty average, right? And um, that was really revelatory, I think, of the limits uh of good heartedness. Misapplied or misdirected. You know, I felt bad for those kids who didn't learn nearly as much as they could have. They were shortchanged. Not because anyone set out to shortchange them, but they they weren't fed enough. No, that's right. And you know, there's a difference between class time and extra time outside of class. You know, you you have those few minutes of class time, and you and I have talked about this for years. You're teaching to the top third, you're pulling kids along, you're giving them things that are just out of their reach, but they they eventually get there, like your your mom did with those those books. Um and then you invest the time in those kids who might be behind, might not enjoy school, might be rebellious outside of class time, you know, where you have it. And I really appreciated that. Um and I want to get back to high school uh and moving moving forward in just a second. But when I was at Veritas with you, and the, you know, so for any listeners who are saying, oh my goodness, this is scandalous, he's just saying, leave the kids behind. Well, obviously that's not what you're saying. But also the school you ran that I was at, every teacher had to do tutoring twice a week outside of class time. Um, and that was when you really invited those kids to say, hey, look, there's extra time here for you. Uh, but we're not going to put 25 kids through remedial tutoring when they're ready uh constantly to be challenged and kind of go down a fast moving river of adventure instead of you know a day at the lake every day where where you're just splashing around in the same place. So yeah. Well, I wanna I wanna shift back. I want to shift back to now you're at Trinity. Was there a moment in high school where uh you you felt like, you know, I know you named a lot of good teachers and good texts already, but was there a place in high school where you felt like, man, this education I'm getting is is different uh than maybe the other people in my community, or was it later on? Well, it it's it's both and right. And I think probably it was so a lot of it had to do with the continuing study of Latin in high school, uh, where I started to realize that there were other ancient languages too. And uh again, ninth grade uh Bill Walker was teaching the whole ninth grade class again, and he had done you know graduate level work in ancient languages, and he was familiar with the Hebrew and the Greek of the New Testament, and um, you know, even though it was Latin class, he would let little things like that in on us all the time. Uh although I do have to say, here's something pretty epochal. Um pretty darn important uh was the the textbook that we used in um ninth grade Latin, uh was the good old uh Wheelock's Latin. And this was the 80s version, no pictures in it, you know, very, very Spartan, still mostly Frederick Wheelock and not um Richard LeFleur, the the guy who put all those you know puns and jokes in it and things like that. And in the introductory chapter, I remember the first week of school in ninth grade, it might have been like day two. Taking the my my red wheelock book home with me and something about it just intrigued me because it the the font, the typeface looked old. You know, and it sort of looked more stately, more dignified. And I started uh reading the introduction and it started talking about the history of the romance languages, and then the history of the Indo-European language family. And then there was a full-page chart. And you had to take the book and you had to turn it on its side to read the chart. And um it was a family tree of the Indo-European language family from ancient to modern. And on the facing page uh were was, among other things, a table of uh Indo-European cognate words for uh mother and brother and father, uh, and uh you know, basic a few basic numbers in Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, English, Russian, Irish, Lithuanian, Sanskrit. These are things I never never heard of Lithuanian or Sanskrit before, right? And um those two pages in Wheelock's Latin blew my mind. Blew my mind. Um and I mean I I still I consider myself a language geek to this day, right? And have through my schooling and then through much uh uh informal study and and just you know pursuit of learning outside of it, so much of my life's intellectual journey can be traced back to those two pages in Wheelock's Latin. Interesting. And that was not something that Mr. Walker taught us in class. Right. It was the introduction, go to chapter one, read the vocabulary, and do sentences one through ten. Right. Uh but it was there, something deeper than that was there in that book, waiting for me to discover. And I discovered it, and something went on uh in my in my mind that year, uh, specifically built around uh around Latin and linguistics and philology. Did it just awaken wonder of kind of so much depth that was there before you that you didn't realize, so many places you could adventure and explore with language? Yeah. Yeah, I I I think so. Um it was just was the beginning of, and here's some stuff you've never heard of before, right? And it was it was not just a horizontal expansion of knowledge, right? It wasn't, okay, you know about 20th century Germany. Now let's look at 20th century Peru. It wasn't just moving laterally, it was, hey, let's go back a thousand years, let's go back two thousand, let's go back five thousand years or more. And I think having that vertical dimension to knowledge uh become really clear to me at that point, and and how um just the paradigm that languages change over time is still something, Alex, many adults don't understand. Yeah. They just don't understand, right? Um when you ask people, you know, what did um what uh language did they speak in England uh in in the the time of uh you know uh uh King Alfred the Great. Uh people will say things like, I don't know, Latin? Everyone's everyone spoke Latin in the old days, right? Certainly, not quite, not quite. And then someone will go, ooh, ooh, ooh, I know, I know. Yes, German. Not quite. And actually, there was no such thing as German back then either. Right. Or um, you know, you ask adults how English has changed, and they're like, well, I mean, it used to have like more E's on it, you know, like you'd spell old with an O L D E, right? That that's that's old English. No. Right. Um so merely having that perspective that languages change over time um was something that had not occurred to me before. And that those two pages in Wheelock made that come alive. It was like a bomb going off. Um That's interesting. Yeah. Well, well, thank you. I I want to spend our last uh 10, 15 minutes just kind of fast forwarding into uh that that time where uh maybe in college and then and then right after where you started uh as an educator. Um and and maybe we just skip forward to to you being an educator, but what made you go into teaching and into uh what made you choose to continue classical ed? Fascinating. Um well I I don't want to do that without really, really quickly skimming over the whole of my high school and college experience. Sure. So so eight minor years of formation, uh done very, very quickly. You know, the Trinity School's program was just was just amazing, right? Uh seminar discussions of uh Locke and Burke and the Federalist Papers, and you know, eventually Dostoyevsky and Jane Austen and such great history. And I have to give credit to my my great teacher, Andrew Zwerneman, who now runs the Kina Academy. A really important intellectual influence in the classroom for me at Trinity School, taught me Plato, Aristotle, Dostoevsky, Marx, all those things. Doing ancient drama, you know, I was Oedipus Rex in my senior play. Um continuing to learn Latin, getting to learn some German, uh, things like that. Well, like I said, I was always a you know, kind of a follower, and this was me following the Trinity School culture. Well, then I went to a very mediocre private university. Um and I'm I just realized that I'm I'm trashing it, and people might look up and see where I went. Uh, but I'm not gonna say the name of it. Let the reader understand. There you go. Um, lector. Um, you know, and I just a follower, right? And and was the spirit of learning there deeply humane? No. No, I mean there was an interesting humanities program that I was in, but it was by no means classical. Uh, you know, I had some great experiences there, and you know, there's some Chinese philosophy, and uh, here's some postmodern literature, and um, you know, then studying history and political science and you know, German and all those kinds of things. In in many ways, it was sort of I didn't perceive that there was a discontinuity from the Trinity School experience. Right. Right. You know, I didn't perceive a discontinuity really. But where I ended up was kind of where a lot of college students who are a little bit smarter than average end up, you know, after a couple years in college, is that you're you're you're a wise acre, well-read nihilist. Yep. You know, and uh you you you kind of realize that's the cool thing to do around here. And um, you know, it feels kind of edgy. And and so that's where I ended up, uh, not perceiving that there was any real discontinuity. Just perceiving that, you know, Trinity was that, and we learned about these things, and now I'm in college, and now I'm learning about these things. And, you know, I was a church-going Christian then, and you know, now I'm a Nietzschean, and you know, all that kind of stuff, right? You go on that journey. Now the question is, um, why classical education? And I had no idea when I was a senior in college what I was gonna do, where I was gonna go. Uh pretty late, coming to the table, thought about grad school, applied to one program, but you know, applying to one program in grad school, and they said, well, where else are you applying to? Right. Oh, only one program. Right. Yeah, you're you must be real serious. I didn't know what I was gonna do. I was interviewing for a you know, an international consulting internship with a firm in Chicago that's long since been acquired by somebody else. And uh then I got a call from my old friend and mentor, Andrew Zorneman, who said, Hey, so um, I'm leaving Trinity School. Uh I'm moving out to Phoenix, Arizona, and I'm gonna take over the headmastership of a public charter school that is modeled after Trinity. So Latin and great books. But do you know what a public charter school is, Andrew? Nope, never heard of it, right? And a little, you know, primer about that, and um, you know, it was just sort of thinking, I don't know, sounds like an adventure. I like Andrew's orderman. He was a cool teacher, he was fun. Uh, my mom was a teacher, maybe I'll be good at it. Um, you know, 2,000 miles away, I'm I'm up for some adventure. Uh and and so, you know, without really any great deliberation about a career path or a vocation, or even Alex, without a again, without conceptual distinction between classical education and everything else. No, no distinction. It just was well, I went to this school, and then I went to that school, and then I went to this university, and now I'm gonna go teach at that school. It just, to me at the time, it just felt like slightly different emphases. That there was not a sense among us who were doing the work, among parents at the time, that this was a thing with a capital T. Classical ed had not been reified yet. Yeah. We just called it education. We called it the best education and a great education and a better education. Um, that was all we called it, and that's what parents were responding to at the at the time. And you know, in one sense, it was easy for me because I, you know, how are we gonna teach? Well, just like we did at Trinity. Okay, I got that. I can do that. Right. You know, and um it wasn't until probably three years in that I start to realize there's actually there's something going on here that is not just normal run-of-the-mill education. And I think it was because the school was getting some, you know, this was the Tempe Prep Academy, still there, still operating out in uh Tempe, Arizona, and um, you know, founded in 1995, 96 or something like that. I joined the faculty in '97 there. Um, the school started to get some attention. Charter schools started to get some attention. Charter schools were doing better on public school standardized tests than anybody else did, and the school got more attention, and that kind of forced the administration and uh the school leader at the time, Andrew Zwerneman had started it, and he moved on and gone back to Trinity Schools. And then many listeners will know the name of Dr. Dan Scoggin from Great Hearts. He was a young faculty member who became the headmaster, and he and board members and others, and we had to learn how to talk about the school in a way that better expressed how we were different from everybody else and what we were doing uh differently. And um, you know, some faculty orientation activities would take place, and you know, I was reading a little bit of Mortimer Adler, and it was, oh, I remember this book, How to Read a Book. Isn't that a funny title? Um, you know, I think one year Dan Scoggin had us read something from How to Read a Book or a chapter from the Paidea proposal, and it just clicked for me. I went, oh, this is a this is a way of explaining what I know is right, and I didn't really know how to talk about it before. And um I wonder what other books Mortimer Adler has written. Famous last words, he wrote like 78 books. And once again, you know, the public library plays a role in that. And you know, it was it was probably the summer of maybe I think actually, oh, he died in 02. I think. So it was 01 or 02 um that when news came out about his death, that I went really deep into Mortimer Adler and read everything from all of his Paidea writings that I could get my hands on, and his autobiography, which you know really is a history of the great books movement, from Columbia and John Erskine and Mark Van Doren to Chicago, to St. John's and post-University of Chicago world and all that. And I haven't have never stopped since then. You know, and so from from an that's when I really felt like I'd perceived my calling. Right. And there was a time in there when I was thinking about getting out and going to graduate school again. I think it was that time when married and with one kid, uh, my wife and I looked and we were $38 short every month in our budget. And uh looking at the modest savings account, it was okay, well, poverty is on the horizon, bankruptcy is coming. What are we gonna do? Um, I was thinking about just getting out of the teaching business entirely, uh, even though I really felt like I was getting the hang of it and finding a vocation. And then the opportunity came uh to start uh Veritas, um, to be the founding headmaster of what was at the time, we called it the Tempe Prep Sister School. Uh and then eventually the Great Hearts Charter Schools sort of formed as a CMO out of a sort of a big, you know, Wonder Twins, you know, activate moment where the two boards founded a new organization together that has remained in continuous existence since then, uh, Great Hearts. Um, and and you know, Alice, in the course of this conversation, I've really placed a lot of emphasis upon elementary school, which was the non-classical part of the story. Yeah. Um but clearly an important part. Such continuity, right? That it wasn't a radical rupture. It was just the fulfillment of the pursuit of learning and wonder and history and language and literature that had been planted in me by my public school mother, public school educator, certified masters of education mom. Uh, and then the good folks at Trinity School took it not radically, not in a direction that felt radically different, right? But Seristotle says proverbially, a small distance in the beginning is a big distance in the end. Yeah. Um, and and that was the pathway that led me to really that breakthrough moment, maybe summer of 01 or 02, when I felt like this is my calling to be an educator in the and again, no one was calling it classical at that point. Liberal education, paidea education. Um, no one was calling it classical. Uh, but that was the that was the vocational moment, the passing of Mortimer Adler in 02, and then a deep, personally driven dive into his works, checked out from the public library in Tempe, Arizona over that particular summer. And uh have not looked back. I mean, honestly, everything since then is is uh I don't know. I don't know, I don't know what the analogy is, but uh that's really that's where the journey and the turning came for me. Everything else after that is just continuing pursuit of fulfillment. That's so interesting that you you talk about you know coming full circle back to just the education that your mom planted in you, uh just a love for things that you should love, keeping energy and interest alive in the things that you should have energy and interest for. And and I think for parents listening, um we expect schools to do that for our kids. And uh at least many of the non-educator parents, you know. Uh my wife and I are both educators, so my my kids are blessed and cursed by having teachers for parents. But I I think it's so important for people to recognize that starts at home. Um and it clearly did for you. And it starts with books. It's let's let's be let's be real. Let's be real here. Um, it starts with books. And uh one-to-one devices, Andrew. Uh and and and uh not stupid books, not piece of crap books, yeah, not uh uh uh wimpy kid and the farting dog and skippy John Jones, not that, not slop. It starts with good books. Uh Mother Goose, Child's Garden of Verses, uh Narnia, read to your kids, read to your kids and fill, make sure there are books always in their hands, and make sure that the books are high-minded. You know, and the great test of a high-minded children's book is is it something that is repellent to adult sensibilities? If the answer is yes, this is repellent to adult sensibilities, then it shouldn't be in your kids' hands either. That's right. You know, uh, what what's what's her what's her name? This absolutely awful YouTube individual uh who just came out with uh Zoran Mamdani in New York making some sort of socialist pronouncements. Uh Miss Rachel is her name. She's a YouTuber who does educational videos for two year olds, right? Vomit. Yeah. After 10 seconds, you will want to wretch. It is so disgusting, saccharin. Infantile, stupid, right? That's not wholesome. That's actually toxic. Um, so the test of whether it should be in your kids' books or in your library, uh, or whether you should read it to them is is this offensive to adult sensibilities? Is it repellent? Is this stupid? And if the answer is no, read it to your kids. Put the books in their hands, give them nature books, science books, history books, and read to them all the time, please. Yeah, I've been thinking of this term of you know, children are self-absorbed. Uh, but I've actually been thinking of it in a different way of children are just constantly absorbing into the self in a much fuller way than we adults do. You know, we've got so much stuff in us already, but but kids are absorbing into the self. And so what do you want them to absorb? Because whatever they absorb precipitates the next thing they're going to want to absorb. You know, and and here's here's a tough message. Nothing is harmless. Yeah. It is either beneficial or harmful. But as far as cultural inputs are concerned, there is no such thing as the value free or the neutral. Music, literature, speech, activities, religious services, social life, parties, entertainment, everything is either helpful or harmful. There's nothing, there's nothing in the in-between category. There's nothing. And that's that's stark. You know, that that's hard, I think, for people to hear. And I say that, and people say, you know, sometimes people say, I'm insane, you know, you're you're you're you're a fanatic. And I say, when the world is crazy, I am happy to be called insane. And if if you're defending the cultural inputs for your children on the basis of, well, there's no dirty words in it. Yeah. Right. I submit in the bowels of Christ. Consider that you your standards are not high enough. Yeah. It's not of an it's not immediately overtly offensive, is not a high enough standard. Right. Again, they are absorbing things into themselves and making it part of them. That's that's what kids do. They are sponges, they are followers, they are iron filings that will leap to the magnetic field wherever it is pointing them or pulling them. Yeah. Nothing is nothing is neutral. Everything is having some effect. Yeah, well said. Andrew, I wanna I want to close with you and just where uh where have you seen um kind of significant impact over the last couple decades in classical ed? And and maybe just because you've been involved in it so deeply over the your whole life, really, where do you see it going over the next uh decade or so, or where do you hope that it goes? Yeah. So, you know, one thing that just didn't exist, um let's go thirty, it's 30 years ago now. 30 years ago, uh there were people sitting around in uh, you know, the late Dr. John X Evans's living room in Tempe, Arizona, talking about starting a school, you know, and that became Tempe Prep. 30 years ago, Trinity School had only been around for 14 years. Right. Um, 30 years ago, it seemed like the heyday of the Mortimer Adler Great Books movement was was over, was dead. You know, it was pretty hot stuff back in the early 80s for a while. And you know, you could see Mortimer Adler on TV with Bill Moyers, but you know, all that was pretty much dead by the 90s. It seemed like it was dead and it was going and it was going nowhere in the public sphere or in the public realm. Um that decade from uh you know the mid-90s to the the mid-mid 2000s, 05 was a huge decade for classical education. Uh because it was in that decade that people started calling it classical. It just sort of wasn't getting called that before. Um, and I don't know that it started in in one place and then grew everywhere. I think in you know, uh it started in a lot of different places and happened in similar ways at similar times. And I think um, you know, uh Christian homeschooling had so much to do with it. Um intellectual uh Roman Catholics who had, you know, gone to institutions of Catholic higher learning that maybe had not entirely dropped the thread of Western civilization and the trivium and logic and Latin and all those things. Um and then you see charter charter schools came up at just the right time, just the right time for experimenters to experiment and for a thousand flowers to blossom and many to die, and you know, the the wild, wild west of charter schools back in the 90s, man, they were just giving out charters to anybody. Yeah. You know, uh, and I remember reading in the paper about this ridiculous flim phlam charter school operation that eventually got closed down after multiple years, right? Where uh the school, the principal and founder named it after himself and bought a Cadillac for uh himself with state money, right? And it still took the state four years to shut him down, right? Those are wild times back then. But um, as Socrates says in the Republic, you know, if you're gonna try to reform a regime, a crazy anything goes democracy might be a good place where you could get started. Yeah. Because anything goes in a democracy, including the true, the good, and the beautiful and philosophy. There's a place for that amidst all the other wacko things and the diets and the fashion and the luxury and the demagoguery and the hedonism of a democracy. They'll even tolerate, you know, classical education. The charter movement was huge. The charter movement was so important for that. And it gave a place like Hillsdale College, which has just been so seminal, so seminal in the educational movements of the uh and trends and the growth of classical ed in the last 30 years. You know, Hillsdale was a long time coming, you know, that they spent a lot of time being a very small, under-the-radar institution uh and building a fundraising arm and raising money and building the capacity to leverage influence. And the Hillsdale's various charter school initiatives over the years did so much to advance classical liberal education in the K-12 space. Great Hearts grew. Um, you know, and then there were other standalone schools in different places in the country. Um, I'll mention the uh Ridgeview Classical School in Fort Collins, Colorado. Uh they punched above their weight in terms of kind of some national attention. And uh, you know, Edie Hirsch wrote about them in one of his books. And um yeah, it was the the early 2000s were a really good time for the movement, um, and really got us to where we are today, where Great Hearts isn't the only classical charter school network. There are others in the country, right? There are many others here in the state of Texas, even. Um Yeah, so where do I see the movement going? This is this is really we're in an interesting time because um You know, the Secretary of Defense wrote a book about supposedly about classical education or co-wrote it with somebody else, right? Yeah. Um that's pretty interesting. Um, I I haven't read the book. I can't comment about it. I've read some critical reviews of it by some classical educators. I've read uh reviews that have spoken very positively about good portions of the of the book. Uh, you know, but um you got the Secretary of Defense who's a phone call away from you know the president of the United States. Say what you will about him. Yeah uh or say nothing about him. Say nothing. Say nothing. You don't need to say anything. Uh just in terms of actual power and influence. We've got a fervent devotee of classical education uh in the president's cabinet, uh, who got the classic learning test accepted in um uh U.S. service academies, right? Some of the most elite of the elite institutions of higher education uh in the in the United States. Um interesting time. You know, and I don't see the movement retreating away from that. Yeah, um, I don't see the state of Florida banning the CLT again, you know, or or or decertifying it under some future administration. And and politics, it will change. It comes in cycles, man, and and you know it, and I know it. And whatever you think about what's happening now, it's like the Texas weather. You might not like it now, uh, it'll change. You know, tomorrow it'll be totally different. You might love it right now. Tomorrow's gonna be rough. Um, you know, you'll you'll run your air conditioner on one day and you'll have your heater on and your fireplace burning that the next day. The other thing I the other comment I would make about Classical Ed is it is big enough now. And you know, you probably know better than I do what percentage of school-aged children in the United States are attending a classical school. And it's it's still single-digit percentages, isn't it? It is. Yeah, I think it's um between four and six percent, but that's still a lot. Yeah, it's not inconsequential, but it's it it's um I mean, it's still the fastest growing. Yeah. You know, single digit digits fastest growing. Yeah, if there are enough practitioners out in the field now that there are different schools of thought and even dare I say, factions emerging in classical education. Yeah. The movement is now in a place where it can start to have conversations internal to itself about better and worse ways of being classical and educating kids. And I say for you know, for better, we can have conversations, and those conversations can either be productive or they can be bad and unproductive and acrimonious and you know, heoristic rather than dialectic and collaborative and uh friendly, right? And um, I think the biggest challenge for the movement in the next 10 years is going to be learning how to have those conversations without anathemas, right? Without self-cannibalization, without you're dead to me, without excommunications and schisms and um, you know, what uh Protestant churches call church splits, right? Uh, where you know the pure get purer and the small get smaller every year. If you ask me, that's what the movement has to have on its conscience for the next 10 years. Uh, is we don't want to go from having been the Roman Empire uh to being the Holy Roman Empire of 1740, right? Uh or even worse, the the Holy Roman Empire of 1618 through 1648, right? We cannot afford a 30 years' war in this movement. That would be devastating. Uh so uh, you know, if if this is closing, I've got plenty of strong opinions, right? And I have never hesitated to call out what I think are right and wrong ways of doing classical education. And there's a lot of interesting things being done in the movement. There's a lot of stuff going on in classical schools that ain't classical in the least, right? And a lot of people who don't know what they're doing, but really want to know what they're doing. Um we got to work together to make the movement better, even if not every corner and pocket of the movement is exactly as we would like to see it. You know, I think that there are Protestant classical educators, there are Catholic classical educators, and then there are the uh Americanist classical educators, you know, you know, sort of made the flag Uncle Sam is sort of a big figure. Uh there are the um, you know, there are public classical educators who have to make all kinds of compromises with the state with a capital S. Uh, you know, they're all there are Orthodox with a capital O, classical educators. Um, there are Jewish classical educators, you know, they're out there. They're running, you know, they're running schools, they're running, you know, uh there's a Jewish classical education concentration in the classical degree program here at the University of Dallas, um, which is just a fascinating cultural development there. Um the movement needs to cooperate and coexist amongst itself. That's the biggest challenge for the next 10 years. Not to turn into rancor and self-cannibalization and uh 30 years' war. Yeah. Well, that's a that's a great tone to end on. Uh, unity for classical education, but not a false harmony, just the unity of good dialectic. I mean, the thing that we preach, we want for the kids graduating from our institutions. It's a it's a recover of it's a recovering of civic civil discourse. Uh, and we need to practice that ourselves as people are looking to us. Yeah. Andrew, thank you so much for being on the Furos podcast. It was great having you. We'll definitely have to do a part two. Uh and and we look forward to yada yadded a lot of good stuff in there. But uh there's a whole not a whole bunch of other stories that are in there as as well, and including some funny Alex Julian stories, which uh oh, I don't know. Oh, we're out of time, he says. Yep, out of time. But part two, we'll put those in and uh we'll have Ryan Kopak with us next time. But this has been another wonderful episode of the Furos Podcast, and thanks Andrew Austin for being on. Thanks. Thanks so much, Alex.