St. Brendan's Podcast
The St. Brendan's Podcast exists to equip you with rigorous, practicable, and affordable Christian education for many generations to come.
St. Brendan's Podcast
St. Brendan's Founder's Episode: What Were We Thinking??
Have you ever wondered what was going through our heads as we ramped up to the start of our Classical Christian school? What could have dared us to take the risk?
Maybe you find yourself in the same boat that we were, praying and planning to start your own school, weighing the risks and discussing the costs. Or, maybe you're just in need of some encouragement in this monumental task that we call education.
Either way, this episode was made for you.
Join us as Eric Conn interviews the Dan Berkholder, Brian Sauvé, and Kevin Love, the Founders of St. Brendan's Classical Christian Academy.
The long-awaited episode airs at last!
P.S. Did we miss you at the 2024 NCP Conference? Feeling a little FOMO? Don't worry–we have you covered. Simply follow this link over to our St. Brendan's Patreon channel for the link to all the conference talks. We want you to be equipped to build Christian boroughs in your place with your people.
God is the light in which we see and understand everything else. Without him, the universe is a fragmented pile of incomprehensible particulars. Indeed, the universe can no longer be understood as a universe. It has become a multiverse. Christian education must therefore present all subjects as parts of an integrated whole with the scriptures at the center. Without this integration, the curriculum will be nothing more than a dumping ground for unrelated facts.
Speaker 1:When God is acknowledged, all knowledge coheres. It is obvious that all aspects of this coherence cannot be known to us. We are finite creatures, but, as the late Francis Schaeffer would put it, while our knowledge cannot be exhaustive, we can grasp what is true. We can understand that God knows what we do not, and therefore the universe is unified in principle. Where God is not acknowledged, the pursuit of knowledge is just one thing after another and the ultimate exercise in futility. The French existentialist philosopher Sartre understood this when he said that without an infinite reference point, all finite points are absurd.
Speaker 1:Education is a completely religious endeavor. It is impossible to impart knowledge to students without building on religious presuppositions. Education is built on the foundation of the instructor's worldview and the worldview of those who developed the curriculum. It is a myth that education can be non-religious, that is, that education can go on in a vacuum that deliberately excludes the basic questions about life. It is not possible to separate religious values from education. This is because all the fundamental questions of education require religious answers. Learning to read and write is simply the process of acquiring tools to enable us to ask and answer such questions.
Speaker 1:Public education can approach this problem in one of two ways. The first is to refuse to address such questions. We have already seen that such an attempt is impossible. If any information is transferred at all, it will assume the truth of certain presuppositions. Every subject, every truth, bears some relationship to God. Every subject will be taught from a standpoint of submission or hostility to Him. The second alternative is the hidden agenda. The agenda is implemented when the state gives religious answers to the fundamental questions but hides the fact that it is doing so. The religion is humanistic and it is taught with the power of the state behind it. Thus, a church has been established by law, but it is not a Christian church. Without realizing it, many Christian parents are requiring their children to attend. End quote that was read from Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning An Approach to Distinctly Christian Education by Douglas Wilson. Welcome to the St Brendan's Podcast, where we exist to equip you with rigorous, practicable and affordable Christian education for many generations to come.
Speaker 3:Welcome to this episode of the St Brennan's Podcast. I am one of your hosts. I'm Eric Kahn, joined by Mr Kevin Love. Thank you, for we had a brilliant cold open, Pastor Doug Wilson. By the way, recently on Tucker Carlson.
Speaker 1:Yes, he was, which is excellent, by the way. I didn't get to at first. I didn't get to listen to the full thing. I actually like the full hour episode much better. Very good, well done.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'll have to check that out. We have two other guests with us today, two of the most brilliant and good-looking men that I know Pastor Brian Sauvé.
Speaker 4:I'm sincerely flattered, Eric, and you must not know very many people, but I am glad to be one of those people.
Speaker 3:One of the people, thank you, and one of the other ones, dan Burkholder, the Norseman. I thought you were going to juke me out and say the other one is me, and then there's Dan, that is not the case, gentlemen, we're going to be talking about the podcasts, or the school in this podcast, but first of all, kevin, I want to ask you we'll give a quick plug for Patreon what's going on there? What kind of content are people get if they sign up for that? So walk me through that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So the big reason for Patreon with all of this is largely to put out more resources for the school, not just the like how to start a school, that kind of stuff though that will be important but also other things like what are the first. You know five books that you should read on classical Christian education, so I just wrote that the other day. I think something like that will be helpful. Where it already has the hyperlinks you just click on, it kind of tells you a little bit more about other resources that are out there. But then also one of the things I'm particularly excited about is this the community aspect to Patreon. So that's where people can come.
Speaker 1:Whether you're homeschooling or whether you're trying to start a private school, it doesn't matter. There is a chat thread that you can join with other like-minded families, other parents who are pushing in the same direction, after the same things for their very own kids, where you can discuss with them, you can ask questions, you can get the kind of help that a lot of people are wanting right now. I mean, I talked to many different families, many different parents who are saying we can't start a private school right now, but I just feel isolated. How can I get more help? How can I join some kind of community with other people who are like-minded? Because I have questions about Latin. How do you guys do Latin? I'm not a Latin expert, or about math, or whatever. It is right, so Patreon is going to be really helpful for that.
Speaker 3:So a lot of good conversations, a lot of good resources. As we jump into the episode now, we have really some introductions to do and we'll get to those. How. You guys are all involved in this project but really want to start talking today about why St Brennan's? How did this come to be? What was the genesis of this project? So, obviously, kevin, you're the headmaster. At some point you got wrangled into this whole thing. I did, yeah, so maybe we'll start with you. Why don't you just give me some background for our listeners?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So it's helpful maybe just to say up front we have the full board for St Brennan's Classical Christian Academy here. So that's myself, that's myself, that's Pastor Sauvé and Pastor Burkholder, and we thought it'd be really helpful just to take a step back, maybe even for us, for our own brains, to document this right so that we don't forget in the future. Just yeah, how we got here right. For me it was a little different because I joined later on in the picture, because I didn't come out here until I believe it was July of 2019. So that was pre-COVID. You know, the world is a completely different place, but I plugged into this church, did some Sunday school teaching and then I got medically retired from the Air Force in 2020, right as we were going full swing into COVID. Not because of the vaccine stuff.
Speaker 1:Not because of the vaccine stuff. Not because of the vaccine stuff. I mean, was it a vaccine injury from before, though? That's the question.
Speaker 4:But not the COVID vaccine.
Speaker 1:But not the COVID vaccine.
Speaker 4:Unsolved Mysteries music cue it. Cue it Is that on the soundboard this is now a conspiracy theory.
Speaker 1:It's.
Speaker 5:Hanukkah. We turned it over to.
Speaker 4:Hanukkah.
Speaker 3:Was it demons? Yeah, the answer is always on on a Cosmos.
Speaker 4:Maybe it could have been fairies. It was probably fairies.
Speaker 1:So, at this time, this is uh derailed. This, this is uh May of 2020. We go back to California that's where I was born and raised, that's where my wife was born and raised and while we were out there, uh, we heard some whisperings, you know, of a school potentially being started here at Refuge at some time in the near future. So this is how I remember it. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Speaker 1:When I heard those, I wasn't doing a whole lot at the time when I was in California. So I reached out and I said I know I'm from afar, but I could help if you want to. You know, maybe throw in some curriculum together at this time. And I think maybe after two or three of those texts, dan and Brian reached out and basically just said hey, if you're serious about this, like we need to talk, right. So we FaceTimed, and it was in that conversation where, I believe, you guys made the soft pitch, which was hey, if you're serious about this and you could come back to Utah, you could be the headmaster, start the school, run the school, and we'll do this together, though, and it would be like this next year and get paid a million dollars a year and one million dollars.
Speaker 4:One million dollars. That was the price Over the lifetime of the position. That was the price Maybe.
Speaker 1:With inflation.
Speaker 4:It's a total and they get excited If you put your money in crypto.
Speaker 1:You say $1 million potential dollars over the next 30 to 60 years If you had put it in in 2014.
Speaker 3:But if you bought Bitcoin in 2008, you're set, you're set Genius.
Speaker 1:So it was at that point that we made the plunge. Uh, came, came right back. We started meeting as a board weekly at that point, do you guys remember that? I mean it was it was months of like weekly meetings yeah, I want to ask this.
Speaker 3:So is the genesis between dan and brian then? For the idea, for the school?
Speaker 5:it actually came from brian, probably from lexi through lexi correct, through doug wilson through doug wilson yeah, we're not original here. What? No, actually. Uh, if you'd like to tell the story, brian, we had pitched for a school before kevin love had lived here.
Speaker 1:The first time been here, yeah yeah, yeah, and so we were trying to start this time frame wise.
Speaker 3:This is like pre-2018. 2017. It was 2017 and earlier it was yeah.
Speaker 4:So Lexi and I had been working through our homeschooling and getting into different streams of homeschooling classical streams, kind of the ACCS, dorothy Sayers kind of influence trivium as interpreted through how the ACCS did it for a long time Along with, like Charlotte Mason and some of her kind of stuff, the PNEU schools. And then what happened was my wife had been very much. I was overseeing it, going yeah, let's read all the books. I'll read two. Let's figure this out, let's do a good job, let's make sure that we're on the same page and I'm not just on autopilot. So I'm reading. She read the case for classical Christian education, I think is the book. It was Douglas Wilson. And then, um, she's like you should read this book.
Speaker 4:So I read it and I put it down when I was finished. I remember the exact moment. We were in our Ogden house, which sets the timeline pre like 2017. And it was. I sat it down and said we're starting a school. This is it. We need to start a school. And my wife wasn't convinced at first. Not on the education Christian education, yes. Classical, yes.
Speaker 3:All this stuff? Yes, more like can we start a school.
Speaker 4:It was more like is a school a good idea? I prefer homeschooling. Yes, More like can we start a school? It was more like is a school a good idea? I prefer homeschooling. Yes, oh, okay, and you find this a lot, particularly in the Christian education world, that it's typically led by mothers and the sensibilities of mothers tends towards let's keep everything at home, let's keep everyone at home, because I can see them, I can squeeze them. I can love them, I can nurture them.
Speaker 4:And it's scary to think them, I can squeeze them, I can love them, I can nurture them, and it's scary to think like I'm going to start sending them out to this other thing and that's legitimate, yeah, yeah, and there's a lot there that you have to work through. But that was really the genesis for not just as a personal I'm a father parenting my own children but moving into this public conviction as a church we need to start an actual school, a private Christian school.
Speaker 3:Well, and one of the things I think that should encourage people is that, you know, maybe they're having that thought right now and so maybe they get discouraged and like, well, there might not be a school at your place next year, and that's okay too. It takes a lot of work, a lot of behind the scenes.
Speaker 1:Well and this is typical right, I mean even for Pastor Wilson he said I believe in recovering the lost tools of learning, that it was when his oldest daughter got to be school age, right, that was the moment that he turned to his wife and said we're doing it, we have to make something right. Can I ask, brian, as you're reading that book those books, really it's. He turned to his wife and said we're doing it, we have to make something right.
Speaker 3:Can I ask, brian, as you're reading that book, those books really, yeah it sounds like.
Speaker 4:Yep, that was like. That was the linchpin book.
Speaker 3:Were there certain ideas or like, what was it that struck you? That was like, no, like. This is a reason why we have to do it.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it was a cascading order of convictions from public ones that we already held personally, like public school is definitely not an option for our family. And then it was wow, christian parents owe their children a Christian education, normatively speaking, and but kind of a little bit soft on that, like, ah, but I wouldn't, you know, really try to argue with someone who had a different conviction on this. And then, and then, christians owe this and it is a duty, and increasingly, I do think there's a scale here where in some settings and times and places, it would have been permissible or it was more of a wisdom judgment when it came to even things like public schooling. I mean, public schooling in America goes back to the 1600s, so we're not just talking about post-feminist world.
Speaker 5:Is that timeline the same as Charlemagne signing the Magna Carta?
Speaker 4:Actually King John signed the Magna Carta.
Speaker 3:That was the most deep cut.
Speaker 4:In a recent sermon I misspoke and proved my public schooling education that I received.
Speaker 3:It was just funny that the first people to catch it were St Brandon students. They were like what the heck? The Magna Carta. I know the signer. So public school goes way back.
Speaker 4:Public school goes. You know the old Deluder-Satan Act in the 15th century in North America. So there were times, I think, where it was a different calculus, but now I'm sorry, the 17th century. So now what we're talking about is okay, but now it's not permissible in our day and age for any parent. Bar thing we could do to achieve that principle of Christian education is a private school, and I believe that would have more benefits than simply nurturing a culture of homeschooling. But even from that moment it was years before we I wrote a massive proposal spoke with the elder team for months, we had an elders retreat where we were like really going to come together and for a couple days pray, talk through this, and it got voted down. Yeah, the elder team said no, you were not starting school. We're a plurality of elders. I can't, just, I'm not the.
Speaker 5:Actually, from my recollection, it did not get to a vote. Yeah, it wasn't. Evenection, it did not get to a vote? Yeah, it wasn't even. No, it was immediately met with hostility.
Speaker 3:Do you remember what some of the objections were?
Speaker 4:Classical education creates elitism. Financial considerations, logistical considerations, the concerns about messaging that it was actually bad to send your kids to public school, that that was not permissible, Worries about legalism concerning that it was those kinds of concerns.
Speaker 1:So you're saying you're not a legalist? We've come a long way.
Speaker 5:No, we definitely are. No, we're not so Dan.
Speaker 3:I want to ask you on that same front, in your mind, what were some of the leading causes or reasons that you were saying, yeah, I think, because I take it, you two were on board.
Speaker 5:Yes, yeah, we were like-minded on that, and nobody else has laughed, except for us. Because hey right there, that's what it was.
Speaker 3:But you know, as Brian said, you could have started a homeschooling co-op. You could have. There's a number of things you could have done and I'm just wondering in your mind, why this?
Speaker 5:Yeah, I think there's really two categories that both Brian and I are coming we have to think through. The first one is as fathers. You know, we have children. We have certain responsibilities to them. Brian talked about some of those and became convinced that homeschooling was the best fit or, I'm sorry, private school was the best fit for his family. I came to similar convictions. But there is, I think, another category that many people that listen to this won't have, and that's as a leader of a people. So we're also looking at, so we look at our family and know that's probably best for them.
Speaker 5:But what about our church?
Speaker 5:What do we want our people to look like in 50 years?
Speaker 5:And that was really a criteria that was heavy on our minds at that time was we need to be making 50 and 100-year decisions?
Speaker 5:Our culture and our people and the fruit to look like what we'd hope it would look like, which is the kingdom of God here in Ogden, utah, generations of Christians worshiping the holy and living God, fruitful houses, like all of the good things that come with Christian blessings, then we really need something that can unite a people in like-mindedness, to have similar shared culture, similar values, similar skill sets, such as singing, being able to recite poetry and reading Greek and Latin, having all of the intellectual foundations to be able to have interesting conversations, to be able to see the world in a certain way and interpret current events and past events through this worldview that's been developed, and the best way to do that is through a private school. It's not to do it in somewhat segregated homeschooling, even though that's a good thing. It doesn't. It could not. It's a vehicle that could not produce what we wanted it to produce, and so that was another big driving factor for us was just looking at our people and saying what do we want them? You know where are we leading them?
Speaker 1:Yeah Is, do you think like in your mind as you're thinking through that vision, is it the togetherness of the school that really helps point towards that vision a little better? Is that kind of how you were thinking through it?
Speaker 5:Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. You cannot have, you cannot build a culture that's deracinated from location and from proximity.
Speaker 5:You know, this is why you get tribalism online. You know on social media, but it's so limited. You know. And when you get to the granular level within a school, where you're, where you're together every day, you see parents, you see each other. Every day, you get to interact with one another's kids. You have the same teachers that are imparting the same values and principles and wisdom and knowledge to your children. They have peers. Now that they're friends with, and family groups become friends with one another. There are other activities, like you're doing nature study or you're doing wrestling or whatever. The next thing is that we will do. These families are doing that together and so it's a daily life together within a shared context, within shared information and values, especially values. What does everyone say is actually important? What is the standard for our children and for our families? What are the patterns of daily life? What is the catechism? What are theological? It just goes. Every single area of life is touched in the school and you're doing it together every day.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm curious. So are we in? We're finishing year three? Yes. So I saw something on Twitter and somebody said if you think we're annoying, this is kind of like our camp People on the conservative reformed Christian right. They said if you think we're annoying, wait till you meet our kids.
Speaker 4:Yeah so.
Speaker 3:I just want to throw this out there. As you look at the kids and what's happening in the school, do you think that's true? Are we producing that? Do you think the kids will be more? I guess potent.
Speaker 4:Yes, I mean when you have a shared history, not only personally. I mean that on two levels when you have a shared history in friendships and classrooms and cohorts and things like that, with teachers and the same influences, but also when you have a shared history in terms of your mapping of how you got to where you are today, how your people got to where, how the Christian community, how the church militant got to where it is today. What is the history of America? What is the history of the Middle Ages? What's the history of Rome? What's the history of the Old Testament? You share those views. You share all of those views.
Speaker 4:You're eating at the same table when it comes to theological, cultural, philosophical, historical, all of these different worldview foundations. It grows up a community in a way that is kind of like a tree that branches out into many different. It's got a shared trunk and then it branches out north, south, east, west every point on the compass like a great redwood, into different interests as the kids grow up and then they drop off different seeds and plant other trees. So not all the kids are going to be identical, but they are going to grow up from the shared trunk of knowledge and rootedness and then they're going to go out in their own direction. But what it's going to do is it's going to solidify.
Speaker 4:Many of the cultural things that we had to fight for in the first generation will become assumptions in the second generation. And I don't mean that in a bad way, like oh, you assume it, you take it for granted, but I mean they become. I had to fight for years in my own mind to come to these convictions. My children are growing up with them as default starting point assumptions. So they will take them further, lord willing, than I will in terms of application and fruitfulness, imagining what I would have been like had I known some of these things at age 15 or 17 or 20 that I didn't.
Speaker 5:In a lot of ways, I think about it like this so, if our children this is why I think this generation will be more potent, especially here in Ogden is because in a lot of ways, like all of us, we were in this pretend war soldiers, in this pretend war, you're just thrown into battle. Here's a gun. By the way, your teachers at your public school, they don't like you, your peers are not for you. You're going to have to battle from day one. Right, there's, this is your training ground. It's on the job training, which in war is really bad thing where our children are going to have the opportunity of doing basic training and they're going to have, yeah, and they're going to have the war college and they're going to have a shared community to where it's like am I crazy?
Speaker 5:Like when I go to my 2000 person student, you know high school, and there's like it feels like there's not that many Christians here. You know, I feel like I'm one of the only ones, whereas they're being formed in this barracks where they're like no, I've got my unit, I've got my my guys, I can be bold, because I know they've got my back, you know so. So in a lot of ways, I think that's. There's also generational things going on right now in the waves and the different waves of cultural I guess movement and emphases and everything like that, which is going to compound this. I have a lot of hope for the generations that are going to come from this school, in part because of that they're trained for war.
Speaker 3:Yeah, one of the questions I want to ask you, kevin. Nonviolent war.
Speaker 5:This isn't a threat, to be clear.
Speaker 3:When we're talking about classical Christian education. I think one of the contentions we're making is that that will produce a different kind of culture. One of the things for the King's Hall was interviewing Dr Chris Schlecht from New St Andrews and he was talking about we were talking about Charlemagne and how he brought in all these people to revive, even in that time, basically classical Christian education, trivium, quadrivium, etc. And I'll ask you one of the questions I asked him, which is what is the point of that type of education? What are you trying to create in a student?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so. So there's a lot, of, a lot of different ways this has been explained. But if we were to boil it down, one thing that we've said is we want to produce students who can lead well, lead well in this, to be honest, a relativistic, postmodern Christian world. How do you? How do you get that Right? Well, you need students who can read well, they need to be able to think well, they need to be able to speak well. Right, and I think one of our podcasts we had talked about this Roman idea, this Roman ideal actually for rhetoric, was the good man who speaks well. Yeah, well, why is that? Because the man who can speak well can convince people either of his stance or to go out and do something right.
Speaker 1:For a lot of rhetoric, the whole point is to get somebody to go do something. Sometimes it's to convince you to think a certain way. But just because you can speak well doesn't mean that you're a good person. Just because you can speak well doesn't mean that you're a good person. Also, that's where the Christian side of this really comes in.
Speaker 1:If you want to have a Christian leader, this could even be for a business, this could be for a church, it could be in the home, it doesn't matter. You want somebody who can read well, think well, speak well, so that they can lead other people well to the true and the good and the beautiful. Because, again, this is love of neighbor. This is actually making it so that our children grow up and when they have reached their maturity they're actually able to love their neighbor better because of who they are, because of how their education has shaped them and formed them. They'll be so well-versed in the scriptures not just in the actual text but in the ideas of the scriptures as well that they can apply that to every single facet of life, every single area of life, and through that they can love better.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think that's really helpful. I want to ask some of the core founding principles about the school, because there's a unique, I guess, features of our model. Yeah, this is important. So, brian, I want to ask you to start with on that. When you think about the model itself, I guess, what is it? What are some of the cornerstones that you guys intended to lay?
Speaker 4:Yeah, so I mean a lot of what Kevin just laid out in terms of we're starting with the goal in mind, which isn't just even the student. It's also, like Dan pointed out, goal in mind, which isn't just even the student. It's also, like Dan pointed out, it's the civilization that we want to see established, the culture. If you're going to have a civilization and a culture, then you need a certain type of people, because a culture is just the externalized religion. I think Henry Ventile was right that culture is religion externalized. So it's their worship, it's their thinking, it's how they do. You know everything that they do, from blue collar work to white collar work, to parenting children, being mothers, being fathers, being churchmen, leaders within the church, leaders within the polis and the state. So we want that. Let's get really clear on that first, because if you have a vague idea of where you want the thing to end in 500 years, if you have a say in it, right, it sounds presumptuous, but you really do have to start there. Or, how are you going to point how are you going to build the ship? How far you build a ship to say what seas are we going to travel into, where A canoe won't get you across the Atlantic. Right, you're going to need something bigger, you're going to need something better, so you have to set that. And then you're asking something bigger, you're going to need something better, so you have to set that. And then you're asking what kind of people do we need to make to see that happen? How do you make those people? So we were reverse engineering the school to create good men, good women, who can think well, read well, speak well, lead well and do anything they put their hand to well, because they can learn well, they can go and figure out how to do whatever's within their wiring to do. Because not all of them are going to be cultural leaders in the sense of typically envisioned leadership. Some of them are going to be employees, some of them are going to be blue collar, white collar, all of that.
Speaker 4:So from that starting point we said well, we want our school to be Christian, because there is no such thing as neutral knowledge. I know you guys are talking about this, talked about it a lot in the podcast and we'll continue. But why does two plus two equal four? Why does the speed of light travel, you know, so many meters per second in a vacuum? Because Christ is Lord because he spoke it thus it's not arbitrary or neutral.
Speaker 4:So we want to start a Christian school so that they can think about any subject Christianly, rather than just simply taking a public school secularist education and sprinkling the ramen seasoning packet of Christian faith over it in the sense of a Bible study or a chapel once a week or once a day. No, math class, history class, reading, all of it's going to be approached from a Christian lens. So it's a Christian school, a classical school, where we're saying, rather than going with modern educational theory from Dewey and onward and enlightenment thinking, no, we want a classical school. We want to say we're going to go back and learn the way that not only the Western tradition but Christians in particular have been approaching learning, which is a unified whole. Everywhere Christians have gone, they've started schools. I mean you could look at Augustine talks about this in De Doctrina Christiana on Christian teaching.
Speaker 4:Cassiodorus in the seventh century at the Vivarium, the cathedral schools in the early Middle Ages in Europe, the Puritan schools in the early American colonies, the schools that settled the West, that went forward from there like the frontier schools. We want to have a classical curriculum. It's going to approach through the liberal arts, the trivium and quadrivium and beyond as well, but rooted in that historical methodology, pedagogy and curriculum. And then, finally, we wanted it to be practical for our community. So it's a Christian school, it's a classical school and it's practical for our community, meaning that in the foundations we had to go back and learn how to educate, how to take the Protestant ideal of universal education, built on the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, rather than a more common historical model in fact, vanishingly rare would be to educate everybody.
Speaker 4:You would educate nobility and clergymen historically, and that's about it. Most people wouldn't receive what we consider a normal education today. However, protestants said, hey, we're all a priesthood of believers, everyone should be able to read the scriptures. Think well, resist it. That's why the early American colonies passed that old, deluder Satan Act. They were saying Satan's going to deceive our children unless they can read. So once a community passes a certain number of people, you have to form a grammar school, maybe not all the way to secondary, but you got to have a grammar school, some kind of school.
Speaker 4:So we wanted a school that could reasonably educate all of the children in our community, in a practically approachable way which led us to some of the practical structural decisions and how we deal with things like tuition, what the classroom is going to be like, how much staff is needed to run it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's what a day. And I want to ask you this about the structural side of things. So I think most people when they hear about the school, they're like you know, our tuition model is unique, forms model is unique, but correct me if I'm wrong the school is intimately tied to the church and I want to ask why some of those features, what are they and why?
Speaker 5:Well, yeah, I guess if you back up just a little bit to the question of what is education I'm sure you guys have talked about this, but often we just assume it's like the dissemination of information, like downloading here's facts, we're going to put them in your child's brain and that's that's what education is. But once you realize that education is actually more it's a formation of a human being, you know into the fullness of a human being as much as possible it becomes less important that you segregate everybody down to the nth degree, because that's the most efficient thing that you could do if you're just trying to download information, and so we're trying to create a people, and so in order to do that, you have to be realistic, first of all, with the resources that you have. We don't have a ton of resources. It's not like we're in an affluent area and we have billionaires coming to our church that give generously.
Speaker 4:Though, if you are in the area, you can definitely call or email text show up, I'll give you my Venmo, anyway.
Speaker 5:So we're looking at this, you know, building a people and what do we need to do in order to first accomplish that goal and, second, protect it right? We have to do both of those things. So we have to be able to grow it and actually produce the results that we want, and we also have to protect it. And so we've gone through a couple iterations of this and we've essentially landed at this point that, in order to get into the school, you have to be a member in good standing and your children will then be qualified to apply to the school. And we did that for a number of reasons, but one of the reasons is because, if we're trying to build a people in a certain culture, it doesn't make sense to import people from outside of this culture to try to integrate in a half measured way with other families and with other other students, and so and we did try it and it didn't work, and so we had to, you know, say well we tried to the drawing outside people.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 5:We tried to have outside people. Yeah, thank you for clarifying. Yeah, you're good and it, and it didn't work and it it it really clarified our thinking on that. We don't accept tuition from outside, you know outside families. You can't come and there's.
Speaker 5:there's a whole lot of temptations that automatically go away when you say nope, here's the standard. We don't take money from outside people. That means that the Jewish family and the Catholic family and the secular humanist family that have all tried to apply for the school, we just say we don't take tuition, you're not a member of the church. It just avoids a whole lot of problems. Also, you have families then that are in the church with people that they trust the other families, they trust they trust the kids, they trust the teachers. Everybody has the same authority structure. There's not some outside authority that you have to rely on for some church discipline case that maybe they don't actually practice church discipline or, even worse, like an unbelieving family. That's like, well, there is no authority. You don't recognize any authority, not even the Lord Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1:So I don't remember what your question was. Well, remember we had that sit-down meeting where we were talking through what is our goal for this school. Is it evangelistic? In the end, it was no, no.
Speaker 4:Primarily no.
Speaker 1:That is not primarily what this school is for. This school is for our people.
Speaker 4:So Christian education as a category, the way that I think about this is that Christian education as a category is a subset of discipleship, and that's one of the reasons why I draw the conclusions I do about the impermissibility of a secular education for your children. Impermissibility of a secular education for your children is because education is a subset of this broader thing that you're supposed to be giving your children, which is discipleship, Christian discipleship. So, when we were thinking about some of that, I think I want to speak a little bit to our forms model and the tuition thing and some of the pitfalls we're trying to avoid. So, to be clear, the way our school is formed and you guys have probably talked about this, but we have multiple grades together in forms. We haven't talked about it yet. Okay, we haven't talked about this? Great.
Speaker 4:So instead of having discrete 12 grades where you have a first grade class, a second grade class, a third grade class and then a teacher for each one and they have a homeroom and that's it, we build our school around three-year clusters, four three-year clusters of students called forms. So if you're in first, second and we start at first grade, we have a list of things that the Headmaster Love is going to, I think, provide to patrons as well, some of the standards we encourage families to aim for in the preschool years so that by first grade they're coming in strong. No, kindergarten, that's at home. First, second and third grade is together in form fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, 10th, 11th, 12th. Within those forms they have discontinuity and continuity subjects. So discontinuity subjects are subjects that. Do you want to explain this really quick, because I think you might Sure? Yeah, you're in the weeds. I explain it all the time right.
Speaker 1:So the difference between continuity and discontinuity is basically just a way of treating our subjects, right? So there are some subjects that have to be addressed on this kind of stair step, sequential yeah, sequential model. So that would be math. You can't really teach, just you know first, second, third grade. Let's just all do math together today.
Speaker 1:No, you need an actual lesson for first grade and then a different lesson for second or third grade. But then there are other subjects which we call our continuity subjects. Those would be like history. You could totally read a history book together First, second, third grade. They'll get it at different levels but honestly, even within a first grade class some students are further along intellectually than others. So even within a first grade class they would get it at different levels. But you could do that right. You can read the Iliad in a form three classroom and you can do that with seventh, eighth and ninth. That's totally okay.
Speaker 4:And then do your narrations and writing, and they're all learning from each other. So we have forms that treat subjects like that differently, where sometimes they're splitting out and sometimes they're all together, practically speaking. Again, we're not inventing all this from whole cloth. I mentioned the frontier schools that settled the American West, which were Christian schools, by the way. Guys, they were Christians, educating Christian children. That was what they were doing. You would have a one teacher with somewhere between a handful and a couple dozen students that would all come from this community, and it would be now okay, now, first form students are, you know, open reader one and you do your reading while I handle math. It was one maestro teacher, usually a 20 year old lady, who was handling all of this teaching, or one one man that was handling all of this teaching.
Speaker 1:Well, you think of like little house on the prairie right, you have. Mrs Beadle. She's teaching there and it's first, second, third, all the way up through I think it's eighth grade and then a lot of the in that model too.
Speaker 4:It shows post-Great Depression. We really extended our schooling up to 18, mainly to keep men out of the workforce who were going to come and compete for jobs with 20s and 30s and 40-year-old men. That was the main reason. So, yeah, so they kept kids in longer and basically normalized secondary school for everybody all the way up. But in the frontier schools it would have been very normal for a ninth grade boy to be leaving school for significant portions of time in harvest season or planting season.
Speaker 1:This is why, by the way, when we think of 200, 250 years ago, when they would have a student go up into college at 16, years old we think whoa, this is crazy, but it was actually pretty normal?
Speaker 4:No, and when you look at just the normative result of that education, Little House on the Prairie is a great example, One of the books I can't remember which one particularly they're doing this community-wide get-together where there's some exhibition of knowledge and contests, and some of them are like doing long division in your head, mental arithmetic, dividing seven-figure numbers on the spot. They're reciting the Declaration of Independence. They are doing elaborate retellings of particular moments in American history from memory cold. The type of people that this education produced were far more educated than the typical high school graduate in a STEM school or whatever today Totally 100%. So, backing up, though, we've got forms. Why do we do that? Well, because it produces a great effect in the classroom. Every student learns what it's like to be the little fish in the pond with older kids. Everyone learns what it's like to be the top dog in the form.
Speaker 4:There's social benefits, there's educational benefits. There's also financial benefits because, bridging to the next point, we wanted our school to be practically affordable. So we asked ourselves Dan, can you afford? How many kids do you have? You had not four yet, but you have four. So, Dan, you're going to have all your kids in school. At St Brennan's Tuition begins at $7,000 a student a year. You good with that? Like you ready to sign up? I mean, do you want to know my plan?
Speaker 5:I would have to get a third job.
Speaker 4:Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, okay, I have six children, yeah, and then you do the whole. We'll never turn anybody away for finances, we'll never. This is the kind of culture I've seen this produce in classical Christian schooling communities. When they have normal tuition model, normal discrete grades model, high resource model, you need 12 teachers minimum to have 12 grades and usually more than that, right With administrative and head mastering and all these other functions.
Speaker 4:A lot of what it produces it does produce some good things. Families have skin in the game, they have ownership in this school, they're paying for it, they're taking it seriously. I don't want a straw man. This is there's absolutely good, and we'll talk about how we try to map this onto our model in a minute. But so it produces fathers who work really hard and go all out in their careers and they're doing businesses and they're hustling and they have three jobs and they're like I make 60 grand. I need to make 120 by the time little Johnny gets to be number four in school or I can't afford it.
Speaker 4:But another thing it produces is wives working full-time, because you can see the temptation oh, my kids are now out of school. Hey, honey, we can't afford the school unless you're working 40 hours a week at the local whatever right. So I've talked to many families in communities like this and some of the consistent threads I've heard is from the wife and the husband man. I'd really love it if my wife could stop working so much. It's really impacting our home culture, but we can't not do that. So it Because of the cost of tuition.
Speaker 1:It produces a dual income culture, because they're caught on the other side too, where they do want to give their children a very robust Christian education and they see that as their ticket Totally so they're punching their ticket by saying, hey, this is just a sacrifice we're going to have to make.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, it does some things like that. There's issues there. So what do we do? Well, we said from the beginning let's try to reverse, engineer a school to where we could say to somebody a family and member who are the only people eligible members of our church if you come to the church, if you're a member and you tithe, you give 10% of your income to this church, then we will not charge you tuition. And this is going to be a project that all of us together the family with the four-year-olds and the grown kids who are now giving to the church as well are seeing through this shared mission that we all have as a community of faith to make sure our children receive a Christian education. And so now, because in another community, you're expected to tithe and you're expected to pay tuition for these two completely isolated entities in many ways, practically and legally and in many other senses, isolated entities and institutions and what we were saying is let's figure out a way to combine these interests, use our resources wisely when it comes to the church building, staffing, all these different things, and see if we can accomplish it with the resources we have. And so far, we're three years in and we've been able to stick with this model.
Speaker 4:We expected to run in the red for several years. We planned financially for that to say, well, we're going to lose money as a church. We're going to dip into savings for a few years to make this happen and instead we've been in the black every year. It hasn't been easy, but we've been in the black every year. It's made us think very carefully and critically about how we staff our school and looking back to other ages and not just assuming the model of our current day, which is insane. It spends $16,000 to $20,000 per student typically per year. That is insane to produce outcomes of illiterate children who can't tie their shoes. Where's all the money going?
Speaker 1:Well, even it's administration it's.
Speaker 3:HR. I think on St Brendan's social media we shared that it was from California. Right, which one the graphic? The graphic about how they had to lower, like you can pass now with like a 44% 44 to 66.
Speaker 4:And A was like 80 to 100. I'm like that was a, b, that used to be so. We were looking at all these things and saying, a, can this be done? Has it been done? The answer is yes, it has been done and it can be done. And B can we make it happen in our community and how? And we said, well, let's try. And the result is that so far we've been able to maintain our budget, we've been able to hire, we've been able to expand staffing for our school. The school is growing every year over year, sometimes significantly, looking ahead at even more significant growth. We have so far been able to avoid that whole two or three tier model of the community where you do end up with families who are like we'd love to go to the school, but we just can't, can't afford it.
Speaker 3:It's too expensive. One of the questions I have going back to something you guys had touched on earlier, but we've also grown and made changes. One of those was requiring that you're a member, a church member. I want to ask Dan, why was that so important? What made us change? What were some of the issues we saw when they weren't member? Families?
Speaker 5:issues we saw when they weren't member families. Well, yeah, like I said earlier, when you don't have shared values, vision and culture and authority, then it really introduces a lot of problems, and so one of the this has actually been a benefit for people that are doing business together in the church and also for people who are going to school together in the church. So when you have a shared authority, you actually it's not. People think authority is like something that, oh man, I'm going to get my wrist slapped Like that's what's going to happen, when actually it's a protection to where, if you have a problem, there is somebody there that can solve your problem, that can be judicial and come to a good ruling. The other reason that it's really important more in the shared culture and values is that you actually are at considerable risk to your school and to your people when you start importing values that you don't share or visions for the future that you do not share, and so that becomes a danger to the school, to the students, especially, you know, to the students, as you have these other values or I mean just quite honestly, like immoral behaviors or low character type of children, because they come from low character type families and so, as the really the best way for us to facilitate like-mindedness, shared value, mission, vision. All that was to close this to members of the church only, and so in a lot of ways I mean the members are known by the pastors the way that we organize as a church this isn't a podcast about that, but it is a very hands-on method so that we know who our members are and they who know who we are and we are discipling them through this.
Speaker 5:When there's issues in the school their kids misbehave or are failing academically or something like that, it becomes not just a headmaster-parent-student discussion, but a pastor is now involved because we're there to help them, we're here to shepherd them. What is going on in the home? It gives you a really good idea for shepherding people the temperature of the home, based on what the kids are like. You're seeing the fruit of their home. So there's many, many benefits to that. But you get a non-member family in here into the school that goes to a different church and you see these issues. Pastors don't have authority. They don't have the authority and so you're dealing with it purely as a school administrator and you really have. Your limitations are like well, I mean you're on probation academic probation or you're out of the school. I mean, those are really the degrees. You know there's performance academically, but but really the shepherding is happening elsewhere and so it's, it's really it. We just cannot produce the school that we want. Can I make this really concrete? Just?
Speaker 1:I mean this, this actually happened to us. So you know, this was something I was thinking through and I was even presenting to you guys us restricting our scope to just members only. You need to ask yourself why, in such a high trust community, you would go with somebody who doesn't want to be part of the church. We actually had a family where the mother reached out to me, said, hey, I'd like my daughter to go to your church or go to your school. No, we're not members at Refuge. We actually came two years back and just didn't really like it. Didn't really like what we saw, but we would like our daughter to be in the school. That is just a recipe for disaster. Having somebody come to our church and say, you know what, I don't trust these men. You know what I don't actually like this place, but it is actually advantageous to me to have my child at your school and not in the public school. So it's a play for them, I get it, but for us that makes absolutely no sense and you're just asking for trouble.
Speaker 3:Well, it seems like one of the big issues is that you've got to be unified, like the, whether it's the school board, you as headmaster, the teachers. You've got to be unified with the parent and the task at hand, and if you're not, it seems like what we found correct me if I'm wrong. It just doesn't work out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, typically it's going to come down to discipline issues. Right, Maybe it's academic, but typically it's discipline issues where a student, you know, isn't behaving in class or something, and they go through the discipline process which, for us, right, it's nipped in the classroom, okay, it's done. Well, maybe it's not done, maybe it continues. That behavior is addressed in the hall, privately, you know teacher, to the student and then, if that still persists, then that student's brought to me and that's an immediate, you know, email, phone, call home.
Speaker 1:I am expecting the parent to come alongside in that case because really realistically, we're the ones coming alongside them. So if there's a discipline issue flaring up in the school and I bring that to their attention, they go. You know what, not a big deal. I mean it's like no action on my part, Like I think we're okay If they say that and just wave their hand at it. We are not seeing eye to eye, we are not aligned and, honestly, those kinds of issues, those discipline issues, ruin a classroom. That's why you can't have that right. So, again, this is more of just us being honest with ourselves and being honest with everyone who would like to apply and come to the school. It's such a high trust environment that we have to be on the same page. You have to.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 3:One of the other questions I want to ask we came from homeschooling and there was a number of reasons that the school was attractive to us.
Speaker 3:Particularly as our boys became teenagers, I really wanted more male presence, because it gets to a point where we say, OK, well, we say to women, we're like, OK, the realm for a wife and a woman is the home, because it's a very feminine motherly environment, Because it's a very feminine motherly environment, Well, the problem is, if you're trying to create men and you're keeping them, you know, in teenagers, especially under mom and in a motherly environment, this creates real problems. I saw this. So my question to you guys is we kind of have this mix and dance right in our church where we're saying, hey, we believe in this model. We also have homeschooling families and we want to be generous and all those things. And you guys, I think, struck a good balance with that. But you know, as you think through those types of issues, Brian Pastorly, how do you navigate that with mixes of people and different philosophies on how they're going to educate?
Speaker 4:Yeah, so I mean one of the phrases we say a lot not original to us is that you have principles and methods. Important to understand the difference Principal Christian education method. Some families in our community are going to homeschool, some are going to go to St Brendan's and we want to say amen and yes to both, pray for both, pastor both, encourage both. When we say like we really believe a school is the best option. Of course we started a school, why else would we do that? Of course we think a school's the best option possible, but not everybody's going to agree with that and so you don't want to have a two-tiered community.
Speaker 4:But when it comes to the male-female thing, even in homeschooling, private school, when our kids were coming up into that second form era, I do think this is one of the most important considerations for school is this to the young men you're not just, until you're an adult, primarily educated by mom at all times. You're actually going to be able to get you know some male influence. That's going to you know, even outside of just mom and dad. Some of the culture things that have resulted from that are so good. You know the dynamic as a parent when your kids are like they'll, you can take them to piano lessons and the piano. And they're like yes, ma'am, you know piano teacher says like your kids are so good can you take your shoes off, please and come into the, the studio room?
Speaker 4:yes, ma'am. And then at home you're like, can you take your shoes off? And and they're like, why? And of course they get a spanking. I get corrected on it. But there's a dynamic of respect that they're learning for hierarchy when they come into a school environment with other non-peers, with other authorities in their life. It's just a different dynamic, like when my kids are, lord willing, going up into second form. Soon I'll have kids not too long in second form and they'll be with Mr Crawford not too long in second form and they'll be with Mr Crawford and it's going to be like they're learning respect for this, this other man, and how to interact and how to learn how to navigate this environment of hierarchy.
Speaker 1:They're going to learn crypto, I was just going to add. So when I did brain training with your son, right, brain training is hard, I mean it's, it's an hour of a legitimate brain workout.
Speaker 1:It's like lifting weights for your brain right, and that was hard. It was hard for him. Some days are much worse than others, and I regularly had to say, just like I would to anyone else you need to control yourself, you need to work hard as unto the Lord, and I know that this sucks right now. Yeah, I know this doesn't feel good and it's like a workout and I need you to push through it, and so if he would buck against that, I just simply would not accept it. You're just no, absolutely not. Do 50 pushups.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I mean just, it's funny how the kids are like yes, sir, you know there's some dynamic that happens when kids step out of just their own threshold. Where there's comfort, it's good. They're comfortable there. They're not, you know, and now they have this, learning also how to navigate and say oh, my public behavior really is has implications for how my peers view me, for how my teacher views me, and they're learning some of these dynamics of relationship that we all have all throughout our lives, of living within hierarchies, superiors and inferiors. They're learning that on a level that's difficult to emulate in the same way in the homeschool, one of the things we found I have a temptation to go off on a rabbit trail right now that I'm going to resist about boys versus school girls upper year. Like boys school, girls school, I'll resist it, we'll get there.
Speaker 3:One of the other questions I think is tied to this. It's been really cool. So, brian, we have sons in the same form. Yeah, the friendships that develop among the kids, they become like one living organism. And it's funny to me because even in homeschooling you know you're around your brothers all the time. That's a different dynamic. But then to have friends where my kids literally are like they spend all week Our boys do and then when you have Tuesdays and it's half day and they're like, can I go home with you?
Speaker 2:know, Ari, Can I go home with Walter and you're like?
Speaker 3:you're with them all week. You're with them. Third, why? But it is cool to see the friendships develop, dan, even the way that we do. In the basement we have a culture, but they also have that in the classroom, so I think friendship is such a big part of it. And then it's tied to the male presence as well. It's one thing when I correct my sons. It's another thing when you have a whole community of men who are correcting them and being like no, you need to do better. In fact, come work at my business, because we have things to work on.
Speaker 1:Can I give you an example of that? So this happened. I believe it was last year. We had a student who was struggling through some academics and was kind of falling behind, right, and so we were saying you can't fall behind, so you need to catch up, right. And this student tried to explain to me you know all the the seven reasons why why he was behind, and I basically said, okay, good, let's fix it Right. Like everyone has reasons, right, let's fix it though.
Speaker 1:And uh, that really wasn't good enough. So later he pulled me aside and said hey, mr Love, can I talk with you for a moment? Like, yeah, sure, he said. I think maybe you didn't quite hear me enough. Like, like, didn't quite understand, like, my reasons for this, and I said okay, I'm willing to listen. So he explained and it didn't change my opinion. I basically said I know this is not what you want to hear. I know this is really hard, but I'm going to just shoot you straight. As a man, the world does not care about your excuses. When you grow up and you have a home and you have to pay for your mortgage and you, for whatever reason legitimate excuses were, you know fell out of work and you, you, just, you can't make your payments anymore, grandma got run over by a reindeer and I had to pay the medical bills.
Speaker 1:It doesn't matter right, at the end of the day they're still going to take your home. And I was trying to instill that in him in a very just, real, direct, manly way, kind of like when, when, uh, so I was in in the military. When you go through basic training, one of the fundamental things they try to break in you is this uh knee-jerk reaction to always make excuses. They would purposely put you in situations where, uh, we called them superman drills, right, so you had to. You're, you're out in your uh, in your abUs and like your camo gear out in the hall, right, and they're screaming at you and making you do pushups and all this stuff. And then they tell you you have to go into your room and you have to change into your blues I mean jacket and all like looking really nice, and they're screaming at you, pounding on your door while you're doing this and you come out and you're kind of disheveled because you were having to do as fast as you could and open the door and all this stuff, and then they'd come in and check your socks that you accidentally, you know, ruffled while you were in there and they're screaming at you and they're saying why, why did you do this?
Speaker 1:I told you you're not allowed to do this and you want to say, well, you didn't give me enough time and right. You want to come up with all of these excuses. They say that is not the right response. The right response is no excuse, sir. Every single time they know that you have an excuse, they know you have a legitimate reason, they get it. They did it on purpose. They want you to learn. No excuse, sir. I'm going to fix it and I'm going to move forward. So, anyways, I was trying to instill that in this student right and I just think it hits on a very different level. It comes off a very different way when you have a mom saying that yeah.
Speaker 1:It's just different. It uh, you know he, he took it and and he ran with it and like totally reformed his, uh his kind of mindset towards his academics and everything. Uh, I, I think it's just totally different when a woman is saying that to you.
Speaker 5:Yeah, I think it's one of the keys to the school's success is having a masculine influence. It's also one of the most difficult aspects of the school is having a masculine influence, because the temptation is going to be hey, we're going to start a school who's available? The moms, all the moms, the moms are available, naturally. Well, when you don't have that masculine influence, you actually have a compounded issue within the school that you would with homeschooling. So one thing to keep in mind with masculinity see the Hard man podcast with Eric Kahn if you want an expert take on this.
Speaker 5:But masculinity is caught, not taught, not taught. And I know that's true just because of your example. If a lady had said to this boy, as a man, you have a mortgage to pay, you don't get any excuses, they're going to take your house. You know what that sounds like. Nagging, nagging and shame, that's what it sounds like. But from a man, it's like no son. You have to take responsibility because like me, you're going to be like me someday. You don't get excuses, you have to provide for your family. It sounds a lot different. It's a calling up versus a calling down, addressing down.
Speaker 4:It's like why in every 80s and 90s and early 2000s sitcom was there a lovable older high school teacher that was a beloved mentor of the character whom they would go to with girl troubles and for wisdom, even even in cases where there was a dad present who was active this is like a boy meets world, yeah, like that kind of thing. What's the teacher's name?
Speaker 4:I can't remember I can't remember either but I didn't really like watch that show that much. But I'm I can picture in my mind I did. I was a when he comes back in and he's like you know, I've got this problem teacher and the teacher gives him a hard lesson but it's for him and there's mutual respect and there's like generational funny issues where it's like oh, you're such a boomer, you know, in our vernacular today.
Speaker 4:Mr Feeney, yes, why is that kind of character so ubiquitous? Because it's in ancient literature too, this equivalent, older mentor, sage, who will give you the tough love and from whom it's somehow easier to receive than from your dad or from your brother or from you know well, in a sense, the elder. There's a reason. The pastoral office is actually the word itself. It literally really does mean older man, an elder right. God made the world this way. You can fight against it and it's never an excuse. We can never allow it to be an excuse for our children to disrespect mom or dad or not hear a hard word or say mom, you're just nagging me? Of course not. We don't tolerate that for a second. But we should also recognize oh, there's something creational here. God made the world this way. Let's work with the grain of his creation and introduce some superiors, sage superiors, whom maybe there's a little easier, naturally, to respect and learn ultimately then how to have more perfectly respect your more immediate, your parents, you know, in that kind of environment.
Speaker 1:Well, in this very situation, on the same topic, the question that's kind of even more foundational to whether or not that could be received better from a man or a woman is the question of would that have been said in the first place better from a man or a woman? Is the question of would that have been said in the first place Exactly, if it was a woman, would she have not have softened the blow and said you know what? You're right, that is really hard. Take a few days to get caught up or whatever you need to do, whereas my instinct, just to be honest with you, is okay, I don't care. Right, I get it. I understand. It probably has been really hard. You've been sick for three days, okay, Time to cowboy up son yeah, you're out for three days.
Speaker 1:You have three days to make stuff up. It's due the next day. What do you mean? It's pretty black and white, right. It's just a different instinct on it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think that's really helpful. Gentlemen, as we sort of wrap this show up, Kevin, I think we want to give some encouragement to our listeners for people who are thinking about schools, maybe starting a school, joining one, I guess what sort of encouragement and helps? We'll point to the Patreon channel, of course, but what sort of encouragement would you leave our listeners with?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I don't want to. I don't want to say that this is easy. Starting a school is not easy.
Speaker 1:Running a school is not easy, but I will say that it is much simpler than you might think.
Speaker 1:Right, especially again, with our model, with a lot of the resources that we're putting out, much of what it comes down to is less on the intellectual side and more on the courage side. Right, because you're going to catch flack for it. You're going to have other people in the community who disagree with you, you're going to have to work through some hard issues together, but it's actually much simpler to start than you would think, because you don't have to have a teacher for every grade, because you don't have to have a PhD in every seat, because you don't have to have a master's in every seat. However you look at it, our model is much simpler to start. And if that's true and it is then the question really comes down to courage. If you see the writing on the wall, if you see that this is the aspirational goal that you're trying to shoot for, remember it is courage, first and foremost, so that you can provide this shelter and this help for your people.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think that's really helpful. Dan, certainly one of the things with this school, I think, has been we sort of like you guys did especially, but like built the plane while it was taking off. Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 5:And so I think there's.
Speaker 3:there's sort of this, this picture that people have like, well, you got to have it all figured out and you got to know everything beforehand, and a lot of times what people need is just you just need to start.
Speaker 5:Yeah, perfect is the enemy of good, kevin. Mr Headmaster Love, over here he introduced the phrase shoot what was?
Speaker 1:the list.
Speaker 5:The okay plan, the okay plan. That's it, the okay plan, yeah. And so often he's like I don't know what to do in this situation. But here's the okay plan, yeah. And it's like, yeah, that that looks okay. Let's roll from it with this and we'll just tweak as we go. And it ends up working, that's the thing the okay plan is.
Speaker 1:In a democracy, it's really hard to come up with a plan because everyone wants to go different ways. So somebody says, hey, this is the okay plan, this is what we're doing until we actually have a better idea that we all agree on. This is the direction that we're going, and it's amazing how much progress you can make that way.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's really helpful. Well, gentlemen, it's been a great conversation. Of course, we do want to let people know. You can sign up on Patreon, support this show, but also get exclusive content. You'll get early access to episodes. And then, Kevin, I believe we're also going to have the Old Captain's Log podcast posted as well.
Speaker 1:Yep, we're going to start putting that out there. So I and Pastor Sauvé really, I think during the ramp up to our school launching in fall of 2021, did some sit down conversations recorded. You know what does our model look like? How many grades in a class? You know where did some of these influences come from? You know, are we trying to shoot for Ambleside? Are we trying to do Logos? Are we trying to do the Dorothy Sayers method? Are we trying to do more of like a Charlotte Mason thing? We explain all of that at a fairly high level. So I'll be posting those, we'll be putting those on Patreon and I'll also give some kind of updates, maybe if there's anything that has changed. What's changed since?
Speaker 3:you originally recorded.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what's changed? Have we tweaked anything? Have we refined it? So I'll put that out there as well, but that will be available on Patreon.
Speaker 3:Awesome. Well, thank you to all of our listeners. We appreciate you, guys, and we will catch you in the next episode of the St Brennan's podcast.
Speaker 2:We all belong to Jerusalem above, and we sail for Eden's shores and we sail for Eden's shores and we sail for Eden's shores.