Why Modern Education Feels Empty And How We Fix It | Dr. Margarita Mooney Clayton

What is education actually for?

In this episode of The Liberty Show, we sit down with sociologist and author Dr. Margarita Mooney Clayton to explore the deeper purpose of education and why modern systems may be missing something essential.
Much of education today is focused on credentials, outcomes, and career preparation. But historically, education aimed at something much greater: the formation of the whole person. The cultivation of wisdom. A love for truth, beauty, and goodness.

Dr. Mooney Clayton helps us rediscover why these ideas still matter and why recovering them could transform the way we educate the next generation.
In this conversation, we explore:

• Why modern education has drifted away from its deeper purpose
• The role of beauty in shaping the human soul
• How the liberal arts form wisdom, not just job skills
• Why great teachers must love the subjects they teach
• The importance of moral formation alongside intellectual development
• How parents and educators can restore meaning to education

Dr. Mooney Clayton shares insights from her work as a sociologist and educator, offering a vision of education that develops both the mind and the character of students.

About Dr. Margarita Mooney Clayton

Dr. Margarita Mooney Clayton is a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and the founder of the Scala Foundation, an organization dedicated to restoring meaning and purpose in American culture through the integration of education, art, and religion.

Learn more about her work:
https://margaritamooneyclayton.com
https://thescalafoundation.org

About The Liberty Show

The Liberty Show features conversations with educators, scholars, and leaders exploring the ideas shaping the future of education and culture.
Produced by Liberty Classical Schools, where students are formed through an education rooted in truth, beauty, and goodness.

Learn more about Liberty Classical Schools:
https://libertyclassicalschools.org

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Liberty Show, where we talk about American classical education and invite you to participate in our work of improving the moral and intellectual character of the next generation. I'm Matthew Kirby. I'm the CEO of Liberty Classical Schools, and our mission is to launch and support K-12 American classical charter schools that emphasize virtuous living, traditional learning, and civic responsibility. We operate a growing network of schools in Georgia, and you can read more about us at Liberty Classical Schools.org. Today, my guest is Dr. Margarita Mooney Clayton. She is an associate professor in the Department of Practical Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. She founded the Scala Foundation in 2016, and she continues to serve as its executive director. Their vision is to restore meaning and purpose to American culture by focusing on the intersection of arts, liberal education, and religion. She aims to renew culture by restoring beauty to liberal arts education. She received her BA in psychology from Yale University and her master's and PhD in sociology from Princeton University. She's also been on the faculty at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and Yale University and Princeton University and Pepperdine University. She's written a series of books, one of which we will discuss in our interview here in just a few minutes. And you can read more about her at margarita mooneyclayton.com. At the end of our conversation, Dr. Mooney Clayton has some very practical advice for students, for parents, and for prospective academic leaders and teachers. And I'm excited for you to hear my conversation with Margarita Mooney Clayton. Dr. Margarita Mooney Clayton, thank you so much for joining me in this conversation. I apologize profusely for the rough start here. And uh, but I'm so delighted for our audience to get to hear from you. I think that our students, our teachers, our parents are gonna really enjoy the things that you have to say. So I thought we'd just get started. I'd love to hear what you're up to this semester. I think you're teaching, I'd love to hear what this semester looks like for you.

SPEAKER_01 2:06

Well, as we speak, I'm teaching a class at the Princeton Theological Seminary that I call Christianity and the Liberal Arts. And in that class, we pose the fundamental question of what is the end of education? And one of the things that we discuss is that it's so much easier in education to talk about how we educate or what the metrics of a test are than it is to ask, what does it mean to educate? What does it mean to be an educated person? And what I hope to help students see is that all of the wonderful methods and even the content of a liberal arts curriculum are in the service of developing young minds and hearts to know how to exercise prudential judgment, to grow in wisdom for the rest of their life, and to firmly adhere to the values and the virtues that bind us together as a people, in family, in nation, and in church. Because I don't actually think most educational institutions have kept sight of that grander mission.

SPEAKER_00 3:20

Yeah. That sounds like an excellent course. I would love to take at some point. What are some of the major texts that you read in the in that course?

SPEAKER_01 3:30

We read a combination of educational philosophy focusing on thinkers such as Jacques Maritan, who was a French philosopher and a convert to Catholicism, who visited the United States in 1942 as we were getting involved in World War II and commended Americans for loving freedom enough to go fight to save his country, but worried that educational institutions weren't teaching people why it's important to love liberty so much that you would die for it. We also read a Catholic priest and theologian, Luigi Gisani, who started an educational and youth movement in Italy to counter the radical Marxist student movements that were taking over in the 1960s. And he really emphasizes that all education, whether it be science, like physics or math or the humanities or theology or philosophy, is always getting down to the fundamental questions. Because without an educational system that upholds the traditional liberal arts, not just as content, but as revealing the fundamental structure of all reality, then knowledge just becomes another tool to dominate people rather than a path towards wisdom and true freedom. We contrast those two with what can be taken from the two most popular texts in schools of education, where educational administrators are trained, are probably John Dewey and Paolo Freire. So we read those as well. And both of those texts extol community and friendship and progress. But they use those words in a fundamentally different way than Maritan and Gisani, because for them, there is a transcendent and there is something sacred, and there is something beyond this world, but it's so remote that it's not really present in the forms of education. And so perhaps inadvertently, what becomes sacred is the community itself. But the problem with that is that when the community is sacred, without a transcendent personal God, that leads to forms of collectivism that squash the individual and take away the love and the joy of learning. And so, you know, you said you hope your listeners have fun. I would say one thing I'm doing now only for the second time in this class is teaching about literature, in particular children's literature, because I deeply care about the fine arts, creative writing, art, music, as helping young people to not just get in touch with their imaginative faculties, but develop the imagination and open themselves up to God's grace to bring that imagination in line with reason so that the exercise of reason isn't merely a technical thing, but truly human, truly intuitive and creative. And so one of my concerns with students is that we're not educating them to be creative or to have a strong sense of personal calling. And we certainly don't want any form of education to turn people into what Dietrich von Hildebrand called metaphysical bureaucrats, role players. Teachers aren't playing a role. They're human beings, they're people. Students aren't a collection of different identities from this race or that ethnicity. All of those things are a part of who we are. But we are a whole. We have a being that is in communication with God. And all of those other particular identities are held together by that essential identity. And that is the most liberating thing for anybody to find out, I believe.

SPEAKER_00 7:45

That's really beautiful. You've touched on so many things we could we could dive deep into. Um, I'm really interested to know what part of that course, and perhaps you're right at the beginning of it, and perhaps it is self-selecting in some regard, but I'm curious what elements of the course do your students find surprising and new? And have they, as college students, and I don't know if it's a graduate course or undergraduate, but are these people that are coming into the course having given a great deal of thought of the importance or the aims of education, or are a lot of these things new and surprising to them?

SPEAKER_01 8:24

Well, I have taught this subject matter both to undergraduates when I was at Yale, also to masters of public policy students at Pepperdine University in a summer program, and to graduate students at the Princeton Theological Seminary preparing for educational ministry, whether that be in a Christian school or in a church or in a public school setting, but as a Christian educator. And I would say that most students, like most parents and most people listening to this podcast, don't sit around reading educational philosophy. I was educating and teaching for probably 15 years before I read any of this. But like my students, I came to this class when I first taught it with questions because I suddenly found myself teaching at Yale surrounded by students who didn't believe in truth. And I just thought, but if you don't believe in truth, what's what are you learning? Um, and what's gonna happen in the classroom? Does that mean anybody can say anything? Like what makes anything true? And how does that lead to a meaningful personal life? And so what I saw was that there was this kind of combination of a denial that there is truth alongside really deeply personal unhappiness. And oftentimes, um, although there's no truth, incredible forms of censorship of other students and self-censorship. The journalists for the Yale Daily News told me they self-censored because of fear of retribution. And so, as you know, probably, right, there's been all these surveys and qualitative studies talking about self-censorship on college campuses. And I just thought to myself, how is it that supposedly by denying the reality of truth and everybody gets to express themselves, nobody's expressing themselves. Everybody's channeling language that other people are giving them. And when I began to read some of these works on educational philosophy, I thought, oh, this is kind of exactly what somebody like Neil Postman was worried about in amusing ourselves to death. That if we replace truth with something, which is difficult, granted, these conversations are difficult, but if we replace that with something easy to sort of smooth things over, all we're doing is kind of entertaining ourselves and then really kind of lowering ourselves to more base desires. And this leads to unhappiness. And I just thought this just can't be. So that said, um, having done this now, fast forward, you know, 10 years, I've been talking about this. What most people find strange and surprising and exciting uh and want to delve more into is that the understanding of the liberal arts that I've grown to appreciate upholds the power of story to shape reason. And by story, I don't just mean reading literature in a humanities or an English literature class. I mean story in a sense of kind of the Socratic questioning of the fundamental basis, right? And the conversation that can happen and must happen around natural science, math, right? How exciting is it that we can discern natural order? And how exciting is it that we can observe gravity? All of us live in a world with gravity. That's actually pretty cool, you know? And what does that tell us about the order of the world? And so science education shouldn't be simply like repeating a process in a laboratory. There's a questioning and there's a story to be told. And so, in some ways, I do believe that the humanities, right, literature, great texts, poetry, um form that imagination. But that imagination comes into play in the sciences, which is why in the traditional liberal arts, in the quadruvium, there's mathematics and there's astronomy, by which it means kind of the movement of celestial bodies. What do we know about the order of nature? Um, and so students are intrigued by this idea that story forms our reason. What? What does that mean?

SPEAKER_00 12:54

Yeah. That's great. Uh let's talk about teaching at maybe a little bit of a more fundamental level. And part of our audience is going to be teachers or perhaps even aspiring teachers, and they're contemplating their path into either modern progressive schools or potentially into one of our schools, which are American classical schools. Um how would you describe excellence in teaching? What what what are the elements of a great teacher in a classical or liberal arts setting? And um, you know, what what are you trying to achieve in your classroom? What's going on in there?

SPEAKER_01 13:32

I had this discussion this week with my students. Um and I think the most important quality of a good teacher, and this certainly applies to me, is somebody who has what one author reread named Chris Higgins calls ripeness of self, who himself or herself has gone on this journey of self-cultivation and of always being in touch with the desire to communicate knowledge and to connect to other human beings. Because what we don't want teachers to become, and this is why I think the teachers I know who have been burned out in schools, feel that they're bureaucrats, that they go into a classroom, they're given a very strict curriculum, they know they're going to be tested in a certain way by the end of the year or the end of the semester, and judged on some metric of how they got the students to acquire a certain amount of knowledge. Now, nothing's wrong with that in and of itself. But the reality is a lot of those teachers are dealing with children, especially in public schools, um, where the children are coming in with a lot of deficits because it might be that they have a learning disability. It's not their fault. It might be that they're coming to school sometimes hungry, or they're coming from a home environment where the parents aren't able to support their education. Maybe the parents aren't present, or one of the parents isn't present. And the teachers who go into school, they care about those children as people, as people with a disability, with a deficit. And so, how do they balance the kind of care for the person in front of them with the need to pass on a certain amount of content? And I think most teachers really want to do both because most teachers know intuitively, without reading any of the philosophy books that I've just said, most teachers know that you can't pass on content if the student isn't motivated and if the student isn't receptive. And most teachers know that young children or you know, middle-aged children or high school children who are going through something really difficult at home need to have their hearts opened in order to be able to take in what's happening. And so I think for teachers in those schools, in the kinds of schools where there's not a fellowship among the teachers, where there's not a shared mission, where there's not a big vision of why they're doing what they're doing. And I think a lot of teachers feel that they're kind of just can't possibly give the attention to the students that the students need and that they want to give. And they begin to ask themselves, why am I here? Why am I doing this? This is draining me. And to be honest, you know, one of the books that we read talks not just about teacher burnout, but he uses a term, this is Chris Higgins uses a term burn in, that there are teachers who burn out but don't leave. And they become disillusioned, they become angry. And sometimes, I this is what teachers have told me, they resent the more enthusiastic teachers who are striving for excellence anyway. They've given up on standards of excellence, and they don't want the hardworking, idealistic, self-giving teachers because somehow it's a threat to them because they've given up. Um and they're just holding a place. And those schools tend to have high turnover rates of the teachers, uh, because the better teachers are honestly aren't rewarded for what they're doing, and they will leave. Now, um, so that said, what I said to my students, I have always taught in high-resourced schools, you know, University of North Carolina and Chapel Hill, Yale University, Princeton University, Princeton Theological Seminary. But for me, the issues I deal with are um more along the lines of student mental health concerns that I see, they're high-achieving, high capacity students. But I've learned that if I'm not praying every day, and if I'm not pursuing the beautiful life that includes co-creating with God, I sing in a choir, I take music lessons. If I'm not enriching my soul through prayer and beauty, then I do tend to just kind of barrel into the classroom and go through my lesson plans and grade the papers. And I'm not, my soul isn't ripened to perceive and be in relation with the students who may be really struggling and who need to be inspired again and need to be uh led to believe that whatever they may be struggling with, God has given them a special calling, and they're in my classroom for some reason. Um, so the most important quality of a teacher is somebody who knows how to care for their own soul.

SPEAKER_00 18:44

Yeah. That's beautiful. You know, in preparation for our conversation, I was looking through your website and imagery and videos and so forth, and I see uh that you invest in your students relationally, that you know, friendship seems to be an element of things, that you are seemingly bringing people together to break bread and just enjoy time together. And I just am curious, and maybe you've already touched on this a little bit, is that an expression of your own personality, or is that um an element that uh distinctly important for a teacher?

SPEAKER_01 19:26

I was taught not to be friends with students because it would diminish my authority in the classroom or my authority intellectually. Now, I've just read a book on friendship, and it makes the difference, it makes a distinction between friendship and mentorship. There's friendship that's between peers. There's some kind of a friendship, let's say, between a parent and child, but we have crossed a boundary if a parent is a friend to a child as if a peer. And I would say similarly, a professor or a teacher is more akin to a mentor friend. Um, and what I mean by mentor friend is that you want to pass on wisdom and the student understands that you have something uh excellent to share with them that they're seeking. But the manner in which you do it is personal. And what that means is that you get to know a little bit about them as a person and about their strivings, their desires, their personalities. Um, and I cultivate that kind of you know, mentorship friendship, yes, through meals at my house, through even just a field trip, you know, 20 minutes away, where I'm riding in the car with the students, they begin to reveal um the deep questions of their life. Like, how am I going to deal with the fact that, you know, my brother is now fallen away from this faith that we both used to share and I want to bring this to him? Or I come from a community in the rural south where, you know, the levels of heroin addiction are so high, and my cousin, my cousin just overdosed. Um, and how am I to be a student and a pastor and a teacher when my family is dealing with this, with this tragedy? And then I begin to see what journey they're on. And a mentor also lets the student know that they're on a journey too, that the questions that I'm posing in class are still meaningful to me. Yes, I've tried to answer them as best I can, but I'm still on that journey. And so cultivating meals together, kind of embodied experiences. Sometimes I just take them into the Princeton University chapel for half an hour. And Look at the stained glass. And what struck me, speaking of the mission of education, what struck me is the Princeton University Chapel built in the 19 late 1920s, so after World War I, but before World War II. And then, you know, more things have been added, but there's a big um engraving on one side of the transept, and it's carved into the stone, and it says, You shall love the truth, and the truth shall set you free. And it had the banners of the universities from which the first presidents of Princeton University came. And then you know what it had on the other side, Matt? It had an engraving that said, Um, and he who loves the truth will persevere to the end. And above that engraving were stained glass windows of martyrs, people who died for the love of the truth, like St. Thomas Becket. And then below that engraving, they added on later, but they added on the names of Princeton University graduates who gave their life in World War I, in World War II. So the fact that the University Chapel is a memorial of Christ's suffering and death, but also human suffering and death for ideals of justice and liberty, was sending a message that human knowledge is important, and it's important because it leads us to love the truth so much that we're willing to die for it. And those engravings are right next to the spot where I was going as a graduate student to pray, and where I still go to sing in the choir, in the student, in the undergraduate student choir. And I just thought my heart was being shaped in prayer to love the truth so much that I will persevere and seek it, even if it costs me. Now, most of us are not going to be physical martyrs. We're not going to go die in the military. Most of us, some of us listening, maybe, or maybe we have children. My father fought in Vietnam. My mother fled Cuba, and family members of hers were killed there. Now, but most of us are called to the everyday martyrdom and dying to self, which is dying to pride and dying to the need for education to be a form of affirming every identity and emotion that I have, so that we can actually form those intuitions and those instincts into something grander and learning to live and follow our calling, even when it costs us in terms of reputation or money or prestige, you know, um, other than physical survival, most people care about their pride and their reputation.

SPEAKER_00 24:55

Yeah. You've touched on something a couple of times, uh, and I know it's a big um part of your of your thinking, and that is um in the area of beauty and and the arts. Um one of the things I observe a lot in my own life and in my friends and in the students and employees and everybody in our in our circles is we're all pretty enamored with the entertainment options around us these days, including the medium like the one we're producing right now. It's pretty easy uh to be a consumer of things that are artistic and um to be drawn in and to sort of conflate that consumption with um with happiness when when it's actually probably the participation and the production and the creative work itself that is probably more likely to lead us in the direction of happiness. I love how what you just said a few minutes ago about your own teaching sort of comes out of a you know, when when you're the in the best place, in the best place um personally and in your own soul, in part in your case, perhaps by by teaching, but also through singing and acquire and participating in all that. Um I guess I just wanted to get you to talk a little bit about that balance and you know, how do you think about that? And do you observe that challenge in students that you're teaching as well?

SPEAKER_01 26:17

Oh, absolutely. Um, so when I first began teaching on the liberal arts, I had a guest speaker, George Harne, who's a musicologist. He's now president of Christenden College, but he talked about how, as a public school student in rural Florida, um, in the Panhandle, he was taken to a classical music concert when he was eight years old and how it transformed him, and how his love for music was what drove him to want to be the first college student in his family, and how nobody understood why he would be the first college student and go on and study music with no utility and no money earning capacity. So he's dedicated his life to education, to music education, and to higher education and the liberal arts in general. But when I taught that, what I was surprised to hear was how many students were so excited to learn that the hobbies or the passions that they had as a kid, playing piano, playing an instrument, being in a choir, that that practice, that artistic practice, which they just loved, could actually help form their reason. They had never heard this before. And when I began to ask students, how many of you have a creative hobby that you did as a kid? They all can name something, right? Oh, I like to write poetry or I like to compose music, one student told me. Um, and others love to draw. You know, I'm not talented at drawing, and I'm I'm married to an artist now. So that's in my face all the time. But I meet people who are so talented at drawing, like my husband. And I began to think, wait, you know, why? Like, wait, when did I give up all this? And why don't I find time for it? So I tried to kind of find the creative artists in Princeton University and couldn't really find many. I'm I'm being serious here. Now, I said I sing in the student choir. I sing in the student choir with community members who sing for the students, and a couple students come and they're mostly grad students. To this day, the number of undergraduates singing in the choir is kind of, I can count them on one hand. In a school with, you know, hundreds of Catholic students. So, and then I started to realize, Matt, that some of them hadn't had music in the home the way that I did. My dad loved classical music, that's all he listened to. My mom played the guitar and sang to me in Spanish mostly. But we were singing in the home in all my family gatherings, it was music. And so I began to ask myself, as you, you know, you pose the question, music isn't only something, music in the arts are not only something that we consume, we are meant to co-create with God. So part of what I've been developing with my husband, who's an artist, a painter, is a Way of Beauty program where we ask people to commit one hour a week to some creative activity. It can be gardening, it can be drawing, it can be poetry, and then reflect on how that practice opens them up to God's inspiration. Now, a lot of people don't make it a whole hour, but okay, maybe it's 15 minutes. But once they've done it, that that desire is there, and there's ways that that desire can grow into something that can be an habitual practice of some kind. And so the reason we're doing this is not because everybody's called to be a maestro in music or art, although some will discover that is their true calling, like George Harne, you know, or like my husband, who studied physics at Oxford, but really felt his true calling was to be an artist, but thought it was going to be impossible to make a career in it. Uh, he eventually did. And what I've noticed is how the students who do practice something creative have a source of joy in their life. Um, and it's not that the creative practice is now let me shut off my analytical brain and I can just have a free expression. We want people to actually try to master that art form. So learn from a master. Um, I have a master teacher in music, meaning he has degrees in music and music education. I'm learning from a true professional. Uh, and then when he came to our house, when my husband's brother was here playing music, and my niece was here, who was only 11, we joined in with the professional musicians and had a jam session at the home. So there's a place for learning from the professional and elevating your game, and there's a place for kind of community participation and expression. It's not either a word, but let's not forget the professional formation. And I've seen that most people, if you encourage them, would love to be doing something like this, would love to have the time, but they don't value it. And I think they don't value it because our educational system doesn't value it, and because our culture doesn't value it. We value technological skills. Um and but if you talk to the greatest inventors of technology and science, they've been profoundly shaped by beauty, by observing the natural world, by listening to patterns and music, and then they transpose what they've observed and heard in nature and felt. They transpose that into a material object like a computer, like an iPhone, like all these devices that we like using because they're convenient and look nice and draw us in. But let's not confuse the like plastic and computer for the thing that it's modeled after, which is God's creation.

SPEAKER_00 32:14

Yeah, yeah, that's right. On this topic of beauty, um, you've written many books. One of your books, more recently, The Wounds of Beauty, has to me a very provocative title there. We typically think of beauty as being something that brings us comfort and joy. Um, but you describe it as being a wound. How does true beauty wound us? And um, why is that wound ultimately good for individuals and even for society at large?

SPEAKER_01 32:45

Well, I was I picked that title as you picked up on uh to be provocative, because too often beauty, understood in the classical or Christian sense, has been transformed for most people into something that's mere attractiveness. But true beauty is something, yes, that that captivates us, but also that draws us towards something. And it's that paradox of the simultaneous attraction. So we see something good in what we're observing, but also perceive that there's a greater good that we're not able to obtain. So it's kind of like that feeling of being simultaneously in awe and overwhelmed, let's say, at the beauty of a sunset or the beauty of a concert, or an amazing masterpiece of art, like the first time I went to Florence, Italy, or something. And you know what you're sensing with your eyes andor hearing isn't gonna last. Um, and that there's something even greater. There's a sign, it's pointing to something greater. And so beauty is the attractive, the good that wounds us in a sense that it just augments that fire in us for more of what is true. Beauty is the radiance of God's truth into the world. But we don't have the fullness, we don't live in that fullness because that fullness is going to be when when when God brings everything all in all and brings it all together. We are living in a world that is marked by sin and darkness and brokenness. And beauty helps us to perceive that in spite of our fall, there is a unity and a goodness to creation, but it's not all together. We're not in the Perugia, we're not in the second time, the the end times, the fullness of time. We're moving towards there. And it's like moving towards there is both exhilarating, but also difficult. And so beauty is meant to, like Augustine talks about, right? Like the beauty of God's creation and the beauty of human love, all of that is meant to lift up our desires and our desire ultimately for God, which is something that is so grand that it can never be filled. And we are painfully aware of that gap between ourselves and our transcendent vision and the limitations and the possibility and the limitation on what we can be and do. But yet accepting those limitations and learning to live within those limitations because we're not God. We are creatures. We're creatures destined for a spiritual existence, um, but not something that we can give ourselves. And so we have to be patient. Beauty teaches us attentiveness and it teaches us patience. And the more attentive we are and the more patient we are, the more we are filled. And the more we're filled, the more that we can give.

SPEAKER_00 36:05

Yeah. To me, it's pretty straightforward to connect that back to the essential activity that occurs within a classroom. That, you know, to me, some of the greatest teachers have inspired me with beautiful things, you know, across a whole host of domains, whether that's in the humanities or or in the natural world. Um, but these things call us, you know, and call us to step forward and you know, be more than we are. And I I've often thought, you know, maybe gosh, I hope this isn't just some sort of prideful response. But you know, when I listen to a great speaker or watch an incredible musician um or or observe an incredible athlete do something amazing, you know, it I I want to do what they're doing. I want to pick up the paintbrush and try myself and kind of step into that. Um so anyway, your your work on beauty resonates a lot with me. And you know, one of the core pillars on which uh our schools are built is this notion of training the affections of our students towards goodness and truth and beauty. And of course we do that in ways that maybe are traditional at this point, but it has a lot to do with making sure that students do have access to um to to the fine arts, and it's it is uh to expose them early on to things that are really beautiful and worthy of their affection and attention. And then it's imitative, as you were saying earlier. You know, there's there's certainly a time for sort of free expression and raw creativity, but oftentimes it's it's often let's look at a great artist or a great musician and let's try to do what they're doing, um, and and then from there sort of develop our own skills and capacity for more. Um I guess there's not really a question in that. I'm just responding to your to your conversation there. Um okay, part of that book, I I I really enjoyed the the the chapter where you were with Francis Meyer. I wasn't sure if that was a dialogue or or kind of a written exchange, but you were talking a lot about Roger Struton, and um I really enjoyed that section. You know, he he you all were speaking a lot about this. It's kind of a weighty topic here, but this idea of deconstruction, and I think what Struton calls deconstructivist theology. And I I as a as a parent of some kids who are in college or headed to college and thinking about our own parents, I I don't know the degree to which many parents are concerned about the kind of ideologies their children are going to face when they get to school. And so I was hoping you could kind of equip our parents and and perhaps some of our students with kind of a working definition on this topic of deconstructionist or deconstructivism. Um it seems to me to be a really pernicious way of approaching a person's education. And I was hoping you could just kind of talk to us about what that is, how to spot it, and perhaps how to equip a high school graduate who's entering a world in which they may be taught um not to value the things that have happened before, but just to tear them down with really no reliable replacement. I wonder if you could speak to that a little.

SPEAKER_01 39:13

Yeah, so Roger Scruton was a philosopher and he wrote extensively about the crisis in the humanities in in higher education, which spills over into secondary education, and also the crisis, I think, in the social sciences, which is where I was trained in psychology and sociology. I only moved into theological school 10 years ago, so 20 years into my career, because I was asking these fundamental questions about the human good. Um, and apparently I wasn't supposed to do that in the social sciences, which is telling you something. Now there were pockets that do it, but it's not the dominant uh mode of thinking. And so I think what I have learned that what Roger Scruton is talking about, maybe another way to put it is kind of we educate students into skepticism or into cynicism. Um, and by that I mean we educate students sometimes to think that to be smart is to always find a hidden sinister motivation behind other people's behaviors, or to find one or another ism uh intending to oppress people, like any utterance of speech is ultimately uh coded full of isms to hold certain people back based on race or gender or class or something. And when we educate students to always um find something sinister, it does produce this kind of cynicism that we're locked in a world where all we're doing is going in circles and repeating platitudes or harming people. This leads to this kind of self-censorship I was talking about. And it also leads to the opposite, which is kind of this virtue signaling that, you know, I'm gonna have a sign in my yard and I'm gonna have a pin and I'm gonna have a button on my computer where I'm gonna show people that I believe in, you know, X, Y, Z cause of the day, you know. Um, and look, those causes may be worthwhile, depends on what it is. But has the student actually formed their conscience to understand what that issue is? Whether it's an economic issue or an environmental issue or a social issue, is the student actually armed with the knowledge that would help them go be a productive member of civil society to do something about our housing crisis or economic impoverishment? Or are they just really good at, you know, putting out a 150-character statement of conviction? And I think it's too oftentimes it's it's the latter. And so what I want to help students understand is that it's great to talk about the problems that we face and the darkness that we face, but we have to know what it is we're proposing. And as I mentioned earlier, for most of us, we're not going to die as martyrs in a war. But it is a kind of death to self to step out there and take a risk and try something. You're an entrepreneur, Matt. You know, you've you've run businesses, you're you're starting a collection of schools, and not everything any entrepreneur has tried has worked. We only see the successes, but any entrepreneur is going to tell you that they learn through failures. But what entrepreneurs are telling me today is that we're not generating a generation of students willing to take risks. Um and it doesn't mean you take blind risks, it doesn't mean you take uncalculated risks, it doesn't mean entrepreneurs are unbridled and you know risk all of their capital on a venture they haven't thought through. You know, that's not an entrepreneur. But the point is that we need to sure look at our problems serenely, but propose something. And so what I teach students to think through, um, again, get to the fundamental question about what is the human good that you're proposing? What is the skill? And also how would you apply this knowledge to some sort of a case study? So I think you can do this in high schools, you certainly can do it in colleges and graduate schools. But what I did learn in sociology was a lot about observing how organizations and social groups work and talking to people. So if you want to go learn, I honestly I think even whether it's mathematics or science or technology, how did that technology firm that you like so much, how did they get started? How did they grow? What were the principles that led to their, to the vision behind that product? And so I think with students proposing moral Exemplars is incredibly important. And that, again, there are moral exemplars in technology too, because we need to know which technology is being used to further the human good, not destroy us, right? So educating students rather than being cynical, Bill Damon, an educational psychologist at Stanford, talks about the importance of moral exemplars. And this is just a fundamental part of who we are as human beings. We can't help but create moral exemplars. Now, we don't want to idolize the wrong people or idolize a superstar. But frankly, if you ask students today who their idols are, they're mostly going to be athletes or entertainers. But how many people really understand the struggles and the vision of the great entrepreneurs or the great founders of this country or the great heroes who started, you know, the nursing system in the Civil War, right? The great women who founded schools, who developed methods of education. We need our students to encounter a living embodiment of the tradition and the values that we that built this country, of the men and women who sacrificed time and blood and effort to give us this beautiful country. So I often teach about the people who wrote the books. And I think biography, again, story, you know, having students interview their grandparents, maybe, who come from a different country or grew up in a different time. But having students through story, through biography, encounter a living embodiment of the virtues and the traditions that we believe in. And they will see that cynicism and skepticism are not there. Struggle, for sure. Challenges, absolutely. And so for parents who are worried, I would say keep your kids connected to reality and to people. We are really living inside of our heads. And students who are always on their devices, alone in their rooms, and aren't out with people, are not learning the fundamental human skill of relating to people and learning from people. Again, I'm not anti-technology, but to encounter me on a video with you is not to encounter me in the flesh. So I love that ideas can spread like this. I'm delighted to do this, but this doesn't replace the personal witness that people are so hungry for. And there are lots of ways to do this through connecting students. I would say the other thing we want to encourage everyone to do through our Way of Beauty Fellowship is also to do one hour of service a week. I know schools talk a lot about service, and service doesn't have to be going far away or doing something big. But what if every high school student committed to one hour of service? That could be visiting a sick neighbor. That could be walking somebody's dog. I mean, that's actually kind of fun. But um that walking somebody's dog who needs it, right? Who needs help. Who do you know who needs one hour of your personal presence this week? And what can you do for that person? And look, I talked to a friend whose daughter did get into a good college, but she gave up all of her volunteer work and all of her reading to just do test prep. And her husband said to her, it feels like we're just waiting to live. Now, her daughter got into a great school, she's happy, but she's got to learn to live now. And I said, please don't let your daughter just get caught up on the next test and the next metric and the next thing. She does need to live. She needs to write her poetry, to do her volunteer work with little kids, and to have some time where she's not preparing for a test.

SPEAKER_00 48:18

Yeah. Well, that's great. I think you've outlined how sort of the um anecdote to the cynicism that flows out of this deconstructionist way of thinking is is really to elevate goodness and truth and beauty in all of its manifestations. That's a great way to get our minds and hearts focused in the right direction. And um kind of on that point a little bit, I I wanted to give you a chance to talk about your exploration of the Haitian immigrants and and their challenges. And um you know, I just wonder if they well, maybe I'll just let you like w what were the primary learnings? You wrote a book about this. Seems to me that their struggles have led to some sense of meaning and purpose, which is a topic I'm really interested in because it seems so essential for us to educate young men and women who have a sense of how to pursue meaning and purpose in their lives. And I just wonder what do we learn from the Haitians? What did you learn from them in the research and writing of that book?

SPEAKER_01 49:22

Yeah, so I spent a good part of my career writing about adversity and resilience. And I became interested in this topic because as a child growing up in a family of Cuban refugees, I saw people who had suffered enormously but had been able to recover and to pass on great traditions and start over. But it didn't mean that there wasn't deep suffering, but yet there was a sense that we can come together and try to rebuild. So when I went to Haiti and wrote my book on Haiti, I was similarly struck by people whose lives had been marked by poverty and hunger, violence. But yet, and of course, not everybody in the society reacts the same way. There are, you know, periodic outbreaks of social violence that are incredibly destructive. But I was interested in the people who laid down uh the violence and took up community life and uh sacrifice for other people, even in an environment that wasn't necessarily changing as they wanted it to. I had seen similar things in my work in post-war reconstruction in Central America, uh, where I did a lot of work in the mid-1990s with combatants on both sides of the civil wars in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua. A lot of people gave up their arms for plowshares and other people didn't. Other people did not. They kept shooting. So I wanted to understand what it was that led people to say no to violence and to say yes to peace and to love. And what they would tell me was that it wasn't them. It was a gift of God's grace. Um, yes, God calls them to, but God acts first. And although I was raised a person of faith, I was raised Catholic, still Catholic, you know, I kind of still had a sort of American, me-centered idea that, you know, God's given me these gifts and now it's mine, you know, I'm using them. I have this sense of autonomy. And the people I met in Haiti or in Central America, they didn't have this sense of autonomy. They had this sense of dependence on God and an incredible gratitude. Now, that doesn't mean they didn't want radical political economic change, but they weren't determined by their environment. That's what I want to say. People are not determined by their environment. Doesn't mean they're not shaped by it. I didn't say that, but they are not determined. And we can't help people to better their environment unless we know that, and unless we believe that fundamentally we have something to share. And so if we want to help people who are in a difficult environment, we have to be able to connect with them personally. And what I learned from impoverished people in Haiti was that they didn't want my help or my skills if I didn't love them. Because then it feels demeaning. And they care more about their sense of purpose and worth than about my money or my skills. Now, can we come together and build something beautiful? Now that's that's a different question. But they have skills and they have resources because they're human beings and they didn't want to be treated as people who just needed to be transferred something. And that was a humbling lesson for me. And I began to realize that there's this kind of dominance of like the culture of the experts, of which I thought I was one without realizing it. And that ultimately what human life is about is about holding on to dignity and meaning and purpose. And people who have that are the best employees, are the best poverty fighters, because they can take and apply and make judgments with the tools and the resources. But people who are cynical, people who are skeptics, people who are angry all the time, they drag people down. They do the opposite. They drag people down. And so in any society, whether it's a family or a school or a civic community or a nation, sadly, because of sin, I believe, you're gonna have people who are mired in negative habits that possibly have been formed on them because of their environment, but they could with help choose to get out of that. And other people who are heroic and live the supernatural virtues of faith, hope, and charity to an excellent level, who have human prudence, who have courage and perseverance. And those people, they don't actually have to be a lot of people to change the environment because love is stronger than hate. You know? And so what I realize is that you don't need to change everybody. You need to change, you need to support the people right around you. You need to support the people who are receptive to what you have to offer, and they're changing you too. And when you enter into those relations of mutual dependence and striving towards a higher purpose, you can bring others along. Um, and that to me was absolutely amazing. That the real engine of change in a society is a human person striving for God who knows how to work with other people. And then wow, things can really change. And so it's not, you know, I know a lot of people listening to this podcast are like, but these classical schools cost a lot of money, or, you know, going to college costs a lot of money. You know, money doesn't solve all these problems. Hey, look, I'm not saying it can't help, but it's actually not the fundamental thing. And I work with groups of classical educators that are bringing classical education into prisons, that are bringing it into after-school programs. I'm going to an after-school program this week called Neonsa. I think their annual budget is less than$1,000 because they're working with volunteers who teach public school kids twice a week how to read, how to read Odysseus, how to read African American classics. And they're not looking for money. They're looking for dedicated teachers, you know, two hours a week, who will pass on these great traditions because they love these kids and because they love the truth. And so, look, in education, the problem never has been, Matt, I don't think, about defining what are the excellent texts and resources and what do we teach. If we sit down, most people know. You know, we can we can broaden the canon, we can bring in more recent writers, but it's not about what we should be teaching. The problem in education is a human problem. It's a problem of lack of, you know, motivated teachers, it's a problem of bored students, it's a problem of people who've lost that fundamental eros, that fundamental drive for greatness. And this country, I think, is great. It's helped my family recover from the evils of communism. My father risked his life in Vietnam to defend this country and came back a wounded warrior, at least wounded morally and psychologically, but he believed in what he was doing. And so I just, I'm so passionate about this because I know what tyranny looks like having been to Cuba, and I know what poverty looks like, having been to Haiti, and I know what war looks like, having been in war zones and having had my life threatened and facing severe fear in those places. And I want other people to understand that we are called to build a civic life and we are called to defend this nation, and we're called to serve other people, and we're called to be joyful. And all those things are possible, Matt. And I want teachers and parents and students to believe once again that a joyful, meaningful life is possible. And if we pursue this way of beauty that my husband and I are promoting for the Scala Foundation, we're working on a curriculum that we've started, which we hope to finish and have some videos for and train teachers or school administrators how to encourage students in daily prayer service and a practice of beauty as an enhancement to their education, not a replacement for the rest of the curriculum, but to enhance this kind of ongoing discernment of personal calling. It's an ongoing thing. It's not just what am I going to major in and what college am I going to go to. We want to teach people an ongoing method of personal discernment of God's calling through praying the Psalms, through beauty, and through service. We're piloting it here in Princeton. We're working on the videos, we're working on the written materials, we'll probably have it to share sometime in 2026. And this to me is the key piece of what the educational reform movement is fundamentally about. It's not about the fight over the canon or the classical texts, it's a fight for the soul of our young people. And the content in the texts are an input into that, an important one, because those are the texts and those are the ideas that have shaped the greatest people that have come before us and have bequeathed to us this tradition that we need to preserve. And this is what I think the educational movement is about. Most people come to classical schools, as I said, because of the problems of anxiety and depression and cynicism, and they're looking for some sort of solution to get out of this cynicism, this negativity. But what the classical movement that you're involved in is bringing back is this incredible rich tradition of joy and beauty and knowledge and love of the truth that's going to do a heck of a lot more than just solve anxiety. It's going to create entrepreneurs, it's going to create scientists, it's going to create the next Michelangelo. And we're only beginning to see this, Matt, because the classical movement is gaining speed. It's been around about a generation. We're now starting to see students who have benefited from this really for their whole life. My nephew's about to graduate from Princeton, was in classical conversations, um, homeschooled most of his life. You know, he's 22 years old. His sister is at Vanderbilt doing music. Um, also, you know, classical conversations they followed and a few other homeschool things. Um, those kids are about to hit the workforce. And they're about to start founding their own companies and their own schools and their own families. And so the thing I'm most enthusiastic about, as you can tell, is the classical school movement, whether it's homeschooling, charter schools, private Christian schools. And I also think the classical model can be in non-chartered public schools. I don't see why not. You know, and I know there are state superintendents out there who also believe this. Um, and I know there's school boards out there. Sorry.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:14

Yeah, they could do it, right? Those superintendents could do it. They don't necessarily have to do it in the charter space. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:20

That's correct. And some of them want to, and I bet you there's going to be some superintendents and some governors who and some state legislatures are going to start thinking um about doing this. So, anyway.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:32

Well, this um this battle for the soul of our children, as you put it, um, is is an idea that we share with you. And one of the reasons we're doing this podcast and and you know, is to make friends with people like you who are doing great work in this space. I'm I'm so excited for you and your work at Princeton and and in the Scala Foundation, and thank you for sharing some of that. I hope our listeners will look you up and see what you're doing and support you in that because it seems like a great initiative, and to the extent we can partner with you on things like that, we would really welcome that opportunity. So if you got just a few more minutes, I I was gonna ask you to work through a little uh short answer round with me. I won't put the um we won't call it a lightning round because that may put more stress on us to say exactly the right thing, but I've got a series of questions I'd love to ask you more quickly. Um Do you have a teacher that has been uniquely influential in your life?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:30

I remember very well my eighth grade uh speech and debate and literature teacher, Mrs. Emerson, and she taught me uh oral communication skills and the love of literature. And I enrolled in a competition, um, and I played Joan of Arc and uh gave her a speech before she got burned at the stake. So I learned the virtue of courage and speaking my speaking my truth.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:00

That's awesome.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:01

Speaking the truth, I should say.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:02

That's awesome. You may have already shared with us this answer, but what is your favorite hobby outside of your intellectual teaching pursuits?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:10

Singing.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:11

Singing, okay. Um, how about a classical or historical figure who has inspired you the most?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:20

I go back most often to Augustine, in part because we know so much about him, and because my neighbor, Peter Brown, who is in the Love of Learning, uh, sorry, the Wounds of Beauty book, um, helped me to understand Augustine.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:35

Okay. Um, how about a specific book that has shaped your point of view the most?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:43

I have to say I really loved um Friedrich Hayek's Road to Serfdom uh because it describes the pitfalls of collectivism, I think, very, very well.

unknown 1:02:56

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:58

In this age of distraction, how are you doing? How have you developed practices to maintain and restore your attention to the right things?

SPEAKER_01 1:03:07

I try to limit technology in not constantly respond to all of the things. I don't have social media on my phone. I don't have email on my phone. So I create some separation, and I've signed up for, you know, voice lessons and choir and spend more time cultivating beauty in my own life.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:34

Okay, excellent. I would ask you to share some advice with parents. What is your best advice for raising strong, resilient high school graduates?

SPEAKER_01 1:03:47

God has given us children for a limited amount of time, and our ultimate goal as parents is to teach our children to know that God is their ultimate authority. So be a witness. Discipline if you need to, but lead with love and with beauty, and pray for God to reach the conscience of your kids so that they learn to love the truth and do what is right.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:13

That's beautiful. How about sharing some advice to prospective teachers? What should they study in college or graduate school to prepare for a career in teaching?

SPEAKER_01 1:04:26

Well, the best teachers are going to teach a subject they're passionate about, whether that's geography or art or music. But I would say you could teach something as well that might be slightly off from what you're uh used to doing. And I would say the best teachers that I know learn from other teachers. I'm a big believer in kind of peer learning and having a fellowship of other teachers who share your passion and share your mission. Um and then otherwise, as I said, self-cultivation and a deep prayer life.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:00

Great. Margarita, what is on the horizon for you and how can people learn more about you?

SPEAKER_01 1:05:08

Well, I invite people to visit the website of the Scala Foundation, which is being redone to feature some of these Way of Beauty resources. I write on Substack a blog, a Substack, you know, post called The Graced Imagination. You can find a lot of my writings there. My husband writes another Substack called The Way of Beauty. And those are the two best ways to see what I'm up to, what events we're doing, what books are coming out. I have a book on um devotion to the Mother of God, to Mary, uh amongst Protestants and Catholics and Orthodox that's coming out in May. So you'll see more about that as well on my websites. But that's a totally different topic.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:53

That's great. Well, thank you for doing this with us. Uh, know that our folks are going to enjoy hearing from you and uh delight. Delighted to have spent this time with you today. Thank you. Well, friends, I'm Matthew Kirby, CEO of Liberty Classical Schools. I hope you'll consider this podcast to be an invitation to learn more about our work. And you can do that at Liberty Classical Schools.org. And we'll see you next time. Take care.