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Sign up for your $1 per month trial at shopify.com slash special offer. David Goodwin joins us now, something totally different. Let's talk education. He's got a brand new book out, Forging the American Mind, a Year-by-Year Guide for Classical Christian Education. His last book he wrote with Pete Hagseth, who went on to become Secretary of War.
David, congratulations on the book.
Well, thanks a lot, Brian. I appreciate it. It was a few years since we wrote the original, so it's good to get out again. Transforming K-12 learning, practices for teaching, virtue, and wisdom. I don't know if I hotted topic consistently in any barbecue, tailgate, small family gathering, then education.
I really don't, even if your kids aren't in school. It's the talk of how are we raising a bunch of kids that don't love the country? How are we raising a bunch of kids that don't embrace free enterprise? And that's what we're seeing. And you go back to education, fundamental education, can't you?
Well, right. I think we've seen, you know, we've had a respite here of a few good years. We, you know, certainly after that show that was in Washington Sunday night. We look and we real we may not realize that education is what feeds from You know, the very roots of our civilization, it feeds the West and America with our values. And so if we don't Invest in a very different form of education now, it'll be hard to keep the republic.
So, give me an idea of what a Christian education would look like.
Well, classical Christian education is the form of education that the founding fathers had.
So we call it classical Christian because when it was restarted, it had to have a name. Back then, they just called it education. Really, what it is, is an education that teaches you how to think well, which seems like that's what most education should do. But when you think about it, most education tries to teach you a lot of facts. This is more of a formative uh type of education that brings students to uh be able to reason through things.
form was reestablished. following an essay by uh early 20th century author named Dorothy Sayers who said that children in the media age are given lots of words, but they they just really don't know how to assess what the truth is. And so that's what our task is in our form of education, classical Christian education, is to train students in truth. And how many schools are there like this? And was it would would you say separate this from, let's say, a charter school?
Well Um our schools, there's about um 1,200 in the country, but we have about 500 in the membership of the association that I run. We do accreditation for these types of schools.
So there's a variety of different forms. There are some charter schools that do classical education as well. Obviously, it's not classical Christian education.
So it's a growing form. It's been very popular. And we're actually struggling to keep up with the growth and train enough teachers.
So so in other words, you have trouble getting teachers?
Well, teachers who are trained in the progressive method, if you remember the book that Pete and I wrote together, we talked about the progressive takeover of education through the institutions like the teachers' colleges.
So our schools don't do very well kind of retreading teachers from a progressive background.
So we end up training a lot of teachers from the ground up. They're often people who went through college maybe in literature, history, maybe in science.
So they're people who are actually doers that then want to get in the classroom and we train them how to do it classically. All right. And what do you what do you worry most about our current school system? Especially I watch New York City. We pay more for our school system in New York City.
Anybody that has the wherewithal does not use those schools in New York City? And it's a shame because we're pouring money into it, but we're not getting anything out of it. Right. Actually, it's grown much worse. This is a.
Sort of poorly held secret for parents who are out in the system right now. It got worse after COVID because during COVID, Most of the institutional gravity, I guess you could say, that was carrying along literacy and other things kind of fell apart as students realized that education must not be that important because we suspended it for a couple of years. And so what has happened across the country is if you look at the test scores, things have plummeted since then. And so it's necessary now more than ever to get your kids into. I would say a classical Christian school, but certainly a school in the private sector that is doing true education of some form.
What role does religion have in the school? I know my uh son went to A old boys' school on Long Island that was Christian. I don't want to give the name out, but and they had to go a religion every day. Every semester was a different religious course, and they definitely had different masses they had to go during the day. What are your requirements?
Well, our schools are quite different because we don't encapsulate the Christianity into a class or course. We sort of envelop it in all of our over or it penetrates all of our subjects. And so when we study literature, for example, we're looking for the Christ types in that literature. When we study ancient history, we're looking at a parallel history between, say, the Greeks and the Romans and the Hebrews. And so our form is very integrated because the idea behind classical Christian education is that the entirety of knowledge, everything that we can know, can be united into a single A system of knowledge, a single thing, and that's unique to classical education because it's not as fragmented.
as public schools. When you think about it, Christianity brings together All things into one story of history that where God is working purposefully. That's very different than an evolutionary mindset where history, literature, philosophy, those are all just things that happen to be as opposed to were structured for a reason.
So it's that very sense of purpose that makes classical education different. David Goodwin joins us as he's written The Forging of the American Mind forward by Pete Hagset, the Year-by-Year Guide for Classical Christian Education. How does, David, how does. Your school weave in the American story? And why do you think they work well together so well?
Well Mm-hmm. Make an obvious point. 1776 didn't spring up in 1775. It's the product of thousands of years of Western civilization and Western history.
So our students work their way through that. They understand the Roman Republic, the Greek democracy. the Byzantine government. And the many governments that have followed on since then, and how they led through things like the Magna Carta, the development of common excuse me, of the common legal system. All of this crescendos into 1776.
And so our students grow to understand the big picture, and it makes for a deeper patriot, if you will, someone who understands not just that America is the land of the free, but deeply understand how different that is from all other civilizations. Nearly home. Isn't home where we all want to be? Reba here for Realtor.com, the pro's number one most trusted app. If you're hearing me, I'm going to assume you're awake.
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Tax Relief Advocates: Real Solutions for Real People. I keep on hearing, you know, we're trying to, Linda McMahon got the chance to talk to her a lot, and she's trying to revamp education by giving more power. to the States and getting it out no longer centrally located. What's your view on that? Because for example, some of the I guess not it's not for everybody, but some of the fundamentals of what you believe in would be great for the whole country.
How do you feel about giving up some type of control? from Washington. And in turn, you might not be worried about Oklahoma. You know, I might be worried about Texas. But you might be really worried about Chicago and New York City.
So how do you feel about giving up central control?
Well, I don't think central control is ever going to work, even if we had a perfect school system, because central control takes more control out of the hands of the parents. And when you look, you know, biblically and scripturally from a Christian standpoint, Ephesians 6 says clearly education is the domain of the parents. If you look at the founding fathers, they didn't. Even conceive of a public school system. That came much later.
They anticipated more of a common school where the community would come together and form up.
So I think the national move to dissolve the Department of Education is a good move. I think the department was used for nefarious reasons many times in the past. But I do think that even at the state level, we need to push down more to the local communities, get get the government of schools closer to the people and preferably out of the hands of government altogether, which is what our movement's about. That's why we only work in the private sector. How do you feel the role of AI in education?
Go. That's a good question. One of the interesting things, I've done some research on this. AI, it turns out, is very good at teaching kids stuff. If you look, there's one organization out there that is claiming they can do everything in two hours that a public school does in six hours by just using AI.
And I would believe that to be true because most progressive schools are trying to teach kids information stuff, right? Things like, what do you know and what can you do? The thing about classical Christian education is that it takes, it flips the script on that. It really is less interested in what information you know. It's more interested that you're able to think well.
And if you think about it, AIs take over that function. They do the thinking for you when you're learning with them. Even if they're programmed to try and inquire and get you to think, they're still getting you to think after them. There's a scripture verse that says that the student will become like the master. It's in Luke.
And if We want our kids to become like little automaton computers, then it's fine to put them into an AI environment. But if the Bible's true and the student will become like the master, we really would want them to be studying under a teacher who's a human. who can teach them virtue, not just stuff. Right. And then I was seeing this interesting study about and you know, there are some when there's things like TikTok, which are insidious and were put out by a foreign adversary to manipulate us.
I believe that. I don't care who owns it. But number two is, I think the well-meaning people wanted laptops in schools. They thought it would be a great way to consolidate everything, give people, be able to test. You enough to bring around 20 textbooks wherever you go.
And they're finding studies that you need to grab a pen and write things, that using a keyboard does not imprint on the brain. I don't blame anyone for that. I thought that was just a way of keeping the classroom up with the real uh real life. What do what do you find out? What do you believe?
Boy, that's a great question, Brian.
So, in the book, this is the book, in chapter. In chapter, well, it's the third part. We have a whole section, or I have a whole section on teaching penmanship and writing what are called commonplace books. In fact, in the introduction to the book, I use a quote from Reagan's commonplace book because most of the people that you would admire intellectually kept these things called commonplaces where they wrote down the most important parts of any book that they would read. They did it longhand.
In fact, there are actually errors of script in Reagan's commonplace book, and there's an Easter egg for your audience. One of those errors is actually printed in the dedication quote to this book because we took it straight out of Reagan's commonplace book. And the significance of that is that our students learn to handwrite well. We teach cursive because there's a lot of script writing in that. And there's a tangibility to it when you're working.
with an actual journal and writing down and keeping track. My daughter went through a classical Christian school and she kept commonplace books. There were several of them by the time she got to the 12th grade. She took them with her to college. Her younger brothers weren't happy about that because they often used it to kind of figure out what was going on.
My daughter was a better student, but the funny part is these books go with these kids for life. And I think it's just one of the many features of classical Christian education that stand out when you understand how it works, which is really what Forging the American Mind was about. Is when we got done with, when Pete and I got done with Battle for the American Mind, Pete went on to write War on Warriors and asked me to go ahead and write the follow-on.
So I wrote this follow-on, and the editors said, Well, we've created a lot of demand. Why don't you explain how to do it? And that's what this book is: it's sort of a year-by-year guide. You know, we, Pete and I use some military metaphors a lot for obvious reasons. And we call it like the Army Field Guide for classical Christian education.
education. Congratulations, David, on the book, Forging the American Mind: A Year-by-Year Guide for Classical Christian Education, Transforming K-12 Learning, Practices for Teaching, Virtue, and Wisdom. David, thank you. Best of luck with the book. Thanks so much, Brad.
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