Yes, Christian! Why Classical? - Doug Wilson

education it's got to be all about Christ [Music] well good evening like take this opportunity to welcome you here to Trinitas Christian School my name is James Cowart I have the pleasure of serving here at the school as Headmaster and this is our first parent traditio of the Year parents didio is a a series of parent education classes that we hold almost monthly throughout the school year on a variety of topics everything from parenting to classical education to why study Latin we do book reads together and I'm I'm explaining this because I see a few faces that are not our current families and our current parents and so welcome tonight to a school if it's your first time to turn into Hospital delighted to have you it is a little bit larger than our class our regular class size I imagine they're not here for my introduction um so we do welcome you tonight to be here I I'll start by sharing a little bit about this past summer we one of the things that we do as a school Community is we go on road trips together it's a great way to build community this past summer 30 parents and teachers and board members drove to Dallas for the repairing the ruin conference which is the annual National Conference for the association of classical Christian Schools and during that road trip a Trinitas mom who I believe is here this evening shared with me that while most of the families in her church and her Social Circle are committed to Christian education many are not committed or are not convinced I should say of the necessity of classical Christian education and perhaps there's some here even this evening that can identify with that same sentiment so my hope is that before we head home this evening we will all be able to better answer the question yes Christian why classical we are blessed this evening to have Pastor Douglas Wilson with us Pastor Wilson is no stranger to Trinitas having visited on occasion and at least once if not several times he and his wife Nancy have three grown children and a multitude I think you said 17 almost 18 grandchildren Pastor Wilson's activities are many and his ministry is far-reaching in addition to his founding work at the association of classical Christian Schools he helped found logos School nearly 40 years ago the greyfriar Seminary new St Andrews College the communion of reformed Evangelical churches can impress the in Christ Church of Moscow Idaho but your kids would probably be more impressed to know that he is the father to Indy Wilson or Nate Wilson author of Lee Pike Ridge which my my son just finished writing a report on last night hello ninja which is a pretty popular series that Nate has written and many other popular kid books closer to home for us though is his role in the rediscovery of classical Christian education way back in 1991 Pastor Wilson published recovering the Lost tools of learning and approach to distinctly Christian education it was this book and another that he published in 2003 titled the case for classical education classical Christian education that along with founding of logos School in 1981 led to an explosion of classical Christian schools around the country now numbering nearly 400 including Trinitas in 1999. in fact it was through the combination of attending an accs conference and listening to recordings about classical education on cassette tapes from Pastor Wilson and others at the Nolans and the Trotters and the Cumberlands decided to found a classical Christian School right here in Pensacola Florida now as parents whose children are benefiting from classical Christian education we are indebted to Pastor Wilson and I believe we would be hard-pressed to find someone better suited to share with us this evening on the importance of classical Christian education so following his talk he's going to open up the floor for questions from the audience so stay awake and be ready for that please join me in welcoming Pastor Douglas Wilson here with us this evening thank you well thank you very much it's great to be here we've enjoyed our time immensely and the hospitality you are a warm and welcoming people thank you let's pray father we thank you for our time here now we commit it to you please give us clear Minds as we think through what for some is our tough issues and I pray you'd help us to do it with clean Hearts we pray in Jesus name amen so yes to Christian why uh classical I'm going to start by uh with an old preacher's trick and the preacher's trick is to tell them what you're going to tell them and then you tell them and then you tell them what you told them all right we're just all right that's that's a simple device but this is what I'm going to tell you why why classical yes we're sold on Christian why classical here's the bottom line it's because you want the Christian part to be more than two inches deep what we've discovered in the last couple of years is that an Evangelical jesus-y feel type of faith cannot stand up to the brutality that the world can offer up all right we've had we've gone through a couple of tough years with all kinds of people panicking about all kinds of things and hostility and Malice and and we don't know what to do people are not equipped to well okay I know Jesus is the answer but what's the question this time what's the question this time because people don't know how to think and the reason people don't know how to think is is because boys and girls have not been taught how to think all right so what what you need to know as an adult you need to learn as a kid and if you're not learning as a kid what you need to know as an adult when you get there you're not going to have it it's not it's not going to be there so you can have when things are pleasant when life is going along smoothly you can think you're doing pretty good yeah okay I'm a I love Jesus and I go to church and this is this is like a bachelor or an unmarried woman thinking that you've got your spiritual life together um because I'm doing good you know I read my Bible every day and I go to go to church and then you get married and you discover all these hidden reserves of selfishness thank you I'm gonna say oh it turns out that life offers challenge real life offers real challenges and you cannot have cliches bromides and platitudes to get you through that it's got to be it's got to be the real thing and one of our our taglines that we use in Moscow is all of Christ for all of life all of Christ for all of life and that means and because all of life is more than two inches deep that means your Christianity has to go more than two inches deep if it's gonna if it's going to reach everything if it's going to get to everything so uh how did this start I got involved in this as a concerned parent I'm I didn't study education I didn't say I want to be an educator I that that was not on my list of things that I was going to do but getting married was on my list of things to do I got married and we started having kids and when our oldest Becca was a toddler uh one day Nancy said to me Doug I can't see handing her over to someone we don't know and saying here she is teach her about everything oh I don't even know what's your name again and I knew at that that moment I knew precisely zero about Christian education specifically Christian uh education except for one thing and that was that I knew that I agreed with that I I knew I agreed with Nancy okay we can't do that and so I said somewhat rashly don't worry honey by the time Becca hits kindergarten we'll have a Christian school started there were no options for us in our area there was one Seventh Day Adventist school and a Catholic school but there was nothing that we would have been happy with so I sort of committed myself okay we'll have a Christian school started which we did Becca's kindergarten year and what happened was we had a handful like 18 or 19 students four staff members and not a clue because here's the thing this is what you're going to discover this is how you discover that your Christianity is two inches deep right if you have if you get all the Christians together for church once a week for a 20-minute sermon sermon that's for christianettes if if you have this little morsel imagine studying a subject at the University with that amount of intake 20 minutes a week and the material is not all that challenging it's not scripture saturated it's not embedded in a world view okay you're not gonna you're not gonna learn very much and so what happens is you're going along but everything's our life is Placid more or less until you your kid at the government School sees one drug deal too many or one condom in the classroom too many or one outrageous thing too many and so you say that's it we're pulling our kid so you pull your kid and then you say and we're going to start a Christian School you haven't we haven't answered the question why classical but you're going to start a Christian School where that foolishness doesn't happen okay and so you start your Christian school and you show and you show up in late August or early September and you've got a row full of students all these little happy pie faces looking at you and it sinks in on you that you're going to have these same people looking at you for the next nine months they're going to show up at 8 A.M and they're going to be there until 3 P.M and they're going to say teach me like little birds on a nest you know feed me teach me and you think I'm going to have to have something to say hmm and you say what how much I'm gonna at the rate if I took everything I know and offloaded it we'd be we'd be out by mid-september and you think okay because Jesus teaches us a a student is not greater than his master but water doesn't rise above its own level and you can't give what you don't have you can't impart if you don't if you don't have it so that means in order to give a classical education you have to have a classical education and you don't have one on the first day of school so you're playing catch-up right you're doing all kinds of scrambling which is what we precisely what we did I had spent my stint in the Navy and then got out and would got got married as a freshman in college and then when I finished College I did Greek as my undergraduate degree but then we started logos a few years later and we decided that we were going to teach Latin and the only hitch in this plan was that nobody knew Latin other than that everything was fine the decision was made at the board meeting very smoothly and other than that how's the play Mrs Lincoln right so I went back to I went back to school and started taking Latin in order to be able to teach it to the third graders so I was a hop and a jump ahead of the kids I was just taking it in and turning around and reshaping it and teaching the kids and so this is this was very much a bailing wire bubble gum what are we doing now we knew we had the big picture and the big picture was this when I'll collapse a long story into a short one but when I was in high school I read an essay in National Review I'd I'd stumbled across a book by William Buckley up from liberalism and I read that and I he he made an immediate conquest of me I subscribed to National Review and National Review would periodically reprint Dorothy Sayers essay The Lost tools of learning so I subscribed to NR and then it was sometime when I was in the Navy I got the magazine and I read that essay when I was in the Navy I thought huh but I'm a bachelor no kids so I've uh years later fast forward like three years where we decided that we wanted to have a school because we needed to do something with our kids and we knew we what we didn't want but that's about all we knew we knew that we didn't want a fundamentalist reactionary Academy where the kids wore red white and blue uniforms and the church was founded in 1776. didn't want didn't want that and we didn't want a Tony Prep School unbelieving school where you had the same education that the government schools were offering only with Hefty tuition payments on top of on top of that we didn't want that so we adopted and I don't know why we adopted the motto a classical and christ-centered education classical meant that it wasn't a reactionary Academy and christ-centered meant that it was a believing we were decidedly Christian believe in Christians we held to the gospel we we were doctrinally fundamentalist but not culturally fundamentalist if that makes it uh clear so I remembered somewhere in there I remembered oh I read that essay in National Review a few years ago so I went up to the U of I Library University of Idaho library looked up the article uh made copies of it and distributed it to our steering committee and we read it and and the sentiment was we don't know what we're doing let's try this and we did so we implemented it and what happened was nothing short of astonishing we started to see the results in the kids and points started to go up on the scoreboard when when we first started it was a trust me Venture you know we're it's a Christian School we're all nice foreign but after after a few years we started seeing staggering results academically in the in the kids now this is where I want to Circle back around to the point that I made at the beginning which is you want the Christian part to be more than superficial you you want to be Christian front to back top to bottom side to side Christian everything about it needs to be Christian now someone's going to say Well then why classical it isn't classical this other thing aren't you mixing oil and water with Christian and classical no no no and here's why this is why the classical part has two components uh the components are the structure of the education the the procedure the the pedagogy and the other part is the content right so the the content basically is the heritage of the West so the the the kingdom of God and the Christian church are not the same thing okay that's let's be clear about that Western Civilization is not synonymous with the kingdom of God but 2022 you cannot tell the story or the history of either one of those without heavily involving the other one right and in other words the history of the kingdom of God and the history of Western Christendom is interwoven so you can give me the story of the church without talking about Charlemagne give me the history of Western Civ without talking about Pope Alexander VI you can't do you can't do it it's all intertwined so the content of our education is building on the heritage of the West all right which in our times currently is a hate crime right it didn't used to be a hate crime but it's a hate crime now because you're declaring that you don't like uh non-white civilizations and you're saying that the Chinese didn't have a great civilization no we're not saying anything of the kind we're saying we're blooming like the hippies told us in the 70s Bloom where you're planted this is where we're this is where we're planted this is where we are these are our people this is what we want to do because you can't teach and this is critical you can't teach kids to honor and respect other cultures by teaching them to despise their own all right if you teach them to despise their own they are not going to learn respect for others what you're going to do is you're going to get a bunch of neck beards I'm burning Portland down I'm sorry that's what happened wasn't my idea so that's the content so this is not to emphasize the heritage of the West is not jingoistic it's not self-absorbed or it it's not nothing of the kind it's what God has done for us as a people down through history and when we learn that take that in like a son who's taught to respect his mother is going to understand why another son would respect his mother right you that's how that's how respect is inculcated that's the uh that's the content the process is this this is Dorothy Sayer's argument which is that the medieval Trivium consisted of grammar dialectic and rhetoric or grammar logic and rhetoric and those were the three elements of the medieval trivia medieval education Dorothy Sayers had an Insight a pedagogical insight and I don't know if she was thinking of this particular character or not but it was a genius move there was another education reformer in the Reformation era named John Amos kimenius he was a Moravian Bishop reformed a reformed Bishop in Eastern Europe Eastern or Central Europe and John Amos kimenius was the was the person who came up with the brilliant idea of prerequisites okay before you teach a kid this maybe you ought to have taught him this first and this was a challenging problem because in the Reformation ERA this was the time when uh universality of Education started to get traction so back in the old days like in 1300 what you do is you'd identify a bright yeah a bright student a promising student and you'd arrange schooling for him all right so let's say five percent of the kids are educated and taught literacy and and sent off to University so you only had to worry about educating the bright ones so the bright ones are the ones you can just throw in the deep end and they manage right they figure it out just like today you've got kids in the government school system who are not taught phonics in the classroom but they teach themselves phonics off of cereal boxes in the morning they they can figure it out but 90 90 to 95 percent of the students need a teacher they need instruction they need someone to hold their hand walking through and this was just becoming apparent in the Reformation era and John Amos commenceus said well let's do the prerequisite let's let's teach this first and then that later what Dorothy Sayers does is she combines the medieval Trivium with this idea of prerequisites and so she has grammar being the foundational Elementary ages dialectic being roughly the junior high ages and rhetoric being roughly the high school ages grammar dialectic and rhetoric and so you teach them a mound of facts grammar would be multiplication tables and math or addition tables it would be parts of speech in English it would be mountains rivers dates in history and so on so that's just raw facts dialectic is where you sort them out you you teach the relationship of this to that and this to the other thing and this is how you organize them and then rhetoric is how you present them this is how you polish you you polish it up you present it winsimily and well that's grammar dialectic and rhetoric in that order and so someone's going to say well how's that Christian I will tell you there are three terms show up in scripture we see it first with beas allele who is a Craftsman an artisan in Exodus it says the spirit of the Lord was on him this is the first time the spirit of the Lord is given to anybody in scripture and it's to be it's to a guy named bezeliel and it's and and when the spirit is given to beas allele he does not go off into a study and write a big fat book of theology right he's a Craftsman he works with his hands and the Bible says that the spirit of the Lord equipped him with knowledge understanding and wisdom knowledge understanding wisdom three things now if you those three things show up in different places in scripture once in Colossians a couple times in Proverbs a couple times in Exodus with bees allele but if you look at the Proverbs passages I think Proverbs 2 and proverbs 10 maybe knowledge understanding and wisdom are not identical to grammar dialectic and rhetoric but they map onto it very happily right so knowledge is just knowing your stuff just knowing what's going on understanding is sorting it out right wisdom is knowing how to respond how to how to call the shots knowledge understanding and wisdom so there's a knowledge knowledge for example we can say is knowing that a tomato is a fruit wisdom is not putting it in the fruit salad foreign and now you understand so that's the um the the content of the the uh the content of classical education the heritage of the West which is what where the Holy Spirit has been working the gospel and as the gospel continues to progress throughout the world two thousand years from now Chinese history and uh African history are going to become part of the history of the kingdom of God but up to this point this is where we this is where we are that's the content and then the process would be the Trivium The this basic approach when you do it this way when you teach kids this way you find out that the knowledge and the understanding and the wisdom gets all the way into their bones all the way down all the way down and and you find your kids saying and doing spooky things where did you learn that how do you know how comes it that you know this I've never told you that and how you can like the father one time who said I've taught him everything I know and he's still stupid yeah well you don't want to be that you don't want to be that way right but all of a sudden your kids start the ancient rhetor quintillion once said he was a pagan but he said he had a very insightful uh comment when he said a man's son is the only man that a man is content to be surpassed by Okay so when your son surpass you when your daughters surpass you this is a delight to Christian parents I want my kids to have more than I had and this was the driving force with us when we started I wanted my kids to I felt ripped off in my education and I didn't want my kids to be ripped off in theirs and so I wanted to provide them with an education that I didn't have and Nancy didn't have and so here we go and then they got a really good education but my grandkids are getting a better education than my kids got okay I was just telling your board earlier this evening that we just got a report from our superintendent that 25 percent of our student body now is our Legacy Kids of alums all right so kids who graduated from logos and then they get married come back and enroll their kids because they want their kids to stand on their shoulders just like they were standing on ours all right so this was presented and all this was presented in a book and as was mentioned in 1991 and it was uh sort of the you know how it is when you're at a noisy event and everybody quiets down all at once except for you all right everybody goes quiet and you say something everybody hears well that's how it was for the publishing of recovering the Lost tools of learning it was like the right moment everyone went quiet and this Bellow happened and people said whoa look and then a bunch of people started saying uh we have to do this the book recovering was badly named because I've seen all the reupholstering the Lost jewels of learning um rediscovering The Lost tools of learning is is recovering the Lost tools of learning people would read it was part of a worldview series there was a book on viewing films with a Christian worldview and Reading literature with the Christian worldview and understanding International banking from a Christian worldview it's the Turning Point worldview series but when you finish the book on watching the movies with the Christian worldview when you put the book down you said to your wife honey let's go to the movies when people read my book they put the book down and said we have to start a school and then they started calling us up and and some of them with an insufficient grasp of time zones maybe I shouldn't tell this story one time Nate was in high school answered the phone his voice sounded like mine and someone from another part of the country launched in to have their parent meeting that they were having parental interest meeting and he just went on for you know 10 minutes or so Nate was standing there and finally Nate said that's cool I think I saw this Doug either no no no well what happened was the volume of Correspondence got to a high level that I couldn't handle anymore I gave all the education letters to Nancy and said Nancy could you manage these and so accs began on our kitchen table with Nancy being the first Chief cook and bottle washer to handling the education correspondence and then I thought well maybe we could have a conference and have talks and record the talks and then we'd have a recording to give people as an FAQ thing so we had a conference in Moscow and a bunch of people showed up and it was in the summer and these people these were Maniacs who were going to be starting their school in the fall you know and and they did and what happened is as was mentioned there's now 400 schools all kinds of lessons learned all kinds of bruises earned all kinds of mistakes made you know but nevertheless God has been very very very kind to us now the central kindness and I'll this is how I'd like to cap cap this off returning to what I said earlier what we are engaged in doing with the classical pedagogy and what we're engaged in doing in recovering what the Holy Spirit has accomplished in the history of the church this is what this is the sense in which Christians all Christians are to be conservative and all Christians are to be Progressive we are to but there's no virtue or vice in a transitive verb I love fill in the blank well you don't know if the person speaking is virtuous or not right I love ice cream I love my mom I love pornography I love the devil you don't until you get to the direct object you don't know if the love is corrupt or wholesome and I hate same thing hatred is a virtue the fear of the Lord is to hate evil Proverbs tells us so the The Virtue or the vice is not found in the verb itself the same thing is true of conservative I'm a conservative great what are you conserving conservative can mean a polygamous Mormon in the mountains of Utah conservative can mean an Old Guard stalinist in wishing for the old days in the Kremlin a conservative could be a polygamous Muslim in Saudi Arabia or a conservative could be a burkian Russell Kirk guy here in the United States what are what are you conserving Evangelical Christians want to conserve everything the Holy Spirit has given to us through his in through the gospel in in its in culture in its cultural instantiation that's what we want to conserve what are we progressing toward the so-called progressives want to progress toward this Utopia that they can't Define but we Christians are progressives we've got an idea of where we want this to go we want to progress toward everything the Holy Spirit has in store for us coming up so we're conservative and Progressive simultaneously with a fixed standard of God's word overarching all of it so then when you undertake this task the education of your children is a task that is as big as the world all right it's as big as the world which and when you go after a job like that there is absolutely no way to make it trite and superficial if your view of Christianity is um the world is God's Vietnam he got involved in a land war in Asia and the Rapture is going to helicopter us all out of Saigon and then then he's going to write the whole thing off and good riddance well that's God didn't do that all right that's not the that's not how human history goes if you believe that the only thing that Christianity does is get you on the helicopter then it's no wonder when some crisis hits our people and it doesn't involve helicopters we have no answers for our neighbors we have nothing distinctive to say um so if but if suppose God wants us to stay here for the next thousand years and deal with it well oh I better get my kids ready right well that means classical it's not classical that's antithetical to the Christian it's classical is the method a method that has historically been developed in the history of the church applied by Christians in such a way as that enables us to get the Christianity into all the corners it's not an accommodation with paganism it's not syncretism it is a blessed uh pedagogical Insight that really is serves to help Christian parents do what God has called them to do there's lots more I could say but I would rather say it in areas where you have questions So Ready Set Go I'll start us off so grantee that we're blissfully happy with classical education what are some ways you can go wrong oh okay very good um this is a fallen world and absolutely everything can go wrong I was just sharing with someone earlier this was a of law that my son Nate developed we were talking about board meetings and my son developed this um observation he said at any meeting that goes over 20 minutes someone is going to propose something which if implemented will ruin everything so that's a general statement yes things can go wrong I'll tell you the I'll tell you the big concern that I have about fccs in general and Cloud the classical school movement I've seen instances of this already happening and I think it's going to be a a pressing Temptation for us in the years to come and that is classical education is so successful in producing High achieving students that the secular schools desperately want to have them and they recruit them and they do everything they can to get you we need your student here at Behemoth State U and and they flatter them and scholarships and that sort of thing and then bit by bit the school becomes that Tony prep school that we were trying to avoid becoming right because you've got astounding academic success people who are interested in high achieving children will seek your school out not all of them sharing the same spiritual values that the founders of the school did they're just interested in getting placed in an Ivy League school or something like that and so what happens is Mission drift so the devil the devil will try to attack your school two ways one he tries to get you to fail by failing which is sort of the old school persecution you can't pay the bills you can't pay salaries and then you shut down the other trap is to get your school to fail by succeeding um uh in Deuteronomy it says jesuwine waxed fat and kicked okay and that's the Temptation I think that classical Christian schools have um Cotton Mather once said faithfulness begat prosperity and the daughter devoured the mother and that's the that's the Temptation you're gonna one year this was a number of years ago but we've had similar things happen where our our Juniors take the PSAT and the and then the SAT and we had one year we had five National Merit scholars in our senior class at logos now there were two other schools in Idaho that had five National Merit Scholars one was Bishop Kelly at Catholic School in Boise and the other was Capitol High a government School in Boise but they had senior classes of 500 and 500. we had a class of something like 25. so out of 25 we had five National Merit Scholars and they had five and five and that's the kind of thing that people say whoa you could get a full ride at us and such and then oftentimes Christian parents forget all the reasons they sacrificed for the 12 years in order to get this this bubble this trinket uh so that would be I think the the presenting ever-present Temptation classical schools becoming really academically successful such that you become self-sufficient and you forget the Lord that's and I've that uh that's not just a hypothetical worry of mine I've seen it happen ing um is potentially a part of the answer to that problem of family by succeeding Bible College of this regard but uh reforms trade school perhaps is that one of the next steps that we should explore where we say we don't have to go and get these letters or not to hang in order to be uh impactful and godly community that it really matters right have you asked anyone give me any thoughts though yeah we've got yeah we're up against what I might call the hours in the day problem but if you're asking me theologically practically um remember all of Christ for all of life that would include trade schools that would include vocational training that would include all those um so yeah yes and amen to that the the however is that uh when when we it's not however it's more like we're I think hurtling toward a an educate a crisis in higher education higher education the secular system is in a death spiral um there is no way that I see that they can recover I think multitudes of colleges are going to shut down the Herbert Stein Ben Stein's father was an economist and he formulated a law that the gist of it was anything that cannot continue on indefinitely won't either I I just think that was marvelous and and I believe that the higher education system is headed off a cliff and I believe that we are going to be confronted with the challenge of what to do with our kids graduating from high school um before we're ready and entirely prepared for it if you have that preparation if someone were to say I want to establish a school for you know a Christian medical school or Christian pre-med or Christian pre-law or Christian electronic coding all those things I'm open to all of it whether it's done through apprenticeship whether it's done through internship or done through schools that Christians found with Christ's glory in mind I'm in favor of all of it but it seems to me they're real energy is the Tony uh Lawrence all those skills we run we run uh the details about a veil that's those engagement I'll be going after I think it's a that's a great question I would say it's a one-two thing when when you're first planting your classical Christian school and you're biting and scratching and scrapping for every student your competition is the free school down the street all right and so oftentimes that gets into the um sort of the the ethos of the school that we're the alternative to that because that's where you all your initial students are recruited from or you're competing with somehow once you're successful and you're you got your own building and you've you've won all kinds of awards um and you're starting to get some of the world's respect I think you're right the the central threat in our thinking should shift at that point not to the government schools but to the the high influence IVs or the public universities that University of Chicago or Stanford or things like that coming out here so my kids have been educated here since kindergarten essentially um you mentioned medical schools coding schools Etc how do you bridge the gap between The Iliad and creating the next Google what where is the interim step there okay so everybody hear that question all right so how do you how do you bridge the gap between if you if we want Christians influencing culture in in things like high tech or um you know where's the next Google come going to come from is it going to come from someone who spent his high school years studying Homer all right how does the liberal arts translate over to that so one of the things that we have found and as we've done this not only K through 12 at logos but we've also had the privilege of graduating hundreds of students from new St Andrews which is no majors a ba in liberal arts and culture all right that's everybody has one color and it's black and so we put that you know we push them through well one of the biggest companies in Moscow it's a secular company it's been flipped a number of times but when it was a small company it was a software coding company and our president at the time was in a conversation with one of the founders of this software company and Roy challenged this founder owner hire one of our graduates see what happens and he found out that when you hire Liberal Arts students you're hiring someone who's not just pushing buttons or plugging and chugging a code you're hiring someone who's thought about the world and thought deeply about the world and he doesn't understand this particular thing that he's going to have to learn on the job but he understands people and he understands history and he has a big map in his head that has an x on it that says you are here he's oriented in other words and what this gentleman found was that Liberal Arts students excelled at the kind of work that he had them in the company grew to a multi-million dollar company and there was one time where the majority of its employees were new Saint Andrews grad grads because that they were the they were the ones that were heavily recruited this is so what you want is to have students who when they're presented with new material this is the meaning behind Dorothy Sayers essay the tools of learning so you're not indoctrinating them in what to think you're training them fundamentally and how to think so that means they study this problem they they study The Iliad they study um you know these great great books and then they go over to this area of their life and they're confronted with a brand new problem but they know how to take things apart right so it's like think of a dad who who spent uh spent a lot of time with his son stripping down cars taking cars and putting them back together again right and then later on the sun is out away from home and he his neighbor's tractor breaks down he never worked on a tractor before but he knows this world he knows the logic of this world he knows how how people function and this is something we have seen over and over again if if your student is equipped for life and for living it's I I never get tired of saying this our liberal arts and culture education is not vocational training for English teachers it's not vote tech training at all it's training for life how to think and how to be a human being right so I want to go out into the world knowing how to be a human being and if I know that I can step into a firm and pick up on things very very quickly I quote a great chemist Bauer a 19th century chemist Bauer in my first book recovering where in Germany they had two schools because in Germany they separate vocationally destined kids and liberal arts kids early and they've got the gymnasium and the real shoe one and Bauer said and you would think that if you're going to be a chemist that you want the votech trained kids and Bauer said no give me the liberal arts kids give me the liberal arts kids um because they know how to think and I have six months with them and I will answer for their chemistry you know I can give them chemistry and they're they're not going to collapse under the weight of it now the big there's there's one challenge I'll just run around the other side and push for a minute this argument is compelling to me and I've seen it work I've seen people who've liberal arts trained succeed in many diverse professions but we have a credentialed um a credential happy higher educational system and sometimes they just won't let you do what you could do right you might be the most brilliant medical mind ever and they're not still not going to let you in the med school unless you've got a certain number of credit hours so we that's a practical nut that we have to solve and we and we are working on it so new St Andrews is working on a a system a 3-2 system where you don't want someone to do four years and then have to start over again to get a biology degree to then go into med school so what we have are working on is a system where you do all the core liberal arts stuff and instead of taking electives on John Owen or Coral Theory or whatnot you take biology electives and you do it in five years and you're ready to take your mcats or you know whatever so that's a practical problem to solve but we don't want to solve it by surrendering the principle yes loved us a labor knowledge special needs kids and are in the world schools or programs yes what our policy over the years well keep in mind that Moscow has got like 25 000 people in it and it's not very big but it's one of the biggest towns in Idaho in the top 10 or 11 and and so consequently one of the things you need if you want if you want a special needs program that actually functions well is you need a certain population base in order to make the thing viable what logos has done is over the years we have accepted kids with special needs challenges provided it doesn't take away from the other students experience you don't so for example if we had one boy who was deaf and his mom came to school with him and signed for him she was his interpreter and we accommodate that sort of thing but we're not geared to geared or set up to have a program simply because of hours in the day but there's a school in Moscow that started up called Jubilee School that is devoted to helping special needs kids it's Christian it's part of our ecosystem the our community has grown to the point where we can now support that kind of thing and we do so we would want to we'd want to see that sort of thing grow and develop and flourish as soon as we as soon as we have the resources do they teach classical Christian education on that it's yeah it's not um they their their system is a mix of um special needs kids and and kids or don't have special needs and the and the kids who don't have special needs help with the kids who do um and it's I would say they do have a classical emphasis and structure it's not as disciplined as logos is but uh I think it's there there was yes so you mentioned this earlier and I'd be interested in you expanding on it communism is going to fall in China and North Korea thank you the church is going to experience explosive for us at that time does classical Christian education move to Asia and grow there and if so does it engage and interact with the big names in historical Eastern philosophy the way we do with Pagan and Greek and Roman philosophers now the answer is yes and yes right so our our rhetoric teacher at new Saint Andrews currently is named Brent pinkall he's the rhetoric teacher there he was kicked out of China he was with you may have read in World magazine about early Reign church so the early rain church had a college and a schooling system they were very much on the same page with us and Brent wrote a book in Chinese on this very topic and he was already he was arguing from um for precisely what you said using uh keying off of the Great Chinese thinkers and having a uniquely Chinese approach to classical education that was analogous to what we're doing um it's not without controversy but the controversy was coming from the other Chinese Christians there the the Chinese Christians didn't want anything to do with that with with their Pagan past and they were more stalwart against it so it was a he had a tough uh per road to persuading them before him and then the persecution hit and he was kicked out of China and we hired him um at NSA but his name is if you want to pursue that his name is Brent pinkall he is fluent in Mandarin Chinese and was a YouTube star in China he had a he had a channel where he would be an American who spoke fluent Chinese and he'd go to various sites and react to them in China as a foreigner like a foreigner in the and he was he was a big hit over there so yes the last five six months you've had eight percent inflation you know a year over year do you guys is that something that's on your radar as far as coming up with and helping people think through creative ways to you know deal with that or is that yeah yes be warmed and filled you know it's very much a challenge and one of the things that I'm very pleased this I'm sure that there have been some things have slipped through the cracks but I can say consciously that logos has never turned anyone away because of money all right if someone says I'm on board with what you want to do I want my kids there can we work something out we have always worked something out and in the early days we worked it out in sort of a Rough and Ready way you know mom's driving bus and you know doing things like that we now have a more sophisticated way of getting financial aid to parents who are in in need of it but we advertise the fact that we don't want to turn anyone away because of money in addition our logos is surrounded by a number of churches that are supportive and our church Christchurch has a deacons fund and a subset of the deacons fund is the Christian education fund so we don't want any of our kids in our church to miss a Christian education because of money so if we find out that someone has a need we support tuition payments to different schools homeschooling materials and if you were to get on one knee on a Sunday morning at our church you would and look across the room there's a whole nother population down there a second congregation and you would if you're a visitor you might think that we had some sort of strident teaching against birth control but we don't thank you but we don't that's just an optical illusion but they're so they're kids they're kids everywhere and 95 percent of them are getting a Christian education in Moscow and the handful of kids in our church that are in the government schools are overwhelmingly when that happens they're because of a nasty divorce and a court order you know that something like that so we don't want any kid in our church to miss out on a Christian education because of money so there's money available in the church side and logos will work with you uh also so um so yes yes unfortunate Christian Schools approach me towards admitting Pagan families offending uh admitting families ah okay admitting Pagan families this is another um there's the old Chinese curse man you live in interesting times which which is where we are on this his I'll tell you logos just recently changed our position on this historically for most of our history we would admit anyone provided they agreed to us teaching them what we explained to them we were going to teach all right this we're going to teach if you're a Roman Catholic we're going to teach the Reformation was a good thing Martin Luther is a hero you know you good with that um or you know we've had occasional Mormons um sometimes Muslim that that sort of thing so we we did that and the one Proviso that I would put on that is you can't admit too many of them okay which so if you do it by onesie twosies then it works out well because those kids are surrounded by Christian kids from intact families and if you admitted 10 of them let's say and you're hoping and praying that they don't meet each other until Thanksgiving sometime you look over at orientation night and they're visiting in the corner altogether there's an internal spiritual radar that that they have they find each other and then they can circle the wagons and insulate themselves from the from the influence of the school so you don't want so many kids that they are capable of they that you don't want them to have enough wagons to Circle okay so that's that was our thinking and it worked on a practical spiritual level it worked very well okay we just shifted our policy within the last year or so at the recommendation of accs in conjunction with advice given by the alliance defending freedom and it just doesn't have to do with how to protect your school spiritually it's how to protect your school legally right so if um you you if you accept this non-Christian kid and then you say no to another one your trouble then you've got your vulner you're exposed and vulnerable legally so because of the current legal climate we require at least one of the parents to be able to sign our statement of faith and um and so that's that's what we've done in response to legal counsel I would I wish that we lived in a free country still and we could go back to the old way I imagine the conversation between Christian homeschool Families official classical Christian families begin conversation yes I can show you some scars um we hovered over this um in when logos was when we started logos in 19 but it was the late 70s we started work on it and we started in the early 80s at the at the time we started I don't think I had ever heard of homeschooling and then homeschooling came online in a big way in the 80s right when logos was getting liftoff and I'm the pastor of a church that a bunch of homeschooling families in it and logos families and now other schools online schools and you know we've got a an array one of the things that we did in the church and this was something that I think can be done very helpfully on the church side is that we didn't say we we kept the church's voice neutral on which form of Christian education um you should pursue although it was obvious that the pastor had his kids in Logan school but we formally we're not we're not saying you must do it this way you must do it that way we what we did require of our parishioners was that you may not be imperialistic you leave your brother alone okay now that means that the homeschooling families that you have are likely to be diligent conscientious parents who happen to be homeschooling which is very different than ideological homeschoolers an ideological homeschooler is someone who says everything is better at home brain surgery theology theology baptisms everything is better at home that's that's an ideological thing that we oppose but as simply a technique that parents use um yeah knock yourself out we'll we have a Christian education fund that will help you you know we've done that sort of thing and we've said you may not be rude to your brothers and sisters in Christ and we would want to speak to that if you're if you go on the war path we'd speak to that not to your position and it we've worked out it's there were a few years where there was an uneasy truce but it's now I would say really Peaceable and and good and a number of our homeschooling families home school in the early years and then they enroll their kids later on and it's worked out well so it's that was an example of laboring to preserve the unity of the spirit the bond of peace yes if I'm fairly it sounds like you're saying you would strongly encourage a student to classical training through the accf school to look at a classical question yes how do you square that about the in this world how do you how do you might respond to something like you might say you're particularly yeah so um this is basically the same argument that you would have that we've confronted with the K-12 side where the aren't you putting your kids in a hot house a little greenhouse and they they can't function in the world outside they can't thrive in the world outside I think of it more as boot camp um equipping someone to go to the world outside and not to be a little Monastery where they hide from the world outside so if we have a high school or if you have a college where the the sweet Christian kids are hiding from the world then I think you could chalk that up as a failure it's an educational failure but if you're equipping them to go make a dent go out into the world make a debt make your own glory and make it out there you don't go to a Christian school and then go to a Christian college and then graduate and come home and get a job in the church office and the last time you met a non-Christian was in the airport once I think you know uh you really don't we don't want that all right so that's the first thing um we want the education to be rigorous and Preparatory equipping the students to be a hazard to the World when they go out into the world and not to be fearful and timid about the world possibly corrupting them that's the first thing the second thing and I was mentioning this in our discussion with the board earlier too I majored in philosophy and I got a Bachelor's and a master's in philosophy what that means is that almost everything I Learned was false almost and if you major in mechanical engineering almost everything you learn is true and God glorifying right and so one of the reasons Christians gravitate to stem Fields is because the corruption of our modern relativism has not gotten there yet it's going to it's getting there but it's it is still largely in intact I told I told the story of A friend of mine who was back in his non-Christian hippie days was associ was a sociology major and one time he got stoned out of his gourd just absolutely fried and went and took his final and he aced it and his conclusion was I have got to change majors which which he did he went over to microbiology where there were still right and wrong answers right and and did very well there he's a doctor in microbiology now a lot of Christians are attracted to disciplines that still have a sense of right and wrong you can still get red marks on your paper and and I want I covet the day when we can get the humanities back to that into that non-relativistic world because I think that the chaos that we see around us is the result of the humanities disintegrating Humanities education disintegrating and if you are studying these things and you don't go out into the world to make a difference that's not an education that's just a book club some of you guys the parent who brings their child to a classical Christian School for the grammar side and the project but there is time to go to high school what is your advice to them when they come up here but enough about Athletics laughs so or the prom so the reason they're going back to the reason they're tempted to go back to the high school or back back there is not because of all the great reports they're hearing about the academics it's generally something like Athletics or social um social things like the prom um I would say that one of the things you need to do and I'm very pleased to hear that you have regular parent meetings where it's like ongoing education for parents what are we doing here why are we doing it so you wouldn't want to say okay I plant I plowed the ground I plant the wheat I let the wheat grow to a foot high and it's not Harvest yet but we're going to mow it now anyway well that's what's happening oftentimes is is you do all this hard arduous work for six years out of 12. and then you've you it's like okay that's sufficient but that's betraying that you didn't really understand what we were about the whole time all right this this is like a story and it has a story arc and K through 12 is this chapter this section of the book and there's a logic to this now we've when we were getting our school off the ground we had we for a number of years there we were Hemorrhage hemorrhaging at the eighth grade and and so one year we had a we had a group of young kids coming up probably our largest to that date and they were headed toward eighth grade and the board made a decision we are going to recruit those kids heavily we're going to make it really worth their while to to stay because we we needed to get past that point where we were hemorrhaging we still occasionally uh lose someone there but what before it was just um this is not working with our buckets got a hole in it um so that's basically I would say a lot of discussion a lot of uh information meetings about what it is we're doing what's the logic of what we're doing what are we trying to accomplish and then I would also say to the board and to the admin there's a balance here because Proverbs says let another praise you and not your own lips um but I think that there's a certain level where the board and the admin needs to be noisy about your successes all right so um and you can do it without putting a spotlight on an individual kid and tempting him to be conceited or something you can say here's here are test scores this year this is how they averaged with the other kids in the State of Florida here's how they compared to kids in private schools in the state of Florida and your kids are lapping them and that kind of thing is going to be is going to be persuasive so we one of the things we did is um we we started entering our kids in mock trial um mock trial competitions and uh I think we won the state championship the first year we entered and it was like and we've won it multiple times since and our arch rival is in the other end of the state in mock trial Ambrose which is a classical Christian School in Boise those evil doers so it's but it's wonderful year after year to have two of the flagship classical schools in Idaho competing for the state championship and and also having them compete like logos has sent two teams and we've had situations where our a team and our B team were contending that's awkward anyway but I would be noisy about that sort of thing we have band like the banners you have here we have mock trial Championship banners around the gym we let people know that what you're doing is valuable I'll tell you this is very true one of the things that we consistently do is we underestimate what kids are capable of we think that oh they're just a kid they can't do that and I was telling them your board members about every summer we have a music camp it's like a vacation bible school only with Bach and and there are Bible classes and craft classes and you know different things but the kids are learning to sing very challenging pieces over the summer over one week in the summer and then on Friday or Saturday there's a concert and last summer we went to it there was 400 kids up there singing Bach you know singing something and you think is this allowed is this okay how come why didn't I get that right and and if we underestimate what our kids are capable of because we don't want to bruise or hurt their feelings and it's true let me run around the other side it's some parents think that classical means it's got to be hard and that's true it's got to be hard but not everything hard is classical there is a eating a bowl of gravel is hard um but it's not classical and they're classic they're classical schools from hell that just grind the children down it's a grad grind kind of thing but if you have a challenging curriculum and teachers who love the Lord who love their subject and who love the student and that's what good teaching is is loving the subject in the presence of God to students whom you also love you're introducing people you love things you love to one another if you have teachers who do that they can be exacting and challenging teachers and the students eat it out of the can with a spoon it is high morale basically you want High morale in the student body because they know what they're doing is valuable if you lower the standard and give everybody a participant ribbon because they showed up and they're breathing after the competition and everybody gets their participant ribbon one of the things you're going to discover is participant ribbons all over the floor because the students know how worthless that is just worthless and if you say you know you're here you're going to stand up straight and you're going to do it right and this is what I'm gonna and I'm doing this because I love God I love you and I love this subject and this is what we're going to do that kind of there's a cheerfulness that attends that that attends doing hard work that's valuable that other people value and you know that they value it and you value it also and my favorite image of this was uh when um when Nate my son was in high school he was he was playing football and he we had we live in a house with one bathroom at the time he was taking a shower after practice and I had to go into the bathroom and I went in there and the shower was on he was behind the curtain and then outside the curtain was Homer's Iliad okay so you're reading Homer's Iliad in the shower and you think that's normal mission accomplished yes we advocated somewhat how this class of application is available to give for example a break to break the industry instead of just being the followers of yes I think so so um let me repeat it make sure I've got it so we have aren't we getting the kids all dressed up with no place to go right okay so if there there are some very narrow applications like you could if you get the classical K-12 education one of the things you can do that's a very logical next step is go to new St Andrews right we we're it's geared to that but most kids are not in that position and the so the next best thing to do would be to go if if the child if the student not child anymore but if they're equipped in a Christian worldview and their faith is solid and and sound and you know it is and you're not assuming anything if if that's the case there are places where you can go and um create your own education a la carte you take this class and take this class in this class there are resources online there are you but but the educational system wants to control the whole process by managing the credit hours like what's three hours what's three credit hours of sociology anyway what is that um and so they want to say and you can't have this piece of paper which is going to open doors unless you do this unless you jump through the Hoops that we have created I think that either you have to do something that's a niche training like what we've done at NSA or you've got to be prepared to wing it on your own on your own authority piecemeal here and there until the edge higher ed system collapses and we're able to rebuild the whole thing so right now if you're graduating if you're graduating from high school next spring um you've got a very limited range of choices sorry yet the world were just if the world were just and fair that would be very true but it's not so if you look at a million if you look at a million kids with a high school diploma only and a million who have a a college degree the standard of living between them is striking okay the world and and there are kids in the high school diploma only category who are every bit as intelligent and talented in many cases more so than the kids who have a diploma but our whole society is geared to the diploma yes this is what I was trying to call where classical application in terms of educating our children to be the great industry you don't have to work or even the festivals with this person you can make your own you can make your own life I don't know if you're on something yeah you can make your own language if you're bright enough yeah but you but you then have to find someone who can speak it if you have to deal with the other you have to deal with other people and you have to deal with the institutions as they are now what Christian Educators have to deal with kids and classes in the aggregate okay so um there are when you're dealing with people in groups you have to think of them in groups now you can I could I could tell you the names of kids that are fully capable of making their own Glory their own way right and and they don't need a diploma right so I know that that's possible but when you're talking to groups and when you're leading a movement you have to speak to the group you have to speak to the mass while acknowledging the exceptions that you're pointing to and honoring them and when when someone builds a well I mentioned that company that um earlier that was hiring all the NSA graduates well the company the CEO of that company was during the time was doing that only had a high school diploma that was all he had and he was employing all of our college graduates yes right uh I've been trying to think of that as generally a positive thing what would how would you I would like everything is doing your thoughts on that and I'd also be interested in where you see points of tax engagement and cooperation with those groups um particularly becomes more about us okay so um with Roman Catholic classical Educators and Protestant or classical Protestants I can see teaming up as cobelligerence in you know working together on things of common interest where both private schools and and this piece of legislation would protect us both that kind of thing so I think we ought to be not strangers and not enemies but we're we're confronted with the same threat so very much so charter schools are a little bit different um most of the parents who are involved in charter schools will many well I won't say most many of the parents involved in charter schools classical charter schools are themselves individually Christian and so you'll have many uh people there who are on the same page with you individually they just can't talk about it in the classroom right which is like putting on a production of Hamlet and leaving out the prince of Denmark right it's like okay this is now I'm for it I I I look on the charter school movement classical Charter School movement uh with favor and I welcome it but that's my Machiavelli inside welcoming it because I want to introduce into the system anything and everything that competes with this the government school systems as they are and these charter schools are better than um the standard issue government School same thing with school choice things like that logos School wouldn't take vouchers we would refuse vouchers but I would be glad to see a voucher bill pass because I think it voucher bills tuition credits things like that are going to be a wrecking ball with the with the current system which I'm supportive of and I want to be friends individually with people who are involved in charter schools but if someone said can you give it your full-throated endorsement I say no because education it's got to be all about Christ well Pastor Wilson I am thank you for taking questions for the past hour and a half and speaking to us tonight let's get the show pastor thank you once again we appreciate you making the track down here we hope you enjoy your time in Pensacola and you're always welcome back here at Trinitas um friends that are here tonight's parents thank you for for being here tonight for parent your video and guests in our building you're more than welcome to stay and to visit and to linger and to uh to spend time here with us before we leave I want to I want to real quickly call your attention just a couple more parents or video opportunities that are coming up next month we've got a very unique opportunity we are together as a school reading this new book called battle for the American mind there's a number of copies back there for sale our our dad's book club is reading this book a number of our teachers are reading as well it's a book that's been cohort authored by Pete hegseth from Fox News and David Goodwin who is the president Association of classical Christian Schools next month on August October the 20th we will be screening the documentary called the miseducation of America it's a five-part documentary that Fox News Channel ran on their streaming service we'll be watching just the first two episodes at the Rex Theater downtown so this event will be taking place October 20th downtown at the Rex Theater it is free to the public you're welcome to register and be a part of it we'll watch the first two episodes and then David Goodwin will be here with us and he'll do a question answer time similar to what we've done based around this conversation that focuses really on Progressive education what's happening in the public schools and how is it played out in the broader culture we have a variety of other parent classes happening over the year we we do parenting classes here and things of that sort all the way through but then again in January we'll have Dr Louis Marcos from Houston Baptist here and he'll be speaking to our parents once again on the topic of why Christians should read the Pagan Classics and so that'll be happening in January a lot of exciting things are happening let me let me finish and close this with a word of prayer and then we will break tonight and and spend some time here together Father in heaven we want to thank you for your kindness to Trinitas Christian school and bring in Pastor Doug Wilson here with us tonight God we thank you for the experience and the wisdom that he shared with us tonight Lord we want to thank you for the sacred charge you've given in entrusting children to our to our care and calling us to Steward them well and return them to you for your glory and for your kingdom and I pray father that you would enable these parents whether from Trinitas or outside of our school walls to be faithful in that High Calling it's in the name of Jesus Christ we pray these things and by his spirit amen [Music]

Channel: Trinitas Christian School

Views: 5,255

Keywords: classical christian, classical christian school, classical christian education, pensacola, florida, christ-centered

Id: Qj_wYwK96G8

Length: 87min 37sec (5257 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 25 2022