As a father of 10 children, one lesson that I learned early in my parenting experience was that it’s very easy to have a peaceful, happy family. It’s very easy to have a happy wife. It’s very easy to have happy children, really. It’s very easy to have everyone happy with me if I never ask them to do anything and I never correct anything that they do. If I never ask anyone to do anything and I never correct anyone, relationships can all be very, very happy, at least for them. But if I am accountable to some external standards of living and behavior, it won’t be happy and pleasant for me, because I am accountable to these standards that are not my own.
But if I want to maintain a happy home, a peaceful set of relationships with relatives, friends, coworkers, anyone—if I don’t ask anyone for anything and if I never correct anyone—I’ll be loved by all, and everyone will call me a nice guy, and they’ll be happy and friendly towards me. And I’d be in a lot of spiritual and moral trouble personally. And because of my convictions, because of my knowledge that that is not the life that God calls any of us to live, but that God calls us to direct temporal affairs, direct everything in our control according to His will, and because we pray in the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” I’ve always known that it’s my duty, especially in any relationship or sphere of influence that I’m in control of—it’s my job to direct that sphere, that relationship according to God’s will.
And with that commitment comes frustration, criticism, nasty responses, and so on. It can even grow to the point of persecution. And the reason why saints are persecuted is because this is the effect that they have in the world. They don’t simply smile at everyone. They don’t simply look away when someone’s doing something wrong. They don’t pretend not to see; they don’t pretend not to hear. They do ask others to do things. They command others to do things. They teach others how to live. They hold others accountable. They admonish people when they are sinning, and this is what causes saints to be disliked. This is what causes Christians to be disliked.
Jesus said to His followers, “You are the light of the world.” And that sounds like a good thing, if it weren’t for the fact that Jesus also said that people who do evil things hate the light, and they try to avoid the light, lest their deeds be exposed. So being the light of the world, when the world wants to live in darkness, is a warning that you’re going to be disliked and possibly persecuted.
So I learned that early on in married life, family life, business, parenting, and certainly in education. I learned that if I want to be popular in education, if I want to make lots of money in education, if I want my work to be published zealously throughout educational circles, all that I need to do is smile and nod and pat everyone on the back and tell them that they’re all right and they’re all brilliant, and everything that they do is wonderful, and I will be considered a great man.
But again, the problem is that my studies have led me to know objectively and with certainty that there is a program of education that has been developed by wise men, that has been confirmed and perfected and recommended to us by Doctors of the Church and even popes, and we have abandoned that system of education. And we have followed instead a modern situation, a modern system of education that has been invented for ends or purposes other than those which education is supposed to be aimed at. And we have now gone down this wrong road for not 20 years, not 50 years, not since Vatican II, but for hundreds and hundreds of years, really, since the 1500s. And we are so far down this wrong road in 2026 that several generations have no idea where the right road is. They have no idea what the right system of education is. We are so far down this wrong road that we don’t even know what the original destination was, and we certainly don’t know what the right road looked like, because we’ve never been on it.
And so when I talk about this, even if I talk about it with authoritative sources, even if I present Sacred Scripture—which I know no one listens to, because since the Protestant Reformation, everyone with a Bible has a different opinion of what every passage means. So no one pays any attention to the Bible anymore, thanks to Bible-only Protestantism—but if I present the writings of great philosophers of the past, nobody pays attention to that because they weren’t scientists. They never looked through a microscope or through a telescope. They never used a computer, and they never invented the atom bomb, which seems to be the test of real wisdom and learning. So we discount all the ancient philosophers.
And if I share writings of Fathers of the Church, like St. Augustine or like St. John Chrysostom, Doctors of the Church that include Saint Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, they’re all discounted as well because, well, things are different these days. That was good for them, but that won’t work in our society, because now we’re so modern and advanced, and we have so many amazing tools like smartphones and social media that that old stuff just isn’t relevant anymore. And so we’re left talking about Catholicism, which is a religion rooted in divine revelation and apostolic tradition, while rejecting anything that was taught or done before we were born. And this is the dilemma that we find ourselves in today.
C.S. Lewis had a great quote, which I used to share all the time when I started the Classical Liberal Arts Academy, and he talked about how progress means getting closer to your destination. Progress means getting closer to your destination or your goal. But if the road that you’re on does not lead to your goal, if you’ve made a wrong turn and you’re now on a road that does not lead to your goal, progress would mean turning around and backing up, getting back to the right road. So progress, if you’re on the wrong road, means going back to the right road. It doesn’t mean moving faster down the wrong road, recommitting to the wrong road, making the wrong road more efficient or more affordable. Progress means going back to the right road.
And that’s what needs to be done in Christian education. Christians need to humbly acknowledge that they have traveled down the wrong road for hundreds and hundreds of years, and unless they’re willing to go back to the right road and pick up where they turned aside, they are never going to make any progress. And someone has got to do that painful work. We can just ignore it and leave it for another generation. But I want to do that work. I want to make this the generation that gets back to the right road.
And thankfully, thankfully, the work that’s needed to get back to the right road is not that great. There’s a lot to learn and a lot of changes to make, but it’s not too much work. We can do it. And I would even argue that it can be done in a single generation. And this is what I’ve been working to do and explain in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy since 2008—17 years ago, when I founded it.
There’s a passage in the Proverbs that I’d like to focus on and share that expresses the point that I’d like to make here. The purpose of this talk is to invite Christian people, to challenge Christian people to be willing to listen to some painful, but honest and edifying criticism. I’d like to challenge my fellow Christians to listen to some painful, challenging, but honest and edifying criticism. And I’d like to say this in light of Proverbs, Chapter 27, verse 6.
Proverbs 27:6. The Scripture reads: “Faithful are the wounds of a friend. Profuse are the kisses of an enemy.” Faithful are the wounds of a friend. Profuse are the kisses of an enemy.
Ever since I started the Classical Liberal Arts Academy, I’ve had people criticize me, call me arrogant, call me uncharitable. One woman said, “All I desire is power over others.” I’ve been called a jerk. I’ve been called foolish. I’ve been criticized by people for 17 years.
Before I started the Classical Liberal Arts Academy, I was never criticized in the schools I taught in. When I was in college, in school as a kid, I was always popular and loved. I was never criticized personally. I was never called arrogant or a jerk or any of these things, until I began teaching about the history of Christian education. Ever since I began teaching about the history of Christian education, I have been called mean, uncharitable, arrogant, nasty, and so on. Never before. Never by anyone other than fellow Catholics.
And the reason why I’m honest enough and realistic enough to understand the reason why is because the message that I share is very uncomfortable, very painful, and I talk about it very frankly, and it makes people upset. And I understand that. I’m not stupid. I understand that. But this proverb tells us what’s actually needed. “Faithful are the wounds of a friend.”
I honestly believe that I’m acting with good intentions, with no selfishness, as a friend, in saying the things that need to be said. I believe that I’m being faithful to my Catholic friends, even if they don’t like it. And we’re all going to have to realize that things are very bad with respect to Catholic education.
I just read in the news yesterday that a Trappist monastery in Europe, which has been around for 900 years, is likely going to be shutting down because there are no vocations. 900 years this monastery has been in operation, but there are no longer any vocations. And everyone is going to pretend that nothing has changed and that this is a mystery.
Trad Catholics who like to say that the Latin Mass is the solution for everything are going to say that this was caused by the Second Vatican Council, but that’s easy to prove false. The problems began much, much earlier than the Second Vatican Council. As I said, the problems began in the 1500s and they’ve just slowly accumulated over the past 500 years. And now we find ourselves seeing the long-term consequences of changes that were made, changes that were accepted, attempts that were made to be friends with our enemies, rather than to continue to teach them and urge them to move in the right direction.
This attempt to be friends with everybody, this attempt to be the smiling nice guy, to be praised for how nice we are, this has produced consequences over the past 500 years that threaten to destroy and erase and unravel centuries and centuries of developed Christian learning and culture. And so to pretend that we don’t need to change anything, to pretend that God is simply causing these failures, as if Catholics have not made significant changes that might actually be the causes of these things, is just not realistic. And we’re going to continue to reap the consequences of these errors if we’re not willing to listen to correction and make changes.
And it’s very difficult. It’s like dealing with debt. Debt is very easy to take on. It’s very easy to be approved for a $500,000 mortgage, $100,000 in student loans, a $50,000 car loan, thousands and thousands of dollars of credit card bills. It’s easy to accumulate debt. It’s very, very difficult to repay debt. It’s very, very difficult to get out of debt.
And when someone comes along to a person who is in great debt and tells them what they need to do to get out of debt, that person’s voice is the last thing that they want to hear. They hate that advice. That’s why they’re in debt in the first place. They don’t want to hear what they should do. They don’t want to be told how they should budget their money. They don’t want to be told that they should take on an extra part-time job or that they’re going to need to sell off their extra cars or sell off their second house or downsize their current house. They don’t want to hear any advice that pertains to eliminating debt. And when they do so, they respond angrily, as if it’s the advisor’s fault that they’re in debt.
It’s very difficult to get out of debt. It’s also like eating. It’s very easy to get fat. It’s very easy to overeat. You can make yourself plates and plates of ice cream. You can make yourself hamburgers, hot dogs, French fries. Go out to dinner and eat plates filled with delicious foods. Drink mocha frappuccinos at Starbucks all day long, and you can put on pounds and pounds and pounds of weight very, very easily, very quickly, and very, very pleasantly.
Losing weight is very, very difficult. When you think that you can put on 50 pounds of fat in a few years of undisciplined eating, and then you learn that each pound of fat is equivalent to 3,500 calories, and then you start to do the math. Recently, my wife was exercising. She got on the treadmill for a little bit. She’s not at all overweight, but wanted to get in a little better shape. She got on the treadmill, and she walked for 30 minutes or so, and she was very happy. And got off, and she came in and told me that she had burned, I think it was 130 calories by walking for a half hour. And I told her that one pound of fat is equivalent to 3,500 calories. It became very discouraging to realize how easy it is to gain weight and how difficult it is to burn that weight.
Or to be told that one needs to fast, and to learn that when you fast, the body goes through phases. First, you’re going to burn off all of the sugar that’s in your blood. Then the glycogen in your liver is going to be converted to replace that blood sugar. And if you continue fasting for an entire 24 to 36 hours, you’ll eventually get through all of your stored glycogen, and then your body will begin to burn fat. And if at that time you take a drink or eat a meal and replenish all of that blood sugar, you’re then going to need to exercise or wait to burn off that blood sugar before you can get to the burning of fat again.
And when you realize how difficult it is to lose weight, to burn fat, compared with how easy it is to gain fat, it becomes very frustrating to hear the instructions or advice of someone explaining to you how to lose weight, because it’s very, very difficult. It takes a long time. It takes great sacrifice. And it’s so easy to put weight on.
The same thing is true with education. Modern education is designed to entertain and please people who have no interest in the real goal of education. Modern education is designed to earn money for school administrators and teachers. Modern education is designed to provide daycare services for working parents or parents who just stay home during the day. School is designed to provide social interactions for kids, to provide extracurricular activities for kids.
What’s completely ignored in modern education is the actual end of education, which is to instruct every individual child, to initiate every individual child into the Catholic life. That’s the true end and goal of Christian education—to initiate every individual child into the Catholic life. That means providing formal catechesis and instruction. That means initiating into the sacramental life. That means initiating the child into Catholic philosophical studies.
And when we go back through history, we can see that this is what wise men and saints were developing, studying, teaching, and promoting all through Church history—the system of education that was developed to serve this end, this end of leading children to know, love, and serve God with His grace. Of course, that system of education was known as the classical liberal arts curriculum.
And when I say the word “art,” don’t think of painting or dancing. Think of a skill that has rules and methods that needs to be studied and practiced for mastery. An art. Think of what we would call today professional crafts, right? The work of a carpenter. Carpentry is an art. Anyone who has physical ability and reason can learn the art of carpentry. There’s a whole science to it. There are ways to do things. There are best practices, as they’re called. And if you have the privilege of learning the art of carpentry from a master carpenter, and you study and work at it, you can gain the art of carpentry. The same is true of all other skills that are capable of being learned.
The traditional system of education was a system of such arts. But these arts were not arts that lead to some kind of mechanical trade or some monetary pursuit and profession. These were arts that enabled one to pursue wisdom in the best way possible, really the only known way possible. And this system of education was called the classical liberal arts curriculum, and it consisted of seven arts that wise men said were necessary for the pursuit of wisdom.
So think about this: Men in history whom we know to be history’s wisest and best men, men who actually obtained the end, most of whom have been canonized as saints and who are in heaven, they told us what needs to be studied in order to pursue wisdom with the hope of success. And what they told us was, we need to study the classical liberal arts. They studied the classical liberal arts. They taught the classical liberal arts. They recommended the classical liberal arts because the classical liberal arts prepare us for the studies that are necessary for the Christian life. They prepare us for the study of true philosophy, and they prepare us for the study of true theology.
So the wise men and saints of the past have told us that there is a course of study that’s necessary for the Christian life. It’s called the classical liberal arts curriculum. It consists of seven arts that need to be studied and learned for the pursuit of true Christian learning.
If we go back through history, we will find that Aristotle taught these seven arts. St. Augustine studied and taught these seven arts. St. Thomas Aquinas studied and taught these seven arts. Again, all through Church history, these seven arts were studied and taught as true Christian education. We can go back through history. You can go on Google, and you can just search “seven liberal arts” and click on the image search, and you can see paintings and sculptures throughout Church history that depicted this classical liberal arts curriculum.
However, if you visit a local Catholic school in 2026—a Catholic school that may be named after Saint Augustine, may be named after St. Thomas Aquinas, who, by the way, is the patron saint of all Catholic schools—you will find a system of education that is not the system that was studied and taught and recommended by the saints after whom the schools are usually named. Modern Catholic schools are not teaching the classical liberal arts curriculum.
Why that’s significant is because this curriculum is known to prepare students for the study of Catholic philosophy. So modern students are not being prepared for the study of Catholic philosophy. The classical liberal arts were also studied and taught because they were known to prepare students for the study of Catholic theology, the teaching of Thomas Aquinas scholastic theology. Modern students are not studying the classical liberal arts, and consequently they are not being prepared for the study of scholastic theology.
So when we look at empty seminaries, when we look at empty monasteries and convents, when we look at these institutions that were built by Catholics living in the past, and we see them declining, we see them emptying, we see them struggling to find vocations—which means interested younger people coming up in the next generation—we can pretend that we’re still doing what we have always done, and we just don’t know by some mystery all of these institutions are struggling. Or we can look at what has actually changed in history and say, maybe this change, maybe this abandonment of the classical liberal arts curriculum is causing a lack of interest in contemplative life, a lack of interest in religious vocations. Maybe that’s why monastic life is in decline. Maybe that’s why there is a vocations crisis today. Maybe that’s why no one’s interested in being a priest or a monk or a nun. Maybe it’s because none of them have received the education that would prepare them to understand, be interested in, appreciate Catholic philosophy or theology.
Something major has changed in Church history. The educational system known to all of the saints we talk about has been abandoned, and it was abandoned hundreds of years ago.
If you listen to my talks regularly, I’m sorry to repeat this, but for those who are new, I’d like to explain when and where this change took place. In the 1200s, St. Thomas Aquinas famously established what is known as scholastic philosophy, or scholastic theology. He demonstrated in his writings in the Summa contra Gentiles, in the Summa Theologica, that Aristotelian philosophy and Catholic theology, or divine revelation, could be woven together to form a perfect system of theology. And this theology that Thomas Aquinas and others, but most famously Thomas Aquinas, wrote out and explained in systematic form, became called scholastic theology. It’s considered the perfection of Catholic faith and moral teaching. We can read it in the Summa Theologica that was established in the 1200s—so 800 years ago.
Once that was established, that spread everywhere as the norm for Christian learning. Remember, there was no Protestantism in the 1200s. There was just Catholicism and heresy. That’s all that there was—true Catholicism and false teaching or heresy. Scholasticism was Christian philosophy.
In the 1500s, a number of movements that all had the same spirit, all had the same source, but had different manifestations, developed which rejected scholastic theology. And it’s very important to understand this: there were a number of movements developing in the 1500s that had at their core a rejection of scholastic philosophy. One of these was the scientific revolution, which rejected Aristotelian natural philosophy. And the other was the Protestant schism, which rejected Catholic theology, which rejected the authoritative interpretation of divine revelation by the Catholic Church, rejected the whole system of religion that existed and developed in the Catholic Church over the first 1,500 years of Church history.
So these two movements—one was secular, one was religious—both of them were rejections of scholastic theology. And it was at that time that this wrong road of modern education was started. And while some saints, some famous Catholic teachers and scholars tried to point Catholics in the right direction, many Catholics—I would say most Catholics—got caught up in the movements of the day and began heading down the wrong road.
Now this is not with respect to theology or the actual sacraments of the Church and so on. They remained in the Church. They remained faithful to Catholic dogma. But with respect to learning and education, they got caught up in the crowd and were sucked down the wrong road with everybody else. And so there began a new age of Catholic education, which involved a rejection of the way of education that was known and recommended by the Doctors of the Church and saints. And they went down this same path with the Protestants and the scientists, trying to come up with a Catholic way, a Catholic solution on this path, which, of course, doesn’t make any sense.
And I would argue that at that time, Catholic education went off the right road, got on to the wrong road. And what we’re seeing today are the consequences of that. Hundreds of years later, this path is a secular path. This path is a Protestant path. This path does not lead to Catholic philosophy. This path does not lead to contemplative living. This path does not lead to Catholic religious vocations. Protestants don’t even believe that monastic life or Catholic religious vocations are real, and that’s the path that modern Catholic education is on.
And I would argue that that’s why there are no religious vocations. Yes, there are some. Yes, there are some. But considering how wonderful and amazing and beautiful the Catholic life is, the number of vocations is next to nothing. If we consider relatively what those numbers should be, given the excellence of Catholic faith and morals, there are relatively no religious vocations. There is relatively no interest in contemplative life. And the reason why is because the system of education that leads Catholics to understand, appreciate, and choose a contemplative life or religious vocation has been abandoned in history.
And this is demonstrable. This is not a theory. It’s not some conspiracy theory. This is a historical fact. We can show exactly where it happened, how it happened, show the difference between the before and after, and see that this is, in fact, what happened.
And so in modern Catholic education, it doesn’t matter if we use different books, if we rearrange the furniture in the classrooms, if we build new modern Catholic schools. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if we homeschool, if we take our kids out of the modern schools and give them this same modern education at home. It’s not going to make any difference. The modern system of education is the cause of the problem, and if we want to make progress, we need to turn around and go back to the right road, or we’re never going to see any improvement.
Now, one of the greatest problems on this modern road of false education is that the Protestants also know that this is a dead end, that this is a failure. And so Protestants have come up with a fake solution. And the fake solution is to argue against modern education—which, again, by the way, came from their movement in the 1500s—but to pretend that they are the opponents of this modern education.
The Protestants say we’re going to go back to the old system of education. We’re going to restore classical education. But it’s a totally fake Protestant idea of education that they’re calling the ancient education, that they’re calling classical education. It’s totally fake. It has nothing to do with the right road of real classical education. It’s a Protestant invention.
And what they’ll do is they’ll simply say modern education has led us to a place where we’re focused on math and science. We’re focused on all these STEM courses and STEM subjects and STEM careers and so on. And what we need to do is go back to classical education. And what they present as classical education is history and literature studies with a little bit of Latin, maybe some Greek sprinkled in.
The problem is that this idea of education, this history and literature study, this encyclopedic learning, is where the wrong road started. It was the rejection of scholastic learning, the rejection of the classical liberal arts, and the transition to a humanities, encyclopedic system of learning that was the beginning of the wrong road of false education. And all Protestants in the 20th and 21st centuries are doing is going back to the beginning of this false education that started in the 15th, 16th, and 1700s. And they’re romanticizing all of it and pretending that this is repairing the ruins of real Christian education, and they call this classical education.
So that’s a danger, because they’re presenting something as a solution, which is actually the cause of the current problem. But there’s something even worse than this fake classical education that’s been invented by Protestants. There’s something much, much worse, and it’s the fact that Catholics, just as they followed Protestants down this road hundreds of years ago, they have done so again. They’re doing it all over again.
Catholics have followed Protestants into this fake classical education. Catholics are now promoting this same fake system of education, which is really just a modern education. They are now promoting it as classical education, and they’re using all of the images and the names. They’re throwing Thomas Aquinas in there. They’re throwing Aristotle in there. They’re talking about Doctors of the Church and the history of the Church, and they’re talking about the trivium and the quadrivium. But they have nothing to do with any of those things. They have nothing to do with those things, just as modern schools can be named after Thomas Aquinas and not teach anything that remotely resembles anything that was ever studied or taught by Thomas Aquinas. These fake classical schools are doing the same thing. They’re doing the same thing, and they just assume, either in ignorance or in dishonesty, that there’s no alternative, that no one knows anything else.
And so not only do we have failed modern education, we also have fake classical education being presented as the solution to this failed modern education, when in fact it is the cause. It is the historical cause of this fake education.
You’ll see this fake classical education referred to as “great books learning.” You’ll see it referred to as a “Socratic method of learning,” all of this nonsense, gimmicky use of terms that are unfamiliar. When really all that it is is a return to the encyclopedic, humanities-based learning of the 1500s that was pursued when scholastic learning, when real Catholic education, was abandoned by both Protestants, non-Christians, and Catholics at the time of the scientific revolution and Protestant schism. They’re literally cycling back to the beginning of their era—error, I can say both, I guess—and pretending that this is the solution, when in fact it is the cause.
So we’ve got a real mess. And I don’t care if you have children enrolled in public schools, in private Catholic schools, in so-called classical private schools, which are no such thing, or if you’re homeschooling and talking about classical homeschooling as a homeschool parent. If you are not returning—and I’m going to make this very objective, and this is where I believe that, though these words may be painful, I am offering them as a faithful friend—if you do not return to the study of the seven classical liberal arts, if you do not return to the study of the seven classical liberal arts, you are in modern education.
It doesn’t matter what you call it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s 16th century modern education, 18th century modern education, or 21st century modern education. If you do not return to the seven classical liberal arts, you are in modern education. It doesn’t matter if your school is called Aristotle Classical Academy. It’s all baloney. It doesn’t matter if it’s named after Thomas Aquinas or Albert the Great or any great Catholic Doctor of the past. If you are not studying the seven classical liberal arts, you are in modern education, and the consequences of modern education is the decline of Catholic culture and Catholic vocations.
This is all demonstrable. I get emails all the time, parents writing to me with all kinds of problems, telling me that we do classical education, we love the classical method, we’ve been using a classical curriculum for 10 years, our children attended a classical school. And I just want to be honest with you: that is all false.
If you have not been in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy, which is the only place where the seven classical liberal arts can be studied, you have not been giving your children or pursuing yourself a classical education. You have been pursuing a modern education, but you may have been pursuing a different phase of that modern education. You may have been pursuing a 16th century modern education, or an 18th century modern education, rather than a 21st century modern education.
And I saw this recently on a school website. Teachers of a classical Academy were being interviewed, and they were asked to identify their favorite classical book, their favorite classical book. The teachers were naming books like Anne of Green Gables, Pride and Prejudice, and so on. They were naming books from the Victorian age and referring to them as classical books. That’s what I’m talking about.
I was looking at a brochure today from the University of Dallas, which is trying to sell classical education, a master’s degree in classical education at the college level. And when you get to this master’s degree curriculum, they have one three-credit course titled “Trivium,” and they have one three-credit course titled “Quadrivium,” and then they have 15 to 20 electives. They have another three-credit course titled something like “Classical Teaching Method.” They recommend the study of books like Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings or John Milton’s Paradise Lost.
And let me just introduce this to think about: from the 1500s, from around this time that I’m talking about, there was so much published that was anti-Catholic and heretical and dangerous to Catholics that the Catholic Church published an Index of Prohibited Books—books that Catholics were not allowed to study because they were filled with dangerous false teachings.
When you look at these fake classical schools and these fake college programs that claim to be promoting classical education, you will find that their curricula are filled with these books that were prohibited by the Catholic Church before the 1960s. So this era, from the time that I’m talking about, when real classical education, when scholastic learning was abandoned by these evil movements in history, when the Catholic Church acted to identify and prohibit dangerous books that were filled with false teaching—that use of an Index of Prohibited Books continued until the 1960s when it was removed. The books that were on that list are commonly being taught to children today as the “great books.”
How stupid can we be?
So you’ve got to be discerning. And again, I know that this is painful. I know that people have invested a lot of time. People have invested a lot of money in this stuff. People have built careers on this stuff. I know there are teachers and school administrators, possibly college professors, who have built careers on this false classical education. And I know that this is difficult to hear, and I know that the initial response is going to try to blame me somehow for saying this, as if my saying this and proving this is somehow uncharitable or nasty or selfish or mean, whatever.
It’s not. It’s true. It has to be said. We have to be honest. We cannot continue making money by selling kids trips down the wrong road in the name of Catholic education. We can’t keep pursuing our own career interests by selling false education. It doesn’t matter if we repackage it, rebrand it, rename it. We can’t continue down this path and just look for ways to make money off of false teaching.
We can’t pretend that the Socratic method means discussing books with students paying tuition in high school and college classrooms. Anyone who thinks that that is the Socratic method has no idea what the Socratic method is. The Socratic method didn’t consist of book studies. I mean, think about it: if you go back and study the Socratic dialogues, were they discussing books together? Was Socrates using class discussion as a way to teach math and science, foreign languages, history, literature? No, that’s not what the Socratic method was.
This is just the rebranding of modern education and using names that modern people are ignorant of to dupe them, to exploit their ignorance and make money off of them, causing them to think that they’re doing something that they’re not doing at all.
The Socratic method is not class discussion, paying college tuition to go live on a campus, sit in a classroom, read books, common books, and discuss them with classmates. That’s not a college education. That’s not a classical education. That’s not something that anyone should be paying money for. You can do that at home. That’s not the Socratic method.
To have things like “truth, goodness, and beauty” spoken over and over again like some kind of magical incantation, and imagine that you’re doing something ancient, you’re doing something sacred, you’re seeking truth, goodness, and beauty—and what that seems to turn into is visiting museums and having socials where you sip wine and eat cheese. Truth, goodness, and beauty isn’t even a part of scholastic learning. Those three terms—truth, goodness, and beauty—belong to Platonic philosophy, not Aristotelian philosophy.
If someone presents those kinds of catch phrases, all this nonsense talk that you just see copied and pasted all over the place, you should know—and again, I don’t mean to sound mean—but they don’t know what they’re talking about.
When you see people use phrases like “human flourishing,” “we’re seeking to promote human flourishing” while charging you $35,000 a year for tuition, you should ask them if they will accept human flourishing as payment for these classes, or if their ability to experience human flourishing will be acceptable to them as remuneration for their work and education. You will find that they will not accept human flourishing or truth, goodness, and beauty as acceptable payments. They want cash. They want money, and you’re a fool to give them your money in exchange for things which are yours by nature as a human being.
If you’re paying tuition to study books at a school or college that you can freely study for the rest of your life, you’re being ripped off. If you go to a college and that college charges you a great tuition, there should be a return on investment on that money spent, and it’s the college’s job to prove that there is such a return on investment.
If you need to go pay college tuition to make friends, you’ve got social problems. If you need to pay college tuition to go to Mass, you’ve got some parish problems. If you need to pay tuition to exercise or play recreational sports, you’ve got some social problems. That’s not what college tuition is for.
If a college is going to demand high-dollar tuition payment, that has to be seen as an investment that leads to a financial, a material reward in the end, because true liberal arts education is not something that anyone should invest a lot of money in. The whole idea of liberal education is that it is pursued for ends that are separate from financial ends, and you can’t invest tons of money in something that doesn’t bring you any return of that money.
College should offer you a few important things. It should offer you instruction from leaders of different fields. If there’s a field that you would like to pursue professionally in the future, it would be good for you to be instructed by a leader in that field, a leading researcher, an experienced expert who can bring you up to speed on the state of that art. That’s what’s valuable about a college education.
The college should provide you with resources that allow you to gain experience in the day-to-day activities of a certain profession that you’re interested in. They should prepare you to move smoothly into that profession when your studies, when the program is over. And thirdly, they should provide you with professional connections that allow you to transition into a successful career in the field that you’re paying tuition for.
If the college can’t do that, it’s a terrible college. It’s no college at all. In fact, that’s what college is for.
I’ll give you an example. I studied at Rutgers University. I wanted to be a teacher and work in classics, teaching classics. My professors were leading classicists. I could go and find their journal articles in the latest editions of professional classics journals. They were serving as board members of different government agencies, contributing to school curricula, and so on. I was being taught by leaders in the field, and I was being brought up to speed on the state of those fields by those teachers.
When it was time for me to work, my professors were able to get me jobs before I even had my degree by writing reference letters to their connections, putting me in connection with people working in the profession, to move from my college study into that profession very easily as soon as I was qualified to do so. That’s what college education should do for a student.
You do not need to go to college for a liberal arts education. You do not need to go to college for a liberal arts education, just like you don’t need to go to college for an education in many different fields, if you’re capable of studying independently and getting to work in those fields.
How many of the leading men and women in technology and business today actually abandoned college studies because they were already successful in their fields? How many selective colleges and universities today look for high school-age students who are already successful in the fields they intend to work in? That’s how college works at the highest level. And often, it can be said that the kids who are going to succeed would have succeeded without college, as long as they had access to resources that would allow them to study and prepare and get into those fields. Often, kids with the ability and interest don’t have those resources. That’s where college becomes valuable.
But to sit around and study literature and talk about it and call that classical education is just nuts.
You can go back and learn what was taught at the University of Paris in the 1200s if you’d like to know. Send me an email and I’ll give you the curriculum. I’ll show you what was studied and taught at the University of Paris in 1225, around the time St. Thomas was teaching there. This isn’t a mystery. This isn’t unknown, unless you’re a pretender. Then it may be unknown, or it may be something that you’d like to just keep concealed.
- Resource: University of Paris Curriculum (1215)
But we’ve got to be honest. Classical education. True classical education means one thing: the study of the seven classical liberal arts.
If you’d like to know what the seven classical liberal arts are, go to the Classical Liberal Arts Academy website, classicalliberalarts.com. On the top menu, you’ll see a link to the curriculum page. Click on the curriculum link. On that page, all seven of the classical liberal arts will be explained. You can know exactly what the classical liberal arts are in about 20 minutes.
You don’t need to go to college and pay for a Trivium course to learn about the trivium. You can learn about it in 10 minutes at home. You don’t need to go have a three-credit course at the University of Dallas to learn about the quadrivium. You can learn about it today in 20 minutes at home by going to the Classical Liberal Arts Academy website.
We have to be honest. If we’re going to restore Catholic culture, if we’re going to increase Catholic vocations, we’re going to have to restore the classical liberal arts. We can do that without any expensive college programs. We don’t need PhDs. We don’t need master’s degrees. This was our inheritance as Catholics. We simply need to get off of this modern road, which is a dead end, and go back—not one generation, not two generations, but all the way back to the point where we wandered off the right road—and we need to pick up where we left off.
And you can do that for nothing, nothing but hard work in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy.
So I invite you, as the founder and headmaster of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy, I invite you to join us, to come and learn about the classical liberal arts. First of all, I have a free book titled Understanding Classical Catholic Education. It’s free. You can come and download a copy and read the whole thing. It’s very easy to read and follow.
And then if you want to actually go beyond just knowing about the classical liberal arts and actually studying them, you can do so in the Academy. I’m happy to let you do so for free. Just contact me. You can also go on and study scholastic philosophy and scholastic theology in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy. It costs next to nothing.
So I’m offering these words, not as a jerk, not as someone who’s uncharitable, but as a friend. I’m offering them as honest and faithful correction as a friend. And I’m not just criticizing. I’m positively inviting you to come and fix the problem. I’m offering to help you financially to do so. But please accept this correction and come back to the right road.
I hope that’s helpful. God bless you.
