This morning I was talking with my wife, and I said, “We need to do a podcast on the importance of text-based study.” We had been discussing it for a little while when an email came in from a prospective parent asking whether the Classical Liberal Arts Academy offers live classes or an online school. It was providential that the message arrived just as I had the subject on my mind, and as I prepared to answer her I decided to take some time and publish a talk on this general topic: the mode of instruction, and how we actually conduct studies in the Academy.
I think there is a way which seems right to men that ends in death — intellectual death, in this case. There are practical, real-world issues here that have to be discussed, because we are thinking about education wrongly, and that puts us on a path that turns out not to be sustainable.
So I would like to introduce a concept, and then talk about how it applies to the different options we have for conducting our studies. I do not think we have as many options as we tell ourselves we have. When you consider the true goals and the true methods of classical Catholic education, you quickly see that there are only one or two options really open to us, and that everything else, however attractive it may look, is simply not sustainable and cannot produce the results we need.
The concept: intellectual efficiency
The term I would like you to hold in your head is intellectual efficiency.
The word intellectual is simple enough. It has to do with the pursuit of learning, the development of the intellect. But the second word, efficiency, has two important components.
First, efficiency has to be productive. That is really what the word means: that it works, that it gets the work done. So we have to have clear goals, and to be efficient means to accomplish them.
But there is more to efficiency than merely accomplishing goals. There must also be a kind of sustainability. It has to be practicable. We can imagine ways of accomplishing a goal that are wildly impractical. If you have ever seen a Rube Goldberg project, where someone takes a simple task like turning off a light switch and builds an elaborate machine of gizmos and gadgets — a very complex system that in the end flicks off the light — you know the sort of thing. You can look up examples online; they are entertaining to watch. But we do not want education to become a Rube Goldberg project, and in many places that is exactly what has happened.
What we have to ask ourselves is this. What are the goals of education as we understand it? What are we trying to accomplish, and how can we accomplish it? That is the first question. And how can we do it in a sustainable way? That is the second. Those two questions together — how the goals can be achieved, and how they can be achieved sustainably — form the concept I would like to promote as intellectual efficiency.
A personal story
Let me begin with a little personal history, to put this in context.
When I was eighteen years old I had something of a conversion experience and became very religious, very spiritually minded. Having been a public school student from an unbelieving, non-Christian family, I felt as though I were in a deep hole and in a great deal of trouble, and I had to work out how to get myself out of it. I had no idea how I was even going to live.
So one night in my bedroom, while I was still at home, eighteen years old and just before I went to college, I lay down on the floor and begged God to give me wisdom. I prayed that God would give me wisdom, because I was overwhelmed by the prospect of adult life and truly had no idea what to do. My parents were not educated; both were simple working people who had grown up in a very different generation, when the world worked differently. I knew I had all sorts of things to accomplish and no knowledge of how to accomplish them. I had no resources, no support, no one to look to for advice. So I begged God, just as the Scriptures teach: if anyone lacks wisdom, let him ask God. It was the only thing I could think to do.
Then, over the next several years, little by little, I made my way into the study of Sacred Scripture and the Christian faith, and eventually into college studies, and things turned out well enough. But through that whole process I never had time, I never had help, and I never had money. I always had to work out how to do things as efficiently as possible. I could not waste time. I could not waste money. I had to know the most efficient way to accomplish my objectives, and that idea came to dominate my thinking and my whole way of life. I became very disciplined. To those looking on from the outside I seemed very disciplined and very focused, but it was because I could not afford to waste any time, any money, any resource or any opportunity. I had to be careful in making my way into adulthood, and that is what I did. I think I made very good and very efficient use of my twenties, working and studying, and got myself onto a good path. But I had to be efficient in my intellectual pursuits.
And what I found, as I worked to study and learn largely on my own — though I had fine resources at Rutgers University and a number of generous professors who mentored me — was how to study efficiently. I think that was the most important skill I learned in school, and I learned it because of my circumstances. One of the things I learned was how efficiently we can study when we study from texts.
Today, in 2026, more than twenty years after those days, I would argue that in all my experience in education, in all my work as both student and teacher, I am still firmly convinced that when all things are taken into consideration there is no better way to study, no more efficient way to study, than to work directly with texts — to learn how to find texts, how to use texts, how to study texts.
And in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy I think I would be doing a disservice to my students and their parents if I did not enforce that as the rule. For the long-term good of everyone involved, and in service of the golden rule that teaches me to do to others as I would have them do to me, I feel bound to teach students, and to require students, to study from texts.
Text still rules
Before I get into the reasons, let me say a few things about technology.
We live in an age of amazing resources: wireless internet, wireless devices, phones, tablets, the internet itself, artificial intelligence. But if you really think about all of these resources, you will see that they are dominated by text. Text is still the ruler of all this technology.
Think about Google. What does Google rely on? It searches digital text. It is all text. Think of the new artificial intelligence platforms — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and the rest. All of their content is drawn from text. Go to a university library and you are dealing with text. Text still rules everything, and I believe it always will.
It is interesting, because we have sayings like “a picture is worth a thousand words,” which would seem to commend images to us — but images cannot compete with text. We think that speaking directly to one another might be better, more efficient, more productive than text; but if we really put it to the test, we find that text is always the most efficient. Speaking to someone may be more convenient in the moment, but in the future you will wish you had that conversation in writing. You will wish it were available as text.
So as we look at our studies, at classical Catholic education, at the seven liberal arts — and see that the whole classical Catholic curriculum begins with grammar — I think we are looking at a timeless reality. We are never going to get away from the value of text. We are never going to get away from text sources. All these other resources are available, and they are all useful; I use all of them, and they are powerful, giving us capacities we have never had before and letting us do things that were simply impossible. But text is still the foundation of all human communication. Text is still the king of communication, and I do not think that will ever change.
For me, as a poor student without direction or resources, who had to work efficiently, text was always my life. And in God’s providence I had the privilege of using digital texts. I am going to make the argument that digital text is the greatest thing that has ever been invented: the ability to type, to save documents in digital formats, to share them — especially as that technology keeps developing, so that now you can share PDF documents, even images containing text, and share all of it even with AI agents. Text can be transmitted and used in so many ways that I think it is more powerful now than ever before, and it will only become more powerful. I do not think text will ever be replaced.
So when it comes to study — to leading children to become great students, to developing scholars and intellectuals — I believe it comes down to teaching individual students how to make the most efficient use of text. The efficient use of texts is, I believe, the most important skill a student can develop.
What I have actually tried
I would not have said that a few years ago. A few years ago I posted a talk in which I suggested that developing technology might make live communication more efficient for education than text. But over the past few years I have worked hard to experiment with the options available to us, and I have found all of them faulty, and none of them worth pursuing.
I want to talk about this, because I am very frequently contacted by prospective and enrolled parents asking about live classes, online schooling and video lessons. As I said, I have at times thought these might be more useful than texts, and I have experimented with them in many ways. I have offered live classes. I have laid out a plan for a virtual school. I have published and experimented with video lessons. And I have always been disappointed with the outcomes.
Not because of the quality of the content. The live classes we had were enjoyable. The students enjoyed them, the parents enjoyed them, the feedback was excellent, and I enjoyed them. That was not the issue. The video lessons have been well received; the Petty School video classes are still one of our most popular courses, though I never intended them to be. Other videos I have made, teaching students to read the Greek alphabet for instance, have been very effective. So I do not deny that they are effective, and quality has never been the problem.
But as I have tested these options, what I have come to conclude is that they are simply not efficient enough to serve our goals in classical Catholic education. They have the same fault a Rube Goldberg project has. You can say that they accomplish a certain task or fulfill a certain objective — but the problem is that we have thousands upon thousands of tasks. They are not efficient enough for the work that has to be done.
Strategy and planning
Last night I was watching a video from a representative of the Harvard Business Review, a periodical I subscribe to and recommend. If you are a small business owner, I strongly recommend it; it is a fine journal that treats all sorts of challenges in business and their solutions, and it is very practical. This man had boiled an article down into a short video, and it was very helpful. He spoke about the difference between a strategy and a plan. You can look the video up if you like — and, by the way, providing summaries and introductions is an excellent use of video. But that is not what we are doing in education.
What he explained is that planning consists of a list of activities you intend to carry out. You lay out plans; you list activities. We are going to do this, then this, then this. This is our plan for the day, for the month. Strategy is different. Strategy is not a list of things we are going to do. Strategy is an explanation of how we are going to accomplish the goal — how we are going to win.
Think of it in terms of sports. We could sit down a group of coaches and players and come up with a plan for a football game this coming weekend. We could say: here is our plan. When we get the ball we are going to do this and this and this. We could script the entire game, every play we intend to run, everything we intend to do on defense. We could have a complete plan for what we are going to do.
But the problem with that plan is that it does not necessarily take into account what our opponent is going to do. And the goal of a football game is not to go out and do what we want to do. That is not the goal. The goal is to beat the opponent. So planning — listing what we will do, scripting our plays — is not sufficient for the task at hand. We have to look at our opponent. We have to know what he is doing. And the question becomes a different one: what do we need to do to win? How are we going to accomplish the goal? And what is the goal? The goal is that when the clock expires we have more points than they do. How will we accomplish that? Because we may need to do things we do not want to do or like to do, things we may not even be good at, but which are necessary to defeat the opponent and win the game.
That is the difference between a strategy and a plan.
When we look at modern schools, and especially at modern homeschool families, we find the language of planning. We find teachers talking about what they are going to do, principals talking about what their schools are going to do, parents talking about what they are going to do. What we do not hear is the language of strategy. What is the goal? What is the contest? What is the necessary outcome? And how are we going to accomplish it in our real circumstances — because there can be no excuses. You cannot say they were bigger, they were stronger, the weather was bad, the referees were against us. You have to overcome every obstacle and achieve the goal. That is strategy.
And when it comes to education, we rarely hear anyone speaking that language. And if we do happen to find someone speaking strategically, we usually find that his goals are not what the goals of Christian education ought to be. He will say, this is what we are going to do to get into this college, or to get this job, or to enter this career. That is not the goal of education. So even when it sounds strategic, it is not really strategic, because the only way to have a truly strategic discussion of Christian education is to identify rightly the true goal, the proper end of Christian education, and then to discuss how we are going to accomplish it.
You see that as we get into this, questions and topics begin to emerge for which we do not have answers prepared — and that is what is wrong in modern Christian education.
So we do not want to talk about education in terms of planning. Nobody cares whether you or I have a plan. What should concern us is whether we have an effective, winning strategy.
Catholics can look back at winners
And here is the advantage we have as Catholics: we can look back on history and identify the winners. They are the wise men and saints of the past — men whose minds were fixed on the true goal of Christian learning, and who accomplished it.
We can look at an ancient philosopher like Aristotle and say that he had a strategy to win, and that in his context, in his generation, he won. We can look at the early Church, at someone like Saint Augustine, and say that he had a strategy for how to overcome his enemy and win, and that he did it. We can read his treatise on Christian doctrine and see a strategy for winning laid out in it.
So we have the advantage of being able to look back over both classical philosophical history and Catholic theological history, to identify the winners, to see what their strategy was, and to see how that strategy applies in our own generation. We can talk not in terms of planning — merely listing what we intend to do, which is irrelevant — but in terms of strategy. We do not have to be wise in our own eyes, or propose what we think might work, or reinvent the wheel, or talk about this the way Protestants do, as though no one had ever lived the Christian life before or worked out what to do and how to do it. As Catholics we are in a far better position, because we have a history of men and women who won. We can look back, see what their strategy was, implement it in our own circumstances, and we will win.
I would argue that the development and the stability of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy is itself a proof that we can and will win if we implement the strategy of the winners who lived before us.
The goal
So we have to look at the goal of education and make sure our minds are fixed on the proper end of Christian education. And when we look at that end, we have to begin with ourselves. I talk about this a great deal: the goal of Christian education is not a matter of what our children need to do, but of what all of us need to do — what the adults need to do. When we look back at Church history we do not see children. We see adults studying, adults arguing, adults writing, adults evangelizing. We see a history of zealous, wise, disciplined, holy adults engaged in study and teaching. So our question is not what the children need to do. That will become very easy once we understand what we, the adults, need to do, what the true end of Christian education is, how the winners pursued that end in the past, and how their strategy can be implemented in our own times.
So we want to talk about strategy, and that begins with the goal. And if we ask what the true end of education is, we have the help of the Baltimore Catechism, which teaches us from our earliest years why God made us: to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this life, and to be happy with Him forever in the next.
So in this life the goal is to know God. Our Lord Himself said that eternal life consists in knowing the one true God. The knowledge of God — that is our end. To know God, and to love Him, which follows upon knowing Him, because it is impossible to come to know God and not to love Him. And then, in response to that love, to serve Him, to submit ourselves freely and voluntarily to His will and do it. To know Him, to love Him, to serve Him — and then, as the end of all that action, to enter into perfect human happiness, to be happy with Him forever in the world to come.
That is the true end. Anything less than that is unworthy of human pursuit and of human education. That is why God made us. That is the end for which we exist. Anything else is inferior to it, and falls short of what we were created to enjoy.
And the reason we sin is that we have been given a desire for so insatiable an end — the end of eternal happiness. Anything we pursue other than that will never be able to satisfy the enormous desire God has placed in us, because He alone was intended to be our end, and He alone can satisfy it. So any other end is inferior and unacceptable for human pursuits.
That has to be the end of our education. And if we look at our curriculum, at what we study, and more importantly at how we study, it has to answer to that end.
What I would argue is that modern schools do not do this. They establish inferior ends. They settle for inferior ends, and then produce a plan of what they are going to do. But because they are not aimed at the true target of Christian education, their plan — even when presented as a strategy for accomplishing some inferior end — is not sufficient. It is not a strategy for the true end of Christian education.
I remember that in the first few years of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy a number of influential Catholics enrolled. They saw the program and what it intended to do, and they were excited and came on board — but they quickly withdrew. One of them, a man who owns a large Catholic publishing company, said that the Classical Liberal Arts Academy is good if you are interested in contemplative life, but that this was not what his family was seeking in a school program. I was told this by the person he had said it to, and I thought: what a flattering criticism. The Classical Liberal Arts Academy is appropriate if you are interested in contemplative life — because that is what we are supposed to be interested in. So I took the criticism as the highest praise. We are on the right track. Our school is criticized because its end is raising students for the contemplative life, and being contemplative adults ourselves.
That is exactly the end of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy, and it is exactly what the end of Christian education should be, because contemplation is simply the knowledge and love and service of God. That is the contemplative life. That is the fulfillment of the great commandment — to love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. That is exactly the end of true Christian education.
One strategy through all of history
We can take that as our goal and be entirely confident that it is the proper end of Christian education. And then we can look back at the history of the winners — the doctors and saints and fathers of the Church, and the wise men who lived before the Christian era — and ask: this was their goal, this was their end; what was their strategy? How did they go about it?
What we find is that the strategy was the same from one generation to the next. This is what I think I show fairly persuasively in Understanding Classical Catholic Education. There has been one strategy through all of human history aimed at this end of knowing, loving and serving God and being happy with Him forever. And I would extend that even back to true philosophers like Aristotle.
That was Aristotle’s end. If you study Aristotle, you know that he is seeking to know how to be perfectly happy; the whole of the Ethics is a treatise on human happiness and how human beings may attain it. He lived more than three hundred years before Christ. He was a Gentile living in Greece. He did not have the benefit of divine revelation as the Jews did, nor the benefit of the Christian faith as later Gentiles did. So when we look at Aristotle we look at a man who did all he could with what his circumstances allowed.
And yet, if we consider his strategy in the context of his circumstances and then jump ahead to Saint Augustine or Saint Thomas Aquinas, we find the same strategy under different circumstances. The strategy was to work out how to come to know God, and to answer the questions of man’s origin — where did man come from; of man’s nature — what was man made for; and of man’s end — what is his final destination. The knowledge of that end was the goal. It was Aristotle’s goal in his philosophical investigation — and he it was who discovered and taught the art of reasoning, which is man’s greatest tool in that pursuit. Aristotle’s strategy was to use the faculty of reason, together with the remarkable senses we have been given, to rule out every false option and seek true happiness.
Jump ahead to Saint Augustine in the Christian era and we find the same strategy in different circumstances. Augustine lives three centuries into the Christian era, after so much revelation has been received, after the perfection of revelation in Christ Himself, and after the gift of the Holy Spirit poured out upon the Church. So we see a great deal of new activity in Augustine’s life, but the same core strategy that was present in Aristotle’s. Augustine pursues human happiness by means of human reason and observation, but now with the assistance of divine grace, of divine revelation, and of the collected wisdom of the Church. Same goal, same strategy, different circumstances.
Go to Saint Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, some eight hundred years after Augustine, and we find the same goal and the same strategy in different circumstances again. And those circumstances included the rediscovery of the writings of Aristotle, which led to the development of scholastic philosophy. So we have the perfection of this method brought about by Saint Thomas and others, most importantly Saint Albert the Great.
Then go two hundred years further, into the 1500s, and we meet all these terrible revolutions. There is the scientific revolution, a rejection of Aristotelian philosophy. There is the Protestant schism, a rejection of the authority of the Church. And what is the proposed remedy for these attacks on the Catholic faith and the Catholic Church? The Jesuit order rises up and commits itself to preserving and promoting scholastic education. We have Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s famous observation that the devil is a sophist, and that the way to fight him is by Aristotle’s method of reason. If we strengthen ourselves in the use of reason, if we discipline our senses by living temperately, and if we follow the guidance of the Church and trust her authority, we will be led into all truth and obtain our end, which is eternal happiness.
We see this all through history. Again, I go through it in detail in Understanding Classical Catholic Education. We see the strategy of true education, and we see changing circumstances that make it appear different on the surface — but the same strategy, with many of the same practices and the same methods. Because, as I said when I began the Academy, the truth never changes. God never changes. Human nature never changes. The world we live in never changes. Therefore wisdom, and the knowledge of God and man and the world, will never change. The core curriculum will always be the same. And because of the nature of man, the method of study will always be the same. Circumstances may change, but the core never does. The changes that occur are accidental and superficial. They are very shallow. They are not what they seem.
Nothing new under the sun
So when we look at all this technology, we have to look at it with the attitude of Solomon, who said there is nothing new under the sun.
Everything we see today has been seen before. We might object and say that no one ever saw this — no one ever saw Facebook, no one ever saw ChatGPT. But yes, they did. When we boil these things down to their essentials, they have been seen before. The printing press was like these things. The highways that were built so that messengers could travel and carry information and goods were an ancient form of the internet. The same idea, the same concept, the same benefits, different only in their practical details — perhaps in the speed at which they could be conducted, but the concept and the benefit were the same. Do we really need to go faster? Do we really need to communicate faster? Do we really need access to more? There was always a need to look at a new technology, work out how to make good use of it, and ignore the hype and craziness that came with it. We face exactly the same scenario today.
I recently sent out an article on the future of education in the age of artificial intelligence, along with a set of videos I posted on the Academy website. They were put together by a man who is a professor at NC State University, here where I live, and who worked for IBM for more than forty years. He explains what artificial intelligence is, how it is going to change education and how it is not. His conclusion — and I recommend those videos strongly — is that artificial intelligence is going to lead us away from STEM education, which was really a distraction, and bring into focus our dependence on a strong education in the humanities. In other words, the classical Catholic curriculum is going to be brought into focus as the most important form of education, precisely because of the benefits artificial intelligence makes available to us. It is a very interesting discussion, and I recommend you take the time to listen to it.
But the goal is the same, the strategy is the same, and the circumstances are different — though not entirely different. So when we come to our own generation, to 2026 with all this craziness breaking loose, we will hear people announcing that this is the end of the world, that this is the mark of the beast, that this is the great deception of the final age, that this technology was never conceived of before, that perhaps it is from aliens, perhaps it is demonic. This has happened at every great advance of technology in the past. We have to ignore all of the hype, all of the gloom and doom, all of the people interpreting Bible verses and end-times prophecy. Ignore all of that, and look at these things with the disposition of Solomon. There is nothing new under the sun. We face the same temptations, the same problems and the same obstacles that Christians faced in the first century, and that Aristotle faced centuries before Christ. We have to see through all the smoke, all the distractions, all the baubles and bric-a-brac of this technology, and focus on the essential nature of what is being developed — what actually changes and what does not — and make prudent use of it. That is our challenge in 2026.
So there is an initial jumping to conclusions: this is going to change everything, this needs to change everything, we must rethink everything, nothing will be the same. That is false. And then there is the opposite reaction: we must reject the technology altogether, ignore it, go back to printed books and cursive handwriting. That is equally false. The truth is always in the balance, because we have to know what the principles are, what the goal is, what the strategy is, and then look at the practical details of our circumstances and work out how to follow the strategy and win. We have somewhat different opponents — essentially the same, but practically different — and we have to learn to fight the opponent of our own generation.
Why live classes fail
So we see this technology and immediately begin to think that everything is going to change. We are going to have live online classes, meeting rooms, everyone working together online, because the technology is now available and therefore that must be what needs to be done. That is false. We are going to have videos now; we can do away with text; we can all be visual learners; we can have video and audio and all this multimedia. No more reading, no more books, no more papers, no more documents — everything on video. False.
And the reason is that in order to achieve the goal and implement the strategy, we have to be efficient. These methods — live online classes, video lessons — are possible today. They may not have been possible in the past. But if we evaluate them in an absolute way, standing on their own, we may say: how helpful this was! We had a live class, it was wonderful, the children got together, they met other children, Mr. Michael was able to work with them and teach them, they had a fine discussion.
We are looking at that class in isolation, and not looking at the goal or the strategy. Because if we look at the goal and the strategy, we find that the live class accomplished very little. If we get down to it, the children did not do anything that needs to be done to move forward in the service of that strategy. They did not actually get any work done. So what happens? The children have their class, we have all this activity, we have the meeting — and then not one of them has done any work of his own. None has demonstrated his knowledge of the topic or the lesson or the content. So they are all sent off afterward to work individually, to study for themselves and develop and demonstrate their mastery.
The question, then, is whether the live class is helping the students, or whether it is actually an obstacle, making their study and progress inefficient and unsustainable. My argument is that live classes make individual mastery too slow. They get in the way. They take away from what the student should be focused on, and they distract him. Instead of putting all his attention on his academic tasks — by which he himself, as an individual, studies and reads and memorizes and recites and develops his mastery through assessments and writing — we are really just spending time on the class.
And then there are the practical realities. Parents will not commit to regular attendance. The children may not be paying attention during the class anyway. It is all going to come down to independent individual study in the end. And if that is the case, then let us get the live class out of the way and help these children with their essential tasks, their individual mastery activities. That is what I want them to do, and that is how the Classical Liberal Arts Academy is designed to work.
Why videos fail
Exactly the same is true of videos. I can put together an hour-long video, and it can be beautiful and it can be effective. But we are evaluating that video in isolation, without thinking about what actually has to be accomplished, without thinking about the strategy. So yes — this video, which took me two nights to produce and which a child can watch in an hour, may teach him one concept. The problem is that there are thousands upon thousands of concepts. In isolation the video may be enjoyable and may seem effective; in the context of the goal and the strategy, it is not efficient. That is the problem.
So we end up with all sorts of interesting resources and activities — entertaining, engaging, pleasant, beautiful activities and products and services. And if we evaluate them individually, which is exactly what the educational market does, everything gets judged in isolation, in absolute terms, with no reference to the goal or the strategy. All the product reviews are like this. And we get distracted by all of it. We are not asking what the true goal is, what the strategy is, and, most importantly, how we can actually accomplish it in our circumstances.
Something may be beautiful but impractical, and therefore useless. Something may be entertaining, engaging and informative but not efficient enough to serve the goal, and therefore unacceptable. The content of study, the method of study and the resources of study all have to be aimed at the goal. They all have to be aligned with the strategy by which we intend to accomplish it. Otherwise we do not accomplish the goal and we do not fulfill the strategy. We simply spend our time talking about the good experiences we have had.
Let me give an example. I remember one day in sixth grade mathematics, my teacher, Mrs. Krafsky, came into class and put an amazing diagram on the chalkboard that covered the whole width of the room. She drew a great house, an elaborate drawing with three levels and all sorts of people and scenes, in order to teach us the names of the units of measure in the metric system, from millimeter up to kilometer. She had a whole elaborate system, a story she told, in which each unit was a different character.
I can think back to sixth grade and remember Mrs. Krafsky taking an entire class period, with that elaborate drawing, to teach us the names of the metric units. But she did not teach me mathematics. And that is what happens. I can look back and ask: was Mrs. Krafsky a good teacher? If you think that learning the names of the metric units by means of an elaborate, entertaining, class-long illustration is helpful in an isolated way, then yes, she was a good teacher of that one thing. But was she a good teacher of mathematics? No. I do not remember learning anything else in that class.
It is that kind of isolated activity that becomes what we talk about in education, while we are not actually achieving the goal and not actually following the strategy. We are just talking about the products we liked, the experience we enjoyed, the lesson we remember — all of these isolated things, none of which serves the purpose, none of which is aligned with the end. That is why they have to be rejected.
It is easy enough to see. If you are sent out into the yard to collect five leaves, you can build a Rube Goldberg machine that collects five leaves over the course of six days. But if you have to clear every leaf off the lawn, bag them, and put them out at the street, and you have one hour to do it, that method is useless and has to be rejected. It is not cute. It is not fun. It is completely impractical. It does not serve the goal and it is neither prudent nor reasonable. You have to find a way to get all the leaves picked up and bagged and at the roadside in one hour, and any method that does not serve that end is simply useless in that context.
That is how we need to learn to think about education. We have a very demanding goal. We have a strategy that is proven, but that is admittedly difficult. And we have resources available that can help us. But we have to reject anything, however cool or clever or charming, if it does not serve the end. It has to be efficient, because the route we have to travel is long and winding and difficult.
And what we will find, for all the tools available — and they may help us on different days and in different ways — is that the most efficient means of pursuing the true goal of Christian education, according to the strategy of wise men and saints, requires that we learn, especially while we are young, how to study from texts. That skill is what will make it possible to serve the strategy and accomplish the goal.
A little religion is dangerous
And if we do not learn it — if we play with videos, which is a special danger to wealthier families, because they can afford all manner of clowns and dancers and jugglers to perform for their children — if we do not learn to study and make progress efficiently, we will never make significant progress. And that puts us in a dangerous position.
If we introduce our children to Christianity, but not enough of it, we put them in a very difficult position. They have spent all this time learning a religion, but did not learn enough of it to benefit from it or make use of it in adult life. So they are left wondering what the actual benefit of this religion is. I spent all this time, and I have nothing that helps me deal with the real challenges of adult life. The children end up in a dangerous situation where they have some, but not enough.
It is said in the sciences that if a child learns a little bit of science he will become an atheist, and that in order to appreciate scientific learning within a Christian worldview he has to progress deep into the study of nature. A little science is dangerous. I would argue the same of religion. A little religion is dangerous.
Consider what we hear people say: “I went to Catholic school and we did not learn anything. Then I started reading the Bible on my own. I left the Catholic Church and became a Protestant, and now I know the truth.” What do we all think when we hear that? We think: you did not learn the Catholic faith. That is why you left the Catholic Church — because a little religion is dangerous. And now that man walks around telling himself and others that he learned the Catholic faith, and it is not true.
So if we are going to commit to Christian education, we have to go all in, and we have to make sufficient progress for the benefits of that education to become available to our children, and to us as adults as well. We have to make progress in grammar so that we can actually read the languages. We have to make progress in logic so that we can compose sound arguments and take apart false ones. If we cannot do that, the time spent in logic is wasted — better than nothing, perhaps, but not enough to help us. If we learn a little rhetoric but not enough, we have a few interesting ideas in our heads but cannot compose an effective essay or deliver an influential speech.
So the problem of inefficient learning is a serious one. We have to be focused on the goal, implementing the strategy of wise men and saints, and working efficiently enough to get far enough in these studies that we actually gain their benefits and can use them in adult life. Otherwise we are stuck. And that is what is happening in Christian circles, especially where there is a fake classical education, or where parents are merely dallying with homeschool material and doing a little of the Academy’s work, so that the children never make sufficient progress to gain the benefits of the curriculum that wise men and saints recommend to them. That is very common.
Methods have to be realistic
We have to pursue this learning for its end, and follow the strategy of wise men and saints in order to do it — because there is a time limit. Our resources are limited. Our circumstances put real constraints on the time we have, the resources we have, and the physical and mental energy we have. We cannot simply do things our own way and think there will be no consequences.
I hear parents talking all the time: my child has this learning style, and so on. You had better hope that is true — because if it is not, and you are doing all these strange things, that child is going to be hung out to dry with no education, because you followed some fad in modern education instead of listening to the counsel of wise men and saints.
So the discussion of methods matters. We cannot fall into the relativism of modern society and say that whatever anyone says is right, that mother knows best, father knows best, the counselor knows best, and whatever they say may be true. There are ways to evaluate these things and know what is true and false. There are ways to test these theories.
If you do not have the financial resources to hire master tutors to guide your child through his lessons, then tutoring is not an option. It does not matter what the child likes or dislikes; you do not have the resources, and those tutors may not even exist. I often laugh when people tell me what they plan to do, because the resources they describe do not exist. I do not know who these people are who are going to do these things — they do not exist. Methods have to be realistic. Tutoring is very expensive. If you are not extremely wealthy, you are not going to have the resources to hire skilled adults to teach your children and to get through the quantity of study that has to be completed for the children to gain the benefits of it.
What happens then is that you commit to your methods and then begin making excuses and lowering the standards, because you cannot get done what needs to be done. So you say: well, it is good enough that he has a high school diploma. It is good enough that he got into the community college and can start there. It is good enough that we got through these subjects. Good enough. Good enough. He was able to get a job. You have abandoned the goal of education, because you made your methods the governing thing, and abandoned the goal and did not listen to the strategy of wise men and saints.
I am sorry if I sound as though I am complaining. I only want to communicate why we cannot allow this wishy-washy, everything-is-fine talk to go on in education. There are real goals. There is a real quantity of content that has to be learned before these studies become beneficial to children. If we do not accomplish that quantity, if we do not reach that level in the time we have and the circumstances we have to deal with, we will be left in a difficult position.
And again, I am not saying that this position is worse than complete neglect of these studies. I think it is better. It is good for children even to be familiar with these things, to know where the truth is if they should ever want to seek it. But what we ought to be talking about in education is how to achieve the goal and give these children the benefits they need, in the limited time we have with them and with the limited resources we have. And to do that, every discussion of methods has to take this concept of intellectual efficiency into account. It has to be efficient. It has to be productive of the end. And it has to be sustainable and realistic.
We cannot sit here treating our children’s education as an experiment in which we test theories. People have already won this race, and they have told us how to win it. We need to follow their instructions and implement their strategy. And so these things that seem as though they would be entertaining and enjoyable and helpful are simply not efficient enough for what has to be done.
How the Academy is designed
Now, looking at the Classical Liberal Arts Academy — and I will finish with this point — you will see that I have designed the study center to focus children and their parents on tasks. Everything is focused on tasks. Read this lesson. Complete this quiz. Complete this assessment. Move on to the next lesson. Read the lesson, complete the quiz, complete the assessment, move to the next lesson. We have to be practical, focus on tasks, and work efficiently.
I see homeschool parents who are looking to play school, and so they take a single lesson from an Academy course — a single Latin vocabulary lesson, say — and instead of working through it efficiently and moving on to the next, they turn it into a kind of homeschool theme park. Is it fun? I am sure it is. Do the children learn that lesson and remember those words? I am sure they do. But it is Mrs. Krafsky’s mathematics lesson all over again. There were a hundred lessons, and she taught one.
That is what happens in this misguided and, I would say, imprudent educational culture. We are judging individual lessons not with reference to the goal, but in isolation, by themselves — which makes no sense, because education is directed at an end. That end is the fulfillment of human happiness: to know God, to love Him and to serve Him in this life. That is the goal of education. The strategy for pursuing it is the classical Catholic curriculum, and I can show you that through the whole of Christian history; again, Understanding Classical Catholic Education does that in detail. But everything has to be considered in the light of intellectual efficiency.
What is wrong with modern Catholic schools? Do they have fine drama programs? Fine sports programs? Are the buildings beautiful? Do the children have plenty of social activity? Yes, all of that is fine. But they are intellectually inefficient. The children do not get through the studies they need in order to have available to them, as young adults, the benefits that the saints and wise men say they need.
And this, I would argue, is why we have a vocations crisis, and why no one is interested in contemplative life. It is not that they reject contemplative life. If you were to go and talk with eighteen-year-old Catholics, you would find that they do not even know what contemplative life is. They do not understand it. They cannot describe it. What they have learned about the saints has nothing to do with the saints’ actual daily lives or with what their contemplative life consisted of. It may be some interesting miracle or some amusing story about this saint or that one, but they do not learn about the life of the saints — their regular life of prayer and study and devotion. That is not what is talked about, and it is not what is experienced. It is no surprise that there is so little interest in, or even awareness of, contemplative life and religious vocations. It is simply not on the radar. And I believe there is a reason for that: we are not following the strategy of wise men and saints with respect to education.
Conclusion
So, to wrap this up. This is why — as much as I personally would love to have live classes with the children, and my wife will tell you I talk about it all the time; I would love to read Latin and Greek with them and discuss the Catechism and the Bible, I would love it — it simply does not get the work done for them that needs to get done. I would love to make videos, but videos are produced so slowly that they would be limited to a few courses, and in the long run they would not move us toward the goal.
You could say: why not hire more people? That only multiplies the cost of doing more of the same inefficient things. We do not need more staff. We do not need more faculty. We need more focus in our work. It is very simple, very affordable for everyone, and very efficient.
And we need to ask ourselves: is the chief end actually my goal? If it is, then is the strategy revealed to us by wise men and saints the strategy I am following? If it is not, we have to fix that. And if it is, then we have to accept that there will be things we do not particularly like, but which are simply the way things need to be done — because there is more to life than our own pleasure. We have to follow the counsel of wise men and not be wise in our own eyes. We have to do what wise men advise, even when it is unpleasant, and trust in their wisdom, and trust that the outcome will be pleasant even if the process is not.
So that is why, in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy, we are not going to offer live online classes. We are not going to develop an online school program. And we are not going to invest time and resources into video lessons. Students need to learn how to study from texts, because they need to study efficiently in order to make sufficient progress in their classical Catholic studies to gain the benefits that will actually help them in this life.
I hope that is helpful. God bless.
