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Today is August 5, 2024 and this is William Michael, the headmaster of the classical liberal arts academy. I feel bad for modern students, because most of them are being robbed of the opportunity to enjoy education like it’s never been available in world history, and they’re being robbed by teachers and by parents who don’t study and because the teachers and the parents don’t study, because they themselves are are either averse to studies or they’re distracted by all sorts of pursuits in life other than study when The time comes to educate children, which in our society is legally required, because we have compulsory education laws, when it comes time for education, the teachers And the parents not being students themselves, subject the children to all kinds of chaos for all kinds of reasons, and students, despite being in school or or even home schooled for 1213, years, accomplish almost nothing academically, and yet during those 12 years or so, they are constantly busy, but none of the busyness of their education is productive, and they never actually learn to study.
f you look at the culture of modern schools, what you’ll find is endlessly increasing prices, endlessly increasing tuition costs, without any increase in achievement. Schools are allowed to do this because of these compulsory education laws, because parents who are going to send children to school have no choice but to accept whatever the schools make available. And so if the tuition goes up to $5,000 a year, $10,000 a year, $30,000 a year, $60,000 a year. The parents have to come up with ways to pay the tuition. Or, of course, they can just send the kids to a public school and not pay any tuition at all. But again, they’re stuck accepting whatever the schools happen to offer and accepting that as the new normal. These schools endlessly raise prices, and for the public schools, they just endlessly demand more and more funding. The teachers endlessly complain that they’re not paid enough, even though, if we consider their pay relative to the fact that they only work half the year, they actually are paid very well, and the fact that education is a work of mercy, instructing the ignorant is supposed to be done as a work of mercy. They see it as just a means of high living, of earning a great salary, of having all kinds of benefits, retirement plans, vacation plans and so on. They don’t see education as a work of mercy, the prices, the costs of education, just multiply year by year, and there’s never any increase in the results produced by these schools. And the same thing is true in homeschooling.
What’s amazing to me is that homeschool parents accept the idea that a home school enrollment should cost almost the same as a private school enrollment homeschooling, if parents are doing the work of School Administrators, of teachers, of tutors, of lunch ladies, of janitors and on and on. If parents are doing all of that work and the home is the school facility, how in the world can the costs of home schooling be anything remotely close to that of private school? It makes no sense at all, but the homeschool programs design their programs to make money and not to produce results, and so whether children are in schools or whether they’re homeschooled, it’s the same circus culture, this same educational industry culture that runs things, and I’ll argue that parents are largely to blame, because parents as the consumer. If we do look at education as a business, parents are the consumer, parents are the customers, and the customers are always right, because they decide what gets done and what doesn’t. Parents decide what program or school they enroll in and what programs or schools they don’t enroll in.
So ultimately, parents do control everything, but parents are often limited by a number of factors. Number one, they just don’t know what to do. So ignorance can be a hindering factor for parents. Another factor is just necessity. You know, if, if two parents have to work, not that I believe they ever do, but if, if parents think that they both have to work and therefore sending the child to school is necessary, they’re going to face limited options, whether those limitations are financial or whether they’re just geographical. They’re going to have to choose from what’s available, even if there happens to be a decent school in the area, enrollment may be full, and so schooling isn’t necessarily a free choice. So they may have to choose a school based on what’s available, feeling that it’s necessary. And then, if they homeschool, they may again have to choose what they what they from what they know of. They may feel like it’s a necessary choice, because they don’t know all the options but, but even more seriously, many of the parents who have to choose schools or study programs for their children don’t study themselves, and so they have their own aversions to studying, which influence their decisions when they choose how to educate their own children. So when we mix all of these problems in this big pot of modern education, we get a real mess.
Now what I’d like to suggest, and I know that most people won’t like this message, but I want to suggest it because it’s true and right and actually provides a real solution to the problem of education in this generation, I’d like to explain how parents should think about educating their children and how that will solve all of The problems that they face.
There’s a general principle in education that says you cannot give what you do not have. We all know that hypocrisy is a great problem in religion. We see it grossly on display in modern politics. Hypocrisy has to be rooted out of our lives. We cannot tell other people to do things that we ourselves don’t do. We cannot hold others accountable to standards that we ourselves don’t follow. Hypocrisy is the first problem we need to address. And secondly, that the other principle, you cannot give what you do not have. We have to pursue the things that we desire to give to our children, whether they’re virtues, whether they’re good manners, whether their study goals, whatever it may be, we’ve got to pursue the things which we wish to give to our children. We cannot give what we do not have. And in order to do these things, it really doesn’t come down to financial costs. These things are really very affordable.
The problem that develops financially is that the aversion to study, ignorance, false ideas about what’s necessary and so on, creates a. Creates an imagined pressure that leads to great expenses and all kinds of confusion that could simply be avoided. But what parents have to learn is how to think of education rightly, because education is actually very, very simple and very affordable, especially in our generation, and that’s what I’d like to explain in the classical liberal arts academy.
What I’m trying to present to families is the opportunity to study in the most efficient manner possible. There’s no nonsense in the classical liberal arts academy. We’re not going to do things that are unnecessary for education. We’re not going to fill students time with busy work as modern schools do. We’re not going to multiply study materials or resources so that we can make more money selling more stuff to parents. We’re not trying to generate salaries for teachers or for administrators. We’re trying to lead students through studies as efficiently as possible, and that gives parents many benefits, but parents have to make sure that they don’t become obstacles to their children’s opportunities.
The main way that they become obstacles is by being a verse to the culture necessary for study, the culture that’s necessary for study is a quiet, consistent culture. It’s a quiet culture. It’s a consistent, daily culture. You can’t run around all over the place, you can’t be involved in a million different things. You can’t be a social butterfly. You’ve got to be focused on study, and you’ve got to work consistently, day by day, and you need a quiet environment to do that. Think of a library. Think of a monastery. You can’t have a chaotic environment. You can’t be running all over the place. You can’t be wrapped up in busy work running in every different direction. You’ve got to be focused on necessary tasks. You’ve got to maintain a quiet environment that’s conducive to study, and you’ve got to maintain a consistent schedule. You’ve got to give the children the opportunity to chip away at great subjects little by little over a long period of time. That’s that’s what’s necessary for great achievement. In studies, many parents are averse to that culture.
Many parents are looking for social activity for themselves. They want their home school program to be like a ladies Club, where they can get together with all the ladies and talk and hang out and let the kids play while they sit around gabbing with the with other mothers. That’s not education. That’s got nothing to do with education.
Many people just want to use education as an excuse to buy lots of stuff, because they enjoy consumer culture. They enjoy shopping. They like buying stuff. They like having the Amazon truck or the UPS truck show up at the house every day with new stuff so they can have their unboxing ceremonies. But that’s got nothing to do with education. Many even like to use religion as an excuse running all over the place for all kinds of religious activities, church activities and so on. But when we’ve undertaken the work of home schooling. We’re responsible for the actual academic work of our children, and none of those things are necessary. What the children need to make significant progress in education is quiet, consistent work. That’s the only way to actually make progress. You can keep yourself busy. You can multiply all kinds of meaningless activities. You can collect all kinds of resources and books and all of this homeschool clutter but the the meter is not moving with respect to actual academic progress, and the only way for that meter to move is to actually study. And for many parents and I see this all the time, I have to fight against it all the time. And I see parents who act as if they’re going to go crazy if they just focus on helping their children study because they don’t study themselves.
Now, when you come to the classical liberal arts academy, our goal is very different than that of other schools and other homeschool programs. We’re not trying to build the most profitable business possible. We’re not trying to employ 100 people. We’re not trying to create social activity for homeschool moms. We’re not trying to create great conferences that we can make money off of by gathering people together to talk and share all kinds of products and socialize. We’re focused on studies and real academic achievement.
Children don’t need all kinds of resources. They don’t need all kinds of activities. They don’t need a million experts to help them get an education. They need to study. And study comes down to a few very simple skills. First of all, students need to learn to read. They need to learn to read, not graded readers, so they can check off a grade level box and say, hey, I can read at a second grade level. Hey, I can read at a fifth grade level. That’s all meaningless. Students need to learn to read so that they can study without the need for unaffordable, unsustainable living teachers.
The idea that students need living teachers is the great lie of modern education. The whole reason why literacy is important is because the ability to read allows us to study anything. We can study anything if we can read. But there’s a certain level and discipline of real reading that’s required for study.
We’re not talking about leisure reading. Leisure reading is like watching television and flicking through the channels. Leisure reading is like surfing the web and watching videos scrolling through social media. Leisure reading is not real reading. It’s not the kind of reading that’s necessary for study, and we’ve got to be careful that we don’t confuse leisure reading with real study, with real reading. Academic reading. Many parents get the idea that if their children like to read books, they’re doing well, and by books, they mean storybooks, entertaining books, books from the library and so on. But most parents like that, because it just keeps the kids occupied. The kids are quiet, they’re busy, they’re not in trouble. And we say, Oh, this is great, because Tommy loves to read, and what that really means is Tommy likes to go and and sit with books and be quiet and stay out of the way. But that’s not real study. Real study.
Real reading is the ability to learn from books. And when we talk about books, we’re talking about books that introduce real academic subject material. So for example, the ability to read a grammar book and learn the art of grammar, that’s real reading. The ability to read a math book and learn arithmetic or learn algebra, that’s real reading. The ability to read a history book and learn history, or to read a philosophy text and learn philosophy, that’s what we mean by reading. Students have to learn to read at a level that allows them to learn their necessary subjects by reading. So that’s the first thing. Now, that kind of reading is not enjoyable leisure reading, it’s work. And we’ve got to understand that study is really work. Study is work and children need to learn to cultivate a good Christian work ethic in order to learn and study again.
When we look at the parents, we may find that the parents themselves don’t. Have a good work ethic, we may find that the parents themselves don’t have the discipline to read and study, and that makes it very difficult for the children to develop those disciplines, because the house is chaotic when you have mom and dad looking to constantly entertain themselves, constantly talking about food and games and social activities and other there’s no chance of real study, and this is common in many homeschool environments. Parents may be motivated to homeschool by their political views. Mothers may be motivated to homeschool by their social ambitions, but there’s not a real commitment to study. The home is not conducive to study. It’s not like a library, it’s not like a monastery, it’s a circus. What the children need is the opportunity to study. They need to be able to cultivate the discipline of academic reading. If they can’t do that, all talk of learning is over because the idea that you’re going to hire experts to verbally teach them everything that needs to be learned is just not sustainable.
You’re not going to be able to do that also because we have programs like Khan Academy or IXL that give the kids all of these dumb, dumb activities to work on endlessly. Parents think they’re going to use those things, and the kids are just going to work by themselves. Those programs accomplish nothing. You can learn that the hard way. Or trust me when I tell you, those student directed programs, with all of the awards and all of the busy activity that seems to be going the kids don’t actually learn or achieve anything over time. So that whole dream of just having kids who are constantly busy with with books and school materials, or with school websites and learning websites and all of this, this dream of just busy, active students, kind of choosing their own adventure, exploring their own interests, and so it never, ever produces results. It doesn’t work.
In order to make real academic achievement, real academic progress, students need to learn the discipline of academic reading, and they need to be able to move into more and more advanced texts, with the goal being to study St Thomas Aquinas or Aristotle directly through reading. If they can learn to do that, if they can learn to learn through reading. There’s no limit to what they can study. There’s no limit to what they can learn. And that’s the goal. So in the classical liberal arts academy, we’re working to promote real academic reading, real literacy, and that’s the foundation of all real learning. Always has been, always will be.
Now, when a student learns to read and study, the second thing that he needs is the opportunity to have his learning assessed. He needs to have the opportunity to develop his his knowledge and to demonstrate his knowledge, and he needs to be able to subject himself to assessment from someone outside of his own family, because there’s obviously a conflict of interest with a child being assessed by his mother, and if a child’s going to apply to College or some other destination after school and and the evaluator of his progress is going to be mom. It’s going to be held in suspicion, and he’s going to need to provide external sources of assessment anyway to confirm his achievements. So having having a parent assess the work is not a good idea. What the student needs is to have someone who is experienced in the subject, who is outside of his family, assess his work and provide verification. To certify that he has, in fact, made progress in his studies, to verify the quality of his study. So he needs assessment. But this assessment can be very simple.
Many people, when they think of assessment today, they think of all kinds of wacky school activities, science projects, Scantron tests, standardized tests, quizzes, all kinds of stuff that schools do, but none of that is necessary for real assessment. Real assessment can be very simple, because when we choose excellent textbooks that present students, or not necessarily textbooks, but source texts for a subject. When we choose excellent source texts, wherein the content is known to be excellent, systematic, comprehensive and so on. All we need to know is that the student is learning the content of that book. And when we know that, we can be sure that the student is making progress, because the book is excellent itself. It’s written by a master to study moral philosophy. When the book is written by Aristotle himself, simply requires knowledge of that book to obtain mastery of that subject, to learn the Catholic faith from the Catechism of the Catholic Church. When we know that the Catechism is a systematic, comprehensive presentation of Catholic faith, all we need for assessment is to know that the student is learning the content of that book. And so assessment can be very simple. Assessment can simply allow the student to demonstrate that he is in fact, studying and learning the content of the assigned text. And that’s why in the academy, you’ll find very simple assessments.
Now it’s it’s very funny, because, again, many parents, older students and so on, are used to modern school environments, which have all kinds of of problems and troubles, and they assume that those troubles exist outside of those schools, outside of other homeschool programs, and that they’re not just a part of the problem of those programs themselves. And so when they come to something like the academy, they say, Well, how can, how can assessment be so simple? How can assessment be so simple? How come there aren’t answer keys and tests and all of these things? How can assessment be so simple? And there’s a there’s a number of answers to that question.
In modern schools, teachers don’t even need to know the content of the lessons. They don’t even need to have studied the lessons. They’re given textbooks. They’re given teachers manuals that tell them what to do in class. They’re given premade tests and quizzes by the textbook publishers and their given answer keys. One can teach a modern school course without even without even studying the subject, because the textbook publisher provides everything, and so those teachers are stuck following all of the gimmicks, all of the methods that the textbooks publishers have created for their own sales, and everyone has to pretend like that’s that’s somehow necessary for education when it’s not real. Assessment can be very, very simple.
If there is a tutor, or in my case, a headmaster who knows the subject, who has studied and continues to study and is always studying, he can very easily sit with a child and say, have you read the third chapter of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. And the student can say yes, and the tutor can say, tell me what Aristotle teaches in this third chapter. And a student who has read the chapter, who knows the content. Can look into the eyes of that tutor and tell him what Aristotle teaches in the third chapter, and assessment of study is that simple, and in an ideal world where money was no object, that’s how all education. Conversation could be conducted. A master of the Catechism could simply ask students to give an account of their studies, and that expert in the Catechism wouldn’t know very easily whether the student is studying or not. There’s no mystery, there’s no there’s no question, no more complicated assessment is needed in an ideal world where money was no object, all the students could just be examined face to face by by experts.
But of course, that’s not realistic. That’s not sustainable in real life, and so a teacher can simply write up a set of questions and give those questions to a student and say, write your answers. Answer these questions for me and submit your answers. And an expert teacher can read what the student writes and easily discern whether the student has studied carefully or whether the student is just trying to worm his way through an assignment. Now, an inexperienced teacher can’t do that. A parent can’t necessarily do that, but an experienced teacher can, because an experienced teacher knows what the lesson says, because he studied it. And so assessment can be very simple when it’s conducted by an experienced tutor or teacher.
In the classical liberal arts academy, I provide students with simple sets of assessment questions, which, if they are studying, they will be able to answer very easily, carefully and completely, as I say, and their study will be very easily assessed. There’s no confusion, no mystery, no trouble when students are not truly studying and just trying to worm through assignments for an appearance of study, those answers that they give will be very easily identified, and they will not be given credit for study, but they’ll be given the opportunity to go back and study and try again, and our assessments are always open for resubmission, because that promotes study. But there’s no need for all of the crazy different assessment methods, all of the crazy standardized tests, all of the quizzes or science projects or skits or math, there’s no need for all of the craziness of modern schools, because assessment, when you’ve got teachers who actually study and know the texts, assessment is very simple. And in the classical liberal arts academy, assessment is very simple.
Now what happens is that we, we get families who don’t study students, who don’t read and study the lessons, but who want credit for studies. They want an appearance of progress. And they come in and they’re they’re immediately looking for video resources. They’re looking for for tutorials and explanations. They’re looking for all kinds of activities and manipulatives and stuff and resources and circus clowns that entertain kids and all of this stuff. And they’re look they’re talking about learning disabilities and all the and they’re they’re running all over the place to avoid the work of study, and we can cut through all of that talk, all of that fake education talk that we’ve learned from modern schools, and we can simply ask, Has the student read the lesson? And we can get all of the answers. Oh, well, my child this, and my child is this, and this is a learn. He needs video. He’s a visual learner. He’s got this problem, this disorder. Has the child read the lesson. Yes or No, that’s what it means to study. Has the child read the lesson? Is this child literate or not? Because this is what it means to be literate or illiterate. And when we find a parent, or when we find a student dancing all over the place using all of the language and all of the ideas of modern education to dodge the ultimate question of whether or not the student has studied the lesson, there will be no progress. And in the classical liberal arts academy, we don’t play along with that and act dumb as if. These things are real.
There is so much to learn for a real education that these these goofy school ideas, even though we could entertain them, we could make money and just say, Oh yeah, we offer this service and that service, and we have dancing teachers and singing teachers, and we’ve got video lessons, and we’ve got, you know, this lesson over here, which, which uses only the color red for kids who don’t like blue. We could do all that. We could multiply all these activities and hire all kinds of clowns and and twirlers and, you know, fire jugglers to perform and make money in the name of education. But there’s no education in any of that. There’s just one question, Is the child studying is has the child read the lesson? Has the child learned the content of this chapter? It’s yes or no. That’s real education, and for education to actually be productive and for achievement to be significant, that achievement has to be efficient. It has to be cost efficient, it has to be time efficient. It has to be energy efficient, because there’s so much to learn that if it can’t be learned efficiently, there will just never be progress. And again, we can play the game and we can smile and make everybody happy and sell all kinds of stuff, but there won’t be any significant progress over time. Again, some may complain that the assessment seems so simple, but, but there’s a number of differences.
First of all, in a modern school, in a modern school, parents enroll their children, and the classroom is filled with children. Some of them study, most of them don’t. All of them are required to submit tests and quizzes and assignments. Even those who don’t study are required to take the tests and submit the assignments and all this, and the teachers then have this difficult work of grading the assignments, and so we’ve got students who haven’t even done the reading submitting a homework assignment where they’ve just written some kind of gobbledygook fake answer to try to get past the teacher, and the teacher now has To spend 15 minutes reading through this student’s answers. Who didn’t study, and the teacher that the pressure is now put on the teacher to make a decision about what score the student should receive. And the teachers got to think, Well, should I give this student an F, or should I give the student a D to allow him to move along? Surely I can’t give him an A because his answers aren’t very good. But do I want to give him an F, or do I want to push him along? And you see that there’s all of these other considerations in this grading process on an assignment submitted by a student who didn’t study, and there’s all this confusion and stress and difficulty in in grading, I would say corruption in grading, because it’s very easy for a teacher to say, I’ll give it a D so he can just move on and get out of here.
In the classical liberal arts academy, we don’t have to do that because no one is stuck in a class and required to submit anything. All of the courses are self paced. Students submit assignments after they study. So 90% of the assignments that are actually submitted are submitted by the students who actually study. 90% of the assignments I grade are are great. 10% are submitted by students who haven’t studied. And I send them back and tell them you need to study and submit answers based on the reading, or you’re never going to pass this lesson. But 90% of the the assignments that I actually encounter come from students who study and so assessment, again, is very simple. The questions I ask seem simple, but it’s not possible for a student to answer them who hasn’t studied the kinds of questions that I ask may not be direct content questions, which means that students can’t. Jump onto Google or chat GPT and type in the question and get an answer and copy and paste it and submit it so cheating becomes impossible.
For example, I’ll ask a student, what do you think is the main idea, or identify something interesting or new that you learned in this lesson. I’ll ask the student to summarize the content of the lesson. I ask the student questions that really don’t make sense, to get answers for elsewhere. And I can tell, as an experienced tutor, I can tell whether the vocabulary in the answer is appropriate for the student. I can tell whether the answers seem to come from his actual studies, whether they’re consistent with each other. One of the ways to see cheating is that a student will say one thing for one answer, and then another thing for another answer, and those two answers don’t even agree, because he’s just copying and pasting. And most of my assignments don’t even ask questions that can be copied and pasted. So we just avoid that, because I can tell from simple conversational questions, whether the student has actually done the reading or not. I know what a student will say, who has done the reading, and I can easily gage that. So assessment can be very simple. There’s just reading and assessment education is really that simple. So if you you hear me saying this, and then wonder, well, why don’t schools do this? If it’s so simple, then why don’t schools do this? And the answer to that question is very simple.
Teachers in schools who are looking just to make money, they don’t study. They don’t know what the books say. They don’t know what the physics book actually teaches. They don’t know what the grammar book actually teaches. They don’t study. They don’t actually know the content of all the books. And if you think that I’m imagining that you’re sadly mistaken. Many schools have people teaching subjects that they’ve never even studied before. You can look at other home school programs. Look at the courses they claim to offer, then look at the staff members and look at their educational history. Look at their educational background. You’ll find people who have degrees in math teaching foreign language courses. You’ll find people who have English degrees teaching Latin classes. You’ll see that the people teaching aren’t qualified to teach those subjects. You’ll find that they don’t study the texts, they can’t ask assessment questions because they don’t know what’s in the books.
You’ll find homeschool conferences telling parents that you don’t need to know the subject in order to teach your children, because the industry is built on that practice of quote, unquote, teaching subjects one has never studied before. They’re not afraid to admit it. In fact, that’s a big part of how they sell things, telling people that there’s no need to study the subject if you use their products, which, of course, is ridiculous. Who would ever say something like that? Only a salesman. So modern schools can’t offer simple assessment because the teachers don’t study Secondly, when it comes to assessment, assessment is part of the study process. It’s not it’s not an end test that gets a student a grade. It’s part of the study process. And so studying and assessment always needs to be open for restudying and resubmitting assignments and so on.
What we see in modern schools is that teachers like to use tests just to grade students, and they and they really take no responsibility for the achievement of their students. If I, you know, I used to tell my students if I go to a pizza shop and there’s a man making pizza and I order 20 pizzas. Is he allowed to give me three pizzas and then give me, you know, six half cooked pizzas, four pizzas where he forgot to put the cheese on them, two pizzas upside down in the box and so on. Or is he responsible to give me 20 pizzas? Is, and everyone understands that the pizza maker is responsible to actually make pizza. And so if we think of of a teacher, of an English teacher or a Latin teacher, a math teacher, science teacher and so on, why is this? Why is a teacher allowed to simply grade children that have been enrolled in his or her class to learn a subject. Why would the teacher be allowed to grade the students when the teacher is actually the one responsible for teaching? And we can see what a corrupt system that is the teacher should be accountable to results of the learning of the children for whom the teacher is responsible. The teacher should be treated like the pizza maker, and if 25 students are enrolled in the teacher’s class and the teacher is paid as the teacher. That teacher shouldn’t be allowed to simply label the students and give them grades and then take the pay as the teacher, because that teacher is not actually teaching. That teacher is simply judging, and this is what modern schools get away with.
I as a teacher, because I take my teaching seriously. I take learning seriously. I take the subjects I teach seriously, and I’m not just doing busy work. I take responsibility for each of my students to master the content. And so when I assign students a text to read, and then I provide students with an assessment, if that student submits the assessment and it’s not acceptable, it does not show that the student has learned the content. I give the student a bad grade, but the student is responsible to now keep working, to review that lesson, to actually study it and to resubmit that assessment, and I’m willing to review and regrade as many assessments as it takes for that student to finally master the content, because I take personal responsibility for that student’s success. Now, it may take one student more time than another to master the lesson, but that’s okay. Eventually, a student will choose to either begin studying regularly, or he will simply say, I’m not going to study. And when he says, I’m not going to study, that’s the end of his education. And when a student makes that decision, he shouldn’t be allowed to enroll in courses and just get graded, which is which is a rip off for everyone. He should be removed from this a class, because he’s not actually a student.
That’s why, throughout history, very few children actually went to school. Very few children went to school. Because in real life, very few children actually study, and this is largely due to the culture of their parents, where parents don’t study. Children normally don’t study. Where parents don’t study. Children normally don’t have an environment in which they can study and they don’t when children have a mother who’s constantly planning social activities, they’re not going to study. When children have fathers who are constantly watching sports or planning recreational activity, they’re not going to study. And it doesn’t matter how much money their parents spend on modern schooling or whatever they do, it’s not going to accomplish anything because the essential work of studying is avoided my work as a teacher is, first of all, seeking out the best study materials available. My students are not dependent on me as the teacher of the content that that’s really stupid when, when teachers set that up, they set themselves up as the source of the information, as if the greatest teachers haven’t already provided us with complete treatises and textbooks on every subject. Modern teachers, for their own benefit, set themselves up as the source of the learning which limits the student ability to achieve and doesn’t teach the. Students to actually learn to study.
I seek out, through my studies, the best study materials, the best source texts, and make them accessible to my students. I then tell the students study these texts, and I teach the children how to study. And then I ask the students to complete an assessment and show me that they’re studying. And then I’m able to evaluate whether the student is actually learning the content of the lesson or not, and I have the choice to tell the student to move on to the next lesson, or to stay put and study the lesson further to ensure that he actually learns the content. I have some students who work slowly, some students who work quickly, but the standard and the goal is the same for all. And frankly, I don’t care if a student takes more time, because he has all the time that he needs. We’re not subject to a modern school schedule, which makes no sense and doesn’t benefit students. Parents don’t need to be stressed about finances, because we’re not charging $20,000 a year for tuition. Students can take their time, master their lessons, and eventually learn that it’s a lot easier and quicker to just study and complete the work than to goof around, waste time, try to cheat and so on. It’s much easier to just do it the right way the first time, and that’s an important lesson for children to learn. It’s better to just do it the right way the first time, and we teach that moral lesson by this method of study and assessment.
The other advantage the students have is because they have a teacher who is experienced and who studies, and it’s not just me, it’s also others who help with with tutoring, even fellow students, they can ask for help if there’s an if there’s an idea that they that they truly can’t wrap their minds around, can’t seem to grasp. And we all have those sorts of issues. You know, I can, I can identify issues that that I really had a difficult time grasping, and then you find someone else who just gets it and can explain it in simple terms. But when that help is needed, we make sure that students have access to that help. And what’s important is students who ask get help because they’re actually studying, they’re reading, they’re wrestling with a text, and when they struggle, they’re seeking help, all of which is a sign that they’re studying. And when they seek, we help them, but we don’t make this effort to try to avoid the work of studying, which is just unsustainable and fake we challenge our students to study, and if they’re not going to study, we don’t try to keep their enrollment money. Try to keep their tuition by dancing for them and making excuses or labeling them. We tell their parents that they can’t do it. The study process is simple. The assessment process is simple.
And then, as students work through and they study, and they demonstrate their study, and they complete their assessments, they begin to build records of their achievement in studies, and these records are significant, and if they get work done consistently and efficiently with no wasted time, no nonsense, no busy work. They begin to make real upward progress in real studies. And if they’re allowed to do that for an extended period of time, for years and years, across an entire academic career, they can reach into higher and higher subjects that modern students can’t even touch. And this is what ultimately is desired by the most selective colleges and universities. This is what’s actually needed for real, real life expertise. They need to get to a certain level of study where they’re into the studies and into the ideas that actually need to be understood to do things. And it’s not until they enter into those studies that they move from the ignorant class of people to the learned class of people, and there’s only one way to get there, and it’s through study. It’s through consistent study for a long period of time. And everyone who has studied, everyone who has expertise, knows exactly what this means. So study is very simple.
The work of education is very simple. There are almost no costs needed, especially today, where we have access to all of the necessary texts in digital form that cost us nothing. The work that needs to be done is very affordable. I don’t need to travel to students’ houses. I don’t need to build big school facilities, we can do this work using the internet, communicating by common means to get all of this work done. We don’t need any of the nonsense of modern schools. We don’t need more money for teachers. We don’t need more money for facilities or for all kinds of goofy resources that teachers decide to use arbitrarily, just to fill their daily planner with things to do to keep the kids busy. We don’t have any of those artificial problems. The kids can study for almost no cost. The kids can work at their own pace. We can communicate by common communication methods. We can transfer study materials and assessments in simple PDF forms.
Education is very simple, and so the challenge, as I said, is examining ourselves and removing all of these obstacles that we put in the path of our children by our own moral problems, by our own lack of virtue, lack of discipline, aversion to study and so on. We’ve got to remove these obstacles and simply allow our children to study. The support that they need from parents is very simple. They need to see that parents care about studies. They occasionally need some some basic functional help from parents. Parents don’t need to be experts in the subjects.
Remember, the textbook is written by the expert in the subject. The answers are almost always in the textbook. When I get a question from a student and the student answers an assessment question and says, I can’t I can’t find the answer to this question. I don’t know the answer. He’s just missing it in the text. And I usually send a screenshot with the line or the section highlighted that for some reason he missed. It’s never because some some complicated explanation is needed from outside the textbook. But the support the kids need is very simple, and parents need to I think parents need to be honest with themselves.
Parents need to be honest and ask, Am I Am I really seeking to educate my children, or am I seeking something else? Am I just seeking social activity? Am I just trying to be part of the mom’s club and I’m willing to accept whatever the costs are, whatever the methods are, whatever the problems are with the education. Am I just accepting it because I want to be part of the mom’s club, because that’s very common in homeschooling, to sit there and have the poor kids languishing, making no progress, being labeled with all kinds of learning problems and disabilities so that mom can just stay in the homeschool group. Very common. Am I just trying to send my my kids to school so that I can pursue my own career, my own my own professional ambition? Look, that’s fine, but don’t don’t pretend that there’s a problem with schooling. Don’t fuss about tuition because it’s just chosen. Or do I really want to help my child study?
Well, do I want to create an environment that’s conducive to study that actually makes sense for students to work in. It would be like a library. It would be like a monastery. It wouldn’t be a circus. It wouldn’t look like a recreation center or a multimedia entertainment center. It’d be quiet. It’d be it’d be devoted to study. Mom would would be studying. I mean, if mom’s a Catholic, mom should be praying and studying daily anyway. If she’s not, you can’t just replace the Christian life with some chosen devotions to say, like, Oh, I’m just going to rattle off the prayers of the Rosary once a day for 15 minutes. Or I’m just going to leave a chaotic life to drive into town to go to Mass in the morning and then come back home to my chaotic that’s just not the Christian life. We’re creating our own religion with these activities which really aren’t even genuine, genuine participation in those. Activities many people do that. It ultimately comes down to reading classic texts, reading the best source texts, mastering the content of those texts, and demonstrating that mastery with simple assessments, no nonsense assessments, and continuing to do that for weeks and weeks and months and months and years and years. That’s how real study gets done.
So the classical liberal arts academy, I would argue, is the only program even attempting to do such it’s the only program that’s not designed to employ adults, the only program that’s not designed to sell study materials, but to actually give students what they need to achieve real academic progress in a real classical Catholic curriculum. And so I want to challenge parents to examine themselves, ask whether they’re setting obstacles in the way of their children by their own misguided desires to challenge them, to remove those obstacles, to stop pretending education is something expensive or complicated, and actually giving their children the opportunity that they need, the support that they need, the resources they need to make real academic progress. That’s what we seek in the classical liberal arts academy. I hope that’s helpful.
