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How does Veritas Press select books and curriculum? Join Marlin and Laurie Detweiler as they give the answers to some frequently asked questions, such as “Why do you have students read non-Christian content?”, “Why did you have to replace that book in the curriculum?”, and “Why do you like Jacobs math for high school?”
Episode Transcription
Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode for better readability.
Marlin Detweiler:
Hello again. Welcome to Veritas Vox Today, obviously, Laurie is joining me, and you've joined us for another episode. So, let's get right into our subject. We've had the question asked of us: how do we go about picking the books and curriculum, or what are the decisions that we make in creating curriculum?
Those are some very complicated things and really two different things. But Laurie, why don't you lead us off? How does that happen here at Veritas?
Laurie Detweiler:
Well, first, when we started Veritas, whenever you pick curriculum, we always tell people, what are you asking yourself the question, what's your pedagogy? Because if you don't know why you're doing what you're doing, it's hard to decide what you know from everything that's out there. So the first thing we did was established that we wanted to provide a classical Christian education.
Marlin Detweiler:
And in doing that today, there are lots of different educational nuances of classical Christian education. So it's important to know that we're clear that when we say classical Christian education, we mean what Dorothy Sayers made clear – the Trivium and a commitment to grammar, dialectical logic, and rhetoric. You want to unpack a little bit what that means?
Laurie Detweiler:
I mean, I think the easiest way to explain this to you is once we were committed to that, and that was how many years ago –
Marlin Detweiler:
A long time, I’d say.
Laurie Detweiler:
And once we committed to that and I started looking at curriculum as an educator, I realized there's really not much out there anymore because, unfortunately a lot of what had been written years ago, hundreds of years ago, was either gone, meaning nonexistent anymore, or it was found in antique bookstores that, believe me, my husband has traipsed through more of those than I even want to tell you!
Marlin Detweiler:
If you want to go on a summer vacation, capturing visits to antique bookstores, we're your people!
Laurie Detweiler:
And so, yeah, I don't go to a city without going to two kind of bookstores, some antique bookstore, and then a regular local make that clear local bookstore. And so that was the first thing. So everybody who's ever heard me before knows I love history. I'm a history buff, and so that was really one of the first things I looked at when we started thinking about doing this.
And we've told you about Rob, who now teaches with Veritas, but he owned Greenleaf Press, and they had a series on the Great Men –
Marlin Detweiler:
Famous Men of various areas. Greece, Rome, Middle Ages, Reformation…
Laurie Detweiler:
Yeah, but as I read what Sayers first wrote, the first thing I said was, “Well, they need to memorize this. How does one go about that?” And we called Rob, We talked to him, and we thought about it, and that's how our flashcards were actually born. And then, as many of you know – I've heard everybody thinks I'm a closet Charlotte Mason person. I'm not a closet Charlotte Mason person. I love Charlotte Mason!
And so, you know, it was how am I going to make that fun and interesting and what books are out there that are going to bring this alive to children? Because one of the reasons I believe that memorization went away in schools is because they were doing memorization without making it come alive for children.
And memorization unto itself is not something that I'm a proponent of. It's got to be fun, and it's got to be interesting. The first and foremost thing I'm looking for is, is this going to cause a child to have awe and wonder? Is it going to make them ask questions? And not everything can be in that category, but there have to be books that make them do that.
I was a voracious reader as a child. Some of you have heard my family activity on Friday nights was going to a local bookstore and getting books, and so, you know, now when we have a rule in our house with our grandchildren, if you read it, we will buy more. And so, fortunately –
Marlin Detweiler:
It gets expensive!
Laurie Detweiler:
But if they read it, their gramps will always buy more books.
Marlin Detweiler:
We're in a little bit of a rabbit trail. Well, get got 30 minutes. So let's talk a little bit about… We talked as we got into this about Saxon math, which is a really good example. And helped us expand our thinking about how we apply this classical model to what we recommend once you take it from there.
Laurie Detweiler:
So as we look at the grammar stage and we're looking for memorization, what does that mean in the next stage, the logic stage? Well, at that point, we're wanting children to do more math application. Saxon is incredible in the grammar stage. It gives them the facts, it reviews it, it does everything that you want it to do. But when it gets into secondary school –
Marlin Detweiler:
And it covers all the necessary concepts that we think of as foundational building blocks for being able to go very high and very wide in math.
Laurie Detweiler:
And so, but then you get into the secondary, into logic and rhetoric, and I want math to be applied at that point. I don't want them just memorizing it anymore. I care that they can take those concepts and do something with it. And so we needed to look for something else. And what we ended up finding was an algebra text by Jack Jacobs.
And, you know, that was very simple. And then we continued to work on our and our way up and, you know, I have what's a math curriculum, you know, come across my desk. I'll give an example here. Singapore math, Singapore math. It's not that there is that it is not a comprehensive math curriculum. Life With Fred, on the other hand, and I may be getting myself into trouble here, but Life With Fred is not a comprehensive math curriculum.
Marlin Detweiler:
It won't give the foundation that we want our students to have to go into advanced mathematics, whether that's somebody that is pursuing a liberal arts education, as is part of what we do, maybe in college or beyond, we still think it valuable to go into algebra II, pre-calculus, even calculus, because of what it does not only mathematically, but precision of thought and that sort of thing. These are the kinds of things that are considerations for the selection of books and it happens in all disciplines.
Laurie Detweiler:
So as I look at Singapore math, it's more dialectic in nature than Saxon is. And so that's why we've chosen not to use that. You know, I've told people all the time, Life With Fred, I am not a math person. My husband could tell you story after story. I am a humanities person. I am not a math person.
There are great things about Life With Fred, in the sense of how it explains things. But children have to practice math over and over and over again to get it. And so, you know, you want to read those stories to your kids. That's all good. That's great. But as far as a course, so that's how we make choices. If it's not out there, we've made it.
You know, when we want to look at what we wanted for humanities in the secondary, there wasn't an Omnibus text. There were things that had been pieced together, but there wasn't a comprehensive program that made sure that kids were reading what we felt like. Well, when I say we, I don't mean Marlin and I, a team of people we assembled, thought were reading the core of books of Western civilization and more importantly, that they were reading all the books of the Bible.
Marlin Detweiler:
Well, talking about the Omnibus, we're jumping around a little bit here and hopefully you'll find this helpful. But we wanted students to read Christian and Secular works with the understanding of looking at them theologically, historically, and from a literary standpoint. We think it's unfortunate that education in the 21st century has been substantially parceled off, or I'm not getting the right word here, but basically separated into different categories. That's not the way we live. We might be in a conversation about history that has theological implications or about literature, that has cultural implications. We want students to be able to think that way. So our idea with the Omnibus was to create something that helps students think biblically about everything, about the flow of history, about the flow of theology and understanding scripture for what it intends us to know.
Laurie Detweiler:
And you might answer this question that I think a lot of our viewers have asked: why in the world would we read Nietzsche, for instance?
Marlin Detweiler:
Well, Nietzsche, and Darwin. There are lots of people, and there are a couple of different ways that it's important to understand that one is the best time to read something that we're going to be exposed to at some point in our life is under the tutelage and protection and leadership of a biblical thinking Christian to help us think through it correctly.
So the reasons why I said, thinking biblically about everything: Nietzsche, Darwin, other philosophers, other ideas have all had dramatic impact on our culture and understanding that is not just an immunization to the student, but it's the ability to be able to say, “Not this because…” and “This because…” whether that's in a collegiate setting or in leading a household or in business or teaching in a subsequent generation, all of those things are so important to be able to lead and not just survive.
We are about creating people who are ready to tackle anything. And again, we're getting far afield. It's easy for us to do that. But one of the things that I loved hearing one time, we had a vendor from Scotland coming in and checking on us for what things we might want to carry of theirs. And my wife was interested to know about how other people viewed what we chose, and he said, This goes back over 20 years now, He said, “Well, one of the companies knows what they want to add to their offerings by looking at your catalog.” And we got a kick, a real chuckle out of that because one of the strategies, and it's no longer as relevant now that we've really filled the curriculum and our changes are primarily in places where we're creating things.
But one of the things that was true then was how tenacious she was in our travels to go to the – she mentioned earlier the local bookstores and finding local authors and small publishers. And that was an enormous source of some wonderful things that we've been able to carry over the years and continue to carry in some instances. And it was kind of fun for me and it was flattering for Laurie to learn that a fairly large company was following her lead and how we found things. And of course, books that have stood the test of time are an important part of what make up our literature selections.
Laurie Detweiler:
And this is just a little side note for you. For those people, going to the library and getting books and doing all of that. So I get, I don't know, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books across my desk a year from publishers. And one of the things right now, one of the reasons you don't see a lot of replacement books right now, and I'll tell you, even when we must replace something, it's getting really difficult.
Marlin Detweiler:
Must replace happens sometimes because books go out of print or are unavailable for some reason.
Laurie Detweiler:
And so one of the things now that you have to be extremely cautious about is that – and we have to do this with curriculum as well. But one of the things you have to be very careful about is publishers today are extremely – I'm trying to think.
Marlin Detweiler:
They're bought into modern cultures that include wokeness, and they're sneaky in how they do it. They're after the minds of our children, of your children. And we're trying. We do everything that we can to protect them. That doesn't mean the content is always and only Christian, but it is presented Christianly because that's the question we get too, “Why do you have books that have bad words on them or bad ideas?” It's not because we're promoting them, as she's concerned about in what she's saying, but rather we're trying to create leadership that can deal with everything.
Laurie Detweiler:
But it's things like one of the publishers that we use for one of our main curriculums. We use the homeschool version, which is their original version. And the reason we do that is because I literally had to read every sentence in the book of six volumes to see what the children were going to be interacting with. And I'm now having to look for: are they talking about my two daddies? Are there images in there that are presenting families that are not a daddy and a mommy and their children? And so we try very, very hard. And I'm not going to say we don't ever miss anything because obviously, you can miss something. And I love it when I get told we've missed something. I know you might not think that, but we do because it's like, my goodness, I know a couple of people have had my husband call them, and they're like shocked that he's calling. We're not going to say we don't miss anything, but today, you really, the scrutiny with which we – have to Carl Petticoffer and different people in our organization and…
Marlin Detweiler:
You should, too as parents.
Laurie Detweiler:
You have to go through there, and it is an intentional attempt to take our children. And to take to just in very simplistic ways when they're itty bitty. I'm talking three, four, five, and six. Just get in front of them over and over and over again until it just becomes that's the way that it is.
And so, you know, I encourage you, you know, if I take my grandchildren to a bookstore, to the library, and I know their moms are doing this, they're flipping through pages, they're reading it, they're going online and trying to find, has anybody read this? Does anybody know anything? Because it's a different world in which we're living today.
Marlin Detweiler:
Especially from when we started 20 years ago. Actually, more than twenty. There's another thing I want to say, too. We all occasionally, and this happens probably a couple of times a year where we'll hear from someone questioning the judgments Laurie just described that we make, and most times it's not a new question, and it's something that we have thought through and have a good answer for.
But there are times where we've been challenged to reconsider and have. Sometimes we reconsider because the language of 20 or 50 years ago is understood differently today, and we need to factor that in. Sometimes, it's an idea that has become a concern today that wasn't before. And we have to rethink, does that require a change or something like that?
So not only are we careful about what we select, but we're also having to manage the process, and we're not managing it at the whims of culture. We're grounded and want to be challenged, to continue to be grounded in biblical thinking about how we teach and what we teach.
Laurie Detweiler:
Yeah, I mean, I can think one of my sons and they're adult men with their own children now – had pulled the book off our shelf at our house in Pennsylvania and was opening it up. And it was one of my mother's books that had been mine. And, you know, they'd read it as children, and they were appalled at what was in there. And appalled in the sense that–
Marlin Detweiler:
Using language that you wouldn't use today.
Laurie Detweiler:
And it was more it was talking about, you know, I'm looking at this from the perspective of racism. And so I asked them, I said, “I want you to go look at when this was published.” And, you know, they did; they've been through our history programs. So guess what? They know when it was done. And historically, where there is and I said, you know, “Isn't there something to be learned?”
And Tom Sawyer's a book that's in this category, right? Isn't there something to be learned from what was happening during those times so that we understand the culture of the people when it was written and then make a conscious decision whether or not that's something we want to replicate or not replicate? I mean, the kids in our Omnibus program read Twelve Caesar's, Believe me, we do not read the Twelve Caesars to learn what to do. We learn the Twelve Caesars to learn what not to do. And so even some literature that's being pulled out– that's been around forever, you know, for the last 100 years that's now being banned. I look at that and say, I don't necessarily want it banned because I want us to learn from it and have it provide–
Marlin Detweiler:
A historic context for it.
Laurie Detweiler:
Exactly. There are lots of things in Scripture that aren't pretty to read. I mean, that's one of the things I always, you know, I'll have a parent call and say, I can't believe that you let a 13-year-old read that. And I'll say, “Well, do you believe you should read the entire Bible with your children cover to cover?” And 90% of the time, maybe 99% of the time, the answer is “Well, of course.”
And I said, well, there's stuff in the Bible a whole lot worse than that. If you're reading the Bible cover to cover with your children. And they're like, “I hadn’t thought about that before.” And so it's what Marlin said. We want to read these things in the context of having someone that–
Marlin Detweiler:
Is mature in Christian thinking weighing in.
Laurie Detweiler:
And I went to a very conservative Christian high school, very conservative. We didn't read these things. And I can tell you what happened to kids that I considered, you know, to be walking in faith. They went off the deep end when they got to college because they never read this stuff. They didn't know what to do with it. And they felt like it had been hidden from them. And, well, this must be the real world, and it's been hidden. I didn't, we didn't want that for our children.
Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, that's really good. The other thing that is related to the question that we're answering today is how do we make decisions about what we're going to create. And you know, one of the things that we have always said is if there's something out there that we can't do a better job at, we'll use it. We feel like what we need to do, the metaphor that we use around the office is what would it make, what would it take to have Veritas create something that is a better mousetrap?
And until we've got that idea, we don't start the process of creating something. Now we feel like with our model, with our students, creating a complete, comprehensive fit throughout all the grades and all the subjects or disciplines that there is always an opportunity to create a better mousetrap. And so it might take some time, but we feel like we can do that.
But that's another aspect that goes into how we make selections, not only with what curriculum we pick, but what we create.
What other thoughts do you have on that? Where have you seen some of our, what we think are our greatest strides in creating better mousetraps?
Laurie Detweiler:
Well, I mean, I think the Self-Paced history is pretty incredible.
Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, the Self-Paced courses were really a labor of love to bring the the cards and the songs and the teacher's manuals to the computer, to the screen, and make them come alive. And it really has become such a powerful way to learn the content of history and the content of the Bible and then to go through the Omnibus courses, if being part of a live course or part of a school is not a possibility either.
Laurie Detweiler:
I would say, you know, our logic and rhetoric. There were lots of things out there, but we wanted something that was relevant to today. You know, I love Aristotle. Aristotle was great, right? But it's not the only thing. And what I found was that kids did what people do with Christianity. I'm going to go to church on Sunday, and I'm checking it off my list, and then the rest of the week I live my life, and then I get to church on Sunday, and we start it all over again.
But they're not taking and applying on a daily, hourly basis biblical thinking. And I saw kids doing that with logic. They were getting A's on their logic tests. Great. They got formal logic down. They can even do fallacies really well. And, you know, junior high kids love logical fallacies, and they love to call their parents out on them.
But what I didn't see them doing was taking it out of the context of the classroom and applying it to life. And that's really what caused us to write a logic curriculum. We wanted something that was going to change how they thought about how they interacted with the world.
Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, well, you mentioned the rhetoric and Aristotle. One of the things that I'm fairly certain of and I can't be certain of this, you'll understand why is I tell you. But most of rhetoric that has been created with the advent, with the reintroduction of teaching rhetoric because of the popularization of classical Christian education that began in the early nineties and is continuing to grow, was that Aristotle wrote a book called Rhetoric, and that's what we should use, right?
Well, there are a couple of problems with thinking that way, and that's what we wanted to solve, as we created a rhetoric curriculum. One was asking the question: What would Aristotle do today? And secondly, what was he trying to accomplish?
Laurie Detweiler:
Who was it written to?
Marlin Detweiler:
He was primarily working on political discourse and communication techniques for that. And rhetoric, I believe, is best understood in the context that we want it taught and see it taught, to be far broader than that. It's lots of different forms of communication, and it includes lots of different things. Understanding the scope, but also understanding the nature.
The world’s a lot different today in terms of access to information, and those kinds of things are important to us also. And I believe that if Aristotle was to write a rhetoric text today, it would be very different from the one that he wrote, which means one needs to be written, and we think that the people we’ve had write it have met those needs very effectively. So those are just some of the things we try to do.
Laurie Detweiler:
I was just going to say, Dr. Michael Collender, he wrote Rhetoric II, and I often have people say to me, “Can I just skip that course?” and I have to say to them, “Absolutely not.” You can’t skip that course because it takes what they learned, the concepts of what rhetoric is and lets them apply it. We wanted something that was so application-oriented.
I can’t tell you how many kids I’ve watched go through rhetoric classes. They get up, they give a speech, but if I were to say to them tomorrow, I need you to go talk to this group of people and help them get on board with an idea that we have, they would panic and wouldn’t know what to do. And what I talked to Michael Collender about rhetoric is that I want this.
I want it to be for a woman – I’ll get to the male part – but for a woman, I wanted it to be a mom could talk to her children about anything. And explain it to them well. And give them sound rhetoric. But I also want that same woman to be able to go to the White House and talk with the President of the United States.
And I would say that about a man. I want him to do well and be persuasive in his job, so whether he’s an attorney or an auto mechanic, it doesn’t matter. I want the auto mechanic to be able to talk to the customer that comes in and explain to them– be persuasive about why they need to get something changed in their engine. And I want that same auto mechanic or attorney to be comfortable going to the White House and speaking to the President.
And God has wired us all differently, I get that. You know, you got two type-A personalities here. But I also have seen students that have come through who were so shy when they got into class and now I’ve watched what happens. They’re always going to be more uncomfortable than say, Marlin is, Marlin will go anywhere and do anything. But they’re able to do it. And that’s what I believe we’re all called to do.
Marlin Detweiler:
Well this has been kind of a smattering of things about how we choose books, how we choose curriculum, it may raise other questions. We welcome them and are happy to address them in a future episode. But thank you for joining us at Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education.
