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Some see rhetoric classes as merely the “classical version” of a speech & debate class, but it is so much more important than that! Join rhetoric teacher Carolyn Wilson to learn about the forms and applications of rhetoric and how mastering this art will help students stand firm in the Christian faith as they strive to impact the culture for Christ throughout their lives.
Episode Transcription
Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode for better readability.
Marlin Detweiler:
Hello again. I am Marlin Detwiler and this is Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Today, we have someone with us that I have known since high school and maybe younger years (for her. She didn't know me yet, but now you know me.) But I'm with Carolyn Wilson. Welcome.
Carolyn Wilson:
Hello!
Marlin Detweiler:
Carolyn, as you will learn, teaches for us, and there are a number of other connections that I alluded to relationally. Well, let me just mention this. She is the daughter of Tom Garfield, who works for Veritas Scholars Academy as the Academic Dean and I've known for a long time, he has been noted well here before, and Carolyn now lives again in Moscow, Idaho.
And that is a familiar place for many of you. My first trip there was for what became now is known as the first ACCS conference. And I still remember going to the counter in the airport in Spokane, Washington. Deb telling us, you have a full tank of gas to get there. It's a 90-mile drive, I think.
Yeah, and make sure you have a full tank of gas on the way home because there's no place to get gas between here and there. I know that's changed because you can get gas between the two places now, but back then you couldn't. I never heard of such a place. I’ll get into personal circumstances before we get into the topic at hand.
Carolyn Wilson:
Sure. I mean, I also I was thinking about that. I remember meeting you because back in the day, you know, they used all of us high school kids to, you know, run around and do errands. We didn't have cell phones, really, to communicate things. So we were the runners, you know, go print the thing. Go. Yeah, it was we actually had faxes and all that and it was old.
But yeah, I've grown up, as you mentioned, in classical education all my life. And, and God has just seen fit to make that my life. I love it passionately. That's what I went to college for and jumped right into teaching fresh out of my senior year at a classical Christian school.
Marlin Detweiler:
Tell us what school that was.
Carolyn Wilson:
Oh, sure. Okay. Yeah. This was Province Classical Christian School, very young at the time, as many of them were. And I was in what I would perhaps describe as like the first wave of graduates who had gone K-12 through the classical Christian program and then into teaching. So naturally, the first question any of us would be asked is, “Can you teach Latin?”
Marlin Detweiler:
The school is where?
Carolyn Wilson:
It's in Seattle. Yeah. Mhm. And now there are a couple of others I think. Yeah.
Marlin Detweiler:
“Providence” is like “Veritas”, I think. Between the two of them there may be 50 or 60 schools that use those terms.
Carolyn Wilson:
It's true. Yeah. I taught at the Oaks in Spokane for five years after that and then moved to England because I got married and had all my children there and, and Mark and I have three kids, which is delightful. And then God saw fit to bring us back to the United States in 2016, as you mentioned. And my husband teaches at Logos School, the physical version. And our kids go there and I teach here, which is fabulous.
Marlin Detweiler:
That's wonderful. You've been teaching for us for several years. What have you been teaching?
Carolyn Wilson:
I have been teaching here at Veritas for about four years now, and, and I started with rhetoric. Rhetoric I. And then Dr. Cannon has finally folded to pressure from me and allowed me a US history class this year as well. It's coming So that's been delightful. So this year I had it. I had it this year, just finished it.
Marlin Detweiler:
That's great. What are you teaching next year?
Carolyn Wilson:
The exact same thing. So I'll have a couple of sections of Rhetoric I and the U.S. History Course.
Marlin Detweiler:
And how old are your children right now?
Carolyn Wilson:
So Colleen is my oldest at 11. Chloe will be 10 shortly and Jack is 8.
Marlin Detweiler:
Okay. And just for the record, this is being recorded in May of 2023, as one of the things I've realized about age of children is it keeps changing.
Carolyn Wilson:
Weird, haha.
Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, but in other words, it is something that I have learned about you and the information that came to me though, that you enjoy baking challenges. What does that entail?
Carolyn Wilson:
You know my secrets. Yes, I do. I very much enjoy that. And my kids, my students know how to send me off on talking about that.
Marlin Detweiler:
What do you enjoy baking?
Carolyn Wilson:
Well it’s funny, I've worked a lot with Becca Merkle, actually, with catering for New Saint Andrew's functions on a big scale. And it's been a good learning experience because she's brilliant with things. But I also then have merged into wedding catering and making the cake. So the wedding cakes are the challenge.
Marlin Detweiler:
Oh, wow, that's a big deal. So you're back in your hometown where you grew up in Moscow, Idaho. Your husband teaches at Logos School, the school that was the subject school of the book, Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning, which for me and for many of us was the book that got us excited and interested and excited about classical ed.
You went to New Saint Andrew's. That's from where you graduated and then on to teaching immediately. What did you find as a classically educated kid to be the challenges and benefits of stepping right into teaching your first year out of college? But before you answer that, let me preface that with a reason for the question.
At Veritas Scholars Academy, our online school, where you teach, we don't like hiring kids right out of college for lack of experience. We have the luxury of a world-class teacher group because we can go anywhere in the world to hire them. And so we've always worked on the basis of not wanting to hire rookies.
But tell me what benefit you think it was for you having come up in a classical world, being classically educated yourself, that might say, “Yeah, but Marlin, you could do it this way with people because of this,” or what you found to be that really the strengths and weaknesses compared to people who might have come up in a state educational institution or a state school that had an education department or even a traditional Christian school and a traditional Christian education prior to that. What do you find the benefits to be?
Carolyn Wilson:
Yeah, no, that's a very good thing to ponder. Yeah, I would start by saying it is no guarantee that merely because one can get all the grades in classical education, therefore one can teach and I have seen many cases where that has not been good. Somebody can have all the brains in the world and they still may not be the best teacher.
And so so it's good to remember that it doesn't automatically make you one, you know what I mean? But in the first year, yeah, there were so few of us and everybody was it was in that raging we're starting schools all over the place and we need teachers. So I think I was also in that phase of classical education where we're maybe just going to grab you no matter what.
Marlin Detweiler:
The luxury of being patient and looking for experience, we had a situation and this is parenthetical. We had a situation at Veritas Academy, the bricks-and-mortar school that we used to be associated with and where our children went right, that we brought someone in from New Saint Andrew's and they were getting a degree and wanted to be a teacher and had never had any experience in the classroom, even teaching a single class. And it was honestly a disaster. It just didn't work. We didn't hire them.
Carolyn Wilson:
I'm so sorry. Yeah. And see, that can happen. I actually have some pretty potent feelings on it. I would love to see more student-teacher training, I think. And I did benefit briefly from that. But you know, it's it's a complicated thing to do that you understand you know your a class right but I think there's there should be a way at some point somebody should do that.
But in those early years, I did benefit at least certainly from coming from Logos I had been well grounded in the understanding that I am teaching this stuff, certainly, but that the bigger thing was I knew how to teach, not just give them stuff, but know the person, know the class, understand my audience. You can see where I'm going here with rhetoric or where.
Marlin Detweiler:
You learn that though if you didn't have a teaching practicum or experience in teaching.
Carolyn Wilson:
Because I had in one sense I did because I was learning my own teachers and I was given that gift of imitation of my own very good teachers. So I had people like Chris Select and Wilson and Nancy and my own dad for history and people who just gave me their passion and love for their subject. That's what I wanted.
Marlin Detweiler:
Well, I want to push back on that a little bit, because, sure, my experience tells me that that's about your unique learning style. One of the things and I forget which category this falls in of the four main learning style categories, but one of the things that you just articulated is something that I think is important to my learning process, and that's learning by observation.
A lot of people don't learn by observation in the same way. Do you think that benefited you for lack of experience?
Carolyn Wilson:
I do, actually, yes.
Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. And I think that may have played in because a tactile learner would probably not have made the same connections that you made to apply in your first year of teaching.
Carolyn Wilson:
Granted.
Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. Okay. What else do you think made a difference? Clearly, the content did.
Carolyn Wilson:
Yeah. Given I did teach Latin a lot in those early years. It wasn't my favorite, but I could do it. So I did, you know, And I had experience, of course, having done what the students were doing so I was familiar with literature and rhetoric and history that they were having. And I just appreciate, though, again, Dorothy Sayers says, as you well now at the end of that essay, we're talking about, that the point of learning is to teach a man to learn for himself.
And I was given that tool. I knew how to learn for myself. And I think I of course, I made first year teaching mistakes. Goodness, sorry, headmasters. But I had people, though, who came alongside me and, you know, this is the benefit on the side of Christian education. If I screwed up or messed up people who address that and in varying degrees of strength, it was needed and helped me to grow. So I felt like I was well equipped in that way to understand how to listen and to learn.
Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, that's great. What you taught Latin and you taught us history. Did you teach rhetoric at that point?
Carolyn Wilson:
Oh, yes.
Marlin Detweiler:
First year? Wow.
Carolyn Wilson:
Yeah.
Marlin Detweiler:
Tell me about the things that went well and the things that you wish you had a chance to push the redo button.
Carolyn Wilson:
Sure, broadly or my teaching of rhetoric. What do you think?
Marlin Detweiler:
I'm speaking of rhetoric in particular, because that's a focus of what you teach for us. Yeah, a capstone discipline in many respects. And it's a tough place to step in First year teaching.
Carolyn Wilson:
Yeah. Yeah, it was our first year. You know how these things go. The top class was the junior, so it had never been done before. We were all pioneering together. Yeah. And that was good because here I am, young teacher with a young school so we could grow together. And that was right. Curriculum. I would have liked to have had a better prepared way of going into rhetoric with these guys.
This first class I’m thinking of. It was helpful to have my classical sources. Aristotle, who was my best friend right here, you know, because we're going direct from the text, we didn't have anything.
Marlin Detweiler:
Some of the from hundreds and hundreds millennia ago, right? Yeah.
Carolyn Wilson:
Yeah, some periods. But, you know, the benefit for me is I've been taught it well both in high school and college and I have been. I'll shout out to Dr. Chris Lect too, just a brilliant teacher and I had him and it was wonderful. So that was helpful. And I had my notes from college and things that I was using for the kids.
So I think the broader thing was not necessarily the stuff. Again, it wasn't the content. I knew that I would have appreciated perhaps more humility from myself. You know how it is.
Marlin Detweiler:
I fight, you know, we all fight being self-centered. But there is nothing like age to help you realize the older you get, the less you know.
Carolyn Wilson:
So true. Yeah, I do wish I had been more patient. It's really easy for a young teacher to want to have the students think their opinions after them, and instead of making it a better environment for the students to express their own opinions, even if they disagree, that's what's important. And I wish I'd known that then.
Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, there's wisdom. And that wisdom comes most times from some experience. Sounds like you learned that. Sounds like you learned it pretty quickly.
Carolyn Wilson:
Well, God used some experiences to go. Okay.
Marlin Detweiler:
Well, this isn't this is not a public confessional so we can move on now. That's great. What would you say the things were that the students, if we were to talk to that class of students, what would they say they got from that rhetoric class that you taught your first year?
Carolyn Wilson:
Yeah, that's a great question, Marlin, I, I would at least hope that they got my passion for it. I loved what I did. I'm a reasonably as, you know, expressive person.
Marlin Detweiler:
You, shall we say, never quiet. And I relate to that very well.
Carolyn Wilson:
Yeah, I did. But I am pretty open and I love what I do and I love teaching rhetoric and even that first year where I'm inexperienced in that extent, I was excited to talk about this with my students, to give them the chance to come up and talk and give their thoughts on things. And so I would hope that they go, “Yes, she loved her subject, even if she wasn't as good at it at the moment.” We knew that, which helps us students interested in the subject. You know.
Marlin Detweiler:
That's wonderful. We've made an assumption here that I want to step back behind now and maybe articulate the assumption or in terms of why we made the assumption or why it's we've assumed a very basic thing that rhetoric is an important thing to teach in high school. Anyone that studied the pedagogy of classical Christian education has come across the term the Trivium, and they understand the rhetoric stage and the rhetoric, the subject or the discipline of rhetoric being maybe the paradigm discipline of that stage, certainly an important one.
But the question I want to ask you is why is rhetoric important in a K-12 classical education?
Carolyn Wilson:
Absolutely. And since we have limited time, you're lucky and I don't get to deliver pieces to you.
Marlin, you ask, you know, this is the sort of subject that when people who are outside of the classical world ask you, say you have 2 minutes in the grocery store, to explain to somebody who has no idea what classical is.
Marlin Detweiler:
Your father actually does it this way, we're on a ten-story elevator ride. Tell me. Yeah, but he does it about classical education, not just rhetoric.
Carolyn Wilson:
Yeah, that's big. He that is his gift. He can do that one. And yeah, but you know, it's an older term. It's a different sort of class and so people rhetoric what is this and if you have a few seconds you know well it's similar to a speech class, which I suppose is the best comparison we can give to more secular or just outside of classical education.
You know, speech and debate is often what people will associate that with. And what I heard how to narrow it down to as well is just sticking to my friends, the classicists like Quintilian and Cicero and saying, well, it's the art of speaking well or it's the art of observing the means to persuade. And why is it important for our students to do this?
Because that's what we were created to do. We were made to persuade, go out and preach the gospel to all nations, so we better equip them to do so. And it's a safe environment for them to learn how to defend and express their own opinions with some humble boldness to do just that. So if I have time to get that in to people, they kind of give me a look sometimes. It's not really, no, but I'm like, That's what it is. Good luck.
Marlin Detweiler:
Everyone limits it to speaking, but wouldn't it be in the most comprehensive sense, all forms of communication?
Carolyn Wilson:
I mean, in the sense of we especially, you know, here we are with the visual, right? Visual is huge. And we know that how a person appears to us is important, how they sound, how they live. That's important. And so I do think there is an aspect to that for sure. I think the rhetoric, the rhetoric of the classical age understood that the three elements ethos, pathos, and logos all have to work together to create the real, well-rounded, rhetorician. Yes.
Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. Yeah. I as I think about rhetoric, I like to think about it comprehensively. I recently read a book and I can’t think of the author's name and the name of the book, but it was it's a very old and very important book. I say very old, not like Aristotle. It was talking about facial expressions and how we can tell what somebody is feeling by how they look.
It was amazing to me to apply that in a conversational setting and think about it as I speak and communicate. Of course, writing is a form of communication also and body language and that sort of thing. And all of those do have the the element of of communicating. It’s the reason I think about as it more than speaking sometimes I don't think anybody is arguing over that in a serious way.
Most of the conversations that we're talking about are about the conversation about what we say. What is the difference that you hope a student who’s had rhetoric will go away with for the rest of their lives over somebody who has not?
Carolyn Wilson:
Very much. I feel like rhetoric is the discipline of taking your all that well. Sayers calls it “grist for the mill” so all your other subjects and all that other thing.
Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah.
Carolyn Wilson:
And being able to interact with anything that you're presented with in a gracious and persuasive manner as a Christian. I do believe that rhetoric and its overlapping with apologetics, I tend to plug apologetics a lot in my class, but being able to go, Oh yeah, we talked about this thing in history. Oh yeah, we talked about this thing in Omnibus.
Oh yeah, we talked about this thing in chemistry and, and here's how I could persuade this person about this element of a, you know, my opinion on any given topic that we've handed them that tool. And I can't stress enough how valuable that is to a high school student, particularly heading to college, where they're going to be challenged on so many of those things. How can they then respond?
Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, very good. So we in the time I think in the time frame that you've been teaching rhetoric for us at Veritas, you have taken on a new textbook, a textbook to be published, A Rhetoric of Love.
Carolyn Wilson:
Right.
Marlin Detweiler:
Tell us how that changed how we teach rhetoric and tell us what you think about the approach to rhetoric that that has introduced.
Carolyn Wilson:
Sure. Yeah. So Mr. Jones, who was actually one of my teachers at college.
Marlin Detweiler:
He also a Rhetoric of Love, yeah!
Carolyn Wilson:
So it was fun to kind of go through it because he's big into philosophy, as you know, and an expert in his field in that and so it'd be fun to see I'll come across little things like I remember talking about this with you so yeah I.
Marlin Detweiler:
Think when I asked the question I didn't think those kinds of insights that you would have had, and I knew you had it, but I knew that I didn't. I didn't make the connection in that.
Carolyn Wilson:
And it does it really adds an element for me to teach. And I can tell the kids that as well. I do. I know this guy. So here's an angle that he's probably pushing in this book. And that adds a nice personal element.
Marlin Detweiler:
Might scare Doug if he knew that.
Carolyn Wilson:
Yeah, that’d be funny. That's a funny thought. So I've enjoyed his perspective on this and he likes to. He likes to spice things up for sure. He'll kind of present certain aspects and concepts in a new way, a more modern way in some cases, or just a different angle in other cases. He likes to emphasize the story of a thing that's very much Doug.
He has always been like that. He loves story. I remember this, you know, he's written some other books as well, fiction and things. And so so he'll put that out there and early in his textbook, which I appreciate, he says, hey, you know, you're going to come across opinions and different things that will challenge you, including in this book.
And you should, you know, you should deal with that. You should push back. And so so that's great because, of course, we have students from all kinds of backgrounds and beliefs and different things and different things in this book have challenged them. And they have argued with him. But that's right. But that's actually it's produced some of the best conversations I've ever had in my rhetoric classes, because these guys are really passionate about wondering, “But why? Why would he think this? Or maybe what about this or this? And I think this,” and I love it. I want to sit back and go, Yeah, go ahead, tell me, tell me your thoughts.
Marlin Detweiler:
That's wonderful. Yeah. We when we think about taking on publishing curriculum at Veritas, which we've done a lot of, we have three things that we have to have in place before we all go forward with creating something. First of all, we have to have the money available that's going to take, which is a pretty obvious one. Second, we have to have the person well, let me say it in a different order.
Second, we have the idea, right, of the curriculum. We never want to create something where we can't say we've looked at the marketplace and we think this is an idea that raises the bar to a level that's better and higher than anything that exists. So we want what we call a better mousetrap to produce. And then thirdly, we need to have the talent.
In this case, Doug Jones, to create it. And to me it was such a hard thing. I had been involved in classical education publishing.
Carolyn Wilson:
Right.
Marlin Detweiler:
1996, so roughly actually for more than 20 years and had been able to come up with that better mousetrap idea for a lot of different things. What we've done with the great books, with Omnibus, what we do with history, Bible grammar, school composition. I can keep going. Rhetoric was that thing that stumped me.
And I talked to Doug and he talked about how we would bring Aristotle's rhetoric into the Christian realm and the 20th – well, actually, the 21st century, it resonated like few things did. And I was thrilled. And I'm glad you're enjoying teaching it very much.
Carolyn Wilson:
Yeah.
Marlin Detweiler:
How does it differ from the rhetoric that you learned in an academic setting in Logos or New Saint Andrew's?
Carolyn Wilson:
Well, yeah, quite simply we were dealing directly with the classical texts. We didn't have a textbook for rhetoric. I'm sure things existed. You probably did some homework on this, I would imagine, and I'm sure there were companion volumes. Yeah. So we didn't have that kind of stuff. And they usually weren't appropriate for high school anyway.
They were pretty dry, dusty kind of commentary sort of thing. So it was direct from Aristotle to us or Cicero to us or Quintilian to us. So I've read all of it in terms of those gentlemen. I don't know. I am not the definitive expert on all rhetoric, then gone through the teacher. And so, you know, it was very much dependent on the teacher themselves. The speaker with the material and being able to explain it in a way that students would understand.
Marlin Detweiler:
Can you articulate a couple of specifics that would provide a qualitative difference between an Aristotle and a Cicero who are not thinking Christianly and a Christian approach to rhetoric, that A Rhetoric of Love is trying to be?
Carolyn Wilson:
And I think, yeah, approaching Cicero and Aristotle, just the actual textbook as I got to do their work straight up, it was very much making sure that have we given our students a good foundation biblically to think about these guys. And we and they had they did a good job and I had great teachers for that. This book, of course, has its side-by-side. Here is what
You guys have to say here is this approach. Here's how you can here's a way we can talk about it. Right? Bring it into the modern application perhaps. Yeah, that sort of thing.
Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. So what you're saying is it was dependent on the teachers.
Carolyn Wilson:
Yeah.
Marlin Detweiler:
This being worldview thinking into a secular approach. And we have to understand that secular approaches many times borrowed from the Christian world. Following Cicero, there's this good bit of that there. So the jump is not as big a chasm as it can be sometimes. Sure. Very good.
Carolyn, this has been wonderful. So much for joining us here. If you were to run into a parent at the grocery store and they ask you, “Why should my kid take rhetoric?” This is your last chance in this podcast to answer that question.
Carolyn Wilson:
All right. You bet. I've got one. It's applicable to apologetics as well. Very much, which is how I learned it. But 1 Timothy says, “Always be prepared to give an answer for the truth that is in you”. And if you cannot do that eloquently, if you're stumbling around, then is that the best light we can be for Christ in the world? So rhetoric is the way to to be an eloquent Christian and make that difference.
Marlin Detweiler:
Well, thank you so much. Folks, We've had Carolyn Wilson, Teacher Veritas Scholars Academy, a mother of three, a wife and daughter and a wonderful friend. Carolyn, thank you so much. Folks, Thank you for joining us at Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education.
