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Is classical education valuable to those who don’t live in a Westernized culture? Today we travel to Malawi, Africa to learn from Anna Liebing what classical Christian education looks like in the context of African villages and how classical schools from the Rafiki Foundation are benefitting the people there.

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 Detweiler and you've come to us on Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Today we have with us and Anna Liebing. Anna joins us, believe it or not, from Malawi, Africa. I don't know where Malawi is, Anna. And welcome, by the way.

Anna Liebing:

You. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

Marlin Detweiler:

Where in the world or where in Africa to be more precise, is Malawi?

Anna Liebing:

A question that I received from almost everyone when I told them I was going to work with Rafiki. So Malawi is in Southeast Central Africa. It's just a little bit south of Tanzania, where Mount Kilimanjaro is. Some people are a little more familiar with that area.

Marlin Detweiler:

How about where would it be in relation to Zimbabwe?

Anna Liebing:

Zimbabwe is a little bit southwest of us.

Marlin Detweiler:

Okay, very good. Yeah, I would have– Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe's coastal, so I would have thought it to be west.

Anna Liebing:

Oh, no, I'm sorry. East. I was thinking in Zambia.

Marlin Detweiler:

I got going backward there too. So your background, you you were classically educated at Mars Hill and you're from Cincinnati. Tell us a little bit about your background and upbringing and your personal circumstances today.

Anna Liebing:

Yeah. Thank you. So I was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, and my parents grew up in the public school system. And when they had their own kids, they just wanted better. And so they started homeschooling us, which at the time was very strange. Until they ran across Mars Hill Academy in Cincinnati. They visited and kind of had the moment that you hear about from a lot of parents in classical education, “This is what I've been looking for and I didn’t know that this is what I was looking for.”

Marlin Detweiler:

Me and Laurie had that moment back in 1992.

Anna Liebing:

Yeah! They loved Mars Hill. My mom was a teacher and so she went to work teaching in the grammar school at Mars Hill and took the kids along with her. So I spent the last two years of my education at Mars Hill, graduated from there. And then, you know, as every good classical student is, you’re properly spoiled for all other forms of education after you have had classical training.

So when I went looking for colleges, there were very few that I was satisfied with or felt really challenged by. So I ended up going to Hillsdale College in Michigan.

Marlin Detweiler:

That's yeah, our online school sends a lot of students there, and I suspect that's true of many classical high schools.

Anna Liebing:

Yeah. And you know, it's not the only great college option out there, but it is one of a small handful that follows really naturally after a classical education with their, you know, liberal arts emphasis and academic challenge and so forth. So I was there and I did my degrees in history and literature, and then for a time I was determined I would not go back into teaching because I had watched my mother teach. I knew it was a very all-consuming hard job, but I had just become so passionate about the kind of learning that I was able to do in classical and liberal arts schools that I did. I ended up going back to Mars Hill to teach for three years.

I wanted to teach in the secondary and they ended up having openings in the grammar schools and I ended up teaching in grammar school, which I'm really grateful for now– gives me a nice broad picture of the whole scope of a classical education. So I taught there and then I, after a few years decided to go do my master's degree in British literature.

So I was at the University of Edinburgh for that and then got back into Rhetoric School teaching at Veritas Academy in Savannah, Georgia.

Marlin Detweiler:

Oh, really?

Anna Liebing:

So I was there for six years.

Marlin Detweiler:

There's no relation to Veritas Press or any of the Veritas institutes that we’ve been a part of for those people who may have that question. But good folks there.

Anna Liebing:

So lots of Veritas schools out there.

Marlin Detweiler:

The pastor Terry and his wife Emily at the Independent Pres. And I think people that were responsible for that school starting many years ago.

Anna Liebing:

Right. So I was at that church and at that school for six years teaching history, literature, rhetoric, senior thesis. Right before I went to graduate school, I had run into Rafiki when I was still up in Cincinnati because I had lots of friends who knew I had a heart for mission work. And they said, you know, have you heard of Rafiki? They do classical education in the mission field. And I just thought, That's too good to be true, surely. I ended up spending a summer in Tanzania at their village there right before I went to grad school. And they wanted me to come to work with them right away. But I had already committed to grad school at that point.

And so I ended up teaching for a few more years. But it never really left my mind. I ran into Karen Elliot, the Executive Director, at a couple of ACCS conferences, and it just seemed a couple of years ago that this was the time things were lining up in regard to my life circumstances. And God just kept pressing on my heart.

And so I ended up getting back in touch with them. And I came out to be the headmaster of the school here in their village in Malawi. I came out here almost exactly two years ago. I actually just celebrated my two-year anniversary.

Marlin Detweiler:

You've been in this position for two years. Does the school year run the traditional year of the Northern Hemisphere? Basically starting around September 1st and ending before June or something like that?

Anna Liebing:

This year actually will be the first year that we do that. The school has traditionally been on a whole year calendar, ten weeks on, four weeks off, ten weeks, and three weeks off. So we just actually realigned our calendar this year to go along with the national calendar, which does run from September 11 this year up through July. So it's not quite an American calendar but closer.

Marlin Detweiler:

It's not the calendar in the southern hemisphere. Many of the English-speaking schools in the southern hemisphere run a calendar that starts in January or February. It's really contrary, and it makes sense because of the weather and having summer available out of school and that sort of thing or the warm weather.

Anna Liebing:

Right. I haven't quite been able to figure out why they're on a Western-ish school calendar. I don't know. Maybe they're just following the big education dogs in the West.

Marlin Detweiler:

It's unusual in the Northern Hemisphere to find somebody not following that unless they're doing one of the more modern models of several weeks on a few a week or two off kind of thing that happens too. Interesting. Well, we're here to talk about Rafiki. Can you give a little bit of a broad sense of its history before you talk about your specific work in K-12 education?

Anna Liebing:

So Rafiki was founded in the 1980s by a woman named Rosemary Jensen, who before she founded the organization, she had spent part of her young married life as a missionary in Tanzania, in Africa with her husband and children. And then they'd come back to the States, and she had actually become the Executive Director of Bible Study Fellowship for many years.

And she in terms of conviction and Bible knowledge and just energy of character, she's quite a force. And so she really was passionate about getting back to ministry in Africa and internationally. And so she founded the Rafiki organization, which is Swahili for friend, because she had worked in a Swahili-speaking country. And so they actually began with Bible study, similar structure to Bible study fellowship, but not associated with the Bible Study Fellowship officially.

So they started with Bible study and they began developing girls centers to train underprivileged girls and vocation and Bible study. And over time, the mission has kind of morphed. But it largely morphed because Rosemary Jensen had quite a few connections in Africa, and she had some pretty high-up government officials who asked her, “Would you please help us with orphan care?” when Africa was at the height of the AIDS crisis.

And so they ended up beginning to build these villages to care for orphans. And they were also continuing to run systematic Bible studies and widows programs along with orphan care. And as the kids began to grow, of course, they needed to be educated and Rafiki was just not satisfied with what they found when they looked at government schools, which are pretty appalling even by a lot of American government school standards.

Marlin Detweiler:

That’s a bit scary, to be honest with you!

Anna Liebing:

It is really. So they started looking around at different educational models and they came across classical education and just thought, this is it. And even though of course, a lot of people were skeptical and are skeptical, “Can that be done in Africa, isn't that a Western thing?” – They said, “No, this is a human thing. This is the best way to educate a human and a Christian.”

And so they began writing their own classical curriculum that they could copyright for themselves, number one so that they could have control of distribution. And number two, so that it could be tailored to the African context. And so they have been on a 20-year journey of writing this curriculum and implementing it in ten different Rafiki villages across Africa.

Marlin Detweiler:

So there are ten Rafiki schools or ten classical schools that are part of the Rafiki organization?

Anna Liebing:

Yes. And in ten different countries.

Marlin Detweiler:

How many students are in the school in Malawi that you're the headmaster of this year?

Anna Liebing:

We're about to start school, in just a week and a half, we will be just around 350, I believe this year or a little bit over. We're beginning to double-stream. We have really high demand, so we made the decision to start double streaming, and we're up to grade two.

Marlin Detweiler:

Is that two sections per grade, is that what you mean by that?

Anna Liebing:

Yes. Yeah, two sections per grade.

Marlin Detweiler:

Very good. And I interrupted you before I heard you say how far you were up to with that.

Anna Liebing:

This year, we begin double-streaming grade two.

Marlin Detweiler:

Very good. Very good. So those are all interesting things to me, but I'll bet our audience would be very interested in knowing how a classical education is different in a Central African country compared to America. What are the differences?

Anna Liebing:

Well, it's been very interesting over the last two years to have the simultaneous experience. A lot of things are just the same. You're dealing with kids, you're dealing with basic classical pedagogy and techniques and curriculum. But on the other hand, everything is different. So one of my favorite sayings is, “It's always the same, only different.”

Marlin Detweiler:

So that's a quote from a movie, isn't it?

Anna Liebing:

Probably. My mother says that, and I picked it up.

Marlin Detweiler:

My daughter-in-law, I've heard say it many times and can identify the movie, but I don't remember what it was.

Anna Liebing:

But yeah, so there's in many ways, you know, we've had visitors short-term visitors who come, and they're surprised at how many things are very similar. We recite catechisms at morning assembly, and we sing hymns, and they memorize poetry, and so many things are similar. Kids are the same no matter where you go. But in another sense, very different, of course, probably some of the biggest differences that people would immediately notice who teach classical education is we don't teach Latin in the schools.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yes, that was a question that I was going to ask. Let me just give some background on that. And I know I want to hear more about that. But one of the things that we've recognized as we have dealt with a lot of students from the Far East, China, in particular in our online school, that Latin is of its greatest benefit to somebody who has grown up in a romance language. And Mandarin is not a romance language, and so it is of less value to the Chinese student. Is your education in English to them alone?

Anna Liebing:

Yes, it is. We teach all in English, which is one reason the school is very attractive to the community. Our students are known around the whole region as being the best English speakers you can find basically.

Marlin Detweiler:

English is not the national language of Malawi, is it?

Anna Liebing:

No, Chichewa is the national language. Regionally, most people speak a language called Tumbuka, but you know English, everybody wants English. English is the language. It is mandated in government schools because you have to have English fluency to go into higher education. But of course, it's a second or third or fourth language for most people.

So I'm a big advocate of the benefits of Latin. And I could see even in this context, I could see Latin being very helpful. And I do hope – I know Rafiki hopes to be able to one day implement Latin into their schools, but of course, it's a whole different kind of challenge because, as you say, if your root language is English, you have an easy access into Latin.

You know, an African language has no relationship to any of the romance languages. And most of my teachers and students are having a hard enough time just with English. So just being able to especially communicate transcendent ideas in a second or a third language is a huge challenge.

Marlin Detweiler:

So you've got some derivative lost.

Anna Liebing:

Yeah, yeah. And my teachers do a great job. They're great English speakers, especially within their own context, but they're still native Malawians who are struggling to master English in many ways. So we don't teach Latin overall across the classrooms. Of course, there still is some of that language barrier going on. And we also just have a lot of, you know, we have a lot more supply problems. Obviously, being out in the middle of Africa in one of the poorest nations in Africa.

Marlin Detweiler:

Okay, So Latin is not there yet, but you're working on that. How else would it be different than the typical classical Christian school or homeschool in terms of what you teach and how you teach it?

Anna Liebing:

Well, you would see in the school, you would see not just the subjects that you would expect. We are mandated to by the government. There's a lot more government control over even private education here than there is in America. So we are required to have our students take national exams three different times of the year for school, and we're required to teach certain national Malawian subjects.

So we have to teach agriculture and Chichewa classes and life skills classes, many of which, you know, the true hard-core classical educator would really not be a fan of. But we don't have a choice. So we have to adopt them into our schedule and try to bring classical pedagogy to them. And we also honestly, if you were to be in the classrooms, you would see the teachers are in the process of learning how to teach classically, especially with things like Socratic questioning, learning to ask and discuss the why questions.

The stereotypical African method of teaching is the teacher has a sheet of notes, and they stand at the front of the classroom, and they say them, and then they copy them on the board, and the students copy it down on the paper.

Marlin Detweiler:

It’s a one-way dictatorial educational approach filling your brain.

Anna Liebing:

Very, very much so. Very, very memorization oriented. And so learning the techniques of how to guide a discussion and delve into questions of meaning and biblical worldview, that is the reason I'm here, is to train the teachers in that. But it is it's a paradigm shift, and it takes a lot of time and training. And so they're in the process of that. And you would see varying degrees of competence as you're in and out of the classrooms.

Marlin Detweiler:

So what's the receptivity to Christian worldview thinking permeating all of what you do?

Anna Liebing:

Most parents and teachers love that. Malawi is a much more conservative culture, certainly than America these days in most cases. And so, you know, nominally the country is like more than 80% Christian. Now, there's a lot of there's a lot of doctrinal problems and a lot of lack of understanding of basic theology, and very little understanding of what we call biblical worldview integration.

Marlin Detweiler:

So you may have less of a problem with cultural Christianity than you might have in various respects, I understand you might have huge doctrinal gaps, but the cultural aspect of it is not the same problem, is it?

Anna Liebing:

It depends. It's very interesting because, you know, there is a very strong contingency of, you know, church-going Bible-believing people who go to church every Sunday. In some ways, I almost compare it to the 1950s in America, where everybody is a Christian, and everybody goes to church more or less. But do they actually know what it means to be a Christian? Are they actually looking at the Bible when they're hearing a sermon? Very often not. And there is, of course, a lot there's still a lot of animism and, you know, witchcraft in the air. That's all kind of melded together in a very interesting way. So yeah, it’s very much a mix, especially in the place where I am. Zuzu, by any American standards, is a very small city, a big town, really, but it's the third largest city in the country.

And so we are in Malawi in terms of the cosmopolitan area that has a little, you know, you don't have quite the same level of the witchcraft doctor next door kind of thing, but you still get some of that. Certainly.

Marlin Detweiler:

Tell me, if you were to stay in this position for 10 or 15, or 20 years, what would you think success would look like if you were at that point? Looking back, what would make you say, “We accomplished what we wanted to accomplish.”

Anna Liebing:

Oh, great question. I was just talking to my head teachers the other day about how we need to consciously be long-term vision casting. Yeah, I would say a couple of things. Number one, within this school itself, on this village, my biggest definition of success would be if I can look at my teachers and be confident that they really understand how every subject that they teach is integrated with scriptural knowledge and impacted by biblical understanding. If they could really become masters of biblical worldview integration, that would be a big measure of success.

Another one would be, of course, just becoming familiar with the kind of the basic classical canon, reading the books, feeling like they've mastered the curriculum and can walk into a classroom with a depth of knowledge that's more than just a little sheaf of notes, which is what they've mostly been trained to teach with.

And, you know, I don't think we'll have any problems having a full school in terms of numbers. I really don't measure success by numbers. But we do want a reputation, and we have a reputation in the community for training students not just to pass national exams but to understand the scripture, to think critically, to be able to problem solve and not just spit out memorized answers for a test and to honestly to be cultural contributors.

Marlin Detweiler:

Well, that's where we want to go. Yeah. So how might Malawian government, how might Malawian business, how might Malawian churches be different as a result of the work being done at your school in a 20-year time frame?

Anna Liebing:

Utterly transformational. We really believe that because, you know, there are many dear brothers and sisters that we are connected with and we value deeply. Of course, they don't lack intelligence, but they are the general product of the Malawian educational system is very within a box. And it's it's very difficult for them to think long-term. That's partly a result of a very impoverished culture, but it's also a critical thinking issue. They have a lot of trouble thinking long term; a lot of things that I would consider kind of common sense problem solving don't really seem to occur to them. And, you know, when I think of like the churches we have, we’re partners with the Central Church of African Presbyterian denomination here, and I deeply love and respect many of them, but a lot of the average preachers and elders, they just don't know how to read a text. You know, they can read the words, but they don't know how to read a text. And exposit a text. And if we can, you know, crank out over the next 15 or 20 years, you know, several hundred students who know how to read well and question a text and to have been discipled to have a deep conviction about integrity and honesty, that would combat so many basic problems in government, corruption in poor theology, in basic problem solving of business, you know, all the way down the line. I don't think that's any less true in America.

Marlin Detweiler:

That sounds a lot like the goals of classical schools in America.

Anna Liebing:

Yeah, Yeah. It really is like I said, the same, the same, only different. Yeah.

Marlin Detweiler:

Or do you have challenges from a financial standpoint? How do students pay? How is how is the budget of the school funded?

Anna Liebing:

The school is very heavily subsidized by, of course, donor support through the Rafiki Foundation. So we really do believe that students and families do better and are more committed if they have skin in the game. And so our students do pay school fees, but they're very low, even relative to other private schools in the area.

The numbers are basically that it costs Rafiki as an organization a little over $1,000 a year to educate a student in our school, which is wildly low by American standards. But it's a huge amount of money for a Malawian.

So they pay in school fees. They pay like a 10th or less of a 10th of that cost. Their fees basically cover most of our school supplies for a term. And all of the other costs of running the school come through the home office and through generous donors who are supporting the Rafiki Foundation.

It's a very unique situation, especially as a headmaster. I am really grateful I don't have to look at every student as a dollar sign because we have a donor base that is making it possible.

But yeah, you know, we are a missionary organization. We don't have money flowing out the wazoo. So we are very, very budget conscious. Every term is a budget discussion, just like every headmaster has with every school across the world.

Marlin Detweiler:

Well, it does sound like it's the same, only different in many respects. I can't imagine the challenges or the blessings that come with the kind of work that you're doing. What’s one story of something that you would say is one of the greatest blessings you’ve had in the two years you’ve been here?

Anna Liebing:

Oh my, many, many options. Well, because we have resident students who live here, there's the child care, the orphan care aspect that I'm also you know, I live on the campus, so I'm very involved. There are many stories from that aspect. But when I think of the specific school context, the first thing that comes to my mind is a girl, one of our students who this year is going to be going into grade eight.

And she's been a student with us for several years, I think maybe since she was in first or second grade. She's a great student, very smart girl, very sweet. And her parents pulled her out unexpectedly from school at the beginning of last year. And when we went to ask them about what was going on, we found that her father is a carpenter.

You know, they're they're very basic subsistence level making a living. And he had had an accident on the job, had broken his leg. There are none of the social safety nets here. And so they were barely managing to put any food on the table. They couldn't afford to pay school fees. And so I had a conversation with him and just about that.

And he said, “Madam, I'm just I'm heartbroken to have to take my daughter out of the school. We put her into a local government school, and she is just so different than everyone else.” And he said, “And it's not just her English skills. It's not just that she's academically three years ahead of the rest of her classmates. It's that she knows the scripture, and she is wise.” And he said, “Her teachers and her Sunday school teachers at church and her fellow classmates, anytime they have a problem or a question about anything, but especially the Bible, they go to her because what you're doing here is not just teaching them facts. You're making them wise. And she's coming home and she's teaching our family the Bible lessons that you're doing in school.

Every night we hear what the Bible lesson is, and we're memorizing verses with her, and she's helping to make us wise.” And he said this is, of course, all in very broken English, but it's so sincere. And he and he says, “Madam, you are going to transform this community when you send these students out from the school. Every Rafiki student in their churches is basically prized as knowing Scripture and as being academically capable. They are transforming communities. And that's why I want her here.”

And so I actually told that story to the home office and to my supporters in a newsletter, and I had someone step forward and say, we really want to fund that girl. And so we were able to bring her back to school, and she's doing really well. So that kind of thing has happened multiple times.

Marlin Detweiler:

I expected the end of the story was going to sound something like that, and I'm very pleased to hear that it did. And that's a good way. We've we've used up our time. Thank you so much for joining us from Malawi. And thankfully, the Internet worked really well for us today.

Anna Liebing:

Yeah, praise the Lord. My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Marlin Detweiler:

Folks, you have been with us on Veritas Vox, the voice for Classical Christian Education. Thanks for joining us.