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What does classical education from a Christian worldview look like at the different ages and stages children go through? In the first of this two-part series, Veritas Press founders Marlin and Laurie Detweiler give an overview of what a classical Christian education looks like and how it equips students for life as adults.

Episode Transcription

Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode for better readability.

Marlin Detweiler:

Hello again. I'm Marlin Detweiler with Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. I assume the person joining me today is familiar to you. It's my wife of 40-plus years, Laurie Detweiler, who has also hosted episodes of Veritas Vox.

Welcome, dear!

Laurie Detweiler

Thanks.

Marlin Detweiler:

We're actually sitting across from each other to film this. And so there may be occasions where we look at each other and our border collie is trying to get into the conversation also. His name is Mackenzie, and he doesn't realize that he's not invited to participate. Today we are going to do the first of two recordings, and this one we thought would be good to talk about what we mean and how we apply the terms “classical Christian education.”

Laurie, you're obviously very familiar with all kinds of interpretations of that term. Let's talk about what it means for us at Veritas to have a classical Christian education.

Laurie Detweiler:

Sure. As people probably know Dorothy Sayers essay, the Lost Tools of Learning was very instrumental in the foundations of Veritas and where we started, and we would totally agree with what she said. But we'd go a little bit further, I think, in the sense that because of who I am and what I think about teaching, we put more creativity into how some people– and I want to be clear about this, I read enough of her to know. I believe that she has not been interpreted correctly by a lot of people. I don't think she was boring. I don't think she, you know, wasn't thinking that children would be taught creatively. And I think a lot of people have assumed that that's the case.

And so it’s just rote memorization and that things aren't real interesting. I get accused all the time of being someone that is a closet Charlotte Mason fan, and I’m not in the closet: I am a Charlotte Mason fan! I just think Sayers adds some really good direction and guidelines for us to know what we should be doing.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, I was, as I think about how we've interpreted Sayers and how recovering the lost tools of learning has brought that to life, which happened. The book was written back in the early nineties. The thing that was very eye-opening to me then and remains important to us today is a very significant application of the Trivium grammar dialectic and rhetoric and Sayers genius of seeing how that really worked neatly for how children develop.

In grammar school they very much care about pleasing the teacher and just being very interested, very willing to learn lots of things for the sake of learning, the fun, of learning, memorizing, and acquiring the knowledge remains a very important thing.

Laurie Detweiler:

But I think you said it, and that's fine.

Marlin Detweiler:

Absolutely.

Laurie Detweiler:

If memorization isn't fun at that age. They hate learning. So at times at schools where they've asked me to come in and they’ll be having kids memorize things and the kids aren’t loving it. Well, you know if I stand up and say, “Children, repeat after me, ‘A sentence, sentence, sentence is complete, complete, complete when 5 simple…’” I don’t know any child who would do that.

But if they say, “Kids, let’s have fun with this! [sings a sentence song in a lighthearted way] So it's all in the approach. It's not the method, it’s the approach.

Marlin Detweiler:

Well, or it's not what but how. But anyway so that's very much a part of who Veritas intends to be with classical education at the grammar school level.

It's also, I think, a significant thing and very misunderstood. And I'd like you to talk about this a little bit too. We think of many people when they hear about learning Latin.

They think, “Latin is not the language I speak.” So it's a foreign language and then it gets grouped in with Spanish and German, and French. And now we have a choice. Do we learn Latin or do we learn German? And if you read Sayers carefully, I think she articulates so well the incredible benefit of Latin as a tool of leverage for mastering language in general and English in particular.

Talk to us about your thoughts.

Laurie Detweiler:

It's an interesting thing. As online education has grown, we get more people coming to us who may not have ever heard about classical ed. It’s really easy to convince them to take logic or to take rhetoric because people think, “Oh, that's going to help my kid” because there have been some buzzwords about that.

Marlin Detweiler:

Critical thinking, learning to think.

Laurie Detweiler:

So that’s easy. But when it comes to Latin, that's where I'd say we have the most pushback. “Why does my child have to do that? It's a dead language.”

Well, when you have a young child that starts to learn and once again, I'm going to say this, I see really, really, really bad teaching of Latin to the little kids where it's not helpful. It really doesn't make a difference. So if you have a young child who’s learning Latin and then people say, “How are your kids reading some of these things? How do they read The Hobbit as a fourth grader?” Even third graders that are reading The Hobbit, it's really easy when they've had Latin and they encounter new vocabulary. They know what to do with it. They know how to take the root of the word and figure out what it is.

Now, if you don't ever teach them to do that with Latin, you're losing the plane to fly over your teaching Latin. And that's not the only reason. It's grammatical construction, right?

Marlin Detweiler:

There are a lot of reasons we could go into cultural idioms and famous literature. Shakespeare is loaded with things that we learn better with Latin, all kinds of things.

Laurie Detweiler:

If you talk to any great teacher who has taught for a long time, and they started off teaching kids not in a classical school. So let's say they were using a traditional Christian curriculum and they were teaching, say, fourth-grade English, right? Grammar, English grammar. And then they get into classical ed and they have kids that have had literally just a year of Latin. They'll tell you they can't believe the difference in how easy it is to even say teach what a transcendent verb is because the children have an understanding of this. And so it really just opens up the world. But once again, it's all about how you approach it.

If you just go in and teach Latin grammar without making the connections, they're not going to make the connections. That’s dialectic in nature, they’re not going to do it. You have to help them see to do that. So it's what you do with that.

Marlin Detweiler:

I didn't have Latin in my education. Interestingly, my high school, public high school offered Latin, but it was as an alternative, not because they thought–I don't know what they thought. I don't know if they thought of it as a legitimate peer-to-peer, so to speak. Alternative to learning the German that I took or the Spanish that many people took.

But when we talk about learning Latin, we see it as substantially, or at least as a starting point, a grammar school exercise, because cause it is a tool of leverage for learning our language and as you pointed out, is so significant in setting the trajectory of what a student can do may be most easily demonstrated by the literature they're able to easily read and take on.

Laurie Detweiler:

And I would say that a lot of people say, ”Oh, you're a classical school.” We offer Latin all the way up through things that would be considered AP like Virgil or those really advanced Latin classes. Unless you have a student that's in an honors track and wants to pursue that kind of thing, Latin one is the only thing we require them to take.

It's a springboard for everything else. There are those kids that really just love the classics and they want to study Latin and Greek and that’s incredible. I think that’s wonderful. But sometimes people come in thinking, “All of my school is going to be filled with this.” And it's just not. It's a springboard for the rest of their education.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, there’s value in taking it in the junior and senior high years, even for the average student, especially what I would call the junior high or middle school years. But starting it there is not the ideal spot to start. Though it's better than not doing it.

Laurie Detweiler:

You know, I talked to a mom yesterday and her child was coming into ninth grade and they didn’t have any Latin. And when you look at enrolling a student, you check if they’re going to graduate on time. What do you need to do to get the degree? But I also look at if I can’t give you everything in classical ed, what can I give you that is going to make the maximum benefit based on the time available?

You got to have logic and rhetoric. You got to some Latin too. And that's not always the case with students who come in at 11th grade. But if I have a ninth grader I'm going to have them take Latin. Because it's going to give them enough of a springboard that they're going to get something. And we have some great curriculum that, you know, allows a student who's never done any Latin in grammar school to get caught up in a year.

Marlin Detweiler:

So let's let's move on. We've talked a good bit about grammar school, making it fun, making it enjoyable, makes it makes the memorization process very enjoyable.

Laurie Detweiler:

If your hands aren’t dirty, I always say, you aren’t having any fun. I’m a mother of four boys.

Marlin Detweiler:

A mother of four boys knows what that means. So we've come into the second phase, the second of the Trivium, the Dialectic or logic stage. Tell us what we tell the audience, what we really value there in the educational process.

Laurie Detweiler:

First of all, I think you have to realize that's when your kids are going to start thinking. If they haven’t started to push the limits, they’re going to be doing it. They’re going to try to push the limits, right? That's the way God wired them. You know, I often think about this.

Aren't we glad they're doing that while they're still in our homes? But you got to be willing to engage it. They no longer want to just have the answers. That's no longer enough, right? Like they're starting to question and take what you giving them in grammar school and make it their own. So when they ask questions, they probably want to argue with you about it. So, you know, if they're going to argue, let's teach them to argue well, and we want to teach logic at that point.

I went to a large Christian high school. It was what I would call a traditional curriculum. And what I saw was kids leave that. And for the most part, at least for a time period. Fortunately, I'm in my sixties now and I'm seeing a lot of these kids come back to faith, back to the Lord. But many of them lost their faith.

Marlin Detweiler:

I remember going to your ten-year reunion and finding it more disturbing than going to my public high school ten-year reunion in terms of the peers, our peers, our classmates, and where they were in life with regard to important things with the Christian faith in particular.

Laurie Detweiler:

And I think part of the reason is if you don't allow students to ask questions and work things out with them, forcing it down their throat, which, you know, is what happens a lot in the curriculum that has Bible verses on every page, for example. The kids don't make it their own. But when they're making it their own you're not going to always be there by their side. They're going to leave. They go to college. They may just go out into the workforce. Whatever they do, they've got to be able to navigate the world that they live in. And one of the best ways to do that is to teach them logic so that they can navigate it with God's word. Learning to ask questions and think well about things.

Marlin Detweiler:

There are other elements too, learning how things connect.

Laurie Detweiler:

Yeah.

Marlin Detweiler:

That happens in math, that happens in science, it happens in history. And so in this stage, this dialectic stage, kids want to know how things are connected. The other thing that I think is so significant and that we really believe is a critical part of this K-12 education, applying the Trivium to it is that this is the stage where we really are teaching not what to think, but how to think.

We're teaching students to really think in ways that are sound arguments, and are sound processes. I hate to use the term for the term, but it's learning a logical process in learning logic and it's carried out in the other disciplines also.

Laurie Detweiler:

We have a couple of teachers that come to mind. Michael Collander is one of them. He teaches a number of upper-level courses for us, and then Rob Shearer is another of them. Both of those men. If you go into their classes, sometimes I'll have people say to me, Well, they don't seem like they're teaching, and yet they are teaching so well because they're asking questions and they're drawing it out of the kids and they’re getting them to think for themselves. And that is a dialectic exercise that’s difficult to do.

Marlin Detweiler:

It's a very skilled technique. The difference is that the educational process, among other things, is two ways. It's no longer like in grammar school, spoon-fed to the students. Of course, make it fun and interesting – spoon-feeding with a little bit of sugar. It helps things go down better kind of thing. But now we're talking about an interactive process and well-phrased questions allowing students to run with things, and allowing them to interact with each other are frequently part of what we see in well-run dialectic-level classes. That's a really good observation.

Laurie Detweiler:

We get questions about teacher manuals for things like Omnibus. Parents call in and say, “Well, what's the answer?” Because what it says is, “This is a simple answer”. The point is, there are a couple of key things in there that a child needs to have in the answer. But other than that, it's can they make the connections and think well about it.

So literally in a class of 20 kids, you're going to make two components that you were looking for to make sure the child got right. But other than that, as long as they made a really good argument that's logical and well thought out, they're going to do well. That’s what it’s about.

Marlin Detweiler:

But those that struggle with that concept will say, okay, I got to look for the two and you want me to you mean it might be one, might be four, but you mean a very few that are critical. And it's really about how well the arguments are constructed. Very good.

So then we get into the high school years and rhetoric comes about. And, you know, one of the things and we're going to talk about this in the next session that we record, and that is how does how do we at Veritas work on creating what goes into creating a new product, a new curriculum when we create a copyright? Well, that wouldn't take up 30 minutes in it.

We'll talk about that for 30 minutes in our next session. But one of the things that is crucial to that process is finding the idea that we need. I'm hesitating to use some of the terms because I don't want to I want to leave that for our next session. But we really struggled when we saw rhetoric and the rhetoric curricula that were available, and it took us a long time to figure out what made the most sense for rhetoric in a classical Christian education.

And it and so I'm going to leave that for next time. But as we think about the rhetoric stage, talk about the things that we see as crucial and have tried to instill in the children that we get to help educate.

Laurie Detweiler:

As I look at older students, you know. Like, a lot of parents, when you go to your talks in a classical lecture here, things like, “Oh, well, they're becoming aware of themselves and know they want to look good. And so that's why we teach rhetoric.” That's not always the case. What I would say more than anything is they're starting to become not necessarily aware of themselves, but they're becoming aware of their surroundings. And so it's how to teach them to interact with that.

And I've often said that when a child graduates, my role is that the first and foremost thing when we have a child come through our education is that they love the Lord.

That's the number one thing that I would have. We could throw everything else out and

They would have a great education. Nothing else matters. But I also want a child that's comfortable going to visit the president of the United States and having an audience with them and going into the coal mines then and working with the men and women who might be in the coal mines. Right. And so to me, rhetoric is about being able to know your audience, to relate to them well and make them feel like they're the most important person that you're talking to right then and there because if we've done that, we've done our job.

You know, rhetoric is not just about convincing somebody- in fact, I would say that second rhetoric, it's not about convincing somebody with you, believe me, rhetoric is the second commandment. The second great commandment is to love your neighbor.

Marlin Detweiler:

If you deal with the top ten, that's one list. If you deal with the top two, that’s another. But I knew what you meant.

Laurie Detweiler:

Yeah. And so if we have the person that we're engaging with feel loved and heard, you're going to convince them of anything. Probably, Right? But if you don't do that, I watch so many politicians in the world who aren’t convincing of anything. This is a fake speech, right? It doesn't work. Scripture is really clear about this. That’s what rhetoric is really about, this speech. So that's why A Rhetoric of Love is what was written. And you know, we can credit that Doug Jones did an amazing job. And then Michael Collender who also did an amazing job of teaching kids how to use what they learned in Rhetoric I.

Marlin Detweiler:

We have other disciplines, the history, theology and literature that come out in omnibus takes on a new approach. You want to talk about that a little bit, How omnibus four, five, and six differ from one, two and three.

This was kind of a leading question and we didn't brief ahead of time. And you have been talking a lot, but that's okay. Most times I talk a lot. One of the things that is a class type in a live class for IV, V,VI is not in I,II,III is to have the class be what we call student-led.

Essentially, the student becomes the teacher. And there are two reasons for that at a rhetorical level. One is teachers, if you've ever taught anything, learn more than students. When they're teaching something, they learn more about the subject because of preparation, because of mastery, and of having to be able to address a variety of questions and approaches to the material.

The other is to make them rhetorically or more effective with their rhetoric, to learn how to apply the tools. And so that's a very significant part of the rhetoric level. The other thing is that if you get into science, take it well, if we take biology, chemistry or physics as, as examples, we're starting to now not only understand the bones of the body, the muscles, the connections.

Yeah, the grammar and the dialectic, if you will. But now think in terms of diagnoses of problems and be able to apply them. That's what doctors do all the time. That's what chemists do, whether it be in medicine or whatever in physics. Take rocketry as an example, thinking in terms of the variables and creating a plan that's going to be effective and going to work.

It's really amazing- the genius of applying the Trivium to a K-12 education was one of the real attractions to us back in 1992, when we were first exposed to this thinking. You remember well, as you read about the idea of classical Christian education, what really got you excited? There were two things that I would answer, but what would you answer that got you excited and made you say, “This is what I want for our kids”?

Laurie Detweiler:

So I pretty much told you I went to a large Christian school. It used a very fundamental curriculum and I watched kids not be able to engage with the world well. And so I pretty much was an educator. I came from an educator's family, our family from a school that was an all-boys school for many years – a boarding school, which then became coed. But that’s not this school I attended. And so I watched kids walk away from the faith.

So I pretty much determined that (this was before I was married), that I didn't want my children in a Christian school because I just felt like Christianity was something that was just taken for granted with the Bible verse on the page.

When you say two animals plus two animals went onto Noah’s Ark, that’s not why it equals four. It's just forcing something sometimes to make it supposedly biblical. And so I determined I really didn't want my kids in a Christian school. We sent our kids when we got married to a prep school, a very good prep school, and quickly realized that separating the other side of it also was problematic because they were trying to force some things. And this was a long time ago. Our oldest son is close to 40 and so they were trying to force a worldview thinking that was just not good. And that was a long time ago.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, well, the point that you're making is it matters what the world view is that is underlying education.

Laurie Detweiler:

So when we read Recovering Lost Tools of Learning, what I saw was an education that had this worldview. But it didn't shy away from the world, right? So all our parents say, “Why in the world do you read The Twelve Caesars? That is the most horrible book in the world.”

It is one of the most horrible books in the world. I'll grant you that. There are some things in there, but I got news for you. It's just a repeat of things we see today, right? So we study some of these things so that we can look and see what's happened in the past. So we don't repeat it again, but we do it through the lens of a Christian worldview.

I would never want a young child reading The Twelve Caesars unattended or without a lens of “What does scripture say about this?” So I wasn’t afraid to talk about tough things. We’re not afraid to talk about abortion. We’re not afraid to talk about whatever it might be today.

Marlin Detweiler:

Hitler. And seeing what happened. Or Darwinism.

Laurie Detweiler:

The kids read Mein Kampf. On one hand you can say that's scary, but it's not scary. When I went to college, I was encountering those things right away. I wish that I had encountered them with a godly person, teaching them to me through that lens rather than having to go into college and figure this out on my own.

Marlin Detweiler:

I think there's a lot to be said this way. It's not if our children will get exposed to these things, but when. And when implies how. And I want our children, the children that we get to be working with through the parents that trust us to recognize that now, when they're with their parents, when they're with Christian teachers, is the best time for them to learn to think biblically about very difficult and ungodly things. Now, there are limits to that.

We don't have to experience pornography to know that pornography abuses, in most cases, women, it exploits them. It's a horrible thing for men. And again, in most instances, that's the overwhelming percentage. Some women struggle with pornography, too, but that's a minority. And we want to be exposed to the kinds of things that we know we need to understand at some level in order to offset or refute. And that's what you're bringing up.

Laurie Detweiler:

This generation thinks the world is so bad. I thought it was so much worse for our kids. I'm telling you, I'm not that far away from when my children were little. What my grandchildren are asking me now, and they are protected – like my grandkids are either at a classical school or they homeschool. And they come from godly, godly homes. Like they’re being raised to love the Lord and what they are exposed to just by being in a car and seeing a billboard– like there’s no way you can put blinders on your child. Even though their parents are so strict about what they see on video or TV. It is there, you can’t help it. And the things they’re encountering today, if we don’t arm these children to think, it’s scary where they’re going to end up.

Marlin Detweiler:

And that's speaking of the defensive side. And that is very important and very true. But in closing, it's also important to realize that at Veritas, we're thinking on the offensive side just as much and maybe more. We want to see children raised to restore culture to Christ, one young heart in mind at a time– our mission and we want to see children who are ready to take on the world from a leadership standpoint and lead it into godliness and righteousness.

This has been fun. It's been fun to kind of recount history. It's been fun to do it with you. Thanks dear. This is Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Thank you for joining us.