Listen on Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify | Watch the Video

How did classical Christian education get its resurgence in the United States after decades of government education being the standard? Today, you’ll hear it straight from one of the men who was instrumental in this growth: Tom Garfield, the past Headmaster of Logos school in Moscow, ID and current Dean of Academics at Veritas Scholars Academy.

We’ll also discuss the differences between attending an in-person classical school vs. the live online options that are now available – and why online classical Christian schools are an outstanding cultural experience.

Episode Transcription

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

Marlin Detweiler:

Welcome again to Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. I'm Marlin Detweiler, and today we have with us a dear old friend, Tom Garfield. I say old because I've known him a long time, not because he doesn't have hair or because of his age. Welcome, Tom!

Tom Garfield:

Thank you. But that's both true there. So…

Marlin Detweiler:

Hey, tell us about yourself a little bit you, your family and that sort of thing before we get into the subject matter.

Tom Garfield:

Sure. Sure. I'm originally from Ann Arbor, Michigan, so this is my water bottle. (Wolverines)

Marlin Detweiler:

Oh, boy. You get to create controversy with that.

Tom Garfield:

Yeah, right. Yeah. So the short version now. Born and raised there and so, yeah, it's in my blood. But after the Navy, I came out here to Moscow, Idaho; it's in the panhandle of Idaho. Got to be good friends with the Jim Wilson family back in Ann Arbor. Jim had four children, among which was Doug Wilson, of some fame. We got to know each other in high school, got together a number of times in the Navy, and then afterward I came out here to go to the University of Idaho. And anyway, as the Lord would have it, as I was finishing my art degree at the University of Idaho, fully intending to be an art teacher.

Marlin Detweiler:

But you are an art teacher!

Tom Garfield:

Well, I am an art teacher. Yes! But that's all I was going to be. And anyway, Doug accosted me the idea one day in 1980 of heading up a school that they were putting together a class. Well, at that time, a classical Christian school was not in the works. Nobody was talking classical. It was just a nondenominational Christian school so that his daughter would be able to get a Christian education and not have to go to the public schools, basically.

So I felt the Lord was leading me into that, and we opened it in September of 81, as Logos School here in Moscow, Idaho.

Marlin Detweiler:

And Logos School, of which you were the Superintendent, sometimes called the Headmaster or Head of School, was where you went to work at doing that job and teaching art. It started in 1981, as you said, but you mentioned something that I need to unpack a bit, and that was that you were originally simply starting a Christian school. How did it become a classical Christian school?

And while you're at it, talk a little bit about the impact, the Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning, the book that we become familiar with. Maybe you even had a book came about and how it's how you seen it have impact around the world.

Tom Garfield:

Sure. Sure. I failed to mention you asked about my family or my background. I just focused right on school. But yeah, my wife Julie is a native here in Moscow. Actually, she's like fourth generation in Moscow. Anyway, we have four children and now 11 grandchildren. But anyhow. Yeah, so Doug was the impetus for starting Logos, and I'm not kidding about his daughters.

His daughter Becca was really the driving force as a child. In other words, Nancy, his wife, was the driving force to get the school started. And, you know, you know, it's funny, there was there at the time. There, of course, were public schools here. But there was an Adventist school here and a Catholic school here. But nothing non-denominational.

And so that was really the point. That was to start non-denominational. And well, I remember at a board meeting, there were four of us. I was on the board as well as the principal. And I remember when Doug brought this article to our board meeting called The Lost Tools of Learning by Dorothy Sayers.

And we read it, and we all kind of went, Well, that's cool. You got to remember; this was just out of the 70s. So, of course, it was cool. Oh, yeah. And we all thought, at least I think we did. We all thought, Well, this sounds great. We have no idea what this means or how it would look.

But shoot, let's give it a try. What could go wrong? Yeah, what can go wrong? What could go wrong? But it was really, you know, what we didn't realize. And none of us really did what we didn't realize was that Sayers’ approach was very pedagogical, and that is how to teach as well as what to teach, but mostly how to teach.

And we didn't know how to teach anything! And so everything was a hard lesson. And we quickly figured out that the materials that we had bought for our Christian school from a company that would remain unnamed, but it's certainly not Veritas, obviously. But they're still around, and we quickly figured it out- we were trying to essentially screw in a spear with a hammer and it wasn't working well.

And so there's nothing wrong with materials, but it was just the wrong approach. And so we very quickly actually had to redo our entire curriculum and start making some of our own supplies, some of our own curriculum material, because it wasn't out there. And so we had to go, “What are we doing?” And we started searching high and low for anything.

We came across John Saxon and his math approach. Well, we liked it because he incorporated review. We also came across a book called The Seven Laws of Teaching, and that radicalized so much of how we thought about teaching. I won't go into that right now, but we also came across Brenda Shirley, not her personally, but well, actually sorta through her videotapes.

I have to tell you, if you know something, a lot of your listeners would know about the Shirley method. Shirley, I don't know if she's still living, but.

Marlin Detweiler:

She is in Arkansas.

Tom Garfield:

Okay. Well, yeah, Arkansas, you know, so she has this amazing accent. And I remember my teachers in north Idaho watching her talk about verbs, nouns, and adjectives. And, you know, we figured it's really good. But again, it's this pattern of chanting and, you know, singsong and memorization that fits with the grammar stage. And so we found these things. For about the first ten years of our existence at almost every board meeting was always a debate, and there are only four of us. Then there were six. There was a debate, “What is classical education? Well, but what is it really?” And we kept going back to the and looking at it, and it kind of broke down into two possible interpretations.

One is, is it largely about classical era languages, and texts? You know, the the tested works in Western civilization. Like content. Is that, is that largely that? Or is it largely pedagogical? That debate we had for about ten years at almost every board meeting, I went ahead and did it in the school as though it was pedagogical because that's all I could figure out. And I mean, yes, of course, we brought in Latin and eventually Greek and that kind of thing.

But largely, it was pedagogical. Well, then, in 1991, Doug had the opportunity. He was asked to write a book on education for a series called The Turning Point Series by Crossway Publishers. And they asked him to write a book on education. So he said to himself, I suppose, “I'm going to write about his Logos experience trying to do this.”

Marlin Detweiler:

Well, clearly, he was being asked because of the Logos experience that he had had; how did he get discovered for that?

Tom Garfield:

That's a good question. It was Marvin Olasky was the publisher at the time, and I don't know how he and Doug got connected, but they had a connection, and Doug could tell you more about that. So I don't know if Marvin knew about the connection with Logos. I suppose he did. But anyway, Doug used Logas as kind of a “Here's how we're doing this classical thing and rediscover this classical thing.”

And Doug essentially planted the flag on the top of Mount Everest and said, this is it, and this is what we mean by classical. It's all pedagogical with the importance of what we would also call some classical curriculum. Well, that ended the discussion at our board meeting because now we were we are identified with that article on a pedagogical basis.

But it also did this thing, you know, this proverbial stuff hitting the fan, you know, in ‘91, you don't have the Internet. Not quite yet. Al Gore hadn't quite gotten his act together yet. But you had, you know, still, this ability for people to read. Doug's book became the next in a series that already, I believe, had about 13,000 readerships, you know, people lined up for it.

So it wasn't just a book out by itself. It came out as something that people were already reading, if you will. Yeah. And so it just everything went nuts. We got calls, phone calls at school, phone calls at Doug's house, letters to the school, letters to Doug saying not, “How do we get to Moscow and go to your school” but rather, “How do we do this where we live?”

Yeah, that was the huge question. How do we do this in our place? We also heard, sadly, that the Christian schools, by and large, had been failing or failing at least in that these people were curious about doing something else. So many people resonated with the idea of “This is what I've been looking for, this is what we want for our children, and this is not what's being provided by our local Christian school.”

So there was not even a, you know, “Oh, we hate the public school thing.” I mean, that, you know, that wasn't even part of the conversation. It was from people who wanted a Christian education, had pursued a Christian education, but were very disappointed. And so that's why it just went nuts. And I went to Doug at one point, and I said, Doug, we're getting flooded here. I can't run the school and help these people much as I want to. Yeah, we would send them, you know, we would send them whatever we could, you know, copies of our curriculum guide if we, you know, put them in the mail.

So anyway, Doug, I'm not saying I fostered the idea. I don't think I did. Like Doug saw what was happening. He was getting calls in the letters, too, and so he said, you know, this is ridiculous. We need to push this away from Logos in one sense and start its own organization. Well, you and Laurie obviously had been aware of what was going on. You were excited by the books as well.

Marlin Detweiler:

Our reading of Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning was what got us excited. It was literally the finish of that reading that we gathered for the were for couples that gathered in our home on May 26, 1992, to discuss and at that moment, commit to starting the Geneva School in Orlando as a result of reading the book, talking to Doug, etc.

Tom Garfield:

That's interesting. Well, then, yes. So you were on the mailing list. Like I said, this is all done pre-Internet. Doug had written the book Discovering the Lost Tools, so hence the Lost Tools... And we decided, okay, let's let's have a conference of all the people that are interested in this thing out here in Moscow because, of course, Moscow so easy to get to.

Marlin Detweiler:

These people are committed.

Tom Garfield:

It’s a winnowing process. And so so we set that, and I believe it was July of ‘93 that we had it.

Marlin Detweiler:

Actually, it was like ‘92 because it was my first call with Doug, and he also mentioned it, I think. Well, I don't remember. But it was only a few weeks later.

Tom Garfield:

Okay, well, so we had this conference, and here in Moscow, about 70 people showed up, as I recall, and you guys were among them. And at that time, Doug, you, Tom Spencer, and I got together in the staff room one evening, and-

Marlin Detweiler:

That was ‘93. There was not an initiative to start an association. I think that the conference itself probably was a catalyst for Doug thinking about what do we need to do about this. And the answer that he came up with, we need to start an association.

Tom Garfield:

That's right. Yes. Thank you. Yes. So, yeah, so it was in the summer of ‘93 that yeah, you guys came out again, and we had this somebody had drawn up these papers. I don't know if you did that too. Anyway.

Marlin Detweiler:

It looks like you're done. Before I was connected, Doug invited me to join before getting there to be part of the founding board. But the paperwork had been done prior to that.

Tom Garfield:

Right? So, yeah, so we all the four of us said, yeah, let's do this and sign the documents forming ACCS, the Association of Classical Christian Schools. And subsequently I had a visit out to you guys that August as you got Geneva going and that was hot.

Marlin Detweiler:

It’s Orlando, what can I tell you?

Tom Garfield:

Well, I wasn't expecting it. I don't know. You know, it's not what I live in.

Marlin Detweiler:

A city that has a one-day long summer. July 4th is your summer. You got to expect it's going to be hot somewhere else compared to what you're used to.

Tom Garfield:

Well, it sure was! And yeah. So anyway, it was then. Yeah. Subsequently, we had I think a couple more conferences here in Moscow, and finally people said, you know, you really need to take this on the road. And what they meant by that is go where people live. So then in ‘96 we went out to Raleigh and had our first good-sized conference.

I think about 400 people showed up for that, and then away we went. So yeah, so that's kind of the short version of how Logos got going and then ACCS as an obvious spin-off from that.

Marlin Detweiler:

But what was really cool was you were the head of the first school you all it was out of your community that the book was written on classical ed when we found that there were actually some other schools that kind of germinated I remember at least one care Perryville in Topeka Kansas, and they became associated quickly. And so there was connection there and energy.

My experience in getting familiar with the book was that RC Sproul recommended it to me when I asked him some questions on education; he had become familiar with it through Ty Willis. And because of that had become a part of Founding Regents School, of course. And then what his role was related to founding? I assume he was part of the foundation, and I'm I'm fairly certain that he would have learned about the book from Marvin Olasky because I believe there's some connection there. So it's kind of interesting how all that came together.

So your career at Logos was how long as the Head of School?

Tom Garfield:

Well, I was at the school for 35 years and within that time taught a lot of classes, taught art classes, which was, I mean, I laughed because, you know, I thought I was totally getting something near when the Lord said, okay, now I want you to do this administrative thing, which I had zero experience in preparing for. I literally laughed at Doug when he first approached the idea, and instead, I did 35 years of it. And but I taught art basically from day one and haven't stopped since.

Marlin Detweiler:

So that's incredible. So how long ago did you retire from Logos?

Tom Garfield:

Oh, five years. Okay. Yeah.

Marlin Detweiler:

And it was maybe four years ago that you came to work with us.

Tom Garfield:

Yeah, just about. Yeah, about four and a half years ago, early.

Marlin Detweiler:

And what were you thinking? I thought you were retiring.

Tom Garfield:

Well, you know, I. Yeah, I was retired from Logos. But I didn't want to stop life. And so I started a little academy, just an arts thing called Heritage Arts, downtown Moscow. And we put on plays. And I would do art classes and, you know, just things we do, wine and paint nights. But anyway, then you guys got a hold of me a few months later, and the idea of getting back into administration sounded really fun, especially when I didn't have to be the top guy.

Marlin Detweiler:

Tell us your title and what you do day in and day out with Veritas Academy, our online school.

Tom Garfield:

Well, when you guys, when you particularly talk to me, I talked to Bob first, of course, but Bob Cannon is my boss. He, as many of your people know, Dr. Bob Cannon's my boss, the Headmaster of the Academy. But when I realized this, when you spoke to me, and I realized I wouldn't be the final guy, the top guy with all those headaches, and I wouldn't have any board meetings to go through. And I had nothing to do with money. So this is a win all over!

So, yeah, as Dean of Academics, my main role is to observe and evaluate our teachers. And since we archive everything, our teachers are online, and we archive all their classes. I don't need to disturb their classes to observe them.

I watch their archives and send them a summary report. And that was one of the things I enjoyed doing at Logos. Look, was, it was hard to get to you, as every administrator knows. It's one of these ironic things. It's one of the most important things you can do. And it's one of the least things done because it just takes time.

And anyway. So I really wanted to do it. And I get to teach several art classes for Veritas as well. So that's been fun.

Marlin Detweiler:

I would say ACCS today had a very suspect view of online education, and I did, too when we first started. Tell us about the journey and where you find yourself with regard to your concerns for online education.

Tom Garfield:

Sure. Well, you know, yeah, I go so far back, and so do you that we remember when there weren't really computers. Right? So that's how far and far back we go! So I grew up in the eighties when microcomputers were just coming online so to speak.

Everybody's trying to figure out how does this work in education? You know, Bill Clinton told us that it was, you know, the best thing on the planet to make kids smarter. And, of course, we had reason to doubt him. So we all had to kind of shift our paradigm and go, well, how does this work? How does this fit in? Is it just a tool? Whatever.

Anyway, that's important to note because, of course, online depends on computers, and we got our view of computers early on, unlike the millennials, right? They were born in them. We had to figure out what they meant. And, so when online education started cropping up, I admit, I was one of the many who thought, “Oh, seriously, you know, as if the kids don't watch enough TV already or whatever.”

And you know, I had this image of them sitting in a basement somewhere where this, you know, like Neo and Matrix or something and, you know, this is wasted pale person and watching some teacher tell them things, and then they fell out of work because I don't know. And I was like, “Oh, that can't be good.”

And so that was honestly my initial view is, you know, if okay, if you can't, I suppose if you can't do the best thing with, you know, being in person, then yeah, watch a recording of somebody and, and do your best right to get something out of it. But yeah, I had to have my, my paradigm completely changed for one thing, when you started bringing this idea of an online school to the ACCS board meeting and saying, you know, “This is really viable, this is really a thing that's working, and it's working well for thousands of kids.”

I feel that you and I are, you know, we crossed words more than once. But when you were, we usually ended up agreeing. So that was always funny. I have to say parenthetically that, you know.

Marlin Detweiler:

I like that I was right when we disagreed at first.

Tom Garfield:

Yeah, yeah. That's the best. Right. But yeah, I remember a number of board members going, Marlin and Tom, I agree. This has got to be the right thing! That's. Yeah. So it was our secret ploy anyway. But when you're talking about it, I thought, how can that possibly be any kind of a serious school? You know, they're just using computers.

How can they, you know, do this? So as I became more familiar with it, what was interesting, Marlin, you may not know, this a year before I retired from Logos, Roman Roads curriculum

here in Moscow- Daniel Fukushima, one of the owners, asked me to do an art class for them at their online school.

And I thought, well, okay. And it was early enough in the morning that I went. It won’t disrupt my daily schedule. And so I went on, it was twice a week and had, I don't know, half a dozen students or something and really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed it. And so, in a sense, it was like I had this little warmup to what I was going to be doing, and I didn't know it.

And so when I left Logos, then I was picked up by you guys. I was like, Oh, okay, I, I kind of know how this can work online, and my view completely changed.

Marlin Detweiler:

So it is in my experience I've said this before in a number of contexts, including an episode of Veritas Vox, and that is, I knew it was timely. I knew it was important. I knew technology would develop in ways that I couldn't even imagine to make it better. But I didn't know how good it would actually be in our first year of doing classes, which is now 18 years ago; I was blown away by how good it was - the teacher's ability to communicate verbally with things on-screen videos, taking them to websites, all those kinds of things, some of which they can do better with a computer than they can in a classroom.

And the students’ ability to communicate and interact well was absolutely far better than I ever imagined. And it is, in a word, better than I thought it would be.

Tom Garfield:

Well, it certainly is, yes, for me, too. It certainly was eye-opening because, for me, you know, the kids were, of course, the whole point. And for you, too, the kids were the whole point and making sure they had an interactive relationship with their other peers and the teacher. Very, very important. And I just didn't see how that could happen online.

Well, of course, it does. And they're real kids, and they're real teachers, and they connect. And one of the amazing things that I kind of I don't know, at least it was an epiphany for me, was as I told the kids to when I was at Logos, I, in a sense, invited all these kids to come into my classroom for history or art or whatever.

And it was great, and it is great. And, you know, I got to know them and see them in the hallways and that sort of thing. With online, they're inviting me into their homes. Yeah. Okay. I mean, yes, I have a classroom, and they come to that. But more realistically, I'm coming into their homes, they're coming into each other's homes and seeing each other where they live, seeing their pets many times. Sometimes seeing parents, seeing outside.

I had a girl in Brazil, you know, and she was always outside. And, you know, just this wondrous connection between not just between the kids, between kids internationally, kids in Florida, talking with kids in Texas and Idaho. And, you know, every place in between, kids who have never met each other except this connection. Right. So the kids in Logos are wonderful kids. Wonderful. But they all kind of, of course, live in the same area because they have to the teachers all live in the same area because they have to. And instead, now we get together and we would never meet these people if we hadn't had this vehicle.

Marlin Detweiler:

So that unforeseen benefit to have multiple cultures and multiple perspectives be in one place for learning and discussion.

We’re running out of time. And there's a question I want to get to, so I'm going to cut that part off for now and move to something else.

You’ve been around Classical Christian Education's revival about as long as anyone because of your involvement at Logos from the beginning in 1981 through today. 40… do the math. 41 years.

What have you seen progress, and where do you see the future?

Tom Garfield:

Well, on the positive side, I’ve seen the progress in the development of the program both nationally and internationally. Like I said, Veritas has been a great help toward that. In fact, I think uniquely benefited many thousands that way. I mean, to be fair, I mean, the local Christian classical school can't be expected to be an international influence. Right.

But taken as a whole, classical education now is an international movement. And I and I just think that's wonderful because when we first started, the idea of anything being, you know, cross-cultural, you know, sounds good. But, you know, is classical education really for every culture? Well, yeah, actually, it is because it's for every kid anyway.

So I'm pleased by that. I'm pleased by the of course, sheer numbers of kids and families that are being blessed this way across the world, and the number of educators who are giving themselves to it. Now, we have second-generation educators as well as, of course, second-generation students, alumni, and kids coming to schools. So there's a generational shift, as it should be, happening. The baton is being passed, as it should be. Now, that's the good side. I'm pleased by the amount of books being written and that sort of thing.

What I'm concerned about is the initial; this is kind of ironic because the initial debate that we had in our little tiny board meeting here in little tiny Moscow is still there. It's still, “What is it? What is classical education? Is it content driven? Is a pedagogical game on?” My concern on that has grown and now is really quite high because going it obviously, I'm a pedagogical guru that way, but my concern with the content is then it becomes less and less about the ability of the teacher and the character of the teacher than it is about the material.

And when you go that direction, and I know it sounds, you know, doomsaying, but when you go that direction, then it becomes kind of the big tent approach. Theological lines get blurred and pretty soon, you lose so much of what Sayers says. But far more importantly, you lose what I believe is the clear biblical message of what education is supposed to be.

I think by broadening the tent, if you will, say, well, you know, we can involve all sorts of people of faith. Yeah, but then you're not Christian anymore. So anyway, that is a very great concern I have.

Marlin Detweiler:

It's been my sense that first and foremost, the classical and classical Christian education, and this is where we are at Veritas is about a comprehensive application of the trivium, grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric or logic used for a dialectic and understanding that informs how we teach and to some extent what we teach. Because the idea when I talk to people about whether or not they've had, you know, people that have had Latin run into some I went to a Catholic school. Yeah, I had Latin or somebody that's our age. Yeah, we had Latin as an alternative to Spanish or French or, in my case, German. But the reason we teach Latin is so different. And it's not about that or a modern foreign language is, as far as I'm concerned, primarily a tool of leverage for mastering language, which happens substantially in grammar schools.

And so it informs when the content happens. And as you know, we have this thing called the Omnibus, the Great Books, and that's about content, but it's more about ideas and discussing ideas that have influenced education and people over the years and applying them within the confines or within the structure here of this pedagogical model. And so there's a sense in which my answer to your question would be content is important, but not as important as getting the method, the pedagogy in place.

And so the two of them together are where we're trying to be. And you've been a wonderful part of it. Thank you.

Tom Garfield:

Thank you. You’re most welcome.

I don't want people to think that I don't care about content. But like you said, the content guides us in that sense. But yeah, it's as Sayers says, it's kind of grist for the mill, which doesn't sound very particular, but it is. And that's where, again, the whole cultural aspect is so important.

If by focusing on the pedagogical side, you can bring in local culture into your school program wherever you are, as opposed to, Oh, we're just going to follow the Western world, you know, kind of idea. But no, I'm very delighted. I'm thrilled that my grandchildren, all of my 11 grandchildren are getting a classical education in various places. And I'm hugely grateful for that.

Marlin Detweiler:

You've been with us on Veritas Vox with Tom Garfield and me, Marlin Detweiler. Thank you for joining us.