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In the previous episode, you heard what the Veritas Press philosophy of education looks like in each stage of a child’s development. Today, we’re digging in deeper! Join Marlin and Laurie Detweiler for a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to develop curricula and how the Veritas Press team decides what to create.
Episode Transcription
Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode for better readability.
Marlin Detweiler:
Welcome to Veritas Vox again. Laurie My wife and I are the people that you're going to hear from today. As I mentioned in a prior episode, we thought it might be fun for you to hear how we go about selecting and creating new curricula. So Laurie, tell us a little bit about what goes into committing to do new curriculum at Veritas.
Laurie Detweiler:
Well, when we first started Veritas – how many years ago now?
Marlin Detweiler:
1996.
Laurie Detweiler:
96.
Marlin Detweiler:
And some of the work that became Veritas was done even before that.
Laurie Detweiler:
There wasn't a lot of curriculum out there, so you didn't really need to ask the question, “Is it neccessary?” at that point because there was pretty much nothing there. Today, one of the first questions we have to ask because there's some really good curriculum out there, is, “Is it needed? Is it necessary? Why are we doing what we're doing?” And the answer is it needs to be what Marlin refers to as “a better mousetrap”. If it's not a better mousetrap, there's just no reason to do it.
Marlin Detweiler:
Too much work otherwise.
Laurie Detweiler:
And so we're always asking ourselves that question. Then we need the right people. Marlin and I did a lot of the initial work for the history and Bible and for phonics, but as we got into Omnibus, we had to assemble a team of people to do that, and we assembled an incredible team to do that, as we've done logic and rhetoric. Our hands are in all of these things. Marlin really particularly in the older grades, and in the younger grades I pretty much touch every page and the older grades, Marlin touches every page. So if you see something that you don't like in our curriculum, you can know our hands have been on it and you can ask to talk to us about it.
Marlin Detweiler:
And blame us!
Laurie Detweiler:
But the question is who are the people that can write this that are going to make the better mousetrap with this? And then, of course, there's always do we have the funds to do it? Because Veritas, as you've probably seen, doesn't do things poorly. We try to do them very well and to high standards. It always bothered me when I would go to homeschool conferences and look at the things from Random House or Simon and Schuster, and they were pretty. And then you'd go to homeschooling groups and it would be like photocopied and spiral bound.
Marlin Detweiler:
Kitchen table publishing.
Laurie Detweiler:
I said to Marlin when we started this, “If we can't do this well, I don't want to do it.” And so we have both agreed on that. So you know, we try to. That's one of the things that we laugh about with a lot of the larger publishers– they literally make bindings so that they only last so many years. Right. We don't do that. And so our Omnibus books stick around for a really, really, really long time. We intentionally do not build the life out of products.
Marlin Detweiler:
Like a seven-year refrigerator, book bindings that fail in three or a standard that publishers use is really sad.
Laurie Detweiler:
Anyway, those really are the three things that we're we're looking for when we do curriculum. And sometimes we know there's a need, but we don't have the right people yet or we have the right people, but we don't get the money or whatever. So we right now are working on quite a few things. Most of these things take years, right? So we're working on a project now that I've been working on for three or four years. There's a large number of people in the background working, and part of it is we're trying things out, particularly, you know, with our live students. And then we have a cohort of homeschooling families that we test things with, so to speak, and get feedback from them. So the things we're working on, by the time they get to the general public, have gone through a whole lot of people.
Marlin Detweiler:
It was amazing to me to learn that the major publishers, people much better funded than we are, when it came to a book, literally have it go through ten people, ten cycles, if you will, of editing and proofing as a common experience. That's very expensive.
Laurie Detweiler:
The only thing that Veritas is doing, and I think this might be in all actuality, the most important thing we do, is we try to think about the user. And what I mean by that, is this is not a one-size-fits-all right? So when we build a product, we're thinking about how does a five day a week school use this? How does a university model use this? How does a homeschooling family use this? How does an online school use this? And we try to make products so that you can pick and choose. It's why when you look at our catalog, when you go to our website, it's the three ways to teach, right? You teach which means you as a parent or teacher or someone you hire to do it for you, which would be a school teaching it, for instance. There's Self-Paced because we believe that some products are just better with Self-Paced. I’ll put our history and our Bible Self-Paced against any teacher out there.
Marlin Detweiler:
Including yourself?
Laurie Detweiler:
Including myself! That’s my point! And then you know live courses. And so we try to offer things in a wide variety of ways because you know what's best for your children. We don't. We want you to be the one in control.
Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. So to kind of restate that, three things have to be in place for us to greenlight a new curriculum. One is we have to have the money that we need and we're not deeply capitalized. So that generally means out of cash flow. There have been instances where we've worked with private individuals and worked out unique arrangements to fund something. So the money has to be in place. The talent of people that can produce it needs to be in place and that is sometimes within the Veritas Press employment community, but many times is outside it. And then we need to have that idea that, as I like to call it, is a better mousetrap. What exists in the marketplace? What can we do to make something that's better than what exists? If we can't do that, as you said, there's really no point.
The first thing that we did and the thing that caused Veritas Press to come into existence was our grammar school history and Bible cards. We always intended to have music with it, but that wasn't the first thing we did. We always intended to have workbooks or teacher manuals. They're called “bones” sometimes and so those three things – and a projects manual as well now. That's right. But talk a little bit about that product and what the better mousetrap ideas were for it, because I don’t think it's easy for many people to visualize what we mean when we talk about it.
Laurie Detweiler:
When we first started looking at educating our children classically, there was somebody out there, he teaches with us now, Rob Shearer, and he had published a curriculum that was around for a lot of years. Still is. We still sell it.
Marlin Detweiler:
The Great Men series, Great Men of the Middle Ages, Great Men of the Reformation, Great Men in Greece. And Rome and Ancient Egypt, right?
Laurie Detweiler:
And so, you know, as I started looking at things, that was one of the first things I saw. But what wasn't there was a memory tool for it, right? So if I'm reading Sayers’ essay, they were talking about memorizing, the first thing I do is say, well, what are they going to memorize for the timeline? I'm a history buff. I love history. I have since I was a child. So that appealed to me.
Also happened to be that as a child, I was fascinated with Egypt because one of my good family friends growing up, his family lived in Egypt for years in the oil industry. So I would go to their house and they would have all these artifacts and they were believers. And so I would go in and he would hold up these things and talk to me. Whether it was talking about Joseph and his coat of many colors or whatever it was, as a small child, I was looking at real things. So the thought, you know, it hit us very early on both Marlin and I, that most people, they think the Bible existed and then you start what we would call world history today. Like if you go ask the general public they really don't think about the fact that a lot of the things you see in world history happened simultaneously at the time when Scripture was written, Greece and Rome in particular.
Marlin Detweiler:
I don't know if I was like this, but I think I was in Sunday school, you know, we're studying the Bible, learning the Bible. Stories focus a lot on the stories in Genesis, some Exodus. And we think about those things now, of course, New Testament as well. But we think about those things, and because they're in the Bible, we think they happened before the things that we learn in other contexts. I think that's what you're talking about, isn’t that.
Laurie Detweiler:
It's really easy for me to understand how people divorce themselves and are able to kind of say, “I go to church on Sunday” and compartmentalize things. Sundays when I go to church, but then the rest of the world happens to study history. And that's how it is. History happens over here. What the world does God have to do with that? In particular, I’m talking about ancient history. And so as we began to build, I said to Marlin, “We need to teach these things together, I don’t want them to be seen as separate.”
And I am the creative, he is very, shall we say, analytical.
Marlin Detweiler:
Systems oriented.
Laurie Detweiler:
So he sat down and built this timeline system. I went, “Oh my gosh, that's great. Now I'll take this and I'll make it fun!” But we have this to work with, and then we knew we wanted music to go with it because we all know kids memorize better with music. And so that was our first product. We learned a lot through that. We put a lot into it and it was fun. But then – and this was – how old is Self-Paced now? I mean, it's been around for a while.
Marlin Detweiler:
I think it's probably it was probably built around 2010 in the first instance. I think so. But that's a guess.
Laurie Detweiler:
We started doing some research. It was the first time what I would call, you know, you go to homeschool conferences and you see like, you know, you could get a DVD with a computer program that you could watch a video for your kid. And I said, kids aren't going to learn, particularly little children, grammar school kids aren't going to learn. I'm an educator. I know how kids learn. Sitting in front and watching a video is not the best way to do this. So we started doing research. We ended up at what the school I'm trying to say in Pittsburgh. Near Pittsburgh.
Marlin Detweiler:
Carnegie Mellon.
Laurie Detweiler:
Carnegie Mellon. Thank you. We went to Carnegie Mellon because they happened to be doing some really groundbreaking research on the brain and attention spans.
Marlin Detweiler:
Effectiveness and learning process.
Laurie Detweiler:
Yeah, and that's when our self-paced was developed because it's like, okay, we also had some kids that were into programming. So it's like, okay, we can make the computer the teacher at this point.
Marlin Detweiler:
There was a term that was popular then that isn't used as much now because of the nature of technological change. We don't we no longer have a mouse in our hands. There's something called a click experience. I mentioned talking about that a little bit.
Laurie Detweiler:
There was research on how long a child could sit in front of a video before you lost their attention and they needed a “click experience” to draw them back in. And so that's when we started working on Self-Paced. And at first it scared me because I thought, okay, well, how can this be better? And then we saw results. So I knew how hard it was to get a child to memorize the timeline, right? We would have parents calling us. I worked at a classical Christian school and I would deal with parents every week that would say, I just can't get this timeline in my child like I am spending hours at night doing this. When you have to do that, let's be honest. It takes the fun out of learning. It's horrible. And what I saw was that when kids were doing these clicking experiences and playing games to memorize the timeline, they had no clue that what they were doing was learning. They were just having fun and memorizing the timeline. And so I literally when we do an analysis, we get test scores from kids in bricks and mortar schools taking their tests, and then the kids that were taking it online in their chronology, and they were so way off because the kids just innately did it when they were playing games. And the other it's just hard to do.
Marlin Detweiler:
Talk about how music has helped as a pneumonic or memory device.
Laurie Detweiler:
We all know “eeny-meeny-miney-mo”. We know “Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall” of all of these kinds of things and nursery rhymes that you sang as a child, signing so many things you still remember. I'm 60-something and I remember that, right? And so we know that. And so we set our timeline to music. It's pretty hilarious. When I see my 30-some-odd-year-old son, I can tell what they're doing. Literally singing the song in their head that they learned when they were eight. Because they're trying to put something in the chronology where it was. They would do this all the time. When you go on a field trip with anybody that has kids in our curriculum, so often I have docents that will say, how do they know, like what was going on? How can they look at that airplane when all they've seen is a date? How did they know it was from World War II? I'm like, “That's really easy, because they have the chronology in their head and they know there was a war then.”
Marlin Detweiler:
Then I'm still stuck on something. You're 60-something?
Laurie Detweiler:
I am. What is that?
Marlin Detweiler:
Wow. I'm sorry. Yes, I am too. And not by just a year. I'm sorry I got stuck on that a little bit, but it's really true.
The Self-Paced courses and the music are so effective, especially when the educational format of grammar school is one direction. We give you this, you consume it and you learn it. You prove that you've learned it by regurgitating it. But the primary issue is it's in your head.
Laurie Detweiler:
That's right. Yeah.
Marlin Detweiler:
So that was the other thing about the history and Bible that is very significant. And I've grown to realize how significant it is that there are events that are significant enough to make our top 160. That's how many events there are in the grammar school history curriculum over five years, 32 events a year, five years. But there are events that are biblically recorded that are significant historic events. Creation obviously is particularly significant in history.
Laurie Detweiler:
You started off your history in school with creation. That's the beginning.
Marlin Detweiler:
That's the beginning. Yeah. Well, and it's certainly not in a secular education like I got. I hated history in school because I didn't see its relevance. When I studied the Middle Ages. I learned the different categories of people, the feudal system, and I couldn't relate to that. And it didn't have any meaning. But what I started understanding as an adult, the impact of the reformation on culture and how that has impacted where we are today, that resonated.
The other thing is if you Google the ten most important events in history, and I would challenge any listener to do that, I don't know how deep you have to go. I've gone more than 20 pages deep and I've never found a list that included the easily established, most significant event in history in terms of its impact, and that is the birth of Christ or His death and resurrection. But the appearance of God becoming man as a Christian, as we would understand it, that's never listed. And so we wanted our history curriculum to be that way, but we also wanted it, the Bible curriculum, to be really learning the names, dates, places where things are in the Bible. And so we have 160 events, 96 in the Old Testament, 64 in the new of learning the content of the Bible. And when those are integrated, the learning of the Bible and the learning of history, even with history having some biblical events, I think there are about 30 that overlap between the two. It gives students an invaluable education, and we saw that easily as a better mousetrap or a mousetrap that needed to come into existence.
Talk about how the Omnibus came about a little bit. And what it is to some people that may not know.
Laurie Detweiler:
Anybody that's in classical ed, and you do any reading, you know, the great books stand up. But what I saw was there wasn't a connection to what the children always learn. So I think what you're going to find in our curriculum and I think if you read Sayers, that was her whole point.
We don't memorize things in grammar school for the sake of memorizing them, right? And some people would argue this. I know they think Sayers was saying it doesn’t matter what you memorize. I think it does because it’s in there for good. So if I'm going to have to memorize something I want to make it worthwhile.
Marlin Detweiler:
For future recalls, I think you're alluding to.
Laurie Detweiler:
So we wanted something that was tied and our history. We’ve given them 32 biblical events a year, 32 historical events, tie them together, let’s see how they interconnect. But now what are they going to do with that? And the thing that we said was the best thing we know that has stood the test of time is the Great Books. Textbooks, you just get little snippets, but you don't understand, you know, when you read Herodotus for the first time, and you know I’m a history buff; I love Herodotus.
Marlin Detweiler:
Even those rabbit trails?
Laurie Detweiler:
I read that and just go, “Oh my goodness, this makes sense”, right? I never read Herodotus until I was an adult. I didn't even have Herodotus in college when I was reading some of the great books.
And so I look at this and I say “Why are we reading about when we can read the actual source of things?” And so our kids read the great books. And at the same time, like I've said it on the previous podcast, we want them to learn how to think about them. I don't want them reading all these secular things, particularly coming from some of the ancients, Aristotle and Plato and Socrates, without a Christian worldview being laid over that.
And as they're learning logic, they're learning to think so they're learning to ask questions. So Omnibus is full of connections and questions, but you'll see in the back of the Omnibus book, all of the chapters are related to the history cards. So we give you the ability to say, remember, we studied this. You remember when you studied the Council of Chalcedon or the Nicene Creed or you study, you know, about Pharoh. What does this have to do with what we're reading now? Let's put it in the context of narratives.
Marlin Detweiler:
And so we created the Omnibus and it was lengthy. We created six books over eight years and had wonderful talent involved in them. But ultimately I'm not sure we could have even answered the question this way. Like we're able to now when somebody asks me, “So what does my child learn from the Omnibus?” They learn a lot of smaller things like how history unfolded, how literature impacted or came from a historic context, theological development, and the context of historic development. But I think probably the simple, most succinct, and maybe most important thing, in studying the great books in the Omnibus format that exists, is they learn to think biblically about anything and everything. And that is a great place for a student to leave high school and to move into next stages, whether that be college or career. And it's been fun to see.
Now we have another curricular piece that I think is worth discussing, and that is the whole idea of rhetoric and how that came about. Tell us a little bit about how the better mousetrap and the people and that sort of thing came together to be to produce A Rhetoric of Love.
Laurie Detweiler:
So as I looked at rhetoric we used pretty much the same thing as everybody uses in classical ed for 20 years, I mean, a long time, right?
Marlin Detweiler:
I think 20 years is about right.
Laurie Detweiler:
I would see it during Senior Thesis class. Some of them were very articulate and persuasive and others of them weren't. And then I also was starting to see a side that I didn't like and that was an arrogance that comes when you learn rhetoric and become really good at it. And if we’re really clear about loving our neighbors, then it's problematic if we're trying to conquer them all the time. So as basically, everybody is studying Aristotle's rhetoric; most curricula was built off of Aristotle's rhetoric. And the other thing that I saw was it was disconnected from the world in which we live, whether we like it or not, kids have to learn how to use technology today. Just giving a speech is not enough. Just writing a paper and using good rhetoric is not enough. We got to understand the world. Marlin, what was the debate?
Marlin Detweiler:
How many angels are on the head of a pin?
Laurie Detweiler:
I’m talking about the political one.
Marlin Detweiler:
Oh, you're talking about Kennedy.
Laurie Detweiler:
And one of the Presidents.
Marlin Detweiler:
It was Nixon-Kennedy. It was the first debate that was on television.
Laurie Detweiler:
Yes, it was. He was coached, he got makeup on.
Marlin Detweiler:
He made eye contact with the camera.
Laurie Detweiler:
He had his screening first and he blew Nixon out of the water. Not even necessarily what he said, but because of the context in the fact that it's how he presented himself on television.
Marlin Detweiler:
He was rhetorically effective, given the context of his speaking and interaction.
Laurie Detweiler:
So we decided at that point we got to think about these things because after all, this is the world students are learning. I said in the last podcast, I want a student when they leave first and foremost to love the Lord their God. And then I want to be able to go and have an audience with the president of the United States. And I want him to be able to go down into a coal mine and make both of those people feel heard and loved.
So if we're doing that, we've got to know the things. And so we had a Rhetoric of Love, which does have some Aristotle's rhetoric in it, but it's really teaching a student not about how to conquer, but it's teaching them about how to think about the other person in what you're trying to communicate. So that's right there. We wanted a year that was literally nothing more than how to write. Practice.
I have a son who is a grown man now but was in the theater and I saw this just so much as I would have kids. I would watch him as he was going through his classes. I can give you a book to read about theater, right? And you can learn all the things about what, you know, elocution and pronunciation and all of that. You can read all of that. But if you don't get on stage and practice and have somebody in your face telling you you need to do this, you need to do this, it doesn't work. Nobody becomes great on a stage by reading a book, right? It's by doing it that makes you great. And so our second year, rhetoric is about doing it.
Marlin Detweiler:
As we have thought and sought to find and then create better mousetraps, the history and Bible was a relatively simple thing because we had an idea that came to us quickly and it made simple sense.
But as you know, we struggled for decades thinking in terms of what would be a better mousetrap in rhetoric, because Aristotle's rhetoric, like you said, is what most curriculum at the time, I think still is, was based on. Aristotle was teaching his five canons of rhetoric and rhetoric in general to statesmen for purposes of public discourse. Now, I know that there are likely not many people here who have given a State of the Union address. I say that tongue-in-cheek, that kind of speech or a talk in the halls of the U.S. Senate or on national television about a significant or controversial topic is not where most people find themselves. And rhetoric for that is important, but it's not complete.
Rhetoric involves effective communication in small groups. It involves one on one. It involves speaking to an audience. We have done a fair amount of speaking in classical education, homeschool groups and school groups. That's a category that's significant. But it is not all of it. So that was one thing that was lacking. And then the other thing that was really lacking was Aristotle's rhetoric. Well, it speaks against sophistry and the whole idea of simply dominating. It's actually questionable as to whether or not it really gets away from an attempt to persuade at all costs. And that wasn't what we would consider to be a Christian form of rhetoric. And when Doug Jones came to us with the idea of a Rhetoric of Love and the idea of seeing a rhetoric of love versus a rhetoric of domination, that did it for me, that did it for us, we now had this better mousetrap idea, and we feel like what we've created is something that is qualitatively different and really good stuff for a student as a capstone in their classical education.
Laurie Detweiler:
So that's what it takes for us to make a curriculum.
Marlin Detweiler:
I hope that's been helpful. It's been a lot of fun doing it and it's been a little bit behind the scenes. I hope you didn't see it too much, like making sausage and not wanting to know. I hope it’s been helpful. It's been fun to articulate it too. Thanks again, I think of this as a fun time of just kind of thinking through what we do and why we do it. Folks, you have been with us on Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Until next time.
