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

What societal outcomes can you expect when people begin banning or deconstructing books from past generations? Why are stories important for learning? Join us for a discussion on these topics and more with Dr. Dan Coupland of Hillsdale College!

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, and you've joined us for another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Today we have with us Dr. Daniel Copeland, who hails from Hillsdale College. Daniel, welcome.

Dr. Dan Coupland:

Yeah, thanks, Marlin. It's great to be here!

Marlin Detweiler:

Well, it's nice to have you here. We always like to start our generally we start with getting a little bit of personal background. Tell us a little bit about your family, your education and your career path that led you to Hillsdale.

Dr. Dan Coupland:

Yeah, thanks for that. I'm very, very grateful to have grown up in a Christian home. I two very godly parents who trained me and my two older sisters from a very young age, you know, to follow God into and in it to, you know, trust Christ for our salvation. And I'm very, very grateful for that. They were missionaries with an evangelical organization. And so, you know, the Christian life was just a part of our life. And I'm so grateful for that. And I even remind my own children that they have a heritage that their grandparents actually on both sides of their share of our family that have kind of passed on that inherited. So I grew up in a Christian home.

I went to Liberty University as an undergrad. I met my wife there who is a nurse, and in fact, I teach at Hillsdale College and not even half a mile from where I am right now. And my wife runs the health clinic on campus. So we are we're kind of all in here, all in here at Hillsdale College!

After graduating from Liberty, I actually taught in a public school for about five years and enjoyed interacting with the students, but at the same time found it quite frustrating at times, in terms of low academic standards and also just in terms of the limitations of being able to talk about my faith in class as well.

One thing I really enjoyed, though, while I was a teacher is helping to what we would now use in kind of business terms, onboard new teachers. And so I realized that I wanted to do that for a living. I would have to go back to school. So I had earned a master's while I was a teacher, going to night school into summer school. But after five years I quit my job, and I went back to Michigan State and pursued a degree in education again. I found that very frustrating because predominantly, the field of education, what I would call the education establishment, is controlled by, for lack of a better term, progressives or people who, when I was in grad school 25, 30 years ago, it was critical theorists.

And so I found that very frustrating as a person who really didn't understand classical education at the time. But I just knew, you know, because of that heritage, because of what my parents had provided for me in my home, and because of the Christian schooling, I had experienced all the way along. I knew that something was a little bit off.

And so I found it frustrating at times, even though I couldn't put my finger on exactly what it was. And just to kind of wrap this up a little bit, I was actually, again, I have to credit my parents. I was I was visiting my parents in Florida and I was in my dad's study and he had a book in there. And there were a couple of quotes by John Milton Gregory.

Marlin Detweiler:

Is this the 7 Laws of Teaching you’re referring to?

Dr. Dan Coupland:

Yeah, absolutely.

Marlin Detweiler:

We make extraordinary use of that book. We actually have a reprint that we sell. And the electronic copy, I think, is one that we still give away if people ask for it.

Dr. Dan Coupland:

It's an amazing book. And I remember reading through it and in saying, “These are my kind of people!” And as is often the case, one book leads to another. I was introduced to ACCS in the wider classical school community. And one thing led to another. And finally, I discovered that there was a community of people who were committed to the principles that I intrinsically knew to be true or, through my training, I knew to be true.

And so I taught at a state university for a while. And then I came here in 2006 to Hillsdale College, and I've been here ever since. One quick addition to this is that when I arrived here at Hillsdale, you know, Hillsdale was already committed to a liberal arts approach to education, but we were still preparing teachers primarily for public education through state certification.

Within a couple of years, we realized that those demands from the state were inconsistent with the mission of the institution. So in 2008, we actually ended our relationship with the state of Michigan and moved our efforts entirely towards classical schools, charter schools, private schools, but also people who were working in traditional public schools, like I was directly out of college, who know intrinsically that there can be more and there has to be more, and we should be offering students more.

And so we try to reach them as well, even though their work is kind of missionary work, I would argue, in the traditional public schools.

Marlin Detweiler:

And I don't want to go down this path too far, but in many instances, missionary work in a hostile land. So, it has to be undercover.

Dr. Dan Coupland:

Indeed. Indeed, it does!

Marlin Detweiler:

Well, let me ask you, in your experience, we see an attack from the public schools. I don't know who all would be on board with this attack, but there is a general attack against a fair amount of classical children's literature. And I'm using the term classical in a very different way than we customarily use it when we say the phrase “classical Christian education.”

I can probably define that by saying traditional surviving a common kinds of literature that many of us grew up with has been attacked for some of its language and some of its context. What do you see happening there, and why do you think it's happening?

Dr. Dan Coupland:

Yeah, it's really interesting. I think you're exactly right. And let me go back to Creation. I believe that God created us to be to be story-loving and storytelling creatures. And we can communicate through other means, but we're drawn to stories in just amazing ways. What I find fascinating is that people in the world of cognitive psychology are just confirming what we already know within the classical community.

So, I'll point to one person, Dan Willingham, at UVA. He's written on this, and he writes in a little bit of a different way, you know, from a psychological perspective. But he says that stories are actually psychologically privileged in our minds. That's the language he uses now. I would say.

Marlin Detweiler:

I can buy that the terminology in a lot of different things. But if it meant that it gets a special place for understanding. Absolutely.

Dr. Dan Coupland:

Yeah, absolutely. And once again, I believe that God created us that way to be storytelling and story-loving people. And so a lot of the idea of great stories and passing along great stories is under attack from critical race theory, from the idea that in our present age, we're going to use our present standards, if you could really call them standards.

And we'll take stories written in a different time, and we'll deconstruct them, and we, of course, can't learn anything. And I'm speaking from the education establishment's point of view. We can't learn anything from stories because, after all, it was written at an earlier age when they had the wrong ideas. And so if we do read great stories, our task is to show just how closed-minded these authors were, how trapped they were by all their beliefs and their commitments and all of that.

So, at best, we can just deconstruct these stories. So that's one angle of attack on great stories. You see a less overt attack in something, for lack of a better example, there's something like Common Core where the main attack on stories through Common Core was not that we should deconstruct them.

It was just that we shouldn't read them at all. In fact, what Common Core did, it said, “Yes, we need to read, but we need to read more expository text because that's what modern reading really is. And so let's downplay stories and let's upgrade expository text.”

All I can think about here is that example in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader when Lewis is describing Eustace early on in the book where he loved to read these reports about grain elevators and children in foreign countries doing exercises. That's the kind of expository texts that even back in the forties and fifties were beginning to sneak into literature and reading. And it's an avoidance or an effort to kind of downplay those classic stories that I would argue have actually shaped us who we are as human beings.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, yeah. That's interesting! I think the masses, I think I tend to be a little bit tempted to do this too, but we tend to be dismissive of the problem objectionable, but we haven't really thought through it. And I think you make two good points in that that I want to underscore, as you said, them.

One is that story has an elevated level of importance in how we understand who we are before God and two, that story conveys a cultural heritage that many today want us to divorce ourselves from, in some sense, to reset our culture in ways that counters those things that we have held dear for all of our lives. And those are both very important things to realize as we seek to retain that which others would try to eliminate.

Dr. Dan Coupland:

Yeah, if I could add one more thing to that. There are authors who have made the case going back to Russell Kirk, Regan Gray, and William Kilpatrick, they've all made the case that when we make a moral choice in our lives, it isn't as if we rely exclusively on a list of rules. And I'm not trying to downplay logic.

We need to teach students to think carefully and to think logically, and to develop those patterns of thought. However, what those authors and others have pointed out is that often times when we come to make those moral choices, we're actually led by those stories. And in kind of making those choices and those authors refer to it as the moral imagination, having an imagination to be able to draw from those stories and those characters when we make those moral choices.

So one point I want to articulate here is if you have a generation or two or three of students who do not have that storehouse or what Edmund Burke called a wardrobe of the moral imagination to draw from, and that's pretty frightening. If they don't have those characters and those examples of good and evil in their mind from which they can draw and make a moral choice, that's frightening to me.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, interesting. I want to move on here for just a moment. You've written a book. Do you have the book handy? You can put it up.

Dr. Dan Coupland:

Yeah, I do. I do it right here.

Marlin Detweiler:

Tried and true. Thank you. And it's a book, as I understand it. Well, let me not try to define it. Tell us what problems you are trying to solve in writing the book.

Dr. Dan Coupland:

Well, my inspiration for this, and I know others have been inspired by this kind of book before, is The Elements of Style. Often, people refer to it as a Strunk and White.

Marlin Detweiler:

We've sold it. Yeah, I think it's out of print now.

Dr. Dan Coupland:

I mean, it could be, but it is a great book. And in that book, what they say upfront in the introduction is that they're not trying to define great writing, and they're not trying to define or teach all of composition. But what they are trying to do is they're trying to get writers off to a good start, give them fundamental principles that they can hold on to.

Tried and true is the same kind of an effort. I remember what it was like coming into the classroom and the month or two before coming into the classroom where I had to get ready to teach a lot of content, the last thing I wanted to have was someone drop a 300-page book on my lap and say, “This is how we do teaching.”

So, I told myself from the very beginning, I'm going to concentrate on just the basics. Let's get to kind of a kind of a floor level for good teaching, not adequate teaching, but good teaching. I'm not going to try to define great teaching because that takes years to cultivate, but I'm just going to try to start with good teaching.

I'm going to give myself 100 pages to do that. No more than that, because I know how busy educators are, and so what I did was I actually laid out these 14 statements about good teaching. And if you want to, you can actually break them down into four categories, and I'll do it quickly. I call them the four M's.

You start with the mission. Everything in a classical school should be mission-driven. The school identifies what it is and what it does by the mission. And so the mission we start everything with the mission and then management. If you want to teach students, if you want to engage them in ideas, you have to be an authority. You have to lead, which means you have to be a manager. Everyone in the classroom, everyone out of the classroom is expecting you to be that manager. That's the school board, the administration, parents, even students expect you to manage. So if you can't manage, you're not going to be able to teach. Number three is the methods of instruction, and that's how to ask questions, how to lead the discussion, how to present an idea, how to do a review.

And then the last is measurement. How do you know that you've actually achieved the goals that you've set out to accomplish? And so mission, management, methods, and measurement, are the four M's that are represented in tried and true.

Marlin Detweiler:

That is really good stuff. We, I need to become more familiar with that and it seems like we would do well to promote it to our constituency. What's been the reception of it? How long has it been around and what kind of feedback do you get?

Dr. Dan Coupland:

Yeah, well it's interesting. I call it my COVID book because, you know, not a lot of great things came out of COVID. But when I was locked down in my home with my family, I kind of divided my time, spent a lot of time with my family playing Frisbee out on the front lawn. But then I would go back in the house, and I would write.

Actually, this is a culmination of almost three decades in the classroom. So I've had this in mind for a while. And so it was actually published in the summer of 2022. So we've had just about a year, and the response has been overwhelming and quite humbling in two ways.

One is that I received a lot of feedback from newer teachers who have said, “Thank you, I was kind of flying blind here, and at least you give me, you know, something to start with.” But more importantly, it has been the veteran teachers who have written me and who have said, “This is confirming what I try to do in my classroom.”

And so to hear veteran teachers of two or more decades coming in and saying this is the kind of thing I wish I would have had when I started my career. And this would have launched me in a lot in a lot better way. That kind of praise, you just can't top. So anytime I get a veteran teacher complimenting the book, it's just music to my ears.

Marlin Detweiler:

So that's what's really neat. Well, I want to encourage the listeners to look into that book, and we need to look into it to see how we might make good use of it. It's very good for families and the people that we have had a chance to influence and interact with. You have been a part of Hillsdale for how long now? Is it six or seven years?

Dr. Dan Coupland:

No, I actually arrived in 2006, so it's actually been 17 years.

Marlin Detweiler:

For some reason, I was thinking it was 16 or 17. Okay. Yes. And Hillsdale has been a wonderful institution maintaining financial independence from entanglements with state monies and then state influence, whether that be at a federal level or more localized things. And those have all been very good things. They have, as you mentioned, terminated relationships in favor of relationships that are more enduring and not driven with the same kind of concerns and their agendas. But it remains officially a secular classical education. Is that a fair assessment of it?

Dr. Dan Coupland:

Yeah, thanks for asking that. I actually get this question fairly often. Number one, I need to say, I teach at the college. I have the honor of playing the role of the Dean of the graduate school here. So, in some way, I can speak for the college, but I would also encourage people to go to the website, read the mission statement for itself, and allow the college to speak for itself.

But I'll articulate my understanding of it. And I've been here for almost two decades. I should be able to do that. So Hillsdale College identifies itself as a Christian college, and when it uses the word Christian, again, going back to C.S. Lewis, I would argue it's kind of talking about the hallway that C.S. Lewis describes that he's going to talk about in mere Christianity.

So, it's not specifically denominational or to a particular tradition. It's it's broadly Christian in that regard. And so that's the institution as a whole. Let me talk about the effort towards K-12, Hillsdale has been trying to contribute to K-12 education at large for well over 100 years. We were actually founded in 1844.

Marlin Detweiler:

That’s amazing, 200 years.

Dr. Dan Coupland:

Yeah, getting very close! My own children attend Hillsdale Academy, which was opened more than three decades ago, and that is an explicitly Christian K-12 school. It's right on our campus. It holds chapel, it has a chaplain. The teachers are very free to be able to bring the Scriptures into the classroom, and I am incredibly grateful for that. About ten years ago, though, we had some people who came to the college who said, “Man, the kind of education that's going on at Hillsdale Academy needs to be available to our wider population.”

Well, our response was, well, we've been trying to do that for over three decades in providing our resource guides to people who want to follow the curriculum. With the people who are interested in this model, they specifically wanted to target charter schools. And they said, “Is there a way where we could provide this kind of education in a context where people who, for whatever reason, were not able to or chose not to homeschool or were not able to send their students to a private school, is there any way that we can try to reform public education in this space called charter schooling?”

And so, around 2009, 2010, we made a real effort. And when I say we, we have a K-12 office on campus, which is primarily focused outwardly, it's an external kind of facing office. I'm in the Education Department. I'm much more internally facing in terms of I teach undergraduates and I teach graduates. But that external focus office was this K-12 office was trying to can we provide a quality education within this charter school context, seeing that 90 plus percent of the population goes to traditional public schools, is there something we could do in this space?

And I think what Hillsdale has done is quite admirable. We've created a curriculum, a K-12 curriculum, trying to base in the Western tradition, trying to draw from from that tradition to provide the best education we possibly can within that space according to the laws of the land. Now, my own preference and choice that my wife and I make is that we want our children to be able to attend a Christian school.

And so they do, and we're really grateful for that. But we're trying to be able to speak into those communities. And I'll just add one additional thing. Our K-12 office has actually expanded its effort and is now looking to help more private schools, explicitly Christian schools, as well. In addition, we're also trying to help homeschoolers as well.

Again, we're the kind of institution that we're just trying to create resources and make them available. And if there are even – as I said early on, going back to the early stages of my career, even as an educator, a Christian educator in a traditional public school, if I would have had the resources that Hillsdale is providing, I would have welcomed them openly.

So we kind of have this very broad tent. Can we provide these resources to a wide audience? And so we're not selective exclusively to charter schools. We're trying to reach all those communities.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, that's really good to hear. And that really does round out a better understanding than I had before asking the question. The reason that I'm so concerned about this is that there's been recent conversation about the death of cultural Christianity. I've been going through a book called The De-Churching of America or something like that. It was written by Orlando pastors.

And it's talking about the falling numbers in church attendance. And it along with some other things that I have looking at and reading has talked about the the fact that cultural Christianity seems to be on hard times, I don't see that as a bad thing. Christianity is not first and foremost to culture. It impacts culture because it has to be understood for what it really is.

It's not, “You can do better”, it's not the virtue that we see in with the ancients. It's something that we should emulate. Christianity is first and foremost, God is holy, man is not. Man, in order to have a relationship with God, it needs to recognize that holiness and perfection is required as a result. And for that, we are not perfect, and we need an intermediary. We need someone to make us perfect in order to relate. And no amount of effort will make us more good, more true, or more beautiful, in a sense that will approach the holiness of the God with whom we need to be able to relate. And of course, what that means is Jesus Christ came to save the lost, to save me, and save us.

At a practical level, I've said this before, and I've said it even on this podcast: if we Google the ten most important events in history, I went, I think, 26 pages deep and found the death, Resurrection, the Incarnation, or anything that related to the person of Jesus Christ. I don't know how we can make a list of the most important events in history without the one that has affected everything since it's happened.

Dr. Dan Coupland:

Yeah, you almost get the sense in order to do that, it has to be intentional, right?

Marlin Detweiler:

It absolutely does. Yeah. There's no other way to explain it. So what what difference does it make in our education if it is not distinctly recognizing that which I got in none of my public education and that is Christianity is true, it's real. And if we don't understand that, we don't understand the truth of what we're learning.

Dr. Dan Coupland:

Yeah, it's a great question. As you're talking, I'm even thinking back to Proverbs. I don't want to lean on my own understanding. Right? Because I know how I mean, how fallen a creature I am. And so if classical education leads to some kind of moralism or something like that, if I just need to try harder to be a good person. Well, I think we can go to the word and we can discover that that's going to fail mightily. In fact, you could argue that the Old Testament is a description of that failure to live a moral life. So I'm in total agreement with you.

And again, I think a complete education would include that in that idea that, you know, I'm not called to be perfect in my own ability. I'm called to look to Christ as my savior to cover my inadequacies. And so I think that's part of a complete education. But I understand your broader question, and it is a concern to me.

Let me just add this in terms of our efforts in spaces where, according to law, we're not able to bring these issues up like I would like to bring them up. It’s a very delicate balance, too, that what you see in traditional public education, for the most part, is not just that they don't talk about these principles that you and I have just been talking about. It's that they're antithetical to them and that they're aligned they're aligned against them.

Marlin Detweiler:

There is a religion being taught, and it's anti-Christian.

Dr. Dan Coupland:

Yeah. And here's where it gets a little bit controversial in that when we try to operate in these public spaces, what we try to do is we try to articulate we are not antithetical to faith, to the principles of Christianity, but because of the laws that are in place, whether we like them or not, we have to operate in this way.

But we're not going to be antithetical. In fact, we're going to – at the top of the list, just talking about in educational terms, is that parents are the first and often the best educators in schools and are a resource upon which parents can draw upon. Well, when you take that posture, you even in a public space, you're allowing for that cultivation of faith to occur in the home, to occur in the church, to occur in that community.

Is that the ideal? Again, I would say no, but at least it's a lot better than what's going on in a traditional public space.

Marlin Detweiler:

I can't argue that it's not better. It is. Boy, we could go on for hours on this. It's been a wonderful thing to be able to talk to you about these things. Thank you, Dr. Daniel Copeland, thank you for joining us.

Dr. Dan Coupland:

Yeah, thanks, Marlin.

Marlin Detweiler:

Folks, you've been with us at Veritas Vox, The Voice of classical Christian education. Look forward to seeing you next time.