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Today, we talk with Hutz Hertzberg, CEO of Turning Point Academy, about how they are helping churches reclaim their historical role in educating the next generation. In this conversation, we explore the rich history of Christian education in America, the challenges facing modern students and families, and the vision for returning to classical Christian education principles.

Plus, discover how Turning Point Academy is partnering with churches nationwide to launch autonomous Christian schools.

To learn more about Turning Point Academy, visit their website at https://www.tpusa.com/academy

Episode Transcription

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

Marlin Detweiler:
Hello again, and welcome to another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Today, we have with us Hutz Hertzberg, the CEO of Turning Point Academy. Hutz, welcome.

Hutz Hertzberg:
Thank you, Marlin. So good to be with you. I've been looking forward to this.

Marlin Detweiler:
It is good to have you. Tell us, yeah, I always like to start to learn a little bit about our guests. So give us a little bit of background on your education, your family, and things that have made you who you are at this moment.

Hutz Hertzberg:
Well, certainly. I am so glad to be able to share a little bit. I come from really a God-believing but non-Christian home. And so God, in his grace and goodness, saved me just before I went to high school and saved me in more ways than one. Certainly eternally, but also probably from getting into a lot of difficulty and problems in high school.

So I'm very thankful for that. And one by one, God began to work in our family and to bring my brother, then my mother, and then ultimately even my father, who had some Jewish background in his heritage, though he didn't practice the Jewish faith. So, we are all testimonies of God's grace.

I'm so thankful for that. I remember going into my counselor's office and asking where I should go to school. She was a Christian. I was a fairly new Christian, and she said, do you know that there's one of the finest Christian colleges in our backyard? And I said, no. And she said, yes.

My brother teaches there part time. It's Wheaton College, and that's where I think you should go. And so I said, okay. So I went to Wheaton College on the counsel of my counselor in high school, thinking that I was going to major in business or pre-law. But during my time there, God really redirected me to full-time ministry.

My very first job out of Wheaton was working with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, which was a great experience. There were only two full-time staff in Chicago at that time. I was one of them. And here's this 22-year-old young guy working with pro athletes all the way down to junior high athletes.

It was a great experience. But that really set the trajectory of my life. Marlin, I've been committed all my life to full-time ministry in various ways. I would say approximately a third of my life has been in the context of the church, including serving as executive pastor at the Moody Church with Pastor Erwin Lutzer.

Another third would be pure church leadership, working with such organizations as the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Christian Union, which is a leadership development organization committed to working with Ivy League students, which was a great experience. And then also in Christian education, having the privilege of serving at Wheaton College, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and Judson University. All of those experiences and backgrounds really helped prepare me for what I'm doing now.

One of the things that I began to see is that the older I've become, the more important it is for me to really work with younger students because of the longer investment opportunity, but also because students today are being impacted in significant ways that we never were at a much younger age. And so, as much as I enjoy Christian higher education, I accepted the call to become president of Christian Heritage Academy in the north suburbs of Chicago. Back in 2017.

Marlin Detweiler:
And now the title president could be misleading. So I want to make sure we understand that this is not a typical title for a bricks-and-mortar K-12 school. Does that mean that you function as what we might think of as the superintendent, or was that president of the board?

Hutz Hertzberg:
Yeah, great question. No, it was superintendent, head of school, headmaster. Their title was president. And so that was the title that I had.

Marlin Detweiler:
Thanks for the clarification. That's important.

Hutz Hertzberg:
Yeah, great question, great question. And so, that was a wonderful experience. That was a school started by Doctor Wayne Grudem and a few other families. Some of you will know Doctor Wayne Grudem, well-known systematic theologian. He was a professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. His kids were coming up to school age. There were no Christian schools in the northern suburbs of Chicago.

So he and a few other families started Christian Heritage Academy. And so, that's where I was serving until just very recently, in the last three years. And I stepped into this role that I'm in currently.

Marlin Detweiler:
Well, tell us about that. What was the impetus for that change?

Hutz Hertzberg:
Well, when I started at Christian Heritage Academy, it was, like I said, a great experience. Though I'd been working with college students and colleagues, professors, I thoroughly enjoyed working with younger students and colleagues that were teaching younger students. One of those staff members was a young man who worked in our lunchroom, and he started telling me about this young man named Charlie Kirk and asked if I'd ever heard of him. I said, “No. But based on what you're saying, he sounds like he's a wonderful young guy. I'd love to meet him.” So I received a text from Charlie Kirk out of the blue a couple of days later, and he said, if there's anything I can do to help you, congratulations on your new position, I’d love to be supportive. And so that really started our connection. Charlie became a supporter, a generous supporter of Christian Heritage Academy. And so that started our connection.

But here's the best part of the story. This friend of Charlie, who was a part-time staff member in our school, shared with me. And then I found out exactly what happened from his teacher, that he was a student at our school, third, fourth, and fifth grade. He had wonderful teachers each of those years. But in his fifth-grade year, he had a particularly wonderful, godly teacher. And this is where so many of our listeners today, Marlin, will really appreciate this. Every day she prayed over the chairs of her students, committing them to the Lord and praying that they would come to faith or grow in their faith.

And Charlie was one of those students. During the course of that fifth-grade year, Charlie committed his life to Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior, which really set the trajectory of Charlie's life in so many ways. Some listening today will know who he is, and others, probably not so much.

But Charlie now impacts millions on a daily basis in all kinds of ways through media. What's so encouraging about that story is that for whatever reason, his folks took him out of our school after the fifth-grade year, not because of what had happened, just for logistical and other reasons. But the Lord had him there long enough to actually come to faith in Christ.

Again, Charlie is a man of faith, loves the Lord. And that really was a meaningful connection to our school. He's forever grateful for our school. But that's also how we got connected. When he decided we needed to start this new division, which I currently lead, he reached out to me.

Marlin Detweiler:
That's wonderful. So that's how you went from Christian Heritage Academy to Turning Point Academy. That's wonderful. Tell me, as you address your position as the CEO of Turning Point Academy, what are the problems that you're observing and seeking to resolve? In other words, in some respects, why does it exist?

Hutz Hertzberg:
Well, yes, that's such an important question, Marlin. Let me answer that a couple of ways. For years, this organization, Turning Point USA, is about 11 years old. It started with Charlie right out of high school, feeling like there needed to be a conservative voice in colleges and universities across the country. Early on, that was really what Turning Point and Charlie Kirk were all about.

Today, it's about a lot more than that. But even today, he still goes to college campuses and universities across the country, engaging with students. He's visiting 22 campuses just this fall, getting a great response.

Marlin Detweiler:
Let me just say parenthetically, if I may interrupt you for a moment, I really enjoy the videos on social media of him engaging with students seeking to entrap him, to convince them of something else. His mastery of information and ability to articulate it is really remarkable, and it's a joy to see such an apologist at work.

Hutz Hertzberg:
Yeah, absolutely. Charlie does that as well as anyone can in a winsome, non-contentious way, but holding forth truth. I totally agree with you. Dr. Robert George, professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University, made a similar observation. I just heard Dr. George, who's a professional acquaintance, share this recently, when he was being interviewed, they said, "Dr. George, what is different with college students during your 39 years of teaching at Princeton?" Dr. George made this interesting comment, which aligns with what Charlie has been observing. He said, "In the last ten years, students are coming to Princeton already indoctrinated, whereas during the first 20 years of my teaching, they were much more able to be influenced, coming in without as much background and baggage." He said that is a tremendous challenge, and it's happening at the high school level and now at the middle school level. We would argue it's happening even at the grade school level.

Charlie saw this and felt compelled that we needed to get to kids earlier. Waiting until they're in college or even high school is too late. So, three years ago, he started this new division called Turning Point Academy, which is the K through 12 education division of Turning Point USA. That's when he reached out to me and asked if I'd be willing to lead this new division.

Marlin Detweiler:
That's wonderful, and I couldn't agree more. I'm going to come back to that question of timing and what's happened in recent years. But I want to ask a bit of a self-serving question. How does Veritas fit into your plans and what you all are doing?

Hutz Hertzberg:
We love Veritas. I'm saying that not just because I'm in this role, but because as an educator myself, one who has led a school prior to stepping into this role, and also because our model school, which we're now replicating across the country, uses Veritas curriculum and resources in a very significant way.

We are so grateful for Veritas, for the influence, for the partnership, for Dr. Perrin, and for many ways you're influencing Christian and especially Christian classical education across the country. We're supporters. In our most recent educator summit, Dr. Perrin was one of our plenary speakers. Veritas was represented, of course. We are not trying to compete with Veritas in any way, shape, or form. We want to get the resources and materials Veritas is producing out there.

Marlin Detweiler:
Well, we appreciate that and look forward to helping any way we can. Thank you. It's not typical for me to plug Veritas in the podcast, but given the opportunity, I wasn't going to miss it. Thanks for what you said. Let's go back to what I said we'd come back to.

Many think that what we need is a return to the 1950s, focusing on reading, writing, and arithmetic—the basics of education. Maybe that would be a descriptive mindset for it. Dorothy Sayers, who can be credited with giving the vision to the author Doug Wilson, author of Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning, wrote an essay originally a speech at Oxford, called The Lost Tools of Learning.

So the book Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning borrows from it heavily, but Sayers says, around 1947, 1948, that we've got some really significant problems in education that would probably never be of the quality that it once was. And it was Wilson that said, well, I want to do that and then documented it in the book.

And that became, I think, the Renaissance, the resurgence of a new popularity that is continuing to grow. Your Turning Point USA is embracing a form of a classical education model. We are all about classical Christian education. But she is identifying problems in the 50s, where many people think the problems that we have today – and I know that you didn't imply that indoctrination happening in high school was a new thing. So I'm not suggesting that this is a problem that you have, but I think it's good for our audience to understand where these problems came from that we're dealing with.

Hutz Hertzberg:
Yeah, that's such a great question. And I would say in response that if she's referring to the 1850s, that's probably more accurate in the sense that, really going back to the 1800s, late 1800s, even the early 1900s, the church had a much more predominant role in the education of our children. In fact, they looked upon that as really their responsibility to educate children.

And so they looked at education as a part of the mission and the ministry, if you will, as being missional, in terms of the holistic education and not just the Sunday School kind of thing that became prevalent in the 1900s. The church has primarily lost that vision for education as a role and a ministry or an academic ministry of the local church.

And I think there's various reasons for that, Marlin. As you would understand, with the introduction of, I'd say around the 1920s, people like Dewey and Locke and others who introduced this progressive kind of social liberalism philosophy of education that began to permeate education way before the 1950s. And now, through this last century, we've seen the fruit of that in our educational system.

With the birth of the public school system, churches began to abdicate their role as the primary source of education for the community, for the families in their church. So I think it goes back farther than the 1950s as the root of the problem. Thankfully, there is a resurgence in the recapturing of classical education, which was, as you know, the form of education. It wasn't classical and traditional Christian education—it was classical education. That was the way that children were taught and learned.

Marlin Detweiler:
Latin as a standard course was commonplace prior to our educations. It didn't have the same role that it did hundreds of years ago. And it wasn't used the same way, which I think is problematic also. And that's a different topic for a different day. But we were just beyond Latin being a staple in K-12 education.

Hutz Hertzberg:
Yeah. You're 100% right. What has been so encouraging to me and to us at Turning Point Academy is not only the continued growth and resurgence of classical Christian education but that more and more pastors and churches are beginning to reclaim their role in education as part of the ministry of the church, an academic ministry, if you will.

That's why we're partnering with churches across the country to help them reclaim that role. We see it as a biblical role for the church and certainly for parents to have the primary responsibility for the education of their children. We see it as a partnership with the local church as much as possible.

That's been encouraging. Now, on the downside, there are still a lot of churches and pastors who, for whatever reason, don't want to go into that arena. We're trying to help encourage them to say, we will help you. Just to give one example that we're so encouraged about, we're actually working now with a cohort of about 26 different groups. Most of those groups are attached to a local church.

They are moving through a nine-month process that will allow them to launch as a fully autonomous school within their church next fall. We're encouraged by that, but there are so many more that need to be impacted and influenced to catch the vision for why this is so critical today.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. Very good. Tell me, and you don't need to be short on this, we've got enough time. What does success look like for Turning Point Academy in the context of the influence points, which I think is primarily America-focused?

Hutz Hertzberg:
Yes. Well, I'll try to keep it short because it could be a very long answer.

Marlin Detweiler:
That was not an invitation for 20 minutes, but for 8 or 10.

Hutz Hertzberg:
You know, Marlin, as you well know, the question behind that question has many challenges. You think of the role that teacher unions have today and their outsized influence dominating much of what happens in education in the public arena. We would argue most of it is for bad.

I could give you examples in our own state of Illinois. But in terms of what success looks like for Turning Point Academy, we are trying to encourage and wake up and influence as many pastors and churches as we possibly can, along the lines of what I was just sharing. The role of education is not something to be offloaded to government or the public sector. It's really a role for the church working in partnership with parents and their local assembly, their local church.

We want pastors to understand that. We're trying to equip them and inform them. I speak at a lot of different pastors' conferences and summits to help them understand the need, the opportunity, and how we can help them. The great thing about what we’re trying to do is we're not really asking for anything; we're just trying to help. At the end of the day, when the school is launched, it's not called Turning Point Academy. It's called Vintage Church Academy or whatever name of the church is, and we don't even charge for our time or services.

We're just very jealous that we can help get these schools in the context of local churches off the ground, using our background, expertise, and resources to be able to help them, mentor them, and really put them on a positive trajectory. The great news is that it's happening. And so, again, what is success?

Well, you know, in our first couple of years, we have about 12 different schools now that have been birthed out of the context of local churches with pastors that maybe didn't know what they were going to do or how they were going to do it, but looked to us. We were able to help them, and now they're actually having school take place there as a part of their ministry.

And we see this as biblical. We see it as missional. We see it as eternal. We don't see it as just this peripheral thing on the side. We see it as central to the mission of local churches and pastors. Now, not everybody feels that way, and we respect those that disagree.

But more and more pastors are seeing it because they realize there is such great need in their community, within their church, with their families, because the things that kids are being taught today are in direct opposition to what they're trying to teach the kids. In those families, in the 1 or 2 hours a week they have them, kids are at school 35 hours a week, 10,600 hours of education.

It's unrealistic to think that in 1 or 2 hours a week any church or youth pastor can undo the education and indoctrination that kids are receiving today. I think pastors are beginning to see that. We're trying to help them see that, and then we're trying to help them take the next step.

And I'll finish with this, Marlin. For some of them, for whatever reason, they feel like, well, we can't really do a school. That's fine. Maybe you would consider a literacy center where the lift is a little bit different and really look at that as an opportunity. Maybe you can't do that, but you could potentially have scholarships for your families that want to send their kids to Christian education or some kind of homeschooling hybrid option.

There's certainly an opportunity for that. There's also an opportunity just to educate your families in terms of helping them understand what's going on in education today. It's so different than when we went to school. I don't know if education was ever neutral. I would argue it was never neutral in the first place, right? But it's definitely not neutral now.

As you know, and our listeners know, there's an agenda. It's indoctrination, and I would argue that it's evil. If Charlie were on the call with us, he would use the word "demonic." I really agree with him. Again, not everybody would agree, but it's really unfortunate. So we've got to give parents alternative options, and that's what we're trying to do.

And again, back to your original question. That's how we measure success—how well are we doing that across the country.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. There are lots of wonderful initiatives, yours being a wonderful example of that, of ways that we're recognizing and then providing the means for an education that takes the gospel at its core seriously. I still remember in 1962, I believe it was, when we were no longer praying or reading the Bible in public schools.

And we might argue that that's what we need to get back to. I would argue that's not what we need to get back to. The problems that you identified as early 20th century, late 19th century might even have a connection to Horace Mann and what he intended to begin with. Dewey, of course, brought implementation to some of that ideology, and ideology in and of itself doesn't do anything until it's put into practice.

And so, you know, how we discern that. I know you wouldn't disagree with that. I see you nodding with me as we talk. But we are dealing with something that, at its core, the educational system is so much a part of American culture, it's hard to believe that maybe it was a problem from its onset. And now we have people saying that, you all are saying that in wonderful ways, and we're happy to be partners with you in doing that because we want parents and churches, the institutions ordained by God to handle the education of young children, to be where it comes from, because it has to.

We can't send our kids to be educated by the Egyptians and wonder why they didn't turn out like Israelites, or we can't send them to the pagans for their godless education and wonder why they don't turn out like Christians.

Hutz Hertzberg:
You know, that's so well said. And we totally agree with you. That's one of the reasons we exist, and one of the reasons we're ramping up. The need is great, the opportunity is great, and we're committed as much as we possibly can. We've talked about starting schools.

We also do educator summits, which we referenced. We create some pieces of curriculum where we feel there's a need or opportunity. You'd be encouraged by this, Marlin. We have a 2020 Academy Association, which is now comprised of affiliates from 42 states. I think shortly we'll have all 50 states. These are people who affirm basic values that we feel are essential to God-centered education and want to be connected to an organization and to others that share those values and are intentionally trying to implement them in Christian education across the country.

And so we're really excited about our Turning Point Association that is growing. Those are some of the other ways that we're trying to make a difference in the world of education. But you're right, there are some excellent things happening. I had the privilege of meeting some wonderful people doing amazing things.

It is super encouraging. I don't know that 10, 15, certainly 20 years ago, there would be all these different initiatives taking place, but now there are. With all that being said, I still feel like we're just kind of scratching the surface of what really needs to be done.

Marlin Detweiler:
Absolutely. Well, Hutz, thank you for joining us. Really good to have you here and good to talk to you.

Hutz Hertzberg:
Thank you so much. Great to be with you.

Marlin Detweiler:
And folks, thank you for joining us on this episode of Veritas Vox, the voice in classical Christian education.