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Do you wonder how Omnibus (Veritas Press’ flagship integrated humanities curriculum) was created? Today, on the podcast, Ty Fischer gives you the origins story of Omnibus! Ty is the editor of Omnibus and Head of School for Veritas Academy in Lancaster, PA (not to be confused with Veritas Scholars Academy, the online school!)

After hearing about how Omnibus was created, stick around as Ty Fischer and Marlin Detweiler discuss the evolution of classical ed over the past 30 years and also give practical tips on deciding if classical education is right for your family.

Want to learn more about the Omnibus program? Tap here to read an in-depth blog post covering the most frequently asked questions about this unique curriculum.

Episode Transcription

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

Marlin Detweiler:

Hello again. I am Marlin Detwiler, and you are listening to Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Here today is someone that I count among my dear friends, Ty Fischer. Or sometimes, if you want to be more formal, G. Tyler Fischer. Welcome, Ty!

Ty Fischer:

Thanks, Marlin!

Marlin Detweiler:

We got to know Ty a long time ago in a way that I'm going to jump in and let him tell us about.

Give us a little bit of your educational background, which will naturally lead into how you ended up where you are.

Ty Fischer:

Yeah, well, I grew up in a town of 80 people in Indiana, so I had a lot of practical education from there. But I mainly went to school to play football, basketball, and baseball. That was the reason for going in every day. I was a decent student, though, and afterward, thought perhaps I would play some baseball in college, went to a local community college there for a year or two, a year and a half, and then transferred to Grove City College out in western Pennsylvania.

That's really where my education, in some senses, began. I got patted on the back a lot when I was a high school student because I guess I was an athlete who got some questions right some of the time. So I look back– I'm a packrat, so I saved some of those papers, and they have high grades on them, but they're not written in English, I don't think, they're just written in like a stream of consciousness. But at Grove City, I really ran into they have a humanities core and really ran into the Western civilization and the great books and really had a love of history. Really stoked there. I was preparing to go to law school was found that I was reading a lot more on theology than I was on the law and ended up going to Reformed Seminary down in Jackson, Mississippi. And there —

Marlin Detweiler:

And you went straight there, unlike most students who tend to take a break between undergraduate and seminary.

Ty Fischer:

I never really understood taking a break. So I just thought, if you like something and you can afford it. And seminary is a very affordable kind of graduate school. So I worked while I was down there. I sold cut-rate furniture to people that won money on gambling boats. Mainly that's what I did through seminary.

And something happened while I was there at seminary. I used to be a subscriber to a magazine called Credenda/Agenda, which was one of those things that just was kind of a touchstone at the beginning of classical Christian education. And it's really it was a theological journal. Doug Wilson and some of the folks out in Moscow were really involved in writing it.

But for me, the funny part was it was a theological journal that was sometimes written in the style of kind of Monty Python, and I thought that was hilarious, and some people just hated it. But the Internet was also just starting out at that point. And I learned about classical Christian education because somewhere on the early Internet, someone posted my phone number and said, If you want to subscribe to the Credenda/Agenda, you have to call this person.

So I would get calls from all over the country from people who were asking to subscribe to the magazine. And I should I shouldn't charge them like $50 or $100 a free magazine and just put their name in. But I was like —

Marlin Detweiler:

You ended up finishing your seminary degree but decided not to become a pastor. Tell us about the whole process of that year.

Ty Fischer:

Yeah. Yeah. So it was interesting. I went to Reformed Seminary, and I was coming from a reformed perspective. But I was Baptistic, and I changed my views of the sacraments during my last semester of seminary. So that's like cutting all the ties with one denomination and having no ties with another.

So I was planning on doing a T.H.M. and then going on and doing a Ph.D. in theology. I, you know, I still have that. When I came here to Lancaster, I told Emily, I'll do this headmaster thing for two years. And then I got, I mean, I've got my thesis is over there just kind of warming so I know what I want to do it on.

So I'll just do that for two years. But the story is going to not make it back to the thesis. I ended up coming up here. Well I ended up coming up here to visit my wife's family is from Lancaster. And I mean.

Marlin Detweiler:

It should be noted because we have a lot of students at Veritas Scholars Academy that end up in Grove City. I think one year we had ten students start there.

Ty Fischer:

And I think we have four from our school.

Marlin Detweiler:

Is that right? And that is a place that probably finds a higher percentage of people finding their mates there than any other college in America.

Ty Fischer:

Yeah,1,075 girls and 1,075. So at your freshman orientation dinner, the Dean of Women, Nancy Paxton, used to say, look to your left, look to your right. The person you're sitting next to might be your husband or wife. Now, I came mid-year, and they seeded me between two guys, and I'm like, “Blegh, what's going on?!”

But I did I did meet my wife there at Grove City and then came back out here to Lancaster to visit while we were in seminary. And I would drop my Bible as I was packing up to go home, and a bulletin fluttered out, and it landed face down. And on the back of it said “Veritas Academy Classical Christian School in its second year looking for —” and then it listed every position you could imagine. So I applied to teach history and Bible. That's what my degrees were in. And then I think Dan Caywood called me and said, We think you would make a good head of school. And I think I dropped the phone. Then we came out and interviewed, and that was 27 years ago.

Marlin Detweiler:

So I believe the school only had one year prior to that; Laurie and I and Caywood and some others were the ones that took the initiative to start it. You've been with it from the second year. Now it's worth clarifying that Veritas Academy is a school that has a physical location here in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Should not be confused with Veritas Scholars Academy, which does not have a physical location except for administrative offices.

Ty Fischer:

And so we do get sometimes we do get emails from people who are trying to register for classes.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, there's a little bit of confusion there. It was something that we were we've all been sensitive to. So the bulletin says that you end up applying, you end up getting the position you've been there ever since. And that is hard to believe, but it's 27 years in that timeframe. What other than what you read in Credenda/Agenda, what attracted you to classical Christian education?

Ty Fischer:

You know, I think that as I look back, I really see God's preparation, even though I didn't know what he was preparing me for. So it was at Grove City that I really fell in love with Western civilization. I fell in love with reading and history. And it was just and then in seminary, I got to dig deeper into that, the theological underpinnings of everything.

As I was getting ready to leave seminary and come up to Lancaster, even that sales position I had at the furniture store actually did prepare me. Because actually having to talk to people and you're actually having to learn how to sell things and God provided for me even when I didn't know what he was doing with me.

So when I got here, we had what we had like 26 students at the school. We had 370 this year, preschool through 12th grade. So it's been a long time. But honestly, Marlin, it doesn't feel that long.

Marlin Detweiler:

It doesn't, does it? Time does fly. With your involvement at the school, you've gone through a lot of things and ended up big getting involved in the Association of Classical Christian Schools. My guess is you've been a permanent board member for ACCS 25 years?

Ty Fischer:

It's more like 22 or 23, I think. All right now. But that being a permanent board member, I should mention this really quickly, how that happened. I was in the last meeting as a term board member that I could be in, so I was going to rotate off the board, and one of the permanent board members resigned, not that it was a bad thing.

I think it was Clay Howe, he resigned, and then someone had to get out the bylaws to see who was eligible to be a permanent board member. And those bylaws. I'm going to blame you for this, Marlin. They were written very tight.

Marlin Detweiler:

But sometimes, you just don't need much flexibility.

Ty Fischer:

Yeah, well, they started writing all of the names of people that they were thinking about nominating up there. And then, when they read the bylaws, they started crossing them out. And I was the only name left on the board. And they took 15 minutes to think if there was anyone else. I was like, “What are you guys doing?!”

Marlin Detweiler:

I don't remember that at all.

Ty Fischer:

It's true!

Marlin Detweiler:

Oh, I do believe you. So you have served on the board. So you've had a real school’s perspective on the growth of classical Christian education, and it's morphing and evolving. What have you seen happen over that time frame? What would you observe about where we are compared to where we were?

Ty Fischer:

Yeah, so I would say, I'm probably at the end of but maybe in the middle of that founding generation, and what I saw, there was harder work, but it really, in many ways, less temptation. So the people that were joining classical Christian education at the beginning were kind of those pioneer spirits, right?

And I think that this reminds me a little bit of the stories that I get from like first-generation homeschoolers. Everyone thought they were crazy. As I said at an ACCS conference once, “Here we are, a group of 1,200 people joined together by the proposition that we want you to pay for a service that will be given to you for free.”

The interesting thing is that most of the people that I met in the classical Christian world were not people that had had a terrible experience in public school. Most of us were raised in public schools. We never thought we'd be outside the public system. And then through one thing or another.

I mean, Doug's first book, Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning, was very important, but we just hit that conviction of we have to give our children something different. And, of course, I didn't have children when I signed up to be the head of school here. I really came in thinking that if we as Christians don't start educating our children in this way, there's not really a lot of time left for our country, but civilizationally, we were falling apart. We were going to fall apart. Now, I didn't think it would happen quite this quickly, but yeah.

Marlin Detweiler:

Pete Hegseth says there's an old saying, I forget who he credited it with, but “Things happen slowly and slowly and slowly until they happen fast.”

Ty Fischer:

Well, so I ran into this Latin quote, I'm going to mess it up because I don't know Latin, but it was, “Cum di aliquem perdere volunt, eos primum insanos faciunt.” Which means, “When the gods want to destroy someone, they first make them mad.” And that's kind of what we're seeing in our culture right now, right?

You turn on the TV or open the paper now, and you look at it, and you go like, “That's just insane like that. That's not going to work for 15 minutes.” And there are people that believe it. So, you know, I got into this thinking that I was in a vanguard.

And right now, you know, I really feel sometimes like we're in a rearguard, but that makes the work probably even more important.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, it's amazing to me what we have seen happen in the last few years and how quickly certain things have happened; what was even more amazing to me is that there isn't more outrage and more expectation that they have to do better. And it’s an answer that I believe we’ve got.

Ty Fischer:

Well, I think Goodwin and Hegseth have called the educational COVID-19 moment or something like that? And I think that what's happening to fill out that last answer, so we started out with those pioneer people. Right. And now what's happened? When we hit COVID, I was thinking about what online school can I call for a job; is classical Christian education in bricks and mortar schools over; will I ever get out of my kitchen again?. I never thought that going to get the mail every day would be, like, a highlight, but I kind of thought God was killing us, and it ended up that he was blessing us.

He was blessing us in so many ways where Christian parents saw things that they could have seen maybe earlier. But that really those two things of kind of the Cultural Revolution and COVID hit together. And because of that, I think you had another moment where a large group of people said, “I can't do this anymore. I need something different.”

So now classical schools are actually more at risk. We're more at risk because we've now gone from being like the ugly duckling, the weirdo in the back of the class. Now we're the cute girl, right?

Marlin Detweiler:

Great metaphor. Let's change subjects here. There's a lot we can say on that. And there's a lot that others have contributed through Omnibus. Excuse me, through Veritas podcasts. But there's something that you're uniquely qualified to speak on that I want to make sure we cover here. You, as some of our listeners will know and others are about to learn, are the managing editor of the Omnibus project for Veritas Press, our company.

Tell us, what is the Omnibus curriculum? You don’t have to tell me! I know, but tell the people listeners.

Ty Fischer:

So the Omnibus curriculum is reading through the great books, especially a focus on history, theology, and literature, and it's a six-year program, and you can break it down in different ways. But it was set up to have six volumes, which could take you from seventh grade all the way through 12th grade. And it's really a way to take the great ideas of the past and to use the tools that have always been used to talk about those great ideas and to put to put kids in contact with those authors and to give them and their teachers a chance to discuss them.

And Lord willing, think about those ideas, Christianly. So that was really a ten-year project. But that was that's why the time went fast.

Marlin Detweiler:

Part of it, no doubt. Give us the story of how it came about.

Ty Fischer:

Yeah. So there have been a couple of times that I have been so smart that I've just about wrecked the school. And I think one of the great times was we started the school, we had about 27 students. When I arrived, I think at the end of my first year, every teacher that I wasn't married to quit. And we had the school still grow by like 50 students.

And so we had to hire a bunch of teachers. I just found an old picture of the old staff. The school was really built on those teachers. I mean, Eric Vanderhoof still works for you, but we hired those teachers, and when we came to the middle of that second year that I was there, we were still sketching out what we wanted to do curriculum early with older students.

And I describe it as we took the approach– you know that one time that Jesus heals the blind guy? At first he puts the stuff on his eyes and then he says, “I see men, but they look like trees walking around.” Okay. So we love textbooks, and we wanted to use some really good textbooks, and we wanted to read all these original sources.

So at the beginning, we decided to do both. And that's what almost killed our secondary school right there because we gave the kids way too much work. And I remember one parent sending me a note that said, “Is this Augustine fellow really that important? Why are you making kids read this?”

So it was we decided, I think it was in February, that we were going to call together a number of scholars and just have a symposium that you ended up leading concerning secondary school. Some of the things that came out of that have been great. Some of them that came out of there was weird. If they turn out to be right, I have them in my like a pile.

Marlin Detweiler:

I remember the flat earther!

Ty Fischer:
I think he was a geo-centrist. And I'm like, “I'm pretty sure we're not going to start science—”

Marlin Detweiler:

Oh I’m sorry, yeah geo-centrist. I don't know if it was a flat earther but it was a geo-centrist. That’s right.

Ty Fischer:

But one of the things that came out of it was a lot of encouragement to really say what we're going to do is we're going to read the great books. And somebody said the next day in my office, they came in and— I don't remember this, but it sounds right, I had swept everything off my desk into the trash can and was just writing out a list of books. That was kind of the seed. And we did that for a number of years at Veritas Academy. We read the great books and our teachers wilted under the weight of having to recreate the wheel over and over again.

And then I was approached by this publisher, Veritas Press, and they said they said, why don't we turn this into something that is that makes this process more accessible and repeatable? And that's when you and I and Doug and then eventually Gene Vey got together. And I think Doug and Gene really had so much wisdom that they brought to this.

And I had a lot of sweat to give. And I think that what you and Laurie did was you kept saying no. You kept saying no during that first time through. And that helped us make it better and better. I think you had a real sense of what the customer needed. I mean, one of the things that made it so hard and one of the things that was just hateful to me at some points is answering questions.

I didn't want to answer questions for people. I want them to think, I don't want them to have the answer. Writing out an answer took a lot more work. When I think back about it, that was a crucial decision that cost me a few months of my life.

But it was a crucial decision because it makes the curriculum able to be used confidently by people who haven't had a classical education. And they just want to know. They don't want to not think. They just want to know they're in the right ballpark.

Marlin Detweiler:

We learn a lot from the draft of what other people think. It helps us, it stimulates our own thinking. I would much rather deal with a draft of a solution in many instances, not all than seek to originate it. Sure, it helps get the momentum going more quickly.

Ty Fischer:

Yeah. So that was kind of the beginning of the omnibus curriculum. We went down to historic Williamsburg and Doug and Nancy and you and Laurie and Emily and I. And just to show you how many years ago that was, our first daughter had just been born, Maddie, and she now teaches grammar school Latin for us.

Marlin Detweiler:

That was our planning weekend.

Ty Fischer:

Yeah, it was a planning weekend. And I think I wrote I wrote the first chapter down there. I drafted the first chapter of the Theban trilogy and then I mean that process of this works, this doesn't change this. And we hammered on that for such a long time just to get a format that we okay, now this works and I think we wrote the first half of the first book about eight times.

Marlin Detweiler:

That's that's quite likely it does happen that way. I've realized in the publishing world it was fun, you know, that six books. The other thing I remember was we decided to do one book a year and after we did three books, we said, let's take a year break. So we had six books written in seven years.

Yeah, that was a lot of publishing, a lot of writing, a lot of authors and a lot of effort on the project.

Ty Fischer:

It would get to the point where there'd be a due date and an author would send me the first draft of a chapter, and I would either go crazy happy if they if it's a good thing where I know the work with this chapter is going to be minimal, or Emily would say she would just hear this groan, “Ohhhh, like they didn't listen to a darn thing I told them to do.” And that led to some interesting conversations.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, you really see the difference between people who are highly accomplished as authors and those who have a lot of good things to say but have not practiced yet.

Ty Fischer:

Well, and you know what? I think it was after almost one hour of Omnibus to we broke the tasks apart but there were some people that could write essays and classes, but most of the time we had an essay writer and then a teacher that was writing the classes. And I think that that helped the managing editor survive the project.

Marlin Detweiler:

Let's change topics here for one last time. We're running out of time. I appreciate so much you're giving us your time here, but you've been involved in a long time dealing with lots of parents, considering classical Christian education for their children. What would you say to a parent who's unsure about whether or not this is a good thing for their child?

Ty Fischer:

Yeah, so I think that I think that you've got to question first why you would do it this. And I think I think Chesterton said this, but you always you've said it a lot. And I think at the beginning of the classical Christian schooling movement, it needed to be said a lot and we needed to remember this, that anything worth doing is worth doing badly.

Marlin Detweiler:
I did say that!

Ty Fischer:
Things if they're worth doing, they're just plain worth doing. So I think that I think that as a parent, I think you've got to look at your child, but you have to examine the why. When I think of my kids, they seem very similar to people, but they're very, very different.

And for some of them, you know, book learning is easy. For some of them, it's hard. But the why doesn't change for me as a parent. I'm handing them a cultural heritage. I'm giving them an education that encourages them to put their faith in Jesus. It's not that doesn't try to tear that down. And those things are precious things.

When you rewind back to when we were kids, it was a different world that we lived in back then. I had a fifth grade teacher that would hand out Bibles and preach to us in class, and no one thought anything about that, but when I see what's going on now, even in public schools here in conservative Lancaster County… I don't know.

I don't want to tell people. I think people need to make decisions about their kids. I don't want tell them what to do, but it gets harder and harder for me just to stomach what I'm hearing. So you've got to start with the “why”, then you've got to take a good assessment of your child.

Now I would say this if your child is in grammar school that really I would say that decision basically should be the parnt's decision alone. Right? Like if your child's a decently obedient Christian kid and you say, “This is the school you're going to,” and he's a second grader, he should go to that school. You should make the decisions for him. He's not old enough to make those kinds of decisions.

Now, I would have said that all the way through when I started out here, but really, when those kids get into that high school age, it's more of a partnership than it is just “You go and do.” You can lead a horse to water, but then sometimes you have to shoot the horse right there at the edge of the water. A kid can sabotage their own education if they're smart enough.

And in secondary school, we really sit down with the child and make sure that they know it is going to be hard work here. It's not going to be joyless, hard work. But we think learning is good. I tell I tell high school kids, “If you like books and learning and that kind of stuff, you're going to fit in really well here because we think that's good.

Marlin Detweiler:

But don’t come here for the basketball scholarship.

Ty Fischer:

Right? Well, we'd love them to be here for the basketball scholarship.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, but not for that being the primary reason. Like it might have been in our high school educations.

Ty Fischer:

Right, right! But I think that what I've seen is that kids who understand this, who are either bought in or willing to follow their parent's lead and just give it a try. What I think parents need to know is that there's when you're jumping into this, there is a great cloud of people that comes around you to love you and help you if you're in an online school or in a brick and mortar school, or if you're deciding to do this as a homeschool family, there's a whole cloud of homeschoolers that will come around you and help you. So you're not alone.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, and I love the education that I've gotten along with my kids and in the work that I do that I didn't get. I've often said in public education, in my context of public education, my teachers, should they know what I am doing now would shake their heads and wonder how

the world got this way. They couldn't believe that.

And I had the pleasure, as you know, of having one of my math teachers come to Christ before moving back to Pennsylvania. And he ended up coming to work for me, which was kind of funny. We used to recall the times where he spanked me, and I was wondering if I might get the opportunity to return that.

Ty Fischer:

I hope that the answer to that is no.

Marlin Detweiler:

It was! She's been with us today at Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Thank you for joining us.

Ty Fischer:

Thank you, Marlin.