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Have you heard about the $10 billion rise of classical Christian education? Sarah Hernholm notes in her recent Forbes article that, “A 2,500-year-old educational approach is quietly disrupting the $750 billion K-12 education market…Classical Christian Education (CCE) has expanded from a niche movement to a significant market force, with over 677,500 students enrolled across 1,551 institutions for the 2023-2024 school year. Projections indicate this figure could reach 1.4 million by 2035.”

Check out her article here and then listen to this episode where we dive into her findings!

Episode Transcription

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

Marlin Detweiler:

Welcome again to another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. We're glad you're here. Thank you. Sarah. We're so happy to have you here. How do you say your last name Hernholm?

Sarah Hernholm:

Yeah. So that's Hernholm, but I just got married, so Woody is my official last name now.

Marlin Detweiler:

Congratulations!

Sarah Hernholm:

Thank you.

Marlin Detweiler:

We connected because you wrote an article that I saw, I think, on Forbes.com about classical education. And so I want to talk about that. But before, become a real person to us, tell us a little bit about your background and your family and education and that sort of thing.

Sarah Hernholm:

I grew up in San Diego and was lucky to go to a neighborhood private school where we actually could walk to school and ride bikes to school. And I think that I look around now and realize that's not happening as much. And it was really a wonderful way to grow up, to go to. And I had small classroom sizes and things that I appreciate because I used to be a teacher and so when I look back on my own education, I go, oh, that was really nice.

That I had that very nurturing environment. I went to another private school in La Hoya, California, which was very rigorous, very academic, very intense. Caring more about your grades than anything else. That wasn't quite a fit for me. So I ended up at a boarding school in Saint Louis, Missouri, which was very good for me.

It was grounded in faith, and it was just the right spot for me. And I had a wonderful balance of whole child education is kind of the language that was used. So celebrating your talents and then also making sure that you were doing well academically but a more well-rounded approach. And then I went to Pepperdine University and, which is a faith based school.

I don't really feel like I had a lot of faith based exposure there, but it is a faith based school. And after that I went to TV and film and then had a nice little run there and then felt called to be an educator. And so I went to school to become a teacher and teaching in the public school system, which was quite eye opening and not in a good way.

Yeah. Very concerning. Very concerning, and ended up leaving that form of education to launch a nonprofit called Whatever It Takes, which is what I do today, helping young people become entrepreneurs. And also writing about education and entrepreneurship at Forbes.

Marlin Detweiler:

Very good. Well, we're planning on talking to you in a subsequent episode about wit and how you're helping kids to establish themselves as entrepreneurs and bring out some gifts there. But today, I want to talk about an article that you wrote for Forbes, on classical Christian education. How in the world did you run into the idea? I guess, well, I could I can speculate on the answer, but why would I do that when you can answer it?

Sarah Hernholm:

Yeah. Well, like I said, I'm very interested in education. I'm interested not only because I write about it, but because I work with kids from we work with kids at work from all types of educational backgrounds. But I came across a book by Jeff and David Goodwin and was reading that book. Subsequently also had already reached out to David about something completely different, but didn't know that.

Marlin Detweiler:

Battle for the American Mind, yes, that book we have had. Yes, both on here. Of course, before Pete was the Secretary of Defense.

Sarah Hernholm:

Yes.

Marlin Detweiler:

But the book has been a real eye-opener for many people.

Sarah Hernholm:
Very eye opening. And keep reading it, even if you feel called out and you feel embarrassed about the things that you chose to do in your own classroom. Wow. But I ended up emailing David about something completely different and it turns out that I just read more about what he does. And again, in the space of classical Christian education.

And I really just to your audience, I understand this. I was so interested in this work that I went to Boise myself, like, hey, for a it.

Marlin Detweiler:

For our audience. David is now the president of the Association of Classical and Christian Schools. I served on the board with David. I've known David for a long time, was a positive vote for him taking the role that he has. And I don't serve on the board anymore but I know David quite well and he is connected to because he lives in Boise, is connected to the Ambrose School, which is I think is the classical school that you're referring to having visited.

Sarah Hernholm:

And I went out there not knowing I was going to actually visit a school.

Marlin Detweiler:

Oh, you didn't.

Sarah Hernholm:

I wasn't sure if that was too big of an ask but just to really meet and talk with him about the work and in a school and the whole foundation of the education, this process. And in our conversation, I said, I really hope one day I can see it and action. And he said, hop in the car, let's go.

And I'm so grateful. I did. Very game-changing for me and my perspective. And we can get into that if you want. But ultimately my exposure to that in that conversation and then with my own eyes experiencing it, no pressure on the school like, oh, she's coming and she's writing about us. He actually intentionally did not introduce me as somebody who was writing about it, which I appreciated. And so I really got to see everything in its purest form and was blown away.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah. What were the things? Well, let's not go there yet. What was it about classical Christian education that got your attention from Hegseth and Goodwin's book?

Sarah Hernholm:

I think there's more.

Marlin Detweiler:

To it at the end as an answer to the anecdote, not the anecdote, the answer to the problem that they bring out in the book. Was that it or was it more than that?

Sarah Hernholm:

I think for me, it tapped into a place that I hadn't really gone to in a while in myself, which reminded me of the moments in my educational experience where I was in a place like that. While it wasn't maybe, and like I said, I've shared with people I don't know if the schools that I went to were trained in that, so to speak, but there was one school in particular that I went to that when I was reading the book.

It brought me back to that place and I thought, that is how it should feel for a child. That's the most safe I've ever felt at a school, the most loved and where the focus was on my education and on growing and my character. Of course, language I wouldn't use in fifth grade or sixth grade. But I look back now and I see that.

And so when I was reading this book, I thought, oh, that's that. I have had that experience and this is exactly how a child should feel. And I've seen the alternative and it's not good. And you don't have a long time in your life to be a child. And it's really important that those are nurturing years.

And I think I just thought there was something in me that was sparked. I want to see this and I want to understand this because I am exposed to a lot of different forms of education. People pitch me every day in my inbox, like it is the answer. Two hours of school a day is the answer, and I see all of this. So I'm like, I need to go see it for myself.

And honestly, just seeing it in person was why I was like, this is it. It made me excited to want to send my future children to school.

Marlin Detweiler:
What's interesting is the parallels in our experience. There is a book called Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning by Douglas Wilson that I think is really the seminal work in bringing back an interest in classical education, classical Christian education. And of course, it's the title of the essay, which was originally a talk delivered by Dorothy Sayers, called The Lost Tools of Learning.

But when we read that, we—meaning Laurie and me, my wife—we said, this is what we want for our kids. We always knew there must be a better way. And this seems to be it. We jumped in very quickly, took the initiative to start a school. Veritas Press was born out of the needs created around the demand of that kind of education.

And it's been life-changing for us in many respects. What were the things—you know, the thing that really got me was to see a parallel between child development and a type of teaching and a phasing, so to speak, that we call the trivium: grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. But what were the things that really captured your imagination, both from what you read, what you observed at the Ambrose School, and what you've experienced since then as you did research to write the article?

Sarah Hernholm:
Well, I know that when I was on the campus, it made me want to be a teacher again. I mean, if there's any people that are teachers that are listening or have taught in the public school system, you know it's really tough. And so you really are doing it for the kids because the system is broken and there's not a lot of support and you're just dealing with a lot.

And so when I saw these classrooms, I thought, oh, this is what I was hoping teaching was going to be like when I went into teaching. So that was something that stood out to me. But I think this is why I had to see it with my own eyes, that there was something different in the children.

Now, the thing is, it's not that public school students or other types of schools that I visited, that those kids don't have the potential to have this thing that I saw. They do. They're just not given the opportunity to have that brought out in them based on the system that they're in. So this doesn't mean that some kids—

Marlin Detweiler:
System is not going to foster.

Sarah Hernholm:
No, the system will not foster that. Now, you fight for it when you're a teacher like me and you work really hard to do that with 35 kids in your classroom. And I do believe I did a good job with that, but it's a tall order. And I saw this.

It sounds so weird to say, but this, like, purity and this presence and almost like an earnestness or a childlikeness in the faces. And I saw kids of all ages, so I'm talking teenagers and the little ones. And it felt like they were being protected and allowed to explore in a way that I don't always see in other places.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. One of the things that we have done at Veritas is we have challenged—we have set an expectation for the students that are in our live classes and for schools that follow our curriculum—but we've set an expectation that students are going to read good books, read great books, including great evil books.

Mein Kampf, and things like that. But our reasoning for doing it is not as a way of considering other ideas as much as it is having students become aware of what history has produced in a place that's safe for them to explore with a teacher that knows how to manage that process. And it's kind of funny when we go to a homeschool fair and somebody just picks that book up off the shelf, we get a furrowed brow.

And what are you doing with this kind of thing? And that explanation tends to satisfy but it's that kind of environment that you're observing. It's very typical in classical Christian education circles, whether they're bricks and mortar schools like you are observing an online school like ours or a home school where mom and dad are doing the teaching. It's very typical.

And one of the things not all classical educators do this, but one thing I want to say is I want students to be comfortable talking about anything and everything in a place where they're dealing with people who will teach them well about that. With a biblical worldview. And part of what you're observing, does that resonate?

Sarah Hernholm:
It does. And I had an experience when I was in, probably 10th or 11th grade, my English teacher, she was excellent. And I've written her many thank you notes because she just changed my life, impacted my life. And she would let us wrestle with ideas and through books and open discussion and then tie it into our own character development.

And I think what I noticed at the school that I visited is that you have more than one teacher like that at the school. And I think most adults can count on one hand how many great teachers that they've had. Yeah, they were in school for many years. So that's a problem. But on that campus, I really felt like there was more. Her name was Mrs. Clark.

I felt like there was a lot of Mrs. Clark's on that campus. And that's really what you want for children. It's really what you want for young people. And I also think that what made me go into not only just having admiration for what I saw, but really wanting to dive in rather quickly to an article.

I think I published that article within the week of that visit. Okay. Was that I had this. I just thought that, gosh, if more kids did this, how much it would impact our society, positively impact our society?

Marlin Detweiler:

It is happening. I've been around classical education as long as longer than most, not as long as everyone. The book that I referred to that really started things was written in 1991, and at that point, the school out of which the book, well, that was the subject matter of the book had been, was ten years old. But back then there weren't many.

There was one. I know of one other classical Christian school care parallel in Topeka, Kansas, and they didn't know each other at that point. The two schools didn't know that the other existed, but we were one of the first. We took the initiative to start one of the first five schools. And then things happened fairly quickly. But it was in that environment that I think we started to see things happening in ways that we only hoped could.

Sarah Hernholm:
I mean, I really was just blown away by what I saw. And I was talking to the English teacher at the school on this campus and just asking for his reading list, and then he told me how the books he was reading and I said, oh my gosh, I want to be in your class. Like I was like, yeah, this is I said, I want to teach this.

I want to be in as far as I want it. I was so enthusiastic. And I just think it's important to note that I visit a lot of schools, and oftentimes I leave thinking about, okay, how can I raise money for them to get an arts program? How can I get people like bring awareness to their need for food?

Like, I mean, there's just so many things that I usually go on campus and I leave needing to take action to help, which is fine. But this one I just thought, oh my gosh, this is I just want to amplify what you're doing and let people know it's an option.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. Before we forget to tell everyone where they can find the article that you've written, the name of it, of course. And I guess the website that it's on to make it easy for people to find.

Sarah Hernholm:
Well, the articles, the easy way to do it would just be to go to Forbes.com and you can search my name. You can search Sarah Hernholm. Last name Hernholm and all my articles pop up, but you'll see, it's right. It's right there. And I think, I mean, I should I mean, I guess I should know my I don't know my article titles by heart.

Marlin Detweiler:
It's 10 billion, something.

Sarah Hernholm:
Yeah, it's definitely like the interest of Christian education. Yeah.

Marlin Detweiler:
How did you come about? I was shocked at the $10 million number. And I'm as invested in this world of classical Christian education as anyone. Where did that come from?

Sarah Hernholm:
Just by research. You know, I'm putting together. I mean, it's I think the good thing is you have to ground everything in fact. When it comes to something, you know, when you're writing and when you should do that when you're writing any article for any publication, but especially for Forbes. This is very financially driven in terms of when you talk about numbers like that.

So for the reader, the audience, you can go to it. Everything's linked and it gives you the data that supports that number and why that was the number that I shared. And for a lot of different reasons, when you think about the different elements of what the industry can consist of, you know, I think you'll go in and you can see it's layered. And so how we got to that number. But it is backed up.

Marlin Detweiler:
You know, the Christy Association of Classical and Christian Schools was founded in the 92–93 timeframe. I was one of the original board members. So I should remember the year. So you have that. Well, with at this point, 500 to 600, I think, member schools, probably even more so is the homeschool population of classically educated kids or is getting a classical education.

What are the things that you would observe as somebody who's relatively new to this discussion? What are the things that you would observe about opportunities and cautions?

Sarah Hernholm:
For getting into something like this?

Marlin Detweiler:
To parents, to administrators, you have a lot of experience considering anybody that writes on education, which you do regularly, is going to have some opinions about what works, what doesn't work, what's appealing, and what's enduring. And so I'm asking you, as somebody who has maybe a little bit better sense of, as an outsider to the people that are already swimming in the pond, so to speak, of classical Christian education.

I'm asking you to observe and maybe talk a little bit about what you see as things we really need to make sure we keep our nose to the grindstone on, or to use another way of talking about it, sticking to our knitting. The other is what are the cautions you might offer from what you've seen in your experiences and in your writing and reading on education.

Sarah Hernholm:
Well. I think that sometimes. And what I've seen some really good schools get just derailed. Honestly. And not any that are connected to classical Christian education that I know of because like I said, I'm new to learning about it. But I have done my research and I have visited. So I want to say I'm speaking from my personal experience and exposure.

But what I've seen some really great top schools in our country get derailed over is just following trends and thinking that they need to, like, all of a sudden, if that's the question. Like the things that I would be really wary of, as a program, as a school is that don't take the temperature of the country, so to speak, or the trends and then try to incorporate that into your school.

I mean, stay true to what you do. Well, and I think that what the classical Christian education programs are doing is very timeless. And I think that maybe people who go like, oh, it's too old or it's too this or we're too behind because all these other schools are doing, they're doing this trendy thing or they're talking about this trendy topic. And I would be very careful about changing course to the trends.

Marlin Detweiler:
Many, many people that start things are, by their very nature, entrepreneurial, and so when they find something that's new to them, they can be attracted to it because it's attractive and it's new. And I think a pitfall, which is what I'm hearing you say at some level, and I'm repeating it and maybe unpacking a little bit and asking you to unpack it even more.

But when we get settled into a routine, we're tempted to look for new again and further develop. And sometimes we're tempted to do things that simply take us away from that which made it successful in the first place. Aren't we?

Sarah Hernholm:
100%. And then now what's your. I mean, what's your edge? I mean, you know, I'm an entrepreneur. You know, I have, you know, radical businesses. Like, if you just become everything to everybody, then why would somebody how can someone find you and what makes you unique? And I think that's happened a lot over the last decade in education.

Is a lot of schools picking up these trends and getting so far away, even from the principles permission, that they even have on their website. I mean, that's I don't even see any of that on your campus or in your practices or in the educators that you hire, and there's nothing more important than our children, and they deserve us.

They deserve adults that can defend their right to an education like you're providing, like these schools are providing, and to not take the bait of getting into these trends or getting into these programs that they all the schools doing this program. We got to do this program. We got to do this thing and it takes you so far away again. How can you stand out if you just become what everybody else is doing?

How can the people that you need to serve find you? If everything just sounds the same on your website, or everything sounds the same in your agenda or your mission statement.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. Great observation. Yeah. We, when we were first getting started with Veritas, it was just a curriculum business. Now, of course, we're an online school as well. And one of the reputations that we had, because my wife is such a researcher, was that she would find wonderful new books to add to our offerings in our catalog and on our website that became part of our curricula.

Many times, those were literature books. Sometimes there were curricular in nature. And so we got this reputation for being the place that people would go to find the newest things. Well, we knew that that was not something that should be sustained. And so we found ourselves, increasingly stable. And so people that were coming to us looking for new things weren't finding them.

And I had to develop a metaphor for us, so. Well, we poured concrete, and now it's hard. Yeah, it's not changing much anymore.

Sarah Hernholm:
Now, I like that.

Marlin Detweiler:
We do allow for the fact that there are, sometimes better curricula produced, better tools available. Is another possibility. And so the idea is to maintain the stability while always being willing to look at things and run it through the grid of what worked and what works and what is effective to see if we have in fact found or created a better mousetrap to do the same thing, but to not be looking for a substantially different methodology or approach.

Sarah Hernholm:
I mean, I really agree with that. I mean, we don't have to get into it on this podcast. So when we chat about it, we try again. We can about my other organization with WIT, but very similar where we now have been running that business for 15 years and it's education based, and there's a reason that people we're not a fit for everybody.

And if you come to us we're really grateful that we do what we do because, you know, sometimes you're not for everybody is a good thing.

Marlin Detweiler:
I love that as a teaser, Sarah, to get Paul to, come in here about your, your business of helping to create entrepreneurs, maybe, one last thought here. What are your plans? To help inform the marketplace, just like you did with your first article, but to maybe further inform what? What do you have, that you're cooking up, if you don't mind sharing that as to how you might further, communicate into the marketplace what you see happening in classical education.

Sarah Hernholm:
I guess I'll give away some.

Marlin Detweiler:
Oh, good. I didn't know if you're going to hear. That or not. That's exactly. Yeah, they're all right.

Sarah Hernholm:
You're gonna hear it first. Okay, here's what I think. I'm. This is what I'm playing around with. One is this idea that. And I know not every state is doing this, but there's some funds that are coming out or that are already out that people can use the.

Marlin Detweiler:
Funds as the short of it to educate.

Sarah Hernholm:
Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. And an article about how maybe using those funds towards class conversion education is an option and why a parent might consider that. I think that's important. And I think everybody is aware of that. And I'd like to help educate people on that. The other thing is, I'm really looking forward to interviewing some children that are students that are part of classical Christian education.

Because I want to hear their perspective. And I want to find them in a way that, I mean, I just I want to talk to them because I think that the proof is in the pudding, which is such a, you know, an old expression. But it's I think it rings true here. And I would like to hear their experience.

And I think it'd be really interesting to talk to a student who maybe had a different education experience before and then came into this, and what they notice is different, because that's really who we should be listening to. It is our children and how it's working for them and how it's impacting them. And like I said, I saw with my own eyes just things that were just behaviors that I don't always see in other schools. Energy that was different. But now I want to talk to somebody. So that's in the works.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. Very good. Well, this has been wonderful, Sarah. Thank you so much. Thank you for the article you wrote. Thank you for your interest. Look forward to seeing a follow-up article like that. And folks, thank you for joining us. Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Sarah, thank you.

Sarah Hernholm:
Thank you for having me.

Marlin Detweiler:
Folks. We hope to see you next time. Bye-bye.