How do we get kids off of screens and back into reality? Trent sits down with David Williams of Valor and Dan Kerr to discuss how to implement the principles of a classical, wisdom-based education.
Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hello, everyone. Thanks for stopping by the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker Trent Horn. Do you ever worry about the state of our world? You wonder. Do you ever weep for the future? I know sometimes I feel that way when I go on Twitter or social media and see what is currently trending, see what is happening to kids. When I go out with my family, we’ll be at the playground or we’ll be at a restaurant with our kids, and we’ll look out and I’ll just see other little kids. I mean my kids are not even in elementary school yet, but seeing kids their age or even just a little bit older playing with iPads, glued to their phones. It’s a depressing and concerning sight.
So here’s what I wanted to do on today’s episode. I wanted to talk about how do we share wisdom, how do we make wise kids, and frankly wise adults, in a rather foolish age. So I’ve got two guests with me who will give us some great insights about how to impart wisdom, a classical education into children, how to reinvigorate the next generation and make our world sane again if you will. So joining us is David Williams from the Valor Institute and Dan Kerr from St. Martin’s. Gentlemen, welcome to the Council of Trent podcast.
David Williams:
Thank you, Trent.
Dan Kerr:
Thank you very much, Trent.
Trent Horn:
All righty. Let’s … Why don’t you share with us a little bit more just about each of you, what you’re doing and how it relates to the field of education. Then we’ll dive right into this. Though I will say for the best audio quality, four fingers from the microphone are best to be able to speak right in. So go right ahead.
David Williams:
Sure. My name is David Williams. I’m the founder and president of Valor Education as well as Valor Public Schools and the Valor Institute, a series of related initiatives really trying to recapture and renew the education of the whole person in authentic community. We started a number of charter schools in Austin, Texas and we’re looking at opportunities to start both charter schools and potentially private schools in other states. For us, part of the answer to your question, Trent, is restoring the classical ends of education, namely wisdom and virtue, to our schools. Instead of just focusing on career success or some type of technical proficiency, we want students who really seek to grow in wisdom and to seek to grow in the virtues and precisely to do that in a beautiful school community.
Dan Kerr:
Yeah, my name is Daniel Kerr. I’m the president of St. Martin’s Academy in southeast Kansas. St. Martin’s is a Catholic boys boarding school that combines a classical type of academic approach on a working farm.
Trent Horn:
Oh, wow.
Dan Kerr:
We are in our second year. Last year, we began with 17 students. We have 30 this year. It’s a high school.
Trent Horn:
Okay.
Dan Kerr:
Okay. We have 30 this year and at capacity, we’ll have 60. So we’re a rather new endeavor, but we’re off to a very strong start and look forward to sharing a little bit more about what we’re up to out on the farm.
Trent Horn:
What do you farm?
Dan Kerr:
A variety of things. At the moment, we’re primarily focused on animal husbandry. So we have milk cows. We hand-milk cows every morning. The faculty and boys join together in milking morning and evening. We have sheep. We have pigs. We have chickens. We have geese. We have rabbits. I can go on. It’s Old MacDonald’s farm, man.
Trent Horn:
Now, this is going to be counterintuitive to a lot of people nowadays who say the answer to educating kids is to do everything as high-tech as you can, but it sounds like you’re going in a different and possibly more productive direction to tap into something especially young people need that they can’t get from screens or things like that.
Dan Kerr:
That’s right. So I would say a few things. As you were beginning your intro and talking about seeing young kiddos kind of glued to their screens, one of the interventions in addition to the farm work that we do at St. Martin’s is it’s a screen-free campus. So we don’t have, the boys don’t have smartphones and we’re not even really working on computers. So technology does not have a prominent place on campus and within the culture there, and that’s very intentional. So the combination of the screen-free campus and then replacing … Okay. So we take away kind of the pop culture that we access through the screens. We’re removing that and we’re replacing it with something which I think is beautiful and is also very helpful in character formation. So the farm program is not just kind of an exercise in kind of this wistful looking back into the past upon a more kind of bucolic culture. I think it actually really serves the pedagogical approach and strategy that we have at St. Martin’s which is to get the boys in direct contact with reality.
Trent Horn:
Have them do something with their hands. I mean I have a five-year-old right now and honestly, I will pay any amount of money to have him play with LEGOs-
Dan Kerr:
Right.
Trent Horn:
… because I feel like that tactile, using your hands to be present, it triggers so much in the mind. David, how do you approach technology with Valor? Do you have a particular philosophy towards that?
David Williams:
We do.
Trent Horn:
What would you say?
David Williams:
We do. I think that the key, Dan, to what you were just saying which I think is so beautiful is this encounter with the real and not having all of our encounters mediated by screens. This is what essentially is most important because even more than a curriculum, more than a specific curriculum, a school has to do with a way of life. You’re establishing a way of life and it’s not only for the students. It’s for the faculty as well. It’s a beautiful way of life that brings young people into friendship, community, a community that is looking for what is noble and for what is wise. Over time, as Dan was just saying about St. Martin’s and this has happened at our schools too, the students begin to have a totally transformative experience which goes beyond any particular classroom or discipline or course of study. It’s an experience of the whole, of being in a certain type of community that seeks, again, what is noble and what is wise. We don’t have a totally … To answer your question more particularly, we don’t have a completely screen-free campus.
Trent Horn:
Right.
David Williams:
We serve a different population in the schools that we have started. So our schools range from 500 up to 1000 students and they’re public charter schools.
Trent Horn:
Right.
David Williams:
So far, those are the schools we’ve started. So most of our parents aren’t looking for a completely screen-free. We have to have a gradual pedagogy with the parent community so that over time, they’re learning and understanding more of what we’re doing, but students cannot have iPhones. You have no basically screen disturbance during the classroom. Occasionally, you might do things such as work on an essay in a mobile computer lab or something like that. So what we would say is we have a drastically reduced technological footprint on our campus, but there’s still some screens on campus. But the important thing is that it’s the fundamental contact with the natural world, with the work of art, with the singing or with the text that’s being studied, memorized, or discussed. That’s really where we want the emphasis for kids.
Trent Horn:
Let’s talk about pedagogy. So pedagogy would be essentially the art or method of teaching others. There seems to have been a big shift at least over the last 100 years or so when it comes to pedagogy that I think a lot of people when they look at school, school is a place where you are, you insert facts and answers into kids’ heads, and then the kids regurgitate it on a test to prove that they’ve learned it. You guys may know more. I mean the only names that pop into my head would be somebody like John Dewey for example. I mean I remember going to the library, using the Dewey decimal system, but I know that he’s connected to pedagogy in this way. But it seems like you’re trying to buck that trend with classical education. So each of you, your thoughts, what is this kind of Dewey or modern pedagogy and how does classical education differ from that?
Dan Kerr:
Yeah, I’d say a few things. As you’re talking about this facts-driven approach, I think of Charles Dickens’ book Hard Times.
Trent Horn:
Yes, Coketown. Yeah.
Dan Kerr:
Right. With Coketown which opens in a classroom with Thomas Gradgrind, the headmaster of the school, a man that Dickens says is a man of facts. Right? Gradgrind is quickly given an opportunity to demonstrate, flex his pedagogical muscles in the classroom, and exercise those upon a new student, young Cecilia Jupe, Sissy Jupe as she was called by her father. Sissy was a circus child, right? A gypsy. Her father was a trainer and breaker of horses and a farrier. He was a horseman. Gradgrind ascertains this through a little bit of an interrogation of Sissy and learns that she ought to know something about horses. So Gradgrind demands of her that she define a horse. Now, she’s so flummoxed by the very idea of trying to define verbally what a horse is that she’s just quiet. She’s rendered speechless. He then turns to his prize pupil, a young boy named Bitzer who promptly stands up and then spits out this definition of a horse, granivorous quadruped, blah, blah, blah, blah. Gradgrind is very pleased at this and turns to Sissy Jupe and says, “Student number 20, now you know what a horse is.”
Trent Horn:
As if she didn’t know. Of course, the irony there is Sissy knows more about horses than this pupil that’s just managed to regurgitate all these facts.
Dan Kerr:
The sad irony is she’s probably the only student in the entire class that knows what a horse is.
Trent Horn:
Yeah.
Dan Kerr:
Right? But she knows it in a way that can’t be measured in the sort of way that we like to measure things.
Trent Horn:
Like with a multiple-choice test.
Dan Kerr:
Right. With a multiple-choice test or some kind of standardized form which is really trying to detect a certain kind of transfer of facts or knowledge or information from one head to another as if this was a kind of data transfer between computers. Sissy, on the other hand, she knew horses. All right. She knew what a horse smells like. She knew that you shouldn’t approach a horse probably rightly from the front of directly from behind based upon their vision. She knew that they have left-handed … They have a dominant side like human beings have a left or a right-hand side. She knew horses intimately, right? But she knew them in a kind of poetic way, in a experiential and intuitive way.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Dan Kerr:
Right? So that is, I think, what distinguishes … By the way, this preoccupation with a transfer of facts and data, this is very much a post-industrial and scientific revolution situation where human beings are basically machines. Right? It’s a mechanistic way, materialistic way of viewing the human person. So if we can just kind of hook the computers up to one another and transfer the facts then we can … That’s what education is.
Trent Horn:
David, you were saying that we have to look at the whole person. So what does that mean in the classical view that it’s more than just putting facts in somebody’s head? How do you do that?
David Williams:
Right. Well I think you put your finger on this really tragic situation in education when you say, and Dan, I think you’ve been explicating it quite well, the notion that you’re simply transferring facts because it’s not only the diminution of the human person that’s involved. It’s the radical ideological materialist reduction of the entire world. That’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about emptying the world of meaning. That is the philosophical underpinning of modern education. That’s the reason why you can’t ask any truly philosophical questions in public schools. That’s the reason behind this movement against asking about ultimates. What is a good life? What is a human person? What is a just society? These are questions that are scrapped for the most part in many of the schools that our young people attend, and the answer isn’t simply giving a better catechesis, but better series of “Oh, those are your questions. Here are the answers to memorize.”
Trent Horn:
Right.
David Williams:
That ultimately isn’t the answer for education. The answer is returning to wonder and fighting for wonder, the wonder that lies at the heart of every human being to know and to love what is. That’s precisely what is under attack in so many ways in our schools and in our society with the cynicism and the mechanism, these mechanistic understandings of the human which we then extend, of course, to nonhuman animals also. So you could never even wonder at what a horse is because you’ve already reduced it to a simple mechanism for some type of use or it to be reduced to its-
Trent Horn:
Well everything is technological. It’s just how do we apply this to meet a practical end we want.
David Williams:
It’s a technological ontology. George Grant, the 20th century Canadian philosopher, said the ontology of our age is technological as opposed to metaphysical. This goes back to Francis Bacon in the 1500s when he said, “Look, knowledge is power. If knowledge isn’t productive of something in the material world, then it doesn’t even qualify as knowledge,” i.e. this is the abolition of metaphysics. It’s the abolition of the contemplative. With Dan and I, I think there’s a lot of similarities in what we’re trying to do in the educational world. We want to restore philosophical wisdom. We want to restore the poetic. We want to restore wisdom in our schools and the joy that ensues for our communities as a result.
Trent Horn:
Dan, what do you think?
Dan Kerr:
Well yeah, amen. I would say that, just furthering your point, Dave, is that it’s not a matter of us teaching a different set of facts.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Dan Kerr:
Right? That’s not the point here. It’s the point that education is not simply about the transmission of facts. That’s not what it is fundamentally about. So yeah, I think that the conversation really is about going much deeper than that in understanding what education should be aimed at which is kind of an awakening of the imagination to the good life-
Trent Horn:
Well what I-
Dan Kerr:
… to a certain kind of life.
Trent Horn:
I’ve heard it put this way, that you can’t teach another person something. The person can only teach themselves in a sense. I think that sometimes we look at education as if we have teacher and student. Teacher pours facts in, but until we get the student to want to have that drive to really learn and acquire the information in a holistic way, then it’s going to be all for naught. Let me move then to this direction. What are some practical things that you would recommend especially for parents whether they’re considering a charter school or a great arts classical education like you’re discussing or now? Maybe they want to incorporate some of these techniques just in what they do teaching their kids at home whether it’s homeschooling or just what they do after school. What are some practical ways that you can see for parents or anyone else to incorporate this kind of wisdom tradition in teaching kids and teaching others?
David Williams:
I would say just two initial thoughts and Dan, [inaudible 00:18:16] what you say about this, but number one, we need to restore the understanding that we are going further and further into a mystery when we’re delving into the reality of any given being or being itself. What we’re doing is we’re entering into a mystery. It doesn’t mean it’s unknowable. It means it’s, in the words of Gabriel Marcel, the 20th century philosopher, infinitely knowable. That’s the meaning of mystery, not what’s unknowable, but that which is infinitely knowable. So we don’t exhaust when we come into knowledge. We’re not exhausting a given thing. We’re really going further and more deeply into it because I think that that’s one of the dangers that students often have, thinking, “I either don’t have it at all or I’ve got it completely.” The first thing for me for the teacher is to accompany the young person in that journey more and more into the mystery of that which is, into reality. One of the practical ways to do that is to employ what we would broadly call the Socratic method which looks very different at different ages-
Trent Horn:
Right.
David Williams:
… and in different disciplines, but in general, what it means is I am accompanying you and we are engaging something outside of our selves. It’s that engagement from the student which is really going to tell you the success of the educative process. Just to give a quick example, every time I go into a school, every time I go into a classroom, the first thing I do is I look at what the students are doing, not what the teacher is doing. The teacher can be doing whatever they want in front of the classroom, but that doesn’t really tell me what is happening in terms of student engagement. When you see the students, you know whether or not they’re truly engaged.
Trent Horn:
So I think when we’re working with young people, of really any age … I mean my five-year-old’s learning to read right now. There’s this temptation as a parent or a teacher just to want to keep nudging them to get to the right answer and solve the problem and get to the next level. What you’re saying sounds more like, “Let’s take our time and really walk with them.” What we want then is not necessarily to just jump and get the right answer, but that they are learning to ask the right questions to get down the path.
David Williams:
And not even necessarily to look at reality, human reality as a matter of having correct answers. I mean really it’s a matter of more and more deeply engaging reality. That includes other persons. I mean we don’t look at other persons primarily as, “Oh, now I have that person figured out.”
Trent Horn:
Right.
David Williams:
Right? I mean there’s a mystery there and there’s a reason for the mystery, and ultimately the reason is the creator himself.
Trent Horn:
Right. Dan?
Dan Kerr:
Yeah, so a few things. I would say at St. Martin’s, we have four pedagogical commitments and I’ll speak to three of them. Those are to awaken wonder, to heal the imagination, and to develop attentiveness. Then also our fourth is to nurture authentic masculinity, but I want to talk about the first three because obviously those first three would apply to anyone and just some somewhat practical thoughts on each of those. Okay? So first, let’s start with to develop attentiveness. Attentiveness, it seems like such an obvious thing that it doesn’t even perhaps bear mentioning as a commitment in education, but I think that’s a mistake. I think it’s actually critical. The French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil wrote a wonderful little essay in which she argues that attentiveness is perhaps really the goal of all education. All education should be directed towards the nurturing and development of attentiveness.
Dan Kerr:
Why is that? I think it’s because prayer consists fundamentally of attentiveness, of just a simple outward gaze looking not internally, not this kind of self-preoccupation, but an external gaze upon another, the other ultimately. So what would be some ways to develop attentiveness? Well first, I think you have to curtail the use of technology, particularly screens, because they foster a very short attention span.
Trent Horn:
Oh, man. My wife’s going to give me so many nudges when she hears this podcast when I come home. I understand it, but it’s hard. It’s like a drug.
Dan Kerr:
It is. I think it actually is a drug. It has that effect on the brain.
Trent Horn:
Yeah.
Dan Kerr:
The constant checking of the phone and checking the use of a tool-
Trent Horn:
They’re going to put me in … Remember that show Intervention? They did it on A&E. It was a show for drug addicts-
Dan Kerr:
Right.
Trent Horn:
… and alcoholics.
Dan Kerr:
Right.
Trent Horn:
They always do the intervention and they have the family comes in and they bring in the addict who is just a stumbling mess and everyone has their letter.
David Williams:
Are you saying that’s going to be you?
Trent Horn:
“We love you, Trent. We love the person you are, Trent, not what the devices do to you.”
Dan Kerr:
Right.
Trent Horn:
I’ll be like, “You can’t take my phone away from me.” Then it’ll be like six weeks later, “I can’t believe that I was …” Maybe there’s people listening who can appreciate that, but keep going.
Dan Kerr:
So I think that’s step one. We have to exercise some discipline when it comes to the use of screens. I think they should be used very little frankly, especially with young minds and imaginations. Screens … Well I’ll get to this in a minute when we talk about the imagination, but in terms of attentiveness, they’re a disaster. So what do we do to actually positively develop attentiveness? There’s a good quote from Sherlock Holmes where he says, “I don’t see anything more than anyone else sees, but I have trained myself to notice what I see.”
Trent Horn:
That’s a good point.
Dan Kerr:
So the art of noticing is something that needs to be cultivated. I think you can do that in a few ways. Here’s one practical suggestion, would be to have your son or daughter take a journal or a sketchpad and just sit quietly outside in nature. We do this at St. Martin’s. We have what are called sit spots that the boys go to and they sit quietly for 30 minutes, and you would ask, “Well what do they do there?” Well they just sit quietly and observe.
Trent Horn:
Wow.
Dan Kerr:
They begin … It’s very difficult for them at first.
Trent Horn:
Sure.
Dan Kerr:
Right? Because there’s this internal dialogue that’s going on and they’re self-preoccupied and they’re just thinking, “Well I’m not doing anything. This is kind of useless.” Then over time, they start gazing outward upon the created world and they start noticing things. They start hearing things. They start seeing birds. Right? They start noticing what they see.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Dan Kerr:
So that would be a practical suggestion, would be to have your child have a sit spot and to spend some quiet time in observation of the natural world and to write down the things that they see and that they hear and that they smell.
Trent Horn:
I’m going to go get a sit spot. I like this.
Dan Kerr:
It’s actually a wonderful thing to do. It’s quite enjoyable. Once you can sort of put the phone down-
Trent Horn:
Right.
Dan Kerr:
… turn it on silent and quiet and then kind of develop some internal silence yourself, then you can look outward, but that is … We have a hard time. I’ll speak for myself. Prayer is not particularly easy.
Trent Horn:
No. Peter [inaudible 00:27:10] does a great book on that, The Battle for Prayer. You really have to fight for it.
Dan Kerr:
You do have to fight for it. If your attention … If you’ve never developed any kind of habits of attentiveness, of a sustained outward focus, you’re going to have a hard time with prayer.
Trent Horn:
Yeah.
Dan Kerr:
Okay. So that’s one thing. In terms of the imagination, I would also … I think that the screens are problematic for the imagination because we’re largely outsourcing the imagination when we’re looking at a screen. So the act of faculty of the imagination is being atrophied when we are constantly looking at something which is doing all the imagining for us.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Dan Kerr:
Right? I think that’s highly problematic. So you’ve got to … I think Dr. John Senior in The Restoration of Christian Culture said, “First things first, smash your television.” In that, I think that’s some truth to that. Right? I think the first things first, you’ve got to smash the television if not metaphorically, literally. Do it. Then it’s got to be replaced with something. I think it needs to be replaced with what is attractive which is the created world and the beauty of God’s creation.
Trent Horn:
Would you recommend literature like reading books or having books read aloud? Because you have to use your imagination.
Dan Kerr:
Absolutely.
Trent Horn:
Yeah.
Dan Kerr:
Yeah. I was going to say good art and good literature.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. Perfect.
Dan Kerr:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
Well here, we’re coming near to the end of our time together. I’m so glad you two were able to stop by and hope you enjoyed your little visit here to the Catholic Answers office. Where can people learn more about your educational ventures and philosophies and any of the resources you would recommend for our listeners?
David Williams:
So for Valor Education, we’ll have a new website that’s coming out soon, but for right now, you can find out about Valor Public Schools at valorpublicschools.org and you can contact us to indicate interest in having a Valor Public School brought to your part of the state or your part of the country as we’re currently looking at where we’re going to open our upcoming schools.
Dan Kerr:
Www.saintmartinsacademy.org. That’s saint spelled out. Saintmartinsacademy.org will give you, I think, a good glimpse into the life and the culture at the school. We are taking applicants for next year and there is a very healthy demand in terms of enrollment. So if St. Martin’s sounds like something that might interest you, I would certainly encourage your listeners to visit the website and fill out the preapplication form so we can have a conversation about next steps and if it could be a good fit.
Trent Horn:
I think both of your ventures sound good definitely to meet people in different areas and different things they’re looking for, but all united in the pursuit of the classical tradition, the wisdom tradition. Thank you, gentlemen, for stopping by the Council of Trent podcast.
David Williams:
Thank you, Trent.
Dan Kerr:
Thank you, Trent.
Trent Horn:
And thank you all for listening. I hope this was helpful for you to grow in wisdom. We all need to be doing that. If you would like to learn more, I’ll be posting links to this at trenthornpodcast.com for these resources. Consider becoming a premium subscriber so we can have more wonderful guests like this on the podcast and reach many, many more people. We’ve got great bonus content for you as well you can access if you’re a premium subscriber at trenthornpodcast.com. Thank you all so much and I hope you have a very blessed day.
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