Latest / TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast / #770: The Western Canon Belongs To Your Child with Chapter House

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#770: The Western Canon Belongs To Your Child with Chapter House · TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast

• 0:00
  Josh and Hannah, welcome to the show.
• 0:02
  Hi, thanks, Marty. Thanks for having us.
• 0:04
  Thank you.
• 0:05
  I'm really excited for this. It's been a couple years since we last saw each other in person.
• 0:09
  I think it was Austin two years ago at the Natalism Conference.
• 0:14
  Yeah, it's been a minute. Last year, I think. It was last March.
• 0:20
  Oh, yeah. Time flies.
• 0:22
  Well, let's jump into it.
• 0:23
  I know we had the intro, but I think starting the conversation,
• 0:27
  Take me back to the moment when the stopping of frustration in your own home and homeschooling and became a company you felt compelled to build.
• 0:35
  Why? Why Chapter House? What compelled you to to go from being frustrated to building it?
• 0:42
  That's a great question. So we've been frustrated for a while.
• 0:47
  So Hannah primarily uses the Charlotte Mason method in homeschooling.
• 0:51
  We adapted a bit. But, you know, really, the gist of it is you read a lot of old books with your children.
• 0:56
  And there are a lot of these books that you just can't find, or should I say, you either find an old copy, you find a new print-on-demand copy, and those tend to be pretty poor in general.
• 1:10
  Or you use a digital copy like an old PDF, and you read it off an iPad or a Kindle, which is not what we're trying to cultivate in our house.
• 1:18
  Um, so anyway, this longstanding dream of making beautiful hardcover editions of these old texts that were no longer in wide circulation.
• 1:28
  And just so happens, I went to a place in Wyoming a couple of years ago, met a publisher.
• 1:34
  We got to talking, asked if they ever considered doing homeschool material, and it just kicked off from there.
• 1:40
  And so and that's really just how Chapter House was born.
• 1:43
  It's that simple.
• 1:44
  and what was wrong with the additions that were available to you that you were able to find what
• 1:50
  were some of the common problems with them other than they were just pdfs that you had to put on a
• 1:54
  kindle um well the print demands i don't know if you want to comment on this at all but yeah so a
• 2:01
  lot of the print on demand copies they're they're fine they're perfectly fine but the paper's thin
• 2:06
  or you know there might be errors type settings difficult to read um the glue binding comes apart
• 2:14
  and so you know if you've got multiple kids that you're planning to homeschool using the same
• 2:20
  materials and it starts you know having issues with the first one then you're like well i guess
• 2:25
  i'll be buying this again so the the types often blurry uh the paper's often thin and so it's it's
• 2:33
  they're kind of hard to read yeah it sounds like a fiat problem the high velocity trash economy
• 2:39
  prodding books pretty much was there a moment where one of your children reacted to an old
• 2:45
  story and made you realize that these books still work um well my daughter she she's five now newly
• 2:54
  five and he has lots of moments where she makes connections that you're you know they blow me
• 3:00
  away for example we were talking about the story of icarus and i asked her what she learned from it
• 3:06
  and she gave me you know several little girl answers and then she said and you should always
• 3:12
  listen to your daddy she's also currently obsessed with beowulf yeah she has requested
• 3:18
  it was hilarious a few weeks ago you like see the wheels turning in your head daddy makes books
• 3:25
  I like pink and so she goes to Josh and says daddy I would like a pink beowulf please
• 3:32
  so I have to see if I can do a one-off of that one yeah hot pink covered beowulf
• 3:38
  I'm insane and then hey you were you were a teacher for a while right if I recall correctly
• 3:43
  teaching Spanish you spent 13 years in the classroom yes I taught history and Spanish for 13 years
• 3:51
  Yeah. And so what did the transition to homeschooling force you to unlearn about education?
• 3:57
  Oh, gosh. Well, that's it's a really good question.
• 4:04
  Mainly that you don't have to plan every single second of every single day.
• 4:11
  Like you have to have a plan, of course.
• 4:13
  But it's not like it is in the public school where, you know, you're working bell to bell and you only have this X amount of time to complete this thing.
• 4:23
  You know, it's it's much more relaxed.
• 4:26
  It's much more like you get into a flow and then things will naturally move from one to another.
• 4:34
  It's a really different sort of world when you're at home.
• 4:38
  But it also takes a really different sort of discipline.
• 4:41
  When you go into a public school, you know, okay, the bell rings at 750.
• 4:45
  That's when I'm here.
• 4:47
  Then the bell rings again at 920.
• 4:49
  And this is when we go to this thing.
• 4:50
  And so, you know, it's just it's a different type of planning and you have to be a lot more flexible with yourself so that you don't burn out, honestly.
• 5:00
  And I have found myself, especially this year, in a state of like coming close to burning out because I was thinking too much like a public school teacher instead of thinking like a mom who's trying to educate her children.
• 5:15
  There was a couple of things I remember that were an adaptation for you.
• 5:19
  One was, I mean, really the whole gist was you kind of had to go back to first principles on everything.
• 5:26
  And I think you had two great realizations, two great rabbit trails you followed.
• 5:30
  One was, you know, figuring out how to teach our oldest to read.
• 5:34
  You took a very, very, very deep dive on that, learning all these different methods and, you know, weighing them out and testing them.
• 5:42
  And then also, I think for you, one of the big unlocks was realizing that textbook isn't necessarily the way to go.
• 5:49
  Yeah. And learning to teach from literature. Yes. Yes. I've always loved books and books are always important.
• 5:56
  And I had a realization a few weeks ago. I'm preparing to speak in Nashville in a few weeks at an event that we're going to have there.
• 6:03
  And I realized that I was kind of a Charlotte Mason schooler even when I was in public school because I taught high school, but I still read to my students and we still sang songs.
• 6:16
  And I took them outside as often as I can get away with it.
• 6:21
  You know, it's like, OK, we're learning nature vocabulary.
• 6:24
  Let's go and find these items.
• 6:26
  And so I was like, man, I've been doing this a lot longer than I realized.
• 6:31
  But yeah, when we actually decided to homeschool before I even left the public school classroom,
• 6:36
  Josh here was doing the kindergarten homeschooling for our oldest son until COVID.
• 6:41
  Pretty terribly.
• 6:42
  No, you weren't doing terrible at all.
• 6:44
  COVID shut the world down and I came home and then our situation changed and I just never went back.
• 6:51
  So, yeah, it's been really interesting to think back to those early days and how differently I look at things now than I did when I started, especially with regards to like grammar.
• 7:06
  You don't need to spend an hour a day talking about nouns.
• 7:10
  You know, the parts of speech, there really aren't that many.
• 7:12
  You know, you can you can learn those things fairly quickly if you take the right approach.
• 7:18
  So, yeah. Yeah, I guess I guess the core problem of like curriculum designers with big, big education, for lack of a better tech,
• 7:28
  that really try to design a regimented curriculum and give these standardized tests versus a teacher who's actually interacting with the children on a daily basis.
• 7:38
  Well, and it was really miraculous to me. You know, I taught Spanish primarily and I would have students come to me who were juniors in high school and I would say, OK, they were going to talk about nouns.
• 7:50
  What's a noun? Crickets. They didn't know. You know, they've been hearing that word so much for so long that they've just kind of tuned it out, you know.
• 8:02
  So when you try to make things have an impact and you don't belabor the point, you don't
• 8:08
  bathe them over the head with it, I don't know.
• 8:10
  I think it might sink in a little bit better.
• 8:12
  Yeah.
• 8:12
  And, you know, speaking on the standardized tests, you know, it's one of those things
• 8:17
  that I support in theory, right?
• 8:20
  Because, you know, we've known for a long time that the public school system is graduating
• 8:24
  a lot of students who just cannot read.
• 8:26
  And so we need to build a filter for that.
• 8:28
  But then oftentimes that gets distorted by what you might call fiat incentives.
• 8:34
  And what you end up with is a situation like we did a, we just did a Substack post about this, about how there are many students entering college who they can decode a sentence, right?
• 8:46
  They can understand the syntax of the words, but they can't quite put together what it means.
• 8:51
  Like, for instance, if if something's said in sarcasm or there's a simile used or, you know, some sort of over the top reference, they just don't get it.
• 9:01
  They read everything literally. Right. There's no real thinking behind.
• 9:06
  It's all just processing. It's all very spreadsheet brain thinking, as our friend Ashley likes to say.
• 9:13
  Yeah, no, it makes me feel very fortunate. The high school I went to was a private Catholic school.
• 9:17
  and they basically told us day one freshman year like you're going to be here four years and
• 9:22
  our curriculum uh was basically it basically revolved around being able to
• 9:29
  like reading comprehension and writing like can you read something comprehended and then write
• 9:35
  competently about it um on the back end and that's the four years we had six years of language
• 9:41
  um that we were mandated to take i took latin for four years spanish i actually took seven
• 9:47
  Spanish for three. But that teaches you like the structure of languages, particularly diving into
• 9:53
  Latin and some Greek, and then basically reading comprehension and being able to write competently.
• 9:59
  I feel like just the skills alone, I guess I am a writer to a certain extent with the newsletter,
• 10:04
  but I think my career path trended towards economics and finance and having that reading
• 10:10
  comprehension and writing ability, I think was the fundamental basis that set me up for success.
• 10:15
  absolutely the three r's still matter yeah i mean you know if you can read and comprehend and
• 10:23
  comprehend well and then communicate which what you've read that's like 70 to 80 percent of what
• 10:30
  you need right because at that point you can educate yourself um of course like mathematics
• 10:35
  you know plays a big role in that you know sciences and things but you know really the
• 10:38
  reading and writing is the fundamental and if if you can do that then you unlock pretty much
• 10:44
  anything you really want to know if you have the passion and drive to do it. Yeah. And I think
• 10:49
  we're going to come back to this in a bit, but before we get into like the whole idea of what
• 10:53
  is education for is really wrapping up the origin story of chapter house and why you two believe
• 10:59
  this need to be a publishing company rather than simply a reading list or homeschool blog.
• 11:03
  Like why start a whole public publishing company around this?
• 11:07
  well really it was just about having excellent quality books on the shelves that are something
• 11:17
  that will inspire children and families you know the books are beautiful my children love them
• 11:23
  um they'd heard the stories before but now like they're like where are the chapter house books
• 11:28
  you know they want that that gorgeous edition in their hands they want to be read to out of that
• 11:33
  They want to see the pictures. They love the old illustrations. They love the new illustration.
• 11:39
  And, you know, for me, having these unabridged volumes as well, that was also important.
• 11:45
  There's one book in particular in the first set called A Child's Book of Myths and Enchantment Tales for Children is actually two books in one.
• 11:52
  And that book, our version of that is the only one on the market like it because we preserved all of the art in the color.
• 12:02
  And we also did not cut the introductions, which were written by the same woman who wrote America the Beautiful.
• 12:07
  Definitely Bates. Yeah. So, you know, a matter of historic preservation almost in that way.
• 12:13
  So, yeah. And when we both grew up with things like the Harvard classics and these Reader's Digest editions of things,
• 12:21
  and they were cloth bound or leather bound. And, you know, they, they look very important.
• 12:26
  And, and I think that was part of what encouraged us to want to read them is because, um, you know,
• 12:32
  they, they looked and felt important. So it was something you wanted to reach out and understand,
• 12:36
  right. It challenged you to rise up. And I want to do the same thing with these books. You know,
• 12:42
  when you fill one of these books in your hands, you know, you feel like you're actually like,
• 12:47
  you're carrying something important, right?
• 12:50
  Like it feels important, it feels expensive,
• 12:52
  and it kind of is, but, you know,
• 12:54
  and the paper looks good everything feels nice And so many children books are what we would call twaddle you know just kind of junk Right Cheap materials The art tends to be terrible anymore
• 13:08
  The subject matter. The language is very thin.
• 13:12
  And we're watching the reading, the literacy rates plummeting, the reading rate plummeting.
• 13:18
  I think part of that is because so much of what's coming out is just junk.
• 13:22
  yeah as somebody who's got three young children and been exposed to this junk i think i can
• 13:28
  concur we don't need a pout pout fish book for christmas halloween easter with very rudimentary
• 13:36
  like right or they're glorified toy ads it's like here's this paw patrol book even if you've never
• 13:44
  heard of the paw patrol you know grandma gets you this book and then you read it and then you
• 13:48
  you're like, oh, this is a TV show? Well, I want to watch that. It's not a good cycle to get into.
• 13:54
  Your About page asks, what is education for? And the answer is that its purpose is to form
• 13:59
  good human beings. What does a good human being mean to you?
• 14:03
  Ooh, that's a good one. So just to take a step out a little bit, if you read the ancients,
• 14:10
  you read like Plato, Aristotle, St. John Chrysostom, I'm not quite sure how you pronounce,
• 14:17
  which way you pronounce it. But, you know, they all agreed on one thing is that the primary purpose
• 14:23
  of education wasn't facts and figures and reasoning. It was forming virtue, was forming
• 14:28
  character, you know, with the thought that, well, the other stuff's secondary to that.
• 14:35
  And so, you know, to answer in a very broad way, what does that look like? Well, it looks like
• 14:40
  understanding virtue and what virtue is and having an understanding of the good. And, you know,
• 14:46
  having and not just having an intellectual understanding, but having, you know, a truly felt and maybe at least a secondhand experience understanding of those things.
• 14:57
  I mean, ideally, and ideally that comes through some kind of grounding in the real world.
• 15:02
  Why, you know, Charlotte Mason's really big on the nature study and going out in the real world.
• 15:08
  John Sr., who's a Catholic thinker along the same lines, also had a very similar philosophy of you have to be connected to the real world in a real way.
• 15:18
  But you read stories like the Iliad and Odyssey and read Shakespeare.
• 15:23
  And, you know, there's lots of bad stuff going on in those and lots of things you wouldn't want your kids to emulate.
• 15:28
  But there's a lot of virtue, too.
• 15:29
  And I think being able to see, you know, through these ancient stories and passed down generation to generation, you know, then they actually they absorb it, you know, and we're big on not using didactic thinking in this where, you know, you get to the end of a story and you just tell them what the lesson is.
• 15:50
  things are so much better if you know anyone's ever worked a job knows it's always good to let
• 15:55
  your boss think something's his idea right same with your kids right you present them the story
• 16:00
  and they reach their own conclusions that you kind of gently guide them to and then you know
• 16:06
  but then they think it's their idea and when that happens it sinks in so much more deeply
• 16:11
  and i mean on that note which what virtues do you think or would you consider our foundational
• 16:16
  Oh, that's a good one.
• 16:20
  Wisdom, you know, I would say would be one for sure.
• 16:23
  Maybe perhaps the most important one.
• 16:26
  Courage, you know, courage is a very important one.
• 16:29
  I think often sadly is lacking in younger people today.
• 16:33
  And I won't even, I won't exclude myself from that.
• 16:35
  But, you know, you can have all the knowledge in the world.
• 16:37
  If you don't have the courage to act, then, you know, what's it all for, right?
• 16:43
  You know, you look at some of the, you know, the great innovators of our time.
• 16:46
  And the one thing they all had was courage, right?
• 16:49
  They had an idea that might maybe seem crazy, but they thought to pursue it anyway.
• 16:55
  I don't know.
• 16:56
  What were some that you would want to add to that?
• 16:58
  Well, those are the two main ones.
• 17:02
  I don't know.
• 17:03
  I would add like loyalty.
• 17:04
  Yeah.
• 17:05
  Honor.
• 17:06
  Yeah.
• 17:06
  Honor for sure.
• 17:07
  Absolutely.
• 17:08
  Loyalty and honor.
• 17:08
  I think those two things are, you know, hand in hand.
• 17:13
  because if you're loyal and you have honor like you're going to have honor it's a natural byproduct
• 17:19
  right yeah i mean you look at like the iliad right and you know big reason why achilles was
• 17:26
  sulking on a beach is because you know he felt his honor had been violated right and so you know what
• 17:30
  if you know menelaus or agamemnon you know had acted a little bit differently right right when
• 17:37
  things have turned out better yeah um you know so yeah i would say those would be like the main
• 17:42
  ones I would be, you know, I want my kids to pick up. And then, I mean, on that note,
• 17:49
  how do you distinguish virtue from obedience or social conformity?
• 17:56
  It's an intrinsic thing when it's one thing to tell your children, you should be
• 18:03
  fill in the blank. And it's another thing to watch them display that unbidden. Right.
• 18:10
  Right. And, you know, of course, you have to talk about these things as they come up naturally.
• 18:15
  It can't be a lesson. You can't do a lesson on why you should be nice to your little brother and sister.
• 18:23
  You know, we have three children and our oldest, like, you know, he was a born drill sergeant.
• 18:28
  But, you know, the more that we talk to him about you should really be nice to your brother and sister.
• 18:32
  It goes nowhere. But then, you know, we'll we'll have a situation where he gets the chance to display.
• 18:40
  what is actually going on in his heart, which is the part that we as parents, we can't form that.
• 18:47
  We like to think that we can, but we can't. That is something that comes from our creator.
• 18:52
  And we feed it. But one of the things I watch for is, you know, how do they behave in the playground?
• 19:00
  Right. So, you know, we go to a church where, you know, as soon as the service is over, the kids are outside running around playing.
• 19:06
  and how do they interact out there?
• 19:08
  If there's a kid being bullied
• 19:09
  and one of my kids steps in and intervenes.
• 19:13
  There was an event we were at last year
• 19:15
  where we just kept hearing from other parents
• 19:17
  about how good-natured our boys were.
• 19:21
  I don't say that to brag,
• 19:22
  but it's one of those things.
• 19:23
  That's the sort of thing I would look for, right?
• 19:24
  Do you do the right thing when I'm not lording over you?
• 19:29
  Has that sunk in?
• 19:31
  Yeah.
• 19:32
  That's something I think a lot about with my boys.
• 19:35
  Not my oldest.
• 19:36
  is six and beginning to see anyway we're giving them some independence you had older cousins and
• 19:41
  so they can uh we go to the beach in the summer and we're this summer we've allowed the 10 year
• 19:46
  old cousins to walk the younger cousins to to the ice cream um to the ice cream parlor and like get
• 19:52
  ice cream by themselves and it's funny uh running into people that we uh we know in town say like
• 19:59
  oh i saw your boys at the ice cream parlor last night i was like were they doing anything bad
• 20:02
  They're like, no, this is little things like giving them that independence, too, and hoping that when they go out there, they're not being little jerks.
• 20:11
  Yeah. And that's something I always like to try to connect, especially with our oldest is, you know, the more virtuously you behave, the more freedom you get.
• 20:20
  And that's true when you're a child. It's also true of a society. Right.
• 20:24
  I can't remember which founding father it was, but this nation is only suitable for virtuous people.
• 20:32
  And I think as you see a nation pivot away from virtue, then it tends to pivot for tyranny.
• 20:40
  Because what choice does a responsible government have if the people aren't behaving virtuously?
• 20:46
  You have to crack down on things.
• 20:47
  You have to watch every little thing.
• 20:49
  And, you know, so, you know, if we do want freedom, you know, if our children want freedom, if we as a people want freedom, then we have to embrace virtue ourselves.
• 20:56
  We have to be the primary, our own primary governors. Right.
• 21:01
  Yeah. And I think that's why a company like Chapter House is very important.
• 21:05
  It's like, how do you see that virtue and how do you have individual children come to understand that virtue is important naturally without forcing it upon them?
• 21:13
  and you draw the distinction between being educated and being prepared what does a child
• 21:21
  lose when education is organized primarily around credentials careers and economic productivity
• 21:25
  that's a good question so i you know i would go back to
• 21:32
  why we're referred to before about spreadsheet thinking um you know just putting every when you
• 21:38
  just quantify every little thing right like you know for instance we just had this conversation
• 21:42
  about virtue. How do you quantify virtue? How do you put that in a spreadsheet? How do you chart
• 21:48
  that out on a line graph? And you just can't. I think one of the big mistakes we make in modern
• 21:55
  education, especially public education, is this focus on statistics and things that can be
• 22:02
  quantified. I think there's a place for that. We do need to have some sort of objective analysis,
• 22:09
  but it misses a lot of just the greater things.
• 22:13
  Like for instance, I mean,
• 22:14
  I talked about how so many young college students now read everything
• 22:18
  literally, right.
• 22:19
  They don't understand that you're,
• 22:21
  you're making a joke or you're making, you know,
• 22:24
  some sort of absurd suggestion or, you know, you know,
• 22:27
  you're being a little outlandish for one reason or another.
• 22:29
  And they just, they don't get that.
• 22:31
  It's this very mechanical sort of thinking.
• 22:35
  because a lot of the reading that's done in the public schools now is
• 22:39
  nonfiction. There was a pivot to that several years ago, you know, with all the STEM initiatives,
• 22:45
  like we're going to pivot away from fiction, we're going to read more nonfiction. And when
• 22:51
  all you do is read nonfiction, then you fall into that sort of spreadsheet way of thinking.
• 22:56
  For me, you know, Charlotte Mason said that at the end of an education, it's not necessarily how
• 23:04
  much a child knows how much he cares and about how many sorts of things does he care.
• 23:10
  And when you raise children that they only see the value in education by like what sort
• 23:17
  of things they can put on a spreadsheet at the end of it.
• 23:20
  I'll give you a perfect example.
• 23:21
  I taught high school Spanish for 13 years and I had students like the good students,
• 23:29
  you know, the college bound students who would tell me this was toward the end of my career.
• 23:33
  This was when this is one of those moments where I was like, I have to get out of here because I had students tell me, well, your class doesn't have a standardized test at the end of it.
• 23:45
  So I don't care as much about it as I do about my math class or my English class, say.
• 23:50
  And so, you know, if in all of our educational endeavors, students are learning to rank the subjects by, well, this one is important because it has a test and this one is not, then we've missed the mark somewhere entirely.
• 24:04
  because the point of education is not necessarily to, you know, well, I made a really good grade and I passed this test.
• 24:14
  And now, you know, on to the next thing, it's, you know, wow, I know a lot about this subject or I care a lot about this subject.
• 24:22
  And I will continue to pursue education even when there isn't a grade attached to it anymore,
• 24:27
  because there comes a point in your life where school ends.
• 24:30
  And if you never take the time or initiative to learn anything else the rest of your life, then what have we done?
• 24:38
  What is the point of education at that point?
• 24:42
  What have we done?
• 24:43
  So I think we tie it back into Bitcoin and the discussion of money because so much of this you can call fiat education because the standardized test is not the knowledge.
• 24:54
  It is a selective representation of knowledge, right?
• 24:59
  And same thing, you can make the same argument for a textbook.
• 25:04
  Just like with money, a $20 bill has no intrinsic value, like a piece of gold or a bar of silver
• 25:13
  or a Bitcoin has.
• 25:15
  It doesn't have any sort of intrinsic value.
• 25:17
  It's just a value that the government or the Federal Reserve says it has.
• 25:21
  So you could say, OK, well, the fiat money, well, it's a fiat education.
• 25:25
  because you can have these students who come out with perfect straight A's and great ACTs or great
• 25:31
  SATs and then just get out of the world and it turns out they're kind of morons in a lot of
• 25:38
  fundamental ways. Yeah, kids need to learn how to learn, right? That's I think one of the more
• 25:46
  important aspects that's being overlooked right now. I'm going back to reading comprehension
• 25:49
  and articulation of that comprehension. I think that's one of the fundamental building blocks of
• 25:54
  learning how to learn And it it it like a similar And it funny too because I think the public school system that exists in the United States today it based off the Prussian system that was essentially trying to create cogs in a machine for the industrial age
• 26:13
  And that's just been played forward for over a century now.
• 26:17
  And I think that cog model, number one, it's very inhumane where humans are not cogs in a machine, or at least they shouldn't be.
• 26:25
  they're not things that can be molded into a certain gear to throw into the economic machine
• 26:31
  and number two like just the whole model doesn't make sense in the modern day with
• 26:35
  the way the economy works the the tools that we have at our fingertips and so you're you're not
• 26:42
  only throwing students into a system that is trying to turn turn them into cogs into a machine
• 26:49
  but it's trying to turn them into cogs in a machine that doesn't exist anymore yeah i mean
• 26:54
  for the past, what, 20 years or so, you know, all you heard in the public school system is STEM,
• 26:59
  STEM, STEM, got to learn how to, I don't know, trace circuits and program computers. Yeah,
• 27:04
  got to learn how to program the computer, right? And now we have these LLMs that do that for you,
• 27:09
  and companies are laying off software engineers left and right. And, you know, what we're being
• 27:15
  left with is, you know, so much of that technical work can be done by the computer itself. And the
• 27:21
  skills that are actually valuable are those humanity skills that we left behind. You know,
• 27:26
  being able to clearly communicate to the machine what you need, what you want, but also, you know,
• 27:32
  having the critical thinking skills to know when that machine is lying to you or hallucinating.
• 27:38
  Yeah. I mean, this ties directly into your motto, which is virtues at
• 27:42
  miraculous virtue and wonder. And I think we've touched on it a bit, but like really tying the
• 27:48
  not here and connecting them very concretely. Why do these two ideas need one another?
• 27:53
  That's a great question. So, you know, we've gone through virtue already and the importance
• 27:58
  of character formation. Wonder, I think, is the offset to that because, you know, if you just
• 28:05
  grow up in this environment where it's like, you know, be good, be good, you know, do these things,
• 28:08
  then I think, I don't think you become a well-rounded person. I think that's just a very
• 28:14
  flat angle. It's easy to kind of lose the meaning of it. And I think that's why so many kids, for
• 28:20
  instance, who grew up in a religious tradition often will abandon that religious tradition because
• 28:26
  they need something more. They need a reason for that. And that's really where wonder comes in.
• 28:32
  And, you know, developing a sense of how amazing the world is and can be. And I'll give you a real
• 28:40
  example of this. So we had this terrible ice storm back in February. And one of the things that the
• 28:45
  ice storm did, there was this giant old tree on a hill behind our house that toppled over, took out
• 28:51
  a power line, went, did it. And anyway, so like we got that cut up and it left this giant crater
• 28:58
  in the ground. Like this tree was enormous. It left this giant crater. And our seven-year-old boy,
• 29:04
  He has spent the past few months exploring that crater, and he is constantly pulling stuff from it, like bringing it back to the house.
• 29:13
  There was one day he somehow got this cart I had, and this rock he brought in probably weighed at least 50 pounds.
• 29:22
  He somehow figured out how to roll it down the hill and load it into this cart and haul the cart all the way to our house.
• 29:29
  It's probably about 100 yards from where that tree is to the bottom of the hill where the tree is to all the way over here.
• 29:37
  And he was just amazed at this rock he brought, right?
• 29:40
  He's just been amazed at this big hole in the ground.
• 29:42
  And then you go back to that story.
• 29:44
  Think of all the virtues he displayed while exploring that crater, right?
• 29:48
  I mean, it took a certain amount of bravery because it's about like three feet down into that thing.
• 29:52
  You have to jump into it.
• 29:55
  It's a huge crater.
• 29:55
  and then digging all this stuff and then the figuring out all that innovation all this
• 30:00
  these innovative ways to get this rock is as big as he is to the house yeah you know and so you see
• 30:06
  all those like sort of things kicking together i think that's a great example of how virtue and
• 30:09
  wonder interplay right because like if there is no wonder if there is nothing more out there
• 30:14
  you know for the longest time you know the western thinking has been heavily colored by
• 30:21
  this materialist thinking, right?
• 30:23
  The sort of Darwinian, Freudian thinking
• 30:25
  of everything has to be able to put in a spreadsheet.
• 30:32
  Everything has to, everything's material.
• 30:35
  There's nothing incredible.
• 30:36
  There are no miracles.
• 30:37
  There's nothing interesting out there.
• 30:39
  Everything's just atoms and rocks.
• 30:41
  There's an explanation for everything.
• 30:43
  Yeah, and without that wonder,
• 30:46
  I mean, you take someone like Elon Musk,
• 30:48
  you love him or hate him.
• 30:49
  he's done a lot of really cool things. And part of the reason he's done those cool things,
• 30:53
  but one is virtue, right? The guy works insanely hard, you know, often sleeps in his factories,
• 30:58
  you know, just works constantly. You know, he's, you guys issues like we all do,
• 31:02
  but he does have that specific virtue, right? He's very, very driven. But then he also,
• 31:07
  Elon Musk also has that wonder, right? He's constantly talking about Mars. Let's go to Mars.
• 31:11
  Let's see what's on Mars. What would it be like to live on Mars, right? Like,
• 31:15
  does living on Mars make a lot of sense? Not really. You know,
• 31:18
  like would I rather live on Mars than say Hawaii? Well, no. Um, but,
• 31:23
  but that's the wonder taking place, right? Like,
• 31:25
  what would it be like if we could live on Mars? Like let's get to Mars.
• 31:28
  And so every, and he's done all this wild stuff,
• 31:30
  all in the service of trying to get humanity to Mars.
• 31:34
  Yeah. Well, I mean, you,
• 31:38
  you explain what virtue is without wonder and just,
• 31:43
  you don't want to be a drill sergeant.
• 31:45
  And you need to have that strive for something greater.
• 31:47
  But what's the opposite?
• 31:49
  How does virtue counterbalance and balance wonder?
• 31:52
  What is a child that has a ton of wonder but no virtue?
• 31:57
  What does that end up with?
• 31:59
  That's a great question.
• 32:00
  I would say just a dreamer, right?
• 32:03
  Or a criminal.
• 32:05
  Maybe.
• 32:07
  I'm thinking, okay, so here's a great example.
• 32:10
  I knew a guy I went to high school with him, super smart.
• 32:14
  You know, he would read the textbooks for fun and memorize them, right?
• 32:17
  Just an insanely smart dude.
• 32:19
  And the last I heard a few years ago, he was still living with his parents, right?
• 32:23
  He was like in his 30s living with his parents.
• 32:26
  So he didn't do anything with all that genius, right?
• 32:29
  And so I think what happens when you have the wonder without virtue is you're basically just a dreamer.
• 32:35
  I've certainly been guilty of this in a lot of ways, right?
• 32:39
  Where like you have all these great ideas, all these great things you want to do.
• 32:42
  but you don't have the tenacity, right? You don't have the courage to go out and try the idea.
• 32:47
  You don't have the work ethic to, you know, to figure these things out. So you end up just
• 32:52
  kind of drifting through life. Or you, you end up robbing banks because you have, you have the
• 32:59
  wonder, but you have no guiding principles. You know, you don't have anything to stop.
• 33:04
  Okay. Great example. Great example. I was just, I just saw a Twitter thread on the movie Point
• 33:09
  break have you seen point break okay it's about these dudes who like they're thrill seekers and
• 33:14
  they're like surfers and they they jump out of airplanes all this stuff and then they rob banks
• 33:19
  to fund all this right and it's part of like they're thrill seeking right they just live their
• 33:23
  life side they're surf bums who rob banks and so i think it's a great example of wonder without
• 33:28
  sounds like it hold uh what's his name that johnny johnny ohio yeah maybe i don't know man i i gotta
• 33:39
  rewatch that i think i want you on that for butchering that patrick swayze and keanu reeds
• 33:43
  it's classic oh wow uh you mentioned your christian face when you say your vision is
• 33:51
  inseparable from that face so how does christian conviction shape the books you select in your
• 33:56
  understanding of childhood oh great great question so and it's kind of complex to answer but but i'll
• 34:05
  do my best. So one of my big influences is a Catholic writer. I'm not a Catholic, by the way,
• 34:12
  but he's still been a great influence. A gentleman by the name of Dr. John Sr. And Dr. John Sr.,
• 34:18
  he died in 99. But he grabbed my attention because I heard about this program called the
• 34:25
  Integrated Humanities Program. It was at the University of Kansas from 1970 to about 1980.
• 34:30
  and it was him and two other professors
• 34:33
  and they set up what was sort of a remedial humanities program.
• 34:38
  They would read the classics.
• 34:39
  They would learn a little bit of Latin and Greek,
• 34:41
  but they do other stuff.
• 34:42
  And the students never quite knew what they were walking into, right?
• 34:46
  Like they might come in and they might just start singing folk songs
• 34:48
  or they would have like a night class.
• 34:50
  They'd go out and like look at the stars
• 34:52
  or they would, I don't know,
• 34:53
  they would have like a whole class of like square dancing, right?
• 34:56
  It was all this stuff that like at one point in time,
• 34:58
  every educated person was expected to do or to know, and they just never experienced it.
• 35:05
  Well, very strange things started happening, and it's what ended up getting the program shut down.
• 35:10
  But the students started becoming Catholic.
• 35:12
  And I don't mean just like a little Catholic, you know, like they'll say a woman's a little pregnant.
• 35:17
  I mean, like I'm talking like rosary bead counting Latin mass chanting, you know, hardcore Catholics.
• 35:23
  One guy became an archbishop.
• 35:25
  Another one of his students found in a monastery in Kansas.
• 35:29
  And so and that really piqued my imagination, you know, and my curiosity, you know, like
• 35:36
  because at the time I was thinking really heavily about, you know, how do we save the
• 35:40
  West?
• 35:40
  How do we kind of push back against this sort of color revolution we've been seeing over
• 35:46
  the past decade or arguably longer?
• 35:49
  You know, what is what is the cure?
• 35:50
  What is the solution?
• 35:51
  And so that really drew me into the writings of Dr. John Sr.
• 35:55
  And his philosophy on all this was that, you know, the key to forming a good person is to a way called tilling the soil, right?
• 36:04
  Like, you know, not even so much planting the seeds.
• 36:06
  It's just getting the soil in proper preparation so they're ready to sort of receive the message.
• 36:13
  And, you know, Dr. Senior tied all this back to he tied all this sort of like Western canon, all the work of Western civilization back to a central point, which is Christ.
• 36:25
  Right. And so for Dr. Senior, you know, for him, it was the Catholic Church.
• 36:31
  We have a slightly different view on that, but a lot of respect for Dr. Senior and our Catholic friends.
• 36:36
  But that's that's kind of like I know it's a little long winded and maybe not terribly coherent.
• 36:41
  That's sort of how it all ties together is like, I believe that if you look at all these things, they're ultimately a product of Christian thought and or influence Christian thought.
• 36:52
  And this is, you know, I know there's a lot of parents who have objections to some of the titles we've picked.
• 36:58
  Like, for instance, you know, we have, you know, Greek myths and it talks about the Greek gods.
• 37:03
  And we have another book on Norse mythology.
• 37:07
  It was St. was it St. Basil the Great?
• 37:09
  Yeah, St. Basil the Great had this wonderful homily on the importance of pagan literature.
• 37:17
  And he actually recommended his students to read what he called the vulgar literature before they read scripture, because it would help prepare the mind.
• 37:27
  And one of the things I've been finding as I've finally been able to properly read these books, you know, I say properly.
• 37:32
  Of course, we've read them hundreds of times going through editing and all that.
• 37:36
  But there's very much a difference between you're reading something to prepare a manuscript, you're reading it off an iPad, you know, to your kids, and you're actually sitting down with a physical book and reading it.
• 37:46
  This actually isn't the best example.
• 37:48
  So a better example would be, say, okay, so I have this in the Days of Giants by Abby Brown.
• 37:52
  This is a great little book, a very weird little book in our Chapter 2 collection.
• 37:57
  This is a collection of Norse mythology.
• 38:00
  and one of the things I've picked up on while reading this stuff, you know, this and the Iliad
• 38:07
  and the Odyssey and the Greek myths is how capricious these pagan gods were. So just not to
• 38:14
  get too derailed, but, you know, we're, so we're Orthodox Christians and one of our beliefs is that,
• 38:19
  you know, all these pagan gods are real and effectively, effectively they're demons.
• 38:23
  and you read this stuff and you realize how true that is.
• 38:28
  Like, for instance, Odin, the king of the Norse gods, right?
• 38:33
  He was like the top gods,
• 38:34
  sort of like the Norse version of Zeus.
• 38:36
  Zeus was a bad character too.
• 38:38
  Odin wasn't quite as nasty as Zeus could be,
• 38:41
  but Odin would sometimes say,
• 38:43
  you know what, I'm tired of being God.
• 38:44
  I'm going to throw a disguise.
• 38:46
  I'm going on vacation.
• 38:48
  Or, you know, Zeus would do terrible things to women.
• 38:51
  And, you know, if you read the Iliad, you know, the gods are constantly changing sides and just messing with people, right?
• 38:57
  Like I going to take you and teleport you here just to cause trouble Or like you know I liked you yesterday I don like you today I going to make sure you lose today Christ doesn do that Christ never does that You know God the father the Holy spirit they don do these things right They constant They are
• 39:12
  extremely consistent. You know, Christ always loves you even when he's disappointed in you,
• 39:20
  right? He always loves you. He's always there. You know, the God of the Bible never takes a
• 39:25
  vacation. He doesn't take a day off. He doesn't assault human women. And so when you read these
• 39:32
  pagan stories, for me at least, I think for our children, it really just kind of emphasizes what
• 39:38
  Christ did for us. Because when Christ died on the cross, you know, these beings, these entities
• 39:45
  basically were shut down. They were shut down. And this is a historical fact. I know this sounds a
• 39:51
  little nutty, but this is true. Everywhere Christian missionaries went, and every time they brought
• 39:56
  Christ to a new place, all the old pagan rituals stopped working. Like those old gods just went
• 40:01
  away. They were banished. And that's one of the reasons why Christianity spread so quickly,
• 40:06
  because, oh, we used to sacrifice a goat and do this dance, and it would rain, and there are crops
• 40:12
  would be, oh, that doesn't work anymore. Oh, well, I prayed to God, you know, I prayed to Christ,
• 40:18
  and it rained. So I guess that's what we're doing now, right? They converted for practical
• 40:24
  experience. And so, you know, you read about these old gods, these whatever these things were,
• 40:30
  and it makes you realize just how incredibly blessed we are to have Christ and, you know,
• 40:38
  what he did for us in ridding us of such an ugly, capricious world.
• 40:43
  Yeah, I mean, at the end of that story sort of ties with the gospel this week, which was so
• 40:48
  seeds right and uh you said uh you the focus of father senior was to till the soil but i thought
• 40:58
  it was i i was connecting it to the the homily this week yeah we had the same one uh funny enough
• 41:04
  so yeah um yeah you have to have good fertile tilled soil even you know having where to drop
• 41:11
  those seeds right well i mean let's get like really into the meat of it like around virtue
• 41:17
  and courage and these old books.
• 41:21
  I mean, I think we started this part of the conversation,
• 41:24
  but really digging into it.
• 41:25
  Why is courage better taught through Horatius at the bridge,
• 41:28
  Beowulf facing the dragon, or Odysseus trying to return home
• 41:31
  than through an explicit lesson about courage?
• 41:35
  I mean, to me, those are explicit lessons about courage.
• 41:41
  They may not be dressed up with a heading at the top
• 41:45
  that says today's lesson is about courage and a worksheet at the end to fill out. But, you know,
• 41:50
  how can you not be inspired to be brave when you hear about Beowulf showing up and saying,
• 41:56
  you got a problem? Yo, I'll solve it. You know, I mean, how can you not be inspired to be brave?
• 42:02
  I know it's funny enough, like we just got to the part where Beowulf takes on Grendel and
• 42:09
  pulls his arm off. Now I just spoil really old spoilers and nails it to the wall. And then,
• 42:14
  you know, the next day my middle child comes up to me and says, mom, is Beowulf a saint? So,
• 42:20
  you know, he's already thinking along those lines, you know, these men who do great deeds, like they
• 42:26
  are, you know, they're saints of the church. So it's really interesting to me to watching him make
• 42:32
  those connections between things that like we, I never said, hey, you know, the saints of the
• 42:38
  church had courage. He's just picked up on that, that that's a three line here in the different
• 42:43
  saints lives so um i don't know do you have anything to add to that yeah i mean i think it
• 42:50
  goes to like living versus dead texts um you know a dead text would be something like a textbook and
• 42:57
  it just tells you hey uh you know be brave like okay what do i do with that yeah right like does
• 43:04
  reading the dictionary do it like is that enough you know i i don't know like for me it's it's
• 43:11
  seeing these things in action and giving it time to settle into your mind.
• 43:15
  And then being able to act from that when the opportunity arises.
• 43:21
  I think it also helps when you see characters that are not Mary Sue's.
• 43:26
  They're not perfect.
• 43:27
  They're flawed in many ways.
• 43:29
  You can take someone like Achilles who certainly had his fair share of flaws.
• 43:32
  But, you know, when the time came, you know, he was bold, he was brave,
• 43:36
  all this stuff. Right.
• 43:37
  So I think you need three-dimensional characters.
• 43:41
  And again, you know, to kind of go back to scripture, you know, that's one of the things, you know, I've, you know, I've became a believer.
• 43:46
  I really started reading scripture that convinced me of the truth of it was that you look at these characters throughout the Bible and they have flaws, right?
• 43:55
  Moses had a temper.
• 43:57
  Abraham kept trying to sell on his wife because he was scared.
• 44:00
  um yeah well like something that just dawned on me literally last week was that you know when
• 44:07
  jesus was arrested that the the disciples fled because they weren't a hundred percent certain
• 44:14
  it's like me okay well maybe he wasn't the christ maybe like you know that they were like we're
• 44:20
  gonna run away we're gonna let this play out because you know we're we're not we're doubting
• 44:24
  right now and it had never occurred to me that that was why they fled you know um so anyway yeah
• 44:30
  Just seeing the flaws, but then the return to belief of these people, you know.
• 44:38
  Right.
• 44:38
  The redemption and the greatness they did.
• 44:40
  You know, like St. Peter, you know, he denied Christ three times, you know.
• 44:45
  And like, okay, why wasn't he like Judas?
• 44:47
  Well, because Judas, you know, he could not accept God's forgiveness, but Peter could.
• 44:53
  And that was the difference.
• 44:55
  But, you know, that's why one's a saint and one's in hell.
• 44:57
  you know but like but see but like it's it works so much better when you when you see an example of
• 45:04
  someone who just is not perfect who has fear who has anger who has lusts you know like king david
• 45:11
  or you know or solomon right and and they have these real flaws then it lets you know that you
• 45:17
  too can aspire to this sort of greatness even if you have your own weaknesses and your own problems
• 45:23
  as we all do. Yeah. I mean, and we touched, you touched on the beginning of the discussion,
• 45:29
  like you really don't want to finish a story and it'd be like, all right, here's the lesson.
• 45:34
  But like, how do you explain the moral or let the child live with the story and then like pull that
• 45:39
  out and be there for them? We, we don't, I, we try our best not to explain things. So we practice
• 45:48
  something called narration, which is common in Charlotte Mason circles, but also in the classical
• 45:53
  world. So you read something to a child and then you ask them to tell the story back to you.
• 46:00
  And, you know, if they get something glaringly wrong, you might fix it. But otherwise,
• 46:05
  you just let them tell you what they got out of it. And that comes from a place of respecting them
• 46:12
  as a person. So, for example, you know, if Josh and I read the same book, you know, he'll get
• 46:17
  different things out of it than I will, just as it would be, you know, Marty, if we read a book,
• 46:21
  all three of us and we talked about it, you know, we would all get different ideas from it. So
• 46:26
  you let the child tell you what they got from it and then you leave it at that.
• 46:32
  And you layer things on year after year, you know, reading after reading. And over time,
• 46:39
  then they'll start making connections between the stories themselves. So, you know, for example,
• 46:44
  my oldest, he came to me when he loves to come to me when I'm cooking dinner. I don't know why he
• 46:49
  You know, it'll be like a pivotal moment where if I don't do this, dinner is ruined.
• 46:54
  Hey, Mom, I've been thinking.
• 46:56
  Really right now?
• 46:58
  So he read the Harry Potter series in the spring for the first time.
• 47:03
  But we were also reading Oliver Twist for school.
• 47:06
  He was reading Harry Potter for fun, Oliver Twist for school.
• 47:10
  And so he comes to me one night.
• 47:11
  He says, Mom, I've been thinking.
• 47:13
  Harry Potter and Oliver Twist, you know, they're both orphans.
• 47:15
  And then he goes on to tell me all the similarities that he sees between their stories.
• 47:18
  And I was just like, wow, I'm going to have to sit down and take notes because this is blowing me away.
• 47:24
  So, you know, that's what we do.
• 47:26
  We let the child sit with the story where they are.
• 47:29
  And then you just keep going.
• 47:31
  You just keep plowing.
• 47:32
  And then, you know, eventually the soil will be good and worked.
• 47:36
  And then those seeds will start to bloom.
• 47:38
  And you give them all these different stories and they make all these like all these connections between them.
• 47:43
  Right.
• 47:43
  Like, you know, all these connections that our kids have made between these stories and of course other ones they've read.
• 47:48
  for our oldest he's read a lot of harry potter which not my favorite but at least he's reading
• 47:53
  um but you know he's made a lot of connection to harry potter and scripture for instance and
• 47:57
  he'll make connections between that and some of these stories as well um so like didn't he though
• 48:04
  was it was harris that pointed out that ron hermione and ron were like three parts of the
• 48:10
  tripartite soul yeah yeah we we have lots of parts about the the tripartite soul and you know
• 48:18
  which characters in the Harry Potter series fit where in that model.
• 48:22
  It's really interesting, you know, well,
• 48:24
  and that was a case where like I introduced that concept and then he just
• 48:27
  started going with it and plugging things in and like,
• 48:30
  we have three children.
• 48:31
  And so they'll regularly have discussions about which one of them is the
• 48:34
  brain, which one is the heart, which one is the stomach.
• 48:37
  And, you know, it kind of changes a little bit day to day.
• 48:40
  And the thing you'll see if you stick with this sort of method for long
• 48:44
  of is just all these connections they make that, you know, maybe you never even considered.
• 48:49
  But, you know, that shows you that they're not just reading.
• 48:52
  They're not just decoding.
• 48:53
  They're actually thinking.
• 48:54
  They're actually purely processing what they've read.
• 48:58
  You're actually engaging the mind.
• 48:59
  You're engaging those parts of the mind.
• 49:01
  And that's sort of the opposite of what we've seen from this sort of spreadsheet education
• 49:05
  where I just, I know the facts and the figures.
• 49:07
  I can decode.
• 49:08
  I can tell you why your engine's making that sound.
• 49:10
  I can tell you why the code isn't compiling correctly.
• 49:12
  and those are all good things of course but you know we're trying to go for a deeper sense of
• 49:18
  comprehension and i mean you guys have made some decisions that others would say like why are you
• 49:26
  doing this one like deliberately choosing an asap edition that does not append an explicit moral to
• 49:32
  every fable why is explaining the lessons sometimes the fastest way to weaken it i mean we just
• 49:37
  covered that but again reinforcing this in um the the actual physical copies of the book too
• 49:42
  yeah well i'll give you an example so um we read this story about i think it's a crow
• 49:49
  or a raven it may depend on which version of asap you're looking at um
• 49:53
  and with with the the jug with the water in the bottom of it he's trying to figure out how to get
• 50:00
  the water out he drops the pebbles in until the water level rises so that he can drink from the
• 50:06
  jug. And so we read that very short story. And I said, okay, well, you know, would everybody learn
• 50:10
  from that? And my oldest, you know, if the moral had been spelled out, it would have been one thing.
• 50:15
  But my oldest said, well, what I learned from that is that you really need to stay calm in a
• 50:21
  dangerous situation. Okay. That's not the moral that would have been spelled out at the bottom,
• 50:27
  but that was what he took from it. And I'm sure, you know, if you're a thirsty bird, you might
• 50:33
  be on the verge of death. I don't know. It wasn't explicitly stated that he was, but still,
• 50:39
  you know, and that that's the virtue of not just spelling everything out, like letting them take
• 50:43
  from it what is needed in their life at that time, you know, and that's, you know, where we,
• 50:49
  you have to leave room for the Holy spirit. Yeah. Don't box them in. When you spoon feed them
• 50:55
  the lesson, well, first of all, you don't let them engage that part of the brain,
• 50:59
  that critical thing part of their brain.
• 51:01
  They're just, again, just absorbing what they're being given.
• 51:04
  They're just being spoon-fed.
• 51:05
  I really think that's the gist of so much of our education these days
• 51:08
  is they're getting spoon-fed.
• 51:10
  But then you're also boxing them in, right?
• 51:11
  You're not leaving room for the Holy Spirit or their imagination to say,
• 51:15
  hey, you know what, it could be this or it could be this.
• 51:17
  It could also be this, right?
• 51:19
  You know, again, I keep going back to Scripture.
• 51:22
  There's so many Bible verses where someone will read it one way,
• 51:25
  someone else will read it another way, and maybe they're both true.
• 51:28
  And maybe maybe there's multiple. And that's sort of the beauty of the Bible is there's so many different layers to to so many to so much scripture.
• 51:35
  It's like an onion. You know, which layer of the onion is the real onion?
• 51:39
  Well, all the real onion. It's just different layers.
• 51:44
  So. Yeah. I mean, Josh, you mentioned earlier that it's important that children understand flawed heroes rather than impossible models of perfection,
• 51:54
  which flawed heroes have prompted the richest conversations in your home?
• 51:58
  Oh.
• 52:00
  Oh, gosh.
• 52:01
  Um, well, I'll tell you a favorite one of mine.
• 52:04
  Um, my kids don't know quite as much about this one yet.
• 52:08
  You'll understand why, why in a second.
• 52:10
  But, um, so one of my favorite saints, um, is St. Mary of Egypt.
• 52:14
  And I really think she's a saint for this age.
• 52:16
  So St. Mary of Egypt was, um, for lack of a better word, a nymphomaniac.
• 52:21
  And she was just going out and just committing all sorts of terrible sins and just having
• 52:26
  a great time of it.
• 52:28
  And she went on a pilgrimage kind of as a gag.
• 52:31
  And she tried to go into this church and she couldn't get inside the church.
• 52:35
  I'm not quite sure how that worked.
• 52:37
  I don't know if she was like, there's a force field,
• 52:39
  or she just kept trying to go in and get redirected,
• 52:41
  but she couldn't get inside this church.
• 52:42
  And finally, she cries out to this icon of the Theotokos, the Virgin Mary.
• 52:48
  And Mary tells her like, hey, you need to go to the desert,
• 52:53
  and you need to repent.
• 52:55
  And so she's finally letting the church.
• 52:58
  She goes to confession.
• 52:59
  She communes.
• 53:00
  Then she goes out in the desert.
• 53:01
  She spends the rest of her life living in the desert.
• 53:03
  and just repenting and praying and all this stuff.
• 53:08
  And, you know, and so she's found by this monk named St. Zosimas,
• 53:13
  who she recounts her entire life story to him.
• 53:16
  And she dies this sort of beautiful death.
• 53:20
  And, you know, but before she does, she walks on water to go visit him one last time.
• 53:26
  And she's this wonderful saint who lived this very sinful life.
• 53:30
  But, you know, but because she made that choice to repent, she made that decision, then, you know, she's counted amongst the saints.
• 53:39
  I think that's a beautiful story because I think there's so many people these days who, you know, they fall into this sort of stuff.
• 53:45
  And it shows there is a path, right?
• 53:48
  There is a path to holiness from that.
• 53:51
  Yeah.
• 53:52
  And again, I think it's very humanizing, right?
• 53:54
  Like there is no such thing as a perfect hero other than Jesus, right?
• 53:58
  Right.
• 53:58
  Exactly.
• 53:59
  Yeah.
• 53:59
  Yeah. It's it's OK to be flawed. It's natural.
• 54:03
  Yeah. I think there's certain people who take advantage of that these days. Right.
• 54:07
  Like, you know, you bring up like Thomas Jefferson or George Washington and someone be like, well, they own slaves.
• 54:11
  They did this. They did that. It's like, OK, well, you know what?
• 54:15
  I can take literally any, you know, hero from history and I point out all their flaws.
• 54:21
  You know, I can point out all the flaws of Martin Luther King Jr.
• 54:24
  I point all the flaws of Martin Luther. I could I could point out like I could take literally anyone apart.
• 54:29
  heart that you wanted me to, you know? But that's not the point. The point is, you know, when we
• 54:36
  rise from that default state, right? We rise beyond, you know, we do something greater than
• 54:41
  ourselves, right? That's why we remember these people in history. Yeah. And that gets to, I mean,
• 54:49
  your selection standard is that a book should be beautiful. It should be true and worth reading
• 54:54
  aloud. And obviously, as we covered a lot of these stories are myths, ancient myths, and obviously
• 55:00
  they're not true, but what does it mean to be true? What is the truth embedded in these myths?
• 55:07
  That's a great question. So yeah, there was a lot of deliberation of which books to include,
• 55:13
  and we came up with four box sets, three books apiece, so 12 books total.
• 55:17
  and uh you know so we kind of come to the question of well how do you sum up the western canon in 12
• 55:24
  books um and so some things are obvious right like uh shakespeare homer um you know asap i think
• 55:32
  were all obvious things and some other ones for us were obvious uh you know for instance 50 famous
• 55:37
  stories we told that's a very popular book in charlotte mason circles um but then you know
• 55:43
  how do you get to true and, you know, and how do you kind of tease apart truth and myth? Well,
• 55:48
  see, I would argue that myth is a little different than just fiction, you know, because myth,
• 55:56
  you know, may have happened, may not have happened, but there's truth in it. You know,
• 56:01
  for instance, you know, oftentimes we would call, you know, the story of the Iliad a myth,
• 56:06
  but, you know, and for a long time, historians didn't think Troy existed. They thought it was
• 56:12
  fictitious city. And then years ago, archaeologists found Troy. So we know it was a real city.
• 56:19
  And then the question is, well, how much of the Iliad was actually true?
• 56:24
  We can give a great illustration of that. We just celebrated America's 250th anniversary. So
• 56:29
  to tie our first president in with another great president. So one of those stories we have in 50
• 56:36
  famous stories we told is the story of George Washington and the cherry tree. Probably entirely
• 56:42
  made up by a guy named uh was it mason weems that's right yeah so after washington died he just
• 56:50
  and he's he was a methodist minister and a traveling book peddler and just one of those
• 56:55
  kind of early 19th century characters and he suddenly decides you know what i'm going to write
• 57:00
  a biography of george washington like a biography you've never read before because he probably made
• 57:05
  he claimed he interviewed like long lost cousins and stuff.
• 57:10
  So whether that's true or not, who really knows?
• 57:13
  But anyway, so the story of George Washington, the cherry tree,
• 57:16
  I think most American children have heard it at one point in time.
• 57:20
  And basically Washington dad had a cherry tree that was kind of rare and valuable at the time He couldn exactly go to the Walmart and get a cherry And George Washington had a hatchet He like no it be really cool if I chopped down that cherry tree And there so much truth in that because it such a little
• 57:37
  boy thing to do. It's like, there's a tree, I got a hatchet. Let's try this thing out.
• 57:42
  But then of course, Washington cuts down the cherry tree. His dad gets really angry about it.
• 57:46
  And George Washington's like, well, I cannot tell a lie. I cut down the cherry tree. And his dad
• 57:51
  forgives him and embraces him. And, you know, and so was that story true? You know, there's a lot of
• 57:57
  debate about that. A lot of people would say probably not true, probably just more mythological
• 58:01
  in character, but there are truths in it, right? We know Washington was a man of great honesty and
• 58:06
  virtue and also a man of action. He is, I can definitely see a young George Washington cutting
• 58:10
  down a cherry tree. I'm also, of course, the virtue of forgiveness. So in that, you have a lot of
• 58:15
  truth. But then here's where things kind of get interesting, the real truth comes in. So there's
• 58:20
  a young boy many years later who borrowed this book from a neighbor and just became this biography
• 58:26
  of Washington and just became obsessed with it. Just there's only book he read. He's a read to the
• 58:30
  point he ruined it. Like he ended up like getting rained on because he was reading outside and he
• 58:35
  had to work for his neighbor to replace the book. So that was a very famous story. Well, that boy
• 58:40
  was Abraham Lincoln. And after he won the election, his election, the presidency, one of the first
• 58:47
  speeches he gave, he spent like an hour talking about that book, because back then, like,
• 58:52
  speeches lasted all day. People think Donald Trump rambles, like, these guys, they went on,
• 58:57
  like, you know, it was like a speech was a day-long event. So, yeah, he spent a very large
• 59:02
  portion of the speech just talking about that book and that biography and the story of Washington
• 59:06
  and how it inspired him to, you know, eventually run for president. And so, I don't know, you know,
• 59:13
  people have complex feelings about Lincoln, love him or hate him, though, but that is the truth of
• 59:17
  is that this, you know, quote unquote myth about George Washington inspired Abraham Lincoln, you know, to do what he did.
• 59:24
  Right. So like whether the story was true or not, the effect of the story was very much true.
• 59:30
  Yeah. Yeah. It's fascinating. We need to get. We need to get back to this.
• 59:36
  I'm very happy you guys started Chapter House. And I think just continuing down this vein,
• 59:40
  Like, why should children encounter unsanitized myths with real consequences, frightening monsters, concepts like death?
• 59:48
  And how do you sort of filter or understand when a child's ready to hear those stories?
• 59:56
  Well, I mean, they're going to encounter things like that in life.
• 1:00:01
  and I forget if
• 1:00:03
  I think C.S. Lewis and Chesterton
• 1:00:04
  both said something very similar about
• 1:00:07
  letting a child
• 1:00:08
  encounter those things in their story
• 1:00:11
  so that they will know that those
• 1:00:13
  things can be overcome
• 1:00:14
  you know
• 1:00:15
  it was Lewis who said that you know
• 1:00:19
  the child doesn't have to be told about the monster
• 1:00:20
  he needs to hear that the monster can be slayed
• 1:00:22
  right exactly
• 1:00:23
  you already know as a child that there are
• 1:00:27
  scary things in the world you don't have to be alive
• 1:00:29
  very long to find out that
• 1:00:31
  the world can be a scary place. But when you read about someone having an encounter with,
• 1:00:37
  with a terrifying dragon and overcoming it, then, you know, it gives you some hope.
• 1:00:44
  You also see sometimes that things don't work out, but it will go on anyway. And, you know,
• 1:00:49
  that also gives you hope in a different sort of way that, you know, if you have a terrible
• 1:00:54
  situation in life and things go poorly that, you know, you, you will be able to carry on.
• 1:01:01
  Or sometimes you don't, you know, like there's a lot of stories and the Margaret Evans Price collection we have here.
• 1:01:08
  Child's Book of Myths and Enchantment Tales.
• 1:01:10
  These are the Greek myths and these are they're beautiful, but they're really most of them are really freaking sad.
• 1:01:15
  Well, you know, you're inference and you make your wings out of a fly too close to the sun, you know.
• 1:01:21
  I mean, and that's also a reality that has to be dealt with.
• 1:01:24
  But, you know, a lot of times, though, the terrible things that happen to the characters in these stories are because they ignore warnings.
• 1:01:30
  to ignore good counsel. And that's such a common thing in life. You know, I can't tell you how many
• 1:01:36
  loved ones I've had who have about to do something really dumb. I'm like, hey, you shouldn't do that.
• 1:01:41
  You can't tell me what to do. And they go to do the dumb thing and then predictable,
• 1:01:45
  terrible things happen to them. Right. I mean, that's that's a constant thing, I think, in many
• 1:01:49
  people's lives. And so how do you end up being someone who accepts wise counsel from people who
• 1:01:55
  love you. Well, one way is to read these stories and remain at a young age. I understand that if
• 1:02:01
  you ignore good advice, bad things could happen. Yeah. And last story or last question before we
• 1:02:07
  get into some advice of starting to read these stories for your children is you describe the
• 1:02:14
  Western canon as living inheritance that belongs to every child. What do you say to a parent who
• 1:02:19
  hears Western canon and worries about exclusion, triumphalism, and a selective view of history?
• 1:02:25
  I support all those things. I mean, look, you know, we've had some people, you know, most most of the people who come across Chapter House and our Substack Virtue and Wonder say very wonderful things and nice things.
• 1:02:41
  Every now and then we have someone who they a critic and they say oh you being exclusionary You being elitist You you you know you raising up this culture over the rest And I would say yes yes we are And because it just a fact that Western culture is the superior culture throughout the world
• 1:03:01
  And you can like that. You can not like that. It's a fact. You know, for instance, I was reading
• 1:03:05
  something recently. I was an interview with Xi Jinping, the premier of China. Is that the proper
• 1:03:11
  title? And he's a big student of the classics, right? He he's read Plato and Homer and study
• 1:03:18
  these things intensely. Okay. Why? You know, there's plenty of great authors in China. There's
• 1:03:23
  plenty of great Chinese philosophers and great thinkers over there, but he studies the Western
• 1:03:28
  ones. Why? Because we're the gold standard, right? The West has the gold standard of these things.
• 1:03:34
  You know, I'm going to plane right now and I could fly to anywhere in the world. I could fly
• 1:03:39
  to Egypt and I could sit down in a Kentucky fried chicken and eat my, eat my, uh, my plate there,
• 1:03:47
  my biscuit and be staring at the Egyptian pyramids. I mean, literally, literally, there's a KFC set up
• 1:03:53
  where you can sit there and eat your meal and look at the pyramids. I can fly to Japan right now,
• 1:03:57
  Japan, and again, walk into a KFC. I promise you I'm not being sponsored by KFC, but my point being
• 1:04:05
  is that Western culture is everywhere. I can go to Russia and buy a pair of blue jeans,
• 1:04:11
  a thoroughly American thing. You know, I mean, when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union
• 1:04:17
  collapse. The things that the Soviets are the most excited about were blue jeans and Coca-Cola.
• 1:04:21
  We can finally have those things. And they're all products of Western culture.
• 1:04:27
  So you can lob all sorts of nasty phrases at us or descriptions of that. And we have no hate in
• 1:04:36
  our heart. But we do believe, yeah, I mean, it's not a belief. It's just the fact that Western
• 1:04:42
  civilization is the best civilization and there is so much to draw from it. And unfortunately,
• 1:04:47
  there's a lot of people who would love to bury it and love to kill it. And to me, that would be,
• 1:04:53
  you know, apocalyptic. That would be absolutely disastrous, not just for the United States and
• 1:05:00
  not just for Europe, but for the entire world. I completely agree there. And again, that's why
• 1:05:07
  I'm very happy that you guys have started Chapter House and are beginning to reintegrate these,
• 1:05:13
  these timeless stories into, into the curriculum of the home, I guess you could say.
• 1:05:18
  And like on that note, how should families who don't have a reading sort of cadence or a tradition
• 1:05:28
  or just simply, there's a bunch of parents out there listening to this saying, dang,
• 1:05:33
  I need to do this more.
• 1:05:34
  How do you get started?
• 1:05:35
  What books to start with?
• 1:05:36
  Does that pair with the particular age of your children?
• 1:05:41
  Where do you start?
• 1:05:42
  I mean, really, any of our box sets are appropriate to begin with.
• 1:05:47
  They are organized roughly by age, but it's not really the age that matters most.
• 1:05:55
  It's the length of the story.
• 1:05:56
  So the first box set, the green one, chapter one, the books that are in that set, the stories are shorter.
• 1:06:04
  So if you have younger children with shorter attention spans, that might be where you want to begin.
• 1:06:08
  And then as the box sets progress, unfortunately, we don't have the box set three and four yet because they're still at the printer.
• 1:06:16
  So as they progress, the stories get longer.
• 1:06:19
  They get a little meatier, you know, maybe a little bit more complex.
• 1:06:23
  So, you know, look at the age of your children.
• 1:06:25
  and, you know, if you're like us and you have a pretty widespread, then, you know, you might want
• 1:06:31
  to just pick one and start, you know, and that's the funny thing with my own children. I have a
• 1:06:37
  almost 13-year-old, a seven-year-old, and a newly turned five-year-old, and our reading list
• 1:06:44
  is all over the place. You know, we have books that are definitely geared more toward the older
• 1:06:50
  of our children, and then we also have books that are, you know, kind of geared toward the younger
• 1:06:55
  of our children and they all sit and listen to them happily and tell me the things that they
• 1:07:00
  learned from them. So, um, I really don't think there's a bad place to start. Just start. That's
• 1:07:06
  the main thing. You must read to your children. You must. And, and do, and develop a habit of it.
• 1:07:13
  There's actually a great time for this question because we've been traveling for the past couple
• 1:07:17
  of weeks. And so we've completely fallen out of habits. Uh, got, got mixed up watching the world
• 1:07:22
  cup and yeah and so we've kind of followed this habit for the time being i mean as easy to happen
• 1:07:29
  in summer anyway um but yeah set aside 20 minutes a night you can do 20 minutes and um you know the
• 1:07:36
  green set is perfectly fine these are kind of shorter books yeah like she said when we get to
• 1:07:41
  chapter four i finally saw a picture of what those books are going to look like i saw the proofs from
• 1:07:46
  the printer and arlen's story which one of the books in chapter four is like this thick it's like
• 1:07:50
  700 pages. It's like two inches thick. It's a big boy. It's going to be a hawk. That might be a
• 1:07:55
  little intimidating for the newer readers, but if your children have been watching a lot of screens
• 1:08:01
  and maybe you've been looking at a lot of screens and like us, your attention span is totally fried,
• 1:08:07
  then what you do is you get you one of these little thin books here, 50 famous stories,
• 1:08:12
  or you can get a child book of myths This is actually a great one because it has all the pretty pictures and the stories are short And you can easily if you really need a short story you know get the Aesop Fables And those take about two minutes to read And then yeah just spend you know set a timer you know
• 1:08:28
  maybe a little bit toward the end of the day and just set a short amount of time, even 10 minutes.
• 1:08:34
  Yeah. You know, and just read one of these little short stories.
• 1:08:37
  And just every day, you know, I just saw a tweet from Joshua Phillips, who's a big fan of Chapter House.
• 1:08:42
  He's talking about how many books he reads a year and all he reads one hour a day.
• 1:08:46
  He just sets aside one hour a day to read.
• 1:08:48
  So, you know, take your kids, you know, even if you don't homeschool and just set aside that 20 minutes a day and just just read one story or a couple of very short ones.
• 1:08:58
  And if you have younger children that their attention span isn't great.
• 1:09:02
  We do a lot of Legos or magnet tiles.
• 1:09:07
  My kids also have the blocks that are magnetic that look like Minecraft blocks.
• 1:09:14
  And so they haul those things into our little den area and they sit in the floor and they build things and I read to them and it works beautifully.
• 1:09:24
  That's another thing that I think people get hung up on because the public school model is you have to be perfectly still, paying, you know, rapt attention, not looking anywhere else.
• 1:09:34
  But I mean, honestly, how many of us totally checked out while we were appearing to be doing the right thing?
• 1:09:43
  Guilty.
• 1:09:44
  Another one I would add to that, and this is one of the places where the public school system really fails young boys.
• 1:09:51
  If you're reading to a boy and he gets up and starts like dancing around or doing karate kicks.
• 1:09:56
  Keep reading.
• 1:09:57
  Yeah, keep reading.
• 1:09:58
  Keep at it.
• 1:09:59
  You'd be amazed at how much they're still listening.
• 1:10:02
  But this is especially so true for young boys because they need that movement.
• 1:10:08
  They need that action.
• 1:10:10
  It's not good for them to just sit still all day.
• 1:10:13
  And this is how you end up with kids in the public school who have to go on Ritalin or whatever methamphetamine they're pushing that day.
• 1:10:21
  Because they're not designed to sit there and be perfectly still and absorb information.
• 1:10:26
  They need some movement.
• 1:10:27
  And you can't expect a child, especially a young child, to sit for an hour and read. That's way too much to ask of them in the beginning, unless they've built up the habit. Now, my daughter, she's a bookworm. She came out a bookworm.
• 1:10:42
  and I mean I'll never forget Josh a few years ago he had started a new job and at the end of the day
• 1:10:51
  she was waiting for him she was like a year and a half old I mean she was not very old at all
• 1:10:56
  with a stack of books in one hand and her tea set in the other she was like all right daddy it is
• 1:11:02
  time for you to play with me and read to me so she she loves books and she will happily sit for 45
• 1:11:07
  five minutes to an hour, even at five. But that is her personality. And that's the muscle that
• 1:11:13
  she has built up since she was little, because that's what she enjoys. Now, our boys, that's a
• 1:11:19
  bit of a different story. They are also boys. And, you know, boys are a lot more physically active
• 1:11:27
  than girls are sometimes anyway. So, you know, children, one thing we've learned having three
• 1:11:33
  children is that they're born persons and they're sort of born with their own personality. Our oldest
• 1:11:37
  never liked books even when he was a baby he would literally punch them out of my hand uh you
• 1:11:41
  know the the middle child that he he's a bit more you know book he likes books a lot more that if you
• 1:11:47
  start reading he's going to come and sit next to you he's not one necessarily to bring you a book
• 1:11:53
  but he comes to the books for sure and of course my little girl loves them but yeah so you just
• 1:11:57
  you have to kind of tailor things to them and you have to find stuff they like reading and if
• 1:12:02
  something isn't working try something else you know that's why we include three different books
• 1:12:06
  new box set, you know, or, you know, and just because something doesn't work the first time
• 1:12:11
  doesn't mean it will work the next time. Or maybe, you know, you pause, you give it six months,
• 1:12:15
  you go back to it. You know, it's, it's a, it's a puzzle that you have to put together
• 1:12:21
  for your particular situation, but, and it's easy to become frustrated because we all want
• 1:12:26
  things to be perfect instantly. And it's just not going to be necessarily that way. And that does
• 1:12:32
  not mean that you're a failure. Well, this has been incredible. Thank you. Thank you for coming
• 1:12:42
  on, obviously, and then also for starting Chapter House. I think it's a very important endeavor,
• 1:12:48
  and I'm happy to see that it exists. So thank you for bringing it into our reality here.
• 1:12:54
  What can anybody who's listening to this has become motivated? What can they do,
• 1:12:58
  number one, to help you, number two, find the books. Yes, buy books. Chapter.house is the domain.
• 1:13:06
  No.com is just chapter.house. That's where you can find the books. We are on Twitter,
• 1:13:12
  X, whatever Elon's calling it today. chhousebooks is the handle there. And then also our sub stack
• 1:13:19
  that we publish pretty twice a week, pretty, you know, very dedicated to publishing twice a week.
• 1:13:26
  um that is uh virtue and wonder.com virtue and wonder.com awesome well josh and hannah thank you
• 1:13:34
  for your time today and uh hopefully we can do this again at some point in the future
• 1:13:37
  absolutely thank you thank you marty all right peace love freaks