50: Wit

Hello and welcome to Classical Stuff You Should Know, a classical podcast, oh we made this mistake last time, is it, are we a classical podcast? Podcasts about classical things. We're not a classical podcast, we've only been in there for a year. But we're like the high point of podcast, ergo the classical.

Oh, so in future generations they will look back on this as the golden age of podcasting and we are in it. Yeah, so like when Dante was writing his commedia, like he would say, this is a classic, so we can say that too about our podcast, right? Oh, can we? AJ has a, look like he has a stomach bug, he looks like he's going to be ill.

I'm a little hungry. Oh, is that what it is? Sorry. So, as we reference, my name is Thomas Magby here also with Graham Donaldson.

Hi. And AJ Hindenburg. Nope. Yep, that's one way to say hello.

And today we are going to be discussing a few things including wits and judgments, but if you find out anything, brevity is the soul of wit. So thank you everyone for listening, this has been Classical Stuff You Should Know. Yeah, you know that that line comes from a guy who's not at all. When people say that, it's actually a joke because that's like couched in lines that are being not brief at all.

He's the windiest windbag. Speaking of windiest windbag, hey, let's get this one to take away. So, many moons ago, you guys are nerds. So many moons ago, AJ and I recorded a podcast on metaphors.

If you go back and listen to that one, it was back when there were just the two of us. And we were sharing a microphone? We were sharing a microphone and it kind of sounded like a tennis match because it would be like back and forth. And back.

And now, Thomas, you have come and you have been the part that has elevated the hole. Anyway, so you don't need to go back and listen to that, but to summarize it very briefly, metaphors have sort of three things. You've got a tenor, a vehicle, and a turn. The tenor being the thing you're talking about, the vehicle, the image that you're using, and then the turn, the thing that you're saying about the tenor.

And the soprano. So if I, that's right. So the example that was used in that podcast was AJ is a lion, the tenor is AJ, I'm talking about AJ, the lion is the vehicle, that is the image that I'm using to describe characteristics, denoting and connotating things about AJ. And then the turn is everything you can say about AJ based on everything that is connoted in the word lion.

Royal, regal, fierce, dangerous. Naps when he eats. That is actually the truth. AJ is a food camel.

He eats once a day and then sleeps after that. It's kind of like a snake. Yeah, I really am. I like to take a nap and just digest for a while.

It's kind of annoying if I haven't eaten all day and I need to work, but I'm like, I'm shaking. I need to eat food. And then I'm out for like an hour. But so that is a metaphor.

And metaphors are sort of difficult things to create. And what we did on that podcast was we analyzed them. But there are mental muscles that are used to create this metaphor and understand this metaphor. And we're going to talk about those two mental muscles today.

And they are the mental muscles of judgment, or the analytical or dialectical part of our brain, and wit, or the synthetic part of our brain. So we'll start with analytical. So what do you guys think? What is the analytical parts of our brain?

Of our ability to think? Definitely what they do. Like question, critique, see what's wrong with something. Or maybe.

Those are all true. I've studied this a little bit. Do you want to jump in? So the analytical side is primarily concerned with separation and delineation.

So this is separate or different from that in certain ways. But another piece of analysis is I think what you're referring to as wit. It's where you're gluing things together or comparing them. They're similar in the following ways.

So the common topic of comparison is what these two muscles, we're going to call them mental muscles, fall under. And there's judgment and wit. Judgment is being able to say how things are different, pull things apart, talk about differences between two things. It's very useful if someone's trying to pull a fast one, or someone's trying to make a spurious correlation between two things, or a spurious comparison between two things.

You'd be like, well, actually, your parents' bedtime laws are not like Hitler. Like that is, yeah. Because you notice two differences, right? You can say this is separate and different from that.

And even the function of a judge, right? He is delineating categories, right? Saying you have done this following thing. You are criminal.

It's kind of like separating you into an area. That's right. So being someone who can judge, being someone who has a strong analytical mind is an important thing. And then the opposite, not the opposite, but the other side of this coin is the category or is the ability, the mental muscle of what is sort of commonly called wit.

And that is the ability to put two things together. It is synthetic. It is being able to see similarities in things, drawing comparisons in things, and pulling things together. So the best example...

Is there any limit to this? I feel like, is it supposed to be unlike things that we find similarity in? Or can I say two tables are like each other? Well, yeah, you can.

And then you need the analytical side to say whether or not that wit is sort of helpful to discussion or not helpful to discussion. The best example that I remember I heard about this is something... I'll let you tell the story because you heard it at a... I think it was like a classical...

Yeah, I was at a conference and one guy was talking about this, the capacity to compare two things. And he said, you can literally compare anything. And I was in class. And so this isn't me telling the story.

This is this other guy. And he says... I said, give me two things that we can compare. And the student's like, Achilles and a carpet.

And he's like, all right, so what's... Clearly trying to be... Yeah, trying to be like a little punk. And he's like, all right, so what's the similarity?

And then one of the other kids goes, Agamemnon walks all over both of them. And that is just hilarious. That is witty. And the wit comes from being able to put these two things together.

Now, in that sense, that is wit with humor. And you are almost doing a pun on walking on a carpet and walking all over a man. And that is very witty. And that is an attractive thing for a human being to be able to do.

And they're attracted to witty people. I think that's why I'm asking if there's a certain kind of comparison. Because when I think wit, I think of the humorous kind. But I'm guessing there are different types of wit or levels of wit.

Yeah, so there's definitely humorous wit and the lighthearted wit. And that shows that the person has the capacity to sort of think on different levels. She's thinking about puns and also on physical walking. But it's also a really necessary category that the synthetic aptitude of thinking is really, really, really important.

And it is my positive, or I'm positing for this podcast, that it is a very underdeveloped capacity in modern education. We love analytical. And we don't, we sort of like wit, but we don't teach it or we don't place any sort of prominent importance on it. It can't be taught and it's all natural, right, Graham?

No, it can't be. There's no way that it's all natural. I mean, I don't think it is. I mean, it has to be, it's definitely something to be taught.

I think it's an exercise faculty. Earlier in this podcast, Graham was trying to say, you came on the scene, you became the, I think what did you do? Elevated the hole. You elevated the hole, but I was going to say, he's the yeast to our hops.

He's the spark plug to our combustion engine. There's something that he brings to the mixture that makes the whole thing function. And that's where wit is, right? Forcing your students to make those comparisons.

Exactly. So you practice this by forcing them to make those connections. You say, here are two things, find the similarities? I should.

I don't necessarily, actually, I have very rarely made them do a witty assignment. And I wish I did more and I want to do more. The most I've done is I've tried to make them make up metaphors in poetry assignments. Any compare, contrast assignment?

Yeah, any compare, contrast assignment is this. The compare is the way to contrast is the judgment. It's an exercise in way to judgment. Is that, when you say compare, contrast, is the other specific type of assignment you give?

In literature, yeah. You can say, take this book and compare and contrast this other book and say, the student will end up saying, it's similar in these ways and different in these ways. And that's the whole thing. And that's a good, that's a fruitful writing exercise.

It doesn't need to be some big grand conclusion about life. You can use that as an easy little writing assignment so you can help judge their writing, but then they have to think in terms of comparing and contrasting. When I think about wit, whenever I read those Wall Street Journal articles or any sort of article that says, we need humanities, people with humanities degrees, we can't let humanities degrees die. Humanities degrees die.

And usually one of the main reasons why the articles say this is because we're attractive. No, it's because it usually has some sort of component of we need people to think of analogies, that analogies are helpful things for us to be able to bridge gaps in understanding. We need people in boardrooms who can draw two things together in order to convince people for going ahead. Fine, I totally agree with those sorts of things, but it is true.

Literature and humanities is the place where this sort of human faculty of wit is developed because if you want to be witty, if you want to be able to compare things, you need to have a big receptacle of things to draw on and you need to have spent some time sort of analyzing or thinking about these things so you can draw upon it, so you can think about analogies. And also, I mean, I'm assuming people know what analogies are, but an analogy is where you are saying something about, almost like a metaphor, you're saying something about a tenor using a vehicle of another image. So like a sports analogy. If someone was incredibly privileged, you could say that they were born on third base and thought they had triple.

That's a joke that gets thrown around. Yeah, that's a good one. Yeah, I like that one. But you're using a sports analogy to say something about someone's attitude.

And that is an example of wit. Yeah, and that is an example of wit. And being able to do that is, I would say, like a criminally underdeveloped faculty. We, in the modern education world, prize and push forward analysis and not synthesis.

Analysis is useful, isn't it? So synthesis, very useful. I think we push what we call critical thinking. And critical thinking is most often an exercise in judgment rather than wit.

And then we, I don't know, it's easy to look down on when the kids are making jokes and comparisons when sometimes that's a very useful exercise. And so you see this in students when they are, often the very weedy kid is sort of the kid that's a little irreverent and he's making these jokes and trying to see what they can get away with. And yes, it eats into the critical thinking, serious analysis of the class, but that is a skill that is a really sort of prize thing. One way that we can think about this and one way I like thinking about things is, my eventual positive is that there needs to be a balance of these two things in the human soul.

That you need to have a balance between synthesis and you need to have a balance between analysis. The dialectical and the witty, there needs to be a balance or those imbalances are going to create a specific sort of kind of of unhealthiness in a person. So if you were sort of weighed heavy, if you had too much analytical, too much dialectic and not enough wit, what kind of, how would you describe that unhealthy soul, that unhealthy person? What would they be like?

Like a critic? A critical jerk? Yeah. Yeah, you're somebody who's always seen What's wrong with it?

Yeah. It's just as good. No, it isn't. You're the well actually.

You are the well actually of the crew. You are the well actually kid. You can always see the problem of something. You can always demystify something.

You can always, well to use the modern term that is big in sort of higher education right now, you can deconstruct something. Pulling things down into their parts. But I think, AJ, we must have talked about this on some earlier podcast. So there's a danger of pulling things down into their parts too much.

Did we, I don't forget where that was. We were talking about dialectic. Maybe in the Plato podcast. It doesn't matter.

But yeah, if you keep on pulling and pulling and pulling, it's fine to learn what a house is made of, but when you're done pulling it down, you have no more house. Right? Yeah. If you can pull something apart, if you can sort of talk about, if you go into higher level academics in literature, you can have an entire class that is not reading the book.

It is deconstructing and pulling apart the book based on some sort of modern political poli-sci sort of theory of the world. And it is, you know, we talk about lenses. We talk about seeing things through the lens of X. And really what this is, this is the dialectic.

This is the judgment. Faculty, again, an important thing, but kind of put into hyperdrive, put into overdrive. Pulling things apart, pulling them into their pieces. But then what?

To what end? Not really knowing what to do with it. So instead of reading the book on its own terms, you're reading it. I want the Marxist reading of Shakespeare.

I want the feminist reading of... Post-colonial reading of Hamlet. And I'm going to look at it with this sort of heuristic mechanism of pulling apart in the back of my mind in order to sort of unravel the story in front of me and give it up. It's a social commentary type of way of judgment than a lot of what we talk about, how we should read a book, like we talked about a couple of podcasts ago.

I wonder if we're stepping too far away from the strict common topic of comparison versus contrast, analysis versus synthesis. And we're kind of like leaking into disruption versus creation. But on that same token, I feel like there's probably some programs out there where you might come out the back end knowing how to pull a book down to its roots, but you can't write to save your life. You can't come up with a story.

You can't take disparate elements of books you've read and then put them together in a way that is pleasing. You've read plenty of stories about kings, but you don't really know how to make a king. Yeah. So that would be a part of synthesis is the act of...

Well, that's my point. I think I'm getting a little further from synthesis and analysis into creation and destruction. But it's just an attitude of looking at academia as a place to beat things with questions until you get their parts versus learning how to take those parts and make something new from them. Which I don't think is probably an epidemic in engineering.

I think those guys work the parts all the time. But that's the criticism of critics, isn't it? That they can make fun of something but they can't make it themselves. There's something to that, isn't there?

But we should care more about the creation of things even if they're not perfect. In this fantastic book called Norms and Nobility, A Treatment on Education by David V. Hicks, it is an amazing book. I highly recommend it.

Unfortunately, to find it, it's like 50 bucks. And it is super rare. It's not an easy read. It's not an easy read.

But he sort of says that the student who has too much dialectic and sort of revels in the pulling apart, eventually the terminus is cynicism. It's the pulling apart and feeling sort of the sense of smug superiority because you've been able to see through everything. But at some point, you're going to have this incredible crisis because if you've seen through everything, you see nothing. Everything else is empty and guess what, so are you.

So there needs to be a building up faculty. All right, so what would be the unhealthy person who had too much wit? This is a little harder. So if analysis is to cut through something to see what's behind it, then they would be swept up.

They would not be discerning. They're precious? Maybe. Yeah, change easily.

I think it's someone who changes easily or who doesn't have the capacity to judge when something is too much of a joke or doesn't have the capacity to judge propriety or make a witty fool. Yeah, they can't see what goes into making, like, I don't know, maybe they can't delineate parts or they can't judge. Yeah, I'm not saying anything important. Everything is a joke.

I kind of think of Oscar Wilde a little bit. Everything has this sort of witty turn of phrase where you can put two things together and whenever I read Oscar Wilde, we just started teaching Oscar Wilde in the senior English class. I just, every time I read it, I just want to sit down and be like, sir, Oscar, you need to take something seriously. But by the way, he did.

Yeah, his life changed. His life definitely changed. But the idea being that if your soul is one that is sort of overly witty, you're the jokester that doesn't know when to be serious. I've had a couple of students where I had to greet them.

I said, you're funny. You know you're funny. Everyone in the class thinks you're funny and that will completely swallow you up unless you know the time when it is to be serious. And I kind of said it not thinking it was going to be this sort of big thing but the student came back a couple years later and said, when you said that, that was like this big revelatory thing for me.

Which is kind of the fun part of being a teacher and the terrifying part of being a teacher. But there needs to be this balance between judgment and wit. You need to have the ability to have the dialectic to pull things apart but you also need to have the ability to see the connections between things and to take these parts so that you can talk about the whole. David Hicks says that the dialectic is the more important.

I tend to agree that judgment is more important than wit but if you are just judging mcjudgersen forever um um you're going to yeah you're going to sort of lose out in the long run and you probably won't be the most fun person to hang out with yeah yeah you need to yeah there needs to be some levity um so what is what does it look like so if i want to practice analysis so that ties in really well with the how to read a book that's like you know do i agree with the author or not on what points do i agree with the author or not understanding argument tearing those things apart right but then with with wit i don't know do i read lots of things and compare them one to the other let's take how aj finished his last podcast on gilgamesh he said you know story story story he told the story of gilgamesh and then he said gilgamesh is someone who has struggled you know the very first thing that was that we have the oldest story that we have someone is a person struggling with death which is just like us that's a very simple wit that's a very simple joining of two things together to say that you know this character is like us that there is a shared humanity between between people and this is where i want the conversation this podcast to move to sit in for a little bit because it is a it is a fundamental belief of the classical education that human beings are normative or what i mean is that there is a human nature that transcends history that the thoughts feelings of gilgamesh he had the same heart the same mind the same fears that maybe hanenberg and donaldson have 1300 3500 years later and we'll have until gene splicing yes it will happen until we can like read the outlaws man um now so there are probably some of you that listen to this and you're like well duh yeah that's why we can read stories and have this common currency with with ancient ancestors but that is definitely that is not a um uh that is not a held belief i would say in our modern world um even the enlightenment you know or if you take you come into with voltaire or russo talking about the baby is just a blank slate the tabula rasa a human person comes and they are completely uh and so um that is a view that is an anthropology that is a view of a person that has um flavored the way that we teach or the way that schools have gone education has gone is that people are blank slates and if we and so we get to them and we put world views in them um classical education uh has a sort of this posit that human beings have a nature that there's a human nature um that uh generally is why we call it normative as opposed to deterministic um that generally generally reacts to things in the same way there is a um there's like well to use gilgamesh gilgamesh had a fear of death um there is a part of the human person that contemplates and thinks about their mortality that is a shared belief going back or that is a shared part of the human nature you can go even more basic cs was talking about this in the abolition of man when you see a waterfall what's your reaction to seeing a big majestic waterfall beautiful it's beautiful you you stand in awe you feel humbled right very rarely does one look at a waterfall and feel nausea you feel like you have to puke that's like you waterfall yeah like you don't look at it and feel angry unless you're jealous of its beauty which is still the same reaction to the beauty now and here's the controversial part um the tabula rasa type of way of thinking about a person says if a man looks at a waterfall and feels nauseous and a man looks at a waterfall and feels humbled um we can make no claims about anything about those two men they're just different people with different reactions whereas the normative view of education says one of those reactions is superior to the other um one of those reactions is a mistake or a or uh not the way one ought to to react to the waterfall and i admit that that is a claim that kind of ruffles my feathers like really maybe it's because like full-on swing punch it maybe because like we are i'm a modern person um uh but i feel like or maybe because i'm a what's it called a canadian and i'm conciliatory i want people to get along so i don't want to make statements that that rub people the wrong way uh i want i want to be able to say like oh well can the waterfall makes you feel nauseous and like you know hey you do you um go take some bills yeah but um yeah one of the this sort of normative structure of classical education says that a big part of our education is to make the student love what they ought as a result um to make the student love what they ought there are things that are worth loving and there are things that are worth hating there are reactions to things that are how human beings are supposed to react to these things and um the idea of original sin or the idea of the brokenness of humanity or the fact that education is like a hospital a fixing is not just a christian idea this is the stoic this goes back to um platonic the way he talks about the academy um that the school is meant to um almost like restore man into an image of what he ought to be and we've talked about that we've talked about the ideal type before um but so the um the ideal type in regards to um this mental muscle of comparison is that you need to be someone who is both uh analytical and we someone who can both um have you know the capacity to judge and the capacity to synthesize um and that is a like it's incredibly controversial and um schools operate and i think lots of schools sort of operate the way that they were taught like teachers teach the way they were taught and those teachers teach the way that they were taught and i think it's very rare that schools sit down and say like what is a human and how do we think human beings learn and um are humans blank slates and we can put whatever we want in them and if we want humans to be a certain way we can teach a certain way or are human beings kind of like plants and if we put them in the wrong soil no matter what we give them they're not going to work because they're in the wrong environment or whatever thoughts on this i agree what you're saying is that um the idea of the norm of education is controversial and obviously i agree with that um but i don't know how you can you can approach the works that you all teach um without that being true or at least approach them um honestly without doing that because homer is not saying you know this is a greek ideal he's making statements that he thinks are true um you can't read um what do you read in 10th grade uh the world frankstein uh preparedness yeah so um can't be prepared as lost without um getting on Milton's terms um so yeah um but i do understand that of um it's hard to have like i don't know how you have the conversation directly of you think this is dumb and you're actually wrong like at some point i hope we talk about how we know the right way to approach these things or what is the normative like when we talk so um the idea you're kind of pointing to is that there's a broad development of person that a student does not just need education in their head but they need to be cultivated into a an adult human so we have some kind of idea of what that end point looks like um it might be interesting about how we know what that end point is um because we don't agree on it like i don't know i bet the three of us would have disagreements over what that in person is lewis actually says that that's true there are disagreements involving the he calls the tau the ideal type but there are there are certain things that we all agree about right the the good man is kind right that's that's so and so he says there's there's room for development there but we all have a notion in our head of certain things that are good just base level like it's better to know the truth than to be mistaken about lies right that is part of the tau it's better to know what's actually going on than to be mistaken about it um i was i don't know anything about this so i had a long conversation with a friend of mine about about relativism which is kind of like what you're talking about and and universalism which is the notion that there are lasting norms in man right but underneath our moral compass are a set of virtues that don't change to the there are still variants like there's variation rome can be very different in greece and what they posit as ideals but um um but they're still ideals yeah never has there been a society where true cowardice is praised where like you give up your children to be slaughtered because you don't have the moxie to stand up to the people backstabbing your friends is a great the great ideal yeah like great job buddy you really like got one over on your friend and granted like the smart and stole but that was the ideal in service of a higher ideal which was the protection of the nation so we had a long discussion about this and i've always been a universalist but i the question i've been kind of bumping up against lately is in school uh particularly for me because i'm an english teacher is how do you make sort of this synthesis type person and i think that's kind of what you're driving at grandma how do we bring that into education and teaching the books is kind of strange but i think we operate on the assumption that if we expose them to enough great literature they're going to end up being shakespeare's themselves when i think what is actually going to happen is they'll be able to recognize shakespeare's right they'll know what's good and what's bad hopefully or sorry when you said that my immediate reaction was like some people are going to hate shakespeare because they're going to hate um julius caesar and juliet but i mean if ideally we do it right we keep on showing them good books they will be able to see recognize a good book when they see it not necessarily love it i'm not i'm not saying that they might find it so difficult in getting into shakespeare that like that initial native reaction well let's assume that shakespeare is coming at exactly the right time and things go well what we've done is people who recognize shakespeare not people that can write like shakespeare and so there's got to be a different a different set of building blocks that we're not quite tackling that i'm trying to figure out how to work in my curriculum which might be like take this sentence write it 45 different ways you have to change it you have to move things around and that is the scale of synthesis and then tell me which one hits you the best well we're complaining two things um uh so norms and nobility uh david hicks says that classical schools have three academies inside them they have academy of math and science they have academy of art and writing and they have the academy of letters of basically literature and in our school we have writing and literature in the same class with literature definitely getting the lion's share of the time and writing getting the sort of the shaft of the time so um there would be um there so um there needs to be both there needs to be like the actual create the training of the art of writing and then what i was talking about with sort of wit and judgment is the idea is talking about um the human person by using um using humane letters stories and history i'll give you an example of a analytical class assignment and this sort of synthetic class assignment that hicks talks about in this book he tells a story about a teacher who was teaching uh plato's mino to his students and do you remember does anybody remember what mino was all about uh it was the second in the eenie yes uh eenie mino no eenie mino i don't remember it's the outline of the so the question in plato's mino is can virtue be taught and so he did the way the teacher taught this one year is he made the students read the book didn't tell me anything about it and he came back and he quizzed them on what was plato's argument about can virtue be taught um and students you know on varying degrees of success uh could write out the argument of plato and then he kind of talked about it and students didn't really care and they sort of memorized what the argument was they could and then they could talk about what they didn't like about the argument and then they moved on to the next book and he kind of felt like it didn't you know it didn't really stay for too low um but he had done a good analytical uh thing the students on a test could write down the six syllogisms of plato's argument done um next year he tried a different way of doing this lesson and he tried to do something he would consider more synthetic before he even read plato before he sat down and he asked the students can virtue be taught and he sort of basically had a roundtable discussion of can virtue be taught then he said go home i want you to ask your parents do your parents think virtue can be taught and i want you to come back and tell me their answers they went home asked their parents if you can be taught came back and uh and then have this and then before they read the book he said the assignment is i want you to write down a statement of whether you think virtue can be taught your thoughts can virtue be taught student came down wrote a statement of can virtue be taught some students said yes i'm sure i said no and with predictable teenage reasonings and then they went in and then they uh and then they studied me know and the students that you know sort of had similar arguments to play were like well plato's obviously a genius because we are so similar and students that had a very different argument to plato were like wait no no my and then they they had this back and forth um with plato they had to They were judging, they had to judge their argument and Plato's argument, but they also had this synthetic quality where they were having to take the things that they had thought and add this new thing that they were learning into the mix and then sort of dialectic pull that thing apart. So yeah, AJ, I mean, you summed it up perfectly, but he gave stakes for the reason. But the reason that the teacher can confidently do that is because he believes that fundamentally every human heart in that classroom has the capacity and wants to think about topics like that. And if the student doesn't want to think about topics like that, the student needs to be shown why he needs to think about these sorts of things.

The student needs to be awakened. It's not just that that student is a blank slate that that topic doesn't resonate with him or he doesn't need to be taught that sort of thing or he just hates the waterfall and that's cool for you, man, you hate that waterfall. No, the teacher has to have the fundamental belief that this kind of assignment energizes and that this kind of assignment is something that the human soul wants because he has a normative view of the human person. But you all do this.

You all do this with... Of course we do. But you have your Harkness discussions. Harkness being the Latin word for table.

No, no. Harkness was the dude's name when he invented the thing. Yeah. Like Dave Harkness.

Dwayne Harkness. Dwayne Harkness. I'm Dwayne. I don't accept it.

But you have these discussions you are doing. I guess you normally have this on the back end of the... You read the book first and then have the discussion, right? So are you saying that you should be having the discussions beforehand?

Maybe a little bit. I was thinking about how to play it in. So I'm hoping no 8th graders are listening at this point. But I kind of want to pull next year before we do the Iliad.

Just bring him in. Make him do a group project and put one kid in charge of every group. I'm turning in. And then...

You can charge him to be great. Huh? No, and then one kid. I'm just going to dress him down.

Like I'm going to say this is horrible. Like you are the worst. And I think you have failed everyone in your group. And everyone in your group is getting enough.

And I can do that because I'm the teacher. No matter how hard they work. Everyone's just like, I'm going to watch this kid melt in this chair. And I say, I'm going to stop.

And say, okay, how do you feel right now? And what do you want to do? And see what he says. Because that's the experience Achilles had.

Achilles had fought and fought and fought. And then again, no one took his prize. Yeah, you're getting an email from a parent. Oh, absolutely.

But that kid would read that book with higher stakes than he had ever had before. And it would make it real for them. They've never been in a position where they have subordinates. And then they get dressed down by a superior in front of subordinates.

That doesn't happen for kids typically. So AJ, you sort of illustrated a really great point. And that is, that kid is going to have a relationship with the text in a different way. And personally, all the students are going to have a relationship with that text in a different way.

Can you... One of the reasons why the classroom has become more of an analytical-only realm is because the analytical is a lot easier to measure and to grade than any of this sort of... What I think a lot of people call it like a soft or a non-scientific way of... It's hard to measure how clever something is.

It's hard to measure how clever something is. It's hard to measure how clever a student is. We mean clever, not smart. We mean clever, not smart.

It's hard to... And if classical education is really... Its main goal is to create people that love the good, that's hard to measure as well. I can measure your grammar.

I can measure your quality of writing. I can measure your argument. But I don't give a grade at the end of the year for how virtuous your child is. I don't give a grade...

I don't give a grade at the end of the year for how virtuous your child is. You know, you can get an A in an English class and be a liar. You can get an A in an English class and be kind of a toot. You cannot do very well in English class, and you can be closer to a saint than anybody at the school.

And we're not doing a podcast on grading, but it does create a lopsided incentive bias in the hearts and minds of students. And I don't blame them for it because its incentives incentivize a certain kind of behavior. Sometimes it's in line with virtue formation, and other times it's not. Anyway.

Sorry, what behavior? You're saying grades incentives? I'm saying grades are great incentives. Sometimes they're in line with virtue, work diligence.

Generally, people who work hard can usually get rewarded, but it doesn't translate to good grades mean virtuous person, just like how wealth doesn't translate to smarts. Are you telling me my 4.1 high school does not mean I'm a good person? No, your 4.1 does not mean you're a good person, but the friend that I know you are means that. 4.1 life?

Yeah, 4.1 life. I'm a valedictorian at life. Anyway, so that's, where are we going with this? We can teach analytically easily, synthetically is hard.

We can assess analytically easily. We can teach these things. I think part of synthetic education just has to be, I mean, you've said before, the teacher's material. The teacher is a curriculum.

The teacher is a curriculum, and so demonstrating an active wit and synthesis and using analogies and helping them evaluate analogies and then to compare things like it's going to be hard to measure. You're never going to be able to say everybody write an analogy and then say this analogy gets an A. They're like a criteria would be really difficult, but I think you have to model those things. The fear, so, I mean, the fact is that if the teacher is a curriculum, when it comes to essentially humanities, math and science is different.

Even arts and writing is in the middle, and then the humane letters is on the sort of one end of objective versus subjective. That the students will end up coming out like the teacher. Like a teacher is a curriculum. The students, AJ will produce students who are like AJ.

So far, I don't think I'm going to be honest. But that is incredibly hard in a system that wants to create students that are sort of indistinguishable parts at the end of their education. Like we want to stamp students, class of 2017, 2018, they can all do these skills. They can all sort of be slotted into the modern world indistinguishably because they can all do these sorts of certain things.

And there's usefulness to that. But classical education has this tension in that the teacher is molding the students into the ideal type, and the teacher themselves is trying to be more of the ideal type than the students are. So the students are trying to imitate the teacher to be like the ideal type. It's like when Paul, when he said, all right, guys, if you can't be like Christ, be like me because I'm trying to be like Christ.

But the teacher sort of says, if you don't understand what it means to be a human being, like a fully mature person who loves the good, try to be like Hanenberg because Hanenberg is someone who's trying to love the good. So imitate him. Try to write like him. Try to think like him.

Try to have jokes like him because he's trying to love the good. But I think there's a lot of sort of fear of the idiosyncrasies of teachers and sort of student body. I don't know. And there's also, if you make a whole bunch of really just quality charitable men that can't multiply fractions, there has to be that tension between teaching virtue and also including basic skills for life.

If these are liberal arts and our goal is to make them free, then skills are a piece of that. And if the end is to create someone who loves what is good, we need to remember that math is good in and of itself. Like it is a good thing to work with numbers. The men who discovered math, or at least many of them thought they were uncovering the timeless mysteries of the universe because some of those things didn't exist.

Triangles don't really exist naturally very easily. And so when you discover that it's a thing that can be multiplied and worked with and it's purely in the realm of idea, you feel like you're discovering something secret about the universe that puts you in the realm of the gods. And that's how these men felt, which is kind of mind-blowing if you approach math that way. And it's a lot more human than if you approach math like the thing to get me a braid.

And in future, a Prius. Or you can be our dev. You guys don't want a Prius? You can be working on our dev team for Clowder.

Live forever with Clowder in your home, Clowder in your car. Anyway, so this is the thing that fascinates me the most is sort of the tension between teacher-as-curriculum and the schooling for everybody that we have in the modern world. I mean, Plato and Aristotle didn't really have to worry about large class sizes and doing this for everybody because they just would take Alexander the Great and teach one kid. And we don't have anyone to do that.

That tension is the only thing that I feel gives me job security in the face of internet schools. Yeah, and robot teachers. And robot teachers and video teachers. Or Concademy.

Yeah, exactly. Concademy can teach you all sorts of skills. It's good. I'm not disparaging content.

And I think that there's definitely a role for the objective side of learning to be done online. I don't know, Con. I've never seen him be charitable. And I can't talk to him about my life and learn from him.

And so there's just a whole element of educating the person that is missing from those videos. The apprenticeship side of education. There's a relationship there that I think, you know, it maybe doesn't guarantee that schools don't have trouble as they move digital. But I think it's going to guarantee that there are some schools that survive just because they make quality kids.

Cool. Yeah. Also, if the school were to get too large, that would be a problem in the same vein. Like, some of this depends on the student being able to know the teacher.

Yes, it depends on hiring practices. If you hire a bunch of derby teachers, you're not, you know, if there's no charisma there. Like, it's a high requirement on the hirers. And it also, I'm going to say high more.

It is a lofty requirement on the people who hire teachers. It's also a lofty requirement on the teachers themselves to be the kind of person the student might want to imitate. I remember I had a teacher when I was young that I loved. She was fantastic.

She was smart. She wanted to learn things and do things. And she was engaging. And then I left that school.

And my sister had her a few years later. And she had grown bitter and cynical and hated teaching and hated students. And my sister hated her. Like, she just, something happened in her life that had turned her, that had soured her.

And then my sister hated the class and didn't get nearly as much out of it as I did. So that can happen. Anyway. Cool.

Anything else? Graham? That's it. Just, yeah.

Just that, um, uh, sort of teaching is kind of a terrifying thing. Yeah. But, and also, I guess you just need to be honest in there being a normative aspect to what you're doing. Right.

That's not just teaching skills. I did remember the last thing I wanted to say. Um, if, if teaching comes... We got to be honest because the dog really wants us to hang out.

It's okay, doggo. We're coming, buddy. Um, if a teacher or if an educational model really comes out of tabula rasa style, uh, anthropology, that human beings are blank slates, um, teaching very quickly becomes propaganda. Yes.

That you have ends that you want, and I'm, I'm here the ways I'm going to put these ends in. The other way around, if it's normative, it's not propaganda, it's, like, propagating humans. Right. Um, you're not, because at that point you're not using the student to get a certain end.

It's, there's something in them that you're growing up. We're all trying to get to that end. Yeah. And maybe we're further along.

And that's the memetic part of teaching. Yeah. Sorry, I'll wrap up as a warning dog. He just really wants us to be done.

Poor dog. So this has been Classical Stuff. You should know. Uh, you can email us with, uh, ideas for topics or, uh, wanting to invest in our Series B.

Yeah, Series B. It's been an incredible Series A. I want to thank you all for the, um, $1.3 billion valuation. No proof of concept.

Not true. But, um, you know, we're getting, we'll figure it out by probably Series B or E. Um, what do you do is get evaluated high and then sell this thing. Seriously, yeah.

We already got going to go in here to line up. Uh, so, yeah, Classical Stuff at baritacademy.net to email us. You can follow us on Twitter at C-L-S-S-C-A-L-Stuff at Classical Stuff. You, what else?

Is there an email? Oh, yeah. Classical Stuff. Classical Stuff.net.

Uh, if you are enjoying this episode, we'd love if you would rate and, uh, man, give us a five-star. Um, that'd be awesome. Sweet, sweet five-stars. Thank you, everyone.

That's all we're here for, really. Just a hundred for that five-star. And a lot of you have reviewed, so. We're going for grades.

Yeah, yeah. That's all I'm here for. But, uh, yeah, this is, uh, this is Thomas and Graham and AJ, and we are signing off. Thank you.

Bye. And Doc. Bye, Doc. Bye, Doc.

Bye. Bye. Bye.