An Interview with Joshua Gibbs

Hey, classical stuff listeners, Thomas here. Hey, quick heads up before today's episode. It's a little bit different than normal. Usually, as you know, it's the three of us sitting around talking about a work or an idea or a door, sometimes, but this week we have the pleasure of talking with Josh Gibbs as a kind of follow up to our discussion last week about his new essay.

So your parents are thinking of sending you to a classical Christian school. And when I say we, it's actually me. I got to sit down with Josh. It was a great conversation.

You'll get to listen to it as soon as I'm done rambling with this introduction. I wanted to give a brief introduction. Josh Gibbs is a teacher, author, speaker, and deep thinker on all things classical. If you are looking to be introduced to some of his ideas, you can listen to our previous episodes on how to be unlucky, something they will not forget, or the episode titled In Defense of Christmas, which is about a book of essays that Josh wrote about Christmas.

If you, we talked about some of these things at the end of the episode, but if you are interested in following Josh Gibbs online, the best place to connect with him is GibbsClassical.com. I'll say again, GibbsClassical.com. That's where you can find the newest essay. That's where you can see just what he's working on.

And you can sign up for his mailing list and get notified when he puts out new things, which is a thing that you should do. Also, we talk about this at the end of the episode, but I very clearly got the dates wrong. Josh is hosting a conference this summer. It is the aptly named GibbsClassical Online Summer Conference.

If you are a teacher or administrator or parent or student, or anyone who is interested at all in classical education, you should consider signing up for this conference. You can do that, of course, at GibbsClassical.com. The reason I'm telling you this particularly right now is that the early bird pricing ends on March 31, which is this Thursday. If you're listening to this on the Tuesday when it comes out.

So you should go to GibbsClassical and sign up for that. If you are listening to this after March 31, then you can still go and sign up. It'll just be a little bit more. But you should definitely go check that out.

If you're interested in this podcast, if you're interested in any of the episodes where we talked about Gibbs's work, then you should go look into this conference. All right, next week we'll be back to our regular three guys sitting around the table talking about a thing, episodes. But I hope you will enjoy this week's episode. It's a little bit of a departure.

I thought it was a great conversation. And I'm so thankful that Josh took the time. So I hope you enjoy this episode. Hello, and welcome to classical stuff you should know.

Now, longtime listeners will know that I'm normally joined by Mr. Ajay Hanenburg and Mr. Graham Donaldson. But today we had a special guest.

So we recently covered a new essay from writer Josh Gibbs. And Josh Gibbs has graciously agreed to come on the podcast to talk a little bit about his background and that pamphlet from a few weeks ago. So hello, Mr. Josh Gibbs.

Welcome to classical stuff. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to have you here. So we have covered a number of your works on the podcast before.

We've talked about how to be unlucky. And again, so your parents want to send you to a classical Christian school, which we'll talk about later. But something we haven't really covered on the podcast is your how you got to classical education. You talk about it in how to be unlucky, but I was hoping, can you walk us from kind of the late 90s?

I you have described yourself as something of a slacker in high school to coming to work in classical education. Yeah, that's right. So in the mid 90s, my parents moved to Moscow, Idaho, where I attended Logos school. And that was after a couple of years of homeschooling.

And it wasn't working out great. And the Wilson came to when you're by Presbyterian Church, where we lived in Virginia and gave a talk on classical education. My parents were intrigued. We went until the look at Moscow and decided that this was a thing we were going to pursue.

So I think it was 1995 that I started attending Logos, and that was my freshman year. And I was always very good about attending school, not very good to attending to my teachers. I loved going to school. I loved spending time with my friends.

The primary value of school was inside jokes with friends, gossip with friends, flirting with girls. That was primarily what school was good for. And so my freshman year, I had perfect attendance at school. I didn't want to miss a day.

If I missed a day, something very important might happen to my friends. Nothing's going to happen during a lecture. It's going to be something that we can't be made up for. And so I was more or less like this all throughout high school.

I did have one great love in high school, one great academic love, I should say. And that was mock trial. I did mock trial in high school. I loved it.

And I gained a lot from it. I think a lot of the best things I got out of high school I got out of mock trial. And that's not even my teachers. It's less to do with what I was offered, more to do with what I received.

But I received a lot of mock trial. And then I dropped out of college a handful of times. It took me 10 years to graduate with a bachelor's degree from the University of Idaho. It probably should have taken me about nine months to graduate from that college.

But it took 10 years. And I was already in my first teaching job. I married in 2006. And I don't think I really started getting my life together until about maybe a year before I got married.

And I married this very bookish girl that I fell in love with in high school. But she showed me it down. And after I married, I became more intrigued by a quiet life, by staying at home, sort of life. And that was sort of the beginning of my interest in academic and intellectual things.

Yeah, eventually we'll get into more definitions around classical education. But for your personal growth, how much of you ending up in the classical world has to do with education and how much of it is marriage and children and more personal things? Well, I think that my teachers were always very patient people. And I had very good teachers in high school, many of whom were willing to play the long game.

And playing the long game means being willing to throw your pearls before swine and hope that the swine turned into people and pick up the pearls like 10 years later. So that was often the way I think my teachers thought of me, which isn't entirely fair because it's swine. And I think I went back and picked up a few pearls here by year by year. And I realized later on that a lot of what I've been taught in high school was extremely valuable.

And there were a number of teachers, logic teachers and history teachers and theology teachers that stood out to me and began meaning more to me in memory as the years passed. So I don't want to say this entirely classical or this entire, the reason why I'm in classical education is entirely because I'm married, although I think that marriage was the catalyst for beginning to care about what I'd heard back in high school. No, that makes a lot of sense. And that's I think you're giving lots of hope to parents who might have students that are quite not on that academic track, but then also I think of the students that come back five years later, you think they're not interested in anything you say and you just never know the second time they pick up a book that you taught or the second time they thought of some quote you said, and that's what turns something around for them.

There's just no way to know until five years later, right? Absolutely, absolutely. Absolutely. So I've always wondered this.

And in all versions of your bio, you would list that both of your children have seven names. What are the rest of us missing out on by not giving our children seven names? Well, I forget if I've ever explained why I gave my kids seven or my wife and I gave more kids something. Yes.

So back when I was in high school. My father had this, any of these things before, if you shopped at a Christian gift store in the 1980s or 1990s, you're probably familiar with a number of sort of standard issue evangelical posters that you might put on the wall of a study. And my father had this poster that was all of the names and euphemisms for God in the Bible and it's still sold to this day. And so this is like a long list, like Prince of Peace, you know, Lamb, Rock, like every single thing, every name and metaphorical description of God.

And I passed this poster every day coming in and out of my room because I had the pastor study to get to my room. And I was always sort of taken back by the fact that God had all of these names. And I think I came to believe that some of the richness of the experience of God had to do with the fact that he gave us all these different ways of thinking about it. And he was both a prince and a king.

That he was this very strong thing, this lion, but he was also this president himself, that's a lamb. And so when it came time to name my kids, I thought my children will have a richer personality if I give them all of these different names to inhabit. And so the names weren't a random assemblage. There is this sort of musical way of reciting all the names of the syllables shake out like a bit like syllables and lines of poetry.

But my wife and I spent nine months putting these names together meticulously and sort of including all these things in the names, almost like the names are sort of like keepsake, sort of like time capsules or boxes of favorite things. Like all my favorite stuff is in my kids' names. So then is that something that will then come up? So when I think of the few times I use my children's full name as like if they're in trouble, that sounds like something else of more like a reminder of, again, I don't know what, I imagine like the virtues would be included among those seven names or something like that.

Like is it more a reminder of who they could be or how are those seven names used then? Yeah, I would say that it's sort of that the names both are real and are potential realities to inhabit. So my older child is Camila Goliath, even Marie Francis Jerusalem jiggly gives. And my younger is Beatrice Babbit, Cassius Lestiadora Magnolia gives.

And all those names are important to my wife and I had one, some of them are family names, some of them are theological concepts, I think are very important. And there are also names of fictitious characters that I've written in short stories that also appear in their names. There are fictional characters, movies that are referenced in their names. So the names don't feel all that dated to me now because I tried to include things that I've been interested in for a long time for sure in their names.

But yeah, I would say that they are sort of realities to enter into, as opposed to thinking of them as accomplishments. Yeah, they're sort of offers. You could beat this person. Yeah.

So then if your background was with logos, were you Presbyterian growing up? I was all sorts of things growing up. My father was in the military, we moved around a lot. And so I have been a member of more Christian denominations than, honestly, I can name.

I mean, I attended Southern Baptist Church, Orthodox Presbyterian Church, Performed churches, C.R.E.C. churches, non-denominational Bible churches. I really saw the world before I turned 15. Was the Eastern Orthodox Church one of those churches you were a part of early on?

It was not. That was, I couldn't have told you what the Orthodox Church was before. I was 26, probably. Is that when you converted to the Eastern Orthodox Church?

It was 29. I think it was about three years later. Can you talk to me? I'm curious just of what brought you to that, how much of that is kind of starting with an interesting ancient things and then finding a nomination that lines up with that?

Or if there's more to it? It wasn't an interesting old things or even an interesting traditional things. I think the interesting tradition has grown out of being Orthodox, whereas the attraction to Orthodox was still the entirely different up front. The attraction to Orthodoxy had a lot to do with the fact that I was brought up to be critical of what I heard in church.

So my parents were a part of a non-trinitarian Christian cult for the first nine years of my life called the Wei Ministry. I found it, I think in the late 60s, 70s. The founder was Paul Werewell. You can look him up.

He died a long time ago, but the most famous work by Paul Werewell is called Jesus Christ is not God, rather, an ambiguous up front forthright sort of title. It was an absolutely bizarre amalgam of faith healing and blue centrism and heresy and gnosticism. My parents got burned very badly by this cult. They never really trusted any church after they got out, which is why we went to so many different churches.

From the point that they got out, I was raised to constantly question what I heard the man at the front of the name say every Sunday. Really, by the time I was 17 or 18, even at a pretty young age, I realized this was not a great way to go to church. I think a lot of my thoughts on authority, especially the authority of tradition, is an attempt to correct this way over analytical, highly skeptical, anti-authoritarian, iconoclastic sort of upbringing that I had where on the way home from church, we would all criticize what happened and what we had seen. My knowledge that this was not in effect with the raised children, and I didn't want to raise my children that way.

I needed a church for them where the authority of the church was not in question. A church didn't encourage analytical thinking on Sunday. There was more to life than analytical thinking. It's not bad, but it's not the whole story.

Not too long ago, Graham did an episode on Carl Truman's Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, which is a great book. But the place like my question at the end was if we're not centering this decision making an individual's, I don't know what other thing can make those decisions. So take your example of criticizing the pastor or priest up front every Sunday is a bad way to live. But it's also bad to imagine if the next church you walked into was the same one you were in for the first nine years, you shouldn't uncritically accept that.

Do you have some thought on how is it that you found the Orthodox Church and that is a good thing to submit to, therefore you can trust them? Or is there some other way of making that decision of what is worth trusting? Yeah, I think, well, to describe my experience the first time I went to an Orthodox Church, I think that the first Orthodox service that I attended was not Divine Letter to You on a Sunday morning was this epically long Wednesday evening service in the middle of the month. And it went on for hours.

And I had this unique experience when I was walking out of that service. And I mean, I should say, I'm very little about Orthodoxy walking into that service. I knew that I had some friends who were interested in it. But I think I had read half a dozen articles from David Bumpley-Hard's Friday First Things Gone.

Yeah, that was it. And I walked into this Orthodox Church. And my feeling when it was over was finally I have found something that doesn't need me. And I spoke with a friend about what I had seen, but all of my criticisms felt sort of senseless.

Like, I'm criticizing the sun. What point is there in criticizing the sun? Like, the sun doesn't need you. You need it.

It's been around for a long time. It's going to keep doing its thing. And the first time I came out of an Orthodox Church, I was like, okay, I can share my thoughts about what I saw. And the same way I can share my thoughts about the sun.

But it's not like the sun doesn't depend on me. It doesn't need me. This is more about my response to it than it's need of me. And so that doesn't entirely answer your question.

But I think it's important to ask yourself what exactly is an institution asking of me and what exactly are they promising in return? And what sort of guarantees, what sort of accomplishments can they point to that lend some sort of credibility about the claims that they're making about themselves? And it was also true that the claims of the Orthodox Church made about itself were far bigger and grander than any claims I'd ever heard in the other Church make. And yet there was absolutely no pressure to join it.

Like, I would go to these inquires and kind of humans class on Wednesday night. And like, there was no high pressure sales. It wasn't like, you've got to do this. You've got to do this.

You've got to do it now. Instead, the approach was you need to be fully convinced in your own mind or as fully convinced as you're going to get that you want to make a commitment to this. And remember that if you walk away before you make a commitment, that's fine. Like, if you don't make a commitment to us, your life might be a whole lot easier.

And it's a little bit like what the angel tells Dante when he's approaching the gates of purgatory. What do you want? Beware you may regret coming here, which is not the high pressure, you know, the high pressure sale. And I was moved and I found it very persuasive to the Church was more or less indifferent to me.

And at the same time, cared about me. It was this weird paradox. Like, they cared about me, but they weren't dying to have me there. It might have been because they didn't need you there that they could care about you.

It agreed because they only care about you coming for the right reasons if you don't have to join, right? Sure. I think I'm not Catholic, but I think of my image of like a Catholic mass every morning where you have the three people who show up. That mass is going to be there every day, no matter what, no matter how many people show up to it.

It's not a numbers game primarily. Yeah. So this, thank you for that. Let's really what I'm hoping for is for you to answer a bunch of disagreements we've had for going on like 200 episodes or so.

So this next section, I'm looking for a definition around classical education. When you're new as painful at you, it fits perfectly for when a parent is totally bought into classical education, but their child is not sure about it. So I just wanted to do some of the kind of the work to get there of defining what is classical education. So I'll push and ask questions as we go, but let's just at a high level, what is classical education?

I'm going to go with my favorite elevator pitch, which is there is an illiteracy of the soul which no diploma can cure. Classical education is just the education that emerges around this belief. That's Nicholas Gomez to be loved. A classical education is about learning to love what deserves to be loved.

It's about learning to take pleasure in transcendent and eternal things. It's about learning to despair of merely eminent things. A classical education is a way of repenting for a very long time and very slowly with other people and books. The work of, and this is not original, this is just barring Commander Kurdie here.

Classical education is remedial. It's remedial for the soul. It's about learning to repent in a systematic sort of way of your ignorance, much of which is learned, some of which is inherited. A classical education is about the good life.

It's about a life that is sustainably good and not merely pleasant for the short run. A classical education is about the reconciliation of the human and the divine. It plays a small, I would say non-sacramental role in the apotheosis of the human person. It's about divinization.

It's not accomplishing what the Lord's Supper is doing, but it's not working against it, I think that it's, I think in the restoration of Christian culture, John Senior says that Christian culture is just a mass and everything that grows up around the mass. And I would say that Christian culture is a mass in classical education, is the education that grows up, that naturally grows up around your university community. So I think when most people hear about classical education, they're thinking of the building that they would send their child to. So there's an age for it and there's a location for it.

The way you're talking about it is bigger than that. Is that correct? Am I hearing that correctly? Yes.

So then what else is required for, so some pieces of what you're talking about are regular attendance at church, you talk about every day, every Sunday Christians in the essay don't get to. But what else is required for this classical education to be possible? For a classical education to be possible, you need an old book, a teacher who's read it and a student who has it. I would say that those three things are absolutely necessary.

And I don't know that you can get, I wouldn't get much simpler than that. I think that the text or the old book stands for the tradition of human learning. That the teacher is presenting and making a live for the student. But I would say that these three parties and that the text is sort of king.

And that the teacher has this princely role and is helping the student to have the princely role as well. Yeah, you've talked before about that. It's lectern and there's an authority that the teacher brings to it. But it's not even really the teacher.

It's the work that is kind of reading into the students, right? That's right. The text is the sky and the teacher is the finger of the point of the sky. Well, hearing you talk about it that way of localizing it like that, have you come across David Hicks' article about the possibility of classical Christian education?

Yeah. Or heard him talk about it. So he runs through these four pillars and ends the thing by saying that classical Christian education is no longer possible because of kind of a, either cultural resistance or just, there's nothing, there's no intentional, animate force behind this. It's just culture is opposed to the things that classical education wants to pass along.

Is that an argument that you agree with or does it really come down to just the teacher, the book and the student? It certainly feels like it's not possible. Like most days I come into work, it feels like it's not possible. So even if you, even if a teacher is not exactly the answer you push, I feel like even if you don't agree with Hicks, every teacher before they come into a school should have to write their own argument about why it's not possible.

Like even if you, even if you don't buy this, you don't really, if you're not willing to work capable of making a case about why it's not possible, you don't really understand what you're going up against. And I feel like a lot of the people that, so I don't actually know if I agree with David Hicks, but I totally respect this position and this argument because I would prefer it to say that I disagree with Hicks in the letter of what he's arguing, but entirely agree with the spirit of what he's arguing. And that the article is really more about waking teachers up and waking parents up to exactly how much, to exactly how much resistance there is to the books that the teacher is trying to teach. And so like kind of in the same way, you know, there's people out there that say stuff like, I don't know if I can bring a child into this world.

I disagree with that. I think you can bring a child into this world. But I also think that for every truly contemplative person, you need to pass through a moment where you do seriously doubt whether you can bring a child into this world because that just proves that you have taken the world seriously and you have assessed the problem for just how bad it is. But yeah, I would say that the child that's applied into this book, teacher, student sort of sort of trio has to be someone who's of, or it helps if they're of a certain receptive mind to what the teacher is offering.

And you know, of course, the teacher also needs to present the book in such a way that the book has authority in the teacher obeys it. The obedience of the teacher is modeled to the student. And so it's not just any book, any teacher and any student that are going to make a classical education possible. There's a number of caveats about the spiritual state of all three of these things that I would want to declare.

Yeah. And there's also a piece of it that is outside of the education that is a more cultural education maybe. We'll talk about taste, which is a fascinating section of what you have recently written about. But also there's just, it seems like there are so many things that work against what a classical education is trying to accomplish.

And they aren't morally evil things. They're morally, or they're just distracting things. Right. So is the sheltering of a student?

And if you want to disagree with that word, also a part of classical education? Or is that something different? Well, it seems like if we're going to, I mean, if we're going to ask that sort of question, you know, we might as well ask what else about the child's life do we need to assume or not assume the child is being supplied here? Why do they have a place to sleep at night?

Are they well fed? Are they just, are you receiving a child that's hopelessly addicted to drugs every day that they show up and they can actually pay attention? So I mean, there's all sorts of, there's all sorts of difficulties that are going to keep the child from actually receiving what you have to offer them. Sorry.

I think I lost the question. My question was, is there more, my question was around sheltering. So an idea that's come up in your writing a number of times is around smartphones, around video games, around kind of things that are distracting of depth of making oneself better. Is that also a piece of classical education?

It, yes and no. If we're talking about actual classrooms, I don't know that there's any way of college cutting all of that stuff out. But at the same time, I do want to say, you know, sort of in reference to what I put forward earlier, which is that human beings have long memories. And it's possible to communicate to some, you know, TikTok star or video game junkie, some fundamental truth that they're entirely resistant to and yet it sinks down deep into their memory and lays dormant like a cicada for 17 years and then comes to life a long time later and starts making all this noise and all this activity in their heart.

So I think because we can't write any student off forever and human beings are capable of surprised and sudden change and all the rest, I think it's still worth it to try to educate everyone in the classroom and hope that something sticks, even in the minds of students that are entirely hostile and entirely resistant and hope that, you know, hope that this might seem like a tried implication of Scripture, but God will give the increase that you plan to see and it sits there for a long time and that God works with your faithful teaching in mysterious ways, many years later in ways that you couldn't have possibly predicted. So let's follow that idea through then to your new essay. I'm going to get the title correct this time. So your parents are thinking of sending you to a classical Christian school.

I think I got it. My favorite thing is that when you email the pamphlet, you just call it so your parents in the title and I assume that's for limits to the subject line, which I just thought that was very funny. But so, you know, we spend the time going through the essay, we get to the end of it. Graham's first question at the end, is this essay primarily about providing a filtering function for the classical school?

So I said yes at the end. I'm curious, would you agree that that's a primary function of the essay? Yeah, this is a gatekeeping tool left, right, front, back and so on. So then let's go with taking the first point of, I think any student would benefit from a classical education, be that by your definition, home school counts under that, anything that involves private school account for that.

But if anyone would benefit from exposure to that classical education, do you have any worries about providing a filtering function where some people are going to say, I don't agree with this, therefore I won't go, therefore they'll miss out? No, the fact that everyone will gain from it doesn't mean that everyone will gain from equally. And I think that Christ of ministry provides numerous examples of his unwillingness to deal with skeptics and cynics who were not approaching him with purity and simplicity of heart. Christ was not one who was willing to tailor his message to an easily digestible form for absolutely everyone who came to him.

In fact, even conveys his message in ways that he knows the five expectations of frustrates certain of his crowds. But if you're going to ask for the Pharisees better off hearing the words of Christ, they're like, yeah, no telling what the words of Christ will do to them or for them in the long run. And before the New Testament over, you've got a former Pharisee becoming one of the greatest apostles. So it's possible for the words of Christ to have this sort of long-term effect.

And so I think that it might be the case that everybody who shows up at the classical school would be better off getting a classical education than going to a public school. That fact alone doesn't mean that you need to let everyone in, because you also have to worry about what you can offer all of the faithful apostles and disciples that you have in class. And it's often the case that students that are hostile to a classical education end up having far more influence over student culture than obedient students do. I would say that for the average classical Christian school, the three percent, the most worldly three percent of the student body has about 70 percent of the influence over the student body.

And if you're, I'm sure you've heard the quote before, I pay the school master of it since the school boys who educate my son. And so for that reason, I think you've got to be as careful about who you let into the school to be a student as you do about who's the teacher. And if you wouldn't just let any old body teach the enlightenment, you can't just let any old body sit in the students desk because they're going to end up doing some teaching too. We got a great email from a listener who works at a smaller classical school in a more rural setting.

And their comment was, you'll have, there are certain cities or towns where you just don't have enough people. And so for there to be a classical school there requires some lowering up whatever that threshold is. I wonder if you have thoughts on that? Do you accept the premise of that idea?

Or, or would you say you're primarily writing to a larger school that has a wait list or kind of needs filtering? I would say that I'm merely writing to large schools. I would say a sort of uncomfortable truth on this question of small schools and standards as a quotation that I picked up from Andrew Kern about nine years ago, which is a classical school has to be willing to die. A classical school has to be willing to say we're not going to, there are certain things we're not going to do to stay alive.

And it would be better for us to close our doors with integrity than to keep them open dishonestly. I'm not going to claim to know exactly where that point is. But if you're at the sort of school where like there's no book in the curriculum that's more than 150 years old and you don't teach any subject, which isn't immediately acceptable to the spirit of the age, you can't claim to be classical because you've got some pole parrotic poetics filings to your scope and sequence. That's you are being dishonest.

You are not a classical school. You wish you were. You wish you had the guts to be a classical school. You wish you had the constituents to be one, but you're just not.

Yeah. We haven't even brought it up. But the Dorothy Sayers definition of pedagogy didn't enter your definition of what it is to be classical. I wonder if you have thoughts then.

Does that then mean that Dorothy Sayers has nothing to say about how a classical school should look or is it just the two are unrelated? I don't think that Dorothy Sayers has nothing to say. Dorothy Sayers is one of the great literary critics of the 20th century. And she understood that the legal mindset better than almost anyone else in the 20th century.

It could be Louis and Peter Brown accepted. I don't know if this is all that controversy anymore. I think that Dorothy Sayers has been dramatically overplayed in classical schools. Dorothy Sayers had about $3 where the knowledge should contribute to the classical conversation and people like to pretend that she's this powerball ticket, this winning powerball ticket of an intellect.

I think that Dorothy Sayers got a few things completely wrong. I think that she completely misunderstood middle school and the sort of advice that she gives on middle school students is as backward as it gets. I like the logic. Yeah.

I'm teaching logic and argumentation in middle schoolers. I like the idea of I just simply think that she misread human nature and the goal of constructing an education that's based around human nature is good. And the fact that little kids love to memorize stuff, so give them stuff to memorize really by the time you're 17 or 18, you have all these feelings and you need an outlet form and so you teach kids poetry. The whole idea that middle schoolers pull to argue is to teach them to argue.

That's nuts. Middle schoolers want to argue so you teach them to be silent. That's what you do with middle schoolers. So I think that Dorothy Sayers has some very important things that she's contributed and I'm very glad that she existed.

I'm glad she read about classical education. I'm glad that Doug Wilson read Dorothy Sayers and I'm glad that Doug Wilson wrote his book. But at the same time, there's a whole lot more out there on classical education that anyone reading Dorothy Sayers needs to also read. Do you have any like what would you point to as something that people should look at either instead of or in addition to lost rules of learning?

Well, it depends on, great question, great question. It entirely depends on whether you want to think of this in terms of primary sources or secondary sources. So primary sources should be the right answer, right? Go read the classics.

Well, yeah, but I think there are certain books you read on the subject of education that are very helpful on education, but you may not think of those books as theories on education. I think Divine Comics is a theory of education. I think there's a lot to learn about education from the Divine Comedy. And you could probably write a great book on a great book.

You could write a great word commentary on running a classical school. There's nothing but meditations on how education works in the Divine Comedy. I think that sort of discursive style is well suited. If you're going to teach in discursive style and you need an education on that, read the constellation of philosophy, read the dialogue and all that.

If we're talking about secondary sources in the last section. Obviously, I just have to be unlucky. How to be unlucky? That's the right answer.

That's the right answer. Yeah, I'm going to go with liberal arts tradition by Clark and Jane. But I'm going to acknowledge that that's a highly academic book that you can't get to a parent. I don't even know that that's the book that you can give to somebody in their late teens or early 20s.

Liberal arts tradition by Clark and Jane is a brilliant book. But that's inside baseball right there. That's for people that already drank the Kool-Aid and they're like 10 years into their career. It's not an introduction.

And recovering lost to learning was great when it came out. Really somebody needs to write the sequel to recovering the lost to learning. And no one's written that book and no one, I don't even know that anyone's tried. Yeah, I can't.

Nothing comes to mind who's trying for that. Yeah. I was joking before. I do think how to be unlucky and something they will not forget.

Get at something they will not forget specifically is how to teach this classically, this classics style in the classroom. And around getting to what's important. So I do think those would be true. I tried.

You know, running gets worse. Yes. If you want to know your book, I will. Happy to do it.

Okay. Well, to take it back then to the newest essay, so your parents are thinking of sending you to a classical Christian school. The piece of the essay, so you run through these four things that will probably surprise a student if they just show up to a classical school and don't know about them ahead of time. And the last one of them is around good taste or the importance of taste of school.

When that came up in our discussion, the first reaction was, oh, I wish we had a taste class. I don't think that's what you mean by taste or maybe this. I'm curious, how is that taught? How is that conveyed to students through the classical school?

Is it a specific class? Is it time around teachers? Is it something else? Oh, you mean do we have like the finer things, like they have any other.

We literally have very tough, really, that's what I want you to know. And I'm very proud of that. That's awesome. Okay.

So, so the answer to the question is like, yes, all of these things. Okay. So I taught for a number of years, in aesthetics class, ended up turning into a cooking class. And we read, you know, we read portions of very short introductions to beauty by Roger Scrutin, Supper the Lamb, What is Art by Leo Tolstoy.

And it was like this little body of aesthetic theories and, and there's beauty. And I live on the campus of my school and so we would go over to my house and we would, was sort of a cooking class at the same time while reading Supper the Lamb. And then it was also a bit of an art history class. It was kind of, it was like just my favorite things, all kind of trying to gather.

So I think that every school ought to have something like that. Now I never took this class though, right? Like, really? Come on.

That's why I wanted to take choir. I tried. I gave him my best. I taught this like for like four years.

And like last year, there was only three people in one of them that were came. Will you save the city for three righteous? But I don't think that this is merely like a discrete class. I don't think that this is merely like a cooking class.

I think this is also the way that you introduce classic literature. And that there are certain guarantees that you can make about classic, classical literature, certain promises you can make about books at last, and music at last, and artwork at last, and all the rest of it that you can't make about other things. And then it's where they tell students, good things are hard to like, plus things are easy to like, good things and pleasant things are not always the same. And there are, I appreciate the conversation that you had towards the end of last episode.

But I was acknowledged that there is sort of this fast to reality to absolutely everything. Fast food movies and fast food poetry and fast food ideas and fast food theology and fast food worship and fast food, everything. And this is a sort of cheap, easy, greasy, sold in the middle of the night out the drive-through window sort of reality that most students grow up in, where absolutely nothing they see or hear or read is worth going back to. And that's the really awful thing about like scrolling media, is that you're literally throwing your life into a black pit that you never need to revisit.

I guess not like, I mean, I'm finishing my 19th reading of the Divine Comedy, still good 19 minutes later. Whereas, I mean, there's plenty of contemporary novels that I enjoy reading once or twice, but I'm not going to read my year of rest and relaxation 19 times, once or twice was good enough. And that's a decent novel, let alone all of the sort of media paper back novels, where you never need to go back to them the second time. Like you run that stone drive the first time you read it, the first time you watched it.

But explaining this to students and like, I think there's a temptation for a lot of teachers to oversell what you're doing, like, oh, Divine Comedy, it's so great, it's so wonderful. You'll absolutely love it. It's thrilling. All these terrible things happen in hell.

It's so gross, you're going to love it. Like, no, not really. It's a difficult book. It's slow.

And if you're reading Dorothy Sayers' translation, it sounds all wacky. There's also references to... Doesn't hurt Ryan, isn't that the charm of hers? That's the, yeah, charm and quotation marks.

There's a lot of men to read John Senior, you're talking about Dorothy Sayers' translation. Have you read Restoration of Chris Coleser? I have not. John Senior.

Oh, man. Does he have a section in there on Sayers? Oh, it's a savage critique of the translation. It's Divine Comedy.

But, but the comedy's different. Like, you could be Mark Nieces' translation. It's still very difficult. And so, like, telling students, like, this is like transformers, but that...

I feel like there's a lot of people trying to sell the Divine Comedy or Paradise loss along this round. It's like, you thought Friday or 13th was exciting. Wait, so you get to the inferno? Like, no, no, no, no, no, no.

It's a different sort of a thing. But I think that you've got to explain this to students. I know that this is a big buzzword, but I feel like the teachers need to be a lot more transparent about their students. What exactly to expect of the literature?

And I don't like teachers who hide methods that they're applying to their students and have this secret ways of selling things to students that students never pick up on. I try to make absolutely everything clear to my students, everything plain. Like, when I whine about my students' parents in front of them, your parents keep doing this and it bugs me. Don't have your parents do this.

Don't have to email me. I don't want to hear about your workload. I don't want to hear about this. I don't want to hear about this.

And I don't hide anything from them. Sure. Because I don't have anything from them. But I try to be as open with them as I can.

And I try to be open with them about how difficult the books are that they're going to read as well. But then, does that mean that you're opening? Do you read the entire comedy? Do you read all three parts?

We move through all of it, canceled by canceled. There are a few can'tches where we only read the summaries up front. And we read the abstract, but not the actual text itself. I'm just wondering then, maybe you don't give them any context before going into it.

But do you tell them that this will be a difficult work? Do you tell them? You'll probably be bored by the parody. So what is the honest way of approaching those works?

Like, what's the thing with students? Well, I tell them, and this is sort of a kind of canned speech that I give a couple of times every year. I tell them, your mind is going to wonder why we read this. And that's nothing.

That's not a sin. It's not unbelievable that it would happen. It's not a sign that there's something wrong. So when your mind wanders, it's more important that you recognize that your mind is wondering and bring it back to the text.

And so the longer you spend in books like this, the easier it becomes to control your thought. But yeah, I get bored when I have to do things. People are forcing me to do all the time. Some of my mind wanders.

Do not go to something more interesting. So I think that acknowledging to students that your mind is going to be difficult to understand. It's just one of the sort of boilerplate beginning week of the school year sort of lectures where you're not going to pretend with your students they are naturally inherently easily interested in all of this. And you say, not only are we going to learn the content, but we're going to learn how to what I want to say.

We're going to learn how to get at this content. And even getting at it is quite difficult. Training your mind to be receptive to it and to come back to it when your mind is like, oh, this is going to take some practice. So I think that's a standard lit teacher, sort of speech.

You've talked before about how students can understand the constellation of philosophy, at least the earlier parts before it gets weird and metaphysical at the end. Do they have the experience with the purgatory also? Understand what Dante's doing? No, my students don't.

I would trust somebody who was only 14 or 15 years old to read about the first two thirds of the constellation and to understand a good portion of it, whether you liked it or not. Whereas I think some of the most important cantos of the purgatory, oh, one, four, nine, 18, 30, 31. I would never since students come to read those on their own and figure it out on their own. I mean, those are so difficult, even if they're important.

I was going to say later one, I don't know if 30 or 31 is where it turns into pure allegory. It's fascinating to read, but it's also, I read the Eslen translation, I needed his notes at the back to tell me what is going on and what is this. Right. Yeah, the pageants that he sees, 24 elders in the Kindle sticks and all that.

So maybe this will kind of be a last question around the new essay, and then we'll do a little wrap up at the end. We've gotten this push back before, and we got it recently in talking about your essay. You're right. You don't have to spend much time in a classical Christian school.

Do you hate it when people quote things to you that you wrote? Is that weird? No, I don't hate it. I get nervous because I worry that I said something really stupid.

No, you said something. And I think we quoted this in there too. You don't have to spend much time in the classical Christian school before you hear someone mention truth, goodness, and beauty. This is because classical Christian teachers believe that pursuing truth, goodness, and beauty is how you keep from flunking life.

Later on earlier, I said that classical Christian school teachers believe that pursuing truth, goodness, and beauty is what keeps a person from flunking life. It might be better to say that learning to love truth, goodness, and beauty is what makes a person's life true good and beautiful. The feedback we often get is that if you were to go back 70, I'm sure you've heard this before, you go back 70 years, and essentially everyone who is well educated is classically educated. But maybe you can disagree with the premise, but that's usually the way this question comes to us.

Well, we still had problems before 1940, pick your cut off here. Sure. So then, was, do we say that they weren't truly classically educated? Do we say that, there seems to be some contradiction there.

We didn't eradicate all our problems by getting education perfectly right. So then, does the pursuit of the true good and beautiful actually make us virtuous? Does it actually make us true good and beautiful? Okay, so I think that the question is sort of born out of this certain belief about the possibility of changing the world, and it's about this consideration of the world.

And I think whenever you start talking about changing the world, you start, when you go down, when you start down a track, you've got to remember all of the biblical conscience about the world. And the sort of questions that Christ gives about the world, the world hated me, they're going to hate you too. Christ says that knowing what the next 2000 years of human history are going to look like, man is born into trouble. Is this far, it's fly up?

That's not something that was true only in Job's day. I mean, that's just a constant in human history. All of the questions about what a wretched place the world are that we get in Ecclesiastes are true back when Solomon said them 20,000, 20,000 years ago, and they're true now. And they were true during the Middle Ages.

If the world hated me, it's going to hate you too. It's a statement that the church has been reading and believing in the time of Julian Yapaste, in the time of Constantine, in the time of Theodosius, when the first Caliphate is overtaking all the Christian space around the Mediterranean. It's true during the great schism, it's true during the Renaissance, or information like these claims about the world as like a difficult sort of painful place to be are true, whether we have classical education or not. So there's no biblical claim about how difficult the world is that classical education is going to make go away.

But I wouldn't say that this is about, I wouldn't say that classical education is about restoring some sort of golden age. I don't think there's some golden age in human history that we're trying to get back to. So there's plenty of, I mean, there's plenty of conservatives and Republicans who live in some sort of fantasy world, but it's like everything was great in the 1950s. It's crazy.

Man was born into trouble in the 1950s, as far as fly up, we're just as he is now. But, you know, I think I often say is that classical education is not about it's not about returning to some golden age. It's about the preservation of golden things. It's about custody.

It's about taking care of golden things. And these things have to be taken care of because the world's a wretched place and it's going to want to try to destroy good things. And so it's a responsibility of people who love goodness and truth and duty to be the carriers of the fire, like to make a cornet, correctly referenced, or that even when the world is falling apart, you've got to carry the fire. It's not about worship of some sort of ideal that was inhabited in the past.

It's about these manifestations of a higher better world that occasionally break through in this world. And when we find them, we've got to hold onto them with all of our mind. I think that's what classical education is about. So yeah, you're wanting to take this through the 50s or 40s, you're going to find people stealing and killing and destroying and raping and piloting and raving each other off.

And that's true whether people have a classical education or not. I mean, there's a patron saint of prostitutes for crying out loud. That's how awful a place the world is. And that's back when the patron saint of prostitutes originates from a time when the Christian vision of the world was dominant in the West.

So how much more now that has been lost? So then, if classical education were to become more widespread, would you not expect any change in, I guess, with the world not looking any different? Is maybe one way to pose the question? No, I wouldn't.

I whether the world, I do not think in terms of changing the world, I do not think in terms of having an impact on the world. I don't think in terms of having an impact on the culture. I don't like people who reduce classical education to a means of getting leverage over society and moving society in a better direction. He who saves one life saves the world entire.

That's classical education right there, which means that if you reach one student in class of 20, if you reach one student in five sections, that's your whole year. That's your life. Your life is your life is bound up in this one person that you could do some good. And if the world ends up changing or it doesn't, that's really not my concern.

And I'm not expecting it. And I should add that I think as soon as you start thinking, the classical education is going to make things better. The temptation to shortcut and try to seize on these better things that you think it's going to lead to is just unavoidable. And that's what turns classical education into a movement that's primarily about dollars and cents and figures and rising and falling and enrollment numbers.

And that's just the way the world thinks. Sure. Yeah, it makes me think of Joseph Bieber when he's writing about leisure and says that leisure can't be for any other thing because if it's for something else, then you'll twist and turn it to get at what you actually want. So what you want is to change the world.

Classical education becomes a tool to cut out the hard parts. I mean, that's what you're saying. Yeah. But you would say that the individual student's life should be different 10 years out for having gone to the classical school, correct?

If the class, if the student receives what it's not, that's what I mean. Yeah. Yes, I do. And that would look like a husband loving his wife, raising happy children.

Yeah. Maybe not wealthy, but perhaps enjoying their work. So there are things that would be different, but they're smaller scale, I guess. Is that the way to put it?

Yeah. And I say that I don't think classical education is going to change the world. I don't mean it's not going to do anybody. That's what I mean.

So I do believe that a person is better off receiving a good education than not. And that receiving a good education will have a very fine edifying effect on a person's life to some extent in the short run and definitely in the long run. Perfect. All right.

Let me move toward wrapping up. There's so much of your work that we haven't had a chance to cover. So I just wanted to give you a chance to talk about a few things. First off, GibbsClassical.com is that the best place for people to go to get updates on everything that you're working on?

It is. GibbsClassical.com has a mailing list and I send out information on new work, new classes and videos of webinars that I do here. Yeah. That's the best hub for reaching me and finding out what I'm doing.

Yeah. And depending on when this comes out, it'll either be a week or two weeks away from the end of early bird pricing for the Gibbs Classical Online Summer Conference. Do you want to talk a little bit about what people can expect who the conference is for? Yeah.

Yeah. So the Gibbs Classical Online Summer Conference is July 8th and 9th. It's on Zoom. There are, you can register on jibsclassical.com.

It's eight lectures and two Q&A sessions of the course of two days on a variety of subjects, many of which are geared towards high school teachers, some of which are geared towards parents and administrators too. So there's a bit of a, I'm trying to cast a bit of a broad net. Even the lectures that really meant more for teachers, I think administrators would benefit from hearing. And it's on a range of what I think of as practical subjects.

So the video that I have posted on my website, I see, I've done a lot of conferences in my life and I've heard a lot of inspiring lectures at conferences that I can't remember two weeks later. And this is not that sort of conference. So my goal is to make this conference like immensely useful. I want to give this sort of lecture where like two months later, you still remember a good portion of what was said.

You're given some practical things to do, some tools by which you can govern your classroom and bless your students and bless your employees if you're an administrator, not just a sort of generic like, I work as very hard, but we must pray to someone, my brothers, which is like a lot of talks are, yes, all the conference is turned into this. Teachers of the world, you're not young. So I wanted to be very practical. And I also wanted to be useful in the long run.

So all of the lectures that I'm giving are going to be written out word for word. And if you sign up for the conference, I'm going to give you this huge PDF of like 50,000 words of all the lectures that are included in the conference. Like you will have not only the ability to download all of the videos of the sessions, but you will have word for word transcripts of absolutely everything. And then discussion guides for each of the lectures for implementing these ideas at your school.

Sure. That's perfect. And I want to say I think there are discounts based on the number of tickets that you buy also. So if you're looking to send lots of people, everyone who wants to send lots of people is what I'm trying to say.

So you can find that at www.getclasschool.com as well. We have barely, I think we might have mentioned it once, we barely mentioned your podcast proverbial, which is excellent. We, Josh Gibbs also has a regular column on Cersei Institute called The Cedar Room, which I found out is a song. It's from the doves?

It's by dunks, yeah. I've lost souls. I just found that yesterday. It's a great song.

My first time is with you. It was also yesterday for the record. And also we barely referenced that Josh Gibbs has an upcoming book called Love What Last. Do we know at this point when it's coming out?

No, we're just waiting on the fellow who agreed to write the forwards right forward. I heard you referenced that recently. Does that mean it's like a big deal person writing the introduction or writing the preference? I think he's big deal.

Okay. I'm looking forward to it. And obviously, he's, yeah, he's here. Oh, mine.

So, wow, see, that's things like that get me excited. So I'm looking forward to it. And of course, we'll look forward to covering that on the podcast as well. But anyway, there are lots of other things we could have talked about with Josh Gibbs.

You should go to give the classical to sign up for his updates there and to see all the other things that he's involved with. But we would be here for many, many days if we went through that. So I'll go ahead and wrap it up there. Josh Gibbs, thank you for coming on the podcast.

And yeah, just want to say thank you so much for all the work that you do. Absolutely. Thanks Thomas. Thanks for having me.

Absolutely.