EP 147 Why Culture Is Crumbling (and How Moms Can Fix It)

Guess what?!

I've spent quite a bit of time over the last couple of months putting together the training I'll be giving this week! (I'm super excited about it by the way 😉.)

And as I was editing it down to make sure it isn't too long, I had to cut out some information I really wanted you to have.

Then I realized - I can just put it in this week's podcast so you still have it! 

I know many of you, like me, feel frustrated, overwhelmed and sometimes even scared with what's going on in our culture. And I want you to better understand WHY these things are happening.

So this week I dive deep into the History of American Education and how it mirrors the moral decline in our culture.

When I made these connections, it literally changed the way I see the world, and how I navigate it.

I WANT that for you too! 

That's why this week I talk about: 

• the surprising moment that opened my eyes to the education I had never received
• why reading original great thinkers changed the way I understood truth and personal growth
• the kind of learning that strengthens reasoning, communication, and relationships
• what our modern education has lost and why that matters so much now
• why I believe moms need these tools if we want to lift our families and our culture

So if you want to...

• make better sense of what's going on in our crazy world
• know how to better lead your family in the madness
• stop feeling scared and gain clarity about what you can actually DO about our culture
• link arms with like-minded women and start turning things around...

Then give this one a listen.

And PASS IT ON if it resonates because we both know that understanding the problem is the first step to solving it.

This week you'll gain that understanding! 

With love,
Audrey

P.S. For the rest of this story and more insights on how you use what I share in this podcast to solve your significant problems and move forward in your life, join me in the live training this Thursday night!

AI GENERATED TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

Welcome back to the podcast. I’m Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission Driven Life and founder of The Mission Driven Mom.

And if you are someone who has been looking around at our culture and you feel like it’s crumbling, you see the loss of virtue and the loss of truth, you feel frustrated, overwhelmed, maybe even scared, you are not alone. There’s a reason for that. Our culture is declining, and it is scary and overwhelming and difficult to deal with.

So today I want to talk to you about the education that you probably didn’t have that would help you to identify truth, and how that is the key for you and I to solve our significant problems.

You’ve been listening. I’ve been talking about this training that I’m going to do that’s coming up, and building out that training, I’ve had to leave most things out. Originally, I had a story in there that I wanted to share with you, but it didn’t make it into the final cut. And so I figured in today’s podcast, I could share with you what didn’t make it into the training.

And by doing that, it will better prepare you for that training. You’ll have a better idea what you can expect, and you’ll just have some background and some depth around the things that I’m going to share, a better understanding about why it matters so much.

A Difficult Season of Motherhood

So some of you have probably heard the story that when I was a young mom, I had three kids in six years, and things were really, really rough.

My husband had this pornography issue that he told me about before we got married, but it just got worse after we got married. I was not dealing with it well, and of course my pregnancies were really, really difficult. I was in bed, throwing up, hospitalized.

And then finances were rough because we were a one income family and my husband was commission based, and so I was constantly worried about money. Of course our marriage was struggling through the financial problems and the parenting problems and the pornography problems, as you can imagine.

Then on top of that, we had all these extended family issues that complicated everything. In fact, around this time, both of our parents were separated. Blaine’s were divorcing. I was kind of my mom’s confidant, and it was really, really rough going.

And I just got to this point where I had dedicated myself to my children for six or seven years at this point, and I felt a little brain dead. I felt like I was getting lost in it all. I was starting to feel more and more depression, less and less motivation to do the things that I knew I needed to do to take better care of myself, and I felt like I just needed and wanted something for myself.

I didn’t have any idea what that was.

Discovering a New Kind of Education

In fact, I spent like a year looking for something that was for me, that was not going to take over my life. I didn’t want to go have a career, especially at this point when my children were young, but I needed something.

So about this time, I was talking to my sister in law about all these issues. She turned me onto this little college, which unfortunately has since gone defunct. And she said something like, well, you can help build your own curriculum or whatever.

And I was like, what are you talking about? That’s weird.

So when I went to her house, she opened up the computer and she showed me their website. And that moment is just seared on my brain, in her family room, looking at her computer that was sitting on the little desk in the family room.

And the number one thing that struck me so hard was this school listed their curriculum on their website, and it said that they read Plato. And I didn’t even know what to think. I remember like yelling, like bursting out, they read Plato? What in the world?

And then I realized that I had never read Plato. And then I realized that I had never thought about the fact that I had never read Plato. And then I thought, how did I make it through fifteen years of formal education? If we had his writing still, why wasn’t that part of the curriculum?

Well, duh. He’s like one of the smartest people that’s ever lived. You would think that if you wanted to give people a decent education, you would have them read from the smartest people that ever lived, right?

So I was just dumbfounded and so intrigued, so interested.

Reading the Great Thinkers

And it took me quite a while to decide to sign up. And I’ll talk to you more in the training about why I ended up signing up and what it has to do with you and your family and your family legacy.

But I did end up signing up and taking classes. And I want to talk to you about something I’ve really never talked about in this much detail before for the next few minutes because I think it’s really important for me to give you context and a framework around what was happening at this school.

So first of all, we read stuff like Plato. Okay. We read Aristotle. We read, I don’t know, all the people, Plutarch and Archimedes and Marcus Aurelius and Cicero, some whose names I’d heard, some who I hadn’t. I had to become acquainted with people like Hobbes or the Scottish Enlightenment or the Age of Reason thinkers or whatever. Even people in the Renaissance, I only knew the artists at this point.

So we’re reading from the people who had the ideas first or who fleshed them out in ways that were super impactful for the culture.

So that’s radically different. No textbooks. Sometimes there’s a compilation of readings, like short selections from individuals. Sometimes there’s a really, really reputable, well researched, and original writings author to give us a summary of something, and then we would have selections of original writings to go along with that, like for example in American history.

But the focus was to go to the source, to be at the original writing itself. And it was so hard, so incredible. It just made all the difference in the world to read from that person their original idea instead of reading all these other people who were going to tell me what that person thought of whatever.

And that’s what a lot of our textbooks are like today, right? They are four, five, six layers away from the original writing. They read the commentary of someone’s commentary of someone’s commentary instead of just going to the source.

Learning Through the Source

Now, when I tried to read these, I didn’t always get it the first time or the second time or even the third time through, and I didn’t always have time to read them a lot of times through. But I would get a little, and that little bit would open up my mind. It would increase my confidence. It would make new neurons fire in my brain and help me to see things in brand new ways that I never saw them before.

So I signed up and I’m just doing first this distance course, and it’s just the readings, and I’m having a phenomenal time.

In fact, it took me a year and a half to do my first distance course because I didn’t have structure, I didn’t have deadlines, I didn’t have mentoring, I didn’t have other students, I didn’t have anything. I just kind of had a list of readings mostly.

And eventually I ended up hiring a mentor to help me finish the course because it was like I was so stuck in The Federalist Papers. I just could not figure it out.

Well, eventually there were distance courses, and I was able to go to a real classroom with students, with a mentor. And I didn’t know until that point the other aspects of what this education was like.

The Power of Socratic Discussion

And I’m going to talk to you in just a minute about its history and its rich context and why it matters so much.

So we get into these classrooms, and instead of having a teacher, we have what they keep calling a mentor. The mentor is way ahead of us, but they’re also like a student with us.

And instead of having rows of chairs facing this teacher and having all these lectures happening every time and we’re just sitting there absorbing information from the guru of gurus like you would do in college, often we were in a circle. If we were online, we were all just equal squares right on the screen, and we were all talking to each other.

It was Socratic discussion, which I didn’t know what that was, and I didn’t know it came from Socrates, and I didn’t know Plato taught us about it. I didn’t know it meant learning through asking and answering deep, meaningful questions.

And the mentor led because the mentor is way ahead and they are sculpting it. They are using the thoughts and ideas of this really rich reading and the people that come with all of their background and their personal experience, and they’re using all of that to sculpt this beautiful environment where we all learn from each other.

And they’re using incredible questions, and they’re using other resources that they’ve read, and they’re using their experience, and they’re using their well honed reasoning skills.

And that’s one of the goals that they’re trying to help us with, is just to think better. Just to actually stop, slow down, think things through, ponder them, sit on them for a while, and really have them percolate in our minds and in our hearts so that they become part of us.

Becoming a Better Thinker

And it was crazy in these discussions because the mentor would ask me what I thought, and that had never happened before.

And then Jacques Barzun teaches, he’s one of many incredible people that teach how to run great discussions, he says that great mentors will push their students back up against the wall of the great absolutes.

And so that’s what the mentor is doing, is inviting conversation, helping us to be vulnerable, helping us to engage in a quality conversation with each other, but then pushing back against our assumptions and against the answers that you just give off the cuff or the things you’ve been taught to think by your culture.

And they make you question your assumptions and conclusions that you’ve drawn and beliefs that you have and ways of being that you’ve adopted because you might not be in line with good logic. You might be living out beliefs that aren’t helpful to you and you might be totally out of line with truth.

And so I came to understand over time, as I eventually wrote courses for this school, and I’ll talk about that in just a second, and I was taught to mentor, and I got lots and lots of practice there, and then of course for the last twenty years I’ve gone on to practice that lots and lots of places.

And what I learned is that this Socratic discussion is so valuable because it teaches you to listen way better to other people, to be far more empathic to their thoughts and ideas because you’re letting them talk through what’s going on with them.

It really helps you to hone your reasoning skills and to have to think through things. Your communication skills are really leveled up. Your diplomacy, you have to back off and be more careful about what you say and how you say it because there’s lots of different people in the room. But you also have to increase your courage and ability to say what you really believe, but to be empathic and charitable and kind in the way that you do it.

And what I started to see eventually over the years was these tools that I gained in these Socratic discussions were developing and honing my relationship skills. I was just better at relationships in general because I had learned how to ask better questions, how to listen more intently, how to push back kindly with questions, how to state what I believed, how to reason and think things through.

It was really, really phenomenal.

Confidence, Character, and Virtue

But also we gained confidence in our ability to think things through, to stand on the few truths that we did come to, to know what we believed and why we believed it and have thought through it clearly, and why that mattered and how we could live that out.

And I also came to see that this whole process, as I eventually got a master’s degree and studied the history of education and all the way back to the history of Western civilization from the beginning, the development of character and virtue has always been the primary goal of education.

Great philosophers have always said what makes us different from all the other creatures on earth is our ability to use our conscience, the fact that we’re conscious, and our common sense and our reason to elevate ourselves above our primal instincts and to discipline ourselves to live in line with what is good and what is true and what is beautiful.

To be on the hunt for those things and to align our lives with those things.

That’s always been the primary goal of education, not income earning. That was trade work. And you could go be trained and you could apprentice and all these things to be able to earn a living. But education was not about earning a living. It was about the development of the human being to be supremely human.

And the supremely human person is the most virtuous person.

You can see this thread all through the great thinkers and leaders throughout history, and I was seeing that and learning that. It was incredible.

Commonplace Books and Journaling

We also learned from writings by, for example, John Adams to his son John Quincy, and Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and these other great founders, and even before, with Marcus Aurelius and others, that you also need to write, and you need to write for yourself. You need to copy down what the greats have said. You need to pick it apart. You need to think it through.

And they used to call these commonplace books, and it would have extensive notes from the things that they were learning and then their thoughts about those things.

And so we were encouraged to journal, to keep commonplace books, to even write in our books, which I came to do. And I gained a lot of skills for tracking a lot of things in my book and really good bookmarking skills that have been a huge help for me.

Now I can go back to the questions that I’ve asked and the quotes that were my favorite and the arguments that I’ve had with authors as I’ve read, and I can go back to those things and review the books that I’ve read and rediscuss them. And it’s been a huge help in my mothering and just in general with being a mentor and all of that.

And so journaling as a way, because our thoughts run so fast that when we journal, we have to slow down and we have to take all of these fragmented ideas and make cohesive sentences and paragraphs out of them, and that fine tunes our thinking. It helps us to be better, clearer thinkers, again honing our logical thinking skills, our reasoning skills.

Also connecting where our emotions are being sculpted, they’re being created by the things that we’re thinking. Our emotions are then in turn affecting our thoughts, and the interplay of thoughts and emotions and which ones are true and which ones are false, all of that is so, so helpful.

Writing, Feedback, and Growth

We also wrote papers. We would have writing seminars, I guess you’d call it, because what was happening in this school was that it wasn’t a teacher student dynamic. I wasn’t just sitting there absorbing information and regurgitating it to a professor and saying the things that I thought they wanted to hear and that would please them or that would get me a high grade.

I really was there to become the best me. I was there for me. And by virtue of the fact that I became a better me, I was a better wife, I was a better friend, I was a better sister, I was a better mom, right? Because I’m becoming a better me.

The structure, these educational principles that were being utilized in this school were so incredibly beautiful and helpful for my personal development. That’s why this was the educational model in the West for two thousand years. Up until about a hundred years ago, we lost it. It’s because it’s the development of the human being to help us be fully human and to help us be virtuous.

And so I’m there with a team of students. We are learning together. And the mentor is on this journey with us. They’re guiding us. They’re helping us. They’re showing us the path forward. They’re helping us course correct and stay on the path, but they’re learning right alongside us.

One of the first things I learned as a mentor was that when I got into a group of individuals who were ready to learn, were ready to grow, because that’s really what this is. It’s all about personal growth.

Because so what if you read it? So what if you pass a test on it if it doesn’t become part of your character and if you don’t become a better person because of it? It’s not helpful. The only reason those things are helpful is if we’re trying to build a career, and this education was not about that.

Ironically, the more virtuous you became and the more your character was developed, the better you would be as an owner or an employee. That was secondary. The development of you was the primary focus.

The Value of Revision and Oral Exams

And so we’re a team now. We’re discussing every week. We’re diving deep into these readings. We are learning from the best of the best, and it’s elevating us in every way.

And then we have these writing seminars. And because we’re a team of learners, we also give feedback on each other’s writing. Those seminars could be painful.

We had to read part of our writing aloud to the entire class, and they all gave feedback. They all told me what they thought about my paper, and it often meant kind of picking it apart.

I remember one, I can’t remember what it was even about, but it was kind of like to my sister who was giving me grief about stuff, indirectly. And after I read the first page, the room was really quiet, and then one of the other students said, Audrey, I feel like you’re yelling at me.

And it was really important feedback.

I remember another discussion where my husband was in a class with me and he started going off about a bunch of stuff about, I think it was about Alexander Hamilton or maybe it was John Adams, and the mentor just was like, what are you talking about? Finally she was like, you better go home and get your facts straight because you don’t know what you’re talking about.

And so again, course correcting, helping us to develop our character, to become better thinkers.

And these writing seminars were difficult but so enlightening and really helped us to become better at expressing our ideas, which so much of life, so much of happiness, so much of relationships is about. Good communication, being empathic listeners, being good at diplomacy and sharing our thoughts and ideas.

Then what was really cool is that we would have different assignments and we would hand things in and we would get feedback, right, but not a grade. Because instead of it being like, well, you tried for a minute and you had a deadline and now this label lives on as a mark for or against you, it was like, no. Do it until it’s great.

So our assignments, we would redo and redo and redo until they were quality. And you can just imagine how much you would learn having to do things that way.

At the end of the class, we would have oral exams. And in today’s culture, I’m always like, why in the world aren’t we doing more oral exams? We’ve got this AI issue. We’ve got all the cheating in our schools. You can’t cheat on an oral exam. You know it or you don’t.

And I know it takes a little more time, but it’s so worth it.

And our oral exams were usually administered in front of the entire class. And so there would be a couple mentors, and sometimes we would test each other. And so we would bring quality questions from the semester’s long learning or the course learning or whatever it was, and we would question each other, and we would learn so much in those oral exams from each other and from ourselves as we had to express what this had meant to us and how we had grown from what we had learned.

How This Education Changed My Life

So this classroom became a real place of incredible growth and personal development, and I forged relationships that have become lifelong because we were so changed by the experience that we were having.

These beautiful educational principles had a profound impact on me and on my life. They have completely changed the trajectory of everything that I’ve done since. It has changed the way I manage my relationship with myself, my relationship with God, and all my other relationships.

It helped me gain a lot of self discovery that sent me on a new trajectory and introduced me to things that have become my life’s work, that have been so transformational for me.

The Euclid Class

I wanted to give you a quick example of one of the things that happened to me in this process, and then I’ll talk to you a little bit before we finish up about why this matters so much for you and I and for our culture.

So somewhere around this time, a couple years in, I was given the opportunity to take a Euclid class. Now if you don’t know who Euclid is, he was the great geometer. So his work was written, I didn’t look it up, I don’t know, two or three hundred AD, something like that.

He wrote the definitive book on geometry.

When I heard we were going to take this geometry class, I thought back on my high school years.

So when I was in middle school, I was given a test and I scored well, and that meant that I had to take Algebra One in eighth grade. So I took Algebra One in eighth grade. I did fine.

And it also meant that I had to take honors geometry my freshman year of high school, and I totally bombed. And of course, even though they’re both math, geometry and algebra are very different. And obviously I think a little more algebraically than I do geometry wise.

And so, I mean, I was on the cheerleading squad, and I did so poorly in my class I couldn’t cheer. It was very disheartening. It was very embarrassing. It was a big deal at the time. And so I was demoted. I had to go back to regular geometry. I had to wait a whole cycle to get my grades back up to cheer again. It was really terrible.

And I did okay in the regular geometry class. And so as you can imagine, all my life and into adulthood, far into adulthood, I carried this mindset of, I’m terrible at math. I don’t ever want to do that again.

I did manage to get my way through Algebra Two, but then I just didn’t take math again if I didn’t have to.

So I called up this teacher of this Euclid class and I was like, it sounds intriguing. I know that I love these original writings, but let me tell you my story and my history, and I don’t think I can do it.

And he was like, no, no, no, no. I promise you, we will stay with you until you get it. And you’ll learn proof by proof how to think more logically and why this has been a staple in Western education.

And in fact, I later learned that pretty much all the greats did study Euclid. It did help them to think more logically and to understand how evidence is built on evidence and how proofs work. But especially Abraham Lincoln, it was a core element of his education to study Euclid.

And of course I did it. I got through Book One. I have somewhere in this house, in a box somewhere, my notebook from Euclid where I worked out the proofs. And it was hard, and I did the work, and my confidence was so high when I was done.

When I got my first proof, it was a huge moment for me, and I realized I can do this. I can think more logically. I can figure these things out.

The History of Liberal Education

I went on to get a master’s degree and to study the history of Western education especially, and read the great writings from these individuals that talked about what education should be and should look like.

Like I said, it was clear that character development, what is it for, is its purpose.

And in terms of American education, of course the Bible was at the heart. It was the core book that every child went through school with, and there’s some other fundamental reasons for that, which I’m actually going to talk about at the training that we do.

And they were to be guided by the truths and the principles that were in the Bible in all their lives. Because up until the turn of the twentieth century, the goal of education was still the development of character and virtue.

And all through the eighteen hundreds, all the major universities in America had the same curriculum. In fact, I’ve got a book over here that actually outlines what the curriculum list for all four years for I think it’s got Harvard and Yale and a couple others on there, and it’s virtually the same.

And there was this common canon. Up until nineteen hundred, Americans had all these shared ideas. They had all read the Bible. They had all studied Shakespeare. They had all read some of these core classics.

Men that went on, it was predominantly men, some women, but predominantly men, that went on to these high universities and into leadership positions had the same ideas about governmental principles and economic principles, and it was kind of the glue that held the country together.

But then at Harvard, Charles Eliot became the president, and he decided that the students weren’t satisfied with their education and he wanted to improve it and make them happy, and so he instituted an elective system that was in full swing by 1899.

The other universities, especially the Ivy League, pushed back against him hardcore, and they told him not to do it, and he just did it anyway.

So once that was in play, then eventually the other colleges went along, and so we lost this liberal education, and with it we lost the tradition and what was at the heart of it. And that was that our education is about our personal development, and only very secondarily is it about anything else.

From Personal Development to Socialization

As socialization. And of course, having been homeschooled on and off, I can tell you how many people came to me and were like, well, what are you going to do about their socialization? Because thanks to Dewey and others in the forties, socialization came to be synonymous with modern education, that children need to be socialized.

And that was just never the goal.

So he puts this elective system into place. The other colleges adopt it. Pretty soon you don’t have the core canon of readings. They’re not in these original works anymore. We lose it, lose it, lose it.

And so by the thirties and forties at the University of Chicago, you’ve got Robert Hutchins who becomes this young university president. He brings over Mortimer Adler. They realize, and Robert Hutchins, I took a lot of quotes from him, Mortimer Adler, Mark Van Doren, and there were other people in other places, in other countries as well, that were mourning the loss of the liberal education.

And that’s what it was called. The education I was receiving at this college, which unfortunately did not last many years, was traditionally called liberal arts education or classical education or the classical liberal arts. It was the education to be free.

It is the root word of liberty, library, of libro in Spanish, which means book.

And so when I tell people I have a liberal education or liberal arts degree, they really do think it has something to do with the arts because we’re so far from that.

In fact, the great economist, in his book, he talks about how in the preface to his book, he’s like, I don’t understand why Americans let the word liberal be hijacked by people on the left because that’s a very rich word and it’s about their heritage.

Now they have this political party called liberal, and it kind of in some circles has a bad connotation. And liberal does not mean free for all, everybody gets free stuff. It means freedom through discipline, through reasoning.

Mortimer Adler said that we free our minds by disciplining them. And that’s really what goes on when you get this kind of education.

The Loss of Truth Seeking

And so anyway, lots of individuals in different countries were mourning the loss of this liberal education, especially in America.

And The Road to Serfdom, that’s what it is, that’s the book of the economist whose name I can’t remember right now. And part of that road to serfdom is the loss of this liberal education.

In fact, I’ve got a couple quotes. Robert Hutchins said this, and this is all happening in the forties, and we’ll talk a little bit more about this in the training, but this is all the rich context and backstory that I just don’t have time to get into in an hour and a half with you in the training.

Robert Hutchins said, we have come to the point where the pursuit of truth for its own sake is actually regarded as dangerous.

This has to do with, eventually we went into modernism and postmodernism and our postmodern age where we’re being told that it’s your truth, my truth, and there isn’t any absolute truth. And of course there is, which we’re going to talk about at the training as well.

Mark Van Doren said, a university can and should study first principles. It can concern itself with the permanent truth about man as man.

And Robert Hutchins said about, well, just to give you a little background, around this time Dewey is changing the educational system. All of these things are coming into play. It’s turning into a socialization experiment, and Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler and these other people are pushing back, pushing back, pushing back.

And Robert Hutchins eventually said, my mistake was that I thought I was a successful evangelist for the liberal arts education, when actually I was a stopper in the bathtub.

And so liberal arts lost, socialization won, and we have the modern education that we have. And most of us that are alive today just don’t know the difference because it’s been a hundred years now, a hundred and twenty five years since this liberal education was squeezed out.

Why This Matters for Us Now

I could tell you a lot more stories and give you a lot more examples, but I think you get the gist.

And so the reason, if you’ve ever heard of the Great Books of the Western World or heard of the Harvard Classics, the reason that we have those collections of classics is because they were born out of this loss of the liberal arts because they weren’t in the schools anymore.

This was Charles Eliot saying, okay, well we have the elective system now, and we kind of squeezed out a lot of the classics, but what we’ll do is we’ll put them in a set, we’ll call it the Harvard Classics, we’ll create this book set. And so it was in libraries, it was sold.

Hutchins and Adler and others put together the Great Books of the Western World, which was printed by Encyclopedia Britannica and peddled door to door in the fifties and the sixties. They started up Great Books classes because they were just trying to do everything they could to hang on to this education.

Now the reason all of this matters, I’m sure you’ve drawn some of your own conclusions about why I am talking about this in depth and why these rich educational principles matter so much, it’s because you and I were robbed of the education that would have taught us better to think logically, to reason, to identify the good, the true, and the beautiful. And our culture would be more grounded on what’s true and good and beautiful.

What This School Still Missed

But there’s two things that this school didn’t do well.

I have a very superficial understanding of what goes on at most of the liberal arts colleges, the only place you can get this education anymore really.

University of Dallas has a pretty good program there. There are a dozen, two dozen of these liberal arts colleges scattered around the country, and they do use these educational principles to a large degree still. They are steeped in classics. They have added more modern science and things like that, which is relevant, which is fine.

They’re insanely expensive. There are a few that are a little more affordable, but Hillsdale is one of the cheapest. It’s around thirty five thousand a year tuition. It’s the cheapest I’ve been able to find. It’s the one I’m most acquainted with. I’ve visited there on a couple occasions and met the president and toured the classes and attended classes there and done some of their online classes.

And so I know the most about them. They’re one of the best.

They go all the way up to eighty, ninety, a hundred thousand a year just for tuition, not for living as well.

So this is still available in a few places. It’s insanely expensive. I think that these schools do one of the aspects my little college didn’t do well, but I have not seen them do the other.

The Missing Scholar Skills

And so as we wind down here, let me just give you a little more context and a better understanding of some of the things we’re going to talk about in the training.

The first thing that my college didn’t do great, and I don’t know how well these modern universities do it, is when I was about a year into my studies, I went to a little conference. I mean it was tiny because he was visiting little college, and the president of the college was there talking.

And he was an amazing guy. He kept calling them scholar skills or study skills, and he kept saying, you’re only going to be able to get this incredible education if you have the scholar skills.

And although they had really great Socratic discussion, really great writing seminar, and they told us to keep a commonplace journal, I wasn’t sure what he was talking about.

And so I raised my hand and I was like, where are these wonderful scholar skills? How can I get them? I’m ready to go. I want to be the best student I can be.

And all he said was, what are you currently studying?

I told him I was studying worldviews.

And he said, okay, well just keep going.

In other words, they had not made a plan for it. They didn’t know. They hadn’t ever put them in one place.

Maybe some of them had some of the skills.

So the first kind of entry point for me in learning how to even administer this type of education, and even more in depth, how to get it for myself and really get robust lifelong learning skills, was that I was like, okay, well I’m going to have to figure it out.

So I went and studied several books and did a bunch of practice over time to gain good study skills. Like I was talking about, the bookmarking skills, the question asking skills, getting better at leading discussion, and also just how to do interdisciplinary connections and all of that kind of stuff.

And in the end, I figured out a lot of things that were super helpful. I ended up building a course for this college, and then I was able to travel and teach this course to a lot of their students around the country. It was really fun. It was really rewarding to teach people how to learn.

And luckily I’ve been able to carry that into my programs and offerings. And so these educational principles that I was taught at this school, plus other things that I’ve learned in addition, have made their way in there to really give our students the best experience possible.

The Missing Natural Law Framework

The other thing that they didn’t do well, well, maybe two things. One other thing that they didn’t do well was sometimes it was just too much.

I’m all for let’s read some Plato, but you cannot give adults the same education that you give college students. They don’t have the time.

And so what they could have done better is what I’ve tried to do in my programs, and that is highly vet great content so that just reading one small section of a page or two of Plato, accompanied by a little bit of Seven Habits, layered with a really great youth novel or whatever the case might be, so that you can see continuity of the ideas and you can see them in multiple places, then you go dig into scripture and you make these interdisciplinary connections, and it helps you to better identify truth.

Which leads into the other thing that they didn’t do well, and that was that even though we talked a lot about truth and being truth seekers, I was introduced to the natural law framework through, and I’ve said this before, the first thing I read was that John Locke reading. And that was the first time I ever, ever heard the term.

Then I was turned onto a couple other authors that talked about the natural law. But really that framework was never delineated. It was never talked about. I was never taught what the natural law really is, how it really works, what first principles are, what principles are, what applications are, how they all fit together, how to find them.

And I never could find a mentor that could walk me through all of that.

And even though it’s all throughout the great books and many, many different people talk about it in different ways, I was really left on my own for many years to niche in on that natural law framework, to build out my own strategies and frameworks and checklists and practices and tools for uncovering all the layers of it and figuring out how to figure it out and how to have it change my life and the lives of the people that I taught it to.

And so Hillsdale doesn’t do it that way. And I don’t know if any of these other liberal arts colleges do that.

And so that was really kind of unfortunate, but it became my life’s work. It became the thing that I’ve been passionate about for twenty years. And the more I learned about it, the better person I became, the more beautiful the world is, the more I love God, and the more I’m able to help others to identify and live according to truth.

We Were Robbed of These Tools

So the tragedy in all of this, of course, is that you and I were robbed of a beautiful educational experience that would have helped us to be more logical in our thinking, better communicators, better at our relationships. It would have helped us to understand truth better and to be more virtuous.

We also don’t have a place where we can go and learn about what truth really is and the framework of the natural law and why that matters so much.

What I found in my little college was that the natural law, they didn’t understand, I think maybe, just how vital that was. That natural law framework made its way into our Constitution. It was prevalent in the colleges prior to the nineteen hundreds. And so, and the natural law is talked about in our founding documents, so we know that it was talked about.

We know that it was the lens through which people saw the world in the West up until a hundred years ago, and we know that it was understood and these men were trying to understand first principles and trying to live according to principles.

These men and women were trying to build solid foundations in their lives and in our nation with the natural law framework, and using these great works and these educational principles to elevate themselves.

And so it’s just a tragedy that you and I find ourselves in a world, in a culture, without these irreplaceable tools. The inability to really understand what truth is, to identify first principles and principles for ourselves, and know how to live them, to know how to be self educating and how to sculpt and develop our reason and communication skills, we are at a huge disadvantage.

We have been robbed of those things, and it is so vital that we restore them.

Why Moms Matter Most

And this is why the answer in our culture is not, like I said at the beginning, leaders matter. It’s not that leadership doesn’t matter. It matters. But the better we understand truth and principles, the better we can choose the leaders that will also choose that for us.

But the real answer is for moms to lift themselves, which will lift their family, and they will lift the culture if we own it for ourselves.

If we get serious about learning how to place our lives and our families on a solid foundation of true principles, everything else will be better, and our culture will have a shift because we are raising the next generation. So if we raise them with better principles, our world will be a better place.

And this is exactly what I’m passionate about restoring. This is exactly what I care the very most about. Everything that I have done and everything that I do and everything that I will do is about lifting you so you can lift your family, and so we can all together lift our culture.

Closing Invitation

And we’re going to go into all of these ideas in more depth in this training, and I’m going to give you some frameworks and tools that are going to really help you to engage and let the truth make you free, which is what we all want.

To know how to develop individually, to find balance between our own needs and those of our families, to solve our significant problems, to begin to reach our potential, to become all that we can become while still building the most principled, beautiful family culture we can possibly build.

We’re going to talk about that at the training. The link is in the description, and I’ll see you there.