Show Notes
On this episode of Nuance, Case is joined by Dr. Kevin Clark, founder of the Ecclesial Schools Initiative and co-author of The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education. Together they explore the evolving landscape of education, and what a classical Christian education entails. Dr. Clark discusses the Ecclesial Schools Initiative and the aim to cultivate wisdom and virtue in students. He advocates for a system that allows for diverse educational models while ensuring accountability and accessibility.
Episode Resources:
The Ecclesial Schools Initiative: esischools.org
The Light Ages by Seb Falk: https://www.amazon.com/dp/132400293X/
The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education by Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1600512259/
After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory by Alasdair MacIntyre: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0268035040/
The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship by George M. Marsden: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0197751113/
The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief by George Marsden: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0465030106/
Nuance is a podcast of The Collaborative where we wrestle together about living our Christian faith in the public square. Nuance invites Christians to pursue the cultural and economic renewal by living out faith through work every facet of public life, including work, political engagement, the arts, philanthropy, and more.
Each episode, Dr. Case Thorp hosts conversations with Christian thinkers and leaders at the forefront of some of today’s most pressing issues around living a public faith.
Our hope is that Nuance will equip our viewers with knowledge and wisdom to engage our co-workers, neighbors, and the public square in a way that reflects the beauty and grace of the Gospel.
Learn more about The Collaborative:
Website: https://wecolabor.com/
Get to know Case: https://wecolabor.com/team/
Episode Transcript
Case Thorp
Welcome to the heart of a conversation that’s as old as America itself. How we teach the next generation, what we teach, and why it matters. We begin with Boston, not because we’re broadcasting from its historic streets, but because Boston stands as a kind of metaphor for the American experiment in education. It was here that the first public school opened in 1635, and where Harvard was founded just a year later. From the Boston Latin School to the nation’s earliest libraries and teacher colleges, Boston embodied the belief that education was essential, not just for personal advancement, but for public virtue. The city helped forge an ideal that a well-educated citizenry could sustain a republic. Today, that ideal is being tested and reimagined across the country. From classical schools and charter movements to new models of whole child learning, the American educational landscape is shifting in real time. What should a 21st century education form in a student? What counts as success? Where is faith and what role does it play? And how do we carry forward the best of our traditions while responding to the needs of a changing world? Well, in today’s episode, we’re joined by a new friend of mine, a guest who’s going to help shape these answers, not just for us, but is actually doing so out in the world. Kevin Clark, thank you for being with me.
Kevin Clark
Wonderful to be here with you, Case.
Case Thorp
Kevin is the head of schools for the ecclesial school and the founder and president of the Ecclesial Schools Initiative. So I gotta ask Kevin, are we writing a book together or not?
Kevin Clark
I hope we’re gonna write a book together, Case. That would be great. I’ve heard some ideas are being sketched out already.
Case Thorp
Right? Well, actually, I was first friends with Kevin’s brother, Matt, and Matt and I were getting some crazy ideas about a book and Kevin jumped in and was like, the classical school movement would like that text. So maybe the three of us are writing a book.
Kevin Clark
I think it’s going to be visually stunning, going to have some hymns in there, have some great theology. It’ll be wonderful.
Case Thorp
Yeah. Well, dude, I’ll ride your coattails anytime. Well, to our viewers and friends, welcome to Nuance, where we seek to be faithful in the public square. I’m Case Thorp, and please like, subscribe, and share this episode that others can enjoy. Well, so a bit more about our guest. In addition to leading the Ecclesial Schools Initiative, he is head of school for a similarly named school that has two campuses here in Orlando. The mission of the school is to expand access to extraordinary education by creating a network of neighborhood classical Christian schools planted in local churches. Kevin, you’ve got a campus at Northland Church and then the Anglican Church in Oviedo. St. Albans. Well, Kevin’s experience in classical Christian education spans more than 20 years, including 15 years teaching in the classroom and more than 10 in academic leadership. He serves as a teaching fellow for Gordon College’s MA program in classical school leadership, as a board member of the Society for Classical Learning, and as a founding member of the Alcuin Fellowship. Kevin earned a doctorate from Georgetown University where he wrote his thesis on the interdisciplinary practice of liberal arts education in light of hermeneutic philosophy. I love the H word, hermeneutics. He is co-author of the book, The Liberal Arts Tradition, A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education, and will soon be a tri-author with Case Thorp. That book is in its third edition. It is widely read by classical Christian school leaders and teachers across the country. Okay, so Alcuin Fellowship. You told me just before we started who Mr. Alcuin is. Tell us some more.
Kevin Clark
Yeah, the picture in the background here is of Alcuin and has a phrase that he used with Charlemagne. It’s like 10th century, 11th century Irish monk serving the court of Charlemagne. He says, irrigate the land with learning and it’ll bring forth a harvest. And so one of the most important things he could do as a leader would be to invest in the education of the next generation. And the fact that we have systems of education now, we have all the classical arts of mathematics and language arts, even the institution of the university can be traced back to this insightful plan of a person a millennium ago. And I just keep that in my mind, thinking that we’re making decisions now we’re working, but boy, we could be creating things that could last for not just a generation, but for a millennium. That’s really astounding.
Case Thorp
So your picture could be on the wall of a school leader in the year 2900. Yeah, on Mars, they’re gonna have a little Kevin Clark on the wall.
Kevin Clark
Right? Yeah, I guess my picture with Elon Musk’s picture were their own, right?
Case Thorp
I don’t know. Some people would be like, take that down. But no, I think that’s great. Well, so did Charlemagne institute his vision throughout the empire?
Kevin Clark
You know, I think he did. Well, first of all, Alcuin wanted to educate Charlemagne’s sons and daughters, which that’s something a lot of people didn’t realize that in the heart of the Christian model of education, there is a more expansive, more people are invited in to education. That was a radical idea for an emperor to educate sons and daughters, but that was a thoroughly Christian idea from Alcuin. And really, it was set up more as a model. So the cathedrals all started having schools attached to them. One of the famous ones we learned about without going into a deep history lesson would be Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. And really the University of Paris got started there and everyone else kind of followed suit.
Case Thorp
I’m reading a very interesting book; it’s called The Light Ages. It’s not called The Dark Ages, it’s called The Light Ages. And I’m going to look up real quick the author Seb Falk, F-A-L-K. And this was recommended to me by James Eglinton, a professor at University of Edinburgh, great Christian man, friend. And it argues that the Dark Ages have gotten a bad rap and that in fact there was an incredible amount of learning and growth through those years. And he is particularly focused on a cathedral and monastery in Northeastern England and about the school they’ve started and how that school was primarily to get the monks educated so they could do the liturgy in the hours. But then the wealthier families in the local village wanted their children educated. And then if you really showed promise, they’d send you off to Oxford University. So, fascinating.
Kevin Clark
Yeah, fascinating. We could talk all day. One of my heroes is a man named John Colet, who was the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London in the late 1400s. He founded St. Paul’s School in 1509. And it’s still in operation today, 500 years later. But he had an idea of connecting, believe it or not, accessible Christian education to the church property, but independently governed. So we brought together these three things that aren’t normally connected, parochial education, private education, public education, and he created a movement. You wouldn’t have had the English Reformation, for example, without St. Paul’s London. It’s a who’s who. So I’m inspired by these people who make these seemingly small decisions, but they create new structures that change the world.
Case Thorp
Yeah, yeah. Well, speaking of movements, I mean, you are at the forefront of the classical school movement, one that has excited me and interested me. My children sadly have not gotten to participate, but how badly I wish they had. And then I even get to think, begin to think, wow, you know, I want classical, I wish I had had the classical model. Explain to folks, what is the classical model of education and why do you think it’s drawing so many families in this day?
Kevin Clark
Well, there’s a lot of things you could point to. It’s always interesting from my perspective to hear parents describe it to other parents. You can look at the curriculum and say, my children learn the art. They learn logic. They learn Latin. Some of these, they read old books, they’re reading Homer and Virgil. And that’s true. The arts of learning are at the heart of classical education that don’t just teach people relevant skills that are immediately employable now, but give them the skills to learn for themselves. So we call those the liberal arts. Those are the heart of a classical education. Definitely reading great time-tested literature, great books would be at the heart of it. And so I think that people, in a world where it seems like we’re short on truth and high in information, the idea of an educational model that says, I want children to spend their time thinking what’s good, what’s true, what’s lovely, what’s of a good report. You can hear the echoes of St. Paul. But I think more than that, there’s a recovery of an end of education. You hear a lot of talk about wisdom and virtue. I’m about discernment, about maturity. And I think that resonates with parents. Like, what do you want for your child? You know, the world that we saw when we were in high school that everyone told us would be the relevant world we’re going into doesn’t look anything like the world we’re in now. And I think we all get this feeling we’re sending children into an uncertain future. But to be wise and virtuous, it would be useful no matter what the future looks like. It’s kind of like, you know, St. Paul saying, yeah, physical exercise. It’s useful, but spiritual disciplines are useful in every way. I feel like the same thing too, that employable job skills, important, the wisdom and virtue, that’s soulcraft. That’s the project. And I think that, again, resonates with parents, especially in uncertain times.
Case Thorp
Well, Kevin, the way I have thought about classical education is that it’s a response to what education has become and that being so utilitarian that our society needs engineers and workers and business leaders and managers. And so you look back on how the universities, particularly public universities got retooled in that direction. Whereas in the day, Harvard, Princeton, Yale were more about cultivating the virtues. And rather than preparing one for jobs in the modern economy, it’s more about cultivating the virtues with the confidence knowing you cultivate those virtues job skills will come and be there. So speak to me about that bit of history and what are we losing by not even in our non-faith based schools cultivating virtue?
Kevin Clark
Yeah, I think, unfortunately, I there’s been a lot of people who could answer this question better than me. I’m thinking the book that really changed my world right after college was reading Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. I think maybe a step back is that classical education really is just the great tradition of Christian education. From the earliest days, I would argue all the way back to Titus chapter two, we have Christians saying children need to be nurtured in the heart of the church in order to be prepared to serve the life of the world. That’s the way we would say it at the ecclesial school. Children need to be nurtured in the heart of the church in order to serve the life of the world. Yeah, you you think that the whole idea of the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men teaching us that denying ungodliness and worldly lust, we should live soberly, righteously and godly in this present world, looking for the blessed hope and so on and so forth in Titus 2, but that vision, we need somehow to be trained to renounce kind of the characteristic, passions and impiety of our world in order to be formed morally. And so that we can be people filled with hope, but also as Paul says, be zealous of good works. Or if we read that kind of with Greek ears, we’d say be zealous of living well, because he borrows that phrase almost directly from Aristotle. So again, classical education is even relevant, I think, in understanding the original context of scripture and to think what early Christians were up to. I think what’s happened in our day, we’ve lost a common vision of what’s good, what’s true, what’s beautiful. And so the virtues operated when people had, here’s a goal. This is what it means to live a virtuous or godly life. I think those questions are up for grabs in our culture. So I think the school, it kind of retreated back like, well, we can at least agree on what’s useful for getting a paycheck. And so we had to set aside some of the larger things because we couldn’t agree as a culture what they were.
Case Thorp
Right. How do you teach the good when you can’t agree on it?
Kevin Clark
Yeah, exactly. I think that’s a new opportunity. And this is if we were to talk about the ecclesial schools, there’s an opportunity where the church can become relevant again, just like it was in the first century where it defined in terms of a community life, we know what the good is, not because of the answers to all questions, but because we know what the goods of this community are, who’s called.
Case Thorp
And when you say we, you don’t just mean Christians, or do you?
Kevin Clark
Well, I I think it starts around the church and Christians. What’s been really interesting, man, if you get me totally off board, it’s been interesting to see what’s happening with organizations like Arc that are taking place in the UK where people are saying, well, the Christian tradition had a lot of solid answers to what people are for, what culture ought to look like. I don’t know if I’m a Christian, but I kind of want to live at least on the front porch of the church because it offered a common vision for human life. And I think that’s a really interesting thing to think about as Christians in our day. Not to try to convince everybody, we’re right, saying, hey, we have a way of living together that, you know, demonstrably brought about good things. Hospitals, orphanages, universities, education, not to mention all that catalog of things you gave for Boston. Those are Christian ideas and Christian motivations. We could be a blessing to the world again.
Case Thorp
Amen. And I know some friends who would hear what you just said and freak out. My goodness, you’re talking theocracy. You are wanting to force religion. What would you say to them?
Kevin Clark
I would say it’s the opposite. Maybe it’s the inverse that if I understand theocracy, boy, I’m now wading into theological waters, these are dangerous, would be to try to impose Christian ideas and principles on people instead of on the other hand saying, why don’t we live out some Christian ideas that are good for the life of the world, that bring flourishing and human good and invite people into them? And that’s what I would even say at our schools, there’s a big debate and in Christian schools between whether you should be a missional school or a covenantal school. And I think that’s an important debate. We’ve tried to be at least what we say internally in apostolic school, instead of saying either, want to, this is what we do. Here’s how our beliefs work themselves out in practices and relationships. Why don’t you join us? I’m not going to make you sign the dotted line, but I want you to come in because this is what Christian community would look like. And I think that’s, you know, James Davison Hunter’s written about that, the difference between political power and cultural power. I think theocracy might be concerned about political power. I’m more concerned about cultural power, about human flourishing, and about creating community that would actually change people’s lives.
Case Thorp
Yeah, the cultural power emphasis is absolutely what I care about in this work with the Collaborative. I look back on the ‘90s and the Christian coalition and all the efforts to be exercised in politics. And I still think there’s a place and a role that Christians need to be leaning in in the political realm. But politics is a reflection of culture, and if we don’t do that deeper foundational work, the politics will go their wayward way.
Kevin Clark
Wouldn’t you love it if Christian people flourish when things like the arts are flourishing? Wouldn’t you love to see Christian people making beautiful things to see, to listen to, beautiful places to eat, and just find out that that’s the way Christians are working to build culture, the building places where we can all inhabit and experience what’s good, true, and beautiful.
Case Thorp
So then give us some specifics. A classical curriculum differs from say a public school curriculum, specifically how?
Kevin Clark
Yeah, I would say this emphasis on the tools of learning and so on. Well, yeah, I mean, so there is going to be a heavy emphasis, although everyone’s kind of come back on board when classical education first got started, they were the radicals out there doing things like phonics based approaches to literacy. That’s kind of like just understood as the best practice now kind of across the board. I think teaching things like everyone talks about being critical thinkers, but saying, okay, well, we’re in the curriculum that’s happening. We teach formal logic and material logic so that students can know the difference between what’s true, what’s false, when something’s merely suggested or when an argument’s been made. And so some of those skills are taught in the curriculum. We all lament the fact that public discourse has gotten to a really sad state where people just shout sound bites at one another or post things online. We teach the art of rhetoric, where you learn how to think about the needs of your audience and your rhetorical purposes and how to engage them in a way that dignifies their experience, their mind, their will and their affections. Those are at the heart of the classical model of education. Not to mention just good books. I heard a teacher saying one time, it’s not really important what they read just as long as the children are reading. I think no, actually what they read is important. Reading good stories that again, dignify a child’s imagination that don’t pander to them, but elevate them, that awaken wonder, that stoking inquiry and inquisitiveness into the world. That’s what I want to give students. And so I think that not being afraid of classic works of literature, I mean, certainly not being afraid of the scriptures or the Christian disciplines of prayer and worship. Prayer matters. And beginning the day and ending the day with prayer and praise and having a teacher who would make reference, not in artificial or hackneyed ways to our creator, to our redeemer, but to actually talk about Christ in class where it’s relevant. like, okay, this is a merely religious place, but no, our relationship with God is relevant to every area of life. And so therefore it can come into any part of the day. That’s something that a classical Christian school can offer.
Case Thorp
So everything you’ve mentioned is in the humanities direction. I’ve heard the criticism, classical short changes, math and science…you would say?
Kevin Clark
Yeah. One of my favorite things that’s happened over the last four or five years has been Richard Dawkins. You know, one of these great outspoken proponents of the new atheism just a few years ago is now calling himself a cultural Christian, which is really interesting to read about. I encourage you to read more of it. He said, the Christian assumptions about the world is what made science possible. And I want to say, yes, creation is made by an intelligent God, a beautiful design in God and by studying it, can know something about it. Those weren’t, those are Christian assumptions about the world. It’s no ability. It’s purpose-filled nature. And so, yeah, natural history has flourished and natural science has flourished, under the, classical Christian tradition of education.
Case Thorp
Because before the introduction of a Christian worldview, nature was seen to be full of spirits and ghouls and…were trees living? And you had such a different worldview of materiality. It took that Christian overlay to help demystify, demystify, demystify so that things could be studied and nature could be manipulated for the greater good.
Kevin Clark
Right. Yeah. That it was a noble, that it was worthwhile for a person to study. I mean, so even in the ancient world, they would have looked at astronomy and astronomy, the life, the world kind of beyond the moon was perfect and divine and worthy of attention. But just knowing this world here, it was continually changing. It was set to decay. And so it wasn’t as it didn’t have the same dignity. Boy, you see, especially in the, I mean, look at the scientific revolution as a catalog of Christian thinkers who are natural philosophers, understanding the world with explicitly Christian assumptions about nature and to an amazing effect. But the same thing with mathematics. Mathematics has been champion. I say to my students that it wasn’t just the humanities or Bible study class. When you read some of the debates about the Trinity, about the unity of the natures in the one person, Jesus Christ, when we learn about the Chalcedonian definition, they’re making arguments for arithmetic and geometry. These people knew their math. And some of the debates hinge on subtle points of mathematics, which is just fascinating to me to think like a full education is a mathematical education, an education that’s linguistic, that’s historical in humanities, but also that knows the natural world. I mean, even the nature of the human body that, you know, God assumed in the person of Jesus Christ, our body matters.
Case Thorp
And so your students absolutely head on to college with a load full of chemistry and biology and they’re ready for the next step.
Kevin Clark
Right. Yeah. And then hopefully they’re ready in a way that they’re expecting, you know, well, I was going to let me interrupt myself that, you know, one of the complaints is that students aren’t able to apply knowledge beyond narrow fields or it gets siloed off into disciplines. I think George Marsden makes this argument, I think in the outrageous idea of Christian scholarship is book from a gospel more than a decade. It may have been the ‘90s, probably that book came out, the argument that Christians were looking for these kinds of connections and big questions. Christians who study biology and chemistry and physics think that it all fits into a natural philosophy, the way that God’s created and ordered the world, that they’re relevant to each other because they fit into a larger picture. And so yeah, I would say they actually maybe even have not like a leg up, so to speak, but they’re able to make really good use of their education because they’re expecting it to fit together.
Case Thorp
Brag a little bit, please. Tell us where some of your students have gone off to.
Kevin Clark
Well, this is the great part. My Ecclesial school students, the oldest grade we have of them are in ninth grade right now. Yeah. We’ll keep like five years. But I will say, I mean, I’ve had honestly, and I don’t want to say this in like an off-shucks kind of way, but I mean, I’ve had students who’ve gone, who’ve gone to top 25 colleges.
Case Thorp
That’s right. I’ll come back in five years and you can tell me Harvard, Duke and Stanford.
Kevin Clark
I had a former student I was speaking with a few years ago who, he’s a physicist now, and he works for some cancer research company and he explained to me what he does, but he basically makes boxes that are out of single layers of carbon atoms. I don’t really know what exactly that means or what that would look like or what a box means. know when physicists or what you do with it, but it’s helping people. I know people who went into public service. They went into the military. I would say a great classical Christian education sees young men and women equipped to go in the myriad ways that God might call them to work in the world. And I think that’s great.
Case Thorp
Yeah, yeah. And that work may be a stay-at-home parent, and that’s beautiful. Okay.
Kevin Clark
Absolutely. And I have former students who are employed for me and who have children enrolled, which is both exciting and just a little bit making me feel old there. Yeah.
Case Thorp
Yeah, you are old. So let’s pull back a little bit and the greater American landscape on education. Charter schools are taking off and there have been a number of major moves by states, state government to help free up the landscape for charter schools to flourish. I was just reading this week about the Florida legislature and some of the bills that are being considered to help charter schools advance. How do you understand the landscape? How should we be thinking about it? Why do we need this movement to succeed?
Kevin Clark
Yeah, I think the basic way to understand the landscape is that we’re in the midst of an educational revolution. That’s not being overly dramatic. Whatever has been the normative experience for Americans for the last 75 years is not going to be recognizable in 10 years. I sincerely believe that. What has been really encouraging and interesting though, is that the movements toward educational choice have been coupled with people who seem to have a vision for public good. And so I think that that’s a really interesting dynamic. I was a school founder with a group called the Drexel Fund, which is a venture philanthropy group who’s trying to empower innovative school leaders to start new school networks in these choice states. They’re working in eight to 11 states. There’s 11 that are on their list. There may be more than that that are coming online. There’s so many states adopting school choice. But they’re trying to prioritize projects that are leveraging resources to reach underserved communities. Just simply because when parents have choice, that seems to be a decisive factor in the outcome in children’s education. And so it’s just really neat to see that isn’t a choice, like, no, we’re giving up on the noble call of public education, which would have a completely educated American public, which is that that’s a noble call. It’s just there might be different structures we can bring that about. And so even people heavily involved in private school choice, like my own schools are, they’re private, but we prioritize enrollment for people from underserved populations so that we’re actually raising the tide that kind of raises all ships in our culture. And that’s happening kind of across the boards and charter schools obviously are doing that. So yeah, anyway, a revolution taking place right now. And it’s going to be private, it’s going to be charter, it’s going to be micro school, it’s going to be new configurations of homeschool cooperatives. There’s a lot of models that are working themselves out.
Case Thorp
I have been so surprised and saddened that the civil rights component to the school choice movement has been so neglected, not by school choicers, but by those who’ve wanted to defend the old guard and the current system. And whenever confronted with such a question about African American and minority communities who feel stuck in their local school, there aren’t good answers. And then when you look at the statistics, it’s overwhelming when there are options like yours for those families to choose differently. Is there still a place for the public schools?
Kevin Clark
It really is. I think so. And I think the way that Florida in particular, I know Florida’s context best just because we’ve been studying and working here for the last seven years. It provides an opportunity, I think, where you could have a robust, I hate to use the phrase marketplace of choice for education, but maybe that’s not an entirely bad, like a public square of choice where parents have a lot of different options. You have a district public school, you could have a charter school, you could have private schools, you could have micro schools, and parents are empowered to make choices that seem best to fit their family, fit their children’s needs. That seems to be the place. And I think that the public schools have resources at their disposal in a tradition that they could really lean into to serve families. And I think we’ve seen, I mean, people at Ed Choice make a better argument with this. I don’t have the statistics, but even looking, I recently heard former governor Jeb Bush speak about this back in February. He obviously has been involved in school choice in Florida since the early ‘90s. What happens in the context of choice? It’s not just that children having great outcomes in the private school or the charter schools. There’s actually been elevation of student learning in the public district schools that are nearby, it seems I hope this isn’t too controversial, that there’s a kind of healthy competition when people realize that parents have choices, so we need to actually think about serving them best. And when that happens, really the people who win are children.
Case Thorp
Now, I agree. A minute ago though, in making the argument for the charter school movement or the school choice movement, you said you find that a lot of those people have a common good approach or vision. Is that what you said? Now, my public school advocate friends would say, really? We don’t. Do they not?
Kevin Clark
Oh, I think they do. I think what the people expect is that, oh, private schools aren’t about public good, just about the interests of an elite, small minority. But what I’ve actually seen, the people act, that might be, I mean, who knows what might be true in some places. The people I actually know are having conversations. How do we serve these families? How do we make on ramps? How do we create supports for people who haven’t had great educational options before they come to us? I cannot tell you that. That is the overwhelming amount of conversations I have with anybody, whether they’re working in this state or working in choice environments across the country.
Case Thorp
Well, that’s what I love about your model. There is some truth in the narrative that a number of private schools developed in the South in the days after integration for fear of having children learn with other kinds of children. And I think what you’re doing is sort of breaking that, either breaking any of those models that remain, but certainly claiming, no, no, no, we want to make this available to all. And so do you raise money outside of your normal tuition structures in order to make this education available to others?
Kevin Clark
We do. Yeah, absolutely. So our tuition, we say comes from three strands. We have choice scholarship dollars in the state of Florida. Most people know them through Step Up for Students as the major scholarship granting organization. We have scaled shares of tuition from family. Everyone contributes something at our school, but it’s according to their family’s household size and income, a figure that the federal government uses called federal poverty guidelines percentage. And then we have partners in the community, people who partner together with families that bridge the gap between the family’s resources and the cost of education. So our greatest goal is to partner with churches in order to drive down the cost of education. Independent schools in Florida are just over $18,000 a year tuition. We keep our tuition below $12,000 a year. And that’s largely through the partnership with churches to share spaces and services, but also by having a network model where we can centralize some some functions in order to make sure we’re making best use of our resources. And then the scale chairs go beyond the tax credit scholarships. And then we find families. There’s a network of hundreds of people actually who say, you know, the gift of $500 a year, thousand dollars, whatever, I want to help bridge the gap for those families. So yeah, philanthropy plays a key role.
Case Thorp
Key role, key role. So speak to the parent who is thinking through school choice for their child. They’re wondering is the classical charter homeschool hybrid public? Of all the options, how should that parent think about where they send their child?
Kevin Clark
I think one of the most important things for me when I’m speaking with the parent is for them to think like, what do they want for their child? If this partnership with the school is successful, what’s that going to look like? I’ll sometimes, when I have the opportunity to, we do a parent interview, an onboarding interview when we’re enrolling and I’d say, what are your goals for your children? And for me, I’m thinking I need to cultivate a partner because I know that when parents and teachers partner together, it’s just great for children. And so even asking that question, because some of those people, and this is no criticism, it’s just that we’re kind of trained, especially you drop your child off at the bus stop, you pick him up at the end of the day, you’re not used to thinking, what are my goals for my child? And don’t just think about, you know, getting into college or career, something like that. I mean, learning is important. What do you want them to be like? And then ask yourself that question when you go to visit that school, is this school saying this is what they want for my child as well? This might be a good fit, because all that if we have the same goals. There’s going to be plenty, and every parent knows this, that even with people who love each other and have the same goals, we run into all kinds of opportunities to demonstrate humility and patience and forgiveness. But if you don’t have the same goals for your child, it’s going be really hard. So I would say that’s the most important thing is to think about what you want for them and listen to what those schools are telling you is most important to them. And if you find someone who resonates with you at the level of your vision for your child, that might just be the place you need to be.
Case Thorp
Right. So, my three have gone through the Christ School, a K-8 private Christian school, and I’ve still got one in seventh grade, and then on to public high school. And the head of school, Jason Powell, imagine you may know Jason. Well, he left many years ago, sadly, we’re still good friends, though. And one time I said, Jason, look, I hear of other parents and teachers knocking heads and having fights or getting into it over the children. And I said, we’ve had dozens of teachers in this school and we’ve never had a problem. What’s wrong with me? And he said, well, Case, two things. Number one, you don’t think your child is the center of the universe. I was like, well, you’re right about that. And he said, and number two, you see your teacher as a partner. You don’t see them as somebody that works for you. And I didn’t know that I was doing that. But absolutely, we’re on the same team. And anytime there’s ever been a disciplinary problem, I’m always like, you go, teacher, go. Whatever you, you know, they’re going to get in trouble as much as at home as they might with you.
Kevin Clark
Right. Exactly. I say that to parents that I’m not going to say that I’m never, I’m always going to say the right thing to you. You might meet me on a bad day where I’m actually rude to you. It’s not just that I was misunderstood. I might actually need to be corrected and give the opportunity to say, I’m sorry. But I know everyone on this team wants to be the person who is always, you know, only partnering, only working for the best, but we need to, you know, it needs to be a community of grace where we realize we’re partnering together. The education and formation of these young people is so important. Just setting aside all the natural causes, just growing up is hard, learning is hard, maturing is hard. But we also know that we’re living in a spiritual world, a world where we know the enemy would love to undo the efforts of parents and to see children turned against moms and dads and moms and dads against teachers and against each other. So we have to be just aware of that. We have to pray, we have to be patient. And we have to realize that it’s a partnership. Absolutely.
Case Thorp
Okay, so I am sending you through a portal of time and space, and I making you Grand Poobah of the Department of Education with a magic wand. Now, as we sit and record this in April, the Department of Education may not be around very long. If you had the magic wand nationally, what would you do? If you get your agenda across, what would you do? Perhaps end it in the department?
Kevin Clark
Well, I think I would love at least to see a strong system of local accountability. Probably not because I think that people locally are somehow more intelligent than people nationally. It just seems that local accountability seems to work, seems to help us with the natural errors and shortcomings we have because we have a span between bad decisions and feedback, which I think is really important. I, you know, it’s, funny. I’ve been, this is me totally pontificating. Please do not, if I…I’m open to correction on this, mentioned George Marsden again in his Twilight, the American enlightenment that, another book of his, talks about, put, absolutely. I mean, Marsden’s great. If you’ve not read him before, but this idea of principled pluralism as a public virtue, what kind of place would I like to live in?
Case Thorp
And we’re going to put all these books in the show notes.
Kevin Clark
I would like to live in a place where people could actually be able to substantively disagree in public and have a vigorous debate and conversation over public goods and not just speak in sound bites or posture against these are like a warfare kind of mentality. That would be great. Of course I’d love if everyone would come to faith in the Lord Jesus and would want to be, you know, that would be wonderful. And we’re looking forward, that would be maybe my really long-term magic wand, but in the meantime, I’d love to be in a place that was principally pluralistic, which I think would mean that makes room for these different communities that want to educate their children differently. I’m in a place where we could interact with each other, where there was kind of a, you know, similar requirements. I mean, to, to start a private school where it is a significant disadvantage to, starting a public school, there’s just, there’s resources available to public district schools that aren’t available to private schools and so on and so forth. I think it’d be really amazing to see something like, what if, no, we are into publicly available education and we are not going to commit to one model over another, but make it possible for several of them to be ascendant at the same time. I would love to see that and then see some kind of a more local, more local accountability.
Case Thorp
Yeah. Okay, let me get you in some more hot water. And only because we do have a national listening audience and they get in their headlines all the time. Florida’s banning books, Florida’s banning books. Now I feel like I have a little more to the story and I encourage folks to realize, you know, every school system has a process if there’s an objection to some titles and that… objection, those objections are put in these crazy numbers of thousands and thousands of books taken off shelves. Well, like 99% of those same titles that some individual objected to is put back on the shelf after a review committee sits down, hears it out and goes, thanks, interesting, crazy person, but no, we’re putting this book back on the shelf. So, can you speak into that excited controversy at the moment? But then how do you go about forming your library?
Kevin Clark
Yeah, boy. It’s so hard really to do anything in public because everything as being completely like the wag the dog happens all over the place with news, right? I think the thing is like an adult who has reached maturity should have, I think, the right to read the kinds of things they want to or not want to read.
Case Thorp
Yeah, yeah.
Kevin Clark
We want to say that what makes a child specifically different from an adult is that they haven’t reached a kind of moral discernment in majority. For the same reason we don’t let them enter into contracts of marriage or to like rent a car, I don’t think that they have the ability to really know every single title. So I think it’s actually good that school libraries should have certain things that are not available to students. I think a university library is very different, right? A center of learning for adults. And so I think that’s the basic level. And of course we’re going to disagree. Now, again, there would have to be some sort of, you know, public agreement over the good, right? That we talked about earlier and to know like, what would fit in that and what, wouldn’t fit in that? I think, you know, things that typically come up that are hot button issues, things that seem to be clearly pornographic, we would say that shouldn’t be in a child’s library. I think that’s common sense. Ban that book from the elementary library. I think that’s totally reasonable. You know, should there be a copy? I remember when I was in school, there was a copy of Mein Kampf, right? So it’s Hitler’s biography. Is that an important piece of literature for people to understand the inside of like a, you know, an evil person? Yeah. Would I just willy nilly have anyone be able to read that? No, I think that’s going to take some discernment. I mean, maybe, I don’t know if it should be in the elementary school library. Maybe it is in a high school library, especially if people have been taught how to read books in historical context, which is another plug for classical education. That’s really important. So we try to build…on the other hand, we try to build our classroom libraries around what we call good books. There’s an educational theorist from the mid 20th century, a man named John Senior, famous for starting the interdisciplinary, the Integrated Humanities Project at the University of Kansas back in the 1970s, and really has inspired a lot of liberal studies programs and honors programs across the United States. Very influential. But he talks about the 10,000 or the thousand good books. He said he didn’t want to be a great book school. He wanted to be a good book school. What are the fairy tales, the fables, the children’s stories, the legends that he says till the moral imagination that the seeds of the great books can take root and bear fruit. And so we try to think about our libraries. Like what are the good books? What are the classic stories without getting into like, could merely be acceptable? Like, I feel like you’ve already lost when you’re trying to decide what’s merely acceptable. What’s just good. What’s incontestably good. Let’s put that there.
Case Thorp
Mmm, so good. That’s excellent.
Kevin Clark
There’s more good than they could ever possibly read. So anyway, that would be a way I would go about it. Like, yeah, I don’t have time for merely just okay. I want children to have excellent things that are going to nourish their souls.
Case Thorp
Yeah, yeah, that’s great. So, Kevin, this has just been rich. We could go on for two more hours. In closing, you’re a man who has so deeply integrated your faith and work and live out your theological and biblical convictions in the world. So, where is God blessing you right now? What pleasure do you find in your work?
Kevin Clark
Wow. What pleasure I find in my work. That’s, in one sense, I feel like it’s not…when you get to work with children, it’s such a blessing to be around young people. And, I think we’ve all had that experience of learning something that we didn’t know or working hard to try to understand that that just little bit of joy that you get from, I did not understand, I do this equation. All of sudden it made sense. And I take for granted sometimes until people from kind of outside the education world come back and they see. You get to spend your time around young people who are discovering new things and learning new things and growing every day. And so that’s really a great source of joy. I will say one of them though, something that’s been a surprising source of joy in my work has been kind of in the philanthropic part of a private school. And it’s been, it was surprising me to find people who had a heart for Christian education, who wanted to find something they believe in to connect with and seeing how it’s been a blessing to folks in the community to be able to invest in something that’s meaningful to them. Yeah, that’s been, I didn’t come from that world. I came from the academic side and, being on this side of things, I realized like, wow, there’s a lot of people who care deeply for children who know they don’t have any skills in running a school or being an educator, but they get to be part of it, by, joining the community that way. That’s, that’s been a real joy for me.
Case Thorp
Well, I am so glad there are people like you because I leave tomorrow with my seventh grade son in his class for four days in Washington, D.C. And I am not wired for four days with seventh graders. So.
Kevin Clark
Encouragement to you. Go be a lead learner. You’re going to have a great time if you’re more interested in the things you’re seeing than they are. That’s the goal.
Case Thorp
Well, for sure, for sure. Well, Kevin, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Friends, let me encourage you to learn more about his work. You can find his book, The Liberal Arts Tradition online, and we will put that plus links to all the other books mentioned in this conversation. The website for Kevin and his school and initiative is esischools.org. Well, thank you for joining us. So please like and share, leave a comment. really helps us to get the word out. You can go to our website, wecolabor.com for all sorts of content. Give us your email and we’ll send you a 31 day faith and work prompt journal. You can find us also across the media platforms. Don’t forget nuance formed for faithfulness, a weekly 10 minute devotional for the working Christian that follows the liturgical calendar. I’d like to thank our sponsor for today, Michael and Shandy Kelly. I’m Case Thorp, and God’s blessings on you.
