Speaker 3: 0:12

And now from the Blue Ridge PBS Studios in Roanoke, virginia. It's the Virginians of Interest Podcast, with your hosts Brian Campbell and Carthen Curran.

Speaker 2: 0:22

Hello, my name is Brian Campbell and welcome to the Virginians of Interest Podcast. My friend Carthen Curran is not able to join us today because of a scheduling conflict. We're happy today to have two guests with us from the Faith Christian School in Roanoke, virginia Peter Bauer, who's the head of the school, and Leslie Ramsey, who is the assistant to the head of the school. Welcome to both of you.

Speaker 4: 0:40

It's great to be here. Thank you for having us.

Speaker 2: 0:42

Well, let's get things started by telling us a little bit about yourself, peter, and then Leslie.

Speaker 4: 0:46

Sure. So originally from Philadelphia, one of six was in the middle, which means I had to create a lot of problems to be heard and seen. I grew up on a farm, which I think was a great experience, so ended up going to a private school in the area, so that was of interest. My father was an executive with Tasty Banking Company. If there's anybody out there that recognizes Tasty Cake, that might be of interest.

Speaker 4: 1:14

Graduated from high school, went to a small liberal arts school in Ohio called Wittenberg University, majored in business and economics From there, actually worked there for the next five years in the admissions office and then went back to Philly and was employed at two private schools. One was my alma mater. After about 14 years back in Philly, was hired to be the stateside director of a ministry based in Budapest, hungary, and they worked with dentists and doctors. After three years of that, moved to Memphis, tennessee, and was involved in a Christian classical school there for 12 years. Received a call from the head of school at Faith Christian School 10 years ago. He thought it might be a good match for me. He was retiring and the rest is history. Great Leslie.

Speaker 1: 2:04

Well, my name is Leslie Ramsey. I grew up all over as my dad was retired military, so I've lived in Honolulu, hawaii, orlando, florida, newport News, virginia, and came to Roanoke to go to college and really never left, ended up at Faith Christian. Years ago, while volunteering at church, a family asked me if I would come be a mystery reader in a classroom for one of the students that I knew there. I did that and found additional volunteer opportunities. The next year they hired me to be the Latin teacher and I did that for one year before I had my son, and when Peter was hired, he I heard from several people that there was a position opened at Faith and decided to go talk to him, and I've been there the whole time. He's been at the school and greatly enjoy the work that we get to do.

Speaker 2: 2:54

Terrific. We talked a little bit in advance about what we were going to try to achieve today on this podcast. One of the things as we were thinking about subject matter was it's interesting, carthen and I the co-host neither one of us have children, so we don't spend a lot of time talking about educational issues because neither one of us ever had any children in school. But we were both came out of a political background and we noticed, in particular last year whenever Governor Yonkin's election was, that the election seemed to turn over a matter of education and a matter of parental involvement, and it still seems to be almost kind of a divisive issue. That, compared to when I was younger and we're probably, peter, you and I are probably about the same age that you know public schools were sort of thriving. There were private schools that were thriving, probably not as many homeschool as you see now. So there's sort of what I consider the three pillars of education public, private and homeschooling and all that has become much more. There's active parts of all three of those. But one of the things that I was kind of curious about not having children in school was this idea of who was in charge.

Speaker 2: 3:58

So before we came on the air today. I told a story when I was in the third grade in Achilles, virginia, mrs Marshall I think Mrs Marshall has gone on to glory, but she locked me in another real roughing out in a hail storm. And so think about the two third graders out in a hail storm. And when I got home that night I was in trouble, not Mrs Marshall, but it was sort of a reflective point about the relationship between parents and teachers and children and how that sort of has evolved and changed. My guess is that in today's time Mrs Marshall would have been in trouble, not me. So how, as a fellow that's in the education business, have you seen the relationship between parents and students and educators evolve?

Speaker 4: 4:37

I think it's changed dramatically. Certainly when I was in school, similar to your experience, faculty were the adults, they were in charge in terms of making decisions and parents would back those up, and that was the understanding that the faculty were the professionals and when they made decisions, like you said, you'd be in trouble. I think the difference has come with parents needing to view their children's education as less than because of the way maybe some things have gone as less than kind of more strictly academic and they've become infused with things that kind of go beyond just reading, writing and arithmetic, and I think that's kind of where the rub has come. I would say, for faith Christian school, we've taken the stance that I guess you would say it's a biblical stance that parents are ultimately in charge and they need to be actively involved. We talk about being partners with parents, and that's the way we see it, and we want to come alongside parents to help them cultivate in the hearts of their children things that are good, true and beautiful and that their children will aspire to those things.

Speaker 2: 5:48

Yeah, so with the faith-based, your faith-based school. How does that affect all the pedagogy and the other parts of the education?

Speaker 4: 5:57

Yeah. So it's interesting, christian classical education is unique, so there'd be a category of Christian, there'd be a category of classical. Maybe there's public, there's Catholic, secular, private. We ascribe to a Christian classical model of education as actually part of a significant movement that began in 1980. There's now close to 600 schools in the United States and actually throughout the world, and the particulars of that education is the Christian component is that we believe that you cannot educate a part from somebody being a created image bearer of God.

Speaker 4: 6:36

So as you're educating the students, you have in mind that these are, I guess we would say they're eternal beings, they have a soul, and you can't simply educate the mind. So the Christian part is we're seeing our students as what we, the language you use, as image bearers, and so that's a significant part of what we're doing. The other part is classical, and that simply is that we believe there was a model of education that was successful for 2,500 years, that produced some of the greatest thinkers, the greatest statement, the greatest artists, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and we've recovered what we call are the lost tools of learning, and so our model is based on those two fundamental principles of both a Christian and a classical education and, if you wish, I can go into a little bit of the classical side, yeah, that would be good, Because I'm kind of curious about that, because I'm a product of public schools and back then you were segregated.

Speaker 2: 7:28

More about what they thought you would do for a living right, that if you were going to go to college you were in honors classes and if you were going to be a blue collar person you went to vocational classes. So help me understand. How do you view everyone as sort of equal, but what are you trying to prepare these students for?

Speaker 4: 7:43

Sure. So let me start with the idea that we believe every child is created with some innate characteristics they love to learn, they love to ask questions, they love to discover and they're reasoning at a far higher level than we give them credit for. So if you did have kids and you had a four-year-old, chances are you're going to get the question where did baby comes from? Did God create evil? Can a beasting a porcupine? There's all these higher level of questions right that are going on with even young students, and so what we believe our model of education does is it takes those innate characteristics of kids, it nourishes them, it feeds them, it inspires them, and our goal would be that our graduates are graduating, graduating from faith, after 13 years, still loving to ask questions, loving to discover that we've taken their reasoning ability, based on the fact that we've just encouraged and inspired that through 13 years, to significant levels that aren't being experienced elsewhere. So, for instance, if you look like a test, I don't know 80 years ago for a fifth grader, they've got Latin on there, some may have Greek. They've got significant standards for what was expected in education, far beyond, I think, what we do today. So our goal, ultimately, is we want to produce students who love God. It's our faith-based. We want them to love what God loves and expand on that a bit. To do that, we're going to bring before them the things that we believe God loves, the things that are good, true, beautiful and virtuous. We want to produce virtuous citizens. And finally, we want to prepare our kids to be able to engage culture winsomely, persuasively, humbly, to be able to have meaningful intellectual conversations. But what we say is we want our students to first work to understand rather than being understood. We want our students to ask questions to deepen their understanding of something before they might engage their own opinions. What grades do you have? So we have pre-K through 12. And I should throw on here an interesting aspect to this education. We begin Latin in the fourth grade. We begin formal logic in the seventh grade. They have formal logic in seventh and eighth grade. They're learning about how to form a rational argument. They talk about syllogisms, whether an argument is valid or invalid. So that's seventh and eighth. We teach formal rhetoric in ninth grade. That's the art of persuasive communication.

Speaker 4: 10:14

Given the means at hand, we want our students to be able to communicate well. They think well, they communicate well. And then we require senior thesis and that begins in the end of the junior year. They pick a contemporary, debatable topic, they research it and write for over a year with an individual faculty member. They produce a 12 to 14 page paper. They present that paper to the entire middle and upper school and guests, and then there are three faculty that for 20 minutes, will ask them questions to defend their thesis. So you ask, what do we aspire to for our graduates? And in addition to the quick things, love Jesus, love God, love what God loves. We want our students to be able to communicate well, we want them to think well and we want them to aspire to something higher than themselves.

Speaker 2: 11:02

This is fascinating. Everything you just listed I had no exposure to as a public school student. I still think I loved the education I received. I loved everything about it. Help me understand a little bit too, because not all kids are created equal right. So if you're in the fourth grade, there's going to be the kid with the best grades and then the kid with the worst grades. How do you account what sounds like a rigorous, socratic method? How do you help people keep up?

Speaker 4: 11:28

Yeah, good, and I appreciate you mentioning socratic. That's a foundational approach that we take. So I've been in education for almost 40 years and this has included the top ranked school in the state of Pennsylvania, a private school I actually attended and I always have to qualify that by saying I graduated in the half of the class. I made the top half possible, but I attended there and then I returned to work there and what have I experienced with a Christian classical education, given this kind of perspective? It's because we're teaching to what's innate to students that love to learn, that love to ask questions, that love to discover. So you mentioned socratic. We're asking kids a question, we're involving them in the hard work of learning and when they're involved in the hard work of learning, they love to learn. They learn to love to learn because they're schooled in the hard work of learning.

Speaker 4: 12:20

All that to say and direct answer to your question, I have found that kids at all levels respond usually in a really rewarding way, and part of that is by the nature of the education.

Speaker 4: 12:36

We have a profound respect for what they're capable of doing. We believe they're capable of significant achievement. So if you have, if you would, if you want to use the term. You know, students that maybe are going to struggle. We're still providing them an education that has a profound respect for their abilities and engages them in a way which we think is their natural bent. So we do have student support services for students who might struggle. But on the whole, whereas typically you might have 10th grade students getting a little surly, 11th grade, they get kind of angry. 12th grade they're saying look, just get me out of here. Because of the nature of this education, where it's not just teachers giving kids information to give it back to them, it's actively engaging them in this whole journey of learning, our students tend to graduate loving learning, excited about what they've done at Faith Christian and looking forward to what lies ahead.

Speaker 2: 13:32

Yeah, and Leslie, you mentioned you were a volunteer before you were an employee. Tell us about that experience and what drew you to become a volunteer there?

Speaker 1: 13:39

Well, as I said, a family at my church recommended me for it and actually once I got there the then head of lower school said I heard you're interested in volunteering, which was actually news to me.

Speaker 1: 13:52

But what really drew me in was being in the classroom. I went to Mystery Read for second graders in how engaged they were in the story. They didn't just actively receive the story, they asked questions afterwards and it was just an exciting environment to be a part of. And when they asked if I was willing to do more, I went in to read to other students. And then there were a few struggling students that they asked if I would be willing to be their reading buddy. They would sit out in the hallway with me, read to me and I would be able to talk to them about sounding out words and just really saw how the students were engaged, even at a very young level, and how they were taking such responsibility for their work, which I was a student a student but I don't think in second grade I was taking that level of responsibility that I was seeing at Faith Christian and that's what really drew me in and kept me going back.

Speaker 2: 14:45

Well, yeah, for sure, this is sounding really good. It makes me want to go back to school again. I'm too old to go back to school, but part of this you must have certain advantages to be able to do this Is part of its class size. I mean. So, in other words, compare what you're doing versus my experience and I'm saying, man, this sounds really good. Why didn't they do this for me? And part of it would possibly be just the sheer size of the class and what the expectations were in a public school versus a private school.

Speaker 4: 15:09

Sure, but again, a huge part of this is the ability for students to be able to participate. So we're going to limit our class sizes so that we can fulfill what we consider to be our mission and vision. So in the lower school our class sizes are limited to 20. In the middle and upper it's to 23. We have a range of classes from maybe six kids at some point to the 23. But yeah, it's that ability to actively engage the students that really, I think is part of the magic Seeing students actively involved in discussions, asking questions, pursuing understanding. We want our kids to not just know but to understand, to ask the why. Again, I think it affirms who we are as human beings to be able to involve in education that way. But yes, we do need to limit our class sizes if we're going to be successful, as successful as we'd like, in this method of education.

Speaker 2: 16:08

In your collegiate training once you graduated from private school? Is this what you studied? I mean, did you study education or did you study something else? You said you were a business major, right?

Speaker 4: 16:18

Business and economics. No part of my story is so. I'm back at this very elite private school. A third of the graduates went to Ivy League, Calibur schools 150 years old, 800 students, all the bells and whistles plus the kitchen sink. My son was in first grade and he's going there for free. Maybe at that point that tuition would have been between $17,000 and $20,000 a year. Part of well we're thinking, my wife and I. We have this made. We've got one of the top educations in the United States and my son's going for free.

Speaker 4: 16:54

In the transition between the summer between his first and second grade, we heard about this thing called Christian classical education. We went to hear a guy talk about it and my entire paradigm of education was turned upside down. So we'd moved our son from this elite private school into the basement of a church 17 kids, jk through 12. He had three kids in his class. He was there for four years and when he was in sixth grade we moved to Memphis, Tennessee. There happened to be a Christian classical school there. We enrolled him there, no-transcript. He graduated in 2009, went to Grove City College, became a mechanical engineer, and so this is what I would say. Is everything I've seen in Andrew, our son. That has made him a very successful mechanical engineer, is directly attributable to the nature of the classical education, the Christian classical education, for example. He is extremely good at communicating. You know no big bust on engineers, but now I was.

Speaker 2: 17:55

I'm going to get into that, but that's not the normal thing, you think.

Speaker 4: 17:58

Sure, we also emphasize in our classical education the integration of subjects. So you have an engineer who's thinking across disciplines, his training in logic and ability to reason and think through things when he was required to do a senior thesis. I mean you are literally working on a paper for an entire year, you're writing, you're rewriting, you're editing, you're researching that requirement for being engaged for an entire year, the discipline required there. So there are very specific aspects to what occurs in a Christian classical school that really separates it from the other ones.

Speaker 2: 18:43

Well, when you were talking about this, I've been Robert, worked in higher ed for 27 years and I was most recently at NC State and there's a famous professor down there, an engineering named Rich Felder, and sometime in the 70s he was a young professor this is the way the story goes and he just didn't think they were doing a very good job of teaching at this pretty good engineering school and part of it was it was mostly lecture right that somebody would go up at a board with a chalk and they would write.

Speaker 2: 19:06

And he went to Europe and basically spent a year on sabbatical studying how Europeans were learning engineering and realized they had it all wrong that engineering is experiential learning. If you don't get your hands involved, if you're not experimenting, you'll never get engineering. And to this day he's still trying to influence education. So I view education as a lifelong learner. Right that we don't just learn as children and young adults. We learn throughout our lives and different people have different learning styles. So how does the classical Christian education take into the idea that some kids are experiential learners, some can get the lecture series and I have a follow up question to that.

Speaker 4: 19:40

Good, well, a quick bunny trail there's. A gentleman by the name of Olin was a very, very successful engineer, found he couldn't hire engineers. Who could think? He started the Olin School of Engineering in Boston Massachusetts.

Speaker 2: 19:54

One of the top engineering schools in the country. Yes, sir.

Speaker 4: 19:56

He endowed it with 450 million bucks. And essentially he was saying whatever's going on isn't working. We've got to try something new. So there's a Wall Street Journal article and it described your freshman class. Professor brings a bicycle in, spins the wheel, the bicycle, turns to his freshman class and says your job this semester is to write the formula for what you see. Now begin Right. So the education we had. Professor would have brought the bike in, spun the wheel, described all the parts, describe how they all work together. Professor would have put the formula on the board. Professor would have done three sample problems on the board. Then he would turn to his class and say now do the problems in your book.

Speaker 4: 20:35

And what I would say to you is the education that we're pursuing. We are equipping our kids with the ability whether it's an idea, an issue, a bicycle, whatever it is, they're able to engage it on their own to a meaningful end, because they've been trained to do so. So back to your question about different ways of learning. I think the classical model and the mode of engaging kids in questioning it and pursue them in questioning, I think it can go across a broad range of students learning styles. And I think the other side of this is again. Earlier I spoke of seeing students as image bearers. I actually just gave a talk last night at our school about how kids are specifically gifted in ways and we were. We actually require our faculty during parent conferences to try and point out the specific things they see in their kids that are unique to their kids and that may involve the way they learn and it may be encouraged as a strength.

Speaker 2: 21:29

Well, yeah, that gets me to another question, back to differentiation, and this is as controversial as I'll get.

Speaker 2: 21:37

There's a real issue in this country with the way that boys and girls are heading right now, and if you go back to when you and I were students, you know boys had a lot of advantages and that was clear by looking around.

Speaker 2: 21:50

Men were running everything and they were going, boys were going to school at record numbers and so forth, and at some point we just said this isn't fair. We need to try to figure out a way to help girls and young women be successful, which we've done a terrific job at. In the meantime, we've got what appears to be some real issues with young men in our country, particularly as it relates to the way they learn and the way that they enter into society, and one of the things that I've heard that I kind of agree with, that boys and girls are sort of wired differently and when they're in the classroom it's really pronounced that that if you're sitting somewhere on your rear end and somebody's at a chalkboard, luxury for 50 minutes. That's disadvantage disadvantages to boys and advantages to girls. How does the classical Christian education recognize the sort of differences in the way that men and women learn differently.

Speaker 4: 22:41

Yeah, very simply, we try and do a lot to keep the boys moving and give them opportunity to be active, whether that's in class, standing up and walking around the classroom or engaged in group activities.

Speaker 4: 22:54

But I would think if you came to visit our school you would see our young boys moving around a lot. Best case scenario you know you had a trade school where the students, men or women, could pursue trades and hands on, which I think is typically an affinity for boys. But we do try and very consciously be aware that our boys, generally speaking, need to have opportunity to move around, be actively engaged actively engaged in their learning and in various activities. We actually have what's called a motor lab which has a lot of unique pieces of equipment where it's all active learning, it's all training the brain. By the way, that they're required to move through these different kind of little program, programmatic pods if you will. But again, there's a deep understanding of the need for physical activity. Within the historic classical model, gymnasium was part of the curriculum, the whole idea that we're teaching our men to walk uprightly, both literally and figuratively. That would have been part of the ancient Greek, greek, greek, medieval understanding of education.

Speaker 2: 24:08

Let's say how do you feel about this topic?

Speaker 1: 24:10

Well, as a mom of a boy, I also have found that boys tend to want meaning and what they're learning. They don't necessarily want to sit there and listen to a teacher talk, and they want to understand how they apply it. By the way that we educate, we're already asking them to apply what they're learning and we're giving them an active role in their own education, which I think tends to help boys take the ownership. And so, apart from the traditional model of sitting in a classroom and listening, now you've given them a role in something that's meaningful for them to do, which is be an active participant in their education, whether that activity means getting up and moving around or that their mind is able to move where it needs to move for them to understand and master a concept.

Speaker 2: 24:55

One of the questions that I've got for both of you is this issue of I listened to a podcast where this fellow, like me, went to public school but he was concerned about the education his kid would receive, so he was thinking seriously about a private education. But one of the pros about public education has been, historically, that it's a very diverse environment. Right that you're going to, it's going to be much like life. So when you go out and get a job, you can't shelter your children forever that once they go out and get you know, finish college or finish high school and they go out into the real world, they'll be dealing with very different people. How do you, how do you, account for that in this model?

Speaker 4: 25:28

Sure. So I would start with you know what is my ultimate goal for the education for my child? Okay, and given the answer to that question, we chose Christian classical education and we found that there was very little diversity. And my own educational experience had significant diversity. The private school that I attended made that a priority. So what I can tell you is, as parents, we took responsibility to engage our son in situations outside of school that gave him the opportunity to be a minority. He was actually one of the only one in a computer camp of otherwise African American kids. But that was our intent because we knew that that was important, that he experienced other cultures, other students from different backgrounds. So we took responsibility to make that happen. But we weren't saying, gee, you know, there's not enough diversity in this classical Christian education, which we found to be incredibly compelling and what we wanted for our child. But we realized then that we have other responsibilities where that educational experience may have been deficient, to fill in the blanks ourselves.

Speaker 2: 26:41

What's the role of sports and extracurricular activities in classical Christian education?

Speaker 4: 26:46

Sure. So we're very committed to quality athletics. We're. You know there's a limitation, we won't have a football team, but we are very competitive in a number of sports. Our girls middle school cross country team looks like they may be able to be competitive at a state level. We have some basketball, we have soccer, volleyball, those types of things. It's not to the scale as some of the public schools might offer, same with the extracurricular clubs or organizations, but they're all quality and so, again, it might not be as a scale, but every student at faith has an opportunity to participate in some club organization, maybe a couple, and we do make sure that we provide athletic opportunities for them as well.

Speaker 1: 27:31

And one thing that's great about the smaller size is it actually encourages students to maybe take a role that they would otherwise. Students who are already in ninth grade and knowing that maybe we need an extra player or two to field a basketball team, are taking on the role of a basketball player when maybe in a larger setting they would have never had the opportunity to try something new. Students who are interested in drama, maybe if they were at a larger school wouldn't have the opportunity to get cast in a role. So in the smallness we often have opportunities that exist for students to test the boundaries of who they think they are and what they're good at and develop new skills.

Speaker 2: 28:13

Well, two things. One is that there's a lot of data now that shows that organized sports, particularly for young women, is really important in terms of self-esteem and other things. In other words, this gets back to the difference in genders, and that this used to just sort of be well, boys and girls play, but boys the baseball is more serious, that what's going on in the young woman's mind is actually more relevant to the way she's going to behave over the next 10 to 20 years by participating in organized sports than perhaps even the young man. Well, the one thing that impresses me and, like I said, it makes me want to go back to school is it sounds like you're treating these people like little adults, and I think back on my own experience, and I think in most times you know, kids get treated like kids, which means you don't get a chance to develop critical thinking skills. So is that must be baked into the cake?

Speaker 4: 28:57

Yeah, that's spot on. I mean, one of the things that we've mentioned kind of half-joking is the biggest responsibility young man has today is taking out the trash. And so we work very hard at asking our kids to be responsible. It's responsible in their learning, but it may be something as simple in your JK that you're in charge of sharpening all the pencils, but we do everything we can to treat our kids as we would, you know, see them as an adult. Another example I would use is you know they're up in Philly. There's Lancaster County beautiful farmland. You come around the corner, here's an 11-year-old boy behind two 2,000-pound horses. He, you know, hooked this thing up. If things go wrong he's going to have to fix it. And so we really have removed this really ability for young men and women to mature by not taking on the responsibility again as parents to make sure that they are learning how to be responsible.

Speaker 2: 30:05

It's crazy, it sounds. I heard a podcast recently about there's a park in New York where parents who want their kids to hurt themselves. Can you know? There's like hammers and nails, and the normal response would be oh my God, my son will hurt himself if he hits himself with a hammer. Well, that's a learning process, right? You don't want to hit your thumb too many times. In that it sounds a little weird, but kids aren't exposed to this the way they would have been 40 years ago.

Speaker 4: 30:28

Very much so. Yeah, and there's a loss there.

Speaker 2: 30:31

Yeah, correct, and some of those I guess that's the term helicopter parent. Right that the parent is hovering over the child trying to make sure that they aren't exposed to any risk. The problem is you can't do that for a lifetime.

Speaker 4: 30:42

Yeah, we've got a former board chair who's a well-known counselor in town who says that you know, 100 years ago parents, one of their major responsibilities was to produce sturdy kids, and to produce a sturdy kid you have to put them in difficult circumstances. He says that has shifted, where now really the primary focus of parents is that their kids are happy. Their primary responsibility is to keep their kids happy and if you're going to keep your kid happy, you're not going to put them in difficult situations.

Speaker 2: 31:11

Yeah, it's counterintuitive, but it kind of makes it back to that story with my parents, where they, you know, wasn't the teacher's fault. It was a learning experience in there for me that they weren't going to come rescue me, that I needed to make better decisions, so it wasn't a case like that. Well, I'm still kind of thinking that, you know, even in school it's sort of the sad thing. You look around and some kids not kids are created equal right, that some kids are shown up with better clothes, better food at home and so forth. Do you see loss of that, since it's a private school, or do you still try to?

Speaker 4: 31:43

you're trying to diversify your class, I presume yeah. So I would say certainly. We see less of that compared to probably most public schools and even some of the private schools that have committed themselves to greater diversity or have a history of that. We do have a robust financial aid program, so we are eager to make Faith Christian School affordable to all families, so we have families paying a very broad range of tuitions based on their need.

Speaker 2: 32:15

How about well, that gets into the second question service to others, right? So, as part of the experience at your school, how does a young person get exposed to the fact that it's not about them, it's about others?

Speaker 4: 32:26

Sure. So two things there. One, we do have a huge service day called Project Faith. It involves every single student at school and involves parents, grandparents, faculty staff. Typically we have between five and six hundred volunteers that will go to a location to participate in beautifying the campus, those types of things. But what we want to avoid, what we want to avoid is saying, hey, there is a service day, Okay, good, Check the box, You've, you know, you've done your service. We would really like to promote every day, all day, the idea that our kids should be looking to the needs of others, looking out for others, serving others. So we're going to try and create a culture where our kids are mindful of each other. You know that's a challenging age to get them to be thinking about others rather than themselves, but it's something that we're constantly working at.

Speaker 1: 33:22

And one thing that recently has started is in our middle and upper school. When they have morning announcements, teachers, faculty and staff have the opportunity to share what they may have seen a student do that was in service to their, their peers or the school, and one you know. Obviously we want people to serve without the recognition, but it does inform younger students who maybe don't immediately think what can I do to serve somebody and they hear a teacher give accommodation to a student who stayed late after lunch to pick up trash that was left behind and that starts the wheels turning of service doesn't have to always look like a big, bold action. Service to others can be something as small as taking the trash that your friend forgot to throw away and throwing it away for them.

Speaker 4: 34:10

Yeah, Best case is you're avoiding requiring service right.

Speaker 2: 34:14

Well, the other thing and when you told that story I'm smiling. The reason I'm smiling isn't because I think the story is funny, but when I was in school that was called the teacher's pet right, that if anybody, if anybody, did anything to sort of get credit with the teacher, then you were immediately outcast as being a bronzor. How do you build a culture where, where that's celebrated and you're not, you're ostracized for being helpful?

Speaker 1: 34:36

I think partially a lot of it is that our students have tremendous respect for the teachers. The teachers are authority but they also are partnering with the students in the educational process. And I do sense that in our upper school and in the middle school, where kids just historically are trying to move away from authority figures and authority figures are uncool that isn't the experience that we see at the school. We see that they have tremendous respect for the teachers. They know that the teachers are looking out for their best interest and are encouraging them to be their best possible selves, and that flips the idea of the teacher as the authority for the point of well, I'm going to tell you what to do. Yes, our teachers tell students what to do, but they do it from a point of view of I'm here to help you, and that changes the students' mindset and I don't really see that students are going well, you're the teacher's pet because they they recommend or accommodate it for. For this, rather, it's wow, that's great that they noticed that.

Speaker 2: 35:37

Well, don't you think too, though, that is as important as respect for the teachers, respect for one another? And in bigger schools, public schools like I attended, then you had cliques, right so that? So it wasn't just that you know, you, you weren't part of this group, you're part of another group, and so this is weird segmentation that occurs, and it seems to me thinking the way you guys describe it, which sounds much better that would there have been a way for us to respect one another more and then, as we age, stop getting into these groups? And how do you do that? I guess that's. I mean, is that part of the curriculum, or is it just something by creating the environment that works.

Speaker 4: 36:11

Um, I mean, I think you can try and make it part of the curriculum.

Speaker 4: 36:14

But again, that's back to students. Are I don't know what the right word savvy, but you know the idea that they're being, you know, asked to do curriculum, uh, acts, asked to do services, part of the curriculum, I think, sometimes feels a bit um I'll use the word awkward. Um, you know, kind of riffing off of what Leslie said, it really has been interesting for me being involved in these schools with smaller classes. Uh, we have students complaining you know you mentioned clicks about you know they they um don't have any friends. Or, uh, there's a couple of students in their class that don't seem to get along in a larger school. Those kids just go find other friends.

Speaker 4: 36:54

Uh, we consistently hear from our graduates and I've heard it from my own son that because they were in smaller classes when stuff happened, they had to work it out and my son has actually said he thinks he's a better husband because of it. Um, but it's a really interesting dynamic that, going into this you wouldn't necessarily think of, where these students in these small classes are being forced, in essence, to do life together and part of that's having to work through stuff.

Speaker 2: 37:21

How do you what? How do you prepare them for leaving? I mean, does is is? Is there expectation or advice to go to college and study poetry, or is this expectation that you should try to go, continue to your work here and fulfill your mission and life?

Speaker 4: 37:34

Uh, we think, uh, our hope is that our kids follow uh their God given talents into whatever field or endeavor that that uh he's gifted them for. So again, my son was a mechanical engineer and, yes, we have graduates that go and become poets, uh, and everything in between uh, doctors, lawyers, uh, it's, it's really fascinating uh to see them given these skills. So here's another thought is um, you think about all the time you spent in the classroom uh, kindergarten through 12th grade. That's uh seven hours a day, five days a week. Uh, for 140 weeks a year, or a hundred and a hundred and 80 days a year. How much content do you remember? None, no, next to nothing. Yeah, what we would say is that doesn't mean content's not important, but what it means is we're going to use the finest content possible to train our students in certain skills. Those skills are how to ask good questions, how to parse information and how to use it.

Speaker 4: 38:37

Goes back to the Olin uh example. Another example I've used is, um, my previous school. I had a father come to me and say, peter, it's really interesting. You know the education that my kids are receiving at Westminster Academy for kids. He said it's most like law school. I said well, that's interesting, you know, tell me more.

Speaker 4: 38:56

And he said you know, in law school they didn't bring you this textbook and they say to you look, here's a textbook with all the cases you might get, you know, as you go off to be a lawyer. Uh, what they do is they say you know, we can't possibly prepare you for all the cases. So let me tell you what we're going to do. We're going to teach you how to ask good questions so you can get good information. We're going to teach you how to parse that information and the uh things what's meaningful to where you're headed. And then we're going to teach you how to communicate in a persuasive, winsome way. So we're going to use the finest content possible, which we believe trains students affections, to have good content, trains them to love the things that are good to him, beautiful, whether it's good ideas, whether it's good literature, uh, but we're going to do that to equip them to be able to engage anything on their own.

Speaker 2: 39:41

I have a friend who's a lawyer who wanted my favorite quotes, as he says, um legal education is the best education you can get. Just don't screw it up by practicing law. There you go, yeah, so I mean that's what he used to say too, it's critical thinking back to but the ability to think critically about anything about any situation, you know where to start.

Speaker 4: 39:59

You start by having practiced questions, again getting good information, but it's, it's all to a meaningful end. You know where you're going, so you're going to categorize that information away that supports the direction you're headed. And so, again back to this idea is, uh, we believe contents incredibly important, but we recognize that you're not going to remember much content, so we're going to use that content to teach the skills that are going to last, uh, to serve you well for the rest of your life.

Speaker 2: 40:23

Yeah, and um, back to my experience. Uh, somebody made a decision early in my career because my father was a plumber and that I didn't know what I wanted to do that I should be on the vocational wing. So I remember, had he just passed away Mr Flo is wonderful English teacher and he would get really angry because I would leave honors English to go to welding class. And he says you're the only kid in here that's tested into honors English, why are you going to the metal class? But back then it was really wildly I hate to use word winners and losers but guidance counselors decided early on what type of education you're making.

Speaker 2: 40:55

It sounds like to me and this gets into my sort of next question that now we've we've sort of leveled the playing field, that we've made it cool again to be a plaster or to be an electrician or or to be a plumber is the type of education you receive, naturally, sort of preparing people for whatever they choose. In other words, you're not saying somebody's less, less accomplished because you didn't go to Harvard. You're not an electrician, yeah, I would say it's, it's the opposite.

Speaker 4: 41:19

We're going to produce, uh, the most capable electricians. Why? Because, when they face a problem, they're going to not ask good questions, they're going to know how to get good information and they're going to know how to apply it. Um, back to that. You know again the old way of thinking about it. You know again the old one uh, he sticks something from the kids and they have to engage it. And so, rather than giving the electrician a textbook that says you know, here's, every situation is going to fit into this very specific category. We know that's not true, that there'll be times when they have to think, if you will, across disciplines or across issues, they have to ask questions. It's just interesting Almost any vocation or application to be successful, you've got to ask questions. Yeah, yeah, great.

Speaker 1: 42:01

And also, your vocation isn't the sum of who you are, and I think the type of education that we're providing at faith is preparing you not only for a vocation, but it's preparing you to volunteer in your community. It's preparing you to parent Well, it's preparing you to be a good spouse, a good member of the community, a faithful citizen. All of those things, regardless of what role you fill for your nine to five job, or what you're getting paid to do, are things you're going to be called to do throughout your life, and so we're really educating to the whole person. Just as Peter was talking about earlier, about us being image bearers Our work is only a part of the image of God that we bear. Hopefully, we've all found ourselves in vocations that God has called us to, but that's still a very tiny portion of what we do in a 24 hour period.

Speaker 2: 42:51

Well, we talked on the phone earlier this week to prepare for this and I'd shared with you I was a nontraditional learner. I went to college later in life and then I went to graduate school later in life. But when I was in graduate school, my favorite class was taught by a guy named Dan Duke at UVA and he was an organizational theory guy, organizational behavior guy, and he had done work all over the country turning around underperforming schools and he would show up to class in a Hawaiian shirt and flip flops and he immediately set the tone that it was something different and I remember it was my favorite class because he was. He didn't get emotional about everything, he sort of deconstructed things and he thought about. That was the real key to getting to the problem right. So one of the problems there not a problem, but that we talked about was that we both I think you believe I'm speaking for myself now, but I'd be curious to hear y'all's thinking on this that for our country to get out of the problems that we currently face, which are way different than I thought they would be when I was a kid, and part of it is the way we interact with one another and the way we respect one another.

Speaker 2: 43:48

That we need not, do we need? We need a rigorous homeschooling people. We need rigorous private school people and we need rigorous public school people. And it's easy now to sort of pile on public schools and all the myriad of problems they've got, and also I think they've got a really hard job that we just talked to. A lot of their work is prescribed. You get the ability to attract people who wanna come to your type of education. They don't get that choice. They have to go to school every day and they do. Standards of learning. They're gonna be evaluated on certain things. They've got a much more diverse student population. If you were to be given a magic wand today, how would you? What do you think the key to getting back to those pillars where we have all types of education but everybody's doing better than they're currently doing?

Speaker 4: 44:31

Yeah, well, certainly I think it's making sure that a class size is potentially lessened. I think that's huge to ask some of these committed public school teachers who are doing a great job with what they can. I think having large classrooms can really work against that. Also, that some of the classes that have the diversity of learning abilities makes it particularly hard. So I think if I was the way of a magic wand, I would love to see smaller class sizes. I think, too, to the degree that the teachers can be freed up to make me take more time on different subject areas and invest in the kids.

Speaker 4: 45:15

It's difficult when you're in a position where you're test driven and that's what's gonna be required, and even in that there are public school faculty who I think are doing just an exceptional job. I profoundly respect. I profoundly respect that there are so many public school teachers dedicated to making sure that every student has an education In the context that they're in. It is what it is and there's just some exceptional work being done. Magic wand smaller classrooms, I think would be the big one.

Speaker 2: 45:52

Well, it's funny, I wouldn't have completely forgotten to ask you about this. But back to, I was thinking, as you were talking about the measuring, we're always measuring, particularly in public education, and with COVID there has been this thing called the learning loss. Right that? I bet you that it's across the board. I'm sure you guys had it too. But since we measure all the time in public education, it seems to be more pronounced than everybody saying how do we fix this learning loss? How did you all? Nobody was prepared for COVID, but how did you all deal with COVID and how have you recovered from COVID?

Speaker 4: 46:22

Sure. So what we did is we immediately went to our core courses and so we concentrated on the humanities, math and science, and that freed us up to not require that our students were sitting in front of a computer from eight to three. We thought that overall would end up being detrimental, so we cut some of the extras, if you will. Concentrated on the core. We went immediately to online learning. We had somebody in our community that had exceptional experience there, so we worked very, very hard and, again, given the small class sizes, this helped a lot at maintaining the level in those key areas.

Speaker 4: 47:07

We really don't believe we lost ground. We were able to commit and follow through on a level of education and personal engagement that allowed our kids to continue to succeed. They didn't get some of the added benefits that would come with being in school, with being with one another and having some of those extracurricular courses, but we have seen in some of the applicants we've received some learning loss and again, I think folks did as well as they could given the situations that they had, but I think we have not been able to identify for us and our students anything significant.

Speaker 2: 47:50

Well, you two have done something that hasn't happened in a long time. One you've taught me something and you made me excited about going back to school, which I won't do, but the idea of it going back, it just sounds to me. I look back on my life and go what would my life have been different if I had been exposed to some of these really wonderful things you all have talked about?

Speaker 4: 48:08

It's interesting. One of the most consistent things we hear from parents is this is the education I wish I had. Yeah, and it's certainly true for me.

Speaker 2: 48:17

Yes, I was talking last night about I think it's an aging thing my getting angry about stuff and I try not to do it because you don't want to become the cranky bull guy but it all gets back to being able to reflect. So I was saying that I think what I try to do now when I get angry is to realize that I've had a pretty good life and I've got great friends and I've got my health, and that's a process of critical thinking. Yeah, for a nice one. You build to your frame things Well as we wrap up. Tell us anything else folks could know. How do they learn more about you? How do they? You know presumably you've got a website, social media tell us about all that.

Speaker 4: 48:52

Sure, fcsvacom faithchristianschoolvirginiacom. So fcsvacom, you'll get a lot of information. Love to have anybody come by the school and you can get our phone number on the website. But I think seeing is believing. There's a power to being able to see the education in action. We are on social media Facebook. I think there's a robust representation of who we are. If you get to us on Facebook, love to have people come in and visit classrooms, but it, yeah, it would be a real honor to have anybody come by the school.

Speaker 2: 49:33

Well, peter, and I'll say thank you for being with us today. I've heard a lot of good things about you, peter, so it's good to finally meet you and to have this opportunity to learn more about your school. Thank you for joining us today for the Virginians of Interest Podcast. We would like to thank our sponsor and host, blue Ridge PBS. If you'd like to learn more about us, go to virginiansofinterestcom. If you like what you hear today, please download, subscribe and like our podcast.

Speaker 3: 49:56

Thank you for listening to the Virginians of Interest Podcast. To hear other episodes of this podcast, head to virginiansofinterestcom.