"The Second Most Religious Thing We Do"

On this episode of The Right Stuff, Pastor Jared Longshore is joined to discuss how the public school system in America has thrown Christ out, and how students have an ignorance problem because of it.

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I think some of these teachers would say, here we are, we're in these government schools. Don't you think ignorance really is a problem? Like they are ignorant. Mm-hmm. And am I supposed to just pray for them and wait around for the new birth before I start teaching them? I would say apart from formal worship, education is the most religious thing we do. What we're doing is explaining the world to our children. So that they will know how to navigate the world. You don't have the option of saying, we're all saying the same thing really, because we're not saying the same thing. Welcome to the right stuff, everyone. Today I have the privilege of talking with Pastor Douglas Wilson. Hey. And we are going to be discussing messianic education. This is actually a part of a Christ church ministries, teaching series called Christ and Country. And the first four of I think, what are we doing? 12 installments. That's not. I think we're doing 12. There's a pastor dog, myself, Pastor Toby and Pastor Joe Rigny. And we're addressing various topics. And the theme is Christ and Country, only available on the Christ church app. So if you go to your standard app, you can find the Christ church app. And there you will find four installments, one from each of us. And your installment is messianic education. You have been writing about education for a very long time. For a long time. You have the ACCS schools that have spread from here. Logos being, say, the mother ship of that whole movement. So I'm looking forward to talking about messianic education. Why do you, let's start with why do you approach it that way? Does the American government education system have a messianic complex? Very much so. Horace Mann, who was the father of the modern government school system, I need to back up. There have been tax-supported schools, like in Europe, John Knox, and under Luther. You could have a tax-supported school that was explicitly Christian, because the country was explicitly Christian. But what Horace Mann was up to was establishing a school system that was not connected to the church or to the gospel or to Christ. It was a secular endeavor that would eliminate crime, virtually eliminate crime, that would make life safe for everybody, that would eradicate all kinds of social ills. Horace Mann's promises were extraordinarily, he pitched it high. So, and there's a book by Rustunni, the messianic character of American education, that details the founders, the unitarian utopian founders of the government school system, were very much about education as savior. Education as savior. Christian education approaches it differently. Education is education as sanctification, only Christ as savior. And then the people who have been saved and forgiven by grace need to be discipled, they need to be taught, they need to be brought up into it. But the education doesn't bring them to salvation. Salvation brings them to education. So that's the fundamental difference. Is, and this is the way it has to be, it actually goes back to Socrates. If you're a humanist, you believe humanity, man is your God. And it is hard to maintain the posture of man being your God when man is so vile. So wicked, it's hard to maintain the goodness of man when the body's keep piling up, and all these awful things happen. So the humanist has to answer the question, if man is basically good, then why does he do bad things? And the humanist answer to that is ignorance. Man does evil because he's ignorant. Well, if the problem, if the sin problem is ignorance, then the solution is education, right? So we all we need to do is explain to him what's going on. So we bring the program, we bring the message, we bring the social worker, we bring the government school to fix the problem of ignorance. And once we fix the problem of ignorance, the natural goodness of man will take over and the fluffy clouds and unicorns and rainbows will come into the picture, which is how the early Unitarian Egecrats thought. Christians think differently, think we believe that man is irredeemably corrupt and sinful and broken, and we must be fixed before we do anything worthwhile. And so Christ is the Savior. Education is another an additional gift of Christ in sanctification, as opposed to the secularist for whom education is justification. Okay, so this sounds, the structure of it is evangelical. You must be born again, you're dead in your sins and then education. But let me put a little parenthetical comment in here because the false approach to this is a sneaky devil and we'll always creep back in. So you've got this, I've given you the stark contrast between secular education, education will fix it and Christian education, which is built on the grace of God. Well, in private Christian education, there's a movement that is emphasizes virtue, the inculcation of virtue, virtue exit. And in a number of cases, that's just re-fried paganism. It's putting education in the place of a Savior again, only with Christian whitewash terminology on it. It really has to be evangelical. There has to be a commitment to the gospel that saves sinful, corrupt people that being the administration, the teachers and the students. Okay, I wanna dive into both of those things. So the absolute necessity of the new birth with the real problem being dead in your sins, not that you're ignorant. That's one piece. And then I'd like to talk more about the virtue piece too, since we're very much involved in the classical Christian movement. I'm sure that people that are tuning in will be. But the first, I think the first one, thinking of like the your standard Christian out there in the United States that does send, they send their students to government schools, or maybe they work in the government schools, and they hear you say in the secular system, ignorance is the problem. Education is the Savior. And the Christian system being dead in your sins is the problem, and Christ is the Savior. And as you get born again by the Spirit, now education is a sanctification process. It's not a justification process. Okay, that's great. But I think some of these teachers would say, here we are, we're in these government schools. So many students do this still, as compared to a homeschool or even classical schools. Don't you think ignorance really is a problem? Like they are ignorant. Mm-hmm. And am I supposed to just pray for them and wait around for the new birth before I start teaching them? You don't pray for them and wait around what you do is preach the gospel to them. So your next door neighbor's a drunkard and he yells at his wife and abuses her, and all those are problems. But he's a slave to that. I can't go over and give him a good advice. He needs good news because all the good advice in the world is simply going to increase his condemnation. It's going to make things worse. Don't yell at your wife, don't drink so much. Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't. The law provokes sin. Paul tells us in Romans 3, 28, and Romans 5, 20, Romans 7. The law, just be a decent human being, is not good news. It compounds the problem, makes it worse. So yeah, the kids need to be taught, but they need a foundation. The house needs to be built, but you need a foundation to build the house on. If you say, well, building a shelter is urgent, we're just going to skip the foundation because that'll foundation building is going to slow us down. I think of the old saying, if you don't have time to do it right, how will we have time to do it over? The storm is going to collapse the house. Now, what happened was in the American government school system, because we built it on a shoddy foundation, a non-existent foundation, there was a general Christian consensus in the society outside, all right, the all the early school boards, local school boards were evangelical in Christian, but some far-sighted Christians saw the play that was being run. The movers and shakers, the thinkers that were behind the government school system, were unbelievers or secular or unitarian, they were drifting away from, or galloping away from orthodoxy. The system is it was set up because the way United States was, the schools were controlled by local school boards, and those local parents were evangelical Christian, very conservative. R.L. Dabney in the 19th century, you know, when the government schools were still achieving lift-off, said, Christians then must prepare themselves for the following results. All Bibles, Catechisms and prayers will ultimately be driven out of the schools. And then A.A. Hodge said that the government school system is going to prove to be the greatest engine for the propagation of atheism that the world has ever seen. Now, they, and we look at a statement like Dabney's, and we say, now, I went through the government school system and I still remember praying in the public school. I've, I've remembered my earliest memories in school predate the time when prayer was exiled from the school. But modern Christians say there were Bibles in the school, there were Catechisms in the school. Yeah, there were Bibles, prayers, Catechisms in the school, and they were Protestant Bibles, they were Protestant Catechisms, and they were Protestant prayers, not to marry as it. So when the great influx of Roman Catholic immigrants came to the United States in the 19th century, like from Ireland and places like that, the Roman Catholics built their own parochial school system that was distinctively Roman Catholic. And the reason they did that was not because the public schools at that time were so secular, but they were so Protestant and evangelical. There's no prayers to marry, there's no, they used Protestant Bibles, it would be Protestant Catechisms. And the Protestants who were controlling the local schools systems were not playing the long game, right? Hodge and Dabney saw the long game, and they saw that eventually, like Gresham's law, bad money drives out good, bad principles will drive out good principles. So we're at the point now where tens of thousands of students cannot read their own diplomas, where we have litter boxes for the furries, so they can avail themselves of that. We have kids coming to school with in animal costumes, like they're a raccoon, and it's like everybody appears to have lost their minds, just not totally lost their minds. And we used to, if you look at some of the admission tests for colleges in 1900, the things you were expected to know coming out of high school, right? We used to teach Latin in high school, and now we teach remedial English in college. It's just, how did this project come crashing down the way it asks? Well, bad foundation. You don't, if a house collapses in the storm, you don't come and say, well, it's paint the shutters. You need to jack the whole thing up, you need to get a foundation underneath there. Okay, so this is your evangelical through and through, just like, so evangelical bona fides, you've written about that in reform is not enough, and you've the absolute necessity of the new birth. Just against the church is dedicated to that whole thing. Yes. Yeah, the whole thing, I'm setting this up to say, what's happened here? I've been here four years, and I remember reading this book many, many years ago, when I lived back in Florida, and well, it's just rare. People aren't doing classical Christian education. Still, even with the growth and the great abundance of ACCS, and so there's still this weird sense of, if I really want to be a smart person, then I need to go to whatever's left of the Ivy Leagues or the secular living, so they deliver arts and humanities. Then it's not gonna be evangelical. Evangelical has always been tent refivals, Billy Graham stuff. Evangelical mind just doesn't exist, and it's remarkable to me that knowing Logos School decay through 12 classical Christian school that's here, knowing New St. Andrews College, the level of education and the recovery. So when you're lament in this book, as you just did, that Latin's lost. I have seven kids at Logos, the oldest is in 10th, and the youngest is in kindergarten. Now the kindergartener has not started that Latin yet, but nearly everyone else in the household has. It's beautiful, it's a wonderful thing. I'm already thinking, okay, how do we preserve this? And I realize there's no human. The evangelical part is there are no human, there are no instruments in which you should put your trust. Because from the beginning when you built this thing, it was like that point of evangelical through and through. It's great, and not only do you believe in the grace of God, as you lay the doctor or not, you must affirm and believe in and trust the grace of God in Christ. But it turns out that the grace of God is living and active. It does things. And so this whole enterprise would not exist. If it were not for God smiling on it. If God did not, if the Lord builds the house, the one of the labor that builds it in vain. And that's, we started a school in Florida that's still cranking and very, very grateful because God smiles His smile on it and continues His smile on it. And I, but I've talked to plenty that particularly we'll look to the work here and it can be frustrating. It can be hard. You're trying to start it. You're trying to get people on board out of that secular mindset, not sending their kids to government schools and out of the liberal mindset that wants to drift to the virtue, virtues that are not built upon the new birth. And so the message is, it is kind of like the sink or swim sense and it should push you to faith in the Lord, not frustration. If I could say a bit of encouragement. People who are in the trenches building, trying to farm a patch of hard ground, starting a classical Christian school and they, and it's uphill and there's all kinds of challenges. And they look at Moscow and the thriving community here and everything's popping and everything's going good. And they, there can be time to say, it's all very well for you guys. I mean, you've got this thriving, successful, amazing thing. Well, for decades, we didn't. Right? The uphill climb that these people are going through, we went through that and we didn't have any other place to look at. It was sort of, we learned this out of books. And in the distant past, people had done these things. And so we had a lot less to go on and it was a hard slog for us as well. And God is kind to people who endure the slog, Badi. Yeah. I've heard stories about you studying the next Latin chapter in the truck like before you walk into class to teach it. Right. I was taking Latin in order to be able to teach it and being a little bit ahead of the kids. Yeah. That's the slog of, everyone knows it's really in the classroom. There's going to be good days and bad days. There's going to be lessons that you're like, well, that would be great to have somebody sit in on that one. And then there's going to be lessons that you're thinking, I hope no one's as well as sit in on that one. Right. The running of it. That's good. Now, okay, the virtue, a signal we're going to talk about, there's a virtue thing. The cardinal virtues, the theological virtues, as institutes of higher learning say, you could be at the college level or at the high school level. As you now deal with classical Christian schools and they start talking about prudence, temperance, justice, fortitude, cardinal virtues. Is that inherently bad? Should we do it? Not do it? How should we think about it? Absolutely not bad at all if it's instruction in sanctification. Right. If Peter tells us to add this virtue to this virtue, to this virtue. So I'm not against virtue. I'm against virtue without a gospel foundation. And not because I'm against virtue, but because I want to see virtue promulgated and encouraged. So the problem with virtue education is that it sometimes bypasses the gospel. So if you have a virtue curriculum and you want to instill the cardinal virtues, and I have no complaint against any of them, or against that schematic breakout, or the definition of the seven deadly sins and the seven cardinal virtues. I'd nothing against all that. I just think a school that emphasizes that needs to have a weekly chapel service where you bring in some fundamentalist preacher right out of a flannery o'connor short story. And pin the kids ears back. It's got to be hot gospel. And then yeah, instruct kids in virtue as you please. Very good. And this is again, I'm just, since I'm teaching these institutions, yet Herodotus and Thiccidides in history, Plato and Aristotle, all that, would do a coinist. I mean, coinist is different, obviously being in the Christian tradition, but these others, there's a high level. I mean, there's a lot of three years of a classical language at NSA, mostly Latin, but then you can go into Hebrew, Middle English, Old English, Greek. But yeah, but you still do preach as if it were, you know. Just the standard, or Carl F. Hintray gospel right up the middle. So you're not blowing smoke for what's going on here. Pivoting back to maybe, I'm thinking of, back to evangelicals that are thinking about education. You're pushing on the government school system, which is distinctly secular, a prayer indeed has been driven out of schools and all that. But in Messianic education and this piece on the Christchurch app, Christ and Country series, you say education is fundamentally religious. Yes. And I don't believe you're saying our version of our Christian version of education is fine. Every version of education, what do you mean by that? So to say that, I would say apart from formal worship, education is the most religious thing we do. And it may be a false religion, it may be an adulterous religion, it may be the true faith, but it's the most religious thing that we do. What we're doing is explaining the world to our children so that they will know how to navigate the world. And we're going to explain the world to them in the light of our worldview. If we think that we're just the end product of so many years of mindless evolution, that's a worldview and it's a religious worldview and you're going to teach children to live in the light of that truth. And that's where a lot of the hopelessness and despair comes from. Darwinism is a dead end when it comes to people having purpose for life. But what's the point? Well, eat drink and be married for tomorrow we die. So that's a worldview. Hinduism is a worldview. Islam is a worldview. Christianity is a worldview. And you cannot teach your children how to live in the world without assuming the truth or falsity of any one of those worldviews. So you're going to assume certain things. So to illustrate this one time in college, I was in a class where they showed us a woman who had contracted a terminal disease and she resolved to commit suicide. She was a painful disease and she resolved to commit suicide and they had a going-way party and this is a short film where the friends came over and then after the film closed the tail end, she and her husband, she went off and was administered some drug or something committed suicide. And the whole ostensible pitch for this was she wanted to preempt the suffering, the disease that she had was going to be very, very painful and she wanted to just head that off and paint a lot of Christians might say, well, I feel sorry for you. I, what's wrong with that? Well, what's the assumption there? The assumption is that death will remove suffering. But you don't know that, right? In the Christian worldview, we all will live forever either in the presence of God or exiled from his presence and there's weeping and gnashing of teeth in the one route and there's the beatific vision in the other and you have just assumed the falsity of the Christian faith when you took this course of action. You don't have the option of saying, we're all saying the same thing really because we're not saying the same thing. So if you take this course of action, you're assuming the truth of Islam. If you take that course of action, you're assuming the truth of Christianity. If you decide the other way, you're assuming the truth of mindless evolution. You can't leave the casino. You have to place your bet. Okay, so this, when, as schools have deteriorated and you get really crazy stuff going on, Christians start waking up to this reality that there's something at the bottom of all of this occasion. But for a long time, and I still think it's kind of plausible now in conservative areas. Many people think, look, I send my second grader in there, they're not having them roll out the prayer mat and begin to muzzle them calls a prayer. They're not doing that kind of thing. They're teaching them mathematics, there's recess, there's some grammar, we're going to do that. And there's a hamster wheel in the back of the class. Can't we just teach basics? Can we just teach the basics without reference to the triune God? Like if the world is true, I'm a Christian. Aren't they getting kind of the real thing? Why must I acknowledge the triune God? Can I get away with this? Right, the answer is no, because the single greatest command in all scripture is in Deuteronomy 6. Deuteronomy 6, 4 through 9. That, the command is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, all your brains, and all your strength. Jesus is the one who adds all your mind. So, and that command to love the Lord your God, the greatest command in all scripture, according to the Lord Jesus, occurs in the context of a passage that's about education. Teach your children the law of God when you rise up, when you lie down, when you're at the intersection, waiting for the light to change. So, Deuteronomy 6, 4 through 9 requires covenant children to be brought up in an environment dominated by the word of God. That's the requirement. And then Paul, I think echoes that in Ephesians 6, where he says, fathers bring up your children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, in the paedaya of the Lord, the inculturating process of folding your children into a Christian culture, Christian society, and a Christian worldview. Those are explicit Christian commands. Now, when you teach the rudiments in a, let's say a government school that is not characterized by moral disorder, let's say there are no furries, let's say the principal is a decon in the Baptist church and the teachers are all professing Christians and they're running this school in East Tennessee and it's a very conservative county and they quietly ignore instructions from the State Board of Education. Let's say they're getting along, okay, it's not a terrible place, okay? Is that still not fulfilling the command? Because when you just teach basic math facts, just like neutral, two plus two equals four and he had does and three plus three equals six, he had does, what you're doing is you're teaching by implication that what we're doing in this classroom has nothing to do with God. It's not from him to him. It's not from him to, yeah. In other words, whatever opinions you have about God, those opinions are irrelevant to what we're doing here in this classroom, their mere opinions, their opinions and their detached, or even if they're true convictions, you've got the clutch in, it's not engaged. But Jesus said that Deuteronomy was right. I need to do more than know that two and two make four. I have to love God by knowing that two and two make four with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, all your strength. So Christian education is older Christians, teaching younger Christians how to do that, how to love God when you're dealing with historical facts, how to love God when you're working through spelling, how to love God in math, how to love God when you're studying his creation and biology. So the secularists, when they're behaving themselves, when they're behaving themselves, right? The old line used to be this, look, there's a neutral, there's a neutral body of common knowledge that we all share regardless of our worldview, like it's cold porridge. And your distinctive Christianity is like condiments. So we'll give you the porridge and then you take the bowl of porridge home and then you can flavor it, heat it up, cool it down, put ketchup on it. You can do all the Christian stuff to this porridge and flavor it to suit yourself. And then the Hindu kid can do the same thing with Hindu condiments at home and the Muslim kid can do the same thing. So that was the thought, that was the idea. Well, it turns out in retrospect that they were lacing the porridge all these years with cocaine. Never knew. They were not keeping their side of the deal. It was not truly neutral. It was not truly neutral. But even if they were doing their level best to keep it truly neutral, they were saying there are certain parts of the world that God has nothing to do with. I'm gonna model for you how to think about the world and I make no reference to God. I'm not indebted to him in any way. And the kids pick up on that. God doesn't have anything to do with that. Which is why modern Christians are so schizophrenic. They've got different parts of their brain. There's the Sunday school part of their brain. There's the Sunday, go to meetings part of their brain. And then there is the math or history part of their brain. And those two worlds don't touch each other. Now this is very different than the old school hypocrisy. All right, there was an old gospel song. I wanna be more than a Sunday go to meet in Christian. Right, I wanna live out my Christianity every day. But what that was talking about was I don't want to be a rank hypocrite where I worship God on Sunday and I lie cheat and steal in my business. I wanna do my spiritual disciplines on the six days. Right, I wanna be pious all seven days. But this is not, that's hypocrisy, right? But this is more serious than that hypocrisy. This is schizophrenia, right? Where you are truly double-minded. And trained to be so. And Lewis says in screw tape, you're the devil is speaking. Your man has been accustomed to have a dozen incompatible ideas dancing around in his head. Well, that's the end result of what happens when Christians have their kids enrolled in even a decent Christian school, excuse me, a government school. And this is playing out all over again with charter schools. So oftentimes charter schools are run by Christians, started by Christians, heavily a heavy Christian involvement in enrolling their kids there. But the deal, here's the deal and it's the deal with the devil. We don't mention Jesus. We don't thank him for this biological wonder. We don't glorify him in this poem about George Herbert. We don't attach it to God. And that trained detachment is sort of a world view, a Christian worldview suppressant. And it results in Christians having all their different bits of knowledge stacked in different boxes in their head and the boxes don't touch. It's creepy too because even as where we take someone who was 100% on board, I take on board as a teacher in the classroom, I can teach the right things in the wrong way. And if I do it, it doesn't work because that's what the government schools are committed to. You're saying not only you're a good school that you keep the trans stuff out, but you're a good school that you indeed did teach them their multiplication tables. But you didn't do it in the right way. And thus you are actually creating them to be double minded. It's not merely about getting the content. The content matters, content matters, but form matters. And that is yes, something like the doxology at the opening, something like a prayer that God would give us insight and understanding. If you began by the spirit, you can't be perfected by the flesh. You can't teach anything in the classroom by the flesh. If you do it, it's not gonna work. So there's a picture floating around on the internet of 1950, I think a hospital in England somewhere where about 10 nurses are preparing to go on shift in a hospital and they're all gathered around a table kneeling in prayer. And I look at that and I think that is a different world. Right, it's a different world. And it's not just a little sanctumony sprinkled on top of all nurses everywhere do. The reason we're up against it when it comes to things like euthanasia and abortion and sex change surgeries and so forth is that we don't do that. Right, we said all that, we can dispense with that. Oh, no, we can't. Yeah. So this will be unimpressive to all of the youth, but Seattle Seahawks game, maybe think of Seattle Seahawks game. And I don't know the guy's name, the receiver for the Seahawks, Jackson something in Jabara or something like this. I don't know if you've watched any of this. I watched parts of it. Made in amazing catches and someone, the camera caught him praying on the sideline during the game, like during the intense part of the game. And then right afterward having played very well, it immediately gives all glory to God. And now we all know that there can be a superficiality to that in sports or not, but this seemed quite genuine in his prayer, right? This is a great moment. There was another player that made very bad decisions and was arrogant and gotten a thousand. Here's this guy, like really praying. And it's wonderful. Did the God hear the nurses? Did it, is that the world that you live in? Did God hear this man? Is that the world that you live in? And the answer is yes. Yes, God answers prayer. When we say Christ is Lord, we really do mean He's Lord of all. Correct. And that you should be skilled at whatever you do. And you should really ask the Lord to bless it. That's exactly what you're trying to do in the classroom. So all of your teacher trainings need to be not only classroom management, you need to do all the skill stuff, but it is a cultivation of genuine faith and growth in faith and how to live by faith, teach by faith, all that. OK, so let's pivot to this book, rediscovering the lost tools of learning. So now we would be going to people that are on board, that understand Christ as Lord, secular education is out. And we really want to get down to applying it. I've identified some spots here in this book. You wrote this how long ago? It came out in 90 or 91. So late, I was writing probably in the late 80s, maybe early 90s. OK. So I think the place I really want to go, there were several interesting places. Maybe we'll start here. This is chapter 8, the obstacles of modernity. And this is where you bring up the question. You cite Neil Postman, amusing ourselves a death, and you talk a little bit about television. You actually dive right into television. So I'll read from chapter 8 here, page 104. Maybe it should explain the viewers what television is. Yes. I think they're looking at this. They're like, am I doing that now? When I'm watching you guys, am I doing television? They're looking at their phone. All right. Video dependence creates two major problems for the educator, video dependence, you call it. The first has to do with the destruction of the rational and imaginative capacity. And the second has to do with the programmed content. Now, I'm interested in, let's start. I think everyone knows program content is if it's bad. But does video dependence destroy the rational and imaginative capacity? Yes. Not automatically. And it can be done in a way that doesn't. But the natural bias drifts toward that. So the second part, if you've got raunchy teen sex comedies and so forth, then that's the corrupting element I'm talking about. The destruction of rational and imaginative faculties works this way. If you're reading a Tolkien story where Frodo and Sam are being pursued, let's just make up a scene, where Frodo and Sam are being pursued by 15 orcs. And I'm describing it in a very intense way. And they're running down a hill, and the orcs are hot after them. If I wrote that in a story, and I had 10 readers of that story, those readers have to imagine the scene. And the Frodo and Sam are either running toward the camera, toward the viewer, or they're running away, or it's a drone shot. They're looking down, or they're running from right to left, or they're running from left to right. The reader constructs the imaginative scene in his mind. And the author is giving prompts. It's just like, not just like, but it's like AI. The reader is the AI machine, and the author is giving the prompts. So he's telling the story in such a way that the reader constructs the whole thing, and a really imaginative kid is going to construct it. It's going to be a HD, vividly constructed. But everybody constructs it. So when Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan, I ask people, so was the beat up guy on the right side of the road or the left side of the road? Well, the text doesn't say. But if you imagine the story, I always imagine the right side of the road across the road sort of. And which way is the priest traveling? Left to right, right to left. Which way is the Levi traveling, right to left? You have to, if you tell a story at all, that has to happen in order for the person to receive the story. That imaginative construction has to happen. But if Peter Jackson decided to make a movie of your little scenario, it's one way. It's put in a teaspoon, and here you go. This is the image is just handed to you. And the imaginative work, and sometimes it's quite strikingly good, imaginative work. But it's all done by the director. Now, this is why I think the general tendency of movie goers is to have everything dumbed down for them. So if you had someone who's watched a thousand movies over the last 10 years, and someone who's read a thousand books over the last 10 years, the reader is going to have far more imaginative muscle, just given this general structure of movies and the general structure of books. They're going to have more imaginative muscle. Now, if someone who's in the movie making world, here's this, and says, yeah, I take your point. Is there anything that can be done? Yeah, there's the things that you can do. But if you just don't think about it, it's going to drift into that ditch. Things you can do. Basically, if you want to exercise the imaginative capacity of the viewer, it's going to depend on dialogue and plot. OK, intricate plots, dialogue, such that a person could be watching the movie for the third time and notice a little Easter egg that you put in there that makes them want to hunt for those Easter eggs. It makes them want to feed. So it keeps them mentally active as they're doing it. One of my favorite movies is Cherry. It's a fire, which I, well, I won't go there. Well, maybe I will. If you listen to the soundtrack, that distinctive soundtrack, and it goes, ta, ta, ta, ta, ta, ta, ta, ta, ta, if you sing on top of spaghetti, all covered with cheese. OK. OK. Along, it's the same tune. The way that's called complexity. You're right. That's the capacity. So he's coming out, either. You're looking for Easter eggs, and there's one. In that movie, the setup is a Jewish runner who's driven by the law and a Christian runner who's driven by grace. When I run, I feel his pleasure. That, by itself, is just a structural plot juxtaposition that plays out over the movie. It's marvelous. It's just really good. But then the Easter egg is at the very end. It ends with Abrams Funeral. It begins, and I think it begins, and ends with his Funeral. And as they're walking away, it's a Funeral on a Christian church. OK. Abrams, the driven Jew, converted. And oh, OK. That's interesting. And it's not a neon sign pointing at it, blinking, saying, look at this. It's deaf touches that you put there that people can realize and recognize. Right. But even that, I would say that's your long-trained imaginative capacity catching things. My assumption is, well, a couple things come to mind. You're known for your writing. You're known for metaphor, PG Woodhouse, Chestertons, like this, Paradox, all the complexities. And I think it would be fair to say, you didn't learn how to do that by sitting down watching too many movies. Right. You did that by reading, incessantly? Yeah. When I was a kid, we didn't have a television till probably I was in eighth grade or so. My parents were suspicious of that world in us. And so I was largely grown before, had any kind of interaction with TV at all. And so I grew up reading books. I grew up my dad reading books to us, reading books on my own. We had a set of world book encyclopedias that I would entertain myself in the evenings, just by reading a hard sell, like in the modern era. Oh, Johnny, no, too bad. You're spaghetti. Go down and read the encyclopedia. You gravitate. I like G. I like G. So, and we did that. And with our kids, we didn't have a television for the first four years of marriage. I got one because I wanted to follow the presidential campaign with Ronald Reagan in 1980. But we were very jealous of about screen time and the kids in screen time. So we had a television, but no TV on school nights. So most of the time, there was no television. And maybe there was, like a family movie on the weekend, some time, nothing on the school nights. And later when electronic entertainment started to catch fire, like music and different things like that, maybe a video game early. What we did is we said, our kids readers, and all three of them are, and we wanted them, basically we wanted that to not be sacrificed on the altar of screen time. So one of the things we did is we let kids earn time in the bank, money in the bank by reading. If you're reading, you read a book, then you can do this much. But so it was not arbitrary, yes, no, but it was connected to your general lifestyle. Are you grades good? Are you keeping your school work up? Are you active in sports? Are you a reader? Are you doing all the things that we want to see, flourish and develop? Is that there? If it is, then yeah, go ahead and do this. Also, and this is a good place to, when I taught at NSA, when there was a course at NSA, where I assigned Neil Postman's book, I'm using ourselves to death, but I assigned it together with another book by Steve, a man named Steve Johnson, in the title of that book is, everything bad is good for you. I think Postman is extraordinarily insightful about many things, but I'm not exactly where he is. And Steve Johnson is more open to all kinds of, you know, everything bad is good for you. He makes some really interesting arguments about mental development and video games are not bad for you. They might be morally corrupting, the Grand Theft Auto, the sort of thing, but they're back before the internet, kids would make up intellectual exercises, whether they're memorizing baseball stats or collecting different things. There's just arbitrary things that people do, that's part of mental development. And if you take Johnson and Postman and say, yeah, I like them both. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so one more thing on the reading, to inspire readers. And it's connecting something we were talking about before about content. So if you have a good school, it's delivering the content, but they're not doing it in the right way. I wonder if one of the reason people don't get into reading, there'd be no telling how many books you've read of the course of your life that kind of thing, is because they still have this weird idea that they do it like mainly for the content, meaning, they know, I'm gonna read that book, and I'm gonna get content in the moment. And I'll try to write down a mind notebook all the important points, but they know that as life goes on, in three months, they won't remember. Right. And so why did I do that again? Like is it, so the relationship between what's happening to you when you read and the content, you just called forth this, for example, you just called forth the content of two books, the main substance of both of those books, but is it just about getting the content, is about what happens to you? No, sometimes I happen to remember the basic themes of both those books, but there are other times where I'll be sitting in my office and my eye falls on a book and on myself, and all of that looks interesting, and I pull it down, maybe I should read this, and I flip it open, there's blue highlighter all the way. Right. Okay, I already read this. I had made a big impression apparently. So what boils down to here is Tolkien was once asked where his ideas came from. Where do your ideas come? And he said they grow up from the leaf mold of my mind. Okay, the leaf mold of my mind. It's not a matter, it's not just a matter of content, or let me correct that, it's always a matter of content, but it's not a matter of able to remember content. So if I said, so summarize for me, your conversation with your wife in the car three weeks ago. If I gave you a pop quiz, gave her a pop quiz, you'd both flunk the pop quiz. Right, I don't remember what we were talking about, I don't remember. But is it important to be talking with your wife regularly every day, and it's something really happened there, even though you can't remember? Yeah. Right, so what's that is, that's the leaf mold of the relationship. And so if you read a thousand books, you might be able to pass a test, a pop quiz test on three of them. But all 1,000, cover the forest floor. They become part of who you are. The conversations that you have with your loved ones, the conversations you have with a stranger on an airplane, the book you read on the airplane, whether you remember it or not, all of that goes into the composition of who you are. And when a situation comes up and you respond in the moment, you don't know where that came from. It came up out of the leaf mold of your mind. So it's not, reading is like education. It's a subset of education, but education is not about primarily information. It's about formation. So you want, again, gospel of the foundation, formation is sanctification, and growing up into a virtuous intelligent, educated, well-informed person. It's formation, and you don't have to give an account of all the things that formed you. You just have to have been formed by them. Yes. And then in the classroom and education, I think on the teacher side and on the student side. So if as a student you're in that experience and some the common thing that Americans all say is, what am I ever going to use this? I don't plan on being an engineer, I just, let's just get rid of all the math. It's not about when you're going to use it. Well, first you actually are going to use it because it's going to pop up out of the leaf mold of your mind, but the exact problem that you solved won't pop up. But something's happening to you. Yeah, and you'd be surprised at how things come back. My daughters were once got together to make a quilt with a girl from homeschool family where the parents were sort of on school. No need to educate daughters. And because all you need to do is make biscuits and cook and quilt and do that sort of thing. But then my daughters found themselves doing trig to sort out the quilt pattern and the other girls lost. A lot of it is actually usable, but even if it isn't usable, it toughens disciplines your mind. It's like your mind, your brain is not like a shoebox that gets full of information. It's more like a muscle that exercises. So when a football coach has his players run sprints during the week and practice, the sprints don't take you anywhere. They just back and forth and back and forth. And if someone said, what's the point of this? I run to the 20-yard line and then I run back to the 10-yard line and I run to the 20-yard line and I run to the 10-yard line. And the coach says, if you keep that up, you're going to run to the 30-yard line. Well, there's a resource there in the game, but it's not information resource. I now know how to run to the 20-yard line. It's formation resource. I'm different because I did that thing. So thank you, Pastor Doug. And again, folks, if you're interested, I believe our app is free. I think Christ is happy. Yeah, it's free. And then you can go on there. We have Christ and country is the series. Messianic education is the video series that you produce about 17 minutes long, I think, where we're, where Pastor Doug's talking about this topic. And if you haven't actually read, recovering the lost tools of learning, this one has been around and continues to be feeding all of the classical Christian school movement and has kind of a, would be a deeper dive into that subject. Pastor Doug, thank you for taking the time. Thank you.