Today, we’re talking about how the right educational foundation creates true courageous patriots. I’m joined by my friend Daniel Foucachon from Roman Roads Press.
Daniel founded Roman Roads Press in 2011 with the desire to publish a classical Christian curriculum that was designed with the 21st-century learner and homeschooler in mind. Our flagship product is the four-year Old Western Culture great books curriculum, produced with Wes Callihan and several other classical educators.
In 2016, he founded Digressio Magazine, the magazine of Roman Roads Press, whose mission was to encourage parents and teachers as they educate their children.
In 2019, he founded Kepler Education, a consortium of independent educators and an online platform to empower families by liberating teachers.
All of these endeavors have one common goal: to equip parents to give their children a Christian, classical education. To “inherit the Humanities” for themselves and their children.
We discuss classical education and how to keep our children from going to school for 13 years and leaving with no real education to speak of.
Highlights:
- “What we want to do is restore the true ‘liberal arts’ so it’s important to understand what we mean by it and that is the making of a free man.” - Daniel Foucachon
- “They (the Founding Fathers) didn’t just happen to have a classical education, they are attributing, they’re saying this is what enabled us to be who we are.” - Daniel Foucachon
- “My goal is to help families inherit the humanities, to help families who start reading the great book become equipped with tools that allowed our Founding Fathers in America to form America.” - Daniel Foucachon
Timestamps:
[01:44] A public school in Tennessee instituted an after-school Satan Club
[04:42] What is classical education and why we must share it with our children and grandchildren
[07:29] What “Liberal Arts” really mean and how it’s not the bad liberal that we associate with [10:57] How the modern world sees an ‘educated person’ differently from our Founding Fathers
[14:52] How Classical education helped the Founding Fathers become courageous patriots and how we can apply that in our era
[24:15] The Courageous Patriots Western Civilization Package - how it can help you educate your kids, grandkids, and even yourselves
Resources:
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Are we seeing the revitalization of conservative civilization? All over the world has been a massive backlash against globalization, its leftist leadership, and its anti-cultural liberal values. And it's just the beginning. I'm Dr. Steve Turley. I believe the liberal globalist world is at its brink, and a new conservative age is rising. Join me every day as we examine these worldwide trends, discover answers to today's toughest challenges. And together, learn to live in the present in life of even better things to come. This is Turley Talks. So George Washington has been called by historians the Cincinnati of the West. We have a city named after Cincinnati, Cincinnati. The League of the Cincinnati, the Daughters of the Revolution are connected to that. And the story goes that George Washington was so affected by this ideal, this Roman ideal, that one historian says that it was the thing that kept him going through the winter, not to win necessarily, but to win so that he could lay down his commission, to lay down his arms, and not become a king, not become a dictator, and to him he wanted to be Cincinnati. He couldn't be Cincinnati unless he won against King George. And again, it's me, Dr. Steve. And I've been so looking forward to sharing with you this amazing resource in the burgeoning parallel economy, what's really becoming a parallel civilization. And frankly, it couldn't have come soon enough. I know we're all concerned about the rotting state of education in our nation today, but this story really took that rot to a whole new level. A public school in Tennessee, have you noticed I always seem to be doing this in red states? I don't know what the deal is there, but a public school in Tennessee has instituted an after school Satan club. A Satan club, that's really happening. That's not a Babylon bee headline. They've instituted an after school Satan club, and to make it even worse, this isn't even at a high school. It's a Satan club at an elementary school. I mean, if you think this through, you know, young, innocent, wondrous, impressionable hearts and minds are being invited to come and join a quote fun after school sponsored by an organization called the Satanic Temple. Fact is crazier than fiction. I know now, obviously this resonates with a similar story. We saw several weeks back with the Satanic altar that was set up inside the Iowa State Capitol with the permission and blessing ironically of the Republican lawmakers there, whose secularized liberal brand of so-called conservatism has just so ridiculously redefined religion that now Christianity is no different or better than Satanism. And we're sending our kids by the millions to schools that are teaching them precisely that. But the good news is this. There is an educational renaissance that's happening all across the nation, and it's a renaissance that isn't just bringing back the educational curriculum of our founding fathers, but it is literally exploding in popularity as it offers an amazing and hopeful alternative to the absurdities in our increasingly woke public schools. I am so excited to be joined today by our sponsor and friend, Daniel Fukushan, who is the founder of Roman Rhodes Press. They publish curriculum and books in the classical Christian tradition with the mission of equipping families to inherit the humanities. Daniel, it is awesome to see you again, my friend. It's been too long. It's been too long. It's wonderful to see you as well. Obviously, I'm very excited to talk to you. I mean, this is a topic that's near and dear to my heart. I've been involved with the classical education movement for two decades. Now, you and I both know the vast differences between public education today and classic education. But for those listening who might not be as familiar with the term, can you give us an overview of what we mean when we say classical education and why it's so imperative that we share it with our children and our grandchildren? Right. So I love this question because it's actually -- there's not a clear, concise answer that you hear every time you ask it. I've actually made it my task to ask classical educators over the last decade what -- define for me classical education and keep it short. And that's a wonderful thing. And actually, the fact that there's not a concise answer is partly because of the type of -- because it's a historical thing. It's something that has been inherited over time and over different peoples and handed down to us. So it's not this tidy scientific fact. So I actually like to define classical education -- or, you know, we talk about classical Christian education. I like to say that that's redundant. If we're talking about historical, then classical Christian is simply education. Yeah. And so I think that the easiest way to get a handle on what's this thing I'm hearing about called classical Christian education is simply to say it's the education that was -- that was standard for all of Christian history. This is what the only recently abandoned. And I'm talking about like the last hundred years or so. So if you were to go back in time for the past 2000 plus years, even pre-Christ, the books that you -- and the ideas that you wrestle with and read in classical education are the same ideas that they were trained with, especially and in particular. And I hope we'll talk about this, our founding fathers. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I love how you say it. And classical education is Christian. I mean, the three great classical cities, Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome, are all integrated into -- in Christendom. That's the magic, as it were, of Christendom's civilizational vibrancy, is to be able to bring those three cities together in this incredible synthesis all configured around Christ the Logos. Right. One of the ironic terms that comes up a lot -- in classical education is the term liberal arts. Yeah. Yeah. You know? And I've heard people say that when I say, oh, yeah, well, I teach classical education, and we -- we -- the curriculum's center on the liberal arts, and I get this immediate, like, suspicious look, liberal. And maybe even arts, too, because I've seen the arts and -- Exactly. Right, crowd have become. And, oh, I threw in a -- I threw in a little Frenchism there for you, my friend. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead. Well, what is -- what is -- we use this term liberal arts all the time in the classical world. What is it? And how is it not the bad liberal that we often associate it with? Yeah. So you hear the term liberal, and as you said, even arts, and you immediately think, you know, liberalism or liberals, and even the term liberal arts has been so -- it's been destroyed by liberalism that if you -- like, the liberal arts that you have in a public university are just a -- a tiny member. There's basically nothing left. They've been destroyed from what we truly mean when we mean liberal arts. So I want to, you know, get a little Latin in here. Just a few words here. So liberal arts, liberal means free. So as pertaining to a freeman, this is not about liberalism. This is not about a direction, but what it means to be free. And art is the art of making. So there's a real sense in which if you really understand in its most basic sense, what liberal arts mean, what it does, is it's the -- it's the making of a freeman. Yeah. It's the making of free people. And obviously, what has happened in our universities is that they've taken this -- this idea of liberal arts. They've destroyed it and turned it into the -- truly the opposite. Now liberal arts is synonymous with, would you like fries with that? And it's just -- it's been -- there is no -- there's -- they have to keep the term because if you remove the liberal arts from a university, it's actually no longer a university. It's a -- it's a trade school. And the university was created by Christians in the middle ages. And the idea of all things being centered around God, all in one. And so university, the -- everything being one in -- in God, you know, all things centered around God. So they can't get rid of the term, and so they destroy it. So what we want to do is restore the true liberal arts. So it's important to understand what we mean by it. And that is the making of a freeman. I love it. They can't get rid of it, so they destroy it. That is just -- I mean, that -- that was worth the interview right there, Daniel. [ Laughter ] We can't get rid of the term, so let's just go ahead and destroy it. It just sums up wokeness today. It's perfect. It's a battle of words. It's a battle of definitions. So we're going to -- we're not going to let them have this one. I think this one's worth retrieving. There are certain words are like, "Okay, you've destroyed it." You know? Let's -- I couldn't agree back more. Yeah. There is something about being liberated from this kind of technocratic tyranny that we're living on right now. Absolutely. The liberal arts to literally make one free. Yeah. So then that leads us wonderfully into the founding fathers. Again, a lot of people don't realize this. Our founding fathers all had a common education. You know? We throw around the Greek term "pidea" a lot. You know, this common culture that they were -- they were literally forged in. And I think a lot of us can overlook how our whole idea of what an educated person is today in our modern secular context, how much our conception of an educated person has changed over the last several decades. I mean, you got into that with how the term "liberal" has changed. But even the way we even think of an educated person -- can you flesh that out for us first? Yeah. How does the modern world see an educated person differently than say how our founding fathers would have thought of an educated person? Right. Well, today to be educated is become synonymous with your job. So, you know, where did you go to school? Who are you? It's a question of identity. Who are you? I'm a mechanic. I'm an engineer. I'm a doctor. Your vocation. Yeah. It's a vocational connection. And so education for all of human history was the liberal arts education. Those who were educated were -- the education was for, as I said, free men versus slaves in the past. And so if you think about that, there is in spite of all of our talk about being anti-slavery, there's a sense in which modern education is the education of slaves. Yeah. So it's not that learning trades is a wrong thing. That free men, nobles and free men, definitely are in the art of making things and doing business. But the person who only knows how to be a cog in the machine, who only knows how to do this, who has a narrow siloed education, is -- it was not the free men historically. It was the slave. Right. You put this and you put it over there. You learn how to do this. And so our entire education system has become siloed. And it is actually affecting our ability to even advance in the sciences. We posted an article from Dr. Mitch Stokes about how this is affecting physics and the advancement of physics. And even the way we go about research, that we become so siloed even in our specialties that classical interdisciplinary education is starting to really hurt the advancement of even scientific endeavors. So classical education is the reintegration of the subjects. It's what makes -- it's not directly connected to vocation, even though it creates the kind of people who go out into the world and actually make things for our entrepreneurs. A lot of CEOs have that liberal arts education for a reason. Almost every U.S. president, in spite of their policies pushing against this, they themselves had a liberal arts education. So he's like, oh, it's good for me, but not for you. Good for me. Up for the -- Exactly. Yeah. Absolutely. And one of the things is the role of the moral imagination that's coming in. A lot of scholarship today, which is even New York Times, for heaven's sakes, is writing about it. Of how that really is the genesis of the great advances in physics and Einstein wasn't just technically brilliant. He was imaginatively brilliant. He could -- and of course, he was immersed in classical education. So classical education with the great books and great music and great art really nourishes the imagination, then to be able to be applied in all kinds of ways. Whereas today it seems like we're assaulting the imagination. If Netflix and Hulu is the best thing we can imagine to come up with, oh my, tuning our kids minds out of imagination, that's right. That's right. And when they're looking at the screen so much, all of us looking at the screen so much, that is the past of the imagination, it's imagination receiving as opposed to being active when it reads books and the like. So a key focus on the annual on classical education in line with this is the formation of virtue, particularly civic virtue. And I think we can overlook how the education of our founding fathers actually shaped, intentionally shaped their moral fortitude. Right. Can you speak to that? How did classical education help them become courageous? And how could its rediscovery and its renewal help us to find similar courage in our own era where we have to reawaken the founding fathers vision for society? Right. I would like to tell you two stories to kind of illustrate this from antiquity and our founding fathers. So the first one is the story of Cincinnati's is told by Livy. He was a great Roman and to the Americans, he embodied the Republican virtues of Rome. And then as it was carried on to a through the Christian heritage up to the founding of America. And so the very briefly, the story goes is that he was a senator in ancient Rome, but this is the fifth century BC. So this is, you know, very early and there were, there was an enemy. He had retired. There was an enemy. They asked him to become, to become dictator for a term of six months. And dictator at that term meant, you know, there means just the, he had absolute control. You know, he was able to do what he needed to do, get the job done. And so he reluctantly agreed and took power and they were very worried, but they knew he was a virtuous man. They're very worried that he would not give up the power afterwards and just stay a, you know, a dictator for life. But he quelled the rebellion in two weeks and then handed power back to the Senate and retired to his farm. And so that was at one of these stories that really spoke to that moral imagination, the intervention of the American founders and particularly to George Washington. So George Washington has been called by historians, the Cincinnati of the West. We have a city named after Cincinnati, Cincinnati, the league of the Cincinnati, the daughters of the revolution are, you know, connected to that. And the story goes that George Washington was so affected by this ideal, this Roman ideal that one historian says that it was the thing that kept him going through the winter, not to win necessarily, but to win so that he could lay down his commission, to lay down his arms and not become a king and not become a dictator. And to him, but he wanted to be Cincinnati and he couldn't be Cincinnati unless he won against King George. And you know, historians have said that it was King George's, George the third's inability to recognize the power of the Republican Roman ideas and how they affected our founders that led to his, led to his defeat, he underestimated just how influential the Roman authors were. So that's the first story. The, if you, one of our curriculum, you know, Old Western culture tells this story and kind of regularly lays the foundation of, so here's, here's what happened. Here's the story of Cincinnati, that story is told there. And then here's how it plays out in American history or throughout the ages. And then the other is Thucydides. So this is less of a story, but more of a, so that was a Roman, now we're going to go to a Greek, the Greek historian Thucydides considered the father of political history. He wrote the history of the Peloponnesian War. And he was, it was a great war, but he wrote at this time, you know, this is Thucydides' fifth century as well. And he says, this is a tale for all time. I'm not talking about just this great war. I'm talking about human nature and why men go to war. So he's a very influential, every West Point grad, I hope still, but definitely throughout the centuries has to read Thucydides. James Mattis tells all his officers to read Thucydides, you know, he's a very important even to this day. And so this is one of those books. I would warrant that the average American has not even heard of Thucydides. Like if you just much less read the works with a Peloponnesian War, or the Peloponnesian War. And yet if you were to go back anytime in history, especially for the American founders, I don't think there's a single American founder who wouldn't be able to converse at length about any of these great books. You know, if you mentioned Virgil, Thucydides, Herodotus, all these people that are the average person in America would say, what? Who is that? I don't eat, what language are you speaking? These were commonplace. So we've lost something very, very, very important. And it has allowed us to fall to where we have. And if you will, I want to read you, instead of just telling you how this influenced and how they viewed it. I want to read you a short letter of John Adams, the second president of the United States to his 17 year old son, John Quincy Adams, a future president of the United States. And I'll read, it's a short letter, but I'll pull out just a few things. And so first of all, the context, this is right around, I forget if it's right before after, but it's in the 1770s. So we're talking, this is the 1776 moment. This is the time where American patriots had to be courageous, had to decide who they were going to be. And so he writes to his son, this letter, my dear son, has the war in which your country is engaged. We'll probably hear after attract your attention more than it does at this time. In other words, he's being a typical teen. And the future circumstances of your country may require other wars as well as councils and negotiations, similar to those which are now an agitation. I love how he writes. I know. It's just so, what's a guy trained in Latin? Right. Yeah. Well, you'll see that Latin. Yeah. I wish to turn your thoughts early to such studies as will afford you the most solid instruction and improvement for the part which you may be allotted, which may be allotted to you to act on the stage of life. I mean, that's beautiful right there. But so he's saying, so then he goes on, there is no history, perhaps better adapted to this useful purpose than that of Thucydides, an author of whom you I will hope you will make yourself a perfect master in a rinsinal language, which is Greek, the most perfect of all human languages. Well, we can hear that. There's French in there. And he taught us. And Latin. Yeah. So he goes on to say, here's where you can find the book in my library and, you know, try to do it in Latin, but here's a translation from a certain William Smith. If you preserve this letter, he concludes the letter. If you preserve this letter, it may hereafter remind you to procure the book, you will find it full of instruction to the order, to the statesmen, the general, as well as the historian and philosopher. You may, and then I'm with effect, much affection, your father, John Adams. So that's the words of an American founder to his son saying, this is how you will become a courageous patriot. This is how you become a citizen who is going to be powerful, effective in this country. Now, they didn't just happen to have a classical education. They are attributing, they're saying, this is what has enabled us to be who we are. And so the reading of the great books, I think, is the greatest, removing them from our schools has been the greatest fall, the greatest thing that has allowed us to fall to then become deaf, to not even hear. We're not listening to the great conversation. We're not listening to the voice of our fathers, which is built right into what it means to be a patriot. A patriot comes from, you know, Patrice, it means that it means, Livy defines patriotism as the love of the family and the soil. That was how he, but it's the, Patrice has the word father in it, fatherland. And so the voice of the fathers, the voice of the people who have come before us is something we've lost. That's why our motto for Roman Rhodes Press is inherit the humanities. You know, we could have an action verb there, you know, be a courageous patriot, inherit the humanities, inherit the, and when we say humanities there, we're meaning in that liberal arts kind of way. So yeah, recovering the great books and giving the tools for students of every age. We focused on high schoolers, but we have a lot of adults doing using this as well. It is my vocation. My goal is to help families inherit the humanities, to help families start reading the great books, become equipped with the tools that allowed our founding fathers in America to form America. It's so beautiful. And that's why I love to say, I mean, I don't, I can't even, I can't even say like what Roman Rhodes represents is part of this parallel economy. And it's not parallel. You guys are parallel civilization. It's this is a organizational renewal. I mean, it's this is this is what makes economies possible in a flourishing sort of way. You have a very generous courageous patriots Western civilization package, includes all the essentials for a classical education, a patriot education for for our audience here. Can you just tell us just a little bit more? I mean, you're already giving us so much gold there, but can you tell us a bit more about what it includes and how it's going to help. Turley talkers in educating their kids, their grandkids, even themselves. That's one of the coolest things I know you speak to it. It's just the coolest thing about being immersed in classical Christian curriculum is we get reeducated. So like it's like it's literally being born again educationally. It's amazing stuff. Yeah. I believe it's Martin Coughlin who says that the best adult education is homeschooling. I entirely agree. I've heard it put to teaches to learn twice. That's right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So the what we put together, we create curriculum for, you know, high school in particular the classical subjects. But what we did with our courageous patriots packages that we gathered together all the essential resources in one complete package that includes the entire old Western culture curriculum with for the very first time, thanks to this package, the old Western culture readers at 16 volume of all the essential great books, starting from home or all the way to the early modern period in a hardback so beautiful hardback. So this package includes not only the books, but also comprehensive lectures to go alongside these lectures to help. This is what we do. We don't just give here's the book. If you have grandparents alive or if you remember them, there's a good chance they own a set of the great books, Britannica, you know, great book set. There were door to door salesmen selling these back in the day. And their pitch was, well, every household obviously should have the great books. Now, I don't disagree. But what they did is they gave these because back then you still knew that we don't know that anymore. But you should have these. I walked into someone's home recently and they had this beautiful set and they're like, oh, yeah, I've had that and then he knows what I do and then he joked, well, I haven't read any. So the problem with that is that so often they are beautiful books on a shelf that simply collect dust. And so what we do is we are helping people actually read the great books by giving them lectures and even emails and support. So a few years ago, we created a great books challenge for parents. And over time, over 2,000 parents have joined slowly going through this program that we originally created for high schoolers. But as parents, doing a more leisurely schedule that accommodates a busy life. And so it is so encouraging to see these parents start to not only read the great books, but to see the transformation in their lives. We have a completion form, so when they complete a unit, we give them a little prize for completing it. And so they send in this form and I say, can you tell me what it was like, tell me how did this affect you? The letters I've received are probably the most encouraging letters I've ever received from parents from saying, well, I'm going to change how I'm educating my children because they've got little kids. Grandparents saying, I finally understand what my grandkids are receiving in their classical school, and parents who said, this has completely changed how I view the world. I've just heard about classical education. Now I understand what it's about. And so we don't want to just say, here's a big book, read it, but we're giving bite-sized lectures. It's like an episode of a TV show, about 30 to 45 minutes. The full series is 192 lectures walking you through the great books of old Western culture of the West. We also include extra lectures and special editions of The Great Epics, like The Iliad, The Odyssey of Homer, as well as a very special edition of Dante's Divine Comedy with a Reader Guides, one of the new translations that is made from the Italian by Joe Carlson that is just really being well appreciated by first-time readers in particular. We also put in a bunch of swag, we give you some mugs and things to kind of remind you throughout the time. There's bookmarks, there's notebooks. It is a complete package. This is intended for families, but especially for adults who say, I want to retrieve this tools of learning this education. If someone is struggling in their Christian walk, you tell them, read your Bible daily, it will change how you are. I would say, if you want to become a better citizen, if you want to become a courageous patriot, you need to read the great books you need to. This will affect you. I love that advice. That's the price of this interview right there. That's a nugget, that is awesome. What both have, well, one is obviously divinely inspired, but what they both have in common is we're consulting the wisdom of the ancients, we're consulting eternal wisdom, we're consulting a wisdom that is every bit as applicable today as it was back then as it will be a hundred thousand years from now, exactly. That's Thucydides' whole argument there. Gang, look, as many of you know, this is personal for me. I was a classical educator for 20 years. I loved every single month of those 20 years and I just simply could not possibly recommend an education more for you, for your kids, for your grandkids than this. This is the very definition, as you just heard of civilizational renewal, civilizational education, and no one does it better than our friends over at Roman Roads Press. They are offering our audience an amazingly generous offer to help build strong, conservative, courageous communities. Make sure you realize this is, I mean, this is more than just a collection of books. You just heard Daniel explain it. I mean, Roman Roads Press actually offers even live discussions with experts who can dig into this material and teach us how we can be more courageous and how we can strengthen our communities and just take very practical steps to restore what the Founding Fathers work so hard to protect in our great country, but even more than all of that, just to renew your imagination in such ways to experience life at a much more deep and beautiful and spiritual level so that we can see deep spiritual renewal in our society today. So don't wait, click on that link below and make sure you do not miss out on this rich classical education that helps make someone a true courageous patriot and Daniel Roman Roads Press are going to help you do just that. I like to call it civilization in a box. If you had to put something in the ground for a future generations, this would be a pretty good candidate. Civilization of the box, it is, I mean, that is a perfect summary right there. Who says you can't have a little bumper sticker slogan. That's the translation of the box. Daniel, thanks so much, man. Again, it's been too long. Great seeing again. Let's have you back real soon. Sounds good. Thank you so much for having me on. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the "Truly Talks" podcast. Don't forget to subscribe, leave us a five-star review and share this episode with your friends. Help us defeat the fake news media and rank us the number one news and commentary podcast all over the world. Come back again tomorrow for another episode celebrating the rise of a new conservative age. [MUSIC]
