From the Kitchen Table: The Duffys - Exploring An Alternate Option For Education

Episode Date: February 10, 2022

This week, Sean and Rachel bring Headmaster Douglas Minson and Father Daniel of Our Lady of Mount Carmel School to the Kitchen Table to discuss classical Catholic schools.   Headmaster Minson and Father Daniel explain the philosophy behind classical schools and share how their traditional form of education can be beneficial for children.   Follow Sean and Rachel on Twitter: @SeanDuffyWI & @RCamposDuffy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Hey everyone, welcome to From the Kitchen Table. I'm your host, Sean Duffy, along with my co-host for the podcast, but also my partner in life, Rachel Campos Duffy.

Thank you, Sean. It's so great to be back at our kitchen table. We're going to have a really great conversation because a week ago we had Pete Hegseth, my co-host, as you all know, on Fox and Friends Weekend. That's right. And he did this amazing series called The Miseducation of America, where he laid out in long form, which we often don't get on Fox Nation, a series just going all the way back to, you know, what's happened to our education. Why are we in this moment? It goes back over a hundred years,

the progressive movement. If you haven't seen this series, I highly recommend it. It really gets down to the roots of this and how intentional, how intentional it was to take over education, because if you can take over the minds of a child, then you can take over the thought process of a country and you can actually radically transform the way a country thinks. And we've seen that today in American education. That's right.

Yeah. We're seeing people coming from that system now into Congress, people like AOC and others in the squad. And so it has real life policy impact on our country. And so if you haven't seen the series, we recommend you see it. What was really great about the series is it wasn't this intellectual exercise. They actually, at the end, the last episode, he had all these great minds, Victor Davis Hanson, Carol Swain, all these great people that were sort of contributing to helping us understand where our education went. And at the end, she said, he asked them, what's the answer? What's the answer in the elementary and high school level? And they all said the same thing. They all said- Get your kids out.

Yeah. He said, pull your kids out. Stop the bleeding. Pull your kids out of these systems. And then the answer was a classical great books education. And just to say for us, and many of you know that we have nine kids. And so the benefit of having nine kids is that you can make mistakes with the earlier ones and you get do-overs and you get do-overs. That's right. You're going to fix it for the later ones. And so we've always tried to focus on education and do the right thing and make sure our kids are in the right schools for education. But we recently moved from Wisconsin to New Jersey. And when we came here, we did a lot of searching about what would be the best school to send

our kids. And we had heard about these classical education, but we just never lived near one. And we got lucky and we found one. But well, I guess we should just introduce our guest. But I want to say that we found a great school for our kids. And I guess I'm not that excited about just listen, but I want to say that we found a great school for our kids and we, you know, I guess I'm not that excited about New Jersey, but I love this school.

You're allowed to say that. I am. I'm going to say it. I love Wisconsin, but I'm going to tell you what this school that our kids go to is absolutely fantastic. And it's transformational for the way your kids get educated. Yeah. And what's interesting is, you know, when, when Pete and I have been sitting on set talking about, you know, this classical academy, even our very smart co-host, Will Kane, he was like, what is that?

A lot of people don't they know about private schools. They know about Catholic schools. They know about charter schools, but they don't necessarily know what a classical education is, what that means. And so we thought we'd bring the headmaster for our kids school, as well as the parish priest who oversees all this, Father Daniel. And so let's welcome them to the show. Let's just get right into it because a lot of people want to know what this is. So we have with us Father Daniel. As I mentioned, he is the priest who oversees the parochial school of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. As well as Douglas Minson. As well as the headmaster of the school, Douglas Minson. The two partners in crime that fix the minds of kids Carmel. As well as Douglas Minson. As well as the headmaster of the school, Douglas Minson.

The two partners in crime that fix the minds of kids in America. Gentlemen, welcome to From the Kitchen Table. Hey, thanks. Thanks for having me. So why don't we start with you, Father? Let's let you just tell us a little bit about yourself and why you decided you wanted to make this school a classical school, Catholic school. And then we'll go to Mr. Minson and see

his journey into this kind of education. Sure. Yeah. Well, I mean, one of the most salient points I think is that I'm a Catholic priest. Full disclosure here before we begin, I'm a Catholic priest. So I am committed to Christ Jesus in every, hopefully, conceivable way, at least in every way that I can conceive. And that forms not only the foundation of my life, but also the foundation of my efforts in ministry and certainly my efforts in this particular realm, the formation of young minds and hearts. this particular realm, the formation of young minds and hearts. So yeah, I think for some time, I had struggled with the role of education generally in the life of students or emerging young adults, and have struggled in a particular way to see how it is, a Catholic church we can pursue an educational ministry or mission that brings about the, I don't know, that pursues the ends that we're all inclined to. And those ends, by the way, are not dogmatic in the sense of, you know, we're not looking to mind wash or brainwash our kids, quite the opposite.

We want fully flourishing human beings. And how do we get from where we are to that point in the life of any particular student? I think that's where we take the role of education so seriously. So that's, I mean, that's kind of the beginnings of the origin story for the transformation of our native Mount Carmel into a classical Catholic school. But was it traditional parochial school, like the kind, you know, kind of the run of the mill Catholic schools, the kinds that Sean and I used to send our kids to. And then you said, at some point, I really want this to be a classical academy. Yeah, I think on the previous podcast, I heard your assessment of those schools. Although I don't think I would vocalize it in the same way, probably for more political reasons,

I very much share your assessment. I think that we were struggling. I mean, it's a nice way to say it. We were struggling as a school. When I got here, my first year here, we had 77 children in the school. And I'm not sure that people perhaps can do the kind of back-of-envelope calculations that even I was able to do at that time. But our first year, operationally, we lost.

do at that time. But our first year operationally, we lost, as an educational ministry, the parish had to invest an additional $500,000 into the school in order just to keep it going for that year. Yeah, they're dying. Those schools are dying is what you're saying. Yeah. And I think that's exactly right. They're dying in a number of ways. I think the most important assessments are not, we're not going to get to say quantitatively in the sense of, you know, I say the money thing because people realize that half a million dollars is a lot of money. And it's not really possible for communities to sustain their own schools when you're incurring that much debt. sustain their own schools when you're incurring that much debt. Thankfully, we had the money at hand so we could do it. And it's been a priority of this parish community to make sure that we have this educational ministry, no matter what form it took. But I wanted to come in, I come in with a different set of metrics, evaluations, right? We measure what matters. And what really matters is, as I think you were alluding to earlier, is actually transformation. It's the transformation of the minds, hearts, and lives of these uniquely precious human

beings. And that's what we're doing. And I think that when we look at Catholic school and whether or not it's achieving its objectives, yeah, a lot of people administratively are drawn to whether or not it's profitable or how much money we're losing. But I think that we have to really look at the students, prioritize their experience, and they're growing into the people that God is calling them to be. Absolutely.

And just quickly, before I go to Douglas, how many kids are in the school now, Father? Yeah, so it was, as I said, it was 77. And as of today, it's 241. And that happened over what length of time? I think it's five years. I mean, there's a, how you number the years I think matters, but it's about five years. But I mean, it's seen explosive growth. And you know, we travel 35 minutes from home to the school each way. And I think you see that from all around, you know, Boonton, New Jersey, people are traveling to this school because they yearn to have their kids well-educated. And so

to you, Douglas, you've, you've spent a lot of time in education. You were in Arizona, you and father somehow connected and you made the journey like we did just before us to New Jersey, and you're now the headmaster at Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Tell us your journey through education and the philosophy around this classical education. Yeah, thanks. It's interesting. Full disclosure, I'm a Catholic. And so I've been looking to follow God's leading professionally wherever it has taken me. And it's been an interesting journey. I was delighted. I didn't know, Rachel, that you work with Pete Hegseth because in my early career, I was really blessed to work in nonprofit education and leadership development with college and

graduate students, really talented, passionate, committed, and devoted young people who wanted to bring their most deeply held convictions to bear on public life. And I was actually part of an organization that had Pete Hegseth as one of our fellows. Now, he preceded my tenure there, but that was where I really, I think, developed my sense of the role of education in shaping the mind of young people. But over time, I had this growing sense that as important as law and public policy are, you know, they're vital work. But it certainly was impressed on me that in many ways, it was a kind of rearguard action that what could be accomplished through law and public policy is preserving or safeguarding what we've inherited, but that they really weren't well-suited to generating or cultivating a vision of human

well-being, that if we have it, it's really important that we have law and public policy that matches up with it, but that the work of generating it, really the front lines of culture building are in the family, the parish community, and the school. That's right. So this began to, you know, move me to think, well, what is needed to be done to shape the imagination for what's possible, right? Where do we develop in the minds of young people a vision for social health and well-being, an idea of what a well-ordered society is. And as that conviction was growing, and I'm working with these really, really talented, passionate people, I received an invitation to join a charter school network, a classical charter school network. And so we picked up and moved across the country and had that experience. But again, as a Catholic, my concern was whether or not the classical charter school was able to do everything that

could be done toward this end. And so when Father Daniel and I began talking, it was a delightful opportunity not only to return back to the Eastern Theater of Operations here in the United States, you know, my family's here on the East Coast, but also to knit together my own most deeply held convictions and really, you know, what inspires me to do this work with the work of education. So, it was clearly God's calling for me to come back to the East Coast and to be a part of what the Lord has done here in Boonton and at Our Lady Mount Carmel. Wait right there. We're going to have more of that conversation next. Your teen requested a ride, but this time not from you. It's through their Uber Teen account.

It's an Uber account that allows your teen to request a ride under your supervision with live trip tracking and highly rated drivers. Add your teen to your Uber account today. Tell me what is it for for somebody who's tuning in there? They want to know what is classical education? Why should I pull my kid out of public school or maybe my run ofof-the-mill parochial school and find myself a classical academy? Why are you different? This really is the question that everybody asks, and it's not an easy one, right? It's not about bullet points.

What is classical education? Classical education has everything to do with what we teach, how we teach, and why we teach, right? And there we see a distinctive value proposition. What we teach, and why we teach, right? And there we see a distinctive value proposition. What we teach, you know, it's not what is the current trend. It's not what is the, you know, the fixation of the moment, but rather the best that has been thought and written and passed down through generations, right? What has survived the test of time, what has shaped the way that we understand the world, what has guided and created the inheritance that we've received, that we receive with gratitude and humility, even as we learn on

its own terms to critique it, to learn with it and learn from it and to improve it. It has to be ennobling and it has to be that instrument through which we come to a better understanding of what is good and true. And usually we're awakened to it by what is beautiful. It has to be inspiring, right? It has to awaken the imagination. It has to alert us to what is possible, what greatness of soul looks like. And it has to be worthy of delight. It has to contribute to a joyful experience of learning. As students realize what they're capable of, they can feel and recognize their potential being actualized. That's what we teach.

What does that curriculum look like to you? Yeah. Well, I mean, so here's the challenge, right? I'm thinking about Patrick in kindergarten, right? Your son, Patrick. And, you know, Patrick's starting to learn certain, and he, boy, when I think about a classroom of virtue, and I think about, you know, the work of a classroom in serving the whole student,

Patrick comes to mind pretty quickly, right? So I think about the way that he contributes to that experience and what he learns. Patrick deserves something better than what some recent college graduate is able to put together in a textbook and then, you know, working for a publishing company on Madison Avenue to sell yet the next most novel approach to learning to read, right? Patrick actually deserves poetry that shapes his expectation of what language can be. And that means that he's, instead of reading, you know, the wooden prose of, you know, again, I don't want to go after any particular textbook publisher, but instead of this rather uninspiring wooden prose,

you know, he deserves Robert Louis Stevenson. Even though he's in kindergarten, right? Yeah, of course. Yeah. And, you know, his patrimony, this is what belongs to him. This is his inheritance. To deprive him of it would be criminal. He deserves the Psalms.

He should be learning, you know, the Lord is my shepherd. And that then for him begins to frame his expectation of not only what language can do, but what language accomplishes and the solace and the comfort and the beauty that we find in it. It should delight him in the use of language and inspire him to imitate those things that are worthy of imitation. He should be falling in love with what is lovely. That's not going to happen when you're going through worksheets and textbooks. It is going to happen when even at a young age, you get a chance to sample the best of what we've ever done.

Yeah. You know, one of the things that I noticed when I first went into the school, and it was interesting to me because I went to the public school to tour the public school first, and then I went and met you and Father Daniel at Our Lady of Mount Carmel. And instantly, what struck me were the differences in the walls in the school. So at the public school, they had made, I think, caterpillars out of bottle caps and they painted stuff and everything was very whimsical. Tell our listeners what they would see on the walls at Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Yeah, well, I think it's really important that students learn to situate themselves in an ongoing, even eternal kind of conversation, that they recognize they have a place in what is ongoing, you know, through the ages, and what is genuinely ennobling and uplifting. So, you may remember one of my favorite stories when there were two third graders standing in our reception area looking at Raphael's School of Athens on the wall.

And I remember one boy, Max, turned to the other boy, Henry, and he said, okay, I know that the dudes in the middle are Plato and Aristotle, but I really want to know who all the other characters are. And it really impressed me that they were not only comfortable with this artwork, it didn't have to be cartoonish in order for them to find it accessible and to awaken their, you know, interest, you know, to spark their curiosity, but it's also something that they felt in a way that they had the right, they had standing to enter into and discuss and argue about. How old were those boys? They were third graders. That's amazing.

But the walls are full of, you know, classical art. Yeah, we want a kind of museum effect. drawings of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, that we come to understand our own tradition as we experience it situated within this timeless tradition. And I believe I saw an American flag, but I did not see a gay pride flag like I saw at the other school. But I want to ask you guys, and I know we don't have a whole bunch of time left, but as we think about schools, a lot of parents will say, well, OLMC, or Lady of Mount Carmel, doesn't have a vibrant athletics

program. Or they'll say, well, after listening to this conversation, you guys are really Catholic, and I'm a Christian. I'm not Catholic. Well. We're Christians too, but I'm not a Catholic, right? And I guess, and I don't want you guys to kick me through the phone ways, but if I had a great school that was a Jewish school, if I had a great school that was a Christian school and not Catholic, but was actually enlightening my child that was expanding their mind in a very healthy fashion that had morality and courage and virtue. I'm sorry. And I had a school that was lackluster Catholic. I would send my kids to the Jewish school or the Protestant Christian school because I want my children's mind to expand. I know there's some people who might look and say, well,

I don't know that I would have the resources to go to a Catholic school. So I guess I look at, you know, are the parents that listen? I know that you guys work with a lot of parents to make sure if they're called to send their kids that they can find a way to afford it. You make the case, and I believe this too. I don't send my kids to go for sports in school. I know a lot of parents do, but they're not going to be college athletes on scholarship. They're not going to go pro in anything. Not our kids. Why would I focus on sports? Because the purpose of school is education. And so just kind of wondering how you guys handle these different questions that you get from different pockets

of the community and make a pitch on why people should go to Holy Grail Mount Carmel? Those are all very important questions. The one I heard with something of a, I don't know, perhaps internal inconsistency or a contradiction would be, I want to send my kids to a Catholic school, but I don't know that I have the financial resources to do so. That simply cannot be the case. It simply cannot be the case. Not because you need to have more money, but because the Catholic education is a ministry of the church, and the church has to provide that kind of support. Now, you say we all have the responsibility of

contributing to that same mission so that people who can't afford it can, in fact, attend. But how impoverished we would be as a church to say that we can't support parents in the right formation of their children. I mean, that really is scandalous. And I think that your thought about whether or not I could send my kid to another school, either as a Christian or say Catholic, some other denomination or no denomination, I think the challenge there across the board is going to be the parents' understanding of what has to be remediated, depending on your solution. And I think Douglas was right in the beginning to say that there is no neutral here. There is no neutral. work of remediation, whether it's values and morals, and they're not being supported in this place or that place, or how they're talked about, how the scriptures are talked about.

Because of course, we're allowed to talk about them, which means that different people are going to have different views. And if in your family that needs to be remediated, then that's something that you're going to have to stay on top of. And, you know, what, what struggles do you need more reinforcement and so on and so forth. But I do, I do think also, I will say we do have some kids here who will go to, to college on athletic scholarships and the like. And, you know, is, is that remediated outside of school. We have a budding basketball team. I'm very proud of you guys. We're growing into ourselves. Athletically is the nicest way that I can say that.

Hey, we have a championship cross-country team. That's true. Our running chandeliers are something to be proud of. We'll have more of this conversation after this. You've always wanted to be part of something bigger than yourself. You live for experience and lead by example. You want the most out of life and realize what you're looking for is already in you.

And realize what you're looking for is already in you. This is for you. The Canadian Armed Forces. A message from the Government of Canada. I have to tell you that the biggest change for us going from our, you know, mediocre Catholic school that I think most people are getting to your school is quality of the literature that our kids are being exposed to at really young ages. So I went to a pretty good Catholic school when I was in high school and I was introduced to Beowulf in high school, I was probably a junior. My second grader is being introduced to beowulf um they're

getting huckleberry finn they're getting the scarlet letter um as you mentioned you know even through the artwork they're getting introduced to you know greek literature i mean it just it's it's really fascinating to me how much we we have dumbed down things for kids. And what I find most appealing about this classical education is that you don't underestimate our kids and introduce them to things that I think other people think they're too young for. Yeah, Rachel, ordinary kids are capable of extraordinary things. And schools typically set the bar too low for kids.

are capable of extraordinary things. And schools typically set the bar too low for kids. We really want to give them the opportunity to realize all of their capacity. And that means that we've got to provide them with material that's genuinely inspiring. They deserve nothing less than the best of what we've received, you know, through the ages. How could we waste our time with anything else? Why would we? And, you know, Mortimer Adler had a beautiful observation that every child is a vessel of, you know, different size and shape, but no vessel should be filled with anything other than the rich cream of our cultural inheritance. It does not serve the student to water it down. So we're not going to. Our kids have never had Latin and they come home and there's a little bit of struggle, especially for the older ones as they start to learn Latin in the school. But why are you teaching Latin?

Oh, my goodness. There's a can of worms. You know, Latin, you know, there's no question that starting a full throated Latin program in middle school, starting in sixth grade, is the most challenging thing that any middle school student is being asked to do, certainly in New Jersey, right? There's just no doubt about it. You know, we prime the pump in a way through elementary school. We give the kids an opportunity to become familiar with Latin, both through Latin prayers, through song, certain vocabulary exercises, what they're doing in their elementary school classrooms. But in sixth grade, they start, you know, a full-throated Latin class, just like any other class that they're taking. And the richness of Latin as a language and what it makes available to our kids, you know, I had this conversation the other night with a couple of high school students,

and they were wondering, you know, why Latin and how much Latin is really necessary. And they were aware that it's going to strengthen their command of English, it's going to reinforce the kinds of things that learning any other language would reinforce. That's true. But there's something very proper to Latin as, in many ways, the font from which so much of Western civilization has sprung that makes it of particular interest to us. Plus, it is the historic language of the church. So, it makes certain things that are part of our liturgical tradition available and explicable to us. And we also want to make sure that those particular things that are common to all of us, right? If we were learning, you know, Russian, for example, has the kind of grammatical sophistication that corresponds to what Latin demands of its students. But Russian isn't our culture, right? Not for all of us. And even

Russians can look back to Latin and find in Roman civilization, the, you know, the wellspring of what frames their understanding of, you know, how human life is organized. So, Latin provides a kind of vernacular, you know, for all of us. And it is true in terms of impact, you know, educational impact. Because it's so hard, right, because it demands so much, it does create the conditions for certain kinds of structures of thinking. It does prepare students to think logically in a way that we see a beautiful correlation between study in Latin and higher order mathematics and science in particular, right? There is a regularity and a complexity to Latin that really does frame the thinking of young people, not only to be, you know, critical thinkers, but really careful thinkers. Teaching Latin and teaching better books is not sufficient, to my mind, to be a classical academy. There's something about how we learn that has to be present. And that's really evident in those seminars that you're describing that are

guided by Socratic method. It's really just a recognition that all human beings learn actively, that inquiry has to drive understanding, and it creates the conditions for a real encounter with the material. That means that the teacher takes on the role of being a facilitator and a model learner rather than just a disseminator of content. That's true all the way down. In fact, I think in many ways, Montessori is the model for this, right? Children don't come home from a Montessori classroom and say, hey, mommy, let me tell you what the teacher taught me today. Children in Montessori come home and they say, mommy, let me tell you what I learned. Let me tell you what I did. You know, we're inclined to teach the last way that we learned. But when we were in college or when we were in grad school or law school, we could receive content because

we'd already built an infrastructure. We knew where to put it. We are teaching kids how to learn. So, some of that same methodology of simply saying smart things to kids doesn't apply. We ought to be creating the conditions. And what Lumen Gentium Academy is committed to is creating the conditions for kids to say smart things. Yeah. And I could say from our own son, we have a son who's very shy and it's been interesting. In the old way of teaching, it was very easy for him to kind of slink in the back and just sort of not make waves, not talk, not participate. And it's just impossible to be in this classroom setting and not be forced to speak and not be forced to participate. And that's good for him. He needs that.

He needs to learn how to do that. And so, again, I think that this, this way of teaching, whether, you know, at the high school level in this Socratic method and the seminar forum, the great books, the art, the emphasis on classical music that they're also getting at this school, the faith, all of this together, we've seen in very short order. Our kids have only been there a little over a semester, and we've seen our kids blossom. And I'll tell you, they're not at the top of the class because

they're having to catch up. This is a new way of learning. And we tell them all the time, I don't care about your grades. I mean, I just think so many of us are in this credentialized mindset where kids are just trying to get that grade so they can then get to the right school. And it's about the love of learning. It's about expanding your mind. It's about your formation. It's about, as you talked about, delighting in the subject matters. And it's really changed even Sean and I's mindset about what an education is in so many ways. We're so grateful that, Father, that you've taken this on. And I know it's not easy. There's a lot of people that like the old way of doing things.

I'm sure your numbers may be a bit of a competition for some of the schools in the area. Your numbers may be a bit of a competition for some of the schools in the area. But we're so glad that both of you have taken on this kind of education and provided that option for parents like us. I think it's the future. I think people are waking up and they're looking and they're hungry for options. So we want to really thank you, Father Daniel and Headmaster Mr. Minson, for being around our kitchen table. We hope to have the virtual cup of coffee we're sharing here. We're hoping we can do that in person here soon. Sounds good.

Thanks for having us. It's great to talk to you. God bless you both. And thanks for all the great work you're doing at the school. We are grateful. We're truly grateful. All right. All right.

Well, listen, everyone, thanks for joining us again for this cup of coffee. Again, we want to talk about this issue because we think it's so important for America, but it's been so important for our family and kind of been life changing for us. And we just wanted to share our experience with kind of what we've gone through in this in this last six months as we move to New Jersey. Absolutely. Well, lots of people are going through this journey post pandemic. So again, thank you so much. And we've really enjoyed the conversation.

If you did too, let us know. Subscribe, rate, review this podcast at foxnewspodcast.com or wherever you download podcasts. And we hope to see you around our kitchen table next week. Have a great week. Bye, everybody. The world of business moves fast. Stay on top of it with the Fox Business Rundown.

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