Fr. Tom Soroka: Welcome to Ancient Faith Today Live. This is Fr. Tom Soroka, and I’m so glad that you’re with us this evening. We’ll be taking your calls in a bit at 1-855-AF-RADIO; that’s 1-855-237-2346. Matushka Trudi will be answering your calls tonight, so please make sure to turn the show volume off before you come on air. Now, to participate online, the show is livestreamed on the AFM Facebook and YouTube pages, and you can make comments there. You can also send us a text message to 412-206-5012; that’s right, right from your cell phone you can send us a text: 412-206-5012. And of course you can send us an email at aft at ancientfaith.com. So let’s get started.

A headline that came out a few months ago was impossible to ignore. It said, “Test Scores Dropped to Lowest Levels in Decades During the Recent Pandemic, According to a Nationwide Exam.” It goes on to say across the country math scores dropped their most ever. Reading scores dropped to 1992 levels. Nearly four in ten eighth graders failed to grasp basic math concepts. No part of the country was exempt. In math and reading, scores fell most sharply among the lowest performing students, creating a widening chasm between struggling students and the rest of their peers. Every region saw test scores slide, and every state saw declines in at least one subject. Other recent studies have found that students who spend longer periods learning online suffered greater setbacks.

And then, just a few days ago, this story hit:

A staggering 230,000 students in 21 states are “missing” from the school system after failing to enroll in private or homeschooling. Findings revealed families avoided school for a range of reasons, including a continued fear of COVID-19, homelessness, and depression.

However, this is really interesting. When you dig into the data, you do find that public school enrollment went down by three percent. That doesn’t seem like much, but that’s 400,000 students, and private school enrollment went up by five percent, and homeschooling went up by a staggering 30%.

Tonight we’re going to talk about education and specifically classical education. These schools are booming all over the United States, and Orthodox schools are popping up all over the place. Tonight we’re joined by Mr. John Heitzenrater. He’s the headmaster of Chrysostom Academy in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. John has been teaching for 17 years. He has administrative experience in classical schools. He holds a degree from the College of St. Thomas More, where he studied literature, philosophy, theology, classical languages, and history; and in graduate school he attended the University of Dallas, where he received his master of humanities with a concentration in history.

John Heitzenrater, welcome to Ancient Faith Today.

Mr. John Heitzenrater: Fr. Tom, it is an absolute pleasure to be on. Thank you for having me.

Fr. Tom: I hear such tremendous things about you and your school. Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick talked my ear off just how wonderful the school is. I have other priest friends that are there. I just thank you for doing such a great job there. It’s a very exciting time, as you know. Here in Pittsburgh, we’re also starting a new classical school in the 2024 school year. It’s just a very, very exciting time.

Before we actually start to talk about education and the problems there, can I hear a little bit about how you embraced Orthodox Christianity? I would love to hear your story and love to share that with our listeners.

Mr. Heitzenrater: Sure. So I think that I was about 15 years old, and I was actually on a vocational retreat, thinking that I was— that I had a vocation to the Catholic priesthood, and I was visiting a seminary that I will not name nationally right now, but I tended to be more of a traditionalist—had learned to pray the rosary when I was a kid. This old monsignor noticed that I was sneaking off to pray in the chapel, and he took me aside and he said, “You know, you seem like a pretty traditional kid,” and I said, “Well, I like to be in the chapel.” And he said, “Well, I’m going to lunch to meet up with my friend, Fr. Pimen, who is at a church called the Church of the Nativity. Would you like to come along and meet him?” I said, “Sure, what’s the Church of the Nativity?” He said, “It’s an Old Believer Russian Orthodox cathedral.” I said, “Sure, that sounds really interesting.” I didn’t have any idea what that actually meant, but it sounded really cool.

So we went and we met Fr. Poimen, and we started out in the crypt and we worked our way into the church proper. I remember walking through into the church and seeing the floor-to-ceiling frescoes, and this Catholic boy from Pennsylvania, looking up and for the first time in my life thinking that I was standing in the presence of God.

Fr. Tom: Wow.

Mr. Heitzenrater: And that— He gave me an Old Believer prayerbook.

Fr. Tom: The big, thick one! [Laughter]

Mr. Heitzenrater: Yeah. Well, back then it was the black leather cover… It just kind of, it stuck with me. I ended up going to seminary, discovering that I did not have a vocation to the priesthood, and ended up going to college in Texas. My good friend there that I ended up rooming with was an Anglo-Catholic who was reading himself into Orthodoxy. I said, “I know a little bit about that,” and I told him my story.

So we read Fr. Seraphim Rose and listened to Valaam chants. I would take the Catholic position on why Orthodoxy was wrong, and he would take the Orthodox position. We’d have these just great debates back and forth.

Fr. Tom: Debates!

Mr. Heitzenrater: And then over the course of— That was 1999-2000, so for 17 years I read and read and read, and every fall I would get this urge with my wife to go to vespers. There was something about going to vespers at St. Seraphim’s Cathedral in Dallas. You know, it’s getting colder outside, the incense… Anyway, long story short, we were sitting on our back porch one day, and we had just moved to Denton, Texas, and we were looking for a church home. The Latin Mass was 34 miles away. My wife looked at me and said, “You know, when you die, I’m becoming Russian Orthodox.” I looked at her and said, “Why do you have to wait until I’m dead!?” [Laughter]

Fr. Tom: Wow!

Mr. Heitzenrater: So that next night, that next afternoon actually, we went up to vespers at St. Maximus, and I walked in and I had the exact same experience that I did as a 15-year-old young man. And I knew that I was home.

Fr. Tom: Wow.

Mr. Heitzenrater: It was this beautiful, beautiful experience. So that is how I came—

Fr. Tom: So you discerned this for 17 years?

Mr. Heitzenrater: Yes.

Fr. Tom: Wow!

Mr. Heitzenrater: I mean, I consider myself an amateur historian, and there’s the historical line that you are taught as a Roman Catholic, that there’s this kind of this linear movement and everybody broke off from the Western Church. But when I turned that argument upside-down, all these issues that I had were no longer issues. You start to look at the things a little bit differently. That was actually a very freeing moment for me when I woke up and had that grace that God just said, “Okay, look at it this way. Stop trying to over-analyze this. It’s really super simple if you look at it this way.”

Fr. Tom: Yeah, it is interesting that the traditional Roman Catholic movement has really hitched its wagon to the classical school movement also. There seems to be a tremendous connection there. I love that Orthodoxy is growing this classical movement very, very quickly in embracing classical education, and then what I really want to talk about tonight also is: What’s the specifically Orthodox twist on this?

Let’s talk about… Let’s begin at the beginning. What is classical education, for our listeners that don’t understand that, and what makes it different from, let’s say—I talked in the beginning about public schools and so forth— How would a classical education look different from somebody that goes to a public school or even a, let’s say, private Catholic school that’s not a “classical” school?

Mr. Heitzenrater: I think that, first and foremost, the term “classical” immediately implies a connection to a canon of books, a canon of texts, that generations and centuries of learned people have studied. So when we talk about classical texts, there’s the term “great books,” like “we are a great books school” or “we read great books,” and I think it’s something that until very recently was kind of the status quo for even American civic education: the idea that we focus on these kind of transcendentals—the good, the beautiful, and the true.

There are lots of classical schools that are not faith-based schools. In fact, I came from a school system in Texas that was not a faith-based or Christian classical school. So within those schools, you can talk about truth, goodness, and beauty, but you can only really talk about it up to the Incarnation. You can talk about the Incarnation being this historical event, and that Christ was this historical figure, but you can’t really get into the idea that we need to be more Christ-like; the less like Christ that we are, the more subhuman that we are, and the more like Christ that we are, then the more fully human that we are.

So that emphasis on the good, the beautiful, and true, when you put that into a Christian ethos, it really does take that kind of foundation and really helps that flower and grow into something which is really beautiful. It’s this connection with classical texts. It’s the focus on the good, the beautiful, and the true. And also I think the formational element of looking at the whole human being. For us as classical educators, virtue is just as important as algebra; in fact, it may be more important. We do not read great books because they’re good stories necessarily—I mean, they are good stories—but we read those books to learn something about us, that maybe we can’t or we don’t have the ability to kind of reason through. You can see yourself as a character, you can look at somebody like Frodo and Samwise, and see their virtue and their courage, or their lack of courage, and we can immediately connect with those things.

How we’re different [from] public schools, I think that something really unique and terrible happened in the late 19th century with American education. It was this kind of shift from wanting to have a very literate, broadly educated human being to somebody whom we were educating in order to basically put into the workforce to be a good American citizen. And it’s a nuance that you really don’t get—it takes a hundred and some-odd years for that to really germinate and to become fully what it is. But for us, we don’t specifically say that we’re college preparatory, although we are college preparatory, but that’s not the focus for us; the focus for us is we’re human preparatory. We want to form the human being, because if you can get a child to reason and to think, it doesn’t matter what’s thrown at him. They’re going to be able to look at an argument and say, “That’s a garbage argument, and it’s not logical, and here’s the reasons why,” but they’re also going to have to humility to recognize that: “Hey, I need to rethink this. There’s another way to look at this.” Yeah.

Fr. Tom: Okay, I want to double-back a little bit and go over a few points, but let’s remind our listeners: we would love to hear from you. Are you interested in classical education? Maybe your children go to a classical school? We would love to hear from you. Give us your feedback. Tell us what your thoughts are. Why did you choose a classical school? Why do you feel this is so important?

Or—we’re open to all opinions here—why would you not choose a classical school? We have a top administrator here, a headmaster of a school. Let’s have that discussion. Give us a call at 1-855-AF-RADIO, or send us a text. You can do that right now: 412-206-5012.

John, so you mentioned these philosophical touchpoints of truth, goodness, and beauty. We hear this bandied about. Again, I hate to kind of keep going back to the Western or I should say really American understanding of education, but I think it’s so ingrained in us now. Your perspective is you understand that something changed when it went from people being well-read and well-versed and knowledgeable about the world and about language and so forth to training someone to do a job, to be sort of like a cog in the wheel of an economic engine.

What is the value of truth and goodness and beauty, above, let’s say, the knowledge of something that makes someone an engineer to build buildings. Now, I’m not positing them against one another, but I’m saying: If an engineer just says, “Look, I need to know how to do the math. I need to know how to do the physics, and I don’t really need truth, goodness, and beauty, because truth, goodness, and beauty isn’t my field. Truth is your truth, goodness is your goodness, beauty is your beauty.” That’s what we would say today. So how do you teach what truth, goodness, and beauty is in a world that says, “There is no such thing as truth, there’s only your truth,” etc.?

Mr. Heitzenrater: Well, I think that fundamentally we do think there are things that are objectively true. I think that there are lots of things that are subjective. You can take art, for instance, and art can be subjective. However, when art deviates from something which is considered part of the normal thing which makes art art, then we all scratch our heads and say, “That looks odd.” I don’t think that while the engineer, in his daily or her daily existence is saying, “I’m thinking about goodness, truth, and beauty,” there is goodness and truth and beauty in mathematics. The fact that two plus two equals four will universally be true. And those principles, whether it’s mathematics or architecture, there are just certain things that you cannot do with numbers, with angles, with art, that will not radically deform it in a way which will destroy its purpose.

I think that— Actually, I think that engineers are a good example of this, because I think that they have really kind of embraced, subconsciously, these principles, the ideas of truth, goodness, and beauty. When an engineer builds something— There are lots of things that go into building a bridge, but the magnificence of a bridge— I mean, we are all kind of awestruck when we look at a bridge, especially something that connects things that would not otherwise be able to be connected, and that was done in the mind of somebody who said, “From this point to this point, we’re going to use this,” and that in and of itself is good and those things are true.

I have always talked with parents, and it sounds very kind of snooty—we’ve got our pinky up in the air; we’re talking about truth, goodness, and beauty—but we all believe these things. Even the person who has no idea that they believe these things, deep down inside believes these things. It’s why you can stop and see a deer just on the side of the road and everybody— you know, your heart skips when you see a deer. It’s these kind of ingrained, universal truths that are part of our existence as human beings. What classical education does is it says: We’re going to teach you why these things exist and how you can recognize them so that when you go out into the world you’re not a fly; you’re a bee. You’re looking for the honey and the beautiful flowers. Which, I think that if you take that, if you take that equation away from an engineer or what they’re doing, that their craft becomes—it becomes insanity.

Fr. Tom: Mm. Do you have objections from parents that say, “Look, I want my kid to be a doctor,” or “I want my kid to be a lawyer, and they can read on their own”— Again, I’m just sort of playing devil’s advocate here. They say— If they say, “If they want to read on their own, they want to study music on their own, that’s fine, but I want them to grow up to be rich, I want them to grow up to be a famous doctor, and I’m just not really worried about them reading Lord of the Rings.”

Mr. Heitzenrater: Yeah, so I think that’s a question that I have been asked. “Teach my kid his times tables, and everything else will fall into place.” I think that there’s two things that have to be considered. The first real headmaster position that I had was in a little classical school in East Dallas; it was in Pleasant Grove. If you’ve ever been to East Dallas, it’s a very challenging area; it’s a very economically disadvantaged area.

And I had a mother come up to me one evening and ask me, looking at our curriculum, she noticed that there were not a lot of African-Americans who were being read, but there was one very important African-American who was being read, and that was Martin Luther King. She wanted to know how this was going to apply to her son, that she wanted him to get out of the ghetto and to get out of the hood. I looked at her and I said, “When MLK, Jr., wrote his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, he said in that letter, ‘An unjust law is a law which is not rooted in the eternal law.’ ” I said, “And when Dr. King said that, he was quoting Thomas Aquinas, and the fact that Dr. King had read Thomas Aquinas and had been able to apply Aquinas to a present-day situation showed how exemplary of an education that he had received.”

So it’s more— And she— Her mind was kind of blown, because you don’t think about those things.

Fr. Tom: That’s great.

Mr. Heitzenrater: But what we’re trying to do is… A student who has read Plato or Aristotle, especially Aristotle’s Physics, someone who has read Aristophanes, someone who has read Dante—these things make us better human beings. It’s not just platitudes that we say these things. You can see… For instance, I always tell— My daughters hate me, because when they turn 17, I tell them that they need to read Madame Bovary, because Madame Bovary is what happens if you lead a promiscuous life—and it’s not good! But I don’t want to sit down and tell my children, “Don’t lead a promiscuous life,” because they’re just going to zone me out because I’m preaching to them. But you read this in a piece of literature, and you realize: “Oh my goodness, actions have consequences! My parents aren’t crazy!”

For the parent that wants their kid to be a doctor, he’s going to have to have a set of moral principles. He’s going to have to have virtue, or he’s going to be a monster.

Fr. Tom: No, it’s a very good point! It’s a great point, because are we not seeing this today? Are we not seeing the medical establishment embrace ideologies that are now mutilating children, mutilating young girls, removing their breasts, telling them that they can be boys at a very early age, not even allowing them time to mature and to work through their problems, but putting them on the operating table? So I think you’re absolutely right! That a doctor that does not have this ability to process information, does not have the ability to weigh virtuous actions, is going to end up, like you said, being a monster.

Mr. Heitzenrater: Yeah. Yeah, and I think that one of the most fundamental things—we haven’t touched on this much yet, but the idea of an Orthodox education. We’re in an environment where a conscience is being formed. Our students here are great students, but they’re normal kids. There’s the occasional student who doesn’t do their homework; some kids talk back. But what we’re doing is we’re creating an environment where it’s safe and that idea of one’s conscience and being able to correctly identify something instead of just believing what is put in front of you, questioning everything—it was Aristotle who said that the mark of an educated mind is someone who can consider an argument and reject it—and that is something that we want our students to do. We want them to question everything, within that scope of— We’re trying to understand: Is this thing something which is good, is it a moral thing; or is it bad? Or is it something which is initially bad but has a good outcome? What does that look like?

These are important questions that again, if we take them out of the discussion, there’s nothing promising about removing ethics courses from medical school. It’s terrifying!

Fr. Tom: And what are the ethics based on?

Mr. Heitzenrater: Right! Exactly.

Fr. Tom: Even if there are ethics courses, what are the basis for the ethics.

Mr. Heitzenrater: Exactly. [Laughter]

Fr. Tom: All right, John, we’re going to do this. We’re going to go for a quick break, and when we come back, I want to talk a little bit about sort of the Orthodox bent of a classical school: what does that mean? We have some questions that have come in, so I’m going to throw those at you. But also, after we talk about the Orthodox part of the classical school, I want you to walk us through—paint us a picture of what it’s like. Where are your students from? Are they all Orthodox? Do they come from the neighborhood? What is their socio-economic status, etc.? Tell us a little bit about that, and even about the day: What does it look like? Does it look like a public school? Do you have seven periods a day or whatever it is? I want to learn, too.

All right. You are listening to Ancient Faith Today. We’re talking about enlightened minds, classical Orthodox education. We are talking with the headmaster of Chrysostom Academy in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Mr. John Heitzenrater, and we will be right back!

Fr. Tom: We’re back with Mr. John Heitzenrater, and we’re talking about classical education. John, so yours is an Orthodox classical school. What makes it Orthodox?

Mr. Heitzenrater: So we have— Within the curriculum, we have— Actually, let me restart. The whole kind of ethos of the school is based upon Orthodox Christian principles, so the idea that we start the day with prayer, we talk about the feast days… We had some individuals that had passed away that we were praying for, and we were able to offer up prayers for them. We have a beautiful icon in the front entryway that we’re able to change out the icon that’s in it and put the icon of the feast day that’s being celebrated. And these things sometimes happen in the middle of the day because the feast that’s coming the next day.

It is from the moment that the students come into the school. It is an environment that is kind of immersed in prayer. And we begin all of our classes with prayer. I would say that a good portion of our courses within the instructional day are always pointing back to those things that are important and integral to our faith. I teach a course that I developed called “Orthodox Christian Studies,” which essentially for seventh and eighth grade is reading the lives of the Desert Fathers and Mothers and reading the lives of the saints. Why? Because in seventh and eighth grade, students are getting excited about heroes and they’re still interested in marvel and all these different things. We thought, “Hey, these are our heroes.” So we spent the first seven weeks of school reading the life of St. Anthony, which is really life-changing for a seventh- and eighth-grade student who is really used to nice, cushy pillows and everything, is really very comfy, and you’re reading this story about this young man who gave up everything for Christ. And that’s very moving for a teenager who is struggling to deny themselves, who is struggling with image, maybe struggling with anxiety, that this was something which was important.

That aspect of Orthodoxy really does seep into our classes, but it’s not weird. We’re not— I told my staff during faculty retreat, “We don’t want to be— We don’t want weirdness. We don’t want the kids walking around with the prairie skirts—” Nothing wrong with prairie skirts, but we don’t want this image, or for people to have this image that we’re fleeing the world. Actually quite the contrary: what we’re doing is giving students an oasis in the world where they can prepare their minds and prepare their hearts to go out and live in the world and to live radical lives as Christians, as Orthodox Christians, and that is just a really beautiful thing.

I would like to humor myself and say, “Oh, I was this really great, smart guy who came up with this,” but I think that we—my staff and I, we put a framework in place, and then we just kind of said, “Okay, God, lead this where you want to go,” and because we don’t micromanage it, it just works beautifully. It’s just a really beautiful thing.

Fr. Tom: That’s great.

Mr. Heitzenrater: Yeah, it’s not— Our kids are normal kids—I think I said this earlier—and they like soccer, and they were talking about maybe having a rugby team someday and adding cross-country. This is the future, and we’re letting the devil get tired out there in the world. I had a very good priest tell me that one time, that sometimes we just have to let the devil get tired. This is kind of our training for them. So, yeah, that’s… It’s very useful.

Fr. Tom: Yeah, that’s very helpful. Tell me a little bit about Chrysostom Academy itself. Now, I believe— Is this your first academic year?

Mr. Heitzenrater: It is. So I moved here— Sorry, go ahead, Father.

Fr. Tom: I was just going to ask: Tell us a little bit about the school. What grades are you currently offering? And where are the students coming from? And tell us a little bit about the students.

Mr. Heitzenrater: Sure. This is our first year. We officially offered first through ninth grade, although I do have one junior this year. Our students, we have I would say about 80% of our students are Orthodox Christian; the other 20% are Roman Catholic. Of the Catholic families that are with us, one family is Byzantine, and the other family is more of a traditionalist. I don’t know if they’re Latin Mass-ers, maybe Anglican Ordinariate. But we’re all kind of sympatico when it comes to a real robust faith, a liturgical faith.

Socio-economically, we have some students that come from very privileged families, and some students who do not come from privileged families. It’s really a nice, healthy balance of students that are coming from different backgrounds. Nobody has to— There’s nobody anxious about the fact that maybe so-and-so has more money, because nobody really knows that. It’s not something which is discussed.

Fr. Tom: And they’re all wearing uniforms, right?

Mr. Heitzenrater: They’re all wearing uniforms, and we developed a house system here with the students that the second week of school, I think, we had our house-sorting ceremony. I got a kamilavka from Fr. Nikolai down the street. We put the kids’ names into this hat, and Fr. Alexey Petrides came and we sang the Trisagion Prayer, and then we just started drawing names out of a hat and putting kids in houses.

Fr. Tom: That’s great.

Mr. Heitzenrater: So the house sort of becomes their second family within the school, and you are working together with young students, older students, to get points so that you can win the house cup at the end of the year. But these points can be given and they can be taken away. We give points for heroic acts of virtue, we give points for academic excellence, and we take points away whenever students are not living up to their potential. And, boy, you should see what happens when somebody from a house loses points and the other students find out about it. It’s like: “Come on, man! This is our home; this is our family. We’ve got to work together.” It really creates an environment that’s beautiful, and it’s not overly punitive. The kids are holding themselves to a high standard.

Fr. Tom: That’s great.

Mr. Heitzenrater: As far as where they come from, I have students that come from as far north as Nazareth, which is maybe 15—actually, further than that: I have kids that come down from East Stroudsburg, which is maybe 30 miles or so north of us, and then we have students as far south as Emmaus. We registered with the state of Pennsylvania so that we could have access to buses. And the buses— We didn’t have that ability in Texas, so essentially if you were coming to my school, your parents had to get you there or you had to drive yourself. But here they will bus students in, and they come from all over the place: East Penn, Northampton. So that’s been a real blessing for us, because the geographical lines for our students are really kind of diminished whenever we have access to those buses.

Fr. Tom: That’s awesome. And in terms of the future, do you plan on expanding the number of grades that you’re offering as well as the number of students whom you are teaching?

Mr. Heitzenrater: Yes. I’m a dreamer. I jokingly— The board asked me when they hired me, “How long do you think you could do this?” And I said, “You know, I’m not going to leave until the gold-framed oil painting of me is hanging in the hallway.” [Laughter] Yes, the idea is to add one grade on every year until we have first through twelfth grade, and then the facility that we’re in— So we are in the old St. Francis Academy, which was a Catholic girls’ boarding school in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s—I think they graduated their last class in the early ‘90s; it may have been late ‘80s. But the property itself was— The house that was on the property was the summer residence of the vice president of Bethlehem Steel, and in the ‘40s he gifted the property to the sisters and said, “The stipulation I have for you is that the property is always used for some type of educational purpose.” So when we started to plan, Fr. Alexey had been using the gym here for the GOYAns in Bethlehem for years to play basketball, and he approached Sister Donna, and said, “We’d like to rent out the school.”

Fr. Tom: Wow, that’s great.

Mr. Heitzenrater: Long story short, we got this— We have this beautiful property that when I drove onto it the first time, I really thought that I was having a moment of déjà vu, because I have long dreamt of, you know: If I had access to a perfect place and a property, what would a school look like with a bunch of acreage and some farmland and some place to do nature study? My goodness, it was like everything I had ever dreamed of when I got here.

Fr. Tom: Oh, that’s wonderful.

Mr. Heitzenrater: The property itself, I think we could get 300 to 350 students fully built out.

Fr. Tom: Oh my! That would be awesome!

Mr. Heitzenrater: Yeah, that’s the plan.

Fr. Tom: That would be great. All right, so I have a couple of questions that came in, three at this point. One goes back to what we were talking about before, and maybe it has to do more with sort of explaining what the day looked like. It says: “How do they fit in all these classical classes plus teach what they need to know for college?” Now, I looked on your website. Obviously you’re up to grade eight here, so you’re just teaching algebra and so forth, but it says, “Meaning all of the higher math through calculus, all of the hard science classes, etc.?”

Once you get to that point where you are offering education to high schoolers, how does that all get balanced? And again, I don’t mean to keep hammering on this, but somebody— This is a parent, obviously, I would think that wrote this, and they want to know: Yeah, I’m worried about these STEM subjects. I want them to be good people, I want them to learn the truth, beauty, and goodness, but I also want them to know the math. So how does that get done?

Mr. Heitzenrater: Sure. A lot of it’s done through those teachers that I hired. We actually hit the proverbial jackpot when it came to faculty this year. I do have two PhDs that teach in middle and high school at this point. My math teacher could teach all the way up through finite math, calculus. He was an engineer by trade. He’s also a magnificent Byzantine chanter. He’s kind of like the golden coin that you are told exists out there but you never really believed that you could find it: he was one of those hires. And my science teacher, Dr. Joshua Moritz, came to us from Berkeley. He has written extensively on biblical theology and science matters. He can do everything from astronomy all the way up through physics. A lot of it is just in those whom we have hired. Our ninth graders this year are doing astronomy, and we have students of course— The math students are doing is algebra at that advanced level. But if you were to take Algebra I as an eighth grader, you could potentially get up through calculus as a senior. And we have various endorsements that we can give students who have that acumen to do those advanced maths and advanced sciences. The state of Pennsylvania I think only requires three credits; we have the ability that students can get five math and five science.

Fr. Tom: That’s great.

Mr. Heitzenrater: A lot of it’s in those whom we hire, and we do take some account into student interest—

Fr. Tom: So you’re getting it done.

Mr. Heitzenrater: We are getting it done, yes.

Fr. Tom: You’re getting it done. All right, here’s another question. Why is classical education not the norm in the United States and Europe? It used to be in Europe, at least.

Mr. Heitzenrater: It also used to be in the United States. I think… I always tell parents, in order to get into Harvard in the 1860s, you had to be able to read Vergil in the original Latin; you had to be able to translate the New Testament from Greek; you had to be able to prove the Pythagorean theorem; and you had to extrapolate what the difference between Athens and Sparta was.

Fr. Tom: Wow!

Mr. Heitzenrater: That was just to get into Harvard. The idea that you had prairie schools… they were doing real things! It wasn’t until the idea, the kind of philosophical impetus that invaded education through John Dewey and through some others, that the focus kind of shifted from this hierarch of goods within an education to what was most expedient and what could be done. Again, I try not to, as a matter of principle, beat up on my colleagues in the public school system; I have a lot of really good friends. However, they will tell you that they can’t teach—in literature classes, for instance, they’re given excerpts of great texts and they’re talking about the excerpts, but they’re not actually reading great books. If you want great books, you have to be in the honors—you have to be teaching honors or AP classes. But that’s not what all the kids are getting.

Why did it change? Why isn’t it the norm? Educators like to do trendy things. They like to try the newest thing. They like to— And there’s been just an explosion in recent times of learning disabilities and things like that, that I think that educators that go to ed schools, they do a fine job of figuring out why those things exist, but then that comes at a cost, I think, to a good portion of those that are in these schools, where you’re told to differentiate instruction, but we’re going to standardize all of our tests. We say that kids are really just a percentage on a test that they take one day of the year. I hated standardized testing in Texas. It was kind of funny, because we had a situation a couple years ago in Texas, because there was a question that the state test people put on there from a Nobel laureate in literature, and when the Nobel laureate read the questions that were being asked about the poem that she had written, she couldn’t answer the questions. [Laughter] So it’s just absurdity that… You just kind of scratch your head. So, yes, it should be the norm, and until not too long ago it was.

Fr. Tom: Yeah, I totally understand. My wife is a public school teacher, has been so for many decades, and I taught public school for five years, many, many moons ago. It is— It has become— It has gone from a very rewarding, fulfilling career to extremely challenging, I think because of the societal changes, because of the differing levels of expectations that parents have of their students, of their children, if they have any at all sometimes. And it really— Hats off to every public school teacher, but all teachers—

Mr. Heitzenrater: Absolutely.

Fr. Tom: —because it is just an incredibly challenging profession. All right, here’s another question:

Greetings from a member of St. Maximus the Confessor Orthodox Church in Denton, Texas, and a native Pennsylvanian. [Laughter] Your thoughts please on how homeschooling parents can introduce classical education into their lesson plans. Thank you.

Mr. Heitzenrater: Oh! That’s a good question. I think that a good place to start for homeschooling parents is actually Charlotte Mason. Now, Charlotte Mason— If you look at a Charlotte Mason approach to classical education, she wasn’t a classical educator, but she taught real things. I think that we look at Charlotte Mason and say, “Ha ha! She did all these things with nature study and with living history, and these are good things. These can help form our students.” I think that you focus on finding the best literature that you can and incorporating that into your program.

There is a nuance, but it’s a very real thing when it comes to understanding, to make a student literate and to make them numerate when it comes to literacy and numeracy. That phonics instruction, teaching students why, when letters are put together and the sounds that they make, why there are certain rules to that, why English words will always have this particular format and how they can never end with certain letters; and why numbers have a behavior, they have a pattern that they work within. So teaching students to… To find programs in which students can learn to love math or to love reading, I think that if you can turn a child’s heart onto loving certain things, that is half of the battle of classical education. I always tell my teachers, we meet students where they are.

In a homeschool environment, I would focus on getting them to read as much literature— And it has to be appropriate literature. I’m not one of these classical educators who thinks that you should hand Plato’s Republic to a third-grader. [Laughter] I do know of educators who have done that, but I think that really focusing on the literature… And also getting students to— You can do something very classical with students in looking at art and having students just sit there and contemplate a work of art and talk about the color and talk about what’s happening in the picture and asking those big questions: Why does the artist seem to do this? Is the artist angry? Do you think the artist’s happy when the artist does this? Does the artist love this human being that they’re painting? Why or why not? So those are big questions that you can—that parents can get into.

We’ve got bright parents out there that can do all kinds of things with their kids, but starting there: get your kids to read, get them to love numbers I think is the most important thing.

Fr. Tom: Good! Thank you very much for that. All right. We’re down to the last few minutes, John. This is sort of a difficult question here. I was looking at your school’s website, and you write:

Classical schools supply a curriculum which frees the mind from error and allows it to be cultivated in its pursuit of wisdom. There is a reason why the liberal arts are called “liberal”: they free us from poorly formed ideas and habits. Wisdom is found only through thinking about, contemplating, and discussing difficult things after the mind has been freed from erroneous or poorly conceived ideas to do so.

I love that paragraph; it’s really beautiful. My question is: How do you instill—because you use this term, “the pursuit of wisdom”—how do you instill wisdom in a young mind who has not yet experienced the trials of life, the difficulties of life? What do you mean by instilling wisdom in them? Or are you simply sort of creating the conditions for eventual wisdom in the student? What do you mean by that? Help me understand.

Mr. Heitzenrater: Sure. I think it’s a combination: that the environment that we’re trying to cultivate in the school is one in which questioning why something is the way that it is is the first kind of step towards acquiring wisdom, and our job as teachers is to really be a post that says—we’re pointing this way—“Read this person,” and we’re pointing this way: “Read these persons. Now take both of their ideas together and what do you get?”

It is… You can look at something… It’s easier when you have a situation where somebody has done something silly or ignorant, and you can say, “That was really silly,” or even use the word “stupid.” It’s harder to say, “This was a wise decision,” and wisdom only comes through experience. So for us, we create an environment where students can ask that question: What is it about… What is so important about Caesar crossing the Rubicon? Well, look at everything that happened after that, that if that event hadn’t happened, these other things would not have happened.

Once we have— We question things, and once we create an environment where experience is allowed to be experienced, I think that you have the ability, you are on that road to creating a culture of seeking wisdom.

Fr. Tom: Excellent.

Mr. Heitzenrater: It’s also a very liturgical thing. We say in the Liturgy, “Wisdom. Let us be attentive.” So it’s a call to that liturgical aspect of it.

Fr. Tom: Ah! Very good! That was great. Thank you. And finally, just some personal reflections from you. Obviously, you’ve had quite a career now in education, especially in classical education. You’ve played many roles. Now you’re a headmaster. What do you find most satisfying about educating students, especially in the aspect of classical education, and maybe what do you find most challenging?

Mr. Heitzenrater: So I think the thing I find most exciting is being able to take a topic and introduce a topic to a student that sparks an interest in them, where they want to learn more about that particular event or things that are like it. So being that guidepost, being that sage that says, “Turn here to read good things and then let’s talk about it.” I learned a lot from the College of St. Thomas More and the idea that… I don’t know if it was Lewis or Tolkien [who], when asked, if they could have the ability… What’s more effective, lecturing for an hour to students or throwing a topic to students as they’re walking out the door and saying, “Hey, discuss this at lunch”? And the topic that they discuss at lunch, the kids are always going to learn more, because they’re relaxed and they’re having a good time and they’re arguing and they’re changing their minds and they’re defending their positions. Having that environment in a very safe, controlled system with kids who are still trying to figure out who they are is just ridiculously rewarding. It’s something that I always tell my parents that my hair stands up every time I get up to teach a class. So that’s exciting.

Fr. Tom: Aw, that’s awesome! And the challenges?

Mr. Heitzenrater: The challenges. Yeah, it’s really getting students to recognize that hard work is—that grit is important, that not giving up just because you don’t understand something the first time that you look at it, that sometimes people think about things that they write about for years before they can really come up with a cogent discussion or argument about it. But we live in a society that wants instant gratification. You can type into your telephone and have within seconds—milliseconds, the answer to a question. We don’t want Google-heads; what we want are students who have thought through a question and have a good argument to support their position.

Fr. Tom: That’s very interesting. It’s like the cheapening of information versus the rich information that you’re presenting within the classical education movement. John Heitzenrater, thank you so much for joining us tonight.

Mr. Heitzenrater: Thank you, Father.

Fr. Tom: This was a lot of fun.

Mr. Heitzenrater: It was.

Fr. Tom: We wish you all the best with your new school. I know that things are very exciting out there, and we are just so proud of all the work that you’re doing. May God increase all of the work and bring new students and new exciting things that are going to happen at your school. We’re just looking forward to a lot of wonderful years ahead.

Mr. Heitzenrater: Thank you so much, Father.

Fr. Tom: Take care. Before I share a few final thoughts, I again want to offer my sincere thanks to John Heitzenrater for joining us tonight. Thanks to Matushka Trudi for engineering the program; to our show production assistant, Melissa Graff, for her work behind the scenes; for everybody that’s listening in and for those who will be listening.

Just wanted to read a short excerpt by, appropriately enough— We were talking about the Chrysostom Academy tonight. This is from St. John Chrysostom, on the education and formation of children. He writes:

The child’s soul, then, is a city, a city only lately founded and built, a city containing citizens who are strangers who have no experience as of yet, so that it is very easy to direct. Draw up laws, then, for this city and its citizens, laws that inspire fear and are strong, and uphold them if they are being transgressed. For it is useless to draw up laws if their enforcement does not follow. Draw up laws and pay close attention, for our legislation is for the world, and today we are founding a city. Suppose that the outer walls and foregates, the senses, are built. The whole body is the wall, as it were; the gates are the eyes, the tongue, the hearing, the sense of smell, and, if you will, the sense of touch. It is through these gates that the citizens of the city go in and out, that is to say, it is through these gates that thoughts are corrupted or rightly guided.

And that’s our show for tonight. Remember to like us on Facebook at facebook.com/ancientfaithtoday; share out our program after that’s posted; give us your feedback, and contact us with any ideas or topics that you might want to hear about. Join us next Tuesday evening for another edition of Ancient Faith Today Live. Good night, everybody!