Mr. Bobby Maddex: Welcome to Ancient Faith Presents. I'm Bobby Maddex, the director of digital media for Ancient Faith Ministries. Today I will be speaking with Zachary Waltz, the headmaster of Hagia Sophia Classical Academy. This is an Orthodox classical academy in Indianapolis, Indiana. I will also be speaking with Fr. David Wey; he is the rector of the academy. Gentlemen, welcome to the program!
Mr. Zachary Waltz: Thanks, Bobby! It's great to be with you.
Fr. David Wey: Thank you, Bobby!
Mr. Maddex: All right, let's begin with you, Fr. David. Can you tell us a little bit about Hagia Sophia and its history?
Fr. David: So from this vision that I received from my archbishop almost 30 years ago, I've been looking for and talking with all of our local Orthodox brethren about trying to create an Orthodox Christian school. The classical piece was the key, was the secret that made it seem doable for us. So after lots of discussion and exasperation, we finally launched 13 years ago as a parochial school of our parish, Ss. Constantine and Elena, under the blessing of His Eminence, Archbishop Nathaniel, and the Romanian Episcopate in the OCA. We've been building the school now through an entire cycle of a child's life in education, 13 years. So we're still looking to expand, grow, deepen, and offer this alternative to Orthodox parents who are looking for a deeper, more integrated education for their children.
Mr. Maddex: Yeah, so you're starting a school, and I guess you have so many options with the direction you want to go with the curriculum and the pedagogy and everything else. Why did you choose an Orthodox classical school?
Fr. David: That's a great question, and I'll just answer briefly, and maybe Zach can fill in the blanks. While we were trying to consider what kind of a school to start as an Orthodox school in the area, there [were] charter schools, the private school, and so forth. Then some of our teachers and people that were on the initiating group began to talk about classical education, and that just really— It was like the secret key that just clicked for me, because it was— It's like this is the way to do a small school, to start small, and to integrate it in with our Orthodox faith more completely. So the classical model, which hopefully we can unpack for you a little bit, was for me kind of like the key to doing something that would be resonant with our Orthodox faith.
Mr. Waltz: Yeah. I was not there for the initiation of the school. I came in a year later, but for me in my journey was— As an undergraduate, I went to a classical school, a really well-known one, St. John's College, which is a great school. And what's unique about those are that we read all the major subjects; we don't have any specialties. So we read theology, philosophy, history, literature, as well as science, math, and language. And we do that through the great works; we encounter them through the great works. So for example we read Euclid, Newton, Einstein for the math. In philosophy, we read Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and so forth. It goes on roughly chronological order, so in freshman year there's the Greeks; sophomore year, Roman; medieval literature, and so forth.
I didn't grow up with any faith, but I have to say that going through the works and encountering these great works, and the beauty, truth, and goodness that were in them, they were what made me long for God and an encounter with him. So when I finally read a work called Pascal's Pensées, that's when I— That's sort of my conversion moment, and I sought God afterwards in the Orthodox Church. For me, the encounter with the classics and a classical education has always been interwoven with the faith. They complement each other so well that when I came to Indianapolis after St. John's, I just thought it was wonderful that there was a school right here in town that merged both the Orthodox and the classical together.
Mr. Maddex: Yeah, Zach, can you describe the school for us a bit and how it generally operates?
Mr. Waltz: Sure! So we offer a rigorous liberal arts curriculum Monday through Thursday in language arts, math, and science. Then on Friday we also offer Christian studies, art, music, drama, physical education. And the Friday program is also open to homeschoolers, whereas Monday through Friday is also a full-time program for everyone else.
One emphasis, of course, too, while we don't read all the classical authors that I just referenced—one of our distinctions is that we do, in fact, read, for example, Homer in the middle school ages, and do engage with those classics. And then we do also teach Latin Monday through Thursday as well.
Mr. Maddex: Yeah, let's get to a really more fundamental question, because whatever your philosophy is of this, it's generally going to inform how your school is taught. So why don't you describe for us or explain to us what education is exactly?
Mr. Waltz: Great question! So if you look across societies and history, I think I've been able to detect all the following being involved in an education. Before the child becomes an adult, the child in a society is reared to be cultivated in the intellect, in the nous, learn right from wrong, build a conscience, acquire tastes, values, and norms, and this cultivation was used to prepare the young for the role they will play in the society as an adult, whether generally, as a member of a community, or specifically as a particular office of that community or society.
Mr. Maddex: Interesting that the cultivation of taste is listed as one of the ends of education. Can you tell me a little bit more by what you mean by cultivation of taste?
Mr. Waltz: Sure. Cultivation of taste is the cultivation of what delights or revolts someone, whether it be anything from taste in music or film, what company you keep, even religious service as well. I see this kind of thing, just a development of taste, done with parents all the time, whether they are conscious of it or not. I was with a family last spring who had their first child, who was less than a year old at the time, and they had a lively and really energetic debate about whether they were going to expose their child to Harry Potter or not. In the school, we the faculty periodically have discussions about how much of the pagan classics can be shown and at what age. But in my experience, taste actually decides more issues than anything else.
Mr. Maddex: Yeah, it's really interesting. So that's going to slot into the classical education format, so maybe we need to know a little bit more about that. How is classical education different from other types of education?
Mr. Waltz: Again, great question. One could say right off the bat that there are a huge variety of schools in the United States that call themselves classical. I would say what unites them all is a certain disposition. To understand this difference, it may be good to look at the history of the word "classical" itself. When the word "classical" was introduced in the English language, it quickly had three separate but interrelated meanings. It first meant of or belonging to the highest class, approved as a model. And at the time, the works that were of the highest class were of Greek or Roman origin, so the original meaning of "classical" also meant belonging to or characteristic of standard authors of Greek and Roman antiquity. Here in the word is also a third sense, something established, something that has withstood the test of time and is contrasted to something new. For example, classical literature was being compared to what was at the time the newer English literature, and then later, for example, the established classical music was later contrasted to at the time was the new Romantic music.
The three meanings of "classical" are still at play when we use the word "classical" in education. We teach things of the highest class, things that are approved as a model, often involving the study of Greek and Roman culture, languages, something that is older and has withstood the test of time, and then something contrasted to more modern practices. In any given classical school, they emphasize one of these over the other.
Mr. Maddex: Yeah, and what does your school emphasize?
Mr. Waltz: I would say we predominately are interested in teaching the highest class of things, even if they are not Greek or Roman and even if they are quite modern. For example, we love children's literature, some of which isn't that old, so Charlotte's Web, for example, I've said to the staff I think that's one of those works that everyone should encounter in their education. Conversely, we don't shrink from teaching the classics even if this is difficult. For example, we have students slowly start reading Latin in fourth grade. We have them reading the unabridged Iliad and Odyssey—in translation—in sixth grade.
Students have a similar exposure to advanced concepts in math and science. Of course, we do this in as approachable a method as possible. For example, students don't start off reading Virgil or Cicero, the hardest authors; they read stories in Latin that are very entertaining and enjoyable, which start out relatively easy and straightforward and only incrementally become difficult. We find every way to help the students we have excel at their studies.
Fr. David: Bobby, if I could slip in here, I just want to point out that another aspect that I think is very positive in our general approach is that—and this is something that classical education has a strength in, and that is to integrate the different subjects, so that when you're studying math you're also bringing in some of the ideas from the literature; when you're studying science you're bringing in perhaps some of the spiritual topics that you hear. We do prayers every morning to start the school day, and we read a gospel, the gospel of the day, and I usually have a small two-minute homily about the gospel. We integrate all of that sensibility, and we have an ongoing discussion within the faculty about how to make those things harmonize. That's something that's perhaps a little bit more unique in these days than the approach of our modern education, which segments things out into different subjects, siloes them, as it were.
Mr. Maddex: Well, here's the big question for both of you, I suppose. How is your school different from other classical schools?
Mr. Waltz: Yeah! I think it's helpful for me to answer that question. I think it's helpful to draw from the book, Classical Education: The Movement Sweeping America by Gene Edward Veith, Jr., and Andrew Kern. Throughout much of the 20th century, so-called classical education was pretty dormant with other types of schools being dominant. In the 1980s and early 1990s, there was a revival with three sorts of major practitioners and theorists: Douglas Wilson, who wrote Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning; Mortimer Adler, who wrote the Paideia Program; and David Hicks, who wrote Norms and Nobility. Nowadays, any one school can and does borrow from all three writers. We ourselves borrow from all three. However, different schools emphasize different strands. In our own school, we take our model and template from David Hicks.
Fr. David: It's worth noting that Hicks, along with our first headmaster of the school here locally, Andrew Kern, and some of the other folks whom you may be familiar with—and have probably interviewed, I would think, in times past—these were all people who came into Orthodoxy, actually converted to the Orthodox faith, through their exposure and their immersion in this model of classical education. What typically will happen is that they will discover that some of the champions in antiquity of classical education are St. Basil the Great, John Chrysostom, St. Gregory the Theologian, who happen to be three of our patrons of the school, by the way.
And so that sense of the antiquity being something that's connected to our living Orthodox tradition is something that happens not infrequently. Of course, as Zach mentioned, it's his own story as well. He was actually baptized into the faith here in our parish, and so there's a real integration going on between our faith experience and our education perspective.
Mr. Waltz: Yes, and so, getting to the meat of it then, what does David Hicks talk about? His thesis is— His vision of classical education is that: "Classical education stands for a spirit of inquiry and a form of instruction concerned with the development of style through language and conscience through myth."
Mr. Maddex: Wow. Can you unpack that quote for us a bit? What is it stating, exactly?
Mr. Waltz: Sure. As teachers, we should all realize that every lesson is inquiry. Starting with that first phrase, "classical education stands for a spirit of inquiry," you are always starting from what is known and inquiring into what is not known. Sometimes your inquiries are relatively simple, like: How do you write the letter A or write the number one? What is the number one? What is one thing? And then the inquiries could go into various degrees of complexity, like into irrational numbers or even the nature of God. Each type of subject has a particular type of inquiry that is appropriate to it and also a set of answers that are particular and appropriate to theirs as well.
But I want to go to— I want to say emphatically that the value of emphasizing the spirit of inquiry just cannot be understated. When I became Orthodox, the very first book I read was Metropolitan Kallistos Ware's The Orthodox Church. It made a very deep impression on me. It still seems to be a popular work, but in any event, in the very first pages of the introduction, Ware writes about the difference between Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox. He says:
Christians in the West, both Roman and Reformed, generally start by asking the same questions, although they may disagree about the answers. In Orthodoxy, however, it is not merely the answers that are different. Questions themselves are not the same as in the West.
So instilling a spirit of inquiry is one of the greatest gifts we can give the children because it helps them— It will determine their lives in a lot of ways, their ultimate orientation. Andrew Kern, the head of the CiRCE Institute, says it very straightforwardly and succinctly: "The life you life is determined by the questions you ask." With that in mind, then, it's in essence one of the things we try and teach here, is how to ask better questions, more nuanced questions, and also how to answer them in more nuanced and deeper and better ways. By doing that, they will be prepared when they go outside these walls, to ask the same types of questions and come to better and more profound answers.
Mr. Maddex: Okay, so I think I understand that portion of the quote. What about "form of instruction concerned with the development style through language and conscience through myth"?
Mr. Waltz: Sure. Well, we can't ask questions without language, so learning language is essential to the spirit of inquiry. By teaching style through language, Hicks emphasizes that we want to teach good taste through a variety of high-quality language, beautiful language. This emphasizes the uniqueness of man in apprehending things through language, and ultimately in understanding logos, or language. By understanding logos (lowercase) in language, we can understand Logos (uppercase Logos, the Logos, the Word of God that John speaks about in his gospel). By the way, that's not to diminish how much math and science we do and how valuable that is as well, but it shows a priority to language that we have.
I think personally that we neglect just how much we are transfigured by beautiful language or a language of any kind. Language is, in many ways, liberating. It certainly has the power to bless or curse, and the human heart is activated by this. I could think of a lot of examples, but the one that came to me recently was about Churchill and the Battle of Britain. In one of the greatest moments in World War II when Britain virtually stood alone against the Axis powers and was— The war effort seemed lost, and the fate of the world and the war seemed in balance. Churchill came up with one of the most stirring pieces of rhetoric the world has ever known. It says he mobilized the English language and sent it into battle. By the power of his words, he gave the British people the spirit to fight through these dark times and help them through to ultimately obtain victory. This kind of rhetoric he learned from the classics he read. The same can be said to other leaders in other times, leading through beautiful language.
Mr. Maddex: And then what about "conscience through myth"?
Fr. David: Well, that's something that seems to have fallen short in our day and age. This idea of "conscience through myth" could be translated into: What is right and wrong? What are values and tastes as they're shaped through the best stories, the stories that stay with you, the things that reach deep into the soul? I've just been listening to Martin Shaw recently, and he was a wonderful mythologist and storyteller who was also led to the Orthodox faith. His command of story just reaches deep into your imagination but also deep into the depths of your soul. The same could be said by all of our beloved authors in the English language—C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein, many others, even J.K. Rowling did it to some degree with Harry Potter, actually communicated through a mythos or a grand story what our human existence and life is to be about.
Developing the conscience of the child—and by the way, this is one of our core statements— We say we want to educate the soul of the child, not just the mind but the whole person. So we're looking to reach the soul of the child through all of the means that we use. We don't shy away at all from myth. St. Basil himself told the young men in one of his famous orations that they should read Homer first before they ever read the Scriptures. We take that to heart, and we say, "Let's tell each other great stories and ruminate on them, and then look for the ways that they apply to our own conscience and behavior, all of those things that shape us as human beings in this day and age in our contemporary life." I hope that helps a little.
Mr. Maddex: Fr. David, you mentioned St. Basil. How exactly does Orthodoxy interplay with classical education? How does it modify it? How does it affect it?
Fr. David: Yeah, you know, that's an interesting term, "modify," because from my experience and perspective, I would say rather than modifying classical, it is a return to the highest form of classical education, which shaped all of our Church Fathers, like Basil and Gregory and so forth. And so we look at truth, goodness, and beauty, which are those eternals that have always been stated in every society in one form or another, as the things that are permanent, eternal, that are the highest things to shoot for, to aim for. What we're trying to do now is to see how that approach to education can culminate but also be infused by our experience in the Church, in our Orthodox faith, through our worship, through our telling the great story of the Lord's passion and resurrection and so forth.
The Orthodox monks, even the Irish monks, for instance, who preserved all of the great Western literature throughout the Dark Ages, they all preserved this seed, this core of what it means to be human. Of course, as Orthodox, we're concerned with how we can become truly human in participation with the one true Man, our Lord Jesus Christ.
Mr. Maddex: Zach, is classical education antiquated, though? Wouldn't more modern approaches to education be more effective these days?
Mr. Waltz: Well, so you asked me that, Bobby, and my immediate reaction is it's sort of like asking if Orthodoxy is antiquated. [Laughter] There are forms that are ancient. They're ancient; there are customs that are old, but it's a living tradition. I quote from Metropolitan Kallistos Ware in the second half of The Orthodox Church, how each generation needs to take possession of traditions so that we see it as a living thing. To quote again from the book:
True Orthodox fidelity to the past must always be a creative fidelity, for true Orthodoxy can never rest satisfied with the barren theology of repetition, which, parrot-like, repeats accepted formulae without striving to understand what lies behind them. Loyalty to tradition, properly understood, is not something mechanical, passive, an automatic process of transmitting the accepted wisdom of an era in the distant past. An Orthodox thinker must see tradition from within. He must enter into its inner spirit. He must re-experience the meaning of tradition in a manner that is exploratory, courageous, and full of imaginative creativity.
I think that that same spirit through look through— We should encounter the classical tradition through that same spirit. The classical education engages with the good, true, and beautiful with modernity, as well as with modern practices, modern literature as well as with the ancients—hence why, like I said, we love children's literature.
But we seek the best everywhere, and we want to find the greatest works of the past, too, to expose our children to. At least for me, in reading Homer, it's been incredibly transformative, and it's one of those things that will remain on our curriculum as long as we exist, because it just is so— it speaks so highly towards, again, the good, the true, and the beautiful. It's one of the things that will bless our children as long as we teach it to them.
Mr. Maddex: Zach, I'm curious as to why your school emphasizes Latin but not Greek. Why is that?
Mr. Waltz: Great question! There's a lot of factors made in that decision, just to name a couple off the top of my head. Being an English speaker, with so many Latin derivatives and with Latin having the same alphabet as ours, it's just easier to learn Latin versus Greek. We only have so much time in our curriculum, and we're learning so many different things that it is more effective, in a way, to focus on Latin, learning that first in any event, or primarily. So that's what we've stuck to so far. That's not to diminish the Greek, though. We do have exposure— We do expose the children to Greek vocabulary and discussions of Christian studies, in literature, in history, so that that is not neglected either, at least to the extent that we would like to teach it.
But I also just want to mention, too, that Latin literature is part of our heritage as English speakers, just as equally as is Greek. It was a language that inspired Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, to name a few. And it would just be a shame not to engage with it.
Mr. Maddex: Fr. David, how does a classical education handle the subject of science?
Fr. David: Ha! Yeah, that would be a pertinent question for our day and age. I think what we— The core of our approach is to say science is the means by which we investigate the world that we live in, and we want to always seek to be sincerely dedicated to the truth that we find, but we also are not ashamed or hesitant to bring in the faith perspective that can inform the way that we do the investigation. I think that's a critical thing that everyone is struggling with. We make so many assumptions in our day and age about what science has taught us, and we're just now—I'm seeing bubbling up kind of in the public square, so to speak, a question about what is this thing called consciousness, the very means by which we are able to observe the world that we're in and measure it and draw conclusions. Many scientists and philosophers are starting to say: You know, there's something more than just the empirical data and what we propose that shows us.
There's also this encounter of our capacity, which we would say we are made in the image of God and so therefore we are given this capacity not only to study things but to contemplate them in the light of a Creator who infuses the whole of our cosmos with meaning. Our approach to science is not to merely say we reject evolution out of hand or we reject any kind of modern, secular approach, but rather we bring that spirit of inquiry to it, and we're not afraid to say, "Okay, these are the things that present themselves in the studies. How do we integrate them into the larger view of life that we have that includes our faith and a Creator?" Tricky! I think we're learning as we go how to do that.
Mr. Maddex: Well, Fr. David, you and Zach have done an excellent job of presenting your school and emphasizing how important a classical education is and how it differs from modern approaches to education. Where can listeners go to get more information about Hagia Sophia Classical Academy and even perhaps help support the work that you do?
Mr. Waltz: You could visit our website, HagiaSophiaClassical.com, or if you just Google "Hagia Sophia Classical Academy," that'll bring you to the website. On there you can learn more about our school or even, if you'd like, there's a page for donations as well.
Mr. Maddex: Awesome. Well, we will be sure to include that link in the description to this episode. Is there anything else that either of you would like to add before we wrap this up today?
Fr. David: Well, Bobby, I'd like to say that this is the reason why, for 30 years, we've been looking at trying to start an Orthodox school in our area— is because we see the increasingly unstable effects of our secular education. And it seems to me that we're hearing more and more, specifically Orthodox but even just generally Christian parents begin to say, "You know, we ought to think about a different way of educating our children that does actually integrate with our faith."
It's a difficult sell in a way, because we have such a kind of a context where we just assume education is what we've gone through as children when we're now adults and parents, but also to see that this kind of approach to integration of the entire person of the student is critical. One of the little clichés that we like to use is that modern education teaches you what to think and how to do things, in other words, to be a productive citizen; but classical education and specifically our Orthodox classical education teaches you how to think and what to do in terms of living a virtuous life, and coming at all of the challenges that these students will face as they grow into maturity, through the lens of their integrated faith and spirit of inquiry and all of those things that we try to bring to the school.
We have graduated two students so far that have gone on to fine careers in university, so I don't think we've held them back at all, and it seems that we test on the national tests at the high end of the scores. So the tools are there, and the context is there for parents to investigate and perhaps to take a bold step to invest their children's lives in the work that we're doing. We certainly invite anybody who's interested that lives in our area to come and see what it looks like.
Mr. Maddex: And what about you, Zach? Do you have anything to add before we warp this up?
Mr. Waltz: Sure. As I thought more and more about this interview and preparing for it, the more I just realized that the mindset that would incline someone to the Orthodox Church would, in my mine, incline them to classical education. The Church is something both, as I said before, ancient in some respects but something that we're creatively engaging with our own era as well. Certainly a Church devoted to the good, the true, and the beautiful—that's what first affected me when I first came to the Orthodox Church, the love of these things, so that if indeed we want our children to have an experience that's in harmony with their Orthodox faith, with their Orthodox worldview, I think that classical education would be the way to integrate that. I would encourage anyone listening to investigate that education in their area.
Mr. Maddex: Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me today!
Fr. David: Thank you, Bobby. We certainly appreciate the opportunity to share our little story in this corner of the world.
Mr. Waltz: Thank you very much, Bobby. We very much appreciate this opportunity to share about our school.
Mr. Maddex: All right, so once again I have been speaking With Zachary Waltz and Fr. David Wey of Hagia Sophia Classical Academy in Indianapolis, Indiana.