Become Who You Are
What’s the meaning and purpose of my life? What is my true identity? Why were we created male and female? How do I find happiness, joy and peace? How do I find love that lasts, forever? These are the timeless questions of the human heart. Join Jack Rigert and his guests for lively insights, reading the signs of our times through the lens of Catholic Teaching and the insights of Saint John Paul ll to guide us.
Saint Catherine of Siena said "Become who you are and you would set the world on fire".
Become Who You Are
#606 What Reading Crisis? Great Literature Awakens Young Minds to Life's Deeper Questions; with Jon Bishop
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What happens when you hand high school students Aristotle, Aquinas, and Dante instead of dumbed-down material? According to teacher Jon Bishop, they respond with remarkable enthusiasm and depth.
With only 30% of American high school students reading at minimum proficiency standards across the Nation, skyrocketing mental health issues, and declining academic outcomes despite increased spending... Rather than following educational fads, John advocates returning to proven approaches that engage students' moral imagination and foster genuine human connection.
In this thought-provoking conversation, Jon shares how his "Human Flourishing" course creates space for students to engage with timeless texts through almost entirely student-led discussions. The results challenge popular assumptions about today's youth – today's teens are hungry for substance, meaning, and the language to express life's fundamental questions.
"These questions in human life are perennial," Jon explains.
Read Jon's Important Article at the Catholic Exchange!
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I'm excited to be with John Bishop John's out of New Hampshire. He's teaching at a high school there. John wrote an article for the Catholic Exchange A Crisis of Seriousness. We're all trying to figure out what to do about our young people today. John, I'm from Illinois. You're working on your master's. You're just about finished at the University of St Thomas in Houston studying poetry and Catholic intellectual tradition. That's my alma mater up here, so I loved the University of St Thomas. It was an awesome experience. I hope you're enjoying it too, as you're finishing up there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, First of all, again, Jack, thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be on the show. Yeah, I love my time at the University of St Thomas. They're doing a lot of great things there and I'm excited to discuss my Catholic Exchange piece.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, well, I lot of great things there and I'm excited to discuss my Catholic exchange piece. Yeah, yeah, well, I'll tell you what you know I'm like I said I'm at. We're in the belly of the beast here as far as education and all kinds of other things go on in Illinois and what we're seeing is we're seeing it, and of course this is across the country. You know, the costs of education are skyrocketing, mental health issues are skyrocketing and the proficiency standards are dropping like a rock. I just read, john, that 30% only 30% of our kids across the country can read a proficiency standards in high school, and 30% I mean 70% are not there, and so a lot of people are experimenting and I keep telling them go, look at Catholic education. You know the principals that. I know the people that are running some of the Catholic schools that I'm familiar with. Their proficiency standards are much higher.
Speaker 2:They don't have the money to go around with the latest curriculum all the time, and I'll just leave you just with a couple other thoughts here before I have you come on. They don't have as much technology. They couldn't afford it in the beginning and then they found out it's probably better to do without it and they're picking great books. And this is kind of a segue into what you're doing, john. You're picking great literature and you're challenging them. Why do we even need to do that, john? Today Isn't this just about getting a job and going out into the workforce?
Speaker 1:What are you finding? Yeah, no, that's exactly right, jack, and I thought you beautifully summed up why Catholic schools matter there. Yeah, so my essay Crisis of Seriousness in the Catholic Exchange I wanted to address this very topic. I spent my entire career in Catholic education. I found such freedom in the classroom and when I started at this school two years ago it was my second year there I felt ready, in my time as a teacher, to begin implementing a course that I had dreamed about, really a kind of great books course for high school students. So I developed it, called it Human Flourishing, asked them to reflect on virtue In Flourishing. Students have read Aristotle, aquinas, augustine, flanagan, o'connor, ts Eliot all great thinkers and they're tasked with discussing them for 50 minutes, almost a full-length class period. This approach, of course, is not unusual.
Speaker 2:Now, when you say discuss it, so tell me what that looks like. So the whole class is reading the same book, would you say?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so they all get the same reading. Okay, and what they have to do is again I sit and observe and they really just dig into the text.
Speaker 2:Okay, all right. Does somebody moderate that, or are they open to just?
Speaker 1:start to talk. It is totally open. It is totally open. Yeah, so I, I mean I certainly grade them right, but I tell them, I told that this is not really about the grades, it is about digging into this material learning together right and and I have found in the in the two semesters I've done this course that it has great results.
Speaker 2:So let's talk about some of those results, because I'm in on these conversations, especially in this look, I call it a corrupt public school system here in the Chicagoland area and it is in so many ways we're leaving kids behind. So I'm very, very interested, interested. Give us some idea of some of the discussion that you remember, some of the things that you see being sparked in these young people that without that literature, without those discussions, you wouldn't have. I want to pause just for a minute to talk about the assault taking place on our children. Here's the cold, hard facts 73% of all children 13 to 17 have seen online pornography. 100% of the young men that we're meeting have seen hardcore pornography. They're angry about it. These images are burned into their memories and their brains and affecting how they see others, including women, in their life.
Speaker 2:The average age a child sees porn for the first time is under 12 years old. It takes just one time, sometimes by accident, most of the time by accident, to rob them of their innocence and obliterate their moral imaginations. Two things you've got to do You've got to fill them up, and I'm going to get to that in the second part of the show with a program we have called Love Ed. But right now I want to talk about Covenant Eyes. Covenant Eyes is a way to take control of the content you and your family have access to online, and you have to do it before it's too late.
Speaker 2:My friend Theo and his colleagues at Covenant Eyes are committed to protecting families through their advanced online software. They also provide accountability and monitoring services. We have to be able to monitor the content coming into our homes. So step number one go to Covenant Eyes. I'll put it in the show notes it's covenanteyescom. Use the promo code JP the number two, jp the number two, so John Paul II, and you get a free month to check it out. See the show notes covenanteyescom. Tell my friend Theo. I said hello.
Speaker 1:Back to the show. Yeah, so I'll mention one particular student, right. So she came and finished the course back in December and in her final essay I asked her to reflect I asked all of them to reflect on the themes of the course and in her essay she wrote how these questions had existed really her whole life and had no language to frame it yet, and this course gave her that language.
Speaker 2:Okay, so this is so important, john. So this is what we find out when we go out to share with high school kids. So, john Paul II Renewal Center, we have a number of different kind of apostolates under our apostolate. One of them is to go out and do high school retreats and stuff. What we find is, when you give people the language and they start discussing it, they have this bottled up confusion, all these bottled up questions right, that's what you're getting at here and all of a sudden they have the vocabulary to start to express those things. Something new happens, doesn't it, john?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's exactly it. I mean, these questions in human life are perennial.
Speaker 2:They are cross-cultural right.
Speaker 1:They're just genuine movements in the human spirit that really sometimes aren't given full shape without this kind of education. And I would say too, my aim here and I haven't made this as explicit with them is this is Catholicism at its best right. Catholicism is intellectually rigorous. It speaks directly to these questions and I know in my experience when I was younger I often had you know until I went to a Catholic college and everything was changed for me. I reverted to the faith in college. We often, too often, see what I call coloring book Catholicism, where it's just very surface level right and people, human beings, are just-.
Speaker 1:Way too much of that, John, right that's right, yeah, and human beings are just naturally hungry for seriousness, right and again. That just gets to the theme of what I wanted to do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, you know, we forget when these young people are in school that we have this thing called reason right, and we were given reason. Reason and free will make us different than all the rest of creation out there, and reason is seeking the truth. What is the of things? And we're not addressing that. In fact, john, we're doing the opposite in most of these public schools, aren't we?
Speaker 1:well, that's it. And you know and jack, in your introduction you alluded to what often happens. Right, our discussions about education do sometimes fall into a political thing, and certainly as as education is political. Right, it is asking us about how do we form people, right, but it is. It just becomes about career, right, and that is something that is not unimportant. Right, we want to know how, you know, we want to live good lives, get good jobs, but we are losing an essential aspect of education when we just turn the school into a career readiness institution. Right, because if that's all it is, people don't need to go to school. Right, we have a history of autodidacts and others. But when we look at the true history of education, going back to, say, even the Greek academy, right, this was an institution of formation, teaching us how to be more human.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and how to treat one another. You know the basic things. You know. When you take look at John Adams, right? You know one of our founding fathers, madison, would agree with this. You know. He said our republic was made for a moral and religious people and Madison said you know, madison added a virtuous people and it will fall. It will fall. So what you're talking about, john, is not just important for me to be able to think a little bit better or whatever it's better. I mean, it's a way to run our whole country, it's a way to change the culture that we see. We're living in, a violent culture where people have no problem lying to each other, stealing, cheating. I mean this is what you're bringing up with great literature, right? You say there is a way to live and I'm going to model this for you through the literature.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's exactly it. And again, oftentimes when we hear critiques against young people, right, well, they're doing this or doing that, but we're not actually we have to teach them, we have to show them how to do these things. Human beings need models. We need yes, they do, we imitate, right? So, and when we look around and you're right like when we see various pathologies in modern culture, right, it's really because people have not, I think, been given the appropriate really virtue, language and tools to be serious people and to be good citizens and to be really think about the great questions.
Speaker 2:And the great questions bleed right into my own heart and they bleed into my relationships. Talk about relationships because one of the things you say in your article is they start to talk to one another, they start to discuss. You know there are awkward young people out there because of the phones and the tablets and the culture in general. So we become. You know we have pornography addictions. You know we have a lot of things we're doing by ourselves now, in bad places sometimes, but we're awkward. You know we're looking down at our phones and now you're giving them a chance to do what John.
Speaker 1:Right. So it gives them a chance to do something together, to do something in community. Human beings need to be in community.
Speaker 1:You know, Thomas said no man is an island, right? Yes, and that's part of the process. You know I have that. You know, even when I do non-discussion activities, right, they are all communal, student-centered activities. So it's, I've been, I've been blessed to say that the classes have been small, so I've been lucky to do this. But you know, I'll tell them, you know, you know I've asked them to like, say, dig into Dante together, say, you know, you're going to do some research on Dante. They all have to work together, they all have to find roles for each other and it creates this kind of, again, communal, collaborative spirit which, again, we're very atomized individuals today, right, so we need to again recover that sense of community, human beings doing things together.
Speaker 2:And, john, you know, even from you know, john Paul's work was so broad, right, but his theology of the body, how these young people even look at each other, is brought out in this kind of stuff, right. Answering those big questions that John Paul would say who am I? What's my identity? How many times do we walk into a high school today? And even to a grade school, John? They have no idea who they are. You know, it's unbelievable. Am I an L, a, g a, p?
Speaker 2:We have to get the gender ideologies. Am I a racist? Am I here by accident? I hear there's no God, so I'm here by accident. So what's the meaning and purpose of my life? Well, there is no meaning and purpose. Then, right, you're just here by accident. Random atoms hitting atoms. Why are we created male and female? We don't know these things. All these virtuous literature, and also, if I'm sitting there, I'm looking at the girl, I'm looking at the boys and I'm starting to see, hey, we can talk to each other. We are a little different, but we can talk about this kind of stuff and I can see the beauty of who you are, john, and start to understand who you are, and you might be a different skin color than me, you might be a different sex than me, and we find out. We're human beings, we have some common. You know, we have a common father in essence, right, and all of those things will come out when you're discussing things. I mean, I'm very excited about what you're doing, john.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you, and I agree. I mean, like, the human experience is universal. Obviously it takes different flavors for where you're living, you know, and so on, but the human experience is universal. Human nature does not change and you're right. Like we live in a time where people don't know how to ask who am I Right? There's nothing that speaks to the deeper notions of you know, the deeper longings of the human spirit, right? And again, what we really witnessed when people are angry and other things, it's really the soul crying out yes, it is.
Speaker 2:Say that again, john, because our audience, it sees this all the time. You see it in young people who, who you know, don't have much patience anymore. You see it in old people that don't have much patience anymore. And say that again because it's very important.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's right. So again, whenever we see various individual pathologies, this is really the soul crying out for love.
Speaker 2:And truth, huh. Love me in the truth and speak the truth to me in love.
Speaker 2:Edith Stein, teresa, benedicta would say one without the other is a destructive lie. So I need to love you, but I need to love you in the truth. Well, what is the truth? And I need to speak the truth, but I need to do it in love. That's the relationship right. So with great literature we're talking about truths and we get to know each other and build the relationship in love. And are you finding pretty civil discussions and I mean I would think a good discussion has got some pushback right and how are they handling that and what are they learning? John?
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, that's right. Yeah, very civil. I mean it's not a debate, it's more of like how do we get to the meaning of what we're reading together? And I found that.
Speaker 2:Now do they have physical books in their hands?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I always make sure I print it out for them. I think it's important to have the physical copy in there.
Speaker 2:Yes, thank you, they have to annotate it.
Speaker 1:They have to really mark it up.
Speaker 2:I see this is right. There's kids in grade school now that we're meeting with. They don't even know how to write cursive. They don't know how to take notes. They're trying to print. It's very hard to print quickly in a margin someplace, isn't it? I need to circle it, I need to write a little note. It's something creative that happens there and look, we're taking writing away from them. This is done purposely, but finish your thought and then I'm going to ask you about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I mean again it's. You know, what I've seen here and this has sort of affirmed something for me is that the Catholic intellectual tradition is truly Catholic, it is for everybody, right. So you know, when I initially was thinking about this course, you know, talk to friends about it, and again, this was never said to be demeaning or anything. But sometimes people would say, oh well, you know, not everyone's going to be into that, it's only a small subset. But I, you know, in my school, in this part of the state, you know, we really do have a kind of wide section of people, right, and they're all getting something out of it.
Speaker 2:So I think that says I would think, john, that you could take that model and at least use it in any literature class to some degree. And important again, to have a physical, something physical in my hand, whether it's the book itself or, like you said, you're printing something off, something physical that I can look at, I can study. There's some, there's a transfer of of that information and it's and it's more than just it's, more than just information. Right, I'm starting to feel this. I'm starting to feel this, I'm starting to almost taste what's going on. You know, my, my imagination sparks.
Speaker 1:Well, that's exactly it. And again, you know, people forget what. What a great gift. Digging into something is like a philosophy, theology, literature. Yes Right, you know it sounds almost absurd to say, but it's the truth. What we're really doing is communing with another mind who actually took the time to write this down.
Speaker 2:Yes, right.
Speaker 1:Yes, and you know.
Speaker 2:And in most cases a pretty good mind too right, that's right. Yeah, exactly yeah, and in most cases a pretty good mind too right.
Speaker 2:That's right. Yeah, exactly yeah, and he's going to bring his time, his period, in. But it still gets back to what you said. You know human nature doesn't change. You know, we think. You know we're so progressive, right, we're so progressive. You know, forget about the past now, forget about the tradition. And you know, you can go back and read somebody from a thousand years ago and if you didn't tell me I mean a little update maybe on the language, spellings or whatever but if you read that to me, I might not know what era it was in. I mean, I just hear something, I go yeah, that makes sense to me, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's right Again. This is why, even outside of my discipline of philosophy and theology, this is why Shakespeare has such staying power, because we can look at the monologues of Hamlet and such and just see something of ourselves in these people, right?
Speaker 2:Yes, yes yes, yes, what were the students' favorite? That they have a favorite book or favorite topics or something. Because when you're talking about discovery, I can. I can remember back, even as a kid myself. The first time you know, you latch on to something new, or the first time I'm able to express something that I felt in my heart and I I go, ooh, I knew that, I knew that I didn't know how to say it. Nobody ever modeled it for me.
Speaker 2:But now that you did, I found this many times in John Paul's work early on. I'm going back 15, maybe 20 years ago and the first time I start reading him and of course he's pointing to Thomas Aquinas and Augustine. He's pointing all over the place, right, it's not just him. He synthesizes this down, but he's grabbing it from other people early church fathers and I go, I knew that that's so exciting, even for me. I was in my 40s already, or late 30s, when I discovered John Paul II and I said I knew that Nobody ever modeled that for me, but I would imagine as kids, kids this is what you're finding well, well, that's it, and and again.
Speaker 1:I, I think in some ways I recognize that this could have been their last chance for to encounter some of these serious sad, you know sad exactly, but but I can, I can point to the success of this and again I I want to, you know, I want to be clear here, right, like I don't do this as a personal success. I just think that the material teaches kids. When they get serious things, like I pointed out in my essay, they respond. I had a student who was really into Dante and I did some excerpts of the Divine Comedy with them and I have him again this semester and he came up to me and he said, mr Bishop, look. And he pulled out of his backpack a copy of the Divine Comedy. He had gone to Barnes Noble and purchased it because of our time together.
Speaker 2:I have a bookshelf full of books like that and a lot of them I'm carrying through from high school.
Speaker 2:And you know the CS Lewis's of the world, the GK Chesterton's of the world at that time. It spoke to me at that time, right, I could understand CS Lewis. I mean, he was my bridge to a lot of other people and I still have those books. I might drive over to my right, I know exactly where they are, where they're located, et cetera, and I can't throw those away because I still go in and grab them because they're like I'm not going to relate it exactly to the gospel, but they're like the gospel in a way, in that I can go back and say, ooh, I see that in another angle now, you know, ooh, that's touching me in a different way. Now, just like great literature, like Scripture will do, you can read Scripture. Two years later, I'm reading the same gospel, as we all know, and all of a sudden I go oh man, I never thought of that before, right.
Speaker 1:Well, that's it. And again, that also gets to a secondary aim of my catholic exchange piece. You know, on seriousness, and sometimes I wanted to speak to the broader culture here too, learning is exciting, reading good things and serious things is exciting. I think we've forgotten this. You know when, and we can see that there's, there has been a kind of distinct change, at least in the United States, on this question. You know, if you look at the mid, mid 20th century, like, who were, who were some celebrities, right, f Scott Fitzgerald, hemingway, like these, these are serious writers who were famous, right. Even if you go even earlier, right, gk Chesterton used to do tours he would go to, like places Dickens did the same thing, right, we don't have that anymore, you know. It speaks to another thing that's sort of a pet peeve of mine or an interest of mine is a kind of the collapse of our common culture, right, like you know, when we're not reading the same things or watching the same things, you know, I think it leads to a kind of frivolity, a lack of seriousness.
Speaker 2:Again, Well, we could see that. Now, when you say a lack of seriousness, you know what we see and you know if you study education public school, government education you see that this is not by accident in a lot of cases. I'd like to get your you know. Have you gone back and studied that? I mean this was purposely done at the academic. You know the level, the teaching colleges we're seeing in Illinois. We're seeing teachers, superintendents and teachers that are coming out of, say, a Columbia University and this is not good. They're really not taught to teach as much as they're taught to really push some of these ideologies. And some of the young teachers I don't think know, john, you know what they're doing wrong, but they're shaping these kids in some weird ways. But as far as I see, as far as what I've read and I've done extensive reading on this, you know the John Deweys of the world and et cetera, et cetera, they were bringing this in on purpose and kind of dumbing down the education and really to take the virtue out of the government school education. I want to mention again this assault taking place on our children. You know they're being attacked through social media, pornography, other things.
Speaker 2:Earlier on the show I talked about covenant eyes, a way to control, filter what your children, what your family has access to online, very, very important. Let me just mention here really quickly that we also have to fill our children up with what's true, good and beautiful, especially the beauty of their bodies, their sexuality and God's plan. We do that through what program? We have called Love Ed, love Education. And we do this with the parents. That's so beautiful because we teach the child about their biology, what's happening to their bodies, and bring together that love story so that they know what their bodies are for, what our human sexuality is for.
Speaker 2:And the second thing, very, very important, is to bond the parent and the child together. So if a little girl has questions, she goes to her mom, a little boy goes to child together. So if a little girl has questions, she goes to her mom, a little boy goes to his dad. So check it out. Go to our website, jp2reneworg JP, the number two reneworg, it's in the show notes and go find Love Edits, the banner at the very top and check it out. All right back to the show.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, and again this gets to you know very extensive histories of what like what progressivism is and et cetera. But no, I mean again, I think what we're seeing is the fruits of a kind of I agree, I mean a project to move away from traditional education, and I think that the growth of, say, classical schools like I don't work at a classical school, but I think it speaks to this I think people are looking for a deeper thing to assuage their longings. Right, this isn't good for us. It's not good for us to not engage these questions and big ideas.
Speaker 2:No, that's right, that's right Now. I just did a presentation at a school board and I brought up these things and I told them about a Catholic education. I said I'm not going to come here telling that you guys need to use the Bible and put it back in the class. We know we're not going that, illinois, but my point was just bring great literature in, get away, especially at those early grades, with these tablets. Make sure, just bring great literature in, get away, especially at those early grades, with these tablets. Make sure we don't have the phones in there.
Speaker 2:You know there's a ton of great children's literature, john, from you know, from 50 years ago, 60 when I was a kid, that's. That's just as good today, you know, and and authors have gone in and just updated them just a little bit right. And you know I, I have one sitting on my desk right now. Remember St George and the Dragon. I mean it's teaching virtue, it's teaching what is courage, one called the Quiltmaker's Gift, and it's all about being selfless. There's one more here. It's the Greek Myths. It's for fourth and fifth graders. It's the Greek Myths, and it's a big, beautiful book with pictures and stuff in it, right, and it sparks the imagination, john, and this is what I said to them.
Speaker 2:You know I said you know you were struggling here academically, reading math, other things, the kids, mental illness, the costs are going up through the roof because you have to keep bringing more and more people in to deal with the mental illness and the social problems we're having and I I wonder what would it take John? What's it going to take? Is it going to take a voucher? What do you have in Massachusetts or New Hampshire? You're from right. What do you have there as far as school choice goes? Are they doing anything for you there? Because I think this is the battle now, the battle that you just mentioned. There's a number of states now that are giving vouchers and giving you a rebate on your property taxes so that you can spend it where you need to do. I don't know if there's another way out of this thing, unless we get out of some of these government schools, because I don't really see them wanting to change.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, you know, I think there needs to be a greater recovery of really the ideas that we've been talking about. Right, like ideas don't go away, like people just need to actually say you know, this thing is pretty good, why don't we try it? You know, I would say a solution is probably above my pay grade, but I mean, I think if we have people who I think it's what we're talking about right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't think it's right, it's not.
Speaker 2:We used to know how to read. We used to know how to teach, I should say how to read and how to teach basic math and and and basic civil. You know understanding of what it means to be a. You know a good citizen and what it means to be kind to somebody and not and to look past their race and and oh my gosh huh.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and oh my gosh, huh, yeah, no, I mean, I think, and again I mean I think, if we want to. So what I would say is I think, if we want to recover what we're talking about, there probably is a multi-pronged solution here. I think the culture at large needs to recognize the importance of the humanities and again we can get to a variety of reasons why sometimes families will say don't study this, it's not going to get you a job, right.
Speaker 2:Well, I think there's two reasons. One is what you just said it's not going to get you a job. The other thing is they've been twisted, they've been infiltrated by ideologies and ideologues, and so I think that's the other danger. When my kids two of my girls were biology majors and John, they would come home and I go where did you hear that from? You know? I mean, you know you're a biology major I thought this was about science. Well, all these woke ideologies came in. My son was a finance guy, and then and, and, then, and, and, and or or say a. You know, you know some kind of a skill that, like an engineer, you don't get this stuff because it has to work right out in the real world. So my point being this I was afraid to push them into too many humanity courses because I saw what they were getting, john. So I think that's the other side of this.
Speaker 1:Which I and I understand, but I think also we don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water, right, like? I agree, yeah, and we need, we need good guides, we need people to show us, because I think I know for me, my, my, my experience in college, um, I don't think I would have been somebody interested in the Catholic intellectual tradition and the humanities if I didn't have the professors that I did. You know, I went to Assumption College in Worcester, now Assumption University. You know I studied with great people like Daniel J Mahoney and others, and these people left a permanent mark on me, actually even led me to discern the priesthood.
Speaker 1:I'm happily married now, but I mean, I wouldn't have had any of these questions proposed to me if it weren't for this. So I mean, I think, I think families can recognize that, you know, maybe they want, maybe you know, going to institution X, maybe not be the best plan, but but they're also great institutions, like Wyoming Catholic College, you know. You know Assumption College, like I went, and again, like you know, we want to also, I think, take the experience that you can get there and bring it back to schools, right, like, I think there's nothing stopping anybody from saying why don't you know? The kids are very capable of reading Aristotle, right Like, let's do it. And I've been heartened to say I've spoken to some public school teachers up here and they're doing just that they're introducing philosophy and such into it.
Speaker 2:Okay, so let's see. This is very interesting to me, so that because I keep going back how are we going to fix this culture? How are we going to help these kids? It has to somehow the if we're going to keep the public school systems I don't know what, you know, I don't see them trying to get, even though we're getting rid of the looks like the national department of education, which is which is fine with me.
Speaker 2:But if this, if the teachers will bring this back into the public school system, I think the solution becomes bringing great literature back and getting parents involved. Again, you got to have a good school board, you got to get parents involved and you got to say, hey, we're going to bring great literature in here and the English classes and the history classes and et cetera, et cetera, are going to use good books. You know, and I think we might have to go back, you know, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 years to find those books. But that's okay, then then we'll, then we'll do that, at least for the subjects that we can. John, what do you think?
Speaker 1:I agree, I mean, and I think you know, and I think if we did something like that and just you know, said okay, guys, we're going to read Aristotle, we're going to read, you know, we're going to read Augustine, or something, it will do wonders. You know, kids want to read stuff like this, and again, that's that's again, that's what led to my essay. And then we underestimate how students you know, we think students might reject this, but it's not true like they want to read this we find the same thing when we're going in for presentations with kids.
Speaker 2:we'll have a high school and we'll go into there to, to, to present a topic, and they'll tell us oh, you know, these kids don't have more than a 10 second. You know, attention span, uh, you know, try not to talk about that too much or that too much. But I'll tell you what. It's not true. We don't find it's true. We find that if you get rid of the phones, right, and when we're there there aren't phones. When those kids come in and and we present them with the truth and we start asking questions, and man, it's a cool response to your point.
Speaker 2:You know, don't give up on these kids, because when we do, they don't find their way so easy.
Speaker 2:You know, we have a lot of children, john, that are coming from broken families, children that have been born out of wedlock.
Speaker 2:You know, in these classes, even with these younger kids that were younger people that we're meeting, you know, with somebody with two dads, two moms, I mean all these things right to some of the deep thinkers from the past and not try to pick on these individual people is my point, because when you start to talk about reading Aristotle, when you start to read St Augustine or any of the great literature, dante, you don't have to get into the black and white thing.
Speaker 2:You don't have to always get into what does a family look like, because I think the public schools will push back on all that kind of stuff. So we're just going to have to find books that are going to get kids to think, lift them to a higher level and start replacing their moral imaginations that have been obliterated and replace them with hope again. Give them hope and replace them with hope again. Give them hope. Give them hope that maybe true love exists, maybe I'll discover something, maybe life really is an adventure, maybe truth exists. These are great things to put a solid footing underneath somebody, especially somebody that's coming from a family, say, or a circumstance where they're just getting blown around by the wind.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, kids need hope, they need to recognize that life matters and they need to recognize that they matter, and I think a way to do that is to have people read good books.
Speaker 2:Yes, and here let's finish with this, what's your thoughts? I mean, hopefully those kids have picked up the joy of reading, the joy of reading which will last them forever, right For a lifetime, john, and you already alluded to that for this young man that went to the store and picked up Dante.
Speaker 1:And again, we live in a time that says it sort of dumbs things down, and I don't mean that in a pejorative way, but it says oh well, as you pointed out, we won't have attention spans anymore, none of this matters, we don't need to do that anymore, but it's quite the contrary, we need to. You know, if we give people the joy of reading and sitting with good ideas, it's going to do things for people. You know, the moral imagination matters. The imagination matters. And the thing is it's sort of like what Pope Benedict said about the conscience. Right, the imagination in some ways is like a muscle, right, we have to flex it, otherwise it's just a weather.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and what we're finding with this technology? It's actually rewiring those muscles. I mean, it's rewiring the neural pathways and it's not a good thing and we need to be able to sit down and relax. You know, when we meet kids that are anxious, they're getting depressed. I mean, you know, all of these things you know are bleeding into this, John.
Speaker 2:You know, when you start to, if I get lost in a book for half an hour as a kid and'm taking notes and I'm thinking about things, that's that time where I'm not anxious, I'm not depressed, you know what I mean. And it's starting to rewire my brain to go at a little bit slower pace, Even though everything's blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm finding things these are good things but it's not moving me around from subject to subject to subject to subject and nothing's sinking in. I think that's part of my anxiety is, I'm hearing all this noise, all this info, but nothing's really sinking in. So I turn around the next minute or the next second and it's just more information and nothing's coming into my heart. I sit there for a half an hour with a good book, I take some notes. That's sinking in. That's sinking in. That's changing me, modeling. You know, like you said, John, yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1:And and you know if I can appropriate the name of your podcast, right, we bring in this stuff and it becomes a part of us. It helps us become who we are, you know yes, thank you for that.
Speaker 2:Thank you for that, thanks for and that's a good way to finish, to become who you are podcast and john, you're, you're, you're, you're a gift, you're a treat. It was good to have you on uh. Any last words, any encouragement for uh, for, for all of us yeah.
Speaker 1:So I would just direct people to read my essay catholic exchange crisis of seriousness. And again I would just say you know, hope is not lost. Education, education matters. This stuff matters. Let's keep plugging away and remember that we can recognize that life is an adventure.
Speaker 2:Yes, thank you so much and I'll make sure I put a link in to your, your article in the show notes, john, thank you so much. Thanks everybody. Thanks for joining us Talk to you again soon. Bye-bye.