The Consortium Podcast

Language Acquisition with Jonathan Roberts and the Ancient Language Institute

This is Episode 14 of the Consortium Podcast, an academic audio blog of Kepler Education.

In this episode, Scott and Joffre talk with Jonathan Roberts of the Ancient Language Institute about the best approaches to language acquisition and the benefits of learning ancient languages when obtaining a liberal arts education.

 

Kepler Education offers a number of language courses, both ancient and modern, for 5th grade all the way up to adult learners.

Poetry and a Liberal Arts Education

This is Episode 13 of the Consortium Podcast, an academic audio blog of Kepler Education.

In this episode, Scott and Joffre discuss the importance of poetry in a liberal arts education. Poetry is more philosophical than history, says Aristotle. And this means poetry gives us insight into the human condition: what humans might do as opposed to history, which tells us what humans have done.

The Romantic poet, Percy Shelley noted that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. In a sense, they are prophets in the truth-telling sense (rather than the prognosticating sense) because poetry serendipitously offers flashes of wisdom and delightful insight, further cultivating the human imagination. Poetry also enriches other forms of communication by actualizing the music of language, turns of phrases and figures of speech.

Easter and Education

This is Episode 12 of the Consortium Podcast, an academic audio blog of Kepler Education.

This episode was recorded for Easter but due to technical difficulties recording a previous podcast, it was delayed.

The content is nevertheless still quite relevant given Easter is the celebration of the most important event in human history, the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The resurrection absolutely changed everything, including education, since by it Christ “re-formed the human race” as Irenaeus notes in Against Heresies. In his Second Oration on Easter, Gregory Nazianzen affirms the same saying, “A few drops of blood re-creates the whole world.”

In that the resurrection of Christ brings the whole cosmos within range of the redemptive purpose of Christ (Eph. 1), it reaffirms in one sense (Deut 6:4ff), and recreates in another sense (Paideia), the purpose and method of education, making it that much more important for us to get it right.

Visual Communication and the Liberal Arts

This is Episode 11 of the Consortium Podcast, an academic audio blog of Kepler Education.

In this episode is Scott Postma and Joffre Swait interview Roxana Corradino, an artist, college professor, and Kepler teacher, and discuss visual communications and the importance of its study in a liberal arts education.

Images and signs are all around us. But unless we are aware that every day we are being bombarded with ideas, subtly, in the form of visual communication, we may fail to see how our perceptions are being influenced. In this episode Roxana Corradino discusses the nature and importance of visual communications and how this discipline plays a vital role in how we see the world and interpret the meaning of our world in our day-to-day lives.

NOTE: Unfortunately, technical difficulties in recording this week's podcast resulted in an abundance of editing which diminished the quality of this particular episode. However, we believe the conversation was important enough to share with our listeners so you can glean the valuable content our guest provided in the interview.

 

The Liberal Arts Education, Practically Speaking

This is Episode 10 of the Consortium Podcast, an academic audio blog of Kepler Education.

In this episode, Scott Postma and Joffre Swait get practical about a classical liberal arts education.

You can also learn more about Kepler Education and the consortium of teachers who share this vision for student flourishing by visiting our website at https://kepler.education.

Or, visit the Consortium Blog at https://consortium.kepler.education/.

A Liberal Arts Education and the Great Conversation

This is Episode 9 of the Consortium Podcast, an academic audio blog of Kepler Education.

In this episode, Scott Postma and Joffre Swait make a thorough treatment of the meaning of a classical liberal arts education and show its importance and benefits, namely that it has the potential to cultivate a wise and virtuous people whose resultant happiness produces a free and flourishing society. A liberal arts education can be stated as the pursuit and acquisition of that knowledge which is pleasurable for its own sake, and which frees the mind and prepares the soul to be wise and virtuous. Listen to hear how one can pursue this kind of education.

You can also learn more about Kepler Education and the consortium of teachers who share this vision for student flourishing by visiting our website at https://kepler.education.

Or, visit the Consortium Blog at https://consortium.kepler.education/.

 

Robots or gods: AI and Human Education

This is Episode 8 of the Consortium Podcast, an academic audio blog of Kepler Education.

In this episode, Scott Postma and Joffre Swait discuss the development of AI and what this means in light of giving our children a Human Education. The robots are coming and that's not changing. But that shouldn't concern Christians who educate their children to be human beings who know how to assess value and not just function as a cog in a rote society.

 

Writing is an example of this kind of distinction. Writing can formulaic, but it is also a very human exercise. Students who only learn to write formulaically as a job skill will see their job eventually replaced by a robot. Those who learn to be a cultivated human being and recognize writing is an expression of one's humanness, will have nothing to fear. Soft skills like these cannot be replaced by a robot because they are fundamentally human and not replicable by AI.

 

This is the quote referenced in the podcast:

“For the civic educator, the task is to produce a particular kind of citizen; for the educator released from political goals, the end of education is less to shape students than to develop their reason and knowledge to such a degree that they are able to take personal responsibility for shaping themselves as free and independent individuals—thinking through their own views, cultivating their own tastes, developing their own life plans, and becoming unique people. Although it is comforting to think that in a democracy these two projects are complementary (we like to say that democracy is the form of government that values free and autonomous individuals), the open-endedness of the educational process is worrisome from the political perspective; the temptation is to try to produce an education with a known and satisfactory outcome. Free men and women are often a bit too unpredictable for the civic educator's taste.” - Bob Pepperman Taylor, University of Vermont

 

This is the AI article referenced in the podcast. 

 

You can also learn more about Kepler Education and the consortium of teachers who share this vision for student flourishing by visiting our website at https://kepler.education.

Or, visit the Consortium Blog at https://consortium.kepler.education/.

You've Been Schooled! - Deinstitutionalizing Society

This is Episode 7 of the Consortium Podcast, an academic audio blog of Kepler Education.

In this episode, Scott Postma and Joffre Swait discuss the radical idea of deinstitutionalizing society and contend that the modern school, as we know it, doesn’t work for educating free men and women. 

It does work well, however, toward the goal for which it was designed, which is to cultivate a society of both consumers and cogs—simultaneously consumers and cogs—a self-licking ice-cream cone if you will.

Building off of previous discussions, they get down into the weeds and make two very important declarations about the said self-licking ice-cream cone.

First, schools, as we have come to accept them, literally create a dependent society, not a free society. Good people scratch their heads wondering why Americans (and most Europeans for that matter) are so dependent on the State, but we need look no further than our public school model which were modeled after the Prussian schools and introduced to the U. S. in the 19th century by secular humanists like Horace Mann (1796-1859).

Second, schools, as we have come to accept them, have no logical limits, and therefore, create an abyss, a black hole of jobs, money, advisors, bureaucracies, and bureaucracies to regulate bureaucracies—and the list goes on and on. 

Listen to Episode 7 to learn how schools create and legitimize student values and shape student worldviews, which essentially gives the school system a monopoly on the professional, political, and financial aspects of a society.

You can also learn more about Kepler Education and the consortium of teachers who share this vision for student flourishing by visiting our website at https://kepler.education.

Or, visit the Consortium Blog at https://consortium.kepler.education/.

The Architecture of Classical Christian Education

This is Episode 6 of the Consortium Podcast, an academic audio blog of Kepler Education.

In this episode, we tackle the architecture of Classical Christian Education. All education has a foundation, a function, a form, and body of materials from which to build. And like any building, the excellence of an education not only depends on the excellence of the materials but on the excellence of the craftsmanship.

The foundation must be solid or else it will collapse under pressure. Additionally, the form of the education should follow the function of the education. Unfortunately, that's not always the case, and there are consequences for that kind of a building mistake.

Join Scott Postma and Joffre Swait for this 45 minute segment as they discuss the architecture of a Classical Christian Education and learn what it takes to be a good builder of young people.

You can also learn more about Kepler Education and the consortium of teachers who share this vision for student flourishing by visiting our website at https://kepler.education.

Or, visit the Consortium Blog at https://consortium.kepler.education/.

Cosmology and Truth in Education

This is Episode 5 of the Consortium Podcast, an academic audio blog of Kepler Education.

In his fabulous work on recovering Classical Education, Norms and Nobility, David Hicks writes, “Education at every level reflects our primary assumptions about the nature of man and for this reason no education is innocent of an attitude toward man and his purposes.”

In this episode Scott and Joffre take Hicks thesis from an anthropological discussion to a cosmological discussion by arguing, “Education at every level reflects our primary assumptions about the nature of the universe and for this reason no education is innocent of an attitude toward the nature of the universe and its purposes.” 

If education is the transference of the collective knowledge of the universe from one generation to the next, modern education not only falls far from this goal, it has changed the goal posts. Classical Christian education seeks to recover the truth about the nature of the cosmos and what that means for mankind in every generation.

Learn more about Kepler Education and the consortium of teachers who share this vision for student flourishing by visiting our website at https://kepler.education.

Or, visit the Consortium Blog at https://consortium.kepler.education/.