Classical Education: Why Logic, Latin, and Literature Matter | Martin Cothran

About this Episode

What if the real goal of school isn’t chasing trends but forming minds and hearts that can handle anything? On this episode of The Brainy Moms Podcast, Dr. Amy and Sandy sit down with Martin Cothran—co-founder of Highlands Latin School and Memoria Press—to demystify classical education and show why it still outperforms quick fixes. Martin traces the movement’s roots, clarifies what the trivium really is (and isn’t), and explains how the liberal arts and great books build durable skills that translate to every field, from software engineering to public service.

We dig into the core: grammar, logic, and rhetoric as the original “language tech stack.” Latin emerges as a powerful training ground for precise thinking, richer vocabulary, and the ability to read complex texts with confidence. Martin shares how logic helps students disagree without anger, while rhetoric aligns ethos, logos, and pathos to persuade whole people. We also explore the surprising connection between Latin’s structure and advanced programming, making a strong case for fundamentals over fad-driven curricula.

Beyond academics, the conversation turns to virtue and imagination. Stories teach empathy and judgment better than lectures ever could. By steeping students in narrative history and great books, we give them living examples of courage, fidelity, and responsibility they can imitate. Instead of a crowded schedule of scattered electives, Martin argues for fewer subjects pursued deeply—language arts, math, and sustained reading—because generalists thrive in a world where tools change but first principles endure.

If you’re a parent weighing homeschooling, charter options, or a curriculum reset, you’ll find practical starting points and a renewed vision: educate for civilization, not just certification. Subscribe, share this with a friend who’s on the fence, and leave a review to tell us which great book shaped your own thinking.

About Martin

Martin is the co-founder of Highlands Latin School in Louisville, Kentucky, and co-founder of Memoria Press, the largest provider of classical Christian materials for home, private, and charter schools. He’s the editor of Classical Teacher Magazine and has been involved in the classical education movement since the late 1990s as a writer, speaker, and curriculum developer. He’s authored several high school textbooks on logic and reasoning called Traditional Logic One and Two and Material Logic. He currently serves as provost of Memoria College, which offers a Master of Arts degree in the Grade Books. And he’s the co-host of the podcast Classical Etc. Find him on IG @MemoriaCollege and @MartinCothran

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NOTE: This transcript was auto-generated by an AI assistant that thinks it’s smarter than we are. It’s not, but it has more free time than we do, so we gave it a low-stakes job. It probably spelled a few things wrong, but we’re okay with that. We’d rather spend our time interviewing cool guests!

Welcome
Dr. Amy Moore 0:00
Hi, Smart Moms and Dads. Welcome to another episode of the Brainy Moms Podcast brought to you today by Learning Rx Brain Training Centers. I’m Dr. Amy Moore here with my co-host Sandy Zamalis. And before we welcome our guest, I just want to remind you guys that if you want more from us, you can sign up for our free monthly newsletter. And it’s just full of additional resources, recaps from our episodes for the month, and just a deeper dive into the topics that we cover here on the show. And now our conversation today is with Martin Cothran. Let me tell you a little bit about him in case you don’t know who he is yet. Martin is the co-founder of Highlands Latin School in Louisville, Kentucky, and co-founder of Memoria Press, the largest provider of classical Christian materials for home, private, and charter schools. He’s the editor of Classical Teacher Magazine and has been involved in the classical education movement since the late 1990s as a writer, speaker, and curriculum developer. He’s authored several high school textbooks on logic and reasoning called Traditional Logic One and Two and Material Logic. He currently serves as provost of Memori Memoria College, which offers a Master of Arts degree in the Grade Books. And he’s the co-host of the podcast Classical Etc. He’s here with us today to talk about logic, critical thinking, and some other fun ideas related to classical education. Welcome, Martin.

Martin Cothran 1:31
Good to be here.

Sandy Zamalis 1:33
We’re so glad you’re here. Let’s kick us off with just a quick kind of overview of how you got into classical education and maybe even share what classical education is for new homeschool families or for people even thinking about homeschooling who’ve never heard of classical education.

The Cycle Of Progressive Reforms
Founding Memoria Press And A Classical School

Martin Cothran 1:52
Yes. Well, um I got involved in education uh when I was a uh public policy analyst, and our state passed what was at that time the biggest education reform that had ever been attempted by a state. And um we started looking at it, and at that time I didn’t really know a lot about the history of education, but it didn’t take too long to discover that that this it was a really extreme form of progressivism. And uh so we were, and this we discovered later happens every 25 years, almost you can almost clock it, um, where we come in with these very permissivist kinds of uh programs, and we have to have, you know, put uh kids of different ages and ability levels in the same room and the one in in these um uh in part is was part of the program, a back away from basic skills, uh, you know, a lot a lot of those things that we remember from uh the 20s, uh the late 40s, happened again in the late 60s, then in in the late 80s, and then somewhat with common core. Um so we began to fight that. And uh and I was a lobbyist at the time. We actually won the fight, interestingly enough, but but the education establishment always comes back to this place. Um and so you can fight it, but it’s a little bit like the blob in the old movie, you know, you you all the energy you use against it, it takes within itself and makes itself more powerful. And so so I met Cheryl Lowe when I was uh doing that, and she really understood education really well. And so she said, Oh, you need to read this, you need to read this, you need to read this. And this was, by the way, back in the um uh um mid-80s. And uh so um so I started studying, you know, my bop backgrounds in philosophy um and economics is my academic background. And so we uh and and she was talking about classical education, which I had never heard of before. Turns out it was what we used to do in schools, basically. Um it’s what we used to call education. And um and so we decided we wanted to found a publishing company and a school because there were no there was no material out for classical schools at that point in time. And so we we came out with three programs. Uh she had a Latin program she had already that was already selling sort of word of mouth in the thousands, and uh, and so we published her book. She wanted a logic program and a rhetoric program to just establish the basic language skills that are involved in classical education. And um, and so we we put together a catalog, uh, sent it out, and it was immediately successful. And there was at that time, you know, it was really just starting, but there was a growing number of classical schools out there. And uh so uh we ended up founding the school, Highlands Latin School, here in Louisville, Kentucky. Um uh the publishing company has just continued to grow. Um and um I don’t know what else to say there. Uh so here we are, and uh and so I I think it and and as we have grown, the movement has grown. Um I think that this is the hottest thing on the education charts right now. And uh every private school I see opening up is a classical school. So I think it’s uh it’s gonna continue to grow, and so what I have done over the over the last several decades is just articulate and re-articulate what classical education is, because it’s uh it is, like you say, uh uh Amy, uh it’s a foreign term to people. And so we do need to define it. So I’ve been doing that in our magazine, The Classical Teacher, uh, where we have uh uh over 100,000 readers for that magazine. It’s quarterly. And uh just doing that, just articulating and rearticulating what it is in one form or another.

Dr. Amy Moore 6:20
So talk to us a little bit about um the stages of classical education and how it differs from elementary to middle to high school.

Beyond Sayers: Trivium Vs Taxonomy

Martin Cothran 6:31
Aaron Powell Okay. I think there’s a little bit of a misperception, okay, because the movement got started because of an essay by Dorothy Sayers, where she talked about these three stages of learning, which she used the labels uh grammar, logic, and rhetoric. And um she I I don’t think she was actually articulating what classical education was. In fact, she never says it in there. Um but it was uh it was a um a taxonomy of learning. Um and it it it makes perfect sense uh that she would basically what she’s saying is focus on the basic um uh particularly language things in the in the in the grammar stage, which is the lower uh level of schooling, primary school, we probably call it. Um and when you get to elementary, late elementary school anyway, uh you you you now are are are expressing much more of what you are as a human being, which is a reasoning animal. Um and so you you study logic, and then later on she talked about rhetoric, which she she she sort of characterized as a the poetic stage, a creative kind of stage. Now she wasn’t, she knew the she knew the literal meaning of those words in the old program, but she was using that as sort of a metaphor for this taxonomy that she had. And so that’s what actually started the movement, but I think the movement has kind of grown to realize that although those that taxonomy is a is a good taxonomy, it actually, I think, reflects a reality, that the old classical education was something different from that, because taxonomies only come about after psychology in the late 19th century. You know, we start getting, you know, where we’re because we’re focused on now and how children learn. That’s the that’s the almost sole focus of modern pedagogy is how a child learns, many times unfortunately, at the expense of content knowledge and other things. Uh if you went back to the old classical education, there were no taxonomies because people weren’t thinking that way. They weren’t thinking about how children learned. Um, they were thinking about what they needed to know, and their pedagogy was centered on the nature of the subject. The nature of the subject dictated the um, you know, how something was taught. And then, of course, you had to deal with all those regular things about, you know, how the age of the child obviously matters and how you teach them and all that. Um so really hers was not a a really a classical idea. It was a modern idea, but she used the uh the classical trivium as a metaphor for her idea, which again I think is is fine. Uh Sayers’ taxonomy is is, I think, a valid one. Um but even she, if you ask if you asked Dorothy Sayers what what classical education was, she would say what we would say because that’s the way she was educated. She was educated in the old classical system in England.

Dr. Amy Moore 9:36
Interesting. So do you think that that article kind of took off and has adulterated the understanding of it? Kind of like how we have American Montessori that isn’t actually the same spirit of the original Montessori. It kind of has morphed into a version of it. So let me just preface this, you know, by saying that, you know, I was trained in the core knowledge, what your first grader needs to know, what your second grader needs to know, right? And so this language is not as familiar to me as it is to Sandy, who was you know, in immersed in classical education. So I’m actually gonna let her kind of transition that this part of the conversation.

Sandy Zamalis 10:31
I think, you know, to your point, Martin, I it’s interesting, um I think for our listeners for you to really kind of get maybe down into the the true definition of what a classical education is, because it has sort of morphed um over the years uh between, you know, Susan Weis Bauer’s well-trained mind and um classical conversations, and there’s but lots of iterations of what a classical education is.

Martin Cothran 10:59
And I know all those people, they’re all friends.

Sandy Zamalis 11:02
Yes, and it’s all great stuff. Yeah, it’s all great stuff, but you guys definitely do come because I love all the curriculums. Um I we did some classical uh homeschooling when my kids were older, not when they were younger, but when they were older. And um I think what’s really intimidating about a classical model is how much the adult that is the teacher or the instructor doesn’t know or understand about the classical model and the classical uh you know trajectory of what you’re aiming for. So let’s go there. Let’s get into a deep definition. What is classical classical education from your perspective? What should a parent be thinking about or focusing on to get that true classical experience?

Purpose: Human Formation And Civilization

Martin Cothran 11:53
Yes, well, uh I think if you if you actually go back and you want to define what the old classical education actually was, which I think is still the valid definition, um obviously there are things about the modern world that will, you know, qualify it in some way. But um let me give you kind of two definitions, one a very practical definition, and then one a more philosophical definition. Okay. The practical definition is it’s the liberal arts and the great books. Uh the liberal arts were a set of intellectual skills. That’s that’s the we talk a lot about skills now. That was the old way of looking at skills. It was the liberal arts. And there were three linguistic arts, uh, grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and there were four mathematical arts, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Um so there were your language and math skills, and then there was the great books, the great ideas, the best that’s been thought and said. Uh so that’s a real practical definition. Uh on a more philosophical level, what it is is um teaching teaching uh young people how to be human beings, okay? And there was an ideal of what a human what human nature was, and uh the fact that we have an intellect, uh, a will, and an imagination, and taking those things into account in terms of what we taught them. But the the overarching, you know, the Aristotle has these four causes, which is basically a definitional scheme. And the most important one was final cause. What is the purpose of a thing? So what’s the purpose of classical education? Purpose of classical education is, again, to develop human beings and to pass on our civilization, right? We’ve acquired, you know, through the history of Western civilization, we’ve acquired all of these things, all this knowledge. Um, and we need to we don’t we don’t need to start anew every time we start with a this is stuff that’s been handed down to us. Other people have discovered it, have refined it, have have um have refined how to teach it. And so the purpose of classical education is to pass that on to another generation. So there’s that individual goal, the development of a human being, of a human soul, and then the the cultural goal, um, which is to pass on a civilization.

Sandy Zamalis 14:23
I love that, especially from the communication side of that equation. I feel like um so much of our educational options and choices, um, other than a classical model, honestly, uh skip out on the truly uh linguistic side, like you kind of shared at the a little bit ago, of how to communicate well and effectively and to truly understand language. Like I feel those pieces sort of slipping away when I look at modern curriculum today.

Language Arts As The Centerpiece

Martin Cothran 14:56
Right. It’s very we’re very focused on um on science and mathematics. And I say that as someone whose sons are you know principal software developers for major companies, but they never took a computer course. They were classically educated. They knew how to think. And once you know how to do that, you can do anything. And you never know what you’re gonna have to do, you know, to get a job later on. So uh that’s that’s why we always, you know, because classical education is a general education too. It’s not specialized. Um and so I do think uh language is very important. Um that that I do think that that classical education has this emphasis on language arts that you don’t find in a lot of other places. And it is a very organized approach to language study. You’re studying grammar. This is the structure not only of what we write and read, but of how we think. That is the a fundamental aspect of human thinking. Um and logic is, you know, reasoning. Uh we are reasoning animals, and um we have disagreements, and we have to arbitrate those. And if you want to do it without getting mad at somebody, then become then learn logic and become better at doing it, because a lot of people get mad because they’re insecure because they can’t argue well. Um and that’s important these days, it seems like, right, with all the stuff going on. Um, and then rhetoric, the art of persuasion. And Aristotle writes about this. Um, he he talks about ethos, logos, and pathos, which are, you know, Aristotle knew what the human soul was. And uh that is reflective of that ethos, logos, pathos breakdown is very reflective of that. If you want to persuade somebody, you have to appeal to all parts of their soul, their intellect, their will, and their imagination. You have to that that allows you to reach every part of the human being who you are arguing with to persuade him of your position.

Teaching Logic, Rhetoric, And Virtue

Dr. Amy Moore 17:08
So talk a little bit about how we teach that. How like how do we develop that in kids?

Why Latin Is Foundational

Martin Cothran 17:15
Well, this is let me start with something, and and and a lot of people don’t understand this, but but I can’t stress the importance of it enough. And that is Latin, okay? Because if you want to learn grammar, it’s very hard to do in English particularly, because English is so uh um uh free and easy about the grammar. Um but so you need another language, number one, you need another language to study grammar in, whatever that is, right? Um but then you need a um a structured language, uh one that does have all the grammatical inflections in it. Our words uh do not change, whether they’re the subject or the direct object or the end, it’s the same spellings, the same everything, which is why we do sentence diagrams. Uh I don’t know how many sentence diagrams I had, but because they’re trying to get you to understand the grammatical inflections, and it’s hard to do in English because they’re all spelled the same. In Latin, if it’s the subject, it’s got a nominative ending on the end. If it’s a direct object, it’s got a direct object. It’s got the accusative ending on the end. The word tells you what its role in the sentence is, which is why word order doesn’t matter all that much in Latin. And this is completely alien to us. But what it does is it forces us to learn noun cases which we simply do not see in English, and it’s very hard to learn. And um and so I think I think that um you need a foreign language, you need one that’s that’s um that’s grammatically inflected, and one that is regular where there’s not all these uh changes, you know, that are that don’t have to do with the grammar, uh all these irregularities. Latin is the language. And in addition to that, it’s got the the vocabulary for about half of our language. You see, you if you don’t know Latin, you’ll see a I it happens to me every day. I’ll see a word that I didn’t realize had a Latin root and I go, oh, oh yeah, I know that Latin. And it and it gives me an insight into the meaning of that word because I know the Latin word. So there’s just a lot of advantages to it, but but that is how we advocate teaching that fundamental uh discipline of grammar, is with a foreign language. Start with Latin. We later on at our school go on to New Testament Greek, um, but but Greek is a harder language, and it does have some more irregularities than Latin does. So uh and Latin was always used that way. It’s it’s part of our heritage of learning Latin. You go back a hundred years and people knew if you were an educated person, a really educated person, if you knew Latin.

Sandy Zamalis 20:04
I’m gonna be devil’s advocate just because there may be some listeners here who are thinking, you know, why do I care about dead languages? Because I we hear that argument all the time. Um how could you kind of fundamentally help a parent understand why what you’re saying is beneficial for the growth of uh their child and their trajectory and understanding language?

Martin Cothran 20:30
Well, um, I mean, some of the things I just said, but um number one, um, one of the things grammar does is it imposes an order on our thought. And that’s one of the sort of one of the indirect results of it, um is that it’s it’s a hard study, but there’s rules, and the rules almost always apply. You can count on them. And to have a subject like that, there’s very few subjects like that, where you can all you can uh it’s it’s got these rules, you can’t math does that. But it would if we said, well, w why do you need to study grammar with with with Latin? Well, uh for the same reason you need to do arithmetic and you need to do all those mathematical things, which, you know, I mean I don’t use a lot of now, but I did take a got up to calculus anyway. And um and those are essential for the sciences. Um in the same way, I think a knowledge of language is really essential, really more so than math is, because we’re not all scientists and we’re not all mathematicians, we’re not all that’s but we all use language and we use it every day. And so if you don’t have if you don’t have Latin to to to do this for you, to to uh arrange your brain in accordance with the grammar of language, there is a central grammar. And it’s best expressed in Latin, then I don’t know what else you do. I mean, um, language is the most important thing, more more important than math, I would say. Um because we all use it no matter what. So what’s what’s what’s the subject you’re going to use to study that? I don’t I just don’t know a better one than Latin.

Sandy Zamalis 22:19
And it’s such a great connector, I think, um, over history too. Um that’s the piece I think that sometimes parents miss. I think Neil Postman wrote a book and the name I can’t think of at the moment, but one of those pieces was, you know, when you lose grammar, when you listen lose that ability to understand what’s being said, you lose historical documents because you don’t understand more complex sentence structure to be able to really get to the meat of what is this person trying to say. Um, especially in older time when there was definitely more, you know, verbose language and you’re really having to pull things apart. And there was more classical education then. So there’s, you know, bigger vocabulary, longer sentence structures, really trying to figure out, you know, what is the topic of this sentence? What is this sentence about? Just read the preamble to, you know, like the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, and you’re, you know, have to sit there for a minute and try to make sure you understand all the pieces of that statement.

Answering “Why Study A Dead Language”

Martin Cothran 23:21
Right. And if you if you know Latin, one of the things you do, if you see a word you don’t know, you immediately ask, is is this Latin roots? And you you can you can read it. And uh frequently, I’ll see a word I have not seen before, but I know what it means because I know Latin.

Sandy Zamalis 23:38
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Language, History, And Reading Complex Texts

Dr. Amy Moore 25:32
So I want to go back to something that you said a second ago about your sons and having a liberal arts education, but working in a tech field. And that that’s the beauty of having a classical education is that you can apply that uh no matter what field. And so I can remember um several years ago, my nephew was considering um, you know, like a $60,000 a year liberal arts degree. And I was really struggling to wrap my brain around the value of that. Um so talk a little bit about that applicability to all things. Um, like why critical thinking and logic and this um philosophy of education is applicable to all subjects later.

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Liberal Arts And Careers In Tech

Martin Cothran 26:26
Right. Well, and I’ll just say to start out with there that uh if you’re if you’re talking about a $60,000 liberal arts program, number one, $60,000 is probably too much for any program. And number two, uh, what does liberal arts mean there at that particular school? Because that’s a very um equivocal term. Right. Um yeah, so um you know, I I asked my oldest son. I mean, he’s like he’s the principal software person for a top 40 company and um a telecommunications company. Uh and and he has a he has a background in philosophy mostly. That’s his that’s his interest, that’s his hobby, actually. And he is he’s a published academic writer in in in that world. So he’s just real smart. So maybe he could do maybe he could have just done anything because of it of who he is, I don’t know. But but I asked one time, I said, so did when you were uh studying programming, because he just learned on his own, and when you were studying programming, um did you like, did your college classes in modern logic help you? Because if you we focus on traditional logic at the school, but modern logic is much more mathematical and and it’s a more recent historical invention. And I and but it’s it’s uh it always looked to me like computer programming, you know, this is symbolic logic, right, just like programming is. And he said, well, you know, it that helped me all right, but what helped me even more was studying Latin. Because he said, what people don’t realize is it’s it’s programming is not just math. It is a language and it has a grammar, right? Um and so really just understanding grammar helped me to understand advanced programming. Uh he’s a he’s like an expert on closure. He writes journal articles on it and all that stuff, which is apparently a very advanced language. And there’s much more grammar in there. So it’s not, it’s not just a mathematical equation like the basic programming that they teach you in school is. So I think one of the important things, and I think what he would say, is that the the even the programming world is changing all the time. And this is most professions are this way. If you try to learn what is going on today and you focus just on that, then when you get there, you will be obsolete. Okay. Whereas if you have this fundamental intellectual understanding of things that come about from the study of things like grammar, um, you’re going to be able to understand any instantiation of grammar, uh, whatever it is, whatever computer language it is, you’re going to be able to learn that fairly quickly because you understand the basic fundamentals of that. And I think that’s really something that’s wrong with our schools, is that we have I remember when I was in uh University of California and I took some computer classes, and it was Pascal and Fortran. Well, those languages were obsolete by the time I graduated, right? And this the university programs are famous for this. They’re behind the times. They’re not doing that actual work. Um, they’d been out of it for a while. And and and you know, Mark Zuckerberg said that, you know, Mark Zuckerberg, who knew how to read and write Latin and Greek and could read Hebrew before he went to college. People don’t realize that a lot of those guys are classically educated. And in addition to that, a lot of them send their kids to low-tech or classical schools because they don’t want them, you know, um doing uh uh screens and all that stuff all the time. It’s good interesting irony. But um but I think that Mark Zuckerberg said, look, the computer industry is changing uh every five minutes. It’s it’s it’s it’s constantly changed. So you have to have a base that you can apply to a whole bunch of different kinds of things. And in fact, there was a great book that came out uh several, probably about five years ago now, um, called Range, How Generalists Thrive in a Specialized World. Um, David Epstein wrote it, and he talks in there about this and uh about this fact that uh uh a broad education is going to better outfit you for the workforce, you know, and that the STEM people don’t seem to realize this, that that uh that this broad education actually is a better education than a specialized education is, uh, because you’ve got these fundamental skills that you can apply to anything as it changes and changes and changes.

Sandy Zamalis 31:19
So in thinking, because I’m going back to what you said at the very beginning when you talked about like every 25 years, uh, you know, that progressive kind of agenda comes in, and um and and there’s always this underbelly of people wanting to go back to that classical education. Let’s let’s talk a little bit more about that, I think, misalignment with, for example, like Common Core or some of the educational pieces that come in and really try to dictate, you know, what does our country want to be successful in? What jobs do we see that we want to provide, you know, a solid workforce for? Um how as homeschooling families, you know, because I there’s a fear that happens from a homeschooling mom’s perspective, like you get into high school and all of a sudden you start panicking that you haven’t covered everything, that you’ve missed something. Um, we actually, like I said, got into class school education at that point because I felt like I was missing something and I wanted to make sure that we were trying to hit some of those deeper things and and prepare the kids for a future that was coming. But it’s really hard to battle that, I think, societal or cultural push to figure out, like Amy was saying, like, yeah, what are you gonna go to college for? You know, what are you gonna be when you grow up? Do you have your lane picked out, you know? Um, and you’re thinking that way. And then, you know, then we hear about like what you’re saying, like, okay, yeah, but we want to make them great thinkers. And trying to like balance those two pieces of the equation is really hard from a homeschooling perspective. So, what kind of guidance do you give parents or, you know, share with people of how to juggle that out? Because we can trust, like you said, that you know, things will work out. We’re creating great thinkers and they’re gonna have, you know, a great trajectory. But we also, you know, have that fear. We don’t want, especially homeschooling parents, we don’t want to mess this up, right? We don’t want to like have our kids be frustrated with us that we didn’t prepare them for the future.

Martin Cothran 33:28
So yes, homeschooling mother insecurity is a recurring theme. Um because we were homeschoolers. And my wife, my wife was the same way. She’s so inside, am I doing all the things I need to do to prepare my student for the workforce, for, you know, for life in general. And um, and I I think that, you know, I think a lot of people, if you had somebody from from one of the local public schools come to our school and they looked at what we were doing, they would say, well, why aren’t you doing technology? Why aren’t you doing this? Why aren’t you doing that? And the reason we’re not doing those things is because we’re doing the things that um that will allow them to do any of those things. And so I I just think I’ll return to that again, to that theme of of gen of general education. Um because you don’t know what the modern workforce is going to look like. Trevor Burrus, Jr. Yeah, I think so. I think what you were asking, Sandy, was you you mentioned the that 25-year cycle.

Generalists Thrive In A Changing World

Sandy Zamalis 34:35
Yes. Because there’s a huge cultural push, right, to think about preparing for jobs for the future. And then there’s also, you know, what you’re saying, this really deep I mean, I do think it’s like our our for those of us that that are drawn to like the classical model, we’re there’s definitely an understanding that we’re missing some great understanding of history, of language, by missing out on the classical piece. So how do we help a parent balance that be that kind of dichotomy between sticking with sort of a classical model and why that’s so important, and then also trying to think about how to prepare or battle the culture that says we should be pairing be preparing our children for whatever jobs are available out there.

Homeschool Fears And Cultural Pressure

Martin Cothran 35:31
Right. And I I think that, you know, I’ve I’ve already talked about Latin and and how it’s sort of a skeleton key when it comes to the language side of things. I mean, one of the things that is the problem in our schools is the proliferation of subjects. And that’s why we don’t have that many subjects. You know, we have language arts and we have math, and then we read good books at the very young level and great books later on. Um I said before, you know, we we’re human beings, we have an intellect, we have a will, and we have an imagination. And one of the again, one of the things that you’ll find at our school that you don’t find at a lot of other schools is reading of books. This is hugely important. And those aren’t things you can, you know, quantify in the way that you can quantify math and and science and all that. Um but you know, we we are trying to educate our kids uh to be intelligent. Um and we are trying to intelligent uh uh uh uh we’re trying to educate our kids in order to be good. And and how do you do that? I mean, one of the things we haven’t talked about is moral instruction. You do that by reading stories. Um the the best book on this subject is Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right and Wrong by William Kilpatrick. And he makes this point that these modern values clarification programs and this sort of thing, they try to give you these moral dilemmas and you’re supposed to figure them out with no rules. Um and uh and in what you find in the old way of doing that was uh you read books where there was good versus evil, and the good character was very evident to you. You didn’t have to be told, it’s very evident to you. And so you learned how to be good not by learning some lessons in goodness. Um you learned to be good because you were exposed to good people, and they were clearly delineated for you in the literature of our civilization. And so you simply imitated them. You knew what goodness was by just p just looking at it. And he contrasts, you know, this uh uh lifeboat with five people on it, and there’s only food for four, uh, who do you throw overboard? There’s dilemmas that don’t have solutions, right? And he compares it to uh the movie A Night to Remember, which was the old black and white movie on the sinking of the Titanic, where you had a man dressed up as a woman trying to sneak on the lifeboat on one hand, and you had the captain and the crew who go down with the ship singing hymns. And what that does psychologically, I think, for the reader, is it gives you the example of what you don’t want to be. It’s unattractive to you naturally. And then you look at the other, you know, the captain and the crew, and you say, and you say to yourself implicitly, if I’m ever in that situation, that’s what I’m gonna do. And so uh that’s what literature does for you. That, you know, it it’s and it and it’s attacking problems from another part of the soul, the imagination. Uh it’s undergirding the things that you are learning intellectually. You may study ethics at some point, but the books that you read, the stories, you know, narrative that you read is is really what’s going to make a difference because what narrative does, it’s the context where there’s meaning. You you you can’t you can’t talk about morality really outside some kind of narrative context. Because you’re answering questions like, okay, so uh uh um you there’s certain things you do with one person that you don’t do with another person. There’s things where the context matters. There’s things, you know, all kinds of things that only a narrative can give you. And so uh so so literature is very important. I mean, that’s just one of the reasons why literature is very important. And there’s then there’s also just the sheer knowledge of how people interact with each other and um and history. You know, we stress a lot of narrative history, a history that is a story, um, and learning uh again that undergirds the whole moral thing, but also gives you information on the things that happened and makes you familiar with them and allows you not just to know them, but to see them, right? Um so I could I could make other points, but I’ll leave it there.

Dr. Amy Moore 40:21
Yeah, you actually, I was reading an article you wrote, and the I I wrote this quote down because I was so moved by it. You say it is a thing not best taught through admonition or explanation, it is best taught by inspiration. And you were talking about um that this that this idea of virtue and education and and learning what it means uh to do the right thing, A, it can’t really exist outside the context of Christianity, right? Like that’s where we get that’s where we get what is right. Um but the idea that you can pull people in with the stories, with characters who are role models because they were moral and they did the right thing, and that is something that children especially can attach themselves to. They can see themselves in those characters.

Martin Cothran 41:16
Yeah, sympathy and empathy. Um, those are only developed in that kind of a context. Uh a story where you can see the characters and you know the story and you know the past and you know the prospective future. And and um yeah, I think that’s really important. And that gets that gets to uh, you know, I I mentioned Aristotle, you know, uh ethos, logos, and pathos. This is the pathos end of things. You’re reaching the heart, not just the head.

Dr. Amy Moore 41:45
Love it.

Fewer Subjects, Deeper Reading

Sandy Zamalis 41:46
So much good stuff to think about on that end, just because I mean, to your point, you know, in modern education, sometimes it’s I mean, libraries are full of books, right? So it’s not just about reading, um, to your point. It’s about um picking and choosing and reading for a bigger purpose, um uh to and also to think through history um so that you can grapple with some of those historical contexts, like you said, the historical narratives, um, but also um maybe even some deeper, you know, pieces that you wouldn’t even consider. Like I think someone uh posted something recently about, and I had never thought of it this way, that Lord of the Rings was really about thinking through um all of the moral failings of uh humanity and all of the different characters. And I just thought, oh my gosh, there that is such an interesting way to think about that. And that’s really true. Like, you know, was Gollum bad at the beginning or was it because he was greedy and the greed took over, right? So like really getting into some deep conversation about why people choose to do, you know, things they shouldn’t, like, you know.

Dr. Amy Moore 43:08
Yeah, I mean, I always yeah, I always talk about, you know, when you think of the wicked witch of the West, she wasn’t born evil, right? She was born green, and you’re born green, so you’re bullied and you become a product of what has happened to you, and the same with like the Lord of the Rings. And so, I mean, obviously, like he became um turned into this. And so it is interesting to kind of look at what happens to people to make them make poor choices, bad choices, evil choices, right? And then where could we have inserted ourselves in that journey, in that story, maybe to change the trajectory of where they’ve ended up? And I think that’s a great lesson for kids to think about too, right? Like, how can how can I be important in someone’s life so that I change the trajectory of their Moral development.

Martin Cothran 44:01
Right. And they and they see examples in literature of how that’s possible. They see a character who may feel like them, and they see how they have gotten out of that. And so it’s not just telling them in rationalistic terms what to do. It’s showing them, look, uh, this person was like you are, and yet they became this. How did they do that? I sometimes want to call literature how to be a human being. I mean, that’s because that’s really what it is.

Sandy Zamalis 44:31
Is that how you would define a great book?

Literature As Moral Formation

Martin Cothran 44:35
Yeah, sort of, you know, and there’s you know, great books, they bring different things to the table for you, and you never know what they’re going to be, and you don’t read them for that reason, but they just do that. I mean, uh I I finished Jane Eyre, I guess it was about three years ago. And I was driving home, so I had a lot of time to think, you know, I was at a conference in St. Louis, I’m driving back to Louisville, and um, and I I I just thought what happens in there, you could never explain. You could only show it. That’s the only way that that she could have communicated that point is the way she did. And and I also just thought how what a civilization we must have that could produce a book like that from some woman uneducated, formerly living out in the country in England. What what kind of civilization does it take to produce something? That’s how great our civilization is. It produced Jane Eyre, you know? It produced Pride and Prejudice. It it it produced Tale of Two Cities, you know? That’s the legacy of our civilization. And we just need to to soak and steep our kids in those kinds of books so that they’ll realize that at some point later in their life, I’m sure.

Dr. Amy Moore 46:06
So for parents who are considering um adopting the classical education method for homeschooling, or they’re choosing a a charter school or a classical academy, what resources would you point them to to give them a start in as they consider this?

Martin Cothran 46:29
Well, um I think um I think that, you know, in terms of what they can do, um, you know, we uh again, we have our magazine, a lot of those and a lot of the articles from from 20 years of of our magazine are up online, and so they can just go on that search bar and search whatever topic they’re they’re trying to think of at memoriapress.com. And and that’s one that’s one way to do it. And then, you know, we have we have a number of resources they can read so that they can kind of just know what it is. I mean, uh and again, the the our our magazine is doing that all the time. Every issue is some other angle on what classical education is, and it’s free, okay? So uh so I I think that’s that’s one thing to do. Um there’s a really good book that we published called Simply Classical by Cheryl Swope. And that was written for special needs students. But when we finished the book and got it all published and everything, we realized we looked at each other and said, this is just a great book on classical education. You know, regardless of what it was intended for. Um, it’s just a great introduction to classical education. I’ll be coming out with a book. We’re we’re working on it right now. It’s a collection of my essays over 20 years on um on classical education and other topics. Uh so, but you know, our website has a lot of resources on it.

Dr. Amy Moore 47:54
Well, I’m excited to read that book. Like I said at the top of the hour, you’re such an engaging writer that I’ve enjoyed reading out your blog posts and your substack posts. And so uh that’ll be that’ll be a quick thing.

Martin Cothran 48:07
Well, again, I just explained to Sandy we just started the Substack, so more coming.

Dr. Amy Moore 48:12
Nice. Excited. All right. Is there anything that you want to say to our listeners that you haven’t gotten to say today?

Martin Cothran 48:19
I don’t think so. I always feel like I’ve said more than what I should have said. Uh and then then then an hour later, I’ll I’ll think of five things I should have said.

Dr. Amy Moore 48:28
So Absolutely. Well, you’ll just have to email us and say, hey, I want to come back and say five more things. How’s that? Martin, Catherine, thank you so much for being with us today. For taking time out of your schedule to share your insights and uh wisdom and experience. We really appreciate it, and I know our listeners will too.

Martin Cothran 48:47
Well, thank you for having me on.

Seeing Goodness Through Stories

Dr. Amy Moore 48:49
All right, listeners, thank you for spending this hour with us. We love it. Uh, we know that you’re busy and you could choose to spend this hour in lots of different ways. And so we hope you feel a little bit smarter after spending it with us. Hey, remember if you want more from us, sign up for our free newsletter at thebrainymoms.com. You can find us on social media at the brainy moms. You can find Sandy on TikTok at the Brain Trainer Lady. Look, that’s all we have for you today. So we’re gonna catch you next time.