Adam Francisco (2:38)

Many people, because we read, we don't watch videos.

Scott Keith (2:41)

You read. Well, that was the theme.

Caleb Keith (2:43)

I don't watch any videos ever.

Scott Keith (2:45)

That was the, that was the theme of this, was reading. So it was about declining reading rates in the United States and they're pretty much falling off a cliff. The correlation that Stossel was trying to make was to changes in how we teach reading to children, so particularly the drop in phonics. And they were able to demonstrate a curriculum change across schools in the US Sort of led by the Department of Education, led by education departments in public universities across the country. He interviewed one particular example from Minnesota that was kind of wild to watch, if you believe in any sort of normal forms of educating children, where teachers are essentially encouraged to not teach the mechanics of reading, but to teach a love of reading, which I thought is interesting. How do you teach somebody to love reading if they can't read? But the.

Caleb Keith (3:33)

Sorry, that just hit me. How do you teach somebody to love reading if they can't read?

Scott Keith (3:38)

But the result is, by fourth grade, most students can't read at what would be considered an adequate level. That was the big one, was that most students in fourth grade still cannot read. And it's getting worse now. There's a couple of school districts where it's getting better, where they moved back to phonics. Mississippi was an example, where reading rates had gotten so bad in Mississippi that they adopted some aggressive policies there, including holding children back if they can't read for grades at a time, multiple years at a time, and reintroducing phonics and mechanical learning and things like that. And they've had great success. They're now sort of leading the charge in improving literacy rates in their state or something like that.

Caleb Keith (4:19)

But who would have thought leading the charge of improving literacy rates and then you would have said Mississippi.

Adam Francisco (4:30)

Caleb, do you know, I'm sorry, this might be a little bit of a distraction. Did the Stossel report trace it back to, remember, Common Core, I think it was called, under President Obama, where they were changing how you do math.

Bruce Hillman (4:40)

And it's earlier than that. He said, is it?

Scott Keith (4:43)

Yeah, it's earlier.

Bruce Hillman (4:45)

It did get political, though. He talked about that, too. So it started as an educational philosophy which. Where basically they give kids pictures and then they'll say, like, butterfly, and there'll be a picture of a butterfly, and they have to pick out the butterfly from the group of pictures. And if they actually sound out the words, they had video of teachers correcting the kids and telling them not to do that. Like, don't try to sound out the word and say it. Like, just. Just associate it with the picture. But then George W. Bush had a big thing when he was president where he was pushing phonics. And so you said there was a big statistical reaction to that, where a lot of liberal states and stuff then were like, well, now we're not going to do phonics because President Bush wants us to do phonics. So that accelerated the thing.

Caleb Keith (5:30)

Our politics in this country are so intelligent.

Bruce Hillman (5:32)

But now they, they even. Which I thought was interesting, they did have a guy who identified himself as a, you know, a white kind of liberal. And he was even saying he could.

Scott Keith (5:42)

And he was.

Bruce Hillman (5:43)

He's an educator, he works in a university. I guess he's pretty well known. And he was like, yeah, this doesn't work, what we're doing. We got to get back to phonics. And yet there's all these politics that are kind of stopping that from happening. Although some states. He did say at the end that some. I think it's like 11 states have now passed legislation that requires phonics and reading.

Scott Keith (6:04)

And even then they weren't. Adoption was not of a particular alternative method I noticed either. So if you've taught kids to read, you know that you can have, like, pretty immediate success with teaching sight words, for instance. But sight words are not the same as these. They were calling them picture stories or something like that, where the sight word is always carried by an image. And essentially the kid is just guessing what that, that fuzzy pattern of letters looks like because they know what the picture is. So it wasn't even like, hey, we're, we're dropping phonics, and instead we're going to adopt like, memorization, vocabulary, memorization or something like that. It's, it's a total sort of wash of methods. And part of it is this, this very realistic thing for any teacher. I mean, even homeschooling, you can't really do this, which is. They had the one guy talking about that. A teacher's job is essentially to figure out what each student needs to learn how to read and apply their particular needs. Well, do that with a classroom of 24 kids. You're also asking teachers not to learn how to teach curriculum, but they're supposed to basically be a type of like, sociologist or psychologist or anthropologist who studies the classroom, studies the children, and then comes up with unique solutions to each child's challenge or the classroom's challenge or something like this. And that's a hard one, though, right?

Bruce Hillman (7:26)

Because there's a battle between, like, teachers who just teach curricula that comes down from on high and it's just a cookie cutter thing, and then teaching that is geared towards, you know, actually working with the student to help them get wherever they need to go and giving teachers freedom to make those choices. And yeah, I guess if you go on either extreme, it can, it can be bad. But classroom size I think is a big problem really with any of those.

Scott Keith (7:54)

Right.

Bruce Hillman (7:54)

Like there's just like 40 kids in some classrooms and just the buy into.

Scott Keith (7:58)

This, like you saw Bruce in the video, it shows some video of like teachers stopping children from doing what's natural to them, like sounding out a word that was, I mean, pretty jarring to watch after you were told they're supposed to master individual. And also there's just a lot of data on this. I've had sort of a meeting with some of the parents and helpers at our homeschool co op, for instance, to look at some data about how learning styles is a myth people identify with. I'm a visual learner, I'm an audio learner, I'm, you know, I'm an interactive learner. Those aren't a myth in the sense that people do have learning preferences, but the outcomes are not statistically improved if you have access to your learning preferences. Like there are just more effective ways to learn material such as memorization, phonics, repetition and things like that. You know, just because somebody is bored in a lecture doesn't actually mean they perform better if you play a YouTube video for them instead. They often don't. And so stuff like this is, it's just become common language too when we talk about education. So the sort of the individualistic needs of each child or match it, you know, you'll hear this. I didn't do well in school because I was a visual learner. I was a hands on learner or I had this one teacher who I finally learned from because we did these videos or whatever. And a lot of that is just sort of self rewriting history in your own head when we kind of get to the data about it. But my question for the Thinking Fellows podcast, Now that we're 10 minutes into this introduction of this concept, is what do you do about this sort of happening in Christian education? Because I definitely see this when you say you look at like Sunday school material where the Bible, for instance, is rewritten as a comic book. I saw one like this recently instead of telling having children read or read the story of David and Goliath, it's put into a comic book for the purpose of Sunday school. Not even like just as a fun comic book. Or the education is the coloring page itself instead of some form of memorization or whatever, you know. And then people wonder why don't children know Bible verses as well as they used to? Or can't recite the ten Commandments or things like that. Or meanwhile we think we're educating in a superior way, much like this public school system thing where we're not doing it like I did. I was so bored in Sunday school, or it was hard to follow along. Thank goodness they have coloring sheets, comic books, activities, etc. What do we think about this effect in Christian education and maybe what some positive changes back towards catechesis would be like? Is it beneficial to just make education harder?

Caleb Keith (10:48)

Don't you think that even if you go back to the conversation we're just having about learning to read, I don't know when it happened. I know that it was really prevalent when Adam and I were in College in the 90s, that if you wanted to be a teacher, even if you say wanted to be a subject matter teacher, want to be a history teacher, literature teacher, whatever, you went and got an education degree and then an emphasis in history, literature, whatever. I think one of the things that happened in teaching this applies to catechesis too, maybe, is that in the past you'd go become a subject matter expert with the assumption that you could teach, right? So if you wanted to teach history, you would go become an expert in history, you want to teach American history, you become an expert in American history, you want to teach Western civilizations, you'd become an expert in that. You wanted to teach Shakespeare, you'd go do whatever Shakespearean scholars do, and you'd learn all that stuff. And then you'd go and the assumption was that you had the knowledge, you had the passion, and that that would translate into your ability to communicate your subject matter expert to a populace of students and you could take that down. And I think education programs helped in a sense. You maybe tool that down to an age group, right? Because if you're learning college level this or that, that's maybe not going to translate to teaching social studies or whatever to fourth graders. So you learn how to tool that down. But the more you do that, the more it just becomes sort of whatever new theory in communicating information is popular in the time rather than just coming over now with reading. It's hard. Learning to read is hard. I mean, it's not easy. Some kids take to it faster than others. But at the end of the day, I would say you sort of use whatever works the best without a philosophical attachment to anything. If sight memorization works great, if phonics works great, if whatever, they were doing great. But once you do learn, you can't say something like, I'm not going to teach them how to read. I'm going to teach them a love for reading. That doesn't mean anything. You can't have a love for something you don't participate in. You can't love it abstractly. And so that seems to be the philosophical problem there on the catechesis front. I mean, I think the biggest issue that we have these days is just a lack of buy in, not necessarily from the pastors. I think the pastors want it to be. I think the pastors want the catechumens to learn as much as they ever did. In a lot of ways, I think we struggle now more with buy in. I think if you were to, you were to ask more pastors, more pastors would have students do more than they think they can have them do. In other words, it would be harder, right?

Scott Keith (13:49)

It would be. There would.

Caleb Keith (13:52)

Bible verse memorization, there would be more catechism memorization, there would be more of everything, right? But that they just struggle from a lack of buy in on the home front. And it's difficult to convince people that their children should spend more than a half an hour a week on something that they're not getting a grade on that doesn't get them a scholarship in college, you know, and on and on. It's a symptom of everything. It's just church. It's just church. This is just something they want you to do at church. And that's. I mean, it's really symptomatic of a larger sort of issue and how we look at life in the faith generally as just being whatever happens for 55 minutes on Sunday and then it's kind of after that it's gone. I feel like I covered too much in that.

Scott Keith (14:45)

I don't know. I think there's a snowball effect there. I think there's obvious buy in and we talked about before that other things become more important than the catechesis. So that church is an attendance thing. One of the classic examples is sort of like weekend sports or whatever, both on the TV and both like children's sports. But I think it's also a snowball effect where you talk to people and they just don't feel confident in participating in the education of their children. They don't want to mess it up. They want the person who knows what's right to do it. And you see that too even in secular education, where the entirety of educating the child is sort of passed to the schools or to the teacher or whoever. That's where the fault is. When a lot of research, including public research, I'VE been writing about this. There was like a 1994 study issued by the Clinton administration, for instance, on the role of fathers in student learning outcomes. And there was like a previous assumption, data that said, oh, yeah, the role of the. They just said parents, you know, in children is important. Well, they found that it was like you, like the thesis of your book. It was, dads are really, really significant in how children do at school and how much they participate in reading aloud to children, how much they participate in assisting with homework, being the one that insists that it gets done and that a lot of parents, I think, don't feel equipped to teach the faith to their children in the house without the guard rails of a pastor or somebody looking over that they might say something wrong. And so I kind of wonder, how do we get over that to teach parents that they're the primary educators of their children in the faith and that the pastor is there to help and assist their role as the heads of their household, teaching the faith.

Caleb Keith (16:44)

Hey, Adam, when you were going through confirmation, how much memorization was required of you? A lot.

Adam Francisco (16:52)

I don't know. I mean, I just remember constantly memorizing the catechism Bible verses. I think, if I'm not mistaken, we had a supplemental book. I think we started with this as we're going through the Bible called. Just called Bible History, a CPH book in white. And I mean, we didn't have to memorize, like massive paragraphs, but we did have to know the flow, the narrative of Scripture, before which. Even before we learned the catechism.

Caleb Keith (17:25)

Right.

Adam Francisco (17:25)

And I just remember being. I mean, there was. You got a grade? Oh, yeah. You had to go up and stand. I think you stood in front of the pastors would come in and. And, well, like during the classes. This is all at school because I went to a Lutheran grade school, and.

Caleb Keith (17:40)

That'S my experience as well. Yeah.

Adam Francisco (17:42)

And you just. It was just constant. And I think there is. So when I was at the. At the Fort Wayne Seminary for those few years, there was a lot of talk about the necessity of the seminary students, the future pastors, to have the small catechism memorized. I mean, they would be asked on their. I think, what do they call it? Their theological interview. You know, after they are done with all their coursework for three years and their vicarage, they have to go through a. I don't know if it. How rigorous it is. I assume it's pretty rigorous that they could be asked anything from whatever they learned the last three years in the classroom and a Lot of it I heard. I never participated in these things, but was, you know, John Pless especially would emphasize that the requirement that you have the catechism memorized. And I've seen like at our own, my own church now what you were talking about a little bit earlier, Caleb, the pastors emphasized that this is like not just something your son or daughter should do for 45 minutes on Sunday morning, but this should be what happens on Sunday morning during Bible study hour for the, the seventh and eighth graders is just sort of supplemental what's primarily going on in the home. And so I think there is, like you said Scott earlier, pastors I think really do want to ratchet this up. Not just for nostalgic purposes. I think they see it and you know, they probably don't sit around and read studies and reports and some of them do. I think in fact my pastor does. But they just, they, they've witnessed over the years just they what the Stossel report and other reports is, is describing in their in parish education.

Caleb Keith (19:24)

So I think it's funny to me because I know I, I am older than I think, but I never feel like I'm an old man. So when I think of my childhood I don't ever think of it being like a long time ago.

Scott Keith (19:37)

Like in the 70s and 80s.

Caleb Keith (19:40)

Yeah. And 90s.

Adam Francisco (19:42)

That was just a couple weeks ago.

Caleb Keith (19:43)

Yeah, well not 90s, I was 18. But so I've been really bothered by the last show that we recorded on the whole like Lutheranism is failing and it needs to be more relevant and that whole. I assume that show will air before the show.

Scott Keith (20:01)

Yeah, it will air before this one.

Caleb Keith (20:03)

We'll understand the reference because it seemed to me like everything that Lutherans could do to counter that sort of non relevance they did in the past and that just over time was overtaken. Those things were overtaken by the state and my example and Adam's example. I assume your example Caleb, of confirmation sort of proves this in a sense that Lutherans used to and they still do to a large extent be really active in the education of children through the Lutheran day school system. And the Lutheran high school system, you know, was never quite as big as the day school system, but it's, it was still significant. But if you went to a Lutheran day school, what you would experience is not just confirmation or cat put in a broader category. Catechesis on Sunday morning you took from the time you were in first grade until the time you graduated in eighth grade, one of the classes every single day along with mathematics Reading history or social studies or whatever was going to be your religion class. And in that religion class you would have homework, right? That homework would normally show up in the form of Bible verse memorization or catechism memorization or some such thing. Not usually a paper or anything like that or a worksheet. It was usually whatever you were doing for the day concept you were learning for the day, in addition to a weekly Bible verse. Now I remember from first grade until eighth grade, every week you had a Bible verse memorization that you would at one point go up to the teacher's desk and what's you like Bible verse for the week. And you're like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you go, you either got it or you didn't. And you go, sit down. When you got into sixth, seventh and eighth grade, that would be supplemented by a part of the catechism memorization for the week. And then for my seventh and eighth grade, and this was whether. Now this was whether or not you were a member at this particular Lutheran church that I went to, in my case, Grace Lutheran, Lancaster, California, for sixth, seventh and eighth grade. I think you would then go out, I think on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and your religion class would be taught by the pastor. And the pastor would really take you through it, like in a way that maybe your teachers weren't trained or educated to do. In the same way he'd really take you through it, your memorization increased. It wasn't a part of the catechism every week or a like the first commandment and meaning it was okay, this week we're going to make sure you got all 10 of them. And here's a written test on all 10 of them. Commandments and meanings and what it did, whether or not you still have all of that memorized, I still have major parts of it. If probably if you gave me two hours, could pass a test on the whole thing. It just you. It was inculcated into. It wasn't even after a while, you didn't even sort of think about it. You were just. One of the best compliments our friend Jeff Mallinson ever gave me is just that I'm organically Lutheran. And I attribute that to Grace Lutheran School, Lancaster, California, to be honest with you. Just it was a daily grind of this stuff. I don't know how you get that without a similar kind of daily grind, maybe supplemented in the home if you're in public school. But this was just one of the ways that Lutherans passed down the faith to Other Lutherans through the years of saying, okay, if they're going to go out of the home for school, maybe we should make it available to them that they can go get an education where also their Lutheran life and theology is inculcated in them, as well as general reading, general literature, general mathematics, on and on and on. Again, I feel like my diatribe was too long.

Scott Keith (24:02)

There's a competition for everybody's time. And you put me onto a book that I think is excellent called Family Unfriendly, about sort of, why is society having declining family sizes and things like that. And this book talks about the unfriendly nature of our society to families, or several of the chapters deal with this competition for time, which is it's not just economic economics. It's not just costs or house sizes or things like that. It's also that parents feel a need to be perfect parents in a way they didn't in the past. And that means maximizing the time that their children take up. So, like the average parent, both male and female, the amount of time they spend actively parenting in the sense of, like, doing something with their kids is. It's almost double for dads from, like, the 70s. And it's up for mom also. It's up for mom also. Mom's really high. And then you also toss in, there's like an anxiety about, well, did they get on to the right sports teams and not just school teams, but also like travel teams or private teams, and is that going to be an outlet for college? Did they get tutoring? And so you'll ask people, why haven't you had a kid yet? Well, I can't afford tutoring and travel ball and the right preschool and all this yet. And so I'm waiting so they'll give an economic economics answer. But the economics is a competition for time. And so I do think people feel like there isn't time to supplement this in the home. They're running out of time to do this before or between dinner and school and sports and tutoring and SAT prep and you name it. And so you'd have to. People would have to feel like this was as important as getting into college.

Caleb Keith (25:49)

Yeah, I mean, you're getting into the point of my forthcoming book, Being Family, which you can pre order on Amazon currently, by the way. We'll release it on May 5th. It's just that as parents, even as Christian parents, we have really prioritized all of those things that society have told us is important with our kids. Make sure they're well Rounded, well socialized, get them into the right sports, make sure that they graduate high school, take the AP classes, do well on their ACT or sat, get into a good college, apply to many colleges so that they can have a backup school. On and on and on. And we do all these. I mean, people tell us that this is important and we should do it under the guise that it's going to make them successful and happy and all of this other stuff, right? And then you find out the data comes out that that stuff doesn't actually make them successful and happy. And we don't tell them to do, you know, the things that our faith would tell us to tell them to do. Get married, have kids, become part of a congregation, educate your children in the faith, stay in the faith yourself in which you were raised, and on and on. And turns out that even on, sort of just like the secular societal things, if they do those things, they will statistically be more happy, more satisfied, more well rounded, better contributors to society. Da da, da. All this stuff. But we bought into all the secular stuff and we make time for all that because why would we make time for the sports? Because that might get them into a good college. Why would we make them time for the tutoring? Because that might get them into. Why is it important to get them good college? Because then they might get in a good internship. Why is that important? Because that'll help them get in a good master's degree. Why is that important? Because that'll help them get a good career. Why is that important? Because then they'll have a lot of money. Why is that important? Because then they can buy a house. All these secular values, on and on and on and on, never stop. And we invest in all of them ad nauseam. And it's hard for us to imagine why this one would be important. Maybe it'd be important because if the faith becomes organically part of them, they don't actually even ever consider walking away. When a stupid biology professor at college tells them that their faith is ridiculous, maybe the first thought in their mind is, I think you're ridiculous.

Scott Keith (28:08)

I want to pick up on something very simple. You said that was, I think towards the beginning of there, that was the whole theme, which is people tend to do or feel pressure to do things that they're told to do.

Caleb Keith (28:21)

Yeah, they do what they're told.

Scott Keith (28:23)

I think the church because has been afraid or people, members of church families have been afraid to tell people what to do when it comes to the faith because if they don't like your Advice or you put too much pressure on them, they may just walk away.

Caleb Keith (28:37)

They're gonna leave here. News flash, they're walking away anyways.

Scott Keith (28:43)

Yeah, yeah. So just tell people what to do. I also think it is totally okay to associate certain things with going to church, like happiness. I mean, it's not the only reason you go to church. But why shy away from telling people that it is actually a part of personal happiness and fulfillment is.

Caleb Keith (28:59)

Well, not only is it okay to tell them, it's statistically valid to tell them. Yeah, by the way, you'll live longer, you'll be more healthy. I mean, we know all of this. I'll say it. It's going to make me gag a little bit to say it. Spiritual benefits of it. Right? We know all those. They're given to us. Right. They're laid out for us. But you can also know the secular benefits if you're doing all of this because the data tells you this is what you need to do for your kids. Well, the data tells you too, that they're going to be happier if they stay in their faith their whole life. They're going to be more successful, they're going to be more fulfilled to. If they get married and if they have kids. All these things. If you're looking for their happiness, fulfillment, success, financial about you actually just sort of have both and you can just give it to them. And it's the church is. How the church deals with this stuff is interesting. I don't blame them. I mean, we were all told that the reason people were walking away from the church is because church told them how to live their lives. We were told that. I mean, I was told that like. And that we're hypocrites. They saw that. They saw that we were sinners and that when we told them that all these things were important, morally, ethically, as well as spiritually, they saw that we didn't always live up to that standard and they walked away. We were told that, and so we just stopped telling them.

Scott Keith (30:26)

I also want to talk about this idea that there's not enough resources or we need more resources.

Caleb Keith (30:32)

Oh, give me a break.

Scott Keith (30:34)

And I actually think removing resources now as a resource producer here in 1517, this might be bad for us.

Caleb Keith (30:40)

Be careful.

Scott Keith (30:41)

I do want to say this, which is there's some excellent online resources that almost everybody knows about. You guys have probably seen them. They're called Bible project videos.

Adam Francisco (30:52)

I've seen those. Those are nice.

Scott Keith (30:53)

They're nice. They're really well produced. They walk through the stories of the entire Bible, the Old Testament. They're really handy. I have experienced in more than one venue, including a Lutheran private school, various Sunday schools, co ops and stuff like that. Any attempt to teach a Bible lesson from somebody involved at that organization completely just pressing play on Bible project video. And then I'll hear people say, well, why doesn't 1517 produce videos like that for children?

Caleb Keith (31:21)

We did podcast like that.

Adam Francisco (31:23)

Well, the reality is cost a ton of money.

Scott Keith (31:27)

I kind of wish that people actually were that your Sunday school instructor was teaching the book of Job instead of Jesus.

Caleb Keith (31:38)

It would still be better. It'd still be better to have a person in front of you that's passionate about teaching you the Bible teaching.

Scott Keith (31:44)

Instead they're the person who gives you the worksheet, gives you the instructions for whatever we're filling out today or whatever coloring or whatever activity we're doing. And the education part is left to this video. Now again, no shade on bibleproject. The videos are excellent, accurate, well taught. But we've now exported it all to people who are supposedly better than me again. Now we have encouraged even our Sunday school teachers to not talk to not teach. The teacher is now just a facilitator of finding the best source. I would hate for somebody, Adam, remember.

Caleb Keith (32:14)

Don'T be the stage on the, or the stage on stage. Be the guide on the side.

Scott Keith (32:19)

Oh wow.

Caleb Keith (32:20)

Gosh, I hated that so much. I remember the first time I heard that I was like why did I get all this school?

Adam Francisco (32:26)

Or I had, it's all dewy crap.

Scott Keith (32:28)

I had somebody tell me that like, because I've studied theology and I can write about it and teach it professionally, that I couldn't teach it to children because. Or it wouldn't be the best to teach children because I wouldn't, I would stay too high level or something like that.

Caleb Keith (32:44)

There's maybe some, maybe at the end of the day with an individual, there's maybe some truth to that. But you could learn.

Scott Keith (32:50)

I mean I also think there's most.

Caleb Keith (32:51)

You'Re obviously capable of learning. You can learn how to teach down.

Scott Keith (32:54)

I think most people, most college professors who are told or, or pastors or whoever are told that they're, they, they're not dumbing it down enough for children are being told by people who have dumbed things way too far down to children.

Caleb Keith (33:05)

Maybe it's time for those four year olds to study up.

Scott Keith (33:07)

It probably is. It's probably time to talk to your, your four year old like they're an adult and talk to them like they're an adult for their whole life.

Caleb Keith (33:13)

I totally agree with that.

Scott Keith (33:16)

And have hard expectations like realize that a Bible project video might help fill classroom time and be entertaining and give them the basic outline to the story. But that you're still going to have to teach the timeline of the Book of Judges. You're still going to have to. You're still probably going to have to teach how it points to Christ very specifically or who the characters are. You should still require memorization just because you watched it, by the way.

Caleb Keith (33:39)

And if you're a well catechized Lutheran teacher at a Sunday school, you'll probably be better at teaching how all of that points to Christ than the Bible project is.

Scott Keith (33:48)

Yeah, I mean, there's just something to having to put in that that work still. And I think we're just afraid to. And now there's so many excellent resources everywhere. Something like the thinking fellows or these 15 minute videos that we do. My hope would be that they equip people to then have these conversations in real life more than, oh yeah, I don't know much about that. You should listen to this Thinking fellows episode. There is a certain level of honesty, but if you've been listening to this for years or you've been watching videos for years, I also think there's a way to synthesize that and then have the confidence that you can talk to people about this. And if you make a mistake, it's a mistake. It's not.

Caleb Keith (34:24)

So supposedly we should be capable of talking about our particular subject matter at a high level. Hence the thinking fellows. So you get me on Melanchthon, you get Bruce on any one of the church fathers for some reason. You get Adam on Lutheran Islam.

Scott Keith (34:44)

You.

Caleb Keith (34:44)

Get you on the pantheon of stuff that you've obsessed about. You should be able to talk at a very high level. That's different than saying catechesis. Right. Catechesis is supposed to be the basics of the faith. You don't need to be an expert to be well catechized. Now it's nice when a layperson takes that further. You know, they are interested in listening to the thinking fellows and getting tooled up a little bit more into the show with 30 minutes or 40 minutes and hearing sort of going in and out of each particular verse, Greek and Hebrew, the whole nine yards. That's great, learn that. But you don't have to do that within your church to sort of teach a Sunday school class to a fifth grader and do a good job at it. Teach Bible lessons to a fourth grader. And do a good job of it. But you probably do need to be well catechized yourself to do that. That, that, that's maybe where some of this comes in. Like, pastors can't do all of this on their own, especially not if they're of, of a sort of normal sized church. Can't teach every Sunday school class.

Scott Keith (35:53)

Bruce, I know you historically children, I love children.

Caleb Keith (35:58)

I had two for breakfast, but.

Scott Keith (36:02)

He'S like literally the witch from Hansel and Grail.

Caleb Keith (36:04)

This is just.

Scott Keith (36:09)

I assume you had to teach children as a pastor.

Bruce Hillman (36:12)

Yeah, I didn't teach children. Actually. That was the one thing I told them I, I wouldn't do when I was.

Caleb Keith (36:17)

Remember when Bruce said process, I don't.

Bruce Hillman (36:18)

Like, but I did do, I did do confirmation. So the youngest, the youngest group that I taught was eighth graders. I didn't really do below that. Yeah, look, I would agree with everything we've kind of been saying, I don't really have too much to add, but other than maybe summarizing some of what I'm hearing, you know, I don't think it's down. I don't think that the problem with catechesis is down to any kind of method. In fact, a lot of churches I know have kind of been teaching confirmation for the most part the same way for a long time. One of the things I noticed as a pastor and I brought it up to my board is we would get the kids in 8th grade for confirmation and they didn't know even the most basic things. So you're trying to teach them these catechesis questions from the catechism. They didn't know what sin was. Or I would say, how are you saved? And they would say, well, we're saved by Jesus. And I would say, okay, put that in your own words. How does Jesus save you? And like, consistently none of them knew. And so I found it very challenging in that I gotta now get them through this. We call ours the red book because the cover's red. We gotta get them through the small catechism. But they don't even know the narrative. They don't know the very basics. They don't have the vocabulary down. They don't have the. It was very challenging. And I think that all the reasons we've said are what have contributed to it. Parents themselves aren't spending a lot of time with them at home. They've outsourced it. But I think the bigger factor is kind of what Scott said in one of his earlier comments about his experience growing up in the Christian School where he was sort of in an immersive environment with it. If you think back to the way that catechesis sort of worked for most of Western history, and I know that's a broad stroke, the entire culture was immersive in the Christian story. And you could hear about it even in what I'll now call the secular sphere. It wasn't a strange and unique thing. And so, like, I've done a little bit of professional study on language acquisition, and I know, like, in language acquisition, the two most important things are one, engagement. You know, you try, like Scott said, it's really hard to learn to read, right? It's really hard to learn a new language. If you are bored the entire time, you're not motivated to learn, your brain doesn't light up the same way. Not that learning has to be fun, but they. In language acquisition, one of the things they tell you is comprehensible input. So what that means is 90% of what you're hearing has to make sense to you. That's the sweet spot. And 10% can be, like, completely over your head, but you'll actually learn quickest at that sweet spot. Now, obviously, that's a hard spot to achieve, so maybe you get 70% that in 30 is above. The point being, once you start to get below 70% comprehensible input, you just turn off. You find it very difficult. You just get discouraged. You don't think you're capable of doing it. You don't engage with the material. I don't know if language acquisition studies translate to general learning, but I'm making that association here. Kids come in for Sunday school or catechesis, and I don't think they're at 70%. They don't know what we're talking about. So you almost have to start earlier, but then you can't achieve, like, not earlier. I shouldn't say that, because I think the church does start early. You have to assume less of what they know. And you'll discover that if you start asking some questions. And then the challenge is, okay, well, now I gotta go back and establish or reestablish these foundational things while still trying to get through whatever I'm supposed to get through. And it's almost impossible. So I think we should expect, no matter what we do in changing methods, the fact that we're no longer in an immersive environment means there's going to be a sort of. I'm using this word literally, a retarded sense of how quickly we can move forward. Like it's not going to go at the speed that it used to go at. How could it? Because like Scott said, you're not in it anymore. You're in it for 20 minutes on a Sunday or an hour on a Sunday. Well, that's like trying to learn a language. One hour a week. Good luck. 20 years later, you're still not going to be able to say anything other than hello and where's the bathroom? I mean, it's, it's not the way to learn.

Scott Keith (40:27)

I want to do something we don't do very often on the. Thank you, fellows. I want to give prescriptive advice because I can see where people are head nodding and going, great, guys, totally agree with you. Education's. Education's gotten a little too easy. Parents aren't bought in. Methodology's been dropped for entertainment. Kids don't know as much as coming into confirmation stuff. So pastors and parents don't have that much to work with. What do we do? I'm just gonna spitball. Everybody can tell me if I'm right or wrong. This is just, just, this is just me. HarperCollins did a research study on reading aloud to children, and it's collapsing now. HarperCollins partnered with the university to do like.

Bruce Hillman (41:03)

Wait, what's collapsing? That people are reading out loud to kids.

Scott Keith (41:06)

Reading out loud with. And two children from. From zero. They did like to zero to 14 years old. This study is. They partnered with universities. They, they published it in a journal. It's not just like HarperCollins. Obviously you can tell HarperCollins would have an interest in this because they sell all children's books. And if people don't read out loud to children, there goes a huge market for the publisher. It turns out that is wildly disappearing and is tied to literacy rates and whether or not your children learn to read. I think as much as some of these other learning method things, precisely because what Bruce said, if they have never been engaged with reading, this is boring to them. Their brain does not light up.

Bruce Hillman (41:50)

So that would be comprehensible input. Parents reading to their kids.

Scott Keith (41:54)

Yeah, it's really bad, specifically to boys. People don't read to their boys at a hugely different way.

Caleb Keith (42:02)

Boys don't sit still very well. So in order to read out loud, you actually have to get them to sit next to you on the couch or something like that.

Scott Keith (42:09)

So here's my.

Caleb Keith (42:11)

That makes sense.

Scott Keith (42:12)

Here's my little prescription. Begin reading the Bible and the catechism and various other religious materials, parts of the hymnal, whatever, out loud to your Family for a fixed amount of time on a schedule during the week, three times a week, after dinner, before dinner, after school, on the, you know, on the drive to somewhere, if both parents are going somewhere, have one read while one drives, et cetera.

Caleb Keith (42:43)

Read.

Scott Keith (42:43)

Read this material out loud because it will help with a couple of things. It will help with just education outcomes because you'll be reintroducing reading aloud to your children. It will help with this narrative and teaching and this time aspect. If you actually read the Bible story and not just abridged, not the children's Bible, but actual Scripture, open your Bible up and read it. It will also help with knowledge of the timeline, familiarity with the story. When it comes to things like the catechism, if you read it aloud, you may get asked questions. I've done this quite a bit at home where just people are sitting at the counter. It's right after lunch, I ask Esther to go get her catechism off my bookshelf and somebody just starts reading aloud. I usually started. Now Esther can read aloud parts of it. And I have gotten so many questions that help with things that you don't think of at first. The first one is that heart stopping one dad, what is adultery? It's kind of like, oh boy, you know.

Caleb Keith (43:41)

But when mommies and daddies don't love each other anymore and it's a sin.

Scott Keith (43:45)

Yeah, like that was. That's really close to what I gave. I wonder why. But just various things like that. What's the Sabbath? You just get these kind of stop questions. And it's similar to reading aloud. If kids aren't sitting still while reading aloud. I find that that's okay. My son Edmund will run around the living room, but is still listening to you while you do it. Just keep reading out loud. Read loud out loud. Don't whisper out loud. Read into the whole room project. I think that to me is one of the very tangible things that could pick up. It's. It. You know, it. It's a small thing too. It doesn't require expertise to read.

Adam Francisco (44:19)

It's.

Caleb Keith (44:20)

It's interesting to me. I. I would not credit myself for your love of reading, your brother's love of reading, or your sister's love of reading. Until you guys got older maybe. And then I started handing you books that were more interesting. But your mother, who does not like to read as an adult, that's very true, was insistent on spending gobs of time with you guys on the couch, in the car, whatever. Reading out loud to you from every book on the Massive bookshelf that we acquired and it worked. And that's not a credit to me. I would have probably turned on the TV and done some project that was entertaining me. But she did that insistently with you guys and it really worked. I mean, that is a good. If you're going to give a prescription, that is a good one at the end. If you want to supplement some of that material with the catechism and scripture, you absolutely should. I mean, when the early Lutherans started sort of the grade school program in, I'll just say Germany, they started teaching children to read by teaching them to read the Bible and the small catechism. These were the books that were used to teach children to read.

Scott Keith (45:40)

The Bible is not in your language for your quiet time with God. It's in your language for out loud reading.

Caleb Keith (45:47)

Yeah, I agree with that totally. But I also don't necessarily object to sort of like that. For some reason I forgot her name. Susan, like the children. Yeah. This children's storybook Bible, that's a great resource. I mean, for a three year old. I mean, might be hard to read like genealogies to a three year old, but a three year old could very much get the story of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses get started.

Bruce Hillman (46:15)

Give them the King James so that.

Caleb Keith (46:16)

They can be like, I totally.

Scott Keith (46:18)

When they talk to their friends, they'll.

Bruce Hillman (46:19)

Be like, verily, verily, I say unto thee.

Caleb Keith (46:22)

I'm all of a sudden a Wycliffe fan, by the way, and like 85% of the king James Bible is a Wycliffe Bible that he got burned.

Scott Keith (46:29)

I've read burned for. I've read portions of the storybook Bible out loud to the kids as well as just those sections again in scripture. And I don't really think there's anything wrong with it. In fact, it's kind of an easy transition in some ways from what they're used to having read to them in children's books. But I do think there comes a time when you should do both. Really.

Caleb Keith (46:53)

For sure? For sure.

Scott Keith (46:54)

And it's just easy to grab a Bible and start reading the New Testament. For instance, to read the Gospel of John, the first chapter of the Gospel of John to your family doesn't take very much time.

Caleb Keith (47:03)

Time.

Adam Francisco (47:05)

Are we kind of closing in on the end of time here? Because I've got something semi snarky to say to Karen.

Caleb Keith (47:11)

Do it.

Adam Francisco (47:11)

Adam, what would you describe as the telos of all this?

Bruce Hillman (47:19)

I would say to form someone into a certain kind of person.

Caleb Keith (47:23)

Okay.

Adam Francisco (47:23)

Would it be worldview, education.

Scott Keith (47:27)

Yeah. Adam, I think I hate this more than I do you.

Adam Francisco (47:33)

I just, it's just snarky.

Scott Keith (47:36)

No one, I think this is a.

Adam Francisco (47:37)

This is, I mean this is the Lutheran way of worldview formation is reading the scriptures and the catechism.

Caleb Keith (47:43)

Yeah.

Adam Francisco (47:44)

And you know, the catechism sets the parameters, if you will.

Caleb Keith (47:47)

Yeah.

Adam Francisco (47:47)

What about things just a totally different style than say like reformed the way they approach it with other is and t's that are dotted and crossed everywhere here.

Scott Keith (47:55)

I'm going to another.

Adam Francisco (47:56)

I shouldn't say.

Scott Keith (47:57)

You ready for another prescription of world 4, worldview building. Have a weekly memory verse in your household that everybody memorizes. Mom, dad and the kids memorize. Have a weekly memory verse that they can memorize. You'd be surprised what a 3 year old can learn to say out loud.

Caleb Keith (48:15)

No, I wouldn't.

Scott Keith (48:15)

It includes profanities, but also that means.

Caleb Keith (48:19)

Where would they hear profanities?

Scott Keith (48:21)

Not in my house. But that also means they can learn Bible verses. When you start hearing your toddlers sing like lines to songs off the radio or you know, like the wheels on the bus or whatever, guess what? They can memorize Bible verses. Congratulations.

Caleb Keith (48:37)

So what's the, what's the Bible verse this week that we'll be going over at dinner?

Scott Keith (48:41)

I don't know. We need to pick one. I'm giving prescriptions that I might not even be doing. I'm just saying this is for people, like reaching for tangible things. Like where do I start? I think that's have a family Bible verse every week.

Adam Francisco (48:52)

A lot of what you're describing is sort of the part and parcel of what at least one style of homeschool education does. It just extends across the curriculum. Memorizing poems and lots of read alouds. Scott, you mentioned. I was kind of smiling inside because we've done read alouds for. Oh boy, I don't know. Tim's 21, so maybe 20 years. Probably a little less than that. That and the boys, you know, it's hard to keep them sitting still. So we combine a little reading out loud with physical education where they have to get in a leaning rest, you know, like a push up position. They start getting squirrely, pump out 10, you know, and then that wears them out. Then they sit back down. We even have a 19, 19 month old foster daughter who's starting to do push ups because she's seen her 13 year old brother do push ups.

Caleb Keith (49:43)

So.

Adam Francisco (49:44)

So like Caleb, what you're suggesting is.

Caleb Keith (49:46)

I love the idea that your 19 month old foster daughter starting to hear the catechism in her ear.

Adam Francisco (49:51)

Yeah, yeah. She talks about j this all the time.

Caleb Keith (49:53)

I love that.

Adam Francisco (49:58)

So, like, what we're not proposing is anything radical, right? It's just sort of what a lot of folks have done, especially in the homeschool world. Caleb, you're on the front end of that. We're. Rachel and I are on kind of the back end of that. And Rachel did the bulk of the work.

Scott Keith (50:13)

Yeah, I had a shocking realization recently, too. Just, I mean, that, like. Like, you know, I help out with more than just my homeschool kids, and I found out that, like, a bunch of these teenagers no longer knew the Ten Commandments. They, like, knew one or two of them. They had obviously memorized them at some point.

Caleb Keith (50:30)

They're not in their world. They learn them.

Scott Keith (50:35)

They did all have learned them. Not like we did. They don't have confirmation and stuff. But I asked, did you know them? And then they said, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I said, okay, give me, you know, give me a commandment. And one of them said, love your neighbor as yourself. I said, said, okay, well, that's certainly the summary of the commandments, but, like.

Caleb Keith (50:52)

What'S the summary of the last seven?

Scott Keith (50:54)

Yeah. What's the fourth commandment? And somebody was like, don't lie. I'm like, not even in the commandments. What do we.

Caleb Keith (51:01)

Well, you could. Been fair. And they. They probably were.

Scott Keith (51:04)

Do not.

Caleb Keith (51:04)

They were probably referred to. They just remembered false witness against thy neighbor.

Scott Keith (51:08)

Nah, that's. That's not how they were memorizing. Don't bear false witness. They were just saying, don't lie is a command. And it.

Caleb Keith (51:16)

I'm giving them a little eighth commandment.

Scott Keith (51:18)

Well, I'm in. I've got IRL experience, so I'm putting.

Caleb Keith (51:22)

The best construction on everything.

Scott Keith (51:24)

But at the end of the day, part of it is just like, you know, then you talk to some parents, say, like, hey, did you know this? And you go, oh, I didn't even occur to me. And you go, yeah. You could just make them memorize it at home as part of their home. These are homeschoolers, so part of their homeschool curriculum. But this kind of stuff is accessible to people with children in public schools and private schools as well. I don't think you need to spend that much time, for instance, doing like, a memory verse a week. You can memorize a verse of the bible in about 10 minutes even.

Caleb Keith (51:48)

Sure.

Scott Keith (51:48)

You could almost, you know.

Caleb Keith (51:49)

You know, we have. And I think probably still available on the store. The. I have them just outside Actually the. No, the Rod Rosenblatt versus Every Christian should know flashcards. And I think there's not that many.

Scott Keith (52:03)

It's like you, you can buy them as a printout on shop1517.org I think you might be able to buy them printed too. But I actually, I think they're printed.

Caleb Keith (52:11)

So that you can cut them out into flashcards. Yeah, you can print them those little flashcard things like Avery label type things. Anyway, so we have that as talk about abundance of resources as resources and I think there's a hundred and something of them and they're sort of the core verses of Christianity. For memorization, you could do more than one of those a week. Pretty easy.

Scott Keith (52:35)

Yeah, and I just think there's ways to, I mean it's hard if you're just trying to come up with a comprehensive list of everything like Bruce gave the doctrine of sin as an example of, of, you know, it's something difficult to begin catechesis if the word sin isn't registering past like I did something bad. So it may be worth, you know, taking especially for Lutheran families taking stuff that you have available to you like you know, the, the first four articles of the Augsburg Confession and include those in sort of the out loud reading or in memorization even before kids get to catechesis, because that will give you like a doc, you know, like a definition of God, a definition for sin, the person of Jesus Christ, justific. Like you'll get all of those ones, those examples Bruce brought up just from the first four articles of the Augsburg Confession.

Caleb Keith (53:23)

First four articles of the Augsburg Confession are so Lutheran because it's a race to Jesus.

Bruce Hillman (53:29)

And can I just add, all of these are great. And you know, if you're not doing anything or you're just doing one or two things, adding these things would certainly help. But I do think not to be overly reductionistic, what it really does come down to, and Scott had said this again really earlier, is is it just at some point it really just comes down to time. It just comes down to how much time you're willing to do it. You might be able to get more bang for your buck out of certain exercises or methods than others. But at the end of the day, if you're not putting that much time into it, if you're not making it part of your life, then you're not going to see a huge payout from it. I mean, if my doctor says to me, hey, your health is bad, you got to go exercise and I wasn't doing any exercise so now I'm going to do 10 minutes a week. Well, that's a little bit better than doing nothing, but I'm not going to really see a significant amount of results. And Scott, you had said, man, this was maybe over a year ago in one of our podcasts when you were talking about your book being dead and some of the studies that you had found about what keeps kids in the faith, things they've studied, like why will a kid remain in the faith when he's in college versus not. And that one of the major factors was that they saw their dad taking their faith seriously. I think I got that right. Generalizing a bunch of stuff.

Caleb Keith (54:46)

Yeah, it's pretty close.

Bruce Hillman (54:47)

Yeah, that's really. I think the key point here is it's, it's like a. I don't know how you would do it as a math equation. Maybe you would do it like a fraction like time over genuine involvement or something like that. So the kids need to see that you take your faith seriously. That might be more important or might be more important than actually just a timer of how much time you're putting in. But I think it is a ratio between the two. But kids should grow up knowing that you take your faith seriously, that it's a primary thing in your life, not a tertiary thing, not a thing way out on the. Not a thing we just do on Sunday. And I think kids pick up on that. If it's authentic. You don't need to display that in a way that's always overt because if you're just doing it, then it's going to be obvious. But if you are a believer and a parent and. And you are embarrassed or shy or just don't know how to live your faith in the home, and so it sort of is hidden and it doesn't seem to permeate all the parts of your life. I think that's an uphill battle too. You're like, well, we're going to do a. Again, not criticize. It's just saying as an example, like, well, we're going to do a memory verse once a night, but the rest of the time I'm never going to talk about Jesus again. You got to have that ratio, I think, of letting it let the kids see that this actually is a truth you believe in and are living your life in accordance with, in addition to time.

Scott Keith (56:08)

And that's hard.

Caleb Keith (56:09)

Is it?

Bruce Hillman (56:09)

Right. That's maybe why.

Caleb Keith (56:12)

Oh yeah, it is hard. But it's just at the end of the day, it's just making it as much of a priority as you make other things that the world has told you are priorities. I mean, and make it a priority.

Bruce Hillman (56:22)

But also like, if you like sports, it's not like, man, I gotta make time for sports today.

Caleb Keith (56:26)

Enjoy.

Bruce Hillman (56:27)

There's a sense of like it should be. You should love ideally, right? You should love the fact that you have this faith that you can pass on to your kids. Kids that you have a man of yours to give to them. That should excite you.

Scott Keith (56:40)

If you love something else. You actually know how to do this already too. Because people will say, I don't really know how to do this. If you know how to put on the jersey and turn on the game, that's important. And talk to your favorite band strategy or your favorite band or music theory. Yeah, whatever. Yeah, you know how to do this already.

Caleb Keith (56:55)

Jiu Jitsu.

Scott Keith (56:56)

Jiu Jitsu, Adam.

Caleb Keith (56:57)

Yeah.

Adam Francisco (56:57)

Don't mess with Jiu Jitsu if you.

Scott Keith (57:00)

Love using it as a positive example. Yeah. You don't have to to.

Caleb Keith (57:04)

Okay, okay.

Scott Keith (57:06)

I will say I'm going to put some links to stuff in here too, because I want to say, even to people who aren't homeschooling, there's no law against adding new courses to your kids study. Like, they don't have to only learn what's at school. You can make them do a religion class at home if they go to a public school. And you can treat it just like school.

Caleb Keith (57:24)

You can know with your children what you think is right.

Scott Keith (57:27)

There's no rule. And by the way, they're not doing so much at school that you can't add a religious cla. A religion class, because it's not like private Christian schools are removing one subject to add religion class.

Caleb Keith (57:37)

They indeed are.

Scott Keith (57:38)

They're just squeezing it in. And so you can just squeeze it in. So I'm going to put like Adam, actually they have that mentioned something like this, but I'm going to put even a link to Concordia Publishing House's Bible history curriculum. In the link here, there's just a book and a worksheet. And by the way, if you don't know enough about Bible history, the amazing thing about kids curriculum, if you've ever taught kids in a school, is you review it before you teach it. And you know everything already. So it's there to help you.

Bruce Hillman (58:07)

An adult who is passionate about theology and wants to further your education. We have some wonderful free academy courses available for you at 1517.

Caleb Keith (58:15)

We sure do. We sure do. And the field guide to the Bible. If somebody needs to kind of start from ground zero. I don't know any of the Bible characters. I don't know any of these terms. Where do we run into them? We did a whole podcast series on the field guide to the Bible, Old and New Testament.

Scott Keith (58:29)

Well, I know them and I want to read review that's there too. So I'm going to put this this episode is going to have a list of resources again, just because I imagine most people listening to us were probably nodding to the diagnosis of the problem. But it's the offering of solutions that is kind of difficult. I want to put like a one of those rolling legal disclaimers. No guarantee that your children will stay in the faith. Are learning anything at all. There you go.

Caleb Keith (58:50)

But there's probably a better chance that they will.

Scott Keith (58:52)

Yeah. But no. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Thinking Fellows podcast. You can subscribe to the show in your favorite podcasting apps. You can also find it on YouTube and you can find our of these subjects over on 1517 on YouTube links in the show notes below. Thank you for listening. We'll catch you next time. Bye.

Caleb Keith (59:28)

Sa. Sam.