← Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
When Schooling Became Utilitarian: The Quiet Shift That Changed Everything | Andrew Zwerneman
01:00:36
Education is “inherently a historical project” because it’s the generational passing down of culture.
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Quick, choose a meal deal with McValue, the $5 McChicken meal deal, the $6 McDouble meal deal, or the new $7 Daily Double meal deal, each with its
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own small fries, drink and four piece of McNuggets.
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There's actually no rush. I'm just excited for McDonald's for a limited time only. Prices and participation may vary not by algorithm. McDelivery education, I think, is best understood as the transmission of culture from one generation to the next. So it's inherently an historical project that is we're pulling up from the past the best of what we know and the best of what we love and we're passing it on to the next generation. I think what's happened over the last century in two major assaults is an erosion of what we used to call liberal education. And by liberal I mean an education for freedom to be free intellectually, spiritually, morally. That's the objective, that's the goal of a great education. The first major assault came with the progressivist movement which increasingly divorced education from religion and increasingly made education a matter of utility. So students weren't learning what they had inherited, they were learning for the immediate problem before them.
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Well, hello ladies and hello gentlemen and welcome to Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. I'm Jack Fowler, lucky man. Get to be the host, get to ask questions of the great Victor Davis Hansen. Not here today. You know, he's dabbling a little, taking some time off. We do four shows a week now, two with Victor but two with special guest stars which sounds like some great TV show. But we do have a special guest star today, great pinch hitter Andrew Zwerneman who is the head of the founder of the president of Khan Academy. And recently, Andrew, we had an episode where we talked about classical education and and I am very intrigued by this. I am sure many of our viewers and listeners are also because this is a. Well, my old friend Dan Mahoney talks about a parallel polis and these you are, you are creating real, viable and profoundly important options for young Americans and maybe even older Americans to get the kind of education they, they truly deserve. And folks, before I get into. I'll give Andrew's bio in a second. It's canaacademy c-a n a academy.org cana like the wedding Feast at and check it out I there are few organizations I've come across that produce so much good content punch so you know, above their weight. You don't have a skeletal crew, Andrew, but you're not, you're not flush with people, but the. The content you create, the quality of the content. It's. It's terrific. So let me. Let me make my. Give Andrews a little bio here. Okay. Again, he's the president of Cana Academy and he's one of its master teachers. And for 40 years, he's taught and consulted in secondary schools, particularly those that emphasize classic humanities. He's headed a public charter school that's Tempe Preparatory Academy in Tempe, Arizona, Trinity School at Meadowview Outs in Falls Church, Virginia. He's the author of original curricula. He's trained faculty for the Thomas Am I reading that? McLaren School in Colorado Springs and Trinity Academy in Portland, Oregon. You sound like Johnny Cash. You have been everywhere, man. Yeah. All right. He's a graduate of Notre Dame and a master's from St. John's University. Is that the classical St. John's it's not St. John's in Brooklyn?
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No, that's St. John's Queens.
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Yes. Yeah. Okay.
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The classic school, but not classical.
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Okay. And you're the author of History Forgotten and Remembered. We're going to talk about History Forgotten and also the life we have together. A Case for Humane Studies, A Vision for Renewal. So, Andrew, I am very appreciative that you're here today. I am confident Victor's somewhat of a fan of yours. I know you use some of his materials in some of the resources you provide. So I'm going to. I have five questions to ask you. It's probably going to end up being eight questions, and I'll start asking them right after these important messages.
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Since the founding of America 250 years ago, many things have changed, but some things never do. The commitment of husband and wife. The importance of passing along our values to our children. The faithfulness of God. Some wonder how we can ensure America will continue to thrive as long as we keep first things first. We've only just begun America the Beautiful.
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We are back with Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. Andrew Zwerneman, president of KENA Academy, is here to answer some important questions. We are recording on the 19th of February. This particular episode should be up on the 26th. So let's. We're going to talk about two major things here. One is teaching and slash education. And then the other is America 250, which you have a particular passion for. So we'll get to that towards the end of this interrogation. So, Andrew, I want you to give us a background as someone who's deeply immersed in teaching. What is your view of the state of teaching today in America. And if there are problems, general problems, what. What are you, what are you. What are the solutions that are realistic, that can be even just partial solutions?
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Well, first of all, thanks for having me on here. I'm just delighted and honored. I actually was on the other side of the interview process a number of years ago, interviewed Victor Davis Hansen for our podcast called Sources, and it's our most oft listened to podcast. Your question cuts right to the heart of culture in America. And education, I think, is best understood as the transmission of culture from one generation to the next. So it's inherently an historical project that is we're pulling up from the past the best of what we know and the best of what we love, and we're passing it on to the next generation. I think what's happened over the last century in two major assaults is an erosion of what we used to call liberal education. And by liberal I mean an education for freedom to be free intellectually, spiritually and morally. That's the objective, that's the goal of a great education. And we used to call what we taught liberal disciplines. And the very term discipline suggests both that there's a content we need to stick to and we need to stay in that lane. And there's also a kind of a rigor, a set of habits that we have to abide by. And it's also close to the word disciple. And you know, the two classic meanings of education means to form, mean to form a student and to lead the student up and out. Up and out where? Out into the wider world that they participate in with responsibility, with acumen, with skill, with solidarity, with sympathy for the human condition. The first major assault came with the progressivist movement, which increasingly divorced education from religion and increasingly made education a matter of utility. So students weren't learning what they had inherited, they were learning for the immediate problem before them, that is how to get a job, how to participate in, say, the public sector. That immediacy is also known as pragmatism. So those two things go hand in hand. They're pragmatists and they're progressivists. At the same time, the pragmatists also, especially if you follow, or the progressivists, especially if you follow John Dewey, centered education on the child. So it was no longer a transmission of an inherited culture. It was something like an education defined from the child up. And we can talk about what the problem with that is. But in a nutshell, children have very little capacity to know what they need to learn. Education is curated by great minds, great artists, great scientists, great discoveries, great statesmanship. All of that is the experience of adults. Culture is an adult enterprise. It's not a child's enterprise. The second major wave came with the New Left after World War II. This, by the way, is documented brilliantly by Victor Davis Hansen and his cohorts Thornton and Heath in a book called. It's a collection of essays called the Bonfire of the Humanities. And they talk about the. The assault of critical theorists on the humanities departments in our universities. This trickles down by way of teachers because the teachers go into history, English, philosophy, theology departments, and they are hammered by the New Left, which does a total critique on all things American. So the family's under attack, the free market's under attack, our Constitution's under attack, our history's under attack. And the only response, if you buy into that, the only rational response seems to be to tear the house down and start over. So it's a radical approach. I wouldn't call the progressives so radical. I would call the New Left radical. What we're seeing today in DEI, the Howard Zinn Education Project, the 1619 Project, the General woke invasion of education, is largely the brainchild of the New Left, led by people like Herbert Marcuse. But it was left, that is, American education was left open and vulnerable by the assault of progressivism laid to the roots. So that's the problem we see today. And I think the counter to that, the antidote, has to be a recovery of what we mean by liberal education. One major voice in that effort in America is what we call the classical education movement. It's really classical in its historical roots in ancient Athens, Jerusalem and Rome. It's liberal, though, in its objectives. I think the ground that we can all stand on as Americans is a recovery of what we mean by freedom. And sometimes American freedom is reduced to sort of isolated individual, sort of radical autonomy. People put their finger on the founding and then they put their finger on today, and they say, oh, you see where we are today? It's because the founders bought into a form of liberalism. And what I would say is that that's a reductive approach to the founding and to the notion of liberal. Rather, what is liberal, what is truly free, is ordered freedom. And by ordered freedom, we mean it's ordered by permanent things, eternal things. What we call the transcendentals, the great voices of the permanent things, for example, would be T.S. eliot and Russell Kirk. Kirk laid it all out beautifully. And at the founding of the classical education movement in the early 80s. One of the major formative voices in that was Russell Kirk. And a lot of us in that decade were reading Kirk. I met Kirk. He was absolutely important to the founding of the first school where I taught that My wife co founded Trinity School of Goodmont in South Bend, Indiana. That's what we should be driving toward. And I think the solution to what ails us lies in the recovery of that which is fundamentally an act of remembrance in the richest, profoundest and most normative sense of that word, that we remember what we ought to remember. And we live under that history which gives us a vision for how we ought to live.
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Wow, that's. That was more than a mouthful. That was very, very, very deep. Appreciate that. I would, I do want to focus a little on. This may be unfair, but you know, we live in a trite world. I would say would be fair to say Cana Academy teaches the teachers just for, you know, a quick bumper sticker and. And therefore a little more your take on teaching itself as it is, as the typical American might find it in the typical school. And let me make a little statement here. I think studies show that most teachers come from the lower SAT scores in a school system and that continues to repeat itself through the master's programs. So you will come out of. Out of college with a undergraduate degree in teaching education, a master's in education. But I don't know that the typical teacher coming out and I'm not knocking teachers who listening to this show. I love you. We love you. Victor was a teacher. Maron, Andrew's teacher. But you're not getting Mr. Chips out there. People who have seem to have a passion. They seem to me more tacticians, a strategist. And then with a backdrop to their profession is a very ideological and partisan unions that deeply affect the meaning of the essence of this country and maybe even the hatred of this country. Right. So anyway, your views, because I want to get to you after we're going to take a little break. I want to talk to you about how you train teachers. But am I right? Am I off in my assessment of what a teacher in America is today?
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You're dead right. And there's no correlation between outstanding schools and professional education degrees. The best schools today are actually schools that are driven by men and women who have deep, deep command of respective liberal disciplines. So it's far better for a university or a college student to major either in a general program of liberal studies or to major in something like physics instead of science education or mathematics instead of math education. In history instead of history education. I have a brother in law who teaches, he's a very prominent geologist at a state university. And he said for years the students who came out of their program, out of their university, who taught science in the state high schools were being trained in the education department and they were woefully, woefully under educated. And then the university made the very wise choice of shifting everybody over to the science departments for their science training. It does matter an awful lot. We focus at Kane Academy, we focus on training humanities teachers. All the master teachers in our team are. We have 100 plus years of experience running humane letter seminars teaching literature and composition, Latin art, music, history, and so forth. Our speciality is the training of seminar leaders. And we think the seminar method is probably the best pedagogy to train students in the study of classic works of expository and imaginative literature. Within the current trend in America, the classics are being increasingly scrubbed from curricula. When they are in curricula, they are often used as political tools. In fact, if you follow the New Left, everything is turned into a political tool and everything's turned into a text, which is to say it's a narrative about power structures and oppression and domination and that sort of thing. We look at the great text though, as authored by the greatest minds in our tradition. And they become, therefore the text, that is, become a way for young people to connect with the greatest minds. Connect with them about what? Well, in expository literature, we think they ought to read things like Plato's Dialogues, Aristotle's Ethics, Augustine's Confessions, Locke's second Treatise of Civil Government, the Federalist Papers by Publius. Why? Because these expositors lead us into the reality of politics, ethics, our relationship with God, grace, sin, how the best laws can lead to the best kind of life for people. That's largely been rejected under the pressure of Progressivism and, and the New Left. But we think that's the best way for young people to become intellectually free. So they need to learn how to read a text. For what? For knowledge. And in particular, they need to learn the arguments, the concepts and the evidence that are offered by the expositors. And only after a young student has learned how to read for those and has a mastery of the text, can that young person then start to say, okay, is this true? Now, under the left, the assumption that's not true is that the Western classics are modes of oppression. So there's a kind of political dismissal of them from the get go. And so young people are trained in liberal programs, leftist programs, to think of these things as things that need to be torn down. The only reason you read them is in order to get rid of them and to create a new kind of language by which we'd live. But in the liberal or the. Or the classical sense. The books are read to liberate the students to know and to love what they ought to know. Similarly, in imaginative literature, we train the students to read characters sympathetically. We don't want them to moralize about the text and to set the characters up on some kind of juridical platform and say, he's morally wrong, he's morally right. The authors create worlds into which we're invited, and we lead the students into those texts to see the inner architecture of the world created by us. CS Lewis in some place like Narnia or Mark Twain along the Mississippi with Huck and Jim, or Dostoyevsky in the little village where the Dostoevsky brothers. I'm sorry, the Karamazov brothers and their father and the monks and the boys of the village all live. These are worlds that are carefully crafted, and the authors invite us to occupy them, but we need to stand inside them like we would inside a work of architecture, not stand outside them and judge the characters from some index that has nothing directly to do with the text. So those kind of discussions, though, have to be well led. So teachers need to be trained how to read the text themselves, and they need to be trained how to craft really good questions that drive highly productive and lively participatory seminars. That's largely what we're devoted to.
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Well, I'm going to ask you a question about that in a sec, but, you know, this is America. We're free markets. We got bills to pay, and I'm happy to read this. We love paying our bills to our listeners and our viewers. If you've studied enough history, you start to see a pattern. Nations don't lose their way overnight. They drift through, through debt and division, until one day you realize the foundations you thought were permanent were never permanent at all. Today, America is spending at levels once reserved for wartime, and we've normalized deficits that would have stunned earlier generations. And policymakers now debate whether the only path forward is more intervention, more printing, more distortion. But here's the historical truth. Since we're talking about history, every society that pushed its currency beyond discipline eventually paid a price. The wise never waited for collapse. They prepared for the correction. And that's why so many thoughtful Americans, especially those nearing retirement or in retirement, are reallocating part of their wealth into something that has outlasted every paper experiment in human history. Physical gold not as speculation but as insulation. Our reputation matters here at Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. Which is why we're partnering with Allegiance Gold, a company distinguished by integrity, reliability and an A rating from the Better Business Bureau. For years they've guided Americans through transparent education and long standing relationships built on trust. And right now they're extending a special liberty offer to our listeners and viewers to help you get started with Real Gold, whether your funds are in a retirement account or sitting in the bank. If you believe as we do that the best time to reinforce your position is before the storm becomes obvious. Call 8447-9091-9184-4790-9191 or visit protectwithvictor.com that's 8447-9091-8447-9091 or visit protectwithvictor.Com History rewards those who take the long view, and we thank the very good people from Allegiance Gold for sponsoring Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. Before we hit a little break, Andrew Zwerneman Tell me Give me an example of how Khan Academy will help a teacher in in these seminar formats. For example, let's just assume I'm a passionate lover of literature and I want to teach literature. But you know what I despite him being so overwhelming, I never read Dante. But I have to teach Dante. Now I'm not sure if you offer a course on Dante. I'm sure you do on Othello. But give me an example of how you would help train Jack Fowler as he has to teach this course that he might not be an expert on.
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Typically we're contracted by schools or organizations of schools and we parachute into that situation and put on a multi day master course. Sometimes we conduct that online and can catch clients from around the country from different environments. But let's say that you couldn't even join us for one of those training sessions. We have the best guide in the country on how to teach Dante's Inferno, and the guide introduces the teacher to the text, to the historical context in which Dante wrote, wrote the Divine Comedy, and then canto by canto, ask the questions the teacher needs to ask himself before he leads his students into a discussion of the Inferno. And along the way there's running commentary and there are glossaries of terms. Sometimes there are images or historical anecdotes that need to be understood in order for the teacher to grasp that particular Canto, that's a terrific guide if you were. And we have about 60 guides on classic works of expository and imaginative literature, including some of the American Founding, the American Founding documents, the Declaration, the Federalist Papers and the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights. If you were to come to our course, then this is the training that you would hear. We'd give some plenary talks about what seminars are general talks about fiction, nonfiction, poetry and the other kinds of texts that you would teach within those courses. Then we would run seminars. We'd actually conduct a handful of two hour long seminars on original texts so that everybody in the room has a first hand experience of working through the text under the leadership of a master teacher. And then we have specialty talks on things like how do you actually grade discussion, how do you troubleshoot the non discussant or the kid who talks too much, real practical, down in the weeds kinds of concerns. And then we have a whole other master course on how to write. So seminars are directed toward three core or essential skills. How to read carefully, how to discuss intelligently, and how to write clearly. And we have a killer writing guide that's tied expressly to classic works of literature and it's good for about grades 5 through 12. So altogether we have the training and the resources for any humanities teacher who really wants to up his game in the teaching of classic works.
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Well, when we come back from these messages, I'm going to ask you to just give me your sketch of what a great teacher is at a classical institution. We'll do that when we come back after these messages. We are back with Victor Davis Hansen in his Own words recording on the 19th of February. Very glad to have here Andrew Zwerneman who is the president of Kana Academy. Go to canaacademy.org even if you don't care about classical education, you're just the dude out there who loves the Victor Davis Hanson Show. There is going to be, there's just. We're going to get to it at the end of the program here. The films that Andrew and his associates are making related to America 250 are just phenomenal. You don't need to be a high school student. But I want to ask you about what makes a great teacher at a classical institution from your perspective. But before that I just, I'm glad you mentioned earlier the writing guide for from fifth grade up. There's quite a difference of a teacher of a high school level versus somebody teaching at the, at the younger grades. And it's dangerous. I know a little Bit. I heard something once, your reading level at the third grade is probably the best indicator of where you're going to vector off in life. So there's a lot of passion for reading, great works, etc. But there's a lot of need at these very early years. Any thought on that as relates to classical education?
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Oh, yes. So both schools that I was the headmaster for were secondary schools. They went from 7 through 12th, and I used to interview most of the candidates myself. And this was always true that the students who ended up being our best students were students who were big readers. They had a passion for solving problems, they loved puzzles, they loved math problems, they loved to dissect and things like that. There were also students who had either mastered one or had mastered either one or more great instruments, like piano students, classical guitar students, students who played in ensembles, serious vocalists. There's something that happens neurologically, socially, aesthetically for students who study music and do a heavy lift pre secondary school, students who travel, students who read aloud to their parents and whose parents read aloud to them. Students who have a good mastery of grammar and have memorized a lot of things. You know, all the presidents, all the state capitals, you know, all those kinds of their times tables. Students who do all those things by rote are beautifully prepared to start moving up in the higher levels of grammar, logic and rhetoric to engage studies that are more mature. So, yes, there's a great need to renew education at the primary level. It's foundational, you might say. It's more important than the secondary in the sense that it's, as you put it, it sets a kid for life. Set them on a good course.
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Okay, well, back to the question I mentioned before the break. You're in a position to describe that is a great teacher. Why is that person a great teacher in a classical school? What is it about them?
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A great teacher is a great leader. And a leader knows that is a lot like a mountain guide. You know, when people climb a mountain, they could climb on their own and kind of shoot from the hip. Chances are some of them, maybe most of them, are going to get into trouble. They're going to run into something on the mountainside that prevents them from completing the climb. They also might not have the equipment, enough water, the kind of things you append to your shoes to get through ice and things like that. A great mountain guide knows that the climbers have to climb on their own. Like no one can climb on behalf of another climber, but he'll know how to get up that mountain with Intelligence and strategy. And when the climbers finally get to the summit of a mountain, well, they see the world as you can only see it from the top of a mountain. And that's a great achievement. Something similar happens in teaching. A teacher has to be a leader, number one. He has to know where the students are going. You have to have a vision for what a student looks like at the graduation, at any grade level, but especially from the secondary level. What should the student know? What should a student be able to do? What should the student love? What kind of social, intellectual, aesthetic, habits of mind do they have? Should they have. Secondly, he has to know how to lead in the moment. So asking really great questions, I think, is job number one. Oftentimes we think of a teacher as someone who introduces material. And it's true that every great teacher knows how to teach didactically. You have to be able to introduce a difficult sphere of inquiry. So give a couple of examples. Say the students don't really understand logic and you've asked them to read an expository work, so you have to introduce them to a syllogism. Teacher has to introduce that didactically. Let's say you have math students who have never factored a polynomial. Well, you have to demonstrate how to do that. Now, once you get to the next level of teaching in mathematics or language or reading a text, that then you could start to ask questions because the students have some chops, they have some vision for how to probe deeper into the text. They just need a question to trigger that deeper probe. So the teacher has to be able to teach didactically, teach Socratically, or ask really good questions. And thirdly, because the students are going to hit walls, they're going to suddenly realize, I don't know what another question to ask next. I don't know the next step to take. I can't see my way out of this. This predicament, this paradox, this puzzle that's in the text. The teacher can be a good coach. He can model on how to tackle that problem. He can. Let's say in a seminar discussion that the students are just stunned. Let's say they're reading the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and there's a point in which Huck has to decide whether or not to free Jim from slavery or to help return him to his owner. He's been raised to think you have to follow the law, and if you don't follow the law, you're going to go to hell. And we also know he's superstitious. So he has kind of a goofy religious sensibility. And then he's overwhelmed by a memory of Jim. He remembers how kind Jim was and paternal and loving Jim was. And then Huck decides, in what seems to be kind of an incoherent way, he says, all right, I'm going to go to hell. I'm going to go ahead and free Jim, and I'm going to take the consequences. Now, sometimes students are actually stunned by this. They go, wait a second. I can't make head for tail. Good Christian kids are reading this. This is terrible theology. How could this be a moral action? And unto itself, Huck's decision doesn't fit the parameters of, say, a case study in Aristotle or Kant or something like that. What you have to do is read him sympathetically. And sympathetic reading says, okay, this is not about religion. This is about love. This is about memory. This is about the experience of coming down the river, the great odyssey with his friend Jim. So a good coach will say, all right, all right, let me step back here. This is a combination of Socratic questioning and coaching said, all right, we're all stuck here. We can't seem to make our way to an understanding of why Huck did what he did. And then let's revisit all the moments of religion in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. And what we find is a body of superstition and, in a sense, theological gobbledygook. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It's cultural, it's believable, it's true to the history of the time, and it helps us understand Huck, but it doesn't really help us understand the impulse that leads him to free Jim. So you'll coach him through that. And sometimes other forms of coaching will be. The kid won't know what to say at all in response to a good question, and you'll have to take him to the text and say, okay, let's go to page such and such. Go to that paragraph, that line. Look at that term there. What do you think he means by that term? And then work his way out to the sentence, then work his way out to the paragraph, then work his way out, or back to the question that was originally asked. That's good coaching. That's what a teacher has to do. Instruct didactically, ask Socratically good questions, the probe, whatever it is, the sphere of inquiry you're looking at, and then coach the student. That's what a great teacher does.
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You make me want to go back to high school, as long as it was led by you, Andrew. We're going to come back and talk about America 250 in history because this is another passion and it's not a separate thing. It's very enmeshed with everything you are doing on the teaching, the instruction, the development side. Your passion for America 250 is, is really meshed in all that. And we'll get these two final questions when we return from these final important messages.
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It's tax season, and at LifeLock, we know you're tired of numbers, but here's a big one you need to hear. Billions. That's the amount of money and refunds the IRS has flagged for possible identity fraud. Now here's another big number, 100 million. That's how many data points LifeLock monitors every second. If your identity is stolen, we'll fix it, guaranteed. One last big number. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com podcast for the threats you can't control. Terms apply.
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We are back with Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. Andrew Zwerneman, the president of Kana Academy, is with us. And despite him being from having gone to Notre Dame, I'm, I'm letting you on the show.
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So, hey, we had this common, you know that my dad taught at Holy Cross in the early 60s.
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Oh, he did? Oh, I didn't. Oh, did you grow up in Worcester?
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Well, for five years. I was born in California and then he went back to school at Notre Dame and then we made our way to Massachusetts. His first two jobs as a professor were at Holy Cross and Assumption.
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I've spent a lot of time. Dan Mahoney, I don't know if you know Dan or of Dan. Dan was on the show a few weeks ago. He's one of the great scholars from, well, he's a classmate of mine at Holy Cross and then he taught at assumption for about 30 years. So, yeah, we, we have, we spent a lot of time in wutown over the years. Well, Andrew, let me, let me ask you about, I've written this down now since I'm just going to read it. You're a man who has a passion for American history. You are disturbed that things are forgotten. I don't know if we're forgotten or maybe remembered, but vilified. And you're, you are driven to do something about it. The semi quincentennial is here July 4, 2026. It certainly does not have the passion that we've when we celebrated the bicentennial 50 years ago. But nevertheless, it's here and it is an opportunity to. To celebrate. But also I think I'll use the word remediate to teach things big and small that that used to be taught and no longer are. So what. What are the consequences for a nation that is ignorant of its history and related. What role did history itself play in the American founding?
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A
I think there are two principal problems with the loss of history. And I think you're right too, that sometimes the past is not so much forgotten as it is recreated in a way that demonizes the past. I think that's a really good observation. I'd say people forget history out of neglect. I think a lot of students are victims of horrible teaching. Either the teaching is boring or the teaching is ideologically driven. And then there are those who assail our past on purpose out of their ideological convictions. I think there are two principal consequences for the national amnesia. David McCullough spoke eloquently in the 90s about how we're losing our story. And by losing our story we're losing our identity as a people. And I think what he meant, and it's not an uncommon thesis that we were losing our sense of what it means to be a people dedicated to freedom. There's some beautiful theses out there by some of our best historians about what America is all about. Bill McClay from Hillsdale has a great history book and he calls us a land of hope. That's a great way to interpret America. Maybe the more standard one, the one that McCullough held to, is that we're a land of freedom. We're the land of the free right and. And bravery or courage secures that freedom. Some people say America is a creedal nation and largely has to do with universal equality, equality of freedom under the law. We've expended our lives in freedom. Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg of giving the last full measure to the cause of freedom. That's how the lives of the fallen soldiers consecrated the land there. If you go to the Normandy American cemetery in France, beautiful cemetery. There's a lintel there and there's a beautiful quotation. I don't know it by heart, but it talks about the valor and the sacrifice of the men there who are laid to rest there. And the shores of Normandy, the lintel says, are a portal of freedom. Whose freedom? The French, and for that matter the Germans. Anybody who in a sense, was liberated from Nazi tyranny in Europe was freed by the Americans and others, of course, but celebrated there at the Normandy cemetery by the Americans who laid down their life for the sake of freedom. So I think we're a land of freedom, and we I wasn't alive when Normandy happened. I wasn't alive when Gettysburg happened. I wasn't alive in the American Revolution. But all these things have a big pull on me, and I think they should have a big pull on all of us. This is the experience of living under history, is that we remember that which we didn't experience directly. And the way we're held together with our forebears is by remembering what they experience. I think the first people in history to live under history were our Jewish forebears who experienced God's intervention in Egypt. And when they finally took Israel, and subsequently, when they remember their 40 years of wandering and their taking of Israel, they celebrated the Passover meal. But most of the hardly any of the Hebrews who were liberated from Egypt lived to see the day of Israel. So how is it that that's a meaningful event for them? In Deuteronomy 4, which rests on the wall of the United States Holocaust Museum hall of Remembrance, Moses reminded everybody they're just east of the Jordan River. And he reminded all of them, said, don't forget this. Don't lose it from your hearts, and don't lose it as a gift to the next generation. That comes back to your first question. What is education? What's the state of it? Education is the transmission of our culture. It's a remembrance of what. What's been given to us. So it's a terrible thing to lose our history because we lose a sense of who we are. The second great loss has to do with the loss of responsibility. And this has been spoken of most recently, most powerfully by Victor Davis Hansen in the Dying Citizen, which came out in 2021. There he says, the dying citizen, or as the the citizen who has no sense of responsibility, is the citizen who's forgotten what it takes to be free and what responsibilities you and I and everyone else have to take up in order to maintain our freedom for ourselves. And here we go again for the next generation. So the loss of history is a loss of the heart of the matter. And that is what it means to be a people who have a life together over generations. And that takes not only memory, it takes responsibility.
- [42:38]
B
Well, you're doing something about that, and I want to encourage again people to go. I mentioned before kanaacademy.org but the specific website you've created for related to the semiquincentennial is history250.org, history250.org and, folks, if you go there, you're going to find, I think right now, this must be 60 or so short films, 7, 10 minutes, maybe some longer, that are so well done and so instructive, I would think, classroom material, I would. For young, young kids, but certainly educational for anybody. It's just really. You've done some really great stuff here, and I want you to tell us about it. Like, why did you do it? Why are you getting into the. Not the film business? But you're using film as a means to invigorate us and inspire us about the greatness of our history.
- [43:50]
A
History is an art. It's more art than it is science. And the reason I say that, it's really a form of narrative. It's the story of our shared past. And film is one of America's most advanced, that we can claim it for ourselves. It's one of our most advanced art forms. Americans love film. They still love film even though they sit and watch most of the films now from the home front rather than going to the theater. But I wanted to combine, first of all, I wanted to recover the liberal discipline of history in a popular format, that is, for a broad audience, not just for an academic audience. I want to be true to what historians do when they reach back into the past observationally and sympathetically, and they recreate events and they tell that story in ways that are true to the past and meaningful to our existence now. And I also wanted to. To do it in a way that was very accessible to everyone. On a very practical matter, my board said, let's do this for free. Let's not monetize it like we do when we have our training programs where we sell our products. We want this to be a great cultural contribution to America, not only to celebrate our 250th birthday and celebrate this remarkable land. The historian Walter McDougall says that the most important event in modern history is the establishment of the American republic. And that for all intents and purposes, that really gets cooking with the Declaration of Independence. So this is a great opportunity to take measure of what kind of country you are, what we've accomplished. It's also a time maybe speaking to the grievances, you know, the culture of repudiation on the left, which looks at our American past and only sees slavery, Japanese internment, Indian removal and so forth, and sort of dismisses the American past as meaningless. Howard Zinn says at the beginning and the end of his book, People's History of the United States, that there is no such Thing as a meaningful nation. There's no such thing as a nation community that binds us all. There are only classes, genders, races, et cetera, and there are only the oppressed in oppressors. I don't think that's true. A cursory glance at history says that's not true. You can't measure something that's worth grieving about anyway unless you understand what's good. And there are all sorts of good things in the American past to look at. The American Founders and the whole revolutionary generation I call a recollective generation. The Founders read more history than they did philosophy. They were deeply, deeply attuned to the Roman Republic as their chief model for republicanism. They were also attuned to what failed in Rome, and it failed from within. That is, it was an interior loss of the customs that were Roman customs inherited from their fathers that they recognized as the heart of their culture. When they let that go, then you kind of say the spirit of Rome dissolved and the Republic itself fractured at its foundations. They knew that unless we preserve what makes the Republic true to the past and true to human nature and to the God of human nature, then the Republic won't stand. So they knew that. They also were keenly attuned to British representation and to the common law tradition, among other things. Just under half of the signers of the Declaration and just over half of the signers of the Constitution were lawyers, all of whom would have known their law from Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws, which meant that to a man, they were all trained in some measure of the natural law. They looked at history for villains and for heroes. So Cato was widely embraced as a hero. The most popular play at the time was a play called Cato. Washington read large sections of it to his troops. Ben Franklin quoted it, Nathan Hill quoted it. Things like that were just in the air. All of them were versed in Shakespeare and in English poetry. Many of the revolutionary general, and certainly most of the Founders, knew Latin and Greek. And there were popular debates about the latest translation of. Of some classic work of literature. Most of the Founders were Christian. All of them knew their Bible. The favorite book of the Bible was the book of Deuteronomy. The favorite story in the Bible was the story of the Exodus. Even Franklin and Jefferson, whom we recognize are more Enlightenment driven than they are, say, Christian driven. They loved the story of Exodus and kind of read their own story of. Of the American Founders is kind of an Exodus story. So I bring this up because oftentimes the founding is reduced to kind of a radical form of liberalism, but it's not. It's very complex. And the founders were deeply devoted to things like marriage, parenthood, faith, community. The Puritans in England had a wildly high literacy rate. They were really dedicated to one iteration of liberal education. The first college, Harvard, was founded by Puritans about a hundred years later, the original Georgetown. If you look at its curriculum, it looks a lot like the Harvard curriculum. It was a liberal curriculum anyway. All that's to say that culturally, religiously, politically, legally, in terms of philosophy, all of that was absorbed from. By the founders from the past. So they were a recollective generation. And I think the assault on American history is an assault on what I would call the customary character of the American founding. That is, they embraced customs that were intellectual, spiritual, social, economic and aesthetic that we do well to recover for ourselves as a matter of personal identity and. And as a matter of renewing our capacity to be responsible citizens.
- [50:10]
B
Andrew, that's terrific. Again, history250.org is the repository for where you've put many of these thoughts and what did you in this great cultural contribution to America. I love that term. As we head out the exit here, would you give us a. You've got something coming out. Well, this will be out next week. We are talking on the 19th. But on the actual week that this podcast comes out, are you releasing something?
- [50:43]
A
Yes. In fact, if you follow us over the next week, several things are going to roll out. We're going to have, for example, an episode on slavery. And it's a complicated issue. It's an extensive history, but we're working hard to help Americans understand the context in which American slavery can be understood. We're also. That's going to be an important episode. We're also. We're going to. There'll also be an episode on the first great battle of the Civil War, that is the assault on Fort Sumter. So we're right at that point in rolling out the chronology at the beginning of the Civil War. When people go to the website, they'll see several episodes that are sort of out of sequence, and we call them history 250 specials. There's one on Martin Luther King's I have a Dream speech. There's another on the Cuban Missile Crisis. When we get to that, we're making our way in history. And when we get to that point, we'll plop those back in sequentially. But the one I think you're referring to is our new trailer, and we're going to premiere that next week at the National Classical, or I should say the National Symposium on Classical Education, which is being held in Tempe, Arizona, and hosted by the Great Hearts Institute and the Great Hearts Academies, which is the Great Hearts Academies collectively is the biggest purveyor of classical education in America today. So the symposium is an important event that we participated in almost every year for the last decade. But I'll be presenting on how to Teach American history. My wife's going to present on how to Teach John Locke in a seminar, and I'm going to introduce the new trailer, which we're very proud of. We think it's very. Although it's only three minutes long, it gives everybody a good window into what we're doing. We're not. Look, we love America and we're very grateful for it. There's no doubt about it. We also are not uncritical of failings in the past, but we recognize that not out of a condemnatory approach, but out of a recognition of the human condition. God's unfailing in his freedom and love. We're not. And people do fail. So there is slavery, there is Indian removal, there is Japanese internment. There are all sorts of failures. However, what we really love about America, this is the thing that I think I've come to most appreciate in the process of telling America's story, one film at a time, is that over the course of our history, there have been exemplary Americans who have found in our history a way forward that is a remedy to what ails us. So Lincoln didn't dismiss the founders for not doing away with slavery. He looked to the opportunity in the effort against the Confederacy to prove the proposition that all men are created equal by defeating the Confederacy and by freeing the slave. Martin Luther King Jr. Didn't dismiss the Founding and the hundred years of history since the Civil War because of segregation and because of slavery. Rather, he says, what happened in the Declaration, what happened in the Constitution, what happened at the Founding was a promissory note that needs to be paid off. And there are countless examples. And we pepper our films with examples of how to look at the American past not in an uncritical way, but in a way that says, this is our responsibility. It's not something that we ought to burn down. It's something that we ought to preserve. And if we need to remedy, then we need to remedy. Okay, let's find solutions. But it's amazing there are solutions within our backdrop. Do you know, one of my favorite stories happened in 1995? Saint Pope John Paul II had paid a visit to America, and as he left the country, he departed from Baltimore, from the airport in Baltimore. And as he left he gave a little talk about America and he charged Americans with the following responsibility. He pointed to the Founding. He said, you have a bulwark against moral skepticism that is in the Declaration, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. And he said out of that you should cherish and love and protect every human life. So even a Polish pope could see in American history something worthwhile and meaningful to the present moment. Had the problems of cherishing and loving and protecting human life gone away? No way. Those problems are still with us. Can we dip down into our past and find a way forward? I think so. Not only in the American founding, not only in the 250 years, but also in the deep origins of the American founding. As I mentioned, how the founders thought in the Bible, in natural law, thinking in common law and representational government in England and in Roman Republicanism.
- [55:47]
B
Andrew, I could listen to you all day. I'm going to go find a tri corner hat, go do something. I don't know what it is, but I'm going to do it. You've been wonderful. I want to again recommend to our listeners and viewers kanacademy.org history250.org different but related and inspiring as all. Heck. We won't say hell here we watch our language on this show. Thank you so much for joining us today Andrew. Really appreciate it. What a great pinch hitter for Victor. Thanks folks for watching and for listening. And we'll be back soon with another episode of Victor Davis Hansen in His Own Words. Bye bye.
- [56:33]
A
Thanks Jack.
- [56:35]
B
Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal. Please like share and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website@victorhansen.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.