The Charter School Founder Turning Children Toward Plato, Virtue, and the Eternal | Caylan Ford

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “People have lost sight of what education is supposed to be,” said Caylan Ford. In 2022, she founded Canada’s first tuition-free classical charter school, the Calgary Classical Academy, with just a dozen faculty members.

Since then, it has grown to 1,500 students across three campuses in Calgary and Edmonton, with thousands more on the waitlist, and has changed its name to Alberta Classical Academy.

For Ford, classical education is all about, as she put it, “turning around the soul so that it’s oriented toward things that are actually eternally true and good and enduring.”

Canadian parents crave the classical education Alberta Classical Academy provides. “A lot of the parents who come to us are absolutely desperate. … The existence of this school is like an answered prayer,” Ford said.

Surprisingly, Alberta is the only province in Canada that allows charter schools. Just as in America, Alberta’s charter schools are public schools that do not charge tuition. They are statutorily barred from having a religious affiliation.

Students study Latin beginning in Grade 5, with additional language options like French in high school. Much emphasis is given to the coherent study of history.

“Our students read a lot of primary source material; they’re not judging the past through current prejudices. They’re trying to understand it on its own terms,” Ford said.

The school also has a rich world literature curriculum where students memorize a lot, for example, poetry.

“We do a lot of memorization work, partly because we want to help them furnish beautiful inner worlds. We want their minds and their souls to be places into which they can retire and find themselves refreshed and renewed,” Ford said.

Editor’s Note: A previous version of this episode headline misstated Caylan Ford’s title. She is the founder, not a principal at Alberta Classical Academy. 

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

Caylan Ford, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Caylan Ford:

Thank you for having me on.

Mr. Jekielek:

You have a unique way of approaching education. And so, in your view, what is the real problem with education as it exists today?

Ms. Ford:

I think the problem with education as it exists today begins with first principles. People have lost sight of what education is supposed to be for because they’ve lost sight of what a human being is for. So, I think if you were to survey most educators today and/or policymakers in this realm of education and ask them what the purpose of schooling is, they would probably give you an answer like, well, it’s to prepare people for the workforce. Or if they have maybe a more sort of activist bent, they might say it’s to educate children to be agents of change who will transform society in some direction or other that they consider favorable.

Our view is that human beings don’t exist merely to be future workers. That’s kind of a happy side effect if you can contribute to your society in a productive way. But the primary ends of education have to focus on the idea that a person has a soul, that there are certain things that our souls need perennially, and I think it needs to answer to those essential needs of the human soul.

Mr. Jekielek:

When I think of classical education, I think about educating people to be virtuous and to understand beauty. And so, you’re talking about something even a little deeper than that.

Ms. Ford:

There’s a definition of education from Dr. Johnson’s dictionary, the first real comprehensive English dictionary, where it’s described as something like formation in manners and habits. And then he draws a reference to Richard Hooker’s work, who talks about the idea of education as training in moral and intellectual discernment to allow someone to more readily and accurately judge between virtue and vice, justice and injustice, beauty and baseness. So, I think there’s this element of fostering those faculties of discernment that’s a big part of it.

But if we look at the root of the term to educate, it comes from the Latin educere, which means to extract, to draw out, which of course raises the question: to draw out of what? And the image that for me comes to mind is going back to the original academy, Plato’s Academy, where he talked about, he elaborated the allegory of the cave. In this allegory, you picture human beings as prisoners inside a cave. Their necks and their limbs are bound to a wall, and so they can face only one direction.

So they’re looking at a wall of the cave, and they’re sitting in front of a wall to which they’re bound. Behind that wall is a perpetually blazing fire. And then someone is passing artifacts above the wall to cast shadows. So the prisoners are basically looking at this play of shadows that’s being cast on the wall. So, you know, puppets and figurines, and they mistake these projections for reality, but they don’t realize that this is actually just a sort of faint shadow or simulacrum.

And so in Plato’s telling, then one day you imagine that one of these people is forcibly unshackled, made to stand up and turn around. And so for the first time, they actually see the fire that is creating these shadows. And this burns the eyes, right? If you’re accustomed to darkness, when you start to see something that is closer to truth, it can feel uncomfortable at first. And then they’re pulled forcibly out of the mouth of the cave and into the sun, which in this metaphor, kind of represents the agathon, the ultimate good, the source of things in creation. And this is even more painful, of course.

But through this process, the person comes to realize that they have encountered reality. It’s this, what Henri Bergson calls the opening of the soul. So you’re actually, it’s this sort of almost sublime, almost ecstatic encounter with reality as it truly is. Now, if that person were to go back down into the cave and try to enjoin their fellows to come out of the cave to unshackle themselves, in all likelihood, most people are going to disbelieve them. He’ll be laughed at. He’ll probably be persecuted. So if this person goes back down into the cave and tries to free their fellow prisoners, most likely he’ll be set upon and persecuted and torn to pieces.

But in Plato’s telling, a person still has a kind of obligation to go back down into the cave and to try to raise people up and to turn them around. So education in this sense is about turning around the soul so that it’s oriented toward things that are actually eternally true and good and enduring and to draw them out of the cave into the light of reality. So that to me is what education is really about; it evokes this image of pulling people out of the shackles of ignorance, but also turning their souls toward what is actually eternally true and good for them.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, what you described earlier makes me think about something that I’ve just been coming up against in this show regularly. And it’s just how our society has really turned towards utilitarianism in all sorts of forms. And because what you’re talking about is, again, sort of a realm that I think a lot of people just don’t simply think about today. Never mind about educating their kids.

Ms. Ford:

Yes, absolutely. This is one of the consequences of when we push questions of ultimate concern, questions that engender metaphysical questions or questions about, you know, what is life for? Why do we come here? Where do we go after death? These are kind of, to me, the ultimate questions. And if we don’t have answers to those, I don’t know, for me, everything else sort of starts to seem a little meaningless.

But we’ve relegated those questions to the margins of our consciousness and are very fixated on the material, on the things that can be kind of empirically demonstrated, sensed through the sensory organs, held and possessed. But ultimately, those things are all fleeting. And so what are we really left with when those things go away?

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, the complication that I think a number of people might respond with, right, to what you just said is that, yes, but there are all sorts of different models of how that works and how do we decide and why should one model dominate another and are they even true in the first place? How do we know that?

Ms. Ford:

That’s a great question. So I turn back to the etymology of the word philosophy. So philosophy means it’s the love of wisdom. It’s not a claim to possess wisdom, right? So it’s not perfect knowledge of everything that is true, of everything that is kind of transcendently real. It’s an orientation toward it. So it’s a loving orientation of the soul to try to seek what is true and good, recognizing the limits of human wisdom. We have pretty stark cognitive limitations, so we’ll never have perfect knowledge of these things. We have to be humble in our approach to it.

But the inability to perfectly grasp these concepts at every level of manifestation isn’t a reason to throw up your arms and say, well, we shouldn’t try then. I think it’s an undertaking that we need to cultivate the habits to allow us to do it. We need to try to temper our own souls so that we acquire that discernment, that sight. It takes diligent study, and I think it takes fortitude, and, of course, a sort of epistemic humility. But it’s not a reason to say, let’s not try in the first place.

If we accept the premise that claims about what is true, or just, or beautiful, are all merely fungible, and that these are totally subjective, right? If you have your truth, I have my truth, what’s beautiful to me is ugly to you. I don’t think it’s possible to share a society. There are, of course, a huge array of differences between people, but I think on these kinds of fundamental things, we probably do agree, even across cultures and faith traditions, on a lot of the really fundamental questions. But if we say that these things aren’t real, then we lose the collective criteria by which we can actually adjudicate moral disputes.

Typically, if two people disagree about something, we might, though we disagree, say that we both want what’s true. And then we can compare our ideas, we can debate, we can engage in dialogue, and we can try to approach the truth more closely. But if you say there’s no such thing as truth, or I disagree fundamentally about the value of truth, then there is no process by which we can adjudicate those disputes. We’re basically just left with power, with violence. And I think you get a lot of sort of civilizational fraying at that point.

So we need some kind of common moral vocabulary. We need some set of standards against which human beings can judge their own actions, against which we can judge the acts of government, whether they’re just or unjust. So without those transcendent standards, all you’re left with is power. I don’t think that’s a world that anyone wants to inhabit.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, you know, and apparently a lot of people who have kids agree with you as this, you know, you have this giant waiting list for people that want to come to your school. You know, before we dive into, you know, how this looks practically, there are a few of these types of lessons that a very young child could learn easily, even kind of with building blocks or something like this.

Ms. Ford:

Absolutely.

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes, so we’ll comment on this, please. And then let’s get more into the practical reality of what’s happening with these kids when they land and start, you know, you’re starting to shift them away from the wall or cave wall.

Ms. Ford:

So you’re totally right. And I attribute that in part to the fact that most students never study history in a coherent or sequential way. So here in Alberta, history is not part of the mandatory curriculum. You get little smatterings of it here and there. It’s never systematic. There’s no coherent narrative. It’s often kind of a theme or a sort of thematic lens through which you might view a couple of episodes in history.

But if you want to inculcate a sense of gratitude, I think it really helps if you take students through the process of how early civilizations were formed. What’s the transition from a nomadic society to a sedentary to a civilized society? What is a civilizational golden age? What are the qualities that characterize it? How do you get there? By studying this systematically as our students do, you start to understand that actually resting order from chaos is really, really hard. That peace, prosperity, and freedom are not the default conditions of human civilizations or of human societies throughout history. And so to the extent that we enjoy those, they’re very, very hard-won.

We try to teach our students too that it’s much easier to destroy something than it is to build. Building a prosperous civilization, one that’s flourishing in arts, learning, and culture, is a task of hundreds, if not thousands, of years. By taking them through this history cycle, by having them inhabit the minds of people in different periods in history, our students read a lot of primary source material; they’re not judging the past through current prejudices, they’re trying to understand it on its own terms, and by helping them understand that even our scientific developments were arrived at through an iterative process spanning many, many generations.

I think this all inculcates intellectual habits of gratitude and humility, and it inclines us to be a little bit more deferential toward what we’ve inherited. Not blindly deferential, but a little bit more inclined to say, all right, we’ve inherited something precious. We should make ourselves fit stewards to receive this tradition, hopefully improve upon it, and pass it along to the next generation.

Mr. Jekielek:

It just reminds me of something that Thomas Sowell wrote or said, which is that we’re kind of in the world where we’ve replaced what works with what sounds good.

Ms. Ford:

Yes. Again, this brings me back to the metaphysical first principles thing. Classical education, not just in the West, I think this is true too if you look at the classical pedagogical traditions from ancient China, for example, they share certain principles. One is that the created order of the universe actually is an order. It’s an orderly, harmonious thing. It’s not random and chaotic, right? There’s something intelligible behind how the universe exists, how we exist in relation to it, that that thing is good.

So in the Far East, for example, there are Taoist traditions where the Tao is like the animating force behind the universe. It’s sort of the principle that governs it, the thing that comprises everything, and it’s fundamentally a good quality. So if you start from reality exists, it’s ordered, it’s harmonious in a sense, and it’s good, and we can attune our souls to it. So the intellectual process begins with apprehension, with perception of what is, what is real, what’s true, and then we move to how we attune ourselves to that quality.

Progressive education flips this, and it basically says that either truth doesn’t exist in a kind of real way, or it does exist but is disordered. And so rather than trying to attune our souls to this harmonious quality of the universe and live in symbiosis with it, progressive education says, no, there’s something disordered about the world. And the task of the child and the future adult is to transform the world, to use knowledge, to try to fix it, to remedy it.

And so I think that’s very good; that relates to what you said, that rather than, or I mean, it’s kind of reminiscent of the classic Marx, isn’t it, his epitaph? The Marxist line that philosophy hitherto has always sought to describe the world; the real purpose is to transform it. That kind of idea. This is the idea behind progressive education. It’s not a loving, humble approach to reality. It’s kind of a spiteful, hateful view: reality’s bad, let’s transform it.

Mr. Jekielek:

But with all the best intentions, of course.

Ms. Ford:

Yes, to try to usher in a utopia, eventually.

Mr. Jekielek:

I was going to ask you about Paulo Freire’s influence because something that we’ve covered on the show quite a bit is critical pedagogy. Viewers can look back to some episodes around that.

Ms. Ford:

I’m happy to talk about Paulo Freire’s pernicious influence.

Mr. Jekielek:

But this is one of the most influential people across the entire Western educational system, yes. And just very briefly, if you could kind of expand a little bit on what you just said and how that figures in and how that’s in contrast with this approach.

Ms. Ford:

Absolutely. Paulo Freire was a Brazilian Marxist scholar of education. And his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, is apparently the third most frequently cited work of social science in history, which is incredible, particularly given that almost no one has ever heard of it. So that tells you how influential it is in education faculties; this is kind of the only place where it’s studied, and it’s studied so often as to be the third most frequently cited work of social science. It’s almost impossible to get an education degree without being steeped, knowingly or unknowingly, in his ideas.

The most superficial idea that he is associated with is that he developed, I think, this false dichotomy where he says that traditional educators are engaged in a banking model of education, where the teacher is in charge and they make deposits of knowledge into the presumably empty brains of the students, and that this dynamic primes students to accept oppression.

Now, I don’t think that this is actually a description of traditional education. I’ve never met an educator, even the most old-school ones, who actually project such total ignorance onto the minds of their pupils. There’s always some kind of reciprocal relationship there. There’s always some presumption that you’re building on some scaffolding that they already have some insight, and you’re helping them develop that.

But what he’s actually saying is, so one of the things he says basically is that teachers shouldn’t be relating to their students in this hierarchical way. They should be teacher-students and student-teachers, and you should blur those lines. This manifests in modern pedagogical instruction as education faculties will tell teachers. In some cases, you should never be at the front of the classroom, you should never be lecturing; your job is just to help co-construct meaning, to facilitate this process with your students.

And they’ll say things like, you know, you need to make the learning relevant to the experience of the students rather than trying to pull them up and make them worthy of something beyond themselves. You should shrink what you’re teaching down to their frame, which I think is sort of a pretty deadening way to try to educate someone.

But at a deeper level, what Freire says is that the purpose of education is to develop what he calls critical consciousness. And critical consciousness means an awareness of the oppressive nature of reality and then undertaking action to destroy the limitations and the oppressive conditions under which you find yourself. Now, his philosophy would be more sympathetic if he narrowed its scope.

So he was in Brazil, you know, teaching literacy to the descendants of slaves, right? People who maybe were a little bit fatalistic, maybe didn’t feel they had much agency.  So in that context, you could almost sympathize with what he’s saying, that he wants people to sort of perceive their limits, perceive how they’re oppressed and take action to better their lives. Except that he doesn’t limit the scope.

He says this is a universalizable pedagogy that can apply at all times and places to bring about endless, perpetual revolution, and it’s about the endless transformation of reality. And he never says in what direction reality should be transformed, really. He never says to what end. The point is the assertion of human will over reality. That’s the whole point.

I think it’s about overthrowing the image that there is something transcendent. He often uses the language of rejecting reality as a gift. So it’s about rejecting the givenness of reality and rejecting the gift and making it yourself. So he says things like, freedom is not acquired as a gift; it’s acquired through conquest. So there’s something very, like, at a certain point when you’re reading through Freire, I was reading him in parallel to reading Milton’s Paradise Lost.

At a certain point, the voices between Milton’s illustration of Satan and Freire become very difficult to discern, except that one’s much more poetical than the other. But it’s this idea of like, you know, you don’t want to exist in this state of servile pomp, receiving gifts from God. You want to be the ruler of your own world, the maker of your own world, the creator of reality. The eraser of the distinction between student and teacher. So all kinds of hierarchies are equalized and leveled. You get curricula that are often stripped of a lot of content because you’re supposed to make everything relevant to the students’ immediate frame of reference.

You’re not trying to stretch them to reach beyond themselves. You’re trying to shrink the world down for them. You get a lot of disorder. So Freire also mocked the idea that the teacher should discipline students, right? This too is priming them for oppression. It’s priming them to model themselves on the teacher’s expectations. And that’s, according to Freire, what you’re not supposed to do.

So I think his ideas are also responsible for a lot of the breakdown in order and discipline in schools, such that violence is endemic. It’s one of the leading causes of teacher attrition now. And then I think at a deeper metaphysical level, you get teachers who view their role as transforming students into activists, who enter every situation in their lives asking the question, who is oppressing whom and how do I destroy this system?

Mr. Jekielek:

So it sounds like classical education basically completely rejects this model as sort of pulls it out from, I mean, this is something that I know is taught, you know, across various teachers’ colleges, I think probably every teacher’s college almost that exists, but somehow you’re creating a school and education without it. How do you manage to do that if this is kind of the centerpiece of what’s required in a way?

Ms. Ford:

It’s quite challenging in part because we haven’t really had classical education for a couple of generations now. So most of our teachers were not educated in this way. They were educated in something that more closely resembles the kind of modern or progressive model. So it’s an interesting process of trying to reach back and rediscover this tradition. And the way we do that is, well, this is a tradition that is very, very heavily documented. So our teachers will do book studies.

In our first year, we studied Aristotle’s Ethics together, and then the next year we read the Republic together. And this year, kind of working our way through canonical texts from classical antiquity and the pre-Socratics through to scholastics of the Middle Ages up to modern times, with some Confucian educational tradition thrown in there as well. So it’s an ongoing process of trying to recover that tradition, even among those of us who didn’t directly inherit it ourselves.

Mr. Jekielek:

So who are these teachers?

Ms. Ford:

Well, so when I first applied to open a charter school in Alberta in 2021, it was finally approved in January 2022. And then it was kind of a rushed process to try to figure out, what’s our building going to be? We have to put together a board of directors, develop a curriculum, put policy together, enroll hundreds of students, and hire, I think in our first year it was about 15 or 16 teachers. I was really worried initially that we wouldn’t find the teachers who could actually teach this program. We were looking for people with deep content knowledge who view themselves as subject matter experts, for people with certain pedagogical training.

That’s the opposite of the progressive kind of pedagogical fads and going back to things that actually work, but also for people with the right philosophical disposition who are interested in and want to pursue a very different kind of project. I was really worried about this in our first year, and yet there they were. You know, it was people who, in many cases, had been in other public schools kind of keeping their heads down, people who had often been passed up for promotion opportunities because they didn’t toe the line ideologically, but were actually incredibly competent teachers and, as we discovered, administrators. And a handful of people who had doctorates or advanced degrees in classics, linguistics, and medieval studies, who didn’t find a home in academia but wanted to teach in the classroom. So we’ve been able to find a way to hire a number of these people as well to come into a K-12 setting and be our teachers.

Mr. Jekielek:

So how did you find them?

Ms. Ford:

This was a total, if you build it, they will come type of situation. I built a website, and people started finding it and then telling their friends who they thought were sound. So we grew from, in our first year, we were kindergarten to grade six with just under 300 students and a little more than a dozen faculty. We now have over 100 school-based staff. We’re just entering our fourth year. We have 1,500 students in three campuses with over 100 or close to 100 teachers.

Mr. Jekielek:

That’s a pretty rapid growth.

Ms. Ford:

It’s very rapid growth, yes. A number of them have also moved to Alberta to teach for us. So we have a few people who’ve moved from other countries or continents and certainly other provinces to come teach at our schools.

Mr. Jekielek:

This classical education idea, I mean, okay, first of all, charter schools at all, it’s kind of, for Canada, it’s not something that’s known at all. In the U.S., it’s a well-known approach, and, you know, it stirs controversy, but a lot of charter schools do very well in teaching in a way more similar to what you describe. I don’t think they all adopt the classical model entirely, but there are certainly amazing schools that do that as well. But in Canada, it’s rare. or it’s, I think, the one example, right?

Ms. Ford:

Yes. Alberta is the only Canadian province that allows charter schools. And yes, they’re widely misunderstood here. People confuse them with private schools. They think we charge tuition. We don’t. So we charge no tuition. We are statutorily barred from having a religious affiliation. We take students from all across the city, so a huge range of socioeconomic backgrounds, religious, and ethnic backgrounds. About 20 percent of our students are low income. A similar percentage are English as a second language students. So it’s a really, really diverse population.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, something that’s been coming up in recent interviews I’ve been doing is the concept of natural law, or the Tao, actually, as C.S. Lewis called it. And so it’s interesting, as you’re describing this sort of search for the truth, right, and some sort of divinity, it could run afoul of these restrictions that you have. But you found a way; you found a way to look at this. Is it through natural law and looking at it that way?

Ms. Ford:

Charter schools in Alberta are not allowed to have a faith orientation or have an affiliation with a specific denomination, church, or faith group. But that doesn’t mean that we need to be secular in the sense of being unconcerned with ultimate questions. I think for any kind of epistemological undertaking to make sense, any attempt to find truth to make sense, whether it’s applied to math, science, or anything, you have to have some kind of metaphysical ground.

You have to believe, for example, that truth is good and so you should seek it. So if you don’t have even that, then why are you studying anything? What is this math? What is this knowledge? If you can’t start from the premise that truth is a real thing, that we have reason and can seek it, and that it’s good. So you need a metaphysical ground. And even if you deny that you have one, you still have one, right?

So I was just talking about Paulo Freire’s metaphysics. That’s a definite metaphysic. That’s a set of quasi-theological beliefs. You always have a metaphysic. You always have some kind of theology. Sometimes you just don’t recognize what it is. And I think what we’re doing is we’re uniting a lot of traditions together. So these beliefs about the existence of truth—this is not something that’s unique to a single faith tradition. This is shared across numerous philosophical and religious traditions spanning all of human history. So I think that we’re able to pick up on those unifying elements.

Every human culture cares about virtue and has sometimes slightly different language to describe it, but really they’re kind of getting at the same thing. So that’s what we’re trying to do; we’re not trying to tell students you have to have this faith. For this interpretation, we actually try to expose them to different world religious traditions in the course of teaching about history because you can’t understand the human experience without understanding the faith dimension, but we’re not trying to teach them to adopt a particular religion or set of religious claims.

Mr. Jekielek:

So tell me how the curriculum looks.

Ms. Ford:

Our curriculum is pretty unique in several different ways. We are, again, statutorily bound to teach the Alberta curriculum, but we find it’s highly permeable to our approach, and we can then enhance it and add additional content that we think is important for the children to learn. So there’s all the standard core academic programs, as well as our students studying Latin beginning in grade five. It is mandatory all through their middle school years. Then in high school, they have additional language options as well, like French; we’re looking at rolling out a Mandarin option, ancient Greek, and even more advanced Latin and philology. Our students study world history in a sequential, recurring way.

As I mentioned, the Alberta curriculum actually doesn’t really teach history, or very little of it. But our students, starting in kindergarten, learn about ancient civilizations, the earliest known civilizations. By grade two, they’re up to classical Greek antiquity, ancient Rome, Anglo-Saxon England, the Chinese Middle Ages, and the Mauryan Empire in India. They then progress through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the early modern period, the age of exploration, and into the modern world. By grade five, they’re cycling back to the ancient world again.

At that point, they’re at a different stage of cognitive development. They’re able to engage more with primary sources, think more about the connecting ideas and themes, and ask interesting questions about history and the human experience. We then go through that cycle again. By the time they’ve completed high school, they’ve kind of done three rounds of world history, philosophy, and studied biographies of great people and the great faith traditions.

We also have a great books program. We have a sort of prescriptive book list that takes students through a lot of the Western canon. We start with what we would call good books when they’re in early elementary, and then we move into great books, those really enduring classics that have passed through the filter of time and have demonstrated their value over many generations.

By the time they’re in high school, they’re reading works like Boethius’ On the Consolation of Philosophy, Dante, Milton, Plato, and Aristotle. They also study works like the Tao Te Ching or the Analects of Confucius, for example. and some of the Chinese classics. So it’s a very rich world literature curriculum. They study and memorize a lot of poetry. So we do a lot of memorization work, partly because we want to help them furnish beautiful inner worlds. We want their minds and their souls to be placed into which they can retire and find themselves refreshed and renewed, and a place where they can find consolation amidst grief and have different resources that they can draw on. So our students memorize a lot of poetry.

We do classical drama. They do a lot of Shakespeare, Sophocles, and Aeschylus. But the difference in approach also permeates the maths and sciences. So, for example, our grade nines this year and our grade eights will be doing a lot of Euclidean proofs. So they’ll be working their way through some books of Euclid, studying geometry and getting into the habit of forming mathematical proofs. Sciences, too, sometimes they’ll start with primary source readings from Aristotle, for example, as they get into the high school sciences. So it permeates all the different aspects of our curriculum.

And then, of course, we have systematic instruction in fine arts, like drawing, painting, and sculpture. We’d eventually like to offer a traditional crafts and building arts component, but we’re getting there. It’s kind of contingent on facilities, things like plaster work and stonemasonry. And also a very strong emphasis on music. So we have choral instruction, instrumental music, and a lot of music theory. So the students are getting a very, very rich music education.

And that’s partly because when you go back and think about when we say that we’re offering a classical liberal arts education and people have a lot of misapprehensions about what the liberal arts means, they think it’s the humanities or they think it’s kind of some people, I think, have a slightly dismissive view of what a liberal arts major might look like, for example, in college. But the traditional liberal arts come from the ancient Greeks and then were codified in the medieval era.

There are seven classical liberal arts: grammar, logic or dialectic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, crucially, and astronomy, which is kind of like physics. It’s the study of magnitude and motion. So music is considered the crown of these in many ways because music is the study. It’s almost a mathematical study of ratios and harmonies. And one of the purposes of studying music is you study the harmony of things, and then you attune your own soul to that harmony. So studying good music, properly ordered music, helps you order your own soul and bring it into harmony as well. You know, as you’re describing all this,

Mr. Jekielek:

I keep thinking to myself, you’re really trying to help educate grounded, thoughtful, engaged people in society.

Ms. Ford:

Yes, absolutely. A lot of what we would measure our success by is not just how many of our students go on to elite universities, right? We would measure our success by questions like, do you participate in voluntary civic organizations? Did you marry and have children? Which is not for everyone, but it’s probably for the vast majority of people, right? Do you continue to read for leisure? Do you feel that your life is meaningful, right? Do you have sort of an active spiritual life, whatever that may mean to you?

So these are, I think, the metrics by which we would measure our success, not the kind of very narrow, did you go to university? Did you get an elite kind of professional job? Again, those are good things, but we have to put first things first and second things second. And if you put the first things first, you’ll probably get the second-order benefits. If you put the second-order things first, you may not get either.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, as you’re describing the curriculum, especially for the younger students, I was thinking to myself, I think I need to take these classes. I think I missed out on this.

Ms. Ford:

My seven-year-old is studying ancient Greece right now, and she would happily tell you all about it.

Mr. Jekielek:

So you basically have to move to Calgary or Edmonton to be involved in a classical curriculum in Canada. And frankly, there just aren’t any in the entire continent, actually, that are happening.

Ms. Ford:

Yes. So in the United States, there’s quite an active, I’ll call it like a neoclassical movement. Because of course, we’re taking a classical tradition and then trying to distill things that work in a modern context, right? So it’s quite active in the U.S. There are a lot of parochial schools, private and charter schools offering some version of classical education. But there was really nothing in Canada outside of a very small smattering of private, usually religious schools.

So there’s nothing in Alberta. There’s certainly nothing that’s tuition-free, almost nothing that is non-sectarian. So the very, very few programs that were doing this were doing it with a religious lens and so weren’t necessarily available to the general public. So ours is the first network of tuition-free, non-sectarian classical education programs in Canada.

Mr. Jekielek:

And so you have 1,500 students now. What is the trajectory here?

Ms. Ford:

We could have doubled that number this year if we had the facilities for it. We typically have enough applicants for kindergarten that we could fill 30 to 50 kindergarten classes per year. We just don’t have the facilities to accommodate that at this stage.

Mr. Jekielek:

And you could scale that quickly, you think?

Ms. Ford:

We could scale very quickly. There are two major impediments to growth. One is access to facilities. It costs $50 million-plus to build a new school here. So most of our schools weren’t built as school buildings. They’re buildings that we leased and renovated. One is a former military barracks built right after the Second World War. Another is a former commercial office building that we have retrofitted. So it’s the availability of capital and facilities that is the major impediment.  And then the second impediment to growth is the pipeline of teachers. Those are the two biggest things.

But there’s incredible demand every year for this program. And we’re doing everything we can to try to acquire new facilities, to renovate them, and to open new geographic markets. We’re trying to do our best to meet that demand. Because we know that parents are not just hungry for this, but a lot of the parents who come to us are absolutely desperate. They say, I don’t know what to do for my child’s education. The existence of this school is like an answered prayer. We would do anything to get in. And I don’t know what to do if I don’t get in.

Mr. Jekielek:

Is there a boarding school element?

Ms. Ford:

No, it’s not boarding. It’s all day school and all tuition-free.

Mr. Jekielek:

Oh, no. What I mean is, can a student that, you know, can parents send their kids here, right? Or is it all local?

Ms. Ford:

If they can arrange lodging for them, I suppose. But it’s all local, yes.

Mr. Jekielek:

Okay, but so basically 1,500 local students across these two cities.

Ms. Ford:

Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:

Okay, so it sounds like you want to grow, and you’re ready to do it. You need resources, and you need teachers being a major resource like that. Just practically, what would be the most useful thing for you to be able to move ahead with growing this system?

Ms. Ford:

We would like our own faculty of education. So unironically, I think the next step is to try to establish our own post-secondary institution, train our own pipeline of teachers, and try to do something about the problem that we have a generation of adults who, for the most part, didn’t receive this education themselves. We’d like to start training people to be able to teach in our school, to be able to pass on these traditions.

And that, yes, probably involves starting our own post-secondary institution. So again, this is something that there are examples of in the States. There are schools like, you know, University of Dallas comes to mind and several other small private liberal arts schools in the U.S. There isn’t really anything like that in Canada. So that may be a first step towards solving that problem long term.

Mr. Jekielek:

And what would be a big lesson or two that you learned along the way that you’re trying to apply now?

Ms. Ford:

When you think about the challenges, we’ve had to fight for everything here. We’ve had buildings fall through a month before we were supposed to open, with everything from city permit problems to fire department problems, to not having bus drivers. Just everything that could go wrong with a startup has gone wrong. And that’s to be expected partly. I think when you’re trying to accomplish things, you can expect a commensurate degree of difficulty to accompany it, right? You need trials to temper you.

Mr. Jekielek:

If I can jump in, what strikes me is something that probably is central to classical education is precisely this lesson. Would you agree?

Ms. Ford:

Yes, that you can expect trials in life, and the question is how do you bear them well? This is another huge problem with modern education is that you have a generation of students who are anxious, depressed, who struggle with suicidal ideation, who struggle most of all with lacking a sense of meaning. So when they encounter difficulties or suffering, they don’t necessarily have a narrative to help them understand its purpose, right? It’s just unpleasant.

And so one of the things that we want to try to do is to cultivate resilience in our students, to help give them models of what is a meaningful life. It’s not a life that’s full of pleasure and ease, right? But when you actually study human beings in history who’ve overcome great things, who’ve left a beautiful legacy, it often involves suffering, sometimes some very, very deep tragedy and despair, and then being able to transcend it or make meaning of it to redeem it in some way. So those are some of the things that we want our students to be able to come away with: a way of making meaning of their experiences, the tools to be able to bear hardships with equanimity, with stillness in their hearts, because it is inevitable.

Mr. Jekielek:

And in a way, according to many of the traditions that you’ve described, a kind of central part of the meaning of life, actually, wouldn’t you say?

Ms. Ford:

Absolutely. I remember talking with some of the grade twos about this, I think, about Taoism. Taoism has the symbol of the Tai Chi, or what people call the yin-yang symbol. Even grade twos can understand this concept that you can’t really have light without darkness. You know, you need this duality. between things that are sweet and things that are bitter, between dark and light, highs and lows, in order to generate flourishing, in order for life to have vitality. And so you have to expect both of these things and be able to sort of see them as part of a coherent whole that is whole because it has both elements.

Mr. Jekielek:

So what’s the bottom line here, Caylan?

Ms. Ford:

Bottom line. At the outset, you asked me, how do I diagnose the problem with modern education? And I said, we’ve forgotten what education is for because we’ve forgotten what human beings are for. And to answer that a little bit, human beings are not made for a life merely of pleasure, of ease, of sweetness and delight all of the time. Our lives are not merely for material accretion. It’s not to possess things. All of our worldly possessions, whether it’s social approbation, our friends, our sense of belonging, our ranks or titles or prestige or material things, all of that will perish. It will all be taken from us, whether at death or at some earlier time.

And philosophy, to go back to Plato, is about preparing to die well. And we do that partly by being able to encounter those little deaths in life, the little sacrifices that we make, learning how to bear those well with grace and with gratitude. And that prepares us, I think, yes, it prepares us for a life of meaning. If we can prepare ourselves to die well, then we’re also preparing ourselves to live well.

Video clip:

Ms. Ford:

Let me show you around our school. This is our front office here, and then this here is our grade five corridor. The grade fives study ancient history from ancient Mesopotamians, Egyptians, and Indus River civilizations, but then they all progress up through the fall of Rome, so we thought we would see this. The gladiators are a popular topic, so this is one example. As I mentioned, we try to include some art that is representative of different cultures, different faith traditions, but all of which are kind of orienting students towards something that’s beautiful and transcendent. So this is a classical Chinese painting, and it’s the descent of various bodhisattvas from the heavens.

This is our east entrance, so we have a ceiling painting panel from a Buddhist temple in Beijing, a Ming-era Buddhist temple. So this is Jacques-Louis David, who was unfortunately the artist of the French Revolution, but I’m not gonna hold that against him because he was also a great neoclassicist. So this is depicting Socrates’ speech just as he’s about to drink. The hemlock, as described in Plato’s dialogue the Phaedo. So he’s expounding on what happens to the soul after death, and his friends are around him weeping, and he’s basically trying to console them, saying, why are you fearing for me? You know, the soul doesn’t just descend into Hades. My soul is, you know, I’ve cultivated myself such that my soul is pure and unalloyed, and so on my death, I will return and kind of unify with those qualities in the heavens.

This is the Acropolis. But here, I’m going to show you my favorites. There are two that are my favorites. This is the School of Athens. Raphael painted himself. This is Raphael staring at you. And then he painted these figures. So this is Aristotle, who’s pointing to the earth because his philosophy concerns things that are kind of practical in a sense, whereas Plato is pointing up toward the heavens, toward the eternal. And then this is Socrates in dialogue, maybe with Alexander the Great, maybe with Alcibiades.

This is a painting full of anachronisms, but one of the fun things is that Raphael modeled them on his friends. So he made Plato in the image of Leonardo da Vinci and Heraclitus in the image of Michelangelo, I think, and Diogenes sprawling on the steps and the mathematicians calculating the spheres and things—that’s one of my other favorites. This is a fresco; it’s actually quite a small city or town in Italy whose name I forget, and it was done by a student of Raphael’s, and this is a ceiling fresco and it kind of descends down the walls, and this is the fall of the Giants. With many of our faculty, we hire them initially as tutors, but they have doctorates, and then we get this letter for them from the minister so that they can be full teachers after we’ve kind of made sure that they fit in.

Mr. Jekielek:

This has been just an amazing, truly amazing experience, actually. I can’t wait to see—you know, it will take a few years—but I can’t wait to see what happens with these kids.

Ms. Ford:

I look forward to it too. Thank you.

 

This interview has been partially edited for clarity and brevity.