Anchored by the Classic Learning Test

Equipping Schools for the Modern Student | Davies Owens

May 02, 2024 Classic Learning Test
Equipping Schools for the Modern Student | Davies Owens
Anchored by the Classic Learning Test
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Anchored by the Classic Learning Test
Equipping Schools for the Modern Student | Davies Owens
May 02, 2024
Classic Learning Test

On this episode of Anchored, Jeremy is joined by Davies Owens, host of the BaseCamp Live podcast. They discuss classical education’s relevant work for modern students and their families. They dive into the new kinds of kids entering schools and how techno-influences have undermined attention spans. Davies also talks about the story behind the name, mission, and work of BaseCamp Live. 




Show Notes Transcript

On this episode of Anchored, Jeremy is joined by Davies Owens, host of the BaseCamp Live podcast. They discuss classical education’s relevant work for modern students and their families. They dive into the new kinds of kids entering schools and how techno-influences have undermined attention spans. Davies also talks about the story behind the name, mission, and work of BaseCamp Live. 




Jeremy Tate (00:01.957)
Welcome back to the Anchor Podcast, folks. I'm here today with a man who needs no introduction for many of you. Davies Owens has been part of the Classical Christian renewal movement for a long time and has been, is the voice of Basecamp Live, which I believe is probably the most downloaded and listened to podcast in the Classical Christian education arena. Davies, thanks so much for being with us.

Davies Owens (00:30.082)
Jeremy, thanks for letting me have the opportunity. It's so good to be with you, and I love what you guys are doing. So this is exciting to have this conversation.

Jeremy Tate (00:37.733)
Well, and you should have been one of our very first guests. You know, you've been part of this movement for such a long time. And I think your voice, everybody knows your voice, everybody trusts your voice, because so many folks listen to Basecamp Live. We're doing something fun right now is that you're not the host for once and are being interviewed. I think a lot of folks who enjoy listening to you would love to just kind of hear a little bit about kind of the early days of Davies-Owens. What was school like for you growing up? I mean, do you?

Did you get a nice, rich, classical Christian education?

Davies Owens (01:11.026)
So don't we wish. I mean, so often I'm in rooms with parents and raise your hand how many of you had class. It's starting to happen, but no, I'm part of the generation that unfortunately did not have that. And honestly, envied my own children who had all three of my kids who are now graduates of the K-12 journey. My wife and I have been married 32 years. So I always say, Jeremy, I now, I used to stand up in front of parent open house events and.

speak of the wonders of classical education, knowing the whole time my oldest was like in third grade. And I can now officially say, no, we've gone through it. It's been fantastic. And if anything, I just get jealous of what my kids had the experience of. I was a, God does have a sense of humor. I mean, I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, kind of a school mutt, if you would want to call it that. I mean, I went, I was in Atlanta public schools back in the day, and then ended up in a two different, quote, Christian private.

College prep schools ended up graduating from Woodward Academy, which is I think the largest K-12 college prep school in the nation these days. School for me, it wasn't my first love. I was probably seeing school just like most people's reading, writing arithmetic and check the box and get the grade and go to the next thing. In God's sort of sense of humor again, I ended up becoming very much passionate about this

classical Christian experience. Kind of my, you know, I went into the local church world, loved the church. I was in the church for about 12 years, suburban, urban. And the whole time, I kept thinking, how do we influence next generation when we only have a few hours a week in the building? And I'd run youth ministries and young adult programs, and even did my doctoral research on using internet-based technology to build online community. I worked for Christianity.com because I thought maybe if we could leverage this thing called the internet when it was really starting to...

pick up momentum 20 years ago in terms of connecting people. Maybe this is a way we could extend the reach of building up families and sharing the gospel and educating. And in the meanwhile, my oldest was a little, you know, five-year-old and we started thinking about schools in Atlanta. And I had a flashback to an experience I had when I was 18. Long story short, my mom had gone through an agnostic period in the 70s and had read Francis Schaeffer's books. And

Davies Owens (03:27.658)
decided that she was going to kind of make a pilgrimage to LaBrie fellowship in Switzerland. And I had the joy of going with her as a young teenager and then went back when I was 18 and I tell you the story to say I was there in this beautiful setting and I'm watching these, these young children, uh, of Susan Schaefer, McCauley Schaefer's daughter, who are winsome, articulate, putting on Shakespeare plays for fun. And I remember saying to Susan, I'm 18. I don't have kids, but if I ever have kids, I want to do what you're doing. I said, what are you doing? She said, well, it's this.

Jeremy Tate (03:28.446)
that

Jeremy Tate (03:38.165)
No kidding, yeah.

Davies Owens (03:56.482)
thing called classical education. And Charlotte Mason was part of it as well, who I think is also classical. And filed that away. So fast forward to, I got a five year old in Atlanta and I got involved in a brand new classical Christian school there in Midtown Atlanta and got on the board and then got so excited about it, I became the interim and then full-time head of school. And I realized, all right, I'm getting it now. If we wanna change our culture, we wanna restore family, we might wanna start with these.

young children and raise them up over the 16,000 hours. So I have, that was 23 years ago, Jeremy. So I have, I've never looked back.

Jeremy Tate (04:33.745)
Okay, so you were at Lebrie when you were 18. Like, did you hang out with Francis Schaeffer?

Davies Owens (04:40.166)
I didn't hang out with him. I did meet him at one point. I was hanging out with a lot of the people that had been there early on with him. I minored in philosophy, so I actually interviewed a lot of the early workers and did some research on the life of Francis Schaeffer. And I was mentored, parents had divorced when I was young, mentored by a gentleman named Donald Drew who was a Cambridge grad. And I remember Jeremy when I was there at 18 and I was a typical American teen. You know.

kind of education light, just the experience I'd had. And he was putting books, Donald Drew, who's a worker at Labrie, who was also the mentor of Oz Guinness. So Oz and I have kind of this interesting connection through our shared kind of father figure mentor, Donald Drew. But Donald, I remember putting books like Martin Lloyd Jones's the Christian soldier book in front of me. And I'm like, gosh, this is thick, you know, it wasn't even that hard, but it just where I was at that point. And he said, you know,

you know, stay the course. And then he would have high teas on Sunday afternoons and play classical music and read different great works. And I thought I was awakened to something I'd never seen. So that's an important part of this story. I think in a sense, I got a taste of classical and what's possible even at that early age, which set again, this trajectory for where I am now that I believe so much in what we're doing with classical education and raising the next generation.

Jeremy Tate (06:06.205)
Man, Davis, I love that story. You know, I was working at Annapolis EP Church and met students that were going to Rockbridge Academy and they were just different. You know, I love that you saw that the, I wanna raise kids like that. And you heard about this thing and as you said, kind of filed it away. So then you go back into pastoral ministry and did you come across a school that also had, I mean, a church that also had a school attached to it?

Davies Owens (06:19.18)
Yeah.

Davies Owens (06:36.942)
I mean, I definitely saw it. I mean, that was absolutely a common model. Some were more, I guess, in the classical vein. A lot of them were just using the building space to be good stewards of it and bring Christian schools in, which I think is a really important and increasingly viable way for classical schools to partner up with.

churches in that regard. But you know, I think it was probably more the early experience I'd had at Lebrie that kind of gave me an awakening of what classical is. And then again, ended up at Heritage Preparatory School in Atlanta. And I often say, Jeremy, I was probably about two or three years into it, even as a head of school. I remember talking with Chris Perrin about what exactly is classical Christian education. And he was saying, you know, Dave, it's really, it's human soul formation. And I thought, okay, I need to take this a couple steps further in. Because I think

Jeremy Tate (07:24.893)
Wow.

Davies Owens (07:29.946)
part of what has been in the last 15, 20 years for me, a real passion is how do we explain what is classical education and what is classical Christian education? I have a funny video I did a number of years ago at the ACCS conference where we walked around with a film crew and I just said, hey, what's classical Christian education? And there were some good answers, but there was a lot of folks that were caught off guard and fumbled a bit and I thought, wow, can you imagine being at any other industries conference and ask them, what is...

Jeremy Tate (07:48.713)
Hmm.

Davies Owens (07:58.358)
whatever it may be and not have a real... So I have really tried to make it part of my interest and passion, maybe not having come through a classical education, but being aware of some of the challenges of how do we understand what this is in our modern moment? And how do we articulate it in a way that what I've done over the last seven years with Basecamp is really try to articulate...

Jeremy Tate (07:59.25)
Yeah.

Davies Owens (08:21.474)
kind of at the 101 level, what is classical Christian education to Minnie Van Mary and soccer dad Sam who put their kid in a classical school and love the uniforms and the character development but they're not quite sure why we're doing Latin instead of Spanish or they're not really sure why we're spending so much time reading about these old pagan Greeks and Romans. Why does this make sense for a modern world? And are we just a throwback education or are we actually...

really preparing the best education for a complicated world, which I believe we are. And so I've really increasingly desired to kind of take on that challenge of how do we recontextualize, articulate classical education in a way that is compelling and beautiful to a modern parent and educator.

Jeremy Tate (09:08.197)
Davies, let's talk about Basecamp Live. I don't know the number, but everybody in the classical Christian world has heard it at least a few times. I know a lot of folks I know, they don't ever miss an episode. I don't know how long you've been doing this. When I think back of my early days kind of in the movement going to SCL and ACCS, you would be there interviewing people. And in many ways you've become kind of a really important voice that people just know and trust within this movement.

How did this idea come about and why Basecamp? What's with the name?

Davies Owens (09:42.538)
Yeah, it's a great question, Jeremy. Well, the name base camp, and I remember people saying to me, oh, you're going to, this is going to be challenging. And people are going to think you're selling like REI climbing gear. And I said, well, people used to think Amazon was a river. And so I think my desire was to create a, really it's an analogy. And if you, I think we all can appreciate the challenges of raising the next generation, whether you're a parent or an educator. And so I said, look, it's a bit like.

Jeremy Tate (09:56.814)
Yeah.

Davies Owens (10:12.278)
climbing up the side of Mount Everest here, raising the next generation over the 16,000 hours. And along the way, of course, mountain climbers do these things called base camps, where they stop and they eat and they get warm and they recharge and get re-inspired to keep climbing. And I thought, we need that. We need that as educators, we need that as parents. It's a long journey and there's not a lot of reinforcement and re-encouragement along the way. So that was the analogy. And I think, you know, hopefully now people...

Jeremy Tate (10:29.517)
Hmm.

Davies Owens (10:41.546)
don't think of climbing gear immediately when they think of base camp. We do have a really significant number of followers. And it was really, Jeremy, just born out of, I would say I was a desperate school administrator trying to figure out how do you communicate with modern parents. And I often say, and I say this lovingly as a school administrator, we use kind of 1998 delivery systems to communicate over.

Jeremy Tate (10:54.621)
Hmm.

Davies Owens (11:07.15)
a 13 year journey where we're raising the next generation. How do we actually come together and encourage and have that alignment? So what we typically do 1998 styles, we send out emails or we have, you know, with newsletters with lots of words on them, or we do events at the school. All of those things are good to do. But I think the modern frame of the millennial Gen Z family, they're on the go and it's hard to get more than that Pareto 20% down to the school building. So seven years ago, I began,

Jeremy Tate (11:31.229)
Hmm

Davies Owens (11:36.47)
David Goodwin, in fact, in the Ambrose Library out here in Boise at the Ambrose School, started this, we said, well, let's just call it Basecamp for the reasons I just gave you and then let's have the event at the school library. And then we ran into my 1998 problem where we were getting the 20% that were true believers that knew most of the answers. The ones we really wanted to reach weren't coming down. So this thing called podcasting seven years ago when we started was starting to pick up momentum. One of my favorite stories, I was at a school conference, national conference, and I had a

a teacher come up to me with completely all serious questions. She said, is this about gardening? And I went, what do you mean? She said, well, it's throwing out pods, like podcasting. I went, oh boy. So needless to say, seven years later, podcasting has continued to build momentum. And I'm doing a lot of not only work, I think, trying to help with better, more accessible content, but I do believe that we as schools need to think about better delivery systems. So

Jeremy Tate (12:12.617)
Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (12:23.133)
Hmm.

Davies Owens (12:34.546)
actually piloting this week with 24 schools, a brand new initiative that's basically a short form drive cast drive time podcast. So Monday morning, every family gets it, it's customized their school. It's a mix of local content and nationally syndicated content, parenting tips, classical one-on-one information. So I just think we've got to think a little bit more dynamically if we're going to partner well with our families that we so urgently have to have as part of the classical

We're not into the outsourced education. It's an in loco parentis, you know, lock arms. Let's do this together. So that's, that's the journey. Yeah. And it continues to go.

Jeremy Tate (13:08.755)
Yes.

See you.

Yeah, yeah. Davis, when I think back about our conversations over the past seven or eight years, I think a number of times I was like, it'd be so cool if you just went all in with Basecamp and made this into just something that is bringing folks into the movement. Because there's a lot of folks that are kind of periphery, right? You see this on the Catholic side and on the Protestant side where more and more ACSI kind of ceases schools. You go and you tour, I was just a little

Pretty classical. Who is the audience for this? I mean, I keep thinking a lot of folks are low, you're articulating with a lot of clarity. I think what so many folks are kind of looking for in the dark, if that makes sense.

Davies Owens (14:01.406)
Yeah, no, I mean, the audiences I indicated earlier, I mean, I actually think about this all the time and it's important anytime you do marketing, like who's the actual, they call it, you might call it an avatar or the actual image of the person you're speaking to. And it's Minnie Van Mary and soccer dad Sam and increasingly 50% of Basecamp Plus are, you know, I haven't worked out their names yet. Maybe Alvin the administrator and, you know, and Tom the teacher or something. But you know, it's, it's us. It's me, it's you, it's parents.

I am increasingly concerned that Jeremy, as I talk to school heads, if I put 30 heads in a room or key administrators, teachers, and ask the question, what keeps you up at night, as much as the answer's probably gonna be a range of things from board governance challenges, since 80% according to ISM of heads leave because of tension with their boards or because of financial concerns or building in grounds or HR, all that.

Jeremy Tate (14:57.222)
Enough.

Davies Owens (14:58.966)
But I think the issue that's kind of the elephant in the room is that what I'm hearing is these families are not the same as they were three, four years ago. The students are not the same. They're showing up more distracted, less aware of classical education, maybe even less concerned, more frazzled, more hoping the school's gonna just basically pick up the slack for what they can't do at home. I'm making a broad generalization. There's many families that show up very.

very focused and committed and aware of the richness of the education. But again, I think if we were talking about classical education as a business, I think we need to probably pay more attention than we have historically and who our customers are. I had an experience a couple of years ago that was very formative for me. The head of our board of our classical school in Atlanta at the time was one of the senior leaders at Chick-fil-A. So it was always fun to kind of get to.

look over his shoulder into the Chick-fil-A organization. And I had an experience several years ago where he invited me in to kind of watch them think about what the changing landscape looks like for them as a business. So they brought in kind of their key leadership team, they brought in a marketing team, and they said, today is called BTR Beyond the Restaurant. And the idea was that they said, look, the generation of millennial Gen Zers that are coming in to buy our chicken are changing in how they expect.

the relationship with this restaurant to work. They don't wanna come in and sit in the dining hall. In fact, at the time, they said there are 279 delivery services like Uber Eats. Their engagement with the restaurant was changing. And I thought, wow, we need to do a BTS beyond the school. What does it look like to continue to do classical education with excellence with a very different millennial Gen Z, you know.

Jeremy Tate (16:22.096)
Hmm.

Jeremy Tate (16:46.991)
Hmm.

Davies Owens (16:47.586)
What's the frame of this family of families coming in? And, you know, when I was just last week at Seattle Classical Christian School with Matt Greco, the head of school, and I laughed to him because, you know, here I am. It's easy for me to say, we all need to, hey, schools, you need to, in the midst of everything you're doing, you need to now think about how do you partner even more intentionally, how do you educate parents on parenting best practices, on understanding classical? And there's Matt.

while we're trying to meet the boiler and their hundred year old beautiful building in downtown Seattle goes out. And so Matt spends the better part of his day trying to work with plumbers and eventually had to have somebody sit down there with a five gallon bucket and fill up this boiler with water. And I think, you know, welcome to running a classical school. It's a lot of work. And so here when I'm saying we need to think about beyond the school, how do we partner better? How do we articulate? What is classical better? How do we help families get a hold of?

managing Cyclops, the one-eyed screen monster that is now, as I call on the Basecamp podcast, the 301 problem. We can control kind of the school day and the environment and the limitations of technology, but we better be figuring out how to help parents sort through all of this because that five to 11 hour, depending on what survey you read, techno-influence is undermining and rewiring attention spans and reframing the loves that we've formed.

through reading the great books and the great ideas. So we've got some real challenges that we haven't maybe seen even in the last, you know, three to five years, I think we're in a different world today. And so I really have a passion to try to help schools, equip them the content they need to be able to help onboard and align the culture of our families and of our staff for that matter. So there's a lot of work to be done, but we're in this together.

Jeremy Tate (18:40.629)
Dave, I want to talk a little more about this. I don't want to go too far down kind of a rabbit hole here, but you know, you're saying the students are different. The families are different than they were 30 or 40 years ago. You know, we're just a week out or so from the first neuro link that was installed in someone's brain. Thank you, Elon Musk. I mean, we're rapidly and we're, you know, hitting the gas, accelerating into this very, you know, strange new world.

How different are students right now? Are they just a little more distracted or is it more sinister?

Davies Owens (19:15.87)
You know, again, it depends. It depends, obviously, on the individual family. I think what's happening is you're getting some percentage of families that are really stepping up and saying, OK, this is really this being that, you know, technology, techno intrusions, the screens are really undermining our home life. And so I'm encouraged in that I am seeing a lot of families and now schools really collaborating as a community and saying, let's don't just keep saying.

how bad smartphones are. I call it the Nancy Reagan problem of you just say no to drugs, but what am I saying yes to? So I see parents coming together, I see schools coming together saying, let's start addressing this earlier, let's create pledges and commitments to not be on technology moving forward. Having said that, Jeremy, I think that's definitely more the exception than the rule. I think part of the problem, saw a statistic recently that Gen X is only 7% less on the screen than Gen Z.

So it's very easy for us as parents to complain about all of this. The reality is that we are, if you will, as addicted as adults as students are to the technology. And again, there's so much research on this. I mean, when you realize that there are 95 million photos and videos posted on Instagram every day, 500 hours of video uploaded to YouTube, and you realize that 70% of teenagers are on YouTube as subscribers, and they say that social media creators get 12 times the number.

of comments than traditional celebrities do, which is even more than any other hero that we're putting forth in classical education. There's such a counter narrative that's building momentum. It's very loud and it's, dopamine hits on addictive technology for at least 30%, they say, are at that clinical level of addiction. And the problem is, again, this is a, to your point, it is a very deep.

you know, hold a jump into, but I think it's a, it's a conversation we have to have both in terms of, okay, let's soberly talk about the impact of that. I know of a prep school, Christian prep school in Atlanta, um, it was just in Atlanta recently and the challenges that school basically said, we give up. We're so tired of the pressure from the parents to keep the kids, um, off their phones, we just gave up. And so now all the kids have access to smartphones all day long, which is. I mean, unfathomable to me, but the.

Davies Owens (21:37.71)
pressure that administrators are feeling from the parents to have access to their children claiming safety or whatever it may be. I think we've got to really formulate strong answers for what this needs to look like, starting with the kindergartner family and giving a path forward. Because otherwise, I think we're going to be seeing single digit success here in terms of kids that go the distance.

Jeremy Tate (22:03.839)
Yeah. Has this movement that you've been in and you've really helped to build and create over the years, over decades, has it hit this Malcolm Gladwell tipping point? Has classical education arrived on the main stage right now? What are your thoughts?

Davies Owens (22:05.303)
It's a.

Davies Owens (22:24.414)
I do think we are seeing some wonderful acceleration. I remember 10, 15 years ago, you would know this talking to college admission officers that it's kind of like homeschool 20 years ago. It was like, wait, what are you guys doing? And now they're offering scholarships to these kids. They get that they're showing up with strong work ethics. They're critical thinkers. I mean, all the things that we claim, we're actually seeing the fruit of it as are other people. I know a...

patent attorney here in Boise that says, I will never hire anything but classical trained students because they're so significantly different in terms of just their demeanor and their capacities. And so I think we're now quickly gaining awareness. I think the average Christian family is increasingly aware of classical as an option out there. And they're coming, especially since COVID looking. So I mean, this is a good thing. I mean, it also means we have to be a little bit more

Jeremy Tate (23:05.561)
Thanks for having me.

Davies Owens (23:21.734)
intentional on how we interview and screen families to make sure they really understand what this is. And it's not just, you know, we've created Mayberry over here in the corner to keep your kids safe. We do kind of want Mayberry in grammar school, but at some point we actually need OP to head to the big city and be ready. And I think that's a big part of what I like to talk about is this is a forward-facing, real-world ready education. We are not

Jeremy Tate (23:40.606)
Hmm.

Davies Owens (23:50.85)
just the throwback, the fusty sentimental group over here in the corner. So, but no, I think we're on the rise.

Jeremy Tate (23:50.909)
Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (23:55.232)
Yeah.

Yeah, Davies, your base camp has become for a lot of schools that I know of, the kind of the podcast that a lot of heads of school are recommending for parents. And when I think about the schools that I have visited that are really, really flourishing, really on fire, places like the Veritas School in Richmond, Founders Classical, Leander, Texas, Our Lady of Lords in Denver, one of the constants

is you have incredible buy-in from the parents, from the community. It's hard to nurture that, you know, and in some ways you're helping out every head of school that is wanting to create this missional buy-in. So if folks start listening, where do they pick up? Do they just go listen to the latest episode or is there somewhere they started episode one back in 2015? How do they get started?

Davies Owens (24:55.082)
Well, I have had some people say they've been binge listening. I'm like, boy, that's a lot of, that's impressive if that's what you're doing. Um, we, you know, we've, we are close to 300 episodes, Jeremy, and there is a, you know, you have the main website and type in the search bar and, you know, just, you know, something you may be interested in likelihood is something will come up, you know, ranging from. I always talk about, there's kind of three areas we try to build content around. One is parenting 101 folks like Keith McCurdy coming in.

just really helping us think about what does it look like to raise kids today. As I've been doing focus groups around the country with young families, I had one mom say to me recently, there is no James Dobson anymore. There's no singular voice to help us figure out how to parent. And it's quote, a smog a sport of competing information on what it even means to parent. So I'm realizing that part of what we're seeing a lot of, you know, the higher download rates are sometimes just around basic things like a, you know, if somebody goes to the site right now and looks, uh,

Types in Keith McCurdy, he's in there at least once a month. We just did one on baselining, which is this idea that he says 98% of young people a day that are drug into counseling offices and taken to doctors to be put on medication because of perceived ADD or ADHD or whatever. He says 98% of that can be cleared within 90 days just by getting them off of technology, getting these kids to sleep and eat well and just basic stuff. So I mean, so I feel like there's a need.

you really have to just back up. So we can't educate if we don't have home life and parenting figure out. So that's a third of, or, you know, probably half of what these episodes are about. The other third is probably what is classical. Like I indicated, just let's talk about the great books. Let's talk about why we educate. Some of the idiosyncrasies and curiosities of the modern parent looking in on us, like why are you doing that? And why would you wear uniforms? That just stifles their creativity and their individualism. I'm like, well, there's an answer to all that. So we try to answer those basic questions. And then the other

Jeremy Tate (26:42.599)
Hmm.

Davies Owens (26:49.698)
component is really what's happening in the culture. Let's interview Barna. Let's talk about sort of these changes and trends that are happening generationally and be able to be wise to that as parents and as educators. So that's, you're gonna get probably a mix from one episode to the next of that, but no, thank you for your encouragement, Jeremy. I think this is, I'm kind of headed towards I'm calling Basecamp 2.0. We wanna move to video. We're gonna get even better indexing system, but...

Jeremy Tate (27:16.774)
Yeah.

Davies Owens (27:19.578)
I'd love to hear from anybody listening that, you know, reach out to me info at Basecamp live directly email me. You can also jump on and start listening. It's definitely would be a joy to have more listeners.

Jeremy Tate (27:32.097)
Davies, we always conclude the Anchor podcast talking about books. Is there one of the books or maybe one or two that have been most formative for you?

Davies Owens (27:40.394)
Yeah. Well, on, well, most formative ever, you know, there's, there's so many things I would point to. I mean, Schaefer early on was definitely early, early influence for me. I think, you know, God who is there escaped from reason. I mean, those books to me early in my journey were helpful to realize like, wow, evangelical Christians.

can actually engage in thoughtful conversation. This was not the world I grew up in where it was just love Jesus and it'll all work out. And it will all work out when you love Jesus. But what if we could actually think deeply and where does philosophy fit in? And that shaped me into a lot of the directions of where I am with Classical Education Day. To the topic we've been discussing, I've just finished going back through two books. One is Todd Oppenheimer's book, The Flickering Mind, which I recommend to everyone. And Oppenheimer,

really counters this notion that education is better on technology and sort of demystifies a lot of the things that are happening in the 80s and 90s when a lot of Microsoft and Apple execs were convincing the Department of Education that we need to all install iPads or before iPads, we just computers around all these kids so that they'll be ready for the future world. Sounds great, but it's actually counter to what the science shows. I would say a similar book would be Nicholas.

car's book, The Shallows, which is again, he'd written an article in Atlanta, Atlantic monthly, a number of years ago called this Google making a stupid. And, you know, again, to that point, there's a lot of research that I'm trying to become even more aware of so I can help, you know, fight this fight for our school leaders and for our families, just saying, let's don't fall into that trap of believing that just because we're in a technology oriented world, we have to bury our kids in that. They will be far better off actually learning how to think. And,

write and articulate well and the technology will follow that.

Jeremy Tate (29:36.097)
Again, we're here with Davies Owens, the voice of Basecamp Live. Folks, you've gotta tune in, you've gotta subscribe.

Davies, thanks for being with us and come back soon.

Davies Owens (29:47.638)
Thank you, Jeremy, for the opportunity. Look forward to being back with you.