Debunking the Teacher-Scarcity Myth | Erik Twist and Ben Lindquist

On this episode of Anchored, Jeremy and Soren are joined by Erik Twist and Ben Lindquist, two of the founders of Arcadia Education. The four discuss the cultural gap in operational guidance for schools and faith-based organizations that brought about the need for Arcadia. They dive into the importance of valuing operations on par with missional drive. They also discuss the myth that there is a shortage of talented teachers in the classical education world and how Arcadia illuminates the opportunities for good schools to attract good teachers. 

Transcript

Jeremy (00:02.232)
Folks, welcome back to the Anchor Podcast, y'all. This is going to be an Anchor Pod episode like none before. We have with us two folks, well, three folks. We've got our own Sorin Schwab. We're doing this together. And then we've got the amazing folks, two of the founders of Arcadia Education, I think an organization now that everybody seems to know about and is really, really excited about. We have with us today, Eric Twist.

and Ben Lindquist, Eric, Ben, thanks so much for being here. my gosh, yeah, thank you for having us. Great to be with you guys today. In frigid Annapolis. The first time the Bay's frozen over, the rivers are all frozen. We've had a great little trip already. So I think if our guests are anything like me, they know your names, you've got incredible reputations. You've been in this movement for a long time. The name Arcadia is now a household name, but I think there's maybe still some confusion with some folks with exactly the work Arcadia does.

I want to get into that in just a bit, but I want to maybe first start off with just a little bit about your own background in schools. How did y'all get into this whole world of classical education? Maybe Eric will start with you and then go to Ben. Well, thanks for having us. It's been great being with you both and, you know, Annapolis aside. No, Annapolis is beautiful. It's been great. Well, yeah, I, you know, by accident, I got into classical education. I had just finished graduate school.

and needed to do something. what I had initially gone, I won't bore you with all the details there, but what I had initially gone to graduate school for, it sort of didn't pan out. And so we were living overseas and decided, we could live anywhere. And so we decided to move back to my hometown of Phoenix. And that really started for me the process of getting in really deeper into education. so I ended up.

working for a little school called Veritas out in Phoenix, which then became as part of a little small grouping of schools, became Great Hearts. And so I was just really fortunate to get into this community that was really on the forefront, especially of kind of a non-sectarian charter classical education and just surrounded by people that were amazing and really introduced me.

Jeremy (02:18.83)
to the fundamentals of ed reform and classical education and I'm thinking here of Jamie Hansen and Andrew Ellison actually who hired me. And was this totally different from your own education or were there some similarities? totally different. I I was educated in the public school system in Arizona and was the recipient of what you might

referred to as just gross negligence. mean, these were big box factory farm, industrial education, that was really clear way to put it. And it really wasn't an, I would say it wasn't really until graduate school that I, started to get a glimpse of classical. Although that's not what it was called, you know, but, but I started to get a sense, you know, a sense of actually getting into the great tradition. But even my undergraduate degree, which was at Trinity university in San Antonio,

where I met my lovely wife, a wonderful place. You know, it was a fine education, but it wasn't in any respect, you know, sort of embedded in the tradition. And so it wasn't until I was really 30 that I got into it and immediately fell in love with it. was sort of like, oh, this is the thing I've been looking for. know, it was so easy to get inspired by it when you started to see the depth of the tradition. And then

what it produced in students. know, every day you see that happening and you think, this, could devote my life to this thing. This is, in a sense, it's even a, you see it's a, it's a kind of special ministry, you know? And, and so it was, it was just, it was, you know, I, I look at it as just one of the greatest blessings of my life, having Andrew Ellison hire me at Veritas and getting to be around these people. then, our friend, Andrew is now the VP of enrollment at the University of Dallas, one of our favorite partner colleges.

And Andrew has had more of an impact on, well, certainly the leaders at Great Hearts, but then, you know, those that have kind of gone off in the diaspora of now the movement. you know, he's such a clear thinker and he was so inspiring, especially for me in those early years. you know, so much of my understanding of classical education, of sound pedagogy, of what a school culture should look like is because of Andrew.

Jeremy (04:42.668)
Fantastic. Yeah, Ben, what about you? How did you discover this huge world of classical education? We walked around Annapolis yesterday and got a little bit of your childhood story and grew up in a very faithfully Catholic family and spent some time there. But how did you get connected to this bigger movement and kind of from the very beginning of your career out of college? Well, first of all, great to be with you guys. Soren and Jeremy really appreciate the chance to learn more about the classical learning test and the cause that you guys are a part of.

From 1992 to 1997, I was doing my undergraduate work at St. John's University in the College of St. Benedict in central Minnesota, a men's Benedictine institution with a monastery and a companion sister institution with a convent. And I was an English major in the honors program there. And that led to an internship with a startup company called the Education Industry Group.

I became a researcher and a writer there. We were writing cover stories, profiling people, writing about companies doing different things in different parts of the education industry. And that was really my entree into learning about education and getting involved in the space. And that led me down the path to join a charter school organization in Chicago after my wife and I got married and moved there. And now it's been 29 years.

I love the cause we're a part of. I believe that what we're doing is we're really bringing about the systemic reform of K-12 education. And like Eric, I just feel blessed to be a part of it. As many of you all know, I travel a lot. I go to a lot of conferences and I feel like everywhere I go, you guys are. Really the last few years, Arcadia has been a presence in this movement. I think what our two organizations have in common is that we serve the whole movement, right?

certain pockets of the movement. But Jeremy alluded to it, Arcadia group, Arcadia Education. Talk to us a little bit about your mission and what you do. Yeah, great. well, there are a couple of different ways to answer that question. But fundamentally, we're kind of born out of this conviction that the great strength of the classical ed movement, and really sort of more broadly, the Christian ed reform movement, the Catholic ed movement, is

Jeremy (07:08.398)
It's great strength is a mission and vision. you speak to the leaders in the movement and they are so eloquent to of discussing the, what we might say, the platonic form, the being that they want to bring into the classroom. And because of that, there's, I think, been a lot of success in the growth of the movement. people are, like I was, many years ago, to this vision.

right, of what could be possible both within the classroom, within a larger school context. What its weaknesses are, because everything has weaknesses, what its weaknesses are really are on the business side. So we think about business acumen and operational discipline. And this was true of me. I you know, my evolution through the years of sort of working with a great team of helping to build great hearts into what it is today.

You know, we went through these kind of different epics and I think we're seeing the movement go through those epics as well where, you you have the necessary condition of having a clear sense of what are the ends of education that you want to bring into being. You have to know that. again, the great strength of the Classical Ed Movement is it has a deep anthropology and a deep teleology. And it speaks, you know, in terms that are...

Well, they're eternal terms. in that, I think that's one of the great advantages that it has against the progressive and sort of the counter movement that doesn't have really any deep thinking about what the human person is or what the ends of education should be other than maybe the marketplace or something like that. And they're not even good at doing that. But I think as we look at what the movement needs today,

in order to really become the transformative reform movement that I think it ought to be, it needs more operational discipline and business acumen. And so when we were looking around at the firms that support classical traditionalist, back to basic schools, Christian schools, Catholic schools and the like, there's like an embarrassment of riches when it comes to firms helping you with the philosophy of education, with curriculum, pedagogical methods and those things.

Jeremy (09:28.494)
But your kind of Deloitte McKinsey Price Waterhouse work, not only was there not a lot of it for the K-12 movement, but the firms that did exist that were doing that work really all gone woke. I there was a deep progressive bend to them. So the cultural alignment that, you know, let's say a huge portion of the industry was looking for, you know, an affiliation with the deepest loves that were animating the movement. wasn't...

that along with these firms that were there to sort of get into the weeds of how do you build operational infrastructure? How do you think about bringing the business side of the house, the business ecosystem within the education framework? How do you bring that up to the level that the academic ecosystem is at? And so Arcadia is passionate about that, right? We're passionate about getting alongside leaders and helping them gain greater business acumen.

build the operational infrastructure and disciplines that they need in order to be sustainable, to avoid burnout, and to really become the fullness of the mission that they have in their hearts and in their minds. I think we were telling you guys last night, know, a kind of tagline for Arcadia is that we want you to love your operations as much as you love your mission. And that really guides us.

Yeah. I love that. I resonated and felt so grateful last night as we were having dinner just for the mission of Arcadia. And I think we experienced this so we're in it CLT where we realized about a year and a half ago, we wanted to become an EOS traction company. And we read a lot of the same books, Rock and Duel and Traction. But it meant the world that we had someone who cared about our mission, who's going to help us implement this. And we really lucked out. We ended up working with Brian Hodge, who's Jolie Hodge's husband over at Classical Academic Press, who's missionally aligned, but like

There's a ton of need and like this is what y'all are focused on. So what is this? The schools, other organizations in the movement, how does that work?

Jeremy (11:29.77)
So Jeremy, to that point, we talk about ourselves as elbow grease. And elbow grease is not a glamorous term. we mean it. Every institution at different stages in its development, from its initial planning and launch, through maturation, through phases of growth to sustainability, through growth to networks of schools, beyond that, through leadership succession.

Every institution experiences junctures where it needs outside expertise and capabilities to really progress forward. And that's what we specialize in doing is finding clients when they've reached those junctures, helping them to really identify what the pain points are, the limitations are that they have, and then helping them really move the ball forward. And a lot of times that requires us to really think flexibly and creatively about

how to bring the right capabilities, the right expertise to them at the right times. And so we think of that as applicable to a wide variety of different types of institutions, certainly classical schools and networks, certainly faith-based institutions. But also we do a lot of work and have a lot of background with charter schools, charter school management organizations. As we see this movement continue to grow, we expect that we'll be working with school boards to help them.

make fundamental change in public school districts across the country and with other types of entrepreneurial leaders who really are trying to bring the right anthropology, the right formation to our students and families. And I'll just add, think the playing off of what Ben said, think one of the things that we really have been committed to since the founding of Arcadia is to make sure that we're not just a firm that's like producing decks and saying, well, here's a roadmap, you know, best of luck.

But like Ben said, behind the scenes elbow grease, getting in there with the team and being an extension of that organization and the leadership team of that organization for a time to build things that will last and to help them accelerate. A lot of times those side of the desk projects that they're kind of sitting there going, we'd love to go and get these things done, but we're not going to go higher up people full time to do that. But we need people that really understand that these projects are part of

Jeremy (13:49.998)
buttressing and advancing the things that we love, the mission that we're pursuing. And so Arcadia really, really enjoys coming alongside leaders for a time and building that stuff, getting into the weeds, putting things down on paper and making sure that the organization is left actually in a very different structural place at the end of our engagement with them than when we started. And you alluded to that already a little bit, but for those...

of us listening here, who's your target audience? Right? Because we have folks listening from the homeschool world, Catholic, Christian, charter. You already mentioned charter, who's kind of your target audience from a client perspective? The way we talk about it and think about it is we want to knit together and animate that portion of K-12 education, those segments of K-12 education that really are trying to form

human beings in mind, body, and soul. And those are the institutions we want to work with. We really don't want to work with institutions that don't acknowledge the human soul, that aren't seeking to form a rising generation in a way that instills nobility, that instills a sense of purpose through life. And that needs to be the future of K-12 school choice in America.

Eric, you really blew my mind last night at dinner and it was like a four hour dinner and I felt like it was half an hour because I couldn't listen to you talk all night. I really believe this and these are conversations that we have internally and with friends all the time. What are the big obstacles to this movement really scaling, really scaling, really going mainstream? And I think most people would say having great teachers, great administrators who can go into these schools.

and faithfully pass on the tradition. Because not many receive this themselves. And you were making a case last time at dinner that maybe that's a myth, that maybe there isn't a talent shortage. I wonder if you can speak into that. Yeah, I think it is a myth. I think one of the things holding back our movement is the scarcity mindset. And I think it's debilitating for an individual. I think it's debilitating for organizations. I think it's debilitating for the larger movement.

Jeremy (16:07.978)
And I don't think it's based on reality. When it comes to, when we think about the schools that we're all hoping will thrive, if we really think about what are they going to market with? So let's just start there. Well, yeah, they're going to market fundamentally with a person. The promise is a person. And this is one thing the classical school movement I think needs to get clearer about. And I really appeal to the leaders in the movement to think about this.

some more and this is sort of born out of, you know, that oft quoted remark from John Senior in his idea of a school that the essence of a school is a faculty, right? And that paragraph has other things and it's sort of been brought into the essence of a school is a faculty of friends. We could talk about kind of the different meaning of all of that.

But the essence of a school is a faculty, which is to say that the essence of a school is not a curricula or a pedagogical method or a facility or a mission statement. Those things are very important and we should think deeply about those things and make sure that we get them right. But you can put all of those tools, which is what they are, in the hands of a bad person or an underdeveloped person and you will not fundamentally see

the activity that you need to see in order for the thing to be real, for it to be or to be realized, right? That in a sense, all knowledge of the real is an interpretation of action. And that action that we're looking for in classical schools is manifested through the decisions that the adults are making in the school every single day. And so you could actually not have the...

curriculum well designed and the mission statement could be poorly stated and all those things. But if you hire the right souls to be in front of those kids, you're closer to the ideal than maybe you even realize. And so the question is, well, I guess the fear is, well, are there enough people in America to serve all the classrooms that we want? And so what I had written an article for CERC recently was,

Jeremy (18:19.768)
really tackling this idea. it came from us, Ben and I and other team members being across the country talking to school leaders. We work a lot with classical schools and saying, well, there's a teacher shortage and people just don't want to teach anymore. And because of the constraints of cultural alignment that we need and those things, there isn't enough talent in America to even serve the scale of the market of classical education.

or Orthodox Christian education as it exists today. And so you think, gosh, it must be true. People are feeling these things and they're experiencing them. And then you start to dig into the numbers. You say, well, how true is it? And when you start to dig into the numbers, you find out, gosh, it seems a little strange that, and this is what I go through in the article, at least in the first part, it seems a little strange that we can't find enough people when

there are 180 million working age adults, which means I think we're, I can't remember the exact, it's like 0.00039 % of that we would need, even if we were to double the movement over the next 10 years. And then you look at how many college graduates are coming out. You look at how many current teachers there are in the larger education system. And so when you start to do the math, you think, well, it seems that there's more talent out there, even if you're taking small fractions of each one of those pools.

There's more talent out there than we realize. So the scarcity mindset is the country's much bigger, by the way. There's more people than I think we can really even wrap our head around. So you have that problem. Then you start to say, could there be another reason? Could it be self-inflicted? Are we really doing everything that we need to do to attract the best talent to us? And when you start asking schools what they're doing to attract people, what are the...

active things that they're engaged in in order to bring people. Most of them will tell you what they're posting. They're posting requisitions. And so they're active on LinkedIn and they're doing Red Balloon and they're doing other things and they're just not getting the applications that they want. And our contention, our Katie, we've been pushing this really hard is you're not doing anything then. That if you want to be compelling in the labor market, you have to do high touch.

Jeremy (20:44.782)
recruitment strategies, right? And so we start to lay out in that article, I mean, it's very surface level stuff, but we start to lay out some of the ways of thinking about this. We've just finished, we've been working with schools on it now, a recruitment and retention infrastructure assessment that is about, I have 65 questions or something, and it's giving schools line of sight on the substrat of logistical work in all of these key areas from core clarity,

Do we really understand why we have the positions we have, what success looks like for them? Do we have a compelling mission statement? Are we actually saying things in the marketplace that attracts them, both on the family side, but also on the labor market side? What are we doing when it comes to sourcing talent? Then what's the work that we've done to attract them after we've thought about the pools of talent that we're finding? How are we actually vetting that talent?

How are we discerning who we would let into our schools? How are we welcoming them and integrating them? How are we building support structures and review structures and how are we commending and removing? So you think about this whole ecosystem, right? The people ecosystem. Each, they're all connected to one another. And when you start to dig in with schools about, well, what are the things that you're doing in each one of these substratum activities? You find it's very little. They're doing very little. So we are losing by our own rules in these things. And so Arcadia is really passionate about

giving leaders line of sight on the areas that they could be effective in and yet are not at this moment. And we believe if we can start to build that discipline, you know, when it comes to attracting and retaining talent, that we'll find that we kind of demystify these market assumptions. And we really set up the classical school movement, the Christian school movement in particular to be the very

best when it comes to attracting great talent into their institutions and holding onto them, even with the constraints that no doubt exists. Right. I just love that term. is so powerful, the scarcity mindset, you know, because it's not, it's not easy to scale anything, but at the same time, and we're taking this tradition that is timeless and is absolute fire and we're taking it into an arena. That's very sleepy. Kids are bored out of their minds. You know, like we've got the thing.

Jeremy (23:05.774)
That's right. Yeah, I'm thinking about our friends at Valor in Texas and I feel like they would you explain they do that really really well they go out there and then we talked a little bit earlier about Kind of the shift in higher ed as well where for the longest time, know You had your director of admissions and it was very passive, right? They were just essentially their job was to process applications and to pick the right ones versus now they have whole recruitment teams

and marketing is under that, right? And they go out there. Can you speak to that a little bit and maybe give an example of, who does that really, really well? Yeah, there's such ample evidence to support what Eric just said, which is that claiming that talent is a primary constraint. It's just it's misled thinking. It's scarcity thinking. And if we want that evidence, we can look in two different places.

In the K-12 space, we can look at the growth of charter school management organizations that's occurred over the past 20 years. Great Hearts grew from a single school to 42 schools in that time frame. Success Academies in New York grew from a single school that now has 15 schools and is serving 15,000 students. Uncommon Schools, Achievement First, Green Dot Public Schools, all across the country we've seen

this remarkable growth of charter school management organizations that are really delivering achievement gap closing options to students and families in communities nationally. We all stand on the shoulders of the people that have gone before us. And we believe that our Christian classical leaders now have only to look to those organizations and the kind of growth that they've supported to find the evidence and the practices that they need.

to move forward and build their institutions. I was just at the Belmont Abbey College earlier this week, meeting with their team. They have an honors college that's grown to 140 students in an institution with a total of 1,800 students today. And one of the things we were talking with them about was that their president has essentially called for the honors college to grow.

Jeremy (25:16.706)
further from 140 students to 350 students, I think the president would love to see the Honors College reach 650 students over time. If that happens, and the makings are there for that, Belmont Abbey College will be delivering more and more of exactly the classically trained educators that we need to be going into our schools. And we need 500 institutions like that thinking and operating with that kind of growth mindset that we see at Belmont.

I think the other issue and maybe you can speak to that and what Arcadia can do to help school leaders with it, but I'm thinking of a school I'm not gonna say names but you know that they they did not have the scarcity model and they felt like wow we can we can open the school brand new classical charter and we're gonna open it as a K-10 because the demand is absolutely there which is rare right schools usually open as a K-6 or K-8

They opened as a K-10 and they were excited. And I think they opened with 800 students and they had to hire a lot of teachers. And I think the school now, a few years in, has fewer students than they originally started with. I think three quarters of their faculty left. They made the wrong hires, right? And we see that a lot and especially as it pertains to the unique cultures that we have at these schools. what advice do you have for schools, not just

go out there and recruit, but then also hire the right teachers and build culture with those teachers. Well, yeah, I mean, this is why senior was so spot on, know, so kind of going back to that. You have to if you don't understand again as a leader that you go to market with a person and that that's your promise to your customer, you're going to make a lot of mistakes. Right. So most of what schools should be focused on is creating the conditions where they can find the best talent.

develop them and hold on to them. Because you can test this. mean, it's certainly in a classical school world. If you want to prove that the essence of a school is effective, there are different ways to do it. But one way is, that actually, let's put it this way, that mom and dad are at your school fundamentally because they're seeking a better teacher for their kid. That's what they want. And most of them, by the way, they have no idea how you're making the sausage.

Jeremy (27:40.864)
Right? They don't act. They're not attracted to classical or the liberal tradition. They don't even know what those things necessarily are. But there's something in them that is deeply attracted to the promise of a great teacher loving their kids. And so if mom comes to you as a headmaster and says, well, Mrs. Smith isn't cutting it in the classroom, like your answer can't be to mom. Yeah, but we're doing phonics here. Yeah, but we study Aristotle. But yeah, but we do the Socratic method. Mom's gonna be like,

I don't care about any of those things. I need Mrs. Smith to be top notch. And if Mrs. Smith isn't, it doesn't matter all the tools that you have in your toolbox. Right? so one of the reasons why you might not want to open K10 is if you haven't built the recruitment and retention infrastructure requisite to ensure that you fulfill your promise to the marketplace. And, and so what is the, what the investments that you're making as an institution?

to ensure that you are consistently delivering on that promise. It's not rocket science, everything we talked about last night, but it's hard work and it doesn't happen by accident and it doesn't happen because you have a great stump speech and it doesn't happen because you have a great reading list. Those are all good, you should have those things. But if you're not thinking in a disciplined and consistent matter about your logistical and operational frameworks,

to solve for the people that you need in those classrooms. You will over time fail. The market will know. I remember my dad said once that we were, this is early on in my career at Great Hearts and I was reflecting with him on some talent issues that we were having. was trying to understand what was going on as a nice person and all these things, but parents were fleeing.

we weren't seen the role of their were in other places might remember my dad's in eric the market always knows before you do it will always know because mom and dad care more about the product that you're putting in front of their kids than you can and the moment that they start to see that you are not delivering on that promise they will go find that promise somewhere else for their kids because those kids need more to them than they do to you so the market will always know before you do

Jeremy (30:04.286)
That's beautiful. I'm thinking now that during our long dinner conversation, the thing we didn't talk about enough or maybe at all is books. We always talk about books on the Anchor podcast, the books that have shaped us. And again, Sora and I were just talking about this great quote you had, that we ought to love some of these masters of business as much as maybe Aristotle and Plato, the giants of the tradition. But I maybe want to hear a recommendation from each, something within the tradition. And then also when you think about operational excellence.

the books that have been influential for you. You want to go? It's so hard to, it's so hard to, especially from the tradition, Jeremy, it's so hard to pick just one. mean, so we are huge on Lencioni at Arcadia and a lot of that's just personal too. So.

So when, when great hearts was growing, you know, we were going through these kinds of different epics, you know, that kind of a scrappy startup phase to starting to actually become a large institution. You know, there were pain points along that way. And there was a particular time when we were growing extremely fast and we realized that we couldn't, um, uh, we couldn't just bump into one another in the hallways and tree off stuff. You know, we needed to actually grow up and, and, and start to learn how to run the business.

and started through Lencioni to understand that pouring into management theory wasn't some sort of crude exercise, right? It wasn't sort of reducing the purity of our cause. It was a way of actually leaning further into it so that by getting better at operations, getting better at team health, getting better at thinking about the way that we were managing the company was a way of loving one another.

and loving those people that we had brought into the organization. I don't think we ever did it perfectly. think operations is really hard. I think you ever get it exactly right. I mean, we're complicated individuals and broken, but that idea came essentially from that time is that, hey, we love Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Maybe we should start to also love Drucker, Collins, and Lencioni. And so we started to do that.

Jeremy (32:20.538)
I think it was transformative for us. So I would say, you know, what did Whitehead have that great quote that all the philosophy is a footnote to Plato. You know, I think all the management theory is a footnote to Drucker and maybe Lencioni is his Aristotle, you know. And so I think what the table group is doing is some of the most important work for just organizations in general.

I think that there's a particular genius that it unlocks for school leaders and teams that we've seen firsthand. one of the most exciting things that we do is taking people through the five dysfunctions of a team and the working genius stuff and the six critical questions and depth by meeting and now the motive. So it's just great stuff. I've got this question for you that I do want to hear from

from them, but, and I don't know, I have some sense of this, but Drucker and Lanzione, are they students of the tradition themselves? Yes. for sure. mean, Drucker, no doubt. You know, I really encourage people to go back and to read Drucker's essays. And there's some great, there's some great old videos of Peter Drucker that are actually, some of them are quite amusing. He was a bit of a character.

But in both of them, both Drucker and Lencioni, you see an anthropology underneath everything, and especially in Lencioni. Lencioni's worldview is there, you know, within his body of work. And so when you start to implement it with teams, especially within Christian school environments, Catholic school environments, or otherwise sort of traditionalist environments, you see that the worldviews map over

very brilliantly and that the management theory reinforces the value system and that it really draws out some of the deeper truths that are animating our best schools in the country. But it's giving them a structure by which they can think about the operational implications of the desires of their heart, right? And making that connection between trying to form souls

Jeremy (34:41.966)
and then thinking deeply about, how are we interacting with one another as the adults in the institution to make that possible? We say at Arcadia all the time that the culture of any school is always downstream of the adult culture in that school. And the adult culture is always downstream of its leadership culture. And Lencioni is brilliant on this. His four disciplines of a healthy organization, the first one is you have to build a cohesive leadership team. And how do you do that matters. It doesn't happen by accident. But that

That insight that Lencioni had is born out of an anthropology and a metaphysics. And when you start to hear more about Pat, I think he's a daily master and other, he has commitments in his life that have informed the way he thinks about how organizations should arrange themselves and work together. And when you really start to get into it, you see the genius of

There's two books that I would recommend. One of them we talked about at dinner last night, the book Atlas Shrugged by Anne Rand. And in fact, if you remember at the end of the night, Soren commissioned us to read Atlas Shrugged overnight. But did you? Well, I know the book very well and I actually was really impacted by Anne Rand's work when I was a young professional. And I think in this cultural moment that our country's in right now,

remembering the power of free enterprise, remembering that we're blessed to be a part of a democracy that supports free enterprise. Understanding that entrepreneurship, building successful companies, having lasting impact through the goods and services of those companies and what they're bringing to our economy. I think that's really powerful. And I think we've been at risk of forgetting that for the past four years or more.

So Atlas Shrug maybe is an important read for all of us right now. The other book that I would point I'm inspired. got literally like 500 pages in. It's a big book and I never finished it. But I feel like I got a lot of it. Noah Tyler, he got to go finish it. And The Fountainhead and there are others. But anyway, the other book that I would point to is called The End of Average by Todd Rose, who I think it's a compelling book.

Jeremy (36:58.826)
And the reason I think it's a compelling book is because of what Eric said earlier about education. One of the most important things that great schools and great teachers do is they make every child feel known and loved and personally formed. No child feels normal or average. at the same time, if you look at the paradigm of our current public school systems, so often our public schools are

talking about children as either average or as subpar. They're categorizing them, they're sorting them based on perceived or known disabilities. We're looking at young boys and the way that they have a tendency to disengage in the classroom. And we're looking for reasons not to value our children, to know and love and form them. And that's the biggest change that I think classical Christian education can bring to our.

country right now. It's really ending the average. Awesome. I'm so excited about the work and the future of Arcadia. You're doing wonderful things. Huge, huge, huge contributions already to the movement. think the next several years, it's going to be so much more of that as well. And I want to give a special shout out as we're thinking about operational excellence to our whole team, Michelle Hawkinson, Noah Tyler, Kimberly Farley, Katie Prefontaine, Brian Hodge.

I think everybody who contributes to me, because I thought about it so much and it makes me value the work that Arcadia is doing so much. So thank you for that. Again, we're here with Soren Schwab, Eric Twist, and Ben Lindquist. Thank you all, and keep up the amazing work. Thanks for having us. Thanks, Jeremy.