AI as an Educational Threat and Opportunity | Robert Garrow

On this episode of Anchored, Soren is joined by Robert Garrow, founding principal of Golden View Classical Academy in Golden, Colorado. They discuss the push back Golden View has faced for teaching The Bible in a literary and historical context as a classical charter school, and the state of school choice in Colorado. They also talk about the challenges of recruiting, training, and retaining teachers who have a classical orientation and technical proficiency, as well as some of the strategies they’ve used to succeed in these areas. They conclude by discussing the challenges and opportunities presented by the growth of AI.  

Transcript

Soren Schwab - CLT (00:00.952)
Welcome back to the Anchored Podcast, the official podcast of the Classic Learning Test. My name is Soren Schwab, VP of Partnerships here at CLT, and today we're joined by Dr. Robert Garrow. Dr. Garrow is the founding principal of Golden View Classical Academy in Golden, Colorado. He previously served as assistant headmaster at Founders Classical Academy of Leander in Texas. Before that, he was a Political Theory Institute Fellow at American University in Washington, DC, an instructor in American politics aboard the USS George Washington,

and an adjunct faculty at Pitzer College and California State University at San Bernardino. He holds a PhD in politics from Claremont Graduate University and a BA in political science and government from the University of Colorado Boulder, where he graduated summa cum laude. His primary academic interests include classical political philosophy, American political thought, classical education, and school choice. And we're so honored to have him on the podcast today. Dr. Guerra, welcome.

Robert Garrow (00:58.439)
Yeah, thank you, Soren. It's good to be here.

Soren Schwab - CLT (01:00.234)
Absolutely. Well, we always start the Anchor podcast by talking about our guests own educational background and journey. So talk to us a little bit about your own kind of K-12 experience to go to public school, private school. What was it like?

Robert Garrow (01:11.921)
Yeah, so I went to Mark Twain Elementary in Littleton, Colorado, standard public school. Don't really have many memories about it. I remember enjoying it generally, but the most important thing was recess as always. I went to high school at Puder High School in Fort Collins and they had an IB program there. And I really liked that. They took time to help you learn how to speak in seminar, how to write in particular. There was an extended essay that kind of worked on that skill.

And then I actually studied abroad for a year in France, did that, and then CU Boulder for a bachelor's. Bordeaux. Yeah, yeah, it was lovely.

Soren Schwab - CLT (01:48.958)
Where did you study in France? In Bordeaux. And of course you were old enough to have a Bordeaux in Bordeaux at that point probably.

Robert Garrow (01:58.235)
Yeah, well, you know, it's a little bit different culturally there. But what was great is I had actually already graduated from high school. And so you have to go there and do high school. But I'd really graduated. So I didn't really have to do the schoolwork, which was lovely at first. And then I realized, man, I could really get a lot out of this and took some fun classes, started learning Spanish and Chinese for fun. And it was really the first time that my education was my choice. I really felt like it was my choice and loved it. So yes, enjoyed French culture as well.

Soren Schwab - CLT (02:01.228)
Right. Right.

Soren Schwab - CLT (02:06.546)
I see.

Soren Schwab - CLT (02:13.646)
Yeah.

Soren Schwab - CLT (02:28.504)
So you went on to undergraduate and of course graduate, but not in education. So I mentioned the bio political thought, political philosophy, political science. When were you first exposed to, well, one maybe interest in K-12 education and then classical education in particular.

Robert Garrow (02:47.859)
So my background is primarily political philosophy and classical education is largely what political philosophy is concerned with or some kind of education. So I didn't know it, but reading Plato's laws in particular with one of my professors revealed how seriously you have to take education if you're going to have a good regime and studying political philosophy, I was thinking about the regime at the time. So I was never really interested in the K-12 world. tried...

the postdoc route for a couple years. It went well as long as it went. But then, you know, my wife and I had our daughter and we're thinking, you know, we don't wanna move year over year across the country to make this work. And serendipitously, I got a call from Katie Arn at the time, now Katie O'Toole. She was starting a school in Texas. She's a friend of mine from graduate school, looking for an assistant principal. And I said, that sounds really stable. Okay, what is this thing?

Soren Schwab - CLT (03:21.848)
You

Robert Garrow (03:41.843)
Um, and then I did a little bit of research on, Hillsdale, uh, at that time it was called BCSI and then Ridgeview classical up in Fort Collins in Colorado to see what is this. And what I found is this is basically what I was studying practically at work. And I was like, let's, let's jump in. So I was the assistant principal down there for a year and that was really how I got into it.

Soren Schwab - CLT (04:03.736)
Wow, yeah, that's a jump, right, from the kind of postdoc and then into K-12 and then directly into K-12 leadership at a brand new school. And that was, think, one of the first PCSI schools by...

Robert Garrow (04:17.041)
Let's see, I forget what number Goldenview was and there were a handful that were part of the network that are no longer part of it. So I forget the exact number, but we were pretty early in the scheme of things. Founders in Leander, that was great. They were one of the early ones with RES down in Texas, a big education network. And then Goldenview, just an independent charter school in Colorado. My wife and I had our second child on the way and we're both from Colorado. So we said, let's go back home. So I actually applied.

Soren Schwab - CLT (04:26.69)
Yeah. Yeah.

Soren Schwab - CLT (04:31.372)
Mm-hmm.

Robert Garrow (04:43.507)
to work at Goldenview as the ninth grade literature and history teacher, had a great interview and they said, hey, why don't you, we'd love to have you, but we'd prefer you as a principal. So did that and so I went.

Soren Schwab - CLT (04:47.136)
interesting.

Soren Schwab - CLT (04:52.418)
Well, I wonder that conversation with your wife when you know you're going into an interview for ninth grade. So here's what happened.

Robert Garrow (04:58.003)
So a little bit different. But it was great. mean, the founding board was lovely, really good, really good people putting, you know, where we are in Jefferson County, Colorado is particularly hostile to charter schools or could be at the time was and then really hostile to a Hillsdale charter school. So the board really had a lot of courage to pull this off and families jumped in and it was just really, I'm really grateful to be a part of it.

Soren Schwab - CLT (05:20.674)
Yeah, I And I told you kind of pre-recording just grateful to you, to the board, to the bold leadership, because some listeners might know I was in Colorado Springs for many, years. And you're right. mean, it is hostile. It's challenging. And there are a lot of external forces that don't want your school to exist or want to change your school and sometimes even internal. So it requires a lot. Maybe for our listeners who might not be as familiar with...

keep on hearing this charter school. Later on, we're going to talk school choice. What makes a charter school? How are charter schools unique? And then how is a classical charter school different from another traditional charter school?

Robert Garrow (06:02.875)
Yeah, so a charter school is going to be dependent on state law. So whatever state you're in will have some kind of law that says how charter schools can be authorized. It's a public school that's given a grant to exist. And they have two primary freedoms. One is who to hire. And that's not true in every state. Sometimes you do have to have licensed teachers in Colorado. don't. And then you get some discretion over your curriculum. So with those two primary freedoms, you're able to create your school. So Colorado has a pretty friendly charter law.

that Bob Schaeffer, he's the executive director up at Liberty Common Schools. He was instrumental in bringing about in the early 90s and that's on the books. So, you know, I would say that the charter school world in Colorado is a little bit more aggressive or challenging these days, but the law as it exists is pretty friendly. So charter school is that it offers you flexibility in who to hire, what curriculum to have. We are a public school though, so that there's no tuition charged and everything is by a lottery.

So anybody can put their name in and it's a randomized lottery and then you get a seat. So it's open to anybody to come.

Soren Schwab - CLT (07:07.15)
And so, you know, maybe our listeners can Google some charter schools in Colorado and they might find one that has a certain curriculum and they might not receive the kind of hostile reception that you're receiving. And so what is it about Goldenview and especially the classical charter schools, one that I think makes you such a strong school, but maybe also why, you know, whether it's public school districts or some other forces.

might not want you to succeed.

Robert Garrow (07:40.179)
So early on and I think this is abated over time but early on it was the affiliation with Hillsdale Hillsdale is a Christian school and is creating a liberal arts and sciences curriculum and the assumption was if you're affiliated with Hillsdale in any way that de facto makes you Christian so they would accuse us of this which is just a violation of the Constitution which we take very seriously And we said no, that's not at all what a liberal arts and sciences curriculum is We also don't think it's illegitimate to talk about the Bible in school. That doesn't make you

Christian, that doesn't make you particularly religious. So we leaned into that early on. We said, yep, absolutely. We love Hillsdale. We're going to send our students there. We're going to get teachers from there. And that really built the school from the beginning. A lot of energy, a lot of enthusiasm. Over time, that's kind of gone away. I did receive a letter from an advocacy, one of the best letters I've ever received from a religious freedom advocacy group in DC last year saying we need to cease and desist teaching religion in ninth grade.

I responded on Constitution Day with some arguments why it's not unreasonable to actually teach about religion in a literature or history context. And so that was a lot of fun. Now, I would say the biggest or the most, the biggest reason why a school like ours would be perceived as hostile is because we don't really like the district. And we don't really, it's not that we don't like the people at the district. We just don't like districts as such.

Soren Schwab - CLT (08:41.166)
Ha

Robert Garrow (09:04.797)
The whole premise of a bureaucracy that assumes to know what's best for any given school is anathema. And so anytime there's something asked of us, we say, you really need that? And that gets annoying to people over time. But that is how we have maintained our independence. We love our authorizer now, CSI at the state level. And that built us friends at the Colorado League of Charter Schools and then in other advocacy groups that, you know, ultimately I think we're in a really stable place and kind of those controversies might have gone away.

Soren Schwab - CLT (09:35.182)
Yeah, ultimately you're just a really good school serving families and they seem they all seem really really happy. Talk to us a little bit about. Right.

Robert Garrow (09:41.069)
We say that we'll have parents like it here. Can we just stop with that? Because they like it here and they're sending their kids here. So let's be grateful for that and move forward.

Soren Schwab - CLT (09:49.442)
I assume you have a wait list.

Robert Garrow (09:51.379)
Yeah, we do. And we recycle it every year. So we just ran our lottery, just about 500 students applied. We will have 60 ish 5050 to 60 spots available in kindergarten. And then in first grade through sixth grade, there'll be something like four seats available. So it's pretty hard to get in when in the younger grades. And then it opens up a little bit in high school.

Soren Schwab - CLT (10:07.938)
Yeah.

Talk to me a little bit about kind of the key distinctives of Goldenview, but of a classical charter school in particular. What are some of the, maybe in the elementary, middle, high school, what are some of the kind of the key features that you would say makes your school different from maybe the charter school down the road?

Robert Garrow (10:29.627)
Yeah, it's a good question because schools will say the same things and mean completely different things. know, school will say, well, we worry about, we think about character. So, well, we think about it completely differently. So, main distinct is, I would say, explicit phonics in the younger grades. That's becoming, thankfully, more common across public schools.

Soren Schwab - CLT (10:50.126)
call it the science of reading now, but because whatever they call it, as long as they get kids to read, right.

Robert Garrow (10:51.963)
Yeah, yeah, you know, and

Absolutely, and there really is a legitimate, you know, science background on the process of it. You would say some curricular things like the thesis, senior thesis, a defense and questioning. You would say the expectation in the hallways is that students are respectful of one another and teachers, and that's kind of in the air. And when students are not, there's consequences for it. The core thing, and this is something we're always striving to do better, is how can students speak well with one another in class?

So there's a model that's really didactic. A teacher is presenting information, students are writing it down. And there really is a place for that. But there's more of a place for students to be able to speak intelligently about the things they're learning. So a seminar will be a core feature of a classical school in Golden View. We're really pushing for that. Questioning sequence and teaching through questions or Socratic questioning will be kind of part and parcel of what a teacher does every day. And that's even down to the youngest grades. So that's...

is a very humane approach to teaching. I think you could really contrast it with a technological delivery approach, where there's a live human actually interacting with you and asking you to interact with each other in some kind of intelligent and upward-aiming way. We also teach Latin, so that's a big one. And Greek, that's pretty unique about Goldenberg. We have a good Greek program and we're also doing French, but Greek is a fun one.

Soren Schwab - CLT (12:11.534)
I'll see you then.

Soren Schwab - CLT (12:19.15)
Well, let me pick your brain a little bit on that. And I was recently talking to some folks who gave a little presentation on the modern kind of renewal movement, classical recovery, and kind of our classical Christian friends dating back to 1780s, kind of in the great books, University of Chicago, John Senior. And so a lot of these schools,

started and then it almost seems like there's like different generations of these classical Christian schools now and maybe the first generation really want to make sure they get that right and then maybe the second generation maybe focused a bit more on culture or maybe a bit more on certain pedagogical and now the third generation maybe focus more on aesthetics and beauty. I'm wondering because the classical charter school movement is fairly recent and I think

that sometimes the perception is that classical charter schools care a lot about rigor, rigor, rigor, rigor, and that it's direct instruction and the kids are sitting there well-behaved and they don't speak, they just listen and they produce. What you're just describing is very different. Is that unique to Goldenview or do you think that as this movement is growing and just we have a lot more years under our belt that there is going to be kind of a development and potentially a change kind of in

what's happening in the classroom.

Robert Garrow (13:48.071)
Yeah, so I, you know, I don't think I can speak very, very well about other schools. What I can say is the kind of chatter that I hear. so rigor becomes content rich and we have a content rich curriculum, but there's always a push then to make it more and more rich. And the richer you make it, the more a teacher is actually the focal point of attention as it ought to be. But you can push so far in that direction where students aren't actually thinking about it. They're just kind of scribing it. And unless they're pause, consider and discuss, then

Soren Schwab - CLT (13:52.962)
Sure.

Soren Schwab - CLT (13:59.256)
Mm-hmm.

Robert Garrow (14:17.309)
they're not actually learning the thing. You learn what you think about and you don't think about it when you're just listening and writing down. So it's not to say we need to get away from a teacher-led instruction. It's we need to think seriously about things like working memory and the ability of students to attend to things live. So I don't know if other schools, I've had some conversations with other principals and they seem to be pushing in this direction as well, trying to get students to engage on their own more genuinely.

but the danger there is to get away from content. And so there's this, you know, this scale you got to make sure that you're teaching really high level stuff.

Soren Schwab - CLT (14:48.056)
That's right.

Soren Schwab - CLT (14:53.006)
Yeah. We talked a lot of headmasters, right? A lot of schools kind of in our work at CLT and we hear a lot about what's perceived as a teacher shortage, a school leader shortage. It seems like no matter where I go, know, there's schools with, you know, with weightless schools are growing. can't find teachers or qualified teachers or school leaders. I'm wondering kind of your thoughts on is that true?

Is that kind of your experience? the supply not keeping up with the demand? And maybe can you speak to how it pertains to Goldenview, how you hire teachers, develop teachers and leaders? yeah, if there's any advice that you can share with other school leaders.

Robert Garrow (15:41.105)
Yeah, we've had a, that's a really good question. I do think there's a shortage and there's a shortage of like a really good mix of technical proficiency and classical orientation. And a classical orientation means the aim of your class is, you could say twofold. One, to provoke the kind of wonder that's worthy of the highest kind of study. And that's kind of vaguely stated, but you mean somebody, you want somebody who's struck by, interested in and falls in love with things that are better than

other things. Students should leave the school actually liking Shakespeare and being interested in and wondrous about. The other one is you want to create students who will be citizens who live up to the doctrine of natural rights. And that is that's not just a propositional framework. That's a manner of approaching your own self-improvement and your own not even self-preservation but your character in a manner that's far more noble than I think is is widely considered.

So it's really hard to find teachers who have that orientation and technical proficiency. So for us in the past, I wanna say three, four years, that's pushed really aggressively towards teacher coaching. And that means a more frequent cycle of observation feedback with deans who are focused on that, on the assumption that if you pick somebody with a good orientation and one of those two major orientations, or they just love students,

you can work on the technical proficiency and slowly build them up. But it is really hard to find people who are qualified on both dimensions there, I think. In terms of school leaders, I don't know. I do know that a lot of times teachers turn into administrators, but that's not the same job. They are very different. And the need to be decisive, but also humble and patient is...

you it's a quality of heart, of character that the position demands and builds. Well, it's different than the pressures of a teacher. And you're not doing the same thing. You know, as an administrator, you don't have as live of a connection with what makes classical education lovely. You know, if you're a teacher, every single day you show up and you have students you're able to speak with and two, about lovely things. As an administrator, that's not really the case. And so you have to find, you have to be okay with kind of...

Robert Garrow (18:04.901)
stepping back a little bit and thinking about it differently. But yeah, it's a bigger movement than the supply right now, I think, on both sides.

Soren Schwab - CLT (18:13.422)
You mentioned Hillsdale and their K-12 department. I'm of course at Hillsdale graduate and I went to the classical job fair and that's how I got my job. And I know that Goldenview attends every year is trying to recruit teachers, but again, supply and demand, right? can't all, all schools can't hire Hillsdale graduates. Are there some other institutions of higher education that you can point to that in the past you've found?

Robert Garrow (18:35.174)
Exactly.

Soren Schwab - CLT (18:42.806)
I success. know University of Dallas. You got to keep it. Yeah. there a best known secret?

Robert Garrow (18:44.369)
Hey, man, if I tell you I'd have to kill you, I got to keep that stuff secret. so Dallas has good grads. St. John's has good grads. But there's also some reasonably good

schools across the country that have education departments. So Colorado Christian University, Regis University in Colorado, both of those are really good. We find teachers really from all over the place. So our assumption now is our job is to coach you. We cannot assume on the front end that you're able to do this. We're going to work really hard with the curriculum we have, the coaching structure we have to get you up to speed. It takes a couple years. It takes three years, I think, to really see what you're able to do.

Soren Schwab - CLT (19:27.308)
Yeah, it's an investment. Yeah, it's a, it's a big investment, but they have the fundamentally aligned anthropology and they have the willingness to be coachable. And that's obviously, that's obviously a big one. and so, what's kind of your, last few years, do you have, you have big, teacher turnover or, or are you doing some things that you feel like we keep retention high?

Robert Garrow (19:34.109)
Yeah.

Robert Garrow (19:50.321)
Yeah, there's so many things that go into teacher retention. First of all, Colorado is a pretty expensive place to live and teacher salaries aren't very high. So you have that as a complicating factor. You have as a complicating factor, you hire a lot of young people who would like to start families and maybe move back home to where they're from. So that means that some things might be short lived. But so year to year we'll have a different rate of turnover, but we are compared to the Colorado average pretty low, which we're happy about.

We've taken some steps to build some teacher support on the bonus side. So there actually is some, know, the longer you stay at Goldenview, we have a private 501c3 that supports the school in that way. That's been really successful. But there has to be some upward aim for the teacher. Like you have to feel like in your classroom, you're getting better teaching your students. And so the better your coaching is and the more teachers feel like they're more effective, the funner it is to do the work.

And so that is the intrinsic good of the coaching, the coaching model. So I think that's worked. I would say in our upper school, we have really low turnover, grammar school a little bit higher, and a reasonable amount of teacher autonomy. So if you're gonna be a school like Goldenview, we are a mission-driven school. And that means there's some constraints and there's some things that are out of bounds. But within those bounds, teachers do have a lot of discretion about their manner of approach or.

The questions they're going to be asking about their books and how they engage with it. And that professional freedom, think, is something teachers really value.

Soren Schwab - CLT (21:23.788)
Yeah, certainly. You talked earlier a little bit, Bob Schaefer, and kind some of the charter school laws, which for a blue state that Colorado now certainly is, seems rare. Charter school laws seem to be more thriving in other states. What is kind of the state of school choice in Colorado? Obviously, we had some major breakthroughs in Arizona, in Florida. There's some school choice legislation in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas.

there hope for Colorado when it comes to certain school choice legislation or?

Robert Garrow (21:58.375)
Yeah, so it's a very complicated landscape. would say for the foreseeable future, which is probably a decade or more, pro-charter advocates need to be on a pretty defensive posture. And that means aggressively maintaining your prerogatives. So we are part of an advocacy group called the Education Alliance for Colorado. So we have people at the Capitol letting us know what kind of bills are being dropped, communicating with families about those, not directly lobbying, but more informational.

because every single term, every January or February, there will be a bill dropped that is aggressively anti-charter. it changes the way they're approved, changes the way they're reauthorized, changes their funding structure, all with the purpose of making them fewer and harder to sustain. And that is, I think, the fact of the matter. So we've had some success in all those fronts, but man, state politics is dirty. So like,

There were a couple of times that bill was dropped and we were in opposition to it. So they can have public comments. So they cancel the public comments. So everybody goes home. So then they drop the bill the next day. So there's no public comment. You're like, man, this is bonkers. But that's the kind of thing you got to be aware of. Right now, the governor, Governor Polis, is very pro-charter. And so we're looking at the governor's office as kind of the backstop for a runaway anti-charter legislature. When he's out of office, which is soon enough,

Soren Schwab - CLT (23:15.096)
Okay.

Robert Garrow (23:25.777)
it's gonna be more challenging.

Soren Schwab - CLT (23:27.534)
Yeah, yeah, it's fascinating. think Polis and Shapiro are probably two of the few Democratic governors who are actually very much in support of at least.

Robert Garrow (23:36.305)
Yeah, Polo signed a letter in support of Goldenview when we were founded. He started his own charter schools. He's very pro-choice.

Soren Schwab - CLT (23:42.232)
Yeah, yeah, that's fantastic. I know a very, very easy question to answer. What do you think are some of the biggest opportunities and the biggest challenges in kind of the classical education movement, classical charter school movement facing us the next few years?

Robert Garrow (23:57.954)
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, in some cases, opportunities and threats are the same thing. I would say there's two. I've had a lot of conversations with people that are trying to define a list of books or what is classical education. And I don't think that is as productive as people imagine. I think there's a rich and reasonable variety of interpretations. If you have a more pro-civic approach,

I wouldn't call that anti-classical if somebody has a more liberal arts kind of philosophical wisdom approach. I would say any mix of those is going to be reasonable because the primary emphasis, I don't think, should be classical education, but it should be the classical school. Parents don't choose classical education. They choose this place where their children, like it's a marginal choice. There's a school down the street. Do I want that school or this school? And this school does classical education a particular way.

And the bigger the movement gets, the more kind of definitive statements get, even the bigger, there are some really successful classical education networks in the country, the bigger those get and the more uniform they get, man, they start looking a lot like districts. And so I think an opportunity is to maintain the integrity of the independent school. As Tocqueville will talk about voluntary associations as the heart of a democratic life or successful and free democratic life.

I think that's key, maintaining your own independence as a school. The other one is AI. AI is both an opportunity and a threat. I'd say it's an opportunity in the sense that classical educators and proponents of classical education are best positioned to define the purposes of learning and AI stands in the way of that. So, we're looking at it right now. Should we even assign long form essays? Because...

it's just as easy to turn one in, hide your footprints and or fingerprints and get a grade. You know, I've kind of played with students. I've said, if you turn in an AI paper, do you care if I have AI graded and just give it back to you? And that way we can just have AI talk to itself through it and through us. So it's fun to play around with the idea, but the temptation is still powerful. You you have stuff to do as a 17 year old and you can cut that corner. And the only reason you would engage in the work is because the work is intrinsically worthwhile to you. So

Soren Schwab - CLT (26:05.291)
Yeah.

Robert Garrow (26:21.337)
We have not cracked that nut in terms of convincing all high schoolers that learning for its own sake is the purpose. But that I think is going to be a huge challenge for schools like ours.

Soren Schwab - CLT (26:32.482)
That's interesting. I mean, it's ultimately it's allowing us to be, you know, really think deeply about why are we doing this? What's the purpose of education? And if it's really just about, yeah, why? Yeah, why are you here?

Robert Garrow (26:45.241)
Why are you here? You know, yeah, like you don't have to be, you don't have to raise your hand. There's so many things you don't have to do unless you truly think this particular writing and thinking better because of it is worthwhile to you. And that's a hard sell sometimes, but students who buy it love it and they just forswear AI.

Soren Schwab - CLT (26:57.4)
Yeah.

Soren Schwab - CLT (27:06.446)
Yeah, I'm wondering, I I mean, that conversation is obviously being had in higher education as well. the idea of, well, if the purpose of education is just skills acquisition, then what's the purpose of college that you actually physically attend, right?

Robert Garrow (27:19.865)
Yeah, I've tried to, I've brought a couple of lessons to class. Let me just show you how it plays out if you do AI. So I'll get job applications when the cover letter is clearly AI. And you can tell because the language they use matches nothing in the resume. So the funnest thing I'll do there is have AI generate a refusal letter warning against the dangers of using AI in cover letters. So that's a lot of fun to do. It's a waste of life, but it's fun to do.

Soren Schwab - CLT (27:36.802)
Yeah.

Robert Garrow (27:48.881)
And then I say, okay, students, what would actually happen if this person had convinced me on the front end that they could think? They'd be in front of you teaching a class, unable to think. They would have gotten the job potentially, and then not been able to do the job. And like think about any realm of life with your friends or with your spouses. You want to be able to think live. If you're not able to engage with something, like you and I are having a conversation right now. If all of this were prepared because we had been working on AI in the past, this would be nothing, you know?

And so trying to bring those kind of real lessons that are a little bit more tangible. Yeah, we're working on that to get them kind of away from.

Soren Schwab - CLT (28:27.662)
I'm wondering though, has admin kind of used AI to schedule build? Like has that been utilized? Because I can see that being potentially being.

Robert Garrow (28:36.155)
Okay, yeah, there's a handful of things you're thinking, man, that would cut some corners in a good way. I like building schedules, so I kind of stick with that. I'm absolutely sure there's great uses of it. Students generating thoughts on the front end is the major danger. And even editing it, you know, they'll use it, they could use it to edit their work and recognize that it's good, but not thereby learn how to make something good on their own. And if it's taking that work out of it, then it's not good. But yeah, you know.

Soren Schwab - CLT (28:42.574)
But you do.

Robert Garrow (29:05.875)
I've used AI, for instance, and I know people, this might be verboten, to say, I have a student who's reading at a first grade level in my 10th grade moral and political philosophy class. What's a good question at a first grade level for this book? And that's helpful. And then I can use that to start a conversation. it's, yeah, it's, but for students, it's a huge danger.

Soren Schwab - CLT (29:29.368)
Right, yeah, I mean, it's a conversation about technology in the classroom. Is it the end? Is it a tool? it serve? Can it help? I'm glad we're having the conversations. And I'm glad that classical schools and classical school leaders are engaging, because I think there's sometimes, whether it's cultural issues or where we just kind of retrieve and we're just not going to have a conversation about it as if that means it's going away. It's not. And so we might as well proactively address it.

Robert Garrow (29:33.661)
Yeah. Yeah.

Robert Garrow (29:56.147)
Yeah, I agree.

Soren Schwab - CLT (29:57.368)
Well, this has been delightful, Robert. I do have one more question, which is my favorite and usually the hardest to answer because you have to pick one book or one text that you can point to that has had kind of the biggest impact on your life and why.

Robert Garrow (30:14.909)
So I mean, think I'll give, yeah, I know what it is. The standard ones are all true. Genesis, Plato's Republic, the ethics, the laws, these are things to me that I continually return to. But there's one book that changed my life in a way that I hadn't expected. And that was Harry Jaffa's Crisis of a House Divided. And so he was a scholar out at Claremont. And what do I mean by that?

Soren Schwab - CLT (30:19.374)
You

Robert Garrow (30:42.743)
I went into college as a lot of 19 year olds do as a tepid Marxist. What does that mean? I like equality. People should be treated well, you know, that kind of lightly held and unseriously examined opinion. And I had a professor in college at CU Boulder named Vincent McGuire. And he said to the class, you got to read this book to understand civil war and natural rights. And I had never.

ever taken anything as seriously as this man had taken the doctrine of natural rights. And the stakes finally were clear to me, that if you don't have a regime committed to this way of life, you have the equivalent of slavery. Even if you're not there yet, you're on your way there. And so that kind of hit me and changed the trajectory of my education. Now, ultimately, I don't return to that one as much as I do Genesis or The Republic, but for me, that was a transformative book.

Soren Schwab - CLT (31:37.742)
Yeah, I mean, talk about trajectory and your pursuits after that and where they landed you fascinating. Can you repeat the name, the title of the?

Robert Garrow (31:48.615)
Yeah, Crisis of a House Divided by Harry Jaffa.

Soren Schwab - CLT (31:53.882)
I can tell you we've done a lot of these anchored podcasts the first time this has come up. we'll put it on a list. Yeah, that's great.

Robert Garrow (31:57.533)
Yeah, it's pretty niche. it's funny, I actually applied to go study at Claremont Graduate University thinking he was teaching there, but he had already retired. So I got there and went, dang. But ended up having a phenomenal faculty down there in political philosophy.

Soren Schwab - CLT (32:11.982)
And of course there met Katie Arn, now Katie O'Toole, who then called you to get the assistant principal job. So it all worked out. It all worked out. Well, thank you so much, Robert, for this conversation. Again, we're here with Dr. Robert Garrow, founding principal of Goldenview Classical Academy at Golden, Colorado. Thank you, sir, for this wonderful conversation.

Robert Garrow (32:31.729)
Yeah, thank you, Soran. It was great.