Raising Human Beings Not Human Doings with Joshua Pauling

March 31, 2026·48 min·3 clips

Davies describes two families in open conflict over a 0.1% grade variance for valedictorian—and asks what that says about what we think education is for.

1. BaseCamp Live host Davies Owens interviews Josh Pauling, headmaster of All Saints Classical Academy and vicar of All Saints Lutheran Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, on the 'tyranny of technique' in modern education. 2. Josh Pauling spent 13 years as a high school history teacher and cross-country and baseball coach in a Title I public school before transitioning to classical education in 2021; he holds degrees from Messiah College, Reformed Theological Seminary, Winthrop University, and Concordia Theological Seminary. 3. The episode's central argument is that Ellul's concept of 'technique'—the totality of methods rationally arrived at having absolute efficiency in every field of human activity—has silently infiltrated classical schools along with progressive ones, reducing students to numbers and teachers to technique-implementers. 4. Pauling explains that Ellul, a French legal scholar and theologian writing in the 1950s, was one of a broader tradition of technology critics including Lewis Mumford, Martin Heidegger, and Neil Postman; his book 'The Technological Society' (originally 'La Technique') is Pauling's primary reference. 5. He distinguishes the episode's concern from the smartphone debate: technique is more dangerous because it is invisible—efficiency and optimization simply feel like virtues, so they do not trigger the same resistance that screen-time discussions do. 6. Pauling argues that grading systems, rubrics, and numerical percentages can become barriers between teacher and student, replacing the humane relationship of trust that should define teaching with a mechanistic output measure. 7. He identifies the bell-driven school schedule as a 'nudge' in the Ellulian sense: a regimented, factory-like structure that trains students to respond to signals rather than to the natural flow of learning. 8. Tim Ferriss, whom Pauling calls one of the 'technique gurus' of the last decade, recently published something called 'The Self-Help Trap,' arguing for the wisdom of subtraction and being enough—which Pauling reads as an Ellul 'I told you so' moment. 9. Davies adds that the efficiency template leaches into parenting: the primary question parents ask is 'what grade did you get?' rather than 'what ideas are you actually learning?' 10. He shares the anecdote of a head of school friend whose two valedictorian candidates were separated by 0.1% in grade average—and whose parents were in open conflict over it—as the reductio ad absurdum of technique-dominated schooling. 11. All Saints Classical Academy, opening in Charlotte in fall 2026, is being deliberately designed to resist technique: grades K-2 will run from 9am to 1pm, not a full day, to allow rest and family time. 12. The school will replace bells with songs: when it is time to transition, a teacher goes into the hallway and sings a hymn or folk song; students hear it and join, then know to move on. 13. Younger students will be evaluated through oral narration and dictation rather than numerical grades; Pauling argues narration is a 'very elegant' technique because it simultaneously assesses comprehension, writing, grammar, and rhetoric. 14. Each class period will open and close with a liturgy—a minute of silence and prayer—designed to encourage students to slow down, ponder, and reflect rather than pivot immediately to the next task. 15. Pauling plans to use hourglasses alongside clocks for certain activities, as a way of marking time in a slower, more analog mode. 16. On digital technology, Pauling says the school will be 'tech minimal': he taught without smartphones long before it was common practice, collected phones in public school, and cites Jared Horvath's recent book 'Digital Delusions' as evidence that the data on educational technology is now confirming what teachers intuitively knew. 17. He notes that more schools are returning to blue-book essay exams in response to AI writing concerns—a way of reintroducing direct, humane assessment that cannot be easily automated. 18. Pauling mentions the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod's historical model in which to start a church you had to start a school; Davies connects this to the broader classical Christian movement's convergence of church, school, and family formation. 19. Classical educators, homeschool parents questioning whether they are unconsciously importing technique thinking into their home evaluations of school success, and school leaders interested in founding models will find this episode most directly relevant. 20. Listeners seeking data on student outcomes from technique-minimal schools, or who want specific curriculum recommendations, will not find those here.

As heard by us

A clear, grounded conversation about education, formation, and the pressure to perform.

Joshua Pauling's conversation on Basecamp Live keeps the focus on what education is for once grades and metrics start steering the discussion. It asks a plain question: are schools helping form people, or just training students to score well?

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Why you'd press play

If school feels like a scoreboard, this conversation resets the frame.

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