Givers, Doers, & Thinkers—A Podcast on Philanthropy and Civil Society · Jeremy Beer

Eric Cook & rescuing education from mediocrity

·41 min·2 clips

John Adams said education either teaches you how to make a living or how to live.

1. Givers, Doers, & Thinkers—A Podcast on Philanthropy and Civil Society speaks with Eric Cooke about the classical education movement and its growth. 2. Jeremy Beer hosts Eric Cooke, President and CEO of the Society for Classical Learning, which supports classical Christian education. 3. The episode asks what classical education is for, how it revived, and what infrastructure it needs to keep expanding. 4. Cooke says classical education is about “how to live,” not only “how to make a living,” and he ties that to wisdom and virtue. 5. He says the model centers on great books, classical languages, great texts, and questions of ultimate significance. 6. Cooke contrasts that approach with modern progressive education and calls the progressive model the outlier in Western history. 7. He traces the modern revival to schools that emerged in the early 1980s, including Logos Academy in Moscow, Idaho. 8. He also names Kennedy schools in Kansas as part of the early experiment, with schools learning the model separately. 9. Cooke says the movement reached about 150 classical Christian schools by 2010 and then grew exponentially after COVID. 10. He links growth to dissatisfaction with the mainstream school model, cultural conflict, and families wanting education aligned with their values. 11. Cooke says parents cared about SAT scores and college entrance, but many also wanted true, good, beautiful, wise, and virtuous formation. 12. He says classical schools have also drawn attention because students often stand out in church and Sunday school conversations. 13. Cooke describes an ecosystem of accreditation, teacher training, curriculum work, publications, and leadership coaching that had to be built around the schools. 14. He says the Society for Classical Learning created an accreditation program and tried to avoid the “paper pushing bureaucracy” of some accrediting bodies. 15. Cooke says the Generations campaign is a $60 million effort, with a $12 million first phase, to replicate thriving classical Christian schools. 16. He explains that universal ESAs and school choice could make that model more scalable, especially in states like Florida where families can direct $8,500 per child. 17. Cooke says the biggest constraint is not demand alone but teacher supply, because growth to 12 million students would require many more teachers. 18. He says AEI called teacher supply the “Achilles heel” of classical education and that schools must build internal training systems as well. 19. The conversation is practical and strategic, with Jeremy Beer pressing for numbers, infrastructure details, and how donor capital changes the market. 20. Listeners interested in school choice, classical Christian education, and nonprofit scaling would get the most from it. 21. Listeners looking for a short ideological debate or a non-education episode should probably skip it.

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