Words of Wisdom: Interview
How I Discovered Classical Education
A CONVERSATION WITH ANDREW PUDEWA
By David Kern
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ndrew Pudewa was once described by a young Alaskan boy as the “ funny man with the wonderful words”— perhaps the greatest fan endorsement in world history because it’s both humorous and accurate. The founder and director of the award-winning Institute for Excellence in Writing, Pudewa is a much-loved public speaker best known for his ability to communicate complicated ideas with clarity, humor, and profundity all at once. For years he has been speaking about writing, music, spelling, memory, and much more, but, of late, he can also be found at various classical education events (including at CiRCE conferences). In a way this makes sense, because classical education brings together so many of his interests; but he was late in discovering classical education, as he explains here. This interview has been edited slightly for clarity. When did classical education first come on your radar? I read a book by John Taylor Gatto entitled, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Education. That was probably in 1991 or 1992. I found the book to be very freeing, as it helped me answer the question I had been asking myself at that time, “Why am I so stupid?” I had, at the age of 31, with a young and rapidly growing family, become acutely aware of how poorly educated I was, and in reading Gatto’s book, I realized it might not only be because I was lazy or unapt. Perhaps it was the type of education I had experienced. The only problem, however, was that Gatto didn’t really explain any alternatives other than his kind of eclectic teaching style . . . but that book planted the seed in my mind—there must be a better way. After a while, the Gatto thinking kind of went off my screen, as I was busy teaching violin and early childhood music classes. Then, for a couple years, I quit teaching entirely and started a different business in California, which—to make a long story short—I found dissatisfying and even depressing. However, my wife and I were always thinking and researching the best options for educating our children, a couple of whom were in a small Christian school at the time while a couple were being home schooled. I don’t recall exactly where it came from, but somehow a copy of Doug Wilson’s Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning made it into our hands, and that was the beginning of our pursuit of classical education. It provided the solution to the Gatto problem. We were excited.
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So excited, in fact, that we left California and moved to Moscow, Idaho so that one of our children could attend Logos School! So I got to know Doug Wilson, James Nance, Wes Callihan, and other “pioneers” in classical Christian education. We lived in Moscow three years, and that’s where I started IEW. In fact, the second TWSS (Teaching Writing: Structure & Style) seminar I ever taught was at Logos school for their teachers and a few homeschoolers in town. By the time we left Idaho in 1999, there were many other classical schools coming into existence around the country, and soon after that, Veritas Press began to provide classical education curriculum to the home education market. So in those days when you were first discovering Classical Education, what about it was most attractive to you? Was it initially just that it was a viable alternative to what you found in Gatto, or was there more to it? I would say that in the early days, things were a bit confusing. It was possible to go to a homeschool convention and hear three different talks on classical education and come out more confused than before, wondering if the presenters were actually talking about the same thing. Trying to sort it out and reading more books, I came