by Donald Devine
Would you be interested in a book on reforming education by a man who created flourishing grade, middle, and high school charter schools, all with waiting lists today, found them too mired in government bureaucracy and so started 13 even more successful purely private campuses in 2007 — and who is willing to share his secrets of success with you?
In hiring young people for his large private business, Bob Luddy of Raleigh, North Carolina, ran head-long into the problem shared by other employers — namely, that many potential employees with a public-school education did not have the elemental skills required to hold jobs, some unable to understand basic logic or even to read.
As Luddy says in his new book The Thales Way:
I watched so many struggle due to lack of skill, discipline, knowledge, or motivation. Some of our technicians could not understand basic fractions, while others could not read well. At the professional level, they lacked both the rigor and the ability to handle new challenges, which require adaptability and a continuous learning curve.
Unlike most of us, he decided to do something about it.
Luddy (pictured above) first brought together others in his state who were concerned about education. In 1996, he and they had helped North Carolina adopt “charter schools” that were still to be regulated by the state but were freed from some of the more onerous restrictions required for standard public schools. In 1998, he started a grade, middle, and high charter school he called the Franklin Academy, which over the years since became so attractive to parents that it has educated 1,600 students, with long waiting lists.
As popular as charter schools became, after a decade Luddy concluded that state government restrictions from so-called educational experts and government bureaucrats made it “virtually impossible to change the K-12 status quo in public schools,” including in the new charter ones. Even the state legal accreditation system was harmful. State accreditation agencies were stuck in the past while the world was dynamic; they needed to look forward. So, he began the long task of building purely private schools based on the best ideas of classical education and using modern techniques and affordable tuitions to advance them.
His Thales Academy was born as a private, non-profit school “uninhibited by state regulation and bureaucracy,” with “the freedom to teach the Classics” within Western civilization’s Judeo-Christian tradition, first operating “in a small suite behind our corporate office.” Since then, it expanded “to become one of the largest providers of private K-12 education in the area, educating thousands of students throughout the Southeast” on 13 separate campuses.
Now he has written a book explaining what he has produced after 20 years of experience, passing this on so that others may join in the revolution that is happening across the states to fundamentally change how children receive elementary and secondary education. If you are the head of a public-school trade union or are a died-in-the-wool long-term school of education bureaucrat or professor, you may be skeptical, but if you are among the majority today who think public education does not work, stay tuned.
The Three Phases of the Thales Way
Luddy’s private academy was founded on ideas tracing back to the sixth century B.C. with Thales of Miletus, “the first individual known to have engaged in scientific philosophy.” Its mission is to provide a first-rate and affordable classical-curriculum education for grades pre-K to 12th, using proven modern technologies like what is called “direct instruction” (DI). Its fundamental principle is to support “the good, the true and the beautiful” by teaching the great books of Western civilization. Its goal is to build student character based on skill, habit, and virtue, promoting the four cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, courage, and temperance.
The great value of the book is that it moves from principles to their actual attainment so that teachers and students can learn how to replicate them. The classical so-called trivium model guides a “curricular progression with the aim of maximizing efficiency and measuring progress.”
In the first (pre-K–5) phase — grammar — students in pre-K to fifth grade master basic facts, learning the foundational structure of a subject through observation and memory. This stage is taught in direct instruction:
The principles of DI are simple and intuitive. Humans make sense of things by learning rules that then bridge understanding between concepts. Poor understanding leads to incorrect assumptions and mistakes, while precise and unambiguous rules lead to effective learning. In 1998, after doing extensive research into curriculum efficacy, we selected DI for Franklin Academy. Right from the start, the outcomes were extraordinary, even with students who had been underperforming at their previous schools. Thales utilizes DI because of the excellent results it produces.
In the second phase — logic — students in grades sixth to eighth “begin to discover why certain facts exist as certainties.” Students learn Latin and discover the new world that opens up for languages and history. Students are encouraged to “begin asking questions, hypothesizing, and debating to determine cause-and-effect relationships and the deeper meaning of realities,” to understand “the ‘why’ behind facts”:
In this phase, questions begin to take on a particular prominence as students try to get to the bottom of a subject. By questioning, posing hypotheses, and debating, students work to find the solid certainty upon which knowledge is established.
In the third phase — rhetoric — students in grades nine to 12 develop self-expression and high-level communication skills: “Basic facts from the grammar phase and reasoning skills from the logic phase are combined to critically analyze a topic and develop conclusions.” In this phase, students “come to think for themselves” from “what they read and do,” while “so many different perspectives compete for their minds.”
The Socratic method of reasoning dominates this phase, encouraging searching through “trial and error the key questions that a subject depends upon.” This begins an “exploration through dialogue” to try through repetition to “find something solid to build from.” Once dialogue finds that point, it “begins the process of moving toward truth,” setting “aside false or mistaken ideas, which in turn requires humility” and produces the well-educated man and woman.
Classical Education Is the Future
The second part of The Thales Way is more philosophical and meant for the more specialized reader, covering the nature of the entrepreneurial way of thinking so necessary for the creative life. It explains the details and methods of a sound economics, of nature and the physical world, of individual inspiration and courage, and of the virtuous human leadership necessary for a better future. As a former professor and adviser, I found it deeply perceptive and rewarding, especially his venture into scientific thermodynamics. In that area, my knowledge is very limited, but I agree with him that it has been neglected relative to particle physics as the primary understanding of nature.
The heart of the book, however, explains how a successful classical private-sector education would look. Today, as several states encourage private education through tax-deduction funding to parents and guardians (supposedly) without strings, The Thales Way provides the solution for all those looking to create and attend schools based upon a proven classic curriculum in a successful learning environment.
This is a book that — if widely read and implemented — could revolutionize American elementary and secondary education and save the nation’s deserving children from today’s failing public schools.
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Donald Devine is Senior Scholar at the Fund for American Studies in Washington, D.C. He served as President Ronald Reagan’s civil service director during the president’s first term in office. A former professor, he is the author of 10 books, including his most recent, The Enduring Tension: Capitalism and the Moral Order, and is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator.
Photo “Bob Luddy” by Thales Academy Waxhaw. Photo “The Thales Way” by Amazon. Photo “Thales Academy” by Thales Academy.
