Latest / Catholic Spirit Radio / Being Catholic #384: San Damiano Trades: Reviving Medieval Education for Today's World

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Being Catholic #384: San Damiano Trades: Reviving Medieval Education for Today's World · Catholic Spirit Radio

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This is Being Catholic with Bob Johnston on Catholic Spirit Radio.
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We're going to talk today a little bit about education, and school is going
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to be coming up here in the fall, so it's a good topic.
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But education is something that needs, I think, changing, and modern education,
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I think, has hit some of its limits.
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And there is a new college that is starting down in Springfield,
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Illinois, through the Catholic Church, the San Deamano College for Trades.
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And we're going to talk somewhat about that.
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We hope maybe next week or thereafter to have someone from there on the show
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and for a discussion about what takes place there and how it operates.
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But we are going to touch on it a little bit today and touch on education somewhat
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also and maybe do an article on education.
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And my wife is going to talk a little bit about that before we start.
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So I'm going to turn this over to Lynn and see what she has to say on that topic.
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And then we'll go into an article here talking about education must evolve for the A.I. era.
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And so we'll get into that in a little bit.
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Hi out there. Good to be with you again. And school has started, Bob.
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It's not like when we were growing up. We went to school day after Labor Day.
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I had a nice long vacation. Now they're back in school. True. Very early.
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It's too hot. Then they have to, you know, a lot of schools have to close down
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because it's too hot. But who knows? You know, it's all money.
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You know, they get paid for how many days and how many students you have in
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class and so on and so forth.
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So that's public education, and it sets the pace for the rest, I guess.
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Well, I found out this week through my prayer group that this is our new San
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Damiano College for the Trades in Springfield, Illinois.
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It just opened up. And this is their first semester.
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What they offer is an associate degree in liberal arts, a durable,
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employable profession, no debt, that's a biggie, basic experience in variety of trades,
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up to 400 hours of technical instruction in trade, and up to 2,000 hours of
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on-the-job training in that trade.
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And the trades, if you get to the right page here, I downloaded a lot of things.
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And by the way, we did make contact with them, and hopefully somebody will be able to come on.
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I suppose this would be pretty busy for them right now this weekend,
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because they're just starting out their first clone ass.
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What they're doing, to me, it sounds like, now this is my view of it.
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Remember, well, in the Middle Ages, when the guilds were formed and they learned different skills?
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So this kind of reminds me of that. And what were the guilds tied to?
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To the church, which makes sense.
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And this program is tied to, well, not only the church, but to thought.
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And I think, you know, their goal seems to be.
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To educate people in a trade of
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their choice and to give them the practical experience and then also integrate
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into that some of the great books and philosophy to some extent, I should say,
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philosophy to some extent, and formation of people to be honest, hardworking people.
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And it won't cost them anything in the long run.
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They cover some 12 credits of theology, 12 of the humanities,
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3 of philosophy, music lantern, so forth.
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There's 12 credits available in that.
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Seminars, 12 credits.
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Building arts. and they also, in the building arts program, it looks like they
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have training in stained glass windows, wood preservation,
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carving, and so forth, air conditioning.
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It's that HVAC.
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It covers air movement, I believe, and air conditioning and heating.
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Heating, ventilation, air conditioning. Okay.
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And I think electrician, I think, also.
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Well, yeah, roofing, welding, plumbing, welding and fabrication.
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So, you know, you can do the option, you have an option to do the non-degree, non-degree program.
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And I think they will go to mass just about every morning, I think, as well.
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And they'll learn to think with church along those lines. Right, right.
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And they have that on-the-job training. They work 24 hours a week for local contractors.
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And at the end of the first year, they apply for apprenticeship of the trades. That's the first year.
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The second year, students work at least 40 hours a week during the summer and
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24 hours a week during the academic year.
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During the summer, on the third year, they work the 40 hours plus week in on-the-job training.
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Students remain at 40 hours a week during their final year in the San Damiano program.
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So I think it's very comprehensive.
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You know, you can get a liberal arts degree and still be ready to go out into
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the workforce and join a union if you need to because you'll be trained.
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So, how I read it is when they are, after doing their apprenticeship and stuff,
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of course, you're paid for the hours you spend.
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You're paid for your labor. And that's how you can be debt-free when you finish
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using that money rather than paying school and professors and all that.
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That money that you've earned working pays for that education.
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It's kind of similar to what when I was in nursing school, we got paid 50 cents
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an hour or something like that. But by the end, it covered almost total what my education costs.
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So it's kind of on that framework, too.
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But it reminded me very much of the Middle Ages and the guild work and how they
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formed their guilds, or you might call them.
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That's exactly what it does, yeah. It's looking back, you know,
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at the history of Western civilization and the history of our church,
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and it's putting education back, you know, how it really should be.
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It combines both work and church.
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So you've got labor and church, and you've got the trade. You've got practical
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learning and all of that put together.
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The whole man, it's treating, you know, that's what the humanities are supposed
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to be about, is treating the whole person.
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And it goes back to the, you know, in Latin, ora et labura, work,
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you know, and prayer and work and thought and study and work along with it.
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You're not just doing one thing.
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You're also tuning into tradition. Tradition is really important here.
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You're emphasizing tradition.
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It's recovering and restoring tradition because the best actually way of learning
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is being brought into the tradition of your culture.
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Of looking back the thousands of years and so forth of all the various problems
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and so forth that your culture has met and how it has solved those problems
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instead of reinventing the wheel over and over again as it seems that our modern
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culture seems to be doing.
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In fact, it seems modern education is designed almost to destroy Western civilization
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and destroy Western culture and abandon it and throw itself upon all kinds of
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problems and solutions that are irrelevant to how people have solved things
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in the past. I mean, human nature has not changed.
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And so we need to look at, you know, all of the things that have happened in
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the past and find out what were the solutions to problems back then and how
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can those solutions be modified and brought into play today and that kind of thing.
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It's what Chesterton called the democracy of the dead.
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It's letting the people that came before us speak and letting our history speak
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and being part of that history and being put into it and understanding, you know,
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where you're at in that history and what we have already learned and what you
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can contribute and so forth.
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And it's tuning into that. It's a much, much more comprehensive and better way of education.
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And it does one thing, I think, Lynn, it's the emphasis here is that the church
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has always emphasized that debt is to be avoided.
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I mean, the church, this is what, when the church opposed usury in the Middle Ages,
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it wasn't opposing, you know, the modern banking system, the idea of being able
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to lend money and be able to use money to build wealth and so forth for the future.
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A culture that is constantly in debt is a culture that is easily manipulated
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by politics and politicians and a culture that loses its freedom.
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And the church understood that.
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And this is why they opposed usury. And this is why every culture learned over
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the ages that to destroy the middle class, and that's what is happening in modern
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society, and we need to talk about that.
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That to destroy the middle class and destroy the wealth of the middle class
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is to destroy the culture and destroy the society itself.
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And what we need to understand is we need to restore and make the family central.
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And this is what this does.
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It talks about, you know, people working as, you know, husbands or wives and
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bringing them into play,
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either their job and their understanding of their culture and their history
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and other things are all working together to make them a citizen,
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you know, of their time and of their culture.
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And this, I think, was with being restored.
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And it's really a good thing. Yes, I did. Well, I got off the...
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Off the internet, they say, in our age of digital distraction,
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San Damiano College for the Trades aims at restoring the trades to man so that
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he may support himself and his family through honest work of his hands while
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contributing tangible goods to society.
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Shouldn't that really be, you know, a goal, a very precious goal.
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Yes, it should. And the fact is, is that our culture, you know,
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it used to be at one time, for example, and, you know, I'm just sort of going
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over a few things here, and we'll talk more about this when we get into talking
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about the school itself.
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But to restore the family and restore the middle class, we have a politics that
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deliberately, in my opinion,
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destroys the centrality of the family, destroys the middle-class wealth and
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prosperity so that the middle-class people can't stand on their own.
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In other words, it creates a crisis in economics and other things,
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and then it offers a solution to those crises, and that solution always is a
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dependence on the state.
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And this whole idea of this education here is to take away that dependence on
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the state and replace it with independence, you know,
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on the person themselves able to work and earn and not be in debt in the first
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place and to avoid what we have in education today.
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Kids going into education, coming out, owing a tremendous amount of money,
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and for the most part, not being able to find work or jobs and being totally dependent on the state,
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asking the state constantly to relieve their debts, asking them to forgive their
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loans and so forth, which means somebody else has to shoulder that burden and pay those loans.
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But the point is that the whole thing is constantly designed to make people dependent on the state.
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And it's the old story of the politicians in a state creating the crisis and
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then offering the solution to the crisis by making the people dependent on a state.
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And this is what we need to avoid. And we're seeing that right now.
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We're seeing that in New York, for example, with this Mandani offering all of
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these so-called free solutions to problems in New York City that have been caused
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by the state in the first place.
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And now the state coming in to actually offer solutions to the very problems that it has created.
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And it's the same thing even in, I'm seeing on TV here, people in a lot of areas,
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especially in the Northeast, but in a lot of areas, are dependent on daycare.
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You know, women have to work nowadays. That was another thing.
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At one time, women were able to stay home, but by creating more and more taxes
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and so forth, making the whole family dependent on paying all of that.
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And having to go to work, the state creates problems and then offers solutions.
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And now we have the state coming in and saying, you know, there needs to be
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help for people by the state.
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The state can come in and provide daycare and so forth. But the point is people
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don't seem to understand it's making us more and more dependent on the state.
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And it's just educational system here that we're talking about is going in the opposite direction.
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We're going to have to stop here and take a break. So stay with us. We'll be right back.
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Hi, this is Bob Johnson. You're listening to Being Catholic right here on Catholic Spirit Radio.
19:37
And we're talking about education and we're talking about a new form of education
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being created by the Catholic Church down in Springfield, Illinois.
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And it's St. Damon College for the trades, and it's the idea of.
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Combining, it's actually restoring a type of education that was common back
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in the Middle Ages and was really, really the foundation of Western civilization,
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the foundation of our culture, the universities and so forth.
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The whole idea of the complete man, of being able to educate,
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to earn a living and do things,
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and at the same time have an understanding of your history and your culture
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and where you fit in and what the problems of the past were that can be applied to, you know,
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what's going on today and being a whole person.
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And this is what education at one time was, and it's been changed in our modern times.
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And so it's almost destructive of those things instead of helpful along those lines.
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And this is its whole idea. And the whole idea of the church at one time was
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to avoid debt because societies where the middle class, especially the middle class people,
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become indebted and beholden constantly to the state, the society loses its
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freedom, its independence,
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and its innovations, and so forth, and becomes totally dependent on and on sort
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of a more and more totalitarian type society.
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And the politicians and so forth love that because they are in charge and we
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need to move away from that.
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And I think that this is what the whole idea of education should be.
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It should be restoring those ideas.
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It should be a restoration of what our civilization was built on,
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restoring the centrality of the family.
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In restoring economic prosperity to the middle class and restoring a culture
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of tradition that is looking to those things that worked in the past and solved
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problems rather than trying to reinvent the wheel over and over again as we
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seem to be doing in our modern times.
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And so this is something that's going to be interesting to talk about,
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and we're going to hopefully do that in the next show or two,
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maybe next week. Is next week Labor Day, is it?
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I have no idea. Is it next week Labor Day, John? Next week.
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I have no idea. Maybe it's the next week after that.
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But at any rate, one of these weekends, not Labor Day weekend,
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but one of these weekends, we hope to get somebody that's a student or somebody
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from the school and have a discussion about what's going on there and this whole
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new idea. I think it's wonderful.
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But we have to remember the emphasis should be on making people independent
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of the state and not dependent on the state.
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And that is the whole purpose, it seems, anymore of our political process is
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to make people dependent on the state,
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to create crises and problems in the first place, and then offer solutions to
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those problems that are dependent on them. And that's what we need to avoid.
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And I think the church needs to understand that. And this is a perfect opportunity,
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I think, for the church to expand on that understanding and along those lines.
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Yes, I think Bishop Procopy, Pro... Paprocky, yeah.
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Paprocky in Springfield kind of worked with them, not kind of,
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he worked with them to get this all set up. And it's...
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What they say is you learn on your feet, not stuck in a seat.
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That's a good idea. It's a good saying.
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And they're saying that you won't fall asleep in the San Jamiano classroom,
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recovering an education model from the days of St. Thomas Aquinas.
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We take an active approach to learning.
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Students come to class ready to stand and argue with each other and the faculty for or against ideas.
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Now that has gotten to be a novel thing.
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Now we've got IA. Who knows? You go to school and plug into IA and it'll do the work for you. AI.
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Well, whatever it is.
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Too thrilled with it. Yeah, those are very good ideas.
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The whole idea is to learn to think for yourself, to learn to stand on your
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feet, to learn to make a case and to make arguments and so forth,
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whether you're right or wrong, but how an argument works and the fact that arguments
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can be constructive, they can
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be positive, and that's what you're there for, to have a clash of ideas.
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That's how advances and so forth are made by a clash of cultures and a clash of ideas.
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To understand your own culture and to understand, for example,
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how wonderful and how much our own culture has to offer, what we need to understand
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is things are all not the same.
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Cultures are not all equal as modernism and modern.
24:43
It seems like when I talk about modern education, it seems like it's design.
24:48
Modernism is almost a heresy. There's no doubt about it against the church.
24:53
But it seems like a heresy deliberately designed to destroy and wreck Western
24:58
civilization, and we need to get rid of it.
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And we need to start understanding where our learning and so forth has come from, our history,
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and go back to the methods and so forth that built our civilization and use
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those methods to carry on and advance beyond where we are at now.
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And I think maybe we're going to show here in a little bit how AI can be used
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to actually move along those lines, to change the whole idea of what an education ought to be.
25:29
And that it's not something where it's a passive learning where stuff is thrown
25:35
at you basically by the state itself and you're brought into debt and so forth
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and then made to go along with and approve of whatever the state happens to toss at you.
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Well, then you have to because you're enslaved to the state, are you not?
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Exactly. When you're in debt, you are enslaved and especially you're in debt
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to the state. And that has got to stop.
26:01
And middle-class independence has got to be restored.
26:04
And these are the things we need to do. And I think the church has to come to understand that.
26:08
And I think Bishop Paprocki is to be commended down there for maybe understanding
26:13
that and for this school of reaching back into our past and bringing some of
26:19
those great things in our culture back into modern times.
26:24
Things that can actually move our civilization along with AI.
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I'm going to read an article here on how that kind of thinking can pattern right
26:34
along with AI and make sure that AI isn't something that's an enemy rather than
26:40
a friend. So we'll get into that as well.
26:43
You know, they even the one course, ecclesial restoration.
26:48
Exactly.
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It's how to work in stone and on stained glass and wood preservation.
26:57
If you learned that and became very good at it,
27:01
you would be working on preserving things.
27:05
Right. That's exactly the word preserve, and not just material things,
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but ecclesial restoration can
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also come to mean and should come to mean to restoring the church. Right.
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The whole, you know, this is what you get. And when you go back to St.
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Thomas, not just St. Thomas Aquinas, but St. Francis of Assisi, isn't it?
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Oh, yeah, Assisi, yes. To rebuild my church. and the church needs rebuilding all the time.
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Yes. Our houses constantly need to be rebuilt.
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I know, in our own house, yes. Yeah. You live long enough and you've got to redo it all.
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Right. They need to be constantly repaired and be rebuilt.
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Our civilization constantly needs to be attended to, repaired and rebuilt. It's falling apart.
27:51
And I think maybe, you know, we can look at how even maybe some other countries, even Russia,
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you know, We need to look at how it might look at us as being a blip on world
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history that pops up and now is going to fade back into the woodwork again if
28:09
we don't follow the great culture that made us in the first place.
28:14
And the church, that is one of the huge jobs of the church is to preserve that
28:19
culture here in the here and now, the temporal.
28:22
The church has two realms that it has to deal with.
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It has to deal with the eternity, the immortal, and it has to deal also with
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the here and now, the temporal.
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And I think it's neglecting, you know, especially the temporal.
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And so it needs to attend to both of those things.
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And I think this type of education is reattending to our cultural needs.
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And we need to understand that cultures differ.
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And some cultures are more productive by the fruit of the culture, you shall know it.
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You know, but Christ came and said, by their fruits, you shall know them.
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And a culture is the same thing, by its fruit, you shall know it.
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And what does it build? Take a look at what Western civilization has built.
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Of course, there are going to be all kinds of downsides to every culture and
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everything because human beings have flaws.
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They're not perfect. This world has fallen.
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We have to understand that. We have to understand why things have happened the
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way they've happened. We've forgotten that, and that has to be brought back.
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The religion is going to be brought back as an everyday thing in this college,
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where you go to mass, where you understand your religious history and how it
29:32
fits in with your work and your work habits.
29:34
All of that should be something you just take for granted, and it's no longer taken that way.
29:39
Our culture has sterilized all of that. It's gotten this idea that somehow or
29:43
another, you know, we've got to have a.
29:44
Religion and state have to be separated, the separation of church and state.
29:49
That's not working. It can't be separated. There needs to be a distinction,
29:54
but not a separation between the two.
29:57
You can't live inside four walls in your church and then walk out into a different
30:01
world and drop everything that applies in the church.
30:06
It applies to the entire world, and education has to apply that way.
30:10
And this is what has to be brought back and restored.
30:13
That's exactly right. Especially during this time, you notice how many junior
30:18
colleges, high schools too.
30:22
But they're all working towards this trades, teaching trades, teaching trades.
30:28
And what a gem this would be to have this type of education within the church
30:35
available to you with being debt-free.
30:40
And we don't want the public education to usurp this because we don't want the trades to be sterile.
30:47
We don't. In other words, the whole idea of work and everyday life and culture
30:54
needs to be infused with religion as well.
30:56
I mean, we need to understand that almost every single precept and so forth
31:03
that a culture is built on is a religious precept.
31:06
We need to understand how our culture used religion and so forth and why it
31:12
is the way it is because of religion. People need to understand that.
31:16
And, you know, it's not something that needs to be separated from the state. It can't be.
31:21
Otherwise, the state becomes sterile. The work becomes sterile.
31:25
One thing is separated from another. They're not combined. So this whole idea
31:31
of separation of church and state has got to be rethought because there really
31:37
is no separation of church and state.
31:39
Or how you believe is how you work.
31:44
And how you accomplish and how your culture accomplishes and so forth and what
31:49
your laws are and everything else.
31:51
All of that depends on how you believe.
31:53
We need to know why we believe the way we do and why it came into existence
31:57
the way it did. All of those things are important and necessary.
32:01
And this is what this college is going to be teaching. And this is what we need to reestablish.
32:06
Even if we're going to have public schools, they need to be reestablished in
32:10
the public schools as well.
32:11
That's exactly right. I'm really excited hearing about this. I really was.
32:17
Yes, it is. And immediately I thought about the time of the great philosophers and stuff.
32:25
You know, the people were not uneducated in the sense you think when they did
32:31
all these things and built all these things in the so-called dark ages. No.
32:41
They weren't book-wise educated, but they were aware of so much that we don't.
32:49
We've got too much going on in civil society or whatever today that we're distracted. Exactly.
32:58
We're distracted from everything. If any age is dark, it is our age.
33:03
The darkest age is the most superstitious darkest age, it seems like,
33:07
in all of history, if you want to take a really good look at history.
33:11
So, at any rate, but, and I'm going to read an article here also,
33:15
if I could get it in here, a short article.
33:19
Do you have anything more that you want to? No, basically that's it.
33:23
I think it's something to look into for somebody that wants a good base,
33:29
this could be a great basis for, you know, for your education.
33:34
And we'll open your eyes to what was going on in the world I mean,
33:38
you look at those great cathedrals and those glass stained windows and the woodwork
33:44
that had to go into it and all the things that today we have to have our air
33:50
conditioning and everything, all these things,
33:53
roofing, you name it, it has to be, you know, we need those,
34:00
but we are not building things that are going to last.
34:03
So, you know, I hope it's a return to stability.
34:10
Exactly. I think this is a great, great idea. And people need to be returned
34:15
into the great culture that they grew out of and understand it.
34:18
And that's one of the important things of education.
34:21
That needs to be, you know, coordinated with doing things, moving around and
34:26
not just sitting around in, you know, some classroom learning,
34:29
you know, everything from a book.
34:31
That's not how people did things back then.
34:33
That's not how their culture blew. We need to understand how it all came about.
34:38
And there were, you know, so much to draw on. At any rate.
34:42
Well, you know, if you look at even Shakespeare, Bob, the people that really
34:48
made Shakespeare popular in his time were the people.
34:52
Yeah, he had a little Latin and less Greek, but he didn't let that stop him
34:55
because he was in the stream of his own history and his own culture. He understood it.
35:01
And he had so many good things to say and write about it. And he understood people and so forth.
35:06
There are so many solutions to problems and everything. You can read right there.
35:09
You don't have to learn them all over again. It's like we're a bunch of strangers
35:14
in some kind of strange land.
35:16
Yeah. And you look at modern society, and that's what it seems like.
35:19
It seems like people walking around in the dark, bouncing off of walls.
35:25
Wondering what they're doing. The blind, the leasing of the blind.
35:28
What in the world they're doing. Yeah. Thank you.
35:31
Man has to have a purpose. At any rate, we're going to stop here.
35:35
I'm going to come back and see if I can get this article in.
35:37
It's just a little article on education must be evolved for the AI era.
35:42
So we'll see if we can get that in.
35:44
Stay with us. We'll be right back. You've been listening to Being Catholic with
35:48
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38:49
Hi, this is Bob Johnston. You're listening to Being Catholic right here on Catholic Spirit Radio.
38:55
We're talking about education in general, and we're talking about a new college
38:59
that has started down in Springfield, Illinois, a Catholic college,
39:03
St. Damon College of the Trades.
39:06
And it sort of seems to be reaching back and recapturing how education used
39:11
to be, incorporating the whole person, learning how to, you know,
39:15
do things and at the same time incorporate it into the culture.
39:19
And I'm going to read this article here on learning the factory mindset,
39:23
how education must evolve for the AI era.
39:26
And this is found in the Epoch Times. It's the August 20 to 26 edition.
39:33
Says here, it's by Kay Rubichek. We were at the start of a new industrial revolution,
39:38
yet we still think with factory minds forged in the last revolution.
39:43
As artificial intelligence accelerates in reach and power, reshaping everything
39:48
from labor to law, it's tempting to ask how we'll keep up.
39:52
But that question assumes that we're following something we understand.
39:55
The harder question that needs to be asked is this. Can we be in command of
40:00
the world we are building?
40:02
For the past 150 years, we have been taught to value efficiency over intuition,
40:07
specialization over synthesis, and production over perception.
40:12
These were deliberate structured systems designed during the last Industrial
40:16
Revolution, and now, as that system is breaking under the weight of its own assumptions,
40:22
we find ourselves entering a new era with tools we don't fully understand,
40:26
guided by frameworks that no longer fit.
40:29
The first Industrial Revolution mechanized labor.
40:33
The second and third electrified and digitized it.
40:37
Each phase moved us further from holistic thinking and closer to compartmentalized function.
40:45
Education was no exception.
40:47
Modern schools were not designed to cultivate wisdom, but to supply compliant,
40:52
punctual, uniform labor.
40:54
We normalized a reductive view of intelligence in which art,
40:59
ethics, emotion, and natural health were seen as secondary or as pursuits of lower value.
41:05
If the goal was to build a predictable workforce, this model of education worked,
41:10
but it also stripped away many of the traits that define what it means to be human.
41:16
Curiosity was replaced by compliance, imagination by instruction,
41:21
and emotional nuance by standardized testing.
41:24
We split the world into silos.
41:26
Math in one room, history in another, literature far from science,
41:30
and the body separated from the mind.
41:35
That division didn't just fragment knowledge, it fragmented us.
41:40
Nowhere was this more deeply entrenched than in regimes that combined industrial
41:45
planning with ideological control.
41:47
In communist and socialist systems, the human being was recast as a unit of
41:53
production, useful only insofar as to serve the goals of the state.
41:58
And that's what I'm talking about here. Education and people must not be subject
42:03
to serving the goals of the state or the state's politicians.
42:07
Education became a tool not for liberation, but for indoctrination.
42:13
Descenting thought was eliminated. The arts were repurposed as propaganda,
42:18
and boy do we have propaganda today.
42:21
Scientific inquiry was only permitted within the boundaries of a political orthodoxy,
42:26
and we certainly got a lot of that during the COVID scare.
42:30
The mind was no longer sacred. It was a state resource. That ideology has spread far and wide.
42:38
Even in capitalist systems, people have become data points and students have become test scores.
42:44
Success has come to be measured in market readiness instead of growth in character.
42:49
We told ourselves that this was progress, that we were finally moving beyond
42:54
the superstitions and limitations of the past.
42:56
We created false narratives that ancient cultures, with their mystics and philosophies,
43:03
were primitive compared with our factories and forecasts.
43:06
But that story, too, is beginning to unravel.
43:10
Long before the modern era, civilization thrived, not through specialization,
43:16
but through integration.
43:17
In ancient Greece, philosophy was inseparable from science and art.
43:22
In India and China, medicine was tied to metaphysics, cosmology, and moral conduct.
43:28
These and many other cultures produced works that still resonate across millennia,
43:32
not because they were efficient, but because they were whole.
43:36
They understood something that modern ideologies pushed aside.
43:40
That knowledge is not a set of files, but a web of meaning that wisdom requires
43:45
context, and that understanding grows not in silos, but in synthesis.
43:51
The modern industrial era promised that it would do better, that we could move
43:55
faster, build bigger, think smarter, and leave the past behind,
43:59
that our future would be a straight line of progress, constantly improving.
44:03
But the farther we moved, the more we began to fracture.
44:08
Wars became mechanized, communities fragmented, attention collapsed.
44:13
Depression, loneliness, and meaninglessness has become the modern epidemics
44:18
that we are moving too fast to deal with properly.
44:22
The very systems built to deliver progress began to unravel the human spirit quietly.
44:27
And now, at the height of our technological sophistication, we find ourselves
44:33
asking ancient questions once again. Who are we? What matters?
44:37
And how do we prepare the next generation to carry forward not just knowledge but wisdom?
44:43
AI doesn't just challenge our economy, it challenges our assumptions.
44:47
It doesn't respect our categories or institutional silos. It doesn't stay in its lane.
44:53
To understand AI, one must cross disciplines, mathematics, linguistics,
44:59
ethics, psychology, design, and law.
45:02
A data scientist must now think like a sociologist. An engineer must consider philosophy.
45:08
An artist must engage with code.
45:10
AI, by its very nature, exposes the weakness of siloed thinking.
45:15
And yet we are sending students into this world with training built for a different
45:19
century, when the goal is to fill minds, not connect them.
45:24
The old model taught us to become specialists. But the future will belong to
45:28
those who can see patterns across domains, who can think in systems,
45:33
who can ask the kind of questions machines cannot.
45:37
Questions such as, what is this for? Who does it serve? What might it cost us?
45:43
These are not technical questions. They are moral ones, and we cannot outsource them to code.
45:49
And that's what I was talking about here is that the morality,
45:53
the moral questions can't be separated from the technical questions.
45:59
We can't live in a country or a culture where the church and a state are totally
46:05
separated from each other.
46:06
That's not possible, and it's a mistake that we made.
46:09
Distinctions, yes. Separation, no.
46:13
If we want to remain in command of the tools we create, we can't expect AI companies
46:18
to develop the new social culture alone.
46:21
Our education systems must evolve, not by simply adding coding classes or digital
46:27
literacy programs, but by fundamentally rethinking the purpose of learning.
46:31
We must teach students how to navigate uncertainty, not just memorize facts,
46:37
how to integrate ideas, not just absorb them, and how to unlearn, reframe, and imagine.
46:44
That means embracing ambiguity, encouraging wonder, teaching ethics as urgently
46:50
as engineering, and recovering the lost art of asking better questions.
46:54
And I think all of that will come a lot better with doing things,
46:58
with learning trades and learning how to work with your hands.
47:02
Artists and so forth back in earlier times were also religious people.
47:06
They understood religion. They understood art. They understood mathematics.
47:11
They understood lots of things.
47:13
Sure, they understood why they existed, why they had a purpose.
47:19
Exactly. And we're losing our purpose
47:22
in this country. and we're being fragmented, and that's got to stop.
47:26
And I think this college brings all of that together again and makes people feel as if they're able,
47:32
and that's what we need is ability and the feeling of ableness and the feeling
47:37
of being able to earn a living and being able to stand on your own two feet
47:42
and being able to be separated from the state and not to be dependent.
47:47
And those are the things that our new education has to incorporate.
47:51
If it doesn't, we're doomed.
47:53
Most of all, we must reclaim the value of being human.
47:57
Emotional intelligence, moral discernment, artistic expression,
48:01
and spiritual insight are not outdated relics.
48:05
They are not the core consequences of the age to come, as they are what AI cannot replace.
48:12
They are what education must not protect and amplify.
48:16
We cannot control every outcome of this revolution. But we can decide how we meet it.
48:22
The world does not need more machines. It needs more meaning.
48:26
And meaning will not come from better algorithms. It will come from better minds.
48:31
And I think that's exactly what this... The goal of the school, yeah.
48:35
The goal of the school is to build able people and strong minds.
48:40
And the whole idea of being debt-free, there's this emphasis in Scripture,
48:45
will bring this understanding back.
48:47
And if anything, like I say again, it seems like the modern heresy,
48:52
and there is such a thing as the modern heresy.
48:56
And it seems like a combination of almost all the old heresies piled together in one.
49:03
And it seems like it's aimed right at the heart of Western culture and to simply
49:09
destroy the independence of people, but especially the independence of the middle
49:15
class, the independence of the family.
49:17
And the independence that comes with understanding the tradition that you live in.
49:23
And those are the things that absolutely need to be restored,
49:26
and they need to be restored in a doingful way, if I want to point a word.
49:31
A doingful way, a way of understanding and learning by doing and seeing,
49:38
and the trades are the things that can help do this.
49:41
They're going to teach people both the classical view of our culture and our
49:47
society and the problems and how to solve those problems and at the same time,
49:52
how to earn a living and work in such a way that you're a productive member
49:56
of society and you feel you belong in that Western tradition,
50:00
that you don't live in some kind of alienated world where you have to learn
50:04
everything all over again.
50:05
And where you can look for solutions, you know, to what did we learn over the
50:11
years in the past when you want to look and see something.
50:15
I mean, we have debates today.
50:18
One of my examples, Lynn, I saw this on TV, this idea nowadays,
50:24
you have this idea nowadays if somebody were, say, in a situation where they're
50:29
going to commit suicide, I jump off a bridge or something,
50:32
that somehow you don't have the right to go in and save them or that you can
50:37
debate this or do you have to sit and discuss whether you should or shouldn't.
50:43
And, you know, in a sane society, what a person does that fits into that society,
50:50
he looks at his history and he looks at the history of Western civilization.
50:54
And he sees that all the heroes of Western civilization have acted in a way
51:00
to prevent suicides, that they have saved people.
51:04
And they have brought people, you know, to life wherever they could.
51:07
And then, you know, to live is better than to die and so forth.
51:10
And that's the history we've been handed and given. And that's the answer.
51:14
And we don't sit there and try and debate this and decide, is it right to save somebody from suicide?
51:19
Or do they have an independent right to commit suicide? And blah,
51:23
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We look back to our past and we get the solution.
51:28
And we say, I live in a world in which, you know, my ancestors and so forth,
51:33
the democracy, the dead.
51:34
Have told me what I should do in this situation.
51:37
I don't have to think about it and debate about it and so forth.
51:41
And my religion tells me what I should or shouldn't do along these lines and so forth.
51:48
Instead of this nowadays debates, am I a man or a woman?
51:53
Well, my society hands me down a whole history that tells me whether I am a
51:58
man or a woman and so forth.
52:00
I don't have to debate this and go on and on about, you know,
52:03
somehow or another that we're chasing ghosts and.
52:08
Debating shadows and inventing things that never existed before and making.
52:16
Problems where they don't exist.
52:18
And we can look back and see in our literature and so forth that there were
52:22
things like this that happened before.
52:24
And we can see how the heroes and so forth in the literature overcame those problems and so forth.
52:29
We have that with us just as we go along and do our jobs.
52:32
They're part of us. And that's what this is bringing back. And I think that's
52:36
what, you know, is going to be so important about it.
52:39
That's right. You know, we need to tell you how to get a hold of them.
52:45
You can go online and go to lowercase san dam miano trades, all one word, y'all together,
52:55
dot org forward slash labor.
53:01
Or you can just go online and Google or whatever search tool you use and put
53:07
in San Damiano School for trades.
53:14
It's S-A-N-D-A-M-I-A-N-O. And just go and Google that and you'll come up with lots of information.
53:28
You can just go under trades too. Trade schools. in Illinois,
53:32
Springfield, Illinois. You'll get it.
53:35
I just think it's fantastic.
53:38
I think so, too. And I think the whole idea of reaching back,
53:42
you know, for this type of education is really great because,
53:46
you know, the church has so much to offer.
53:50
And the whole idea of not only learning a trade, but thinking along with the mind of the church.
53:55
And when we talk about the mind of the church, We're not talking about what
53:58
some bishop happens to think today or some one person.
54:02
We're talking back with what has the church learned and taught and so forth
54:07
for the last 2,000 years.
54:09
What is this tradition and how has it been handed down? And those are the kind of things that…,
54:15
will be learned there. And I know Bishop Paprocki is a very orthodox bishop,
54:19
and we need to bring back orthodoxy. We need to bring back tradition.
54:24
We need to bring back the democracy to the dead. If we want to talk about democracy
54:28
and preserving democracy,
54:30
democracy consists of people that are independent and can stand on their own
54:34
two feet, are not beholden to the state, and are not broke from owing all of
54:39
their money to credit cards and to college education.
54:44
So, at any rate, it'll be interesting to have somebody from that school,
54:49
a student or a representative, if we can get them on.
54:53
And if not, we'll talk a little bit more about it in the curriculum and so forth when we can.
54:58
So, at any rate, we'll say our prayer.
55:01
St. Michael, the archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection against the
55:06
wickedness and snares of the devil.
55:08
May God rebuke him and humbly pray. and do thou, Prince of the Heavenly Host,
55:14
by the power of God, thrust into hell, Satan, and all evil spirits who wander
55:19
through the world through their souls.
55:22
Amen. You've been listening to Being Catholic with Bob Johnston.
55:26
On Catholic Spirit Radio, if you'd like to contact Bob, email bob at catholicspiritradio.com.
55:33
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