Ken Myers on Classical Education: Interviewing the Interviewer
This November (2010), I had a chance to spend about two hours interviewing Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio. Ken is the author of All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes and the host of the Mars Hill Audio Journal. The academically-inclined admire and envy Ken, because he gets paid to read books and interview authors. He is certainly one the most well-read cultural critics in the country, and always offers insightful commentary on the large issues facing the church and the nation—issues like the function and impact of media and technology on church and society, or the significance and role of art, literature and music in human society and worship, to name a few. Every two months Ken releases a 90-minute CD (or mp3 file) that features Ken’s interviews (conversations really) with about six contemporary authors. To date, Mars Hill Audio has released 104 such CDs.
Ken is also a student of education, and while insisting he is not an educational theorist, his wide reading and ongoing reflection have made him an advocate of classical Christian education. Over the last several years, he has spoken at several conferences for classical Christian educators and even visited some classical schools. My interview with Ken was fascinating. He was able to connect the renewal of classical Christian education to a number of other cultural trends from the shaping of a human soul to embodied learning to the disorder of modern education. I have broken down the interview into several segments by topic, which average about 10 minutes in length. Classical educators and leaders will particularly enjoy his comments on the forming of the soul, embodied learning and community. Click on any of the links below to listen to various sections of the interview.
Ken Myers Cultural Assimilation
Ken Myers Seeing a Classical School
Ken Myers Concerns for CC Leaders
Ken Myers A Disordered Education
Ken Myers Are the Lib Arts Useless
