Brian Williams: Hey, folks. This is Brian Williams, host of Forged, a podcast of the Humanitas Institute about forging lives of discipline, delight, craft, calling. Our goal on Forged is just to have honest, unhurried conversations about timeless ways of living that help men pursue well lived ordinary lives. Today, I am talking with my friend Chris Hall. Chris, welcome to Forged.
Chris Hall: Thank you very much, doctor Williams. Good to see you.
Brian Williams: Nice to see you. I've often said that whether I'm in the urban jungle or the Amazon jungle, I'd want Chris Hall by my side because my chances of survival in either place would increase exponentially if he were. So Chris lives with his wife and three sons on a small homesteaded farm in Central Virginia where they tend animals, raise food, and attend to the kinds of daily chores that sustain a farm and, I think, structure a life. Chris is a longtime practitioner of the martial arts. He's a craftsman, musician, and teacher of the common arts.
Chris is also one of the clearest voices calling men, women, schools, and students to rediscover the wonder, dignity, formative value, and fun of the applied arts. So, Chris, let me start out. I've just said that you live on a homesteaded farm in Central Virginia. So first, just tell me what's a what's a normal day look like on your homesteaded farm in Central Virginia?
Chris Hall: We're up nice and early, probably by o 05:30, o six hundred. And my early morning routines are grab a cup of coffee and then tend. I go out and take care of the animals that are around, make sure everything is good and secure. And by the time I get back from that, the boys are usually getting up and getting their breakfast.
Brian Williams: And Okay.
Chris Hall: Then it's it's off to the teaching and learning day. I'm I'm pretty much in in addition to running a business here and doing some consulting with All Is Orring Education, I'm a pretty much full time teacher online in person. Okay. So my my son's here, now older, two in college and one, finishing high school pretty soon, are just entering into their academic days as I'm into mine. And the rhythms proceed like that until about the time the sun sets.
Brian Williams: And K.
Chris Hall: This time of year, that means time to light a fire. Right?
Brian Williams: Start to Yes. It
Chris Hall: does. Down and get warm. That's that's how it rolls.
Brian Williams: That's great. Okay. So what what kind of animals are you tending? You get up at o 05:30, and you go out and what kind of critters are out there?
Chris Hall: Boy, the years I could tell you the long list of the years. Currently, we're down to just chickens, ducks, rabbits. We have meat rabbits here. Of course, the gardens are in season when that's there too. But, gosh, for the years, that's meant milking goats.
That's meant going a field and checking on livestock out there. It's meant a lot through time.
Brian Williams: Okay. And I know I've seen pictures of your trail cam. You got you got all kinds of critters out in the the deep woods there, don't you?
Chris Hall: Such as it is from deer to bears and everything in between.
Brian Williams: Yeah. Exactly. Okay. So, hey, tell us the story, would you about this property that you live on. I mean, I just think it's fascinating, like, how you came to live on this property and just kinda what the what the story is of of journeying with this piece of land.
Chris Hall: Well, first, I'll tell you that my wife is a saint, and I have to preface all this by saying, Brian Brian knows the story. Gentlemen out there who are listening to this, you're about to hear it. When my my wife and I met, gosh, twenty three years ago now Mhmm. And we were talking about getting married. We were talking about where to live, and I had a house up in Maryland.
I was there. She had an apartment. And we came into possession at the time through a gift of her father of some family land. We've been six generations now in her family. Large wooded tract here in Central Virginia.
And we decided that we were gonna come down here and build a house, but we didn't do it immediately. When we sold my old house, we came down and lived in a tent and then a tool shed that we converted for the next two years, give or take, while we built the house.
Brian Williams: Okay. Hold on. Just just I'm gonna stop you just for a second just so people don't miss what you just said. You get married, and you and your wife move to this piece of property, and you live in a tent. Is that right?
Chris Hall: Yes. Then a shed for
Brian Williams: the whole summer, and then a tool shed.
Chris Hall: Yep. And for a grand total of two years, we lived without running water. We had electricity for a bit. My first son came home from the hospital to that tool shed. He was in there with us for our first six months.
Brian Williams: Okay.
Chris Hall: Just about the time he learned to crawl is when we got occupancy on this house.
Brian Williams: Okay. Alright. So where did you find your saint wife who was willing to live in a tent in a tool shed for two years?
Chris Hall: Well, my my brother introduced us thinking that we would hit it off, and indeed, he was correct. But I have to tell you a lot of our early dates were not what you'd think of as standard. We went to the movies. We went to dinner and others like that, but I remember one of the first things I ever bought her was an archery bow. I used to go running through the woods behind my house hunting stumps and milk jugs and others, and she would come with me.
And I used a little bit of leather working to make her a quiver so she could carry her arrows on her back. And gosh, we just had a great old time. I taught her birding. She taught me cooking, and we traded a lot of skills. It was a wonderful dating time.
Brian Williams: Yeah. Chris, no. I was asking about you and your wife, not Odysseus and Penelope, but thank you because that's kinda how I imagine, you know, Odysseus might have wooed Penelope as well. Hey, babe. There's look at this bow and arrow that I have here.
Chris Hall: Check it out.
Brian Williams: Okay. So hey. So tell me the tell me the story just a little bit, your own story, Chris. Like, you're a philosophy major at Gettysburg College. Right?
So then how do you go from being a philosophy major at Gettysburg College to living in a tent in a tool shed on a piece of land in Virginia? Because that's not a natural progression for most philosophy majors.
Chris Hall: Well, I could say it would say it's a philosopher's salary that would drive one to that.
Brian Williams: That was Yeah. No. That's that's fair.
Chris Hall: On the side, I think a lot of it started even before I became a philosophy major. I was a boy scout. I had a great time coming up. I was an eagle scout in 1991. A suburban kid.
We didn't have gardens. I didn't go hunting. But through scouts, was introduced to kind of this life of the hands. Many a merit badge that was on my sash was a crafting one, and then I realized after Gettysburg and getting a philosophy degree, earning my first black belt, martial arts was a big part of my my time there in college, that I wanted to go a little more paleo. I wanted to continue my studies in martial arts and go go to foreign countries and study there as well as study here, and I wanted to go learn tracking.
Right? Really, the the the ancestral and paleo skills of that, and I apprenticed for a while under guys like Tom Brown junior and, just a number of of great trackers in the nineties who were building their skills, and, that's where I kind of made my first connections with this. But I say that the flip side of this, Brian, is the classroom. When I was in the classroom, and I told the story in my book, Common Arts Education, the the first classes I encountered, my kids just had a huge deficit of natural knowledge and knowledge of the hands. I was teaching in an urban environment.
I had kids in there who didn't even know that tomatoes grew on plants. They thought they grew inside those little Styrofoam packages with plastic wrap on the top. And later on in a very kind of high end affluent college prep school, I discovered that my kids couldn't use scissors or glue or other things in seventh and eighth grade, and I thought we're really just impoverished with these skills of the hands that I just take for granted. Right? I've it's been something that's been part of my life since I was a kid, and I really wanted to bring that back.
I know some kids who lived a very good life of the mind, but almost no life of the hands, but maybe a life of the thumbs. Right?
Brian Williams: They use a lot
Chris Hall: of this.
Brian Williams: Yeah. Sure.
Chris Hall: But they they just missed out on the others, and I thought, you know, if you don't know what these are and you don't have a deep connection and with the abiding givenness of reality Mhmm. It's gonna be really hard for you in in the grand scheme of things to make good decisions, be wise, and and do things that are just basic to our survival in the world, much less thriving.
Brian Williams: So for you, was the move did you did you move towards this being in the classroom? Was that what the impetus was when you started, like, pursuing tracking? I mean, were you already teaching when you when you said, I wanna learn I wanna know this more because my students don't, or did you come to the classroom after doing some of that tracking?
Chris Hall: I came to the classroom slightly after. When I first got out of college, I used my philosophy degree in my Japanese minor to sell gym equipment. That was my first job Yep. Out of there, and I was I was a bouncer. I was doing some security work there for a bit.
So, really, it came later. Once I realized what the kids in the classroom both had and did not have, that really drove me to take a lot of those things from my own training, my own environment, bring them back. But, Brian, I gotta tell you, I was not fully prepared for it. There were things I still had to learn, and that set me on a a continuous learning path. I would say I would say that it was both motivation and motivated to serve, those kids well.
Brian Williams: Yeah. So so, Chris, I wanna follow with something you just said. Can I you you you said Yeah? Near the end of what you were saying a second ago that, yeah, they they could use their thumbs with their Nintendo controllers, which I think that's probably what you were doing there. Yes.
If you had done it earlier, you would have had a joystick for your Atari, which is what some of I didn't have one growing up, but I knew kids that did. Yeah. Okay.
Chris Hall: Yeah. That's that's us too.
Brian Williams: But you said they they lack some, yes, some dexterity, but you said something even further. They lacked a kind of connection to reality and a connection to reality that would help them make wise and judicious decisions. Did you say that?
Chris Hall: Yes. I did say
Brian Williams: by that?
Chris Hall: I mean a lot of things by that. Imagine that by the time we've gotten to now, and these kids have grown up kind of totally immersed in it, they've probably not grown up in a a home with a garden. They've they've gotten their food from the store. They've probably gotten their clothes from the store. When they get a hole in them or they lose a button or two, they just buy a new shirt.
They buy a new pair of shoes. They have a home improvement folks come in and outsource the repairs of the home. Maybe dad knows a little bit here. Mom knows a little bit there. But most of the time, we just pay other people for these skills, these resources, and we've developed an economy that's like that.
That's not a bad thing in and of itself. We have a lot of skills to trade. It's wonderful, and we have wealth enough to do it. But if we don't do those things ourselves, even just a little bit, maybe making a little bit of food, maybe cooking our own food, maybe learning how to heal, tying a few basic knots, just a few things like that, it tends to disconnect us from that givenness. We only outsource.
And when we don't know the fundamental realities underneath those, the things that make them go, when those, structures go away, we not only can't can't thrive. It's harder to survive. Many of us would just simply not know what to do. Find our way around. Think about navigation and GPS.
Here's another great example. Yeah. Many a kid does not know how to use a paper map, and they use GPS. Adults use GPS, but they don't remember the route because GPS is telling them the whole way.
Brian Williams: I outsource my memory. So so why would I remember that? Because I have GPS. That's right.
Chris Hall: Bingo. And, boy, have we have we gone into that the last few years. Think about That's right. One of the challenges of generative AI. I mean, we have so many students using that and and adults adults using it that we're losing some really fundamental things unless we make a conscious effort to bring them back.
Brian Williams: So is that your concern a kind of widespread global deskilling of the human race? I mean, is that is that part of it? Because that's what I hear you say when you say that. We're losing some things. I teach university students.
We have a generation of university students who outsource their thinking to AI and LLMs, they don't know how to compose, how to articulate their own ideas, articulate their own thoughts because they've outsourced all that, well, yeah, then you have a kind of generational de skilling. I mean, is that one of your concerns?
Chris Hall: It's one of them, but I would say that's a foundational one. It's perhaps the bricks that make the foundation of a much larger building of concern. I I think the one, though, if I can go all the way to the cupola, if I can go to the very tip top of that concern Mhmm. I think it's the three sixty degree view of beauty. Because oftentimes when we disconnect from things imagine, the only thing that you know of cooking is a bag of Doritos.
Every single one you pull out is the same taste, and, yeah, it's good. You want another one because it's real salty. Right? We have a taste for that. But because of that, we don't eat vegetables.
Right? We we don't understand that food might have different tastes with different bites. We lose a certain musical appreciation, a poetic understanding of what food could be for lack of experience. And have we never put our hands to the garden, if we never understand how to use tools and other things, we lose a certain understanding of a fundamental nature of who we are. We we have a givenness to us and to the the nature of our craft and our hands and even a joy.
Brian Williams: And that's what it is. It's a it's a it's a it's also a failure to understand who we are as embodied creatures in relation with creation. Chris, you might not remember this, but one time you and I were walking across the campus here, and we have a protected wetland through the center of our campus. And we see deer there all the time and birds. I know you're a birder, so you and I were walking across campus, and I don't think this is apocryphal, and this is how I remember it.
I remember saying, Chris, I'm hearing birds tweet. What do you hear? And you named, I think, three or four different kinds of birds, and then you said, These two probably won't be around in a couple months because the insects they eat will have either moved on or died off. And I immediately thought, wow, the world of birds is familiar to Chris in a way it's still foreign to me, and I feel detached from the world of birds in a way that I'm sure you feel like a participant almost in the world of birds.
Chris Hall: Yeah. In in many ways. But the funny thing is the birds nonetheless retain a tremendous amount of mystery. It's joy to hear them at every single level. The level you hear, the level I hear, but I I still can't tell all their little stories.
And those are the wonders about these things. The arts that we could get into here just have no ends. It's lifetime learning if if ever there was.
Brian Williams: Yeah. Okay. So so, Chris, what what what kind of common arts have you pursued in your own life? I know you've been doing this for a long time, and you do this very intentionally in a way that a lot of us haven't and a lot of our listeners won't have done, but what do you think of the you're a master of or a pursuit in a serious way?
Chris Hall: Master is a title that's always given by others. So I
Brian Williams: would I know that you were gonna balk at that. Yeah. But what kind of arts have you pursued?
Chris Hall: Let me let me put it this way. Of all the arts, I would say, I I tend to think of them as white belt, green belt, brown belt, black belt. Right? White belt is a total beginner. Green belt is I've got a little bit of time.
Right? I know it's in brown belt. That's pretty experienced. There's some bark on that tree. Black Belt is I know enough to really be dangerous and to get going at the same time.
Right? Maybe that's it. I would say say that the ones that have been with me the longest are probably the arts of armament and hunting. And by that, I mean martial arts, but also strategy and tactics. I've been a chess player and a game of strategy player since I was a kid.
I've just always enjoyed it. Tracking is part of that. Hunting, which I do for food for the table, but also for the joy of wildlife photography. We can hunt with different optics. It it all depends on what if you wanna put it on the table or not.
I would say navigation's been another one for me. I was an for a long while with backpacking, metalworking, brewing, those kind of cooking things. My wife laughs because she is a she is a pit boss, my wife. You put her in a smoker, anything good is gonna come off of that. But she says my artistic medium for cooking is yeast.
I do bread, and I do beer. Right? There there it is.
Brian Williams: Hey. No bad thing right there. You can go a long way with bread and beer.
Chris Hall: I agree. The ancients thought so too. There was there was a a great way there. But I would say too, if if I can kinda riff into this, I would say that the last four years, I've actually become somewhat of a brown belt, maybe even a black belt in the amateur radio operating world.
Brian Williams: That's right.
Chris Hall: I have a call sign whiskey Romeo five whiskey delta. I'm an I'm an amateur extra class operator, and I started with that about five years ago when the pandemic started from nothing. But I built up now to the highest licensed class and and doing awards and contesting, which is a lot of fun. And that's a common art too, but not quite like cooking or not or agriculture. It's a second order.
It's one that's built within man made systems.
Brian Williams: Tell tell us what what what is ham radio?
Chris Hall: Ham radio or amateur radio is amateur operators can get a license from the FCC to broadcast And above a certain threshold, about five watts for most bands, you'd simply can't without a license. We wanna control those bands to keep everybody from doing it. But amateur radio is kind of the art and science of radio communications at a local and a global level. There's every day, I'll get up in the morning, and I'll get in here. I'll turn the radio on, and I'll sip my coffee while listening to the chatter of the world.
I listen to the tuning of the stations and what the ionosphere is doing. And if I get a chance, I'll get on the Morse code key and send out some things, or I'll get on the phone and talk to some people out there, maybe half a world away just as the day starts and trade news and information. How you doing? And, maybe what's going on in your part of the world. I find it's a just a joyful experience.
Brian Williams: Okay. As you listen, and I quote to what the ionosphere is doing, what does that mean?
Chris Hall: That means the world is a tuned musical instrument. There's this layer on the the Earth's atmosphere called the ionosphere that reflects radio waves back down. And sometimes it lets them through. Sometimes it lets them in, and you bounce pass off the sky. It all depends on what the sun is doing and the Earth's magnetosphere, but ultimately, it's like any musical instrument.
The Earth has a tuning, and if you know how to follow that tuning, you can communicate with all kinds of obscure places out there just just knowing how to bounce pass off the sky.
Brian Williams: Okay. Like I said, friends, the world is familiar to Chris in a way that it's foreign to to many of us. But, Chris, I can imagine, you know I mean, I'm listening to you. I've you know, we've talked a lot about this, and I know some people are probably listening thinking, okay. That sounds pretty cool, but, like, I'm not gonna tune the ionosphere, and I'm not gonna be a black belt tracker.
And so, I mean, if if somebody was, you know, thinking, okay. You know, I I want to refamiliarize myself with the world or familiarize myself with the really real, the material world for the first time, What what kind of counsel do you give someone like that?
Chris Hall: Where do they start? Oh, wow. There's there are so many places to start, and it really depends on the person. Oftentimes, if I have an adult who's coming to me about that question, I'll say, what do you like to do? And oftentimes, there's a common art connected with whatever they liked.
I really like my car. Okay. Well, then let's learn how to change the oil. Let's learn how to check the fluids. Let's learn how to hey.
You want let's upgrade your stereo. Right? In the process, we're gonna learn a little bit about auto mechanics. That's a second order art. Oftentimes, I get someone who comes and I'll say, they oh, man.
I really wanna grow food. Right? Like, that's something I've always wanted to. I saw my grandmother do it, but my parents never taught me. I never learned.
How do I do it? And I'll put them in touch with the local master gardeners, right, or some people in their neighborhood who do it. But oftentimes, the reinterest there just comes with something as simple as what do you love to do already, and let's find something in the common arts that's low hanging fruits, an easy place to get in. Here's a good one for anyone. Can you tell the directions by the sun?
If you think about it, the sun rises in the East. It sets in the West. So anything 90 degrees offset to that arc is north and south, and you can tell by where the sun is in the sky what time of day it is. It's always high in the sky at noon, even in the winter, and it's lower in the sky towards the the times of day. You can tell by the motion of the sun, the moon, the stars, what time it is, what month it is.
So sometimes just refamiliarizing yourself with a calendar, and you can do that on a walk with the dog. You take the dog for a walk, look up, see see what's around. And sometimes those little things are just wondrous to people. You've never done that or maybe you haven't done it since you were a little kid. Yeah.
And just basked in the wonder of it, and it's still there. Still there.
Brian Williams: It hasn't gone away. That's right. No. Yeah. Yeah.
That's great. I love that advice. I mean, to start with what what is it that you like doing? Do you like bread and beer? Okay.
Great. You know, you can make that kind of stuff.
Chris Hall: That Yes. You can.
Brian Williams: Yeah. I mean, you like to walk in the woods. Okay. There's things to know about the woods that you enjoy walking in. There's you know?
So to start with what you like and and where you live and, you know, what you have some familiarity with already. Or maybe what you need, like to change the oil on your car or to fix I've got some, as many of us do, some home repairs that need to be done. I'm looking at those thinking, do I do that myself, or do I hire that out? But it's in my lived environment, so a few skills, very rudimentary skills of carpentry, can fix some stuff like that, so that's great. Hey, so you've been calling these common arts.
I mean, you've referenced that. Your book is called Common Arts Education. Why are you using that phrase to to describe all of these things that we've just been talking about? What what what what makes them common? What makes them arts?
What does that mean?
Chris Hall: There's so much there to unpack. I think the beginning, the best thing to start with is what is common? And if you look back in the historical arc, any of you are familiar with the tradition, the great conversation, other things there.
Brian Williams: If you go back to
Chris Hall: the old authors, they refer to them as the mechanical arts. If you go to the Romans, they call them the servile arts because the people who wrote in the Roman times had servants to do these for them. Right? Oh, but that agriculture. Right?
Oh, that's the good stuff. Right? Because I have a farm. Right? I know.
I call them the common arts because that term really describes what they are to our lives. They're mundane. If I define the common arts, the arts and skills by which we meet are basic embodied needs in the world. That's it. And we all need to eat.
We all need to have shelter. We all need to wear clothes. We find our way around. We need to trade. All of those represent the the basic common arts, the ones that are at the at the bottom.
The they're so common. They're every moment of every day that I would call them that. Now arts is an interesting one because it involves making. Anytime you have an art, you're gonna be making something.
Brian Williams: And it's not artifact. Right? You're gonna be making an artifact. That that's where That's it. Mean, that's where we get that word is the Yep.
The the the art, the skill of making something.
Chris Hall: Artifacts, artifice. Right? All of those people right there, that's the nature of arts, but there's more than one kind. We have liberal arts and fine arts and common arts and, you know, there's there's a zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance. Right?
How many times has art been used as a word and term? But the way I'm using it here is really as a matter of making, and sometimes that's a physical artifact like a piece of woodworking or a fixed set of clothes, but sometimes it's a matter of of skills that make outcomes, like navigation. You don't actually have a tangible outcome of navigation other than arriving where you need to go at the right time in the right place. So, when I'm thinking about common, I'm really thinking about mundane every day, but they're so deep and profound. And I'm thinking about arts in that way too.
Sometimes it's a simple thing about making a simple loaf of bread, but sometimes it's about making something delicious, nutritious, and musical in in terms of food.
Brian Williams: So so the so the common arts are the arts of making and make making the kind of I don't know what what stuff of our common life. Yep. Something like that?
Chris Hall: Yep. And Bonaventure, actually, not to go too deep into the tradition here, but Bonaventure calls those the arts for for comfort and for consolation, which I love. Right? They meet our physical needs, and they console us. The fact that we don't have to be cold, we can make a coat.
We don't have to be, you know, out out here in the woods alone. We can make a shelter, to start at the most basic levels, but we can also improve that and and serve others by it too. Let me make sure that component's in.
Brian Williams: Comfort and consolation. That's that's from Bonaventure. Yep. Yeah. Where did we get this how did we move?
Because you mentioned earlier the the Romans called these sometimes the servile arts. Yep. And sometimes in the ancient Greek tradition, you get something similar. Right? You get something like, these are the kind of things that our either our servants do so that we can sit around and philosophize.
The landed gentry, they're not doing these common arts. They're outsourcing this. Similar to us, I mean, in a way Yes. We want to become like landed gentry, right, and we outsource this kind of stuff. So if if that was the Greek and the Roman kind of approach or relationship to these kind of things, how do things change between them and Bonaventure?
Chris Hall: I'll actually cite two. I'll go one that's almost contemporaneous with Bonaventure and then one a little bit later. Guys like Hugh Saint Victor. Hugh Saint Victor wrote a book called the Deidus Galicon, but perhaps even more important than the book, he was a guy who ran an abbey, the Abbey Of Hugh of Saint Victor outside the walls of Paris. And, Hugh had the notion that, you know, many of our liberal arts, what we would call the seven liberal arts, the arts of language, arts of number, the scholars wrangle with those, and we wrestle with those under the auspices of philosophy and and theology.
But the beekeepers and, the leather workers and the folks who work with their hands have another kind of wisdom about the world, perhaps a lowercase w wisdom to use a a term that we've bantered back and forth before. And when you take the liberal artists and the common artists and you put them together in conversation between their two lowercase w wisdoms, they can distill and kind of interpret out a capital w wisdom. What is the grand interplay and wovenness of of reality here? And just to cite an example of that, how much cooking could we do if we didn't use the arts of number? Your recipe would go horribly awry.
Right? Imagine doing carpentry without understanding some basic math, but but there's even more to it than that. There were balances of the human body for medicine to consider, the restoration of and the maintenance of health that came in. So when this came under the auspice of philosophy and theology, people got kinda caught that bigger pattern again. There's a wisdom in here, a givenness to creation that we can tease out.
And I'll tell you that the, many of these common arts saw another renaissance during the time of the enlightenment and the scientific revolution, if we can use that term. We needed better tools to do our measurements, better tools to make measurements and and reckon conclusions that would come out scientifically. And all of a sudden, we see the lens grinders of the world start to reach a prominence. All they before, they were somewhat obscure, but now we need microscopes and telescopes, and, ah, here we go. And the brass workers who could make fine measuring instruments so we could really do this right.
The clock makers, people who worked in leather, metal, wood, stone, all of those arts began a a kind of a renaissance with the renaissance, if we will. So there's been a couple of reinstorations or rebaptisms perhaps of those arts.
Brian Williams: And a kind of elevation of the arts, it sounds like, of these common arts. Yes. So that these these these aren't just some things we things we we outsource to other people, but but I think it sounds like you're saying, like, in the medieval period maybe, there was an understanding that these are important not only for our survival, but for being humans in this kind of embodied world, something Yes. Like Okay, so question here. If there was this revival of these in medieval period with Hugh and Bonaventure, and then there was a revival of them during the Renaissance and a revival of them during the Enlightenment for various reasons, why do none of us know how to do them?
I mean, where did we did we fall out? Where did we lose these Oh. These common arts? When did that happen?
Chris Hall: It it really happened across a long stretch of time starting with essentially Reconstruction from the civil war going all the way through the nineteen fifties, sixties, frankly, our childhood, Brian. I I think really we we saw it coming through there. There's a lot of threads that we could cite, and again, the podcast is only so long, so I'll I'll put some highlights in.
Brian Williams: Okay.
Chris Hall: We saw some big inversions of this when we went to public schooling. When we started to decide what schooling was, we needed blue collar workers for the factory floor who would be skilled in certain things and white collar workers who worked in the offices upstairs who would be skilled in certain things. We began to create a a bifurcated structure of educational paths, and oftentimes the blue collar workers today, would call Votech or trades. They trade their skill for money, and the white collar workers had the money to pay the Votech folks to come up and do it, and that was kind of a beginning. But the other was the GI Bill after World War two.
We came back, and many people decided it was time to go to college. GI Bill was gonna foot that, and we did. And we had very quickly within that the rise of the American dream of the small home and the car and the potions and the television set. Right? We saw a number of things coming in.
And to support the American dream like that and the rise of suburbia, we had supply chains. We had grocery stores. The victory garden of World War two gave way to the local grocery store where we could just go buy that stuff there. And you remember back in the fifties and sixties, dads did a lot of home repairs. But by the time we got to the nineties and the February, Lowe's and Home Depot were making videos for dads on how to use a screwdriver and a hammer.
We just kinda lost touch with those skills as we outsource them continually. We've had just a kind of a generational slide, and as our schools, particularly public schools, have focused more on high stakes testing, math, and language skills, what went away but home ec, industrial arts. Right? A number of these things where those common arts used to be a little bit of the fabric that we did, but now are are just not. And if we don't do them there, we don't do them at home, we lose them.
Brian Williams: No. That's right. That's that's my next question for you. You know, when you and I were in school, I think probably in middle school I had to take a home ec class, and as a, I don't know, as a 12 year old boy, I balked at that, but I shouldn't have. But when I got into high school, then we did have vo tech, but you had that bifurcation of students, you know, and your vo tech students, at least where I was, were often students who didn't see themselves as pursuing any kind of academic path or they just didn't want to.
They wanted to go make stuff or beat stuff up. So there wasn't much of an integration other than the Vo Tech teachers shared a common parking lot with the, you know, the the normal high school or the other high school teachers. Right? Yes. So is what you're describing, is it just the Votech that we saw in the eighties or and maybe still have now, or is it is it different than that, your your vision of these common arts?
Chris Hall: Oh, far far far more than that. When I look at this, I look at that Votech has really kind of been sold to us in terms of utility. Right? The utility of those skills to participate in an economy. And if you look at the two goals for the United States Department of Education, it's essentially equal access and economic opportunity.
That's right. We have built our schools to make this happen. What I'm talking about is the rest of life outside of those schools. All the things that we aspired to while we were daydreaming in the middle of it. Right?
There it was.
Brian Williams: That's right.
Chris Hall: And I will tell you that that when I'm talking about the common arts, I'm talking about thriving at home. I'm talking about making a homestead that has good cooking in it, nutritional food. It has repairs that can be made to it. It's got a certain perspective on the world that allows us to not only value the people that do Votek. Right?
I I love talking to the trades guys that come here and do the work that I can't do because I get to learn from them, but but also that we just have an agency in the world. If we face problem and we somehow can't get to the supply chains, do we have the skills to even sit at the foot of it or approach it? Yes. And if we do, then how can we solve that problem ourselves? It's just a little bit of ownership, but again, to come back to a theme from long ago, a connection with the givenness of reality creation, and that's that's the real thing right there.
That's a thriving, not just a surviving.
Brian Williams: That's a thriving, isn't it? I mean, because we are we are embodied creatures, and I think we have we have bodies, and we flourish when our bodies function well. And so that's why I think it's important we use our bodies, because it's just kind of part of the nature of the human person to see this as a basic human good that we wanna live into. Sometimes on the podcast here, I've described the idea of basic human goods. These kinds of things that are good for us as humans just given the nature that we have.
If I were a dog or a plant or something else, other things might be good for me, but given the nature that I have as a human, things like knowledge and friendship and health and play, these kinds of things are just good for me given my nature. You're describing a little bit is the pursuit of embodied interaction with my world around me, which seems just basically good, but boy, that's hard these days, Chris. We live virtual It is. Virtual reality is so passe even, but we've had that phrase for a long time. We have.
When we think about the number of hours we spend on screens, or even I spend on screens working, or students, certainly our students spend on on screens, it it it's even harder than ever to pursue these these kinds of things. So tell me about what this could look like in a school. Right? When I Again, like, school I went to, you had I did history and English and physics and and chem and that kind of stuff, and anatomy and physiology, which was great fun and interacting with the world, but I didn't do Votech. And so it wasn't like these were integrated in any way or that it was a given that you were coming up through school.
You were gonna learn some of these common arts.
Chris Hall: No. They were already off the priority list by the time that you and I went through school, even here in our thirties. Right right, Brian? I'm sorry.
Brian Williams: That's right. In our thirties. That's right, Chris. That's why I like you, Chris.
Chris Hall: We'll hide our salt and pepper for now.
Brian Williams: That's right.
Chris Hall: I think yeah. Just to circle back to that one, I think, again, by the time that we came through school, they were already kind of assumed that these were only things that were done at home. We're not gonna spend our school time with it. So what does it look like to re to reclaim that for a school? Yeah.
And I'm gonna tell you, when I go and talk to teachers about this, the very first thing I hear is, oh, it's just one more thing. Like, how am I gonna fit this in the day? And I said, no. No. No.
No. You don't get it. You gotta think like an overhead projector.
Brian Williams: Chris, you just stated yourself. You're definitely not 30. You just referenced an overhead projector.
Chris Hall: I I a chat GPT told me to say this,
Brian Williams: so I'm gonna go with that. Okay.
Chris Hall: An overhead projector was, for those of us who remember, one of the finest pieces of technology back in the classroom in the eighties and the nineties. It it it was a a a screen, that had a lens at the top and a light bulb in it, and you turn the light on, and it would shine light up and on to a screen through that lens, and you'd write on transparencies, these seats of kind of cellophane with special markers. And if you put them down on the glass stage and the light shone through them, that's what would show up up there on the the screen. Now a lot of people think about their lesson plans as, oh, I gotta teach something and say the liberal arts. So I'm gonna write down my objectives.
They put that on transparency, and that's the only thing to go on the screen. And I said, well, how about grabbing another transparency and thinking of those liberal arts there, where can the common arts help you find a meaningful lab for science or a meaningful set of math problems or explorations for math, a connection with literature, living history, and write those on another transparency, put it right on top, and you'll see the light shines through both. We don't have to think of them as separate or one other thing. You don't need to make common arts its own separate thing. The best is when it just blends right in with what you're doing.
Brian Williams: Alright. Give me an example of this, and and define our listeners, Chris, the liberal arts. We've been defining the common arts. We've been saying the common arts, and if you say something like the fine arts or the performing arts, we think of painting. I'm looking at the art around my office right now, or we think of music.
So we understand the common arts maybe because of our conversation and the fine arts or performing arts, but when just when you say liberal arts, what do you what do you mean?
Chris Hall: Okay. I can actually mean a couple of things there. Okay. One is the actual medieval definition of the liberal arts, which are the the three arts of language, trivium, and and that's the grammar, dialectic, or logic, and rhetoric. Okay.
And the four arts of math, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, which is like cosmology. And we could go through a walk through those arts. I imagine you have a podcast on this one coming up at some point in Possibly. Possibly, I hope. But these are these are the arts that many of us just might think of, and maybe I'll use this meaning here, the academic arts, what we study in school.
We learn how to read and write. We learn arithmetic. We learn history and science too. Those may, for modern listeners, fall under that auspice.
Brian Williams: And I guess we call them arts because they're skills that produce the artifact of knowledge or a skill of understanding or a skill of speaking or writing, something like that. Is that right? Is that fair?
Chris Hall: That's it. That's it. And let's bring the fine arts in on that too because when you think about a fine art, we often think about visual arts. Right? Beautiful paintings on the walls.
We think about music, but it can also be performing an art so well that whoever is on the receiving end of it, it has that aesthetic experience. They encounter goodness, truth, and beauty in it. I guarantee you all of us have experienced that sitting at the foot of a good sculpture that was made by someone who really understood stone working, which is a common art. In order to get to that fine art level, they had to come right up through the common arts. Perhaps many of us too might have experienced a musical cheeseburger, one that was just so finely done that it was sublime to sit there and eat it.
Right? And that's when the fine arts become not just music and performing arts. They become something that is so good, so well done, a speech so well done or a performance so well done or even an artifact from the kitchen so well done, we experience it aesthetically.
Brian Williams: Well, and this is why we use the phrase I mean, I'm a huge soccer fan, and sometimes my son and I were watching it, and what will we say? That was a beautiful play. That was a beautiful shot. That was a beautiful save. What do we mean is there was some harmony that we saw there such that we can't describe it any other way but using that kind of aesthetic language.
Absolutely. So we're, in my family, we're big William Morris fans, and so we often refer to things as useful and beautiful. Is that useful and beautiful? It might be useful, but not beautiful. But could it be?
Yes, as I grab my hand thrown coffee mug here that I drink from. So how did we get on this? What are you saying? I was asking about the liberal arts. So we got the common arts.
I think we understand the fine and performing arts to some degree, but when you're saying liberal arts, there's the medieval understanding of the trivium and quadrivium, grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and then arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. But you were saying that liberal arts are academic arts. We should think of them like that.
Chris Hall: That's I would think for the modern year, that's probably the best because to our educations, those are there, but we also have history courses and science courses and others that that lump in.
Brian Williams: Okay. So tell us how the common arts and the academic arts or the liberal arts how do you pursue these at the same time?
Chris Hall: Let me illustrate because some of the best come from stories, and these are the ones that I've experienced myself. I've helped teachers craft them. One great one was we were I had a a group of second and third grade teachers back in brick and mortar school. They were looking to spice up their history curriculum, and I said, well, what do you have? And they had Virginia history of the colonists and Virginia history of the native Americans.
Native Americans in second grade, colonists in third. And I said, well, here's how you do it. You guys have a potlatch every year where they get together at Thanksgiving, and they have food. We get together over a table, and we play the roles, and we learn, you know, how the others thought. And every year, the second graders dress up as Indians and then Native Americans, and our third graders dress up as Pilgrims.
And so why don't we grow the food for that? Why don't we grow some beans? Why don't we grow some squash? Why don't we grow some things that come to the table? And we'll cook the turkey right there.
We'll do it in the courtyard. And so all of a sudden, the kids had a chance to get their hands on seeds, grow some crops late season. They started right at the end of the school year, so it'd be ready by November. Some indoors, some outdoors, and all of a sudden, the kids came to the table, not just from an understanding of the history, but the living history behind the food. They understood what a gift that was because they know when the colonists came in November, you aren't growing beans or squash anymore.
You can't do it. Yeah. And so it was a it was a living lesson that they got to eat and share and partake of that way. Another great one was we had kids who were doing kitchen chemistry. Kitchen chemistry, and their teacher happened to be here's an interesting guy, former NFL player and a chef.
He had
Brian Williams: done both in his time. Okay.
Chris Hall: Here is this big strapping guy, and he's like, I don't know how to teach kitchen chemistry to fifth graders. You know, help me out on that. As the academic dean, I said, well, you know, what are your talents? Oh, you were a cook. Well, why don't we do a little seed to table gardening?
And you can teach kitchen chemistry through a little biology, And those kids had a garden space on campus. They grew quick to grow crops. We had cilantro. We had greens. We had others.
He helped across the summer growing tomatoes. And what did they do but make things like salsa and spaghetti sauce? And through that, they learned about acids and bases, the effects of heating on what that did to the pH of solutions and even the tastes. They learned all the kitchen chemistry that otherwise might have just been academic lessons and from the book and go look up this article and labs with predrawn conclusions, And then again, they got to eat their lab. Right?
In the end of it all, it was it was there. And that's just two stories out of many. It was taking the liberal arts goals or the subject level goals, taking the common arts and putting the two transparencies together, shining light through them so that both are well learned and well earned.
Brian Williams: What's John Milton say about this? John Milton, author of Paradise Lost. Doesn't he have something about a a tincture of delight or a tincture of reality? Or what what's his line?
Chris Hall: His his quote on this one, and this is from of education. Right? John Milton's being asked, you know, what give us your ideal education. Milton's an old man now, and his friend asked him, give us an ideal education. Milton spells it out, and he says, you know, let let us give them such such an education in these things that they shall not only not forget, but daily augment with delight.
And Milton says, you know, once you learn a little bit about trigonometry and a little bit about physics, go work with enginery. Right? The guys who make siege engines was Milton's things and fortifications. And, you know, once you learn a little bit about mathematics and arithmetic, go find the apothecaries. Find the hunters, the fowlers, the fishermen, and learn from them how these things express in the natural world.
And you shall not only never forget, but daily augment with delight. Every time you see a bird, every time you see a fish, every time you see a basket woven a certain way, a crop in a garden, you remember, and you'll probably have more questions, which will lead you in great directions.
Brian Williams: This is Melton. That's great. Okay. Thank you. I I I figured you'd remember it.
I couldn't I couldn't recall it off the top of my head. So so, Chris, this is interesting because when I think well, I was mentioning earlier, like, some of us guys who we we don't maybe have a have a craft or a common art that we we've pursued, but some of us certainly have. I mean, I grew up in the Ozarks of Southern Missouri, and my family all come from Kansas, and these, my brothers in law and family members and uncles, they had common arts, but they felt detached from schools. They never would have thought they had something to offer students in a school, but if I'm putting the pieces together here, it sounds like you might have a teacher who doesn't have a given common art, but man, you might have a dad in a school, or you might have an uncle in the school, or a grandfather who actually has a little bit of time and a a common art to share. Is that have you seen that happen?
Chris Hall: Oh, yeah. Plenty. And in fact, I'll share another story on that. Ask the custodians. Ask the secretaries.
Ask the people on the grounds group. I have a great story about that where I was teaching biology of plants, and I had a great unit going. And I realized that the custodian in our school was a ginseng hunter. Right? This guy has been hunting sang since he was a little kid.
He'd been up in the mountains. Right? His daddy taught him how to do it, and he and I had great conversations about how to preserve food because that's how he grew up. He gave me great advice and knowledge, and I traded. And I told him one day, I said, man, would you be willing to come in and teach my kids about ginseng?
Right? Come tell us how and he's like, nah. No. I couldn't do that. That's like, you know, that's a class.
I said, I'll help you with the teaching and the management. You just come tell them what you know, and I'll help you organize the thoughts ahead of time. Well, he did. He came in, and for about twenty, thirty minutes, he told the story, told the tale, showed the pictures. The kids were asking questions.
He was back and forth, and again, off he goes. Right? You know, thank you so much for that. Three weeks later, he comes and he finds me and he goes, you know, thank you for for helping me with that lesson. I don't have to clean up as much anymore.
And I said, what do you mean? He said, the kids have been picking up after themselves at lunch now because I'm a human being to them. They see me as a person who knows something in authority, not just the guy that comes and picks stuff up.
Brian Williams: That's great. And I
Chris Hall: would dare say that there's a lot of people in our culture right now with those Votech skills who think of those as lesser, but they're not, not even close. And frankly, I would love those those with those deep educations in the books to get their hands dirty in an engine block and in the garden. Yeah. And I'd love those guys, the plumbers, the mechanics, and the others to be reading Plato with us and talking about some bigger ideas because they govern the basics of how we live in the world. There's a huge exchange there.
Brian Williams: Oh, man. Absolutely. I mean, I I I would love to see something. I don't know if this is possible, but a liberal arts trade school of sorts, right, where you could learn the common arts, you could learn a trade, you could learn a craft, but you also learned how to read, and you also learned how to write. You also had the opportunity to delight in some of the great literature and some of the great history.
History delight. And so it seems like our schools and our culture over the last maybe hundred years have pulled these two things apart, and both of us have lost, right, where those of us who, yeah, we pursue the academic arts, we didn't have the delight of being able to navigate by the stars and plant a piece of wood and know which mushrooms to eat and which mushrooms not to eat. On the other hand, if you went for the trade or a skill or a craft, you didn't have the delight of being able to read Jane Austen or being able to read Dante or being Augustine or talking about justice and these kinds of things. And it seems like we've we've kind of all lost in a way.
Chris Hall: And more than that too, I think because we've been doing it for so long, a lot of people who have been in the Votec and their dad was and their grandfather before him, they don't see a value in poetry. Right? They're, oh, there's nothing there. You know, see that stuff. Just like the guys over here say, why would you wanna do a work a day job?
Why would you wanna learn that skill? We can just pay others to do it. To close that gap is to bring together some men, some men of both sides of that thing and bring them back together over a table, over a campfire, over an engine compartment, and over a book. What a beautiful thing that is over time.
Brian Williams: Well, and it struck me one time when I was teaching Sophocles and Aeschylus and Euripides, some of these these Greek playwrights from fifth century BC Athens. And they're writing these plays. They're playwrights, they're poets, but they're writing about soldiers, and they're writing about warriors, and you think, what do you know about being a soldier and a warrior? And then you dig into it a little bit more and you're like, Oh, yeah, these guys were in battle after battle after battle, and then came home and wrote their poetry. When we look at so many of our great authors, our great poets over the years, they were men who were farmers or who were soldiers or who had their hands dirty, let's say, in all kinds of ways and still found value in the liberal arts or the academic arts as you've said.
Chris Hall: To make a Washington, we need a Cincinnatus, and Washington was a great general and Cincinnatus was too, but both were also farmers. And, yes, there's a line.
Brian Williams: Yeah. That's right. Hey. Can I can I ask you a little bit about what this to come back to your your homesteading, your three boys? Because you you grew up with three sons.
Yes. And I grew up with three boys. I didn't have any sisters. In some ways, was glorious, you know, and we could just beat up each other, and we could break stuff. And my cousins on one side of the family were all guys out on grandma's farm, and so we got into all kinds all kinds of mischief.
But, you know, I will say I have an 18 year old son, and I also teach the Odyssey. And any of you who know it, the first four books of The Odyssey are about Odysseus' 18, 19 year old son. He's trying to find his way in an adult world, and he's hesitant, and he's anxious, he's faltering, and he does some dumb things, but his dad's been absent. And so I have been thinking a lot about Telemachus and Odysseus and the way other people come alongside Telemachus to help him navigate the adult world. Can I ask you what this was like with you in your home with your three boys?
I mean, did you think about, in particular, raising boys, kind of either, you know, in in dialogue in a way with the with these common arts? Like, what what kind of things did you see or or try to attend to?
Chris Hall: I think the things I tried to attend to most, and I speak not from a position of perfection whatsoever. Man, if we had time, we could unpack all that. And I tell some stories even in the book of times when I was not so good at doing this. I would say the big thing I I wanted to impart to my sons was being a man. Right?
And you're all apprentice men. You're you're young men. You're boys, but that means you're an apprentice in this. So watch my lead for the good and for the bad. Right?
You'll see me mess up as much as you'll see me have success, hopefully more of more of success than others. But from your earliest ages, I'm gonna give you an ownership in this. You're gonna be able to carry a bucket. I'm gonna ask you to remove the rocks from the furrow that I just plowed. I'm gonna ask you to help me with the animals.
Tend the chickens, tend the rabbits, tend the ducks. Keep an eye on things. I'm gonna ask you to give them ear mite medicine if they need it. Right? That's on you.
I'll show you how to do it, apprentice you in it, but then I'm gonna ask you to do it and expect it to be done. And as Ronald Reagan said, of course, trust but verify. You always wanna go and make sure it was done. And boys but boys will flub it. And the way to handle that as a dad isn't to, you know, scream at him and yell at him and say, okay.
So what happened? Right? Where is it? Where did it go? And there was a building of a process not only of ownership of responsibility, but a culture of conversation.
And I have to tell you, one of the finest things that came out of this is the laughter. We all have such a sense of humor because we've seen absurdities. We've dealt with ridiculous things. We've dealt with the frustrations of impossible tasks, and we have all fought together side by side even by the time they're 18 and come to leave home. But I realized too just how much their childhood is really just a lifelong thing.
Now they're fledging. They're going off in the
Brian Williams: world to be men of
Chris Hall: their own. But I have a feeling that twenty years from now, we will still come back to the table to talk about Plato, and we'll still have some things to go and do on the farm. Maybe they'll help me cut the firewood, and that ownership will be simply extended.
Brian Williams: Yeah. Yeah, Chris, let me dig in a little bit to that idea of apprenticeship. I mean, I love the idea of parenting as apprenticing, and yes, they're human persons, but they're young human persons, they're children, you're apprenticing them into a human being, if you will. Do you think that, I mean, you had three boys, Would their apprenticeship have been different than you might have apprenticed girl? I don't know because we've got testosterone coursing through our veins.
You've got larger muscle mass. You know? I mean, they're all kind of differentiations between, you know, boys and girls, men and women. I mean, do you think that the kinds of things you had them doing on the farm were kind of, I don't know about uniquely, but but but especially important for them as as young boys being apprentice to be men.
Chris Hall: I think that the tasks would be universal because Yeah. A a boy or a girl can learn how to use a shovel. Yep. A boy or a girl can learn how to lift a load. A boy or a girl can learn how to caretake, and we think of that typically as a feminine thing.
But men need to learn how to caretake too, and we really pay attention to an animal to know even by the slightest movements or, you know, the shift of the body posture, you got a sore foot. Right? Just to keep an eye on that. Think about the variety of skills, life skills, whether male or female that come from that. I think the difference might be in the the flavor of the apprenticeship.
Maybe not maybe not the difference of the task. With boys, it's very easy to push a little bit push a little bit harder in certain directions, and with girls, it's easier to push a little bit harder in other directions. Sort of a a a more emotional direction. And I'm speaking of this not just from my experience, but from the experience of our friends who had three girls and apprentice them on a farm similar to ours. And we would sit around the dinner table and laugh at the differences in the apprentice.
We were all doing the same tasks. Those girls knew how to wrangle cows. My sons didn't know how to do that. Right? They're Yep.
And so we would just talk about the way that you could speak to them, the way that you could question them to draw out the best of the experience, and that was certainly different. With boys, it was very and direct and but but also wonderfully soft because each of my sons, I have to say, had a different apprenticeship. They all apprenticeship apprentice under me Yeah. But each of them was different. And I knew when I could use a word like this or a word like that with each of them, and it wasn't all the same.
So perhaps it's not so much a gender split as it is just knowing who it is you're teaching. Right. As a good mongister, it's good to know who's on the receiving end of that, who are you, and let me draw the best out of you from there while mitigating or perhaps pointing out the best of things you could fix.
Brian Williams: Yeah. I'm just I'm just curious because I have two girls and a boy, and I I used to coach girls soccer and boys soccer, and it's different coaching girls. Yes. Well, I mean, I love coaching the girls, but we always had tears in preseason. I didn't have that with the guys.
But the guys, you know, after we lost a game, they would want to, like, replay every every moment in the game on the way home. And the girls processed it very quickly, and they were like, where are we going for dinner? And I was like, you know, that's a little more healthy. And just, you know, my my son broke more things before he was five years old in the house than either of my girls have over the whole course of their lives, you
Chris Hall: know? Yes.
Brian Williams: So he just was a very, very physical guy. And so I've just thought, does this look different, you know, or how do they experience it differently? And that said, I have to give a shout out to some of our well, some of my dear friends, Jeff and Joella Erickson in in Central Kansas, whose kids only think I'm cool because I knew I know you. So Hans, Charlotte, Louisa, Thomas, I mean, they've all or, you know, they've done classes with you, and I know Charlotte and Louisa for sure love doing stuff with with Chris Hall. And and so, yeah, you're you're right to say, yeah, this isn't a girl guy kind of thing when it comes to the common arch, but we we maybe we do experience these differently.
I know, you know, I mean, one other example from my son, because he was rather monosyllabic, you know, he needed to, like, engage physically. So when his sisters walk by him, he relates to them physically. He'll shove them, push them. They're not really appreciative of that. And then when he needed to blow off steam, if he was just being cranky, at one point in time, my wife, when he was like six or seven, she got him a block of wood, some nails, and a hammer.
She's like, in backyard and just hit stuff. And yeah, 45 later, he came in, and he was, like, all calm and delightful. You know? That's just that way of interacting to the physical world was just different at least from from my son and and my my girls.
Chris Hall: So Well, remember what we were talking about a while ago about how the common arts gets you in touch with the givenness of things, the natural order of things? There's a definite givenness to boys and to girls Yeah. That will come out in any apprenticeship and in any task as it comes. You can't avoid it. And I love listening to the stories you're telling of this because I'm laughing at my my last thirty years in the classroom.
I'm coming up on year 31 this September, and the way I apprentice boys and girls even in the same subject in a class is different. You the way you talk to them and work with them has to be because they are.
Brian Williams: Yeah. That that's that's absolutely right. Hey, Chris. I wanna draw this to a close, but as you know, I would keep talking to you all afternoon as we've done many many times. So Forged, the podcast here, it attends to the disciplines, delights, crafts, and calling that constitute our well lived ordinary lives.
So let me let me go through each one with you. Discipline. What's a discipline that you have pursued over the course of your life that has really sustained you?
Chris Hall: Can you see the guitars in the back?
Brian Williams: I can.
Chris Hall: The discipline of music. Because the discipline of music isn't just the the learning to play and putting in the time and the other pieces. It's also an appreciation, understanding of the dynamics, tempo changes, the poetry. And I think that is a metaphor that I tend to use whether it's on the Marshall field or in a classroom or even tending with kids. It it's just their music is a discipline that's been with me since I was four, and it it continues.
Brian Williams: Okay. Have you ever made musical instruments?
Chris Hall: Not good ones. Let's say that my skills there are lacking yet, but
Brian Williams: we'll give it time. Fine. Oh, wait. That's good. We found we found a common art that Chris Hall is still still learning, still developing.
That's great.
Chris Hall: Okay. Wants to see me dance either, but go ahead.
Brian Williams: Yeah. Fair enough. Alright. So that's a discipline. What do you especially delight in, Chris Hall?
Chris Hall: Being in the woods. Being in the woods, whether it's tracking or being up in the hunting stand, just sitting and waiting. As Thoreau once said, sometimes fishing is about the fish and sometimes it isn't. Yeah. And I think it's like that going hunting and just spending that time fading back into it, letting nature come back to its baseline, and essentially, being being at one with it.
Right? That's a very peaceful and delightful thing for me.
Brian Williams: Yeah. That's great. And I I I often ask people, have you pursued a craft? And I think the answer is yes Yes. With you.
And so maybe maybe for you, is there a craft that you would still love to pick up that you haven't pursued yet?
Chris Hall: What? What couldn't? I think fine woodworking might be something that awaits me in the fifties and sixties. We'll see.
Brian Williams: Okay. But back to your first question, what what do you think is a craft that you've really pursued and honed? And I will say, like, don't be shy, that you've really mastered.
Chris Hall: Yeah. I would yeah. Again, mastery is a title given by others, but I would say at this point in my life, probably the the the associated arts of scout craft, of armament and hunting. Okay. Those that go in there.
I've been a distance marksman marksman, a competitive marksman, but also a tracker. I've spent a lot of time out there doing that. I love that. I would say navigation, probably brewing at this point too, as strange as that sounds. Yeah.
It's it's yeah. Those those to me are are are just long term delightful arts, ones that I'll just continue to explore.
Brian Williams: That's great. And and friends, this is why at the beginning, I said whether I'm in the urban jungle or the Amazon jungle, I want Chris Hall next to me because he's also a black belt as we've established. But so, Chris, calling, when when you think of the you're you're calling, you know, sometimes calling and career are two different things, but when you think of my calling, what what comes to mind? Or callings, I suppose, plural, but what comes to mind?
Chris Hall: You know, that was a a long thought. When you and mentioned that one to me a long time ago, I really had to think about it, and I came to the fact and the conclusion perhaps that I think in this case, my calling and my vocation really have matched. I I love education. I've been an administrator. I've been a a a dean.
I've done all the the administrative jobs, but I like nothing more than to be in a classroom with kids. Whether that's outdoors, whether it's online, I think for me, that's where the music happens. It's a it's a beautiful place, a beautiful space. And for an introvert, I love people. When I'm in that classroom setting, I've learned to be an ambrovert.
Right? Maybe a little of both. And I think that's one for me where a calling of vocation really really do come together, and I wanna do that one until I simply can't anymore.
Brian Williams: That's great. Hey, Chris. Is there a poem or a reading or a paragraph that's been significant to you over the over the course of your your your life?
Chris Hall: Yes. And there were many, actually, I could pick, but the the one I might pick for today is actually out of Musashi's book of five rings, the Go Read No Show, Very famous book. And if you don't know Musashi's history, he was a famous samurai who went ronin after the battle of Seki Gahara in sixteen hundreds. He was his, master was killed, which was a disgrace for him. So he he kind of went went forth, and had to fight duels and battles.
He fought his first one at a very early age. I believe he was 14 to the death with with another teenager who challenged him, an older teenager. And by the time he retired from dueling and studying the arts and and rolling, he had fought 62 battles, life and death. He was only defeated once, and it was not to the death. He came back and defeated the other guy again, and gave him his life back.
So Musashi was a very skilled warrior. He knew the arts of armament from the the hilt of a sword to the fullness of battle, But he retired in his later years. He went to a monastery and said, I'm done with the blood arts. I'm here to to reflect. And as part of his time in a monastery, he wrote.
He wrote the Go Read No Show, the book of five rings, and it runs everything from the art of martial science to the art of human science across those those scrolls. And I find in here a piece of advice that he gives everyone who would aspire in his words in the book in the martial crafts, but I find it pretty much aspires to all crafts. You could you could get it here. And here it is. I'm gonna open this up and make sure I hit it right.
These are the nine admonishments from the Earth scroll. First, think of what is right and true. He leads with that one. Second, practice and cultivate the science. Three, become acquainted with the arts.
Four, know the principles of the crafts. Five, understand the harm and benefit in everything. Six, learn to see everything accurately. Seven, become aware of what is not obvious. Eight, be careful even in small matters.
And nine, my personal favorite, which my sons hate because I say it whenever they're playing video games, do not do anything useless. And the definition of that may vary, but I find tremendous wisdom in those nine points from an ancient swordsman to a modern woodworker to a teacher to a father seeking to own the craft of his fatherhood. Mhmm. There are so many wonderful things in there. I find husbands.
My husband work in there too. So many wonderful things could come down to that list. And
Brian Williams: Become aware of what is not obvious, husbands.
Chris Hall: And be careful in even small matters. Yes, sir.
Brian Williams: That's that's wonderful, Chris. When did you first read this? When did this first, you know, resonate with you?
Chris Hall: When I was 17. I had just started the craft of martial arts. I had started it three months before, and someone handed me a copy of the book and said, you should read this. An older, more experienced artist. And my my reading of it at the time was very basic because I didn't know what I was reading fully.
Yeah. But that one set stuck with me, and you know how they say about men in rivers, you step into a river, the river's different every time. Great books are the opposite of that. It's the man who's different that steps into it each time, and the book is the same. And you'll read that book a little differently because you're a different man, and I'm different now at three times 17 than I was at 17, for sure.
Brian Williams: That's beautiful. Well, thank you, Chris Hall, for giving us your time this afternoon. And, hey, so My pleasure. So what would this remind us again, the the excerpt you just read for us. Where did that come from?
Chris Hall: From Miyamoto Musashi's Book of Five Rings. The Go Read No Show is the Japanese name of that one.
Brian Williams: Okay. And what is the book? We've referenced your book several times. Give us the name of that.
Chris Hall: Common Arts Education through Classical Academic Press. Common Arts Education is that book, and it's essentially a handbook for teachers, parents who are homeschooling to integrate the common arts into your instruction. It's full of great ways of doing that, easy dives. It's got an academic reference in the back, an appendix full of just checklists of skills you might consider. A little bit of history, philosophy, it's all there.
Brian Williams: Okay. And if people wanted to find you online, where would they go?
Chris Hall: Well, right now, I'm at always learning education dot net, and you could reach out to me there at [email protected] if you wanna reach me via email. But I've got a new project that's coming up starting this next summer called Common Arts Academy. I'm gonna be offering a number of online courses for for kids and for parents who wanna integrate these things into their home life, into their homeschooling. Maybe just bring a little bit more to home than the chores, right, in the daily battles, and, keep an eye open for that one as the spring comes. Commonartsacademy.com will be that one.
Brian Williams: Cool. I know about that project, Chris. That's fantastic. Yeah. I need to I need to sign up to learn knot tying or something, I think.
So that's that that's great.
Chris Hall: We can do it over a homebrew.
Brian Williams: It's perfect. Oh, there you go. There you go. Well, again, thank you, Chris Hall. And folks, you've been listening to Forged, the podcast about discipline, delight, craft, and calling.
It helps us forge ordinary lives of human flourishing. So thank you, and we'll see you next time.
