Recovering the Common Arts in Classical Education

What are the common arts, and why do they matter for classical education and homeschooling today—especially in an age of rapid technological change and AI? In this Homeschool Conversation I sat down with educator, author, and common artist Chris Hall to explore how the common arts shape learning, character, and human flourishing. Drawing on decades of experience in public schools, classical academies, and homeschooling on a family homestead, Chris makes a compelling case that the common arts are not optional extras but essential to a full, embodied education rooted in reality, charity, and long-term formation.

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Chris Hall’s Background in Classical Education and Homeschooling

Chris Hall brings nearly 30 years of experience in education, beginning in public schools before discovering classical education about a dozen years ago. He describes that discovery as filling in “the gaps, the holes, the things I saw that were missing” in his earlier teaching experience. Eventually, Chris and his wife chose to homeschool their children using a classical model deeply integrated with homestead life.

As he explains, their education combined “all the goodness, truth, and beauty that comes with it” alongside what he calls “the arts of dirty hands.” Gardening, repairs, animal care, and manual work were not add-ons but part of a unified educational vision. Chris memorably describes the relationship between the liberal arts and the common arts as “almost like a Möbius band…as soon as you end with one, you’re beginning the next.”

What Are the Common Arts?

At their core, the common arts are practical arts rooted in meeting real human needs. Chris defines them as “the arts and skills by which we meet our basic embodied needs in the world.” These include arts such as agriculture, cooking, architecture, weaving, metalworking, navigation, and animal husbandry.

Using the contrast between a sterile science lab and a living garden, Chris illustrates how the common arts invite learners into wholeness rather than abstraction. “The garden beckons to things in us and really to things in our souls that we can’t necessarily meet in the science lab the same way,” he explains. The common arts allow liberal arts learning—math, language, science—to become embodied, meaningful, and connected to lived reality.

Common Arts vs. Chores, Crafts, and Life Skills

I asked for clarity on how common arts differ from chores, crafts, or basic life skills. Chris acknowledges the overlap but emphasizes that common arts are broader and deeper. Chores, he explains, are “arts of charity within our own homes,” while crafts often produce small artifacts meant for enjoyment.

By contrast, the common arts form habits, judgment, and attentiveness to the “givenness of creation.” They are not simply about producing an object but about sustained engagement with reality for survival, flourishing, and service to others.

Common Arts and Technical Skills: What’s the Difference?

Chris distinguishes between common arts and technical disciplines using architecture and engineering as an example. Architecture, he says, is a common art concerned with form, proportion, beauty, and purpose. Engineering, while valuable, focuses on technical specifics like materials and tolerances.

“Architecture holds on to a certain purview,” Chris explains, while engineering “improves and augments” that larger vision. The common arts provide the framework; technical skills deepen and refine it.

How the Common Arts Have Changed Over Generations

Over the last several generations, Chris observes a growing distance from the common arts, driven largely by industrialization, convenience, and reliance on supply chains. Skills once passed down through families—gardening, sewing, repairs—have been lost rather than simply forgotten.

The pandemic, however, marked a turning point. Chris notes that many people rediscovered baking, gardening, and home repairs when supply chains faltered. “For us, this was a way of rooting in God’s goodness, God’s creation, God’s order,” he says. These practices reminded people of what is truly stable and enduring.

Do the Common Arts Still Matter in an Age of AI?

Addressing concerns about technological advancement, Chris offers a clear caution. “We are only one power failure away from not being able to use any AI whatsoever,” he notes. While technology will continue to evolve, common arts anchor human agency in what is real, embodied, and reliable.

Chris introduces the idea of first-, second-, and third-order common arts, warning that generative AI risks removing people from meaningful engagement altogether. “It behooves us to stay in contact with the real… and onboard our agency rather than outsource.”

Why Classical Educators Still Need the Common Arts

For educators who feel overwhelmed by already full curricula, Chris offers a powerful image: the overhead projector. The liberal arts and common arts, he explains, are like transparencies layered together, illuminating one another without adding “one more thing.”

The common arts bring literature, science, and history to life. When students experience navigation, forging, or gardening, abstract texts become tangible. “It’s hard to understand The Odyssey if you’ve never been on a sailboat far away from the edge of land,” Chris observes.

How Families Can Practice the Common Arts at Home

Families don’t need mastery or elaborate setups to begin. Chris encourages parents to start by “beholding” skilled work—visiting living history museums, watching craftsmen, or observing experienced cooks. From there, families can experiment with low-stakes exploration, like baking bread or growing herbs.

He emphasizes that mastery grows slowly and encourages parents who feel unqualified: “You don’t know it yet, but there’s always a gateway.”

Three Common Arts to Prioritize First

When asked which common arts to prioritize, Chris highlights three especially fruitful starting points:

1. Strategy and tactics, rooted in the art of armament and hunting, which train judgment and foresight
2. Cooking, which builds hospitality, cooperation, and embodied learning across all ages
3. The x-working arts, such as woodworking, metalworking, or leatherworking, which cultivate attentiveness and problem-solving

“These little crafts,” Chris says, “get us in that meditative crafting mindset of making… and that’s how we walk our days.”

Key Takeaways

• The common arts meet humanity’s basic embodied needs
• Liberal arts and common arts are deeply interconnected
• Common arts differ from chores and crafts in depth and purpose
• Modern convenience has distanced families from these skills
• The pandemic sparked renewed interest in common arts
• Technology is useful but ultimately fragile and ephemeral
• Common arts ground learning in lived experience
• Families can begin without mastery or expensive tools
• Small, low-stakes exploration leads to long-term formation
• Recovering common arts is generational, not immediate

You may also enjoy:

• A Common Arts Education in Our Classical Homeschool (my previous chat with Chris Hall)
• The Harmony of Learning: Greg Wilbur on Music, the Quadrivium, and Loving God Through Beauty
• Classical Homeschooling with Humility and Hospitality: A Conversation with Dr. Joylynn Blake
• Wisdom, Truth, and Cultural Discernment with Dr. Carl Trueman
• All my resources on Classical Education

Find Chris Hall Online

• Always Learning Education (Chris’s website)
• Common Arts Education: Renewing the Classical Tradition of Training the Hands, Head, and Heart
• Common Arts Academy: coming soon
• Chris@alwayslearningeducation.net

Check out all the other interviews in my Homeschool Conversations series!

[00:00:00] Amy Sloan: Hello, friends. Today, I am delighted to be joined again with a repeat guest of Chris Hall. He is a common artist, a teacher, a husband, a father, an author, and a musician. He lives in Virginia on their family’s homestead and teaches both online and in person. And this is sort of a continuation of our previous conversation about the common arts. But before we dive into that topic, give us a little bit of a background of who you are and your family and your experience with like homeschooling in general and classical education more specifically.

[00:00:38] Chris Hall: You bet. Amy, thank you so much for having me on, especially for a repeat conversation. Let’s see, this is year 30 for me in education. I started a long time ago as a public school educator, kindergarten three, five, seven, and made my way from there after about eight years into independent school and only discovered the classical school movement about 12 years ago, 13 years ago. It’s been kind of a recent development across my 30 years, but I was incredibly drawn to it from the get-go. It was one of those ones that was answering some questions about the gaps, the holes, the things I saw that were missing in my experience in public school and in kind of a secular independent school environment world. And what we figured out very rapidly was that the best way we could do classical education involved the academy. We had to have some companions in the journey, right, others who were walking with us. But about eight years ago, we decided we could best do this at home. We were living on a homestead. We knew enough to make this really work here. And so we pulled our kids, who at the time were in seventh grade and fifth grade and third grade, and we started homeschooling. And we did it at a classical model, I guess you could call it that, but very deeply involved in our homestead. The kids helped us with chores. They helped us with gardening. They helped us with car repairs, all the things that we’ll talk about today a little bit with common arts. And for us, the classical model of education with all the goodness, truth, and beauty that comes with it has just come alongside the arts of dirty hands, right? We’ve spent our time in the soil. We’ve gathered our own eggs. We’ve done a lot of our own repairs. And we found the two to be good, not only compliments for one another, but so deeply entwined that they become almost like a Mobius band. This is an image I use in the book, where you take a strip of paper, and you can write liberal arts on one side, common arts on the other. But if you join them up with a twist, you can trace your finger along the arc of both, and it’s one-sided. As soon as you end with one, you’re beginning the next, and they come back around. So we’ve now been homeschoolers for that time. My oldest is now a third-year student at UVA. My middle is in college this year, just started community college. And my youngest, I’m sad to say, is 16 and in his junior year of high school, still working here out of home. And it’s been a wonderful walk.

[00:02:55] Amy Sloan: We have two graduates and three still at home, and my youngest is only 10. But I’m starting to see, like, wow, the end is coming. It is nigh upon us. And that is bittersweet, because it’s exciting. You’re raising them to be adults and to leave and to work with their hands and continue to learn. But it’s also sad, because we also really like our kids, right?

[00:03:15] Chris Hall: Yes, we do. And bittersweet is the perfect word for it. That is the one.

[00:03:20] Amy Sloan: Well, so you mentioned in that wonderful word picture of the Mobius strip and the liberal arts and the common arts. But can you please explain to us exactly what the common arts are and why they matter?

[00:03:34] Chris Hall: Certainly. And could it help if I shared a picture or two for this one? Oh, sure. Please do. Thank you. Hold on one second, and I’ll share over. Here we go.

[00:03:47] Amy Sloan: All right. It should be giving you permission there.

[00:03:50] Chris Hall: Yep.

[00:03:51] Amy Sloan: And Chris, after we’re done, I’ll save this here. But could you send me some of the images? I can put them in the show notes.

[00:04:00] Chris Hall: Absolutely. Absolutely. So I would actually start the journey with the common arts with this one, this picture that’s before us. And can you see the science lab here? This high school science lab? Okay. So it’s funny. When I put this image up in front of audiences and I’m beginning to talk about common arts, I’ll say, what happens here, right? What is this? Instantly, science classroom. Adults do it. Kids do it. And I say, well, how do you know it’s a science classroom? Well, look at the white walls. Look at the glassware. Look at the tabletops. Look at how there’s a board in front and lab pieces out here. And I said, what do we do here? Oh, we dissect things, right? We run chemistry experiments. We play with ramps and carts and other things. Things that we remember from our experiences learning science as we go. And I said, gosh, is this the ideal place to learn science? What does this beckon in you as a learner? And oftentimes it comes down to that kind of reductionist mechanistic, very experimental type understanding. And then I put this picture up and I say, what does this beckon in you, right? As an audience member, what do you see? And of course it’s the garden and you hear the memories start to pop up. I did this with my mom. We have this in our backyard, right? It’s so wonderful. And then I ask is, can you still do physics here? Can you do chemistry here? Can you do biology here? And there’s, yeah, of course you can. I said, well, it’s a little bit different than the lab, right? It’s not as clean an environment. And out here, you can actually eat your experiment, which you would not want to do in the regular lab, right? A little bit of science humor there. But the point I’m making with the common arts and with these two pictures is oftentimes when we think of education, we’re often in the method. We’re often thinking about how to deliver it. We’re thinking about especially science education, piece by piece. And in the process, oftentimes we lose sight of the whole. And the garden beckons to things in us and really to things in our souls that we can’t necessarily meet in the science lab the same way. And when I think about the common arts, I really come back to this image of the garden. The common arts are, if I were to define them, and here it is on the slide, right? The arts and skills by which we meet our basic embodied needs in the world. How do we meet our need for shelter, for food, for security, to find our way around, to trade with other people, to make things? And there’s a short list on the slide, everything from agriculture to metalsmithing you see down there, that’s drawn from the tradition. Hugh St. Victor, Bonaventure, John Scotus, Arijana, even Milton have mentioned the common arts in their writings in various ways to get us rerouted. Every one of those authors in the tradition I just mentioned brings them up as part of a holistic education, a full education. And you can see, I think in each of these, we can perhaps tease this out, how the liberal arts, the arts of language and the arts of mathematics really come to full fruition. They get made manifest. Oftentimes we think about these things, especially math in the abstract, right? We think of math as worksheets and memorization and getting the answers right. But think about the beauty and proportion of using math in cooking. Even making a batch of chocolate chip cookies involves math now embodied to meet, I suppose, our desired embodied needs in the world, chocolate chip cookies. But as we practice any of these arts, we’re really coming down to some basics, right? Some things that keep us going in the world.

[00:07:17] Amy Sloan: So is being embodied sort of an important key element of a common art? Or what separates a common art from a life skill? Or what we might think of as home economics? Because when I think of cooking, I think of that as something, of course, I want all of my children to be able to do. So yeah, can you kind of tease out a little bit of those distinctions?

[00:07:40] Chris Hall: Absolutely. And we had also talked a little bit, I think, a while back about the difference between that and chores too, which is also that. Or even arts and crafts. Think about how many different ways we talk about some of the things or think about some of the things that are on this list. To maybe put it this way, when we think about embodied needs, it’s the most fundamental things that keep us alive in the world. And even our Savior was embodied too, right? He walked this walk with us from a time. He knows what it means to be hungry. He knows what it means to walk without shelter and to make our clothes. Think about how many images from this list appear even in the Gospels. I think in a kind of a spiritual dimension, it’s important for us to consider our needs in the world, not just for ourselves and keeping ourselves going, but in charity. Many times as we think about being charitable to others, it involves providing food, it involves providing shelter, it involves providing clothes. So for these skills, I look at them not as just a chance to embody the liberal arts and take those down to the tangible and the material, but also to practice our arts of charity, to practice our love for neighbor and one another. Now chores are like that too. Chores are arts of charity within our own homes, right? And my kids have had chores since they were big enough to pick up a bucket or to fold a t-shirt, right? It was one of those ones that we made sure in our homeschool, we even have the saying around the house, many hands make light work. If we’re all going to be part of this, let’s all be part of it. And each of you, according to your ability, will participate. But the chores that we do are more like acts of love in the house. They’re simple things that we can do for one another. When I’m thinking about the common arts, I’m thinking about, if I could put this in a Venn diagram form, chores would be this big. They would be a circle within a much larger circle of pursuit that is the common arts. Perhaps our way of showing love to one another is to cook dinner once a week or to help with the animal rounds, right? Which would be the common art of animal husbandry here or cooking. And those are small things that we can master and they’re for the charity of the home. But to really study those to depth brings us further and further and further into a contact with a givenness of reality, a givenness of creation, a givenness of nature. And that is a depth to which our chores can not quite carry us in small doses, right? The chores designed to keep our homes running on a day-to-day basis. Another one, I suppose, that comes out with this, Amy, is arts and crafts. A lot of people look at that and say, okay, the arts of gluing and crocheting and other things, yes, that’s good, right? And good, true, and beautiful in many cases, right? They can lead us into some manual art, some arts of the hands, and we can use those for charity too. But they’re smaller. If we think about the arts and crafts, it’s mostly to produce an artifact for enjoyment. It’s an artifact that we can appreciate and enjoy and put up on the fridge perhaps or have around the house. And they go in the memory box often. Those are the ones that come out 20 years later and go, remember when we made this? Yes, I do. But the common arts might bridge the gap between the two in saying practicing the common arts is a 20-year arc. It doesn’t just stop at the craft. It’s a full-on development of those things over time. And again, with an eye towards surfing or connecting with a givenness in creation.

[00:10:58] Amy Sloan: Okay, so what I hear you saying is the common arts are going to be bigger as opposed to a smaller artifact. We’re looking at something that is, I don’t know, I hate saying like more significant, but maybe you can help me think of a better word.

[00:11:16] Chris Hall: Perhaps something that is rooted in a different purpose. We do arts and crafts to train the basic skills of the hands. We do them for a certain personal enjoyment, right? A warmth and enjoyment. But the common arts would be practiced for a fullness of survival, a fullness of our own thriving, a charity as we seek to reach out beyond just the enjoyment of the art and craft into service perhaps. And I think there’s a deeper study in the arc of the common arts. They lead us back many ways towards say the quadrivial arts in particular out of the liberal arts in ways that simple arts and crafts only scratch the surface of. Maybe that’s the best way to put it.

[00:12:03] Amy Sloan: I’m going to pause just one second. I’m unclear. I’m a little bit worried that it’s only going to be recording the way it is set up on my end. That it’s only now going to be recording your screen share. So can you cancel the screen share? You can bring it back up if you have something to share later. But that way we can see your face too. Okay. Good. That will work out better. I actually just, well, as we’re recording this, the most recent episode was about the arts of the quadrivium. So I got to interview Greg Wilber and that was really excellent. So I’ll make sure to put that link in the show notes here as well. I think the last time we talked, we were discussing my husband who’s a bridge engineer and the difference between like architecture, which you had on that list of a common art and something like engineering, which is a more technical. So can you kind of parse out the difference between what we would call a common art and more technical skills?

[00:13:01] Chris Hall: Yes. And in fact, maybe the best way to do this is let’s use architecture and engineering side by side. Architecture would be the common art of thinking through the idea of how to build. Architecture might include the notion of bridges and the variety of bridges. Engineering comes down to the specificity of materials tolerances that are used to build those bridges. The specifics of the concrete used for the pylons or emplacements. There’s a whole series of arts, sub arts, perhaps that bridge out from that notion once you dig into the study of engineering. And of course, architecture as a common art would involve mathematics. We need a little bit of geometry and proportion. We need arithmetic to calculate materials and distances and other things. And it would also include in the notion of architecture, the music of a structure, how the arithmetic, the number goes with the art of proportion in the fullness of it. We can design them that way. Engineering in that case, digs right down into the nature of material science. It digs around in the physical science of doing those and goes to the specifics. So imagine that architecture is a larger category. Engineering assists in architecture, but architecture holds on to a certain purview that engineering in its attention to the details and finery only improves and augments what architecture has to offer as an umbrella.

[00:14:26] Amy Sloan: Yeah, that makes sense. I will say my own husband, as he applies his engineering, actually, I just overheard a business call earlier today where he was talking about a design and he was like, yes, but if we do this particular thing with the change of the materials, it will actually affect the aesthetics of the arches, right? So we don’t want to just have it stronger just for the sake of it being stronger because that will impact the actual visual art of the bridge. So I know I’m biased because he’s awesome, but I love seeing him combine a desire for beauty and with the technical part of the materials for sure. Amen. Well, what have been some shifts you’ve seen in the practice or the scope of the common arts over the past few years?

[00:15:13] Chris Hall: Oh, wow. I would say the pandemic definitely changed the nature of the way a lot of folks are practicing the common arts. And I think if I can extend it beyond just a couple years to go back even further, perhaps even three generations, not to make the conversation too long, but.

[00:15:30] Amy Sloan: Well, I mean, you know, in the scope of time, that’s not that long, right?

[00:15:34] Chris Hall: Truth. Truth. As we look back, I think the last three, maybe even four generations of people in the United States have become increasingly distanced from the common arts. Once we had, there’s a bit of history for this, the rise of industry in the late 1800s, the provision of things, goods and services became more varied. By the time we hit the 1950s and post-World War II and a huge boom in the economy of the United States, we no longer had people making many of their own gardens, making their own clothes and other things. We saw a gradual decline as we started to rely more on supply chains and people had jobs and capital to buy into the supply chains. If we look at the first suburban neighborhoods in the country, the ones that were first developed in the 50s and then the 60s, we see them centered around the grocery stores. We see them centered around places where the supply chain was easy to have. The department store, right? Another great example of places we used to go to shop and get what we needed. But as we started to trade capital, our money for those goods and services, we did them less. And so as generation became next generation became next generation, they didn’t just kind of fade into the distance. They became lost. We no longer practice them anymore. It came to a point when I was in my teens in the 1980s, my mother said, I’m going to show you how to sew the patches on your scout uniform. And then after that, it’s you, you do it. And I can remember many a Saturday night after a court of honor, sewing a new merit badge on my sash, doing those kinds of things, fixing a button on my shirt. I knew how to do it. But unless I had sat down and done that with my own kids, they would have had no opportunity to learn it. They would never have picked that skill up. They would have, like many folks, a button falls off or two buttons fall off. You go and buy a new shirt. It’s easy to get us pay a few dollars and I’ve got it. Extend that across to everything from garden, the concept of victory gardens after world war two faded to the point that now many of our HOAs won’t let us have a garden because people don’t look at it as aesthetically pleasing. We don’t do many of our own car repairs anymore because back in the seventies and eighties, it was relatively easy to do that today. You may be greeted when you open your hood with a black panel and special bolts around it, that if you take those out, it’ll void your warranty, right? Tesla owners, if you get a flat, you know, you have to take it to the dealership because back in the day, we just go home and fix it. Little things like that have shifted this notion in the last three, four generations here in the U.S. away from our agency in the common arts and they’ve put us in touch with supply chains, but now enter the pandemic. When the pandemic hit and people could no longer go to the store and there were quarantines, a lot of people started reaching out and saying, let’s start making bread again. Let’s start raising a little bit of food in the backyard. They realized the ephemera, there was an ephemeral nature to our supply chains that all of a sudden it was yanked out from under. And I think that was a revolution in the practice of the common arts. I think a lot of people started turning their eyes back to these practices, not just to survive, but for home and hearth. The smell of baking bread at home was a comfort that they remembered from their mothers’ and their grandmothers’ kitchens. And now it was a comfort in the midst of a quarantine. And folks realized they could use those tools that otherwise were in the garage for all kinds of things that now we can’t outsource for. Maybe I’ll look up on YouTube how to fix the toilet when it’s broken, rather than sit here and, you know, kind of, kind of wonder and worry. So I think the pandemic lit a little fire under a number of people about recovering these arts. And with that came an awareness of just how important these arts are to connect us to baseline. A lot of people I know wrote to me after a year or two in the pandemic, and they said, we started this thinking we’d go back to it, you know, the supply chains, and we haven’t.

[00:19:17] Amy Sloan: Right?

[00:19:17] Chris Hall: For us, this was a way of rooting in God’s goodness, God’s creation, God’s order. It was a chance for us to revisit a providence that before had been distanced because the supply chain was in between us and it. And now that we’re seeing it, wow, I mean, God is good, right? Here it is coming right from the ground. With that comes, of course, the frustrations of getting it wrong. How many gardens have failed and how many chickens have been nabbed by foxes and others. But that too has been, I think, a kind of great awakening for people. We realize that many things are not as permanent as we thought, but also some things that we had ephemeral are very permanent. They’re written into the very fabric of this beautiful creation we live in. And I think there’s goodness, truth, and beauty in kind of both of those angles.

[00:20:02] Amy Sloan: And once you get started on homemade bread, you really can never go back. You buy the stuff from the store and you’re like, this tastes fake. It’s terrible.

[00:20:11] Chris Hall: There it is.

[00:20:13] Amy Sloan: Well, what about the person who says, okay, but these are like older arts. So sure, you make your bread, you repair your toilet. But really, do these things matter anymore? I mean, look at the rapid rise of technological advances, AI, things just seem to be moving faster and faster. Shouldn’t we focus more on technological training instead of the common arts?

[00:20:34] Chris Hall: I think that’s a great question to ask. And I think a lot of folks are asking that very one. So thank you for bringing it up. I think there’s two reasons why we should come back and root these common arts. The first is what I just mentioned about the ephemeral nature. We are only one power failure away from not being able to use any AI whatsoever. It’s a fairly simple thing to realize just how ephemeral that power grid is. I was just running a hurricane net with my radio over here with Jamaica. Jamaica just got slammed by a massive hurricane. And for a week, they were without power, without water, without just about anything. And as we got back on the radio, people said, gosh, how great it is to get the power back. But a lot of us in Jamaica, we didn’t worry about it because we’d been living this way for generations. My parents taught me how to do it. We were OK. But the second thing is, remember that with AI and with a lot of technological training, we hear an echo of something that happened in the public schools and a lot of kind of secular independent schools not so much a decade or 15 years ago. The voices were out there to get us on the computer. So I remember when tablets first arrived, the iPad, and how great that was for education. And then it was, how do we use our cell phones in education? It was a continuous trying to integrate the technology because they’ll need it. They’re going to need to use this. And it occurred to all of us teachers very quickly on the receiving end of that, that all of these companies are making the interfaces for those increasingly easy to access. So the specificity of training you have for this platform is going to be obsolete in six months. And chances are, they’re going to make it easier for anyone to access. With AI especially, generative AI, I might throw the double caveat caution in there that I think that art is probably the first third order common art. And if I can go on an aside for a moment, imagine that the first order common arts are where we’re directly encountering creation, agriculture, cooking, tailoring and weaving, woodworking. We are getting our hands on things that are natural and provisioned. The second order common arts are things like coding, 3D printing, amateur radio. It’s how we meet our basic embodied needs in the world, but through a manmade system. And we have a lot of those in place right now. I’m using amateur radio on a daily basis now to communicate. Cell phone communications are based on the same principles. But AI and generative AI is really the first third order. Not only is it a manmade system, but now it’s doing the work for us, which means we’re now kind of out of the loop. It’s a little too easy. And like many things that provide a lot of convenience, eventually the only people who get stronger practicing that convenience are those who provide it. And those of us who are on the receiving end of it oftentimes lose out then on some very fundamental experiences and reality checks. So I would caution against thinking too heavy on the tech side of things. I think the companies that produce it will make it very easy for us to access it, and increasingly so. It behooves them to do so. But it also behooves us to stay in contact with the real, not the virtual reality of those things, but the real reality of the skills and own them ourselves, onboard our agency rather than outsource.

[00:23:45] Amy Sloan: Yeah. I know the kids these days might say we need to touch grass. Yeah, because it leads to the atrophying, right, of the mind and the soul in so many ways. And it’s really interesting. I don’t know about your kids who are in college, but now it used to be I could go and, OK, I have this class. I have a list of textbooks. I would go, and being a budget conscious person, I would go find the textbooks used. That was great. You could save so much money. Then at the end of the semester, you take them back in. You resell them, right? It was great. It was a great system. Well, now there are no paper textbooks. You are required to essentially rent digital access, which is still hundreds and hundreds of dollars just like those old ridiculous textbooks. But now you’re kind of forced. It’s the only option. You got to rent access to the digital textbook. And then at the end of the semester, you can’t resell it. They just remove the permission to have access to it. And it’s really interesting because, one, you just see how much of it is like you become the product. And when you’re reliant on the technology, right, you’re kind of at the mercy. They can set whatever price they want if that’s the only option. But also, I think about some of the resources. My husband even has some. He still pulls something out, reference something, things that I will pull off the shelf and reference, right? We don’t have that access anymore. It’s just vanished. It’s vanished. So I’m a big fan in particular of the hardback, the paper, the actual tangible, touchable sources of information, not just something on a computer that is way too easy to crash.

[00:25:24] Chris Hall: Amy, something gives me hope about that before the next question. And that is my sons collect records now. They’re going back to physical music. Remember when iTunes went away and erased all of our libraries? It was so sad. Gone, yes. But now we have physical music again. And there is something to be said for that. They know the power of books and they know the power of having a record.

[00:25:44] Amy Sloan: Yes. Oh, my kids as well. Not all of them, but some of my teens. In fact, my daughter called me from college. She was like, mom, I just found this, my favorite version of Handel’s Messiah on record. She was like, I mean, I know we can access it through our music streaming service, but like they could take it down and then I would never have access. Do you think it’s crazy for me to buy these records? I was like, if you have the money, go for it. Buy the records. Okay. So we’ve talked about the sort of technological, maybe the counter arguments there. What about the classical educator with their very long book list and they have all of their very fancy things and they’re like, yes, but we just have a lot of more important things to focus on in our time and we don’t need to worry about the common arts. What would we say to those people?

[00:26:35] Chris Hall: So the way that I put this to groups of teachers when I meet, because teachers are always thinking, ah, one more thing, right? How many of us have been brick and mortar teachers and whenever you have the faculty meeting and oh, there’s one more initiative, one more thing we’ve got to add. I often remind them of this very ancient piece of classroom technology that we all grew up with, the overhead projector. The overhead projector had, and for those of you who are of a certain age, maybe you don’t know this, a glass tabletop of a screen with a light bulb below it. And as you turn the projector on, the light bulb would pass up through the screen and through these pieces of cellophane, clear transparencies, they were called, on which you’d written up through a lens and onto a screen so that you could see what was written on the transparency. And the way I put it to teachers is, imagine that you have a set of liberal arts goals that you’d put on one transparency. You lay that down to project. Now think about the common arts that you want your kids to know. The way that they fit with those liberal arts, write those on another transparency and put the two down on top of each other. The light comes right through both, and you end up getting both of those things projected on the screen without knowing they’re on different transparencies. The beautiful thing about common arts is it gives you unlimited science labs, unlimited math problems, living history, and poetic understanding of the books you read. A great example of that last one, because I think that’s the toughest to access. I remember doing the bronze bow with a group of sixth graders long ago. Their literature teacher was working on the bronze bow with them, and they were at the scene where all the rebels were in the cave, off there in the hills, waiting to come back. And there was a forge in the cave, and it talked about how it made the cave smoky and rough. And I was realizing that the kids in this class had A, never been in a cave, and they’d never seen a forge. So these two things were kind of very abstract for them. So I decided to take them caving virtually, where we went to visit the caves here in Virginia, Luray Caverns and others. We did it on virtual tour. And then I took them out into the courtyard where I had set up a micro forge, a very small scale forge, with a blower, a leaf blower at the time, and some coal and other things. And I let them watch me at first, and then try their hands at it, forge simple nails, just bang out nails. I took an old piece of iron and hammered it out, got it red hot, those bellows, let the kids run the bellows. And all of a sudden they realized how smoky that was, how hot it was, what it made the air smell like, the taste that was left in your mouth from the scent of coal dust and and iron. And then they thought, well, wow, that must have been bad in that cave, right? Because now they can connect those two images and go. As I often put it to many of my teachers of literature, it’s hard to understand the odyssey if you’ve never been on a sailboat far away from the edge of land. Little things like that will help them get inside the minds of Odysseus and others. And what is that but the common art of navigation? Here it is right on the list. So if you’re looking for a way to overlap those transparencies, just imagine that common arts give you a way to take what is otherwise abstract or unreal or unexperienced and put it right in the hands, right in the mind, right in the mouth, right in the eyes of the people who are learning these liberal arts in your class or in your living room.

[00:29:48] Amy Sloan: Yes, it makes me think of those 3D movies, right, where you have to have the glasses of the two different colors. And it’s certainly when you have them both that you can see the image in 3D. And that’s almost what I’m hearing you say, like with the liberal arts, the common arts together, we’re actually able to see more deeply the full picture.

[00:30:06] Chris Hall: Maybe I’m going to cite you on that going forward. That’s it.

[00:30:09] Amy Sloan: Sounds good. Well, OK, so this is great. How do we practice the common arts for the benefit in learning while we’re doing this homeschool thing? Most of us may not have access to a forge or maybe the current knowledge yet, growth mindset, we could get the knowledge of designing a forge. But how can we actually do this in a regular, ordinary learning week?

[00:30:36] Chris Hall: Fantastic question. And I think there are places I could look into. I would cite my book on this one. There’s a whole section on how to do this from the five rights, right story, right scale, right season, right supports and right skills to a paideia of craft. But let me go one level, one level more simple. If we don’t know these skills ourselves, how in the world do we get these to our kids? Well, the first, of course, is we just go and encounter them. We go to places in which the skills are being done to such a beautiful level that we experience it fully. A great example of this is is going to Colonial Williamsburg here in Virginia. I can walk down the main line at Colonial Williamsburg and it’s set up like a colonial town. If I want to see blacksmithing, I can go to the blacksmith shop and see what it was like. I can go to the woodwright shop and watch them build a wheel, a carriage wheel right in front of me. And I can ask them questions about why you chose this wood here, but not over here. What is it about what you’re doing? So sometimes it’s just the beauty of the encounter that can bring us into touch with. We don’t need to go out and buy chisels and tools and make wheels. Instead, we can go watch a master at work and ask and behold, sit at the foot of a craftsman. And that can be with a cook too. Go find a master craftsman in the kitchen and just enjoy the food and ask questions. Watch them work. And our kids oftentimes remember mimetic learning is part of part of this, part of its didactic, part of its mimetic. So let them watch mastery and then try it themselves. Once you get home, maybe you’re inspired to try it. There’s also the exploration, which is just, we’re going to try our hands at this a little bit and see where it goes. We’re going to try and make sourdough bread. We’ve never done it before. We’re going to try it. Maybe the first time it doesn’t go so well. So let’s error analyze. It’s a small way to get a foot in the door. It doesn’t take weeks or months. It’s just, we’re going to try it. There’s another, that’s the adventure. And that is where you and the kids, maybe even side by side, get together with your master gardener program, right? Go to go to take a class together and then come back and build a raised bed or go try your hand at something. One of the, one of the local shops and then come back and try it at home. Basic automotives, right? Can you change the oil in your car? Little things like that. You can go and get instruction and then bring it back. So I would encourage folks who are a little bit wary about this to think about first, just going and beholding, go see what mastery looks like. Taste mastery with something that’s, you know, gustatory. Go observe and then try little explorations, low stakes, low hanging fruit, grow some herbs in a pot, try something like that to get a little taste of it. And once you taste success, the ball starts to roll. If you know it’s for you and you go, man, that really was good. What else could we do? That’s how it begins to go. And don’t forget your resources like books are one. This library that I’m sitting in right now is one of three in my home. And most of these books are common arts related, but don’t forget about the beauties of YouTube channels. There are people out there who want to disseminate these skills. You can learn a lot digitally from them. Don’t forget about your local master gardener programs, living history programs. Even your science museum might have some wonderful ways to you to get out there and encounter some of those common arts and either behold them or begin your own explorations. It’s all there to take. Let me encourage too, folks, before I turn, Amy, thank you for the good question. When my wife and I came here to Homestead, we were two suburban kids. We didn’t, we knew nothing. We never had kept chickens. We never kept gardens. We never had done many things, fixed a car. Like we’d done the basics, change a tire, but we didn’t know. What turned us onto this was Bertha. Bertha was a 93 year old lady who lived by herself on the farm she grew up on. She was born there. She was raised there. She never married. She took care of everything by apprenticing herself to her mother and her father, her brothers and sisters, the neighbors who knew things. And we’d go visit her after church. And I remember one Sunday sitting with her, my wife now pregnant with our first son, who’s 20. Bertha, we just got in the conversation of how did you learn all this stuff? And what was it like here on the Great Depression, right? Back in the, yeah, and can’t have anything. Bertha looked a square in the eye and she said, we worried about the city folks. We had everything we needed. We had it. And it was like, what? And she said, yeah, we had food. We could fix our things if we just, we knew how to do without. But we also sent our food and we mended clothes and we sent as much as we could to the folks in the cities who couldn’t do it. And my wife and I realized Bertha had learned this through encounters and adventures and exploration. She had learned this through apprenticeship with her family and others. And in the process, she’d grown independent enough to weather one of the worst economic times in our country without batting an eye. And my wife and I looked at each other on the ride home and we’re like, we got to do this. And that was 21 years ago. And now we’re writing books on it and hosting classes and others. So those of you who are looking at this like I could never, yes, you could. And I loved how you used the term earlier, yet, right? You don’t know it yet, but there’s always a gateway.

[00:35:37] Amy Sloan: And I appreciate just the way you set that up at the beginning, the different, you know, the exposures, the, the trying things, because I think sometimes we, we hear a talk or we read a book and we’re like, okay, we’ve got to do the common arts in our family. And we create this long list and we’re like, okay, kids, we’re going to go build a log cabin. You know, like we just go from zero to 60 and then it doesn’t quite work out. And then we’re like, wow, I guess that didn’t work. Toss that idea. And just to remember that it can start so small and that it still counts. I think we’re, we’re really hard on ourselves sometimes. Like it doesn’t count, but, but these things do count and they build on each other and we’re, we’re creating an environment where we’re raising the kinds of children who want to then do more exploration and learning on their own. So it’s okay if they even don’t learn all the common arts before they leave our house. Lord willing, we’ve set up an environment where they want to continue pursuing these on their own. I think that’s really helpful too.

[00:36:37] Chris Hall: Amy, isn’t it funny to think that home scholaring as we’re doing right now, raising kids to launch, we think through that launch point. I think about my children when they’re 50, 60 years old, when they’ve got 40 more years of experience than they do now. What are the things that they started early on? What did they discover later that they didn’t have and now have added to the stakes? And that’s a long vision. A lot of times, like you said, we think go big or go home, right? We have to make that homestead, that garden. Now I’m getting two dozen chickens. Don’t worry about it that way, right? Start small, low hanging fruit for you and for the kids leads to that feeling of success that makes us hunger for more. And those are the things that 40 years down the line, think of the fruit they bear. We’re doing it with literature. We’re doing it with Latin. We’re doing it with music. We’re doing it with art. We’re doing it with math. And imagine that common arts is just one more thing we can set that spark to. Yeah.

[00:37:28] Amy Sloan: You know, you were talking generationally. It took several generations to lose some of these skills. So it’s going to take a few generations to regain them, but that’s an exciting thing. Like God works generationally and that is how his covenant has always worked. And so I get excited thinking about, you know, third, fourth generation, classical educators, um, and what they are, what they’re going to pursue is exciting. But one of the, oh yeah, sorry.

[00:37:54] Chris Hall: Plant trees and raised in right here. We are, we find ourselves distance from a homeland, perhaps of common arts. And yet we can raise it. What was the saying about trees, right? Best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is right now.

[00:38:07] Amy Sloan: Yeah.

[00:38:07] Chris Hall: Just think about it now.

[00:38:09] Amy Sloan: Exactly. One of my favorite stories with trees, I’m going to go off on this tangent, but I love this story. I think you’ll appreciate it. Um, I heard Dr. George Grant tell this story many years ago and I can’t remember which, which universities was, but one of the old universities, either Oxford or Cambridge, one of this. And one of the colleges they were, you know, it was in modern times in the, in the 20th century. And they were like, man, we need to repair the roof, but where are we going to find these massive beams? Like we can’t find like trees that are going to actually work for this building. And so they were like looking through their old, uh, you know, the old information about, about the original design. And they realized that they had the original builders and architects had planted trees for the purpose of in a couple hundred years, the trees were, I mean, I’m getting goosebumps in a couple hundred years, the trees were going to be big enough at the time that the roof is going to need to be replaced. I just think we don’t think like 200 years in the future, but that’s, that’s what we’re doing. Right. And that’s really exciting.

[00:39:12] Chris Hall: It has been said that we are rebuilding a cathedral. And remember that the people who built the cathedrals started the project knowing full well, they’d never see it in their lifetime. And that’s part of this reclamation really of classical education. We’re rebuilding things that right now are just at the beginning phase. We might not see it, but our children might. And if they don’t and they continue it, their grandchildren may, we’re going to come to that cathedral building point. Yep.

[00:39:36] Amy Sloan: Yeah. Oh, okay. So I’m going to try to like rain in all my excitement, my enthusiasm here. We all have to start somewhere. Right. So we were talking about like just starting somewhere and starting simple, starting small, and we can’t prioritize all the good things. Like I tell my children this all the time, like a lot of times life is not about saying no to bad things and yes to good things. It’s saying no to some good things. Cause you can’t do all of the good things. So if you were going to talk to someone, encourage them to pursue or study just three common arts, which three would you say would be good ones to start with or prioritize?

[00:40:11] Chris Hall: So the answer I’d give is yes. All of them are good, but I do know from experience in teaching this both online and in person, that there is, there are some low hanging fruits that teach certain frameworks of thought that really benefit when we get to the other common arts. And I think the one to start with strange as this may sound is the common art of armament and hunting. Armament and hunting. You think I got to go buy a rifle? No, you don’t. Because the root of armament and hunting is strategy and tactics. If you teach people to approach problems strategically and tactically, you’re giving them a framework they can use later in cooking to make cookies, use in medicine to diagnose conditions, use in navigation to find their way around. I think really one of the easiest arts and low hanging fruits to pick up is strategy and tactics. And the way I teach this online is I start with tic-tac-toe and I give them a tic-tac-toe board and I say, okay, X has taken the center. Is there an ideal second move? And it starts this long cascaded discussions. Will I take the corner? Will I take the side? Well, why? And is there really an ideal second move? Because X is going to go again. Can’t they just counter what you got? And getting kids to think about the sequence of events as it unfolds. Remember in modern psychology, how we talk about the development of the prefrontal cortex is the decision maker in kids. Getting them to think strategically and tactically when they’re young sets them up for a lot of good things. Academically, technically, socially. It’s a great way to start. And with that comes games. Think about the joy of a good game of chess or checkers or cards, something strategic and tactical. So for many folks, that’s a great place to start. A framework of strategy and tactics and games. But if you want some of the best for your home, try cooking. Just start simple. Figure out how to make a warm breakfast. Figure out how to bake bread. Figure out different dinners that we could break out of the, I just grabbed a box of pasta. What could I do with it? Can we break out of the cycle oftentimes of prepackaged or preprocessed food? And can we bring down to raw ingredients? Every kid can help in a kitchen. Even your youngest can help by sorting food. Your middle schoolers can help with cutting food and processing it. They can learn how to use the tools. They can learn how to safely cook an egg, boil water. So cooking is one of those ones that can become multi-age. And as we used to say here, it’s a one-room kitchen, like a one-room schoolhouse, to each their own, to each their ability. And in the end, we all get to eat what we made. And remember that hospitality in the Christian sense very much comes back to the table. I mean, the very notion of the Eucharist being instituted around a table brings us back to that notion of sharing fully, right, in meals. That’s a beautiful thing. And if I could think about a third one, maybe I’d think about a category. I could easily cite navigation here. Like, can you look at the sun and the sky and can you find your way around, right, north, south? Can you tell the time of day? But I might suggest instead of that as a low hanging fruit, try one of the ex-working arts, a little bit of woodworking, a little bit of metal work, a little bit of leather crafting, maybe a little bit of learning how to fix a shirt, put a button on something, right, or make an adjustment. Because those are things that are just around us all the time. Look at the wood in the background here. There’s metal on my desk of various kinds. Leather to repair. There’s an archery quiver off camera. And oftentimes those little crafts just get us in that meditative crafting mindset of making, thinking through the next little move and how I’m going to work with this new problem that I’m faced with. And what is life and what is parenting, but how am I going to deal with this next little problem that I’m faced with, right? This is the way we walk our days. So I find that some good low-hanging fruit and really some frameworks come pretty deeply with the art of armament, particularly strategy and tactics, cooking and then sharing the fruit of our cooking, and any of the ex-working arts. Just getting your hand on materials and learning the way that God has made those materials in certain ways. Really, you could start anywhere. But if I think of three, maybe those are the best three.

[00:44:12] Amy Sloan: And you’ve brought up several times the idea of hospitality in conjunction with the common arts. And I think that is such a beautiful idea too. And actually, even going back to what you were saying, go to someone who knows how to, already has this skill. I just think with, say, gardening, you think, well, we don’t have a place for a garden in our yard. Well, I’m sure you probably know someone in your church who has a garden. And you say, offer your free services. Hey, can we come over some Saturday and help out? Or with cooking, having it be also thinking of it as a relational thing, not just a skill we’re trying to acquire for our own good. And although it is a good for us as well, but thinking of it in the context of community. Because I think that has come up several times in the way you’ve described the common arts.

[00:45:00] Chris Hall: It is. And I was actually looking for my notes right here. You know that oftentimes we’re taught to think of ourselves as consumers. We’re consumers of products. And by the way, that’s the whole supply chain mentality. We become consumers of the things in the train. But you know who had a better idea? Tolkien, who would have thought. Tolkien described his races in middle earth under the notion of sub creators. We had the elves who were the highest of sub creators, the longest lived, the greatest of the arts, all the beauty in the music and the others. We had the dwarves who made durable goods, perhaps a little bit less than the elves because they were avaricious, but they made very wonderful, durable things. Men were at the intersection of the two. And you know, our crafts were our crafts. And then there were the orcs and their whole craft was based on destruction. And if you think about it, Tolkien really nailed the common arts. We want to aim towards the transcendence of the elves with the notion of the durability and strength of the dwarves, even though we are short lived men. And we want to avoid the darkness of the crafts of the orcs in the meantime. Let’s think of ourselves less as consumers and perhaps as sub creators for God’s order. Not co, we’re not alongside, but we can learn how he made it and we can harmonize, right? And not out of harmony like Melkor, right? For those who know the mythology, but with the rest, right? With the rest who are in the process of the song.

[00:46:25] Amy Sloan: Well, Tolkien always has wise words to say, so I’m glad that he was able to apply to the common arts today as well. Well, this has been an absolutely delightful conversation. Chris, thank you for taking the time to chat with me again. If you guys who are listening or watching did not hear our original conversation, definitely catch back up on that one again. And we dove into the fine arts as well and liberal arts and common arts. So I’ll put that in the show notes. But here at the end, I’m going to ask you the questions I ask all of my guests. And so the first is what are you personally reading lately?

[00:47:02] Chris Hall: Oh, what am I not reading? You see, that’s the hard question. If I looked at my bedside table and I just grabbed three off of it, of the massive stacks that are there, my wife’s is nice and clean and neat. Her glasses are there. Mine is a stack of books. I’m reading this, this book, which goes to the common art of armament. This is the art and science of staff fighting by my very old friend and training partner, Master Joe Verity. For those of you looking for a little quarter staff work, either for historical reasons or maybe just a little martial training or PE training for home gymnastic training, these books are great. He’s got a wonderful way of bringing it right to home, well illustrated and set. I have Good Poems for Hard Times by Garrison Keillor right here, which I found particularly uplifting in the midst of everything. There are so many things that land on us in a day, right? And I love the fact, I realized I went through a poetry drought for about 10 years. I looked at my books and I had no poetry and I’m like, nah, I got to fix that because this is the deal. And I found these wonderful anthologies, including this one, Good Poems for Hard Times by Garrison Keillor, highly recommended. And okay, so you know how old books are there because we change? It’s the opposite of that thing about rivers, right? The man steps into the river, the river’s never the same. With old books, the book doesn’t change, it’s the man who changes. And when you walk back into that book, you see it differently. And I’m rereading for the umpteenth time since I was 13 years old, A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin. This is a wonderful little tale that I read one way when I was 13, another way when I was 30, and quite again differently at 51. And it’s a very interesting tale to go back and look through. You’ll do The Hobbit the same way for those of you who don’t know. But just suffice to say a little bit of fiction, a little bit of fact knowledge here and some poetry are on my table.

[00:48:52] Amy Sloan: A beautiful combination. Again, the problem is I always am like, oh wait, I’ve got to write these down. I’ve got to see if my library has them. So many good recommendations. All right, final question for you is what would be your best tip for turning around an educational day that seems to be going all wrong?

[00:49:10] Chris Hall: My best tip for that one. Well, it used to be that we would, you know, like when you’re on fire, stop, drop, and roll, right? That was one that my wife and I would often laugh at. Stop, drop, and roll with it was our way of putting it with that. But I might encourage everyone, and this is a longer view homeschool thing, maybe not just at the moment, but it’ll give you a key to the moment, is to remember music. When we’re teaching, teaching is musical. And when I craft a lesson for my students, I think of it in terms of music. I have an overture. There are certain things we do ahead of time to set us up for success, right? Gather our note material, do a little review, make sure that we’re clear. And as we get into the music, I remember music is notes and rests. There’s notes, times when we’re doing things, but then there’s also space between the notes. And make sure there’s times that you have rest in your day. If it’s time to take a rest because frustration and tears are coming, whether it’s theirs or yours, remember that’s a legal thing to do, right? You can do this. Remember that there’s a tempo, and sometimes our day is Allegro, and sometimes it’s Lento. Change the tempo of your day. Maybe it’s too fast, maybe it’s too slow. Break into a new movement. Remember that symphonies have three movements, and there’s a theme that goes through all three, but they don’t all sound the same. And there’s reasons, right? It’s appealing to the ear and more. Remember dynamics. Some days are fortissimo, other days are pianissimo. And maybe you’re trying to cram through a fortissimo day when it’s cloudy and rainy outside and no one has the energy. And maybe it’s time to go outside and get in that sun if it’s just a little too pianissimo in your living room. Don’t forget to breathe. Remember all players need to breathe, even if you’re not Woodwoods, right? Make sure that you stop and do so. And remember, if you make a mistake, keep going. Just keep going.

[00:50:55] Amy Sloan: Yes.

[00:50:57] Chris Hall: We got this.

[00:50:58] Amy Sloan: Oh, I love that musical metaphor. That is beautiful. And also at the end, so I was a pianist or am a pianist and have taught piano at different times, but what I would always say to my students and what I remind my own children now, when you’re going up there and you’re either playing for church or you’re playing for a performance, you’re going to make a mistake, but you just keep smiling and you keep going and it generally turns out okay. And most of the people around you don’t even notice. So that’s another thing to keep in mind. Well, Chris, where can people find you all around the internet and your book and your classes, all the things? Oh, got it.

[00:51:38] Chris Hall: Well, class-wise, I’m primarily teaching through Scollay Academy this year. I do have some homeschool groups that drop in. I’m about to open up in about six months, a new business venture called Common Arts Academy, which is going to have nothing but common arts classes on it. My current website, alwayslearningeducation.net, has some precursors to that, but Common Arts Academy is about to open it wide. So if you’re looking for some support, maybe a course to take over the summertime with your kids, Common Arts Academy will be online by that point and check it out. We’re doing everything from games of strategy to cooking, to gardening, to you name it, it’ll be on there. The book is through Classical Academic Press, and that would be Common Arts Education. You can look that one up if you have Amazon and you want to go that route, Common Arts Education by Chris Hall. You’ll see it can be found there. And gosh, I just fully encourage all of you, you can look into my websites and others, but keep in mind the beautiful resources you have in a much wider realm, right? You have master gardeners near you. You’ve got people who are offering classes and other wonderful things with Common Arts or just around your area. Don’t forget to go look into them because they have some of the finest local resources you could ask for. And of course, I’ll leave you with this too. If anybody would like to reach out, you can always reach out to me at Chris at alwayslearningeducation.net. I’m glad to help you with your homeschool programs, whether that’s just to commiserate, to bring alongside with all the journeys of the day-to-day or to help you find good resources. I’m glad to do it.

[00:53:07] Amy Sloan: That is wonderful. And I will make sure to have links to all of those in the show notes for this episode over at humilityanddoxology.com. To those who are watching and listening, thank you so much for being here. And please take a moment to share this episode with another friend that you think would be encouraged and inspired, maybe even a local friend who you could come together and do Common Arts in community, which would be even more wonderful, right?

[00:53:36] Chris Hall: Contemplary, to come together at the temple.

[00:53:39] Amy Sloan: I love it. Well, until next time, happy homeschooling.