After the LinkedIn TED Talk Bros Came to Classical Christian Education

You attend a classical education conference this summer and, while perusing the speaker biographies in the conference program, you come across the following:

“Harge Manning is the founder of the Diluvian Consortium, a group of Christian thought leaders who specialize in dynamic vision forwarding, cognitive missional flexibility, core value development, servant viral marketing ethics, and integrated ethno-mindful solution differentials. Under Harge’s leadership, the Diluvian Consortium has helped church ecosystems across the globe reposition themselves for optimal market/Gospel outreach. Harge owes his success to his ability to be comfortable being uncomfortable and his confidence in the Church’s antifragile entrepreneurship. He enjoys equipping tomorrow’s leaders today, energizing today’s leaders for tomorrow, and tomorrowing today’s energy for leaders. Harge is a member of many boards, groups, councils, panels, committees, and clubs. He is married to Desiree, who is the executive director of the Cross Wellness Initiative. They live in a heavily gentrified Houston neighborhood.”

You flip over a few pages to see what Harge is lecturing on. It’s a plenary session.

“Futureproofing the Dynamics of Your Vision’s Marketability by Harge Manning. Is your vision outfitted for the dynamics of marketability in a post-COVID world? In this engaging lecture, Manning offers strategies for vision-outfitting your institution so you can optimize the Kingdom’s next steps.”

There was a time when classical Christian education laughed at guys like Harge Manning—and yet I’d swear that guys like Harge have become an increasingly regular feature of the classical Christian world over the last ten years or so. Maybe Harge wasn’t interested in the movement when it was small, maybe we couldn’t afford Harge’s services when the movement was small, but by this point, I think it’s fair to say Harge has settled in. And not just at conferences.

Obviously, Harge isn’t the kind of fellow you ask to speak at an assembly for students. Neither does he have anything to say which will help teachers teach. Instead, Harge has experience in the corporate world. Before he started the Diluvian Consortium, he was the CFO of a company you’ve actually heard of.  There’s a photo of him somewhere posing with Dick Cheney or Jay-Z. Actually, it might be Katt Williams. Regardless, Harge is cosmopolitan and he conveys stability. Harge has made it. The fact he’s willing to work with the classical movement means we’ve made it, too.

A few teachers attend Harge’s plenary talk, which marries fashionable concepts from bestselling Christian books about “our changing culture” and “our changing world” with the most popular TED talks of the last sixty days. His talk seems geared to deeply impress people who think all the most desirable intellectual property is obviously center-right. Bored teachers in the audience reread his bio, a word salad of lingo cribbed from other mid-range LinkedIn social climbers who are constantly trying to leverage their most recent connections for another rung or two. Harge couldn’t be less interesting to an eighth-grade history teacher from Louisiana if he tried. He namedrops Mike Huckabee and some Catholic bishop and Glennon Doyle (and Katt Williams). He uses the word “optimize” thirty-nine times. At a reception held later in the evening, attendees who enjoyed Harge’s talk call it “important” and “game-changing,” but stop short of “useful” or “practical.” Teachers drink Yellowtail Shiraz out of plastic cups in the corner and read excerpts from the Cross Wellness Initiative’s mission statement to one another in funny voices. Doing your best Cher Horrowitz, you say, “David danced before the Lord, which means he must have cared about cardio.”

That’s probably enough ragging on Harge. Let me hedge my bets a little.

Teachers are an important part of the classical Christian movement, but they’re not the only part. There are important people other than teachers in the movement—and it’s entirely possible they get something valuable out of Harge’s talk, even if teachers don’t. Different strokes (and all that).

Next, a classical school has to keep the lights on and people like Harge get tapped for conferences because they help keep the lights on. Big names draw big crowds. Big crowds convey competence. Competence suggests stability. Stability means the lights stay on. And I like it when the lights stay on. It means food stays in my fridge and gas stays in my car.

For these reasons, my goal in writing all this isn’t to get guys like Harge out of classical Christian education.

My goal is to speak on behalf of classical Christian teachers—and I can’t speak for all of them, of course, but I’ve been in the movement for nineteen years, I’m still just a K-12 teacher, and I can tell you what many teachers like myself (career, married) say about guys like Harge in the breakroom when they don’t have to worry about being diplomatic. They say… well, they say the beginning of this article is kind of funny.

The issue isn’t having one Harge around. Or two. Or three. The issue is when there are twenty or thirty guys like Harge around—guys that don’t have classroom experience, guys that haven’t read Homer, don’t like Homer, don’t understand Homer, and don’t understand the daily struggles of K-12 teachers. While they are capable of drawing donations, grants, and fresh blood into the movement, guys like Harge do not impress the old-fashioned oddballs (modest daughters, bookshelves filled with Penguin Classics, no smart phones) who stand at the front of class and deliver classical Christian education to children. Too many guys like Harge and the oddballs start to feel unwelcome. And what does it profit a classical school to gain a football field and lose every faculty member who understands the Meno?

The other concern I have about Harge is that it won’t be too long before he’s asked to do far more than just fill out conference schedules and retreat openings. He’ll be asked to rewrite hiring guidelines, produce copy for ads, make edits to the scope and sequence, compose annual reviews, and teachers will be told they need to “optimize” their lessons, their tests, their lectures… At that point, we won’t merely be trying to keep the lights on. We’ll be tearing down our barns to build bigger ones.

Again, I’m not saying we need to get all the LinkedIn Ted Talk bros out of classical education. I’m saying a little Harge goes a long way. And while guys like Harge have something to offer, what they offer also comes with a price.