Capstone Classical Today

Tom Tucker (00:01)
The house system, what it is and how it's being used at Capstone Classical Academy. That's the topic of this conversation here. And joining me right now is Mr. Jonathan Maguire. He is the upper school dean at Capstone Classical Academy in Fargo, North Dakota. And my name is Tom Tucker. I'm director of advancement at Capstone.

Jonathan, it's great to have you here for this conversation. I'm looking forward to talking about the House system. We hear a lot about it on campus lately, a lot of buzz around the House system right now. For those who aren't familiar with the House system, kind of give us just a brief high-level definition of what the House system is.

Jonathan McGuire (00:40)
Sure, the briefest and the highest elevated look at the house perspective is that we try to invent or create something that would put students who are learning about virtue in an academic way through virtuous things where their vices could get exposed and their virtuous behavior could be encouraged on the other side. So it is in a sense, ⁓ it is the fulfillment of all the academic hopes and dreams. We don't want students simply to be clever. We want them to be

clever people who love well. And the house system is meant to put students in situations where they have that kind of real responsibility towards each other in the community. And then they can meaningfully reflect on how they failed or how they succeeded in ways that have borne fruit according to our goal, our objective of creating virtuous men and women, not just those who can define virtue.

Tom Tucker (01:30)
At the risk of sounding a little base or a little crass to the uninitiated and to me at times when I first heard about this, it makes me think of maybe ⁓ reality game shows like Survivor or Big Brother. Are there maybe some analogies there?

Jonathan McGuire (01:46)
There are analogies only in that you put groups of people together who are under scrutiny. ⁓ We're all ultimately under the scrutiny and the scrutinizing eye of God. He is our ultimate environment, as one theologian put it. Most people don't think that way. They think that what they do in secret remains hidden. They think that what they do in public may or may not matter. We have separated our public and our private life in America to the extent that we don't care what public politicians do in their private lives.

And at Capstone, it's not that we're trying to expose the secret hidden life of students. That's not it at all. It's simply a recognition that ⁓ the scrutiny that we have with reality TV is a voyeuristic scrutiny. It's the type where I profit off of your misery. And the house system is meant to help us see ways that we actually do that and shouldn't. It's designed to help us hate the right things. There are things that we should hate according to Holy scripture. We're commanded in Romans 12 to hate what is evil and to cling to what is good. And

Teenagers experience that all the time, usually only in a compliance environment where they are told what they're not doing well and they're rarely giving chances to fall the way we want our toddlers to fall when they learn to walk. We're now wanting them to take the lessons of virtue that they get in a classroom as they examine historical figures or movements or ideas or big, big concepts in literature or Latin or science. And now having to implement that in meaningful relationships where we're called to love one another well.

Tom Tucker (03:07)
Yeah. ⁓

Jonathan McGuire (03:07)
to give up

our own selfishness and to figure out where we fall, and then to help each other up, to encourage, to be patient, again, to exercise virtues in relationship. You don't win on reality show if you exercise virtue, you lose. And we want them to understand that even when they suffer because they're doing what is right, they're actually winning and there's a weight of glory stored up for them in eternity.

Tom Tucker (03:30)
Yeah, and good points all, and I appreciate that. ⁓ Do I understand correctly that the house system concept is something that is now in widespread use throughout the classical Christian school community? And ⁓ is that the case? And how is it that we have decided to bring it on board here at Capstone?

Jonathan McGuire (03:50)
Yes, I would say if I answer the second question, it automatically answers the first. The second question is yes, it's used in every Christian classical school that I know of. It's also used predominantly in public charter classical schools. There's a significant movement of different types of public and charter schools that are classical, some that are not. You don't even have to be a classical school to utilize a house system. It is not the same as social clubs. It's not the same as after school clubs or student councils.

It's a significantly different environment. And the way we've done it, as we often try to do at Capstone, is we don't simply try to reinvent the wheel unless we recognize that maybe if we put rubber on a wooden tire, it'll allow us to move quicker and withstand friction and allow for higher rates of turn. So the way I think about our houses is we are doing something unique compared to the landscape that's there in existing Christian schools. I don't think the way we describe it is necessarily different, but I think the way we will eventually have

seven houses in the upper school with about 40 students in each house, existing together in harmony with serving the lower school as well, is going to be a little different. It's going to be unique to our area. It's going to be unique to the nation. And we hope that it will be an example for others to either tweak or significantly overhaul their house program. And to that point, I've already spoken with others who are local to us, I would say within five hours of driving in Fargo.

and also with those in other places and provided guidance for how we're doing things in collaboration with the headmaster here, lower school dean and other other teachers whose role it is to implement the house experience, including ways we incorporate families outside who have no stake other than that they want this school to succeed. Some of them have children in the upper school, some do not. But we are collaborative in an effort to put students day in and day out.

in groups where that virtue can be encouraged and exemplified and not merely learned about academically. So it's exciting to see ways we're already impacting in our third year other schools who have been around longer. And of course, we did not invent this. We have received this from others and we want to treat it well.

Tom Tucker (06:04)
You've said that our classrooms exist to explain and our houses exist to apply. Elaborate on what that means and how does this distinction shape the purpose of the house system?

Jonathan McGuire (06:20)
I think of sitting in our eighth grade literature class yesterday and listening to a discussion over Lord of the Rings. They're still in the infant stages of that grand epic, but there were discussions about Strider, who they knew as Aragorn, son of Arathorn, but his, who he was was still hidden and yet to be revealed. They will eventually have discussions about the heroism of this man who was willing to turn down temptation.

to have worldly power at his fingertips. He could have all the races of Middle Earth under his thumb, but it would mean he would have to choose selfishness. He would have to choose power over service. And though the two are not necessarily dichotomized in Lord of the Rings and in many of our lives and decisions that we have to make in a moment, the decisions are starkly dichotomized. I can't have power and service. I think of the...

the Rotary Club and their motto, he who profits most serves best. You can learn about those things in a classroom, but where in an eight hour or seven hour school day are students asked to demonstrate the bravery or the courage or the fortitude of an Aragorn or the charity and the service and the humility of a Rotarian? Every school, even without the house system, will have moments where they can do that. Maybe the boys can go last and the girls can go first and demonstrate.

chivalry in an age that mocks it, that elevates ⁓ self-centeredness at all. There's a hundred different ways on campuses that can be done. But we started by asking, what if we set aside as a distinct class period through the course of a week, maybe twice a week, maybe three times a week, but anywhere from an hour to two hours a week, where students are meeting together to plan ways where that virtue has to be demonstrated. Whether it's through competitions,

or acts of service or something else where every student from sixth through twelfth grade was expected to be part of that thought exercise where now your thinking has to be embodied. So whatever you say is a good thing to go do, tell me how you're going to go do it and now go do it and now after you've done it, let's talk about how you've done it. So we have actively encouraged and worked that into our school schedule and do it throughout the week and month and semesters.

in meaningful ways, in some ways that take up significant time and other more regular bases that take up less time.

Tom Tucker (08:51)
Talk about how students are placed into houses and why is the selection process designed the way it is with no names, no family groupings, and essentially a draft system. Talk about that.

Jonathan McGuire (09:05)
Sure, is a blind draft. So if you can imagine the NFL combine that is currently in the news right now, which automatically dates this podcast. But if you think about how an NFL combine is done, the athletes show up on any given course of a weekend or several days and they demonstrate their vertical jumps, they demonstrate their throwing, catching, moving, whatever it might be. They demonstrate physical prowess or intelligence. And then their names are chosen based on that skill set that is measured according to a specific rubric.

Now imagine if that was done purely anonymously, where you didn't know who the athlete was, but all you had were a set of skills. Well, now shift that a little bit further and have it where you're measuring in some sense students' self-assessment towards their virtue development, and you're getting closer to what we've designed. It is a bit unusual, in my experience. I don't know another classical or Christian school that will automatically not

put families together in a house. So siblings are not automatically placed in a house. And instead, in a sense, you leave it up to God's providence. I take that as a point of, I hope, godly pride that we're trying to not just automatically put kids in a house because their siblings went before them. But we have designed a document that is still in process. We used it last year, and my assistant and I are reworking it in conjunction with some other leaders in the school.

We're trying to perfect this draft document that will highlight students' academic, athletic, and artistic interests, not necessarily their skills. I think we should have students be able to assess themselves whether they love science, but maybe they're D-minus students. Well, I would rather have a student in my house who is passionate about science and will bring that wonder and curiosity and devotion to science rather than one who is an A student and shrugs it off and doesn't care.

They're there for a grade and a transcript. They're not there for the wonder of what science should evoke in all of us when it's studied properly. Likewise with the faith. We may not have a student that I'm drafting into my house who prays the most, but I would want one who is ambitious towards prayer. Likewise encouragement or art or whatever it might be. So we do try to, in this document, to have students and their parents

And the teacher, if they're coming up through our school, the fifth grade teachers will work on these forms with us to showcase a student's ⁓ highlighted ambition or highlighted interests in certain areas. And we do take the student's self-assessment in that as well. Then our existing leaders in each house in conjunction with the mentors of each house, the student faculty members, will look at these documents and say, our house is weak academically. We need some students who are interested in science.

This kid says he loves science, we need to pick him. And they'll draft that student. And then a week or two later, they find out at a grand induction ceremony who it was they drafted. And through this process, the students learn a lot about themselves. Those who were participating in the draft as selectees, or I should say as selectors, discover a lot about students that they may not have known. So we're not asking a kid how many trophies in basketball they won.

So they may think they're drafting a particular student who's really good at basketball, but they may end up getting a student who's the shortest one in the student body who would not naturally be picked first on any basketball team. But man, does that kid love basketball. And they're going to learn something about the student. And it's a humbling process for everybody, which by the way, is a virtue that we want demonstrated on campus. Humility is one of our seven virtues that we talk a lot about. It tries to remove the...

Tom Tucker (12:41)
My

apologies for interrupting, but just for the sake of brevity here and keeping us on time and on schedule here, ⁓ in terms of draft day, who is it that's making those draft decisions for each house?

Jonathan McGuire (12:56)
Two students that are the leaders or the stewards of the house whose job it is to recognize the weaknesses of their house and where they need to grow stronger for the next academic year, participate with their faculty patron or their mentors. So this is a teacher who has on their schedule as part of their responsibilities here that they are overseeing this house, helping these students develop this eyesight to see others the way God would have us see them rather than making this a popularity or a skill-based concept.

only. That's who does it.

Tom Tucker (13:29)
Okay. And you talk about a couple of roles there. You talk about students serving as stewards, faculty members playing roles as patrons. And then, as I understand it, there's roles for other students to play within each house as well. Talk about that.

Jonathan McGuire (13:42)
You're welcome.

So we have the stewards who oversee the resources of their house, whether it's time or persons. Then underneath them, we might have the friars. Those are those, they're not, some schools might refer to this type of a role as a chaplain. I've been at a school that does that before. The chaplain was expected to pray at chapels or things like that. That's really not the role we have in mind. Hebrews 10, 24 to 25 says, each of us should learn how to stir one another up to love and good deeds according to the faith, according to God's commands.

So the friar may be somebody who's terrified of speaking in public, but they are keenly aware of the struggles of those in their house. So we have asked certain students to perform the role of a friar to roam throughout the hallways, roam throughout the student body, and have a particular insight into what we need to do as leaders, as a dean, to help encourage the student body. It's more than a morale officer. It's a little less than a hospital chaplain.

but it's some combination they're in. ⁓ Underneath them, we have those who are artisans whose job it is to, through beautiful artistic displays, showcase the identity of their houses. And that identity is learned through friction, through encouragement, through involvement in one another's lives. And then they create beautiful art that some of it they wear, some of it they can wear on magnetic pins. We'll have things like...

and battle flags when we do competition, things like armbands, t-shirts, all sorts of things that the artisans get to design. So there's a lot of students who want to do that and there's some who do it phenomenally well. And the goal is to bridge the gap. We also have chroniclers whose role it is to track the history of a house, who served in what roles, why, what happened that was meaningful in their lives. They also help the yearbook committee at the end of each year.

Tom Tucker (15:21)
Yeah.

Jonathan McGuire (15:36)
to formulate our pages in the yearbook and tell the story of what happened over the course of a year. We have significant moments of national crisis that our students think through together. The chroniclers would play a part in recording what we did and how we thought through that. They'll also record over the given year what chapels were like at the school, and they'll keep a written record for future generations to know and remember the history of where they came from. We also have jesters who work with a teacher who we call the jester of all jesters.

Tom Tucker (15:56)
Thank you.

Jonathan McGuire (16:05)
And the jester's roles are to plan out games and competitions, to think of lively ways for us to compete, because we do keep track of points. And at the end of the year, there is a reward for the house that wins. They don't just win a trophy, which our house cup is under development. It's being made by a company that's out on the West Coast that also does the trophies for the LG.

LPGA, I to make sure these acronyms are right. The Professional Golf Association, not the other stuff. Their job is they build these beautiful trophies. Our trophy is going to look, it's very similar to what the Stanley Cup in hockey looks like. It's substantive, it's a real reward. And then they also will spend a day together celebrating after school is out. The House Victor will celebrate. So they receive points through the year for academic success, for virtue acts of kindness, for acts of service that benefit the whole community.

for volunteering that they do that they don't even know they're getting rewarded for. Students also report one another when they see each other doing good deeds and rewards, not even within the same house. We have other houses reporting other houses and tell me, I saw this student doing this awesome thing. Would you give their house points for that? So, yeah.

Tom Tucker (17:13)
Yeah, I'm going to interrupt you a little bit

and move on to the next question. ⁓ You talk about here just a moment ago what happens at the end of a year with a trophy awarded to a house. Let's back up and talk about what happens at the beginning of the year from house meetings to the formal induction ceremony. What are students going to be experiencing in the first two weeks of a school year?

Jonathan McGuire (17:31)
induction ceremony.

That's a great question. The first two weeks of the school year, students will experience us all gathering together. No one has been divvied up into houses yet. So the existing houses know who's in their house, but none of the newbies know where they're going. And for two weeks, we frame it. We meet three times a week for half an hour each, led by me or another faculty member or Paul Fisher, the headmaster. And we talk about the meaning behind what we're doing, what it means to be part of a community that's educational in nature.

not necessarily a youth group or a church community. ⁓ What that means in terms of how we are faithful to one another, what unfaithfulness might look like, and the expectations we would have for them. Then after two weeks of framing the entire year, we get together and this new year we should be able to gather in our brand new chapel that's gonna be exemplary for how it frames the whole day, the reverence it instills, the humility it will instill.

And again, we have a very reverent and meaningful ceremony where students receive a brief homily from our headmaster. We sing and worship together. We will sing ⁓ Psalms and hymns together, led by our choir teacher, Mr. Zentor, who is also a faculty patron. And then students will go through an induction ceremony where their names are called and they're placed into a particular house. There's a brief celebration. And then immediately following that, they change into their

their house swag, they'll be given a t-shirt for the first time to represent their house. And we will have a great feast, Lord willing this year, Fargo weather included. We'll be outdoors with burgers and dogs and just a very low key type of a grilling, outdoor grilling backyard type of a party. And then they'll have their first couple of hours of competitions and the house competition for the year will be off and running. So that's about week two of the school year, the tail end of week two.

Tom Tucker (19:30)
Okay. Which students in what grades are actually being assigned to houses?

Jonathan McGuire (19:37)
sixth, seventh and eighth and ninth grade for this upcoming year. We do have a few 10th graders who will also be placed in houses. So we're doing somewhat of a shake up. We've had three houses existing for two years with a very stable makeup, but we've decided to expand from three to our full seven in this upcoming year because we'll have enough faculty to lead the houses, enough parent engagement, a good logistical plan to make it happen, and the student body numbers to make sure it's effective and fruitful.

So we're doing somewhat of a shakeup. The students all know it. They don't necessarily know if they're gonna remain in the same house. They do have input on that decision and they'll be voting on this upcoming Monday, ⁓ May 4th, I think it is. They'll be voting together on whether they stay in the current house, go to help build a new house with a new identity and tradition and heritage, or whether they don't mind where we place them. So we'll have about 90 to 100 students spread across seven houses next year.

and those will be the seven houses they will remain as such in those houses until the day they graduate.

Tom Tucker (20:43)
As I understand it, each house is named after a city. Talk a little bit about how ⁓ each city was selected. I understand also maybe there's a chronological component to that as well. ⁓ Explain the thinking and the rationale behind that.

Jonathan McGuire (20:56)
Chris.

Yeah, you're right. We had a lot of different things we could have done. We asked for student input when our oldest kids were only in sixth grade. Most of them wanted something that was very age appropriate, an animal or a ⁓ hero. Some of them wanted Marvel themed stuff. None of that was really fitting with our goals. So we took all of their suggestions and realized that if we chose very carefully certain cities that tell the story of Western civilization and

some that tell the story of what Augustine called the City of Man or the gospel marching through time, we would encapsulate all of their ideas and more. So they were chosen to be Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Nicaea, Cluny, Florence, and London. And there were some big names there that were left off. I've been asked, why didn't you choose Constantinople or Byzantium or Istanbul, whichever one of its three names you want to give it.

Why didn't you choose Antioch? Why didn't you choose, and the list could go on and on, including Rome or Barcelona, ⁓ Andalusia, Madrid, Berlin, again, Paris. There's lots of names we could have chosen, but they were selectively chosen. And the ones that were left off like Rome or Istanbul or Constantinople, we have chosen to honor in other significant ways throughout our daily life or in our school. For instance, when you walk upstairs from lower school to upper school, there is a massive mural that is being installed.

I mean massive, the things probably 15 feet by 15 feet of the founding of Rome. You cannot discount the significance of some of these cities that were not chosen. But because they were so vital and so significant to Western civilization, we wanted to incorporate them throughout the entirety of the life of the school, not just have one city represented. So that's why a city like Paris or Rome was left off.

But they do tell a story marching through time. And we've taken each of our seven's virtues, which we call the Griffin's weapons in our school, that are emphasized from pre-K all the way through senior year. And we have attached one virtue to one of the houses. Somewhat arbitrarily, I might add. In other words, we could have chosen humility to be a house other than Cluny. And most people have never heard of Cluny. I had not heard of Cluny until I had a class in history.

in college that was part of my history major in medieval studies. And once I learned about it, I became enraptured by what took place at the city that at one time was one of the most important cities for centuries in medieval Europe, and now is nothing more than a small village. But we attached humility to that time and that place and that city because during that time, it did exemplify this quality and we think students should learn about that and how those men and women in time particularly demonstrated a

a calling and a virtue that God expects all of us to have. So there was a lot of thought and a lot of debate about how we would do this. I love what we've done. I think it's, ⁓ if I may say so, better than what anybody else has chosen to do. I just hope we live up to the names that we have chosen because it's a high calling.

Tom Tucker (24:06)
Of

Yeah, well, it all sounds fantastic and fascinating. As a capstone parent, I'm really looking forward to having my son to be able to participate in what sounds like a fantastic educational experience ⁓ in which we ⁓ partake in. It seems kind of like a social experiment, right? All aimed at

Jonathan McGuire (24:30)
We do

call it a laboratory for the affections. So this is a laboratory where students are on display testing things, testing the waters, learning, growing. It is an experiment, but one that we believe we're commanded to have.

Tom Tucker (24:34)
Yeah.

Yeah, it just sounds like it's gonna be great and so much fun. Talk about ⁓ some of the key events or maybe the traditions that will take place throughout the year within the House experience.

Jonathan McGuire (24:58)
That's also a great question. Let me tell you what we've done this year because we're still working on the schedule for next year and it's probably going to be a little bit different. But this year our houses meet at the end of the day every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. On Mondays they meet with me, the Dean of the upper school, to help keep them on message, to remind them of the mission of why we're here and what is expected of them to be a student who is a Christian or we could simply say a Christian student. And those two are often not held together.

Mondays as framing days, you could say it, to bookend. Everything we're doing in a given week is important. On Wednesdays, they break into individual houses and they meet together with their patron to plan challenges against each other that are kept secret until unveiled. On Fridays, we then get together for those competitions and challenges. We've had challenges that are in depth and create tons of sweat and people get hit in the head and there's injuries, Athletic competitions, in other words.

And then we've had ones that are brainy, that are academic, like let's go downstairs in Founders Hall and the first two can translate the inscription going around the top wins points. Or that might be identification of flags. My favorite one of the year, and this is telling of both my age as a ⁓ late Gen Xer born in 1980, but my favorite was what we did this last Friday. It was a classic rock identification challenge. So I gave out a list of names of music and the artist or the band.

and they had 48 hours to listen to it and prepare. And then they were given 10 seconds to listen to it. And the first one that chimed in would get a point if they got it right. And if they can name the band or the artist, they got another point. I'm proud to say my son in his house won that challenge by a landslide. So I've been preparing him for 14 years for that day. But there's silly challenges, there's deep challenges, there's reverent challenges, there's all sorts of things. But it's a time for them to be kids as they work out their affections in this way.

We also significantly have moments throughout the year like Grandparents Day, which is coming up on May 16th, where houses do participate and will do something in a large assembly for grandparents, or Thanksgiving worship, where we have that every year. There's other ways that we have little moments and traditions built into the calendar where they know as a house, they're expected to give their best and receive the best of others.

And then the biggest, saving the best for last, we have three days a year that we call festival days where all regular schedules are canceled for upper school students. We have one in October, right before winter. We have one in winter in February, and we have one coming up here this Friday, the first week of May, that is our spring slash summer. In the morning, we gather together as an upper school student body and we worship and we pray and we sing and we hear a brief homily from a community member.

reminding us of what it means to be faithful to Christ. Then we break into individual houses and they prepare for the day's challenges that are gonna take the rest of the day. In the morning, we have several hours of academic games. Then we have an hour long feast. And when I say a feast, I don't just mean it's a fancy name. I mean, imagine walking in on a day where you have a hundred people showing up to your grandmother's house for Thanksgiving dinner. That's what we have. We have abundance. We have...

cornucopia of supplies of drinks, desserts. If you don't walk out of their coma toast after a Southern potluck, that's the feeling we want. It is a time to slow down and enjoy the grace of God in food and laughter and song. Then we make them do athletic games. then there's kids who are struggling to catch their breath because they're half asleep from the feast. But we do that for a couple of hours and then we tally up the points for the day and we announce the winner of the day of the festival. And then

then we go home and enjoy a weekend. So we do those three times a year and they're major events. It takes months of planning. The students do most of that planning and the adults help deliver it. Then we follow up on those festival days and debrief about what went well and we continue to get better and bigger and hopefully less expensive as we learn how to use our resources better. But they're major events in the college.

Tom Tucker (29:12)
Sounds like, again, just so much fun. ⁓ You have talked about the idea that houses can be messy. ⁓ How does Capstone view ⁓ conflict, failure, and imperfection in the context of house life?

Jonathan McGuire (29:21)
Yes.

That is a great, great question and one I will probably stumble in answering. I have to constantly remind myself that if I were, if God was as hard on me as I tend to be with students or my habit, my instinct would be with students, I would be crushed before I woke up for breakfast. What we don't want is to create an atmosphere of compliance where students are simply caught in every transgression

corrected to do better and sin on their way. There is a great deal of patience that must be exemplified, grace that must be demonstrated by the way we handle their obvious sin that everybody knows is a sin, except the one sinning. There has to be an atmosphere of reverence that is maintained and yet charity that is given.

And there are, I've been in house meetings on those Wednesdays where I'm not doing anything except observing, where I see teachers push too hard and we talk about it. The teacher and I talk about it. Or I say that, see them let too much go and we talk about it. Likewise, I try to meet at least in the fall semester with the stewards, those students, those students leaders who are responsible to take care of their house. I try to meet with them once a week and we talk about what's going well with your students.

What's going poorly with your peers? What are some praises? What are some fixes? Here are three ways I think you should handle that. Pick one and go do it. The next week, how did it go when you pick this one way to talk about the dress code violations within your house or the students who are being disrespectful to Mr. Zenter and choir? These are all real examples that have come up when I meet with the student leaders. So here's how we deal with it, Tom. We don't let it go, but we try to demonstrate charity and patience. God doesn't let our sin go.

but he does overlook with patience and grace as he recognizes we are growing. And sometimes you have to let a dress code violation go in the moment because you realize there's a bigger war to be fought on the other side of that. And sometimes the bigger war is demonstrated in the dress code violation. They're intentionally flouting the rules for the sake of rebellion, and that's a heart issue that has to be dealt with. And you can let something go like they didn't bring their planner to class.

because that's not where the malice or the sin is really being demonstrated. So it takes a great deal of wisdom, a great deal of patience, and sometimes a willingness to say, I'm sorry I came down on you so hard. You didn't deserve that and I only realize after the fact. So that's the only difference between God and us is he never has to apologize to us. His grace is always sufficient and always perfect. And ours is sometimes too abundant and we don't clamp down hard enough and we have to apologize for that.

Tom Tucker (32:19)
Yeah, as the school continues to grow, how will the house system expand to involve younger grades and create ⁓ stronger ⁓ cross grade bonds?

Jonathan McGuire (32:33)
I wish I could answer that with clarity. I have a great idea that is worked out in a scope and sequence on paper and has not yet had the involvement of the teachers who are gonna have to deal with whatever we do. So I won't say a lot until we can have those meetings, but I will say we do want meaningful engagement for a couple of reasons. One, we actually think we have responsibility to the least of those in our community. And in any school, the least of those are measured by their grade level.

In high school, Tom, who would you say are the least? Every time, every time. And in middle school, who are the least? It's the sixth graders, every time. So we take that as an opportunity to show the ninth graders through the affection of the twelfth graders that you are meaningful, that we are not the snobs who are on the way out.

Tom Tucker (33:06)
Freshmen.

Yeah.

Jonathan McGuire (33:27)
the older we get, the greater the responsibility we expect the students to show, the greater the reverence and charity and humility we expect them to show to those who they think are less than them. So in a school like this, where you have a lot of lower school students, by God's grace, we've already established just in our founding and the way that the families came in, that we don't treat others as less than us. And that's a marketing ploy, right? That can be an advertising slogan if it's not

really boots on the ground operative. But that is how we've been going since day one. So the house system is gonna be a natural display, a natural extension, if you will, of what's already in place, which is love and affection between the grades. Things like reading programs, lunches together, incorporating the lower school into house festival days, which we've done to varying degrees in years past. There's a lot of ways we can establish a relationship that will help student retention

help families want to stay meaningfully engaged in capstone over the long haul rather than consider pulling their students out for another school. We actually think that will help us out a lot. But just from a biblical standpoint, siblings have a responsibility to each other and we're brothers and sisters in this house. And so we have a responsibility to love and participate meaningfully in each other's lives. I would love to see tutoring take place on a meaningful part of the schedule.

Right now, as I said, we're meeting Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays as houses. So I wonder if there's a way to work the schedule so that our houses can go down to lower school and help the teachers deliver math or reading to kids or poetry recitation or whatever. There's a lot of ways we could do this that we just haven't sat down and had to think through yet because we're only just now adding a high school level. So now is where the rubber meets the road and we got to start putting some of the theories into practice.

Tom Tucker (35:21)
I'm going to look forward to seeing how that plays out over time.

Jonathan McGuire (35:24)
Me too. Because that's going

to affect Levi, who's in third grade this year, right?

Tom Tucker (35:28)
Yep, exactly. Yeah, we're looking forward to it for sure. We're nearing the end here. ⁓ One, I guess, ⁓ kind of a capstone question, if you will, here, ⁓ and I guess pun intended. Ultimately, what do you hope a capstone student gains from their years in a house? And how does that shape who they become beyond graduation?

Jonathan McGuire (35:54)
I hope that a student, let's just take one who's here from sixth through 12th grade, the Full House experience, I hope when they graduate, they look back at their own experience of having been loved well by older students and faculty, and then they look back at the ways they were able to do that and recognize what a treasure it was and a gift from God that will change their perspective as freshmen in college.

that will now make them seek to be reformers in any institution they go to, any family they're a part of, any family they helped found as a spouse, to recognize there is a way to live together in a community that is more meaningful than what I could have had somewhere and that my friends received elsewhere. That's what I hope.

Tom Tucker (36:44)
Well, it's beautiful and it's a great way to end it. As a parent and as a staffer here at Capstone, I'm grateful that you are serving in this role. It sounds like you have a terrific vision for what you want this to be and for how you want it to play out. So we're certainly excited and looking forward to what the future brings. Anything else in closing that we haven't touched upon that you want to mention before we go?

Jonathan McGuire (37:07)
I would only say if you are watching this and not a part of the Capstone community, I'd be happy to set up a time to discuss this with you. I would love to learn from you about what's working well in your school as well in the house experience. We don't have this figured out and I don't want to have to reinvent everything myself. And if you are a member of the Capstone community or considering it, I would love to speak to you about this as we do consider this ⁓ a significant, highly impactful experience you and your son or daughter would have as a member of this community. So call me.

Tom Tucker (37:37)
Alright, sounds good. And if you watching or listening right now would like to learn more about Capstone, you can find us online at capstoneclassical.com. Be sure to comment if you're watching via YouTube and like and subscribe as well. And be sure to share this video and the audio clip on your favorite social media platforms. We've been speaking with Jonathan Maguire, upper school dean at Capstone Classical Academy in Fargo, North Dakota.

Jonathan McGuire (37:57)
Thank

Tom Tucker (38:04)
and I'm Tom Tucker, Director of Advancement at Capstone. Thanks for watching, thanks for listening, and we'll see you again next time.

Jonathan McGuire (38:11)
Thank you, bye bye.