The state of education is a serious concern for many families. More parents are turning to homeschooling, and charter schools are growing. Some are going further, trying to create new schools from scratch.
Warren Steury, a 29-year-old from Nashville, Tennessee, is one of them. He founded Meriwether Academy, which plans to offer boys a demanding education rooted in classical learning and outdoor experience. The school is still in its planning stages, but Steury has already become active in Nashville’s conservative intellectual community through book groups and adult workshops. He was also part of a four-person team that brought Peter Thiel to the city for his lecture series on the Antichrist.
What was your education like growing up?
I grew up in North Carolina and went to public school. I was a difficult kid, pushing back against rules and discipline like a lot of boys do.
When I was 16, I was sent, against my wishes, to a program in the mountains. I spent three months living out of a backpack and learning to make fire with rocks and sticks. After that, I went to a disciplinary boarding school on an old Scout camp in the North Carolina mountains. It was a boys’ school, and plenty of the students were misfits.
Did that approach help?
It was better than leaving me in a fluorescent-lit institution. When I began thinking about building schools, I looked back at the parts of my childhood that had most shaped me.
That year outdoors—hiking, camping, living in the woods—had a lasting effect. Most of my other years in public school have blurred together.
What goes into the idea for a new kind of school?
I keep asking whether the school really needs to exist, or whether someone else is already doing the same thing. What would make it different?
For us, it’s the combination of a classical education, a strong outdoor program, and martial arts. I think that gives us a distinctive model.
Have other schools influenced you?
One I especially admire is St. Dunstan Academy in Virginia, a new Anglican school for boys. They acquired 200 acres in the mountains and are building the campus themselves. They recently put up a huge timber-frame Great Hall, about 33.5 feet tall.
The students are learning construction by helping build the campus. They’re not just watching it happen.
What qualities will you want in your teachers?
Life experience matters. A lot of academia follows a narrow path: someone studies a subject in college and then goes straight into teaching it. They can end up speaking from a kind of artificial world they’ve never really left.
A good teacher should also be a mentor and a guide, not just someone who teaches calculus. Parents should feel that the man teaching their son science or literature can serve as a role model, too. Even if a student forgets the math, I hope the teacher will have made a positive impression that stays with him.
You started a Classic Book Study Group, including a discussion of Plutarch’s Lives. When did you begin hosting book groups?
I was 18 when I started my first one with friends. We read The Celestine Prophecy—there were about five of us in Boone, North Carolina, while we were in college.
I’ve always liked book clubs and having friends over for dinner. Sometimes I’d make the gathering more formal and bring in a speaker.
The Plutarch group is for men. Why make it a men-only event?
We want to create events for men because the conversations can be different. It’s not about excluding women. A healthy society needs spaces for men, spaces for women, and places where everyone can come together. I do think there’s a broader effort in America to weaken or discourage spaces for men.
You recently wrote about what fathers owe their sons. Why is that relationship important?
A young child needs masculine guidance. In the Spartan example, boys stayed with their mothers for their first nine years, then entered training under men. The point is that we shouldn’t expect mothers to raise boys into men on their own.
Fatherlessness is a major social problem. It harms children and, in turn, the country. Mothers and fathers bring different things to a family: a mother may offer emotional support, while a father can bring a kind of toughness. Aristotle wrote about the family in similar terms. Children need both, I think.
Meriwether Academy helped organize Peter Thiel’s recent lecture series. How did that come together?
We put it together in two weeks. People should have more confidence in themselves and their friends. Three or four people who agree on something can make a lot happen.
We tend to assume these projects are more complicated than they are. In this case, four of us had an idea and got to work.
You can just do things.
You can. There are limits—the laws of physics, the laws of God—but beyond those, a lot of the rules are things people have made up.
