#770: The Western Canon Belongs To Your Child with Chapter House

**Joshua Centers** (0:07)
You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free.
When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:18)
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.

**Joshua Centers** (0:29)
I mean, that's part of the bold case for Bitcoin.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:31)
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.

**Marty Bent** (0:36)
The most important question about your child's education is not whether they can read. It is what their reading is forming them to become. Most parents know their children should read more, but fewer stop to ask what reading is for. Is education supposed to prepare a child to earn a living or to form a human being capable of courage, judgment, wonder, and freedom? My guests today, Joshua and Hannah Centers, believe modern education has spent the last century answering that question badly.
They created Chapter House.
To put the stories, the great stories, of Western civilization back where they believe they belong. Not trapped in academic syllabi or flattened into worksheets, but read aloud at the kitchen table between parents and children. In this conversation, you will learn why they believe virtue is better taught through story than lecture, why children may need unsanitized myths and flawed heroes, how to tell a living book from a dead one, why 20 minutes of reading can change the culture of a home, and what any parent can do tonight, homeschooler or not, to help a child become a lifelong reader. Josh and Hannah, welcome to the show.

**Joshua Centers** (1:35)
Hi, thanks, Marty. Thanks for having us.

**Marty Bent** (1:37)
Thank you. I'm really excited for this. It's been a couple of years since we last saw each other in person. I think it was Austin two years ago at the Natalism Conference.

**Joshua Centers** (1:47)
Yeah, it's been a minute. Last year, I think, it was last March.

**Marty Bent** (1:53)
Yeah, it was time flies. Well, let's jump into it. I know we had the intro, but I think starting the conversation, take me back to the moment when the stopping of frustration in your own home and homeschooling, and became a company you felt compelled to build. Like why Chapter House? What compelled you to go from being frustrated to building it?

**Joshua Centers** (2:15)
That's a great question. We've been frustrated for a while.
So Hannah primarily uses the Charlotte Mason method in homeschooling. We adapted a bit, but really the gist of it is you read a lot of old books with your children. And there are a lot of these books that you just can't find or should I say you either find an old copy, you find a new print-on-demand copy, and those tend to be pretty poor in general, or you use a digital copy like an old PDF, and you read it off an iPad or a Kindle. Which is not what we're trying to cultivate in our house.
So anyway, this long-standing dream of making beautiful hardcover editions of these old texts that were no longer in wide circulation. And just so happens, I went to a place in Wyoming a couple of years ago, met a publisher, we got to talking, asked if they ever considered doing homeschool material and it just kicked off from there. And so that's really just how Chapter House was born. It's that simple.

**Marty Bent** (3:18)
And what was wrong with the additions that were available to you? You were able to find what were some of the common problems with them other than they were just PDFs that you had to put on a Kindle.

**Joshua Centers** (3:29)
Well, the print and demands, I don't know if you want to comment on this at all, but.

**Hannah Centers** (3:32)
Yeah. So a lot of the print and demand copies, they're fine, they're perfectly fine. But the paper's thin or there might be errors, type settings difficult to read, the glue bonding comes apart.
And so if you've got multiple kids that you're planning to homeschool using the same materials and it starts having issues with the first one, then you're like, well, I guess I'll be buying this again.

**Joshua Centers** (4:00)
So the types often blurry, the papers often thin, and so they're kind of hard to read.

**Marty Bent** (4:08)
Yeah. Sounds like a fiat problem, the high-velocity trash economy and fraud in books. Very much.

**Joshua Centers** (4:14)
Very much.

**Marty Bent** (4:15)
Was there a moment where one of your children reacted to an old story that made you realize that these books still work?