Every year, we celebrate Independence Day on July 4th, honoring the founding of America and the many brave men and women who have worked to make this country great. But how much do we actually know about America’s leaders and the actions they took?

This week on Family Policy Matters, host Traci DeVette Griggs welcomes Allison Ellis to discuss her new book, Finding Our Words: Words That Made America, and the importance of studying America’s leaders and the words that were foundational in the creation of our great country.

• Subscribe to our podcast so you can hear our interviews every week.
• Tune in to one of the radio stations that carry Family Policy Matters (see the list below).
• Click below to listen online.

Spotify • Apple Podcasts • iHeart Radio • Audacy • Amazon Music

Family Policy Matters

Rediscovering America Through the Words of Its Leaders (with Allison Ellis)

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Thanks for joining us this week for Family Policy Matters this year we celebrate America’s 249th Independence Day. But how much do we all really know about the men, women, and ideas that brought this incredible idea to fruition? Allison Ellis, founder of Mount Titano Media, is doing her part to educate Americans about their very important heritage. Her company has published a new book, Finding Our Words: Words That Made America. She joins us today to discuss why books like this and the history they teach are so important if this great American experiment is going to succeed. Allison Ellis, welcome to Family Policy Matters.

ALLISON ELLIS: Thank you, Traci, happy to be here.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Okay, so a little background on you. You had a very nice career in finance and publishing in the US and Europe. You put your career on hold to homeschool your kids, and now you’re back to publishing. So, talk about that path. How is that connected with the recent work to publish this book and others that you feel are so necessary for today?

ALLISON ELLIS: Well, that is the way I say it. It’s the easiest way to explain it, to say that I have put my career on hold to be able to homeschool and be with my family full time. But actually, it happened the opposite way. I decided very young to build my career so that someday I could leave it, because the primary goal was to be able to be with my family. And I grew up as a, what we call a latch key kid in the 70s and 80s, with a single mother, so I know what that kind of childhood is like. And I was around a lot of families where there were either extended family members or the mother primarily in the home with the children, and I saw firsthand how important and meaningful that was to have, you know, at least in the young, formative years, to have a lot of attention at home with the children, and that was my goal. So, I enjoy my career mentally, and all of the skills that I developed at that time are what are enabling me to take what I learned in the time. It’s almost two decades now, that I have not been working full time and I’ve been raising my daughter, she’s 14. In our home schooling, we discovered so many things about education in America in the process. I just wanted to be with my child full time, but I didn’t realize how vitally important it was. I think the recognition of the situation with education in America is much more widely known now than when I started. But even now, I think people do not understand the depth of the devastation, how widespread it is. But the good news is there are some very easy answers right at hand to help turn the tide.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: It’s not a surprise to us to hear you describe it as the depth of the devastation, but can you give us just a brief overview as to how bad you feel it has become?

ALLISON ELLIS: So, the title of the first word that we’ve released is Finding Our Words: Words that Made America, and that title came from the realization over, really, 20 years of visiting schools, researching, going back to university myself for a master’s degree at Stanford, and then homeschooling and discovering what is a huge, growing movement, classical education. But what I learned can be summed up in one sentence. We have lost our words. Americans, and this is everyone. This is, the devastation has been going on for so long. It started probably with the industrial revolution, but it’s accelerated in the last 100 years, and then in the last, I’d say, even just 15 years, it has fallen off the cliff. And so, we actually have generations now who do not have the capacity to read material in our own language, in English, that fifth graders and eighth graders could have read with ease in, let’s say, 1850. So, a part of my research has been, when I was looking for it to build a curriculum for my daughter, it was difficult to find books that weren’t dry, taking wonderfully fascinating material and making it boring, and that’s the last thing we want to do in education, is bore our children to death with busy work and bubble tests. There’s so much material that’s inspiring, and those are the kind of materials we need to use. And so, I started going backward in time, thinking, Okay, let me look for materials or textbooks from my childhood. And then I went further and further. When I got to the 19th century, those were books that very young children could read, and the vocabulary is rich, the diction is complex and beautiful. And it wouldn’t have been difficult for children at that time to read, but I think certainly all children now, but even adults would have trouble with those works, and it almost would appear as a foreign language, and that’s why they’re not taught anymore. It’s not the teacher’s fault. It’s not the school’s fault. At this point, there’s no one to blame. It’s so widespread, and it’s been for a few generations now that we can’t even recognize how much we’ve lost unless we go back and really dive into those works that would have been easily read for many, many centuries, but they’re foreign to us.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: So, this book, Finding Our Words: Words that Made America is part of a solution to this problem. Describe what’s in that book. How did you choose the authors? What kinds of pieces did you choose?

ALLISON ELLIS: I started teaching these great American speeches to my daughter when she was oh, I was reading them aloud with her right from the beginning, but I started having her engage with them and try to read them, you know, very small portions at a time when she was about five, and then we would summarize them together. And the first thing I realized is that these profound works, while they are written with extraordinary use of language, it’s also very clear writing, and with the right kind of help, children can read it and can really appreciate what we summarize as the meaning for them, and starting at that age with these fine works, instills that language in them, and it becomes a part of them. And that’s something else I’ve discovered. We just wait too long and give too little to our children, they are capable of much more than we are currently offering or expecting of them.

So the speeches range from Patrick Henry to Ronald Reagan, and they cover so many different topics and different kinds of writing styles, all beautiful. And so, for example, George Washington, one of his major themes in his farewell address, it was full of ideas and warnings about how to maintain what was built with so much effort and sacrifice. And one thing that we don’t hear regularly now is how vital the role of morality is in the strength and continuance of our nation. And that’s something that George Washington discusses. General Douglas MacArthur, his speech at West Point in 1962. Duty, honor, country. Those are words that will be relevant for not just the military, for all of us. He said, duty, honor, country. Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. So that would apply to parents and children. We all have duties, and we all need to execute them honorably. We have the words of two former slaves, men who pulled themselves up, literally from chains and with mostly self-educated. They soar the seven heavens with their oratory. They were very inspiring, and reading their words, that’s Frederick Douglass and Booker T Washington, reading their words leaves me with no excuse or complaint for anything. It’s very inspiring.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: So, who should be reading this book? I mean, you mentioned a five-year-old. I have an almost five-year-old granddaughter, and I’m very curious to see what will happen when I start reading these to her, which I plan to do. Who else should be reading these?

ALLISON ELLIS: These are the words spoken by the people who made our country. And so, these words represent those concepts that our nation was built upon. It just is very simple. It’s like with any subject. If we want to hold on to that subject and develop it, we need to know it fully. And we don’t know these words anymore. I feel very strongly that most people will be unfamiliar with some of the names in this book, and most of us won’t know these speeches at all. These were once household names. And farmers, every kind of worker, and children would know these names and the words they had to say before the last, let’s say 50 to 70 years. So, if we want to understand what we have, it’s great inheritance. It’s an unprecedented experiment in government that has been a phenomenal gift to us and to the world in many ways. So, if we do want to hold on to it, especially as we approach our 250th, if we want to look forward to passing on our legacy and having a 300th or a 500th we need to know what it is. And the best place to start is at the source.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: So, you mentioned classical education. I think a lot of people have heard that term, but may not really understand what that is, and that goes along with what you’re talking about here. So, give us a little synopsis. What is classical education?

ALLISON ELLIS: Different schools will define it different ways. In its purest sense, classical education means the study of Greek, Latin, and the works of those civilizations. And once diving into that, even as I have through my daughter’s work, she’s studied Latin since she was five, and Greek since she was seven. And I’ve been a witness, not a participant, but seeing how we are so immersed in the legacy of Greece and Rome and, you know, Western civilization, and it’s all around us in our architecture and our expressions. We are swimming in it and don’t recognize it. So, a return to it is a return to the heights of Western civilization. And most of us will not be inclined to study Latin and Greek, and that’s just fine. You can still participate in the wealth of a classical education. There’s an expression in Latin ad fontes, to the source. So, if we go to the most beautiful words ever written by people we wish to emulate, I would say that’s another general theme in classical education that we should have daily encounters with beauty and goodness to emulate, to inspire us to form art, to form our character, and we can access that information in translation. We don’t need to study Greek and Latin. I advocate for that heavily, but it’s not necessary. There are wonderful translations of all those works by people who themselves were great classicists, and the language is beautiful. It’s still a lesson in composition as well as a great transfer of information and ideas. And so classical education is, in fact, available to all.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: And I think that people who are Christians, who study the Bible, certainly understand the need to go back to the source and to, you know, to study some of the original languages. So that makes sense that it would also apply to our founding fathers and some of the other things that make America great. So, when you mentioned the list of people who you have included in your book, you only mentioned men, but there are women that played a huge role as well. Do you have a favorite?

ALLISON ELLIS: I do indeed. It is all men, and that is exactly why we followed up immediately on the heels of Finding Our Words with our release Heroines of History. My very favorite, I call her my patron heroine, is Mary Washington. I would say that most children, at least, would not even know that name, if you ask them who is George Washington’s mother? And I’m not sure any of us really. I certainly didn’t. I didn’t know most of what I know now 10 years, 15 years ago, and I’m still scratching the surface myself, but if I can just read a little excerpt. This is written by Elizabeth Ellet in 1850 about Mary Washington. The mother of Washington. There needs no eulogy to awaken the associations which cling around that sacred name. Our hearts do willing homage to the venerated parent of the chief. Well, that might have been true in 1850 and we want to make that true again. She continues. The contemplation of Washington’s character naturally directs attention to her whose maternal care guided and guarded his early years. What she did and the blessings of a world that follows her teach impressively while showing the power and the duty of those who mold the characters of the age to come.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Just to close, is it possible to give us a few sentences as to why these American ideals that you’ve discussed are worth saving? Why is it an extraordinary thing that’s worth fighting for?

ALLISON ELLIS: That’s a great question, because I think too many people don’t have any idea what America has contributed to the world and this idea of government by the people and for the people. All people and all governments have problems and ways they are lacking. But this experiment that has continued for 250 years, next July 4, is absolutely extraordinary, and it’s why people around the world have flooded here, if possible, from the beginning. Because it is a freedom that is almost hard to believe in so many places. We can’t wait for the government to create change. We can’t wait for schools and teachers and teachers’ unions to change. It’s not that they won’t, and it’s not that there’s not an effort to do so right now, to improve education across the nation. But we’re Americans, and it’s not our spirit to wait and lie back and hope the government does something to improve it for us, and meanwhile, another generation or two goes by without these opportunities. So, it’s just like Reagan said in his farewell address in 1989, all great change in America starts over the dinner table. So, whether it’s Finding Our Words: Words that Made America, or Heroines of History, the Bible or any great book you have on your shelves, one of the keys to turning this around is simply Americans taking charge one by one of their children’s education and their own restoration of their what they missed by reading even 15 minutes a night over dinner, preferably aloud as a family.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Thank you so much. Allison Ellis, thank you for being with us today on Family Policy Matters.

– END –