Friday Feature: Logos Tutoring Program

Colleen Hroncich

Hunt Davidson was teaching high school history when he noticed something that bothered him enough to quit his job and start over. He taught 9th and 11th grade, so he had the same kids around age 14 and again around 16. “A lot of the young women were changing and growing,” he recalls. “And I just did not see the same with the boys, kind of at all. In fact, most of the boys that I got at 14 were, sad to say, they were already just jaded, cynical. They were looking at the adult world kind of going, ‘I don’t want to be a part of that, so video games and sports for me.’ It was pretty tragic.”

That observation, combined with his experience in the Master of Arts in Liberal Arts program at St. John’s College in Annapolis, fundamentally changed how he thought about education. “I was like, you guys hate being here. I hated being there when I was your age. I wonder if there’s a way to offer something that would be more appropriate and fitting to specifically like boys who are just entering puberty, right when things are really starting to change,” Hunt says. He adds that in 4th and 5th grade, boys often seem to be happy and loving life, but things change in middle school. He decided to try creating an environment that would reach those boys more effectively. 

In 2019, he gathered a group of local homeschool families at a café, laid out his ideas, and asked for their thoughts. Nine families signed up, and Logos Tutoring Program was born. Now in its seventh year, the program, led by Hunt and two additional tutors, serves 19 middle school boys on 50 acres in rural Georgia.

The group meets twice a week. “Five hours on Monday, five hours on Friday, and we’re all together. Rain or sun, cold or hot, doesn’t matter the weather. Unless there’s a tornado happening, the boys are outside,” he explains. “No screens, no watches. Like it’s really designed pretty particularly. You get these boys just separated from civilization for three years.” 

They gather at the Agora, a meeting place nestled in the woods. The day starts with liturgy, during which they recite prayers and chants such as St. Patrick’s Breastplate or the Nicene Creed. 

Next comes the Agon report. “Agon is just a Greek word for challenge. And it’s where we get our word agony from,” Hunt explains. “It’s a voluntary challenge every week. And the word voluntary just kills these boys. They hate it. They want to just be told they have to do this. But they don’t. It’s part of the program for them to start learning some self-ownership—like, here’s a challenge. You can do it or not do it.” There is a wide range of challenges, including taking a cold shower every day, baking cookies and taking them to a neighbor, introducing yourself, or completing a solo silent hike between two points. 

“One of the things that we say ad nauseam is failure is your friend if you have eyes to see and ears to hear,” explains Hunt. “What we’re really doing is offering these boys 10,000 opportunities to fail and to suffer and get them to be not afraid of that.” From Hunt’s perspective, if they can make it through three years of failing in a safe space and suffering together as they learn ancient Greek under a tarp in 35-degree rain, they’ll be ready for what life throws at them.

Logos is designed as a three-year program. The three-year ancient Greek course, if done well, gives students the foundation to navigate the New Testament in its original language. For science, they go through a three-year physical science course around the principles of permaculture. They learn soil science, design principles, and systems thinking, and they run a three-year garden project at home. Inspired by Hunt’s experience at St. John’s, they also have a seminar, where “we read and tell old, old, old stories around the fire. And a lot of magic happens there.” 

In the middle of the day, there’s an open hour that serves as a pressure-release valve for the physical and mental challenges of the day. “They can do all the things that a 12-year-old, 13-year-old boy wants to do, which is essentially just create havoc. And so for an hour, they can eat food, they can play games, they can go in the woods, they can be alone. They kind of just go crazy for an hour,” Hunt says.

Before the closing liturgy, they wrap up the day with Kairos. “This is one of the most important parts of the program,” says Hunt. “It’s impossible to sell, but the boys all just sit in the woods, quiet, still, and alone for 30 minutes to an hour. And it’s really remarkable.” Initially, they hate it. “It’s just the worst thing in the world for a 12-year-old boy,” Hunt adds. But over time, it becomes one of their favorite parts of the day. 

Throughout the middle of the week, the boys have one-on-one tutorials with one of the tutors, which is an idea Hunt brought back from when he studied abroad at Oxford. It’s primarily a reading and writing tutorial, but it really becomes a mentoring relationship for the boys. 

Beyond the regular program, they have several campouts in the woods each semester, including a special one for first-year students. “I bring in a friend of mine who is a search and rescue operator in the Smoky Mountains. He comes in and leads the boys in a wilderness 101 survival campout. It’s very intense—with all the boys getting in the creek and having to make a fire while they’re like pre-hypothermic,” Hunt says. 

Hunt adds that the wilderness 101 campout has become part of the lore of the program—with the older kids razzing the younger ones all year, saying, “Just wait till February. You have the creek drill coming up.” But one of the first-year students, who was apprehensive about everything at the beginning of the year, recently said he thought it would be “really good after it’s really bad.” And that’s exactly right—and it’s just what Hunt wants the kids to understand as they face challenges in life.

The three words that Hunt says best encapsulate Logos are mythological, because they’re very story-based; agrarian, because the boys develop a healthier relationship with the land; and monastic, because they learn an old way of being that monks and nuns modeled, which is a way to God.

While the Logos Tutoring Program is unique and special, Hunt doesn’t really credit himself or the other tutors for the magic he sees in the students. “This is actually really old. What we’re doing is very old, nothing new about it,” he says. “We’ve kind of cobbled together these ingredients—outside, hard conditions, boys only, men who aren’t my dad, stories, lands—and kind of put that into the pot.” Then they sit back and watch what happens. “It’s just the juice of the woods and God and real conflict and real challenges and real failures.”

Source: https://www.cato.org/blog/friday-feature-logos-tutoring-program