← Hillsdale College K-12 Classical Education Podcast
Hillsdale College K-12 Classical Education Podcast
Kathleen O’Toole and Robert Pondiscio: Combating Doom and Gloom in the Classroom
00:38:38
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- [00:02]
A
This show is a part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to your favorite. You'll get brand new episodes of all your favorite shows sent right to your device and you'll help us know that you're out there listening. Never miss another episode by going to podcast hillsdale.edu subscribe that's podcast hillsdale.edu subscribe or click the Follow or Subscribe button on Apple podcasts, Spotify or YouTube.
- [00:46]
B
Welcome to The Hillsdale College K12 classical education podcast, bringing you insight into classical education and its unique emphasis on human virtue and moral character, responsible citizenship, content, rich curricula and teacher led classrooms. Now your host, Scott Bertram.
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A
Thanks for listening. The Hillsdale College K12 Classical Education Podcast is part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More episodes at podcast hillsdale.edu or wherever you get your audio. You also can find more information on topics and ideas discussed on this show at our website, k12hillsdale.edu. Today we hear a conversation between Dr. Kathleen O', Toole, Associate Vice President for K12 Education at Hillsdale College, and Robert Pandisio, a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Here's Dr. O'. Toole.
- [01:41]
B
Well, welcome. I'm so pleased to be joined this afternoon by Robert Pondisio. Mr. Pondisio is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and an affiliate of AEI's James Q. Wilson Program in K12 Education Studies. He focuses on K12 education curriculum, teaching, school choice, and charter schooling. In his research and writing, he's worked at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, the Cor Knowledge foundation, and before that he was a public school teacher of civics and other things. Robert, thanks for being here.
- [02:16]
C
Thanks for having me.
- [02:19]
B
Well, I'm so happy to be talking to you. I'm a follower of your work and always learn and benefit from reading what you write. I'm particularly interested today in talking about a recent article you put out called There's Too Much Gloom and Doom in the Classroom. At the beginning of that article, you describe the experience of, I believe, a fictional student named Maya. And you talk about what her what her life is like going to eighth grade at a typical American public school. And I think your argument is that her experience is typical of most students today. Tell me about Maya.
- [02:56]
C
Yeah, I'm not sure if it's typical. I mean, the genesis of this piece is actually a piece I wrote a few years ago for Commentary magazine, which I believe the title because you know, as a writer you don't write your own titles. Your editors Give them the title. It was the Unbearable Bleakness of American Education. And it was much on the same themes. It was like, like young adult literature is just dark and depressing. It's about the, you know, the pathology du jour and trauma in science class. You know, kids are, are talking about and learning how, you know, the, the, the, the earth is going to be burned to a crisp in a dozen years and, and we're all doomed. You mentioned my civics background. I was actually a fifth grade teacher for most of my career. Civics was, as I like to joke, my side hustle. But I got to teach a senior seminar in civics at Democracy Prep, a New York City charter school for many years up until Covid. And there's a fashionable idea in civic education that's commonly referred to as action civics, where rather than learn the dry and dull rebranches of government and how a bill becomes law and blah blah blah, instead we're going to challenge students with authentic civic projects. Identify an issue in your community, a problem that needs solving, and then figure out a way to solve it and you it all together. I'm painting with a broad brush here. Obviously it's not hard to see that I could be a 12 or 13 year old and all I seem to learn is just the bad and the broken, how everything's gone wrong, democracy's hanging by a thread, my community is under duress, on and on and on. And then I'm being told that it's up to me to figure out a way to solve these problems. In other words, we think we are engaging children with, with what I jokingly called in the commentary piece the, the pedagogy of the depressed. And I'd love to say that to audience of teachers because they get the joke. Lay readers often do not. But. And I don't want to overstate the case, but I don't want to minimize it either. In other words, it's, it seems to me, not, not a stretch to say that you could get from, you know what, go from one end of your K12 education to the other and just think, man, things are messed up. And rather than being inspired to be a quote, change agent and looking forward to getting out of school and doing your part to fix things, just being pushed into a defensive crouch and thinking man, things are really messed up and just common sense suggests to me that can't be inspiring to kids, that cannot be challenging them to be change agents, but just the opposite. Pushing them into a defensive crouch and saying why bother? Things are Just terrible. So, again, I don't want to overstate the case, but I also think we owe it to, you know, in our role as, you know, whether we are teachers or administrators or parents, anybody who is interested in children's well being to just kind of stop and say, are we kind of, you know, selling kids a false idea here? Because yes, there is. There are problems, I'm not naive. But there's also hope and opportunity and greatness. And we owe it to children to not just, you know, give them a. Present them with the problems of the world, but also make sure that they understand that we're not the first people to face problems, previous generations face, problems that dwarf ours. And we triumphed over them and we persisted. So in other words, I want to make sure that we are, or at least my plea is let's make sure that we are not just giving kids the bad and the broken, but also inspiring them.
- [06:39]
B
Yeah, I think that's excellent. Opined for a few minutes, if you will, on how this narrative of decline, of danger took root in American schools. The teachers I know in public schools and private schools don't get into education because they want to be discouraging to children, they want to be encouraging to children. They want to help children. Nevertheless, I think you're right that this narrative is very common in American schools and children do run the risk of emerging kind of down or as you say, in a defensive crouch. The teachers don't want that for the children. But nevertheless, it happens. How has it happened? What has made it happen?
- [07:20]
C
Wow. Hard to say because again, a lot of this, you know, to be perfectly candid, is my surmise. I cannot point to data on this and say, here's how I know that, you know, curriculum has taken a dark turn. But I think there's any number of indicators that are highly suggestive of it, including things like, we'll just look at the tenor of young adult literature today, look at what we teach kids about climate science, for example. And also just the kind of. And again, I want to be careful here, some of the performative displays that we see in classrooms. Now, I'm not one of these people, Kathleen, who looks at the virtually daily displays, performative displays that you see on websites or feeds like Libs of TikTok, where you see teachers kind of frankly abusing their position and their authority. I always tell people, when you see teachers kind of venting their spleen about or indulging their political priors or their anxieties, let's not assume that that's true. Of 3.7 million teachers. But, but what is interesting to me about those displays is what they suggest about the permission structures of teaching. In other words, you or I might think, huh, that's inappropriate for me to, you know, to use my classroom, this, this perform in this performative way and to, you know, put my anxieties in my. Or indulge my political priors with students. But the fact that teachers feel so free to do that, suggest something about the nature of teaching like nobody has ever said to them, what, frankly, they probably should have said to all of us who are teachers very early on in our training, which is like, you know, hey, you're a public servant. You are not. This classroom is not your performance space. You need to be humble. You need to realize that, you know, you have a captive audience of other people's children. And that implies a certain amount of circumspection and humility. You can't just, you know, indulge yourself. So what's interesting to me about those performative displays is that they exist at all. I don't believe that they are indicative because I think you're exactly right. Most of us want to do right by kids. But over time, these permission structures have kind of like subverted the work that we do as teachers. And then too, you know, I reflect back on my own teacher training and I could walk you through my master's portfolio that I had to do for Mercy College 20 odd years ago, where I was expected to demonstrate my fitness, to be, quote, a change agent, to teach for social justice, et cetera. In other words, the other thing that's worth discussing here is the disconnect between how teachers are acculturated and the, quote, dispositions that they are expected to bring to the classroom and the simple fact of our status as government employees. We are not independent free agents. We are, we're state actors when all is said and done. So there's this unexamined disconnect between what we are told as teachers is our role and what we are. Frankly, by statute, you know, we are district employees who are hired speech as court decisions have held, and we are there to deliver a curriculum, et cetera. So I think I've strayed pretty far from your question, but I think this dynamic is how this happens. You know, this kind of, this unexamined disconnect between how the field conceives of itself and our function as, again, as what we literally are, government employees, state actors.
- [11:08]
B
No, I think that's great. And even in a private school situation, you are educating the child in partnership with that child's family, that child's family has chosen that school and you have some duty to them. Ideally, they are also, you know, upholding their end of the bargain and also partnering with the school to help the child succeed. But it's, you know, it's not the teacher's sole responsibility to impart upon the child a moral sense of the world. All of that happens, all of that happens in partnership with the family. The other thing I would add is to just flesh out your point about the curriculum. As a teacher, you are a steward of the curriculum. And ideally the school has a curriculum that is robust and that you can be a good steward of. And your job is not to present yourself to the students, but to present the curriculum to the students, maybe through the vehicle of your own, your own example.
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C
But before we move on, can I just, just note the cold, hard reality in many schools, including, you know, where, where I taught years ago in the South Bronx, you know, you, I smirked a little bit when you talked about delivering the curriculum because there often isn't one.
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B
Right.
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C
I've told this story countless times about arriving because I was a second career teacher. Kathleen. I didn't become a 5th grade teacher until I was nearly 40 years old.
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B
You were a journalist?
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C
I was, yes, I was. I was in the news media for, for most of my adult life. And in my naivete, I asked my staff developer from Teachers College, well, you know, what am I supposed to teach? Where's my curriculum? And she said to me, well, Mr. Pondisio, you're the best person to know what your students need. And I thought she was making fun of me because she knew my background, that I'd come out of this other life. So I thought this was almost like a hazing ritual. I didn't realize that she meant it earnestly, that in the absence of a curriculum, it was my job to turn these frankly, way behind grade level readers into literate middle schoolers by finding just the right book and engaging them with, with, with, you know, with reading material that was going to spark their interest and, you know, get them to just fall in love with reading, et cetera. This was, as another staff developer told me, it's not a pedagogy, it's not a curriculum, it's a philosophy. So the reason I became a curriculum advocate and a zealot, frankly, over the years is because what my students needed back then at PS277 was most certainly, certainly not a philosophy. They needed a curriculum. So much of my work since Then has been devoted to make sure they get one.
- [13:38]
B
Yes, well, I've always appreciated that element of your arguments because I think that's exactly right. If a school does not have a common curriculum that can be known by the parents and all of the teachers, it can be very ad hoc, it can be very disjointed, and there's a lot of room for. For teachers to stray off mission. That's one of the reasons why Hillsdale provides this curriculum to all of the schools that we work with. Thank you.
- [14:03]
C
Thank you. No, you're connecting the dots for me, so thank you for backing me up there, but. That's exactly right. The permission structures I was discussing a moment ago, they're a product of that way of thinking. In other words, if it's up to me to figure out what's going to spark kids interest and engage them, well, just as human beings, we're going to naturally default to the things that engage and interest us. Right. That may or may not be in the best interest of children.
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B
Right, right. And then what's the difference between a class in what is interesting to the teacher and a class in the teacher himself or herself? You know?
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A
Yeah.
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C
We create the conditions unwittingly that lead to these sort of performative displays.
- [14:42]
B
Yes. Well, one of the things you talk about in these, in these articles that we're, that we're mentioning here is the research of this psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania named Jeremy Clifton. And you have uncovered this work. And I agree with you, I agree with what you say in the article that it has some ramifications for our work as teachers and our thinking about what students should learn about the world in school. Tell us about Jeremy Clifton.
- [15:11]
C
Yeah. I alluded to this piece that I'd written for Commentary about the unbearable bleakness of schooling, as they called it. And, and it was in the process of reporting and writing that piece that I stumbled upon this body of work from this remarkable young professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Jerry Clifton, Jeremy Clifton, on Primal World Beliefs. And it just went off like a thunderbolt in my mind when I came across his work, because I thought, why don't we know about this in K12? It's so counter to the way we think about it. And it's a big body of work and it's complicated and it's his work, not mine. But if I can kind of give a back of the envelope description of it. Clifton studies what he calls again, primal world beliefs or just primals for short. And. And they are the assumptions that we carry with us, you know, like our cheat code, so to speak, for the world. And, and he's, you know, he. He exhaustively researched how these. How these formed, and he winnowed them down to, you know, a couple of seminal primal world beliefs that we all carry. In other words, it's things like, you know, is the world safe or is it dangerous? Is it intriguing or dead, alive or mechanistic, so to speak? And the reason that this work is interesting to me is because it goes against the grain of a lot of the ways we've been taught to think about, you know, children. And especially, by the way, I should say this, I mean, when I was teaching in the South Bronx, I've only ever worked in Title 1 high poverty settings. So we assume, right, that children's experiences color how they process the world. So if I'm growing up as a child of color in poverty, those things are going to affect my perspective and I'm going to perhaps have a negative view of the world. Well, Clifton's work on primal world belief says is just the opposite, that your primals affect how you process those things. So this is not to minimize, you know, difficulties that children have. But if you, if you believe that the world is intriguing or engaging, if you believe that people are basically good and not bad, it doesn't mean that bad things are not going to happen to you. It just means that you're going to process them differently. So it goes counter to things like, for example, trauma informed education or trauma informed trauma informed pedagogy, where we, we, I think, perhaps unwittingly trained teachers to almost adopt a deficit mindset of their kids. Like, how could you possibly. How can we hold you to high standards when you are bearing the burdens of race and poverty and, and, you know, incarceration in your community, et cetera. You don't have to be a monster, I think, to not. If you take this, this seriously or this view, this is kind of orthodox orthodoxy. It'd be almost impossible to hold these beliefs and not hold students to lower standards. Now, Clifton's work, by the way, I should hasten to add, it's not K12 work whatsoever. He's a psychologist. He works with Martin Seligman, the godfather of positive psychology, for example. So his work is. Not only is it unknown in K12, it was unknown to Cliff in. In other words, when I, when I kind of reached out to him some, some time ago and said, hey, you know, this is who I am, this is what I do. And I think you have a lot to say to us in K12 education. He was almost amused by it, you know, bemused, I guess I should say. Like, it didn't seem to have occurred to him that the work that he was doing could really have applications to K12. So I want to be really clear that the applications that I'm seeing of his work, work to K12 education are mine. They are not his. He's not making these claims about its application to the work that we do in teaching. I'm making these claims. But I think his work has a lot to say to us, or should at least give us pause and make us wonder, hey, are we possibly creating negative effects in children for reasons we may think we're doing the opposite? In other words, by. By thinking that we're being, quote, authentic with children, that we are being realistic with them, that we are preparing them for the dangers of the world, Is it possible that we are cultivating negative primal beliefs, as it were? And the reason this is important. I kind of buried the lead here a little bit, Kathleen. We are trying to achieve good outcomes as educators. We want to send children out into the world not just prepared to make a difference, but prepared to flourish. So if, if our supposition is that by being candid with them about, you know, what I was calling a moment ago, the bad and the broken, we think we are building up their armor, preparing them. Well, it may be, if Clifton's work is right, and I think it is, it may be that we are unwittingly doing harm. Because what his work seems to suggest is that, you know, positive primals are associated with, with positive life outcomes, outcomes with better mental health. Negative primals are associated with a whole litany of bad outcomes, you know, including and up to, and including suicidal thoughts. So this, to my mind, should give us pause and make us think. Hold on a second. In the name of authenticity, in the name of thinking that we're preparing children, is it possible that we're actually creating, driving the negative outcomes that we think that we are preparing them against?
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B
Yeah. Versus a school that seeks to build more positive primals in students. So what are some examples? Let's say you're the headmaster or a teacher at a brand new school and you're thinking hard about what kind of culture you want the school to have. This is a situation that many listeners of our podcast are in. What should we be seeking out of the culture of the school, out of the overarching message of the school, in order to inculcate, inculcate in students these positive Primals.
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C
I don't want to sound, you know, pollyanish or naive here, but I think we have an obligation to children to, yes, be realistic about, about, you know, look, history is, is a struggle, right? I mean, history is, is both positive and negative. There have been eras of great struggle, but there have been great, there have been eras of great triumph as well. So I think it's important. Important that kids understand both. Yes. And place themselves frankly in the stream of history. Like, oh, I don't want to be Blythe about this, but hey, you think we've got problems now, kids? Well, let me tell you about the Black Death. One third of Europe died. Oh, by the way, we face something similar with polio. And then there was this guy named Jonas Salk who created this vaccine. I mean, I'm cherry picking examples here, but I mean, you can, and you can teach this round or flat. You can marinate children in the bad and the broken, or you can also tell them stories of human triumph over adversity. And I think a well rounded education includes both.
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B
You, right? You can build school cultures that cultivated optimism grounded in competence, striving and progress. Attachment to family, to their community, to their country. Patriotism, not jingoism, but gratitude and shared purpose. We cannot expect children to invest in a world we've spent years signaling or telling them is unworthy of their affection or investment.
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C
Well, that sounds good. Who wrote that?
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B
That's really good. So there are ramifications for civic education here too, I think.
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C
Yeah, you know, I think I'm probably almost. I can't avoid applying this to civics. I am, you know, an unappealed, apologetic disciple of a guy named E.D. hirsch Jr. I can barely finish two sentences without invoking his name and his work and his ideas to which I owe my entire career. I've said for a long time that I've never had a thought about education. That Don Hirsch. That's what the D and ED Hirsch stands for. Then they had a thought about education that he didn't have first, better and more comprehensively. So I became disciple of his work as a fifth grade teacher because, as I like to say, it was as if reading his work was as if he'd been standing in my classroom, you know, seeing kids who could decode but. But struggle with comprehension. But in his later work, he's applied it, as I do, to civic education. You know, in other words, yes, we want kids to, to read on grade level, but his, his work on cultural literacy is broader than that. His work is really about as one, the title of one of his books put it, the Making of Americans. You know, and how shared language creates fellow feeling and. And a shared identity. And this has all kind of ramifications for literacy, but also for who we are as Americans and for cultivating civic attachment. So when I became a civics teacher and started looking into kind of the more fashionable ideas about civic education, it was not surprisingly, you know, it was not Hersheyan, as it were. It was really more about things like action, civics that we mentioned a few moments ago and challenging kids, and I should say challenging in air quotes, to be change agents and whatnot, as opposed to cultivating optimism and patriotism. You know, not again in a jingoistic sense, but just in a sense of yes, there are challenges and how fortunate you are that you get to be the next generation. That helps us build that more perfect union. So this is, I think, the piece of the civic education puzzle in particular that has gone missing, that it is not just, gee kids, here's all these problems, let's solve them, but you are part of this now, nearly 250 year old experiments and this f effort to constantly move forward to build that more perfect union. And what a privilege it is for you to now be the next generation that takes up that challenge.
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B
Yeah, it's not hard to see how that message is inspiring and encouraging of positive action.
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C
Yeah, it's only inspiring if we make it inspiring. Kathleen, in other words, I mean, goodness, what an unlikely triumph. America is right? You know, we take it for granted now as a 250-year-old nation that we are stable and then in it for the long haul. But the founders knew that famous story about Ben Franklin.
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B
Right?
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C
You know, what do we have, doctor? A republic, if you can keep it. He wasn't being as smart alec. Republics tended to end in guillotines. They did not end well. So it was by no means a smart uncertainty that we would be able to keep the Republic. And even now, I mean, sorry, you've got me free associating here a little bit, but how. Not just naive, but how callow to think that we are living through some kind of unprecedented bad time in terms of our partisanship and our divisions. You know, there was that thing called the Civil War which claimed the lives of 600,000 of us. You know, in my own memory, in the late 60s, there were I think over a thousand domestic bombings in an 18 month period in the late 60s and early 70s. You know, coming in the Vietnam era. We have lived through, my Lord, the Level of political violence during Reconstruction just beggars the imagination. So it's, it's almost arrogant for us to suggest or believe that we are living through some kind of unprecedented bad times. Let us hope that we can ensure that we never revisit times like that ever again. And we're not going to do it by marinating kids in the bad and the broken. We're going to do it by showing them how we have triumphed over even worse. You know, you think it's bad now? Well, let me tell you about the, the founding years. Let me tell you about the years leading up to and shortly after the Civil War. Heck, let me tell you about the 60s and how we triumphed and persevered and came together after those hard times. That, to me is a much more inspiring message than saying, gee, kid, things are really bad right now and isn't it unfortunate that you were born in this country that cannot overcome its original, original sin of racism and whatnot? You know, you can. And again, I want to be really clear on this. I am not suggesting that we need to give kids a rose colored view of their country. We owe them an honest accounting. But it is dishonest if all it is is the bad and the broken.
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B
Yeah. Beautifully said. Beautifully said. I want to ask you about the classical education movement.
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C
I want to ask you because you have more about it than I will ever know.
- [27:59]
B
Well, I'm interested in how it seems to you. You know, you've come here to Hillsdale, you've been keeping track of some of our schools. You've written recently about the need for a strong teacher pipeline for classical education. What do you think of classical ed? What prospects do you think it has? What do you see in its future?
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C
I envy those who had the classical education that I did not have and frankly didn't know, know about until I was, you know, well into my adult years. I had a garden variety upbringing on Long Island. I went to public schools, as I've joked. You know, if you'd said to me private school as a kid on Long Island, I would have assumed you meant Catholic school. Because that's the only other form of education that I'd known. If you'd said to me boarding school, I would have asked, well, what did you do that way? Because my dad was forever threatening to send me to military academy and sometimes I wish he had. My life would have been better had I had that discipline. So, you know, I had no idea what a classical education was. And now, you know, having found out what it was of course, now I wish I'd had one as a kid. And the reason I'm enamored of it, Kathleen, is because when I take off my teacher hat and I put on my education policy hat, I'm struck by just the explosion of interest in it. In Florida, for example, a classical charter opens on Monday and on Tuesday they've got a line out the door. Even if parents don't, don't quite know, as I joke, like you had me at Aristotle. They don't know. Even if they don't know what it is. We sense that there is something just insubstantial about education. And classical just seems like, oh, wait a minute, it's about stuff, it's about towering figures that I've heard of and I want my kids to know about as well. So there's just kind of a halo effect that, that, that or that as this sounds so insubstantial. But as a brand, so to speak, classical just seems like something that, wow, that's interesting. And, and, and, and it's of interest to, to parents and, and students who, who may not fully appreciate what it is, but just they're, they're just drawn to it it for all the right reasons. So I say this because of the school choice moment that we're having right now. Strikes me, I mean, it doesn't just strike me that the data is there. There's just been an explosion, not just of interest, but of classical schools opening. You know, the rapid and unexpected expansion of things like ESAs and whatnot creates an opportunity for families to now pursue this flavor of education that they might not have been able to pursue in its absence. In other words, once, once I have the power, as I do in a school choice driven environment, pursue the education that I want, as opposed to the one that is being handed to me by my geographically zoned school district. The world is now my oyster. That creates a tremendous opportunity, not just for students and parents, but for educators to, to create these schools. Look, and it doesn't have to be creating a new school. It can be starting a classical education micro school or a co op or whatnot. So I'm really excited by the potential to, to of school choice to create something like a classical education renaissance. We're already seeing it. You, you alluded to the paper that I wrote for AEI about the classical education pipeline. I guess I'm doomed to be the skunk at every picnic. It's just, you know, it seems to be what I do for a living. To me, my concern about this is the talent pipeline, in other words. And I just betrayed my own. My own ignorance about it. In other words, even if I wanted to be a classical educator myself, I don't have the background myself. I didn't have this kind of education. So how do you fuel this flowering of the classical education movement in the absence of a teacher corps that has this background themselves? There ain't a lot of Hillsdales out there. How many undergraduates do you send each year, Kathleen, into classical schools? 100? 150.
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B
Yeah.
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C
Yeah. So if there's 5,000 schools that want Hillsdale undergrads to become teachers, well, how many more Hillsdales do we need to scratch that itch? A lot. So there. And this is. This is not a criticism of Hillsdale. You know, I'm very, very. I'm a big fan of what you do. But you see the point, right? Which is that the pipeline. It's not just that the pipeline is broken. The pipeline doesn't exist. You know, we don't have 100 more hillsdales. We're not going to get 100 more hillsdales. So where are we going to get the teachers who are not merely interested in this model, but prepared to be successful in it?
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B
Yeah. Well, I appreciated the piece very much. I think you're right about it. I do disagree with you on one point. You could be a teacher in a classical school.
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C
Well, if you take this idea seriously, that to be a teacher means you're. You were the principal learner then. Yeah, I guess.
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B
And that is. That is the idea. It's.
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C
I, I will just say woe unto my. My students the first year when I'm learning alongside with them, because one of the things that, that I. And look, I take your point, and it's a good one. And, and, and it's an important one, but we also need to do a little bit better than learning on the job alongside of our students. It's a lovely homily, but I hope our teachers know a little bit more than the students. I've made a joke about this this year. If you're that teacher who says, oh, you know, I learn way more than my students, well, you're doing it wrong. That is not the way it's supposed to work.
- [33:36]
B
Yeah, yeah. And the piece was. We enjoyed reading it here at Hillsdale, and it was thought provoking, too, because we're, you know, we have robust teacher training for undergraduates here and now graduate students who are studying classical education. And then through our office, we're constantly getting former public school Teachers, homeschooling moms, others who want to become teachers. And we're figuring out how do we give them the education that they need to not just be one step ahead of their students. And so it's a good, it was a good, it was a good spur on and a good point I think to make about classical ed.
- [34:10]
C
Thank you. I'll scoop myself a little bit with my colleague Anika Hernandez. We are working on a follow up piece for Education Next and it's about an idea that was discussed but not really fully developed in that paper about the so called refugee teacher. There was one headmaster I think was Michael Rose at Cincinnati Classical who used this phrase that we were just enamored of about how he hires refugee teachers, meaning teachers who for whatever reason just felt ill at ease in the public school system and discovered, as I just described classical education and said, huh, what's that? That sounds interesting to me. Hey, that sounds like what I thought I would be doing. Yes, so he loves to hire these kinds of teachers and I think that's a rich vein of ore for the classical school movement to mine teachers who for all the right reasons graduated, went into the public school system, had one set of ideas about what teaching was all about and then for whatever reason had those, those, those assumptions either thwarted or disappointed. Hey, don't give up on, on teaching, don't give up on education. Because there's these things called classical schools out there that may be a lot more aligned with your vision of what a good education is, with your values, you know, with, with your sense of, hey, wait a minute, I don't want to be the guide on the side. I want to be this age on the stage, you know, because that's what, that's, that's, you know, adult authority has a role in education. Any combination of these things. There are these, there, there, there are these things called classical schools that may be a lot more, a better fit for you. So I think that may be the key to, to solving that teacher pipeline problem for classical schools is the so called refugee teachers. The teachers who, who are just not satisfied with the work that they're doing and may have a career renaissance if they teach in that kind of setting.
- [36:02]
B
Yeah, I'm looking forward to that piece. I think that's excellent. I mean we talk all the time about the benefits of a classical education for students and for families and those are undeniable. But there are huge benefits for teachers too.
- [36:14]
C
Oh goodness, yes.
- [36:15]
B
I mean, I mentioned to you before we started recording that I'm back In the classroom now, after five years of being out and I'm reading and teaching some books that I have taught before, and it is doing an incredible amount of good for my mind and for my overall happiness to be spending time refreshing my memory on Gulliver's Travels and Aristotle's Ethics and all these other things. And you can see how that wouldn't happen with a less robust curriculum. You could see how it would be.
- [36:43]
C
What a pleasure, right, to share your enthusiasm for those books with, with a new generation, you know, to see it through their eyes for the first time, you know, that, that what, what, what a pleasure that is to share things we love with students and, and, and by the way, to bring this conversation full circle. That's another way to cultivate optimism and, and those positive primals, as it were, is, is to, through, through a shared love of content. Hey, here's something I'm really excited about, kids, and I'm gonna. And you're gonna be excited about it too. You may not say that, but, you know, how can you, how can kids not be caught up in your enthusiasm for your subject? Whether it's literature, whether it's science, whether it's history, when you're excited about a topic, when, when you can't share, can't wait to share what you know with young people for whom this is brand new.
- [37:30]
B
Yeah. Yeah. Beautifully said, beautifully said. Well, it's such a pleasure to talk with you. Thanks for this conversation.
- [37:35]
C
Oh, my pleasure. This has been a delight. And again, if I, if I wasn't clear about this, I just. I salute you at Hillsdale. You know, I need to visit again. It's been too long since I've been there. Some of the most encouraging conversations I've had in my 25 year career in education have been with Hillsdale students. The lights are just turned on. I don't know any other way to say it. They're turned on in a way that you just don't see with young people of their age and in other settings. So whatever it is that you are doing, please keep doing it. Not just for the benefit of your students, but for the benefit of the country.
- [38:16]
B
Well, thank you so much. You're welcome anytime.
- [38:19]
A
That was Dr. Kathleen O', Toole, Associate Vice President for K12 Education at Hillsdale College, and Robert Pandisio, a Senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and an affiliate of AEI's James Q. Wilson Program in K12 Education Studies. You can find him on XRPondicio and also his substack the next 30 years. I'm Scott Bertram. We invite you to like us on Facebook. Search for Hillsdale College K12 classical education. You also can follow us on Instagram hillsdalek12. That's hillsdalek12 on Instagram. Thank you for listening. Do The Hillsdale College K12 classical education podcast, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More at Podcast Hillsdale. Edu or wherever you get your audio.