← Hillsdale College K-12 Classical Education Podcast
Hillsdale College K-12 Classical Education Podcast
Kathleen O'Toole & Christopher Nadon: The Tension between "Lived Experience" and Student Learning
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Hillsdale College is a small Christian classical liberal arts college that operates independently of government funding and we want you or your son or daughter to apply. At Hillsdale, students grow in heart and mind by studying timeless truths in a supportive community dedicated to the highest things. Hillsdale College costs significantly less than other nationally ranked private liberal arts colleges and receives regular recognition as a best value and nearly all students receive financial aid. Our robust core curriculum, vibrant student life and 8 to 1 student to faculty ratio make for an education like no other. For more information or to fill out an application, visit hillsdale.edu info. That's hillsdale.edu info.
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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.
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Now your host, Scott Bertram.
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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 k12 hillsdale.edu. today we hear a conversation between Dr. Kathleen O', Toole, Associate Vice President for K12 Education at Hillsdale College, and Christopher Nadon, a former professor at Claremont McKenna College and Trinity College who writes on the character and history of Republican government understood as self rule. Together they discuss a recent essay written by Christopher Nathan against lived experience. Here's Dr. O'. Toole.
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Well, today I'm joined by one of the great teachers. Although I was not a student of Chris Nadon, I got to sit sit in on some of his classes in graduate school and I got to see some really exciting work. Welcome Professor Nade on thank you for having me.
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A
It's a pleasure.
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B
Thank you for being here. I want to talk to you for a number of reasons. One, you're a great teacher. Two, you are a student of some of the great authors. Three, you wrote something which I thought was just excellent about education, how it happens and the challenges to it happening today. It's a piece called Against Lived Experience published by the University of Austin and it's one of those articles that comes out and you just think that is exactly what classical schools need to be reading right now. I myself have read it many times and I gather something new from it each time, so I'm happy to have a chance to talk with you about it today.
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Next slide.
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B
As I mentioned, I sat in on a couple of your classes and I wish I had spent more time doing that when I was in graduate school, that's one of my regrets. One thing I noticed about your teaching is it's very exciting. You know, in graduate school you have teacher, and in college you have teachers who are brilliant and who stand at the front of the room and they relate their brilliance to you. And your job as a student is to write it all down, think hard about it, study it after the class is over, and ask the occasional question. That's a wonderful way to go to school. That's not what I saw in your class. I saw relentless questioning of students, especially undergraduate students. And I saw the students thrilled by the opportunity to explain what they knew and defend what they knew. Describe to me when that teaching method is going well, what it looks like. How do you prepare for it? How do you achieve that kind of dynamic in the classroom?
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A
Well, it requires, believe it or not, doing a discussion class in some way requires a different kind of preparation than it does giving a lecture. I'm actually a very poor lecturer. I have to give lectures occasionally for papers and things like that. And, you know, it's just not something. It doesn't reflect the way I think. So part of it is just the way teaching is. Is. Is. Is a reflection of the way I go about thinking myself. And to some extent. And what I do is I take the text and I literally sort of map it out. I try to see the shape of the argument. It's a very kind of visual thing. And I've got diagrams and all sorts of things like that in my notes, and then just various passages to refer to. And what I like to do is to, you know, begin by asking some questions of the students, mostly just to find out what they made of the text. Because you always have to start from where the students are. And so you sort of find out did they understand it, how did they understand it, how did they misunderstand it? And of course, usually all of us begin, usually misunderstanding, speaking from my own experience. And then you come up against the fact of your misunderstanding, can't explain other things in the text. So you have to go back and start over. But what I like to do is ask, find out where they are and, you know, and almost always where they're at isn't exactly probably on point. Maybe it is. Hasn't happened to me yet. But how you're going to move them depends on where they are. So, for example, if you have a map and I'm. I don't know, I'm in. I'm in Denver, and. And I want to Give someone's instructions how to get to Kansas City. Right. I'm going to tell them to go east, pretty much just straight east. Right. But if it turns out we want to go to Albuquerque or they want to get to Kansas City, but they're in Chicago, well, you have to go south. Right. And so students often. I had one very funny student, quite a good student, came to me at the end of his, his undergraduate career and said, you know, I started keeping track. And whenever you asked a student a question that was sort of, you know, X or Y, if they said X, it turned out to be y, like 100% of the time, he said, I don't understand how that's possible. It should be about 50, 50. In which I said, well, you know, it didn't matter what they were going to say. We were going to go the opposite direction in a certain sense. Right. Whatever. And, and, and, and I do that partly just to sort of, you know, because usually, you know, nobody ever gets the XY coordinate right on the spot usually. And I'm not even always altogether sure where the XY coordinate is. But, you know, and I think that, you know, sort of showing them, you know, there's different ways of approaching it, different ways of looking at it, that that is a, A good way or sort of showing them somehow there's something a little bit inadequate about whatever they. Their starting point is. Right. And I think that's just the experience all of us should have when reading. And reading is trying to not necessarily fill ourselves with information, although that's very important. And the whole classical school movement, I think one of the most important things about it is, particularly in the early grades, right. It gives over a huge amount of time and energy to memorization. I think that's incredible. That was completely lacking from my own education. I still have a hard time doing it. When I teach other students to memorize, I'm sure they do the assignment in about 10 minutes. Takes me like a half an hour to make sure I've got the poem memory or even longer. Right. And then they remember it for like, you know, who knows how long or six months later. I'm like, well, I gotta go back and refresh myself because I'm old and my memory just doesn't work the same way. But I'm talking a little bit more about which do with students, you know, sort of from 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th grade in the high school level. And I think it's important. And one of the good things about the classical school movement is it sort of makes the distinction between the approach that you take has to be appropriate to the. To the students you're teaching. But what it's really about is, you know, as Plato says in the Republic. And so this is a. This is a educational heresy that's been around for a long time. And it's a heresy because it's not far from the truth, but it's not the whole truth. And that is that education is sort of transfer of knowledge and living in a digital age where everything is zooming over the Internet and transferring and downloading and uploading and people thinking of their brains as their. If they're computers, which of course, they're not. That image of education is very powerful. You get people who say, well, who needs a College? I've got YouTube, and I have some sympathy for that point of view, but it doesn't capture the experience you have of having your soul, as Plato says, turned around. Now you need the information to turn it around. But just because you've got the information doesn't mean your soul's going to be turned around. And it's that turning around experience that I tried to sort of reproduce in the students, and particularly nice about it is to show them what's sort of lacking in their understanding and then why they didn't see something that oftentimes turns out to be pretty clear in the text. And that's. I. I had teachers who were masters at doing this. I was a student of Alan Bloom. I don't teach at all like Alan Bloom did. He gave these masterful lectures. He could just talk off the, you know, off the cuff, go off on digressions that were all very coherent and. And tie it all together and speak in a very beautiful, moving way. The teacher I kind of was, in some ways most influenced by was a historian named Carl Weintraub. And he came in and he just, like, grilled us on. And it was a history class. So partly it was just knowing what was actually going on, and then secondarily, in a certain sense, you know, knowing the facts and figures and then thinking about it. But the thing that happened with, when I took this class with. With Mr. Weintraub was I found myself in the library and reading this stuff and thinking, why does. It just gave me a better sense of if I didn't really understand something, I had to go back over it. And always sort of hovering over behind me in the library was Professor Weintraub's head saying, yes, Mr. Nadan, that's fine, but what does that actually mean? Right? And Having that sort of prod or someone sort of looking over my shoulder, I found to be very helpful. And so in a way, I sort of try to do that with my students as well.
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Yeah, you force them to take responsibility for their own understanding. And it's a funny thing, you know, students don't, don't naturally understand that they have to take that responsibility. It takes the teacher to sort of make them, make them take stock of what they understand, make them say what they understand in words and then help them think through, is it actually true? You know.
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Is it actually correct?
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Having to gauge with someone else. And obviously I find this my own self. It makes. You have to articulate yourself, articulate your understanding, you know, actively in a way that brings out problems with it. You get the same thing when you write a paper. Yeah, whenever I write a paper, I start out, okay, this is what it's about. This is the thesis. And especially, you know, you know, when you're writing a lot of papers as an undergraduate, you maybe don't have the whole time to sit there leisurely and map the whole thing out and plan your strategy. But, you know, you're under time pressure. You get halfway through the paper or maybe halfway through the first paragraph and you see, wait, that just doesn't really match up with what's in the text. And so you have to take another stab at it, rethink it, retreat, take another, you know, go up a different valley, take a different take in a different vista. And it's that sort of recalibration and reconsideration that I think that's. That experience that I think is extremely, extremely valuable. And, and trying to get students to experience it can be, you know, for some of them can be quite rewarding. It can also be very frustrating for them. And, and, and they can get angry. And I, I never try to provoke students to get angry. My ST. Professor, Alan Bloom, he actually intentionally would try to make students angry because he says that they're angry, their passions are engaged and they're interested in engaging with the material. And the way he usually got them angry was they would, you know, he'd get them to, to, to, to, to. To give their views. And, and he could do this very nicely as well, in a kind of Socratic manner manner. He would bring out how they had some sort of contradictions in there. And therefore this couldn't be a perfectly adequate understanding. And some students get angry. And actually Bloom liked those students who got angry at that. He did this to me all the time in class, but I could never get angry. I just thought, oh, my God. I. I thought it was kind of funny. But what was funny about it was like, and this is the other thing that you want to do with students. It was so funny. Like, how could I have thought this thing that was so manifestly absurd. Right. And it made me sort of, like, laugh. And particularly what I was really laughing at was laughing at myself. Right. And I think that's an important.
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It's very good to be able to do that.
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Yeah. My reaction was. Was to laugh. Now, maybe that's not even the best. And I think, you know, someone like Bloom would say, well, when you're laughing at yourself, maybe you're not taking yourself all that ser. Seriously. Whereas when you get angry, there's this other element of taking yourself seriously as well. And I probably think, probably in the long run, I'm probably not as good a student as I should have been because I didn't get angry enough, but I did.
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But it does sound like it was. It does sound like it was. Because your tendency was to laugh at yourself. It was easier, therefore, for you to abandon the wrong idea that you had in favor of the right idea.
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I guess I wasn't all that attached to my ideas to begin with. Right. Which, again, that's not necessarily a good thing. Right. You can be that you. You should be attached to them to this extent, that you shouldn't give up too easily. Right. And maybe the, you know, reacting with the passion of anger in a certain sense shows. And you see this in the Socratic dialogues all the time, how various characters get angry when they're. When they're shown to be. When they're shown to be. When they're shown to be wrong. And I don't think we should be upset when that happens in our classroom. And if students have a certain kind of, you know, the initial experience is not always altogether. Altogether pleasant. But what's common to both of those, I think, is that you have this experience of your own inadequacy. Right. And therefore, that leaves you open in a way that you weren't before. You understood problems with your own way of seeing things to somebody else's explanation. And that's where. Sort of taking the authors as an author, not just as a writer, because author has this word authority. And we usually don't like to, you know, we shy away from the word authority in education, not without good reason, but it has to be sort of an initial starting point where you accept the authority of the author, and it's someone that you might actually be able to learn from someone who's quite. Almost certainly your moral and intellectual superior and to really take him seriously as a teacher and to. And. And to understand the book as maybe being something that could help you. My teacher, Alan Bloom, would say to be a little bit provocative. Of course, this is back in the. The age when, you know, early hi fi technology. He was a big fan of stereo equipment. He said he wanted students to read the Republic or any other book that he was teaching with the same intensity and attention that they would bring to reading the manual on how to set up their hi fi. Like the manual for setting up your stereo. Of course, today I think stereos, they. It's all kind of plug and play, and so it's not so difficult. But it used to be rather difficult to get it just right and get everything in the right spot. And they would go into long explanations for that. Because these books are ultimately about us. Right. In a certain sense. And we want to use them to improve our understanding. But before we do that, we kind of have to have this experience of why we really need that.
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Yeah. My favorite Strauss quote is at the end of. I think it's the end of the essay, what is liberal education? It says you have to have a posture of humility and boldness at the same time. And I think your point is, first, humility when you're reading something.
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If it's the right kind of thing. If the author is truly someone you can learn from, which of course he is or she is in classical.
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In the.
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In classical schools, you know, first figure out what this person is trying to teach you. Make yourself treat that book as an authority so that you can understand it fully.
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Exactly. And again, ultimately, at the end of the day, you do have to decide, well, is this right or is this wrong? Is this fully. Is this acceptable or not acceptable? So, you know, we are, at the end of the day, not subject to the authority of the author. We do have the. The ability to decide to accept or not accept. But you want to be careful to try to make sure that before you accept or don't accept, have you actually really understood what they're offering? Because a lot of times. Well, of course I reject this. This is an absurd position. But then, wait a second. Maybe that's not what the author thinks. Take, for example, you know, the Iliad. Something students struggle with and I struggle with all the time, is the notion of fate. In the Iliad, well, everything just seems to be faded by the gods. Is that Homer's view? I'm not exactly sure. I don't think he ever actually ascribes to a lot of his characters. Ascribe to it. Hector might be the one who ascribes to it most of all. And I think it turns out Homer's got some criticisms of Hector. Then, of course, there's Achilles. And just on the face of it, what happened with Achilles? Well, he had a choice of two fates. Wait a second. But if you've got two fates.
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Yeah.
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How can that be simply faded, right? And, you know, and so already I think it's very easy to see that, you know, if you just think, oh, this is a book about the gods and we're the playthings of the gods. And, you know, that turns out to be really not very interesting, although, you know, not perhaps that might be characteristic of certain other ways of understanding the gods. But when you start to see that Homer can't simply accept that view, the book becomes much more. More interesting. And if I had dismissed it just because, well, you know, who wants to read a book where everyone's just a plaything of the gods and these are these kind of crazy gods anyway? And that's. Those are not my gods. And nobody believes in gods like that anymore. You're never really going to enter into it. And what's also interesting is to sort of look at someone like the character of Hector is why does he want to believe in fate so much? What is it about him and his aspirations that do that? And so then you start to form a kind of psychological analysis of the various characters. And I think that's another good way to think about reading books. My father was a. An English teacher, and he ended up teaching at a community college throughout the last 10 or 15 years of his life in Denver. And about three or four years into that, the Denver city government decided that if you wanted to get a promotion in the police department, you had to have a undergraduate degree and even better, a master's degree. Now, I don't know what the relation between that and good policing was, but it ended up that my father started getting all these cops in his classes. He taught American literature. And he told me these policemen were some of the best students he'd ever had. And, and, and, and why was that? He said, because they were constantly profiling everybody, all the characters in the, in the, in the stories and coming up with explanations. Well, if they did this, then they must be thinking this, or if they're thinking this, they must have done this and putting it all together. And in a way, I I sort of want to think that's what we should be doing in reading. It's learning how to profile a book and profile the characters in the book. And ultimately, the reason we want to do that isn't just so we understand the book, but this then allows you to profile people in the real world.
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Right.
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Not in an abstract, stereotypical sense, but in a very concrete way. And what these books, I think what we really want to take away from them is not that we know that this happened in 1765, or this was the view of, you know, the. This was the view of a typical, you know, Renaissance Republican in Florence in. In 1512 or something. But we want to use these books to develop our own skills. To read the world.
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Yeah.
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And to be. And by reading the world, I mean understanding the world. And. And of course, you know, we often use this word read rather loosely. You know, I'll ask my students, well, did you read the text? Yeah, of course I read the text. But then it turns out. Well, then you say, it says this, and it says this, and how does it. Did you really read it? And they're like, they still want to hold on to that. But then I ask them, well, if Tom Brady, he drops back and, you know, tries to throw a pass to his tight end and doesn't see the linebacker coming in from the left and throws an interception, did he really read the defense? Right. And so what I really want to do is strive to inculcate this understanding that reading means not just passing your words over the. Your eyes over the words, not even memorizing the words, but understanding how the words fit together. And the reason you want to do this is so that you stop throwing interceptions.
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Yeah, right.
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And that you're able to actually connect with the past and make some progress.
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Yeah, that's great. That's great. When I was running a classical school, I was so grateful for my education, and I did not have any education in running a classical school or running anything, but I had read a bunch of literature, and I read a bunch of political philosophy, and a lot of that was about justice and the difficulty of achieving justice in actual human affairs. And I found myself, you know, it's a very. It's a political job, running a school, and it's a personal job, too. I mean, you have to read all of these people. You have to understand all of these students and how you're going to get them educated. And they're all different from each other. They're all, you know, coming from a different place, and then there are their parents too, and their families. And if you've had an education in the human types that's helped you start thinking about the human types, it can help you sort through all of that really quickly, or at least more quickly. So I struck by what you said about old fashioned policing.
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To be a cop in the old days, before it was all technology or whatever, you got to know people to be a good cop.
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Well, I think those cops are still doing old school policing out there. If you talk to policemen, they're.
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I hope so. Yeah.
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They're actually pretty interesting. They can be really interesting human beings because they're out there kind of in a living a novel day to day and stuff is coming at them very fast. And if they don't learn to react and to react correctly, they're not going to last long. And the ones that are successful at it are the ones that are learn to sort of, you know, see what's actually going on around them, becoming aware of what's going on around them. And if we can bring that same kind of sensibility to reading a book of really being aware of what's going on in the book. And you know, often I think, and you know, what you want to do is you want to fold the book over on itself sometimes. And if the author is talking about something, how does this point of view, or what does the character's point of view, how does it explain or apply to that character, the author himself? Right. And, and, and there's a kind of, you know, a heightened sort of level of self awareness that we can gain by trying to see the kind of self awareness that the author must have himself had when he was writing the book. And that's what it means to be alive in some way that you're able to take things in and, and, and explain them by looking at everything without having to have a kind of tunnel vision or, or excluding things. And that's why I sort of like to stray away from, you know, really appeal abstract sort of formulas about what this author or that author thinks. But you really have to sort of look at concrete passages and then it's just a habit. Then that does stick with you. There's a. What you said earlier about your experience as a school teacher. I read, I did my dissertation on Xenophon's Education of Cyrus and Cicero has a quote about him reading this. He was sent off to be governor off in the, you know, off to a distant province for a while and he brought with him a copy of Xenophon's Education of Cyrus. And he writes a letter, I think it's to his brother, if I remember correctly, where he says, you know, I wore. I wore this book out with my eyes, passing my eyes so often over the letters because it taught me so much about how to actually rule and engage with. Successfully engage with the people. With the people around him. And I have to say, at the time when I read that letter, I'm like, yeah, I didn't find it very interesting at all. But later on in life, like you, I had to engage in a sort of political. Political office for a while. I was. I was chairman of the department of Political Science at a college where I was teaching. Xenophon was really helpful, not in any direct way, but just the. His. The. The. The. The. The habits of mind and the way he taught me to sort of listen to people and put together their words and actions, and the practice that I gained doing that reading his book really was useful. And these books that we're reading, we're not reading them because they exist up in some area fairyland, you know, that. That's way above us and just sort of, you know, it's a kind of heaven of perfect abstract thought. We're reading these books to gain some utility for ourselves and to strengthen ourselves and to strengthen our judgment. And that's what I, you know, it's part of why I, you know, do what I do in a classroom is I want to pressure students to see if they can actually give an articulate, coherent account of what they've read.
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B
Yeah, yeah. It's regarded as a very abstract good, you know, a classical education. And sometimes it's even regarded as a luxury, like, oh, you know, if I had the time to do that, I would. It's actually extremely practical to receive an education in the great books.
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A
Yeah, that's been my experience. And I think one of the nice things about, you know, one of the knocks on classical education, which is unfortunately not altogether without some grain of truth, is that they don't do so well with the STEM subjects. How can you have a classical education in the STEM subjects? The STEM subjects are the cutting edge. And, you know, and they have some other issues in teaching, teaching science, which I think are certainly understandable. But what's interesting to me is a lot of the classical graduates of classical education and classical academies that I know of have gone on to be very successful in studying the STEM fields. And even though they. Maybe they came in with just calculus and they hadn't really had, you know, classical school doesn't have all the labs and all that kind of stuff. And frequently they might not have had a lot of practical experience in doing chemistry and things like that, but when they get to college, they're thrown into these classes. And unlike a lot of their compatriots who came from, you know, very well funded STEM places, they've got this habit of teaching themselves how to, they know how to learn. And what they learned by reading these books, you know, wasn't, they didn't read, you know, they didn't learn Planck's equations, but the habits of mind of trying to figure things out for themselves, they then bring to this other dimension, to this other area of life and they quickly catch up and in many cases, I think surpass a lot of their, a lot of their compatriots who had, in a quote unquote, a kind of better preparation in, in the technical aspects of the field. And so it's that it's, it's almost as if, you know, the classical schools develop a certain kind of, you know, capacities or muscles that are being neglected in the sort of general education education as it's sort of generally practiced, particularly at the high school level these days.
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Yeah, they, they've learned to take responsibility for their thinking.
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A
And not only that, but then, you know, it's like you can't ask someone to go out and run a four minute mile if they've been sitting on the couch for four years.
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B
Right.
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But you know, if they've been out there doing other stuff, riding horses or doing other activities, they're going to get to that. They're, they're going to get up and running and get into shape much more quickly.
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B
Yeah. You write in the piece about artificial intelligence. You say artificial intelligence cheats us and especially our children with the promise that our intellectual development will be enhanced when it does the heavy lifting for us. Tell me about how you think the spread of AI is going to affect the prospect of classical education in the coming generations.
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A
Yeah, I think it makes the need for the classical education even more acute because teaching at the college under the AI regime, you get students who come in and here's just a good example. I get an email from a student or got an email from a student who missed the class. And could you give, could you give me the four bullet takeaway or can you give me the takeaways from the class so I know what actually happened, so I know what I need to, can you give me what's important that I need to know from this class that I missed? On the one hand, fine. They Miss the class. Not good. They want to make up for it somehow. But it's not the four bullet takeaway point that is important in the class. It's the experience of how you get there. In a way, as Cervantes might say, the road is better than the inn. Now, the inn's important. You want to get to some, you know, to some concrete place that's going to give you shelter and food. But how you get there is, in a certain sense, as important. And the problem with AI is it gets you there without your effort, and it doesn't even get you there.
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B
Yeah, right.
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A
You thought you were going to the Plaza. AI is only going to get you to the Motel 6.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And the worst thing is then you might think the Motel 6 is the Plaza, that this is as good as it gets. What it does is, it short circuits the experience of learning. I have a very good friend who loves A.I. he's 60 years old. He's been a lifelong reader. You know, he's a student of the Russian Revolution. He's a businessman. But he always, you know, he engaged in, in the world in all kinds of practical ways, but he always kept up a very active intellectual life. And he just thinks it's wonderful. And in a way for him, it is because he came of age reading on his own and having a real relationship with books on his own. And so I can supplement that and helps him out. You know, what's this? Can you, you know, what's this reference to things like that? I mean, he uses it kind of like an encyclopedia. And as much as it acts like that, particularly for people who've, you know, already learned how to read, fine. But the problem is that's not the effect it has on, on our students. On our students. It short circuits their ability to read for themselves. And if they can't read for themselves, they are pretty unlikely to be able to think for themselves. And because when we're reading for ourselves, that's what we're always aiming at eventually is thinking for ourselves. Even if before we start thinking for ourselves, we have to walk a mile in the other guy's shoe and try to look at things how they understood it and how they, how they looked at it.
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B
Yeah. If education is merely delivery of content, then AI makes a ton of sense because it's. Yeah, it's quick, it's efficient, it's relatively cheap. Or it will get that way, is getting that way.
- [32:15]
A
And even, you know, okay, well, but how about if I have YouTube, but I'm going to have a Harvard lecturer doing his lecture classes. You know, that can be maybe a little bit better. But this is the other thing I think, that people misunderstand about college. Most of your education in college isn't given to you by your instructors. The instructors, in a way, are the, the, the, the catalyst for, for, for, for learning if they're doing their job. And this was certainly my own experience at the University of Chicago, where I was surrounded by students who were a lot smarter and a lot better educated than I was. And I spent a lot more hours with my fellow students than I ever did with my professors. That's where you get your learning from. And when you're just sitting there by yourself on a computer taking in a lecture, you're by yourself. And you miss the sort of community aspect of learning, which is not ultimately what learning is, being part of a community. In fact, learning ultimately maybe has what helps you separate yourself from your community or stand up for your community or rise above your community. But if you're not in that community to start with, you're never going to be able to escape from the, the circumstances that you find yourself in. I mean, it does require. I mean, it's a very funny thing. It's, it ultimately it's ourselves who have to decide at the end. We have to judge for ourselves, we have to see for ourselves. But if we don't do that along with other people, it's incomplete and I think just never really gets to that final goal. And I think that's another thing that I think classical schools provide in a much more concrete, sustainable way than students get when they're in school. You know, for example, even now in a high school, people will be working on their own separate projects, right? They're all doing on their own interests, which sounds nice, but they're also kind of siloed away from each other. And what are they going to talk about at lunch with the class they just had together? Not if there was no class together. If they're just stuttering on their studying on their own, they remain separate. But one of the most important experiences, and this is becoming less and less an experience on college campuses, is arguing about the books that you've all read in common outside of class. And part of the reason that doesn't happen is because there are very few books that students have actually read in common.
- [34:48]
B
Right? I knew our school was on the track to becoming healthy when the volleyball girls eight weeks in were at a tournament and between matches, they were in the stairwell of the gym, 9:00pm at night, debating Achilles versus Hector.
- [35:06]
A
Yeah. No, that's what, like, that is. Now we're cooking, I think, like, the best class teaching. Teaching last year, ninth graders. The very best class that those kids had was a day when I didn't show up because I'd broken a tooth and had to go to the dentist on short notice. And so I just left them an assignment for them to do by themselves, which they did. And not only did they do it, I know they did it because they were, I think, you know, they were kind of proud of themselves for what they did. They, like, had a discussion, an orderly discussion, and then they took notes about what their discussion was and what their deliberation was and what they concluded and what some people concluded and other people thought this, that, and the other thing. But they wrote up this record of what they had done. But it was so thrilling to me because it meant, like, I didn't have to be there.
- [35:53]
B
Yeah. That's remarkable.
- [35:55]
A
And if you can make yourself obsolete, that's actually not a bad goal for a teacher.
- [36:02]
B
Yeah, well put. Well put. Well, Professor Nadon, it's been a pleasure.
- [36:06]
A
Good. Take care.
- [36:08]
C
That was Dr. Kathleen O', Toole, Associate Vice President for K12 Education at Hillsdale College, and Christopher Nathan, a former professor at Claremont McKenna College and Trinity College who writes on the character and history of Republican government understood as self rule. 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 to 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.