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Hello America. I'm thrilled, thrilled to announce my new 10 part podcast series, Liberty and Learning with Mark Levin and Larry Arne. Join me and my dear friend Dr. Larry Arne, President of Hillsdale College, as we dive deep into the founding principles of our great nation. In these challenging times, understanding our history and the ideals of self government is more crucial than ever. We'll explore the core of America's current crises, the changes in our government and what it means for our lives and liberties. From education to borders, citizenship to the separation of powers will cover it all. Tune in to Liberty and Learning with Mark Levin and Larry Arn of Hillsdale College. So subscribe now and join us on this wonderful journey to rediscover the principles that made America the freest, most prosperous nation in history. Don't miss it.

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Listen right now to Liberty and Learning with Mark Levin and Larry Arne at podcast hillsdale.edu. that's podcast hillsdale or wherever you find your audio.

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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. Now your host, Scott Bertram.

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We continue a series of episodes from presentations delivered at Hoagland center for Teacher Excellence Seminars. The Hoagland center for Teacher Excellence, an outreach of The Hillsdale College K12 education office, offers educators the opportunity to deepen their content knowledge and refine their skills in the classroom. These one day conferences are hosted during the academic year in cities across the nation and feature presentations by Hillsdale College faculty, K12 office staff and leaders in the Hillsdale Network of member schools. There is no cost to attend and attendees may earn professional development credits. Currently, the Hoagland center is hosting a series exploring the art of teaching a variety of subjects. To learn more about upcoming events, visit our k12 hillsdale.edu Lovely to be here.

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With all of you. I feel like I am the outlier in the room. I'm not a math teacher. After attending John and Sam's sessions, I want to be a math teacher and even in certain moments in Atlanta Classical's history, I have pretended to be a math teacher and at a time of duress taught algebra two and Mr. Classen had to come in behind me and clean up my messes on more than one occasion. I was watching Sam's session though and was laughing along with the jokes and and John was very quick to turn to me and say, you don't even get that joke. What are you laughing at? You don't belong Here. So know that I come to this with great humility and a sense of being ostracized by all of you. So, you know, I won't talk about math. When I think about the work of leading one of these schools, of leading a classical school, a school that's part of Hillsdale's network, the first job that occurs to me is that of storyteller. We oftentimes tell our teachers that they have this responsibility to come alongside of our students, at whatever age they are at, and narrate to them the story of their lives, the story of their educations. Think of the many great works of literature, perhaps Dante first among them, where a character appears and guides you through a particularly difficult event. And this is what teachers do. Teachers are narrators. They tell the story of what's happening to their students. To show nothing that's going on is accidental. And I think leaders have this same responsibility. And so I'm going to share a lot of stories here in this brief talk to narrate what exactly this experience of leading one of these institutions. Institutions is. So just last week, we had a really important evening at Atlanta Classical that kicks off our senior thesis project. So this is the capstone activity for every senior, really, at any Hillsdale school across the country. It's a 15 page paper that students write over the course of their senior year. We assign one faculty member who acts as an advisor for that student, helps them build a reading list, and then craft an argument that takes the form of a paper that they will defend for an entire hour in the spring of their senior year in front of a panel of three faculty members, all of whom have read the paper and prepared questions. And then a gathering of family, friends, grandparents, faculty members, et cetera. It is this intense and wonderful achievement. The highlight of this dinner, though, is this beautiful wicker basket that sits in the middle of the dining space that is full of wrapped books. In each of these books is a personal letter that the advisor has written to their student to say, I will be guiding you through this process. I've chosen this book for you that I think will complement the argument that you're going to be making. And so the high point of the evening is when these books are dispersed. The students wrap, you know, rip off the wrapping paper and eagerly look for the letter. It's just a lovely moment, and in a way, it's a reflection of our preoccupation with stories, our love of great works of literature. I share this because the next morning I woke up and I read this article from the Atlantic, which perhaps some of you have seen, it's been making the rounds where it interviewed a series of professors at elite institutions across our country. Columbia was sort of the COVID of this thing. And professors were lamenting the fact that they were receiving college freshmen who had never read a book over their entire high school careers. They had read excerpts, they had read some works of nonfiction, but they had never read a story from COVID to cover. And so Columbia, of course, has this ambitious great books program that is now being sort of destroyed from the inside because freshmen simply aren't prepared. I had probably a dozen parents send me this letter or this article rather over the course of the day to say, have you seen this? We are so grateful to be at a school where this is not the case. And it was interesting. In the following days, classical teachers across the country were just posting their reading lists on Twitter. It was this lovely moment of seeing the classical movement rise up and have a response to universities that are now wondering, what do we do with these kids? One thing to note is that this isn't accidental. The fact that books are not read is not a mistake. Right? Two or three years ago, the National Council for Teachers of English that produces guidelines for public schools, even private schools across the country said that the time has come to de center books at the heart of a literature education and that instead things like media studies ought to be taking their place. And so that students are not reading is something that we have planned for. There is a kind of intention behind it. This is one, I think, of a number of disturbing trends in the public education space. Specifically, another thing that I've noticed of late, one of the largest networks of charter schools in the United States used to have this very simple little slogan, work hard, be nice. Perhaps some of you have heard it. They a couple years ago eliminated it because it said they made the argument that it supported the illusion of a meritocracy in the United States. And they never want to communicate that to students. And so you then ask about the experience of a 14 year old boy who was working hard to get great grades, but is told there is a glass ceiling hovering just above your head that you're going to collide with the moment you exert yourself. Because your hand has been dealt and it's a bad one. There is no hope for you. I began my own teaching career at a school like this. I worked at a massive public high school on the west side of Detroit. I worked for Teach for America. At the time, my very first day of school, I was 21 years old, was teaching English to freshmen and to seniors. I had seniors that were 19 and 20 years old in my class. But I remember not knowing what classes I was going to teach on my first day, my principal coming along beside me and handing me my schedule to say, oh, just so you know, here are the texts that you're going to be reading and the classes that you'll have. And then she hands me a roster. And in my very first class, it had over 100 names on the roster for my first hour. And I said, I only have 30 desks in my room. How am I going to accommodate for over 100 kids? And she said, you'll figure it out. What she really meant was that the population was very transient and so it was unlikely that in fact we had 100 kids. I probably had about 40 to 50 students. So imagine your very first day in the classroom. You have no formal teaching experience, standing room only kids literally sitting in window sills. And this is my job. I'm going to teach these, these kids. And of course I didn't, of course I did. Terribly. One of those students. No, I did my best. More to say there. One of my students in that first class was named David. David was maybe the brightest student at the school, among the brightest students that I've taught in my time in education. I remember in the winter we read this beautiful little short story that many of you all are probably familiar with, called To Build a Fire by Jack London. I tried to get my principal to allow us to go out into a snow covered field in Detroit. I was going to give each kid one match and see if they could start a fire. And she was like, what are you talking about? You can't do that. Well, she didn't say that exactly. She said, you can do it if you can get a permission slip from every single kid. I was like, no chance. So instead I opened all the windows of my classroom and brought the temperature down to probably 40 degrees. And so we're all reading To Build a Fire and just shivering terribly. And it tells the story of this trapper that is sort of in northern Canada with his dog who eventually succumbs to the elements and dies of cold. You know, sorry to spoil it for those of you that have not. Have not read it, but he dies in the end. He dies. And the dog is fine. The dog does great. And it's meant to sort of invite this meditation on man's relationship with the natural world and the indifference of your environment to you. And David, at the end of the story raised his hand, and he said, Mr. Andrew, this story is true to life. What do you mean, David? Well, your environment does actually dictate your outcomes. I, for instance, am a Cody kid. All my students would call themselves Cody kids. The school is called Cody high school. And my life has been dictated by the zip code into which I was born, and I cannot overcome this. And I remember looking at him and saying, or thinking, you are brilliant. You are the kind of kid that should have every single door in the world open up to you. And your school has not given you a vision of what is possible in your life. Because we did not have a mission as an institution. Our whole mission was to get kids jobs. Every year we would have a different, like, occupation that we highlighted. My last year, we were just trying to turn everyone into certified nursing assistants. The year after that, it was firefighters, Right? We were just desperate to make kids employable. And for a brilliant student, they're looking for something more. In fact, I would argue even the most struggling student is looking for something that is meaningful, looking for purpose of a kind. So oftentimes, so frequently in public education, we make this mistake of saying the pursuit of what is true and good and beautiful is meant only for the privileged, for the elite, when in fact, it is the kids who are struggling most intensely that most need a mission that speaks to their humanity, that calls them towards something higher. In the absence of that mission, David had begun to tell his own story, which was depressing and demeaning and that overlooked the incredible potential and intelligence that he had. I used to drive home every day from school and just wonder, does a school exist that could honor the person that is David? And then I found Atlanta classical academy. Atlanta classical. And I think many of your schools are like this, has this beautiful and bold mission of forming students in knowledge, of forming them in virtue, toward the end, of making them citizens. And there is tremendous demand for schools like this. We have a small school. We can only fit 6, 700 students. That's the limit of our charter agreement. We have over 2,000 kids on the waiting list who want to get into this school. And we don't have an answer for them. We don't have room for them. Now, charter schools are popping up across the country, Popping up across Georgia, across the southeast. You should know that there are two challenges to starting a charter school. One is finding a building. This is always difficult. But the second as pressing is finding a leader, finding a person who wants to take on a project like this. Which is why I want to Share something about the importance of school leadership and this movement in creating opportunities for kids like David. I want to say something really brief about each component of that mission statement. Forming knowledgeable and virtuous citizens. At the school that I run and at Hillsdale schools broadly, we believe that there are a certain set of things that a student ought to know about their world by the time they graduate from school. This might seem like the most obvious claim in the world, but in fact, it's become countercultural, right? We're preoccupied now with giving students skills, skills of critical thinking, etc. But give very little attention to the books, the stories, the principles that actually begin to give shape to their vision of reality. At our schools, at these classical schools, we think for you to be 18, for you to become, for instance, a voting member in a democratic republic. You ought to have read the founding documents, not so that you all think the exact same way, but so that when you have a difficult conversation, you are working from first principles. I think so much of the poverty of public discourse in our country returns to the fact that we don't have a common educational foundation. We haven't read the same things, and so we're having these little conflicts over superficial matters, when in fact, there are substantive ideas about which we could be engaged in discussion. But because we haven't read the same things, because we don't have a shared vocabulary, we speak past each other. So our schools aim to form students in knowledge. We also want to give them virtue. We think that knowledge without virtue just makes you dangerous. But when you give virtue to knowledge, it transforms into wisdom, which is knowledge directed toward the best things, toward the highest things. The final aim that we have for students at all of these schools is that we would turn them into citizens, and we use this word intentionally. So many college freshmen, I think, are sort of in love with their freedom, right? For the very first time, you are out from beneath the watchful eye of your parent. And so if there is, like, one word to define your experience of being a freshman in college, it is free. We want our college freshmen who graduate from these classical schools to have a sense of duty, to have a sense of obligation. We think that the best schools are ones that are going to imprint a certain kind of character on their students. I think a general failure of mediating institutions from schools to churches to community centers in this current moment is that we have become platforms for performance. Who do you want to be? And we'll turn you into that. Right? This is, I think, a problem in Congress. Congress used to be an institution that shaped the people that joined it. And now it has become a platform, right? You can perform whatever you want. You can become a celebrity of a kind. You can have a brand if you like. Instead, we want our best institutions to shape the character, to mold our human beings into citizens. And so at our schools, we have this beautiful vision of. Of the kind of person that you will become so knowledgeable and virtuous citizens. Beneath all of this is this core belief that we have in our schools, which is that the end of an education is not merely to teach students how to think. And this has become very, very attractive. People love this idea that what a school does is that it gets into your brain and reorganizes neural pathways to make you more. More intelligent, a more analytical, efficient thinker that can cut to the heart of a problem with clarity and force. And of course, we want that. We want for an education to produce that. But beyond teaching students how to think, we have to consider this. What are you thinking about and what do you love? And the work of leading a school? It's about ordering the loves of your students, ordering the loves of your faculty, of your community. And when you begin to think about this, you ought to be terrified. When I think about, just like the last week for me at school, right, There is a student whose parent is saying he's been underserved and she's very upset with us. We have a teacher who has fallen ill and who has cancer, and we're working through this. We have a coach who has gone rogue and is defying the athletic director, right? The problems go on. And when you think about leading a school, you can suddenly feel like you're playing this insane game of whack a mole, where you're just trying to identify problems and knock them down. And you begin to resent your faculty, right? You begin to resent the people around you. Because, man, I used to just be responsible for 27 kids, and they were the only ones that can make my life go wrong. And now there are 700 of you and their parents and the local school district and any other entity that has influence over ourselves. School. So if your work is just a matter of sort of solving these problems, it is hollow, it is aimless. But when you remember that your work is actually about forming the loves, suddenly you have a positive vision for what education is about. I think a danger, a risk of the classical movement. And in a way, I think John is speaking to this. We could become defined by the things that we oppose, right? It's very easy for classical schools to become known by. These are the things that we don't agree with that are going on in the public education space. I would much rather be known for what we love, what we support, the goodness that we are trying to realize in the lives of our students. And that's what you get to participate in fully. As the leader of one of these schools, though, the responsibility is truly overwhelming. We had a conversation about this exact challenge last year as a leadership team, the responsibilities of leadership. And one gentleman that has been at the school since the very first day just said to me, being at this school makes me a better man. I'm a better human being. I am more earnestly in pursuit of virtue because I'm part of a school that names truth and goodness and beauty as the end of an education. I hope that's happening for all of you, and surely it doesn't happen every day. There are days of deep frustration and angst and confusion, particularly in February. But the work of being with these students, engaging with this curriculum, ought to inspire your own life. And this is the opportunity you have as a leader. I will close with one final story. Sort of back from Detroit in my very first. My very first year of teaching. That for me is sort of a defining principle of why I do this work and why I've chosen to lead schools like this. So the last book that I wanted to teach with my freshmen, once I figured out how to teach them, which took a very long time, quick aside, this is a funny story. I had all of these tricks and strategies of ways that I wanted to engage my students in the first month, and they just rebelled. They would not listen to me until I finally picked up a book and just started reading it. And then there was silence in the room. What's happening right now? I just. Like I'm reading, there's silence. I look up to see who's going to throw something at me. First no one had. And then I stopped reading. And a kid is like, hey, man, this is the first good thing you've done all year. Just keep reading. Just don't stop. So we get to the spring, and we're reading Homer's Odyssey. It was an ambitious text. And if you've read the Odyssey, you know that the first. First books of the Odyssey are called the Telemachi. They tell the story of a young man named Telemachus, whose father, Odysseus, is off on this great journey. And Telemachus is left at home with his mother and suitors from across the land are descending on his home, trying to win his mother's hand in marriage. And I had this boy in my class named Amani. Amani used to sleep through every single one of my classes. I did everything to try to get Amani's attention. It never worked. He was a great sleeper, a prolific sleeper, and nothing I did ever worked. Amani came to me in the early spring of that year and said, hey, Mr. Andrew, I want to tell you why I've been falling asleep in your class. I'm like, oh, gosh, here we go. I'm bracing myself for this. He said, I'm homeless right now, and my mother and I have been bouncing from shelter to shelter. And this was one of the coldest winters on record in Detroit. We had a number of cold days. It was just so cold that we closed school. There is no public bus system in Detroit. The city could not afford school buses. So kids would take the city bus, and getting to school would take hours. And so this young man would get to school, and it would be the first warm place that he had found, and so would fall asleep in my classroom. So we're discussing the Telemachi, talking about the problems that Telemachus faces, and Amani's hand goes up for the first time all year. And I call on him and he says, I know what it means to be Telemachus. I know what that's like. I know what it's like to feel responsible for my mother and to not know what to do, to feel utterly hopeless. And suddenly this young man is reaching across a couple thousand years of history and looking to this beautiful, ancient, disorienting text for direction, for purpose. And it was at that moment that I realized that schools that conceive of themselves as institutions that direct students toward lives of meaning and purpose and virtue must exist. And they must exist in every city, in every neighborhood to serve American school children. That's my story. That's what animates my ambition. And this work, it's. It's the reason that it's worth it to deal with the million complications that come along with leading a school. And to be totally frank, as I'm saying all this out loud, I find myself being convinced by it again. Right. Truly, I have questions myself about whether this work is meaningful. As recently as the last week, moments of distress and frustration and annoyance. But when you tell yourself the story of the students who are in front of you, when you tell the story of their lives, when you tell the story of your own life and allow for your faculty and your community to be part of crafting that narrative. Meaning is abundant and it is ready to be received if you'll chase it.