Podcast Host (0:01)

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Scott Bertram (0:45)

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.

Podcast Host (1:04)

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 Visit our website k12 hillsdale.edu.

Head of Seven Oaks Classical School (1:55)

Well, good afternoon. Mrs. Moshell urged us to clothe our children with a moral imagination. I think we live at a time where the educational establishment is increasingly naked. Kind of like the Emperor's New Clothes, right? There's a lot of money being spent and not a lot to show for it, and it's left our children naked and shivering as well. So I work at Seven Oaks. We are a school that, as Eric mentioned, opened in 2016 and we had about 160 students K through 8, and we've since grown to be a school of roughly 570k12. We're very much of the view that we have a duty to give every child of every generation the best education that we can, and we're trying to prove that this can be done in places where it's not always assumed it can be done. We're in a small town outside of Bloomington, and yet we've seen the kind of growth that we have. So the topic that I've been asked to speak to is why I Lead a Classical School. It's a great question. Sometimes I ask myself that. My wife who's here probably does as well. But really the answer is a simple one. Like most people, I want to do something meaningful. I don't think I'm alone in this. We all want to participate in some noble work that is larger than ourselves, that our experience, interest and aptitude fit us to do. And I found that in classical education. I think all of you would agree that there's something really beautiful and life giving about working with children, but for the classical educator, there's something. There's also kind of an awesome added weight of responsibility because we think that we actually have a part to play in the formation of children's souls. So this is a burden, but it's also a really high calling. And I can say that even on the hardest days. And if you, if you ever participate in the founding of a school, you know that there will be hard days. I've never doubted the goodness of the work, but I've actually been sustained by a deep seated satisfaction born of the confidence that I'm doing something worth doing. The school that I lead has set for itself lofty aims. The mission of Seven Oaks Classical School is to train the minds and improve the hearts of young people through a classical liberal arts, or, sorry, excuse me, through a rigorous classical education in the liberal arts and sciences, with instruction in the principles of moral character and civic virtue. So, a bit of a mouthful, but the central idea there really is virtue. We're not content simply with college and career preparation. Rather, the. The education we offer aims at the cultivation of virtue. Another way of putting that is human excellence, intellectual, moral and civic in the ways that are appropriate to a school. We're trying to help students enlarge their thinking and invigorate their imagination. But also we try to form good habits and decent character, and we think that this will help them flourish both individually and as citizens and neighbors. Like every education, a classical education focuses partly on skills, to be sure, beginning with excellence in language. We are embodied souls and we are languaged beings. And we want to train our students to read well, write well, think well and speak well. But the education ultimately is about far more than just skills. At the end of the day, it's an education focused on helping students know and love what is excellent. And to help us, we draw on the tried and true. Great men and women, great works of literature and poetry, arts and music all command a prominent place. They not only provide subjects of study, but also models for emulation. Through the education we offer, we seek to introduce students to age old conversations about the human thing, about truth, beauty, goodness, justice, friendship, love. And we do this with a prevailing sense of coherence and order. And we try to do this in an environment characterized by respect, but also by joy. Ultimately. The key, of course, is the teachers, people who are expert in what they teach, who love their children wisely and well, and who are skilled in the art of teaching. Whether fictitious or historical stories theme of our conference feature prominently in the education we offer. But teachers are essential as well, and they're a kind of living story, and particularly powerful one because the students are reading them each day. And this is a kind of story that unfolds. If I may, I'd like to tell you just a brief story about my parents and grandparents. My mom's dad came from an immigrant family who left the instability of the Austro Hungarian Empire for the New World. Granddad grew up in the Great Depression. While he was in high school, he was sent to live with another family on a farm outside the city. He ended up becoming a mechanic who worked on tanks in World War II. He never got to go to college, but he had an active mind. What schooling he had left a mark. You can see his old letters, and they were grammatically correct and they were written in a beautiful script, and they reveal an intelligent, sensitive soul. One of my grandfather's deepest convictions that he carried through life was that a good education could change the trajectory of a person's life. Having grown up in the Great Depression, he was also hard working and frugal, and he made it possible for his two daughters to go to college. And my mom went on to become a veterinarian in Georgia at a time when there were few women in the field. My dad's story is very different. His ancestors had immigrated to the United states in the 1600s and had drifted down into the Deep South. They remained in rural Georgia and got stuck in a cycle of intergenerational poverty. My grandfather came back from World War II and lost himself in drink while his mom worked in the local textile mill. In a losing battle to make ends meet, all the children went to work early. But in my dad's case, the owner of the local diner where he was a busboy took a liking to him. She helped him believe college was possible and supported his enrollment, first in a community college and then ultimately he went on to the University of Georgia and became a pharmacist. So my parents inherited the belief and the power of a good education. For them, it was personal, and I inherited that belief in turn as a child. Part of what this meant was that I grew up in a home with books which we supplemented with weekly trips to the local library. I gravitated toward tales of chivalry and adventure, which my brother and I enacted in the woods and in the creek around our house. When I graduated from high school, though I confessed that I had more drive than direction, I was still trying to figure out what quest I should undertake, what monsters I was to slay, what hills I was to climb. Because of the sacrifices of my grandparents and my parents, college was possible for me, and I ended up at a little liberal arts college that prized good books and wisdom and virtue, one of the few colleges left that can claim to be a fellow traveler with Hillsdale. And I went in thinking I would be a lawyer and came out wanting to teach. My My own education had been a hodgepodge. I had not had the benefit of a full fledged liberal arts education until college. But at college, I was absolutely blown away by the richness of the Western tradition. In a very real way, I felt myself lifted outside the narrow valley of my own experience and kind of perched on a vantage point that commanded a much broader view of history and thought than I had yet even been aware had existed. So when I came out, I thought, I'd like to teach, and I'd like to teach at the college level. I wanted to give what I'd received, and since I'd been introduced to this tradition at college, I naturally gravitated there. First, I thought it would be a beautiful thing to continue studying the things I'd studied, to enjoy good conversation with people who shared similar interests, and to cultivate the kind of relationship with students that I had found so helpful. So I went on, and in the course of my doctoral studies, two things nudged me in the direction of K12 education. The first was an idea. As part of my doctoral program, I spent some time with Alexis de Tocqueville, famous for his book Democracy in America. Tocqueville argues that the art of freedom has to be learned. That's not enough to have big theoretical ideas about liberty. You need to understand what liberty looks like in practice, on a human scale. Schools are one of those local institutions where this kind of learning can take place. A school prepares kids for liberty. Of course, this is partly by teaching them the history of their country and how to read and write and speak well. But in the little commonwealth of the classroom, there are all kinds of other lessons being learned. Students have the opportunity to learn humility and thoughtfulness and courage and perseverance. They can learn a sense of duty and self restraint and respect for others, rights and their own obligations, and they can encounter ennobling truths. They meet with heroes and villains, and they're helped to think deeply and to find words for their thoughts so that they can communicate with others. So first was an idea, but then there was also an experience. While I was still in my doctoral program, I ended up starting teaching at a local classical Christian school there in Dallas. And I immediately loved the content. For sure, I was amazed by the depth of the curriculum, but above all, I was delighted by my colleagues, the teachers, and enjoyed the friendship and conversation across disciplines. They were smart, interesting people, and together they had a wide ranging expertise. But they were joined at the same time by a common purpose. And it struck me that this kind of unity and diversity was exactly the old idea of the college, of the university. And so this experience showed me that much of what I was looking for in a college could be found to an equal and in some cases, perhaps a greater degree. At an excellent K12 school, you can enjoy warm collegiality, a shared sense of purpose and intellectual depth. And when it came to students, you had the gift of time. You could walk with students day in and day out during a transformative period of their life. And for those who work in a K12 school, this is a period lasting up to 13 years. Subsequent experiences only served to further confirm my love of classical education. With the benefit of hindsight, I see now that what we call classical education is pretty similar to what was just education to my mom's dad. Schools used to focus on academics and an environment characterized by order and respect. Schools taught real content. Even in my parents generation. It wasn't surprising at all that my mom read a lot of classic literature and studied Latin. And even my dad at his little country school in poverty stricken Georgia became somehow a master of world geography. So this idea and this experience led me to my current work. I get to, as a school leader, work with young people. I get to assemble and provide a space for my own little merry band of fellow travelers. And we have adventures together, we read books together, and the work is always worthwhile and the conversation good. And the longer I go, the more aware I am that too many schools are not like this. They've lost their way, dominated by testing, stripped of content, and lacking in a common vision for cultivating virtue. Our kids are missing an important help and growing as human beings. And I get to help with something different. And because I work in a public charter school, I have the added satisfaction of knowing that the kind of gift that we're giving with a classical Education is something that most of our students would not have the opportunity for, but for the presence of our school in that community. I'll just very quickly add a couple stories. The first illustrates the power of a classical education's emphasis on language. And I have borrowed this from Mrs. Moshel. A few years ago, she told me about a quiet young man in her class that she overheard reciting a poem to himself as he was swinging on the playground. And sure enough, it was Robert Louis Stevenson's the Swing. How do you like to go up in a swing up in the air so blue? Oh, I think it the pleasantest thing ever a child can do. And she asked him what he was saying, why he was reciting this poem that he had learned several years previously. And he said, because that's how I feel when I swing. There was nothing ostentatious about it, but poetry had given him a vehicle for awakening and giving expression to his inner life. The other illustrates the power of love. And in a classical school, one of the most powerful things we do is we offer again a wise love. In our very first 8th grade class, there was a girl, Ariel, who was being raised by a relative because her dad had long since been gone. And then her mom dropped out of the picture as well, and she ended up that first year in a fight. And then she left for a couple years. But she couldn't shake the memory of Seven Oaks with its teachers who loved her and wanted to help her grow as a human being. And again, a couple years passed, and then, out of the blue, Ariel's caretaker contacted me and asked for a meeting. I was wondering what this was about. And she came and she said that Ariel's birthday wish, her one birthday wish was to return to Sevenoaks. And of course, we were delighted to have her back. And she came back as a different person. So classical education's goal of cultivating and awakening the human, it was not an abstract thing for her. It was something very real. Her teachers had names and personalities to her. They were real people, and they knew her name. And she graduated and earned a degree and got married and has become a social worker. And she and her husband have recently become the guardian of a much younger sibling. And as soon as they got custody, they enrolled him at Seven Oaks. So why am I a school leader? I'm a school leader because leading a classical school is a good and needful work. And I just happen to have the interest and opportunity and ability. But I really see myself as a trustee, just one link in a long chain doing the work that many others do, trying to do my duty, to use the British phrase, to do my bit and pass along in one little local institution, in one little town in southern Indiana what, what I've received and hopefully to pass it along with interest. Why do I keep doing it? Well, not only because the work is good and needful, but because of the company I get to keep and the conviction that I'm giving something good to the boys and girls who come through our doors. I get to lead and serve an incredible faculty and staff, got to hear from one, and to help support them in the work they do with students. And this work is nothing less than fostering growth and good habits and decent character, the enlargement of their intellect and imagination and a vision for the good life. And in this way, I have the opportunity to pay down something of the debt of gratitude that I owe to many, including my parents and grandparents. And in just a second we'll watch a video about the work that Hillsdale College is doing with classical schools around the country. And I'll be honest, the school I lead would not exist and certainly would not have achieved much of what it has without the support of the college. And I count it as a great honor that Seven Oaks is a member school working with Hillsdale. And it's a real joy to work with the staff of Hillsdale's K12 education office. So I think we'll see the video now.