Dr. Kathleen O’Toole is the Assistant Provost for K-12 Education at Hillsdale College and the founding headmaster of a K-12 classical charter school in the Austin, TX area. The Classical Classroom takes families and members of the community into the halls of our affiliated schools to learn about classical education.
Dr. O’Toole grew up in Claremont, a small college town in Southern California. She attended the University of Dallas, a liberal arts college in Irving, Texas. She graduated with a BA in Politics and moved back to California, where she completed a Ph.D. in Political Philosophy and American Government. While in school, she was an editor for the Claremont Review of Books, a quarterly journal of political thought and statesmanship.
Dr. O’Toole has presented academic papers on Aristotle, Cicero, St. Augustine, Shakespeare, and Alexis de Tocqueville. Her doctoral dissertation is on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics and examines the place of moral virtue in the happy life, focusing on magnanimity, justice, and prudence. Her career in higher education showed her how important good moral and intellectual formation is before college and before adulthood. She lives in Hillsdale, Michigan with her husband Daniel and their daughter Charlotte.
The Classical Classroom 