A glimpse inside Hillsdale College's network of classical schools across the country.
The K-12 Education Office provides training and advice for teachers across our network, and one of the most important aspects of elementary education is learning to read and write. Check out this post to see the different ways we encourage teachers in this area of instruction!
Why do we study the fine arts, and how should K-12 schools cultivate a love and understanding of great art among their students? How should we study sculpture in particular, and what makes the great sculptors so excellent? How should we study Michelangelo's David in particular? Dr. O'Toole had a fascinating conversation with Prof. Anthony Frudakis, Associate Professor of Art at Hillsdale College on Michelangelo's David and why we study sculpture. Enjoy!
Excellent classical education requires both high quality curriculum and good teaching. Hillsdale's K-12 Program Guide supplies the curriculum, and now, Tried and True: A Primer on Sound Pedagogy can help teachers develop their technique and refine their craft.
Pedagogy and classroom management are necessary, but they are always in service of a higher thing. That higher thing—cultivating within students the wonder and love of learning—ought always to come first. That, then, must also be the end of the education of the teacher when they themselves are students.
We have to learn how to be students, and my favorite book on that subject is Study is Hard Work, by William Armstrong. Except for its title, the book is a welcoming introduction to the habits and skills that make someone a learner.
Today there is confusion about the role of the teacher. It stems from a larger confusion about the role of education in the life of the student. The unfortunate truth is that education is seen primarily as a kind of job training, reducing students to receptacles for information and teachers to its delivery system.
Teachers should be free to use their natural and developed gifts to teach a robust curriculum in science, literature, mathematics, the arts, history, physical education and civics. This is the kind of schooling experience that students deserve, parents desire and society demands. -Dr. Dan Coupland
At Hillsdale College we know—from both experience and principle—the authority that teachers and parents have in the noble work of education. We profess this in all that we do, but especially through our work in K-12 education. No remote system of control or bureaucracy can supplant the knowledge, interests, and love that local communities bring to bear—primarily through parents and teachers—on the education of the young. As Hillsdale was founded to advance education, we will ever promote these great truths and the practices that arise from them. It is our mission, and we will not shrink from it.
Here at Hillsdale College, we promote the founding of classical schools, and excellence in their teaching and operations, so that American schoolchildren may be educated in the liberal arts and sciences and receive instruction in the principles of moral character and civic virtue. We refer to this education as American classical education. What is American classical education, exactly? What does it look like within the walls of a particular school?
Instead of helping us to deepen ourselves and take a mature and complex view of the past, history is increasingly employed as a simple bludgeon, which picks its targets mechanically—often based on little more than a popular cliché—and strikes.
The Classical Classroom 