A glimpse inside Hillsdale College's network of classical schools across the country.
Families attend my classical charter school for many reasons. Our curriculum brings students into contact with the greatest books, ideas, and role models in Western civilization. Our students have incredible success in their collegiate years after the education they receive from us. Our families pay no tuition and need not fit into any social, economic, or political mold in order to attend our school.…
I often catch myself thinking that if I just make it through this day or until that break, then I’ll get a chance to catch my breath. Despite my hopes, the next week is almost always full of its own new challenges and problems that I could not or did not anticipate. The following is a list of five truths and their corresponding disciplines that help me teach well when I realize that next week isn’t going to slow down. …
Nobody argues that schools ought to teach Shakespeare because it helps students to write office memos. Yet many argue that schools ought to teach Pythagoras because it helps students to become engineers. While engineering and other STEM fields are certainly noble endeavors, would it not be a shame to say that any student who becomes a lawyer, librarian, poet, or plumber cannot benefit from a mathematics education?…
“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”– George Eliot, Middlemarch
To learn calculus is, at its core, to learn the rules of playing with infinity: the infinitely big and the infinitely small, or infinitesimal.…