“Back-to-school” is plastered on every billboard, commercial, and email we see and read just as the last firework explodes on the Fourth of July. The phrase brings back memories of my school uniform and wandering around the house looking for my backpack which had been discarded sometime in mid-June between the garage and my bedroom. My middle sister enjoyed school supply shopping and I looked forward to regular sports practice and competition. I also remember experiencing some anxiety as I rushed to finish summer reading assignments as they were forgotten at the bottom of my wayward backpack. My sister and I both became upper school math teachers after college and the phrase took on new meaning. Across the country, teachers return to school weeks before the doors open to students for in-service “orientation and professional development”. Two more phrases that conjure images in the mind. Oriented towards what and developed in what way?
Before a new Hillsdale Member School opens, Hillsdale’s Teacher Support Team leads New School Training on the school’s campus often as a part of their in-service. This type of support is offered at no cost throughout Hillsdale’s relationship with the member school. The training provided goes well beyond instruction on what resources to use and practical advice on classroom management although we are prescriptive with both. Our team spends up to eight days calling teaches to continually consider deeply what it means to teach for love, knowledge, and virtue.
Teachers at Hillsdale classical schools are hired often with no direct experience with classical education. They are people who love their subject matter and love students. Some are recent graduates and others seasoned teachers from the local district school. Perhaps they are drawn to classical by the emphasis placed on reading great books, memorizing poetry, or have rejected the ideas of project-based learning and student-led classrooms. I think it is more often what is felt in the heart when you enter a classical classroom that draws people to it. The students are more than just happy or smart. They are good. Hillsdale classical schools offer a robust education in the liberal arts and sciences that cultivates students in moral character and civic virtue. Each of the schools works together in pursuit of the highest things—of truth, goodness, and beauty. Truth, goodness, and beauty for kindergarteners? Yes.
Before our team arrives on campus for training, every teacher is asked to read the first chapter of C.S. Lewis’ Abolition of Man. The chapter is titled Men Without Chests in which Lewis discusses an English textbook for upper school students. Lewis does not assign motive to the book’s authors, but points out that their curriculum does very little to make pupils wise. Gaius and Titus, fictitious names given to the authors by Lewis, seem to believe that the world around them is “swayed by emotional propaganda” and it is the educator’s job to “fortify the minds of young people against emotion”. But what of the pupil who cannot put aside his emotions? What chance does he stand against disordered affections? He argues that explicit instruction in virtue is proper preparation for young children.
When the age for reflective thought comes, the pupil who has been thus trained in ‘ordinate affections’ or ‘just sentiments’ will easily find the first principles in Ethics; but to the corrupt man they will never be visible at all and he can make no progress in that science. Plato before him had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting and hateful. In the Republic, the well-nurtured youth is one ‘who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just distaste would blame and hate the ugly even from his earliest years and would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it, so that he becomes a man of gentle heart.
The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis
Teachers in Hillsdale classical school are called to teach for love, knowledge, and virtue because an education without these things produces students who are not fully human, gentle of heart, or wise. “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” An orientation to this traditional way of thinking about education is the purpose of new school training.
