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PODCAST | “Freedom to Learn:” “In classical schools, students learn how to use their minds well.”

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Kathleen O’Toole on Classical Education, AI, & Rescuing a Lost Generation.

What if the real education crisis isn’t falling test scores, but a generation losing the ability to focus deeply, think critically, or even just read an entire book? In this episode, Dr. Kathleen O’Toole of Hillsdale College explains why today’s students are less cognitively developed and how classical education offers a powerful alternative. From the failures of literacy instruction and colleges of education to the impact of screens and COVID disruptions, we discuss what went wrong and what can be rebuilt.

Dr. O’Toole makes the case for content-rich learning, great books, and the formation of the whole person, and explains why more families are turning to these models, especially now that expanding school choice programs empower families to choose a classical education option. In an AI-driven world, she argues, classical education graduates’ ability to develop their minds, acquire knowledge, and think for themselves may provide the ultimate advantage.

Check out some of Dr. O’Toole’s recent op-eds and listen to our full conversation below.

How the Classical Education Movement Is Rescuing a Lost Generation

Classical education can help students endure the age of AI

Nine questions every parent should ask before choosing a school for their child

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This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

There’s been a flurry of think pieces and social media posts bemoaning that students can no longer focus or read entire books. In your writing, you refer to these students as the “lost generation.” How would you describe today’s students and young adults?

Kathleen O’Toole: I think that they’ve not been treated well by the education system. And I think that the results are starting to show. Of course, many of the students who are currently in K-12 schools were COVID kids, and their education was interrupted, for several years sometimes, by the pandemic. But declines in their performance predate COVID.

There’s an author named Jared Cooney Horvath, and he has just released a book in which he explains that this is the first generation of students that’s less cognitively capable than the previous generation. Up until this point, for many generations, our children were more accomplished, better thinkers, better educated, more capable than their parents, but that’s no longer the case with this new generation.

That book is called The Digital Delusion, so we know what he’s pointing to as far as the cause of that. Do you agree that, in addition to the problems with the K-12 education system, with COVID closures, technology has also had a significant impact on students?

Kathleen O’Toole: I think that’s right. I think these children are being raised in front of screens from a shockingly early age. It’s not uncommon to see one and two year olds just glued to an iPad. And of course that’s when their minds are beginning to form. If the mind forms to accept a screen and becomes used to having a screen, the mind loses the ability to imagine. The mind loses the ability to dwell with any particular subject for any length of time, and that has massive effects on curiosity and on learning itself.

You’ve also written that experts and ideologues broke literacy. The science of reading, what’s been going on with literacy, that could be a whole podcast. In fact, it was a whole podcast series that was amazing, the Sold a Story podcast series. And fortunately, some steps are being made to right that wrong. But we’ve also abandoned, for a generation or so, teaching literacy correctly, right?

Kathleen O’Toole: Yes, I think that’s right. For a couple of generations there, we had the idea that students didn’t need phonics instruction. Students didn’t need a way of learning to read that broke down the English language into its parts and taught them to decode English words. The fear was that phonics was too burdensome, too technical, too boring, and we wanted children to plunge right into the texts and learn to love the stories themselves. And that approach has been completely disproven. And as you say, the Sold a Story podcast chronicles that history beautifully.

Today, there’s a resurgence in the science of reading, which is two things. It’s the insistence on teaching students to read using phonics. But it’s more than that, too. It’s a recognition that without a rich environment of information to draw on, without rich content in their education, students will merely learn to decode English words and they won’t be able to understand the meaning of those English words. And there are a lot of education writers who have explained this beautifully. Robert Pondiscio, Natalie Wexler and others have explained that without a rich library of experience to draw upon, you may be able to decode English, but you won’t be able to understand really what those words mean. And so the science of reading is helping to bring that back.

And I think that there’s a growing awareness among parents that the best thing that they can do for their children is not just provide technical instruction and how the letters work, how the English language works, but give them interesting childhoods full of experience. Read to them from books that are above their reading level so that they can acquire a rich vocabulary, not merely by decoding those words, but by understanding what content is behind them. So, encouraging news on that front.

Yes, and I’d like to talk about more encouraging news for the rest of our conversation. We’re going to focus on solutions rather than the problems. Any more problems, though, to mention as far as the contributing factors to this lost generation, or have we covered it?

Kathleen O’Toole: Well, I think we could talk about teachers as well. I think we’ve lost a vision, a compelling vision for what teaching looks like. In many American schools, we regard teaching as merely delivering information to students, taking information from the mind of someone who’s more experienced and transferring it to the mind of someone who’s less experienced. And that’s not what teaching is.

Teaching is the shaping of a human soul. Teaching is helping the child turn into the adult that that child is going to become. It’s not merely delivery of information. And so the person of the teacher, if you conceive of education in that full sense, really matters. We need not only the brightest and the best educated, but the most excellent, the most loving, the most humane people in our society to become teachers.

Teaching, especially since the pandemic, but even before, is experiencing a mass exodus, especially of people who have that full robust vision of education. So the recovery is needed not only in the curriculum, but in the way that we teach and the people who are doing the teaching.

You point to the growing classical movement as the big solution for a lot of these problems, and that’s the growing classical education movement. You talk about returning the book to the center of the classroom. You talk about how with classical education, children’s minds become storehouses of meaning, not junk. I’d love to know, what’s your elevator pitch for classical education? How would you describe it to somebody who’s not heard of this approach before?

Kathleen O’Toole: Classical education is the way education ought to be. It’s the way education used to be. It’s an understanding that in order to be educated, a child needs a cohesive course of study that is well-rounded, and the child needs access to a community of adults and fellow students who regard education as the formation of the human person into everything that that person is going to be, not merely, as I said, the delivery of information into the mind of a child.

There’s a lot of information though, when we’re talking about classical education. Students memorize speeches, poems, history timelines, great works. Tell us a little bit about that aspect of classical education. It’s different from what many of us have experienced in traditional public schools where our students aren’t even reading an entire novel, an entire book. And they certainly aren’t asked to memorize anything.

Kathleen O’Toole: It is true that in many American schools, teachers focus on the skills that are required for a student to learn and not on the content. Classical education is, by comparison, extremely content-rich. I was the founding headmaster of a classical school about 10 or 15 years ago. And when we got rolling, the first thing that the parents said after picking up their children at the end of the day was “They’re so energized. They’re not exhausted, they’re not burnt out, they’re energized, and in the car ride home from school, they were full of information about history, science, literature, geography.” These kids were just excited to know things, and the parents were shocked at the amount of information that their students had acquired.

So, yes, classical education is very content-rich, but it’s not delivery of content for the sake of filling the human mind as much as possible, or creating the world’s greatest Jeopardy contestant. Things that we study in classical education are worth knowing for their own sake. They’re worth knowing because they make us better people because they help us understand and navigate the world better. They push us in this direction of becoming our fullest selves.

Could you describe the model across the school years? There’s grammar, logic, and rhetoric. How does that break down?

Kathleen O’Toole: Yes, sometimes people use this way of describing classical education. The thought is, there are levels of understanding that you progress through over the course of your childhood. The grammar stage is the stage in which you acquire information. The logic stage is the stage in which you learn how to put that information together. And the rhetoric stage is the stage in which you learn to evaluate that information.

In Hillsdale schools, we don’t we don’t categorize the levels at which a student is is is working in exactly that way. Instead, we think that to become educated, there are two areas you need to study. One is the human world and one is the natural world.

The natural world means the natural order around us. That’s what we’re studying when we’re doing mathematics, the sciences, any type of investigation into the principles that make the world around us coherent. Then, there’s the human world. That’s what we’re studying when we read literature, when we study history, when we read philosophy.

Every human being is curious about the world in which we live, the natural world. In order to be an educated adult, in order to leave your high school years with a foundation from which you can proceed to a life of learning and a life of just choosing well… All of the choices that we make as adults add up to the sum of our lives. So how can you equip yourself to make to make those choices well? This is the course of study that produces that.

You’ve written about families flocking to classical schools. Do they know all these things we’ve been talking about as far as what classical schools offer? Are they coming because they’re drawn to classical education, or are they fleeing from what they haven’t liked in their residentially assigned public school?

Kathleen O’Toole: I think it’s a real mixture. Some families are coming into classical schools with a really robust understanding of classical education. Often they’ve been homeschooling families, and they’re delighted to see that this kind of education is available in a K-12 school. I had many families like that in the school that I started in Austin, Texas several years ago.

Some families are very green, very new to classical education. And I think that’s just wonderful. They’re searching for something real. They’re searching for something meaty. They’re searching for something serious for their children. Not serious in the sense of “solemn,” but serious in the sense of worth doing and important.

They look at the schools, the way that they talk about education. They look at the students who have been at the school for a while. They look at the effect that the school has had on the families themselves, and they look at the types of people that are teaching in these schools, and they think, that seems excellent. I’m new to it, I don’t understand it myself, it seems excellent.

The best classical schools are really welcoming of parents like that, and they understand that their job is to educate the parents just as much as the students. They look for opportunities to do that because they think it’s so important.

What are the obligations of parents once they’re enrolled in the school? This isn’t just a drop off your kid and ask them if they’ve done their homework kind of deal.

Kathleen O’Toole: Yes, and I think parents are really looking for opportunities to be more involved in their children’s education. I think they’ve seen that the hands-off approach that many parents took a couple of generations ago was not the best way.

In classical schools, we are the teachers. We are responsible for making sure that the students learn, but we regard parents as the primary educators of their students.

When you choose to enroll your child in a classical school, whether it’s a private school, a public charter school, or any type of school, that’s a big decision you’re making as the parent.

Think about the decisions you make as a parent. It’s hard to think of one that’s more important than where my child is going to go to school, who will be responsible for educating my child. Classical schools understand that. They regard that choice as a really important choice, and they regard it as the parent’s choice. They think it’s their job to show the parents before the choice is made what it will look like if their child does enroll in the classical school.

If the enrollment does happen, then the parent and the school have undertaken a partnership. The parent’s job is to support the child in receiving this classical education and to understand that the education is transformative, and, done well, it’s the kind of thing that can transform the entire family.

When my school started, I had these families who were brand new to classical education, but they saw the mission of the school and they understood it and loved it immediately. They’d never experienced it, but they thought, “That’s what I want for my child.” They undertook a complete revolution of their family life for the sake of enrolling in this school. They read all of the summer reading with their children and they talked about it around the dinner table. All of the devices went away. In a very short time, shorter than you would think, it became this incredible source of joy for the entire family because they had these rich ideas to talk about in common around the dinner table. So it was a big leap sometimes, but very quickly became clear that it was a leap worth making.

It can be humbling as a parent, too. In the handful of years that my family was enrolled in a classical school, working on those memorization passages — this was a Christian classical school, so a lot of long Bible passages, but also a lot of poems — was a good reminder that that muscle had completely atrophied for me as I was working with my children.

It’s exciting, but also challenging as a parent. So parents definitely need to be up for it. They are, in many cases. The demand for classical education is rapidly growing. You’ve indicated that projections are somewhere around a million students will be enrolled in classical education in the coming decade.

Kathleen O’Toole: Right now, about half of the students doing classical education are in homeschooling, and the other half are in brick-and-mortar schools of some kind.

With the adoption of school choice legislation, and sometimes funding for families to send their children to private schools, which is being adopted in many states across the country, we anticipate a real rise in the number of classical schools.

So it could be over a million students, but the supply needs to meet the demand. So I guess that’s where you come in, running a classical education network. Will the supply be able to meet the demand?

Kathleen O’Toole: Yes. We are working hard to make sure that it does. The first and most urgent need is teachers who are familiar with this curriculum, who are steeped in it, and who have this vision of education. We are finding them all over the place. Many of them are young graduates from schools like Hillsdale College, where I work, that are interested in teaching when they graduate. One in seven Hillsdale College students becomes a teacher after graduation, and they make really good teachers. There are lots of other colleges like that that are bringing up young people to become teachers.

We have this network of classical schools across the country and many of them are staffed from former public school teachers from traditional public schools that are attracted to classical education because they see an opportunity to work with really rich content, to teach in a way that is natural and effective and not burdened by a whole bunch of structures. They like working in Hillsdale schools because not only is the curriculum rich, but it is consistent.

We know what students need to learn. Although we revise the curriculum annually, we don’t revise the content. We revise the books that are recommended if they go out of print or something like that. But basically, if you work in a Hillsdale school, there is a common understanding about what these children need to learn. And that’s really attractive to teachers who want to get to work with content, to learn it deeply, and then to practice the art of teaching and spend their time thinking about, “How could I have prepared that lesson? How could I have led that lesson a little bit more effectively?” rather than, “Oh no, another curriculum is getting handed down by the district.”

These teachers must be familiar with these books, and they have to deeply know this curriculum and be intellectually engaging. So I hear you saying that they’re coming from schools like Hillsdale.

Where are the other teachers receiving their education and their training? I ask that, primarily, because I’m wondering if these young people are graduating from colleges of education in other universities, what do you do then? Do you need to retrain them? Do you need to reprogram them? Because there are some worrisome aspects of colleges of education.

Kathleen O’Toole: That’s right. I think a lot of the education that people receive if they’re going to an education college is in the methods of teaching, and not so much in the content. So you do have to have a rich understanding of the content in order to be a teacher in a classical school. There are a lot of smart people, a lot of deeply educated people who got into teaching for all of the best reasons. They love what they know, they love what they studied in college, they love the opportunity to teach students. And for people like that, a classical education school is just a dream come true. There are other teachers who have been merely trained in the methods and they aren’t deeply educated in the content. And for them, they need to learn and to develop an expertise, almost like going back to college.

Is that something that you all would provide? Or, are you asking people to come to you with knowledge already?

Kathleen O’Toole: We do provide it. Hillsdale’s online courses are a wonderful way to begin your education. Whether you’re a parent of a child who’s enrolled in a classical school who finds the content exciting but new, or whether you’re someone who wants to be a teacher someday in a classical school, the online courses are a great way to begin to learn what the books that we study in a classical context are, and how you go about studying them. It’s a very, very easy kind of helpful beginning, I think.

Before the first year of teaching, it’s really important for a teacher to already have that content under his or her belt, because it’s showtime. You have to be ready to go for the students. Our schools do look for people who are richly educated and who understand this curriculum well before they hire them.

How would you say that you all monitor the teachers to ensure that they’re meeting the demands of the job? It’s an intense job.

Kathleen O’Toole: It is. It all begins with the hiring of the school’s headmaster or principal, the head of school. That is a really important decision that the school’s board makes. We advise the board about how to do that. We even train people through our graduate school of classical education and through some other apprenticeship programs that we run to lead classical schools.

The reason that hiring on the part of the board is so important, is that the person who’s responsible for locating and hiring all of the teachers and the school is only as strong as its teachers. The school is only as strong as the conversation going on between teacher and student in the classroom, so we teach boards how to find headmasters and we teach headmasters how to find teachers and then, once the school is launched, we’re responsible for all of their training, and we visit the schools continually. We have a team of people who are on the road about two-thirds of the time visiting classrooms, observing teachers, giving them feedback, coaching them in how to be a classical teacher. So it’s a very close relationship that we have with our member schools for the sake of those teachers and their success in this classical context.

Before we run out of time, I want to talk about something that you’ve written about that I think is on everybody’s mind, and that’s AI and the impact that that’s going to have on the current generation of students. You have a message of hope to offer on that front. I’d like for you to address how classical education can be helpful when we’re faced with what AI might cause as far as unemployment and a very uncertain future.

Kathleen O’Toole: I think in a lot of circles, including some of the circles that I travel in, AI is regarded as this very promising new solution to all of the problems we’ve had in K-12 education. And people are excited about the prospect of bringing AI tutoring into our schools and making it responsible for the education of our children. We at Hillsdale caution against that, especially in the case of young K-12 students who need human beings taking care of them and helping them form their minds, not robots.

I think with the increase of AI in the workplace, and also perhaps in our K-12 schooling, we’re going to see a group of people who resist the outsourcing of thinking and insist upon doing it themselves. It will become the case that the most important thing that you can do for your success and your happiness is to insist upon developing your own mind, and training it and, through it, acquiring knowledge about the most important things. And if you are the kind of person who insists upon doing that, you will be able to think.

You will be surrounded by a lot of people who have lost the ability to think, perhaps especially at a high level, because they just aren’t in the habit.

Classical schools are more important than ever, I think, this, on the cusp of this increase in AI usage, because in classical schools, students learn how to use their minds well, and their minds are filled with the kind of information that is worth knowing because it is beautiful, because it is delightful, but also because it is useful. It is a guide for how to go about your life. So I think the most important thing that we can do for our children, especially today, is help them learn what it means to learn for themselves and give them an environment which encourages the development of their own imagination, their own thinking, their own rich and deep understanding of the most important things.

In your work, you write about the intellectual agility that these students develop and the ability to see patterns and arguments across works. It’s not just memorizing that poem. It’s not just reading that tough book. It’s also this agility, this muscle that they have that’s very different from typing a little command or request into a box, hitting a button and having AI do it all for you.

It’s very appealing, your description of what happens in the classical education process and what is produced if that student perseveres through classical education. It’s an option, not just K-12, but also in higher education, if you’re enrolling in a school like Hillsdale.

Is there a myth about classical education that bothers you, that you’d like to dispel today?

Kathleen O’Toole: There are many. I think a lot of people regard classical education as only for some people, only for the people who can operate at that intellectual level, only for people from a certain background. And it’s really not the case.

Hillsdale has been working with classical schools intensely for 15 years now, and they exist in every type of neighborhood. They serve every type of student that we have in this nation, and they all do it with fidelity to the same mission and using the same curricular resources.

Classical education just means becoming educated. It turns out, that’s what makes human beings happy, and is what’s necessary for the development and flourishing of human souls. It’s not niche. It’s not rarefied, not only for the people who could afford it or something. It just means educating the being.

How can people follow your work?

Kathleen O’Toole: We produce many things which are useful to teachers and parents across the country. We have a website, K12.hillsdale.edu, where you can go for information about what we do and how we do it. I recently joined X. You could follow me there. I’m on LinkedIn, too.

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