In May I was wrapping up my first year working at a local elementary school, preparing for another year there. On a Friday afternoon, I received an email asking if I would be interested in teaching art at a charter school.
This was the school that stood out to me way back in the spring of 2021 when I was still living in Washington. The title of the school caught my eye immediately: Great Hearts. I was intrigued and had to learn more.
I completed their General Faculty Application and answered a series of questions. These were not the typical questions. The leading question was: Do you believe that it is the place of a public school to be involved in the moral education of students with universal ideas of right and wrong?
A public school concerned with the moral questions of right and wrong. Was this legal? It must be, I told myself, because the school functioned for several years and had grown from Arizona into Texas. Plus the name of the school, Great Hearts ®, had the registered trademark symbol next to its name.
I further learned that the school uses the Socratic method in their teaching. I quickly scanned my memory banks — Socrates, philosopher, got people to think deeply by asking a lot of questions. That seemed like a good way to teach.
I’ve spent the last two weeks immersing myself in their training and I must say that I am very impressed. One of the co-founders of the school said on the first day that GH serves the family first. That was music to my ears. He then shared the the school’s Six Loves and Core Purpose which is: To cultivate the minds and hearts of students through the pursuit of Truth, Goodness and Beauty.
That is an ambitious goal, but I believe a very worthwhile one. Another leader spoke to the choice of the word, cultivate. The gardening term is not an accident; children are like seeds we plant and nurture so that they will grow to be good adults. I was actually more curious about how the school would define Truth, Goodness and Beauty. It seemed like there was room for debate about how each person might define these terms.
In every GH campus you will find a print of the painting The School of Athens by Rafael. I remember teaching art history and pointing out that in the Western tradition, it was those Renaissance artists that figured out how to create a one-point perspective. Rafael did this by training our eye to land right in the center. And who is standing there? The great Plato and Aristotle, two of the most recognized philosophers of all time.
But why is this painting important enough to put in every campus? One of the school’s Six Loves answers this question. To promote Conversation and Community. The painting shows a group of some of our greatest thinkers of all time having a conversation. They are discussing morality, religion, science, mathematics and other worthy topics. They are probably having some disagreements, but they are still having the discussion.
This is what our centers of education should be: places where we can discuss important topics in a safe and healthy environment. We might disagree on what Truth is, but instead of ignoring the question altogether, let’s have a civilized discussion and find the common ground.
One of our assignments as new faculty was to read Plato’s Meno, a dialogue between Socrates and Meno, a military leader from a neighboring region. In the dialogue, Meno asks if virtue is best learned by being taught or by practice. What ensues is a several page series of questions posed by Socrates and answered by Meno. I won’t say how it ends. But we, as educators, were divided into small groups and had our own group discussion led by one of the school’s headmasters. He was purposely quiet for most of the discussion while we, the “students”, attempted to figure out the purpose and meaning of the text. It was like being in college again and I loved it!
Something I love about our training is how we are to introduce new concepts. A common teaching method is to walk in front of a class and announce, “Today we are going to learn about ______,” and then write the term on the board. Then the students will probably passively copy the information on their papers. The GH way would be to introduce the subject with some sort of demo (preferably involving one or more of the students) and then to ask a series of questions so that the students can discover the concepts together.
A few years ago our family hosted a German exchange student. One night we had a conversation about education and I asked her to compare her experience in German schools to ours. She said that in Germany, they had to write more papers about different topics. But it wasn’t just researching and then regurgitating information to write the papers. It involved a lot more thinking. Thinking about the topic and then coming up with a viewpoint and then defending that viewpoint.
This is what today’s students in America need to do more of: thinking. They need to put aside their devices and think, and then have a conversation with their peers and then write or produce something. One of the hallmarks of this unique charter school is that it is intentionally low tech. As instructors, we need to put aside the bells and whistles and trust our students enough that they can handle learning in a traditional way.
Admittedly, I have felt like a teacher needs to be an entertainer these days. But maybe not. Maybe it’s time to trust the texts. Time to dust off the old Latin books, to revisit the Greco-Roman canon of literature.
Vincit omnia veritas!
