Great Hearts Institute

What do we mean when we speak of the liberal arts?

The phrase is often repeated, but not always understood.

In this conversation, Jake Tawney sits down with Chris Perrin, CEO of Classical Academic Press, to recover the meaning of the liberal arts as arts of freedom. These are the habits and disciplines that form students as makers, thinkers, speakers, reasoners, and seekers of wisdom.

Their conversation moves from grammar, logic, and rhetoric to arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, showing how word and number help us perceive the order of reality.

Along the way, Perrin invites us to consider the deep relationship between language, mathematics, music, beauty, and truth, and why classical education depends upon recovering a richer vocabulary for education itself.

For classical educators, this is a timely reminder that education is not merely the transfer of information. It is the formation of free human beings who can see more clearly, speak more truthfully, and live more wisely.

Watch the full interview in ON Classical Education. https://open.substack.com/pub/classicaled/p/recovering-the-language-of-the-liberal?r=52duzv&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Should one study history?

Aristotle famously suggests that poetry is more philosophical than history because poetry concerns what may happen, while history concerns what has happened. But if history is more than a catalogue of facts, if it is a moral inquiry into what has formed us, then its place in education becomes far more urgent.

In this essay for ON Classical Education, Michael Austin reflects on The Golden Thread by Allen Guelzo and James Hankins, a work that treats the history of Western civilization not merely as information to be mastered, but as a moral inheritance to be understood, judged, and preserved.

Austin argues that civilization is not simply a record of achievements. It is the space in which human beings may seek truth, beauty, order, honor, gratitude, and the good life. To study history well is to learn what has made such a life possible, and what must be passed on if future generations are to inherit it.

For classical educators, this is a vital reminder. History is not merely about what happened. It is about who we are, what we owe, what we love, and what kind of human beings we are trying to form.

Read the full essay in ON Classical Education. https://open.substack.com/pub/classicaled/p/in-defense-of-western-civilization?r=52duzv&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

The Bill of Rights Institute is a national history and civics organization dedicated to promoting principled history and civic education for every child.

We gratefully acknowledge the The Bill of Rights Institute for its invaluable support of the National Symposium for Classical Education

Mathematics is often treated as merely practical: useful, necessary, and measurable.

But in the classical tradition, mathematics is also deeply formative. It teaches students how to think, how to wonder, how to reason from what is true, and how to perceive the order woven into the world.

In this conversation, Cammie Passey sits down with Jessica Kaminski, longtime math educator and founder of Math with Purpose, to discuss the beauty and depth of Singapore mathematics, the challenge of helping teachers relearn math conceptually, and the role of mathematics in the formation of students’ minds and souls.

Their conversation moves beyond methods and algorithms into something much richer: the teacher as artist, the classroom as a place of discovery, and mathematics as a human endeavor that cannot be replaced by technology.

Kaminski reminds us that good math teaching requires wonder, humility, careful language, and the ability to help students become lifelong thinkers.

For classical educators, this is an invitation to see mathematics not only as a subject to be mastered, but as a discipline that can cultivate wisdom.

Watch the full interview in ON Classical Education. https://open.substack.com/pub/classicaled/p/mathematics-wonder-and-the-art-of?r=52duzv&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Can virtue be taught?

In his latest essay for ON Classical Education, Andrew Ellison takes up one of the most important and often misunderstood questions in classical education: what can schools truly do to shape moral character?

Drawing on Aristotle, C.S. Lewis, Jacques Maritain, Russell Kirk, and others, Ellison argues that classical educators must speak more clearly and humbly about virtue, moral formation, and the proper work of the school.

For classical educators, this is an essay worth reading slowly.

Read Andrew Ellison’s latest essay, “Which Virtue? Whose Character Education?” at ON Classical Education.

https://classicaled.substack.com/publish/post/202143950?r=52duzv&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

The Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society teaches the historical ideas, traditions, and texts that have shaped the American constitutional order and society.

Special thanks to the Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at Ohio State for its generous support of the National Symposium for Classical Education.

Fairy tales are not merely stories children outgrow.

Rightly read, they are among the first great works of moral formation.

In this conversation with Jerilyn Olson, Professor Vigen Guroian invites classical educators to recover the deeper purpose of fairy tales: the awakening of the moral imagination. These enduring stories help children encounter goodness, courage, fear, wonder, sacrifice, and truth long before they can define such things abstractly.

Guroian also offers an important caution: great stories should not be reduced to tidy lessons or flattened into moral slogans. Children often receive more from a tale than adults realize, and the mystery, beauty, and drama of the story itself must be allowed to do its work.

The conversation also considers the importance of translation, illustration, repeated reading, and the teacher’s own formation as a careful reader.

For classical educators, this is a rich invitation to think again about the stories we place before children, and the kind of souls those stories help shape.

Watch the full interview in ON Classical Education. https://open.substack.com/pub/classicaled/p/fairy-tales-and-the-moral-imagination?r=52duzv&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

What does Shakespeare have to do with America?

More than we may first imagine.

In “Bard in the U.S.A.,” Sir Jonathan Bate traces Shakespeare’s remarkable American afterlife — from Revolutionary-era parody and Lincoln’s love of Macbeth to Ira Aldridge, Paul Robeson, James Baldwin, Orson Welles, and the founding of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

The essay reminds us that the great books do not sit quietly on the shelf. They enter public life. They shape conscience, expose prejudice, clarify moral conflict, and give language to a nation still arguing with itself.

For classical educators, this is no small point. To teach Shakespeare is not merely to preserve an old literary inheritance. It is to invite students into the deep drama of human nature: ambition, guilt, justice, mercy, courage, self-deception, and the search for truth.

And perhaps this is why Shakespeare remains so necessary. His plays do not flatten human beings into slogans. They “defeat all labels and complicate all battles,” as James Baldwin saw so clearly.

Read the full essay from Sir Jonathan Bate in ON Classical Education. https://open.substack.com/pub/classicaled/p/bard-in-the-usa?r=52duzv&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

The mission of the Institute for Excellence in Writing (IEW) is to equip teachers with methods and materials which will aid them in training their students to become confident and competent communicators and thinkers.

With deep appreciation, we thank the Institute for Excellence in Writing (IEW) for its generous support of the National Symposium for Classical Education.

What does it mean to educate students for citizenship, memory, and moral seriousness in a fractured age?

In this ON Classical Education interview, Robert Pondiscio joins Jen Ramirez for a thoughtful conversation on America’s 250th anniversary, the purpose of public education, and the urgent work of recovering reading and reason.

Pondiscio reflects on the 1976 Bicentennial as a formative moment in his own education, then asks a question classical educators should take seriously today:

Are we helping students love and understand their country before asking them to critique it?

The conversation moves from civic formation to curriculum, literacy, background knowledge, and the deeper purpose of schooling itself.

For classical educators, this is well worth your time. Watch the full interview 👇

Recovering an Education Worth Inheriting Robert Pondiscio and Jennifer Ramirez