Using the Past to Study the Good | Kathleen O’Toole

In this episode of Anchored, Jeremy is joined by Kathleen O’Toole, the assistant provost for K-12 Education at Hillsdale College. In this conversation, Dr. Kathleen O'Toole discusses her journey in education, the impact of classical education on K-12 schooling, and the role of Hillsdale in shaping educational practices across the country. She emphasizes the importance of a solid foundational education rooted in the liberal arts and the mission of classical schools to cultivate good citizens. The discussion also touches on the political implications of education, the future of classical education, and resources for educators.

Transcript

Jeremy Tate (00:02.882)
Welcome back to the Anchor Podcast. Folks, we are here today with Dr. Kathleen O'Toole from Hillsdale College. name you may know already. Dr. O'Toole is the Assistant Provost for K-12 Education at Hillsdale College where she leads Hillsdale's work in K-12 education, including the K-12 Education Office and Hillsdale Academy.

Prior to joining Hillsdale, she was a founding headmaster of Founders Classical Academy of Leander, a great school, I can attest to that, a classical charter serving 700 students in grades seven to 12. She has taught at the college and high school levels at Claremont McKenna College, Morehead State University, and Founders Classical Academy of Leander. Dr. O'Toole was an editor for the Claremont Review of Books, a Publius Fellow at the Claremont Institute, and served on the board right here

at the classic learning test. Dr. O'Toole has presented academic papers on Aristotle, Cicero, St. Augustine, Shakespeare, and Alexis de Tocqueville and her doctoral dissertation on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Politics examines the place of moral virtue in the happy life. Dr. O'Toole, thanks so much for being with us.

Kathleen O'Toole (01:16.525)
Hey Jeremy, thanks for having me.

Jeremy Tate (01:19.064)
So thrilled to be chatting with you as we often do in the Anchor podcast. It's great to just kick off and hear a bit about your kind of early education growing up. you love school as a little girl? Did you imagine yourself as a teacher? Then my mom would like set her dolls up and teach all of her dolls when she was like four. that you or what was school like?

Kathleen O'Toole (01:36.493)
Yes.

Kathleen O'Toole (01:40.385)
I loved school. I always loved school. At my wedding, my dad gave a toast and part of it was about me, I can't even remember, but me dressing up on the first day of kindergarten and being ready the day before with my little jumper and all of that. So I've always loved school. I've always wanted to do more of it. I think the main reason I went to graduate school is I just liked school. I just want to keep doing school. And then when graduate school was over, I ended up starting a school.

So I love school, I love being in it, I love the community, and I've been to many different types of schools by this point. And I like that too, you I like going into a school and being able to figure out what it's about. And I've learned you can kind of tell, I mean, you've probably experienced this too, you can kind of tell after just a couple of hours in a building what the place is about.

Jeremy Tate (02:36.622)
Now many of our folks here at CLT are Hillsdale graduates. In fact, I believe almost our entire marketing department led by Soren Schwab, great, great Hillsdale graduates. And I've heard these stories, know, folks just walk into class and your dad, of course, who is, you know, the president of Hillsdale College, Larry Arnn, who's maybe one of the most influential voices in higher ed.

going up and saying, what is the good? What is the beautiful? Asking these questions just to a student walking the class, you know? So if they experience that as just a student, what was it like being the daughter of Dr. Arn? Were you getting these questions just fresh out of bed at six in the morning?

Kathleen O'Toole (03:17.699)
I will tell you, I think my dad is a great man and one sign of people who are great men is they're always the same. They're not a different person depending on who they're talking to. And so the Dr. Arn that you see in the halls at Hillsdale College and in the lunchroom at Hillsdale, that's my dad.

Jeremy Tate (03:25.868)
I love that. I love that. Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (03:38.102)
Yeah, so you were having those in a lot. mean, you grew up around the dinner table.

conversations. mean you were kind of, I think of education and I majored in education, taught for 10 years. I never really thought of education as a form of enculturation until getting around classical educators and seeing the way they think about community and culture in a place like Hillsdale that is what students and this is why maybe doesn't work as well online.

is this transformative in-person experience. But you were around the dinner table, I'm sure, with other professors, and you were kind of peering into this life of the mind. Did that have a deep impact to you as a young girl?

Kathleen O'Toole (04:20.649)
I think anything you do as a child has a deep impact on you. I had a very happy, very normal childhood. And yeah, there were professors everywhere and graduate students everywhere, it was, I was a normal kid and I was raised in a normal way. And I was never made to feel like I had to go off and, you know, live the life that I ended up leading. I ended up doing it because I wanted to and I was suited to it.

Yeah, was a very happy childhood and a very not overtly a learned childhood, you know? It was just raising kids is serious business and I think my parents did it well. I look back on my childhood fondly.

Jeremy Tate (05:06.721)
And you're one of how many?

Kathleen O'Toole (05:08.845)
for.

Jeremy Tate (05:10.06)
Okay, that's a good number. That's a good number. Well, good. Well, let's talk about the work that you're doing now leading up, you know, this all over the country. I think of states like Florida. I mean, the influence of Hillsdale College is influencing the country as a whole. And there's so many just incredible testimonials of folks that have their own kiddos in a Hillsdale connected, a Hillsdale classical charter school. I've toured some of these schools and I've met a lot of the folks

along the journey. You've been doing this work now for a number of years so I'm wondering if you could maybe folks who are not familiar with this at all maybe haven't heard of this concept. What does it mean for a college, Hillsdale or any college, to be involved in a K-12 space? How and why did Hillsdale get into this in the first place?

Kathleen O'Toole (06:01.379)
Hillsdale has been involved in K through 12 education for a long time, for 30 something years now. We trace it back to the beginning of Hillsdale Academy, which is a private school here in town. It was founded by the former president of the college before Dr. Arn came to the helm. And it was intended to do two things. It was intended to serve as a model for schools across the country, but also provide

local people here, not just faculty and staff of the college, but the community with a quality educational option. So Hillsdale Academy was founded in 1990 and very quickly it garnered kind of a nationwide following of private Christian schools mostly that used its curriculum. And the curriculum was provided just for the cost of printing and many people came and toured Hillsdale Academy and then went back and started their own schools.

And that effort existed for a really long time at the college. still exists. Hillsdale College or Hillsdale Academy is going strong, serves as a model for lots of schools, including Hillsdale's classical charter and now private schools, which started through the Barney Charter School Initiative and then the K-12 Education Office in 2010 and 2020. And so we've just, we've always felt a responsibility to teach. And we know that when you teach,

Jeremy Tate (07:04.428)
Mm hmm.

Kathleen O'Toole (07:29.207)
You teach by precept and example. So it's good to tell, but also good to show. And Hillsdale Academy has been a place where people could come to see what an excellent classical school looks like.

Jeremy Tate (07:41.58)
And Hillsdale Academy is a Christian school, is that right? Okay, and are they a member school of ACCS or SCL or?

Kathleen O'Toole (07:45.613)
That's right. Yeah.

Kathleen O'Toole (07:54.627)
They do some things with SCL at the Academy. We're friendly with SCL. that, you know, the Academy pre-exists a lot of those membership organizations. And so it's, you know, it's...

Jeremy Tate (08:07.534)
Yeah, I was thinking about that. mean, just kind of the, maybe 83, the Logos School, but there weren't many in 1990 of Christian schools that...

were talking about the great books and we're kind of using the language of classical. So Hillsdale Academy became kind of a model school. People are looking at this and they're saying, hey, we want something like this. And then from that, it kind of got more formalized. And now how many schools are there now that are kind of part of this network?

Kathleen O'Toole (08:42.499)
Well, we're with about 30 member and candidate member schools, and those are schools that we're visiting all the time. They're visiting us all the time. And then we have an additional 50 or so curriculum schools. And these are schools that we're providing the Hillsdale College K through 12 program guide, we call it. This is our comprehensive liberal arts scope and sequence for K through 12 schools. And we provide it to schools that are mission minded at no cost.

Jeremy Tate (09:05.633)
Mm-hmm.

Kathleen O'Toole (09:13.311)
And so that network is growing and we hope that it'll grow increasingly because the curriculum is just excellent. It's been built here at the college over the course of several decades. It's authored by professors here at the college, some of the best teachers in our affiliated schools and some people in our office too. And it provides what so many private schools have needed.

and public schools too. A cohesive plan for students starting in kindergarten and going all the way up into 12th grade. A curriculum integrated across the subjects and that builds on itself. And schools that use it can say with honesty to their parents, when you enroll your child here as a kindergartner or whatever grade, we promise that we have a plan for this child that will go all the way up until graduation from high school.

Jeremy Tate (09:50.029)
Mm-hmm.

Kathleen O'Toole (10:10.571)
and everything we teach will be with that end in mind.

Jeremy Tate (10:16.494)
I love that. And for the 30 schools, are these all, are these all what we call a classical charter school? Or are some of them private Christian schools? Okay, okay.

Kathleen O'Toole (10:26.403)
Some are private. Yeah, we started doing, so the Barney Charter School Initiative was started in 2010 and it was helping local people start charter schools. And we would provide them with a curriculum and teacher training and leadership training and board training and everything they needed to know in order to get a school founded.

Jeremy Tate (10:40.909)
Okay.

Kathleen O'Toole (10:51.093)
And increasingly we've had interest from private school founding groups. And so we started helping people found private schools a couple of years ago.

Jeremy Tate (10:59.106)
So Dr. Till, we experienced this a year and a half ago or so when Florida was adopting the classic learning test as an alternative. And we kind of thought we're a test. Yeah, you're reading some Jane Austen. You're reading maybe Aristotle. But that's not that scary. And there were some folks, Florida news outlets, there people losing their minds.

that it was this crazy thing that they were adding a third option for a test that heaven forbid kids would read Frederick Douglass or Shakespeare or something. And there has been, I think of kind of the story in Tennessee, some stories of folks sounding an alarm of a Hillsdale school. I mean, you look at the actual substance of what you're doing and it's like, okay, what parent doesn't want this for their kid? I think that that's not many, but,

So is, so I guess kind of what I'm asking is a political question of is, you know, it a political move? Would you say that the work you're doing transcends politics? Or would you say it is kind of everything is a part of politics and this has to be as well?

Kathleen O'Toole (12:11.127)
Yeah, good question. I think sometimes the work of classical schools gets painted as if it's politicized work. And you guys, as you say, have seen this with the CLT too. In truth, what we are teaching in classical schools is what every school child used to learn in public school a couple of generations ago. And there's nothing politicized about it. The work of educating

Jeremy Tate (12:19.832)
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Tate (12:30.818)
Hmm.

Kathleen O'Toole (12:39.971)
K through 12 students, young students, and they're still young even when they're juniors and seniors in high school, is not the work of political indoctrination. And if it becomes that work, then we're not doing a good job. Now, to answer your question a little bit more fully about are these schools political schools, one quick way of explaining it is they're not politicized schools. They shouldn't be, right?

Jeremy Tate (12:50.904)
Hmm.

Jeremy Tate (13:04.662)
Okay, okay.

Kathleen O'Toole (13:07.715)
If students are coming out of their classical schools or their K through 12 schools with having spent a lot of time debating the issues of the day, forming early strong partisan opinions about whatever's in the media, then that's an indication that some important learning time has been sacrificed for the sake of something that is not eternal. And we should be spending our time in school focusing on the things that are eternal.

Jeremy Tate (13:18.947)
Hmm.

Jeremy Tate (13:34.04)
Mm.

Kathleen O'Toole (13:37.987)
Now does that mean we don't talk about politics? Well it depends what you mean by politics. Politics, if you look at Aristotle's politics, is the study of how human communities seek and reach their good. Aristotle says at the very beginning of the politics, man is a political animal. And what he means by that is not that we angrily debate each other as talking heads on the news by nature, but that we're made to live in community with each other.

Jeremy Tate (13:53.176)
Hmm.

Kathleen O'Toole (14:07.139)
A happy human life is lived in company of other human beings. And that group that they form, that political community that they form has an idea about what is good. And that idea of what is good could be right or wrong. But whether it's right or wrong, it will have a profound effect on the outlook of the individuals within the political community. And so we should be contributing to strong political communities.

Jeremy Tate (14:11.843)
the

Kathleen O'Toole (14:36.723)
as individuals for the sake of ourselves and for the sake of the people who are around us. And thinking that way about the importance of human community, I think is an important part of a child's education, but it does not mean forming a narrowly partisan opinion about hot button issues. That would be irresponsible.

Jeremy Tate (14:59.278)
Okay, Okay. That's a very helpful distinctive, I think, to make for sure. I wonder, there's kind of a paradox I've noticed with classical education where they actually talk much far less than my experience in a public school, almost 10 years. We would debate, you know, typical contemporary hot button issues, and they would just come up a lot.

And I think there's almost this paradox of classical Edwards, like they actually can have more insight of the current because they're not always in it, you know?

They have something to get, they have something to observe and to contrast the current moment with, because they've received a formation that's rooted in a different time period as well. mean, drawing them out of like the here and now, I think is part of the work of any good college or K-12 school, which Hillsdale Charter seem to definitely be doing.

Kathleen O'Toole (15:55.959)
Yeah, I I would put it a little bit differently, I think. I think classical schools should be concerned with all things. I think we look to the past because there's more of the past and there's more stuff in the past to look at than there is the present. But we're not rooted in the past unless the past has something good to teach us. And we're interested as human beings, right? We're interested in learning all things.

Jeremy Tate (16:17.644)
Mm-hmm.

Kathleen O'Toole (16:24.471)
particularly the things that have a bearing on our own happiness in life and the happiness of the people who are around us and who we are close to in life. But we're interested in the good, right? That's what an education should be focused on is giving us knowledge of the good or right opinions about the good. And so the decisive question is not like, we creating children? Are we helping raise children who are

part of this world or these times or not, the decisive question is, are we raising children who will be thoughtful students of the good? And there is good, right, in present times. There's evil, too, just like there was in the past, the recent past and the distant past. What you've got to be able to do is have the intellectual formation and the content knowledge, especially of history,

Jeremy Tate (17:03.875)
No.

Kathleen O'Toole (17:22.765)
to be able to sort through the past and figure out what is good in it, what can I draw from it that will be instructive to me today and what.

you know, and what is is otherwise? Does that make sense?

Jeremy Tate (17:38.478)
It does, yeah. I'm wondering, Hillsdale as a college, 1,200, 1,400 students, not big, but it punches way above its weight in terms of national influence. And even in terms of showing other colleges, smaller liberal arts colleges, what is possible. And I think it's had a good kind of reforming impact on a number of colleges.

What you're doing on the K-12 side is there a similar hope? I you've got 30 campuses that are partners, they're using Hillsdale curriculum, but in terms of influence, of folks getting a vision for what is possible, what a great education actually looks like, is that part of the vision, part of the hope with your work?

Kathleen O'Toole (18:23.905)
Yeah, very much so. And probably now would be a good time for me to explain the way in which we work with schools because it's unusual. I don't know of another organization that works the way that we work with schools and the way that we work with schools is considered and it's part of the mission. We do not accept any funding from or give any funding to schools that we work with.

It's entirely application-based and merit-based. And we try to accept schools. When schools apply to work with us, either as member schools or curriculum schools, we try to accept them because we think there's no movement in American education more important than the classical education movement. But also, we really believe in the ability of local people.

Jeremy Tate (18:52.792)
Okay.

Kathleen O'Toole (19:20.995)
local founding groups to create good schools. They have to have human virtue and talent. There's no substitute for that, but there's an incredible amount of talent to be found out there. And this mission, the mission of a K through 12 school, a K through 12 classical school is a powerful mission that speaks really strongly to people. And so if people are hearing the call of the mission and have the talent to start an excellent school,

We should help them do that. And we think they will do a good job on the local particulars, if they are the right kind of founding group. And they will do a better job on the particulars than we would here from Hillsdale, Michigan. So you were asking me before we started the call, how similar are the Hillsdale schools? And they're really different from each other.

Jeremy Tate (19:51.683)
Hmm.

Jeremy Tate (20:07.106)
Okay, okay.

Jeremy Tate (20:13.858)
Yeah.

Kathleen O'Toole (20:17.495)
because they're in Orange County, California, New Mexico, Northern Florida, Southern Florida, Georgia, you know, the Midwest, and they kind of take on the local character of the places in which they're located. Superficially, they're very different from each other, therefore, but on the principals, they are, the member schools are very strong and they are identical.

Jeremy Tate (20:18.139)
okay.

Jeremy Tate (20:27.49)
Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (20:39.949)
Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (20:46.478)
I wanted to ask you about this. One of the classes I will never forget at Louisiana State, I had to take two. had to take one, just Louisiana history. You're not taking that at every other university of course, and one just Louisiana politics. In hindsight, I really love that I got to take those classes and it was focused on kind of the local particulars that would have just been unique and we got to go into Huey Long and all of this great stuff.

I think it's one of the concerns I've had as we think about the influence of the Department of Education and kind of this uniformity. I you're in a very different place and context if you're in a place like Orange County, California, where I've heard there were like 3,000 apps in the first couple of weeks to that school. The demand is absolutely insane.

Kathleen O'Toole (21:30.497)
waiting list for Orange County Classical Academy is out of control. It's regularly over a thousand children to get into that school.

Jeremy Tate (21:34.508)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (21:39.232)
It's incredible, it's incredible. Yeah, but so where do you draw that line though in terms of, mean, Hillsdale's got the name, Hillsdale's got kind of the name. So I think a lot of schools want like your Hillsdale connected classical charter, but where is the line in terms of where Hillsdale can kind of be prescriptive or this is what a Hillsdale curriculum looks like and then kind of autonomy at the local level?

Kathleen O'Toole (22:04.045)
Well, they apply to work with us. And in an application, we're looking for two things, willing and able. You know, they've got to be ready to do it. They've got to understand what the mission is, you know, in a kind of a deep way. And then they've got to be able to found a classical school. And anyone who started a classical school, charter or private, will tell you it's an incredible amount of work. And over many, many years, you know, unpaid.

Jeremy Tate (22:16.43)
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Tate (22:30.04)
Mm.

Kathleen O'Toole (22:33.889)
And if you're doing it properly, you don't really get any glory or honor from doing it. And so, and so when people, when people come to us and they know that, or they're receptive to that, that's very, that's a very positive thing. You know, that means they can, they can probably do this, right? If they're, if they're able to, you know, devote the time and devote the energy. And I will say we have never advertised Hillsdale, the opportunity to found a Hillsdale member school or apply for the Hillsdale curriculum.

Jeremy Tate (22:38.124)
Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (23:02.038)
Okay.

Kathleen O'Toole (23:04.159)
And we've never had to, mean, applications just keep going up and up and up because people adore this mission and they are willing to do an incredible amount of sacrificial work to bring it to their community.

Jeremy Tate (23:19.194)
Mm-hmm. I love that. And then what is the dream? mean, five years, 10 years, 20 years out from now, you know? What are your hopes or what are some of the goals for your work?

Kathleen O'Toole (23:31.725)
Well, think our member schools are really excellent places. I think they will continue to demonstrate their excellence. When we work with a new school, it usually starts kindergarten through sixth grade. So it takes some time for these schools to develop. There's no such thing as putting your Zeus lightning bolt in a specific place and having an excellent K-12 classical school pop up right away.

And so we, you know, we help these places get founded and we help make sure that they're getting founded on the right principals and that they have the right board governance set up. They have the right person at the helm because the choice of headmaster or principal is, is like the choice for the school. And then we, we do all of the teacher training. We provide the curriculum. We visit the school many, many times over the course of its early years.

Jeremy Tate (24:16.684)
Hmm.

Kathleen O'Toole (24:29.345)
And then they come here to Hillsdale all the time too. We train their boards, we train their leaders. We have a massive summer conference that fills up the entire Hillsdale College campus as soon as the students go home. part of my job, I'm lucky now, part of my job is just figuring out where the bottlenecks are and removing the bottlenecks. And so we think that we're in a position to grow.

Jeremy Tate (24:35.352)
Mm-hmm.

Kathleen O'Toole (24:57.825)
especially in the curriculum schools. We want the member schools that we work with to be really excellent and we want to be able to devote our attention to them to make sure that they have the support they need to grow well. But there's no reason that the curriculum school program can't get much bigger.

Jeremy Tate (25:00.684)
Okay.

Jeremy Tate (25:16.526)
So I wonder if we could talk for a few minutes about just kind of where we're at in this moment of kind of the growth of classical ed nationwide. I think we probably met back in 2017, 2017, maybe 2018 around that time. I think back then most folks that I would meet, I'm just on a typical college campus or just.

family, friends, like most people hadn't heard of classical education, even in 2017. And I feel like now everybody's heard of classical education. Everybody's got some picture of it. It's very different. And I think about the work that y'all have been doing now for 30 years. We're a different moment now where folks do have some conception of kind of what this looks like.

Is this, are we at a turning point? mean, is Classical Ed, are you hopeful Classical Ed is going to once again be kind of the new normal in American education? How far away are we from that?

Kathleen O'Toole (26:23.661)
Well, I certainly hope for that because it is normal. Like regardless of how people think of it, it is normal education. There's nothing rarefied about it. There's nothing specific about it. It's just solid foundational learning in the liberal arts and sciences. And it's treating kids as if they're going to grow up to be good people or not good people and helping them become good people.

Jeremy Tate (26:32.449)
Yeah.

Kathleen O'Toole (26:52.225)
so that they can be happy. And it's very common sense. One thing I say frequently is that we didn't invent anything about classical education at Hillsdale College. We're just reminding people of what they already know about education. And so I think if we think of the classical education movement that way, the hopes for it are pretty much boundless. I think we're getting to a point in the conversation among classical educators where we're figuring out

Jeremy Tate (27:05.582)
Mm-hmm.

Kathleen O'Toole (27:22.115)
What are the things that we agree on? What are the things that we disagree on? You know, there are conversations about the canon, there are conversations about the curriculum, conversations about whether classical education can happen properly in a secular setting. And I think we should have those conversations. You know, and I think that if we have them in good faith and try to learn from them, it will make the movement stronger. I think if we don't have the conversations, we're in danger of sort of separating out into

Jeremy Tate (27:46.603)
Okay.

Kathleen O'Toole (27:51.447)
different camps that are pretty ineffective compared to how effective we could be if we were pulling in the same direction and having the talks that we need to have.

Jeremy Tate (28:04.163)
Have you been on campus? And if our listeners could tour a couple of these schools just to get an idea for what these schools are like, are there any that you could recommend?

Kathleen O'Toole (28:16.941)
Hillsdale member schools? Yeah, I would go to Seven Oaks Classical School in Ellitsville, Indiana. That is a beautiful place, led by Dr. Steven Shipp, who's been there since the beginning. Dr. Shipp will be embarrassed to hear me praise him, but he's truly excellent and kind of unassuming about it, which is impressive.

Basketball is king in Indiana or was in the public school days of Indiana. And so when you go to that school, the gym, the entrance to the gym is like, it's like a limestone temple to basketball. There are columns with like basketballs on them. And it's a beautiful, it's a beautiful building and they've done wonderful things with it over their time there. Yeah, go to Seven Oaks. Seven Oaks is awesome.

Jeremy Tate (28:46.89)
yeah.

Jeremy Tate (28:58.157)
Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (29:10.616)
Fantastic. And then what would you recommend for our audience for reading? there a book in case they want to just get a better sense, understanding the work that Hillsdale College is doing in this, a book or an article that you can point folks to?

Kathleen O'Toole (29:25.175)
well, I would read if you are thinking about being a teacher or if you already are a teacher and want to become even better at it than you already are, I would look at Tried and True by Dan Copeland. That book is, it's so good. It's so good. He's, he's the, I don't think he thinks of himself this way, but in some ways he's like the architect of all of the teacher training that we do in Hillsdale schools.

Jeremy Tate (29:35.916)
Yes. Anything with the name Dan Copeland next to it. I love Dan Copeland. Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (29:50.352)
Kathleen O'Toole (29:52.863)
And so, and Tried and True is such a gift because we've been teaching our teachers these things through, or Dan's been teaching them these things through lectures at the summer conference for a decade now. But now it's in a book and they can read it throughout the year without having to be here and talking to Dan. So that book is really good and very helpful. Just like Dan Copeland himself. Good.

Jeremy Tate (30:03.554)
Hmm.

Jeremy Tate (30:11.98)
Right and true, okay. He may be the single most joyful human I know.

Kathleen O'Toole (30:18.379)
He's always like that. He's very happy. He's a very happy person.

Jeremy Tate (30:22.166)
Yeah, and I think that is, you when I think about all the classical schools I tour and just the years of experience I had in New York.

schools and I think the main difference is kind the levity, the joy that you experience. You you see it in the halls, you see it in the teachers, you know, I mean there's this very worn down experience that think so many are having in the mainstream K-12 public schools. I felt that for sure and just to see the joy that teachers and students have in these classical schools is incredible and I know my reputation and getting on the ground, I it's the case at all the Hillsdale schools as well.

Kathleen O'Toole (31:01.825)
Yeah. Well thanks, Jeremy.

Jeremy Tate (31:05.335)
We're here with Dr. Kathleen O'Toole from Hillsdale College doing great work for K-12 education at Hillsdale. Dr. O'Toole, thanks so much for being with us today.

Kathleen O'Toole (31:17.219)
Thanks for having me. Great to chat.