Why We Teach Our First Graders Shakespeare: Michael Fitzgerald

American Thought Leaders

Jan Jekielek

Government, News, Politics

4.9 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 3 December 2024

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As part of our special series on alternative models of education, I’m sitting down with Michael Fitzgerald, principal of Northern Schoolhouse, an upstate New York private school focused on classical literature and art, immersion in nature, and nurturing strong moral character based on time-tested virtues.

“This is the trend in education: ‘It doesn’t matter what you’re reading, as long as you’re reading.’ And I actually disagree with that. I think it’s very important what you’re reading,” Fitzgerald says.

“In the end, we want them becoming autonomous people who know how to move themselves well through the world, as truly good people who recognize beauty,” he says.

“If you recognize beauty, you can recognize what’s good. And those are highly correlated in the classical world, especially in the Socratic sense. They talk a lot about truth, beauty, and goodness.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Transcript

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0:00.0	What we're doing at the schoolhouse is we've taken away those letter grades, but we've
0:05.2	simply filled the entire atmosphere with the best things you can learn.
0:09.3	And of course, the students don't want to study Shakespeare.
0:11.4	They don't necessarily want to study Charles Dickens and Jane Austen.
0:14.4	It's hard.
0:15.6	But actually, it's about going back into tradition, back into the humanities.
0:19.7	And as you constantly go back to the origin, your work becomes more creative and it becomes more original.
0:25.6	Skills are highly important, but those most sophisticated skills come out of rich, challenging content.
0:31.6	As part of our special series on alternative models of education, I'm sitting down with Michael Fitzgerald. He's the principal of Northern Schoolhouse,
0:39.3	an upstate New York private school focused on classical education,
0:43.3	nature and art, and nurturing strong moral character based on time-tested virtues.
0:48.3	In the end, we want them becoming autonomous people
0:51.3	who know how to move themselves well through the world, who recognize beauty.
0:55.0	And if you recognize beauty, you could recognize what's good.
0:58.0	This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanyi Kellick.
1:01.0	Michael Fitzgerald, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
1:06.0	Thank you. Thank you for having me.
1:08.0	So tell me about Northern Schoolhouse. Well, uh Schoolhouse. It's an elementary school. It's grades one through five, though we can, some of our six graders can stay with us. So it's like one through five, one through six. It's a part of a larger system called Northern Academy, which was originally a middle school and high school.
1:28.6	So it serves grade six through 12 and rigorous academics, doing some wonderful things, focus
1:36.6	on dance and music and fine arts, just a very well-rounded school.
1:40.6	And I was working at the academy and then they asked, do you want to start an elementary school? My wife and I, she's also very forward thinking, I think, with education, but with this hard line, traditional emphasis.
1:52.0	And so we started putting some ideas together and out came Northern Schoolhouse.
	...

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