Do. One. Thing.

by Andrew Ellison

In Book VIII of the Republic (557c-d), Socrates offers an interesting account of the nature of democracy, characterizing it as the “prettiest” sort of regime, “like a general store”, containing all sorts of interesting wares and multi-colored things to choose from. Fyne knackes for ladies, / cheape, choyce, brave and newe, as the song by John Dowland (1563-1526) goes.

This is no good thing for the soul, he goes on to argue, for the infinite choices and wide freedoms of life in a democratic city beget a certain type of aimlessness and lack of purpose. The abundance of choices becomes a burden, and while it is possible to live a good life in such a “general store” of a city, there are many ways to go wrong.

There is a lesson about academic leadership to be taken from this. For while teachers and schools today have access to more pedagogical and curricular resources than at any time in human history—a seemingly-unlimited menu of lesson plans, textbooks, teacher guides, ready-to-print worksheets, methods, manuals, syllabi, workshops, articles, conferences, and even symposia to choose from—the choices in effect become a curse for the teacher, overtaxed and over-tasked already: How do I discern from among a thousand choices what’s good, better, and truly terrible? Where am I supposed to find the time to review all these choices? I just need something that WORKS.

School leaders are faced with a similar swarm of choices when considering how to pursue faculty development over the course of a year or from year to year. There are so many great books and essays on classical education to choose from, practical resources on classroom discipline and order, non-

intelligence-insulting business books on teamwork, “growth mindset”, or conflict resolution. What should we do as a faculty this year? Grimm’s Tales “Teach Like a Champion”, Dostoyevsky, Christopher Perrin, or Pat Lencioni? We did Carol Dweck last year, so maybe some Shakespeare? “Love and Logic”? Charlotte Mason or Moby-Dick?

When faced with so many choices about curriculum, textbooks, methods, and professional development, my categorical guidance for teachers and school leaders is: choose ONE thing and do it well. Stick with that one thing. Do it again and again, and get good at it. Get focused. Do it again next year. Sharpen your focus. Get really, really good at it. Stay good at it. Build a culture of institutional craft-knowledge that is so strong and de-centralized that it can sustain staff turnover every year.

For education and culture-building require constancy of purpose and methods. Variety, novelty, and experimentation will always stop your efforts dead in their tracks.

Permit me to offer a few examples.

The practice of a faculty, under the direction of the headmaster, engaging in a year-long program of liberal learning together is essential to a school no matter how busy everyone is. It could be selected Grimm’s tales, a Jane Austen novel, a series of poems, Plato’s Republic, painting and drawing under the art teachers’ guidance, or even working through Book I of Euclid. (This is SO HIGHLY RECOMMENDED—if you want to get people out of their comfort zones and learning together, straight Euclid, no mixers, ice, or chasers, is the potent potable to serve up.)

However, the culture-building and community-strengthening power of an all-faculty liberal learning plan is squandered when, instead of doing one single thing, a school gives teachers options and splits people up by interest and self-selection. This fragments instead of uniting. One group reads some Plato, another group reads Poe, yet another group tackles Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a third reads The Velveteen Rabbit. Sure, the learning is all liberal and enriching, and it’s fun to get together with a small group of like-minded colleagues and get into a nichey topic of shared and narrow interest. But this cafeteria-style approach doesn’t build focus and purpose amongst faculty. Its effect is to pull teachers apart into separate cliques.

Another example: in my experience, there’s no more restless, always-searching for perfection, strive-seek-find-never-yield group of liberal educators than Latin teachers. Their passion for the absolute is inspiring, and Western civilization would be a much better one if the aggregate masses paid one-tenth as much attention to words and sentence syntax as Classicists do.

The obverse side of the coin is that, when left to their (and I taught Latin for a number of years in my career, so I can say OUR) own devices, Latin teachers are inclined to 1) experiment with curriculum in search of the mythical “best”, and 2) get into sectarian arguments with each other, sometimes quite fierce, about which Latin teaching methods and resources are superior and which are barbaric and a threat to the Western mind.

When this passion for perfection isn’t reined in by the headmaster at the school level, the unfortunate result will be a disjointed and discontinuous experience for the students as they ascend from grade to grade. Sometimes I have even seen one cohort of students get three totally different Latin curricula three years in a row in a single school, each time more or less starting over; instead of a vertically-aligned and cumulative Latin 1, 2, and 3, the experience was more of a “Latin A, अ ,א”.

Insist upon the tightest unity and focus upon the things that matter most in your schools: the culture and vision of liberal teaching and learning.

A final example can be found in the person of a jovial and always-cheerful Humane Letters teacher I worked with decades ago who suffered from an acute case of tinkeritis curricularis. In his endless pursuit of doing things better, he wrote up and presented, after just two years on the job with a well-thought-out proposal for completely changing the 9th grade HL course he had been teaching: big changes to the reading list in both selections and sequence, a new US history textbook, a hugely-expanded list of primary source documents to be read, many quite obscure, a totally novel music component to the course. Such creativity, such good intentions! And yet, the answer had to be no, you aren’t allowed to do any of that. Teach 9th grade Humane Letters as it was given to you.It is the measure of you, not you of it. A Great Hearts education is categorically different from the paradigm of the professorial guild, in which each has “academic freedom” to teach whatever and however it pleases him to do so. Here, we teach the fundamentals as determined by an educators’ consensus that stretches back decades—not the personal interests of individual teachers. You will either make 9th grade Humane Letters as it is into your passion, and pronto, or you will be assigned to teach something else.

School leaders, it is up to you and you alone to maintain academic and cultural focus, unity, and coherence in your school. You are the safeguard of this principle and no one else. Resist pressure to tinker, experiment, or mix it up. Boldly and unapologetically insist that teachers at the grade level and subject level stay tightly coordinated in the fundamentals. Resist those requests to spend $12,000 on new textbooks every few years and junk the old ones that cost $9000 at the time and haven’t even fully depreciated on the balance sheets. Prevent outbreaks of tinkeritis curricularis, and be willing to impose unpopular measures to stop the spread.

And insist upon the tightest unity and focus upon the things that matter most in your schools: the culture and vision of liberal teaching and learning. Instead of searching for new sources and readings year after to year to keep from getting bored, revisit the same ones. And instead of letting choice and diversity in core faculty development activities multiply like the selections in José Chung’s incendiary pan-Asian-Mexican-fusion* lunch buffet, stick to the simple loaves and fishes, which have a way of multiplying and feeding everyone—with plenty of leftovers.

*This was a real restaurant we once saw off a highway in southeastern Michigan. To “José” we say: just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

Andrew Ellison has worked at all levels of the classical education movement for almost thirty years. In 1997 he joined the faculty at Tempe Preparatory Academy, at that time one of the first classical, liberal arts public charter schools in the country.  After six years of teaching Latin, Humane Letters, Drama, and German, he became the founding headmaster of Veritas Preparatory Academy, the successful launch of which led to the establishment of Great Hearts just a year later.  After a decade as the school’s headmaster, he moved into assistant superintendent and executive director work overseeing schools and headmasters in Arizona and subsequently in Texas.  After a stint in higher education as a VP at the University of Dallas, he has returned to serve Great Hearts as a Senior Advisor for Academics and Culture.