By Cozy Faber
I watched again today a piece on you-tube of John Taylor Gatto (former award winning public educator) talking about the 14 qualities that graduates of upper echelon private schools leave their high-school careers with. Among these graduates are many of our presidents, many who have run for president– they are the leaders of this country and they have behind them an education that has supported them every step of the way.
As I watched this lecture I realized how so many of these 14 qualities found in Mr. Gatto’s observations are introduced and fostered at SLO Classical Academy. I became excited knowing that my children, along with the other 209 students on our campus, are on a path to an education that is in line with the best of the best boarding schools across the country.
Today I will start with the first quality: “No child should graduate without a sense of human nature.”
How do these schools facilitate this knowledge? Here you go: History, philosophy, literature and law. According to Gotto these four mighty agencies of human history and the human mind have a wealth of information to afford an individual with the ability to develop a sense of human nature. Granted, we do not have a study of law here at SLOCA– clearly this is a subject left for the higher grades– but we DO have history, we DO have literature and our middle school kids are introduced to the foundations of philosophy through their logic coursework. I’d say that based on Gatto’s first observation and how it is achieved, SLO Classical Academy offers each student a baseline from which to begin their individual development of their own sense of human nature.
