How Should We Educate the Educators?
Plus: A UATX dean speaks out against 'slippery' political language.
At least once a week, UATX transforms our campus from a hub of casual conversation and the daily business of student life into a lecture hall for speakers and scholars.
Last week, we welcomed Wilfred Reilly, Associate Professor of Political Science at Kentucky State University, who encouraged students to resist ideological oversimplification of complex issues. Yesterday, legal scholar and former president of the American Civil Liberties Union Nadine Strossen and University of Texas professor David Rabban dropped by for a conversation on the contours of academic liberty.
We also recently hosted a landmark gathering of educators and invited our Dean of Economics, Politics, and History to reflect on buzzwords that have been much in the news.
New UATX Center Accelerates Innovation in K-12 Education
Since its inception, the University of Austin has been rethinking how we educate educators.
Earlier this month, UATX hosted the inaugural colloquium for the Center for Education and Public Service (CEPS), established to equip teachers, entrepreneurs, and policymakers for the future of education.
Under the leadership of Erin Valdez, executive director of the CEPS incubator, the Center will design new curricula and programs from the ground up.
Among the speakers at the event were the Honorable Brad Buckley (Chairman of the Texas House Committee on Public Education) and the Honorable Paul Renner (Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives), who discussed the opportunities that universal school choice will afford education entrepreneurs.
“Parent empowerment is not an either/or discussion,” Buckley said. “There will always be public schools in Texas, so why do we have dogmatic opposition to giving parents options?”
UATX President Pano Kanelos opened the colloquium, “Looking Back to Look Forward: Nurturing the Renaissance of Classical Education in Texas,” by reflecting on the University's role in fostering new education models.
“One of the joys about starting a university from scratch is asking the fundamental and foundational questions,” he said. “Under Erin Valdez’s leadership, we're convening some of the most important educators, thinkers, and scholars working across the country today to help us reimagine what a school of education can and should be.”
Kanelos described three areas of focus for CEPS: pedagogy, teaching, and curriculum; educational entrepreneurship; and educational policy.
He cited the rise of the classical school movement in the United States—which he called “the single most positive development in education in America today”—as an inspiration for UATX.
Valdez was particularly excited to welcome some 60 classical educators from around central Texas to the UATX Scarbrough campus.
“With over 1,000 classical schools nationally (and 250 opening since 2020), we heard about the key obstacles that classical educators face when trying to meet the demand parents have for this kind of education, including facilities and qualified teachers and leaders,” she told me.
“Higher education leaders reflected on how their institutions are meeting the need for more classical education leaders at the K12 level,” she continued.
“The Center for Education and Public Service looks forward to hosting additional colloquia to bring together education entrepreneurs and leaders across a variety of educational models.”
Beyond “Woke” or “Anti-Woke”: A Dean’s Perspective
What should we make of the terms “woke” and “anti-woke”? Do they point at something substantial or obfuscate more than they reveal? Do they make sense as evaluative terms for a thinker or an educational project? In a recent essay, Dean of Economics, Politics, and History Morgan Marietta scrutinizes the language of “woke” and finds it wanting:
“Anti-woke” is too vague to mean much. At UATX I encourage students to express what they actually mean rather than hide behind a slippery phrase. Invoking woke is similar to saying “you know?” in order to gain false nodding when the listener doesn’t in fact know what you mean and neither do you. …
If you say exactly what you mean by wokeness, or social justice, or populism, or another over-burdened and under-defined term, then I can say whether I am anti or pro. Honest argument begets open communication (and social progress). The intentional use of double-representation, the purposeful invocation of misleading shorthand, or the veiled jibes of the too-clever-by-half serve no one but those who profit from our divisions.
On his own Substack, WhyAmerica?, Professor of Economics Tim Kane reflects on the need to define UATX based on what it stands for, not what it might oppose:
For me…those principles are the same that motivated me as a young man in the cloth of my country: liberty, equality, Constitutionalism. I mean it. We stand for a radical equality that inspired the poorest soldiers in the war for independence in 1776 and the infantrymen who fought for the liberty of strangers in Europe and Asia in 1915 and 1944 and 1951 and 1970 and 2019 and even today. We are all still fighting so that every American is measured by the content of their character, rewarded for their individual merit, free to say/write/broadcast whatever they want, at liberty to create, secure in their personal property. These are simple principles. These are radical principles.
“There is no shortcut to greatness,” Kane wrote. “Rather, competition on an equal playing field is the essential ingredient from which excellence emerges. And appreciation comes from something achieved with difficulty.”
Among such achievements is the second edition of The Austin Beacon, the UATX independent student publication. In its latest post, managing editor Corban Fikes reflects on organizing a Writer’s Salon and planning future feature stories. Readers can learn what’s ahead for the Beacon here.
Maggie Kelly is the Communications Manager at the University of Austin.
What you are doing to bring innovation to teaching is long overdue. I hope some of it filters up to our part of the country (Northeast) and into Ivy League culture.
This is the only hope to save Americas debased Education system. I hope and pray that donor money is contracted to be a gift and can never have stipulations attached. America has became the cesspool of a morally decent educated society and true education like this is our only chance to save our country.