Claudia MacMillan

“You are the guardians of culture,” my teacher said in a melodious voice to a small auditorium filled with teachers at the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. That was 1989. I was among those school teachers, and Dr. Louise Cowan’s words, her vision, changed the course of my life.

​I would not bother sharing this anecdote or the words that follow if my experience had been an isolated one, or if I were the only one whose life had been transformed by this educational philosophy of generosity, openness, intellectual integrity, and communal grace. But for forty years at the Dallas Institute, the hearts and minds of primary and secondary educators have been lifted up and treasured, and I believe that this message of love and hope needs to be in the world.

​In 2004, I had the privilege of assuming responsibility for the programs that changed me in what is now the Dallas Institute’s Louise and Donald Cowan Center for Education™. Since coming, I and others have spent our time and energy trying to shape and share this ennobling vision that the Drs. Cowan conceived and taught. Their aspiration was that every child in America receive a liberal education of the quality that only privileged students in the nation’s highest-tiered private schools typically receive.

​The Cowans created a work at the Dallas Institute designed to foster this sea change. And in the public schools of Fort Worth, Texas, a bold educational experiment that is modeled on their philosophy—on their love of learning, of teachers, and of human life—is currently underway.

​In three public schools in the Fort Worth Independent School District, students are enrolled in Cowan Academy® in the Humanities classes. The results have been impressive and hopeful. In the first year of classes (2018-2019), at the high school where all students are enrolled in Cowan Academy® in the Humanities classes, teachers, administrators, parents, and the students themselves saw and felt the impact of this unique experience and the quality of community that it seemed to inspire.

​Cowan Academy® in the Humanities classes were piloted in three 8th grade classes in this same year in one Fort Worth middle school. Students with all ranges of abilities were invited to join the class. The only prerequisite was that they be willing to do the work.

The Cowan Academy® in the Humanities Educational Model

I should begin with a nod to what drives public school education. So for those who consider standardized test scores important, although little test prep was introduced into these classes, in both original Fort Worth schools, scores the first year (2018-2019) were outstanding. The 8th grade averages in every category in reading and social studies were above the rest of the campus and above the district averages. Some of the strongest gains were for “English Language Learner” students. Regarding the benchmark tests given in December 2019, one middle school student reported, “Everything we read in this class is so much harder than those test passages, so the test was so much easier than it seemed before.” In the high school, where every student is enrolled in Cowan Academy® in the Humanities classes, the 9th grade English I scores ranked the school among the top in the state of Texas, and this in its first year of operation. In the category of “closing the achievement gap,” their English I scores earned them a 100%, tying for third in the state! Granted, this is the new magnet school in the district, but the district has wisely required the school to represent the district demographically, and in addition, the school has very generous entrance requirements. So although it is a magnet school, students with a wide range of abilities are enrolled.

​There are a few critical standards worked into this educational model designed to help it to succeed.

1. In order to learn to read by writing—a luxury that most public school students are not given—Cowan Academy® in the Humanities students must receive their own personal copies of the books (not the textbooks) so that they can read with pen in hand. Cowan Academy® in the Humanities classes are very low-tech, teaching students, rather, to engage with the texts and with one another in conversation daily. The Fort Worth ISD has been wonderfully generous in providing books for each Cowan Academy® student.

2. In addition, Cowan Academy® teachers who teach history and English must not have more than 75 students a year so that they can tutor and mentor their students like their peers in a private school. However, this usually works out easily for those who are teaching a Cowan Center™ humanities course. Technically, they are teaching 75 English students and 75 history students. Their total is 150 students like many of their colleagues in the district.

3. Perhaps the most important feature of a Cowan Academy® or a Cowan School® (another trademarked educational model certified by the Dallas Institute’s Cowan Center™) is that the principals who lead both educational models have the exact same certification “training” requirements as their teachers so that they can foster the community of the school in this human vision and support the vision of liberal learning overall. The educational vision that gives shape to this work is vastly different from what the bureaucracy knows or provides. And this is not a “do as I say” kind of “training.” It is a “do as I do” vision.

​Cowan Academy® in the Humanities students have largely responded with pride about their achievement. They have even sensed the importance of community that this philosophy seeks to foster. After their first year in a Cowan Academy® class, 8th graders like Eduardo stated, “Thanks to humanities, writing essays is easy, and I am not afraid to talk out loud in front of my speech class.” Madison explained, “This class gives me an advantage for my future. I have learned to see many different perspectives,” while Ke’Onna observed, “we work hard, but the class is getting us ready for high school.” According to the Cowans’ vision, non-competition and community are daily fostered in each class, making a burgeoning human community one of the most common features in a Cowan Academy® class that is observed both by students and by the grown-ups in their lives. As Fernando stated, “I feel a part of a large community in this class.” His classmate, Uriel, proudly claimed, “Humanities makes me feel like I’m part of something so important.”

Cowan Center® Humanities Curricula

Next month, the Cowan Center™ will begin its third year of Cowan Academy® in the Humanities classes in three Fort Worth ISD schools and will be serving students in grades 6-11. All three campuses have chosen to use the trademarked Cowan Center™ curricula. These daily syllabi are modeled on an integrated history/English curriculum used with great success for more than twenty-five years in a private school in Dallas. Cowan Academy® in the Humanities students in the Upper School level, grades 6-12, write and present original speeches to sharpen their powers of persuasion and their public speaking skills. They read aloud daily. They study grammar and rhetoric, write often in journals and frequently compose and revise formal essays on literature, history, and philosophy. They participate in formal small-group seminars that are guided by their own text-based questions or responses. They memorize and recite at least five lyric poems each year. Students do art projects and presentations based on ideas or images from the readings that have captured their imaginations. In addition, students at each level view, sketch, and study the form and meaning of art, architecture, and monuments from around the world. In each grade, then, Cowan Academy® in the Humanities students are tenderly taught to read, write, listen, think, and speak at a high level of sophistication about ideas and situations that have challenged and inspired humanity in every age.

​At each grade level, Cowan Academy® in the Humanities curricula are organized historically around the epoch studied in that year. Freshman Cowan Academy® in the Humanities students study world history and geography from prehistory through the early modern period launched by Machiavelli’s thought. Titles here include The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Ramayana, the Odyssey, Plato’s Apology, Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, One Thousand and One Nights, The West African Mwindo Epic, Dante’s (entire) Divine Comedy, and Erasmus’ The Praise of Folly. Connections and comparisons are steadily considered among themes and cultures throughout the year. Apparently startled by the continuity, one 9th grade Cowan Academy® in the Humanities student asked her teacher in the second half of the year, “Are we ever going to stop talking about The Epic of Gilgamesh?” The answer is no, and why would we want to?

​An example of the continuity of the curriculum is found in the way in which freshmen are guided to treat primary documents. Throughout the year, as they read passages from The Code of Hammurabi, the 10 Commandments, Confucius’ Analects, Laozi’s Way of the Dao, The Code of Justinian, the “Beatitudes,” the Tang Code of China, Shotoku’s Constitution, the Magna Carta, Luther’s 95 Theses, and Machiavelli’s The Prince, the class compares the new code or set of laws to preceeding ones to consider what the new codes reveal about the people who wrote them. Ninth grade student also read primary texts to trace the historical development of the three “Abrahamic” religions— Hebrew, Christian, and Muslim—to help lay the foundations for a better understanding of the complex relationship that exits among these traditions even to this day. Lyric poetry by Rumi, Petrarch, and Shakespeare complement one another and deepen in the daily reading of lyric poetry in every class. For their end-of-year speech, each freshman choses an image or idea and traces it through the major historical epochs in at least three different cultures.

​Carrying forward both the content and the modes from their freshman year, sophomore Cowan Academy® in the Humanities students build on this, picking up world history and geography in the early 17th century to study through our time. After Don Quixote, students study literary works such as Hamlet, Candide, Frankenstein, Hard Times, Bartleby the Scrivener, Notes from the Underground, Heart of Darkness, and Kafka’s Metamorphosis, making additional connections to the history and the readings from the 9th grade class. The epic creation story theme continues here from the freshman year with the study of the Popol Vuh. From John Donne to Newton, from Kant to Kobayashi’s haiku, from Blake and Mary Wollstonecraft to Frederick Douglass, from Marx to Mill, from T.S. Eliot to the Harlem Renaissance, from Hitler’s Mein Kampf to Churchill’s and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speeches, from James Baldwin, William Faulkner, Gabriel García Márquez, lyric poetry, political documents, and philosophical works are considered from within the frames of the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, the age of industrialization and the Romantics, and up into modern times. The sophomore end-of-year speech requires students to reach back into the freshman curriculum to trace the idea or image from ancient times to modern day.
​On the high school campus, the original Cowan Academy® students are now going into their junior year, a landmark being initiated with Moby-Dick for their Summer Reading. This level of expectation is not new. Students are assigned Volume I of Don Quixote for Summer Reading going into their sophomore year. But these students going in their third year of Cowan Academy® classes are beginning “The American Experience and the World™” with a broad yet deep foundation from reading, discussing, and writing about world history and geography, as well as about literature, philosophy, political philosophy, religion, and art history from around the world. The junior course is framed by Moby-Dick and Invisible Man, epics whose themes and images will allow students to recall, discuss, and write about works studied in both the freshman and sophomore Cowan Academy® classes. Among the authors studied here are Walt Whitman, Ida B. Wells, Booker T. Washington, DuBois, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Elie Weisel, Zora Neale Hurston, Frost, Hemingway, Pound, Eliot, Virginia Woolf, William Carlos Williams, Toni Morrison, O’Connor, Neruda, Baldwin, César Chávez, Malcolm X, Gloria Steinem, Lorca, Faulkner, Borges, Cortázar, Paz, Momaday, Barack Obama, and Jumpa Lahiri. In addition to nonfiction essays and speeches, in each of the four parts of the curriculum, political documents include rulings from important cases from the Supreme Court of the United States to help students understand how the political, cultural, social, and spiritual landscape of America has been created and sustained.

​Middle school Cowan Academy® in the Humanities classes are conducted using the same integration of modes and disciplines as their high school counterparts, with a daily dose of in-class poetry memorization celebrating joyful recitations and readings. On one of the two middle school campuses, all the 6th graders will be enrolled in Cowan Academy® in the Humanities classes beginning in August and the comprehensive Cowan Academy® classes will roll up with the students each year in this neighborhood school.

​In the 6th grade “World Myths: Mappings and Meanings™” course, students review the basics of grammar, of language and form in writing, in speaking, as well as practice active listening and reading deeply by annotating texts. Rather than history, the focus here is on learning world geography and on reading broadly from around the world novels, short stories, and folk tales. A steady diet of beautiful images of the world in power point presentations and beautiful picture books about creation myths from Virginia Hamilton’s In the Beginning and D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths fill students’ hearts and minds with the wonder and complexity of the planet and the human condition. The end-of-year assignment in this grade is an original short story about a child from another culture that includes a focus in the plot on a significant geographical feature from that particular region.

​In the 7th grade “Texas Myths™” course, students study the history and epic spirit of Texas, its glories and its blunders. A book of Texas Indian myths and selections from J. Frank Dobie’s Texas Tales provide a touchstone throughout the year. These works are deepened by the study of significant historical documents and with novels such as Juneteenth, Old Yeller, Summer of the Mariposas, and The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate. Enfolding the idea of Texas in its mythic terms is the study of Virgil’s Aeneid, which these students read in class in its entirety. This ancient poem evokes a timeless landscape from which to consider Texas’ (six!) foundings, the struggles and the achievements thereof. Historical figures in Texas are compared to Aeneas and to other major figures in the poem through formal essays, speeches, and journals. The 7th grade end-of-year assignment is an original “tall tale,” Texas-style, to present to the class.

​In the 8th grade “American Myths™” course, students study American history from Jamestown to Reconstruction, with an emphasis on primary historical documents and nonfiction writers such as John Smith, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, Olaudah Equiano, Alexis de Tocqueville, Thoreau, Emerson, Douglass, Harriot Jacobs, and Abraham Lincoln. Lyric poetry and short stories bathe the year, including authors such Native American poets, Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley, Jonathan Edwards, Jupiter Hammon, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Emily Dickinson, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Walt Whitman. The final assignment for these students is to write and present a formal speech considering the difference between “freedom” and “liberty.” Students must use primary sources that go back to the original colonies and that include the voices of at least three different peoples from the diverse American “myths.”

The Cowan Vision of Liberal Learning for All​

Out of the depths of the pandemic lockdown this spring, messages of inspiration and hope issued from Cowan Academy® students, galvanizing our commitment to the work in Fort Worth and to the splendid teachers and principals who guide it. Missives such as Carlos’, a 7th grader who explained, “Humanities has not only been a class to learn history but a life lesson in itself. I think it is very safe to say that this is a great class that not only one school district needs but the whole country needs in every single school.” A 9th grade student remarked to her teacher, “As the year progressed, I started to view humanities as my little opportunity to really understand the world. I had assignments and lessons that didn’t teach me how to read or annotate for a grade, but to look deeper into the ancient worlds to understand what life meant for anyone at any point in time. I was starting to learn how to read for the experience. The experience to live someone else’s life, and to know what it meant for them to be human.” And an 8th grade Cowan Academy® student sagely observed, “Through our class I have learned that we have a great life because others went through difficult things before us.”

​There are many, many more such comments from our Cowan Academy® students, and we are grateful for every one. They are proof, to me, that the Cowans were correct in their estimation of human possibility and in their confidence that liberal learning truly does set one’s heart and mind free.

​I could go on in great detail about the Cowans’ philosophy of liberal learning. They were profound intellectuals and thinkers, and their vision is what I am privileged to consider and apply every day. But in closing, I would simply like to point out what I believe to be most essential to their vision—what they contributed to the tradition of liberal learning. Their most concrete contributions are Donald Cowan’s—a physicist—emphasis on the purpose of a liberal education—-to cultivate a “poetic imagination” first through the proper study of literature.

The other indispensable feature of their mark on the tradition is the loose yet sturdy frame of Louise Cowan’s literary genre theory in which she teaches how to read for understanding, for broadening one’s views and ideas about life. But just as important as their rigorous academic theories are their insights into the impact of what Donald Cowan calls the “spirit of liberal learning.” They believed that the effect of liberal learning is to help enable a person to achieve the true form of his or her life. They taught the unpopular reality that the deepest understanding almost always comes from the greatest struggle. They taught that true learning always begins with submission. They believed in the power of the well-educated imagination, in society and in one’s life. And they believed that wisdom was connected to mystery and beauty along with the search for meaning and truth. Most importantly, to me, what distinguishes their vision of education from cynical educational and social theories is that they believed that an education better fits a person to be in the world, particularly to be in a democracy where a liberally educated citizenry is critical.