Michael Moynihan and Austin Hatch on Teaching the History of our Strange New World

To help our seniors synthesize the many ideas, events, and texts they've surveyed across high school—and to help them better understand their own cultural moment—Heights teachers have developed a senior core class titled "History of Western Thought." In this episode, Upper School Head Michael Moynihan and long-time teacher Austin Hatch discuss the course and its guide-text: Carl Trueman's Strange New World (2022).

HOWT covers essential texts from Plato's Republic to Pope Benedict XVI's "Regensburg Address.". Its goal is not only to prepare students for college work but to prepare them to meaningfully engage with the culture they will inherit, understanding its origins and its underlying assumptions.

Chapters:

00:02:31 History of Western Thought course
00:08:10 The "HOWT" syllabus
00:11:31 Strange New World, a primary source guide
00:14:13 Teens and the intellectual tradition
00:16:39 Seeing ideologies in motion
00:18:48 Pairing philosophical threads
00:27:26 Understanding our cultural moment
00:29:25 Pushing back on 'authenticity'
00:33:31 How students respond to the course
00:35:09 Thinking about friendship
00:41:04 Big ideas in a short class
00:44:32 Reading Trueman alongside your son