On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, Dr. Kathleen O’Toole, assistant provost for K-12 education at Hillsdale College, joins Executive Editor Joy Pullmann to explain what every school district in the U.S. needs to be teaching kids about American history.

“A lot of people who go into teaching, ordinary Americans who go into teaching, right, are not going into teaching because they’re activists. They’re not going into teaching because they are political. They’re going into teaching because they really care about kids and they really liked school and they know some stuff,” O’Toole said. “And so if there are those people out there who want to be treated with respect and given curriculum that allows them to treat the students with respect, then we can work with that.”

Hillsdale’s goal of providing teachers with guidance to educate their students well extends far beyond offering them a primary-sourced curriculum.

“We find ourselves at Hillsdale advising the schools that we work with on pedagogy, on teaching, just as much as we do on curriculum. And that makes sense if you think about it right, like putting the best books of the Western tradition into a literature curriculum is no guarantee that the kids will actually learn those books. There are all kinds of reasons why they wouldn’t,” O’Toole said. “So we have to get those things right and it’s all common sense. And I think we should focus on teachers, we should focus on creating incentives for the best people, meaning the best educated and the best explainers to become teachers. And then when we find those people, we should think about how to keep them in teaching and honor them for the work that they are doing.”