The Cowan Vision

The MacMillan Institute was created to prepare public school teachers and administrators at all levels to learn, teach, and lead in the “spirit of liberal learning,” the philosophy and modes of “liberal” education conceived and practiced by Drs. Louise and Donald Cowan.

The Cowans believed that every child in America needs and deserves the education that has traditionally been called a “liberal” education.

This is an education designed to help enable a person to achieve the true form of his or her life. Therefore, an education designed to liberate the heart and mind is the only proper response to the needs of a democracy and to the desires of humanity at large.

The highest quality liberal education in America has largely been reserved for students who attend top-tier private schools.

But this only fosters the divide between the “haves” and “have nots.”

The Cowans believed in the latent nobility in every human being.

Every child deserves the best education.

The Cowans sought to equip public school educators with the liberating vision of the “spirit of liberal learning for all” so that these educators could provide children in regular public schools with the quality of education historically offered their peers in top-tier private institutions.

To engage in Cowan studies at The MacMillan Institute means to explore the foundational role of the imagination in learning, teaching, and leading, cultivating what Donald Cowan called the “poetic imagination” first through the proper study of great works of world literature. Using Louise Cowan’s elastic yet sturdy literary gene theory as the primary lens to read literature and life, in every MacMillan Institute course, school teachers and administrators experience the transformative power of liberal learning across all disciplines that places the cultivation of human community and the complexity of the human situation at the center of all learning and knowing.