This ‘Cowboy’ Wants to Teach Princeton Kids About Greatness

This ‘Cowboy’ Wants to Teach Princeton Kids About Greatness

The Free Press | 2024

The Free Press profiles Hertog faculty Shilo Brooks:

Shilo Brooks is on a mission to teach Ivy League students how to read.

If the trend in academic life for the past few decades has been to skim hundreds of pages per day and then pick apart the past, Brooks wants to do something old-school that feels radical: he wants his students to absorb no more than fifty pages a week and see the big picture. And he’s doing it by bucking another trend: he’s embracing great men (and women).

And his message is resonating. When Brooks first debuted his elective course, “The Art of Statesmanship and the Political Life,” in the spring of 2023, just forty kids enrolled. This spring, more than 250 signed up, making it one of the most popular classes that semester, alongside major requirements like Introduction to Computer Science.