The key ideas of liberty enshrined within a curated collection of pivotal primary source documents designed as add-ons for high school history, civics, and economics curricula.
It’s more than teaching from primary sources—it’s the learning for liberty necessary to be a good citizen.
Waypoints tutorials prepare teachers to frame moving and unforgettable classroom discussions. Introduce your students to the most important ideas while they engage with influential thinkers, writers, and statesmen.
Waypoints are geographical markers that help travelers reach a destination.
Pivotal primary sources are the waypoints of history. The key ideas of liberty within those documents are the path to freedom and human flourishing.
They form a map of the human journey from the past to the present, helping us know where we are tending by understanding better how the world came to be what it is today.
The most important primary source documents were written in particular historical contexts, and present ideas, insights, and lessons that transcend place and time.
The premise of Waypoints is that rare and great thinkers are more than products of their culture; their thoughts are more than the prejudices of their day.
Within our primary source documents one finds permanent human questions about fundamental and first things, questions all thoughtful people should contemplate—questions we today should ask and try to answer.
Waypoints shows how certain individuals courageously altered the course of history by blazing a trail toward freedom, self-government, and human flourishing, while others substituted new for old forms of tyranny.
Waypoints showcases 30 key ideas of liberty that explain the virtues and knowledge necessary to be good citizens. For those wanting happiness and a better way of life, these ideas are the waypoints to get there.
The Waypoints tutorials prepare ordinary teachers to become extraordinary at telling the human story, preparing students for the responsibilities of civic and personal self-government, and engaging with some of the greatest minds in history.
After students wrestle intellectually with thinkers such as Aristotle, Locke, Jefferson, Madison, and Lincoln, they will become more confident and more willing to read for themselves important documents such as their own United States Constitution.
Education is becoming increasingly controversial. Americans disagree over what the purpose of education is, or should be.
Waypoints avoids these controversies by focusing on primary source documents with which teachers can introduce students to a wide range of ideas articulated by diverse thinkers, writers, statesmen, and others from the past, in their own words.
It’s difficult to accuse a teacher of misrepresenting the American Founders when students are reading and discussing The Federalist Papers rather than politically-skewed textbooks.
The most unfiltered way to learn about the ideas and arguments of Aristotle, or Adam Smith, is to read Aristotle and Smith.
In the most famous debates of the 19th century, who had the better argument? The Waypoints way to answer that question is to let both Lincoln and Douglas speak for themselves through the primary source documents they left behind.
By engaging important minds from the past, students experience the Socratic approach, which is a catalyst for higher-level critical thinking.
By looking through the eyes of great statesmen and towering intellectual figures—and seeing daunting problems as they saw them—students start to view the world from an elevated plane of thought and understanding.
Click any of the three links below for samples of Waypoints content, including select primary source documents and tutorials that prepare teachers for delivering classroom presentations that students find moving, relevant, and important.
Dr. Thomas L. Krannawitter is the founding president of Waypoints and proprietor of the Substack Zetetic Questions.
He sits on the Mackinac Center’s Board of Scholars, the Scholarly Advisory Board at The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and he is a member of the National Association of Scholars.
He holds a Ph.D. from the School of Politics & Economics at the Claremont Graduate University. He has taught undergraduate and graduate classes at Claremont McKenna College, Hillsdale College, Ashland University, and George Mason University, among other places.
He was formerly Vice President at The Claremont Institute, where he helped launch The Claremont Review of Books in 2001.
He’s been one of the principal instructors for the Leadership Program of the Rockies for over twenty years, where he directs the Defenders of the Declaration of Independence program, and he frequently advises businesses and charitable organizations on communications, employee culture development, branding, and fundraising.
He is currently teaching the Elite Leadership Program within J.R. Butler, Inc, one of the nation’s top commercial glass and fenestration companies.
Dr. Krannawitter has testified before state legislatures, though he doesn’t put much faith in politicians. That’s why he focuses on teaching citizens, helping teachers, students, business owners, employees, and others to improve our modern American culture through persuasion and moving stories. Americans won’t get principled constitutional policies from their government until they demand politicians who are principled constitutionalists.
Dr. Krannawitter’s research and published writings have ranged from politics to history to constitutional law to economics to social commentary, from specific historic events to timeless philosophic questions.
His 2008 book, Vindicating Lincoln, was featured by The History Book Club and endorsed by the United States Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. His 2014 book, Crisis of Our House Divided: A Guide To Talking Politics Without The Noise, applies the lessons of Lincoln to our challenges today.
His most recent book, Save the Swamp: Career Guidebook for Budding Bureaucrats, is different. Swamp is funny. It’s satire. He has also contributed chapters to numerous edited, scholarly collections. Please check out Dr. Krannawitter’s author’s page at Amazon.com.
Currently, Dr. Krannawitter is finishing a civic primer titled, Tragedy & Triumph: The American Founding and the Greatest Anti-Slavery Movement in History. He recently finished a chapter on Professor Harry Neumann, which will be published next year by the University of Chicago Press in an edited collection of scholarly essays about select students of Leo Strauss.
Dr. Krannawitter has received many research fellowships throughout his career, including the H.B. Earhart Fellowship (which puts him in the company of other Earhart Fellows such as Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, Larry Arnn, and Ed Feulner).
He was a Winston Churchill Society Fellow, a Henry Salvatori Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a Richard Weaver Fellow at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and the recipient of a John M. Olin Foundation Fellowship.
Dr. Krannawitter grew up in Hays, Kansas, where he wrenched on cars in his father’s full-service Phillips 66 gas station. He can be tempted occasionally with a cigar or a peaty Scotch, or both. He is married and he has three children. He is romantic about baseball, though most people think he roots for the wrong team.
It’s not unusual for him to arrive at professional events with fur from his English Cream Golden Retrievers adorning his suit: When the choice is between staying tidy and smooching dogs, he smooches the dogs.
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