Schooling America

Send us Fan Mail Alex Havard’s grandfather was sixteen and orphaned in St. Petersburg when a parish priest convinced the French consul to give him a passport, and Havard traces his whole understanding of greatness back to grandparents like him. The founder of the Havard Virtuous Leadership Institute walks Ryan and Alex through the four temperaments and the virtue each one needs most. For your clas...

Send us Fan Mail Bishop James Conley of the Diocese of Lincoln sits down in studio with Ryan Klopak as Arcadia Education searches for the diocese’s next superintendent. A self-described happy pagan who got by on B’s in high school, he found his way into the Catholic Church through a great books program at the University of Kansas, where three professors discussed the Odyssey and Augustine’s Confes...

Send us Fan Mail Joshua Gibbs, director of the Classical Teaching Institute at the Ambrose School in Boise, Idaho, couldn't be paid to read books as a kid—and he started teaching classic literature at 28 with no natural interest in the texts in front of him. Then The Consolation of Philosophy became the first book he ever really understood. Ryan and Alex talk with him about how a storyteller&...

Send us Fan Mail Jane Scharl read Crime and Punishment alone at eleven, and what it gave her was not a sense of being special but the opposite: a sense that everything she felt had been felt before, and that she owed it to those people to go find out how they'd handled it. She's now a verse playwright whose Rabelais plays get staged, and she talks here about the classical language she ne...

Send us Fan Mail Patrick Whalen spent a decade in the Marine Corps, founded a boys' boarding school on a Kansas farm, and now builds physical education curriculum for classical schools through Iliad Athletics.  He tells Ryan Klopak and Alex Julian how a candlelit reading of Ecclesiastes, a wagon crash into a chain-link fence post, and The Song of Roland read over cigars all point at one convi...

Send us Fan Mail Elizabeth Williams knew she wanted to teach from the time she lined up her stuffed animals for class as a small child, but it was a homeschool high school built on classical literature—and a self-led reading of The Grapes of Wrath—that showed her what her early Catholic schooling had left out. After studying literature, history, and theater at Franciscan University of Steubenville...

Send us Fan Mail Nikhil Jandhyala came to classical education as a public-school kid raised on two faiths—Hinduism American capitalism—and left it a Catholic teacher who now hands the same gift to his own students. Ryan Klopak and Alex Julian trace that transformation with him: the sixth-grade natural-philosophy class where "nature acts for an end" first cracked his world open, the ninth...

Send us Fan Mail Professor Owen Anderson teaches philosophy and religious studies at Arizona State University, where starts every intro philosophy class with "where did your life go so wrong?"  In this conversation, Ryan and Alex trace his journey from a curious teenager in Arizona public schools to a philosophy professor working to recover what education has lost. What's in This Ep...

Send us Fan Mail In Part 2 of his conversation with Ryan and Alex, Andrew Ellison—veteran classical educator and former headmaster—opens with something he couldn't wait to share: a bucket-list Tallis Scholars concert in Dallas that arrived at exactly the right moment. The story becomes a lens for exploring how classical education transforms not just students, but every person in a school buil...

Send us Fan Mail Andrew Ellison grew up in the suburbs of Indianapolis with a public school teacher mother who read the Chronicles of Narnia at bedtime and ran summer learning programs at home—and had no idea any of it was "classical." In Part 1 of this two-part conversation, host Alex Julian traces Andrew's path from that curiosity-rich childhood through a soul-killing public junio...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Anthony Sciubba leads one of the largest K–5 classical schools in the Southwest at Great Hearts in the Phoenix Valley. In this conversation, he traces a journey from a public school upbringing in Gilbert, Arizona—where Great Expectations bored him to tears in seventh grade—to a transformative encounter with the great books at Pepperdine, graduate studies at Yale, Oxford, and E...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Toyin Atolagbe shares how her early education in Nigeria, marked by daily hymns, strict discipline, and a focus on shaping both heart and intellect, formed the habits and virtues that guide her work today. She discusses the power of classical education to instill excellence, the crucial role of parents as first educators, and her current work supporting families through Lighth...

Send us Fan Mail In Part 2 of their conversation with Jonathan Mueller, Ryan and Alex pick up where they left off—tracing the circuitous path from Torrey Honors College through Boethius, Plato, and the Phaedo that eventually led Jonathan into classical education.  What's in This Episode: How Jonathan went from Biola/Torrey to dancing Greek waiter before finding his way into classical educatio...

Send us Fan Mail Jonathan Mueller grew up at the intersection of classical homeschooling and community college, encountering Plato in ninth grade and the Tao Te Ching at seventeen—two texts that cracked open the difference between a conception of God and the eternal thing itself. In part one of this two-part conversation, Jonathan traces a winding path through dialectic and doubt, a year of constr...

Send us Fan Mail Betsy Brown McClelland spent over a decade teaching medieval history and humane letters in the Great Hearts network—watching students encounter saints, suffer through Socratic seminars, and walk out of her classroom different people.  In this episode, she traces her own story: from a rich homeschooled childhood into a season of spiritual and intellectual numbness, through a colleg...

Send us Fan Mail Matt Skinner, longtime head of school at Heritage Classical Academy in Atlanta, Georgia, returns for part two of his conversation with Ryan and Alex.  This time, Matt unpacks the four-pillar framework: purpose, people, programs, and place , that guided Heritage from a bold vision to one of the most respected classical high schools in the country. What's in This Episode: Why p...

Send us Fan Mail Matt Skinner spent over two decades leading Christian schools—most notably as the longtime head of school at Heritage Preparatory School in Atlanta, Georgia.  But he didn't start there. He's a Texas-raised athlete, former CPA, and reluctant educator who found his calling at a school board meeting in 1995—having never once set foot in a school as anything other than a stu...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Kathleen O'Toole is the Associate VP for K-12 Education at Hillsdale College. However, she didn't arrive at classical education through a straight line. She grew up attending a good-but-not-classical school, survived a grueling private prep high school, found her footing at Hillsdale Academy, and finally experienced the full power of a classical curriculum at the Uni...

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