News

Inside America’s Educational Renaissance

‘We’re astounded by this growth. ... The word got out without us doing any publicity,’ said a founder of an international classical school network.

Aaron Gifford photo By Aaron Gifford

May 25, 2026

hero image

Inside America’s Educational Renaissance

Epoch Times • Aaron Gifford

Classical education is growing rapidly across the United States, with enrollment now over 677,500 students in more than 1,500 schools and momentum that could push the movement past 1 million students within the next decade.

Many families are turning to these schools because they want classrooms marked by order, depth, moral clarity, and serious learning. The model emphasizes phonics, Latin, cursive, great books, history, mathematics, logic, rhetoric, and the pursuit of wisdom rather than mere test preparation.

School-choice programs, including tax credits and vouchers, could make private classical schools available to more families, though critics worry that public money is being redirected away from public education. The biggest challenge ahead may be finding enough teachers who are trained not only in classroom technique, but in the deeper intellectual and moral vision classical education requires.

Aaron Gifford photo

Aaron Gifford

Epoch Times

Related Resources

Podcast Growing Up Classical: Literature, Wisdom, and the Questions We Carry

June 08, 2026

Composed: Timeless Ways of Living


Growing Up Classical: Literature, Wisdom, and the Questions We Carry

What does it mean to grow up classical, and how can the great books help form a young person’s moral imagination? In this episode of Composed, Christine Perrin speaks with Olivia Reardon, a graduating senior at Messiah University, about literature, ethical formation, and the classical Christian classroom. Drawing from Olivia’s senior honors thesis and her upcoming ClassicalU course, Journeying with the Great Books: Ethical Formation in the Classical Christian Classroom, the conversation explores how stories give students language for their deepest questions, offer “handholds” for living in a broken world, and invite readers to return again and again as they grow in wisdom. Together, Christine and Olivia reflect on reading as a relational and formative act, one that happens best in a community of trust, conversation, and shared attention. Olivia offers the images of mirrors, windows, and doors as a way of understanding how books help students see themselves, encounter others, and enter experiences beyond their own. The conversation also considers the breadth of the Great Conversation, not as a narrow inheritance for a few, but as a living tradition shaped by many voices and offered for the formation of all.

Podcast Festival as a Way of Life: Father Nathan Carr on Joy, Time, and Christian Formation

June 01, 2026

Forged: Timeless Ways of Living


Festival as a Way of Life: Father Nathan Carr on Joy, Time, and Christian Formation

What would it mean to practice festival at home, in school, and in church? In this episode of Forged, Brian Williams speaks with Father Nathan Carr about the posture and practice of festival as a way of living with joy, gratitude, and holy attention in the midst of ordinary time. Drawing from his work as priest, headmaster, husband, father, and author of Festive School, Carr reflects on Christian calendars, prayer books, school feasts, household rituals, and the slow formation of children who learn not merely to observe the good, but to receive and name it. This conversation is an invitation to recover joy as discipline, delight as formation, and celebration as a serious part of Christian life. Together, Brian and Father Carr consider how homes, schools, and churches can resist anxiety, urgency, cynicism, and suspicion by learning to inhabit time differently. From Benedictine hours and red-letter feast days to hidden Wise Men during Advent and children serving in the liturgy, this episode explores the small, concrete practices that teach us to see the world as gift.

Podcast The Harmony of the Parts: on Beauty, Place, and Belonging

May 29, 2026

Forged and Composed: Timeless Ways of Living


The Harmony of the Parts: on Beauty, Place, and Belonging

What does beauty have to do with the spaces where we learn, teach, worship, and gather? In this shared bonus episode of Composed and Forged, Christine Perrin speaks with Brian Williams about Templeton Hall, the home of the Templeton Honors College, and the deep work of making a place that feels whole, hospitable, and human. Their conversation moves from architecture and furniture to poetry, asking how beauty forms us before we can fully explain what it has done. This is an episode about attention, creation, community, and the grace of places that help us to belong and to overcome the rootlessness of our times. Brian reflects on the making of Templeton Hall at Eastern University as an act of stewardship, one that honors the old while creating room for students and faculty to dwell together in the pursuit of the true, the good, the beautiful. Christine and Brian consider why beauty is not a luxury, why material places matter to Christian formation, and how the experience of a beautiful space creates harmony. The episode closes fittingly with Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty,” a poem of praise for the dappled, particular, and creaturely world.