This article shares a vision for an education shaped by rigorous learning, family partnership, and the formation of students in wisdom, confidence, and character.
March 20, 2026
Jennifer Burns’ ‘Excelara’ Helps Parents Reclaim Their Kids’ Education
Daily Citizen • Emily Washburn
This article presents Excelara as a thoughtful response to families seeking a more intentional and integrated approach to education. Through Jennifer Burns’s leadership and experience in Christian classical education, the piece describes a model that brings together school, home, and community in the shared work of forming young people. Rather than focusing only on academic achievement, it emphasizes the cultivation of wisdom, independence, strong character, and meaningful relationships. The result is a compelling picture of education as something deeply formative and relational, shaped by a vision of human flourishing that extends well beyond the classroom.
Daily Citizen
In this episode of Forged, Chris Hall reflects on the formative power of the “common arts”—the ordinary skills and embodied practices that introduce us to the givenness of the world and manifest our humanity. Drawing on stories from the classroom and the farm, Hall argues that formation and education flourish when intellectual study is joined to hands-on craft, inviting students into apprenticeship, real responsibility, and attentiveness to the natural world. He also addresses the cultural divide between academic learning and vocational skill, urging a recovery of an older vision in which the liberal arts, practical arts, and fine arts enrich one another for the sake of a fully embodied, fully aware human life of discipline, delight, craft, and calling.
We have a problem with reading in the 21st century. When we discuss reading as a society, we are not merely talking about a pastime disappearing such as kids no longer collecting baseball cards or playing marbles, we are talking about the loss of access to the treasures of wisdom from our shared tradition. We are—without fully understanding the ins and outs of the reality—lamenting the loss of reading as a loss of virtue in our culture.
In this episode, Lynette Hull invites us into a conversation about art, faith, and the quiet transformation that can happen when the two meet. With warmth and wisdom, she reflects on creativity as a spiritual practice and on the ways beauty can draw us deeper into meaning and connection. It’s a thoughtful and inspiring exchange that will leave you curious to see the world, and perhaps your own creative life, a little differently.