A 17-year-old Lander homeschooler who beat out 8,000 other students in what was billed as the “Ultimate Civics Showdown” stood beside President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on national TV on Tuesday. Miriam Washut won a $150,000 scholarship in the effort.
July 01, 2026
Lander Homeschooler Wins ‘Ultimate Civics Showdown,’ $150,000 Scholarship
Cowboy State Daily • Dale Killingbeck
A Wyoming homeschooler’s national civics victory is more than a feel-good story; it points to the kind of formation that takes history, citizenship, and inherited wisdom seriously. Miriam Washut, daughter of Kyle Washut, president of Wyoming Catholic College, comes from a family closely tied to classical liberal education, and her deep study of America’s founding documents offers a hopeful glimpse of what young people can do when they are invited into the great questions of liberty, virtue, and self-government.
Cowboy State Daily
What we attend to quietly shapes the people we become. In this episode of Composed, Christine Perrin speaks with Nadezhda Gribkova about beauty-first education, the patient work of looking, and the relationships that make genuine learning possible. Drawing on Dostoevsky, Rowan Williams, Jane Jacobs, sacred icons, and her own experiences as a student and teacher, Nadezhda explores why formation cannot be reduced to transferring information. Her own education, as a fifteen year old in a new country, significantly shaped her life. Her teachers, she explains, took her seriously by tackling difficult books in conversation and asking good questions toward the person she would be but was not yet. She offers simple practices for recovering attention, including memorizing poetry, observing art without rushing to interpret it, and returning to the patterns that remind us what is true. Their conversation invites parents and educators to consider how beauty can deepen family culture, strengthen human connection, and orient an ordinary life toward flourishing. At the heart of the conversation is a hopeful claim: beautiful things are not luxuries reserved for experts. They are gifts that can ground us, enlarge our vision, and help us remember how to live.
After nearly 20 years of homeschooling, this mother is honest about both the work and the gift of educating her children at home.
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Classical Christian education in Africa is not a cultural import or a luxury reserved for the materially secure. It is a humane education that equips students to think, speak, serve, and flourish within their own communities.