The $10 Billion Rise Of Classical Christian Education
A 2,500-year-old educational approach is quietly disrupting the $750 billion K-12 education market.
A 2,500-year-old educational approach is quietly disrupting the $750 billion K-12 education market.
The $10 Billion Rise Of Classical Christian Education
Forbes • Sarah Hernholm
Classical Christian education is no longer a small countercurrent; it is becoming a visible force in the American school landscape, with hundreds of thousands of students and growing attention from parents, educators, and even investors. This Forbes piece frames that rise in market terms, but beneath the numbers is a deeper question: why are so many families searching again for an education ordered toward wisdom, virtue, and lasting human formation? At Humanitas Institute, we think that search reflects a growing recognition that children need more than academic performance; they need schools that help them love what is true, good, and beautiful.
What does it mean to build a culture of intellectual friendship, one shaped by books, music, meals, memory, and shared attention? In this episode of Composed, Christine Perrin speaks with historian and colleague, James LaGrand, about the habits that form students and teachers into a genuine community of learning. Their conversation moves from violin lessons and hymns to Augustine, Dante, Frederick Douglass, Lincoln, Tyehimba Jess, and the Sunday dinner table. Together they consider education not merely as competence or achievement, but as the patient formation of persons who can receive beauty, honor the past, and seek the good in company with others. LaGrand describes his work in Messiah University’s Honors Program as the building and protecting of a culture, rather than the management of a program. Through seminars, shared meals, walks, tea, concerts, trips to Gettysburg, and the reading of great texts aloud, he invites students into patterns of attention that join the life of the mind to friendship and delight. The episode closes with a tribute to Tyehimba Jess’s Olio, and with the quiet image of a grandmother’s Sabbath table as a pattern for a life of hospitality and care. Mentioned in the Episode Olio by Tyehimba Jess | https://www.wavepoetry.com/products/olio Tyehimba Jess | https://www.tyehimbajess.net/books.html
What is art for, and why does beauty awaken deep longings within us? In this conversation, Brian Williams joins artist, Bruce Herman, in his studio to explore the human calling to create, the role beauty plays in shaping the soul, and the discipline of learning to see. Herman argues that we are not merely consumers but makers by nature, and that art at its best is a form of hospitality that invites others into a meaningful encounter. Through stories of childhood wonder, reflections on modern art, and the language of longing, this episode offers a compelling vision of everyday creativity, from painting and poetry to spreadsheets and shared meals.
What does it take to remain fully human in an age of distraction? In this conversation, Christine Perrin speaks with Dr. Jeanne Schindler about attention, technology, homeschooling, civic life, and the quiet disciplines that help us fight for what is real. Together they consider how modern devices flatten experience, weaken our sense of place, and make presence harder to practice, while also pointing toward a better way, one rooted in community life, embodied friendship, serious thought, and shared public spaces. This is a conversation about recovering the habits that make a human life deep, relational, and truly lived. Drawing from her own intellectual formation, Dr. Schindler reflects on childhood influences, her shift from history to political theory, her decision to leave tenure and devote herself more fully to home and family, and the rewards of lifelong learning through homeschooling. She and Christine also explore AI, the limits of technology, the strain placed on civic discourse, and why restlessness should not always be medicated by screens, but instead received as a summons to seek truth, communion, and a richer form of life.