News

The Battle Hymn of the Refugee Teacher

The explosive growth of classical education is luring teachers from traditional district schools—and reminding them why they became teachers in the first place

Annika Hernandez photo By Annika Hernandez

April 14, 2026

hero image

The Battle Hymn of the Refugee Teacher

Education Next • Annika Hernandez

Something hopeful is happening beneath the headlines about teacher burnout: many educators are not giving up on teaching, but searching for schools where intellectual seriousness, moral formation, and love of learning still shape the work. This piece traces why classical education is becoming that refuge—and why its growth may signal not only a new home for teachers, but a deeper renewal in American education.

Annika Hernandez photo

Annika Hernandez

Education Next

Related Resources

Podcast Patterns That Make Us Alive: Timothy Patitsas on Beauty, Learning, and Home

April 13, 2026

Composed: Timeless Ways of Living


Patterns That Make Us Alive: Timothy Patitsas on Beauty, Learning, and Home

What makes a place, a school, or a daily life feel truly human? In this conversation, Christine Perrin and Timothy Patitsas explore beauty first living, the “quality without a name” described by Christopher Alexander, and the patterns that help people feel at home, at ease, and fully alive. Together they consider paper routes, classrooms, liturgical seasons, friendship, motherhood, teaching, and the built world, asking how living patterns form the soul and why beauty is not an ornament to life but one of its deepest truths. This episode is an invitation to notice the forms of life that nourish wonder, awaken desire for the good, and help us belong more deeply to the world. Their conversation moves from childhood memory to architecture, pedagogy, eros, ritual, and community. Along the way, Timothy reflects on the difference between potent information and quality information, the role of stories in shaping desire, and the kinds of educational practices that help students encounter truth not only analytically, but with their whole persons.

Podcast The Reading Man: Shilo Brooks on Making a Life with Books

April 06, 2026

Forged: Timeless Ways of Living


The Reading Man: Shilo Brooks on Making a Life with Books

What do books do to a man? In this conversation, Shilo Brooks and Brian Williams discuss reading, ambition, teaching, and the making of a life. Brooks reflects on growing up in West Texas, discovering the great books almost by accident, and learning to read not merely for school or profession, but for wisdom, courage, and the ordering of desire. Together they consider why men stop reading, what is lost when they do, and why the best books are not simply objects of study or instruments of advancement, but companions in the long work of formation. They do more than convey information. They enlarge the soul, sharpen judgment, deepen wonder, and usher us into a richer and more serious way of being in the world. Along the way, Brooks discusses the teachers who first put serious books in his hands and the books that shaped him, from Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise to Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus. The conversation ranges from landscape and longing to teaching and apprenticeship, and from the allure of ambition to the discipline of moderating it through wisdom. This is a conversation about books as guides for life, about the formation of men, and about the kind of education that moves from the classroom to the soul.

Podcast Pursuing Embodied Wonder and Material Wisdom: Chris Hall on the Common Arts

March 24, 2026

Forged: Timeless Ways of Living


Pursuing Embodied Wonder and Material Wisdom: Chris Hall on the Common Arts

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.