From Latin drills and logic lessons to hands-on ceramics, local schools are embracing the ancient trivium to cultivate critical thinking, character, and a deeper love of learning.
March 20, 2026
Why classical education is gaining ground in St. Louis
St. Louis Magazine • Megan Rubenstein
This St. Louis Magazine feature highlights the growing interest in classical education and the way schools are helping students build strong minds, confident voices, and lasting character through deep learning and thoughtful discussion. It also shows that this approach is about more than academics, blending rigorous subjects with hands-on experiences like ceramics and wellness practices that nurture the whole child. Families are seeking educational communities where children can grow in wisdom, wonder, and purpose.
St. Louis Magazine
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.
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.