More Than a Résumé: Classical School Graduates on Who They’ve Become
Classical school graduates reflect on who they’ve become and how their education formed them in mind, character, and a lifelong love of learning.
Relational Education: Love, Friendship, Attention and Return with Grant Holbrook
What if some of the most formative patterns in a life begin with simple obligations, reading the same book again, walking the dog each morning, showing up for students, or staying rooted in one place? Christine Perrin talks with teacher Grant Holbrook about the relationships and repeated practices that quietly shape a person over time. Their conversation moves through Augustine, the Psalms, friendship, beauty, teaching, and the connection between knowledge and love. Along the way, Grant considers why education is deeply relational, why older students need responsibilities to younger ones, and how good books can become lifelong companions. For parents and teachers wondering what habits truly help form a human being, this conversation offers a hopeful picture of a life shaped through attention, fidelity, and love. Grant also shares practical patterns from his own life, including memorizing the Psalms while walking his dog, rereading great books under the helpful pressure of obligation, and taking time with former students who return, to walk, talk, and continue learning.
What Do We Lose When Work Becomes Only a Paycheck? with Jeffrey Dill
What happens when work becomes little more than a paycheck, food becomes something we expect to appear in a grocery store, and home becomes mostly a place of consumption? In this episode, Brian Williams speaks with sociologist, professor, and farmer Jeffrey Dill about the dignity of work, the discipline of living within limits, and what farming can teach us about family, freedom, and responsibility. Drawing on his experience with a regenerative beef and pork farm in Pennsylvania, Jeff considers what industrial efficiency gives us and what it can quietly take away: connection to land, craft, neighbor, and the formative power of labor itself. Their conversation ranges from Adam Smith and Wendell Berry to care work, fatherhood, household life, and raising young men who understand that a good life is larger than a career. Listen for a thoughtful invitation to recover work as something that forms us, not merely something that pays us. Jeff also reflects on folding laundry as a discipline, time outdoors with family as a delight, woodworking as a craft, and the love of God and neighbor as the calling that gathers the rest of life together. The conversation closes with W. H. Auden and a reminder that meaningful lives are built through ordinary acts of work, love, service, and fidelity.
Not All ‘Classical’ Schools Are Created Equal
The most consequential differences are often the least obvious.