As an admissions counselor at Wyoming Catholic College, it is my responsibility to speak with as many high school students as possible from around the world. I have travelled the country to visit close to 50 classical schools in 8 states. I have spent countless hours on the phone learning about the biographies and aspirations of hundreds of high school seniors. These travels and conversations have revealed to me, somewhat surprisingly, a strong sense of hope and optimism in Catholic education. Classical, Catholic schools are springing up all around the country. Some sources estimate the number of such new schools to exceed 1,000. Moreover, online educational platforms, such as Kolbe Academy, are bringing rigorous classical education to a broader, more accessible platform. The entire underpinning of America’s systematized and secularized educational model is crumbling, and there is increasing talk of the Department of Education being terminated. Students and parents are awakening to the corruption of the public and mainstream Catholic school system and are taking the reins of education into their own hands.
My heart is filled with joy at this prospect, and I know it will reap wonderful fruits for the strength of the Catholic Church and the vigor of American culture. However, within these hopeful currents there lurks an insidious danger. In my travels and conversations, I frequently encountered a startling attitude: Many young students and parents of the classical movement, when faced with choosing a university education, believe that classical education is “old news.” “Oh, but I’ve already done that. I’ve read those books and studied those old ideas in high school. Now it’s time for me to move on to something new!” While on its face this idea appears logical, in its implications it has the capacity to undermine all the benefits of the Catholic, classical movement. The topic is personal for me, as my parents espoused a similar attitude in my educational journey. As a teenager, I was committed to pursuing an athletic career in college and beyond, and my parents prudently decided to secure for me a classical education while I was still in high school. I progressed through a rigorous classical program that included many of the elements of a college-level liberal arts education. However, my sports aspirations eventually fell through, and by a providential string of events, I ended up attending Wyoming Catholic College (WCC), a classical liberal arts school in the Great Books tradition. I was faced with a reading list that I had largely completed and a curricular track that I had already experienced in high school. This couldn’t last long, in the mind of my young freshman self.
Two realizations dawned on me in my first year of college, which ultimately resulted in my staying for all four years at WCC, which transformed my entire life. In the first place, I realized that although some of the material was the same as in my high school education, my college experience at WCC was radically different. The classes, which followed the Socratic Method, delved far deeper into the ideas and questions of the Great Books. The in-person and intentionally integrated curriculum wielded a cumulative force, bringing together the insights of philosophy, literature, theology, and science into a singular vision of reality. At WCC, all the disciplines of human thought were brought into harmonious and insightful correspondence, which allowed me to form a well-rounded mind and character in a way that was never attainable in high school. The fact that I had already read many of the books in the curriculum, far from being a detriment, was a profound advantage. I discovered that my classical education at home was a marvelous preparation, not for something “new and different,” but instead for deeper study of the same monumental works and ideas.
More importantly, however, I realized a difference in myself––that isin my capacity for learning. I discovered that the “step” you take when entering college is one of the most consequential moments of your life, and that it can define the person you become. Because college is your first excursion outside your childhood household, the first endeavor that is truly “your own,” it has the capacity to either permanently solidify the values of your upbringing or utterly destroy them. No amount of classical education in childhood and high school can guarantee a student's resilience to the dangerous, radical forces present at most universities in today’s secular world. As I progressed through four years at Wyoming Catholic College, I grew in gratitude for God’s intervention in my college decision process. I realized that, if I had attended a “typical” university and secured my degree in mechanical engineering while playing on a sports team, my high school education in the classics and in the truths of my Catholic faith would have been a mere blip in my life’s course, a momentary, superficial exploration of the deepest truths of human life, followed by a permanent decline into the nihilism so pervasive in higher education today.
In themselves, these realizations are enough to convince me of the immense value of continuing classical education. However, my reflections on my time at WCC have inspired a deeper insight into the issue that springs from the very essence of classical education. When I encounter a high school senior who bears the attitude, “I’m through with the classics…now it’s time for servile, modern education,” my first response, though blunt, is, “You have not been classically educated.” Why do I say this? Classical education, by definition, means an education in those works and ideas of human thought that are “classic”––that are timeless and that capture something unchanging about human experience. A true education in the Great Books is an education in those works that bear study and reflection again and again throughout human history, and throughout the lifetime of an individual. The person who says, “I’ve read the Iliad once in high school, and it will now occupy a dusty bookshelf in my attic for the rest of my life” has never truly read the Iliad. This type of person has not been “classically educated.” Because if he had been, he would realize that classics like the Iliad merit continual reflection and study.
Classical education, in its concern with answering and exploring the fundamental questions of human life, is something we can never “graduate from.” No longer seeking answers to the existential questions of humanity would mean no longer being human. For an illustration of this claim, take the Greatest Book—the Bible. No good Catholic or Christian would espouse the attitude: “Well, I read the Bible in high school. Glad that’s over with! Now on with the rest of life.” This attitude is clearly absurd, considering that the Bible is a work whose meaning and significance can never be exhausted. Many of the intricacies and beautiful truths of God’s Revealed Word only manifest themselves after continual study and reflection. Only the experienced reader of scripture, who has poured over his God’s message time after time, reaps the fullness of its intellectual and spiritual harvest. This observation remains true even beyond Revelation. The Great Books can never be exhausted, and their power only increases with repetition. The works of the classical canon, because of their outstanding insight and merit, require us to return to them again and again in order to understand their true depths. The student who rejects this inexhaustible nature of classical education is, ultimately, a student who has spectacularly failed his classical formation.
These realizations solidified my conviction that a classical liberal arts education, particularly the integrated, whole-person education offered at Wyoming Catholic College, instead of being rendered obsolete, is only made more powerful and formative by the classical movement in primary education. I will always remain grateful for my four years at WCC, and I sincerely desire to share the riches of my education in Wyoming with any high school student whose heart yearns for an education grounded in the most meaningful realities of human life.
About the Author:
John Walsh is currently serving as an Admissions Counselor at Wyoming Catholic College. He graduated from WCC in 2024 and thoroughly enjoyed his four years as a student. In high school, John was homeschooled with a classical, Great Books-focused curriculum. He is fully in support of the recent resurgence of classical education and hopes to spend his life contributing to this movement. In his spare time, John loves reading and adventuring outside, often at the same time!
