Description In this episode of The Christopher Perrin Show, Christopher Perrin welcomes John Mays to tell the story of his vocation as a teacher, writer, and founder of Novare Science. Mays traces his winding path from electrical engineering and recording-studio work to public school teaching, graduate study in physics, classical education, and two decades at Regents School of…

Description In this episode of The Christopher Perrin Show, Christopher Perrin welcomes Keith McCurdy and Davies Owens for a conversation about Raising Sturdy Kids, Keith’s new book on forming strong families and capable children. McCurdy argues that children today are not naturally sturdier than previous generations, but are often more fragile—marked by rising anxiety, depression, diagnoses, medication, and difficulty coping with…

Description Christopher Perrin welcomes Dr. Matthew J. Smith, founder of Hildegard College, to discuss why he left a tenure-track literature career to build a deliberately small, relationship-centered “micro college” in Southern California. Smith describes modern higher education as expensive, bureaucratically bloated, and often unable to offer a unified vision of learning—especially when general education becomes a “Wild…

Description Christopher Perrin welcomes Dr. John Mark Reynolds for a extensive conversation about the renewal of classical education—and why the term classical often confuses more than it clarifies. Reynolds shares how family life, great teachers, and deep reading (especially C. S. Lewis and Plato) shaped his intellectual and spiritual journey, eventually drawing him into the classical Christian…

Description Recorded at the 2026 Great Hearts National Symposium on February 25, 2026, this edited episode features Christopher Perrin’s keynote speech exploring the history, meaning, and renewal of classical education, asking a foundational question: what exactly are we trying to recover? Drawing from sources as diverse as Augustine, Herodotus, Tocqueville, and C.S. Lewis, he traces the…

Description Christopher Perrin welcomes author and speaker Heidi White to discuss her book The Divided Soul and the inner conflict so many people experience between duty and desire. Along the way, Perrin draws on his own work, The Good Teacher, to frame how educators can unite discipline and delight as they form students’ loves. White traces her path…

Description Andrew Zwerneman, writer and narrator for HISTORY250® and co-founder and president of Cana Academy, joins Christopher Perrin to argue that America’s cultural crisis is, at root, a crisis of memory—and that renewing history education is a work of restoration. Zwerneman traces the teachers, places, and lived experiences that formed him as a historian, then explains why the…

Description Christopher Perrin explores why “classical education” is both widely used and widely misunderstood—and why the language we choose matters. He surveys common assumptions people attach to the word classical (Greek and Roman history, Great Books, elitism, Eurocentrism) and explains why the modern renewal is, for better or worse, “stuck” with the adjective. Perrin argues that we…

Description David Diener, Assistant Professor of Education at Hillsdale College and president of The Alcuin Fellowship, joins Christopher Perrin to reflect on how a philosopher’s training can become a vocational doorway into the renewal of classical education. Drawing from years in K–12 school leadership and now higher education, Diener describes why classical schools often foster unusually rich intellectual…

Description Father Nathan Carr, Headmaster of The Academy and often dubbed “the Jack Sparrow of classical education,” joins Christopher Perrin to recount his unexpected path into classical Christian school leadership—and the hard-won lessons of building a flourishing school culture over two decades. Their conversation draws on James K. A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom to argue that “liturgies” (in church…