An Examined Education

Josh Kapusinski arrived at Cambridge in eighth grade expecting to enter ninth. His first lesson was in humility. His second was that literature could do in a classroom what it had always done for him alone at home. Josh now teaches rhetoric, speech and debate, and senior thesis at the Geneva School, a classical Christian school not unlike Cambridge. He spends a good deal of his time thinking about what his Cambridge teachers did and how they did it. The answer he keeps arriving at is that they modeled the virtues they asked of their students, brought genuine love for their subjects into the room, and held their students to a standard high enough to mean something. That combination lit a fire in him that eventually became a vocation. His episode is as much about teaching as it is about being taught. The skills Cambridge gave him, how to write, how to speak, how to think, are worth something. But what he treasures more, and what he is now trying to pass on, are the relationships. The teachers who pursued him, challenged him, and eventually became people he could call friends. Cambridge, he says, set him on a trajectory. He is still on it.

Aksel Yoder graduated with the class of 2023 and spent eleven years at Cambridge. He is now in college, and on Saturday mornings he meets with a classmate to read through the Gospel of John. That Bible study is the heart of his episode. Aksel's reading partner is a committed Christian, but one whose biblical foundation runs narrower than his own. What Aksel discovered in their conversations was not just that he knew more than he realized, but that he knew how to think about what he knew. He could trace the theological argument, hold his ground in genuine disagreement, and do it without making the other person feel diminished. Cambridge, he says, taught him how to read well, argue well, and love rightly in the same breath. The thread running through his reflection is the difference between receiving information and learning how to think. It is the latter, he finds, that proves irreplaceable.