The Disenchanted Graduate

Why Classical Students Lose Wonder After Graduation

This article is adapted from a talk given at the 2026 Repairing the Ruins Conference.

Every year, roughly 3,750 seniors graduate from ACCS classical schools. They have read Homer and Augustine, debated Aquinas and Locke, sung psalms, and memorized catechisms. By many measures, they are among the most carefully formed students in American education.

At the same time, all the classical Protestant colleges in America combined enroll roughly 270–400 new students per year from all backgrounds. This means that most of our classically formed students will never step inside a classical college. Many don’t know one exists or have no desire to attend one.

The result is that many of them disappear into the same cultural stream as everyone else.

I don’t say this to indict anyone. I say it because I think it points to a question we haven’t asked clearly enough: What is classical education actually for?

The Purpose Question

In his treatise Of Education, John Milton gave us a clear answer: the end of learning is “to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him.” T.S. Eliot, echoing the same tradition, put it more plainly: “A Christian education would primarily train people to be able to think in Christian categories.”

A classical, Christian education is paideia — the deliberate, multigenerational project of forming students into people who see the whole of reality through the lens of Christ.

That is a very different goal from college prep. It is a very different goal from vocational training. It is even a different goal from producing students who can argue well, though that is a good gift.

The goal is formation. The goal is wonder. The goal is a life ordered toward God.

So why are so many of our graduates going off into the secular system and doing exactly what their non-classical-trained peers do?

What the Students Are Saying

Over the years, I’ve been collecting quotes from seniors at classical schools about their thoughts on classical education post-high school, and I find the results quite interesting. Here is a sample:

“I like to discuss the books, but I’m worried I won’t make enough money if I don’t become an architect.”

“I appreciate the hymns, but can we sing some normal songs in chapel, too?”

“I don’t like the liturgy and catechisms. We aren’t Catholic.”

“Why do I need to continue reading the Great Books? We read them over the past several years. Now it’s time for me to get a job.”

All of these students have been what I would call “good” students; they were obedient, turned things in on time, did well on assessments, etc. Why don’t they think classical education is worth pursuing after the age of 18?

In my estimation, they are students who have received classical content without fully inhabiting classical formation. They have learned the vocabulary of the good life without yet loving it. In other words, these students received classical content but haven’t learned to live the classical life.

So, what gives? These students are in solid classical schools. Why don’t they see the connection between classical education and the classical life?

Content vs. Formation

Here is a distinction I keep returning to:

Classical content provides: reading and discussing great books, mastery of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, habits of argument and close reading, a vocabulary for virtue and the good life.

Classical formation requires: a community in which learning is a way of life, liturgy that reorders desire week by week, mentors who model the examined life, a telos that makes sense of everything else.

The school can give students almost everything in the first column. It cannot, by itself, give them what is in the second. That requires the school’s two great partners: the home and the church.

The Three Pillars

If we want graduates who are still reading great works at 30, still praying at 40, still asking the deep questions at 50 — we need to think about three pillars working together across a lifetime.

Pillar One: The Classical Home

The home is the school’s quietest and most powerful partner. A classical education does not happen for six hours a day and then stop. The home either reinforces what the school is doing, or quietly works against it.

When I ask families during admissions interviews about the spiritual life of their home, most tell me their family attends church, attends Sunday school, and prays before bed with the little ones. That is good and right.

It is much rarer to hear: We have family worship. We sing psalms and hymns together. We catechize our children.

This is not about adding more to already-burdened families. It is about recovering ordinary practices that used to be common: shared meals with deep conversation, reading aloud together, discussing a sermon, family worship, liturgy, and catechism. Children absorb what their parents value by watching how they spend evenings, weekends, and free time. The home’s rhythms teach as much as its rules.

The ordo amoris — ordered loves — is not just a concept for the classroom. It is a pattern of life that has to be practiced somewhere. The home is that somewhere.

Pillar Two: The Classical Church

And when I look at where classical students are worshipping, the numbers are sobering, but also revealing. About 77% of practicing American Christians worship in non-denominational, contemporary, or mainline contexts. Statistically speaking, most of our students are going to churches that do not share the formative logic of the classical school.

This matters because lex orandi, lex credendi — the law of prayer is the law of belief. Liturgy is not neutral. The church that sings the psalms, prays the hours, and breaks the bread is doing something that no classroom can: it is shaping the loves of the whole person, week after week, year after year.

I want to be clear: schools do not need to tell families which denomination to join. But we can help families ask better questions. Does this church have regular corporate confession and the Lord’s Supper? Is preaching expository? Is worship rooted in historic Christian practice? Are children worshipping alongside adults, or sequestered in separate programs? Is worship formative or primarily entertaining?

The classical home and the classical church are the guides for classical life. Though I am noting this anecdotally, in my years of teaching, I have witnessed a nearly 1:1 correlation: Students who have classical homes often attend classical churches, those who attend classical churches understand the value of their classical education, and those that see how home, church, and school connect go on to live the classical life.

Pillar Three: Classical Education — K–12 and Beyond

Statistically speaking, most of our classically trained students won’t continue on to a classical college. While we could ponder what the non-classical schools are doing that is so attractive, the deeper question isn’t where they go — it’s why they aren’t hungry for more.

This is not primarily a recruitment problem. It is a formation problem. If we have done our work well, students should want what a classical college offers — not as a brand, but as a natural continuation of a life they have already begun to love. Chapter one should make them hungry for chapter two.

College is not a neutral choice. Education is always taught from a perspective, even if that education is “just vocational.” The years between 18 and 22 are among the most formative in human life. If we believe our K–12 education is genuinely shaping students — and we should — then we must also believe that what happens after graduation is not neutral.

If the classical life is actually beautiful, actually true, actually good, then students who have tasted it should want more of it. The fact that so many don’t is the clearest sign that formation — not content — is what’s missing.

What Can Schools Do?

A few diagnostic questions worth bringing to your team:

• Are your graduates still reading after graduation — and what would help make that more likely?

• Do you know which churches your families attend on Sunday, and how you might partner with them?

• Are your teachers modeling the examined life?

• Where are your graduates going to college? What sort of church are they attending?

• Does your school culture celebrate wonder alongside achievement — or primarily achievement?

• When families choose your school, do they understand they are choosing a way of life?

The formation of teachers matters enormously here. Formation is caught before it is taught. The student who sees a teacher reading for delight has learned something no syllabus can teach. The student who hears a teacher speak of their church with genuine love has seen what the classical life looks like in a body. The student who watches a teacher sit with a hard question — resisting the urge to resolve it too quickly — has learned the posture of wisdom.

Three Commitments

If you are a school leader reading this, here are three places to begin:

Help strengthen the classical home. Help families see the dinner table, family reading, and daily rhythms as part of the curriculum. Give them language: ordered loves, the examined life, beauty as pedagogy. The home either reinforces classical formation or quietly works against it.

Help anchor families in a classical church. Help families see that the sanctuary shapes the land, and the land shapes the world. Worship is not a separate sphere — it is where formation begins. You don’t need to become a denominational recruiting office; you need to help families ask better questions about worship.

Help students see K–12 and college as one story. Begin the conversation in 9th or 10th grade. Frame a classical college not as an alternative path, but as chapter two of an education already underway. Let students know such places exist. Let them hear from graduates who chose them.

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The disenchanted graduate need not be. Schools cannot do everything — but we can do more than we are currently doing to help students and families who are coming from non-classical environments begin building a worldview of wonder. Classical education, at its best, is not something that happens to a student for twelve years. It is something a student begins to inhabit — and then carries into a lifetime.