In 1989, Teach for America (TFA) started with a winning idea: recruit elite college seniors to teach in low-income schools, places far from the privileged sites from which they’ve come. Give them intense training in the summer after they graduate, and then in September they will pass their knowledge and work ethic to kids who need them the most. The innovation caught on quickly, making founder Wendy Kopp, herself a recent graduate of Princeton University, a hero to education reformers across the country.
Now comes a new initiative on the model of TFA but for a niche group: classical education instructors. Classic Learning Test (CLT) made the announcement on Tuesday. It’s called the Classical Teaching Corps, open to college seniors with a commitment to classical curricula and eager to begin in August 2025. The contract is simple: Those who are chosen will be guaranteed a post at one of the classical schools in the program’s network as long as the candidates pledge to remain at least two years in the position.
As with TFA, Classical Teaching Corps will provide summer training for candidates who’ve been accepted, which will be conducted in 2025 at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, Belmont Abbey College in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Templeton Honors College at Eastern University outside Philadelphia. The program differs from TFA, however, in how applicants are matched to institutions. TFA lodges successful candidates in weak schools for the purpose of equity. High-performing elites are brought to low-performing schools, giving these young intellectual stars a chance to give back. It’s a social plan, a unification of haves and have-nots. Classical Teaching Corps will not use a class yardstick. The matching will be intellectual, classically-oriented grads placed in classical education schools.
I predict the program will receive hundreds of applications by the spring. We are now at the point where kids who entered elementary and middle schools ten or twelve years ago when classical education was just starting to blossom are in college and thinking about jobs beyond graduation. Enough of them appreciate the formation they got to wish to continue on the other side, as teachers. Given the growth rate of classical schools, they may be confident that the world they favor wants them and needs them. For aspiring classical teachers, the market outlook is very good.
In fact, the opportunities number more than CLT’s initiative can fill. If someone is no longer a college student and wants to enter classical teaching, Classical Teaching Corps is closed to him. There’s an alternative, though, which CLT mentions in the press announcement. Robert Jackson has built a platform that makes it easy for schools and candidates to find one another and communicate. It’s called Classical Commons, and its aim is to address a problem that follows from the field’s success: with so many new classical schools opening their doors and existing schools adding grades and admitting more students, how do they find teachers and administrators to handle the demand?
As noted on its homepage, more than five hundred schools were established in the last decade. They need teachers, and schools of education at the universities won’t supply them. The public schools have an ecosystem in place; everybody knows how to get certified and join the ranks. TFA has been around for decades. (I used to give recruiters visiting campus ten minutes of my class time at Emory.) Classical education is an ecosystem, too, but it’s too young and dynamic and uncoordinated for it to count as systematic. That’s why Jackson founded the project: to build the network and make life easier for both interviewers and interviewees. In the future, I would like to see it function much like the Modern Language Association did when I was in graduate school, that is, as the pipeline, clearinghouse, job board, meeting place—in a word, the spot where aspiring individuals such as myself went to become a member of the guild.
I urge recent and upcoming grads to check out Classical Commons and Classical Teaching Corps. Every school leader I have recently spoken to has cited parent demand with a smile and staffing burdens with a frown. These two programs are signs that classical education is taking the next step in institutional maturity.
Mark Bauerlein is a contributing editor at First Things.
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Image by Winslow Homer, from Wikimedia Commons, via the public domain. Image cropped.
