A podcast from The Cambridge School, a Christian Classical School in San Diego California, where we discuss an education worth pursuing. From Faculty and Administration to scholars across academia, we sit down with renowned names in the field of education to discuss both the classical and Christian principles that focus on formation, not simply information.
Publisher
The Cambridge School
Category
education · kids & family · religion & spirituality
Host [Host Name] interviews alumnus Caleb Kapusinski about how a smaller school fosters a well-rounded individual who asks "why" to uncover deeper truths and solve real problems.
15 May 2026
20 Alumni Stories - Stephen Priest
Stephen Priest graduated with the class of 2020 after attending Cambridge since second grade. He went on to Baylor University, where he majored in mathematics, philosophy, and linguistics, and is now completing a master's in philosophy at Georgia State, where his research touches on AI ethics and moral cognition. The throughline connecting all of it runs directly back to Cambridge.
Stephen's episode is a sustained meditation on how ideas connect. Latin and Ancient Greek taken simultaneously led him to linguistics. Logic opened the door to set theory and philosophy of mathematics. A senior thesis topic became an undergraduate thesis topic and remains an area of active inquiry. The Cicero he studied in rhetoric class became the subject of a first-semester college research paper, written in Latin, drawing on three distinct strands of his Cambridge education at once.
What he finds most striking is that it was not only his training in mathematics that prepared him for advanced mathematics. It was his training in the humanities. Upper-level math is about proofs, and proofs are arguments, and knowing how to find, develop, and communicate an argument clearly is the same skill Cambridge builds through essays and debate. The disciplines were never as separate as they appeared.
For Stephen, philosophy is where all of it converges. It is the discipline that asks what the other disciplines are actually doing, and Cambridge, without ever teaching a philosophy course per se, spent years preparing him to love exactly that question.
8 May 2026
20 Alumni Stories - Josh Kapusinski
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.
Inside a recent episode
20 Alumni Stories - Caleb Kapusinski
Published 22 May 2026 · Transcript excerpt
[…] And the teacher certainly did that at Cambridge. Always breaking time for students to ask questions, for them to be answered thoroughly. So I think that posed a real advantage because it's not just like... A professor or teacher is talking in front of the room, no time for questions, moving on. The small classroom setting really enables you to dive deeper, which has been a total advantage for me since graduating college. Another thing I'd say is like I participate in basketball, volleyball, theater, house leadership. even cross country once or twice. So I think the fact that Cambridge isn't this massive school and that there's opportunities to try different things, that's a huge advantage because we're starting to live in a society that gets really singularly focused. […]
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