Name: The Charter School Principal Turning Children Toward Plato, Virtue, and the Eternal | Caylan Ford
Uploaded: 2026-05-16T23:28:24.019Z
Duration: 55 min 41 s

American Thought Leaders

https://media1-us-west.cloudokyo.cloud/video/v14/fd/52/ec/fd52ec84-e951-4042-8d60-63e203057d1b/master.m3u8

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“People have lost sight of what education is supposed to be,” says Caylan Ford. In 2022, she founded Canada's first tuition-free classical charter school, the Calgary Classical Academy, with little more than a dozen faculty.

Since then it has grown to 1,500 students across three campuses in Calgary and Edmonton, with thousands more on the waitlist, and has changed its name to Alberta Classical Academy. 

For Ford, classical education is all about, as she put it, “turning around the soul so that it's oriented toward things that are actually eternally true and good and enduring.”

Canadian parents crave the classical education Alberta Classical Academy provides: “A lot of the parents who come to us are absolutely desperate. … The existence of this school is like an answered prayer,” Ford says. 

Surprisingly, Alberta is the only province in Canada that allows charter schools. Just as in America, Alberta’s charter schools are public schools that do not charge tuition. They are statutorily barred from having a religious affiliation. 

Students study Latin beginning in Grade 5, with additional language options like French in high school. Much emphasis is given to the coherent study of history: “Our students read a lot of primary source material, they're not judging the past through current prejudices. They're trying to understand it on its own terms,” Ford says. 

The school also has a rich world literature curriculum where students memorize a lot, for example poetry: “We do a lot of memorization work, partly because we want to help them furnish beautiful inner worlds. We want their minds and their souls to be places into which they can retire and find themselves refreshed and renewed,” Ford says. 

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