The Charter School Founder Turning Children Toward Plato, Virtue, and the Eternal | Caylan Ford

American Thought Leaders · May 16, 2026 · 55m

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

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…