Formation of the Young

Every other sector depends on education. The doctor needs medical school; the plumber needs a master to apprentice under; the pastor needs a seminary. But all of them — before any of that — needed a teacher who believed in them, knew their community, and stayed.

A community that loses its teachers to distant cities cannot reproduce its own culture, staff its own schools, or pass its accumulated wisdom to the next generation. The teacher shortage in rural and small-town America is not a pipeline problem. It is a retention problem — a consequence of training teachers for a mobile career market rather than for the place they already love.

CHI's answer: form teachers who are rooted in the community they serve, credentialed through partner universities, trained in the classical tutorial tradition. Teachers who stay because they were formed to stay — not because there were no other options, but because they chose it.