There should be no contradiction in pursuing hard sciences, humanities, and moral virtue all in one day.

For upper schoolers switching classrooms every hour, or for teachers siloed in a single subject, it can be easy to mistake “education” for a series of distinct academic categories. In this rebroadcast from 2015, Upper School Head Michael Moynihan gives us a better framework. He urges us to look at how our school’s different departments present a unified and infinitively connective worldview—one that invites inquisitive engagement and exercises the full scope of human reason.

4:39 The strength of “entertainment culture”

8:16 Successful families

9:28 Assessing the educational landscape

11:32 Fragmented school subjects

14:20 Teaching persons, not subjects

17:18 Appreciating the full scope of human reason

Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton (see chapter 8, “The Romance of Orthodoxy”)

By the Communion of Persons Man Becomes the Image of God by Pope St. John Paul II

The Lost Tools of Learning by Dorothy Sayers

The Idea of a University by St. John Henry Newman

Regensburg Address by Pope Benedict XVI

Laudato Si by Pope Francis

The Art of Teaching Sovereign Knowers by Michael Moynihan

Fall Open House at The Heights School (October 18, 2025)

Fathers’ Conference at The Heights School (November 1, 2025)

Convivium for Teaching Men at The Heights School (November 13-15, 2025)

“Be perfect” (Matt. 5:48) and “anxious for nothing” (Phil 4:6).

This tall order from the New Testament may put modern parents into a cold sweat. Parental perfectionism and anxiety are surely on the rise, but in his annual Headmaster’s Lecture at The Heights School, Alvaro de Vicente talks us down. He shows us the compatibility and wisdom of these two Biblical encouragements by refocusing on the process of growth—moral, academic, athletic, and spiritual—over simply the apparent results.

2:41 Introduction: being “good enough”

8:15 A new way to see perfection

10:07 Context changes our expectations

17:34 Setting reasonable expectations

24:46 Acknowledging our son’s freedom

29:28 Parental anxiety: danger ÷ opportunity

36:54 Surrounded by goodness, a twitch upon the thread

40:53 Perseverance through hard times

47:42 Addressing real problems

53:15 Ultimately, in God’s hands

Men in the Making, Alvaro de Vicente’s Substack

Loss of the Creature by Walker Percy

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Minority Report (2002)

The Innocence of Father Brown by G. K. Chesterton

Peace Like a River by Leif Enger

Failure Is a Great Tutor—Don’t Fire Him by Alvaro de Vicente

Having Better Mentoring Conversations by Alvaro de Vicente

Fall Open House at The Heights School (October 18, 2025)

Fathers’ Conference at The Heights School (November 1, 2025)

Convivium for Teaching Men at The Heights School (November 13-15, 2025)

The art of mentoring is not just for teachers and coaches, but also parents—who can never really be out of mentoring mode.

In a recent Substack article, Alvaro de Vicente named five pitfalls for our attempts at mentoring young men. This week, he talks us through some of the takeaways, reminding us that mentoring is not a profound lecture but an ongoing conversation, and the goal is not to modify but to form.

3:49 What mentoring is

4:35 Conversation as the basis

8:55 Parents: always in mentor mode

10:13 Presence over “meaningful content”

16:01 Weighty conversations

18:25 Daily conversations

21:24 Love unlocks a child

30:48 Urgent conversations

33:34 When to mandate

35:36 When to end the conversation

37:33 Formation is a game of inches

Men in the Making, Alvaro de Vicente’s Substack

Five Conversational Temptations Mentors and Parents Commonly Face by Alvaro de Vicente

Peace Like a River by Leif Enger

Only the Lover Sings by Josef Pieper

Having Better Mentoring Conversations by Alvaro de Vicente

Forming Others: What Mentoring Can and Can’t Be featuring Colin Gleason

Anthropological Foundations of Mentoring featuring Dr. Joseph Lanzilotti

Mentoring without a Program: Joe Cardenas on Teaching the Whole Person featuring Joe Cardenas

Fall Open House at The Heights School (October 18, 2025)

Headmaster’s Lecture on Freedom in the Home at The Heights School (October 4, 2025)

Fathers’ Conference at The Heights School (November 1, 2025) link coming soon

Convivium for Teaching Men at The Heights School (November 13-15, 2025)

In the broader society, mistrust increasingly defines the parent-teacher relationship. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

As a Heights parent and seventh grade core teacher, Kyle Blackmer shares a practical vision for sound parent-teacher relationships. It begins with understanding parents and teachers in their true, cooperative roles for a child’s good. And it ends with developing real friendship between parents and teachers as they pursue this good together.

1:29 Decline of the parent-teacher relationship

4:51 Parents’ true role as primary educators

10:18 How teachers relate to parents

13:40 How parents relate to teachers

18:28 Shared understanding of the goal

20:52 School as a community

26:39 Building parent-teacher relationships

We Need to Talk About Parent-School Relationships by Daniel Buck

Partnering with Parents: Some Implications for Parents as Primary Educators by Michael Moynihan

Communicating with Parents by Kyle Blackmer

The Role of Parents in the Conspiracy for the Good featuring Alvaro de Vicente

Order and Surprise: Lionel Yaceczko on Beauty and the Western Tradition featuring Lionel Yaceczko

Humility and Teaching: On Leading While Walking Backward by Joseph Bissex

Parents as Primary Educators by Michael Moynihan

Headmaster’s Lecture on Freedom in the Home at The Heights School (October 4, 2025)

Fathers’ Conference at The Heights School (November 1, 2025) link coming soon

Convivium for Teaching Men at The Heights School (November 13-15, 2025)

“One of the best places to cultivate a Catholic worldview in the hearts and minds of young people … is in the backcountry,” writes Fr. John Nepil in his recent release, To Heights and unto Depths.

Fr. Nepil, who has led dozens of group treks through the mountains of Colorado and said Mass atop every fourteener in the state, joins us to talk about adventure and a young man’s theological education. The backcountry, he says, is rich in lessons of creation, dependence, suffering, and beauty—restoring our sense of being created and loved by a self-giving God.

5:18 What draws us to the mountains

9:04 “Nature” vs. “creation”

13:16 Fatherhood

16:00 Dependence

20:44 Cultivating a worldview

25:54 Guiding the conversation (or not)

28:13 Redemptive suffering

31:23 Starting with beauty

38:59 Physical vs. metaphysical limits

46:46 Men doing hard things together

48:29 The backstory of the book

50:39 A habit of reading

To Heights and unto Depths by Fr. John Nepil

Rethinking Mary in the New Testament by Edward “Ted” Sri

Daughter Zion: Meditations on the Church’s Marian Belief by Joseph Ratzinger

Poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton

Why We Go: Seven Benefits of the Backcountry by Elias Naegele

The Way of Encounter by Joe Breslin

Why We Need Exposure to Nature by Eric Heil

Convivium for Teaching Men at The Heights School (November 13-15, 2025)

How many times a day do I tell my son what to do next?

In this rebroadcast from 2015, our Head of Middle School Andrew Reed offers his ideas on cultivating an environment at home (and in the classroom) where boys can develop their own academic will. This entails not only greater freedom but also—just as necessary—a close and reliable family bond. Mr. Reed explains how this counterintuitive pair works together to teach a boy to choose the good for himself.

6:32 The will: a marker for success

9:02 Overmanaging: telling them what to do

10:54 Boys grow from experience and challenge

12:33 The indifferent boy

14:43 Prompt the will with a question

17:31 Create an environment of freedom

20:16 But keep a close family bond

22:33 Manage the influences

24:21 A parenting examination of conscience

27:10 Patience and optimism

29:00 The will, freedom, and good academic habits

Developing Academic Habits: A Guide for Parents by Andrew Reed

The Key to Success? Grit, a TED Talk by Angela Lee Duckworth, May 2013 (transcript here)

Academic Habits and a Student’s Developing Will by Andrew Reed

Convivium for Teaching Men at The Heights School (November 13-15, 2025)

To help our seniors synthesize the many ideas, events, and texts they’ve surveyed across high school—and to help them better understand their own cultural moment—Heights teachers have developed a senior core class titled “History of Western Thought.” In this episode, Upper School Head Michael Moynihan and long-time teacher Austin Hatch discuss the course and its guide-text: Carl Trueman’s Strange New World (2022).

HOWT covers essential texts from Plato’s Republic to Pope Benedict XVI’s “Regensburg Address.”. Its goal is not only to prepare students for college work but to prepare them to meaningfully engage with the culture they will inherit, understanding its origins and its underlying assumptions.

00:02:31 History of Western Thought course
00:08:10 The “HOWT” syllabus
00:11:31 Strange New World, a primary source guide
00:14:13 Teens and the intellectual tradition
00:16:39 Seeing ideologies in motion
00:18:48 Pairing philosophical threads
00:27:26 Understanding our cultural moment
00:29:25 Pushing back on ‘authenticity’
00:33:31 How students respond to the course
00:35:09 Thinking about friendship
00:41:04 Big ideas in a short class
00:44:32 Reading Trueman alongside your son

Strange New World by Carl Trueman

“Canada Is Killing Itself” by Elaina Plott Calabro, The Atlantic, September 2025

Texts from the HOWT course:

The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self by Carl Trueman

Republic by Plato

Phaedo by Plato

The Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle

De Officiis by Cicero

Moralia, vol. 1, featuring “How to Know a Flatterer from a Friend” by Plutarch

Confessions by Augustine

Summa theologiae by St. Thomas Aquinas

Utopia by Thomas More

Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau

Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy by René Descartes

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

The Idea of a University by St. John Henry Newman

Regensburg Address by Pope Benedict XVI

American Restlessness featuring Dr. Benjamin Storey

A Study for All Seasons: On the Western Tradition featuring Lionel Yaceczko

Is The Heights a Classical School? by Michael Moynihan

Convivium for Teaching Men at The Heights School (November 13-15, 2025)

Properly understood, the imagination is not something you escape to; it’s something you draw upon every day to make decisions, understand events, and communicate.

This week on HeightsCast, Dr. Matthew Mehan explores the purposes of the imagination and the habits of wit and wisdom that help us insightfully process our world. We may think of the imagination at odds with reality. But, he says, cultivating the imagination actually makes us more capable, “wittier” thinkers about reality.

00:03:05 Defining the imagination
00:05:31 “Good mother wit”
00:08:25 How LLMs undermine the wit
00:11:05 Beyond the “moral imagination”
00:15:33 Imagination of the Founding Fathers
00:20:03 Aesop and governing your animal spirits
00:24:28 The mistakes of Naturalism
00:27:57 18th century ABCs
00:32:13 Role models for the civic imagination
00:40:38 Who chooses what goes in
00:43:26 Reality educates us
00:46:39 Recommendations for parents
00:52:24 Metaphor control: guarding your hope
01:02:33 Humor and joy

mythicalmammals.com, Matthew Mehan’s website

“Restoring America’s Founding Imagination” by Matthew Mehan

Mr. Mehan’s Mildly Amusing Mythical Mammals by Matthew Mehan

The Handsome Little Cygnet by Matthew Mehan

The Plutarch Podcast by Tom Cox

Illustrated Aesop’s Fables by Aesop, with an introduction by G. K. Chesterton

Fifty Years on the Old Frontier by James Cook

Saints Series Podcast by The Merry Beggars

The Boy Stories Series by Tom Longano

Metaphor Control: A Modest Hope for Civilization by Matthew Mehan

Shaping Your Son’s Moral Imagination (article) by Alvaro de Vicente

Shaping Your Son’s Moral Imagination (lecture) featuring Alvaro de Vicente

Seeing History: On Using Images in the History Classroom by Kyle Blackmer

Convivium for Teaching Men at The Heights School (November 13-15, 2025)