In May of 1781, mere months before the American victory at Yorktown would turn the tide against the British, John Adams offered brief but profound advice about education to his son, John Quincy Adams. First, he predicted without hesitation that, by studying the classics—the ancient Roman histories of Sallust in particular—the thirteen-year-old would thereby “learn Wisdom and Virtue.” To denizens of the twenty-first century, for whom education is often little more than a means for achieving one’s personal dreams, this claim about its formative capacity may seem far-fetched. However, in light of what Adams called “the Sum total of the Advice of your affectionate Father,” it makes perfect sense. What was his recommendation? To “ever remember that all the End of study is to make you a good Man and a useful Citizen.”
Having received a phenomenal classical-liberal-arts education from Wyoming Catholic College (WCC), and now serving in the Trump administration as chief speechwriter for the U.S. secretary of agriculture, I can wholeheartedly affirm the truth in Adams’s advice. To be clear, my life is far from the ideal of perfect goodness or maximal civic utility. Yet nothing could have better prepared me for my current position than four years of immersion in the Western tradition at perhaps the most unique college in North America.
The order I perceived in the world around me served as an invitation to step into the great Western tradition, not merely as an observer but as an active participant.
Let me set the stage. I attended public elementary and secondary schools that were quite hostile to my conservative beliefs, my Catholic faith, and the very possibility of objective truth. On the one hand, this proved to be a sort of crucible, as I was forced to defend my beliefs against secular classmates and teachers, which sharpened my mind and my tongue. However, I sensed that education was ideally meant to be an experience of leisure—a challenge, certainly, but not a minefield. Hence, WCC stood out as a remedy, as it offered a holistic community of learning, worship, and friendship. It was also an opportunity to study subjects woefully neglected in my education until that point: theology, philosophy, Latin, and the humanities. Thankfully, my yearnings were satisfied in abundance, and my years at WCC proved to be formative in ways unexpected and essential to the direction of my life.
Above all else, WCC taught me intellectual humility. In the very first week of classes, I joined the ranks of the Socratic ignorant who are at least aware of how little they know. In many ways, that awareness only increased as I encountered new (or, rather, old) texts, dilemmas, and ideas throughout the curriculum, nearly all of which I had never even considered. Can private interests ever outweigh one’s obligation to the common good? As Hermocrates argues in his speech to the Sicilian generals in Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, no, since security, the common good of a city, is required for the pursuit of private goods. Can a ruler justly exercise power at the expense of the ruled? No, as St. Thomas Aquinas explains in his Summa Theologiae, because political leaders are meant to serve the citizens of their regime, just as law exists for the good of those whom it governs. At what point can we have certainty that repeated observations of a black bear’s aggressive behavior reveal a characteristic inherent to its nature?
Answering this last question required appealing to the causal principles of natural philosophy, but it also had real-world consequences for our lives as students, since we occasionally met bears face-to-face. After all, the WCC curriculum includes a leadership program taught through outdoor experiential learning, starting with a three-week backpacking trip in the Teton wilderness before the first semester of freshman year. Each semester, we left the classroom and entered the great outdoors—also known as God’s first book—for a week of backpacking, whitewater kayaking, mountain biking, rock climbing, canyoneering, and other activities that took advantage of the western geography around us. Again and again, these experiences brought the lessons I learned in the Great Books to life. Paddling around the bend of a river in my kayak, with log jams and underwater boulders creating a dangerous maze of turbulent waters ahead, I found that courage, fortitude, and prudence were not just abstract virtues once possessed by Odysseus on his way home from Troy. They were instead my best chance at survival.
Being immersed in these unfamiliar and sometimes daunting environments amidst intense semesters of academic study shaped my body, mind, and soul all at once. It was an education of the whole person, which discouraged compartmentalizing knowledge gained through the classics as though those truths were destined to remain in a term paper to be read only by my professor. Instead, WCC invited me to understand the various facets of human learning and life as parts of an integrated, hierarchical, objective whole. The order I perceived in the world around me served as an invitation to step into the great Western tradition, not merely as an observer but as an active participant.
Upon graduation, I knew my task was to extend that harmonious order in myself, my family, and my community. I began by working as a public-policy analyst at the Texas Public Policy Foundation before joining the Trump administration as a political appointee in 2025. Much like my time in the classroom did, my role as chief speechwriter demands deep study on a multitude of topics, logical and persuasive writing, humility in the face of the unknown, and the ability to thrive under high pressure and tight deadlines. And, similar to my adventures in the outdoors, the fast-paced political arena brings unexpected daily challenges that require a calm head, quick thinking, and an abundance of moral virtue.
Thankfully, I am not left alone in the face of these challenges. The deep wells of the classical tradition never fail to furnish me with the tools I need to succeed—and not just because the secretary appreciates classical allusions sprinkled into her speeches and op-eds. My political work is a natural fruition of WCC’s mission to produce “the truly free man who, because he possesses the intellectual, moral, and theological virtues, can direct himself—with God’s grace—to his proper end” (WCC Philosophical Vision Statement, 34). Although acquiring virtue and wisdom—and their fulfillment in the Kingdom of God—is a lifelong project, classical Catholic education sets us on the path toward that end, in line with John Adams’s advice from nearly 250 years ago. It certainly did for me. America and the Church are ripe for renewal in Christ, and I cannot recommend classical education in general, and WCC in particular, highly enough to others who yearn to be good men and useful citizens in service of both.
Anthony Jones is chief speechwriter for Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins and a graduate of Wyoming Catholic College (Class of ’21). The views expressed in this article are solely his own.
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