20 Alumni Stories - Josh Kapusinski

20 Alumni Stories - Josh Kapusinski

From An Examined Education by The Cambridge School

May 8, 2026 · 7 min · Season 7 · Episode 18

About this episode

Josh Kapusinski shares his journey from student to teacher, reflecting on the impact of his education at Cambridge School.

Josh Kapusinski arrived at Cambridge in eighth grade expecting to enter ninth. His first lesson was in humility. His second was that literature could do in a classroom what it had always done for him alone at home. Josh now teaches rhetoric, speech and debate, and senior thesis at the Geneva School, a classical Christian school not unlike Cambridge. He spends a good deal of his time thinking about what his Cambridge teachers did and how they did it. The answer he keeps arriving at is that they modeled the virtues they asked of their students, brought genuine love for their subjects into the room, and held their students to a standard high enough to mean something. That combination lit a fire in him that eventually became a vocation. His episode is as much about teaching as it is about being taught. The skills Cambridge gave him, how to write, how to speak, how to think, are worth something. But what he treasures more, and what he is now trying to pass on, are the relationships. The teachers who pursued him, challenged him, and eventually became people he could call friends. Cambridge, he says, set him on a trajectory. He is still on it.

People in this episode

Guest: Josh Kapusinski

Topics covered

  • education
  • teaching
  • literature
  • relationships
  • classical education

Keywords

  • alumni stories
  • rhetoric
  • speech
  • debate
  • senior thesis

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Cambridge School, Geneva School

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