Schola Classical Tutorials

Schola Classical Tutorials is the live online seminar arm of Wes Callihan, a founding figure in the modern classical Christian renewal. It is the program serious classical families turn to when they want their child reading Homer with a teacher who has read Homer fifty times.

Last updated: 2026-04-24 · Every Homeschool Editorial Team

At a glance

Method	Classical / Great Books / live online seminar
Worldview	Christian (broadly Reformed; Protestant traditionalist)
Grades	7-12 (some 6th-grade tutorials)
Formats	Live online video seminar (small group)
Cost tier	Premium
Parent intensity	2
ESA-common	No
Accredited	No
Established	2003
Website	scholatutorials.org

Our scoreboard (1-5)

Criterion	Score	One-line reason
Academic rigor	5	College-level reading load and discussion in high school courses
Ease of teaching	5	The tutor teaches; parents administer logistics
Content quality	5	Primary texts unabridged, taught by specialists
Flexibility	3	A la carte course-by-course, but tied to a fixed weekly meeting
Value for money	3	Premium per-course pricing; cheaper than peer tutorials, dearer than DIY
Worldview scope	2	Christian (Reformed-Protestant) framing throughout
Visual/design	3	Functional Zoom-era seminar interface; not a feature
Support resources	3	Reading lists and recordings provided; no LMS bells and whistles

Who the publisher is

Schola Classical Tutorials was founded in 2003 by Wes Callihan, a longtime classical educator, headmaster, and writer who had been a fixture of the classical Christian school movement since the early 1990s. Callihan taught at Logos School in Moscow, Idaho, the institution most associated with Douglas Wilson and the modern classical Christian school renaissance, and his Schola tutorials emerged as one of the first attempts to deliver Logos-style Great Books seminars to homeschool students over the internet, back when "live online class" still meant dial-in audio and a shared whiteboard.

The program is small by modern online-academy standards. Schola enrolls a few hundred students per term across roughly two dozen courses, and the tutor list remains short. Callihan himself, plus a small circle of classical educators he has trained or vouches for. The flagship offering is the Old Western Culture sequence, a four-year Great Books cycle (Greeks, Romans, Christendom, Early Moderns) that Schola also licenses as a video curriculum through Roman Roads Media. A family can therefore encounter Old Western Culture in two distinct forms: Callihan teaching live to a seminar of twelve students (Schola), or Callihan on prerecorded video that the student watches at home (Roman Roads).

Theologically Schola is Christian, broadly within the Reformed-Protestant tradition that produced its tutors. The framing is plain in course descriptions: the Bible is treated as authoritative, the Christian intellectual tradition as the reference point against which Greek and Roman thought is read, and Augustine and Aquinas as serious interlocutors rather than artifacts. Catholic and Orthodox families have used the tutorials in significant numbers and report the seminars as substantively engageable; secular families occasionally enroll, but the worldview frame is integrated, not bracketed.

The core pedagogy

The Schola method is the seminar. A weekly class of typically eight to fifteen students meets live with the tutor for ninety minutes, having read an assigned passage in the days before, perhaps Books I-III of the Iliad, or Plato's Phaedo, or Augustine's Confessions VIII. The tutor opens with a short orienting lecture and then drives a Socratic discussion: questions, student answers, follow-up questions, occasional correction, frequent connection back to earlier readings. Students are expected to talk. Students who do not talk are noticed.

Scope and sequence runs four years through Old Western Culture for the Great Books strand: Year 1 Greeks, Year 2 Romans, Year 3 Christendom (Augustine through Dante), Year 4 Early Moderns (Reformation through eighteenth century). Each year covers roughly thirty-two weekly meetings and a substantial reading load, typically 800 to 1,200 pages per term in primary texts. Latin and Greek tutorials follow a separate sequence using Henle Latin and a Greek primer Callihan has recommended for two decades; rhetoric is offered as a senior-year capstone built on Aristotle's Rhetoric.

Signature mechanics: (1) Primary texts, unabridged. Schola does not use Norton anthologies or "selections from." Students read whole books, and a Greeks year that does not finish the Iliad is considered a failure. (2) Discussion as the assessment. Quizzes are minimal; the tutor knows whether the student is reading because the tutor is talking with the student weekly. (3) Wes Callihan as institution. Callihan personally teaches a meaningful fraction of Schola's flagship courses, and his lecture-and-question style is the school's house pedagogy. Other tutors are trained to it.

A day in the life

A tenth-grader enrolled in Old Western Culture Year 1 (Greeks) and Henle Latin II at Schola has a Tuesday-and-Thursday rhythm. Tuesday morning at 10:00 Eastern, ninety minutes of Greeks seminar, last week was Iliad Books V-VI, and the tutor opens by asking what the student made of Diomedes' aristeia. The student has read the books and her annotated Lattimore translation is open on the desk. The seminar runs until 11:30. Thursday at 10:00, ninety minutes of Latin, translation drill, a passage from Caesar, parsing exercises with the tutor calling on students by name. Outside class, the student reads roughly 80 to 120 pages of Greek primary text per week and works through forty to sixty Latin sentences. Total weekly time commitment for these two courses: ten to twelve hours, of which three are live seminar.

A typical Schola family treats the tutorials as the academic spine of their high schooler's humanities work and stacks math, science, and electives elsewhere, most commonly with Veritas Press, Wilson Hill Academy, Wes Callihan's own Old Western Culture videos, or self-paced math through Saxon or Art of Problem Solving.

What they do exceptionally well

Wes Callihan's Great Books instruction. This is what Schola is. A student who sits with Callihan through the four-year Old Western Culture cycle has read more primary text, and discussed it more rigorously, than most undergraduate humanities majors at most American universities. The lectures are unhurried, the questions are real questions, and the connections across centuries. Plato to Aquinas to Calvin, are drawn naturally rather than imposed. Editorial view: Callihan is among the strongest Great Books teachers operating in the American homeschool sphere.

Discipline of reading whole books. The discipline of reading the Iliad rather than excerpts, the Aeneid rather than passages, the Confessions rather than chapters, leaves a residue in students that no excerpt-based program produces. Schola graduates routinely report that college humanities work felt under-loaded by comparison.

Latin instruction grounded in classical texts. Schola's Latin sequence uses Henle and proceeds at a pace that produces actual readers, by Latin III a Schola student is reading Caesar's Commentaries with a dictionary, by Latin IV she is reading Cicero. This is not the modern conversational Latin of Lingua Latina, but the traditional grammar-translation pipeline aimed at primary-source access.

What they do poorly

Not a complete program. Schola covers humanities, literature, history, Latin, Greek, rhetoric. It does not teach math, science, or electives. Families who want an all-in-one online classical school should look at Wilson Hill Academy or Veritas Scholars Academy instead. Schola is a humanities tutorial, full stop.

Schedule rigidity. A live seminar at a fixed time does not bend to the student's calendar. Families with multiple children, travel commitments, or competing extracurriculars find the fixed weekly meeting a constraint that asynchronous video courses (Roman Roads, Memoria Press Online Academy recordings) do not impose. Schola does post recordings, but the discussion happens live, and a student who only watches recordings is taking a different course.

Production values are utilitarian. Schola's website, registration system, and Zoom interface are functional rather than polished. Families coming from contemporary online academies with sleek learning management systems should adjust expectations downward. The pedagogy is the product; the platform is plumbing.

Who it fits / who it doesn't

• Pick Schola if: the student is a strong reader entering high school and you want serious Great Books instruction; a Reformed-Protestant or broadly classical Christian frame is acceptable or welcome; you want the student in live conversation with a specialist tutor each week; you are willing to source math and science elsewhere; the family budget can accommodate $400 to $600 per course.

• Skip Schola if: you want a one-stop online school with all subjects covered; the student resists discussion-based formats and would rather work alone through video; you want a secular Great Books program (consider Online Great Books for the adult or college-bridge version); the student is below grade-level reading and would be lost in unabridged primary texts; the family schedule cannot accommodate fixed live meetings.

Cost honest assessment

Schola's published tuition runs roughly $475 to $625 per course for the 2025-2026 academic year, depending on course and tutor, with Old Western Culture seminars at the upper end and shorter electives at the lower end. A student taking two Schola courses (Old Western Culture plus Latin, the most common combination) pays approximately $1,000 to $1,250 per year. Full humanities load. Great Books, Latin, rhetoric, would run $1,400 to $1,800.

Compared to Wilson Hill Academy at roughly $700 to $900 per course, Schola is somewhat cheaper. Compared to the Roman Roads Media video version of the same content (roughly $300 per Old Western Culture year), Schola is substantially more expensive, the difference is the live tutor. Compared to DIY Great Books with a public-domain Iliad and library Augustine, Schola is dramatically more expensive but delivers something the DIY family rarely produces: weekly accountability and real discussion.

A realistic high-school humanities budget at Schola for one student running two to three courses per year: $1,000 to $1,750.

ESA eligibility notes

Schola Classical Tutorials does not appear on most state ESA marketplace vendor lists. The program is small, the registration is direct, and the tuition model is per-course rather than per-curriculum-package, which makes ESA approval administratively awkward in states that require pre-approved vendor codes. Some state programs that allow tutoring expenses with documentation, including Arizona's ESA and West Virginia's Hope Scholarship, have approved Schola tuition on a case-by-case basis when families submit invoices, but families should not assume eligibility. Confirm with the state ESA program before committing tuition. Religious-curriculum restrictions in certain ESA programs further complicate matters given Schola's Christian framing.

Alternatives

• Wilson Hill Academy, a family would pick Wilson Hill over Schola for a complete K-12 classical Christian online school covering math, science, and electives in addition to humanities.
• Roman Roads Media (Old Western Culture video), a family would pick Roman Roads over Schola for the same Wes Callihan Great Books content delivered as recorded video at roughly half the cost, without the live discussion.
• Online Great Books, a family would pick Online Great Books over Schola for a secular, adult-oriented Great Books seminar program that an advanced high schooler can join, framed as humanist rather than Reformed-Christian.

How we verified this

Our editorial team reviewed Schola's published course catalog, tuition pages, and Old Western Culture course descriptions at scholatutorials.org in April 2026. We cross-referenced founding history and tutor biographies with Wes Callihan's published profile on Roman Roads Media, the Logos School historical record, and Cathy Duffy Reviews' coverage of the Old Western Culture sequence. Tuition figures and course offerings verified April 2026.