150 episodes listed below
Liberal arts formation for boys and their guides.
HeightsCast is a reflective education show rooted in The Heights School’s work with boys and young men. Its conversations move between parenting, classroom practice, faith, American founding, technology, and the habits that help boys grow in integrity.
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HeightsCast is a show from The Heights School that treats boys’ education as a work of formation. It is not built around hacks or hot takes. The show’s core question is steadier: what helps young men become truthful, attentive, intellectually alive, faithful, and free? Episodes often begin on campus in Potomac, Maryland, then move into conversations with teachers, school leaders, writers, and invited speakers. The register is thoughtful and humane. A discussion about integrity becomes more than a lecture on lying; it turns toward the unity of words and heart, the difference between exterior compliance and interior truth, and the way boys learn to see the good before they can reliably choose it. A conversation about middle school resists panic. It frames awkward independence, withdrawal, and stubbornness as signs of growth that require timing, confidence, and parental patience. Classroom episodes are equally interested in practice and principle. Rote learning, attention, Latin, Greek, literature, mathematics, and habit are treated as paths toward freedom when guided by teachers who love their subjects. The show also follows the pressures of the moment, especially AI and technology at home, in school, and in future work. Its religious conversations are careful about conscience, freedom, clarity, and charity, particularly in Catholic classrooms with students from multiple faith backgrounds. Civic and literary episodes widen the frame, taking up the American founding, Thomas More, leadership, law, liberty, and citizenship. Conference talks bring in themes of calling, career paths, ambition, and the temptations faced by strivers. The result is a show for parents and educators who want to think slowly about boys, not simply manage them. It is warm but demanding. It assumes that families, schools, and teachers can speak about virtue, beauty, truth, and intellectual joy without embarrassment.
Made for: Parents, teachers, school leaders, and fathers thinking seriously about the formation of boys and young men. It especially suits listeners drawn to liberal arts education, Catholic school culture, virtue, and classroom craft.
What sets it apart: HeightsCast combines practical school experience with philosophical, religious, and literary depth. Its conversations stay close to boys, classrooms, and parenting tensions while keeping the end of formation clearly in view.
Welcome to HeightsCast, the podcast of The Heights School. With over 200 episodes, HeightsCast discusses the education of young men fully alive in the liberal arts tradition. The program engages teachers and thought-leaders in the educational/cultural space to support our community of listeners: parents, teachers, and school leaders seeking to educate the young men in their care. Instead of downloads, HeightsCast's most important metric for success is the unknown number of thoughtful discussions it prompts in homes, faculty lunchrooms, and communities around the country and the world. Thank you for listening; thank you for continuing the conversation.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
HeightsCast connects the daily education of boys with sustained thinking about character, parental authority, intellectual appetite, and faith.
Rich Moss turns questions about educating boys into deliberate conversations about judgment, character, and the work parents and teachers do between crises.
A son says no, then does right; Rich Moss's conversation asks what you call integrity.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A focused conversation on the American founding, reading, and the long work of teaching boys well.
Dr. Matthew Spaulding's conversation with Rich Moss on Heightscast, the podcast of the Heights School in Potomac, Maryland, is a steady reflection on education, the formation of young men, and the liberal arts tradition.
A serious case for forming virtue before managing behavior.
Colin Gleason's talk on leading boys to integrity treats honesty as more than getting the right words out. It keeps returning to the gap between exterior truth and interior truth, and to the older work of forming virtue rather than merely managing behavior, which gives the talk…
Repetition becomes formation rather than busywork.
Rich Moss and a guest frame the episode around repetition, practice, and how formation can matter inside a liberal arts education. The guest argues that students need an intrinsic payoff, and he grounds that point in teachers whose enthusiasm for literature, Latin, and Greek can…
A calm case for patience when middle school starts to look like resistance.
Andy Reid’s conversation with Rich Moss finds its center in the middle school years, when the pull toward more independence begins to matter. The episode keeps returning to practical wisdom: making room for conversation, guiding at the right moment, and seeing a son’s need for…
A grounded conversation about teaching religion with clarity, charity, and respect for students' freedom.
Bill Dardis treats the religion classroom as a place where clarity and charity need to stay in conversation, especially when students arrive with different levels of belief.
A reflective conversation on parents setting the standard and keeping family values stable.
Rich Moss and Kevin Toomey frame family leadership around a simple order: parents set the expectation, the standard, and the course before bringing children into the conversation.
Parenthood and bodies, told one honest story at a time.
Dr.
Colin Gleason's HeightsCast talk on leading boys toward integrity opens with Jeremy Affel of the San Francisco Giants returning a $500,000 contract error and Andy Roddick correcting a match-point call that CNN Sports framed as 'honesty backfires for Roddick.' Gleason argues that integrity is 'interior truth,' not just a child saying the right words, and he uses The Hobbit, Bilbo, Gollum, and a false confession over a stolen lacrosse stick to show why consequence-based parenting falls short.
Heightscast's Rich Moss talks with David Maxim, a Heights School teacher who currently teaches physics, chemistry, and algebra 2, about his essay on automaticity and creativity.
On HeightsCast, host Rich Moss talks with Andy Reid, head of the Heights Middle School since 1999, about parenting boys through what Reid calls the middle school "wonder years, wander years" that can become "lost years." Reid argues that anxious "worry doesn't equal love," and that parents who default to either the permissive "little buddy" role or the surveillance-heavy "legrand inspector" role undermine a son's growing confidence.
Andrew Cantarutti says sustained attention is teachable, citing a study of 700 California high-school students where attention predicted up to 25% of standardized-test performance.
HeightsCast host Rich Moss asks Hillsdale College’s Stephen Smith how Thomas More’s education can inform the formation of leading citizens.
Bill Dardis discusses strategies for teaching religion in a classroom with students of various faith backgrounds.
On HeightsCast, Arthur Brooks draws on his Harvard teaching and Catholic faith to explain how people can find a professional calling.
Patrick Lencioni's The Three Big Questions for a Frantic Family is the least sold book from The Table Group, but Kevin Toomey calls it maybe their most important.
Colin Gleason frames fatherhood as a call to use strength to serve and protect, illustrated by a boxer who gives his earnings to a hungry boy.
Michael Moynihan discusses the role of a father as a guide to the world for his children.
Clare Morell discusses her book 'The Tech Exit,' offering practical advice for families to reduce smartphone use among children and teens.