The strangest educational experiment in history is the idea that students can understand a civilization without reading the books that built it.
Imagine trying to understand Christianity without Augustine.
Or democracy without Aristotle.
Or the modern West without Shakespeare.
The books are not optional. They are foundational.
“The challenge before us is how to live with virtue and technology when technology tends to erode virtue and place and human texture. Our response must be to cultivate habits, community and a revivification of place.”
—@BenSasse (@SenSasse)
https://t.co/d63YMJbkyS
The principles of truth, goodness, and beauty are to be thought of as identical with God’s being: they are the attributes of God.
—Prof. Cornelius Van Til, PhD (1895 - 1987), “The Defense of the Faith” (1955)
For most of Western history, education meant introducing students to the greatest books, ideas, and minds that civilization had produced.
Today many students graduate without reading Homer, Plato, Augustine, Dante, Shakespeare, or Dostoevsky.
A society reveals what it values by who it introduces its children to.
“We cannot love humanity. We can only love our neighbors.”
Bogumil Jarmulak draws on Nietzsche, Scheler, Luther, and Rousseau to show why altruism is often a counterfeit of Christian love: abstract, hollow, and evasive.
https://t.co/0XInFibRzV
If you want to understand people, read literature.
If you want to understand civilization, read history.
If you want to understand yourself, read both.
The classics help with all three.
Many students spend twelve years in school and never encounter a serious answer to the question of what makes a good life.
That should concern us.
Education cannot answer every question.
But it should at least introduce students to the greatest minds who spent their lives wrestling with them.
One reason classical education produces more mature young people is because it introduces them to greatness early.
Students spend years around saints, philosophers, statesmen, poets, generals, and missionaries.
They grow up reading about courage, sacrifice, honor, discipline, truth.
Modern education tries to protect students from greatness because greatness creates objective standards. But young people desperately want standards.
They want something higher than themselves to admire and live up to.
Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun.
—Clive Staples Lewis (1898 - 1963)