In what remains of this series, I’m going to seek to do more than simply offer humane and legitimate justifications for reading literature. I will do that briefly and fairly matter-of-factly in the outset.

Then I want to try and give you adequate and meaningful language to explain why reading literature brings the literary people among us so much joy. I will, in any case, supply the language for it that satisfies me. Hopefully, it will serve you too. As a bonus, if I have time, I’ll offer an explanation for why I believe some people have never discovered the joy of literature.

To begin with, I need to provide a definition of literature. It’s too broad of a term to leave undefined. I’m taking my definition, specifically for this talk, from an amalgamation of entries on “literature” in the OED:

“The result or product of literary activity; written works considered collectively and valued for superior or lasting artistic merit including non-fictional books and writings published on a particular subject.”

With a definition of literature now tucked safely in our proverbial belts like Reepicheep’s rapier, and given this is a conference made up primarily of educators who already have the buy-in—educators who already know from training and experience that reading literature has a humanizing effect—we should lose no time articulating the humane and legitimate justification for reading literature. And, by the way, this is, in and of itself, a real source of joy.

At the conclusion of an essay titled, A Defense of Literacy, Wendell Berry writes,

Literacy—the mastery of language and the knowledge of books—is not an ornament but a necessity. It is impractical only by the standards of quick profit and easy power. Longer perspective will show that it alone can preserve in us the possibility of an accurate judgment of ourselves and possibilities of correction and renewal. Without it, we are adrift in the present, in the wreckage of yesterday, in the nightmare of tomorrow.

Berry’s statement captures in three sentences more than two millennia of thinking on the matter. He argues that the ability to preserve an accurate account of thoughts, ideas, actions, and struggles of our Western ancestors, and the ability to discern the symbols that communicate these preserved accounts, orients us to the collected wisdom of human history.

In short, Berry contrasts two competing attitudes, two competing philosophies, two competing worldviews about standards for being human, and he compels us to choose a side. In fact, he calls us to identify and name which way of life we are going to embrace.

The truth is, these two attitudes or perspectives have been at war since the Fall of man. The human conflict between the utilitarian activists who are after quick profit and easy power might be metaphorically represented by Cain in the 4th chapter of Genesis.

The true contemplatives, those with the “longer perspective,” as Berry calls it, might be represented by his brother Abel. The former are just as ubiquitous as smartphone notifications in our world today. Joseph Pieper has something to teach these utilitarian activists, the-cog-and-consumer pragmatists of the world: that receptive attention is not idleness; it’s in fact, the highest activity. Alas!

The latter are those who know how to use leisure, not merely for amusement or entertainment, but for recognizing the Eternal, and for developing an accurate judgment of ourselves in light of it, that we might prepare ourselves for it, and live for the good in this life by correcting our errors and renewing ourselves and our societies.

Following in the steps of Lewis, Berry is saying that to read books—especially old books, and I might add, to do so with a pipe in our teeth and a pencil in our hand—is a palliative to our inherited errors. Without the ability and desire to read old books, we have no connection to the past. Without literacy, we are at the mercy of words, words, words, decried Dorothy Sayers. We are prone to the worst kind of propaganda.

Without reading, we must depend on CNN, Fox News, and TikTok to tell us what is good, what is true, and what is beautiful. And, without our books, we’ll soon be at the mercy of large language models that are presently—as we speak—buying up rare books across the world, scanning and shredding them. If this modern implementation of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 continues, it’s possible they alone might one day be the sole stewards of collected human knowledge. If that be the case, we are looking at a nightmarish tomorrow more terrible than Huxley’s Brave New World and more terrifying than Orwell’s 1984.

Berry is correct: books and the ability to read them are a necessity and not an ornament.

Now as to the joy of literature that I was invited here to tell you about, you already know there is some kind of magic going on. The joy is there, or we wouldn’t keep buying and reading books. The pleasure exists, even if we’re unsure if it’s more like revenge or buttered toast. The real mystery is in how to explain what is going on. Let me briefly try to help with that.

I’m tempted to borrow from Tolkien’s discussion of fantasy to make that point. To do so would be more than adequate. It’s hard to improve on Tolkien. But I hesitate because his is a language most classical educators are familiar with and so there’s a tendency for his formula to feel cliché. Tolkien tells us that Fantasy—and his definitions rightly extend in many ways to general fiction—provides escape, recovery, and consolation.

By Escape, he doesn’t mean the flight of the deserter—someone neglecting his responsibilities in life—but the musings of the prisoner, someone taking a break from the mundane to contemplate the wonderful. Recovery, then, is the cleaning of our mind’s windows so we can see clearly. Recovery gives us a new backdrop for seeing and contemplating reality that we may behold its glory again. Finally, Consolation is the sudden joyous turn that breaks into the story and lets a gleam of unexpected hope come through. He calls this eucatastrophe. The good catastrophe.

While Tolkien is really good, his paradigm does help to give us adequate language for explaining what we experience when we read good imaginative literature, it’s also possible we’ve become too used to the language, so I wanted to try and approach it a bit differently.

In the first place, there is a sense in which adequate language to describe our joy in reading literature escapes us because it’s difficult to explain an innate human condition. It would be like trying to explain why you look the way you do? Why are your features one way and not another? Today, we can point to DNA, of course, but even DNA and protein mapping can only explain in cold scientific terms why your nose grew bigger than your brother’s.

There’s a sense in which scientific explanation fails to connect with the human condition. For example, if I said it was 18° C in the room, it would be a measurement that has significance in certain contexts, but not in all. And it would be less meaningful than if someone said it’s pretty chilly in here, don’t you agree?

Back to the point, there is something similarly innate in our human condition, the human need for story. A DNA kind of explanation falls flat, but it’s true nonetheless. We are not data centers; to quote Jonathan Gottschall, we are Homo Fictus, storytelling animals. The history of this element of our human nature can be traced back to 21st Century BC Mesopotamia, to Moses and the Genesis account, to the Hebrew stories of the covenant nation of Israel, to Plato and his expositions of myths and music.

More recently, Alasdair MacIntyre, in his book After Virtue, also argues that humans are essentially story-telling animals. MacIntyre claims that we can’t understand human action without looking at the narratives and traditions in which those actions take place. There’s also the notable Joseph Campbell whose concept of the “monomyth” (the Hero’s Journey), argues that humans have always and fundamentally used archetypes and mythological stories to make sense of the human condition and personal transformation.

And, just for good measure, let’s not forget the uncomely carpenter of Nazareth whose world-shaking teaching ministry consisted primarily of stories.

My second point will be quite brief, but it’s not for lack of weightiness…

It was a chilly November in 2053 when Leonard Mead took his regular evening stroll for the very last time. In fact, he had strolled the empty streets of his city each evening for nearly ten years, always without incident. But this night…

This night would be different. Mead had joyfully walked to his hearts’ content and was on his way home when, less than a block from his destination, he was stopped by the police. Unable to justify his reason for walking—walking to see, he explained; walking to enjoy the fresh air, walking nowhere in particular, he claimed; walking just because he was a human being with two legs capable of walking—Leonard Mead was arrested by a technopomorphic, self-driving police car. At the threat of being shot by the robot authorities, Mead climbed into the car under protest, and it silently took him to the Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies.

Ray Bradbury wrote The Pedestrian in 1951. It probably seemed far out at the time, a really strange story about an average man being accosted by an unmanned, robot car for simply doing a normal human thing: walking just because it brought him pleasure.

And, although it might be startling if something like that happened to one of us today, it probably wouldn’t sound quite as abnormal, I think—not like it would have in 1951. Today, it might feel eerily similar to being arrested for singing in church without a mask or being arrested for sharing your unpopular opinion on social media. My, haven’t we “progressed” a long way in 75 years?

Progress notwithstanding, there is a human experience some folks from 2026 would still find very similar to folks in 1951. Like Mead’s walking habit, every reader… since at least the Enlightenment… has experienced, at some time or another, the need to justify his reading habits. I’m not talking about justifying the timing or the selection of the literature being read, necessarily. There might be legitimate reasons for those questions in certain contexts—like why Susie is reading The Vampire Diaries in study hall when she should be studying her Latin.

But the utilitarians among us, and even that cold utilitarian that lurks within each of us, at some point or another compels us to justify our purpose for reading literature at all.

The critic demands to know, Why are you wasting valuable time reading fiction or poetry? That’s time that could be used much more productively, don’t you think? If you find that you have to read, you could be reading something “strictly educational,” or at least “overtly moralizing.” Better yet, you could be using that time for chores, for work, for getting ahead, for turning a profit. Have you seen your task list recently? What gives, loafer? (At least that’s how my inner critic speaks to me.)

When the critics “critic,” how do you answer? What is your most satisfying justification for reading literature? Before you answer, may I remind you, that even the esteemed W. H. Auden once mused that “When one thinks of the attention that a great poem demands, there is something frivolous about the notion of spending every day with one.”

Perhaps your answer might be—and of course you would answer in your most pious tone—”Well, for the sheer pleasure of this good story or this beautiful poem!” You say.

“Ha!” says C. S. Lewis, suddenly peering from around the corner of one of your dusty memory banks, that one that contains the vague memory of reading his An Experiment in Criticism in college:

“The real objection to a merely hedonistic theory of literature, or of the arts in general,” begins Lewis, pointing the glowing end of his half-smoked cigarette at you, “is that ‘pleasure’ is a very high, and therefore very empty, abstraction. It denotes too many things and connotes too little. If you tell me that something is a pleasure, I do not know whether it is more like revenge, or buttered toast, or success, or adoration, or relief from danger, or a good scratch. You will have to say that literature gives, not just pleasure, but the particular pleasure proper to it; and it is in defining this ‘proper pleasure’ that all your real work will have to be done. By the time you have finished, the fact that you used the word pleasure at the outset will not seem very important.

“Fine!” you answer, unfazed by the fact that C. S. Lewis just emerged from the annals of recent history to speak directly to you in your braincase. Mustering a slightly more honorable reason, you answer: “I’m reading for no reason in particular; I read because I am a human being capable of reading. And, that’s that!” you say, confidently hiding the fact that you are still unsatisfied with that answer yourself.

“Well, off you go,” says Ray Bradbury, leaping up from behind your left occipito-temporal-fissure. “Perhaps, it’s time you pay a visit to the Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies.”

“That’s right!” chimes some unknown and bespectacled, cognitive scientist that suddenly appears to be standing just behind Bradbury’s right shoulder in a white coat and holding a clip board. Stepping around Bradbury, and nudging him aside as he peers first at the clipboard then back at you, he continues: “the tale of reading begins when the retina receives photons reflected off the written page. But the retina is not a homogeneous sensor. Only its central part, called the fovea, is dense in high-resolution cells sensitive to incoming light, while the rest of the retina has a coarser resolution. The fovea, which occupies about 15 degrees of the visual field, is the only part of the retina that is genuinely useful for reading.”

“Wait!” You interrupt, annoyed that these critics, who suddenly seem more real and weighty for some reason, have interrupted your reading time—and right when you were at the good part, about to find out who really killed Smith—his betrayed and jealous wife, his illicit lover, or the secret cabal that he had double crossed.

“Can you just get to your point?” you calmly ask the cognitive scientist through your grit teeth and conjured smile.

“Well, to skip over the process and get to the point, brain imaging suggests there is a cerebral organ for reading even though there’s not been sufficient evolutionary time for one to develop, since humans have only been reading for a few thousand years. Evolutionary change moves at a much slower rate…”

Suddenly, a burst of loud laughter coming from somewhere much deeper in your mind, overpowers the silly scientist and echoes through your head. As the laughter slows, the same voice, now sounding a little shrill asks, “Didn’t I tell all of you where this ‘writing’ would lead? Remember the mythos… Remember Theuth and King Thamus… said the voice now fading into silence… now familiar to you as Socrates.

“Fine,” you tell your inner critic as you regulate yourself with a few deep breaths. “Here’s my best answer, my best justification for reading literature—Socrates notwithstanding:” “Reading literature allows the clean sea breeze of the centuries to blow through my stifled modern mind,” you answer.

Maybe this conversation feels somewhat familiar to you, or maybe I am just a maniac, but I can say with certainty, the need to apologize for our writing and reading of literature goes back a long way. And I use apologize in its more formal and rhetorical sense—to give an answer for our position. As was previously noted, Socrates famously objected to writing in general. And as late as the 17th century, John Bunyan penned in verse his famous apology for the Pilgrim’s Progress to answer his critics:

May I not write in such a style as this?

In such a method, too, and yet not miss

My end--thy good? Why may it not be done?

Dark clouds bring waters, when the bright bring none.

Yea, dark or bright, if they their silver drops

Cause to descend, the earth, by yielding crops,

Gives praise to both, and carpeth not at either,

But treasures up the fruit they yield together;

Yea, so commixes both, that in her fruit

None can distinguish this from that: they suit

Her well when hungry; but, if she be full,

She spews out both, and makes their blessings null.

My point is, despite a long history with the critics—be those critics around us or be it the one lurking within us—literary people find great joy in reading literature and it’s not always easy to say why. It’s not always easy to justify that joy.

To merely say literature brings us pleasure, isn’t enough to silence the critics. We need meaningful language.

Read Part 2 - The Joy of Literature

In Part 1, I established intellectual virtue cannot be separated from moral virtue. And, to be good at anything that requires sound thinking, like school leadership, one must be committed to taking personal ownership of perceiving what it’s going to take to get to the truth of the matter and the moral responsibility to pursue that truth which is universal. His opposite is the idiot—by definition, the one who is not intellectually or morally involved, one who is not concerned where his public role requires it. This is, in sum, the virtue of perceptual expertise.

In this post, I want to carry our virtuous standard of perceptual expertise through the three stages, or the lifecycle, of a Classical Christian School.

The Birth Stage: Marked by Development and Growth (Emergence from the Cave)

Every classical Christian school is born out of an awakening. Similar to the prisoner who first climbs out of the cave into the light of the sun, the founders and early adopters of a school are moved by a profound sense of disillusionment with the status quo, the prevailing modern educational paradigms. These are people who recognize the shadows on the wall for what they are. They perceive the relativism, the utilitarianism, and the cultural fragmentation projected by modern pedagogy as imitations of the real thing.

In response to their new insight, they seek for a passage to reality. The ascent is often messy and uncomfortable as they stumble their way toward the light, toward a vision of education that is true, good, and beautiful. Discovering an education rooted in the liberal arts, the humanities, and the Christian intellectual tradition is the school’s proverbial emergence from the cave, its birth stage.

Generally, this stage is marked by three elements:

• Conviction: a deep commitment to truth.

• Sacrifice: founders tend to work with limited resources and overwhelming challenges.

• Clarity of Purpose: the mission is fresh, focused, and communal.

And yet, like the freed prisoner who struggles and squints to see reality in the full light of the sun, new schools often experience similar disorientation as they ask the guiding questions. What does it mean to implement a classical curriculum? How do we train teachers in this tradition? How do we articulate our theological commitments to our leadership, to our teachers, to our students, and to our students’ parents?

In the birth stage, the school must be led by philosopher-educators who are willing to pursue reality by the light of the sun even when it costs them popularity, comfort, or control. They must also be willing to descend again into the day-to-day operations of the school and help others ascend—teachers, parents, and students alike. In the corporate world, they call this MBWA (Manage By Wandering Around). For purposes considered here, I would like to suggest DABWA—Descending Again By Wandering Around.

In the birth stage, the descent is necessary as a moral and spiritual endeavor. It doesn’t require a whole lot of management or technical skill. Instead, it requires that the one who would lead others toward the light must be one who has already learned to see by it. That’s why I suggested that leadership in a classical Christian school is far more perceptual than it is operational. The most important decisions are not based on checklists or protocols, but on what the leader sees or fails to see. And this requires what I referred to in the previous post as perceptual expertise: the cultivated capacity to discern the truth in the concrete, often ambiguous, particulars of institutional life.

This kind of perceptual expertise—knowing what to look for, knowing what the signs mean, knowing what is absent but should be present—requires something more than experience in administration; it requires virtue, specifically the virtue of ownership. The headmaster cannot be a spectator or an idiot in the sense we’re using it. To highlight this virtue in Aristotelian terms, I mean the headmaster cannot see himself as owning the school for personal profit (excess); nor can he see his role as a stepping stone for career advancement (deficient). He must serve as the steward of the school’s mission with this intellectual powers as a matter of moral responsibility (The Golden Mean).

The Distortions of Vice

As both Aristotle and Plato knew—and as the Christian tradition affirms—vice distorts the our vision. Vice clouds the soul and leads it away from universal truths toward private idols. In other words, a school leader cannot guide a community toward the Good while he is himself being governed by vice: pride, envy, wrath, or sloth. The consequences of the infamous seven deadly sins extend beyond an individual’s spiritual demise; they become epistemological poison, toxic to perceptual expertise.

Consider just a few of the ways vice will disable the leader’s capacity to discern the truth about the school:

• Pride blinds. It renders a leader incapable of admitting institutional faults or recognizing personal limitations.

• Envy hardens. It refuses to learn from others, especially rival neighboring schools that are actually flourishing.

• Wrath (irritation) disables. It becomes defensive, repels criticism, and makes honest dialogue impossible.

• Sloth neglects. It disregards problems that require sustained, humble attention.

• Avarice distorts. It perverts discernment by overvaluing the material and the useful. It treats truth as a commodity to be leveraged. For example, corporate-style cost-benefit analyses rather than truth decide the school’s priorities and budget.

• Gluttony subverts. It undermines attentiveness through overstimulation and dulls the leader’s perception.

• Lust deforms. It skews perception by confusing appearance with essence. It substitutes the fantasy of what-never-will-be for the reality that really is.

Each of these vices leads away from universal truth and into idiosyncratic folly—the fruit of the idiot. Together, they cripple the school leader’s ability to diagnose problems, to anticipate complications, and to understand solutions. And without this perceptual clarity, decline is inevitable—even if outward appearances remain respectable for a period of time.

The Management Phase: Marked by Stability and Maturity (Life in the Cave)

After it outlives the initial zeal of founding, the school enters a season of management. Policies are formalized, procedures and processes are codified, the culture is established, and the school becomes institutionalized. This is a necessary and even healthy development; but it is also a perilous development.

In the management phase, the danger is not chaos like it was during the founding; the threat is complacency. This is the rub of institutionalism. The fire is still burning, but it’s casting shadows once again. Instead of engaging the tradition directly, schools may begin to rely on second-hand ideas, innovations, formulas, or fads. For example, instead of cultivating virtue and wisdom, parents and school leadership may become preoccupied with branding, growth metrics, test scores, and college acceptance rates.

The great temptation here is to conflate values with processes, to confuse control with genuine formation, and to confound academic performance with real learning. And because the problems are no longer obvious at this stage, it’s also where leadership most desperately needs perceptual expertise. Threats to the institution’s vitality are subtle. Often, the institution seems to be functioning—perhaps it’s even flourishing externally—but internally the soul of the school might be dying.

In this stage, leaders must possess the ability to ask hard questions and answer them honestly and rightly. To possess that ability, the must have trained their own souls in virtue. The questions are:

• Are we truly cultivating wisdom and virtue, or merely producing compliant students—consumers and cogs for the State and the market?

• Are our teachers lifelong learners and lovers of truth, goodness, and beauty? Or are they themselves institutional cogs who have come to tolerate the curriculum, the lifestyle commitments, and the faculty meetings all for a paltry paycheck?

• Are our policies ordered toward formation or have they multiplied to serve administrative convenience and efficiency?

• Have we become market reactive rather than principled in our decision-making (i.e. loud parents, whiny students, public opinion, etc.)?

One important note is light of these questions is the vices we discussed in the birth stage don’t magically disappear in the management phase; often they become normalized before eventually calcifying into school’s culture. The leader governed by pride will become defensive. The leader governed by sloth will defer hard decisions. The leader governed by avarice will prioritize image over substance.

Without spiritual vigilance and perceptual clarity, the school in its management phase becomes an echo chamber of its former ideals. To put it in Platonic terms, it becomes an imitation of its real self—a new cave with new images.

The Great Injustice: Renewal or Decline (Return to the Light or Embrace of Shadows)

Eventually, every school comes to a crossroad. Having moved from vision and growth to operations and management, it must now choose between renewal and decline.

The challenge is knowing how to recognize where it is in the cycle because decline is not always dramatic. It often happens quietly and professionally. In other words, it looks like managed mediocrity; it becomes a polite school that maintains the outward forms of classical education while gradually adopting the assumptions of modernity. The school curriculum remains intact, but attitudes and assumptions don’t; thus, the institutional culture begins to shift by degrees. For example, maybe the school still teaches Latin, but it can no longer articulate why. In other words, the school just becomes the same ol’ cave with better lighting and polished shackles.

Renewal, by contrast, is difficult and costly. It requires returning again to the first things—the three-fold injustice of disorientation, sacrifice, and suffering. It demands that leaders continue to confront external challenges while also standing up to internal decay. And this kind of work calls for a fresh ascent into the light—a rediscovery of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful for their own sakes.

But here, too, renewal depends on leaders who can see with perceptual clarity. The school cannot rely on systems managers; it needs a fresh infusion of genuine soul stewards. As I like to say where I teach, we don’t need more teachers of curriculum; we need more teachers of students. Forget the efficient technicians; those are a dime a dozen; we need more lovers of truth—philosopher-educators.

If a school is going to revive from its decline, and not merely preserve itself, then it must be led by those who can see rightly. This shouldn’t be confused with “visionary leadership” in the modern, corporate sense. Rather, it’s leadership grounded in virtue, seasoned by wisdom, and practiced through perceptual expertise—a kind of spiritual attentiveness to the moral and cultural conditions that either elevate or erode a community.

Conclusion: Recovering the Philosopher-Leader

The lifecycle of a school is not inevitable. Schools decline because leaders lose sight of the Good. They forget how to see, or maybe they just tire of looking. In any event, they become governed by vice that warps their judgment and blinds their perception. They may not be carrying scandalous secrets; they may just become idiots—privateers who are looking for the next rung in their career ladders.

Also, decline is not final. Renewal is always possible. But to succeed, we need leaders who, themselves, have been formed and are always seeking to be reformed. School renewal requires leaders who have cultivated the virtue to perceive the real, the humility to confess their limits, and the courage to lead others toward the light.

This is the calling of the classical Christian school leader. And it is a calling that demands not only strategy and stamina, but also perceptual expertise.

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The Allegory of the Cave

In Book VII of Plato’s Republic, the Allegory of the Cave offers one of the most profound meditations on education and leadership in the Western tradition. Every philosopher, educator, and Great Books student knows about The Cave. It’s one of the staples of a liberal education. Yet, many never actually lean on it or proactively put its principles into practice.

Too often, it sits in the classical educator’s mind like a marble bust on a library shelf where everyone unconsciously recognizes the aesthetic value it adds to the library; yet, few pay attention to its likeness or pause long enough to meditate on the life of the person it represents.

Let’s recall the allegory: A group of prisoners are chained in a cave, staring at shadows on the wall, mistaking illusions for reality. One prisoner is freed, ascends into the light of the sun, and after a painful adjustment comes to know the true forms. The former prisoner then returns to the cave, not to lord his knowledge over the others, but to lead them into the light.

The allegory captures the essence of the classical educator’s calling. But here is what a lot of people miss. Plato’s allegory is more than a model of intellectual ascent; it’s also a model of moral virtue and personal responsibility. Education, as Plato understood it, is the liberation of the soul from ignorance and vice so it can behold the truth and function in virtue.

Plato insists that we think, not just with our minds, but with our whole soul which must be rightly ordered: noetic, thymotic, epithymatic. The predecessor to C. S. Lewis’s head-chest-belly sentiment, the head must rule the belly through the chest. Consider Plato’s dialogue with Glaucon:1

But then, if I am right, certain professors of education must be wrong when they say that they can put a knowledge into the soul which was not there before, like sight into blind eyes.

They undoubtedly say this, he replied.

Whereas, our argument shows that the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already; and that just as the eye was unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole body, so too the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into that of being, and learn by degrees to endure the sight of being, and of the brightest and best of being, or in other words, of the good.

Very true.

If Plato is correct about nature and capacity of education, then to emerge from the cave will require a great injustice (517, 519d). It means a perilous journey back into the cave, one that involves disorientation, resistance, and suffering. Plato calls it an injustice because the philosopher must either become unjust himself by not descending and sharing the knowledge of the truth when he is compelled; or he must suffer an injustice by descending and being disoriented, resisted, and abused.

Perceptual Expertise

I propose that the Allegory of the Cave can also serve as a fitting metaphor for understanding the lifecycle of a classical Christian school. Just as a soul matures through stages of ignorance, illumination, and injustice (i.e., either by transformation or by decline), so too a school passes through similar phases of birth, management, and suffering—either by decline or by renewal.

At each phase, the health of the school depends on much more than systems or strategies; it depends on the moral vision and perceptual clarity of its leaders. For this reason, school leadership must cultivate what I will call perceptual expertise: the ability to perceive the truth of the institution in all its complexity, and to act wisely and humbly in light of that perception.

In Part 2, I will walk through the three stages of the school’s lifecycle; but first, I want to explain my use of this expression, perceptual expertise. I am actually repurposing the expression here having borrowed it from Matthew Crawford in his book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, where he maintains forensic perceptual expertise is the mark of an expert mechanic.

To illustrate, the expert mechanic—the one who has cultivated forensic perceptual expertise—is the guy in the shop that knows what’s wrong with the car just by hearing it run or hearing the story of how it broke down. The novice can also diagnose is but he is going to need to get out his equipment and run through his checklist. While he’s not a bad mechanic, per se; he’s certainly not an expert. Similarly, as a novice, he is not the expert’s opposite either.

The expert’s opposite is an idiot (to use the word in its original meaning). The Greek work idios means “private,” and idiōtēs means “private person.” An idiot in this context is literally one who does not grasp his public role: his role entails perception and active concern for the other (person or thing).

An idiot is one who is not intellectually or morally involved. He is not concerned where his public role requires it. He may never say it out loud but he has the disposition and moral torpor of one who believes, “It’s not my monkey, not my circus,” when his role actually requires it.

We also take our English words “idiomatic” and “idiosyncratic” from this same Greek word, both of which suggest self-enclosure. The idiot is closed off, doesn’t listen, and jumps to conclusions because of his premature conceit of knowledge. An idiot is not unintelligent, necessarily; he’s foolish. His is not so much an intellectual failure as his is a moral failure. Sticking with the mechanic scenario, the idiot is the guy that carelessly and in haste, grabs the wrong wrench for the bolt and strips it out, or starts beating on things with a hammer when the job requires some actual finesse and thoughtfulness.

Crawford himself borrowed the insight of the idiot from Robert Pirsig’s book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig tells the story of a mechanic shop that had butchered his bike after numerous times of taking it back to them. He writes,

Why did they butcher it so?.. They sat down to do a job and they performed it like chimpanzees. Nothing personal in it... But the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, easygoing—and uninvolved. They were like spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job. No saying, “I am a mechanic.”

There is a bit of a paradox going on here. The more personally one owns their work, the less private and more universally thoughtful they are about the work. The opposite is also true. The less attentive or less ownership one takes in his work, the more private, or closed off, he is in his thoughts about the work. To not take personal ownership of the work is to remain a spectator, and spectators are solipsistic and idiosyncratic. Perceptual truth, that truth which is universal and applies to all of us, does not reveal itself to spectators.

This means having a degree, a license, or a credential does not mean a person is an expert, or that the truth as it relates to that person’s work will automatically reveal itself to him or her. Having a title or degree doesn’t mean the person will perceive what it’s going to take to get to the truth of the matter. Unfortunately, we see this all the time in academia (and often in the church too). Think of the headmaster (or the pastor) who is building his own resume rather than the students, the people, or the institution that he’s been entrusted with.

The idiot lacks the attentive openness that seeks things out in a shared world; in a word, he isn’t concerned with universal truth. The universal truth here can be understood as the issue needing to be addressed or the thing that is broken. And it is so in the particular way that’s the same for everyone. To address it or fix it is going to require moral responsibility—a turning of the soul toward the sun—to get at the truth of it. You can’t just wing it. You can’t fake it till you make it.

For example, one cannot be an expert headmaster and simultaneously a headmaster who is concerned first with his own needs, his own advancement, his own “whatever” more than the public work he’s (or she) is called to. THIS IS THE GREAT INJUSTICE! Perceptual expertise is only conceived in those who willingly go back down into the cave regardless of the cost.

And, this brings us full circle, back to Plato’s (and the Christian’s) understanding of truth and light. One must be good (in a particular way; this way I’ve just described) to know the truth. Truth and goodness are transcendentals and therefore share one ultimate end. They both (along with beauty and unity) converge in God himself.

Thus, intellectual virtue cannot be separated from moral virtue. To be good at anything that requires sound thinking—to be an expert, say, at school leadership, or anything else—one must take personal ownership of his or her commitment to universal truth. This is the virtue of perceptual expertise.

Read Part 2 Here ->

“Everything in the Pagan world that was valiantly done, brilliantly said, ingeniously thought, diligently transmitted, had been prepared by Christ for his society!”1

Desiderius Erasmus’s humanist mantra is set in the mouth of Jacob Batt, a character in The Antibarbarians who serves as a secretary of the town council in the city of Bergen. Through the speeches and dialogues of the characters in his seminal work—all based loosely on his real-life friends and colleagues—the “prince of humanists” lays out significant aspects of Christian humanism.

A fuller excerpt of Batt’s speech expounds on one of the key tenets of Christian humanism, suggesting with St. Augustine that there are spoils possessed by the Egyptians that were prepared by God in advance for the benefit and welfare of God’s people. Proverbs 13:22: …the sinner's wealth is laid up for the righteous.

Batt (Erasmus) says,

Everything in the Pagan world that was valiantly done, brilliantly said, ingeniously thought, diligently transmitted, had been prepared by Christ for his society! He it was who supplied the intellect, who added the zest for inquiry, and it was through him alone that they found what they sought. Their age produced this harvest of creative work, not so much for them as for us; just as every region cannot supply every commodity, nor (as Virgil says) does every land grow everything, so it seems to me that every century is allotted its own gifts. Many of the philosophers wore out their lives and their brains in seeking the highest good; but the real highest good, the perfect gift, was reserved by Christ for his own time. However he did not intend all the rest to be useless and done to no purpose. We see with our own eyes how in material things nature takes care that no portion of time shall slip away uselessly. Look at the trees (the sight of them suggests this example to me):

Batt goes on the illustrate his point by highlighting the seasonal changes of an apple tree. Spring supplies the sap and the budding flowers. Summer produces the pulp of the fruit and autumn the ripe apples which fall and produce new shoots from its seeds. Even winter, in its interval of quiet, plays the part of reestablishing the cycle. The manner of the planets and all of nature work the same way, he argues. The great discord of nature is actually working toward “the completest concord.”

So it is in the generations that proceeded Christ. His time was, of course, “the recognition of the highest good,” but the virtuous pagans had their own special privilege in the scheme of history too, striving to reach the things nearest to the highest good. Christ is the ripe fruit, but their generations were the sap and the bud that prepared the way. Similarly, the generations following will play their own special part in the work of bringing about the completest concord—the spread of the gospel and the discipling of the nations.

This manner of thinking about the reformation of humanity is a fundamental key to understanding Christian Humanism. It’s ancestor to Abraham Kuyper’s famous claim that, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!”2

Notwithstanding, when we speak of Christian Humanism today, the expression can be off-putting to readers. For many, these two words don’t belong together. They ring something of an oxymoron, like “sweet sorrow,” “cruel kindness,” or “military intelligence.”

This is because, on the one hand, widespread conceptions of evangelical Christianity tend toward notions of anti-intellectual fundamentalism. On the other hand, the common understanding of humanists are that of “enlightened,” anti-religious priests of secularism. In popular lore, these visions of life are mutually exclusive and fundamentally at odds with one another.

Yet, this popular assumption couldn’t be further from the truth. As I explain in my Very Short Explanation of Christian Humanism,

Christian Humanism predates secular, atheistic humanism which has borrowed the term and some of its effects, cut-flower. Further, Christian humanism is not man-centered; it’s incarnationally centered. That is, the Incarnation affirms the dignity of humanity and God’s lovingkindness toward him. Finally, Christian humanism acknowledges that Christ is the ideal human, and in him, we recover the fullness of our humanity. Therefore, Christian humanism seeks to recover and restore a vision of human flourishing under the lordship of Christ, integrating faith, reason, and the moral imagination.

Christian humanism is rooted in the tradition of men like St. Augustine, Boethius, Dante, Erasmus, and Milton—thinkers who saw that truth, goodness, and beauty are coherent in Christ and accessible through a disciplined and grace-informed intellect.

Perhaps J. Gresham Machen captures the concept best in his classic work, Christianity and Liberalism, where he writes,

The trouble with the paganism of ancient Greece, as with the paganism of modern times, was not in the superstructure, which was glorious, but in the foundation, which was rotten. There was always something to be covered up; the enthusiasm of the architect was maintained only by ignoring the disturbing fact of sin. In Christianity, on the other hand, nothing needs to be covered up. The fact of sin is faced squarely once for all, and is dealt with by the grace of God. But then, after sin has been removed by the grace of God, the Christian can proceed to develop joyously every faculty that God has given him. Such is the higher Christian humanism - a humanism founded not upon human pride but upon divine grace.3

When humanists think that they can promote and cultivate an educated class of flourishing human beings by erasing religion and setting man up as the measure of all things, his project will crumble because it’s rotten at the foundation. Humanity is fallen; men and women are sinners. On the flip-side, when Christians think pious religion is the continual beating of the breast and crying, “Woe is me!” and “man will never be anything more than a worm,” they fall into the other ditch, something Machen calls “the religion of the broken hearted.”

Christian humanism affirms the efficacy of the gospel. And the gospel’s transformative power has, in large part, been the impetus for Christian thinkers, writers, and educators from John the Evangelist and the Apostle Paul to Flannery O’Connor and C. S. Lewis.

The written testimonies of those who witnessed the Incarnation claim Christianity is the ultimate (and arguably first) humanism because while Christianity is chiefly interested in the glory of God and transcendent matters of the human soul, it is also deeply concerned with texts, human flourishing, and society’s common good. These focal points of Christianity are not bifurcations of priorities. They are interdependent and consistent with Jesus’s mission. As the Church Father Irenaeus made abundantly clear in his work Against Heresies, “the glory of God is a living man.”4

Christian humanists believe everything that is good, true, and beautiful belongs to and comes from God. Even the good works of Pagan and pre-Christian cultures were inspired by the Holy Spirit for his own purposes. That includes literature, philosophy, art, poetry, rhetoric, politics, etc.). It’s up to Christians to harvest the pollen from their flowers and make good honey. Such is the high calling of Christian Humanism.

The reason I publish BOOKS AND LETTERS is to promote Christian humanism and provide humane reflections on literature, culture, and education in an age dominated by fleeting trends and digital noise.

Because authentic humanism can only flourish under the lordship of Christ, my first book, Beloved of God and Called to be Saints, is an exposition of St. Paul’s letter to the Church at Rome, where he offers his longest and most sustained theological explanation of the gospel.

This is where he unpacks the gospel’s power to save the unrighteous and establish a flourishing humanity in the new age of Spirit-led liberty, a humanity that is united in and by Jesus Christ for the glory of God the Father.

If you’re interested in exploring Christian humanism, let me invite you to become a free subscriber to BOOKS AND LETTERS.

Subscribe now

Then grab my 378-page book with 267 daily reflections (i.e., theological crumbs) on Paul’s letter to the Romans. It’s not a sentimental devotional; it’s a humble invitation to those who want to see more clearly.

Grab Your Copy Here

Buy It on Amazon

Strangely, I just held a physical copy of my book for the first time, yesterday (mos…

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We’ve probably all experienced that one particular uneasy moment whenever you’ve set the table for special company—that moment when the doorbell rings. We race through our mental checklists to make sure we didn’t forget anything, check our teeth for some stray piece of broccoli hanging around, and then open the do…

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Over the last three videos, I’ve been making a case for education that I believe with all my heart.

In the first video: modern education, with its watertight bulkheads, teaches students subjects but fails to teach them how to think. They learn everything except the art of learning.

In the second video: there is a better road to education, the road the West always regarded as self-evident. The Great Conversation. Six years, one cohort, reading the primary texts of the Western tradition in chronological order as living voices, organized around the six great ideas: Truth, Goodness, Beauty, Liberty, Equality, and Justice.

In the third video: how it works. Two ninety-minute Socratic seminars each week. Thirty-two weeks a year. Four high school credits per year—twenty-four credits over six years—covering literature, history, philosophy, theology, geography, civics, economics, art, music, architecture, logic, writing, and rhetoric, all integrated, the way reality itself is integrated. You add physical education, math and lab science. The rest is here.

Today, I simply want to invite you!

This fall, I am opening The Great Conversation to its founding cohort: twelve to sixteen students, ages twelve to thirteen. These students will begin with Genesis and Homer in year one, and six years later they will finish with Lewis, Tolkien, and Solzhenitsyn — having read the whole arc of the Western tradition together, in order, as one community.

The tuition is $3,000 per year—$18,000 across the full six years—and that rate is locked when you enroll. It will NOT increase for your family, EVER, regardless of what future cohorts pay. Plus, you can pay annually or monthly interest-free.

Let me put that figure in perspective. Three thousand dollars a year, for four high school credits, works out to $750 per credit for live instruction, twice a week, in a seminar capped at sixteen students, taught by a PhD who has given his career to this tradition.

Families routinely pay more than that for a single online course with a fraction of this scope. And a classical Christian day school, where the humanities block would be one part of a much larger tuition, typically runs many times this amount each year.

I’ve priced the course this way deliberately, because I want it filled with the right students. I’m not running an elite prep-school for students of the wealthiest families. As Hutchins frequently argued, the education of “the best” is the best education for all.

Now, I want to be candid with you about how enrollment works, because it is different from anything else you’ve probably encountered. Because of its six-year continuity, this cohort enrolls only once. And then it closes. That’s just the nature of this kind of course.

There is no joining it in year two or year three. The depth of the conversation in year five depends entirely on what these same students argued about in year two, for example. A student who wasn’t there for Achilles can’t fully answer for Aeneas. The cohort is not a feature of the course. The cohort is the course.

So when these twelve to sixteen seats are filled, the door closes, not until next fall, but for six years.

If you have a child who is twelve or thirteen years old, this is the moment! Not because I say so, but because arithmetic says so: a six-year course that begins at twelve must begin at twelve.

There is an old proverb I’ve shared with my readers before: the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is today. Math is math.

Next Steps

Here is your next step. Below this video you’ll find a link to an interest form. It takes about two minutes to fill it out. Tell me about your child: who they are, what they love, where they are in their education.

I will personally follow up with every family. We’ll have a real conversation where you can ask me anything; and together we’ll discern whether this course is the right fit for your child. No pressure, and no obligation. If it isn’t the right fit, I’ll tell you so, and I’ll gladly point you toward what is.

But if it is the right fit—if you have one of those young people who is hungry for something real—then I would count it a privilege to spend the next six years introducing your child to Homer and Moses, to Plato and Paul, to Augustine and Dante, to Shakespeare and Milton, to Dostoevsky and Lewis and Tolkien.

The Great Conversation has been going on for three thousand years. It has never ended. It is waiting for your child to join it.

Fill out the interest form today, and let’s talk about your child’s seat at the table.

I hope to meet your family soon.

Interest Form

In the second video, I introduced you to the Great Conversation: a six-year integrated humanities course in which a single cohort of twelve to sixteen students reads the primary texts of the Western tradition in chronological order, from Genesis and Homer to Lewis, Tolkien, and Solzhenitsyn.

In this video, I want to answer the practical questions about the course. It’s one thing to agree that children need a humane education. It is another thing to build an academic year for a real child in a real family with real limitations.

So let me walk you through exactly how this course works.

The Schedule

The cohort meets with me live, online, twice a week, on Mondays and Wednesdays, for ninety minutes per session. We conduct two weekly Socratic seminars modeled on the Adler and Hutchins Paideia approach. Each year runs thirty-two weeks, organized into four eight-week terms, with natural breaks at the regular academic intervals like Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and summer.

Ninety minutes, twice a week, may not sound like much compared to a seven-hour school day. But I’d ask you to consider what actually happens in those hours.

It would be distracting to talk about it in this video but you can watch my 11-minute short film called, We’ve Been Schooled to learn why it happens. In short, modern education has succeeded at what it set out to do, which is to occupy the family’s valuable time by having students do busy work to prepare them for the industrialized State.

In any case, I love what Hutchins said about our modern education model:

“The American scheme of an eight-year elementary school, a four-year high school, and a four-year college, with graduate and professional work on top of that, is unique in the world, and we cannot congratulate ourselves on its uniqueness.“

In a Socratic seminar, no one hides in the back row. Every student reads, every student reasons, every student speaks. Three hours of genuine dialectic, sustained across six years, will form a mind in ways that thousands of hours of passive instruction never will.

The Course Curriculum

This is one integrated course, but it does the work of many. Studying the great books in an integrated fashion weaves together literature, history, philosophy, theology, geography, civics, economics, art, music, and architecture, along with some math, astronomy, and natural science where the tradition itself takes them up, as when we read the ancients on the cosmos or the early moderns on the new science. And running through all six years: logic, writing, and rhetoric, taught not as separate subjects but naturally and organically through the texts themselves.

The writing progression is deliberate. Students begin in year one with narration and imitation—learning, as I frequently tell my students, that good writing is clear thinking made visible. They progress through analysis and argumentation, and they finish in year six with a substantial senior thesis, defended aloud before their peers. Six years of weekly writing under the eye of one teacher who knows exactly how each student’s prose has developed since he or she was twelve years old.

Course Credits and Outcomes

Each year of The Great Conversation is technically worth four high school credits, distributed across humanities, writing and rhetoric, logic, history and civics, theology, and fine arts. Over six years, that’s twenty-four credits, which means this one course provides your student’s complete humanities education. As a parent, you need to add, really, only three things: gymnasium or PE, a mathematics sequence, and laboratory science. Everything else is here, and it is integrated rather than scattered.

I want to pause on that point, because I’ve counseled hundreds of homeschooling families, and I know where the burden actually falls. It is not usually the math curriculum that exhausts parents. It is the finding and coordination of five or six separate providers, each with its own philosophy, its own schedule, its own gaps. As I have been saying, one of the chief weaknesses of modern education is fragmentation. But reality is not fragmented this way. All truth belongs to the One Truth. A better education helps students see the integrated nature of knowledge; it helps them understand the world as cosmos rather than chaos.

Reading Load

We begin gently. In the first term of year one, students read twenty to thirty pages a week, enough to go slowly, to reread, to wonder. The load grows deliberately each year, so that by years five and six students are reading at a genuine college-preparatory pace, over a hundred pages a week, and handling it with confidence because they were led there step by step. In the Great Conversation, the student is led, not driven.

The Teacher and the Community

Curriculum matters, but curriculum alone is not enough. Education is mentorship. It is discipleship. It is transformation. A child is always being formed; the question is not whether formation is happening. The question is: who is forming the child, and toward what end?

For six years, your child will be formed in a community of serious-minded Christian peers, reading the greatest books ever written, under a teacher who has spent more than thirty years in this tradition, as a classroom teacher, a pastor, a college professor, a journal editor, and the president of a classical education institution. I will know your child’s mind. I will know how he reasons, where she hesitates, what he loves, and what she is capable of. There is no substitute for that kind of continuity; even though there are some wonderful courses and teachers out there, no year-by-year program can offer it.

The Ideal Student

Now, the last question is who is this course for?

It is for families committed to a classical Christian education who want the depth of a great books formation without assembling it piecemeal. It is for students who are curious, who ask hard questions, and are not content with the surface of things. And it is for parents who understand that students who take this course are committing to something bigger than their self-comfort and contemporary conveniences. They are committing to the work of securing an ultimate possession.

Disclaimer

And I’ll be honest with you: this course is not for everyone. A six-year commitment is a serious commitment. A student who does not want to read should not be made to fill one of these seats. There are better paths for that child, and I’d be glad to help you find one.

In the final video, I’m going to extend the invitation: describe the details of enrollment, talk about the investment, and explain why this cohort—unlike nearly every other course you will ever consider—enrolls once and then closes.

I’ll see you there!

Six years ago, Kepler Education, where I serve as President, hosted our first Consortium Conference in Louisiana—the Southern Consortium of Classical Educators. That year, we hosted a one-day conference and luncheon to encourage and equip families and educators already involved or in…

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In this video, I want to show you the alternative. And to do that, I need to tell you about two men and a very big idea.

In 1952, Robert Maynard Hutchins, who was then president of the University of Chicago, and the philosopher Mortimer J. Adler, published a fifty-four-volume set called the Great Books of the Western World. The first volume in the series was Hutchins’ introduction to the set. There is something he wrote in that introduction that I want to draw your attention to. Hutchins wrote:

Until lately the West has regarded it as self-evident that the road to education lay through great books. No man was educated unless he was acquainted with the masterpieces of his tradition.

He called the great books the road to education; neither a supplement nor an elective. The identified them as the road, the pathway, the means of acquiring one’s education.

What Hutchins and Adler understood is that the great books of the Western world are not simply artifacts in a museum collection. They are a long, sustained conversation, the written record of the poets and philosophers throughout the West who have discussed and debated, for nearly three millennia, the perennial questions that relate to the human condition.

We encounter Homer speaking, Plato answering and Virgil building on Homer. St. Augustine answers Plato and Dante gathers all of them up into a single vision. Hobbs disagrees with Aristotle and Rousseau borrowing from and nuancing Hobbs, puts forth his own vision. And, Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkien shine the whole inheritance bravely and brightly into the darkness of the modern, progressive twentieth century.

Hutchins called this the Great Conversation. And the remarkable thing about this conversation is that it has never ended. It only waits for the next generation to join it.

To read the great books is to engage in the Great Conversation, to discover how generations of people understood the answers to the perennial human questions, and to see how ideas have consequences, and which of those ideas have shaped our present moment.

The Great Conversation Course

Now, here is what I am offering your family.

My Great Conversation course is a six-year, integrated humanities course for students who begin at twelve or thirteen years old. I’m inviting twelve to sixteen students of this age to spend six consecutive years in a single cohort, where we will read, discuss, and write about the primary texts of the Western tradition in chronological order. We will engage these works not as museum artifacts but as what Chesterton called, “the democracy of the dead,” living voices in a long and lively conversation.

Each year of the course is anchored both chronologically and thematically, structured around one of the six great ideas Mortimer Adler identified in his book Six Great Ideas as threads running through the whole of Western thought: Truth, Goodness, Beauty, Liberty, Equality, and Justice.

Year One: Creation, Cosmos, and the Heroic Soul. The big idea is Truth. We read Genesis, Homer, the Greek tragedians, and Plato, etc., and we ask: What is real, and how do we know it?

Year Two: Reason, Virtue, and the City of Man. The big idea is Goodness. Plato’s Republic, Aristotle, Virgil, Cicero, the New Testament, etc. What is virtue, and how is it cultivated?

Year Three: Faith, Reason, and the City of God. The big idea is Beauty. St. Augustine, Boethius, Aquinas, Dante, Chaucer, and the Beowulf-poet, etc.. What is the transcendent, and how does it draw us?

Year Four: Renaissance, Reformation, and the Collapse of Christendom. The big idea is Liberty. Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Shakespeare, Milton, Pascal, Rutherford, etc. What is freedom, and what does it cost?

Year Five: Revolution, Romanticism, and the Modern Self. The big idea is Equality. Locke, Burke, the Federalist Papers, Tocqueville, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, etc. What does it mean for all persons to bear dignity?

Year Six: Postmodernism and Cultural Recovery. The big idea is Justice. Chesterton, Eliot, Lewis, Tolkien, O’Connor, Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, Pieper, Sowell, etc. What do we owe one another, and on what basis?

Along the way, students will study the flow of big ideas in the historical narrative: for example, how beauty was conceived in Athens, transfigured on cross in Jerusalem, encoded in the Gothic cathedrals, then fragmented in the modern era.

Together, we will read history, geography, civics, economics, art, music, architecture, even some astronomy and natural science. And, all of it will be synchronized to the civilization we’re reading, because that’s how the tradition actually holds together.

The Most Significant Component

Now let me tell you about the part of this course that I believe matters most; it’s the part almost no other program offers.

The students who begin this course together will finish it together. The same cohort for six years. Why does that matter? Because the Great Conversation cannot be had alone, and it cannot be had well with strangers.

Students who join this cohort will learn to read with increasing depth and breadth, write with increasing sophistication, reason with increasing rigor, and speak with increasing eloquence; and they will do so together, as a community of Christians whose understanding and wisdom incrementally grows deeper precisely because the community of learners does not change from year to year.

By year four, these students will share an intellectual vocabulary. By year six, when they read Nietzsche, they will answer him with the Plato and Augustine they read together years before. That is what it means to join a conversation rather than take a class!

By the time a student graduates from The Great Conversation, he or she will have read more primary texts deeply, written more substantive prose eloquently, and engaged with the perennial human questions more seriously than the vast majority of students entering America’s finest universities.

More importantly, students who complete this six-year course of study will know how to think wisely and act virtuously, which is really the only kind of education worth committing six years of their lives to.

In the next video, I’m going to get practical. I’ll talk about the weekly schedule, the credits, the reading load, the writing your child will produce, and exactly what this course covers so you can see how it fits into your family’s plan.

I’ll see you in the next video.

“Do you often come across people,” she asked,

for whom, all their lives, a ‘subject’ remains a ‘subject,’ divided by watertight bulkheads from all other ‘subjects,’ so that they experience very great difficulty making any mental connection between, say, philosophy and economics, or chemistry and art?

Let’s think about that image for a moment.

A watertight bulkhead is a wall inside a ship, sealed so that nothing passes from one compartment to the next. This is a fine thing for a ship, but it’s a disaster for a human mind.

Sayers pressed the point even further. “Is it not the great defect of our education today,” she asked, “that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils ‘subjects,’ we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think? They learn everything, except the art of learning.”

I’ve been an educator for more than thirty years, and I have to tell you: not much has changed since Dorothy Sayers lamented this pedagogical deficiency nearly eighty years ago.

Modern academic programs, even some of the better ones, are still organized around “subjects.” Students take Math at nine o’clock; history at ten; literature at eleven. Each discipline is sealed in its own watertight compartment. Each with its own textbook. Each disconnected from the others. And, more often than not, each is disconnected from the child’s soul.

But here is the thing every parent instinctively knows: reality is not fragmented that way. Learning “subjects” is no substitute for learning the arts of dealing with the interconnectedness of our reality, the reality from which subjects are merely extracted, or dissected.

When Dante wrote the Divine Comedy, he was not writing “literature,” per se. He was writing theology, astronomy, politics, philosophy, and poetry all at once, because that is what reality is actually like. When the medieval builders raised a cathedral, they were dealing with geometry, engineering, music, and worship all in a single act. The whole was greater than the sum of all of its parts.

A truly humane education is an integrated education; it’s an education that teaches students how to see and how to think about reality in all of its layers and complexities, such that the whole of it is much greater than all of its parts.

Now, why am I telling you this?

Because if you have a child who is twelve or thirteen years old right now, you are standing at the single most important educational crossroads of that child’s life.

These next six years—from about age twelve to 18 (i.e, graduation)—are the years when a young person’s mind and character take their lasting shape. It’s true that early development plays a huge part in a child’s personality, but these are the years when a student either learns to think, or merely learns to check boxes and perform the prescriptive hoop-jumping routines of cogs and consumers. These are the years when the child will either come to love what is true, good, and beautiful or learn to love whatever the algorithm serves him next.

A drum that I am continually beating, something I tell parents every chance I get is education, rightly understood, is the formation of a human soul. It is the noble work of passing down wisdom and knowledge from one generation to the next. It is where every culture tells the truth about what it believes and what it loves.

Consider that in the modern world, we have learned how to effectively transfer information to a machine. We’ve learned how to store massive data in clouds and on devices. And just like our machines, modern education has taught students to accumulate disconnected facts while remaining unformed, unwise, and spiritually malnourished.

And in an age when artificial intelligence can produce gobs of information instantly and endlessly, the one thing your child needs most is the one thing you cannot get from a machine: a humane education. The education of the whole person. An education that forms judgment, imagination, courage, eloquence, attention, and wisdom.

That is why, this fall, I am offering something I have spent the better part of my career preparing to teach: a robust, integrated humanities course called The Great Conversation.

It’s a single course of study that spans six full years, covering the best primary literature of the Western tradition from antiquity to postmodernity, with history, philosophy, theology, geography, civics, economics, art, music, architecture, logic, writing, and rhetoric woven together the way reality actually holds them together.

This course is not a collection of subjects confined to watertight bulkheads. It’s one ship, built whole.

In the next video, I’m going to tell you exactly what the Great Conversation is, where the phrase comes from, what my six-year course covers, and why a small cohort of students reading together for six consecutive years accomplishes something no year-by-year program can ever replicate.

Let me encourage you to take a moment to ask yourself Sayers’s question about your own child’s education: is he (or she) learning “subjects” or is he (or she) learning the art of learning?

I’ll see you in a couple of days in the next video.

We all agreed there was plenty of ti…

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Do you often come across people for whom, all their lives, a “subject” remains a “subject,” divided by water-tight bulkheads from all other “subjects,” so that they experience very great difficulty in making an immediate mental connection between, let us say, algebra and detective fiction, sewage disposal and the price of salmon, cellulose and the distribution of rainfall—or, more generally, between such spheres of knowledge as philosophy and economics, or chemistry and art?… Is it not the great defect of our education to-day (—a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned—) that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils “subjects,” we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think? They learn everything, except the art of learning.

—Dorothy Sayers, “The Lost Tools of Learning”

Modern academic programs, even some of the better ones, are still organized around “subjects.” Not much has changed since Dorothy Sayers lamented this pedagogical deficiency all the way back in 1947. But learning “subjects” is no substitute for learning the arts of dealing with the interconnectedness of our reality, from which subjects are merely extracted or dissected.

A truly humane education is an integrated education that teaches students how to see and think about reality in all its layers and complexities such that the whole of it is much greater than all of its parts (i.e., subjects).

That’s why I am offering a new course this fall, a robust, integrated humanities course called “The Great Conversation” that spans a full six years, covering the best primary literature from antiquity to postmodernity.

The Great Conversation course is organized around the most profound perennial human questions, the very same questions that got Socrates executed, the same questions Augustine wrestled with in his Confessions, Dante mapped onto the architecture of the cosmos, and that men like Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkien brought bravely and brightly into the twentieth century.

A Six-Year Structural Architecture

I’m inviting 12-16 students (12-13 years old) to spend six consecutive years in a single cohort where we will read, discuss, and write about the primary texts of the Western tradition in chronological order, engaging them as living voices in a long and lively conversation.

Students who take this course are committing to something bigger than their self-comfort and contemporary conveniences. They are committing to the work of securing an ultimate possession. Students who join this cohort will learn to read with increasing depth and breadth, write with increasing sophistication, reason with increasing rigor, and speak with increasing eloquence.

They will study, for instance, how beauty was conceived in Athens, transfigured in Jerusalem, encoded in the Gothic cathedral, and fragmented in the modern era. And they will do all of this together, as a community of Christians whose understanding and wisdom incrementally grows deeper precisely because the community of learners does not change from year to year.

By the time a student graduates from The Great Conversation, he or she will have read more primary texts deeply, written more substantive prose eloquently, and engaged with the perennial human questions more seriously than the vast majority of students entering America’s finest universities. More importantly, students who complete this six-year course of study will know how to think wisely and act virtuously, which is really the only kind of education worth committing six years to.

Basic Functionality

Each 32-week year is organized into four 8-week terms, covering:

• Great Books (primary sources, heavily weighted)

• Writing & Rhetoric (progressing from imitation to argumentation to original thesis)

• Logic (formal and informal, integrated with texts)

• Art & Music (chronologically synchronized with literary/historical period)

• Geography, Civics, & Economics (contextualizing the civilizations being read)

• Theology (Christian Scripture and theological tradition in dialogue with secular texts)

Two weekly, 90-minute Socratic Seminar component runs through all six years, modeled on the Adler'/Hutchins Paideia approach.

A reasonable annual credit allocation for such a 32-week, 3-contact-hour per week curriculum would be:

Each year will be anchored both chronologically and thematically, structured around one of the six perennial questions Mortimer J. Adler identified in his Six Great Ideas as the threads running through the whole of Western thought.

Year I - Creation, Cosmos, and the Heroic Soul

• Big Idea: Truth

• Ages: 12-13

• Chronological Focus: Antiquity to Classical Greece

• Textual Focus: Genesis, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, the Pre-Socratics, Plato’s Socratic dialogues, etc.

• Objective Focus: What is real, and how do we know it?

Year II - Reason, Virtue, and the City of Man

• Big Idea: Goodness

• Ages: 13-14

• Chronological Focus: Classical Greece through Roman Empire

• Textual Focus: Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, Virgil, Cicero, Plutarch, and the New Testament.

• Objective Focus: What is virtue, and how is it cultivated?

Year III - Faith, Reason, and the City of God

• Big Idea: Beauty

• Ages: 14-15

• Chronological Focus: Fall of Rome to the Medieval world

• Textual Focus: Augustine, Boethius, Aquinas, Dante, Chaucer, and the Beowulf-poet.

• Objective Focus: What is the transcendent, and how does it draw us?

Year IV - Renaissance, Reformation, and the End of Christendom

• Big Idea: Liberty

• Ages: 15–16

• Chronological Focus: Renaissance to the Early Modern Period

• Textual Focus: Erasmus, More, Luther, Calvin, Shakespeare, Milton, Descartes, Pascal, Rutherford.

• Objective Focus: What is freedom, and what does it cost?

Year V - Revolution, Romanticism, and the Modern Self

• Big Idea: Equality

• Ages: 16–17

• Chronological Focus: Early Modern to Modern Era

• Textual Focus: Locke, Rousseau, Burke, The Federalist Papers, Tocqueville, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Freud, etc.

• Objective Focus: What does it mean for all persons to bear dignity?

Year VI - Postmodernism and Cultural Recovery

• Big Idea: Justice

• Ages: 17-18

• Chronological Focus: Modern Era to Postmodern Era

• Textual Focus: Chesterton, T.S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Tolkien, O’Connor, Orwell, Arendt, Solzhenitsyn, Pieper, Sowell, Sartre, Heidegger, Polanyi, etc.

• Objective Focus: What do we owe one another, and on what basis?

If you have a child 12-14 years old that you think would be interested, please use this button to express your interest. I would be happy to follow up.

Interest Form

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