As I write this post—looking out the top-floor window of a 100-year-old dutch home at the quaint brick-homed neighborhood around me—the fact that I’m here hasn’t completely landed for me.

Leeuwarden is the provincial capital (the capital of Friesland and seat of the Provincial Council) in the northern Netherlands. The city has a population of about 127k people, but it’s surprisingly small enough to lack the hustle and bustle one might assume comes with a city of this size. It’s a city of historic canals and old enough that you feel the weight of centuries in the cobblestone streets beneath your feet.

It was chartered as a city in 1435, became the capital of Friesland in 1504, and served as the residence of the Frisian stadtholders of the house of Orange-Nassau, which are the ancestors of the present Dutch royal family.1 Since 2019, UNESCO has recognized it as a City of Literature.2

Obviously, it’s difficult to get a full sense of the political climate of the city but given it is part of the Netherlands, one of the most progressive countries in Europe, it’s fairly easy to make an educated guess. Nevertheless, it feels like the kind of place that makes you aware that you are very small in the grand scheme of things, yet, at the same time, very grateful to be alive.

The canal systems here are extraordinary. According to the Netherlands Tourism website, Leeuwarden once had around 130 windmills within the city used to harness the power of the water. They’re all gone now but there is one complete structure nearby that nods to the past. It’s called the Froskepôlemolen. Even though the windmills are mostly gone, you can still recognize all around you the specific way in which this region of the continent has pursued the long, patient quest of man trying to conquer nature. For centuries, the Dutch have harnessed and diverted the water to make civilization out of what might otherwise have become something of a marshland.

An Interesting Discovery

Yesterday, we spent most of the day walking the beautiful city and visiting the cultural center searching ancestral records. One of the more surprising discoveries had to do with my own name. Before 1811, most Frisian families did not carry permanent surnames as we do today. Identity was local and practical. Everyone was known by their given name followed by their father’s name.

But when Napoleon formally annexed the Netherlands into the French Empire on July 9, 1810, his mandate required every family to choose a permanent name because a regime can’t efficiently draft soldiers or collect taxes if half the population is named “Jan, son of Lieuwke.” Surnames became mandatory in 1811 and our family (for reasons only speculated) chose Postma. After the French occupation ended, the Dutch government kept the obligatory surname and ours has been Postma ever since.

The funny thing is it might not have been. Based on the names of the heads of household at the time, we could just as easily have been named Hendricks, Wilhelm, or Herke. Those are some of the alternative patrilineal names that ran through our line in the generations just before Napoleon’s decree made the choice permanent. A different ancestor at the head of the household in 1811 may have given me a different last name.

I find it somewhat remarkable that the name I carry, and the name some of my progeny will potentially carry, exists in its present form in large part because a nineteenth-century emperor, Napoleon, wanted to count people, and a Frisian farmer in Barradeel had to comply.

There is a handwritten family history, written by my grandfather’s older sister, Rena, who was born in Amsterdam in 1902 as Rinska and renamed when she came to America, that traces the Postma line back through Leeuwarden, Minnertsga, Wynaldum, Barradeel, and Franeker. She wrote it a few days before her fifty-third birthday, noting how she was always striving to be something more, something better, something just out of reach. Reading her words today, at approximately the same age that she was, yet standing in the province she left as a child and never returned to, I feel something I might only describe as the weight of inheritance. I have received something that needs to be stewarded properly and passed down to those who will come after me.

What This Has to Do with a Book and a Course

As I write this, I’ve been thinking about why I felt compelled to stand on the land my ancestors left more than a century ago. I don’t want to veer into sentimentalism and romanticize a past that never was. But visiting Leeuwarden has been sobering in the sense that it reminds me that I am a single link in a long chain. The people who worked these canals, who bore these names, who took the name Postma aren’t just figures in a history book. They are, in some real and irreducible sense, part of me.

That is what the classical tradition has always understood about education, and what the modern world has largely forgotten. None of us begin from nothing. We are formed by our inheritance, by what we receive from our ancestors. We are formed by the languages, the stories, the cuisine, and the habits of thought—even what and how we’re taught to worship—that have been handed down to us before we are old enough to choose them for ourselves. We literally enter into a long story as a new character who will play a role in shaping that story for future characters.

Francis Bacon wrote that “reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.” I have been writing the essays in Becoming Classically Educated for more than a decade now, trying to discover what I can rightly say about humane learning, and what I keep discovering is that the fullness of our humanity is not self-generated, not in the existentialist way. Rather, it is to a large degree inherited.

Which is, in part, why I am teaching the course that is based on the book.

The Course and Why It’s Running Out of Seats

The Christian Humanist Reading Life: Recovering Wisdom in an Age of Noise begins July 7th. It runs six Tuesday evenings—July 7 through August 11—ninety minutes each, live with me at 5:00–6:30 pm PT. Every enrolled student receives a copy of Becoming Classically Educated as part of their $397 investment.

I opened thirteen seats. We are more than halfway filled.

As I noted in a previous post, I’m not going to manufacture urgency or pretend the seats are running out faster than they are. What I will say, however, is that I am ready to close enrollment and begin preparing the students who have joined. Soon, I’ll be sending the readings, establishing the community, and doing the work of getting ready together. That is the part of teaching I love most, and I am eager to start it.

In other words, the course will be better for everyone if we get the room settled sooner rather than later. If you have been sitting with this decision and something keeps drawing you back to it—if you have felt the restlessness Augustine describes, the hunger that information simply does not satisfy, the sense that you have been given a great deal of knowledge and somehow left the deepest questions unanswered —then this course is for you.

RESERVE YOUR SEAT HERE

If you have a question before you decide, email me at me@scottpostma.net. I will respond personally. Even from Europe.

For wisdom, the great tradition, and the good life,

Scott Postma Writing to you from Leeuwarden, Friesland, Netherlands

We arrived midday (Copenhagen time) and quickly learned to navigate the transit system without getting on any wrong trains or heading the wrong direction. Tomorrow we tour the Assistens Cemetery, the canals, and the Rosenborg Castle. Time will prevent us from visiting the National Museum, but we might make it Kronborg castle before our next stop, notable for inspiring Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Later this week we’ll make our way to my ancestral homeland, Friesland, before heading to Amsterdam and Anderlecht. After that, we’ll meet up with and and stand where Erasmus is buried in Basel, visit Calvin’s cathedral in Geneva, and spend a day at L’Abri in the Swiss Alps. After that, it’s Italy, Germany, and the UK. Along the way, we’ll visit Museums and browse antiquarian bookshops, behold cathedrals and frescos, and conclude our trip walking the medieval streets of York.

I mention all this not to try to make you jealous—although I understand if you are 😜—but because this trip is, in a very real sense, the course I’m teaching in July made visible. By the way, we are going to document as much of it as we can for you, because seeing the tradition in the flesh, in the places where it actually happened, is its own kind of argument for everything I’m about to mention.

A few days ago told you about a course I’m teaching this July: The Christian Humanist Reading Life. It’s a course based in part on my new book from Roman Roads Press, Becoming Classically Educated.

I want to follow up with this post to explain something I don’t feel I’ve been able to emphasize strongly enough before.

We live in a unique and troubling age, and age of unprecedented access to information and simultaneously an unprecedented poverty of wisdom. I mentioned previously that most of us feel this, even if we haven’t been able to put words to it. We are gorged on content; yet, somehow still starving. We have access to and consume more information than any generation in history and we understand less. In a real sense, we are knowledgeable beyond our wisdom.

The ancient philosophers had a word for the kind knowledge that actually matters, sophia (wisdom). Sophia is not information; it’s not credentials; and it’s not mere skills. In the past I have argued it’s the capacity to perceive what is real, to love what is good, and to live accordingly. Wisdom is the ability to answer the question, How should we then live? To answer that question we need to apprehend what reality, apprehend what is worthy of our sustained attention, worthy of prioritizing our loves for.

I must add that the great tradition of the West—from Plato to Polanyi—has, for all its disagreements, maintained with remarkable consistency, that wisdom is not accumulated knowledge. It is a cultivated art. It is planted intentionally and grows slowly over years of disciplined attention and approximation of one’s life to the right things.

What’s happened to us, culturally, in the estimation of those who study cognitive and moral development, is we’ve gotten stupider. We’ve been trained in efficiency by our screens, by our institutions, and by our economy to optimize for information retrieval rather than soul formation. We have been taught to scan rather than read. To consume rather than contemplate. To acquire knowledge rather than be transformed by it.

Consider, in the first place, how screens train humans to scan like machines. Content designers call it the “F scan”—that eye pattern we’ve all developed, skimming across the top of the page, down the left side, across the middle, quickly extracting what we need before moving on. The scan happens automatically: quickly and often unconsciously.

Where the act of reading presupposes that we are not machines.

Where screens train us to scan, the page trains us to commune, to converse, to contemplate. Where information fills the mind, wisdom forms the soul. And soul formation—the cultivation of a person capable of recognizing the true, loving the good, and being moved by the beautiful—is precisely what the modern world has eradicated in the name of efficiency and what the classical Christian tradition has always emphasized in the name of humanity.

Consider also that Josef Pieper argued that the totalitarian work state—a society in which human beings are valued only for their utility and economic productivity—is the direct consequence of our faulty understanding of leisure. We have confused it with recreation, entertainment, and amusement. All of those are things we do so we can return to work. Leisure, rightly understood, is something done for its own sake, something meaningful in itself, not as a means to something else.

The question Pieper left us with is the question this course is built around: What is worth doing for its own sake? If we cannot answer that question, we have not yet discovered the meaning of our existence.

So, in case you missed it or could use a reminder, The Christian Humanist Reading Life is six weeks of live, guided study on exactly that question. It’s not a course in abstract philosophical exercises; it’s a course in the practical formation of the habits of mind and heart that make human flourishing possible.

We begin July 7 and the course runs through August 11. It will take place over six Tuesday evenings, ninety minutes each, live with me at 5:00-6:30 pm PT. It’s capped at 13 students. The investment is $397. As part of your investment, you’ll receive a copy of Becoming Classically Educated.

If this is resonating with you—perhaps you’ve felt the restlessness Augustine describes, the hunger pains that information just doesn’t satisfy, the sense that your education gave you a great deal of facts and skills and yet somehow left the most important and perennial questions unanswered—then I want you in this course.

Reserve your seat before they’re all gone.

Register for the Course

Please don’t mistake this as a high-pressured sales attempt. If you’re not asking these questions yet, or this is not resonating with you, then this course is not for you—at least not yet!

And if you have a question before you decide, questions about the course, the readings, or whether this is the right fit for you, personally, then email me@scottpostma.net and I will respond personally, even from Europe.

For wisdom, the great tradition, and the good life,

this is Scott Postma,

writing to you from Copenhagen, Denmark

P.S. C. S. Lewis once observed (in an essay titled, Learning in War Time) that humanity at its best has always found a way to pursue knowledge and beauty even under the most unfavorable conditions: in beleaguered cities, in condemned cells, advancing toward walls under fire. I might add: in the noise and distraction of the modern world. The only people who achieve much, Lewis says, are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Summer is not an obstacle to the reading life. Summer is its invitation. And this course begins just as summer does.

The Invitation, the Investment, and the Door

This is the video where I ask you to make a decision.

Over the past couple of weeks, I have shared five lessons on classical Christian education.

I’ve also shared with you the crisis, the wisdom impoverishment that afflicts our modern generation, what actually changes in a person who recovers the reading life, and exactly how the six weeks of The Christian Humanist Reading Life work, with my forthcoming book Becoming Classically Educated as the spine of the journey.

Today I am opening enrollment to my six-week course; and here’s what that means.

The course runs from July 7 through August 11. It will take place over six Tuesday evenings, ninety minutes each, live with me.

I have to cap this course at 13 students, which is one more seat than I usually open. I cap it at thirteen students because the conversation requires a room small enough for everyone to have a voice. In other words, this is not a course for wall flowers; it’s real Socratic engagement.

The investment is $397. That is less than one college credit hour. It is less than most professional development seminars. It includes the live cohort, the assignments, the community space, and a copy of Becoming Classically Educated, a 200-hundred-page volume of essays you will return to long after the cohort ends. What you will receive is six weeks of live, guided formation with someone who has spent thirty years in the Christian intellectual tradition, and a book that distills the substance of those thirty years. This is something you cannot get from a podcast, a blog, or even a self-paced course.

Answering Objections (i.e., The Refutatio)

Let me take thirty seconds to answer the three objections I often hear whenever I’ve offered invitations like this in the past.

“I do not have time.” You have ninety minutes a week. That is the live session. The reading and assignment will take another sixty to ninety minutes. If you cannot find three hours a week for the most important kind of formation a human being can undertake—the ordering of your soul toward wisdom—then I would gently suggest the course is not the problem. The course is the solution.

“I am not academic enough.” This course is not for academics. It is for intelligent adults who are serious about their intellectual and spiritual lives. It’s for parents, professionals, pastors, teachers, and curious people who have always wanted to read widely and think well but never had the structure or the guide. Becoming Classically Educated was written precisely for you. It wasn’t written for specialists, but for thoughtful adults willing to take their formation seriously. If you can read a newspaper and hold a conversation, you are qualified.

“I have tried this before and it did not stick.” I know. That is why this course exists. What makes The Christian Humanist Reading Life different is not the content, necessarily; it is the structure, the accountability, the community, the fact that you will have a tangible book in your hands as a companion, and the fact that every session is designed to produce formation, not fill your head with more information. You are not signing up for a lecture series. You are signing up for a way of life.

Here is what I want for you.

I want you to be the kind of person who, five years from now, reads Augustine with familiarity, thinks about the question of the good life with clarity, orders your days around the things that matter most, and has a community of people who are doing the same alongside you.

I want you to be able to hand your children and grandchildren a tradition, not just a set of beliefs, but a way of reading, a way of seeing, a way of being human—a great tradition that they can live by.

That does not happen automatically. It happens by deliberate choice, made on a particular day, to begin.

Today is that day!

Enrollment is open now. 13 seats. The course begins July 7th.

I want to see you there.

And if you are on the fence—if you have a question that has not been answered, a concern you have not been able to shake—please, email me@scottpostma.net. I mean that. I will reply personally.

REGISTER TODAY! - JUST 13 SEATS

And, I also talked about what actually changes in a person who recovers the reading life of a Christian Humanist. Today I want to show you exactly what we are going to do together over six weeks.

First, I want to dispel a myth I suspect is sitting in the back of your mind.

You have tried making reading lists before. You purchased the books. You started journaling, but somewhere around the second or third week, life intervened and the whole project faded away. You thought you’d pick it back up again when life slowed down; but that never happened.

You may feel that you’re not disciplined enough, that you lack commitment. What you lacked was the right structure, the right community, and a guide who had been down this road before and knew where the pitfalls were. That’s exactly what The Christian Humanist Reading Life provides.

The backbone of this course is my brand new book, Becoming Classically Educated: Humane Letters on Education, Culture & the Great Conversation.

Becoming Classically Educated is a collection of essays I have spent years writing, edited into a single volume by Roman Roads Press for release next month. It is the most personal argument I have ever made for what classical Christian education actually is, why it matters now, and how an ordinary adult can begin to inhabit the tradition.

Every student in the cohort will work through this book with me, week by week, examined as a series of provocations toward, and pathways into, the Great Tradition. Most of what you read will be the essays themselves. Some weeks I will supply you with a supplementary text from one of the greats (i.e., Augustine, Lewis, Pieper, Sertillanges, etc.) to deepen the conversation. But the spine of the course is my book, and you will be the first to explore it—with the author as your guide.

Here is how the six weeks work.

Week One: What Is a Human Being For?

We begin with the question every other question is going to be built on. What kind of creature is a human being, and what is he for? Drawing on the opening essays of Becoming Classically Educated, we’ll trace the answer the classical and Christian tradition has given for two and a half millennia: that human beings are made in the image of God for wisdom, virtue, and the knowledge of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. Week one is the anthropological foundation of everything that follows, and getting it right will set the stage for everything else.

Week Two: Live Not by Lies: Truth, the Logos, and the Life of the Mind

Modern distraction is not, as they say, a flaw, but a feature. It is a carefully engineered condition. So is modern relativism. In week two, we’ll take up the essay “Toward a More Certain Knowledge of the Truth” and ask what it means to build an intellectual life on the conviction that Truth is not a set of propositions to be mastered but a Person to be known. Together, we will build a daily reading rule—a systematic and sustainable rhythm—and you will discover that reading is not just an amusing activity but something Josef Pieper called an act of genuine leisure: a form of receptive presence that makes wisdom possible.

Week Three: Ordering the Loves

St. Augustine’s great insight is that sin is not primarily the doing of “bad things,” but it can even be the loving of good things in the wrong order. Thus, real education is the reordering of the loves. This week works through the longest and most ambitious essay in the book, tracing the concept of the good from Plato and Aristotle through Augustine’s ordo amoris to the contemporary distortions of self-actualization and therapeutic happiness. This is also the most personally confronting week of the six. You’ll map your actual loves against your intended loves, and you will begin to see clearly where formation is needed.

Week Four: Words Create Worlds: Language, Beauty, and the Liberating Arts

I’ve emphasized this before, but classical education is, at its root, a language-centered education. What do I mean by that? I mean words are instruments of communication, yes; but, more importantly, they are, in the deepest sense, constitutive of reality. Drawing on “Cosmos or Chaos: Words Create Worlds” and “Toward a Recovery of Beauty,” we will explore the way in which the liberal arts are more than an ornament on the edifice of education; rather the liberal arts are the foundation, the very disciplines by which a human being learns to perceive truth, love goodness, and recognize beauty as objective realities and not private preferences.

Week Five: Into the Great Conversation

We demystify the Great Books and I walk you through how to actually read difficult texts. How to read closely and be changed by them. You will do a guided close reading of a central text, like Plato or Dante, alongside a Christian humanist like C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, or Flannery O’Connor on literature as formation. That way we can experience the primary means by which the soul is trained to see goodness and beauty as real. In week five, you learn to read with your whole person, not just your intellect.

Week Six: A Rule of Life for the Christian Humanist

The course concludes with a commission. Drawing on the book’s essays on science, justice, and history, we will turn from personal formation to applied judgment; and, from there to your own vocation. You will leave with a personal Rule of Life: a document that defines your daily reading practice, your weekly intellectual disciplines, your community of conversation, and the texts you will pursue in the months ahead. I’m not just going to pump you up with inspiration; I will help you create a personal plan.

Each week includes a ninety-minute live session with me (e.g., discussions, teachings, questions, etc.), plus a short written assignment designed to move the ideas from your head into your life. The assignments are not academic exercises, per se. They are more formation practices. You will also have access to a private community space where the conversation continues between sessions. There you can share what you are reading, ask questions, and discover that you are not alone in any of this.

In closing, let me be completely honest with you. This course will not give you everything!

Six weeks is just enough time to reorient your attention, recover your love of serious reading, enter the Great Conversation, and build a sustainable Rule of Life. It is not enough to exhaust the tradition, obviously. You won’t finish all the great books or complete your personal formation. No course could do that. What it will do is give you the foundation, the practice, the community, and a book I hope you’ll return to for years as you continue the long work of personal transformation well after the six weeks are over.

The good news is that the tradition is inexhaustible. If you finish this course and want to go deeper—and most of us nerds (I mean students) do—there will be an opportunity for an advanced cohort, an ongoing community, and continued work together.

But that comes later. Right now, the question is whether you are ready to take the bull by the horns and begin.

In tomorrow’s video, I am going to tell you how to join the cohort, what the investment is, and why I am limiting this first cohort to just 13 students.

I will also answer the three objections I hear most often: “I don’t have the time,” “I am not academic enough,” and “I have tried this before and it didn’t stick.”

Watch for the video. And in the meantime, if you have a question about the course, about my new book, Becoming Classically Educated, or about whether this course is right for you, please leave it below.

I will answer you, personally.

Mike came to me several years ago. He was a retired professional in his fifties, successful, and genuinely intelligent. He was fairly well read, politically engaged. He kept up with the news. He thought of himself as an educated person, and by every conventional measure, he was.

But he came to me with something he couldn’t quite name. He described it as a sense of intellectual and spiritual restlessness, perhaps a mild state of acedia, but closer to his words, a feeling that for all his education and all his success in life, left him feeling oddly empty. Mike was full of trivia, facts, and information; and yet, he was somehow starving spiritually and intellectually. He could discuss almost any current event or political policy with confidence but almost none of the deeper questions with any certainty at all.

There was more to Mike’s struggle that included his parents’ history and how that influenced his thoughts about his own identity; and so we read C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity together. I would have normally started with St. Augustine’s Confessions but due to some of the details surrounding his personal circumstances, we started with someone whom we could still rightly qualify as a native of Old Western Culture but was also more contemporary; and that suited his particular needs.

We read Lewis together—him for the very first time—and every week for nearly a year, we met for a deep and candid conversation. He was transformed by the experience and repeatedly expressed his surprise for the way Lewis’s insights manifested the entire Christian intellectual tradition and somehow touched on just about everything he felt was wrong with him.

What Lewis knew—what the entire classical Christian tradition has known—is that the human soul has a specific shape. That it is ordered toward particular goods. That when the loves are disordered, when the attention is fragmented, when the imagination is malnourished, the result is not only intellectual poverty but emotional disorientation and spiritual malnutrition.

I have to be sensitive with the details for a number of reasons, but Mike became a Christian, was baptized, and continued to pursue Truth, Goodness, and Beauty inside and outside the Church. It was a marvelous transformation to behold.

Living in this postmodern era, it’s almost certain that you know more than you can use. A lot of people tend to feel more than they can interpret and long for something they cannot name. And what the Christian humanists of the past two millennia knew is that this condition is a perennial human conundrum; and it’s fixable. It takes some deep personal reflection and humility, but it’s genuinely fixable.

What I want to tell you about today is what actually changes in a person who recovers a robust reading life, not just the Greatest Book, the Bible, but also the great books, the best that has been thought and written for the past two millennia.

The first thing that changes is attention. Most of us have lost the capacity for what Josef Pieper called genuine leisure—not idleness, not entertainment, but the receptive stillness in which the soul can actually receive what is being offered to it. When you rebuild the kind of reading habit I’m talking about—a slow, deliberate engagement with the right texts—you recover this capacity. Students tell me, consistently, that within a few weeks of disciplined reading, their ability to concentrate on everything else improves dramatically, including their work, their conversations, and even their prayer life.

The second thing that changes is what Edmund Burke called the moral imagination—your capacity to perceive and respond to goodness, truth, and beauty as real but transcendental things. Christian thinkers from Erasmus to C. S. Lewis have emphatically argued that great literature trains the emotions as well as the intellect: Lectio transit in mores (Reading shapes moral character).

It gives us categories of feeling adequate to the reality we inhabit. When that faculty is cultivated, a person begins to see differently. You read a passage of Scripture and something opens. You hear a piece of music and it means something it didn’t mean before. You make decisions with a kind of clarity you didn’t know you had.

The third thing that changes is perhaps the most surprising: community. The reading life is not solitary. The great Christian humanists, Augustine, Erasmus, Thomas More, and C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and the Inklings, all understood that wisdom is formed in conversation. When you find yourself in a room—even a virtual room—with others who are asking the same questions, reading the same texts, wrestling with the same ideas, something happens that cannot happen alone. You discover you are not the only one who has felt this restlessness. You discover the tradition is much richer than you knew. And you discover, often with some relief, that you are not too late.

In a few days I’m going to share with you the specific structure—the six weeks, the texts, the assignments, the community—of The Christian Humanist Reading Life. I’m going to show you exactly what we’ll do together, how it works, and why this particular sequence is designed to produce lasting change rather than a temporary burst of intellectual enthusiasm.

Before then, I’d love to know: what would change for you if you had a genuinely ordered intellectual life? What would be different about your marriage, your parenting, your work, your faith?

Leave your answer in the comments. I’m asking seriously; I want to know. I’ll respond to as many as I can. More soon.

There’s a paradox at the heart of modern life and I think you’ve probably felt it even if you haven’t had the words to explain it.

We are, by nearly every metric and standard, the most educated generation in human history. Ours has issued more college degrees, distributed more information, and provided more access to more content than any people group or generation who have ever lived. Yet, we all feel the burden that something is profoundly wrong. Not only do we feel it intuitively, but studies confirm that we are more anxious, more distracted, more confused about fundamental questions of meaning and purpose than almost any generation before us.

When Nietzsche pointed out that “God is dead,” that Europe had lost the source of its vitality and was suddenly facing the nausea of nihilism, that was 140 years ago; and we have only plunged significantly deeper into the abyss of meaninglessness since then.

To say it another way: we know abundantly more and we understand significantly less.

The ancient philosophers had a word for the kind of knowledge that actually matters, sophia, wisdom. Sophia wasn’t, fundamentally, facts or information; it wasn’t solely skill, and certainly wasn’t credentials. Wisdom was the capacity to apprehend what is real, to love what is good, and to approximate one’s life accordingly.

And the great tradition of the West—from Plato to Polanyi—maintained, with remarkable consistency, that wisdom is not the accumulation of disparate facts. It is something that must be cultivated. Wisdom grows slowly, over years, through disciplined attention to the right things.

And if there is any merit to the research cited by the social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, in his recent writings, what has happened to us is we’ve actually gotten cognitively stupider. That’s not meant to sound unkind; it’s just an honest report on the condition of our culture.

What’s happened is that we’ve been trained by our screens, our institutions, and our economic markets to optimize for information retrieval rather than soul formation. We’ve been taught to scan rather than read, to consume rather than contemplate, to acquire knowledge rather than be transformed by it.

The result is what C. S. Lewis called “men without chests.” We are a people who know the facts but have no trained loves, no ordered desires, and no moral imagination capable of perceiving goodness and beauty as objectively real. Again, that description was Lewis’s diagnosis of the 1940s. It is a flattering portrait compared to what we are now.

Now, with all that doom and gloom hanging over us, I still genuinely believe that our condition is recoverable.

So let’s think about it. The tools are still there. The books are still there. The great tradition—what Robert Hutchins called the Great Conversation, that nearly three-thousand-year exchange between the greatest minds of the Western world about the things that matter most—it’s still there, waiting for us to pull up a chair and join it.

I’ve spent thirty years in Christian education—as a pastor, as a teacher, as a scholar, and as the president of an online academic institution that serves classical Christian families across the country. I have earned a doctorate in the humanities. I’ve edited a journal of classical Christian education. And I’ve recently published two books, one on the recovery of classical Christian education, and the other a devotional commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans.

I tell you that not to brag or impress you, but to demonstrat that I am not offering you a theory. I’m offering you a practice, a way of life that I have been striving to live, a way of life that I have watched transform students young and old, and that I believe with everything in me can transform your life too.

In the next few days, I’m going to share with you something I’ve been developing for some time: a course called The Christian Humanist Reading Life: Recovering Wisdom in an Age of Digital Noise.

This is a six week, live, in-community course, working through the ideas and practices that make a genuine intellectual and spiritual life possible—regardless of your background, your busy schedule, or how long it’s been since you’ve read a serious book.

But before I tell you about the details of course, I want to share something with you in the next video that I think, or at least I hope, will change how you see this entire conversation.

It’s about what actually happens in the soul of a person who recovers the reading life, what gets transformed and why. I think it might surprise you; at least I hope it encourages you.

Watch for it. It should be in your inbox tomorrow.

And if you have a question, or if something I’ve said today already resonates, feel free to leave a comment. I read every one.

I’m Scott Postma. I’ll see you in the next video.

Of course, it’s understandable that many parent who have begun educating their children classically, did not receive the same education themselves. But that’s not a reason to neglect it’s pursuit. You’ll do better by your own children by shoring up your own education. In the second place, I found most parents agree with me on this but struggle to remedy their situation.

This is something I hear constantly from intelligent, well-intentioned adults who are drawn to the classical tradition but haven’t found their way in. These are adults, often parents, who say to me something to the effect: As I listen in on my child’s class discussions, I realize I missed out on reading most of these books. Or, our dinner table conversations have been the highlight of my day ever since my child began pursuing a classical Christian education.

I only wish I had received this kind of education; but, it’s too late for me. For most parents, the obstacle to their own entry is not laziness or a lack of interest. It’s most often one of two things, sometimes both: time constraints and intimidation.

The Great Books sound impressive and feel inaccessible. Homer. Socrates. Plato. Augustine. Dante. Aquinas. Just their very names seem to carry so much weight, and sometimes if feel like too much weight. The moment you pick up the Confessions or the Republic and encounter the first page, something in you says: I am not equipped for this. This is for scholars. This is for people who were trained for this. This is not for me.

But let me tell you something. That’s just not true. The voice in your head telling you that is lying to you. These texts were not written for academics. They were written for human beings.

• Plato wrote dialogues, conversations between people wrestling with real questions, because he wanted philosophy to be accessible to anyone capable of honest thought.

• St. Augustine wrote the Confessions as a prayer, as an outpouring of his restless soul toward God, because he wanted every restless soul to recognize itself in his soul.

• C. S. Lewis wrote for the common reader because he believed that the common reader was capable of uncommon thought if only given the right invitation.

The literature of the Western tradition is not meant to be some kind of fortress. It’s literally meant to be a door, a door into the human condition, and a door that swings inward into your own soul.

I’m going to riff off of something Charles Eliot, a former president of Harvard University, said about his famous five-foot bookshelf. The five-foot book shelf was a kind of metaphor for what later became the collection of books known as the Harvard Classics. Eliot opined that a working man could acquire a liberal arts education by reading for just fifteen minutes a day from a five-foot bookshelf filled with the best of Western classic literature.

So drawing from this, let me share how you can wase yourself into the Classical Christian Tradition in just 15 minutes a day.

Start with a single text. Not a book list, not a commentary, not a curriculum guide, just one single text. The temptation when you discover the Great Books is to make an ambitious reading plan covering everything you’ve missed. My encouragement would be to resist this. Pick one book and begin. My recommendation for most adults who are new to this tradition is Augustine’s Confessions. It’s personal, emotionally honest, and theologically rich. It requires no prior knowledge of philosophy or Latin. Its only requirement is a willingness to be humble, a willingness to sit at the feet of St. Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, and let him speak to you.

Next, read slowly, slower than you think you need to. Since grade school, we have been trained to skim and scan. Newspapers were formatted and printed with this in mind. And in recent decades, we’ve been further conditioned by screens to scan for information, to extract the key point, maybe summarize it, and then move on. That mode of reading will not serve you well for our purpose here. These texts reward close reading, restful, contemplative, lingering reading. Read a paragraph. Stop. Ask the author what he means, what he is claiming. Then ask why. Then ask about the implications of his meaning. Finally, ask yourself whether or not you agree. Then why or why not? Read it again. In fifteen minutes, reading this way, you will cover perhaps a page or two. That is just fine.

Keep a commonplace book (i.e., a florilegium, or something the Italians called the Zibaldone). While each of these tended toward a slightly different purpose historically, what I mean by a commonplace book is simply a notebook in which you copy out passages that strike you, passages that arrest your attention, quotes or statements that seem important, thoughts that you want to return to or perhaps memorize. The practice of writing out a passage by hand does something that highlighting cannot do: it slows you down, makes you engage the exact words, and imprints the idea more deeply on your mind. One additional benefit is after six months of commonplacing, you will have a personal anthology of the tradition’s most powerful moments, written in your own hand.

Fourth, find one other person to read with you. I’m not talking about a class or formal group, per se, just a friend, a spouse, or a colleague with whom you can meet for regular conversations. Agree to read the same thing and talk about it once a week. The conversation doesn’t need to be sophisticated; it just needs to be genuine and honest. What did you make of the passage? What nuggets did you find? What confused you? What surprised you? What made you push back? This is how the Great Conversation has always worked. While reading in isolation isn’t necessarily unprofitable, solitary brilliance unusual. Learning happens within the friction, inquisitive tensions, and illumination that occurs when two minds meet over a shared text.

Finally, be patient with the difficulty. Of course, there will be passages you do not understand. At times, there will be arguments you can’t seem to follow. There will be days when fifteen minutes will go by quickly and others where St. Augustine feels like an hours worth of wrestling. Don’t confuse this with failure. It’s actually a sign that you are reading something worthy of your attention. Texts that offer no resistance offer no transformation. The summer beach novel is light and effortless for a reason. The texts that require effort from you, texts that require you to reach above and beyond your current intellectual capacity, are the texts that give something back that effortless reading never could.

In closing consider how this works itself out for just a minute. Fifteen minutes a day is ninety minutes a week. In a year, it is more than seventy-five hours. In seventy-five hours, you can read the Confessions, the Apology, the Abolition of Man, and a dozen other texts that have shaped the Western imagination for centuries. And the great thing is, you’ll not be the same person at the end of that year. You will be wiser, more attentive, better equipped to ask the questions that matter in life, and better equipped to sit with the questions and answers long enough to learn from them.

The tradition has been waiting for you for a very long time. It is not going anywhere. Fifteen minutes. One book. you can begin this week.

What does success look like—not at the end of the school year, not at graduation, not when they enter college, not at their first job—but at forty-five?

What does success look like at forty-five? What kind of person do you want your child to be when they are forty-five years old? To clarify, I’m not asking, What do you want them to have achieved” I’m asking, Who do you want them to be—when they’ve hit mid-life?

I ask because the way we measure educational success almost entirely determines what kind of education we provide. And most of us, without realizing it, are using standards and measuring devices borrowed from a tradition that holds a very different vision of the human person than the one we actually profess.

The modern educational system measures specific inputs and outputs. Inputs include: seat time, curriculum coverage, instructional hours. Outputs include: standardized test scores, grade point averages, college acceptance rates, graduation statistics.

Not these aren’t meaningless measures. They do track real things so they do have their place in the service of the greater good. But to track only these things is to prioritize the wrong things if what you actually care about is wisdom, virtue, and the capacity for a genuinely good life.

Aristotle made a distinction that helps clarify this point. He distinguished between things that are good as means and things that are good as ends. Wealth, for instance, is good as a means—it enables other goods. But nobody in his right mind pursues wealth for its own sake; he pursues it for what it can provide. The person who pursues wealth as though it were a final good has disordered his loves. The one who treats accumulation as the point rather than the instrument has confused the means with the end.

The modern educational metrics are almost entirely metrics of means. Test scores are means. Credentials are means. Even knowledge, strictly speaking, is a means. The end that we’re looking for—something Aristotle called eudaimonia, what we might translate as human flourishing—cannot be measured on a standardized test. It is not a score. It is a condition of the soul.

So what does this look like? What are the marks of a person who has been genuinely well educated?

I’m going to suggest at least four.

The first mark of a genuinely educated person is ordered loves.

The well-educated person loves the right things in the right order. He loves God above all, his neighbor as himself, beauty more than mere novelty, truth more than comfort, and goodness more than approval.

C. S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man, makes a point that is worth contemplating here. Lewis is responding to a pair of textbook authors—he calls them Gaius and Titius—who believe they are doing students a favor by debunking emotional responses to the world, by teaching children that such responses say nothing about reality and everything about the person feeling them.

Lewis’s reply to this is pointed: the task of education is not to hack down the jungle of desires; it’s to irrigate deserts. His imagery here is powerful if we understand the ancient conception of the soul that recognizes noble sentiments (chest) and baser sentiments (belly).

The problem with the modern student is not an excess of sentiment that needs pruning—what Gaius and Titius are trying to do; it’s actually an aridity of soul; the modern soul (the chest) is dried up and needs cultivation. We build up just sentiments not by dismantling the baser ones through skeptical critique, but by nourishing the noble sentiments and the student’s capacity for a right response to the world through long exposure to what is genuinely worthy of love, wonder, and reverence.

The goal of classical education has never been to extinguish desire. This is where modernist education, and frankly, fundamentalist Christianity, get it wrong. They are both out to kill desire, not to cultivate it

Classical Christian Educators, on the other hand, want to train the heart to respond rightly to what is genuinely worthy of response. The educated person’s desires are cultivated and shaped—not extinguished or hacked down—but nourished and formed by that long and patient irrigation of the soul. That shaping is what Lewis calls the stock of “just sentiments,” and it is the indispensable foundation of a fully human life.

That’s the first mark of a genuinely educated person: ordered loves.

The second mark is intellectual humility.

Socrates said the beginning of wisdom is knowing that you do not know. But I want to be precise here, because intellectual humility is often confused with its opposite—a kind of performative self-deprecation that is really just arrogance in disguise.

I once had lunch with the wing commander of an F-22 fighter pilot training squadron, and he told me something I have never forgotten. He said their recruiters were always on the lookout for cocky pilots, never arrogant ones. When he said it, he got the curious pause from me he was looking for; and the distinction he made is worth the pause that it required.

A cocky pilot is one who says, I have something to offer. He knows his skills, he trusts his training, and he’s willing to press the engagement. An arrogant pilot, on the other hand, is one who says, I have nothing left to learn. He stops listening. He trusts his instincts more than the instruments. He is, in the most literal sense, flying blind and is likely to get himself and other crew members killed.

That distinction maps strikingly well onto the intellectual life of a well-educated person.

We stand in the tradition of the Western mind—a tradition that stretches back through Augustine, Aquinas, Aristotle, and Homer—and we may indeed have something to offer our present moment; so, we shouldn’t be timid about stepping up and engaging the disorders of the age. But we can never forget how many people have lived and thought before us, how much has been worked out at great cost, how much we have yet to understand. The well-educated person holds his judgments and conclusions with appropriate tentativeness. He listens humbly and carefully before he speaks. And, he recognizes that the tradition he has received is far larger and wiser than he is on his own.

The third mark of a well-educated person is the capacity for genuine conversation.

Not contentious or polemic debate, but conversation—rational public discourse. He possesses the ability to sit with another person, hear what they are actually saying rather than what he expects them to say, engage their ideas honestly, and allow his own thinking to be genuinely challenged by the encounter.

I want to be clear about what I mean by genuinely challenged. I do not mean the hollow affectation of open-mindedness that never actually changes anything. I mean something with real stakes: the willingness to have your assumptions examined, your conclusions tested; and, when something has been sufficiently demonstrated, the moral courage to follow the argument where it leads—even when that is inconvenient.

Intellectual integrity is not a posture. It is a discipline of the mind.

This capacity for real conversation, for rational public discourse, is rarer than it should be, and it is almost entirely a product of formation—of having been in many conversations, with many interlocutors, including the dead ones we meet in books.

The fourth mark is what I call the long view.

The well-educated person is not owned by the present moment. He knows enough history, and has enough knowledge of the human condition and spirit, to understand that the crises of his age are not unique, that the tradition has survived worse, and that the virtues required to navigate difficulty are not invented; they are inherited.

He is, in C. S. Lewis’s phrase, a native of a larger country than the one his passport says he belongs to. He is cosmopolitan, not provincial, in his thinking. He is, like Erasmus, a citizen of the world and a patriot to the Republic of Letters.

Because he inhabits that larger country, he is not easily rattled by the shrill, inflammatory language of the media cycle or the opportunistic outrage of politicians. He has read enough to know that such language has always been with us, that it is a feature of those who wish to bypass reason and commandeer the passions.

The person with a long view reads the media headlines without being consumed by them. He takes the present seriously, but he doesn’t mistake it for the whole of reality. And because he does so, he is capable of responding responsibly; he doesn’t merely react to the next scary thing on the news. He doesn’t fall for all the propaganda and conspiracy theories that are rattling the demos.

None of these marks—ordered loves, intellectual humility, capacity for genuine conversation, and the long view—appears on a transcript. None of them is measured by a standardized test. All of them are the product of years of deliberate formation: reading great literature, engaging the great conversation, lot’s of practice, and the slow cultivation of habits of mind and heart.

The question worth asking is not whether your child is on track for the college or career of choice. It is whether or not your child is on track for a good life.

Those are not the same question. And the education that answers the second one well is the education worth pursuing.

Here is my argument: choosing not to pursue a classical Christian education for your children is not a benign or neutral decision. It is a choice that comes with a price tag. And the cost of not educating classically and in the Christian intellectual tradition is much higher than you might realize—perhaps higher than you’ve ever been asked to calculate.

Let me be careful about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying that every child who attends a modern public school is doomed. I’m not saying that classical Christian education is the only path to wisdom and virtue. What I am saying is that the alternative—the modern progressive educational model that the majority of American children inhabit—has a specific shape, a specific set of assumptions, and, therefore, a specific set of outcomes. And those outcomes are not accidental.

Modern education is, at its core, utilitarian. It is designed to produce workers and buyers—or, as I prefer to say, consumers and cogs. I’ll grant that some of its earlier, more ambitious forms did attempt to cultivate informed citizens. But that, I would argue, is no longer an accurate description of our contemporary situation.

In any case, I cannot honestly say that a utilitarian approach to education is wicked, exactly. But there is something deeply impoverished about it. And that poverty doesn’t always show up in academic failure. It shows up in something harder to measure and far more important, but it does show up.

It shows up in young adults who are technologically competent and spiritually adrift—adults who may hold degrees but possess no framework for asking what kind of life is worth living; adults who were never taught to love what is objectively beautiful, to recognize what is actually true, or to order their desires toward what is genuinely good; adults who arrive at the great questions of human existence—Who am I? What am I for? How should I live?—with no resources to answer them, because their education never considered those questions worth asking.

Modern education also measures success by standardized metrics: test scores, graduation rates, college acceptance, and potential employment outcomes. It treats knowledge as a commodity and learning as a transaction. If you pay in the currency of time and tuition, modern education will ensure you receive credentials and some level of earning potential within the system it cultivates. It is rather like the old Fingerhut catalog, which would help you “build up your credit”—but you could only use that credit to shop their catalog. It is useful only in the limited ways that serve their interests. And because secularism always creates a vacuum, it opens the door for something far worse than mere utility to take up residence.

Dorothy Sayers, writing her landmark essay “The Lost Tools of Learning” in 1947, put the matter rather sharply. She argued that modern education had produced a generation easily manipulated by propaganda, because students had never been taught to recognize it, let alone argue against it or see through it. We give children words, she observed, but not the tools to discern truth from fiction, nor the ability to identify and refute the fallacies embedded in those words. That was 1947. I leave it to you to assess how much has improved since then.

Now, what does a classical Christian education offer instead?

It offers, first, a different answer to the question of what education is for. Not credentials. Not employment. Not even knowledge, strictly speaking. Education is paideia — the formation of the whole person toward wisdom and virtue. Classical Christian education is the cultivation of a soul capable of recognizing the true, loving the good, and being moved by the beautiful.

It offers, second, access to the Great Conversation, nearly three thousand years of the best minds of the Western world wrestling with the questions that matter most. Your child, formed in this tradition, will sit with Homer and Virgil, with Plato and Aristotle, with Augustine and Aquinas, with Shakespeare and Milton, with C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton. Students don’t merely come to know about these thinkers; they come to know them as conversation partners, as intellectual friends, as voices from the past that illumine the human condition.

And it offers, third, a language. Not Latin alone—though Latin is part of it—but a shared vocabulary for talking about what matters most. A student who has read the Republic can speak meaningfully about justice. A student who has read Augustine’s Confessions can speak with equal depth about desire. A child who has read The Abolition of Man can recognize, and resist, precisely the manipulation of language that Sayers warned about.

The price of not educating your children in the classical Christian tradition is the forfeiture of their intellectual and spiritual inheritance. And as we all know, once forfeited, inheritances are exceedingly difficult to recover.

In lesson four, I am going to talk about something that costs almost nothing and takes almost no time, but that begins—for those willing to take it up—the work of recovery.

The word is leisure.

Now, I know what you’re probably thinking: I know what leisure means. It means time off. Vacation. The weekend. And you wouldn’t be alone in thinking that—most people in our culture use the words leisure, recreation, entertainment, and amusement interchangeably, as though they all meant roughly the same thing.

But they don’t. And the confusion, as Josef Pieper argues, is not a trivial one. In his remarkable little book Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Pieper suggests that the totalitarian work state—a society in which human beings are valued only for their economic productivity—is the clear historical consequence of our faulty understanding of leisure. That may sound alarmist. But stay with me, because I think he’s right.

Let’s consider what these words actually mean.

Recreation comes from the Latin recreare—to create again, to renew. It is what we do to restore ourselves so we can return to work. Entertainment comes from the Latin inter and tenere—to hold among, to maintain in a certain condition. We entertain ourselves by holding our attention pleasantly. And amusement comes from the French amuser—to divert one’s attention. That’s it. That’s all it does.

Every one of these—recreation, entertainment, amusement—is something we do for the sake of something else. We refresh ourselves so we can go back to work. We divert our attention so we can return, somewhat recovered, to the demands of ordinary life.

And here is what Aristotle observed with his characteristic clarity: work itself is also something done for the sake of something else.

We work so we can eat, pay our bills, sustain our families, and occasionally buy something we want. Work is noble—do not misunderstand me—but work is also, by its nature, servile. There is a reason the classical tradition distinguished between the liberal arts and the servile arts. The liberal arts were those suitable for a free man—arts which serve to free men, not from work entirely, but from the kind of existence in which nothing is ever done for its own sake.

That is what leisure is. The word comes from the Latin licere—to be allowed. Leisure, rightly understood, is not the absence of work. It is the presence of something done for its own sake—something meaningful in itself, not merely as a means to something else.

To flourish as human beings, we need to recognize that work is not an end in itself. We work so that we can have leisure—so that we can engage in those things which are good or meaningful in themselves. And that is precisely what recreating, entertaining, and amusing ourselves does not give us.

Now, what does any of this have to do with summertime? Everything!

I want to borrow an argument from C. S. Lewis that I have found clarifying on this point. In his essay “Learning in Wartime,” Lewis raises the question of why students should continue to take an interest in what he calls “the placid occupation” of learning when lives and liberties are at stake. “Is it not,” he asks, “like fiddling while Rome burns?” (a reference to the Emperor Nero, who reportedly played his instrument on the balcony while the city below him was consumed by fire.)

Lewis’s answer is worth reading carefully:

The war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. 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. We are mistaken when we compare war with ‘normal life.’ Life has never been normal.

Now Lewis was answering the weightier question of why we should learn in wartime. But his logic applies equally well—inversely—to the lighter question of why we should learn in summertime.

We don’t have to wait for normal times to pursue knowledge and beauty, because there are no normal times. There is only the permanent human situation, which is always pressing, always urgent, always threatening to convince us that now is not the right moment. Lewis puts it plainly: “The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable”—be it wartime or summertime.

What makes human beings different from the animals, Lewis observes, is that while animals respond only to immediate circumstances, men have always been capable of something more. They “propound mathematical arguments in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the latest poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae.”

We might add: in modern times—times not threatened by war but bombarded by amusement and assaulted by entertainment—free men and women study in summertime. They don’t wait to be told they have to. They pursue the things that make them better human beings.

So let me suggest three reasons why summertime is not the enemy of learning but one of its best opportunities.

First: summertime is a defense against ordinary academic distraction.

There will always be distractions to learning—that was Lewis’s point. Sometimes the distraction is a war. Sometimes it’s a global pandemic. But for most students most of the time, it’s the competing demands of academic schedules, extracurricular activities, and institutional rhythms that prevent the kind of deep, unhurried engagement with ideas that genuine formation requires. Summertime, used well, affords real leisure—time to dive deeper into a subject, to read more slowly, to think without a deadline pressing from behind.

Second: summertime learning is a defense against the false leisure of mere amusement.

Here is where Pieper’s argument bites. The entertainment and amusement that fill most people’s summers are not leisure in the meaningful sense—they are sophisticated forms of recreation, designed to divert the attention pleasantly until the fall semester begins. But as Pieper rightly argues, if we cannot identify something worth doing for its own sake—not for the sake of a grade, a credential, a paycheck, or a screen—then we have not yet discovered the meaning of our existence, and we will never be able to justify ourselves apart from our economic usefulness to society. That is a hard word. It is also a true one. Reading a great book, learning a language, studying history, cultivating a genuine intellectual interest—these are not merely fun alternatives to Netflix. They are exercises in becoming fully human.

Third: summertime is an opportunity to get ahead, get caught up, or simply resist the fog of forgetfulness

The fog of forgetfulness settles over most students between June and September. The research on summer learning loss is consistent: students who read nothing and pursue nothing intellectual during the summer arrive in September measurably behind where they left off in May. Summertime learning doesn’t have to be rigorous to be restorative. It simply has to be intentional.

Let me close with the observation Pieper leaves us with—the question this whole argument raises but cannot answer for any individual person: What is the point of leisure? What can we rightly call something done for its own sake, an activity meaningful in itself?

If we can’t answer that question, we have not yet discovered the meaning of our existence. Summer is your annual invitation to begin answering it. I hope you’ll accept it!

Bonus: Try All Three of These Suggestions

Read aloud together. Not just to the young children in the home, to everyone. Pick a book that is slightly above the youngest member of your household, and read it after dinner, or before bed, or on Sunday afternoons. It doesn’t need to be a Great Book, though it could be. It needs to be worthy of attention. The act of reading aloud together is one of the oldest and most powerful formation practices in Western civilization, and it has been almost entirely abandoned. You could use this summer to reclaim it.

Second: Have one serious conversation a week. Not about logistics or family issues, but about ideas. Choose a perennial human question and put it on the table—literally, make it the dinner table. What is man? What is courage? Is justice always fair? What would you do if you knew you could not fail? The question matters less than the habit. Families that talk about ideas raise children who think about ideas. It may be rare, but it’s really not complicated. It is simply rare.

Third: Read something that is above you. I don’t mean tackle something impossible, just something slight above you, something you have to reach for. Choose something that requires you to slow down, re-read a sentence, look something up, or sit with a thought before moving on. This is the experience most of us try to avoid. We have been conditioned to move quickly, to consume efficiently, to stay in our comfort zone of comprehension. But growth happens when we pursue the edges, not in the center. This summer, try to find that edge.

It wasn’t because I was a bad parent or a careless educator. I made these mistakes because I had not yet been taught to think differently. I hadn’t yet discovered, at least in any meaningful way, the older Christian intellectual tradition. I actually didn’t have the furniture I needed to cultivate a robust life of the mind. As a result, I did what many sincere Christian parents and educators do: I tried to build a better version of the same thing I had inherited.

So, we adopted better standards and expected better behavior. We purchased better textbooks and added Bible classes and chapel services. But, to change metaphors, the differences we produced were often more in the wallpaper than in the foundation.

I suspect that if you are honest with yourself you’ll likely recognize at least one of these mistakes in your own home.

Mistake Number One: Confusing Information with Formation

Here is the assumption many of us absorbed from our own schooling without ever examining it: education is primarily about filling the mind with content.

Education is accumulating as many facts, skills, and knowledge as we can. And, success is measured in completing assignments, getting good test scores, and how focused we are on college readiness and career preparation. The more a child knows, the better educated he is!

But the classical Christian tradition would say this gets things almost precisely backwards. Education is not the accumulation of lots of information. Education is “the passing down of 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.”

See, education is never neutral. It is always forming loves. It is always shaping the student’s attention. And, it’s always cultivating some vision of what a human being is for. The ancients called this paideia: the rearing of a young person in a proper view of the world.

Paideia is synonymous with “upbringing, training, instruction,” but not in the sense of just data transfer. Paideia is the formation of the whole person—intellect, will, imagination, affections, appetites, and desires.

Classical Christian Education “seeks to educate the whole person, human qua human. It is not finally about training workers for an institutionalized society. It is the education that makes for “a full and free human being.”

So the child who has memorized a thousand facts but has not learned to love what is good, recognize what is true, and be moved by what is beautiful has been trained, perhaps even efficiently trained, but he has not yet been educated.

The practical consequence of this mistake is that we begin to measure our children’s education almost entirely by what they can produce: good grades, better test scores, assignments completed, facts recalled, and credits earned. But those are not the deepest or most meaningful measurements.

The question can’t simply be, “What did my child learn today?” The better question is, “Who is my child becoming?”

Mistake Number Two: Outsourcing Formation Entirely to the School

This mistake is subtle because it feels responsible. You have chosen a good school. Perhaps a classical Christian school. Perhaps an online academy. Perhaps a rigorous homeschool curriculum. You trust the teachers. You care about the books. You are involved enough to know your child is receiving something better than the public schools or mainstream approach to education.

And so, without intending to, you begin to assume that the formation happening during school hours is sufficient. It’s enough to do what you expect it will do. But formation is never outsourced. It is either intentional or accidental.

The school can cultivate, the teacher can guide, and the curriculum can even order the mind toward truth. But the home remains the first and most powerful culture your child inhabits. The books on your shelves, the conversations at your dinner table, the jokes you laugh at, the stories you tell and return to, the things you admire, the things you dismiss, even the way you spend your leisure; all of it teaches. Your home has a liturgy, whether you have written it down or not.

Classical Christian education can give a child tools of freedom. It can introduce him to the liberal arts and the great conversation. It can teach him that “humane learning is ultimately a discipline of attention toward that which is worthy.” But the home either strengthens that discipline or dissolves it.

If the school teaches attention but the home practices distraction, the child will learn distraction. If the school teaches reverence but the home practices cynicism, the child will learn cynicism. If the school teaches that wisdom is more precious than utility but the home speaks as if education is mainly about college, earning a good income, and building one’s résumé, the child will likely believe the home.

This doesn’t mean parents have to become professional educators, but it does mean they have to recover confidence in their own vocation. Even though the school may assist you, it can never replace you.

Mistake Number Three: Assuming the Tradition Is for Children, Not for You

This may be the most common mistake among parents who have chosen classical Christian education for their children but did not receive it themselves.

You believe in it. You have seen what it does. You can see your children flourishing in ways you did not flourish. They are reading books you never read. They are learning Latin words you never learned. They are discussing Homer, Augustine, Shakespeare, Milton, and Lewis while you’re just trying to remember what you read in high school.

And somewhere in the background, you feel the gap, the gap between what they are receiving and what you were given. The gap between the education you now admire and the education you never had is real; and parents tell me this all the time.

Here is what I want to say to you directly: the Great Conversation is not age-restricted.

Plato didn’t write the Republic for twelve-year-olds. Augustine didn’t write the Confessions for people who had grown up in classical schools. And, C. S. Lewis certainly did not write The Abolition of Man only for professional philosophers.

The great tradition is for any person, at any stage of life, who is willing to sit down with a serious book and give it the attention it deserves. In fact, there is a particular gift that comes to the adult who encounters these texts with the accumulated experience of a life already lived. You bring questions a child cannot bring. You bring sorrows a child has not yet carried. You bring all kinds of things—loves, losses, regrets, hopes, and longings—that make the old books speak with a startling intimacy.

Augustine’s restless heart is not a metaphor to a forty-five-year-old who has spent twenty years building a life that doesn’t quite satisfy. It is a diagnosis, an analysis of lived experience that’s recognized from the inside. And this is one of the great recoveries of classical Christian education for parents: you are not simply choosing an education for your children. You are being invited into the life of the mind yourself.

You do not need to return to school to begin. You don’t have to pursue a degree to get this kind of education. You just need a book, a chair, and a pencil; perhaps a little courage and a few friends with whom to read in community might even be helpful. But this kind of education is for adults too, and it’s accessible.

Bonus Mistake: Failing to Fully Entrust Teachers Who Are Truly Your Allies

There is one more mistake worth naming, especially in our present moment. Some parents choose teachers who share their deepest convictions—at least broadly speaking—and then fail to entrust them fully.

They scrutinize every assignment. They suspect every difference. They talk down the teacher at the dinner table. They assume that if a teacher doesn’t agree with the family on every detail, then that teacher must not be safe, faithful, or trustworthy.

Of course, parents need to be discerning. Teachers are not substitutes for parents. And no parent should blindly entrust a child to a teacher who is hostile to the family’s faith, values, or vision of the good life. That would be stupid. But there is a difference between discernment and suspicion. There’s also a difference between alignment and total agreement, unity and uniformity.

A teacher may not share every preference, every emphasis, every denominational nuance, or even every household practice, and still be a true ally. Indeed, a good teacher often serves the family precisely by bringing gifts the family doesn’t possess in the same measure. Maybe it’s the mastery of a particular subject; maybe it’s pedagogical wisdom; maybe it’s patience born of practice and a love for students ordered toward their intellectual and moral good.

A good teacher knows the telos of education. They know education is not job training and that it’s not only civic formation. They also know it’s not helping students become whatever they want to be. “The purpose of educating children is to prepare them to be virtuous and wise, free men and women in the kingdom of God.”

When a teacher is genuinely laboring toward that end, parents should be careful not to undermine that labor with careless words or a bad attitude. Children learn how to regard authority by watching how their parents speak of those to whom they have delegated a portion of authority.

If a parent constantly corrects, belittles, mocks, suspects, or second-guesses the teacher, especially in front of the child, the child may end up learning more than the parent intended. The child may inadvertently learn that teachers are service providers and not authorities. He may learn that education is a consumer transaction rather than a shared vocation. He may even learn that every disagreement is a betrayal.

That’s not classical. And it is certainly not Christian.

The better way is covenantal, not consumerism. Parents and teachers are not competitors. They are not rival claimants over the child’s mind and soul. At their best, they are allies in the same work: both helping the child apprehend wisdom, appropriate noble judgment, and become the kind of person capable of bringing ordered judgment to the disorders of the age.

So, by all means, choose teachers carefully. Choose teachers whose loves are rightly ordered. Choose teachers who understand that humane learning is a discipline of attention toward that which is worthy. Choose teachers who know that education is ordered toward wisdom and virtue. But once you have chosen them, entrust them and speak well of them.

Ask honest questions, sure. But assume good will where good will has been demonstrated. And when disagreement comes, as it surely will, treat it as an occasion for conversation, not as an occasion for contempt.

So there they are, the three mistakes parents make without even knowing it—and one bonus mistake that may be more common than we care to admit.

1. We confuse information with formation.

2. We outsource formation entirely to the school.

3. We assume the tradition is for our children but not for us.

4. And sometimes, having chosen teachers who are truly our allies, we fail to entrust them with the work we asked them to do.

The good news is that none of these mistakes is fatal. They are all correctable. And the correction begins with a simple shift from asking what your child is learning to asking who your child—and you—are becoming. I think that’s a question worth sitting with. Because in a confused and fragmented world, recovering such an education for our children is now more essential than ever.

Since we’re gearing up for the homeschool conference season, and because the number of people (teachers and parents) migrating to Classical Christian Education (CCE) is astounding—and joyfully so!—I thought this post was worth reviving from the archives and g…

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To think Christianly about education is to think incarnationally about humanity and the cosmos (i.e., the world). C. S. Lewis makes a profound observation to this end, particularly in terms of our responsibility toward others, in his remarkable essay, “The Weight of Glory.” Lewis writes,

The load, or weight, or burden of …

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“The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?” -Ecclesiastes 1:1–3

Many years ago when my youngest daughter was in elementary school, she asked a profound question that caught me off guard! It wa…

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Most trips begin with a destination in mind, unless you’re taking one of the road trips my military buddies and I used to take on a weekend pass. We would just hop in a car of someone willing to drive and head out on the highway looking for adventure—or whatever might come our way. Happy to see where the wind would blow us for the next forty-eight hours…

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“The telos of classical education is not to produce a graduate who will one day earn a six-figure salary or run for Congress. Our goal is much harder to obtain:” writes Mandi Gerth in her book, Thoroughness and Charm. Gerth’s claim…

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In lesson five, we’ll continue building our case by establishing causal arguments.

Keep in mind, we are seeking arguments that support our thesis—our main argument—the spine of our paper.

In classical rhetoric, we discover what can be said about a text, a character, an incident, or a phenomenon by way of stasis theory or topics of invention. For our purposes, there’s little need to emphasize the differences between stasis theory and topics of invention, but the distinction can be helpful in carrying out quality research.

Drawing from classical rhetoric, stasis theory is technically diagnostic (i.e., What are we arguing about or what is our point of disagreement?). Topics of invention, on the other hand, are generative. They help us discover what we can actually say about our subject.

Stasis Theory consists of:

1. Conjectural questions (i.e., did something happen?): Where is the evidence? Who are the witnesses? What is the likelihood: Is it possible? Is it probable? Is it likely? Is it certain?

2. Definition questions (i.e., what is it? / what is the problem?): What is its nature, genus, species, and/or properties? What is not included in the boundaries of its definitions?

3. Qualitative questions (i.e., what kind of thing is it? / how serious is the issue?): is it good/evil? is it just/unjust? is it expedient/inexpedient?

4. Jurisdictional or policy questions (Is this the right one?) Is this the right court? Is this the right person? Should action be taken? What should be done to solve the problem?

Following Cicero, who codified Aristotle’s common places or topics, there are five topics of invention: definition, comparison, relationship, circumstance, and testimony. In his book, The Office of Assertion, Scott Crider lays out the topics of invention as follows:

1. What is the definition of X? What are its characteristics, both general and specific.

2. What is the difference between X and Y? How are they different, and how are they alike, and to what degree?

3. What is the relationship between X and Y? cause and effect? antecedent and consequence? contraries or contradictions?

4. What are the circumstances of X? Is it impossible; is it improbable; is it probable; is it certain?

5. Is there any credible testimony that supports my argument? Is there an authority, a statistic, a law, a maxim, a precedent, or an example?

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In terms of academic writing, we can supply supporting arguments for our thesis by using causal arguments. Causal arguments belong to the relational category of inquiry in the topics of invention. What caused the phenomenon in question or what effects did it have?

In Gregory Roper’s book, Mastering the Four Arguments, he classifies the causal relationship question as stasis theory rather than a topic of invention. I suppose such a distinction is of little importance given our purposes here and because the various aspects of rhetorical arguments have been classified and organized differently at different periods of history, but I mention it only because the purposes of the questions matter in relationship to where we are in our research and writing.

Are we still diagnosing an argument to discover where the disagreement lies? Or, are we attempting to generate arguments by discovering what can be said truthfully about the phenomenon under consideration? In any case, Roper lists the following eight causal arguments which can be helpful in discovering the arguments that best support our thesis during our research process.

1. Proximate causes are those causes that happen just before the event under consideration.

2. Remote causes are those causes that contributed further back in the chain of events.

3. A necessary cause “is a factor that must be present for the effect to take place.”

4. A sufficient cause “is one that is enough all by itself to make and effect happen.”

5. Precipitating causes “are the final steps that, when all the other factors are in place, kick off the actual results.”

6. Contributing causes are those causes that are neither necessary or sufficient all by themselves.

7. Hidden causes are those causes which are either unknown or not understood.

8. Reciprocal causes are the looped causes, those which lead back to another cause and then back to themselves again.

When considering arguments, it must be recognized that causal arguments function in the logos domain rather than the ethos or pathos domains of persuasion. Thus, the logic for cause and effect must be both sound and valid. Roper suggests that in order for a causal argument to work well in it’s persuasive function, it must:

1. Describe fully the phenomenon or event under consideration.

2. Then either: lead the reader to understand the chain of events that led to the phenomenon or event or lead the reader to understand the effects that came out of the phenomenon or event.

3. While also eliminating any false causes, those factors that may appear to be part of the chain of causality but were in fact not part of it.1

Given the complexity of causal arguments, consider trying your hand at answering the following question by developing a causal argument: What prevented Odysseus from returning to his home in Ithaca before Telemachus reached manhood?

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In last week’s post, I suggested 10 reasons for studying philosophy. The first reason in my list asserts that the ability to philosophize (to study or practice philosophy) is the mark of an educated mind. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, to be educated is to be brought up, reared, or instructed…

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To think Christianly about education is to think generationally. The fact that generational thinking is foreign to so many Christian parents speaks to the cunning power of secular influence on modern Christian parenting and education.

Too many parents think they are hitting the mark because they support their ch…

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