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 door with a hearty smile to greet the guests.

Builders, artists, and teachers experience something similar when they create or build something for the public. In marketing lingo, to put something out into the world is to “ship it” (I’ve also heard “publish it.”) That uneasy moment always comes just before it’s time to ship—usually with your finger hovering over the “return” key.

Is this going to work? Will this help anyone? Will people care? Will I be able to cut through the digital noise enough that people will pay attention? Will people sign up for our conference? Will anyone buy and read my book? Will this course get enough traction to “green light”? Such moments are both scary and exciting!

The flip-side of that is equally true. There’s that moment you arrive somewhere as a dinner guest and press the doorbell. Are we dressed appropriately? Are we too early? too late? Is our hostess gift too banal? The same often goes for signing up for a course. Did I apply in time? Will this be a waste of time and money? Am I smart enough? Will they take me?

Well, we have arrived at such a moment.

Over the past several weeks, I have anxiously laid out—in the span of four videos—a case for The Great Conversation. If you have followed along as I set the table, you already know the argument. But there’s two things I have learned in more than thirty years of teaching: 1) usually only 5-10% get the lesson the first time, and 2) even then, the most persuaded often mistake conviction for decision (i.e., we really only believe what we act on).

Because of those two human obstacles, I want to gather all the flatware and cutlery and give them a final polish before getting everyone seated at the table. In laymen’s terms, I want to go over the details of this course together again, and lay out the plan for what happens next one more time.

To begin with, let me remind you where we have been.

In the first video, I offered you Dorothy Sayers’s image of the ship with watertight bulkheads—the tragedy of modern education that seals off every subject from every other subject, so that a student may learn a number of “subjects” but never learn the art of learning itself. I argued that since reality is not partitioned that way, neither should be your child’s education.

In the second video, I introduced the concept of the Great Conversation: the three-thousand-year-long, sustained conversation about the perennial questions relating to the human condition—the written records of the poets, philosophers, and prophets that Hutchins and Adler called the road to education. I also showed you the six-year arc we’ll be following, systematically organized around Adler’s six great ideas—Truth, Goodness, Beauty, Liberty, Equality, and Justice. Finally, I made the case that this conversation cannot be had in isolation. And, for the greatest success, it favors a cohort that begins together and finishes together.

In the third video, I went really practical: two ninety-minute Socratic seminars a week; thirty-two weeks a year; twenty-four high school credits across six years, covering all the humanities in an integrated fashion. Parents need only add mathematics, laboratory science, and physical education. I explained the graduated reading load, the writing progression, and the reason why continuity with a qualified teacher and Christian community matters more than any curriculum.

Finally, in the fourth video, I extended an invitation to interested families and explained the one feature that makes this course unlike nearly anything else you will consider: enrollment opens once and then closes for good. This is not a scarcity marketing gimmick; it’s just math. We won’t add students to the cohort along the way because the depth of the conversation in the later years depends entirely on who was present for it in the earlier years.

If you haven’t watched all four of the videos, they’re linked above. They would be worth 25-30 minutes of your time. As a matter of fact, because this is a six-year decision, I would encourage you to not fill out the interest form until you’ve watched them.

Next, here are a few details to be aware of:

1. I have to close the interest form on August 1st! (We start class on Aug 17th and will need time to interview every student, arrange for books, and secure supplies.)

2. I’ve opened 12 seats and 5 are already spoken for! (I cannot, for any reason, take more than 16 students. Once these seats are filled, the door to this cohort closes forever.)

3. This course is only open to the right 12-14 year-olds. (I am personally following up with every family who submits an interest form. We will have a real conversation where we talk candidly and I’ll try to answer all your questions.)

Finally, here’s what I would ask of you.

If you have a child, around twelve or thirteen, who is hungry for something real, who asks the hard questions, who likes to read, then don’t let this decision drift into the category of “things I meant to get around to.”

Take the two or three minutes to fill out the interest form. I will follow up personally, and together we will discern whether this course is the right fit for your child. If it’s not a good fit, I will gladly tell you so and point you in the right direction.

If this is the right fit—if you have one of those rare young people who is ready to sit at the table with some of history’s greatest thinkers (e.g, Homer and Moses, Plato and Paul, Augustine and Dante, Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, Lewis and Tolkien, etc.)—then I would count it a great privilege to spend the next six years making those introductions and picking their brains together.

The Great Conversation started nearly three thousand years ago. It’s a banquet of words and ideas that have shaped the Western world, and it’s just waiting for the next generation to take its seat at the table.

The table is nearly set. The invitation ends August 1st. Fill out the interest form today, and let’s talk about your child’s place at this historic banquet called The Great Conversation.

Interest Form

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 interested in learning more about Classical Christian Education.

Over the years, we expanded our efforts to include New England, Sacramento, and now for our third year, the Southeastern Consortium of Classical Educators in North Carolina.

The Consortium of Classical Educators is a national effort to provide resources and regional connections for Christian families, teachers, and educational organizations to expand the reach of classical education and foster human flourishing for generations to come.

As a collaborative initiative of Kepler Education, the CCE is a platform for parents, classical Christian educators (i.e., homeschooling parents, classroom and online teachers, and college and university professors). CCE publishes helpful articles, a podcast, and an academic journal for parents, students, and fellow educators who are serious about the life of the mind, classical Christian education, and the liberal arts.

The Southeastern Consortium of Classical Educators is an annual, regional effort to bring together amazing people who love Classical Christian Education (or want to learn more about it) into the same space. The goal is bring together the right people such that teachers are encouraged, leaders see more clearly, and everyone has opportunity to meet other people engaged in the work of nourishing souls.

This year's Southeastern Consortium will be hosted by Christ the King Presbyterian Church in Raleigh.

Speakers include:

• Patrick Whalen from Michigan

• Dale Stenberg from Florida

• Dr. Josh Herring from North Carolina

• Scott Postma, PhD from Idaho (yours truly 😉)

Our amazing sponsors are:

• Kepler Education

• Paideia Graphic Design

• Triangle Classical Forum

• Veterum Sapientia Institute

• The Ciceronian Society

• New Aberdeen College

• Faulkner University's Center for Great Books and Classical Learning
  

Southeastern Consortium

Early bird pricing ends July 31st!

There are also student and teacher discounts available. Email jherring@logresinstitute.org for discount codes.

Come join us - it's going to be amazing!

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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 time to imbibe in some much-needed refreshment—preferably large, inexpensive, ice-cold adult beverages—before we boarded the boat. As we approached the centrocondario, lo, and behold, my little eye spied an unassuming restaurant doorway to my left. The sign over door read, Ciprianis. But the name etched in the glass told the better story—Harry’s Bar.

Notorious for its exorbitantly expensive Bellinis and extra-dry martinis, Harry’s Bar is also known for its famous clientele, most notably, Ernest Hemingway. His novel Across the River and into the Trees was directly inspired by the bar. During the 1950s, the novelist occupied the back corner table every day around 11:00 am to write, talk politics, and do what he probably did best—drink booze.

Declared a national landmark in 2001 by the Italian Ministry for Cultural Affairs, Harry’s Bar was founded by an Italian chef named Giuseppe Cipriani. He opened the joint in 1931 with a financial gift from Harry Pickering, a young American from a rich family who had been the beneficent of Cipriani’s generosity.

The story goes that Pickering had been a regular at the Hotel Europa where Cipriani was tending bar. Pickering suddenly stopped his visits after his family cut him off for spending all of his allowance on drink. Apparently, the two were close enough pals that Cipriani loaned him some money to get by. A couple of years later, Pickering returned the money, 5-fold, with the caveat that Cipriani was to open a bar and call it “Harry’s Bar.”

Other notable frequenters of Harry’s Bar included Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Jimmy Stewart, Truman Capote, Orson Welles, and Joe DiMaggio. Regrettably, we didn’t meet any famous patrons that day. But, the dapper, white-jacketed staff did pack us into a tiny table, served us a bowl of olives with our tiny drinks, and then charged us like we were celebrities. That’s got to count for something, right?

Now, I didn’t do any writing while I visited Harry’s Bar, and I’ve yet to finish my great American novel, but I did write a couple of other books that may interest you. One of them was even written about a special letter addressed to a community of Italians.

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

Behind the Scenes: Thank You for Filling This Course

When I launched my recent book, Becoming Classically Educated, I wanted to find a way to immediately get the message out and put its contents into practice in a meaningful way. Being a teacher, I naturally conceived of a seminar-oriented course where I could help interested adults develop a genuine rule of life centered in the Christian Intellectual Tradition using this book.

Since I was enlisting adults who were probably working a job or at least had full-time responsibilities, I needed to craft a syllabus and schedule that took us to the heart of the matter in the shortest time possible without compromising the priorities of the book’s message. After a little work, I launched the Christian Humanist Reading Life course.

I didn’t know how well a course like this would be received, so I turned the public square into my classroom. I simply taught four things to anyone who would listen: 1) what I was going to teach them, 2) why it mattered in real life, 3) how they would benefit from this course of study, and 4) why they could trust me to be their guide.

Turns out, at the present hour, there is a real need for such a course. I opened registration for one month and am happy to report we filled every one of our 13 seats. And, never did I have to sell my soul or resort to slimy marketing tactics to get students. For that, I want to send a big and hearty “Thank You!” to everyone who joined this cohort and everyone who helped me get the word out. I pray July’s cohort will be more than satisfied with what they learn, and they will flourish with what they take with them into their future work.

A Short Poll

I would like to learn a little bit more about the BOOKS AND LETTERS tribe’s communication and social media preferences. Would you help me by answering these three questions?

Happy 250th Birthday to the United States of America!

In a letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 3 July 1776, commenting on several aspects relating to the Declaration of Independence, which the Continental Congress had, just the day before, voted to approve, he concludes his remarks saying about the great occasion,

I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.

You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. -- I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. -- Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.

In wishing you all a very happy Independence Day on this 250th anniversary of our nation’s birth, allow me to encourage you to commemorate it with solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty and celebrate it heartily, with Pomp and Parade, etc.

But please indulge me also, by allowing me to remind us all of the cost of this glorious inheritance and the responsibility that inevitably belongs to us in preserving such a heritage of freedom that we might, in turn, faithfully pass it on to our children and grandchildren.

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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.