what is a great books education

St. John's College

St. John’s Reading List: A Great Books Curriculum

St. John’s College is best known for its reading list and the Great Books curriculum that was adopted in 1937. While the list of books has evolved over the last century, the tradition of all students reading foundational texts of Western civilization remains. The reading list at St. John’s includes classic works in philosophy, literature, political science, psychology, history, religion, economics, math, chemistry, physics, biology, astronomy, music, language, and more. Learn more about classes at St. John’s and the subjects students study .

The reading list presented on this page may not accurately reflect the current reading list due to recent changes, works that are read only on one campus, works that are read in part, and works that are read by some students as junior and senior elective classes.

Agamemnon , Libation Bearers , Eumenides , Prometheus Bound

“On the Equilibrium of Planes,” “On Floating Bodies” 

Aristophanes

Poetics , Physics , Metaphysics , Nicomachean Ethics , On Generation and Corruption , Politics , Parts of Animals , Generation of Animals

Amedeo Avogadro

“Essay on a Manner of Determining the Relative Masses of the Elementary Molecules of Bodies”

Claude Berthollet

“Excerpt from Essai de Statique Chimique”

Joseph Black

“Extracts from Lectures on the Elements of Chemistry”

Stanislao Cannizzaro

“Letter to Professor S. De Luca”

John Dalton

“Extracts from A New System of Chemical Philosophy”

Hans Driesch

“The Science and Philosophy of the Organism”

Hippolytus , Bacchae

Daniel Fahrenheit

“The Fahrenheit Scale”

Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac

“On the Expansion of Gases by Heat,” “Memoir on the Combination of Gaseous Substances with Each Other”

William Harvey

On The Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals

Iliad , Odyssey

Antoine Lavoisier

Elements of Chemistry

On the Nature of Things

Edme Mariotte

Dmitri mendeleev.

“The Periodic Law of the Chemical Elements”

Blaise Pascal

Treatise on the Equilibrium of Liquids

Meno , Gorgias , Republic , Apology , Crito , Phaedo , Symposium , Parmenides , Theaetetus , Sophist , Timaeus , Phaedrus

“Lycurgus,” “Solon”

J.L. Proust

“Excerpt from Sur Les Oxidations Metalliques”

Poems 1 and 31

Oedipus Rex , Oedipus at Colonus , Antigone, Philoctetes , Ajax

Hans Spemann

“The Organizer-Effect in Embryonic Development” (Nobel Lecture 1935), “Embryonic Development and Induction”

J.J. Thomson

“Extracts from System of Chemistry”

The History of the Peloponnesian War

Rudolf Virchow

“Cellular Pathology Lectures”

Virginia Woolf

On Not Knowing Greek

Hebrew Bible

New testament, dante alighieri.

Divine Comedy

Thomas Aquinas

Summa Theologiae

De Anima , On Interpretation , Prior Analytics , Categories

Confessions

Johann Sebastian Bach

St. Matthew Passion ,  Inventions

Francis Bacon

Novum Organum

“The Disappointment”

Anne Bradstreet

Geoffrey chaucer.

Canterbury Tales

Nicolaus Copernicus

On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina

Missa Papae Marcelli

Michel de Montaigne

René descartes.

Geometry , Discourse on Method

Princess Elisabeth

The Correspondence Between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes

Discourses, Manual

Joseph Haydn

Johannes kepler.

Astronomia Nova

Early History of Rome

Niccolò Machiavelli

The Prince , Discourses

Guide for the Perplexed

Andrew Marvell

Claudio monteverdi.

L’Orfeo

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Albert murray.

Stomping the Blues

Generation of Conic Sections

The Enneads

“Caesar,” “Cato the Younger,” “Antony,” “Brutus”

Franz Schubert

William shakespeare.

Richard II , Henry IV , The Tempest , As You Like It , Hamlet , Othello , Macbeth , King Lear , and Sonnets

Igor Stravinsky

Symphony of Psalms

Ludwig van Beethoven

Third Symphony

François Viète

Introduction to the Analytical Art

Lady Mary Wroth

“A Crown of Sonnets Dedicated to Love”

United States Historical Documents

Articles of Confederation, Declaration of Independence, Constitution of the United States of America

André-Marie Ampère

Jane austen.

Pride and Prejudice , Emma

Daniel Bernoulli

“On the Vibrating String”

Miguel de Cervantes

Don Quixote

Charles-Augustin de Coulomb

“Excerpts from Coulomb’s Mémoires sur l’électricité et le magnétisme”

Madame de La Fayette

Princess of Clèves

Jean de La Fontaine

François de la rochefoucauld, richard dedekind.

Essays on the Theory of Numbers

Meditations , Rules for the Direction of the Mind

George Eliot

Middlemarch

Leonhard Euler

“Remarks on the Preceding Papers by Mr. Bernoulli”

Michael Faraday

“Experimental Researches in Electricity”

Benjamin Franklin

“Excerpt from several letters to Peter Collinson on the nature of electricity”

Galileo Galilei

Two New Sciences

William Gilbert

“De Magnete”

Hamilton, Jay, and Madison

The Federalist

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Scarlet Letter

Thomas Hobbes

Treatise of Human Nature

Christiaan Huygens

Treatise on Light , On the Movement of Bodies by Impact

Immanuel Kant

Critique of Pure Reason , Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Monadology , Discourse on Metaphysics , Essay on Dynamics, Philosophical Essays, Principles of Nature and Grace

Second Treatise of Government

James Clerk Maxwell

“On Faraday’s Lines of Force,” “On Physical Lines of Force,” “A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field”

John Milton

Paradise Lost

Le Misanthrope

Don Giovanni

The Marriage of Figaro

Isaac Newton

Principia Mathematica

Jean-Antoine Nollet

“Observations on Several New Electrical Phenomena”

Hans Christian Ørsted

“Experiments concerning the efficacy of electric conflict on the magnetic needle”

Pensées

Jean Racine

Phèdre

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Social Contract , The Origin of Inequality

Wealth of Nations

Baruch Spinoza

Theologico-Political Treatise , Ethics

Jonathan Swift

Gulliver’s Travels

Brook Taylor

“On the motion of the stretched string”

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Alessandro Volta

“On the Electricity excited by the mere contact of conducting substances of different kinds”

William Wordsworth

The Two-Part Prelude of 1799

Richard Wagner

Tristan and Isolde

Thomas Young

“On the Nature of Light and Colors”

Hannah Arendt

The Human Condition

Samuel Beckett

Waiting for Godot

The Bhagavad Gita

Albert camus.

The Stranger

Madame de Sévigne

Fyodor dostoevsky, marcel duchamp, ralph ellison.

Invisible Man

Alcestis ; Medea ; Hecuba ; The Trojan Women

Richard Feynman

Gustave flaubert.

Madame Bovary

Michel Foucault

Discipline and Punish ; Security, Territory, and Population

Gabriel García Márquez

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Edward Gibbon

History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

G. H. Hardy

A Course of Pure Mathematics

Georg Hegel

Philosophy of Nature ,  Elements of Philosophy of Right

Martin Heidegger

What is Metaphysics?

Alfred Hitchcock

Selected movies

Henry James

The Portrait of a Lady

James Joyce

Soren kierkegaard.

Dao De Jing

Halldór Laxness

Independent People

Emmanuel Levinas

Totality and Infinity

Konrad Lorenz

Studies in Animal and Human Behavior

Jorge Luis Borges

Édouard manet, herman melville, arthur miller.

Death of a Salesman

Toni Morrison

Friedrich nietzsche.

Gay Science

Flannery O’Connor

Thomas piketty, marcel proust.

Swann’s Way , Remembrance of Things Past

Ranier Maria Rilke

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

The Rise and Decline of the Roman Republic

Bertrand russell.

An Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy

Measure for Measure

Oswald Spengler

The Decline of the West

Eudora Welty

Short stories

Tennesee Williams

A Streetcar Named Desire

The Works of Zhuangzi

Finnegans Wake

Kate Chopin

The Awakening

Zora Neale Hurston

Their Eyes Were Watching God

V.S. Naipaul

A House for Mr. Biswas

William Gaddis

The Recognitions

Neuroscience

United states supreme court decisions, james baldwin.

Stranger in the Village, The Fire Next Time

Charles Baudelaire

Les Fleurs du Mal

George Beadle & Edward Tatum

Elizabeth bishop.

“On the Spectrum of Hydrogen”

Theodor Boveri

Gwendolyn brooks.

Sonnets from  Children of the Poor

Joseph Conrad

Heart of Darkness

Charles Darwin

Origin of Species

Clinton Davisson

Simone de beauvoir.

The Second Sex

Louis de Broglie

“Matter Waves”

Alexis de Tocqueville

Democracy in America

Emily Dickinson

Brothers Karamazov

Frederick Douglass

Selected speeches

W. E. B. Du Bois

The Souls of Black Folk

Albert Einstein

“Relativity,” “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” “On the Influence of Gravitation on the Propagation of Light,” “The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity,” “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend upon its Energy Content?”

T. S. Eliot

“On the Absolute Quantity of Electricity Associated with the Particles or Atoms of Matter”

William Faulkner

Go Down, Moses

Un Coeur Simple

Sigmund Freud

Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis , Mourning and Melancholia , Beyond the Pleasure Principle

The Federalist Papers

“Mendelian Proportions in a Mixed Population”

Phenomenology of Mind

Basic Writings , The Word of Nietzsche: God is Dead , Introduction to Metaphysics

Werner Karl Heisenberg

“Critique of the Physical Concepts of the Particle Picture”

Edmund Husserl

The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology

François Jacob & Jacques Monod

Søren kierkegaard.

Philosophical Fragments , Fear and Trembling

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

“Zoological Philosophy”

Abraham Lincoln

Nikolai lobachevsky.

Theory of Parallels

Capital , The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 , The German Ideology

Benito Cereno

Gregor Mendel

“Experiments with Plant Hybridization”

Hermann Minkowski

“Space and Time”

Robert Andrews Millikan

“The Electron”

Thomas Morgan

Evolution and Genetics , “The Chromosomes and Mendel’s Two Laws,” “The Linkage Groups and the Chromosomes,” “Sex-Linked Inheritance,” “Crossing-Over”

Song of Solomon

Beyond Good and Evil

Good Country People, Revelation, The Displaced Person

Sylvia Plath

“The Quantum Hypothesis”

Arthur Rimbaud

Ernest rutherford.

“The Scattering of α & β Particles by Matter and the Structure of the Atom”

Erwin Schrödinger

“Four Lectures of Wave Mechanics—First Lecture”

Wallace Stevens

Joel sussman, walter sutton, j. j. thomson.

“Cathode Rays”

Leo Tolstoy

War and Peace

Paul Valéry

Johann wolfgang von goethe, booker t. washington.

“Atlanta Exposition Address,” “Our New Citizen,” “Democracy and Education”

Mrs. Dalloway , To the Lighthouse, A Room of One’s Own

James Watson & Francis Crick

William butler yeats.

The Human Condition , The Origins of Totalitarianism

Madame de Sévigné

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Remembrance of Things Past

The Decline of the West

School's out

A critical take on education and schooling

The 50 great books on education

Professor of Education, University of Derby

View all partners

I have often argued that I would not let any teacher into a school unless – as a minimum – they had read, carefully and well, the three great books on education: Plato’s Republic, Rousseau’s Émile and Dewey’s Democracy and Education. There would be no instrumental purpose in this, but the struggle to understand these books and the thinking involved in understanding them would change teachers and ultimately teaching.

These are the three great books because each is sociologically whole. They each present a description and arguments for an education for a particular and better society. You do not have to agree with these authors. Plato’s tripartite education for a just society ruled over by philosopher kings; Rousseau’s education through nature to establish the social contract and Dewey’s relevant, problem-solving democratic education for a democratic society can all be criticised. That is not the point. The point is to understand these great works. They constitute the intellectual background to any informed discussion of education.

What of more modern works? I used to recommend the “blistering indictment” of the flight from traditional liberal education that is Melanie Phillips’s All Must Have Prizes, to be read alongside Tom Bentley’s Learning Beyond the Classroom: Education for a Changing World, which is a defence of a wider view of learning for the “learning age”. These two books defined the debate in the 1990s between traditional education by authoritative teachers and its rejection in favour of a new learning in partnership with students.

Much time and money is spent on teacher training and continuing professional development and much of it is wasted. A cheaper and better way of giving student teachers and in-service teachers an understanding of education would be to get them to read the 50 great works on education.

The books I have identified, with the help of members of the Institute of Ideas’ Education Forum, teachers and colleagues at several universities, constitute an attempt at an education “canon”.

What are “out” of my list are textbooks and guides to classroom practice. What are also “out” are novels and plays. But there are some great literary works that should be read by every teacher: Charles Dicken’s Hard Times – for Gradgrind’s now much-needed celebration of facts; D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow – for Ursula Brangwen’s struggle against her early child-centred idealism in the reality of St Philips School; and Alan Bennett’s The History Boys – for Hector’s role as the subversive teacher committed to knowledge.

I hope I have produced a list of books, displayed here in alphabetical order, that are held to be important by today’s teachers. I make no apology for including the book I wrote with Kathryn Ecclestone, The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education because it is an influential critical work that has produced considerable controversy. If you disagree with this, or any other of my choices, please add your alternative “canonical” books on education.

Michael W. Apple – Official Knowledge: Democratic Education in a Conservative Age (1993)

Hannah Arendt – Between Past and Future (1961), for the essay “The Crisis in Education” (1958)

Matthew Arnold – Culture and Anarchy (1867-9)

Robin Barrow – Giving Teaching Back to the Teachers (1984)

Tom Bentley – Learning Beyond The Classroom: Education for a Changing World (1998)

Allan Bloom – The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (1987)

Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron – Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (1977)

Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis – Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (1976)

Jerome Bruner – The Process of Education (1960)

John Dewey – Democracy and Education (1916)

Margaret Donaldson – Children’s Minds (1978)

JWB Douglas – The Home and the School (1964)

Kathryn Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes – The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education (2008)

Harold Entwistle – Antonio Gramsci: Conservative Schooling for Radical Politics (1979).

Paulo Freire – Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968/1970)

Frank Furedi – Wasted: Why Education Isn’t Educating (2009)

Helene Guldberg – Reclaiming Childhood (2009)

ED Hirsch Jnr. – The Schools We Need And Why We Don’t Have Them (1999)

Paul H Hirst – Knowledge and the Curriculum (1974) For the essay which appears as Chapter 3 ‘Liberal Education and the Nature of Knowledge’ (1965)

John Holt – How Children Fail (1964)

Eric Hoyle – The Role of the Teacher (1969)

James Davison Hunter – The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age without Good or Evil (2000)

Ivan Illich – Deschooling Society (1971)

Nell Keddie (Ed.) – Tinker, Taylor: The Myth of Cultural Deprivation (1973)

John Locke – Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1692)

John Stuart Mill – Autobiography (1873)

Sybil Marshall – An Experiment in Education (1963)

Alexander Sutherland Neil – Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing (1960)

John Henry Newman – The Idea of a University (1873)

Michael Oakeshott – The Voice of Liberal Learning (1989) In particular for the essay “Education: The Engagement and Its Frustration” (1972)

Anthony O’ Hear – Education, Society and Human Nature: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (1981)

Richard Stanley Peters – Ethics and Education (1966)

Melanie Phillips – All Must Have Prizes (1996)

Plato – The Republic (366BC?)

Plato – Protagoras (390BC?) and Meno (387BC?)

Neil Postman – The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School (1995)

Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner – Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969)

Herbert Read – Education Through Art (1943)

Carl Rogers – Freedom to Learn: A View of What Education Might Become (1969)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau – Émile or “on education” (1762)

Bertrand Russell – On Education (1926)

Israel Scheffler – The Language of Education (1960)

Brian Simon – Does Education Matter? (1985) Particularly for the paper “Why No Pedagogy in England?” (1981)

JW Tibble (Ed.) – The Study of Education (1966)

Lev Vygotsky – Thought and Language (1934/1962)

Alfred North Whitehead – The Aims of Education and other essays (1929)

Paul E. Willis – Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (1977)

Alison Wolf – Does Education Matter? Myths about Education and Economic Growth (2002)

Michael FD Young (Ed) – Knowledge and Control: New Directions for the Sociology of Education (1971)

Michael FD Young – Bringing Knowledge Back In: From Social Constructivism to Social Realism in the Sociology of Education (2007)

• Teacher training
• Continuing professional development

Assistant Editor - 1 year cadetship

Program Development Officer - Business Processes

Executive Dean, Faculty of Health

Lecturer/Senior Lecturer, Earth System Science (School of Science)

Sydney Horizon Educators (Identified)

THE GREAT BOOKS ACADEMY & HOMESCHOOL PROGRAM

Great Books Method

“Never before has there been such a great opportunity for parents seeking the best education for their children.” – Norris Archer Harrington

In recent years there has been an increased interest in the great books approach to education. Nowhere is this approach more realized than at schools such as St. John’s College and Thomas Aquinas College. As four year, great books programs, both of these schools focus exclusively on the original texts of the greatest writings in the history of the Western world. After reading these works, students and tutors engage in Socratic discussion groups so as to bring out the rich meaning to be found there.

Undoubtedly, there are many parents who desire for their children the traditional and classical education afforded by a great books approach who yet find themselves asking, “Just what is the Socratic Method, why should we use it, how does it work?” It is illustrative that by asking these very questions in order to understand the method, one actually initiates the method itself.  To answer requires a brief discussion of Socrates, the Greek philosopher from whom the method takes its name. It is interesting to note that in any listing of great books, Socrates is never one of the authors listed. This is because Socrates never wrote a book. All of the written dialogues of Socrates we have today were written by his student, Plato.

Thus, the Socratic Method is a conversation, a discussion, wherein two or more people assist one another in finding the answers to difficult questions. Why did Socrates proceed in this manner?  Despite his many claims of ignorance Socrates understood better than those with whom he spoke that it was not enough simply to “learn” facts, to memorize lessons, or to parrot lectures. To know truly, to seek wisdom, one must work toward understanding.  If the question “what” leads us to see what we do and do not know, then the question “why” leads us to understand our world in a more full and fundamental manner. If a student tells you that the square on the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the squares on the two remaining sides taken together, he would, or course, be correct. But if you ask this student “why” this is so, would he be able to give you that answer? If he cannot, then he has memorized an “answer” that, while possessing certain utility, does not of itself provide understanding of causes.  But if he gives any one of a number of reasoned explanations why the right triangle has the property described, then he demonstrates not only his understanding of causes, but also the ability to communicate that understanding to others.

Further, his understanding is greater to the degree that his account is the one that comes closest to the cause itself.  The discussion method facilitates the student’s quest for understanding by requiring him to answer questions on his own, to ponder the validity of what others have said or written, and (not the least of which) to give reasoned support of his own opinion to the other students in the group. While the discussion method is a powerful tool, it is by no means the only activity by which people learn. There are three distinct activities by which learning takes place.

The first type of learning activity is to memorize material, and while memory skills are essential to learning, what one memorizes, one can also forget. The second activity is the development of intellectual skills such as adding, reading, and writing. The second method draws on the foundation of the first. For example, since one learns to read by reading, there are certain rules of phonics which are memorized that assist in the process.

Man does not forget that which he understands, and when a man understands both the world he lives in and his true place in it, he is empowered with the ability to choose rightly for his own betterment and the betterment of those around him.  Additionally, it is important to note that the activity of increasing understanding is not limited to the material world.  The phrase “faith seeking understanding” acknowledges that even those things we know by the grace of religious faith are not contrary to reason, even if they happen to be above reason.  Articles of faith are known by grace and divine revelation, yet one can increase understanding of much that is held by faith.  This is possible because faith and reason are complementary, they go hand in hand.  Even Jesus employed discussion to force his disciples to articulate what they held by faith when he asked, “But whom do you say that I am?”  Through parables and returning question for question, Jesus engaged the minds, the reason, of those with whom he spoke.

It is a fact of human nature that a man often thinks he knows something until he is forced to articulate it.  In other words, an indistinct “knowledge” of something – which is really little more than a feeling – reveals its true nature in the process of being brought into the light of discussion.  The beauty of the process is that in finding the limit of our knowledge we not only discover where our ignorance ends, but also where our true knowledge begins.

Group of Great Books Program Students

It has been said here that homeschooling is ideal for the foundational learning activities of intellectual skill development. On the other hand, homeschooling parents will immediately encounter problems if they seek to have their children engage in serious discussion with other children reading the same works and learning at the same level.  Even a large family with many children schooling at home cannot have everyone reading and discussing The Iliad or Democracy in America (to name only two) at the same time or at the same level of comprehension. The Socratic discussion requires the challenge of one’s peers in order to push the student to excel at his greatest intellectual capacity. How then are homeschooling parents to provide such an opportunity for their children? The answer is found in the rapidly increasing opportunities for “distance learning” made possible by the Internet.

Available courses

Blended Shared Inquiry Training

• Instructor: Michael Elsey
• Instructor: Teri Laliberte
• Instructor: Josh Sniegowski

Building Internal Capacity

• Teacher: Denise Ahlquist

Close Reading

Junior Great Books Sampler

Great Books Plus

• Teacher: Pay Pal
• Teacher: Ellen Teacher11
• Teacher: Sushant Wankhede

Great Books. Great Conversation.

• About Overview
• Mission & Philosophy of Education Statement
• Biblical Foundation Statement
• Ethics Statement
• The History of Gutenberg College
• Faculty & Staff
• Board of Governors
• National Advisory Board
• School Profile
• Academics Overview
• Degree Program & Classes
• Academic Catalog
• Academic Calendar
• Reading List
• Study Abroad
• Student Life Overview
• Residence Program
• Living in Eugene, Oregon
• Spiritual Life
• Career Development Liberal Arts: Education for All Walks of Life
• Tuition & Aid Overview
• Tuition & Fees
• Financial Aid
• Admissions Overview
• Applicant Profile
• College Counseling
• How to Apply
• Continue Your Application
• Learn Overview
• The Gutenberg Podcast
• News & Events Overview
• Latest News
• Events Calendar
• 2024 Education Conference: The Independent Mind
• Great Books Symposium
• Preview Days
• Young Philosophers
• Get Involved Overview

Why a Great Books Education is the Most Practical!

Gutenberg College is a great books college. The curriculum is designed to develop good learning skills in students; they read and then discuss in small groups the writings produced by the greatest minds of Western culture as they grappled with the most fundamental questions facing human beings of all ages. When I tell people about Gutenberg College, one of the most common responses is: “It’s a good idea, but not practical.” The thinking seems to be that if one had unlimited time and money, a great books education would be very good to pursue; but in the real world, food has to be put on the table, and a great books education will not do that. I am convinced, however, that a great books education is not only practical, but, in our day and age, the most practical education available.

Modern society has adopted the historically recent perspective that the purpose of education is training for the workplace. In this view, college should provide students with skills and knowledge that will prepare them to procure reasonably high-paying, satisfying employment for the rest of their lives. The common wisdom says that the best way to achieve this goal is: first, as an undergraduate, select a promising occupation and major in the appropriate field of study; and second, after graduating, enter directly into the work force or attend a graduate or professional school for more specialized training. The logic seems to be that the sooner one concludes one’s education and begins work in one’s field, the less will be the cost of education and the better the prospects for advancement into secure, high-paying positions. While this was once a reasonable strategy, it is not suited to the economic environment currently developing.

The world is changing at a bewildering pace. Anyone who owns a computer and tries to keep up with the developments in hardware, software, and the accompanying incompatibilities is all too aware of the speed of change. This rapid change, especially technological change, has extremely important implications for the job market.

In the past, it was possible to look at the nation’s work force, determine which of the existing occupations was most desirable in terms of pay and working conditions, and pick one to prepare for. But the rapid rate of change is clouding the crystal ball. How do we know that a high paying job today will be high paying tomorrow?

A photographer told me about a talented and highly skilled artisan who touched up photographs. He was the best in our region of the country, and people knew it; because the demand for his skill was so great, he was unable to keep up with the work. A few years ago, however, this artisan suddenly closed his shop; he did not have enough work to stay in business. Due to developments in computer hardware and software, anyone with just a little training can now achieve results previously attainable by only a few highly skilled artisans. Technology had rendered this artisan’s skills obsolete. And this is not an isolated case; technology is antiquating many skills.

One could try to avoid this fate by finding an occupation unlikely to be automated, but automation is not the only cause of job elimination. Historically, mid-management positions in large corporations provided good incomes and considerable job security. However, AT&T’s recent layoffs have drawn attention to the growing trend in American companies to eliminate mid-level managers as the companies restructure to compete better in the world market. As a result, a glut of unemployed executives are having great difficulty finding employment in their field of expertise. Most of them never dreamed they would be standing in unemployment lines.

Medicine might be a more promising field. There will always be sick people to treat, and doctors have a reputation for high pay. However, recent news reports have called into question the future of this occupation. There is an excess of doctors in the United States right now, largely due to the number of foreign medical students who decide to remain in this country after they complete their training. And physicians’ incomes recently declined for the first time in decades, a change attributed to the proliferation of HMOs and managed health care providers–a trend expected to continue. To further complicate the picture, in the near future a national health care plan may rise from the ashes of President Clinton’s ill-fated one. What effect such a program would have on physicians’ incomes and working conditions is impossible to predict with certainty, but doctors ought not expect raises under such a plan. In light of such an uncertain future, should a student invest the time and money medical training requires? This is a tough question, but similar uncertainties lie in the future of many professions.

One could forego the traditionally desirable occupations and choose a field certain to grow and develop. Clearly the high demand for programmers, electrical engineers, and computer programmers appears to hold great promise for job security in the foreseeable future, even if one must work for several different employers over the years. However, no one in this field will be able to take his job for granted. Due to the rapid rate of technological change in the computer industry, people in this field need to be constantly learning and updating their skills to keep up with the new technology. In areas of state-of-the-art development, some companies do not want software writers or engineers over thirty-five years old because their training is out-of-date and they are too set in their ways to approach problems with fresh thinking. These companies prefer to replace older employees with recent graduates. Thus the longevity of one’s career in this fast changing field could be relatively short.

No matter what occupation one chooses, the future is full of question marks. Although this economic dislocation is in its early stages, statistics already indicate a high degree of instability in the job market. According to the United States government, the average American switches careers three times in his or her life, works for ten employers, and stays in each job only 3.6 years. ( Note 1 )

Such unpredictability calls for a different strategy in preparing for the job market. Rather than spending one’s undergraduate years receiving specialized training, one ought to learn more general, transferable skills which will provide the flexibility to adjust to whatever changes may occur. A well-educated worker should be able to communicate clearly with co-workers, both verbally and in writing, read with understanding, perform basic mathematical calculations, conduct himself responsibly and ethically, and work well with others. These skills would make a person well-suited to most work environments and capable of learning quickly and easily the requisite skills for a new career, should the need arise. Thus a hard-headed realism, with long- term economic security as the goal, would seem to dictate an undergraduate educational strategy of focusing on sound general learning skills–just what a great books education provides.

Therefore, a great books education makes good sense in terms of dollars spent and dollars gained when calculated over a lifetime, and, therefore, good training for the workplace. This is fortuitous, however, because a great books education is not designed with this as the primary goal. It is designed to achieve the even more practical goal historically assigned to education: to teach students how to live wisely. I say this is practical because that which helps one achieve what needs to be done is practical. Living wisely is the most important thing a person can do in his lifetime. Therefore, education with this focus is quintessentially practical.

Wise living means to live as one ought; in other words, to strive to achieve good goals by moral means. This statement immediately evokes an array of fundamental questions: Why are we here? What is valuable or worthwhile? What are the principles of right and wrong? Is there a God? Who is He? What is my relationship to Him? Without having seriously wrestled with these issues, one will be condemned to a life without direction or purpose. Without clearly defined and worthwhile goals, success and fulfillment are impossible. Therefore, one’s answers to these questions have very important implications for how one chooses to earn a living.

Is such a goal realistic or attainable by education? It is difficult to teach a person how to live wisely. In a sense, such a skill can not be taught; it can only be learned. The student must be challenged to think through these fundamental questions for himself; he must be an extremely active participant in his own education. We all derive our wisdom from careful reflection on our experience, and this reflection can be made more profound by considering the reflections of others who have had similar experiences. That is to say, we can benefit from the wisdom others have attained.

A great books education creates an educational environment conducive to the learning of wisdom. Classes are small, personal, and largely discussion based. The small class size and the discussion format encourage each student to be actively involved in consideration of important issues, and they allow the course of the discussion to be tailored to the concerns of the students. The writings of the most influential thinkers of our cultural tradition are studied, which provides many thought-provoking insights into the fundamental questions. As students work to understand these writings, they develop important learning skills–reading with understanding, thinking clearly, and writing cogently–which equip them to become life-long learners.

A great books education is not for everyone. In order to benefit from such an education, a student has to be highly motivated, mature enough to realize the importance of such a focus, and self-disciplined. Whatever reasons one might have for not pursuing a great books education, it can not be because it is not practical!

Note 1: Sue Brower, “When You Want-or Have-to Make a Career Shift.” Cosmopolitan, v. 199, no. 2 (Aug 1985), p. 229.( Back to text )

Continue the discussion:

About the author: david crabtree.

Related Posts

Taking Off and Putting On

A Meditation on Trees

Interpreting the Parable of the Prodigal Son

Truth Is Faith’s Greatest Ally

2023 Gutenberg College Commencement Address

Thomas Aquinas College is unique among American colleges and universities, offering a faithfully  Catholic education comprised entirely of the Great Books and classroom discussions.

• Our Campuses
• Mission and History
• College Guide Reviews
• Faculty & Staff Directory
• News & Press
• Events Calendar
• News Archive
• College E-Letter
• The Aquinas Review

Truth, and nothing less, sets men free; and because truth is both natural and supernatural, the College’s curriculum aims at both natural and divine wisdom.

• The Great Books
• The Discussion Method
• Program Objectives
• Teaching Faculty
• Lecture & Concert Series
• St. Bernardine Library (CA)
• Dolben Library (NE)

The intellectual tradition and moral teachings of the Catholic Church infuse the whole life of Thomas Aquinas College, illuminating the curriculum and the community alike.

• New England
• Prayer Requests
• Faith in Action Blog
• California Chapel
• New England Chapel

Do you enjoy grappling with complex questions? Are you willing to engage in discussions about difficult concepts, with the truth as your ultimate goal?

• Apply to the College
• High School Summer Program
• Visit & Connect
• Send Me Information
• Tuition & Fees
• How to Apply for Financial Aid
• Financial Aid Calculator

There is always something to do at TAC — something worthwhile, something fulfilling, and something geared toward ever-greater spiritual and intellectual growth.

• Beyond the Classroom
• Beaches, Mountains & More
• Online Payments
• Student Forms & Documents
• Parent Gateway

Nothing speaks more to the versatility of the College’s academic program than the good that our alumni are doing throughout the Church and the world.

• Career Services
• Alumni Association
• Alumni Portal
• Arts & Media
• Law & Public Policy
• Priesthood / Religious Life

A mudslide that has shut down both lanes on Highway 150 between the College’s California campus and Santa Paula. Although the California Department of Transportation has begun preparations for clearing the roadway, officials do not expect to finish the work before sometime this summer. Therefore, if you will be traveling to campus from points south, please be sure to give yourself enough time to navigate the detour route, which will take you along Highways 126, 101, and 33. Directions to campus

Why the Great Books?

By Marcus R. Berquist

One of the most obvious features of a school is its curriculum, and within its curriculum, the list of books read. Thus, when a school has a “great books” curriculum, it is almost inevitable that it should be characterized as that kind of school. In studying the nature and purpose of the school, one begins with this assumption, and tries to understand everything within its light. Accordingly, since Thomas Aquinas College has such a curriculum, it is frequently likened to other schools which make use of the same books, and its educational program is assumed to be essentially the same.

The Great Books vs. Textbooks

Such an assumption is reasonable, for not only is this reading a true point of resemblance, but it is also based upon principles which are to a considerable extent held in common. In the first place, it is commonly held that the great books are intrinsically better than the multitude of textbooks which have replaced them in the curricula of colleges everywhere. These latter, indeed, have been introduced to make the former more accessible and to proportion them somehow to less able minds. They are the outgrowth of necessities imposed by universal education, and suffer from the dilution of content which inevitably characterizes such education. This is why a school which aims at the best will necessarily concentrate upon a study of the great books, and seek students with the ability and the dedication to learn from them.

Another reason why the great books are preferred to textbooks is that the latter, almost without exception, are “secondary sources” — that is, they are two steps removed from reality. They are, as it were, thoughts about thoughts. The great books, by contrast, are much closer to common experience in its fullness; they raise questions and pursue inquiries which arise directly from a wonder about things themselves. On this account, they are of the greatest importance to beginners, for they begin where thought itself must begin if it is to bear any fruit.

A third reason for the study of the Great Books is that students are thereby allowed and encouraged to become directly familiar with the greatest minds. They are not limited to what passes through the minds of their instructors and the authors of textbooks, which can hardly be more than diminished and perhaps distorted views of what exists more fully and more powerfully in the great books themselves. And when educators themselves have been educated in such a way, and for many generations, the original light can scarcely be seen. But with a study of the great books, students have a much better chance to encounter wisdom and to become wise themselves.

The Great Books: A Great Defense

Lastly, the careful study of the great books, especially at the beginning of one’s education, is the best defense against the unreflective historicism that so burdens the modern mind. By “historicism” here we mean the insistence that every human work must be studied within its historical context, as a “moment” in some historical process. The consequence of this historicism is that every work is in fact read, if at all, in bits and pieces, and within a framework peculiarly modern, imposed by contemporary assumptions which may be no more than fashions. This framework itself, because customary, is seldom noticed, and never examined. But when one has had independent access to the great books, this historicism becomes conspicuous, and is no longer assumed as a matter of course. One begins to read the books as they were written and consider issues on their own merits.

The Same Means, But Different Ends

Reasons such as these are common ground for most schools with great books programs. However, it is possible to overestimate these resemblances, and to be impressed by the likenesses which, though true and significant, are quite secondary. One may be misled by the maxim, plausible enough in itself, that what is held in common is what is most important. In the present case, the application of this maxim would be seriously mistaken, for it would confuse a community of means with a community of ends. It would be like asserting that the common network of roads we all make use of is more important than the various destinations we reach along those roads. Or like assuming that since we are all using the same roads, we are all going to the same place. For the books will be read, not just to be read, but for some further purpose, and it makes no small difference — rather it makes all the difference — what this purpose is. Distracted by obvious but secondary points of resemblance, one may not discern significant differences in ends.

When one finds a Catholic school with a great books curriculum, one is inclined to suppose that Catholic belief is incidental to its educational program, and that (at most) it modifies but does not determine that program. This inclination is encouraged by Catholic educators themselves, who have by and large reduced Catholicism in their schools to some indefinable and insignificant “presence.” Catholicism, it seems, makes a difference, but not an educational difference. In this view, the end of a great books education, and perhaps of liberal education generally, would transcend such a difference. Yet since differences of this sort concern the greatest and most important truths, one might well wonder what this common end could be. If it does not arise from a common conviction concerning the highest matters, it must concern something inferior, perhaps trivial.

Radical Disagreements

A similar difficulty arises about the great books themselves. By what standard are they judged great? Is it that they contain a true doctrine about the highest matters? Perhaps some of them do, but taken as a group they disagree radically among themselves about these very matters, not only in regard to the truth about them but also in regard to the right method of pursuing that truth. They even disagree about what is worth studying and whether there are actually any “highest matters.” If the end of liberal education is a kind of wisdom, however imperfectly achieved, most of these books must be judged failures.

Thus, when viewed as defining a certain kind of education, the great books cannot be regarded as teachers, nor their students as disciples. By their immense variety and mutual opposition they exclude discipleship. Of course it is possible that discipleship to a particular master may come out of such a curriculum — one might, for example, become a Cartesian through reading Descartes. But discipleship cannot be the intent of such a curriculum, nor can a school define itself by discipleship while still defining its educational program by the great books. Thus, for example, no school which defines its education program in this way could honestly describe itself as Catholic, since to be a Catholic is to be a disciple of a very particular kind.

The Catholic Intellectual Tradition

The intellectual tradition of the Catholic Church contains a clear and detailed account of what education should be. Perhaps more than any other tradition, it insists that there are great books, but it goes much further than this. It explains why certain books are great, and it distinguishes among them as regards their excellence and their authority. But it does not regard the understanding of great books as an end in itself. Rather, it orders the study of all such books to an understanding of the truth about reality — a reality of which it speaks with confidence, from the word of God which it receives in faith.

Marcus R. Berquist was a founder of Thomas Aquinas College. He served on the teaching faculty for 40 years until his death in 2010.

© 2024 Thomas Aquinas College Board of Governors. All rights reserved.

Why the Great Books Still Matter

In Rescuing Socrates , American-studies professor Roosevelt Montás ’95CC, ’04GSAS makes the case for the kind of liberal education embodied in Columbia’s Core Curriculum.

Lots of people need our help — why rescue Socrates?

The title actually works on three levels. It signals a real moment when I found a volume of Plato’s dialogues in a garbage pile in New York and it changed my life. It alludes to the attempt to free Socrates from jail before he was executed for corrupting the youth of Athens (he refused the help). And it highlights my main topic: revitalizing the centrality of liberal education within the undergraduate curriculum. The book follows these strands, part intellectual memoir, part personal reading of four transformative thinkers — Socrates, Augustine, Freud, and Gandhi — and part polemic.

You say undergraduates often arrive at college “longing for meaning.” Can Socrates rescue them ?

His message that “the unexamined life is not worth living” is even more relevant today. Socrates struggled philosophically with the ascendant values of his time — materialism, ambition, and raw political struggle — and proposed a different way of valuing what matters in a human life. Students are often profoundly moved, sometimes even profoundly reoriented, by encountering his uncompromising, full-throttled embrace of the life of the mind.

In some of the most evocative passages in the book, you share your own story. Why?

Describing the ideals of a liberal education and the value of wrestling with texts that have had an outsized impact on the world can sound kind of lofty, unreachable, even sappy. I hoped to make that impact concrete to readers by showing them how it actually played out in my life. At twelve, I moved to New York from a remote village in the Dominican Republic, not knowing English. I attended under-resourced public schools in Queens and then experienced the culture shock of attending Columbia as a first-generation college student. Ultimately, I joined the faculty. Every life is different, but I want people to understand the kind of awakening, empowering, unfolding, and flourishing that this kind of education brought me. Students, and especially those that come from marginalized communities, are often told their education should serve a practical end, that liberal education is an elitist privilege. I argue that it is, in fact, the most powerful tool we have to subvert the hierarchies of social privilege that keep those who are down down.

As director of the Center for the Core Curriculum for ten years, did you have to respond to a lot of people who objected to the very idea of great books?

Yes. A lot of that criticism often focuses on how the great-books tradition has excluded certain groups, including and most especially women, and how it can be used to support and legitimate other forms of exclusion. That’s all real. Acknowledging and dealing with that is part of the learning. Yet these books still matter. We have to be able to disentangle their role in the cultural and institutional evolution of our world from the violations of norms of justice sometimes encoded in them.

It’s not just great books that changed your life but also great teachers.

Yes. Liberal education is something that happens between people, not between books and people or institutions and people. It requires a small, curated artisanal practice in which a student’s individuality is recognized and cultivated for what it is. And so it may produce in you something entirely different than it produces in me. It might make me a brilliant politician; it may make you a recluse and a monk. It takes the individuality of the student as its centerpiece, and that takes another individuality to see it. I had many great teachers.

We live in a particularly fractious time. Can a liberal education help us find common ground?

Absolutely. Reading these books creates a tool of communication and communion across generations, cultures, races, and other lines of diversity. All of our points of difference can come together with a shared vocabulary and meet around shared human questions, bringing in different life experiences and cultural frameworks of interpretation. This discursive connective tissue — a shared way of speaking, debating, and relating — is just extraordinarily valuable, especially in a diverse democracy. It can leave us with a sense of the complexity of the human experience, a sense that there’s always another side to every question and another way of seeing the world.

This article appears in the Spring/Summer 2022 print edition of Columbia Magazine with the title "The Examined Life."

More From Books

6 New Books to Add to Your Summer Reading List

All by Columbia alumni authors

Review: Long Island

By Colm Tóibín

Review: The Stone Home

By Crystal Hana Kim ’09CC, ’14SOA

Stay Connected.

Sign up for our newsletter.

General Data Protection Regulation

Columbia University Privacy Notice

Mortimer Adler: Champion of Great Books Education

• Video: Global Warming Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit ...
• Article: Global Warming Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit ...
• Entry: Global Warming Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit ...

Even now, decades after his death, eighth-graders everywhere get to read the Odyssey , thanks to the efforts of a man born to Jewish immigrants in the heart of New York City. Philosopher and educator Mortimer Adler is largely responsible for what we call Great Books education. Adler wanted more for America’s youth than he had received from his Ivy League professors, so he worked to bring the American education system back into the Western tradition.

Adler was born into a world with diminishing respect for that tradition. Writings from Homer to Augustine were taught only to the elite, and usually in excerpts. Charles Eliot, Harvard University’s president at the time, had purged most of the core curriculum at his institution, an act that put the hammer to Greek and Latin studies. Eliot tried to remedy the situation by publishing “Dr. Eliot’s Five-Foot Shelf of Books,” a compilation of influential works of literature and philosophy, but Adler didn’t think this adequately accounted for the classical tradition. Adler’s professor at Colombia, John Dewey, spent much of his life fighting the liberal arts education model, favoring vocational training for students. The two did not get along.

As Adler saw it, the benefit to his Ivy League education was revealed to him in a single English class. John Erskine, an English professor who became the first president of the Juilliard School, introduced Adler to the Socratic seminar. In Erskine’s class, students would read a book every week and discuss their findings in the classroom. Erskine would speak as little as possible, only asking questions to guide students to new topics. Adler went on to popularize this method, an effort now considered one of his greatest accomplishments.

After graduating from Colombia, Adler began his crusade against the ideas made popular by Dewey and his associates. He disdained the idea of training students for a single job and scolded those who discouraged the goal of self-improvement. In the preface to his book “Aristotle for Everybody,” Adler wrote, “When I say ‘everybody,’ I mean everybody except professional philosophers; in other words, everybody of ordinary experience and intelligence unspoiled by the sophistication and specialization of academic thought.” He wrote for everyone, of any age and class, simply because he believed it was right for them to be educated.

When he wasn’t writing books, Adler was finding other ways to get his message across. He ran night schools for labor unions, made appearances on television and radio programs, and developed The Great Books of the Western World series for Encyclopedia Britannica. The more people who knew the themes of the great books, the more people there would be who could rejoice in and contribute to what Adler called “the Great Conversation.”

In his studies of literature and philosophy, Adler found common topics of discussion. The ideas of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and other ancient philosophers overlapped, which proved to Adler that some topics are prevalent throughout time and across cultures. Adler assembled a guide to these ideas in a volume he called “A Syntopicon.” Education in great books meant following the themes in the “Syntopicon” and ultimately joining in the Great Conversation about them. By doing so, a larger number of people than ever before could engage with these ideas. Broadening participation in such philosophical discussion was one of Alder’s main goals.

Many of Adler’s critics wondered what the point was in continuing the Great Conversation. As they saw it, a common person could add little to the findings of Aristotle, and Aristotle, in turn, had little to say that addressed present problems. In Adler’s mind, however, Aristotle’s insights were of permanent value, and common people could and should engage with them, learn from them, and even try to put them into practice. The Great Conversation that Adler reignited a century ago is now a tool that anyone can use to craft a common intellectual heritage.

The study of integrated humanities through a chronological framework that melds history, philosophy, and literature together owes to the work of Mortimer Adler. This practice has extended from higher education to primary and secondary schools across the country. Americans would do well to reflect on and revisit these philosophical inquiries. In doing so, they may yet contribute, in their own small way, to the Great Conversation.

Erik Ellis is a Research Fellow at the Center for Thomas More at the University of Dallas and works in the faculty of philosophy at the University of the Andes in Santiago, Chile. This overview of Mortimer Adler is based on his interview with Scott Bertram on the Hillsdale College Classical Education Podcast .

Related Articles

Find anything you save across the site in your account

What’s So Great About Great-Books Courses?

By Louis Menand

Roosevelt Montás was born in a rural village in the Dominican Republic and immigrated to the United States when he was eleven years old. He attended public schools in Queens, where he took classes in English as a second language, then entered Columbia College through a government program for low-income students. After getting his B.A., he was admitted to Columbia’s Ph.D. program in English and Comparative Literature when a dean got the department to reconsider his application, which had been rejected. He received a Ph.D. in 2004 and has been teaching at Columbia ever since, now as a senior lecturer, a renewable but untenured appointment. He is forty-eight.

Arnold Weinstein is eighty-one. Although he was an indifferent student in high school, he was admitted to Princeton, spent his junior year in Paris, an experience that fired an interest in literature, and received a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1968. He was hired by Brown, was tenured in 1973, and is today the Richard and Edna Salomon Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature. These two men started on very different life paths and ended up writing the same book.

They are even being published by the same university press, Princeton. Montás’s is called “ Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation ”; Weinstein’s is “ The Lives of Literature: Reading, Teaching, Knowing .” The genre, a common one for academics writing non-scholarly books, is a combination of memoir (some family history, career anecdotes), criticism (readings of selected texts to illustrate convictions of the author’s), and polemic against trends the author disapproves of. The polemic can sometimes take the form of “It’s all gone to hell.” Montás’s and Weinstein’s books fall into the “It’s all gone to hell” category.

Both men teach what are called—unfortunately but inescapably—“great books” courses. Since Weinstein works at a college that has no requirements outside the major, his courses are departmental offerings, but the syllabi seem to be composed largely of books by well-known Western writers, from Sophocles to Toni Morrison. At Columbia, undergraduates must complete two years of non-departmental great-books courses: Masterpieces of Western Literature and Philosophy, for first-year students, and Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West, for sophomores. These courses, among others, known as “the Core,” originated around the time of the First World War and have been required since 1947. Montás not only teaches in the Core; he served for ten years as the director of the Center for the Core Curriculum.

Although Montás and Weinstein are highly successful academics at two leading universities, where they are, no doubt, popular teachers, they feel alienated from and, to some extent, disrespected by the higher-education system. As they see it, they are doing God’s work. Their humanities colleagues are careerists who have lost sight of what education is about, and their institutions are in service to Mammon and Big Tech.

It will probably not improve their spirits to point out that professors have been making the same complaints ever since the American research university came into being, in the late nineteenth century. “Rescuing Socrates” and “The Lives of Literature” can be placed on a long shelf that contains books such as Hiram Corson’s “The Aims of Literary Study” (1894), Irving Babbitt’s “Literature and the American College” (1908), Robert Maynard Hutchins’s “ The Higher Learning in America ” (1936), Allan Bloom’s “ The Closing of the American Mind ” (1987), William Deresiewicz’s “ Excellent Sheep ” (2014), and dozens of other impassioned and sometimes eloquent works explaining that higher education has lost its soul. It’s a song that never ends.

So, although Montás and Weinstein seem to think that things went wrong recently, things (from the point of view they represent) were wrong from the start. The conflict these professors are experiencing between their educational ideals and the priorities of their institutions is baked into the system.

That conflict is essentially a dispute over the purpose of college. How did the great books get caught up in it? In the old college system, the entire curriculum was prescribed, and there were lists of books that every student was supposed to study—a canon. The canon was the curriculum. In the modern university, students elect their courses and choose their majors. That is the system the great books were designed for use in. The great books are outside the regular curriculum.

The idea of the great books emerged at the same time as the modern university. It was promoted by works like Noah Porter’s “Books and Reading: Or What Books Shall I Read and How Shall I Read Them?” (1877) and projects like Charles William Eliot’s fifty-volume Harvard Classics (1909-10). (Porter was president of Yale; Eliot was president of Harvard.) British counterparts included Sir John Lubbock’s “One Hundred Best Books” (1895) and Frederic Farrar’s “Great Books” (1898). None of these was intended for students or scholars. They were for adults who wanted to know what to read for edification and enlightenment, or who wanted to acquire some cultural capital.

The idea made its way into universities after 1900 as part of a backlash against the research model, led by proponents of what was called “liberal culture.” These were professors, mainly in the humanities, who deplored the university’s new emphasis on science, specialization, and expertise. For the key to the concept of the great books is that you do not need any special training to read them.

In a great-books course of the kind that Montás and Weinstein teach, undergraduates read primary texts, then meet in a classroom to share their responses with their peers. Discussion is led by an instructor, but the instructor’s job is not to give the students a more informed understanding of the texts, or to train them in methods of interpretation, which is what would happen in a typical literature- or philosophy-department course. The instructor’s job is to help the students relate the texts to their own lives. For people like Montás and Weinstein, it is also to personify what a life shaped by reading books like these can be. “The teacher models the still living power of the book,” as Weinstein puts it.

You can see the problem. Universities like Brown and Columbia make big investments in training scholars and researchers in their doctoral programs, and then, after they are credentialled and hired as professors, supporting their work with office and laboratory space, libraries, computers and related technology, research budgets, conference and travel funds, sabbaticals, and so on. Why should an English professor who got his degree with a dissertation on the American Transcendentalists (as Montás did), and who doesn’t read Italian or know anything about medieval Christianity, teach Dante (in a week!), when you have a whole department of Italian-literature scholars on your faculty? What qualifies a man like Arnold Weinstein, who has spent his entire adult life in the literature departments of Ivy League universities, to guide eighteen-year-olds in ruminations on the state of their souls and the nature of the good life?

It’s not an accident or a misfortune that great-books pedagogy is an antibody in the “knowledge factory” of the research university, in other words. It was intended as an antibody. The disciplinary structure of the modern university came first; the great-books courses came after. As Montás says, “The practice of liberal education, especially in the context of a research university, is pointedly countercultural.”

Montás is using the term “liberal education” mistakenly. Virtually every course at an élite school like Columbia, from poetry to physics, is part of a liberal education. “Liberal” just means free and disinterested. It means that inquiry is pursued without fear or favor, regardless of the outcome and whatever the field of study. Universities exist to protect that freedom. But Montás is right about the countercultural part. Great-books courses tend to be taught against the grain of academic disciplinary paradigms.

This has obvious educational value. Many students who take a great-books-type course enjoy encountering famous texts and seeing that the questions they raise are often relevant to their other coursework. And some students experience a kind of intellectual awakening, which can be inspiring and even transformational. For students who are motivated—and motivation is half of learning—these courses really work. They are happy to read Dante in translation and without a scholarly apparatus, because they want to get a sense of what Dante is all about, and they know that if they don’t get it in college they are unlikely to get it anywhere else.

Undergraduate teachers, whatever their training, can play a role as a transitional parent figure, someone students can talk to who is not privy to their personal or social lives, someone who will let them have the keys to the car no questions asked. And students profit from learning how universities operate and arguing about what college is for. It opens up the experience for them, gives the system some transparency and the students some agency.

So why the tsuris? At this point, great-books-type courses—that is, courses where the focus is on primary texts and student relatability rather than on scholarly literature and disciplinary training—are part of the higher-education landscape. Few colleges require them, but many colleges happily offer them. The quarrel between generalist and specialist—or, as it is sometimes framed down in the trenches, between dilettante and pedant—is more than a hundred years old and it would seem that this is not a quarrel that one side has to win. Montás and Weinstein, however, think that the conflict is existential, and that the future of the academic humanities is at stake. Are they right?

Between 2012 and 2019, the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded annually in English fell by twenty-six per cent, in philosophy and religious studies by twenty-five per cent, and in foreign languages and literature by twenty-four per cent. In English, according to the Association of Departments of English, which tracked the numbers through 2016, research universities, like Brown and Columbia, took the biggest hits. More than half reported a drop in degrees of forty per cent or more in just four years.

The trend is national. Some departments have maintained market share, of course, and creative-writing classes seem to be popular everywhere. But, in general, undergraduates have largely stopped taking humanities courses. Only eight per cent of students entering Harvard College this fall report that they intend to major in the arts and humanities, a division that has twenty-one undergraduate programs.

The decline in student interest affects doctoral programs as well, and this fact is crucial, because doctoral programs are the reproductive organs of the entire system. Fewer graduate students are admitted, because the job market for humanities Ph.D.s is contracting. More important, no one is sure how to teach the students who do get in. If courses in the traditional subfields of literary studies (medieval poetry, early-modern drama, the eighteenth-century novel, and so on) are not attracting undergraduates, shouldn’t new Ph.D.s be trained differently? If so, given that faculties are mostly trained in the traditional subfields themselves, who is going to do it?

And, even if you could completely redesign doctoral education, it takes at least six years to get a Ph.D. in the humanities (the median time is more than nine years) and another six years, minimum, to get tenure. An academic discipline is a big ship to turn around, especially when it is taking on water.

Montás and Weinstein don’t cite these figures. They don’t cite any figures, actually, because even if business were booming it would make no difference to them. But this is the real-world context in which they are publishing their books. This is the moment they have chosen to inform readers that academic humanists are not doing their job. “Liberal education is impaired and imperiled,” Montás reports. “Too often professional practitioners of liberal education—professors and college administrators—have corrupted their activity by subordinating the fundamental goals of education to specialized academic pursuits that only have meaning within their own institutional and career aspirations.” “Corrupted” is a pretty strong word.

What humanists should be teaching, Montás and Weinstein believe, is self-knowledge. To “know thyself” is the proper goal. Art and literature, as Weinstein puts it, “are intended for personal use, not in the self-help sense but as mirrors, as entryways into who we ourselves are or might be.” Montás says, “A teacher in the humanities can give students no greater gift than the revelation of the self as a primary object of lifelong investigation.” You don’t need research to learn this. Research is irrelevant. You just need some great books and a charismatic instructor.

For the advocates of liberal culture a century ago, the false god of literature departments was philology. Today, the false god is “theory.” Montás complains that contemporary theory—he calls it “postmodernism”—subverts the college’s educational mission by calling into question terms like “truth” and “virtue.” A postmodernist, in his definition, is a person who believes that there is no capital-T truth, that “true” is just the compliment those with power pay to their own beliefs. “This unmooring of human reason from the possibility of ultimate truth in effect undermines all of Western metaphysics,” he tells us, “including ethics.” (He blames this all on Friedrich Nietzsche, whom he calls “Satan’s most acute theologian,” which is an amazing thing to say. Nietzsche wanted to free people to embrace life, not to send them to Hell. He didn’t believe in Hell. Or theology.)

Weinstein’s criticism of theory is somewhat less apocalyptic. For him, theory represents a desperate and wrongheaded attempt—he calls it “the humanities’ ‘last stand’ ”—to introduce rigor and objectivity into literary studies. He doesn’t think rigor and objectivity have a place in an undergraduate literature course. “You won’t find very much of them in my classroom,” he assures us. “In my crazier moments I think that rigor may be akin to rigor mortis.”

But questioning the meaning of accepted values has been a major theme in Western thought since Socrates, and “truth” and “virtue” were never exempt. Postmodernism is not a license to shoplift. People who see “truth” and “virtue” as functions of power relations tend to be hyperethical, because they see power disparities everywhere. Postmodernists do not run more red lights than evangelicals do.

And if, as these authors insist, education is about self-knowledge and the nature of the good, what are those things supposed to look like? How do we know them when we get there? What does it mean to be human? What exactly is the good life?

Oh, they can’t say. The whole business is ineffable. We should know better than to expect answers. That’s quant-thinking. “The value of the thing,” Montás explains, about liberal education, “cannot be extracted and delivered apart from the experience of the thing.” Literature’s bottom line, Weinstein says, is that it has no bottom line. It all sounds a lot like “Trust us. We can’t explain it, but we know what we’re doing.”

In the creation of the modern university, science was the big winner. The big loser was not literature. It was religion. The university is a secular institution, and scientific research—more broadly, the production of new knowledge—is what it was designed for. All the academic disciplines were organized with this end in view. Philology prevailed in literature departments because philology was scientific. It represented a research agenda that could produce replicable results. Weinstein is not wrong to think that critical theory has played the same role. It does aim to add rigor to literary analysis.

For Montás and Weinstein, though, science is the enemy of ethical insight and self-knowledge. Science instrumentalizes, it quantifies, it reduces life to elements that are, well, effable. Weinstein can see that students might think that science courses are useful for a successful career, but he thinks that “success” is just another false idol. He writes, “One has read a great deal about ‘quants’ being gobbled up by investment firms, hired on the strength of their mathematical prowess, hence likely to add to bottom lines. What actually does a bottom line mean? Is anyone asking about judgment? Does any university or graduate school transcript even whisper anything about judgment? Values? Priorities? Ethics?”

Weinstein won’t even call what students learn in science courses “knowledge.” He calls it “information,” which he thinks has nothing to do with how one ought to live. “Life is more than reason or data,” he tells us, “and literature schools us in a different set of affairs, the affairs of heart and soul that have little truck with information as such.”

For Montás, the trouble with science is that it answers the important questions—Who am I? How shall I live?—in “purely materialistic terms.” He blames this on a writer who died in 1650, René Descartes. “Today, the heirs to Descartes’s project are perhaps most visible in Silicon Valley,” Montás says, “but the ethic that informs his approach is pervasive in the broader culture, including the culture of the university.”

What did Descartes write that set us on the road to Facebook? He wrote that scientific knowledge can lead to medical discoveries that improve health and prolong life. Montás calls this proposition “Faustian.” He says that it implies that there is “no higher value than the subsistence and satisfaction of the self,” and that this is what college students are being taught today.

Humanists cannot win a war against science. They should not be fighting a war against science. They should be defending their role in the knowledge business, not standing aloof in the name of unspecified and unspecifiable higher things. They need to connect with disciplines outside the humanities, to get out of their silos.

Art and literature have cognitive value. They are records of the ways human beings have made sense of experience. They tell us something about the world. But they are not privileged records. A class in social psychology can be as revelatory and inspiring as a class on the novel. The idea that students develop a greater capacity for empathy by reading books in literature classes about people who never existed than they can by taking classes in fields that study actual human behavior does not make a lot of sense.

Knowledge is a tool, not a state of being. Universities are in this world, and education is about empowering people to deal with things as they are. Students at places like Brown and Columbia want to make the world a better place, and they can see, as Descartes saw, that science can provide tools to do this. If some of those students make a lot of money, who cares?

Isn’t it a little arrogant for humanists like the authors of these books to presume that economics professors and life-science professors and computer-science professors don’t care about their students’ personal development? The humanities do not have a monopoly on moral insight. Reading Weinstein and Montás, you might conclude that English professors, having spent their entire lives reading and discussing works of literature, must be the wisest and most humane people on earth. Take my word for it, we are not. We are not better or worse than anyone else. I have read and taught hundreds of books, including most of the books in the Columbia Core. I teach a great-books course now. I like my job, and I think I understand many things that are important to me much better than I did when I was seventeen. But I don’t think I’m a better person. ♦

New Yorker Favorites

• How we became infected by chain e-mail .
• Twelve classic movies to watch with your kids.
• The secret lives of fungi .
• The photographer who claimed to capture the ghost of Abraham Lincoln .
• Why are Americans still uncomfortable with atheism ?
• The enduring romance of the night train .
• Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker .

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Manvir Singh

By Rebecca Mead

Basic Program of Liberal Education

Why the Great Books?

Great Books are historically significant texts that shaped or defined entire cultures or movements—whether for the better or the worse.

These books wrestle with enduring themes of cultures, societies, emotions, and the human condition. Many of these moral, social, and political questions are as relevant today and strikingly applicable to contemporary issues.

The Basic Program engages directly with primary texts as a way to encounter the meaning of these ideas in their own time, while also inviting students to reflect on their relevance to our present day.

What is a “Great Book”? A book that has been impactful, that is well written, and that is in many ways timeless. We still read Plato because we are still human beings dealing with the fundamental ideas of humanity like happiness, virtue, and justice, and even though society has changed, these fundamental topics have not. Zoë Eisenman, Director of Academics and Basic Program instructor

We believe that study of the Great Books offers a valuable foundation for intellectual inquiry. By letting voices other than our own influence, inspire, and inform our perspective, we can look anew at the world from a variety of viewpoints.

Questions on the Registration Process?

If you have questions about the course registration process, click here .

Sign Up for Graham School news and updates.

• Discussions
• Reading Challenge
• Kindle Notes & Highlights
• Favorite genres
• Friends’ recommendations
• Account settings

Great Books on Education

A book’s total score is based on multiple factors, including the number of people who have voted for it and how highly those voters ranked the book.

People Who Voted On This List (130)

Post a comment » Comments Showing 1-3 of 3 (3 new)

Featured News & Interviews

• Create New List
• Lists I Created
• Lists I've Voted On
• Lists I've Liked

Anyone can add books to this list.

Saving My Votes

Friends votes, how to vote.

To vote on existing books from the list, beside each book there is a link vote for this book clicking it will add that book to your votes.

To vote on books not in the list or books you couldn't find in the list, you can click on the tab add books to this list and then choose from your books, or simply search.

Welcome back. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account.

What are the Great Books? Classical Education Books to Enrich Study

• January 7, 2023
• Booklists , Classical Homeschooling , Homeschooling FAQS , Improving homeschool

Classical education has deep roots in Western culture and literature, and reading is an integral part of this tradition. Finding the right books for your curriculum can be daunting as there are so many to choose from. In this article, we will explore some of the best books for those who want to engage with the classics, either for academic purposes or simply for personal enrichment.

I hope you enjoy reading this blog post. If you want to do my course on how to homeschool, click here .

We’ll also have a close look at what living books are and how they’re different from the great books in classical education.

Let’s take a closer look below.

Affiliate links included.

What are Great Books?

Classical education has been around for centuries, and some of the books associated with it are timeless. Whether you’re looking to learn more about the great minds from history or find a path toward self-improvement, these great books in classical education are sure to inspire.

From Plato’s Republic to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, many of these titles have become staples in educational systems worldwide. They explore topics such as philosophy, mathematics, ethics, and politics – topics that remain relevant today. For those interested in literature, Homer’s Odyssey and other works by Virgil, Shakespeare, and Dante provide insight into storytelling techniques still used today.

Those looking for tales of adventure can turn to works like Robinson Crusoe or Moby Dick, which provide gripping stories that also offer lessons on perseverance and survival.

Short List of Great Books

For readers looking for a short list of great books essential to understanding classical education, there are a few classics worth attention to: The Bible, the Illiad, The Odyssey, and The Republic.

Let’s discuss them below briefly and look at a few other favorites.

The Bible is hands down the most famous and popular book of all time. This timeless work which claims to be inspired by God himself, offers guidance, hope, strength, and encouragement from God’s word. It speaks to all ages with powerful lessons about faith, life, and love that are relevant today as ever.

Homer’s epic poem, the Illiad, tells the story of the ten-year siege of Troy by Greek forces, focusing on the mighty warriors Achilles and Hector. Written around 700 BCE, it is one of the oldest surviving works in Western literature.

The Odyssey

The Odyssey is another ancient epic poem written by Homer sometime during 7th or 8th century BCE. This work follows Odysseus’ ten-year journey home after fighting in the Trojan War as he encounters all sorts of dangers, from mythical creatures like Cyclopes and Sirens to vengeful gods such as Poseidon. It has been praised for its themes of loyalty, love, and friendship, among many others.

The Republic

Written in 360 BCE, it is a Socratic dialogue exploring justice and its role in society. It introduces the famous allegory of the cave, which has been cited and interpreted by thinkers over centuries since its publication. In addition, it also elaborates on his theory of ideal forms, where he addresses concepts such as knowledge, truth, and beauty.

Nicomachean Ethics

Another classic work is Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics which was written around 350 BCE. This ethical treatise by Aristotle explores moral philosophy by examining virtue and happiness as well as other topics such as political leadership and friendship.

Shakespeare’s Works

One of the most influential works among the great books is William Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets. His works are essential to understanding the English language as well as providing an insight into our society and culture.

Here is a short list of great books in classical education that incorporate Shakespeare’s works (from The Norton Anthology of English Literature by Stephen Greenblatt et al.):

• Julius Caesar,
• Romeo and Juliet,
• Macbeth and

The significant worth of these plays and sonnets is one of the reasons so many students study Shakespeare’s works in their classical high school education today. (BTW if you don’t know much about classical education , check out the video below, which will convince you why this is a great way to educate children.

Want a Large Great Books Booklist?

So, where can you get a comprehensive list of all the great books for all grades? Check out this complete homeschool booklist for Grades PreK-12th Grade , which is primarily made up of classical books.

You’ll find all your favorite (and the hardest to read)  great books there.

Living Books vs Great Books

Living Books vs Great Books is a debate in the homeschool world right now.

What is the difference between these two types of books?

Living books are written engagingly and conversationally, with the author often discussing their personal experiences and opinions. They focus on presenting ideas rather than facts, allowing readers to form their own conclusions and opinions.

In contrast, great books are considered classics within literature.

These books include works by renowned authors such as Shakespeare, Homer, Dickens, Tolstoy, and Austen.

Great books offer an accurate historical representation of events from the period they were written in, providing insight into the history or culture that was present at this time.

They often require more effort from the reader by challenging them with dense topics or philosophical questions which can be difficult to answer or understand without prior background knowledge of the subject matter.

But, there are some similarities between living books and great books in that many books on a living books booklist come from the classic great books.

This is perhaps mainly because Charlotte Mason (the founder of the term ‘living books’ was herself a classical educator. Mason realized the value of some classical books but felt others were tedious and could put children off learning more than they would encourage children into the world of learning.

Classical Education vs Charlotte Mason Education

While homeschooling has become an increasingly popular option for families seeking a unique educational experience for their children, the decision to homeschool can be overwhelming, with so many different homeschool approaches to choose from.

One major choice is between classical education and Charlotte Mason education, two distinct approaches that vary widely in philosophy and execution.

Classical education is centered around the traditional “ grammar , logic , rhetoric ” approach to learning and reading classic literature. It emphasizes memorizing facts and acquiring knowledge of language arts and mathematics through repetition and drills.

Charlotte Mason education focuses instead on developing creativity, imagination, observation skills, and critical thinking abilities in students by introducing them to nature studies, foreign languages, fine art appreciation, and more within a framework rooted in Christian values.

When you study with a Classical education curriculum , like Memoria Press , you’ll almost always be getting a rigorous curriculum that requires a lot of hard work (for example, students will probably do a Latin curriculum and do lots of memorizing).

But, when you study with a Charlotte Mason curriculum , things are much easier as there is much less memorization. Children don’t have to do heavy memorization work, and learning is from fun and enjoyable storybooks.

After spending a while looking at the two curriculum types, I’m convinced they both have their pros and cons. The one you choose should depend more on your family than ‘which of the methods/curricula type is best.’

Want to Learn How to Homeschool?

There are two great ways t learn more about homeschooling: one is free, and one is a $67 fundamentals course.

The $67 Course

Looking to take your homeschooling to the next level?  Join Rebecca Devitt’s online  Homeschool Parenting Program  and learn the strategies and techniques needed to make homeschooling a success ! Learn  more about the HPP here  and  signup here .

The FREE Youtube Channel

Also, make sure you join the  How to Homeschool Youtube channel , which will give you a fun and exciting look into the homeschool world and help homeschool your children. Check out the channel here, and don’t forget to SUBSCRIBE.

If you’re not sure where to start, start with the following playlists:

• Starting homeschool playlist
• Homeschool Methods playlist
• Homeschool Curriculum playlist
• FAQs on Homeschooling playlist

You’ll love it and find it helpful and entertaining! Discover the  channel here .

Conclusion on Great Books in Classical Education

In conclusion, classical education is an excellent method to explore knowledge and the great books of history. It provides a rich foundation for students to learn to think analytically, reason rigorously, communicate effectively and lead confidently. The great books of classical education provide diverse perspectives on human experience and offer timeless wisdom that can be applied to modern life. Through reading the classics, one can gain insight into the ideas, values, and beliefs of different cultures throughout history.

Rebecca Devitt

Most adults don't particularly want to relive their schooling experience on a daily basis. They would gladly move on to a new life devoid of homework and teachers. Very, very few adults will passionately blog about their schooling some 15 years after graduating. This makes Rebecca Devitt somewhat unique. As it happens, she was homeschooled. And she loved it. Still does. And she wishes every kid could get a taste of homeschooling at its very best. Her website How Do I Homeschool , is a springboard for parents to see what a life of homeschooling could be for both them & their children. When she's not blogging Rebecca is still homeschooling her-adult-self by learning Latin, growing weird vegetables and most importantly looking after her two children Luke & Penny. She has a husband Tristan and is a participant at Wollongong Baptist Church. She's also written a book about why parents should homeschool called 'Why on Earth Homeschool' .

Related Posts

BEST Christian Homeschool Curriculum Packages Reviewed (2024)

• 12 Comments

7 Best Classical Homeschool Curriculum: Classical Education Programs

Your Guide to Homeschooling Children With Special Needs

Leave a reply cancel reply.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Name  *

Email  *

Add Comment

I accept the Privacy Policy

Post Comment

Innovating for learning: How two innovators made access to books and education more inclusive

The world has set ambitious education goals to be achieved by 2030. Image:  We Love Reading

.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo{-webkit-transition:all 0.15s ease-out;transition:all 0.15s ease-out;cursor:pointer;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;outline:none;color:inherit;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:hover,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-hover]{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:focus,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-focus]{box-shadow:0 0 0 3px rgba(168,203,251,0.5);} Adam Gavin

.chakra .wef-9dduvl{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;font-size:1.25rem;}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-9dduvl{font-size:1.125rem;}} Explore and monitor how .chakra .wef-15eoq1r{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;font-size:1.25rem;color:#F7DB5E;}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-15eoq1r{font-size:1.125rem;}} SDG 01: No Poverty is affecting economies, industries and global issues

.chakra .wef-1nk5u5d{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;color:#2846F8;font-size:1.25rem;}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-1nk5u5d{font-size:1.125rem;}} Get involved with our crowdsourced digital platform to deliver impact at scale

Stay up to date:, sdg 01: no poverty.

• There's a big funding gap that is preventing children's access to learning in many poorer countries.
• Social innovators play a key role in society by offering disruptive services in areas where traditional institutions have fallen short, including in education and learning.
• Here's how We Love Reading and First Book continue to improve access to books and educational resources, making education more inclusive for everyone.

The world has set ambitious education goals to be achieved by 2030. However, a 2023 report by UNESCO estimates a significant funding gap to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goal 4 - ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education for all.

This funding gap is preventing children in many poorer countries from receiving their right to education. Social innovators, who prioritize purpose over profits in their organizations, play a crucial role in society by offering new approaches and disruptive services in situations where traditional institutions and markets have failed to provide solutions. Education is one of them.

Cultural norms, gender, class and the value societies place on education are some barriers to accessing books and education. Rana Dajani, Founder and Director of We Love Reading, and Kyle Zimmer, President, CEO, and Co-Founder of First Book, have spent decades innovating the educational sector to make learning more inclusive.

Through the power of books and storytelling, Dajani and Zimmer have sought to overcome educational barriers that marginalized communities face. We Love Reading and First Book have implemented both digital and physical solutions, and they offer insight into how digital and physical access to books and educational resources can complement each other to improve learning.

Here's how Dajani, of We Love Reading, and Zimmer, from First Book, have worked towards making education more inclusive.

Rana Dajani, Founder and Director, We Love Reading

We Love Reading , founded by Dajani in 2010, aims to foster a love of learning and reading by connecting it to pleasure and fun.

Since its founding, the organization has expanded to more than 60 countries around the world, trained 8,000 women who have started ‘reading aloud’ activities in a diverse range of communities – rural and urban, as well as refugee camps.

When children and adults fall in love with reading, they become lifelong readers and therefore lifelong learners.

Dajani, the recipient of the 2022 Social Entrepreneur of the Year award from the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship , underscores the importance of native language and local culture in promoting a love of reading and learning among children.

She advocates for books that are not only in the children's native language but also reflect their local culture. This approach allows children to connect with the stories, fostering a sense of pride and confidence.

By involving the local community, Dajani says we can tailor education programmes to the unique needs of the children and families, making learning more accessible and engaging.

Dajani criticizes the top-down approach of many international organizations, which often overlooks the specific challenges and needs of the local community. In contrast, We Love Reading provides communities with a supportive framework to establish their own educational and reading programmes.

Access to digital educational resources is increasing, but it's crucial to acknowledge that not all children in marginalized communities have access to the internet or digital resources.

We Love Reading prioritizes physical access to books to encourage reading from a young age. Its philosophy is that children don't need an abundance of books as they often find joy in revisiting stories. Once the love of reading has been ignited, children can explore digital resources if they are available and accessible.

We Love Reading uses digital platforms to train adults and youth to become WLR ambassadors who can then read aloud to children . This training is a low-tech solution that is widely accessible.

Kyle Zimmer, Co-Founder, President and CEO, First Book

Kyle Zimmer, the recipient of the 2006 Social Entrepreneur of the Year award from the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship , co-founded First Book over three decades ago to remove barriers to education for the estimated 27 million US children growing up in marginalized communities.

I co-founded First Book to address a market failure – that millions of children in low-income communities didn't have access to books. This market failure leads to educational disparities that perpetuate lifelong inequities.

Empowered by a network of 575,000-plus individual educators, practitioners and volunteers, First Book has addressed a market failure in ways that conventional businesses and charities haven't: it aggregated previously fragmented groups of teachers, practitioners, and volunteers serving kids in need into a new market.

First Book uses insights from educators and data gathered through the organization's research arm to understand the content its members need. This enables First Book to purchase books from publishers in large volumes on a non-returnable basis and negotiate the lowest prices.

Additionally, First Book manages all of the warehousing, shipping and marketing. This approach drives down the cost of books while increasing the relevance of books and educational products to better meet the needs of children in under-resourced communities.

A small margin built into prices on the First Book Marketplace contributes to the organization's self-sustainability and has allowed it to grow into the largest specialty buyer for most of the major children's publishers in the US.

It provides children living in poverty with new books and resources, enabling educators to select what they need for the kids they serve, and creating a new market for publishers, content producers, and others.

Digital and physical books and educational resources complement each other. Sharing physical books with babies and young children can provide important bonding time with parents and caregivers. It also enables young children to learn how to interact with books.

The latest figures show that 56% of 8-12-year-olds across 29 countries are involved in at least one of the world's major cyber-risks: cyberbullying, video-game addiction, online sexual behaviour or meeting with strangers encountered on the web.

Using the Forum's platform to accelerate its work globally, #DQEveryChild , an initiative to increase the digital intelligence quotient (DQ) of children aged 8-12, has reduced cyber-risk exposure by 15%.

In March 2019, the DQ Global Standards Report 2019 was launched – the first attempt to define a global standard for digital literacy, skills and readiness across the education and technology sectors.

Our System Initiative on Shaping the Future of Media, Information and Entertainment has brought together key stakeholders to ensure better digital intelligence for children worldwide. Find our more about DQ Citizenship in our Impact Story .

However, it's not only about the format but the content. In our diverse world, all children, from the earliest ages, need access to diverse books to see themselves and learn about others. Diverse books help children develop understanding and empathy and impact reading engagement.

In 2023, First Book Research & Insights released the results of a six-month study involving nearly 450 classrooms to explore diverse books' impact on student reading. The study revealed that adding diverse books to classroom libraries increased collective student reading time by four hours per week, resulting in reading scores that were three percentage points higher than the national annual expected averages.

Don't miss any update on this topic

Create a free account and access your personalized content collection with our latest publications and analyses.

License and Republishing

World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

The Agenda .chakra .wef-n7bacu{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;font-weight:400;} Weekly

A weekly update of the most important issues driving the global agenda

.chakra .wef-1dtnjt5{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-flex-wrap:wrap;-ms-flex-wrap:wrap;flex-wrap:wrap;} More on Education and Skills .chakra .wef-17xejub{-webkit-flex:1;-ms-flex:1;flex:1;justify-self:stretch;-webkit-align-self:stretch;-ms-flex-item-align:stretch;align-self:stretch;} .chakra .wef-nr1rr4{display:-webkit-inline-box;display:-webkit-inline-flex;display:-ms-inline-flexbox;display:inline-flex;white-space:normal;vertical-align:middle;text-transform:uppercase;font-size:0.75rem;border-radius:0.25rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;line-height:1.2;-webkit-letter-spacing:1.25px;-moz-letter-spacing:1.25px;-ms-letter-spacing:1.25px;letter-spacing:1.25px;background:none;padding:0px;color:#B3B3B3;-webkit-box-decoration-break:clone;box-decoration-break:clone;-webkit-box-decoration-break:clone;}@media screen and (min-width:37.5rem){.chakra .wef-nr1rr4{font-size:0.875rem;}}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-nr1rr4{font-size:1rem;}} See all

Reskilling Revolution: The Role of AI in Education 4.0

Why investing in people is essential to revive growth: Key quotes from leaders at the #SpecialMeeting24

Gayle Markovitz and Kate Whiting

May 2, 2024

In Haiti, a bold project for education is delivering results

Jean-Claude Brizard

May 1, 2024

How storytelling is teaching children around the world financial literacy

Pedro Rocha e Mello, Anurit Kanti, Rita Lousa and Shankar Keshav Prasad

April 30, 2024

Reskilling Revolution: Rethinking Education

The future of learning: How AI is revolutionizing education 4.0

Tanya Milberg

April 28, 2024

How Graded Readers and Engaging Activities Can Ignite Student Interest in the Magic of Books

If contemporary societies view reading as an essential life skill, loving to read is definitely “the” gift that makes all the difference in a person’s life.

Reading for pleasure opens doors to all sorts of worlds for us to explore.  When we are hooked on a story, we feel like we have jumped into the book’s pages to undergo an exciting reading experience. Times flies, our imagination goes riot, we are curious to know how the story unfolds, the words are full of powerful meaning and new words and expressions expand our linguistic repertoire. Likewise, when the story ends, we may even have a book hangover! Suddenly, we find it difficult to part in the company of those characters we’ve learned to love. Luckily, there is always another book around the corner, waiting for us to open it and read “Once Upon a Time…”, to make the magic happen all over again.

The powerful stories that circulate in our communities build bridges among generations, and readers develop a strong sense of belonging to their cultures and values. What is more, we remember information which comes in the form of a story because we connect with the narrative emotionally. Myths and legends are examples of how, in the past, we used to make sense of the world we lived in (Egan, 1998). Stories bring together schools and families. Just imagine parents and children reading together about the adventures of emblematic characters such as Sherlock Holmes, drawing the wall a selfish giant built around his castle, performing the gingerbread man’s traditional story or chanting Humpty Dumpty or Dr Seuss’ cat in the hat’s rhymes. As Brewster, Ellis and Girard (2002) say, stories and storytelling create the ideal learning context to undergo reading as a social experience.

Creative Reading as Classroom Practice

Let me introduce creative reading as classroom practice and show how it can be fun, engaging and memorable. We need three things: Developing reading routines, choosing appropriate graded readers and following a pre-, while- and post-reading model.

Reading Routines

Reading routines such as regular storytelling, reading aloud / reading alone time and book talk moments give learners the chance to express their personal response to the reading experience (Mourao & Ellis, 2021). In this way, we create communities of readers which make reading visible in the classroom with cosy reading corners and comfy cushions, shelves with books to read for pleasure and classroom walls decorated with the learners’ creative work which show reading in the making.

Graded Readers

Do not be scared to add a graded reader to your syllabus! These texts come from many different genres and teachers have a big palette to choose what topics to explore.

Graded readers are accessible to all. Their benefits are plenty. First, they are specifically produced for foreign language learners and use limited lexis and syntax according to the learners’ linguistic level. As students read to their reading ability, their motivation increases, and they develop a sense of achievement. For many students, this can be the first time they read a whole book in English! What a feeling of success, don’t you think?

Second, the graded readers’ appealing content triggers motivation. There are several abridged versions of all sorts of genres, such as folk and fairy tales, fables, traditional stories and modern classics with lively illustrations accompanying robust plots. [1] Choosing stories from around the world, for example, is a solid plan, since learners have access to world literature in their English class, learn and explore different cultures and human expression, gain global perspective and develop a broader worldview. Isn’t it fantastic? [2]

Following a Pre-, While- and Post-Reading Model

Planning a lesson on a graded reader is simpler than you think. By following a pre-, while- and post-reading model which organizes the lesson around three main stages, we will integrate graded readers into our syllabuses and exploit the full potential of the stories. We will exemplify activities which intend to inspire teachers to design creative tasks to accompany the reading experience since planning appealing activities for each stage is crucial to motivating learners to develop an interest in the story. [3]

First, as a pre-reading activity, we can bring realia into the classroom and show learners 5 different objects they can touch and play with. We tell them that only one of those objects appears in the story and ask them to look at the cover of the book to guess which one belongs to the story and give reasons for their choice. For the pre-reading phase, we can use the think-pair-share (TPS) collaborative learning strategy to foster interaction [4] . In this way, we are creating expectations about the story, we have made learning concrete with real objects, and we have given learners a specific task to carry out and reasons for listening/reading. Now the learners are motivated to listen to/read the story to confirm or discard their predictions.

Reading activities foster storytelling and interactive reading moments to trigger imagination, involve the learners in the narrative and play with sound, rhythm, and rhyme. This playful interaction with English sounds and rhythm has a very positive effect on memory building and language learning. The same happens with book talk moments which bring the learners’ own imagined or real worlds into the reading and create precious opportunities for spontaneous listening and speaking in the classroom in relaxed classroom practice. Storybooks and storytelling, as a social experience, create a rich environment for learning (Brewster, Ellis and Girard, 2002).

Last, post-reading activities nurture the learners’ connection with the story and respond creatively to the reading experience. Examples of these activities are: Draw your favourite scene, design an infographic with specific information about the story, use a graphic organizer to create a story mountain to represent its structure, perform the scenes you liked the most, create a collage to introduce a character, create a story cube to retell the story, design a different book cover or book jacket, create a poster to advertise the book, write a different ending, add a new character, do freeze frames to present the different scenes.

Sometimes, just introducing a slight minimal change to traditional reading activities is enough to trigger immediate interest. For example, completing a Venn diagram with specific information about two different elements is very often used for identifying, categorizing, comparing and contrasting information. When we add movement to the activity, learners have another stimulus. If we ask students to create the activity in pairs to pass it on to other learners to complete it, the challenge, engagement and enthusiasm grow since it becomes community-based. See the following example of an activity I created based on the primary course book series Buzz, book 6 (2023, p. 25)

Beyond the Classroom Walls

Moreover, for those teachers who embrace creative reading and would like to go a step further, participating in international reading projects is a great option since these projects move beyond the classroom walls and bring together learners from faraway places. Oxford University Press, for example, carries out one such project every year: the Oxford Big Read competition [5] and provides online access to several resources, such as ready-to-use templates, genre information, rubrics to assess creative tasks and teaching tips to guide teachers to plan creative activities to work with graded readers.

Participating in global projects like Oxford Big Read offers schools the chance to show their commitment to teaching languages and gain international visibility and recognition. The whole school community participates in making these projects happen; families and teachers work together in collaborative contexts to support the learners’ efforts, involving parents in their children’s learning processes and schools in creating bonds with the learners’ homes. Most importantly, these kinds of creative reading experiences boost students’ love for reading, language learning, sharing with others and exercising agency.

Creative Reading in a Nutshell

To conclude, creative reading fosters a comprehensive language learning experience, which creates room for learners to explore and experiment with language from a very personal and creative perspective. It contributes to developing learners’ confidence in their reading process, in the learning of a foreign language, and the development of their creativity and criticality. [6]

It is about loving to read and invites readers to let themselves go, be caught by the power of the narrative, develop empathy and engage their imagination in the reading process. It aims at educating learners, who have acquired tools to become critical, creative and independent readers, aware of their citizenship responsibilities, both at their local contexts and globally. All in all, be a daring teacher and give graded readers a chance!

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

Griselda Beacon is an English teacher with a Master’s degree in English Literature and Foreign Language Teaching from Philipps-Universität Marburg in Germany. She has extensive experience in teacher training and curriculum development for primary school. She is the co-author of the Together textbook series (Oxford UP, 2018) for teaching English in Argentina and co-editor of the book International Perspectives on Diversity in ELT (Palgrave, 2021). She is a teacher trainer for various educational institutions, including Oxford UP in South America and NILE – Norwich Institute for Language Education in England. Passionate about children’s literature, Griselda visits schools, reads picture books, tells stories, and carries out literary projects in primary school classrooms with literature and art that promote reading and creative writing, intercultural dialogue, and inclusion in English lessons. Based in the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, Griselda works as a higher education teacher and teaches Children’s and Young Adult Literature, Creativity, and Theater Techniques in the English teacher training program.

Bibliographical references

Brewster, J., Ellis, G. & Girard, D. (2002). The Primary English Teacher’s Guide . Pearson ED

Douglas, S. R. (2017).   Extensive reading for engaging learners beyond the textbook. Blog. Oxford University Press ELT. https://teachingenglishwithoxford.oup.com/2017/07/18/extensive-reading-the-key-to-language-learning-beyond-the-classroom/

Egan, K. (1998). The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding. In Canadian Journal of Education / Revue canadienne de l education . Bibliovault OAI Repository, the University of Chicago Press. 68. 10.2307/1585992.

Mahony, M. & J. Ross (2023). Buzz , book 6. Oxford University Press.

Mourão, S., & Ellis, G. (2021). Demystifying the read-aloud.  English Teaching Professional , (136), 22-25. Article 7.  https://www.etprofessional.com/demystifying-the-read-aloud

https://www.oxfordbigread.com/

https:// www.oxfordreadingclub.com/

https://www.readingrockets.org/classroom/classroom-strategies/think-pair-share

https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/professional-development/teachers/knowing subject/articles/making-reading-communicative

[1] See Oxford University Press selection of graded readers at https:// www.oxfordreadingclub.com/

[2] https://teachingenglishwithoxford.oup.com/2017/07/18/extensive-reading-the-key-to-language-learning- beyond-the-classroom/

[3] https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/professional-development/teachers/knowing subject/articles/making-reading-communicative

[4] https://www.readingrockets.org/classroom/classroom-strategies/think-pair-share

[5] For more information about this global project, see https://www.oxfordbigread.com/

You may also like

Useful prompts for ai to help teachers save lesson planning time, four reasons you don’t need to feel worried about teaching english pronunciation., how to help your students deal with common grammar mistakes , leave a reply cancel reply, recent posts, helping advanced students overcome the language learning plateau, ‘play is for children’: myths about learning through play, the big debate: ai and inclusivity, four more reasons you don’t need to feel worried about teaching english pronunciation., recent comments.

Copyright 2023 © Oxford University Press 2023

Read our Privacy Policy , Cookie Policy & Legal Notice .

This blog contains external links. OUP are not responsible for the content of external sites nor do we endorse any companies or organisations linked to. Any views or opinions expressed in the articles on these posts are those of the author(s).

Oxford University Press - ELT

10 Books To Read If You Love Fourth Wing

• Fans of Rebecca Yarros' Fourth Wing should check out other great books for more dragons and romance with a political twist.
• Those who love the " romantasy " genre will get their fill from popular novels like A Court of Thorns & Roses and Divine Rivals .
• Many novels offer diverse takes on dragons and dangerous academies, making them ideal for Fourth Wing fans seeking similar reads.

Rebecca Yarros' Fourth Wing has become a massive hit among book lovers, and there's plenty more in store for fans of this story and world — but they may be looking for other books to read while they await the third Empyrean novel and future sequels . Part of what makes Fourth Wing so unique is its combined focus on fantasy and romance, setting it firmly in the " romantasy " genre with other popular stories like Sarah J. Maas' Court of Thorns and Roses books and Jennifer L. Armentrout's Blood and Ash series.

Of course, Fourth Wing may have strong romance elements, but it doesn't hold back on the fantasy. That's precisely why it's so hard to follow. So many similar stories lean more in one direction than the other, but Fourth Wing weaves an intricate world full of politics, magic, and dragons. These are well-balanced with its romance subplots, so the Empyrean series really does offer something for everyone. Depending on what readers enjoy about Fourth Wing, they'll be able to find books with similar motifs. There are plenty of great follow-ups to Yarros' 2023 novel and its sequel, Iron Flame .

Fireborne By Rosaria Munda

Those who enjoy the dragons and dragon-riding featured in Fourth Wing should pick up Rosaria Munda's Fireborne , the first book in the author's Aurelian Cycle . Fireborne is a young adult novel, so its romance themes will be less mature than those in Yarros' series. Still, the two novels have many similarities. Fireborne follows two dragon riders — Annie and Lee — as they compete for a top-ranking position in their faction while navigating the political turmoil unraveling in their world. Like Fourth Wing, Fireborne has themes of rebellion, dragons, and a complicated romance. It's an obvious choice for fans of Yarros' work.

Dragonfall By L.R. Lam

Another book centered on dragons is L.R. Lam's Dragonfall , and its premise plays up the complicated relationship between humans and dragons — something Fourth Wing could benefit from digging into in more depth. Dragonfall is set in a world where humans betrayed dragons hundreds of years ago, and the dragons haven't forgotten. When a dragon prophesied to save his species gets mixed up with a thief, he sees an opening. However, fulfilling his destiny will require betraying the thief in question, and this becomes a more difficult task as the two grow closer. With intense politics and a compelling enemies-to-lovers romance, Lam's novel is perfect for Fourth Wing fans.

A Court Of Thorns & Roses By Sarah J. Maas

Sarah J. Maas' Court of Thorns & Roses series focuses on fae instead of dragons, but it's commonly recommended to fans of Fourth Wing — and for good reason . Another " romantasy " series that took BookTok by storm, ACOTAR has a fan-favorite romance at its core, along with great supporting characters and a complex enough fantasy setup to satisfy readers looking for more than a love story. ACOTAR follows Feyre Archeron as she's swept into the world of Prythian and forced to navigate the fae and their politics. Like Violet, Feyre really comes into her own over the course of the series. Her story will appeal to anyone who enjoys Fourth Wing.

10 Books To Read If You Love A Court Of Thorns & Roses

The serpent and the wings of night by carissa broadbent.

A lesser-known romantasy novel, Carissa Broadbent's The Serpent and the Wings of Night is often pitched to fans of Fourth Wing and ACOTAR, though it doesn't deal with dragons or fae. The Serpent and the Wings of Night chronicles a romance between a vampire and a human, and it's perfect for those looking for the steamy fantasy moments present in Fourth Wing and Iron Flame . In addition to a compelling romance, Broadbent's novel features a deadly tournament on par with the recruitment process for Basgiath War College and lots of magic. Needless to say, Fourth Wing fans will eat it up.

To Shape A Dragon's Breath By Moniquill Blackgoose

Those who want more of Fourth Wing 's academy setting or higher political stakes can check out To Shape a Dragon's Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose. The first installment in the Nampeshiweisit series, To Shape a Dragon's Breath follows an Indigenous woman named Anequs as she finds a dragon and is given a choice: enroll in an academy run by the people who colonized her home or watch her dragon be killed. Anequs chooses the former, but her differing beliefs and way of life make this a difficult adjustment for her. To Shape a Dragon Breath goes beyond most other dragon books in that regard, tackling hard topics like colonization head on.

The Priory Of The Orange Tree By Samantha Shannon

A lengthy fantasy novel by Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree is a multi-perspective story that has three things in common with Fourth Wing : high-stakes politics, a looming extraordinary threat, and dragons. While Shannon's story is lengthier than Fourth Wing and contains more running threads, its themes are ideal for anyone looking for a follow-up to Yarros' series. There's also great LGBTQ+ representation, though the romance subplots take a backseat to the fantasy elements of Shannon's story.

An Ember In The Ashes by Sabaa Tahir

Sabaa Tahir's An Ember in the Ashes doesn't have dragons, but it features a ruthless military academy and a corrupt government — two major elements of Fourth Wing . The first novel in Tahir's four-book series, An Ember in the Ashes kicks off a thrilling story with strong female characters, revolution, and magic. It also features a forbidden romance, so there's a lot for fans of Fourth Wing to love about this book . Laia and Elias' story is a memorable one, and it holds up as one of the best adult fantasy series in recent years.

A Deadly Education By Naomi Novik

Dangerous and deadly schools are a common theme in fantasy, and Naomi Novik's A Deadly Education will also appeal to readers who like Fourth Wing 's setting . The novel is set at the Scholomance, where those who fail their magical studies are doomed to die — a reality that the characters in Fourth Wing know all too well. The story follows El as she enrolls and starts digging into the school's secrets. It also sees her grappling with her own magical abilities, with its story spinning out from there.

Divine Rivals By Rebecca Ross

Divine Rivals and Fourth Wing blew up on BookTok around the same time , and while they don't have a ton in common, both fall firmly in the romantasy category. Those looking for another compelling blend of the two genres should give Rebecca Ross' novel a try. The fantasy elements of Divine Rivals aren't as expansive or complex as Fourth Wing 's, but the character dynamics hold up. The book's leads — Iris Winnow and Roman Kitt — also set out to uncover the truth about the war between gods that's impacting their nation. This search for truth is present in Fourth Wing , and Violet and Roman would fit right into the Scribe Quadrant.

From Blood And Ash By Jennifer L. Armentrout

From Blood and Ash has a story that's very different from that of Fourth Wing, but its steamy romantic elements are sure to appeal to fans of Yarros' book . Jennifer L. Armentrout's book also has a powerful female lead like Violet, and Poppy wants to save her people in much the same way. Poppy's role in her story differs greatly from Violet's, but those who appreciate a tough female protagonist who can save the day and engage in a thrilling romance should check From Blood and Ash out. There are six books in the series, so that will keep readers occupied until Fourth Wing 's next sequel is out.

To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .

The 24 Best Book Club Books for Your Next Group Read

We may earn a commission if you buy something from any affiliate links on our site.

There are competing theories about how to pick the best book club book. When I nobly started a book club in my early 20s, I had grand ambitions of filling in the holes in my undergrad education. I think we started with Confessions of Zeno . Years later, I joined what had been dubbed the “high-low club,” a group that used the gathering as an excuse to read some of the mass-market fiction that was dominating the bestseller lists. I think the first book that group read was Fifty Shades of Grey. A decade later, that’s the group I still meet with every month, and it’s solidified allegiances with some people I now consider my closest friends.

There is really no answer to what makes the best book club book, so I asked a few trusted reader friends, including Kate Slotover, who is so obsessed with the matter that she started The Book Club Review Podcast , as well as my favorite local independent book-sellers, Briana Parker and Davi Marra of Brooklyn’s Lofty Pigeon Books . As Kate puts it, it all comes down to the reaction the book provokes: “What you want is a great read, but also, ideally, a book that generates lots of different opinions—then the fun is in the debate, and seeing if you can all meet in the middle.” Below, find some of our choices.

Acts of Service by Lillian Fishman

The protagonist of Acts of Service by Lillian Fishman is feeling impulsive and maybe a little stuck when she decides to post nudes online, leading to a relationship with another couple. But it's her obsessive questioning and chronicling of the dynamics of gender, sex, sexuality, and personality among the three of them (and her girlfriend) that will have you overthinking along with her, and looking for someone to talk it all over with, perhaps mining and divulging your own personal experiences and revelations along the way. Plus, it's pretty sexy. —Briana Parker, co-owner, Lofty Pigeon Books

The Bees by Laline Paull

The Bees: A Novel

Bookshop.org

The Bees , Laline Paull’s compulsively readable novel set in a beehive, is a bit of a wildcard. I know it will divide people. It tells the story of Flora, a lowly sanitation worker bee, who uncovers a dark secret at the heart of her hive. The social hierarchy is unbending, but Flora knows she is destined for something greater, even though this puts her at odds with her superiors. There is no speech, everyone communicates by pheromones, and Tarantino-esque levels of danger and violence are never far away. Wildly inventive, written with great dramatic flair and ultimately a strong ecological message that will stay with you, your book club will either love it or loathe it, and you’ll have fun finding out which. —Kate Slotover, host of The Book Club Review podcast

The Book of Night Women by Marlon James

The Book of Night Women by Marlon James is so uniquely devastating, it's ideal to have a support system in the form of a book club to read with. Exploring the particularly cruel form of slavery that existed on Jamaican sugar plantations, James brings up thorny issues of consent, desire, love, class, and power without resorting to clichés, presenting a story of such depth and humanity that you'll want to spend hours picking apart the nuances even as you recover emotionally from this wrenching read. —B.P.

Evicted by Matthew Desmond

After hearing the low-grade but long-running buzz about how amazing this book was, I “made” my book club read it. It falls into the category of something I would never pick up on my own, and needed a bit of peer pressure to complete. But I was so glad I did. For those of us who have never confronted the trauma of eviction, it can seem like one of those problems on the periphery. But by deeply embedding himself with his subjects, Desmond shows how thoroughly housing insecurity is entwined with all other corollary effects of poverty. If you don’t have a reliable place to call home (to send mail, to register for school, etc., etc.), it is almost impossible to obtain the modicum of stability that is necessary to begin to escape poverty. This is an incredibly sobering text that reads like a novel. It shook our book club, and years later I still think about it. — Chloe Schama

Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Fleishman Is in Trouble

My book club read this book for one of (maybe the) last gatherings before the pandemic, and when I polled my books club members about their favorites, this one was nominated. (Full disclosure: We are a group of New York City women who undoubtedly share some zip codes with Brodesser-Akner’s characters.) This is one of those books that puts its finger very precisely and somewhat uncomfortably on the material concerns of a certain milieu. Did it cut close to home? It certainly made for a good discussion. —C.S.

Free: Coming of Age at the End of History by Lea Ypi

Free: Coming of Age at the End of History

Another can’t-fail book club choice is Free , Lea Ypi’s memoir of her childhood in Albania, a country ruled by the hardline Communist party and largely closed to the countries beyond its borders. Everything changed once Albania opened up to the West in the late 1980s, and Ypi was finally able to understand the truth behind lies she had been brought up with all her life. Today Ypi is a Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics, and reading her story you understand why, for her, politics and economics could never be abstract—she shows the dramatic way in which they affected a whole nation of people, and some of the good that was lost along with the bad. It’s a fantastic book, vivid, relatable and surprisingly enjoyable, despite the fact that there is some heartbreaking material contained within. It will lead to rich discussions afterwards, I guarantee it. (Also-ran: Border by Kapka Kassabova.) —K.S.

Help Wanted by Adelle Waldman

Help Wanted

Many a 20-something Brooklyn dweller saw themselves reflected in Adelle Waldman’s debut novel, The Love Affairs of Nathanial P . That is likely not true of her second novel, which is set in a big box store, but has none of the voyeuristic distance that the premise might imply. This is a caper told with such sensitivity and nuance that it might just alter the way you think of the workplace novel. Set against the ruins (or triumphs?) of late-stage capitalism, Help Wanted gave my book club a huge amount to chew over in terms of—and this isn’t much of an overstatement!—what America is. All that, and it’s a great read that every member of my group finished. (While we have the best of intents, but I can’t recall the last time that happened.) —C.S.

How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto

How I Won a Nobel Prize

Sometimes you read something new and immediately think how brilliant it would be for book club. How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto has all the hallmarks of a book that will set sparks flying, an of-the-moment campus novel that deftly explores moral relativism. The protagonist is Helen, a brilliant physicist working on superconductors, who is forced to move to a new academic institution brought into existence by a reclusive billionaire (his face smoothed away by wealth) that exists to provide a haven for academics and cultural figures who have been “canceled” elsewhere. Unwillingly along for the ride is Helen’s partner, Hew, who disapproves of the whole enterprise. Enjoy the fascinating and surprisingly accessible dive into theoretical physics, appreciate the accumulating tension of the psychological drama, and laugh out loud at the one-liners. (Also-ran: When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut, trans. Adrian Nathan West.) —K.S.

How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard

How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read

The more serious you and your book club become about reading, the more hopeless you may end up feeling about all the books you will never, even with the best of intentions, have time for. How to Talk About Books you Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard will make you feel much better about this and, indeed, let you beautifully off the hook if you haven’t managed to finish your book club read in time. That’s ok, you can skim, flip through, read the end, or even just hold the book, unopened in your hands, all are fine with Bayard and he makes a compelling case for why you might be better able to discuss the book if you haven’t actually read it. Although Bayard’s credentials as a reader and academic are serious, his book is delightfully mischievous and funny. Give it a try and see if you agree with him or not. You might want to adopt his notation system for future reference: UB: book unknown to me; SB: book I have skimmed; HB: book I have heard about; and FB: book I have forgotten. —K.S.

Invisible Child by Andrea Elliott

Invisible Child by Andrea Elliott should be required reading for every New Yorker, as it details, with extraordinary compassion and acuity, a side of the city not often written about or shown. In a monumental feat of immersive journalism, Andrea Elliott spends years  with a Black unhoused family, and the reader comes to know them like their own family. It's a book with the power to change the way you see the world, and what better way to experience that than with others in conversation. —Davi Marra, co-owner, Lofty Pigeon Books

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab vibrates with beautiful melancholy. In eighteenth-century France, Addie makes a Faustian bargain to live forever, but she is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets. The book goes back and forth in time between the first desperate days of her curse and present-day New York where she's figured out how to push up against its limits and carve out a life—until one day, everything changes. Like the show Russian Doll, the book similarly sparks an intense interest to pick apart the nuances of the plot and the decisions of the main character and to consider what you'd do in her unique circumstances. —B.P.

Little Library cookbooks by Kate Young

A tangential thought: If you like to gather friends and serve food at your book club Kate Young’s fabulous series of Little Library cookbooks may be the literary inspiration you need. From a Sebastian-Flyte inspired picnic to a loving recreation of Babette’s Feast (minus the turtle), Young offers a go-to list of crowd pleasers drawing on her expertise as a cook and as a lifelong reader. Pick a recipe: try the Väserbottenostpaj (Swedish cheese tart) inspired by The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, read the text, share the meal, and discuss; the perfect recipe for book club. —K.S.

Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt

Loved and Missed

It’s no secret that I adore this book , but I promise I wasn’t just seeking new opportunities to plug it when I put it on this list. This nomination comes via my very own book club. When I asked the group chat what book from our readings stayed with them, this was the first response that came back. This delightful little novel (that is immense in its emotional scope) is the kind of quiet-seeming book that might pass you by. But our conversation ranged widely when we discussed it, and while everyone had quite a strong response, the reactions varied and brought up all kinds of questions about parenting, emotional inheritance, and familial responsibility. I have said it before, but this is a really stunning read. —C.S.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov is one of those books where its history is just as interesting to discuss as its contents. A too-often-overlooked classic of Russian literature, it presented such a devastating send-up of the Soviet regime that it couldn’t be published until after the author’s death. It's also uproariously funny, original, and weird, so you feel both like you're reading capital L Literature but also having a grand old time. The devil and his entourage visit Moscow, and Soviet Russia and generations of readers were never the same again. —B.P.

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Middlemarch

In the depths of COVID winter my best friend, her sister, her dad and I started a book club and kicked it off with Middlemarch . It changed my life! I read the book and listened to the audio book and fell in love with Dorothea and felt I’d moved to the Midlands for a couple of months. I bought the book in January 2021 and the manager at Shakespeare and Co. told me, masked, “I wish it was the middle of March, then we’d have a vaccine available.” Thanks to George Eliot, the next two months flew by and soon enough it was mid-March. —Chloe Malle

A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr

Book club can be just the nudge you need to read a classic from the past. A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr is a slim little novel that was recommended to me by a friend who cited it as his all-time favorite read. It tells the story of Tom Birkin, a traumatized World War I veteran who takes a job in a tiny village in the North of England restoring a medieval mural in the parish church. Over the course of the summer, he comes to know the locals and one other interloper, a young archaeologist excavating a field. Not much happens as slowly, slowly the mural is revealed, and yet Carr’s prose is weaving its spell. At the end you will find yourself reflecting on the nature of time and lived experience and with any luck come away with something that you will carry in your heart for the rest of your days. But at the very least there’s plenty to be charmed by and discuss. Richard Osman says he’s never met a person who didn’t love it! If you buy the Penguin modern classic edition you get the double whammy of the perfect introduction by Penelope Fitzgerald. (Also-ran: The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald.) —K.S.

Random Family by Adrien Nicole LeBlanc

Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx

This was another book where the lore preceded my book club’s reading—and probably would have influenced it were the book anything less than a truly astounding tour de force. I first read it about 10 years after it came out, but two decades later, I am sure it still holds up as one of the most amazing feats of embedded journalism. (Davi’s excellent pick, above, Andrea Elliot’s amazing Invisible Child , is a definite heir to the approach.) Another work of non-fiction that is every bit as compelling as a novel, it was a harsh but rewarding read that left us with tons to talk about. —C.S.

Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe

Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe is one of the many deeply human stories to be told about the Irish Troubles. It reads like a thriller and culminates in the probable resolution of a decades-long mystery about the identity of the people who kidnapped and murdered a mother of 10 accused of passing sensitive information on to the British. It’s an extraordinary piece of journalism that raises as many questions as it answers, and therefore it’s the perfect pick for a nonfiction book club. —Davi Marra, co-owner, Lofty Pigeon Books

Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama

Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama is an extraordinary thriller steeped in a genuine sense of mystery and suspense. Readers are rewarded with a fascinating deep dive into Japanese journalism and policing, all while an urgent procedural unfolds to locate a killer who may be related to a cold case that haunts the novel’s protagonists. Whether you picked up on or missed the clues which point to the unforgettable climax, you absolutely must talk to somebody else who read the book as soon as you finish. —D.M.

Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us by Rachel Aviv

Sometimes a book club is all about the text, and sometimes it’s all about what people are bringing to it. This book, which has plenty to discuss between its covers, fell into the latter category when my group discussed it. The book is, loosely, an examination of the mental health industry, and in the opening essay, Aviv, a New Yorker journalist, discloses her own experience being deemed the youngest anorexia patient in America at the age of six—a diagnosis that was partly about a certain kind of medicine, but also about labels and stories, as is so much of the class of care that falls under mental health. Read this one to question the way we interact, categorize, and deal with people whose neurology isn’t quite “normal,” and also to (maybe) learn things about your fellow book club members that you never knew. —C.S.

Super Infinite by Katherine Rundell

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne

Non-fiction can be great for book club, with the caveat that ideally you want a page-turner. (Our book club is still reeling from the time we attempted Adam Feinstein’s exhaustive biography of Pablo Neruda .) With this in mind I recommend Super Infinite , Katherine Rundell’s prize-winning biography of the poet John Donne. The lines of poetry themselves might not immediately light you up, but Rundell’s analysis will, and to read this book is to walk with her through time. (If you’ve ever read Helene Hanff’s 84 Charing Cross Road —a book club classic, by the way—and wondered why she was so obsessed with Donne’s sermons, this will put that mystery to rest.) Super Infinite is a fantastic read and made for brilliant book club discussion. If you try it I’d encourage you to go a step further and get everyone to bring a poem they love to share. Trust me, good things will come of this. (Also-rans: The Poetry Pharmacy by William Sieghart, Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa, and Pearl by Sian Hughes.) —K.S.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

I ran my post-college book club like a little tyrant, and if it had lasted longer than two books I certainly would’ve made everyone read Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. Coming in at 400-plus pages, it appears intimidating, but Zevin’s vivid writing and gripping storytelling had me totally spellbound. Tomorrow seems like it was engineered to be a book club read—squabbling over the polarizing main characters, Sam and Sadie, is the perfect low-stakes book-club fodder. —Hannah Jackson

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

The Vegetarian

One of the first books we ever read for the show was a fantastic book club read: The Vegetarian by Han Kang (trans. Deborah Smith). Winner of the 2016 International Booker Prize, this is a psychologically intense short novel structured in three parts. The protagonist, Yeong-Hye, is a young woman who decides she will stop eating meat, without reckoning on the lengths her family will go to in order to get her to conform to South Korean social norms. Beautifully written, surprisingly erotic and ultimately quite strange (but in a good way), this is a novel guaranteed to provoke questions. (A side-benefit of reading any Booker shortlisted novel is that you can avail yourself of the excellent reading guides and extra material on the Booker website, a boon to those who like to have plenty of background.) (Also-rans: The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa and Love by Hanne Orstavik.) —K.S.

A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter

A Woman In the Polar Night

One of our favorite discoveries on the pod was A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter (trans. Jane Degras). In 1934 Ritter joined her fur-trapper husband to spend the winter living in an isolated hut on Spitzbergen, a remote island north of Norway. She had hoped it would be an opportunity to “read thick books in the remote quiet and, not least, sleep to my heart’s content” —and who doesn’t want to do that, but of course life rarely works out as we expect it to. Funny, dry and relatable, it’s impossible not to be charmed by Ritter, or to share her dismay in discovering that there will be another, previously unknown to her, man sharing their cramped living quarters. Read it for the sense of adventure, the beauty of the Arctic, and the profound appreciation of regeneration and rebirth once the sun returns. Discuss Ritter’s extraordinary talent, and collectively lament the fact that she never wrote another book. —K.S.

By Lorena Meouchi

By Leah Faye Cooper

By Hannah Coates

Daughtry drops out of Triangle-area congressional race, Knott responds to endorsement

Brad knott reacts to daughtry's endorsement, more on this.

Republican Brad Knott responds after Kelly Daughtry drops out of NC-13 runoff

Kelly Daughtry drops out of runoff in 13th Congressional District

Canes to kick off round 2 of stanley cup playoffs sunday at madison square garden, courage look to bounce back with game in nj saturday, after top betting choices fierceness and sierra leone, it's wide open for the 150th kentucky derby, waddell: deal will get done, brind'amour wants to be 'hurricane for life', 'hats off': charlotte bar trolls panthers owner david tepper again.

WRAL Late News

WRAL WeatherCenter Forecast

Daytime Pick 3 and Pick 4 Drawing

Watch live: Processional and memorial service for fallen officer Joshua Eyer

Cary crews rescue woman trapped on front porch