The Thousand Good Books

In other words, to be a virtuous person, we need to love what deserves love, in the right way and to the right degree. Because of original sin we are born with disordered loves. We love the wrong things, and we love the right things in the wrong way. Take the newborn, for example. Even though we have a special affection for the very young, it’s plain to see that babies are completely self-absorbed, caring only about their own needs and wants. They are perfectly fine with making you miserable until you give them what they want. In fact, that’s what they’re known for in the early years! Education–which is initially undertaken by parents on day one of the baby’s existence–has as one of its main goals to rightly order the child’s loves and thereby untangle the knot of narcissism which gives way to charity. Children cannot cease being selfish until they’ve learned the virtues of humility, generosity, and love.

This work of sanctification should be one of the primary aims of education! Sadly, the education system today sees its role as merely ushering children through the memorization of facts so that they can perform well on standardized tests and be prepared to succeed in their eventual careers. On the contrary, the Christian tradition teaches that the primary aim of education is sanctification, the purification of the whole person. It is the formation of a virtuous character through the contemplation of the true, the good, and the beautiful.

Making them Virtuous

So how do we go about nurturing a love for the good, true, and beautiful in our children? There are many ways, but one proven method is to direct them to the best books that have been written. Books are where we encounter the truest, best, and most beautiful ideas. But with millions of books in print, how can we tell which ones are the best? Which ones will guide our children to contemplate morality, truth, and beauty?

In their book How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler and Mark Van Doren describe what they call The Pyramid of Books. This method of classification has three levels. On the lower level are the millions of books that are merely amusing and entertaining. These would be books by John Grisham, Dean Koontz, or Nora Roberts. Many people refer to these kinds of books as “fun reads” or even “guilty pleasures.” There may be nothing inherently wrong with reading these books, but reading them will not cause your mind to grow. They will titillate your mind with interesting stories, but they won’t raise questions that only contemplative reflection can answer. They won’t make it such that after having read them, you are now a better reader and a better thinker.

The second level of the pyramid is what we might call good books. These books on first read stimulate the growth of the mind. They may even give you some “aha” moments. But after a first read you may sense that you’ve extracted everything that can be gotten from them. Books like this may help you to grow in wisdom, but a second read may reveal that you’ve already gotten everything that you could out of them. This is because you as a person have grown since your first time reading it, but the book has remained the same. Thus you may say of the book that it was good for a time or it was helpful, but it’s not one that warrants a second read.

Finally, on the top level of the pyramid are the books that we can call great books. They are the works that can elevate the mind each time you return to them. No matter how many times you read them, you’ll have the sense that there’s more to it and thus another round through it would reveal or inspire yet more wisdom. These are the works that have inhabited the minds of the greatest thinkers in our culture’s history. They present and discuss the most influential ideas of western civilization. Examples include works by the likes of Plato, Aristotle, Dante Alighieri, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, John Calvin, Karl Marx, and John Stuart Mill.

The Thousand Good Books

Sensing the educational value of this kind of literature, many schools have attempted to provide their students with a “Great Books” education, eschewing textbooks and shaping entire courses around the works themselves. John Senior, a humanities professor at the University of Kansas, was disappointed to discover that his students were ill-prepared to read The Great Books. He accurately described why college students cannot understand great literature.

“College teachers faced with freshmen who hate literature, think their job is somehow to convert them–by cajolery, finding something in a text (or selecting lesser texts) relating to their sick, impoverished wants. But the fault was back in high school where they should have loved Shakespeare. But, the high school teacher found his freshmen coming up from elementary school with no desire to read Shakespeare because they had not first loved Stevenson. And the grade school teacher found his students coming up from home without Mother Goose. And more important still, the love of literature at any stage supposes love of life–grounded in acute sensation and deep emotion.”