Why Great Books Matter Now

 

Last Friday, I spoke at the INCH homeschool conference on moral imagination, great books, and the forming of the inner life.

I had prepared notes carefully. Yet once I began speaking, I found myself leaving them behind almost entirely. The ideas had become something more than prepared material. They had become conviction.

And what surprised me most was not simply that people listened attentively, but that many seemed to recognize immediately what I was trying to name.

There is a deep uncertainty in the world right now, especially among parents.

Many mothers sense that something essential is slipping away in modern culture, even if they struggle to describe exactly what it is. The questions beneath homeschooling today often reach far deeper than academics:

How do we raise children who can recognize goodness?

How do we form courage without hardness?

How do we cultivate wisdom, steadiness, reverence, and moral clarity in a fragmented age?

How do we help children love what is worthy of love?

Increasingly, I believe these questions lie at the very center of education.

Charlotte Mason understood this deeply. She knew that education concerns the formation of the whole person, including the imagination, affections, habits, and moral perception.

Long before children can explain virtue, stories help them recognize it.

Children are formed by what they admire, imitate, laugh at, pity, and love. The books placed before them quietly shape the inner world from which choices and judgments later arise.

This is why great stories matter so much.

Not because they deliver moral lessons mechanically, but because they awaken moral recognition. Through literature, children begin to perceive courage, loyalty, sacrifice, mercy, humility, beauty, and truth almost before they possess language for them.

Tolkien understood this.

He once described certain fairy tales from Andrew Lang’s collections as giving him a sense of “giantness”—the feeling that the world was larger, older, stranger, and more meaningful than ordinary modern life often suggests.

What a remarkable phrase.

A sense of giantness.

I think many children today are starving for precisely this enlargement of soul.

Much of modern entertainment trains children toward irony, speed, detachment, mockery, or endless distraction. Yet worthy books cultivate very different qualities: wonder, attentiveness, reverence, courage, tenderness, and the ability to recognize that some things are worth loving and defending.

At the conference, I found myself speaking less about curriculum and more about vision.

Because beneath many educational anxieties lies a deeper fear: parents are no longer certain what kind of world they are preparing children for—or even what it means to become fully human within it.

And yet I came away encouraged.

Not discouraged.

Because I sensed that many families are hungry for something older and more enduring than educational trends or endless information. They are searching for rootedness, meaning, wisdom, and a way of seeing that restores coherence to both learning and life.

A few nights after returning home, I wrote in my dream journal about uncovering buried treasure beneath an old road. I could only carry part of it away, though I sensed there was vastly more still hidden beneath the surface.

That image has stayed with me.

Because increasingly I suspect that many of the things we most need in education today are not new inventions at all. They are older inheritances waiting to be recovered.

Great books.
Living ideas.
Moral imagination.
Attention.
Wonder.
A world alive with meaning.

After the conference, several mothers wrote expressing a desire to continue exploring these ideas together. I have been considering hosting a small online gathering in the coming weeks for those interested in these deeper questions surrounding education, moral imagination, literature, and the forming of the inner life.

Nothing elaborate. Simply a thoughtful conversation.

If that interests you, simply reply to sheila@livingbookspress.com and let me know. If enough people are interested, I will send details in the coming weeks.