How Do Books Work in Our Classrooms?

The teacher in the first classroom engages her students through her charisma. She roams her classroom and reads key passages aloud. She brings the text to life with her lively recitations—or we might even call them performances. By her magnetic presence, she draws her students into lively discussions. She stirs them with her lively rendition of Shylock’s demand for vengeance in Act III, and again by Portia’s soliloquy on mercy in Act IV. She pulls her students into the drama; they identify with the characters, see the weight of their circumstances, and develop a healthy appetite for virtue. This charismatic teacher forms her students into lifelong lovers of Shakespeare, just as she is.

Now we turn to the second classroom and another cohort of 10^th graders. Here we encounter a more analytical teacher. This teacher highlights ways in which The Merchant of Venice raises timeless ethical issues. He steers his students toward fundamental ethical questions: If justice is giving a person his due, then how does mercy figure in? Is mercy inherently unjust? How shall individuals balance their ethical duty to family, to community, and to their fellow man? This analytical teacher uses the text to draw out eternal principles that speak to universal questions about the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Note how this analytical teacher handles The Merchant of Venice differently from the charismatic teacher. Consider the different ways they lead their students to virtue. Whereas the charismatic teacher awakens her students to virtue by enacting the story in person and drawing them into the story through their vicarious participation, the analytical teacher sharpens his students’ ability to distinguish true virtue from false virtue and articulate that distinction. Whereas the first teacher has the students embodying and emulating what they read in the text, the second teacher has them grouping, dividing, and comparing what they read in the text. Both teachers teach the same text, both teachers use that text to steer their students toward virtue, and both teachers do it effectively. And yet they handle the same text quite differently.

These two teachers represent two different ways of wielding a text for instructional use. Later we will visit another classroom, representing a third way a teacher might handle a text. But first we should step back and reflect on the fact that these differences exist.

My aim is to help educators recognize the way different teachers might handle the same text in different ways. Our imaginary classrooms point to experiences many students have as they move from one classroom to another. You may know what books are assigned in a given course, yet still not know what the students are taking away from the course. I am not addressing the differences between good teachers and bad teachers, nor am I considering the way teachers might emphasize different parts of a given book. Such distinctions are easy to account for. My purpose, rather, is to highlight more profound differences that arise in our classrooms. These weightier differences arise from disparate notions about how books do their work.

As educators, we aim to form, to shape, to influence our students. The question I am raising is this: What educational work do books perform? When a book does its part in shaping a student, how does influence flow from the book to a student? However you may answer this question, your answer will shape both your curriculum and your pedagogy.

What is a book? Simply stated, a book is a bound collection of pages that contain writing. As conduits for writing, books are meant to be read. That is their purpose. When books sit on a shelf, if they remain unopened, if their pages are never turned, then their purpose goes unrealized. Unread books have a form of bookliness while denying their power. Unread books are worse off than Bishop Berkeley’s proverbial sound of a tree falling in the woods. Just as scissors find their purpose when they cut, just as nuts and bolts find their purpose as they fasten and hold, so too for books: books realize their purpose when they are read. If books are to have any instructional effect, they do so insofar as our students read them.

In the two classrooms I described earlier, both groups of students dug into The Merchant of Venice, but they dug into it using different modes of extraction. These two modes of extraction pulled out different things from the same text—that is, different ore from the same mine. Consequently, the same text influenced the students in these classrooms rather differently. The text was the same, yet the curriculum and pedagogy were different.

I am not advocating in favor of one mode of extraction or one way of reading over another. I am simply highlighting the difference. By highlighting the difference, I hope to sharpen our decisions about which books we assign, why we assign them, and how our teachers lead our students through them. Again, we may know what books our students are reading, but this alone is not enough to tell us what our students will take away from those books. This is true even if the students are engaged and learning from good teachers.

The long history of Christian education is, among other things, a history of leading students through books. As we shall see, it is a history that offers three different ways of handling books, or three different approaches for extracting something valuable from books. I already introduced two approaches, represented in the two imaginary classrooms we encountered. I will get to the third in a moment. If we understand the unique advantages and limitations of each approach, we can better tailor our instruction to whatever it is we want our students to get out of the books we assign. What follows, then, is a survey of these three historical approaches: the charismatic approach, the scholastic approach, and the humanities approach.

The Charismatic Mode of Instruction

I will begin with the charismatic approach, which takes us to the cathedral schools of central Europe in the Ottonian era, the 10^th and 11^th centuries. Teachers in these schools looked to books as sources of wisdom no less than teachers in other eras. Yet they had a distinctive way of leveraging books for instructional use. Whenever these teachers gathered their students around a book, the students experienced the text coming to life through the embodied performance of its reader. As the teacher read the text and commented on it, he offered himself as a model that the students should emulate. The best teachers displayed the wisdom found in books by embodying it in their own bearing and conversation.

Consider how one writer explained why Bernard of Clairvaux was such a great teacher: “You need only look on him, and you are instructed; you need only hear the sound of his voice, and you learn; you need only follow him, and you are made perfect.” What made Bernard exceptional was his compelling personal presence. By embodying the wisdom that he and his students encountered in the books they read, Bernard aroused his students to imitation.²

Bernard and others like him represent the charismatic approach to instruction. In this mode of instruction, both teachers and students experience a book much like the performers in the woodwind section experience the notes on a musical score that appears on a page in front of them. The marks on the page resonate through a reader’s body through the ritualized experiences of recital and memory. Even after a text is returned to the shelf, that text lives on, inscribed in the embodied life of a good reader. The book abides in the reader’s manners and conversation, and in his bodily routines and habits of remembering. To read is to bring life to a text, almost like the spirit of God that put flesh onto the dry bones in Ezekiel’s famous vision.

As we imagine the charismatic teachers who flourished in the cathedral schools of the Ottonian era, think of them as walking and breathing illuminated manuscripts. When a reader reads, he embodies a text through his voice and manner, just as a scribe embodies a text through the bodily act of moving his ink-filled stylus over vellum. Either way of handling a written manuscript—whether by a living reader or by an illuminating scribe—converts a lifeless text into a lively image. It should come as no surprise that the era that elevated the charismatic mode of teaching, the Ottonian era, also left a legacy of beautiful illuminated manuscripts.

Let’s now return to our imaginary 10th-grade classes that are working through The Merchant of Venice. That first teacher represents the charismatic way of handling texts. Today’s Christian and classical educators reflect this charismatic sensibility in singular ways. For example, in our circles, we like to celebrate dynamic teachers who bring books to life with their contagious style and flair. We also echo the charismatic ideal when we promote recitals, role plays, and liturgies in our schools. These are bodily actions aimed at disciplining a student’s manners.³ Finally, we extol the same sensibility whenever we quip that “the teacher is the curriculum,” which is a canard that holds purchase in our CCE schools.

The charismatic mode of instruction, for all its merits, has potential downsides. It runs the danger of corrupting instruction by turning the classroom into an arena for a personality cult. Impressionable students, under the thrall of a beloved teacher, may think him erudite when in fact he is just a poser. This very criticism was leveled back in the 10^th-century heyday of charismatic instruction when a monk called out one of these teachers:

Whatever bespoke grandeur and distinction, he affected. This man, almost wholly ignorant, claimed to be a doctor of the arts, and persuaded people of it by virtue of his pompous posing, by elevating himself above others on a platform, by stimulating the dignity of a teacher in his manner rather than by the substance of his teachings, by burying his head deep in his cowl, pretending to be in profound meditation, then finally, when the expectations of the listeners had been whetted by his long hesitation, giving forth an extremely soft and plangent tone, which was effective in deceiving those who did not know better.⁴

The power of personality, which is the hallmark of charismatic instruction, implicates both the strengths and the limitations of this mode of teaching. Nobody was better at exposing these limitations than Peter Abelard, who famously made sport of his own teachers when he drew attention to their inconsistencies. Abelard pointed out how their teachings contradicted some of their other ideas or the ideas drawn from authorities the teachers claimed to emulate. Abelard famously charged such teachers with being all style and no substance. Today’s CCE teachers should guard themselves against this downside of charismatic instruction.

The Scholastic Mode of Instruction

Such criticisms helped fuel the rise of a new mode of instruction that took shape as scholasticism. The scholastic mode of instruction became prevalent in the 12^th century. This is the mode we witnessed in the second classroom we imagined earlier. This mode is best represented by such towering figures as Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, Hugh of St. Victor, John of Salisbury, and Bonaventure. These scholastic teachers sought to extract wisdom out of books not so much by their charismatic display and embodiment of virtue, but through dialectical reasoning. The scholastic approach called upon readers to identify propositions, categorize them, resolve contradictions, and draw inferences that would ultimately lead readers to embrace universal and timeless truths. “The method of expounding a text consists in analysis,” wrote Hugh of St. Victor, “Every analysis begins from things which are finite, or defined, and proceeds in the direction of things which are infinite, or undefined.”⁵

Scholastic teachers shared with their charismatic predecessors a conviction that books can offer wisdom. But they regarded books, other than the Scriptures, as imperfect human artifacts. Yet the wisdom contained in even the best books lay somewhat hidden beneath their imprecise human language, their parochial human opinions, and the murky particulars of human experience in history. A well-trained scholastic reader, equipped with the proper tools of analysis, can cut through a book’s human imperfections, thereby enabling him to extract the timeless wisdom a book contains.

The key to the scholastic mode of teaching and reading was to approach texts through the lens of the arts. And so, when a scholastically-trained reader opens the pages of any work—say, Cicero’s On Duties, or Vergil’s Aeneid—he can extract linguistic wisdom by reading the book according to the linguistic arts of grammar, dialectic, or rhetoric. Alternatively, a reader might draw out practical wisdom by reading the same books according to the practical arts of ethics, economics, and politics. Likewise, a reader can draw out theoretical wisdom from such works by reading them according to the theoretical arts of theology or physics. For scholastics like Hugh of St. Victor, the arts offer readers a sure pathway to tap the timeless wisdom found in the pages of any good book, a pathway that ultimately leads readers to philosophy, that is, to the love of wisdom.

The scholastic mode of instruction, like the charismatic mode, also has some limitations, as its critics were quick to point out. We shall look at these criticisms in a moment. Even so, scholastic impulses run strong in today’s renewal of Christian and classical education. Most obviously, we reflect scholastic commitments whenever we describe our education as a liberal arts project. We also echo the scholastics whenever we teach our students to interrogate books in order to extract their timeless ideas. And we promote a scholastic pedagogy when we enjoin our students to sharpen these ideas through dialectic or “Socratic” questioning, or when we instruct them to place books alongside one another in order to compare and to systematize the great ideas that lie within them.⁶

Up to this point, I have addressed two of the three prominent ways teachers across the long tradition of Christian education have handled books for instructional use. First, the charismatic approach, which flourished in the cathedral schools of the tenth and eleventh centuries. In the charismatic approach, instruction proceeds mimetically: teachers embody the wisdom found in books and inspire their students to imitate that wisdom. Then came the scholastic approach that emerged in the 12^th century, where teachers instructed students to extract wisdom from books by means of the arts, beginning with the seven liberal arts. Whereas the charismatic approach draws wisdom from books mimetically, the scholastic approach draws wisdom from books dialectically (or analytically).

The Humanities Mode of Instruction

Finally, we come to a third approach to handling books: the humanities approach. Just as the scholastic approach emerged as a reaction against the charismatic mode of instruction, so the humanities approach emerged as a reaction against the scholastic mode. Petrarch paved the way in the fourteenth century when he derided the scholastics for their tendency to isolate wisdom from the textual home where wisdom naturally resides. Petrarch complained that the scholastics concerned themselves more with ideas than with action. He insisted, against the scholastics, that doing the right thing is better than thinking the right thing.

We can see Petrarch’s concerns in his lively takedown of the scholastics who promoted Aristotelian-style analysis.

[In Aristotle’s Ethics] I see virtue, and all that is peculiar to vice as well as to virtue, egregiously defined and distinguished by him and treated with penetrating insight. When I learn all this, I know a little bit more than I knew before, but mind and will…remain the same as they were, and I myself remain the same.

It is one thing to know, another to love; one thing to understand, another to will. [Aristotle] teaches what virtue is, I do not deny that; but his lesson lacks the words that sting and set afire and urge toward love of virtue and hatred of vice or, at any rate, does not have enough of such power…

However, what is the use of knowing what virtue is if it is not loved when known? What is the use of knowing sin if it is not abhorred when it is known?⁷

Such complaints against scholasticism set the backdrop for the humanist movement that came to flourish in the fifteenth century—the quattrocento.

The humanists turned to books for wisdom no less than their scholastic predecessors had. But they parted ways with the scholastics in how they went about accessing a book’s wisdom. Whereas the scholastics searched out a book’s timeless ideas through a process of careful analysis, the humanists tapped books for the compelling examples they present. Whereas scholastic reading is an undertaking of disciplined analysis, humanities reading is an undertaking of disciplined imitation. The humanities approach begins by taking a great text—say, a work of Cicero or Vergil—and situating that work within its historical time, place, and situation. Thus, by reading a text, a good reader is transported back to ancient Rome, where the greatness of Cicero and Vergil played out in real time. Here, a good reader vicariously experiences the virtues of a great statesman like Cicero or the virtues of a great hero like Aeneas.

You may notice that this approach to texts would have introduced a conceptual challenge for the humanists. If the most important features of Cicero are not the timeless features, but rather the situational features specific to time, place, and circumstance, then doesn’t that put Cicero at a distance from us? Surely today’s readers inhabit a different context than the ancients–both the great authors we read and the great heroes they wrote about. If Cicero lived there and then, and if we readers live here and now, then how can Cicero possibly speak to us? How can the voice of an old Roman carry across the long span of time? The scholastics faced no such conundrum because they probed books for their timeless ideas, not for their time-bound examples.

The humanists resolved this conundrum by insisting that a book’s written language carries unusual power. They believed that an author’s words can span the chasm of time that separates his own era from the time of his readers. Through the power of words, the past penetrates into the present time. Pier Paolo Vergerio captured this humanities vision when he wrote,

What way of life, then, can be more delightful, or indeed more beneficial, than to read and write all the time: for moderns to understand things ancient; for present generations to converse with their posterity; and thus to make every time our own, both past and future? What excellent furniture books make! As we say, and as Cicero says, What a happy family books make!⁸

Vergerio believed that, by reading and writing, we “make every time our own.” When an ancient author writes, the author converses with his future readers; and when a present-day reader reads, he converses with an ancient author. The language inscribed in a book enables the men of the past, and their readers in the present, to commune together as if they inhabit the same place and time.

The humanists of the Quattrocento sought to restore charisma to the act of reading. But unlike the charismatic approach that had prevailed in the earlier Ottonian era, the humanities approach locates charisma not in the embodied presence of a living reader, but in the power of an original author’s words, and also in the powerful models on display in the compelling characters whose exploits an author writes about.⁹

The humanities mode of instruction, like the earlier charismatic mode, proceeds by example and imitation. It is a mimetic pedagogy. Because the example on the page is a worthy model, the immersive act of reading can usher a young reader into the culture that his predecessors had forged ahead of him. Here, a reader’s own character is shaped by the characters he reads about. A reader is inspired by his own people’s heroes, and he is warned by his own people’s villains. He learns the ways of his people—about their laws and institutions, their customs, what they celebrate and what they shun. Reading, then, is an act of both imitation and enculturation: as great books rub off on the students who read them, the students come to realize their own place within a larger story, the story of their own people. In a humanities education, reading initiates the students into their own heritage.

The humanities instructors of the quattrocento departed from their scholastic predecessors in important respects. First, whereas scholastic teachers taught virtue and vice by analyzing great ideas, humanities teachers taught virtue by exposing their students to virtuous examples, and they warned students against vice by exposing them to powerful cautionary tales. Second, because scholastic teachers mined texts primarily for the ideas they contained, the scholastics were comfortable teaching from abridgements, summaries, compilations, or Latin translations of Greek works. For example, many of us are familiar with Aquinas’s scholastic practice of extracting individual lines or quotes from various sources and then placing them alongside one another in order to analyze their propositional content. But humanities educators refused to divorce a text’s substance from its original authorial form. Humanities educators preferred that their students read entire works (not selections), as they were originally written (not in summaries or synopses), and in their original languages (not translated into Latin from another source language).

A third way humanities teachers differed from the scholastics touches on how they organized their curriculum. Scholastic teachers mapped the entire course of study along the various divisions of philosophy, which are formal branches of knowledge. For example, Hugh of St. Victor divided philosophy into four branches: the theoretical arts, the practical arts, the mechanical arts, and the logical arts. He treated these various arts as the interpretive keys that could unlock almost any book. But humanities teachers organized their curricula differently. They treated books as irreducibly whole units, and resisted the scholastic propensity to parcel out a book’s contents into the various branches of philosophy. For humanities teachers, then, organizing a curriculum entailed arranging whole books according to literary genre. Some books are poetry, some are history, some are moral philosophy, some are drama, some are oratory, and so on. These were the categories by which they organized entire curricula.

The Protestant reformers embraced the humanities approach in the way they treated original writings. It was humanities educators like Calvin, Melanchthon, and Sturm who championed a way of handling texts we sometimes refer to as “the grammatical-historical method” of interpretation.

In today’s renewal of Christian and classical education, we encounter humanities impulses just as much as we encounter charismatic and scholastic approaches to reading. For example, we follow the humanists in our schools that feature “integrated humanities” or “omnibus” courses; these courses organize readings by time period rather than by topic or by discipline. We also take up humanities concerns in our ongoing discussions about a canon of “Great Books.”

Classical educators today imitate the scholastics whenever we promote the liberal arts, but we imitate the humanists whenever we promote great books.

I opened my remarks by imagining two different teachers leading their students through The Merchant of Venice. Respectively, they represented the charismatic and the scholastic approaches to instruction. Now we can imagine a third teacher who leads a different cohort of 10^th graders at a different school. This teacher exemplifies the humanities approach as he teaches The Merchant of Venice. This humanities teacher situates the playwright, Shakespeare, within the context of Elizabethan England. She calls attention to Shakespeare’s rich diction and to the musical rhythms of each line. She stages her classroom as if she and her students together are entering into the very presence of The Bard; to open the text is tantamount to inviting Shakespeare into their very midst. In this way her students taste Shylock’s bitterness as a cautionary example, and they feel Portia’s loyalty and eloquence as a powerful model they should emulate.

The humanities mode was susceptible to corruptions no less than the other modes that preceded it. It is one thing to look to the great men of the past as examples worthy of emulation; it is another thing to regard them as the very definition of what virtue is.

Yet this is exactly how some early modern humanists came to revere Cicero. These enthusiasts assessed their students’ work by how closely it imitated Cicero’s vocabulary and phrasing. Suppose one of their students prepared a speech: if the speech was laden with words and phrases taken from Cicero, these teachers deemed it to be eloquent, even if the student totally bored his audience. For these humanities teachers, to describe a student’s work as Ciceronian was to award the highest praise.

Such “Ciceronianism,” as it was called at the time, was an overly enthusiastic version of the humanities approach to instruction. Who better to expose such cold and inflexible traditionalism than Erasmus? Erasmus’s satirical dialogue Ciceronianus is a brilliant takedown of those great-book enthusiasts who fetishize the past. Erasmus affirms that students should imitate good examples, yet he also shows that an absolutist approach to imitation can be corrupting, both rhetorically and morally. We imitate rightly, he insists, only insofar as we understand that the exemplars we imitate addressed a context that was different from our own. Good imitation invariably requires a measure of adaptation; imitation should never descend into reenactment.

In the dialogue, Bulephorus represents Erasmus, and Nosoponus represents the humanities purist, the unreserved imitator of Cicero.

[Bulephorus]: Well then, do the present conditions agree with those of the time when Cicero lived and spoke, considering our absolutely different religion, government, laws, customs, occupations, the very face of the men?

[Nosoponus]: No, not at all.

[Bulephorus]: What effrontery then would he have who should insist that we speak, on all occasions, as Cicero did? Let him bring back to us first that Rome which was; let him give us the Senate and the senate house, the Conscript Fathers, the Knights, the people in tribes and centuries; let him give back the college of augurs and soothsayers, the chief priests, the flamens and vestals, the aediles, praetors, tribunes of the people, consuls, dictators, Caesars, the assemblies, laws, decrees of the senate, plebiscites, statues, triumphs, ovations, thanksgivings, shrines, sanctuaries, feasts of the gods, sacred rites, gods and goddesses, the Capitol, and sacred fire; let him give back the provinces, the colonies, the municipal town, and the allies of the city which was mistress of the world. Then, since on every hand the entire scene of things is changed, who can today speak fittingly unless he is unlike Cicero? Therefore, it seems to me that our argument brings us to a different conclusion. You say that no one can speak with propriety unless he copies Cicero; but the fact itself convinces us that no one can speak well unless he wisely withdraws from the example of Cicero. Wherever I turn, I see things have changed, and I stand on another stage, I see another theater, yes, another world. What shall I do? I, a Christian, must speak to Christians about the Christian religion. In order that I may speak fittingly, shall I imagine that I am living in the age of Cicero and speaking in a crowded senate in the presence of the senators on the Tarpeian Rock? And shall I borrow words, figures, rhythms from the orations which Cicero delivered in the Senate? I must address a promiscuous crowd in which there are young women, wives, and widows; I must speak of fasting, of repentance, of the fruits of prayer, the utility of alms, the sanctity of marriage, the contempt of changing things, the study of the Divine Word. How will the eloquence of Cicero help me here to whom the themes as well as the vocabulary were unknown? Will not an orator be cold who sews, as it were, patches taken from Cicero upon his garments?¹⁰

Erasmus would likewise have wielded his satirical pen against the purist antiquarians who run around the margins of today’s classical education movement. These are our colleagues who fawn over old things simply because they are old, and who leer at anything recent simply because the thing lacks age. If we find it in Homer or Plato or Cicero, then they deem it to be worthwhile; otherwise, they allege, it isn’t worth their time. Erasmus had little patience for this kind of humanities overreach, and neither should we.

Concluding Reflections

My historical survey traces just over 500 years of instructional practice, spanning roughly the years 950 to 1500 AD. Educators back in these centuries promoted three ideal modes of instruction: first, the charismatic mode; then came the scholastic mode, followed in turn by the humanities mode. The charismatic mode flourished among leading educators in the 10^th and 11^th centuries. When critics exposed its downsides, the next generation of educators turned to the scholastic mode, which had taken root by the twelfth century. Later on, a new breed of critics brought to light the weaknesses of scholasticism. Their criticisms forged a pathway for the humanities mode to emerge and eventually prevail among the leading educators of the fifteenth century. The humanities mode, too, was vulnerable to corruptions no less than the charismatic and scholastic modes that had preceded it. The historical sources that bear witness to these three modes of instruction tend to be polemical in nature; they either promote or denounce each mode in its turn. Such sources invariably present each mode as either an ideal or a caricature. What actually occurred between teachers and students in the actual give-and-take of instruction probably did not live up to these types in their purest forms. The reality on the ground is always messier than the tidy categories of idealists who wrote about it.

By way of analogy, consider that the typical American family includes 1.9 children, and yet there exists no family in the real world that actually fits that description. I suspect the same was true for charismatic, scholastic, and humanities modes of instruction as they lived out in classroom instruction. In polemical literature they existed as types, whereas the practice of actual teachers was probably more complicated.

Nonetheless, it is helpful for school administrators to keep these three types in mind. These types can help us discern what is happening in our classrooms. They also offer a vocabulary that helps us describe it.

I offer two practical takeaways: one is pedagogical and the other is curricular.

First, with regard to pedagogy, consider how you develop your faculty at your school. You probably know teachers who incline toward either the charismatic, the scholastic, or the humanities mode. If you know a teacher’s inclinations, then this history also indicates where that same teacher’s temptations may lie. You can shore up a teacher against these pedagogical temptations by supplying an appreciation for the other modes of instruction.

Also, consider the implications for hiring. If all your literature or history teachers are humanists, then perhaps your next hire should be a scholastic. Likewise, if your school is top-heavy with scholastics, you would do well to add a charismatic teacher into the mix.

In the second place, we turn to the curriculum. My historical survey can help you assess whether your teachers are putting texts to the use that your school intended for them. Ask yourself: Why is it that your curriculum committee selected Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice? Did your school adopt this text because you want your students to wrestle with questions of justice and mercy? If so, then deliver the text in the scholastic mode. Alternatively, perhaps you selected that text for its compelling style, and because it stands as a monument to what our mother tongue can accomplish. If that is the case, then you want a teacher who instructs in the humanities mode.

Consider a worker who digs a hole in the ground. Some might dig one way in order to extract minerals; others dig another way if they want to extract natural gas, and still others will dig in yet another way if they want to draw out water. Suppose a book holds a place in your curriculum because it is a source of fresh water, but you treat it in the classroom the way a miner digs for copper or silver. Sure, your students may be digging into that book, but what they draw out of that book is not the fresh water they were supposed to be digging for.

I’ll reiterate: If you know what books are assigned in a given course, that does not mean you know what the students will be taking away from that book. All classical schools are vulnerable to this point, and especially schools that feature “integrated humanities” or “omnibus” courses—courses that are designed around reading lists. The problem is not that you organize your courses around great books. You should be selecting and assigning great books! My concern, rather, is about the all-too-common failure to align the reason why a particular book is assigned with how that book is actually handled.

Here’s a final takeaway. You hire teachers to teach your students, and you select books that your students will read. Are your teachers and your book selections working well together? Or are they laboring at cross purposes? My brief survey of the history of Christian education highlights a legacy that can help you answer these questions.

Notes