EnglishLanguage Arts

The Oldest and Most Effective Form of Education

Reading the Great Books in community is not a trend. It is the oldest continuously practiced form of intellectual and moral formation in the Western world, stretching from Plato’s Academy through the medieval university to the classical revival of our own time. Mortimer Adler, in How to Read a Book (1940), argued that genuine education requires the direct encounter between a student’s mind and a great author’s mind — with no textbook standing in between. A summary of Homer is not Homer. A textbook chapter about Shakespeare is not Shakespeare. The Great Books are the education.

Adler was not alone. Louise Cowan, the literary scholar who shaped the Great Books curriculum at the University of Dallas, insisted that the great works of literature are not historical artifacts to be studied but living voices that make claims on the reader. A student who reads the Iliad is not merely learning about the ancient Greeks — she is being confronted with permanent questions about honor, grief, and the cost of glory that she will face in her own life.

Literature and the Truth About Human Nature

C. S. Lewis warned in The Abolition of Man (1943) that a generation educated without the old books — without what he called the Tao, the common moral inheritance of humanity — would produce not free thinkers but “men without chests”: clever enough to argue, but with no trained affections to guide them toward what is good. Lewis understood what every classical educator knows: literature does not just transmit information. It forms the moral imagination. A child who weeps at the death of Hector, who admires the courage of Antigone, who recoils from the treachery of Macbeth, is learning to love what is good and hate what is wicked — not by memorizing rules, but by living vicariously through the greatest moral dramas ever written.

This is the transcendental of truth at work. Great literature reveals human nature as it really is — not as an ideology wishes it were. The student who reads Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov learns more about the psychology of sin than any sociology textbook can teach. The student who reads Augustine’s Confessions learns more about the restlessness of the human heart than any self-help bestseller will ever offer.

The Evidence: Great Books Readers Think Better

The case is not merely philosophical — it is measurable. Studies in critical thinking consistently show that students who engage with primary texts and original sources outperform students who rely on textbooks and secondary summaries. The Association of American Colleges and Universities has documented that sustained engagement with complex texts is among the strongest predictors of critical thinking growth across all disciplines. Dorothy Sayers, in her landmark essay The Lost Tools of Learning (1947), argued that composition taught in connection with great models produces writers who think clearly — because clear writing is clear thinking made visible.

Great Hearts Academies, whose curriculum Virtualis delivers, have demonstrated this at scale: their students consistently outperform state and national averages on reading and verbal assessments, not because of test prep, but because students who have spent years reading Thucydides, Austen, and Dante develop the analytical muscles that standardized tests are built to measure.

What This Means for Your Child

Your child will not read about great books at Virtualis. She will read the books themselves — the whole books, in community, with a teacher trained in the Socratic method. By the time she graduates, she will have read Homer and Virgil, Shakespeare and Dante, Augustine and Dostoevsky. She will know how to parse an argument, defend a thesis, change her mind in the face of evidence, and write with the precision and power that come only from years of reading the best prose and poetry the human race has produced. That is not enrichment. That is the education she was made for.