A Three-Thousand-Year Conversation

A Three-Thousand-Year Conversation

In the last video [https://www.scottpostma.net/p/the-ship-with-watertight-bulkheads?r=332w5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web], I talked about Dorothy Sayers’s watertight bulkheads, the great defect of modern education which teaches students “subjects” but fails to teach them how to think. In this video, I want to show you the alternative. And to do that, I need to tell you about two men and a very big idea. In 1952, Robert Maynard Hutchins, who was then president of the University of Chicago, and the philosopher Mortimer J. Adler, published a fifty-four-volume set called the Great Books of the Western World. The first volume in the series was Hutchins’ introduction to the set. There is something he wrote in that introduction that I want to draw your attention to. Hutchins wrote: Until lately the West has regarded it as self-evident that the road to education lay through great books. No man was educated unless he was acquainted with the masterpieces of his tradition. He called the great books the road to education; neither a supplement nor an elective. The identified them as the road, the pathway, the means of acquiring one’s education. What Hutchins and Adler understood is that the great books of the Western world are not simply artifacts in a museum collection. They are a long, sustained conversation, the written record of the poets and philosophers throughout the West who have discussed and debated, for nearly three millennia, the perennial questions that relate to the human condition. We encounter Homer speaking, Plato answering and Virgil building on Homer. St. Augustine answers Plato and Dante gathers all of them up into a single vision. Hobbs disagrees with Aristotle and Rousseau borrowing from and nuancing Hobbs, puts forth his own vision. And, Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkien shine the whole inheritance bravely and brightly into the darkness of the modern, progressive twentieth century. Hutchins called this the Great Conversation. And the remarkable thing about this conversation is that it has never ended. It only waits for the next generation to join it. To read the great books is to engage in the Great Conversation, to discover how generations of people understood the answers to the perennial human questions, and to see how ideas have consequences, and which of those ideas have shaped our present moment. The Great Conversation Course Now, here is what I am offering your family. My Great Conversation course is a six-year, integrated humanities course for students who begin at twelve or thirteen years old. I’m inviting twelve to sixteen students of this age to spend six consecutive years in a single cohort, where we will read, discuss, and write about the primary texts of the Western tradition in chronological order. We will engage these works not as museum artifacts but as what Chesterton called, “the democracy of the dead,” living voices in a long and lively conversation. Each year of the course is anchored both chronologically and thematically, structured around one of the six great ideas Mortimer Adler identified in his book Six Great Ideas [https://amzn.to/4gvoXRS] as threads running through the whole of Western thought: Truth, Goodness, Beauty, Liberty, Equality, and Justice. Year One: Creation, Cosmos, and the Heroic Soul. The big idea is Truth. We read Genesis, Homer, the Greek tragedians, and Plato, etc., and we ask: What is real, and how do we know it? Year Two: Reason, Virtue, and the City of Man. The big idea is Goodness. Plato’s Republic, Aristotle, Virgil, Cicero, the New Testament, etc. What is virtue, and how is it cultivated? Year Three: Faith, Reason, and the City of God. The big idea is Beauty. St. Augustine, Boethius, Aquinas, Dante, Chaucer, and the Beowulf-poet, etc.. What is the transcendent, and how does it draw us? Year Four: Renaissance, Reformation, and the Collapse of Christendom. The big idea is Liberty. Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Shakespeare, Milton, Pascal, Rutherford, etc. What is freedom, and what does it cost? Year Five: Revolution, Romanticism, and the Modern Self. The big idea is Equality. Locke, Burke, the Federalist Papers, Tocqueville, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, etc. What does it mean for all persons to bear dignity? Year Six: Postmodernism and Cultural Recovery. The big idea is Justice. Chesterton, Eliot, Lewis, Tolkien, O’Connor, Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, Pieper, Sowell, etc. What do we owe one another, and on what basis? Along the way, students will study the flow of big ideas in the historical narrative: for example, how beauty was conceived in Athens, transfigured on cross in Jerusalem, encoded in the Gothic cathedrals, then fragmented in the modern era. Together, we will read history, geography, civics, economics, art, music, architecture, even some astronomy and natural science. And, all of it will be synchronized to the civilization we’re reading, because that’s how the tradition actually holds together. The Most Significant Component Now let me tell you about the part of this course that I believe matters most; it’s the part almost no other program offers. The students who begin this course together will finish it together. The same cohort for six years. Why does that matter? Because the Great Conversation cannot be had alone, and it cannot be had well with strangers. Students who join this cohort will learn to read with increasing depth and breadth, write with increasing sophistication, reason with increasing rigor, and speak with increasing eloquence; and they will do so together, as a community of Christians whose understanding and wisdom incrementally grows deeper precisely because the community of learners does not change from year to year. By year four, these students will share an intellectual vocabulary. By year six, when they read Nietzsche, they will answer him with the Plato and Augustine they read together years before. That is what it means to join a conversation rather than take a class! By the time a student graduates from The Great Conversation, he or she will have read more primary texts deeply, written more substantive prose eloquently, and engaged with the perennial human questions more seriously than the vast majority of students entering America’s finest universities. More importantly, students who complete this six-year course of study will know how to think wisely and act virtuously, which is really the only kind of education worth committing six years of their lives to. In the next video, I’m going to get practical. I’ll talk about the weekly schedule, the credits, the reading load, the writing your child will produce, and exactly what this course covers so you can see how it fits into your family’s plan. I’ll see you in the next video. If you enjoyed this post, please give it a ❤️ and consider subscribing to BOOKS AND LETTERS to receive new posts in your inbox regularly. A paid subscription graciously supports my work. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.scottpostma.net/subscribe [https://www.scottpostma.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

The Ship With Watertight Bulkheads

In 1947, the English writer Dorothy Sayers stood before an audience at Oxford and asked a question that continues to haunt modern education to this day. In some ways, the question has become the catalyst for the growth of classical Christian education over the past 30 years. “Do you often come across people,” she asked, for whom, all their lives, a ‘subject’ remains a ‘subject,’ divided by watertight bulkheads from all other ‘subjects,’ so that they experience very great difficulty making any mental connection between, say, philosophy and economics, or chemistry and art? Let’s think about that image for a moment. A watertight bulkhead is a wall inside a ship, sealed so that nothing passes from one compartment to the next. This is a fine thing for a ship, but it’s a disaster for a human mind. Sayers pressed the point even further. “Is it not the great defect of our education today,” she asked, “that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils ‘subjects,’ we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think? They learn everything, except the art of learning.” I’ve been an educator for more than thirty years, and I have to tell you: not much has changed since Dorothy Sayers lamented this pedagogical deficiency nearly eighty years ago. Modern academic programs, even some of the better ones, are still organized around “subjects.” Students take Math at nine o’clock; history at ten; literature at eleven. Each discipline is sealed in its own watertight compartment. Each with its own textbook. Each disconnected from the others. And, more often than not, each is disconnected from the child’s soul. But here is the thing every parent instinctively knows: reality is not fragmented that way. Learning “subjects” is no substitute for learning the arts of dealing with the interconnectedness of our reality, the reality from which subjects are merely extracted, or dissected. When Dante wrote the Divine Comedy, he was not writing “literature,” per se. He was writing theology, astronomy, politics, philosophy, and poetry all at once, because that is what reality is actually like. When the medieval builders raised a cathedral, they were dealing with geometry, engineering, music, and worship all in a single act. The whole was greater than the sum of all of its parts. A truly humane education is an integrated education; it’s an education that teaches students how to see and how to think about reality in all of its layers and complexities, such that the whole of it is much greater than all of its parts. Now, why am I telling you this? Because if you have a child who is twelve or thirteen years old right now, you are standing at the single most important educational crossroads of that child’s life. These next six years—from about age twelve to 18 (i.e, graduation)—are the years when a young person’s mind and character take their lasting shape. It’s true that early development plays a huge part in a child’s personality, but these are the years when a student either learns to think, or merely learns to check boxes and perform the prescriptive hoop-jumping routines of cogs and consumers. These are the years when the child will either come to love what is true, good, and beautiful or learn to love whatever the algorithm serves him next. A drum that I am continually beating, something I tell parents every chance I get is education, rightly understood, is the formation of a human soul. It is the noble work of passing down wisdom and knowledge from one generation to the next. It is where every culture tells the truth about what it believes and what it loves. Consider that in the modern world, we have learned how to effectively transfer information to a machine. We’ve learned how to store massive data in clouds and on devices. And just like our machines, modern education has taught students to accumulate disconnected facts while remaining unformed, unwise, and spiritually malnourished. And in an age when artificial intelligence can produce gobs of information instantly and endlessly, the one thing your child needs most is the one thing you cannot get from a machine: a humane education. The education of the whole person. An education that forms judgment, imagination, courage, eloquence, attention, and wisdom. That is why, this fall, I am offering something I have spent the better part of my career preparing to teach: a robust, integrated humanities course called The Great Conversation. It’s a single course of study that spans six full years, covering the best primary literature of the Western tradition from antiquity to postmodernity, with history, philosophy, theology, geography, civics, economics, art, music, architecture, logic, writing, and rhetoric woven together the way reality actually holds them together. This course is not a collection of subjects confined to watertight bulkheads. It’s one ship, built whole. In the next video, I’m going to tell you exactly what the Great Conversation is, where the phrase comes from, what my six-year course covers, and why a small cohort of students reading together for six consecutive years accomplishes something no year-by-year program can ever replicate. Let me encourage you to take a moment to ask yourself Sayers’s question about your own child’s education: is he (or she) learning “subjects” or is he (or she) learning the art of learning? I’ll see you in a couple of days in the next video. If you enjoyed this post, please give it a ❤️ and consider subscribing to BOOKS AND LETTERS to receive new posts in your inbox regularly. A paid subscription graciously supports my work. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.scottpostma.net/subscribe [https://www.scottpostma.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Introducing 'The Great Conversation' Course

Do you often come across people for whom, all their lives, a “subject” remains a “subject,” divided by water-tight bulkheads from all other “subjects,” so that they experience very great difficulty in making an immediate mental connection between, let us say, algebra and detective fiction, sewage disposal and the price of salmon, cellulose and the distribution of rainfall—or, more generally, between such spheres of knowledge as philosophy and economics, or chemistry and art?… Is it not the great defect of our education to-day (—a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned—) that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils “subjects,” we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think? They learn everything, except the art of learning. —Dorothy Sayers, “The Lost Tools of Learning” Modern academic programs, even some of the better ones, are still organized around “subjects.” Not much has changed since Dorothy Sayers lamented this pedagogical deficiency all the way back in 1947. But learning “subjects” is no substitute for learning the arts of dealing with the interconnectedness of our reality, from which subjects are merely extracted or dissected. A truly humane education is an integrated education that teaches students how to see and think about reality in all its layers and complexities such that the whole of it is much greater than all of its parts (i.e., subjects). That’s why I am offering a new course this fall, a robust, integrated humanities course called “The Great Conversation” that spans a full six years, covering the best primary literature from antiquity to postmodernity. The Great Conversation course is organized around the most profound perennial human questions, the very same questions that got Socrates executed, the same questions Augustine wrestled with in his Confessions, Dante mapped onto the architecture of the cosmos, and that men like Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkien brought bravely and brightly into the twentieth century. A Six-Year Structural Architecture I’m inviting 12-16 students (12-13 years old) to spend six consecutive years in a single cohort where we will read, discuss, and write about the primary texts of the Western tradition in chronological order, engaging them as living voices in a long and lively conversation. Students who take this course are committing to something bigger than their self-comfort and contemporary conveniences. They are committing to the work of securing an ultimate possession. Students who join this cohort will learn to read with increasing depth and breadth, write with increasing sophistication, reason with increasing rigor, and speak with increasing eloquence. They will study, for instance, how beauty was conceived in Athens, transfigured in Jerusalem, encoded in the Gothic cathedral, and fragmented in the modern era. And they will do all of this together, as a community of Christians whose understanding and wisdom incrementally grows deeper precisely because the community of learners does not change from year to year. By the time a student graduates from The Great Conversation, he or she will have read more primary texts deeply, written more substantive prose eloquently, and engaged with the perennial human questions more seriously than the vast majority of students entering America’s finest universities. More importantly, students who complete this six-year course of study will know how to think wisely and act virtuously, which is really the only kind of education worth committing six years to. Basic Functionality Each 32-week year is organized into four 8-week terms, covering: * Great Books (primary sources, heavily weighted) * Writing & Rhetoric (progressing from imitation to argumentation to original thesis) * Logic (formal and informal, integrated with texts) * Art & Music (chronologically synchronized with literary/historical period) * Geography, Civics, & Economics (contextualizing the civilizations being read) * Theology (Christian Scripture and theological tradition in dialogue with secular texts) Two weekly, 90-minute Socratic Seminar component runs through all six years, modeled on the Adler'/Hutchins Paideia approach. A reasonable annual credit allocation for such a 32-week, 3-contact-hour per week curriculum would be: Each year will be anchored both chronologically and thematically, structured around one of the six perennial questions Mortimer J. Adler identified in his Six Great Ideas as the threads running through the whole of Western thought. Year I - Creation, Cosmos, and the Heroic Soul * Big Idea: Truth * Ages: 12-13 * Chronological Focus: Antiquity to Classical Greece * Textual Focus: Genesis, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, the Pre-Socratics, Plato’s Socratic dialogues, etc. * Objective Focus: What is real, and how do we know it? Year II - Reason, Virtue, and the City of Man * Big Idea: Goodness * Ages: 13-14 * Chronological Focus: Classical Greece through Roman Empire * Textual Focus: Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, Virgil, Cicero, Plutarch, and the New Testament. * Objective Focus: What is virtue, and how is it cultivated? Year III - Faith, Reason, and the City of God * Big Idea: Beauty * Ages: 14-15 * Chronological Focus: Fall of Rome to the Medieval world * Textual Focus: Augustine, Boethius, Aquinas, Dante, Chaucer, and the Beowulf-poet. * Objective Focus: What is the transcendent, and how does it draw us? Year IV - Renaissance, Reformation, and the End of Christendom * Big Idea: Liberty * Ages: 15–16 * Chronological Focus: Renaissance to the Early Modern Period * Textual Focus: Erasmus, More, Luther, Calvin, Shakespeare, Milton, Descartes, Pascal, Rutherford. * Objective Focus: What is freedom, and what does it cost? Year V - Revolution, Romanticism, and the Modern Self * Big Idea: Equality * Ages: 16–17 * Chronological Focus: Early Modern to Modern Era * Textual Focus: Locke, Rousseau, Burke, The Federalist Papers, Tocqueville, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Freud, etc. * Objective Focus: What does it mean for all persons to bear dignity? Year VI - Postmodernism and Cultural Recovery * Big Idea: Justice * Ages: 17-18 * Chronological Focus: Modern Era to Postmodern Era * Textual Focus: Chesterton, T.S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Tolkien, O’Connor, Orwell, Arendt, Solzhenitsyn, Pieper, Sowell, Sartre, Heidegger, Polanyi, etc. * Objective Focus: What do we owe one another, and on what basis? If you have a child 12-14 years old that you think would be interested, please use this button to express your interest. I would be happy to follow up. If you enjoyed this post, please give it a ❤️ and consider subscribing to BOOKS AND LETTERS to receive new posts in your inbox regularly. A paid subscription graciously supports my work. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.scottpostma.net/subscribe [https://www.scottpostma.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

The Christian Humanist Reading Life

The Invitation, the Investment, and the Door This is the video where I ask you to make a decision. Over the past couple of weeks, I have shared five lessons on classical Christian education. I’ve also shared with you the crisis [https://www.scottpostma.net/p/the-crisis-and-the-invitation?r=332w5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web], the wisdom impoverishment that afflicts our modern generation, what actually changes in a person [https://www.scottpostma.net/p/what-happens-when-wisdom-is-recovered?r=332w5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web] who recovers the reading life, and exactly how the six weeks of The Christian Humanist Reading Life work, with my forthcoming book Becoming Classically Educated as the spine of the journey. Today I am opening enrollment to my six-week course; and here’s what that means. The course runs from July 7 through August 11. It will take place over six Tuesday evenings, ninety minutes each, live with me. I have to cap this course at 13 students, which is one more seat than I usually open. I cap it at thirteen students because the conversation requires a room small enough for everyone to have a voice. In other words, this is not a course for wall flowers; it’s real Socratic engagement. The investment is $397. That is less than one college credit hour. It is less than most professional development seminars. It includes the live cohort, the assignments, the community space, and a copy of Becoming Classically Educated, a 200-hundred-page volume of essays you will return to long after the cohort ends. What you will receive is six weeks of live, guided formation with someone who has spent thirty years in the Christian intellectual tradition, and a book that distills the substance of those thirty years. This is something you cannot get from a podcast, a blog, or even a self-paced course. Answering Objections (i.e., The Refutatio) Let me take thirty seconds to answer the three objections I often hear whenever I’ve offered invitations like this in the past. “I do not have time.” You have ninety minutes a week. That is the live session. The reading and assignment will take another sixty to ninety minutes. If you cannot find three hours a week for the most important kind of formation a human being can undertake—the ordering of your soul toward wisdom—then I would gently suggest the course is not the problem. The course is the solution. “I am not academic enough.” This course is not for academics. It is for intelligent adults who are serious about their intellectual and spiritual lives. It’s for parents, professionals, pastors, teachers, and curious people who have always wanted to read widely and think well but never had the structure or the guide. Becoming Classically Educated was written precisely for you. It wasn’t written for specialists, but for thoughtful adults willing to take their formation seriously. If you can read a newspaper and hold a conversation, you are qualified. “I have tried this before and it did not stick.” I know. That is why this course exists. What makes The Christian Humanist Reading Life different is not the content, necessarily; it is the structure, the accountability, the community, the fact that you will have a tangible book in your hands as a companion, and the fact that every session is designed to produce formation, not fill your head with more information. You are not signing up for a lecture series. You are signing up for a way of life. Here is what I want for you. I want you to be the kind of person who, five years from now, reads Augustine with familiarity, thinks about the question of the good life with clarity, orders your days around the things that matter most, and has a community of people who are doing the same alongside you. I want you to be able to hand your children and grandchildren a tradition, not just a set of beliefs, but a way of reading, a way of seeing, a way of being human—a great tradition that they can live by. That does not happen automatically. It happens by deliberate choice, made on a particular day, to begin. Today is that day! Enrollment is open now [https://buy.stripe.com/dRm6oG7as6SJatWc9o5wI00]. 13 seats. The course begins July 7th. I want to see you there. And if you are on the fence—if you have a question that has not been answered, a concern you have not been able to shake—please, email me@scottpostma.net. I mean that. I will reply personally. Thanks for reading BOOKS AND LETTERS! If it resonated with you, please press the ❤️ button and share it with a friend. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.scottpostma.net/subscribe [https://www.scottpostma.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

The Course, the Structure, and the Book

The Course, the Structure, and the Book In the first two videos I told you about the crisis [https://open.substack.com/pub/scottpostma/p/the-crisis-and-the-invitation?r=332w5&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web]: the profound impoverishment of wisdom in our modern age that afflicts even the most educated people in our society. And, I also talked about what actually changes in a person [https://open.substack.com/pub/scottpostma/p/what-happens-when-wisdom-is-recovered?r=332w5&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web] who recovers the reading life of a Christian Humanist. Today I want to show you exactly what we are going to do together over six weeks. First, I want to dispel a myth I suspect is sitting in the back of your mind. You have tried making reading lists before. You purchased the books. You started journaling, but somewhere around the second or third week, life intervened and the whole project faded away. You thought you’d pick it back up again when life slowed down; but that never happened. You may feel that you’re not disciplined enough, that you lack commitment. What you lacked was the right structure, the right community, and a guide who had been down this road before and knew where the pitfalls were. That’s exactly what The Christian Humanist Reading Life [https://buy.stripe.com/dRm6oG7as6SJatWc9o5wI00] provides. The backbone of this course is my brand new book, Becoming Classically Educated: Humane Letters on Education, Culture & the Great Conversation. Becoming Classically Educated is a collection of essays I have spent years writing, edited into a single volume by Roman Roads Press [https://romanroadspress.com/] for release next month. It is the most personal argument I have ever made for what classical Christian education actually is, why it matters now, and how an ordinary adult can begin to inhabit the tradition. Every student in the cohort will work through this book with me, week by week, examined as a series of provocations toward, and pathways into, the Great Tradition. Most of what you read will be the essays themselves. Some weeks I will supply you with a supplementary text from one of the greats (i.e., Augustine, Lewis, Pieper, Sertillanges, etc.) to deepen the conversation. But the spine of the course is my book, and you will be the first to explore it—with the author as your guide. Here is how the six weeks work. Week One: What Is a Human Being For? We begin with the question every other question is going to be built on. What kind of creature is a human being, and what is he for? Drawing on the opening essays of Becoming Classically Educated, we’ll trace the answer the classical and Christian tradition has given for two and a half millennia: that human beings are made in the image of God for wisdom, virtue, and the knowledge of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. Week one is the anthropological foundation of everything that follows, and getting it right will set the stage for everything else. Week Two: Live Not by Lies: Truth, the Logos, and the Life of the Mind Modern distraction is not, as they say, a flaw, but a feature. It is a carefully engineered condition. So is modern relativism. In week two, we’ll take up the essay “Toward a More Certain Knowledge of the Truth” and ask what it means to build an intellectual life on the conviction that Truth is not a set of propositions to be mastered but a Person to be known. Together, we will build a daily reading rule—a systematic and sustainable rhythm—and you will discover that reading is not just an amusing activity but something Josef Pieper called an act of genuine leisure: a form of receptive presence that makes wisdom possible. Week Three: Ordering the Loves St. Augustine’s great insight is that sin is not primarily the doing of “bad things,” but it can even be the loving of good things in the wrong order. Thus, real education is the reordering of the loves. This week works through the longest and most ambitious essay in the book, tracing the concept of the good from Plato and Aristotle through Augustine’s ordo amoris to the contemporary distortions of self-actualization and therapeutic happiness. This is also the most personally confronting week of the six. You’ll map your actual loves against your intended loves, and you will begin to see clearly where formation is needed. Week Four: Words Create Worlds: Language, Beauty, and the Liberating Arts I’ve emphasized this before, but classical education is, at its root, a language-centered education. What do I mean by that? I mean words are instruments of communication, yes; but, more importantly, they are, in the deepest sense, constitutive of reality. Drawing on “Cosmos or Chaos: Words Create Worlds” and “Toward a Recovery of Beauty,” we will explore the way in which the liberal arts are more than an ornament on the edifice of education; rather the liberal arts are the foundation, the very disciplines by which a human being learns to perceive truth, love goodness, and recognize beauty as objective realities and not private preferences. Week Five: Into the Great Conversation We demystify the Great Books and I walk you through how to actually read difficult texts. How to read closely and be changed by them. You will do a guided close reading of a central text, like Plato or Dante, alongside a Christian humanist like C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, or Flannery O’Connor on literature as formation. That way we can experience the primary means by which the soul is trained to see goodness and beauty as real. In week five, you learn to read with your whole person, not just your intellect. Week Six: A Rule of Life for the Christian Humanist The course concludes with a commission. Drawing on the book’s essays on science, justice, and history, we will turn from personal formation to applied judgment; and, from there to your own vocation. You will leave with a personal Rule of Life: a document that defines your daily reading practice, your weekly intellectual disciplines, your community of conversation, and the texts you will pursue in the months ahead. I’m not just going to pump you up with inspiration; I will help you create a personal plan. Each week includes a ninety-minute live session with me (e.g., discussions, teachings, questions, etc.), plus a short written assignment designed to move the ideas from your head into your life. The assignments are not academic exercises, per se. They are more formation practices. You will also have access to a private community space where the conversation continues between sessions. There you can share what you are reading, ask questions, and discover that you are not alone in any of this. In closing, let me be completely honest with you. This course will not give you everything! Six weeks is just enough time to reorient your attention, recover your love of serious reading, enter the Great Conversation, and build a sustainable Rule of Life. It is not enough to exhaust the tradition, obviously. You won’t finish all the great books or complete your personal formation. No course could do that. What it will do is give you the foundation, the practice, the community, and a book I hope you’ll return to for years as you continue the long work of personal transformation well after the six weeks are over. The good news is that the tradition is inexhaustible. If you finish this course and want to go deeper—and most of us nerds (I mean students) do—there will be an opportunity for an advanced cohort, an ongoing community, and continued work together. But that comes later. Right now, the question is whether you are ready to take the bull by the horns and begin. In tomorrow’s video, I am going to tell you how to join the cohort, what the investment is, and why I am limiting this first cohort to just 13 students. I will also answer the three objections I hear most often: “I don’t have the time,” “I am not academic enough,” and “I have tried this before and it didn’t stick.” Watch for the video. And in the meantime, if you have a question about the course, about my new book, Becoming Classically Educated, or about whether this course is right for you, please leave it below. I will answer you, personally.Thanks for reading BOOKS AND LETTERS! If it resonated with you, please press the ❤️ button and share it with a friend. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.scottpostma.net/subscribe [https://www.scottpostma.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]