BOOKS AND LETTERS Podcast

The Crisis and the Invitation

There’s a paradox at the heart of modern life and I think you’ve probably felt it even if you haven’t had the words to explain it. We are, by nearly every metric and standard, the most educated generation in human history. Ours has issued more college degrees, distributed more information, and provided more access to more content than any people group or generation who have ever lived. Yet, we all feel the burden that something is profoundly wrong. Not only do we feel it intuitively, but studies confirm that we are more anxious, more distracted, more confused about fundamental questions of meaning and purpose than almost any generation before us. When Nietzsche pointed out that “God is dead,” that Europe had lost the source of its vitality and was suddenly facing the nausea of nihilism, that was 140 years ago; and we have only plunged significantly deeper into the abyss of meaninglessness since then. To say it another way: we know abundantly more and we understand significantly less. The ancient philosophers had a word for the kind of knowledge that actually matters, sophia, wisdom. Sophia wasn’t, fundamentally, facts or information; it wasn’t solely skill, and certainly wasn’t credentials. Wisdom was the capacity to apprehend what is real, to love what is good, and to approximate one’s life accordingly. And the great tradition of the West—from Plato to Polanyi—maintained, with remarkable consistency, that wisdom is not the accumulation of disparate facts. It is something that must be cultivated. Wisdom grows slowly, over years, through disciplined attention to the right things. And if there is any merit to the research cited by the social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, in his recent writings, what has happened to us is we’ve actually gotten cognitively stupider. That’s not meant to sound unkind; it’s just an honest report on the condition of our culture. What’s happened is that we’ve been trained by our screens, our institutions, and our economic markets to optimize for information retrieval rather than soul formation. We’ve been taught to scan rather than read, to consume rather than contemplate, to acquire knowledge rather than be transformed by it. The result is what C. S. Lewis called “men without chests.” We are a people who know the facts but have no trained loves, no ordered desires, and no moral imagination capable of perceiving goodness and beauty as objectively real. Again, that description was Lewis’s diagnosis of the 1940s. It is a flattering portrait compared to what we are now. Now, with all that doom and gloom hanging over us, I still genuinely believe that our condition is recoverable. So let’s think about it. The tools are still there. The books are still there. The great tradition—what Robert Hutchins called the Great Conversation, that nearly three-thousand-year exchange between the greatest minds of the Western world about the things that matter most—it’s still there, waiting for us to pull up a chair and join it. I’ve spent thirty years in Christian education—as a pastor, as a teacher, as a scholar, and as the president of an online academic institution that serves classical Christian families across the country. I have earned a doctorate in the humanities. I’ve edited a journal of classical Christian education. And I’ve recently published two books, one on the recovery of classical Christian education, and the other a devotional commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans. I tell you that not to brag or impress you, but to demonstrat that I am not offering you a theory. I’m offering you a practice, a way of life that I have been striving to live, a way of life that I have watched transform students young and old, and that I believe with everything in me can transform your life too. In the next few days, I’m going to share with you something I’ve been developing for some time: a course called The Christian Humanist Reading Life: Recovering Wisdom in an Age of Digital Noise. This is a six week, live, in-community course, working through the ideas and practices that make a genuine intellectual and spiritual life possible—regardless of your background, your busy schedule, or how long it’s been since you’ve read a serious book. But before I tell you about the details of course, I want to share something with you in the next video that I think, or at least I hope, will change how you see this entire conversation. It’s about what actually happens in the soul of a person who recovers the reading life, what gets transformed and why. I think it might surprise you; at least I hope it encourages you. Watch for it. It should be in your inbox tomorrow. And if you have a question, or if something I’ve said today already resonates, feel free to leave a comment. I read every one. I’m Scott Postma. I’ll see you in the next video. 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]

Lesson 5 - Easing Yourself Into the Classical Christian Tradition

Lesson 5:bEasing Yourself Into the Classical Christian Tradition in 15 Minutes A Day In lesson 5, I want to address a final matter essential to this whole series of lessons, the education of the parents or adults. In the first place, I don’t think it’s wise for parents who are educating their children classically to neglect the tradition themselves. Of course, it’s understandable that many parent who have begun educating their children classically, did not receive the same education themselves. But that’s not a reason to neglect it’s pursuit. You’ll do better by your own children by shoring up your own education. In the second place, I found most parents agree with me on this but struggle to remedy their situation.  This is something I hear constantly from intelligent, well-intentioned adults who are drawn to the classical tradition but haven't found their way in. These are adults, often parents, who say to me something to the effect: As I listen in on my child’s class discussions, I realize I missed out on reading most of these books. Or, our dinner table conversations have been the highlight of my day ever since my child began pursuing a classical Christian education. I only wish I had received this kind of education; but, it’s too late for me. For most parents, the obstacle to their own entry is not laziness or a lack of interest. It’s most often one of two things, sometimes both: time constraints and intimidation. The Great Books sound impressive and feel inaccessible. Homer. Socrates. Plato. Augustine. Dante. Aquinas. Just their very names seem to carry so much weight, and sometimes if feel like too much weight. The moment you pick up the Confessions or the Republic and encounter the first page, something in you says: I am not equipped for this. This is for scholars. This is for people who were trained for this. This is not for me. But let me tell you something. That’s just not true. The voice in your head telling you that is lying to you. These texts were not written for academics. They were written for human beings. Plato wrote dialogues, conversations between people wrestling with real questions, because he wanted philosophy to be accessible to anyone capable of honest thought.  St. Augustine wrote the Confessions as a prayer, as an outpouring of his restless soul toward God, because he wanted every restless soul to recognize itself in his soul.  C. S. Lewis wrote for the common reader because he believed that the common reader was capable of uncommon thought if only given the right invitation. The literature of the Western tradition is not meant to be some kind of fortress. It’s literally meant to be a door, a door into the human condition, and a door that swings inward into your own soul. I’m going to riff off of something Charles Eliot, a former president of Harvard University, said about his famous five-foot bookshelf. The five-foot book shelf was a kind of metaphor for what later became the collection of books known as the Harvard Classics. Eliot opined that a working man could acquire a liberal arts education by reading for just fifteen minutes a day from a five-foot bookshelf filled with the best of Western classic literature. So drawing from this, let me share how you can Ease Yourself Into the Classical Christian Tradition in just 15 Minutes A Day Start with a single text. Not a book list, not a commentary, not a curriculum guide, just one single text. The temptation when you discover the Great Books is to make an ambitious reading plan covering everything you've missed. My encouragement would be to resist this. Pick one book and begin. My recommendation for most adults who are new to this tradition is Augustine's Confessions. It’s personal, emotionally honest, and theologically rich. It requires no prior knowledge of philosophy or Latin. It’s only requirement is a willingness to be humble, a willingness to sit at the feet of St. Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, and let him speak to you. Next, read slowly, slower than you think you need to. Since grade school, we have been trained to skim and scan. Newspapers were formatted and printed with this in mind. And in recent decades, we’ve been further conditioned by screens to scan for information, to extract the key point, maybe summarize it, and then move on. That mode of reading will not serve you well for our purpose here. These texts reward close reading, restful, contemplative, lingering reading. Read a paragraph. Stop. Ask the author what he means, what he is claiming. Then ask why. Then ask about the implications of his meaning. Finally, ask yourself whether or not you agree. Then why or why not? Read it again. In fifteen minutes, reading this way, you will cover perhaps a page or two. That is just fine. Keep a commonplace book( i.e., a florilegium, or something the Italians called the Zibaldone). While each of these tended toward a slightly different purpose historically, what I mean by a commonplace book is simply a notebook in which you copy out passages that strike you, passages that arrest your attention, quotes or statements that seem important, thoughts that you want to return to or perhaps memorize. The practice of writing out a passage by hand does something that highlighting cannot do: it slows you down, makes you engage the exact words, and imprints the idea more deeply on your mind. One additional benefit is after six months of commonplacing, you will have a personal anthology of the tradition's most powerful moments, written in your own hand. Fourth, find one other person to read with you. I’m not talking about a class or formal group, per se, just a friend, a spouse, or a colleague with whom you can meet for regular conversations. Agree to read the same thing and talk about it once a week. The conversation doesn’t need to be sophisticated; it just needs to be genuine and honest. What did you make of the passage? What nuggets did you find? What confused you? What surprised you? What made you push back? This is how the Great Conversation has always worked. While reading in isolation isn’t necessarily unprofitable, solitary brilliance unusual. Learning happens within the friction, inquisitive tensions, and illumination that occurs when two minds meet over a shared text. Finally, be patient with the difficulty. Of course, there will be passages you do not understand. At times, there will be arguments you can’t seem to follow. There will be days when fifteen minutes will go by quickly and others where St. Augustine feels like an hours worth of wrestling. Don’t confuse this with failure. It’s actually a sign that you are reading something worthy of your attention. Texts that offer no resistance offer no transformation. The summer beach novel is light and effortless for a reason. The texts that require effort from you, texts that require you to reach above and beyond your current intellectual capacity, are the texts that give something back that effortless reading never could. In closing consider how this works itself out for just a minute. Fifteen minutes a day is ninety minutes a week. In a year, it is more than seventy-five hours. In seventy-five hours, you can read the Confessions, the Apology, the Abolition of Man, and a dozen other texts that have shaped the Western imagination for centuries. And the great thing is, you’ll not be the same person at the end of that year. You will be wiser, more attentive, better equipped to ask the questions that matter in life, and better equipped to sit with the questions and answers long enough to learn from them. The tradition has been waiting for you for a very long time. It is not going anywhere. Fifteen minutes. One book. you can begin this week. 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]

Lesson 4 - Measuring Success

Lesson 4: Measuring Success: Beyond Assessments, Achievements, and Accomplishments I want to ask you a question that I suspect no one involved in your child's education has ever directly asked you. What does success look like—not at the end of the school year, not at graduation, not when they enter college, not at their first job—but at forty-five? What does success look like at forty-five? What kind of person do you want your child to be when they are forty-five years old? To clarify, I’m not asking, What do you want them to have achieved” I’m asking, Who do you want them to be—when they’ve hit mid-life? I ask because the way we measure educational success almost entirely determines what kind of education we provide. And most of us, without realizing it, are using standards and measuring devices borrowed from a tradition that holds a very different vision of the human person than the one we actually profess. The modern educational system measures specific inputs and outputs. Inputs include: seat time, curriculum coverage, instructional hours. Outputs include: standardized test scores, grade point averages, college acceptance rates, graduation statistics.  Not these aren’t meaningless measures. They do track real things so they do have their place in the service of the greater good. But to track only these things is to prioritize the wrong things if what you actually care about is wisdom, virtue, and the capacity for a genuinely good life.  Aristotle made a distinction that helps clarify this point. He distinguished between things that are good as means and things that are good as ends. Wealth, for instance, is good as a means—it enables other goods. But nobody in his right mind pursues wealth for its own sake; he pursues it for what it can provide. The person who pursues wealth as though it were a final good has disordered his loves. The one who treats accumulation as the point rather than the instrument has confused the means with the end.  The modern educational metrics are almost entirely metrics of means. Test scores are means. Credentials are means. Even knowledge, strictly speaking, is a means. The end that we’re looking for—something Aristotle called eudaimonia, what we might translate as human flourishing—cannot be measured on a standardized test. It is not a score. It is a condition of the soul. So what does this look like? What are the marks of a person who has been genuinely well educated? I’m going to suggest at least four. The first mark of a genuinely educated person is ordered loves. The well-educated person loves the right things in the right order. He loves God above all, his neighbor as himself, beauty more than mere novelty, truth more than comfort, and goodness more than approval. C. S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man, makes a point that is worth contemplating here. Lewis is responding to a pair of textbook authors—he calls them Gaius and Titius—who believe they are doing students a favor by debunking emotional responses to the world, by teaching children that such responses say nothing about reality and everything about the person feeling them.  Lewis's reply to this is pointed: the task of education is not to hack down the jungle of desires; it’s to irrigate deserts. His imagery here is powerful if we understand the ancient conception of the soul that recognizes noble sentiments (chest) and baser sentiments (belly).  The problem with the modern student is not an excess of sentiment that needs pruning—what Gaius and Titius are trying to do; it’s actually an aridity of soul; the modern soul (the chest) is dried up and needs cultivation. We build up just sentiments not by dismantling the baser ones through skeptical critique, but by nourishing the noble sentiments and the student’s capacity for a right response to the world through long exposure to what is genuinely worthy of love, wonder, and reverence. The goal of classical education has never been to extinguish desire. This is where modernist education, and frankly, fundamentalist Christianity, get it wrong. They are both out to kill desire, not to cultivate it Classical Christian Educators, on the other hand, want to train the heart to respond rightly to what is genuinely worthy of response. The educated person’s desires are cultivated and shaped—not extinguished or hacked down—but nourished and formed by that long and patient irrigation of the soul. That shaping is what Lewis calls the stock of "just sentiments," and it is the indispensable foundation of a fully human life. That’s the first mark of a genuinely educated person: ordered loves. The second mark is intellectual humility. Socrates said the beginning of wisdom is knowing that you do not know. But I want to be precise here, because intellectual humility is often confused with its opposite—a kind of performative self-deprecation that is really just arrogance in disguise. I once had lunch with the wing commander of an F-22 fighter pilot training squadron, and he told me something I have never forgotten. He said their recruiters were always on the lookout for cocky pilots, never arrogant ones. When he said it, he got the curious pause from me he was looking for; and the distinction he made is worth the pause that it required.  A cocky pilot is one who says, I have something to offer. He knows his skills, he trusts his training, and he’s willing to press the engagement. An arrogant pilot, on the other hand, is one who says, I have nothing left to learn. He stops listening. He trusts his instincts more than the instruments. He is, in the most literal sense, flying blind and is likely to get himself and other crew members killed. That distinction maps strikingly well onto the intellectual life of a well-educated person.  We stand in the tradition of the Western mind—a tradition that stretches back through Augustine, Aquinas, Aristotle, and Homer—and we may indeed have something to offer our present moment; so, we shouldn’t be timid about stepping up and engaging the disorders of the age. But we can never forget how many people have lived and thought before us, how much has been worked out at great cost, how much we have yet to understand. The well-educated person holds his judgments and conclusions with appropriate tentativeness. He listens humbly and carefully before he speaks. And, he recognizes that the tradition he has received is far larger and wiser than he is on his own. The third mark of a well-educated person is the capacity for genuine conversation. Not contentious or polemic debate, but conversation—rational public discourse. He possesses the ability to sit with another person, hear what they are actually saying rather than what he expects them to say, engage their ideas honestly, and allow his own thinking to be genuinely challenged by the encounter. I want to be clear about what I mean by genuinely challenged. I do not mean the hollow affectation of open-mindedness that never actually changes anything. I mean something with real stakes: the willingness to have your assumptions examined, your conclusions tested; and, when something has been sufficiently demonstrated, the moral courage to follow the argument where it leads—even when that is inconvenient.  Intellectual integrity is not a posture. It is a discipline of the mind. This capacity for real conversation, for rational public discourse, is rarer than it should be, and it is almost entirely a product of formation—of having been in many conversations, with many interlocutors, including the dead ones we meet in books. The fourth mark is what I call the long view. The well-educated person is not owned by the present moment. He knows enough history, and has enough knowledge of the human condition and spirit, to understand that the crises of his age are not unique, that the tradition has survived worse, and that the virtues required to navigate difficulty are not invented; they are inherited.  He is, in C. S. Lewis's phrase, a native of a larger country than the one his passport says he belongs to. He is cosmopolitan, not provincial, in his thinking. He is, like Erasmus, a citizen of the world and a patriot to the Republic of Letters. Because he inhabits that larger country, he is not easily rattled by the shrill, inflammatory language of the media cycle or the opportunistic outrage of politicians. He has read enough to know that such language has always been with us, that it is a feature of those who wish to bypass reason and commandeer the passions.  The person with a long view reads the media headlines without being consumed by them. He takes the present seriously, but he doesn’t mistake it for the whole of reality. And because he does so, he is capable of responding responsibly; he doesn’t merely react to the next scary thing on the news. He doesn’t fall for all the propaganda and conspiracy theories that are rattling the demos. None of these marks—ordered loves, intellectual humility, capacity for genuine conversation, and the long view—appears on a transcript. None of them is measured by a standardized test. All of them are the product of years of deliberate formation: reading great literature, engaging the great conversation, lot’s of practice, and the slow cultivation of habits of mind and heart. The question worth asking is not whether your child is on track for the college or career of choice. It is whether or not your child is on track for a good life. Those are not the same question. And the education that answers the second one well is the education worth pursuing. 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]

Lesson 3: Consider the Alternative

Lesson 3: Consider the Alternative: The High Price of NOT Educating Children Classically Here in lesson three, I want to make an argument that might make you slightly uncomfortable. I'm going to make it anyway, because it's true — and because if we're being thoughtful, we'll recognize that the discomfort that comes with wrestling with this argument is itself instructive. Here is my argument: choosing not to pursue a classical Christian education for your children is not a benign or neutral decision. It is a choice that comes with a price tag. And the cost of not educating classically and in the Christian intellectual tradition is much higher than you might realize — perhaps higher than you've ever been asked to calculate. Let me be careful about what I'm not saying. I'm not saying that every child who attends a modern public school is doomed. I'm not saying that classical Christian education is the only path to wisdom and virtue. What I am saying is that the alternative — the modern progressive educational model that the majority of American children inhabit — has a specific shape, a specific set of assumptions, and, therefore, a specific set of outcomes. And those outcomes are not accidental. Modern education is, at its core, utilitarian. It is designed to produce workers and buyers — or, as I prefer to say, consumers and cogs. I'll grant that some of its earlier, more ambitious forms did attempt to cultivate informed citizens. But that, I would argue, is no longer an accurate description of our contemporary situation. In any case, I cannot honestly say that a utilitarian approach to education is wicked, exactly. But there is something deeply impoverished about it. And that poverty doesn't always show up in academic failure. It shows up in something harder to measure and far more important — but it does show up. It shows up in young adults who are technologically competent and spiritually adrift — adults who may hold degrees but possess no framework for asking what kind of life is worth living; adults who were never taught to love what is objectively beautiful, to recognize what is actually true, or to order their desires toward what is genuinely good; adults who arrive at the great questions of human existence — Who am I? What am I for? How should I live? — with no resources to answer them, because their education never considered those questions worth asking. Modern education also measures success by standardized metrics: test scores, graduation rates, college acceptance, and potential employment outcomes. It treats knowledge as a commodity and learning as a transaction. If you pay in the currency of time and tuition, modern education will ensure you receive credentials and some level of earning potential within the system it cultivates. It is rather like the old Fingerhut catalog, which would help you "build up your credit"— but you could only use that credit to shop their catalog. It is useful only in the limited ways that serve their interests. And because secularism always creates a vacuum, it opens the door for something far worse than mere utility to take up residence. Dorothy Sayers, writing her landmark essay "The Lost Tools of Learning" in 1947, put the matter rather sharply. She argued that modern education had produced a generation easily manipulated by propaganda, because students had never been taught to recognize it, let alone argue against it or see through it. We give children words, she observed, but not the tools to discern truth from fiction, nor the ability to identify and refute the fallacies embedded in those words. That was 1947. I leave it to you to assess how much has improved since then. Now—what does a classical Christian education offer instead? It offers, first, a different answer to the question of what education is for. Not credentials. Not employment. Not even knowledge, strictly speaking. Education is paideia — the formation of the whole person toward wisdom and virtue. Classical Christian education is the cultivation of a soul capable of recognizing the true, loving the good, and being moved by the beautiful. It offers, second, the Great Conversation—nearly three thousand years of the best minds of the Western world wrestling with the questions that matter most. Your child, formed in this tradition, will sit with Homer and Virgil, with Plato and Aristotle, with Augustine and Aquinas, with Shakespeare and Milton, with C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton. Students don't merely come to know about these thinkers; they come to know them as conversation partners, as intellectual friends, as voices from the past that illumine the human condition. And it offers, third, a language. Not Latin alone—though Latin is part of it—but a shared vocabulary for talking about what matters most. A student who has read the Republic can speak meaningfully about justice. A student who has read Augustine's Confessions can speak with equal depth about desire. A child who has read The Abolition of Man can recognize—and resist—precisely the manipulation of language that Sayers warned about. The price of not educating your children in the classical Christian tradition is the forfeiture of their intellectual and spiritual inheritance. And as we all know, once forfeited, inheritances are exceedingly difficult to recover. In lesson four, I am going to talk about something that costs almost nothing and takes almost no time — but that begins, for those willing to take it up, the work of recovery. This is a public episode. 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Lesson 2: Leveraging Your Leisure: How to Take Advantage of Summertime

There is a word that has almost entirely lost its meaning in our culture, and I want to try to give it back to you before summer slips away into another season of busyness dressed up as rest. The word is leisure. Now, I know what you’re probably thinking: I know what leisure means. It means time off. Vacation. The weekend. And you wouldn’t be alone in thinking that—most people in our culture use the words leisure, recreation, entertainment, and amusement interchangeably, as though they all meant roughly the same thing. But they don’t. And the confusion, as Josef Pieper argues, is not a trivial one. In his remarkable little book Leisure: The Basis of Culture [https://amzn.to/3R17NAS], Pieper suggests that the totalitarian work state—a society in which human beings are valued only for their economic productivity—is the clear historical consequence of our faulty understanding of leisure. That may sound alarmist. But stay with me, because I think he’s right. Let’s consider what these words actually mean. Recreation comes from the Latin recreare—to create again, to renew. It is what we do to restore ourselves so we can return to work. Entertainment comes from the Latin inter and tenere—to hold among, to maintain in a certain condition. We entertain ourselves by holding our attention pleasantly. And amusement comes from the French amuser—to divert one’s attention. That’s it. That’s all it does. Every one of these—recreation, entertainment, amusement—is something we do for the sake of something else. We refresh ourselves so we can go back to work. We divert our attention so we can return, somewhat recovered, to the demands of ordinary life. And here is what Aristotle observed with his characteristic clarity: work itself is also something done for the sake of something else. We work so we can eat, pay our bills, sustain our families, and occasionally buy something we want. Work is noble—do not misunderstand me—but work is also, by its nature, servile. There is a reason the classical tradition distinguished between the liberal arts and the servile arts. The liberal arts were those suitable for a free man—arts which serve to free men, not from work entirely, but from the kind of existence in which nothing is ever done for its own sake. That is what leisure is. The word comes from the Latin licere—to be allowed. Leisure, rightly understood, is not the absence of work. It is the presence of something done for its own sake—something meaningful in itself, not merely as a means to something else. To flourish as human beings, we need to recognize that work is not an end in itself. We work so that we can have leisure—so that we can engage in those things which are good or meaningful in themselves. And that is precisely what recreating, entertaining, and amusing ourselves does not give us. Now, what does any of this have to do with summertime? Everything! I want to borrow an argument from C. S. Lewis that I have found clarifying on this point. In his essay “Learning in Wartime,” Lewis raises the question of why students should continue to take an interest in what he calls “the placid occupation” of learning when lives and liberties are at stake. “Is it not,” he asks, “like fiddling while Rome burns?” (a reference to the Emperor Nero, who reportedly played his instrument on the balcony while the city below him was consumed by fire.) Lewis’s answer is worth reading carefully: The war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with ‘normal life.’ Life has never been normal. Now Lewis was answering the weightier question of why we should learn in wartime. But his logic applies equally well—inversely—to the lighter question of why we should learn in summertime. We don’t have to wait for normal times to pursue knowledge and beauty, because there are no normal times. There is only the permanent human situation, which is always pressing, always urgent, always threatening to convince us that now is not the right moment. Lewis puts it plainly: “The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable”—be it wartime or summertime. What makes human beings different from the animals, Lewis observes, is that while animals respond only to immediate circumstances, men have always been capable of something more. They “propound mathematical arguments in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the latest poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae.” We might add: in modern times—times not threatened by war but bombarded by amusement and assaulted by entertainment—free men and women study in summertime. They don’t wait to be told they have to. They pursue the things that make them better human beings. So let me suggest three reasons why summertime is not the enemy of learning but one of its best opportunities. First: summertime is a defense against ordinary academic distraction. There will always be distractions to learning—that was Lewis’s point. Sometimes the distraction is a war. Sometimes it’s a global pandemic. But for most students most of the time, it’s the competing demands of academic schedules, extracurricular activities, and institutional rhythms that prevent the kind of deep, unhurried engagement with ideas that genuine formation requires. Summertime, used well, affords real leisure—time to dive deeper into a subject, to read more slowly, to think without a deadline pressing from behind. Second: summertime learning is a defense against the false leisure of mere amusement. Here is where Pieper’s argument bites. The entertainment and amusement that fill most people’s summers are not leisure in the meaningful sense—they are sophisticated forms of recreation, designed to divert the attention pleasantly until the fall semester begins. But as Pieper rightly argues, if we cannot identify something worth doing for its own sake—not for the sake of a grade, a credential, a paycheck, or a screen—then we have not yet discovered the meaning of our existence, and we will never be able to justify ourselves apart from our economic usefulness to society. That is a hard word. It is also a true one. Reading a great book, learning a language, studying history, cultivating a genuine intellectual interest—these are not merely fun alternatives to Netflix. They are exercises in becoming fully human. Third: summertime is an opportunity to get ahead, get caught up, or simply resist the fog of forgetfulness The fog of forgetfulness settles over most students between June and September. The research on summer learning loss is consistent: students who read nothing and pursue nothing intellectual during the summer arrive in September measurably behind where they left off in May. Summertime learning doesn’t have to be rigorous to be restorative. It simply has to be intentional. Let me close with the observation Pieper leaves us with—the question this whole argument raises but cannot answer for any individual person: What is the point of leisure? What can we rightly call something done for its own sake, an activity meaningful in itself? If we can’t answer that question, we have not yet discovered the meaning of our existence. Summer is your annual invitation to begin answering it. I hope you’ll accept it! Consider subscribing to BOOKS AND LETTERS to receive new posts in your inbox regularly. A paid subscription graciously supports my work. Bonus: Try All Three of These Suggestions Read aloud together. Not just to the young children in the home, to everyone. Pick a book that is slightly above the youngest member of your household, and read it after dinner, or before bed, or on Sunday afternoons. It doesn’t need to be a Great Book, though it could be. It needs to be worthy of attention. The act of reading aloud together is one of the oldest and most powerful formation practices in Western civilization, and it has been almost entirely abandoned. You could use this summer to reclaim it. Second: Have one serious conversation a week. Not about logistics or family issues, but about ideas. Choose a perennial human question and put it on the table—literally, make it the dinner table. What is man? What is courage? Is justice always fair? What would you do if you knew you could not fail? The question matters less than the habit. Families that talk about ideas raise children who think about ideas. It may be rare, but it’s really not complicated. It is simply rare. Third: Read something that is above you. I don’t mean tackle something impossible, just something slight above you, something you have to reach for. Choose something that requires you to slow down, re-read a sentence, look something up, or sit with a thought before moving on. This is the experience most of us try to avoid. We have been conditioned to move quickly, to consume efficiently, to stay in our comfort zone of comprehension. But growth happens when we pursue the edges, not in the center. This summer, try to find that edge. 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]